In my post, “Use it Or Lose It,” I talked about the awesome benefits of the Roth IRA. You do have to pay taxes on the money now, but it grows tax-free, and you can withdraw the money after age 59.5 without owing any taxes. It’s the only way to win the tax game. It is 100% your money, forever!
In comparison, money in a traditional IRA, traditional 401k, …
A common question from readers is what to do about an account that contains a bunch of high expense ratio mutual funds or individual stocks.
The reason for having such an account varies from person to person. Maybe it was the only funds available to them in their 401(k) portfolios. Perhaps they collected a bunch of individual stocks and actively-managed mutual funds over the years based on tips from magazines or …
Learning to budget is scary. After all, it means you have to say NO to unnecessary purchases and keep your eye on long-term goals at the expense of short-term pleasure. There are a variety of ways to budget, ranging from the restrictive and somewhat impractical “envelope system” to the more vague and potentially ineffective “wing it” system. I’d like to present a balanced approach to budgeting that …
The fall is over, and winter has come, which means I have just wrapped up a busy season of medical school interviews. Most interviews are conducted in a similar fashion with an hour of introduction, speeches by the dean, presentations of facts I already knew from the website, and finally the interviews.
Within the first hour, I understand the reason: “We are the best medical school at (fill in the blank).” …
The only time my husband outearned me was during our first three years of marriage when I was still in residency and working 80-plus hours per week earning less than minimum wage per hour. Since then, despite graduating in a professional degree, we have made relocation moves that primarily help with my career growth, to the detriment of his.
In 2015, an NPR article quoted statistics showing that 38 percent of …
“You’re a doctor; focus on being a doctor.”
This piece of advice was recently given to me by my own father, in regards to my multiple ambitions outside of the medical field. He himself only recently retired from a long career as a surgeon, so his opinion is the result of years of experience.
His advice got me thinking.
What makes for career longevity in our field? Statistics show that more than half …
This is a tough post to write. I struggle with this issue daily. Is it OK for a physician to retire early? The obvious answer is: yes. Each individual should live their life as they see fit. But with a continued shortage of physicians (granted this is more in rural areas and not big metropolitan cities), and the time, money and resources required for training physicians, is it selfish to …
I feel privileged to be practicing medicine. Many people consider doctor careers and imagine how great it may be. Is it the right thing for you? Yes there are days of frustration, exhaustion, and utter defeat, but at the end of the day I home and know that I helped at least one person if not two from the 16 I meet.
The fact that I alleviated one individual’s anxiety or …
My cousin visited me in sunny Cali this past weekend. She lives a life that many in the medical community can appreciate: a stable and successful job for many years, but burnt out. She then decided to take six months to work on her writing and try establishing herself through various pursuits. While successful in some ways, she decided she needed a more stable position. So she found a job, …
There has been much talk over the years about resident work hours. How long is a safe shift? With safety being considered for both the patient and the resident. But no one ever discusses attending work hours. If putting in a 24-hour shift is bad for a resident, isn’t it bad for an attending as well? When I was working in critical access hospitals, I usually was on call for …
Are you a medical resident or fellow? Do you have a family to provide for? Do you feel that your biweekly paycheck is not quite enough to justify the hard work you put in? Luckily for you, your program offers the great benefit of “moonlighting.” Should you take advantage? Here are some of my thoughts on the matter.
What is moonlighting?
Like so many other things we take for granted in medicine, …
Debt is destroying the lives of doctors everywhere. The cost of getting an education has moved into the ridiculous range. Many doctors are now starting their practice so far in the hole, that they do not see the way out.
I would not have been able to start on my debt-free journey (I peaked at more than $600,000) if I had not developed a new attitude toward debt. Putting debt into …
If you stay in medicine long enough, you will encounter physicians who seem to care more about the paycheck than the patient in front of them: think Dr. Farid Fata. You may find those colleagues revolting; I know I did. I despised these physicians and felt nauseated even to be in the same room as them. But as time went on, I realized that almost nobody starts a career …
In the ten years since I graduated from residency, I have noticed an interesting correlation between burnout and finances among my physician colleagues: The more secure we are financially, the more we enjoy our work. However, physicians working long clinic hours and moonlighting 15 times a month as a hospitalist in order to make alimony payments, boat payments, mortgage payments, or all …
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