158: Which Physician Specialty is Best for Retiring Early?

White Coat Investor Podcast

Dr. Jim Dahle of the White Coat Investor

Medicine, Health & Fitness, Business, Investing

4.9 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 14 May 2020

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you want to retire early, which specialty would be best to go into? Let's get one thing straight from the beginning, medicine is not a great option for FIRE in the first place. With the long years in training, you won't even start making significant money until your mid thirties with $300-400K in student loan debt. Traditional FIRE at 30 or 35 like all these FIRE blogs talk about is not possible in that situation. So if your goal is to retire early, medicine is probably not the right place for you. Not to mention if you are a medical student with this question, there is probably an issue with the career you chose. Maybe you should be thinking about getting out of medicine into a career you’ll be happier in long term. But I do answer this question in this episode even so. Shorter residencies do get you to attending income sooner but those also tend to be on the lower end of salaries for physicians. It may not make sense to choose a specialty with a shorter residency if you will be paid significantly less each year afterwards. In this show I share which specialty I think is best for retiring early and why. I also answer listener questions about buying a home while in the military, timing the market, being over leveraged in your real estate investments, disability insurance for military doctors, tax loss harvesting, and more. I also bring on a guest for a few minutes, Ryan Inman from Financial Residency Podcast and Physician Wealth Services to answer a couple of listener questions about rebalancing and investing on the fixed income side. Lots of your questions answered in this episode!

This podcast is sponsored by Bob Bhayani at drdisabilityquotes.com. He is an independent provider of disability insurance planning solutions to the medical community in every state and a long-time white coat investor sponsor. He specializes in working with residents and fellows early in their careers to set up sound financial and insurance strategies. He is very responsive to me and to readers having any sort of an issue, so it is no surprise that I get great feedback about him from our readers and listeners. If you need to review your disability insurance coverage to make sure it meets your needs or if you just haven’t gotten around to getting this critical insurance in place, contact Bob at drdisabilityquotes.com today by email [email protected] or by calling (973) 771-9100. Just get it done!

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the White Coat Investor Podcast, where we help those who wear the White Coat get a fair shake on Wall Street.
0:06.0	We've been helping doctors and other high-income professionals stop doing dumb things with their money since 2011.
0:12.0	Here is your host, Dr. Jim Dolly.
0:18.0	Welcome to White Coat Investor Podcast number 158, which specialty is best for fire?
0:24.0	This episode is sponsored by Bob Bionny, and Dr. Disability Quotes.com, a truly independent provider of disability insurance planning solutions to the medical community nationwide, and a long time WCI sponsor.
0:35.0	Bob specializes in working with residents and fellows early in their careers to set up sound financial and insurance strategies.
0:41.0	He's always been responsive to me and he's been any sort of an issue, so it's not surprising that I get great reviews about him.
0:47.0	If you need to review your coverage or if you just need to get coverage because you never have.
0:52.0	Give him a call 97371-9100.
0:56.0	You can email him at info at drdisabilityquotes.com or just check out the website at drdisabilityquotes.com.
1:04.0	All right, our quote of the day today comes from Bill Schulfice, who said having the guts to say,
1:09.0	I don't know, can be refreshing. And that applies both in medicine as well as in finance.
1:14.0	Once you realize that you don't know some things and you're not expected to know, you can start creating a plan that doesn't require you to know in order to be financially successful.
1:25.0	And that's the whole point of a fixed asset allocation, a fixed percentages for how you invest your money is you just rebalance back to those percentages every year, no matter what did well.
1:36.0	And that way you don't have to predict in advance what's going to do well. You just have to stick with your plan over the long term.
1:42.0	Thanks for what you do. I discovered recently that the first emergency doc to get really sick with COVID-19 in Washington was actually a residency made of mine, Ryan Pageant.
1:53.0	He got really sick. He ended up on a ventilator. The same day he went into the hospital after realizing he was sat in 75% at home.
2:02.0	And then a few days later was on ECMO actually spent a couple of weeks on ECMO before coming off that and then coming off the ventilator and is now home recovering.
2:12.0	So congratulations to Ryan for surviving recovery from this. And thank you to the doctors who took such good care of him up there.
2:19.0	Those of you who are out there on the front lines who are seeing a lot more cases of this than I suspect I am in my emergency department.
2:25.0	Thanks for what you do. And for the rest of you that have basically willingly cut back on what you do and taken a pretty significant income hit in order to preserve PPE for those on the front lines.
2:37.0	Thank you for making that sacrifice.
	...

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