Just wanted to mention a couple of things since a lot of people have thrown around phrases like "I'll take out more loans" or "I'll take out X instead of Y".
Y'all haven't had to deal with the financial aid mess yet, which is why you probably don't know the deets, so I figured I'd mention this since it was a surprise to me last year when I did the whole financial aid thing.
First of all, the "cost of attendance" that the school quotes is NON-NEGOTIABLE. That is absolutely the max amount of money you can get through the school. You can request less (I'd recommend that you wait until second semester to take out less money than they predict though, just so you know how much you really need to spend per semester), but you can't ask for more. The package you'll get, with grants, various types of loans, etc, will only arrive to that number and no more.
That money BY LAW cannot include car payments. There is definitely a "transportation" amount in there, but it's extremely variable depending on where you go to school (for us I think it was only 200 or 250 a month), so if you're going to be maxing out your housing budget and your food budget for the month, you MUST remain within the transportation budget they give you. If you are buying a new car, and your insurance is high, and you'll be driving a lot and spending a lot of money on gas, tough. The more you need for your car, the more you'll have to take from your housing budget or food. They won't give you extra money cause you're buying a car. Again, the cost of attendance is capped.
IF you absolutely need more money than they're letting you get, you can try looking for a private loan. However, those tend to have very high interest rates, tend to not be as lenient as far as paying less during residency (or not at all) and honestly, there are VERY FEW around, and the ones that there are generally want an excellent credit score, so parent cosigners would probably be handy (if they have a good credit score...the economy has not been kind to anyone). But either way, again, there are very few of these private loans around nowadays.
So, in summary,
1) Once you've figured out where you're going to school, look at the cost of attendance budget and how it's broken down. Ask current students about housing in the area and if their housing budget is enough. Think about stuff like: do you want to live alone ($), do you have dietary restrictions ($), do you have pets ($), do you want a bigger place ($), etc. How close do you need to live to school in order to be efficient? I knew that I wanted to live as close to school as possible because I study in the library and come home late. That had to be factored into my budget right away. Once you've made these determinations, look at the housing around the school and calculate roughly how much you'll be spending on living expenses. BE HONEST WITH YOURSELF. If you only managed to convince yourself once every two months to go to the uber-cheap fresh food market at the crack of dawn on a sunday in college, you won't do it once you're in med school, so don't tell yourself that you'll spend less on food cause you'll put in the effort for the first time ever. If you have expensive tastes as far as, say, shampoo (guilty!), that won't disappear overnight. THEN look at transportation costs within your COA and figure out whether you have room to take some money from your housing and food budget.
2) Once you've figured out your ACTUAL car budget and have broken it down into insurance, gas (again, dependent on how close/far you want to be from school, whether the hospitals you'll be working in are on the same campus or on disparate parts of the city, how often you'll be driving, etc) and all that good stuff, what you have left is what you can spend on buying a car.
3) IF you're totally screwed, look into private loans, but count on the fact that you'll almost definitely need a cosigner with a very well-established credit history and a great score, and think long and hard about whether it's worth it to get into more debt with crappier insurance rates.
