Math class had an order of operations, that string of rules that told you what to solve first so everyone arrived at the same answer. Personal finance has one too, and once you see it, a lot of the "wait, where does this money even go" anxiety quietly dissolves.
Financial folks call it the contribution waterfall. Picture your dollars filling a series of buckets, top to bottom. Each bucket fills before the next one starts, and each one exists for a specific reason.
The top bucket is almost always the employer match, if you have one. When a hospital or group offers to match a percentage of what you contribute to your retirement plan, that match is part of your compensation that you only collect if you participate. Leaving it on the table is the rare financial mistake with no upside at all.
Right alongside the match sits high-interest debt. Not the student loans necessarily, but the genuinely expensive kind like credit card balances. Paying those down delivers a guaranteed return equal to the interest rate you stop paying, and very few investments can promise anything guaranteed.
Next in the sequence, many physicians look at the health savings account, when their insurance plan makes them eligible for one. It tends to fly under the radar because it wears the costume of a medical account, but it carries an unusually generous tax treatment that makes it quietly powerful as a long-term tool.
After that come the main retirement accounts, the 401(k) or 403(b), filled toward their annual limits.
And at the bottom, catching everything that overflows, is the taxable brokerage account, the flexible workhorse with no limits and no age gate.
Building the version of this that fits your actual numbers is exactly the kind of thing worth talking through. We're here to take care of you, and our team can walk you through exactly how the waterfall should pour for your situation.
