This story is part of CNBC Make It’s Millennial Money series, which examines how people earn, spend and save their money.
There are full-circle moments, and then there’s what Shay Taylor-Allen experienced in March. Upon completing her studies at the Howard University College of Medicine, the 32-year-old matched with a residency program at Yale New Haven Hospital, the medical center where she was born and later spent ten years working as a janitor.
The full-circle moment has felt nothing short of “surreal,” Taylor-Allen tells CNBC Make It — especially the moment when she received her new employee ID that says “doctor.” She still has the one she wore when she cleaned the rooms.
“I was in these same hallways on break, studying as much as I [could], getting ready for exams, stressing out that I might not even make it to medical school,” she says. “I’m coming back as a different person.”
Getting to this point has put Taylor-Allen in a financial hole. Between her undergrad, master’s and medical degrees, Taylor-Allen says she racked up more than $590,000 in student debt.
At the beginning of medical school, she relied on her loans as her sole source of income, to the tune of about $30,000 per year. She met her husband, Rob, in April 2023 and the two married in July 2024. A retired veteran, he earns about $5,000 a month in benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs — money the couple used to help keep themselves afloat while living in Washington, D.C. and during their transition to New Haven, Connecticut.
Shay Taylor-Allen, 32, is a doctor at Yale New Haven Hospital, where she once worked as a janitor.Valentina Duarte
The couple are betting that the financial strain of living on a combined $7,500 a month will have been worth getting Taylor-Allen to this new chapter, one in which she plans to grow into her new career, repay her debts and begin saving for her family’s future. Her $88,000 starting salary as an anesthesiology resident at Yale combined with her husband’s VA benefits puts their household income at roughly $150,000 per year now.
Along with her husband, “our future plan is to invest back into us as much as possible,” Taylor-Allen says.
‘Let me be in that position to help more people like my mother’
Taylor-Allen began working as a janitor at Yale New Haven Hospital in 2011 at age 18. She was unsure about college, and saw healthcare as a field that offered stability, she says.
“I just remember people telling me that you could retire there. This is a job you can have for a long time,” she says. “They have good benefits.” The gig paid $14 an hour.
As a janitor, she worked at the hospital where her mother actively received treatment, following a fire that broke out in her family home in 2010. The third-degree burns in her mother’s lungs created damage that necessitated years of care. Yet each time her mother saw doctors in the subsequent years, Taylor-Allen says she noticed the doctors treating her symptoms with skepticism.
Taylor-Allen accrued more than $590,000 in student debt between her undergrad, master’s and medical degrees.Valentina Duarte
Taylor-Allen began researching healthcare disparities and why some people, particularly women of color, are likelier to be disbelieved by medical professionals when describing symptoms. She wrote to the hospital’s CEO, whose trash she took out, about what her mother was going through — and the CEO pushed the doctors to diagnose her mother more accurately, she says.
While working at the hospital, Taylor-Allen begun studying at Southern Connecticut University, still having “no clue” what she wanted to do. Her mother’s ordeal, and the research it prompted, made the path forward clear: “Let me become that doctor that I felt like should have helped my mom,” she remembers thinking. “Let me be in that position to help more people who look like my mother.”
Taylor-Allen switched her major to biology, from general studies. In 2018, she enrolled in a master’s program in biomedial sciences at Quinnipiac University to bolster her medical school resume, and by 2021, she’d started at Howard.
Managing money through med school
For her first few years of med school, Taylor-Allen lived entirely on student loan money, she says: a $30,000-per-year reimbursement for her tuition payments, paid in two installments, which made budgeting tricky.
“Basically, what I would do is: plan to pay my rent when I got the $15,000, and then use the rest for any utilities or groceries that I needed for that six months, and do the same for the rest of the year,” she says.
When Taylor-Allen met and married her husband, the two approached their financial life as a true partnership. When they met, Rob was working as a recruiter at insurance firm The Hartford and receiving benefits from his 12 years of military service. That income buoyed the couple while Taylor-Allen pursued her dreams, she says. He currently attends the Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies and is pursuing a degree in AI management.
Taylor-Allen and her husband, Rob, approach managing household finances as a team.Natalie Rice
“He came into my life and he just helped so much. So I didn’t have to worry too much about any of the bills or anything like that. And he paid for the rent, the utilities — anything basically that we needed,” Taylor-Allen said.
In April, the couple needed quite a lot. After Taylor-Allen got her Yale New Haven Hospital match, the two needed to pay for life in Washington, D.C. while shuttling back and forth to Connecticut to find a new home there.
Here’s how they spent their money that month.
Zoom In IconArrows pointing outwardsChristinia Locopo | CNBC Make It
- Housing and utilities: $3,646 on rent, WiFi and electricity
- Food: $2,557 on groceries and dining
- Transportation: $1,593 on the car payment, gas, parking and tolls
- Household: $667 on school fees, laundry, pets, tax prep and other miscellaneous expenses
- Insurance: $540 on auto, renters, vision and dental coverage
- Subscriptions: $505 on a gym membership and various streaming and professional subscriptions
- Healthcare: $492 on a trip to the eye doctor and a year’s worth of contact lenses
- Discretionary: $457 on travel, entertainment, apparel and beauty
- Debt repayment: $417 Rob put toward credit card debt
- Phones: $146 on the combined monthly cellular bill
Taylor-Allen hopes that their expenses will normalize now that she and her husband have settled in New Haven, she says. Housing is cheaper: The couple paid more than $3,500 a month for a 600-square-foot apartment in Washington, D.C. Their 1,200-square-foot apartment in Connecticut costs them $2,900 a month.
Food costs should decrease, too. The pair dined out more than usual during their month of separation and travel, to the tune of $2,200. Some of that comes down to life in med school, Taylor-Allen says: “We eat out a lot because we’re just so busy.”
My patients ‘come from the same neighborhoods I come from’
“Busy” is likely to be Taylor-Allen’s modus operandi for the next four years while she works as a resident at the hospital, learning the ins and outs of her trade. She’ll spend her first year as an intern, “doing mainly internal medicine and just rotating on different floors, learning different systems and learning different processes,” she says.
From there, Taylor-Allen will specialize in anesthesiology, a practice she says she chose for its reasonable work-life balance and often ample salary. She expects to earn between $350,000 and $700,000 a year after she finishes her residency, she says.
Taylor-Allen’s student loans are federal, and she’s deferring paying them back during her residency. In the meantime, she says, she plans to use her new salary and husband’s income to build their savings back up after Rob sold nearly all of his investments — mainly cryptocurrency — to keep the couple afloat during their move.
Taylor-Allen expects to eventually make $350,000 to $700,000 a year as an anesthesiologist.Valentina Duarte
She also has a few post-residency goals, including tackling her debt, starting a family and maybe even taking a trip or two with her husband. “We haven’t been able to take a vacation since we met because of everything that we have to pay for,” says Taylor-Allen.
As a doctor, she hopes to meet patients where they are, she says. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that she was emptying trash from the same hospital’s exam rooms.
“When I talk to my patients, I understand they’re just like me. They come from the same neighborhoods I come from,” Taylor-Allen says. “I can speak to them just about day-to-day life besides their diagnosis.”
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