My invisible friend and fellow physician finance blogger, Matt Poyner, invested two years of his life in creating a talk for his fellow docs. Why might his education (formal and informal) and experiences compel you to spend an hour of your time with him? Matt is a Canadian ER doc, married and a father of four boys, who sold his …
My Year Of Cash Drag In Review
At the start of 2020 we revised our asset allocation, reducing equities while increasing fixed income. Serendipity had brought us closer to the finish line more rapidly than we’d anticipated, so we wanted to avoid giving up those extra gains. We made the move to heed Bernstein’s dictum that the goal of investing was to not die poor. Part of …
Bulldozer
A wrecking ball wreaks havoc and leaves a trail of destruction in its wake. A bulldozer, in contrast, plows straight ahead flattening all obstacles that lie in its path. In my enthusiasms, I have been accused of being a bulldozer. When I get excited about something, I talk it over with friends and family. I ask my most valued advisors …
Accepting The Formerly Intolerable
I think it was my wife who introduced me to a uniquely useful definition of aging: accepting the formerly intolerable. This phrase was front and center in my mind as I went through a recent roller coaster ride on a real estate deal, one where each new twist and turn revealed an additional cost, a worse than anticipated interest rate, …
Real Estate Is A PPA (Proton Pump Aggravator)
The gospel of real estate has received a lot of air time on Big Physician Finance recently. I consider myself to be on good terms with the powerhouse physician finance bloggers (even if all but a couple couldn’t pick me out of a lineup). I realize that’s such a niche market that it’s akin to boasting of your band’s status …
Docs Who Cut Back #25: Doc To Disco
Doc 2 Disco is a refreshing new voice in the physician finance blogosphere, urging her readers to “tackle the burn through personal finance and hustle.” A highly-trained, dual-boarded specialist within a niche area of medicine, on the surface she might seem the unlikeliest of candidates to walk away from her career. Like many of us, an accumulation of ever-increasing aggravations …
An Ambitious Form Of Sloth
The pursuit of financial independence linked to the desire to spend some of my adult years pursuing activities other than medicine can seem like a deeply lazy indulgence to many colleagues. Choosing to leave medicine in these prime adult years by these folks is seen as twofold betrayal. First, there is the obvious implicit lost income during one’s peak earning …
Docs Who Cut Back #24: Dr. Y
Dr. Y is a rare and exotic species among Docs Who Cut Back: a surgical subspecialist who completed a decade-long course of training in a highly competitive field. More unusual still, she opted to cut back 4 years after working full-time as a subspecialist attending (to be fair, she worked one additional year as a general surgeon prior to entering …
A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Nerd
Some phone calls are long overdue by the time you make them. Distance learning has echoed evolution in our household by rewarding specialization. As a dual-nerd couple, my wife has adopted the more time-consuming math supplementation while I have offered to help teach science and social studies. Discussing the classification of species with my 13 year old recently, I caught …
Docs Who Cut Back: Where Are They Now?
I enjoyed many guilty pleasures in my TV gorging teen years, but none were so satisfying as tuning into a “Where are they now?” program. Whether it was one hit wonders on VH1 or my favorite child actors from Punky Brewster, Diff’rent Strokes and The Facts of Life, I could not get enough of this silliness. There was the male …