Below you'll find a list of all posts from March, 2018
I made a brief visit to a dear friend who recently became a single mother by choice. We met when we were seventeen at a summer program for high school students on the campus of UC Santa Barbara. Between the beach and falling in love with a new crush every 3 days, it was adolescent heaven. But I digress. …
We spent this past weekend in San Francisco, at a friend of my wife’s 50th birthday party. He’s a sweet and thoughtful guy, and as part of the festivities we met up for lunch with a handful of my wife’s college friends and enjoyed a middle-aged version of “The Breakfast Club.” Accomplished professionals gathered around the table like a professional …
One of the most enjoyable ways I’ve channeled my finance geek leanings has been to offer to meet with newbies who join our practice to review their finances and help them develop confidence in a plan to pay off educational debt, invest, and save for retirement. For a surprising number of them, it’s the first such discussion they’ve ever had, …
I use a Feedly account to follow ~50 blogs. 35 of them are physician finance blogs. The other 15 are FI/RE blogs. The vast majority of them espouse low cost index funds and eschew market timing in favor of long-term, buy and hold investing. Recently, an interesting facet of human behavioral psychology has repeatedly been surfacing in this slice of …
True story from approximately 2002. It’s 3am the day after St. Patrick’s Day when an extremely concerned 21 year old woman accompanied by her bleary-eyed boyfriend arrive in the Emergency Department of a large urban trauma center. I am the resident on the night shift who sees them. Me: How can I help you today? Patient: My pooh is green! …
It’s Match Day! You’re happy, relieved, and a few hundred grand in the hole. Which makes you feel a helluva lot better than the med school sweetheart couple that is in twice as much collective debt as you are. Now that you know where you’ll be training, your educational debt gets bumped up a notch to your number one source …
If I were to create a TV show, it would be a romantic comedy for finance and efficiency nerds named “Battle of the Optimizers.” The husband and wife protagonists would constantly try to help one another by assuming household duties, resulting in well-intentioned mayhem and confusion. The battle, as it were, would pit efficiency vs. intrusiveness. The pilot would introduce …
As part of the process of losing a loved one, I’ve made myself available to help a widow get through the tedious and at times overwhelming process of dotting i’s and crossing t’s in ensuring the timely legal transfer of assets into her name. During this process, we had occasion to discuss finances in a fleeting fashion. She and her …
My eight year old son and I were lounging on the sofa with a few minutes to spare before piano lessons commenced. Sun was streaming through windows overlooking the Pacific, warming the exposed bare skin on our arms. We were at opposite ends of the sofa, playing that game where we plant the soles of our bare feet against one …
I’ve never been a manly man – I’m the Michael Cera of physician finance bloggers. I sang a capella and participated in the annual high school musical. I never cared for ESPN, and my final year playing in a league was as a t-ball player. If I go a week without shaving, I resemble the Latvian exchange student who probably …