Good luck with the match! My wife and I were in your exact same position when we started. I'm a 4th year surgery resident, my wife is a medicine attending.
My recommendations:
1. Completely agree with avoiding "investment advisors". They generally have an incentive to make things more complicated than they need to be. I will summarize the important information here.
2. Only useful advice from advisors: get speciality-specific disability insurance in your last year of residency. That's actually worth it and for some bizarre reason insurance companies offer a much lower premium if you get it as a resident with minimal increases once an attending. This is more relevant if you are in a procedure-based specialty as they will insure you against loss of ability to operate or perform a specialty-specific procedures.
3. You should be able to live an upper-middle-class lifestyle on 1.5 of your salaries (except NYC and San Francisco, even with housing subsidies). If not, you're being ripped off somewhere. A lot of people equate resident with rich person driving a BMW, avoid them. Also, don't go buy a BMW or Lexus right after finishing residency. Yeah you can afford, it but focus on the big prize. No one actually cares what you drive to work. Same thing with the house.
4. I recommend a Roth 401k because the tax advantages of a regular 401k is not much in the long-term, this is the money that will have the longest time to grow tax-free interest over your lifetime, and the ability to pull out the principal is well worth it. (Hint: your first job after fellowship/residency will almost certainly not be your ideal one.) Unless you are in a resident union (like in NYC), you will almost certainly not get a match. We didn't contribute to a regular 401k until my wife finished residency. Once you're both attendings, of course contribute the max to each tax-advantaged account, including 401k.
5. One thing to note when choosing jobs is that a lot of the academic centers offer significant advantages in tax-advantaged savings, even if they aren't state hospitals. These include 401ks, accounts that have a separate limit from 401k, pensions, or some combination of the three. You'll get paid less, but keep that in mind if leaning to an academic career.
6. Your income bracket once retired is whatever you want it to be. If you all do this right, you can easily retire fairly early while living off capital gains with minimal taxes (either gains will be taxed at a lower marginal rate rate from a regular 401k, or no tax from a Roth 401k). Frankly, if Social Security stays roughly as it is, you work long enough to vest, and you pay off your mortgage, you can live mostly off that.
7. Intern year isn't actually longer than all other years of your life, it just feels that way.
If you can provide specific about what fields you all are going to, I can give a little more detailed advice. For a framework, here's how my wife and I set up our savings when we were both residents:
W2 Income: $130k
Income after all income/payroll taxes: $90k
Roth IRAs through Vanguard (max out both, invest 100% in total stock market index fund): $11k
Taxable account (same investment as above) through Vanguard: $14k
Once my wife finished residency:
W2 income: $230k
Income after all income/payroll taxes: $160k
401k, both through Vanguard (90% SP500 index fund, 10% total bond index fund): $36k
Taxable through Vanguard (100% total stock market index fund): $45k
Basically we max out the 401k, and put the rest in a taxable account. There are back-door Roth IRAs options that will allow $11k per year to Roth IRAs we would otherwise be too high income for, but I haven't had the time to do this yet.
I hope this helps!
