End in Sight

Signing bonus, moving expenses, stipends, loan forgiveness, salary, non compete clauses, partnership tracks, OH MY!

These are the words that have been floating around our house lately. With the start of his last year of residency we are in the beginning stages of finding a job. It is very exciting yet very very overwhelming at the same time. Since my husband started residency three years ago we have carefully watched each of the outgoing residents try and navigate their way through the process of signing a contract. Some with more success than others.

We have heard the horror stories enough to know that we will have a lawyer review everything and we have a general sense of what we want/need. We also have a good idea location wise where we want to live. Since we are from KS and that is where most of our family is we are pretty sure we want to move back. KS has a hard time getting doctors in some areas so the recruitment of my husband has begun earlier than we thought with verbal job offers and the promise of contracts to review by the end of the summer. It would be nice to know where we are going to move to and to start looking at houses. We have been just surviving on our income and living in a tiny apartment for so long that it is overwhelming. My husband asked me the other day how much of a house we could afford on the salary figures being thrown around and to be honest I'm not quite sure. We will have 5 times more income but his loans will go into repayment (and even that amount will depend on the loan forgiveness) and we don't want to be house poor. With regards to the signing bonus do we pay off debt to get a better interest rate (will that have a big enough effect to give us a better interest rate) or do we roll it all into the down payment of a house that we may not live in forever (most doctors only stay at their first job for 3 years...or at least so we are told).

This is all in addition to the location, the partners themselves, the practice model (private vs hospital owned, etc).

Although we are excited to be at this point it is still a lot to wade through. It seems like only yesterday we were wading our way through residency applications, interviews, match, and relocating.