A Visit From Scrappy Younger Me

When you start a physician finance blog, you are burning to share your message. You say yes to every opportunity, and are flattered when anyone expresses remote interest in what you have to say.

Two plus years ago, I was a young upstart approached by a similarly newish blogger who asked me to complete a written interview that he assured me would run on his website.

His site now haunts the blogger graveyard, and he never ran the piece. I poured out my heart, and didn't even get a pen.

Taking my cue from the Physician on Fire, who had a similar experience with a two year old interview he'd taken the time to complete that was never run, I've decided to take a long, hard look at what enthusiastic younger me had hoped this blog might become.

Here, then, is that ancient interview, unearthed for posterity:

1. Tell us about your story and about your blog. (Please be as specific or as mysterious as you wish)

My blog is my midlife crisis explored aloud, offering a reader all the candor with none of the vulnerability. All the big mysteries that had preoccupied me in my youth (What will I do? Who will I marry? Where will we live? Will I have kids?) had been answered, and I found myself extremely grateful but still yearning.

I had finally reached a point where I had all these wonderful things in my life (family, wife, community, outside interests), yet medicine was a jealous mistress - it deprived me of these pleasures just when I most wanted to enjoy them. Our volumes went up in the ED, the nights and weekends began to take a greater toll, and for the first time ever I started to feel burnt out at work.

I discovered the FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) blogger movement and was able to envision a path where I'd eventually be able to stop trading my time for money, and spend more time performing the activities I loved. I assumed responsibility for my financial life and learned everything I could about investing our assets.

Crispy Doc is a front line report of my journey going from burnt out to FIRE'd up. It shares actionable financial strategies, as well as plenty of musings about the victories that accompany reclaiming your time and achieving financial independence.

2. Did you live like a resident in training? What worked well or what good/bad examples can you share with readers?

I'm naturally a low maintenance dirtbag - I never minded youth hostels, and I shared a room with my brother growing up. Living like a resident for me was just living as I knew it, and since I'm a no frills guy, my life was not spendy. I made contributions to tax-sheltered accounts throughout residency because my dad advised I do so. My one treat in residency was living without roommates. In fellowship, it was more of the same. For the first 6 years after becoming an attending, my wife and I continued to live modestly and save a ton, with occasional splurges on travel. Since she's no dirtbag, we compromised when it mattered to her (i.e., prioritized staying at places where there was no shared bathroom while traveling).

3. When it comes to work life balance, what advice would you have for your younger self?

When I look at physician finance bloggers who've reach FI at a relatively early age, all were workhorses out of residency, and then dialed it back after 10-15 years. This is probably not workable for all physicians - my wife, for example, is also an ER doc and reduced her clinical workload after we had kids.

I still think front-loading your workload is preferable for most docs on the path to FI. Front loading work uses your skills when your youth, hunger, and excitement can be leveraged to your greatest advantage. Kick butt, kill your educational debts, maintain your frugal spending from residency, maximize your savings and investments (an early start and a high savings rate work wonders when compounded).

If young you works hard out of the gate, old you gets to reap the rewards by reducing your clinical commitments and eliminating the most aggravating parts of medicine. What I found in my journey getting past burnout is that I didn't need to ditch medicine completely, I just needed to be doing less of it to regain my work-life balance.

Other residency considerations for work-life balance: maximize your supports whether family, friends, creative or physical outlets. I found that haunting used bookstores, hiking the Santa Monica mountains and hitting the gym kept me sane.

4. Given the time constraints of residency, what do you wish you did more of during that time?

Prioritizing my financial self-education would have been ideal.

I tried moonlighting, and did not continue. Despite friends who urged me to cash in on my MD, I found that it was the perfect opportunity to make a mistake that could haunt me for a long time to come. I didn't want to be the person who is blacklisted out of residency because of a lawsuit from when I was a moonlighter in over my head.

What I loved about residency was finding a tribe of eccentrics that I could both relate to and learn alongside. I loved the attendings who took us under their wing and taught us critical independent thinking (I still get together for dinner with my former residency director and his wife, whom I consider close friends). My residency was a love-fest, but I realize that is not everyone's reality.

Spend the time learning to be a good physician and deepening relationships with your colleagues. Don't focus on making money - this is a distraction and a hazard.

While I wish I'd become financially literate sooner, I would not have added that imposition during residency if it came at the expense of becoming a solid physician.

5. What would you recommend the newly minted attending do with their first paycheck and did you do with your first attending salary paycheck?

First of all, max out your tax-deferred space. Assuming you do not have major debts, see if you are eligible to contribute to an HSA, make a backdoor Roth IRA contribution, or otherwise increase your retirement savings (and reduce your taxes). Next, if you have a negative net worth, kill your debt. Once that's done, either put it toward your downpayment fund in a safe place (CDs, money market funds) if you are preparing to buy a home, or alternately put all the extra in a taxable investment brokerage and invest it if you won't need to touch it for a decade or more and can tolerate some risk.

The best thing to do is pretend it is your senior resident paycheck and put the difference toward growing your net worth. If that's simply not in the cards for you, give yourself a modest raise (~10k increase every 2 years) so you can slowly grow into your income.

6. Tell us the BEST and WORST financial decision you have ever made.

Best - choosing my wife as a life partner. I married out of my league, finding a saver who understands value and still tolerates my experiments with frugality (i.e., cutting my own hair). Finding someone who can collaborate on a life plan with a shared vision for the future .

Worst - using a financial advisor for the first decade of attendinghood. He was a charming, ethical person, but I'd have vastly preferred leaving the tens of thousands of dollars in fees to my kids instead of his. Investing is not hard to learn, and on an hourly basis, you will never earn greater return on investment than the  20 hours you spend reading your first 3 investing books

7. What three to five books would you recommend?
   

Though you'd never ask. I consider these to be the holy trinity of physician finance:

The Four Pillars of Investing by William J. Bernstein
The Bogleheads Guide to Investing by Mel Lindauer, Michael LeBoeuf & Taylor Larimore
The White Coat Investor by James Dahle

8. Top three to five favorite posts of all time, either yours or someone else's in no particular order.

• I've Got The Brains. You've Got The Looks. Let's Save Lots Of Money
• Notes From A Financial Toxic Wasteland
• Financial Puberty
• "Ego Arbitrage" For Physicians

9. Let's talk strategy, how would you recommend a young physician with 300-400K in student loans crush their debt?

I'm a big fan of killing your debt immediately. Assuming you do not plan to pursue PSLF, I'd refinance to a variable rate 5 year loan, live like a resident, and put every dollar toward paying down the loan.

10. Any other advice you want to give to the young physicians and FIRE enthusiast reading this blog?

…Start NOW. Old geezer you will thank young you for front-loading the work and the savings.