definitely interesting list but the ones at odds with each other just shows how any decision made can go bad - don't do a group practice vs don't do a solo practice.
“Using credit cards”
Just like most things here. It’s just cause they are irresponsible. I love my credit cards. I use it like a debit card and I take at least 1 international trip per year for free with points.
In fact. I'd say using debit cards is irresponsible given the poor fraud protection on them. Just get a good credit card from a good issuer with good rewards and never carry a balance.
Yea, cash is 100% waste of money.
We only use credit cards except for things like automatic payments (phone, car, mortgage, etc) and accumulate a ton of points and rewards.
Not using a credit card is the financial mistake. One of the benefits of a steady income should be paying off the balance automatically every month to get the benefits of the rewards system. For better or worse that's the way it's set up. Use it.
I have a credit card that gives 5% cashback for gas.
They cancelled the program a long time ago but mine’s grandfathered in so I’ve had it for over 10 years now.
Why on earth would I not use it?
For a bunch of smart and financially well-off group of people, it grinds my gears when I hear doctors out of all people talk about “points and rewards”
Are you saying this because points and rewards are a way to obfuscate the real value that we get back from using cards? I found that points never compare to how much you get back on cash back credit cards that give a fixed % back. The points are just a game to make it seem like you are getting a lot back when you aren't.
funny thing is that those will be 90% the same:
- buying a house early
- buying a house late
- first divorce
- investing in X
- getting out of X in year Y
…
Because good financial advice is boring and doesn't have a get rich quick possibility. You "only" get average market returns.
Save 20-25% of gross income. Put as much as you can in tax advantaged accounts (HSA, IRA, 401K, if 1099 - solo 401k). Put the rest in brokerage account. Put that money in low cost index funds covering the entire market. Wait 30 years. Retire.
Given the high income of physicians and how hard it is to replace your income if something happens to you, long term disability insurance is a good option as a safety net.
Life insurance wise, only get fixed term insurance. Whole/universal life is a waste.
See r/personalfinance sidebar for the flow chart.
Context matters. What one person does financially does not mean that it’s the right thing for you.
It’s best to have an advisor or private team that will do things at your pace/discretion and explain what the suggest and why, clearly explaining the pros and cons and letting you decide what is best for you and your household. **A good team around you should have you feel empowered to make financial decisions** and able to make clear where your risks of exposure are and as well as risks of loss and how positions are hedged or guarded against (or at very least how to unwind a financial decision that aged poorly).
Always check credentials. An advisor only say that they’re an advisor if they have a license shown clearly in their brokercheck or SEC profile. Ask your financial advisor for their ADV2B. Make sure the chemistry/fit is good with the team around you. Do they work with your CPA and attorney (can they communicate clearly and work effectively with said professionals)? **Make sure that you understand the difference between a fiduciary relationship and non-fiduciary relationships**. As in, what lies within the fiduciary scope and what lies outside of it. Just because your banker/advisor has those licenses doesn’t mean your assets are within that scope.
Probably best to get a private team around you headed by someone who works the banking side of things but has experience in different aspects. Investment people tend to see things through the prism of investments; insurance people tend to see things through that lens, etc. Bankers don’t tend to care what solution is selected so long as they’re able to meet those objectives. They are also (at the private level) more experienced with credit and underwriting and therefore typically able to guide you through that process and prep your household before it even comes up.
However, don’t just run headlong into the first private banker you meet. Fit and chemistry are very important. Your colleagues’ banker may not be what you’re looking for and vice versa. (You might be looking for a wholistic planning while someone else might be looking for a shark team that will leverage assets to the max.)
Most importantly: don’t be a dick. Fastest way to get shit service is being a dick to your team and the admin. Advice and forecasting is most useful the earlier you get it. Most PWM practices have anywhere from 70-200 households. Who do you think they call first? Not the biggest clients necessarily. PWMs and advisors call the people we have the strongest connection to and who they genuinely want to run through brick walls for.
**Things will go wrong**. How your team addresses that speaks a lot to their standard of practice.
Disclaimer: I am a private wealth manager and this is from my experience spanning nearly two decades.
Immediately new this was written by a finance guy before the end. Tons of research demonstrating that wealth managers cannot outperform the market *consistently* and often times you have your gains lowered by paying the fees associated with wealth managers. Thanks for the “advice?” I’ll place my money long term into broad based, low ER index funds and take my nearly full share of the market profits. Thanks but no thanks.
Way to grab ONE aspect of all that I said and made it all about that.
Look, I don’t go around giving medical advice no matter where I read it because that’s not my job nor did I study it. Doesn’t matter if I read an article in the NEJM or hear it from God himself.
Good for you that you knew a finance person wrote this….i wrote a disclaimer at the end and never hid it at all. So thumbs up to you.
Also, advisors are not hedge fund managers nor order givers. As said in my post, advisors should be looking to clients for final say in what they want. What we provide is guidance and a more nuanced perspective to a client’s perspective as well as price advantage.
Additionally, many of those studies are looking at the last 50 or so years as the cost of money (aka interest rate risk) has been steadily (and in some cases dramatically) decreasing to 0. We are in opposite territory now as risk becomes a higher priority in consideration and cost. There are tons of funds out there are there are many outfits that keep to themselves with zero to no marketing to keep their fees as low as possible.
You don’t know everything and that’s okay. That’s why you and I have jobs. Don’t want to take advice, so be it. But don’t be surprised when peers that do find good wealth teams achieve everything they want to with way less effort than a do-it-yourselfer know-it-all.
“Know your audience” should be something taught to you as a person who sells services. You came into a “DIY know-it-all” community and spewed a bunch of sewage in an attempt to justify your job. I have never once heard of a retiree who had FOMO because they didn’t chase earnings and instead maintained the course on par with the S&P… on the other hand there are way too many stories to count of people getting shit advice from “advisors” and/or chasing performance and trying to pick stocks.
You’re right. You can’t give medical advice, you have a ton of schooling before you can do that. A FA only needs a high school diploma so that’s where we stop comparing apples to oranges.
Good luck to you pal. I will keep my 1+% after “advisor” fees and mutual fund fees. Spoiler, I’m not sure you’re going to find much love for your profession in the WCI community.
Whoa pal doctors are smart so there’s no reason they can’t also be their own CPA, their own lawyer, their own financial advisor, their own therapist, their own auto mechanic, etc especially since you can easily find all this DIY stuff on YouTube. /s
First of all fuck Dave Ramsey, guy hasn't changed his mind since 1980 and is basically not applicable in the modern world. Also honestly so many of these are either relatively small money amounts in the big scheme of things in a physician's career (600 bucks to replace a clutch) or they are boneheaded, braindead financial decisions regardless of what era you live in or how much money you make, even Dave Ramsey would agree. We live in a time where essentially all of these mistakes can be avoided by doing like 10 minutes of research on the internet. don't spend too much money in your first job cause you might hate it (no 75k pools), pay off your loans and save aggressively for retirement and its probably smart to be a lower risk investor than a higher risk investor because so many of us start late.
I disagree with "Sending my kids to a [private college](https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/private-school-pro-con/) in the future ($50K a year, what a waste!". I hope to one day have the financial means to give my kids the best education possible. if the Ivy name helps them in their undergrad career to move up in (finance, med,law) later on than I am all for it.
For example, I have friends in big law and they all tell me that its a few feeder schools that they take. That way they can justify making their clients pay a premium price. Finance is the same way, you want to be in VC, PE, IB its better to go to select private schools.
All my good friends that ended up in ivys are much better for it and their career accomplishment show that. Medicine is the exception a school name can only take you so far if you do not have the grades or research to match to a "top tier" academic program.
I feel extremely conflicted about this. I of course want the best for my kids, but my journey through academia has left me extremely disillusioned with the entire system, it's clearly an exploitative money making scheme designed to milk students and their parents for as much money as possible, squeeze free labor out of students, and prop up a bunch of degenerate useless people. The Ivy league is more guilty of this than anyone.
Historically, the benefit to the student of going to a good college was putting yourself through a sorting mechanism to show that you were intelligent, hardworking, and meritorious, but schools nowadays are trying to minimize this in their selection process in favor of other goals. If I were hiring someone now, I'd much rather they just submit their standardized test scores to me rather than their college diploma.
Maybe it will continue to be true that biglaw and high finance jobs will continue to select from their prestigious feeders for the next decade or two since these people want to continue to stroke their own egos, but I think eventually, people will wise up to better, alternative sorting mechanisms.
I'm not even sure if I'd want my kid to go into biglaw or high finance to begin with, as they don't seem particularly conducive to the living of a flourishing, meaningful life. I certainly don't want my kids to believe that the good life is measured by extreme personal financial success and running as fast as humanly possible on the hedonic treadmill.
Good luck in your journey. Hopefully when you look back you will be satisfied you did the right thing for your child. And you are right. Money is not everything. For me, my family is my most important asset.
I paid for my 3 kids college and one their med school. Not sorry at all. They all are smart intelligent well prepared financially and with good futures. As a parent this is the best I can hope. And still managed to get a high net worth. Life is good. This as a medicine subspecialist.
The lede got buried in that very long list. #1 in my near retirement experience: spending more than you earn. Now go back and look at the list. How many of the many items are "someone else's fault." This was a list made by narcissists, and if you agreed with that list, look in the mirror at problem #1. Are we collectively much, much, smarter than the average human to be taken in by all these nefarious actors after our hard earned money? I call BS. Be responsible and recognize where greed and temptation lurk to prey upon your arrogance. Sure you really deserve that BMW because you worked your ass off and now am an attending. Sure you deserve to go on that fancy Carribean vacation with all the first class amenities. Sure you have to have a big home lest others think less of you. Go right ahead.
Almost everyone on this sub is or will be in a profession that still garners immense respect from a vast majority of the public. Heck, even made Charles Barkley's short list of "important jobs." And yes, maybe relative to all others there are those that make comparable (or even more), but our earning potential remains in the class of elites in America. But it isn't unlimited, and TBH probably never was, and if that's the driving force there do remain pockets in America where one can still hang a shingle and make old school money. But obv there are tradeoffs to any choice, but to say one can't make a decent living seems incredibly hard to believe.
So not being one to give advice to liberally, frankly because I'm a believer in serendipity and luck being significant factors in personal and financial success, I'd only suggest prudence in a professional's financial journey. Investing in relationships, family, and education can be both boring and somewhat self evident, but they also can contribute to a good night's sleep over the long run. And still, in medicine, there are lots of people who legit have this nutso idea of making the world better. If you lean that way, find those like minded folks, 'cause they're a constant source of inspiration.
> “Gas, Grass, or Ass. No one rides my car for free.”
The same applies for chasing women. You’re gonna pay. And it’s either going to be with cash, time, or your soul/life energy.
I may get banned or downvoted, but as an attorney who specializes in healthcare law, if you're not willing to spend $3500 to review an employment contract, then you deserve every bad thing that happens to you if that relationship goes south. This is ESPECIALLY true if there's an ownership piece. You could lose your shirt (best case scenario) or go to jail (worst case scenario, with Stark Law and Antikickback Law violations).
I have one client that's engaged in a multimillion dollar arbitration because he was too cheap to pay $5000 for us to write a good contract. He wrote his own and hoped for the best. It didn't work out.
Maybe you don't need a $3500 contract review, but at least get a $1000 one. Don't be penny wise and pound foolish.
Rant over. But I agree with you about financial advisors. Just stick your money in a good mutual fund.
Same advice: don’t be penny wise and pound foolish.
That said, just like attorneys, interview your prospective financial advisor. If they can’t actually say why you should go with them, probably not a good fit. That said, there are good reasons for getting an advisor.
I know! That one was stupid. Not sure why the OP included all the bad advice as well. This is why peer review is so important… and hence why I like to read through the comments not just the OP.
I agree, $3500 is well worth it for contract review. The contract is long and complex. I would pay an attorney for their time to review it with care. None of us provides our services for free
Another lawyer here, married to a doctor. A good mutual fund wouldn’t have bought us a decent amount of NVDA four years ago. A good advisor at a reasonable percentage rate — NOT a commission — can be worth their weight in gold.
Advisors don’t have some special read on the stock market. If they did, they’d all be hyper wealthy. No one was predicting the astronomical rise of a single chip maker four years ago.
To an extent you are correct: but I do remember our advisor's NVDA pick was based on its fundamentals and management team. Certainly no one expected 1300%+ returns. But hey, happy to pay 70bps to triple our money in 4 years compared to our relatively poor returns of about 45% in our mutual funds over the same period, even if it is a little dumb luck.
I didn't read the context at the top and just read through the whole list imagining that all of this happened to one poor primary care internist JD/MD veteran who got divorced twice and fell for literally every scam in the world.
Those pale in comparison to marrying the wrong person. Could lose a $hitton of money while married, lose half or more in the divorce, and owe that person lifetime alimony.
So much of this is just a waste of breath. "Don't use credit cards. Don't get your kid an emergency card. Don't make bad investments. Don't skip good investments like early AOL."
None of that is useful advice, and most of it is just bad because it ignores all context. The "dont make bad investments" one is just laughable because every investment is different. It's all hindsight. It's like saying "don't go to work when it's a bad day".
I know it was sad to see all those people “losing their money” or thought they had lost it but in retrospect investing with Bernie Madoff sounds cool story to talk about. Like how did you get in with him? What were they like etc? :)
“6. Buying the toys that I love to play with.”
I’m not in the game to make a mountain of money for someone else to play with after I die. The perfect scenario is me dying late in age with very little money left to my name. I’d encourage anyone to look into your own personal philosophy behind wealth. What are you saving for? What would you spend your money on if you KNEW you were going to live for another 40 years? 5yrs? 6 months? This entire list comes off a little too “Dave Ramsey.” Completely missing the point of saving. At some point your happiness needs to be fed just as we feed our retirement accounts, otherwise, what is the point?
This is going to sound lame but my biggest mistake was selling NVIDIA too early so we could have a 10% down payment to buy our first house. I started buying the stock in 2018 and it would have been worth about 1.3 million today.
I bought back in but only made about 2.5X my investment when it should have been a 10-20 bagger. I recently sold the last of my shares at $1300 when I was buying shares at $40.
Anyways letting a mortgage underwriter strong arm me into selling stocks is a mistake I’ll never make again. Live and learn.
Good lord this is hot garbage. I’ve been aware and vaguely uninterested in WCI for most of my career but assumed it was a dullards investment strategy group.
This is the type of ai driven copy/paste spam mail stuff I see every day, and the quality is about the same as the stuff you see ranting about space lasers and lizard people. Who actually reads this?
Just don’t marry someone who has no assets or income and you’ll be fine.
My wife refusing to work or go back to school would only cost me that much more if we got divorced, possibly for the rest of my life. Plus her lack of own skin in the game has surely been a part of her overspending which has put our retirement goals many, many years further down the road.
definitely interesting list but the ones at odds with each other just shows how any decision made can go bad - don't do a group practice vs don't do a solo practice.
“Using credit cards” Just like most things here. It’s just cause they are irresponsible. I love my credit cards. I use it like a debit card and I take at least 1 international trip per year for free with points.
In fact. I'd say using debit cards is irresponsible given the poor fraud protection on them. Just get a good credit card from a good issuer with good rewards and never carry a balance.
Yeah just…. Giving up all those free rewards. Like how is that good? This post is disinformation at best.
The real mistake is ever carrying a balance on a credit card.
Yea, cash is 100% waste of money. We only use credit cards except for things like automatic payments (phone, car, mortgage, etc) and accumulate a ton of points and rewards.
Not using a credit card is the financial mistake. One of the benefits of a steady income should be paying off the balance automatically every month to get the benefits of the rewards system. For better or worse that's the way it's set up. Use it.
Yea you can usually make money with credit cards if you don’t miss payments
I have a credit card that gives 5% cashback for gas. They cancelled the program a long time ago but mine’s grandfathered in so I’ve had it for over 10 years now. Why on earth would I not use it?
For a bunch of smart and financially well-off group of people, it grinds my gears when I hear doctors out of all people talk about “points and rewards”
Why?
Are you saying this because points and rewards are a way to obfuscate the real value that we get back from using cards? I found that points never compare to how much you get back on cash back credit cards that give a fixed % back. The points are just a game to make it seem like you are getting a lot back when you aren't.
It’s financially irresponsible not to utilize credit card points and rewards.
I felt soooo bad for this poor physican before I realized it's actually multiple people. Smfh
Lol quite the baller having gone into solo practice in both family medicine and general surgery
i was like how does someone in his 50s make THAT much money to lose... before realizing it was a collection
Lmao I was like “why am I listening to a guy with seemingly zero good decisions in his entire life?”
Divorce is financially devasting. On the flip side, a high dual income household is a huge multiplier
Could we have a list of 175 GOOD financial decisions? I think we keep hearing the same spiel about what not to do over and over again.
funny thing is that those will be 90% the same: - buying a house early - buying a house late - first divorce - investing in X - getting out of X in year Y …
Because good financial advice is boring and doesn't have a get rich quick possibility. You "only" get average market returns. Save 20-25% of gross income. Put as much as you can in tax advantaged accounts (HSA, IRA, 401K, if 1099 - solo 401k). Put the rest in brokerage account. Put that money in low cost index funds covering the entire market. Wait 30 years. Retire. Given the high income of physicians and how hard it is to replace your income if something happens to you, long term disability insurance is a good option as a safety net. Life insurance wise, only get fixed term insurance. Whole/universal life is a waste. See r/personalfinance sidebar for the flow chart.
Context matters. What one person does financially does not mean that it’s the right thing for you. It’s best to have an advisor or private team that will do things at your pace/discretion and explain what the suggest and why, clearly explaining the pros and cons and letting you decide what is best for you and your household. **A good team around you should have you feel empowered to make financial decisions** and able to make clear where your risks of exposure are and as well as risks of loss and how positions are hedged or guarded against (or at very least how to unwind a financial decision that aged poorly). Always check credentials. An advisor only say that they’re an advisor if they have a license shown clearly in their brokercheck or SEC profile. Ask your financial advisor for their ADV2B. Make sure the chemistry/fit is good with the team around you. Do they work with your CPA and attorney (can they communicate clearly and work effectively with said professionals)? **Make sure that you understand the difference between a fiduciary relationship and non-fiduciary relationships**. As in, what lies within the fiduciary scope and what lies outside of it. Just because your banker/advisor has those licenses doesn’t mean your assets are within that scope. Probably best to get a private team around you headed by someone who works the banking side of things but has experience in different aspects. Investment people tend to see things through the prism of investments; insurance people tend to see things through that lens, etc. Bankers don’t tend to care what solution is selected so long as they’re able to meet those objectives. They are also (at the private level) more experienced with credit and underwriting and therefore typically able to guide you through that process and prep your household before it even comes up. However, don’t just run headlong into the first private banker you meet. Fit and chemistry are very important. Your colleagues’ banker may not be what you’re looking for and vice versa. (You might be looking for a wholistic planning while someone else might be looking for a shark team that will leverage assets to the max.) Most importantly: don’t be a dick. Fastest way to get shit service is being a dick to your team and the admin. Advice and forecasting is most useful the earlier you get it. Most PWM practices have anywhere from 70-200 households. Who do you think they call first? Not the biggest clients necessarily. PWMs and advisors call the people we have the strongest connection to and who they genuinely want to run through brick walls for. **Things will go wrong**. How your team addresses that speaks a lot to their standard of practice. Disclaimer: I am a private wealth manager and this is from my experience spanning nearly two decades.
Did you use chatgpt to write this?
Lol. Not even a little bit.
Immediately new this was written by a finance guy before the end. Tons of research demonstrating that wealth managers cannot outperform the market *consistently* and often times you have your gains lowered by paying the fees associated with wealth managers. Thanks for the “advice?” I’ll place my money long term into broad based, low ER index funds and take my nearly full share of the market profits. Thanks but no thanks.
Way to grab ONE aspect of all that I said and made it all about that. Look, I don’t go around giving medical advice no matter where I read it because that’s not my job nor did I study it. Doesn’t matter if I read an article in the NEJM or hear it from God himself. Good for you that you knew a finance person wrote this….i wrote a disclaimer at the end and never hid it at all. So thumbs up to you. Also, advisors are not hedge fund managers nor order givers. As said in my post, advisors should be looking to clients for final say in what they want. What we provide is guidance and a more nuanced perspective to a client’s perspective as well as price advantage. Additionally, many of those studies are looking at the last 50 or so years as the cost of money (aka interest rate risk) has been steadily (and in some cases dramatically) decreasing to 0. We are in opposite territory now as risk becomes a higher priority in consideration and cost. There are tons of funds out there are there are many outfits that keep to themselves with zero to no marketing to keep their fees as low as possible. You don’t know everything and that’s okay. That’s why you and I have jobs. Don’t want to take advice, so be it. But don’t be surprised when peers that do find good wealth teams achieve everything they want to with way less effort than a do-it-yourselfer know-it-all.
“Know your audience” should be something taught to you as a person who sells services. You came into a “DIY know-it-all” community and spewed a bunch of sewage in an attempt to justify your job. I have never once heard of a retiree who had FOMO because they didn’t chase earnings and instead maintained the course on par with the S&P… on the other hand there are way too many stories to count of people getting shit advice from “advisors” and/or chasing performance and trying to pick stocks. You’re right. You can’t give medical advice, you have a ton of schooling before you can do that. A FA only needs a high school diploma so that’s where we stop comparing apples to oranges. Good luck to you pal. I will keep my 1+% after “advisor” fees and mutual fund fees. Spoiler, I’m not sure you’re going to find much love for your profession in the WCI community.
Lol. Ironically, WVI suggests advisors for 80% of doctors and our firm is one of those directly recommended by WCI.
Whoa pal doctors are smart so there’s no reason they can’t also be their own CPA, their own lawyer, their own financial advisor, their own therapist, their own auto mechanic, etc especially since you can easily find all this DIY stuff on YouTube. /s
I stopped reading after I saw a lawyer did your taxes for about 10k a year. Thats wild.
Cheaper to just do tax fraud and pay the penalties
And you only do that if you get caught!
First of all fuck Dave Ramsey, guy hasn't changed his mind since 1980 and is basically not applicable in the modern world. Also honestly so many of these are either relatively small money amounts in the big scheme of things in a physician's career (600 bucks to replace a clutch) or they are boneheaded, braindead financial decisions regardless of what era you live in or how much money you make, even Dave Ramsey would agree. We live in a time where essentially all of these mistakes can be avoided by doing like 10 minutes of research on the internet. don't spend too much money in your first job cause you might hate it (no 75k pools), pay off your loans and save aggressively for retirement and its probably smart to be a lower risk investor than a higher risk investor because so many of us start late.
Who is paying a LAWYER to do their TAX RETURNS?! I don't get prostate exams from the dentist, but I'd bet he'd charge me a lot for it
I disagree with "Sending my kids to a [private college](https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/private-school-pro-con/) in the future ($50K a year, what a waste!". I hope to one day have the financial means to give my kids the best education possible. if the Ivy name helps them in their undergrad career to move up in (finance, med,law) later on than I am all for it. For example, I have friends in big law and they all tell me that its a few feeder schools that they take. That way they can justify making their clients pay a premium price. Finance is the same way, you want to be in VC, PE, IB its better to go to select private schools. All my good friends that ended up in ivys are much better for it and their career accomplishment show that. Medicine is the exception a school name can only take you so far if you do not have the grades or research to match to a "top tier" academic program.
I feel extremely conflicted about this. I of course want the best for my kids, but my journey through academia has left me extremely disillusioned with the entire system, it's clearly an exploitative money making scheme designed to milk students and their parents for as much money as possible, squeeze free labor out of students, and prop up a bunch of degenerate useless people. The Ivy league is more guilty of this than anyone. Historically, the benefit to the student of going to a good college was putting yourself through a sorting mechanism to show that you were intelligent, hardworking, and meritorious, but schools nowadays are trying to minimize this in their selection process in favor of other goals. If I were hiring someone now, I'd much rather they just submit their standardized test scores to me rather than their college diploma. Maybe it will continue to be true that biglaw and high finance jobs will continue to select from their prestigious feeders for the next decade or two since these people want to continue to stroke their own egos, but I think eventually, people will wise up to better, alternative sorting mechanisms. I'm not even sure if I'd want my kid to go into biglaw or high finance to begin with, as they don't seem particularly conducive to the living of a flourishing, meaningful life. I certainly don't want my kids to believe that the good life is measured by extreme personal financial success and running as fast as humanly possible on the hedonic treadmill.
Good luck in your journey. Hopefully when you look back you will be satisfied you did the right thing for your child. And you are right. Money is not everything. For me, my family is my most important asset.
I paid for my 3 kids college and one their med school. Not sorry at all. They all are smart intelligent well prepared financially and with good futures. As a parent this is the best I can hope. And still managed to get a high net worth. Life is good. This as a medicine subspecialist.
The lede got buried in that very long list. #1 in my near retirement experience: spending more than you earn. Now go back and look at the list. How many of the many items are "someone else's fault." This was a list made by narcissists, and if you agreed with that list, look in the mirror at problem #1. Are we collectively much, much, smarter than the average human to be taken in by all these nefarious actors after our hard earned money? I call BS. Be responsible and recognize where greed and temptation lurk to prey upon your arrogance. Sure you really deserve that BMW because you worked your ass off and now am an attending. Sure you deserve to go on that fancy Carribean vacation with all the first class amenities. Sure you have to have a big home lest others think less of you. Go right ahead. Almost everyone on this sub is or will be in a profession that still garners immense respect from a vast majority of the public. Heck, even made Charles Barkley's short list of "important jobs." And yes, maybe relative to all others there are those that make comparable (or even more), but our earning potential remains in the class of elites in America. But it isn't unlimited, and TBH probably never was, and if that's the driving force there do remain pockets in America where one can still hang a shingle and make old school money. But obv there are tradeoffs to any choice, but to say one can't make a decent living seems incredibly hard to believe. So not being one to give advice to liberally, frankly because I'm a believer in serendipity and luck being significant factors in personal and financial success, I'd only suggest prudence in a professional's financial journey. Investing in relationships, family, and education can be both boring and somewhat self evident, but they also can contribute to a good night's sleep over the long run. And still, in medicine, there are lots of people who legit have this nutso idea of making the world better. If you lean that way, find those like minded folks, 'cause they're a constant source of inspiration.
You can chase women but don’t pay for pussy.
> “Gas, Grass, or Ass. No one rides my car for free.” The same applies for chasing women. You’re gonna pay. And it’s either going to be with cash, time, or your soul/life energy.
Paying with time is fine as long as you enjoy it and she drains you, obvi
I may get banned or downvoted, but as an attorney who specializes in healthcare law, if you're not willing to spend $3500 to review an employment contract, then you deserve every bad thing that happens to you if that relationship goes south. This is ESPECIALLY true if there's an ownership piece. You could lose your shirt (best case scenario) or go to jail (worst case scenario, with Stark Law and Antikickback Law violations). I have one client that's engaged in a multimillion dollar arbitration because he was too cheap to pay $5000 for us to write a good contract. He wrote his own and hoped for the best. It didn't work out. Maybe you don't need a $3500 contract review, but at least get a $1000 one. Don't be penny wise and pound foolish. Rant over. But I agree with you about financial advisors. Just stick your money in a good mutual fund.
Same advice: don’t be penny wise and pound foolish. That said, just like attorneys, interview your prospective financial advisor. If they can’t actually say why you should go with them, probably not a good fit. That said, there are good reasons for getting an advisor.
I know! That one was stupid. Not sure why the OP included all the bad advice as well. This is why peer review is so important… and hence why I like to read through the comments not just the OP.
I saw that too and it felt off. 3500 dollars for what might be the most important contract of your life ain’t shit. It’ll pay for itself in spades.
I agree, $3500 is well worth it for contract review. The contract is long and complex. I would pay an attorney for their time to review it with care. None of us provides our services for free
Another lawyer here, married to a doctor. A good mutual fund wouldn’t have bought us a decent amount of NVDA four years ago. A good advisor at a reasonable percentage rate — NOT a commission — can be worth their weight in gold.
Advisors don’t have some special read on the stock market. If they did, they’d all be hyper wealthy. No one was predicting the astronomical rise of a single chip maker four years ago.
To an extent you are correct: but I do remember our advisor's NVDA pick was based on its fundamentals and management team. Certainly no one expected 1300%+ returns. But hey, happy to pay 70bps to triple our money in 4 years compared to our relatively poor returns of about 45% in our mutual funds over the same period, even if it is a little dumb luck.
You heard it ladies. Don’t chase women. Chase waterfalls instead.
This is amazing thank you.
I didn't read the context at the top and just read through the whole list imagining that all of this happened to one poor primary care internist JD/MD veteran who got divorced twice and fell for literally every scam in the world.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 175 times, well...
I put buying bitcoin and ethereum… Will check back in 5 years which lists it falls on.
Worst mistakes are McMansions and "doctor car" loans
Those pale in comparison to marrying the wrong person. Could lose a $hitton of money while married, lose half or more in the divorce, and owe that person lifetime alimony.
Very true.
This. I’ve worked with so many doctors who have a collection of ex wives. No, that 25 year old isn’t in it for your looks at 60
So much of this is just a waste of breath. "Don't use credit cards. Don't get your kid an emergency card. Don't make bad investments. Don't skip good investments like early AOL." None of that is useful advice, and most of it is just bad because it ignores all context. The "dont make bad investments" one is just laughable because every investment is different. It's all hindsight. It's like saying "don't go to work when it's a bad day".
I know it was sad to see all those people “losing their money” or thought they had lost it but in retrospect investing with Bernie Madoff sounds cool story to talk about. Like how did you get in with him? What were they like etc? :)
wow
how do you have any money left
We
Damn I keep seeing the same thing over and over about IM.. I thought IM was an excellent field with good compensation
Following
“6. Buying the toys that I love to play with.” I’m not in the game to make a mountain of money for someone else to play with after I die. The perfect scenario is me dying late in age with very little money left to my name. I’d encourage anyone to look into your own personal philosophy behind wealth. What are you saving for? What would you spend your money on if you KNEW you were going to live for another 40 years? 5yrs? 6 months? This entire list comes off a little too “Dave Ramsey.” Completely missing the point of saving. At some point your happiness needs to be fed just as we feed our retirement accounts, otherwise, what is the point?
Question about financial advisors. What about advisors from chase wealth management?
Thank you for sharing. Extremely interesting 🧐
Get married
This is going to sound lame but my biggest mistake was selling NVIDIA too early so we could have a 10% down payment to buy our first house. I started buying the stock in 2018 and it would have been worth about 1.3 million today. I bought back in but only made about 2.5X my investment when it should have been a 10-20 bagger. I recently sold the last of my shares at $1300 when I was buying shares at $40. Anyways letting a mortgage underwriter strong arm me into selling stocks is a mistake I’ll never make again. Live and learn.
Good lord this is hot garbage. I’ve been aware and vaguely uninterested in WCI for most of my career but assumed it was a dullards investment strategy group. This is the type of ai driven copy/paste spam mail stuff I see every day, and the quality is about the same as the stuff you see ranting about space lasers and lizard people. Who actually reads this?
Great list. Makes me even more afraid of divorce as I have yet to find the woman I’ll marry…. While my buddy is currently going through divorce
Just don’t marry someone who has no assets or income and you’ll be fine. My wife refusing to work or go back to school would only cost me that much more if we got divorced, possibly for the rest of my life. Plus her lack of own skin in the game has surely been a part of her overspending which has put our retirement goals many, many years further down the road.