Category: Finance

July has come and gone, and interns and residents should be settling in at their new positions (and salary). Not every new attending has started working yet, but many are.

This spring and summer a number of people have been looking at my posts about budgeting. Some of the more popular include:

• What Is A Good Budget For Intern Year? Obviously intended for new graduates, entering internship.
• Retrospective Budgeting: The 10% Rule . Geared mostly towards those making the jump from resident to attending.
• Retrospective Budgeting: The Live On Half Challenge. Also for the graduating resident.

For those who did not think about their budget before starting their job, or who maybe find their paycheck isn’t quite covering their bills, this post is for you.

This July I took a lovely vacation, longer than I have had off in a while. I visited family, and saw new places, and actually relaxed for a few days. I would love to do that more often.

On my return, I was soon working in the hospital with July interns. It was intense–both good and not so good–but exhausting. Everything that was not medicine went by the wayside: exercise, reading new books, watching suspenseful miniseries (I can’t wait to get back to The Night Manager).

Both experiences have left me wondering where my finances are vis a vis readiness for retirement.

I was thinking about this last summer also, and I think it is time to revisit that question: are we there yet? With the corollary: how can I figure out where the finish line is?

Join me as I walk through my rough calculations and figure out what I am still missing.

I frequently refer to my “secret” savings account, but realize I haven’t really written about it explicitly. Since I consider it one of my key tools to managing my finances over the past 10-12 years, I think it is time to review how it works and how important it has been.

Just to be clear, I am not advocating hiding money from your spouse; that is not cool in the least.

Instead this is an extra account to “hide” money from myself–which is sort of silly, because for sure I know I where these savings are. But the account is in a separate institution from my checking account, and it’s difficult to check the balance, so I don’t think about it very often. This means money accumulates without any effort on my part, growing steadily month by month.

Today I will finally describe all the ways this account has helped me since I started my “grown up” job, and encourage you to try this as well. Especially those of you just starting in a new position this summer, with a new (hopefully bigger) salary.

If someone were going to ask me, what is the most unusual thing you did that helped you get ahead financially? I suspect that my best answer would be, living as a one car family.

Over the past week, I had to deal with some of the inconveniences of having just one car in the family, as Mr. PiN took ours out of state to help with a family emergency. [This might be why this post is coming out a week later than expected.]

I thought it would be worthwhile to go through the many ways in which this one-car situation has overall yielded great benefits, while acknowledging that sometimes it is not ideal.

Right now, I love my bed.

There is little I enjoy more during the 5,000th day at home, than sliding into my collection of freshly cleaned sheets, deluxe pillows with just the right degree of softness, and my personal comforter.

Before the pandemic, Mr. PiN and I would sometimes consider the merits of going away for the weekend, and decide to stay home because our house, mostly our bed, was just too luxurious to leave. Now that we cannot leave, we are very happy to have the current sleeping set-up already arranged.

However, I was not planning to write a whole post about how lovely the bed is. More, I was thinking about the financial issues that affected how we built this treat we get to enjoy nightly.