Budgeting tips for 1st year analysts in NYC?

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Live off the base salary (at the maximum - realistically your expenses should still leave you with some savings on the base if you don’t spend like an NFL player).

Save / Invest your bonus.

Most of your meals will be in the office / getting lunch so probably won’t have too much food spend in the form of groceries. Most other cash outflow will be for dinners out / drinks out.

I think you have to figure out rent first before you can really create your budget. Also, how Frugal are you? Realistically, you can spend $200 - $300 a month on groceries (and not going out) and still make healthy meals in 15 minutes (maybe an additional upfront cost to build out a seasoning arsenal though). Definitely take advantage of office meals. The social environments of most banks and firms usually have a strong social pressure against saving money and being frugal. Also, do you go out drinking a lot? That's a significant way to budget money or lose money. I see people spend way too much on alcohol. Also, a place I worked all the first year analyst essentially spent half their bonus on Rolexes. It's hard to say without gauging your habits.

Saving more upfront gives you a lot more flexibility (if you hate the job, run into roadblocks, decide you want to go to business school, have unexpected expenses come up, etc.,).

Would always recommend erring on the side of being more frugal and if you find that you hate something or it's a cause of significant stress, adjust from there. It's always easier to spend more vs. look for ways after the fact to cut back. Some tips:

• People in your class will come up for all sorts of rationalizations why you need to spend more. 95% of it is people who are insecure about how little they are saving or how little they have trying to come up with excuses for why they haven't done more. When people tell you things like "you have to live in x neighborhood or you'll have no social life/no girl will ever visit their place/you'll be miserable", just thank them and ignore their advice
• Try to start off living with a roommate in a walk-up. If you find that you hate it, you can always move in a year but it will always be harder to go from a doorman building to a walk-up or from living alone vs. with others. You can get a reasonably nice place for $2k/person and it can be kind of nice to live with someone at the start
• Small expenses add up and make a difference overtime. It takes like 5 minutes to make instant coffee and put together a sandwich the night before instead of stopping a starbucks on the way to work and buying lunch. If you save $30/day, that adds up to like $7.5k+ over the course of the year with little to no impact on quality of life. It can also be less stressful if it's a busy day to have food in the fridge. Note: if you do this, would highly encourage you to still walk with colleagues to pick up lunch/get coffee, just don't buy anything for yourself
• If you work in midtown, queens is like a 10 minute subway ride and you can get a much bigger place vs. Manhattan (and there are plenty of nice bars/restaurants in Astoria and LIC). If you're at Citi/GS or that area, Jersey City or Hoboken are great options if you can find a nice spot near the ferry. Note: if most of your friends are in BK, don't live in queens, because it's a huge pain to get there
• If you're getting dinners out with friends, don't be the guy that refuses to pay their 3rd because they ordered slightly less or whatever or refuses to buy a round of drinks when it's your turn. Try to avoid skipping social activities just to cut down on costs
• Take advantage of firm paying dinners / meals on weekends and ubers covered by company
• Do your own laundry instead of wash and fold service or dry cleaning shirts. Non-iron shirts from CT are cheap, look nice and are easy to maintain

You can live pretty comfortably on $3k a month, with the occasional splurge for vacations or whatever.