The First Paycheck At the end of June after you graduate from residency, if you start working right away, you may experience “sticker shock” when your first paycheck lands into your bank account.  Whether you ever become wealthy or not depends on what you decide to do with that first paycheck.  Show me what happened […]

Recently, a Family Medicine candidate received two offers, one employer located in Chicago and the 2nd employer located in Rockford, Illinois – a community of 150,000 located 90 minutes to Chicago. The employer in Chicago offered a starting salary of $165,000 and the employer in Rockford offered $240,000 and a $50,000 sign on bonus.   In […]

Work SMARTER, Not Harder:  Tips ad Tools for Getting your Priorities Straight The first step on any journey is having a direction to follow.  When you decided to become a physician, you no doubt sought out advice from trusted mentors:  advisors, other physicians, professors, even peers who had traveled that road before you.  But becoming […]

Compensation is a major factor in determining whether or not to accept a particular job offer.  When evaluating various job opportunities, different compensation models and rates of compensation may be presented. Understanding the basis of how organizations determine compensation allows for better evaluation of offers when searching for a new career. Why is it important […]

When a physician employment contract is offered, often the first thing physicians look for is the compensation section to see how this offer stacks up against others.  What physicians sometimes find, is that rather than a simple 3-sentence paragraph outlining the annual compensation, and the payroll policy, there is a reference to an exhibit at […]

Though physician compensation is something you don’t want to bring up in an interview until appropriate, it’s a subject you need to broach eventually. In order to make sure a hiring organization is a good fit, you need to be sure you ask the right questions about this topic. Frankly, physician compensation models and structures […]

If you’re a resident, staying on top of physician compensation trends is important, since they can greatly influence the way you approach your job search. Even if you’re not actively searching for a job, it’s a good idea to stay informed and up to date. Plus, there’s always that element of natural curiosity — it’s […]

Of all of the questions I’m asked on a regular basis, “How much should I be earning?” seems to be the most popular among new physicians. Many of them live in fear that they’ll accept an offer that’s far too low, or they’ll find out that their peers are actually earning much more. The horror! […]

Are you concerned about increasing and maintaining your earnings throughout your career? Earlier this week, I started my two-part blog series on physician compensation with a post about guaranteed salaries and the struggles of graduating to production-based pay. As I outlined in the first post (if you haven’t read it, click here), this is often […]

In an ideal world, physicians could spend as much time with their patients as they needed to. But in the real world — which is one that many patients are blissfully unaware of — physicians have to meet productivity goals. More often than not, a physician’s productivity informs his or her compensation (this is called […]