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We sit down with W. Ben Utley, a certified financial planner specializing in helping physicians navigate the unique financial challenges of their careers. We explore how doctors can break free from the pressure of paying off debt while maintaining strong relationships with their families, define what “enough money” truly means, and find balance between financial success and personal fulfillment. Ben shares valuable insights on aligning financial goals with core values, avoiding burnout, and building a life that prioritizes both wealth and well-being.

W. Ben Utley is a certified financial planner.

He discusses the KevinMD article, “How physicians can find true happiness beyond wealth.”

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Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today we welcome Ben Utley. He’s a certified financial planner. Today’s KevinMD article is “How physicians can find true happiness beyond wealth.” Ben, welcome to the show.

Ben Utley: Thank you for having me.

Kevin Pho: So you’re a certified financial planner. Just tell us a little bit about how your practice intersects with the physician community.

Ben Utley: Heavily. So we serve exclusively practicing MDs and DOs. We serve more than 200 physicians in over 40 states. I’ve been kind of rocking the physician gig for 25 years. I’ve been around a while, an adviser for 30 years, physicians for 25, and exclusively physicians for the last 10 or 15 years.

Kevin Pho: All right, and of the many mistakes that I’m sure physicians make from a financial standpoint, what would you say is the single biggest one that you see them making?

Ben Utley: Starting to save too late.

Kevin Pho: And what are some common questions that they ask you during their session with you?

Ben Utley: It’s all about taxes. Like, how can I save more taxes, what can I do to save taxes? There’s a belief out there that there’s a magic tax fairy, and that the physicians have not yet met this magic tax fairy, and that will sprinkle some tax savings dust on them. And the fact is the fairy doesn’t exist, the dust doesn’t exist. In 1986, Congress, with the Tax Reform Act of ’86, closed up all the magic loopholes.

So there are still a few left over. I saw that you had an interview with Alexis Gallati about the Augusta rule. There’s still a few places where you can get legit tax breaks. But the big tax breaks, they all come typically with some form of give up, like you contribute to your defined benefit plan, your cash balance plan, your 401k, your 529. In some places, HSAs are probably the very best tax break that’s going out there, because you get the triple tax free, a tax deduction when you contribute to it, tax-free growth, and then tax-free withdrawal for qualified health expenses.

So there’s just a handful of tax breaks that are available to physicians, more so for those that are self-employed, and even more so for those who actually own their practices. But yeah, I would say that overlooking easy tax breaks is one of the mistakes that we see.

And then I think there’s kind of a product orientation, I think, among physicians that are just getting into this. They’re focused on the product rather than the outcome, right? It would be the equivalent to have a prescribing physician, you walk in and they just start talking about antibiotics. They list all their favorite antibiotics, and then they go, where does it hurt, how’s it feel? And you’re like, well actually, I had this laceration.

Kevin Pho: So when you say physicians in general don’t save enough or save too late, is it just not socking away money to retirement funds, not saving early enough for college fees? When you say that they’re not saving soon enough or enough, what exactly do you mean by that?

Ben Utley: Yeah, I think that, well, we know for a fact that physicians underestimate in particular the cost of college. The cost of college is enormous, and it’s very rare for me to meet a physician couple that is beginning to save for college, that when we unveil the amount that they need to be saving for the next 18 years, that it doesn’t absolutely pop their eye. It lights them up like a Christmas tree. So I think they’re surprised by that.

Seldom are they surprised by the amount they need to save for retirement, but there are a number of physicians out there that really need to do something other than just max out their 401k and set up and run their backdoor Roth. Some physicians have a standard of living that is high enough that they need to be contributing to an after tax account, and the older the physician is, the longer they wait, the more likely that is to be the case.

If we assume something simple like a 7 percent rate of return, Rule of 72 tells us that that money is going to double about every 10 years. And so if you’re a physician, you get out and you start practicing in your early 30s but don’t really start saving until you’re in your early 40s, you’ve already missed one doubling period, right? So now you have to save twice as much to be able to retire when you want to, or work 10 years longer than expected. So getting that money flowing into some sort of savings program in the beginning is just pivotal, because Einstein said the eighth wonder of the world is compound interest, and that’s exactly what we’re about.

Kevin Pho: So you wrote this KevinMD article, “How physicians can find true happiness beyond wealth.” Tell us the events that led you to write this article, and for those who didn’t get a chance to read it, just tell us what it’s about.

Ben Utley: I think it’s rooted in a lot of the malaise that we see in our medical service system these days. I mean, you’re familiar with it, your listeners are familiar with it. It’s the burnout, it’s the moral injury that goes with things, it’s the financialization of the health care system. It’s all those things that takes the human relationship between a provider and patient and grinds it into a financial transaction that is juiced for the ultimate return and incredible efficiency, and at the same time it absolutely crushes the human connection. And I believe that that leads physicians to begin to feel more like a cog in a machine than a human provider who has a healing touch for another human being.

So that’s the root of it. We see physicians come to us that are just unhappy. Maybe they love their job, they’re not burned out, they want to continue to serve, but the mechanics, this machine that they’re stuck in, causes them to be unhappy. And so through the process of financial planning, we showed them, like, you really don’t have to pile money to the ceiling to be able to have flexibility. It is OK to leave a high pressure practice and move to a lower pressure practice with more life balance, so that you can spend some more time with your children.

It’s one of the things that I see that I feel very sad about. Physicians who come out, they begin their practice, and they’re on fire to pay down their debt, they’re on fire to pay off their homes, they want to save, they want to retire early. But those first six to 12 years that you have with your child are the most precious years in their life. You’re going to see your child as much by the time they turn six as you will in the remainder of that child’s life.

And so those first six years, you watch them crawl, you watch them walk, you watch them say their first words, you’re with them day in and day out, up until the time they’re six and they go to school. As my wife says, you dress them up in the morning, you make them pretty for the day, you give them to people other than you for the best part of their day, and when they’re wound up and dried out then you pick them up from school and you put them back together again, and you rinse, repeat, right?

And of course when they get to be 12, then there’s a mean girl thing, bully boy thing, academic study, they begin to have to study, there’s sleepovers, they want to be at other people’s homes, they turn 13, 14, so sooner or later you’re not cool anymore. And so those early years that a person has with their child is an opportunity, because you can work the rest of your life in medicine in almost all practice areas, particularly like psychiatry, right? You can work until you’re 80.

So realizing that you don’t have to do everything financial right now, that there’s a balance of consumption, there’s a balance of savings. Really what it breaks down to is, I call it being able to pay for the things that money cannot buy. And by that I mean, how do you get the things that money can’t buy if you can’t pay for them with money? You pay for them with attention.

And the way that you get that attention is to be able to shift your focus from the pursuit of the almighty dollar back to the people in your life that matter, because that’s what brings us joy, that’s what brings us happiness, that’s true wealth.

And I think that physician culture, it’s born in the crucible of an academic history where you’re great at things up until you’re in fifth grade, then you get good grades through eighth grade, you get great grades through middle school, high school, you go to the best college, you bust your butt there, and you get out and, like, now you’re a doctor. And so people have counted your every step, your every breath, your every heartbeat and every grade point until you become a physician, and then you’re out of things to count, right? And so what do you begin counting next? You begin counting dollars, because that’s how we measure our worth in this country.

It’s sad, but the intangibles, the things that are hard to measure, that you would need a rubric to measure, are, how do your children feel about you, are they happy to be with you, what’s the strength of your marriage, how’s your blood pressure, how’s your health, how do you feel in the morning? These are things that are somewhat intangible, difficult to measure. And you know what they say, what gets measured gets managed, like money does. But these other things that are hard to measure, they seldom get managed, they get swept under the rug, until you wind up in a point where, gosh, your marriage is on the rocks, or you don’t hear from your kids anymore, or you’re in a feud with your colleagues at work, or you’re in a divorce with your partners at work.

There’s just a whole lot more to life than money, and I think that the planning process allows people to put money in its place and see it as a means to an end, and basically do what I call turning an income into a better life outcome.

Kevin Pho: Incredibly wise words. I wish every physician can listen to what you’re saying. It’s almost like physicians come to you for financial advice, but you almost have to act like a physician coach back to them and kind of talk about their life outside of the financial realm.

Ben Utley: I would never offer coaching to physicians. I think physician culture will not abide that very well. I know there’s some physician coaches out there, but I think there are probably quite a number of physicians who are just like not having that.

Kevin Pho: So when you tell these physicians exactly what you told me, what’s their first response? How did they react to you when you share this wisdom with them?

Ben Utley: With a number of them, it’s relief. They know that there’s something wrong. You wake up in the morning, you get that grip of fear, you get the Sunday night scaries because you know you’ve got to go to work on Monday morning, or you’re late getting home, your spouse is upset at you, and you know there’s something wrong in your life. You can feel that in your gut. Nobody has to tell you, I mean you can feel it.

So when they come here and they’re like, hey, I need to get my finances kind of fixed up, I want to do this and that, and they come for the thought of investing and all the stuff that you think of financial guys for, but what they leave with is a better understanding of the transformative power of money, like what money can really buy you, right? And there’s no catalog for that. You can’t go on Amazon and say, hey, I’d like to buy a better relationship with my kids.

So when we show them that in fact they can say no to some of this earned income, they can say no to some of the time on the job, that there really is enough work and there’s enough earn, and in fact there’s other things in life to pursue, I just get this big gigantic feeling with them. It’s just this big pause of relief, because the rest of the world, Kevin, the rest of the world tells you and all of your species that you’re not enough, you have to work harder, you have to make more. And the opposite of more is not less, the opposite of more is enough. And so finding enough for you is important.

And I’ll tell you a little bit further for this, if you as a parent model enough in your life, guess what, your children are going to learn what is enough for them, right? So I’m a father of two grown daughters, and I remember having a conversation with my kids about, well, they’re like, well gosh, if I don’t study this I’m not going to get the A, and there’s this party and I have friends, or I want to go to this athletic event.

And I’m like, look, there’s enough grades, there’s enough studying. If you get the A+ on this, it’s going to put you in a position where you have to get the next A+, and one of these days you’re going to find yourself A+ out of existence, because life is now, life happens today. And so I said, just study until you feel like you’re comfortable with the material, get the grades that you feel good about, rather than what makes me happy or competing with your colleagues and your peers.

I mean really, because you know this, you see people die on your watch. Many of the listeners to your show have direct firsthand experience with death. Many of them lost spouses, some of them have lost colleagues to heart attacks and other things like that. We’re not here for very long. You don’t get a do-over. This is a one-shot pony. And so if you’re not living in the moment, then you’re not really living.

Kevin Pho: It’s almost like whenever physicians hear this from you, it’s like, you talk about that relief, it’s like the first time that they’ve heard that. All their life they have to study to get that proverbial A+, as you said. You have to work those 100-hour work weeks. And when you say that sometimes enough is enough and you don’t have to work all those hours, it’s such a revelation. It’s literally the first time they’ve heard something like that.

Ben Utley: That is true. It is literally, I’m typically one of the very first people who tells them, hey, it is OK to just be who you are. It is OK to wake up with fatigue. You don’t have to apologize when you’re late to a meeting with me, because I’m the one person in the world who gets you. I understand this.

You have to apologize to your spouse, your kids, your colleagues, your patients, the people who support you, the people you speed past on the road. You’ve got to apologize to all those people, but you don’t have to apologize to me, because I work for 200 people like you. I get it. I see how hard you’re working, I see the sacrifices that you’re making. This is real. But by the same token, it’s really your life, and you do have choices.

Kevin Pho: So tell us a case study, it could be a hypothetical case study, where a physician has made some financial changes or decisions regarding how many hours they work and made a positive appreciable difference in other aspects of her life. What would be an example of that?

Ben Utley: Yeah, so I served a specialist who was practicing down in Georgia, and he had moved there with his wife and they had two children in that state. They were far from home. The money was good and he was doing well.

But I asked him, I was like, how are things going at home? This is one of the things we ask during annual reviews. How’s your family? He said, my wife’s kind of unhappy. And they were going through COVID, so he says, she’s struggling with the kids.

So as I drilled down, I was like, what’s behind this? What would this look like if it were right? He’s like, well, her mom would love to help, but her mom is, I don’t know, it’s like 500 miles away up north. I think Michigan is where it was.

And I said, well, have you thought about moving to Michigan? He’s like, oh no, I would have to recredential. And I said, so there’s risk in the move. I said, what about if you flew to Michigan every now and then and you practiced there, you did some locums and you got credentialed that way? And he said, oh, that’s an interesting idea.

And I said, let’s say that you got credentialed up there and you were able to work into a clinic where you really want to work. And the reason Michigan, her hometown, that’s where her mom was, her friends, her support network, the other mothers that are going to help her raise her children while he’s working.

And ultimately he did that. He flew up there, he did some locums, he kind of found a way to wiggle into the network, and he wound up landing a job in her hometown and they moved, and she was happy after that. Now did he make the same kind of money? Absolutely not. But was he happier? Absolutely.

So money can’t buy happiness, but money can buy attention, it can buy energy, and that energy and attention can be used to purchase the things that make people joyful.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Ben Utley. He’s a certified financial planner. Today’s KevinMD article is “How physicians can find true happiness beyond wealth.” Ben, I know that you have your own podcast, so tell us about that, and then maybe end off with some take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience.

Ben Utley: Yeah, every Wednesday we answer questions from podcast listeners, clients, prospective clients, all physician questions, all personal finance, and all relevant to living a good life. Name of our podcast is Physician Family Financial Advisors podcast, so we’re wherever you find your podcasts.

The nuggets of wisdom that I would leave you with is this. The first thing is, you are enough as you are. Second is, any physician can have enough money, unless you just spent everything and you’re five years from retirement. Any physician makes enough money that they can transform that into great outcomes. And the last thing I would leave you with is the same words that I part my podcast with, is remember, you’re not just making a living, you’re making a life.

Kevin Pho: Ben, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and insight, and thanks again for coming on the show.

Ben Utley: My pleasure.