If you’re a resident, a new grad, or a few years into practice and telling yourself you’ll “get serious about money once things settle down” — this post is for you, because things rarely settle down on their own, and the decisions that matter most are easiest to get right in these first few years.
The short answer
The best time to start is residency or your first year of practice — not because you need a complicated plan on day one, but because several of the biggest financial decisions physicians make have a “cheap now, expensive later” quality to them. Get them in place early and they quietly compound in your favour for decades. Miss the window and you’re often paying to undo a decision rather than simply making a good one from the start.
What actually needs attention this early
Student debt strategy. Not just “pay it off,” but the order you pay it off in, and whether your provincial loan forgiveness or interest-relief programs change that order. This is a one-time decision with a long tail.
Disability insurance, while you still qualify easily. Your insurability is at its best right now — before any diagnosis, any family history flag, any high-risk hobby you pick up later shows up on an application. Physicians routinely underestimate how much of their future income depends on being able to work, and how much cheaper the coverage is to lock in early.
A cash-flow structure that survives a jump in income. Residents and new grads often go from a fixed, modest salary to a much larger and more variable one within a year or two. Without a plan, that jump gets absorbed into lifestyle before you notice — not through poor discipline, just through the absence of a system.
The incorporation question — even if the answer is “not yet.” You don’t need to incorporate as a resident. But understanding when it will start to make sense for you, and what to have in place before that point, means the decision doesn’t sneak up on you or get made in a rush during a busy year. (We cover the specifics of that timing question in a separate post.)
Why “I’ll wait until I’m busier” backfires
Every one of the items above gets harder to fix retroactively, not easier:
- Insurance gets more expensive — or unavailable — the longer you wait and the more your health history grows.
- A debt-repayment order that made sense five years ago may have already cost you thousands in avoidable interest or lost forgiveness eligibility.
- Lifestyle creep is far easier to prevent than to reverse once your spending has adjusted upward.
None of this requires a physician to become a financial expert. It requires having someone coordinate these decisions early, while they’re still simple, rather than after they’ve become tangled together.
What a first conversation actually looks like
A first meeting isn’t a sales pitch and it isn’t homework. It’s a plain conversation about where you are — residency, new practice, a few years in — and which of the items above, if any, are already exposed. From there, the next steps are specific to your situation, not a generic checklist.
A free, no-obligation consultation is the place to start, whether you’re still in residency or a few years into practice. Book a time here, or read more about financial planning for doctors across Canada.
This article is for general educational purposes and does not constitute personalized financial, tax, or legal advice. Individual circumstances vary — speak with a qualified advisor before making decisions based on this information.
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