There’s a lot of financial information out there. Some of it is helpful, and some of it is unhelpful.
I’m sure many of you take notice when the Dow Jones falls 1,000 points in two days.
And even if you don’t usually follow the stock market on a daily basis, when the stock market is dropping, the financial news media will let you know about it.
Because when the stock market is crashing, …
Physician financial literacy is dismal. In the past, many physicians got their first introduction to finance from insurance salesman or financial advisors who give presentations over a free steak dinner.
My medical school’s attempt at teaching us personal finance was to have a financial advisory firm give a half-day lecture about student loan management, budgeting, and investing. While the advice wasn’t inherently bad, I don’t think many of my classmates retained …
By the time you read this, I will have completed a transition to working half-time. Now, I know a lot of docs out there think emergency docs are already only working half-time, so perhaps I ought to start with explaining why that isn’t the case, even if emergency physicians work fewer hours than many other physicians.
Let’s start with the fact that most Americans consider 35 to 40 hours a week …
Guess what? You’re surrounded by rich doctors. You probably didn’t even know it. You know why? Because doctors don’t talk about that filthy lucre known as money. So while you’re assuming that all the other doctors in your group, office building, and hospital are in the same position as you, you’re wrong. Some of them are rich. There are ten things they’re not telling you, but which …
No, I’m not saying that the process of investing in index funds is difficult. In fact, it’s actually quite simple to build a diversified index portfolio, whether your money is invested at Vanguard, Fidelity, Schwab, or Etrade.
What makes investing in the stock market so difficult is tolerating its high volatility. Many investors are unable to stick with the stock market in the long run because of the ups and downs.
But those who stay invested …
Let’s be real here. Women make babies. Women also kick butt working. Sometimes women need to make babies while kicking butt working. So, you know, the human race can survive … no big deal. But, all too often, families are unfairly burdened by our dismal maternity support system. Bleary-eyed and bloody, new mamas emerge from childbirth facing a mountain of medical bills and no income.
For my first pregnancy, my family …
There is a taboo in medicine. It is becoming less prominent, but it still exists. You’re not supposed to talk about money. Not how much something costs a patient, not how much you get paid, not how you invest, and certainly not about the freedom from medicine that financial independence can bring.
This first shows up as you are applying to medical school. You don’t want anyone writing a …
First of all, I am far from a financial genius. I am also not a natural saver. Thanks to scholarships and jobs, I made it out of college without loans. But, I took out a $191K for medical school. In the middle of med school, I took a year off to teach. During that year, I didn’t put anything towards student loans and lived it up. Unfortunately, in forbearance, those …
One common question that doctors face in estate planning is whether to establish a trust. This topic gets brought up in the doctors’ lounges, especially after someone gets a pitch from their financial planner. Most doctors who bring up the topic are quite enthusiastic, and cite that doctors need a trust because “we make a lot of money.”
Fair enough.
Medical students and residents probably do not need a trust
I’ll get this …
Vanguard, Fidelity, and Schwab have been engaging in a fierce competition to claim the mantle as the leading provider of low-cost index funds. As a result, each has aggressively lowered their fees for their index fund offerings over the past few years and advertised their low-cost offerings to investors.
After the latest round of fee reductions in mid-2017, I wrote a post speculating whether it was inevitable that Vanguard, Fidelity, …
If money is the root of all evil, what does that make debt? Evil’s ugly big brother.
A report by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) revealed that over 86 percent of medical graduates carry an educational debt principal of over $160,000, with a significant number of graduates reporting debt totaling over $350,000. In addition to massive student debt, personal financial challenges include the loss of nearly a decade of …
“My group has been approached by a private equity company. It sounds like a great deal! Any questions I should ask?”
Whether it be through one on one discussions or through the Physician Side gigs group, I’ve found myself having this conversation with increasing frequency. Part of the reason for that is because I find it fascinating, albeit also sometimes terrifying. As the trend towards consolidation …
An interesting phenomena recurs when I work with physicians to makeover their finances. They almost never believe that overspending is the problem. They believe the reason their credit card balance is growing, and their large monthly income isn’t enough to pay their expenses can’t be due to their own choice to overspend. They always have a reason for the lack money:
They have huge student loans.
They have eight kids.
They are in …
Many residents and fellows will contribute to a 401(k) or 403(b) over the course of their medical training. They should be commended for saving for retirement on just a resident’s income.
Often, newly-minted attendings wonder what to do with these 401(k)s or 403(b)s from their training hospitals. In particular, they wonder whether they should convert their 401(k) to a Roth IRA.
4 options: some better than others
In general, there are four things …
Education can be expensive. Higher education can be even more costly. Even partial scholarships can be deceptive as one might opt for a more expensive school for the sake of redeeming “free money.”
As a student, I had no financial understanding of return on investment when I was considering higher education. All in, I plowed through more than a quarter million dollars in my college and medical school after substantial scholarships …
You have just gotten a job offer that includes health insurance. You’re lucky enough that your spouse has great family insurance already, but hey that health insurance is going to cover the cracks in the deductible and co-insurance, so you feel great about that double coverage as you sign your contract.
Well, you just got scammed. That is, double coverage is a scam, and you would have been far better off …
It is no secret that medical school is getting very expensive. Over the past 20 years, the cost of medical school has greatly outpaced the rate of inflation, and medical school debt is rapidly rising.
The average medical student now graduates with over $192,000 in student loans, but with the cost of attendance for the most expensive private medical schools approaching $100,000, there are some physicians who are finishing residency with $300,000 or …
As part of my job as an anesthesiologist, I get called to truly horrific airway events. Sometimes they are down in the emergency department after a bad car accident, drowning, or burn. Others are in ICU’s. Sometimes they are even in hallways or bathrooms where people have stopped breathing or collapsed from cardiac arrest. It’s part of the job.
Recently, I was called to an airway in an ICU in what …
Imagine, if you will, that you’re an anesthesiologist. You’ve been part of a successful practice for over 10 years. You can walk down your neighborhood street and run into mothers whose epidurals you’ve helped place. You’ve established a home, a community, and your children are in a great school system.
One uneventful day, say Wednesday, you get an email from the hospital administrators announcing that there’s going to be a meeting …
One of the great myths amongst residents is that once they become attendings, they’ll have so much more free time. I’ll never work this much again, they think. This is the most time-intensive phase of life, and everything after residency is easy in comparison.
Unfortunately, they are usually wrong.
Statistically, working about the same number of hours in residency and as an attending is the norm. In one study, attendings work 59.2 …
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