If I Started All Over Again

What if I told you that there are some things that really move the needle financially, and then there are a lot of things people talk about that simply don't. Keep listening as we dive in. Welcome to the Money Needs Medicine Podcast where we talk all about the personal finance topics you wish you had learned in medical school. I'm your host Justin Harvey and here is your co-host who's about to finally go back to work after 12 weeks off from shoulder surgery Dr. Jimmy Turner. Yes, exciting times I go back to work then very next week after we record this episode and so one of the benefits of being off for the last 12 weeks after shoulder surgery is that I've gone on FMLA and not really allowed to work on anything at the hospital so I finally took the time to take a deep dive into Instagram which has been a ton of fun and it's clearly resonating. I've gone from like 2,500 followers like 10,000 and just over a month and so one of the posts that I put up actually had to do with comparing Dr. Jones and what I call Dr. Early FI, two doctors who made the same income, but made very different financial decisions and choices that led to very different results. And so the OG's listening to this know that Dr. Jones and Dr. Early FI actually come from my book which I wrote specifically for physicians and training so you can snag a free copy at Money Needs Medicine dot com slash free book if you want to get that for yourself. But this got me thinking about the question if I started all over again after residency, what would I do? What would be the things that are on my mind that I'd want to tackle? What are some things that didn't really move the needle? Now that I'm 10 years out and I can see that and even if you aren't finishing training right now or in training, I think this will be an interesting thing to listen to as an attending because some of the things I'm going to mention you may be doing and you may have a different opinion on them and or you might say, hey, I've been doing this thing and maybe it doesn't move the needle. Maybe I shouldn't keep on doing it. So that's some of the docket for today, Justin. I can't wait. My own opinions have evolved over time and perhaps sometime in the future we can do things that Justin has changed his mind about in the last 15 years. I love it. That sounds like a great topic episode. Before we get to it, I've been getting a ton of questions by email the last 12 months that go something like this. They're basically like, hey, Jimmy, love your work and what you're doing for doctors. Thanks for making so much of the free, like the podcast and the book. I learned a lot about the what to do when it comes personal finance, but I want to learn more about how to implement what I'm learning. So maybe they want to learn more about how to create investment plan under an hour or to learn how to negotiate with their leadership or a physician contract or maybe they want to learn how to create an online business to earn some nonclinical income. What I'll tell you is that if you want less of the what and more of the how, you should check out medical degree, financial university or MDFU. Inside of MDFU, we now offer bite-sized step-by-step classes on all sorts of topics. I just mentioned each class will take basically less than an hour or so of your time to finally understand and able to tackle some of things that are important to you that you may have questions about. They're all priced super low so that residents can afford them and there's even a seven-day no questions asked, refund policy on any of those classes. So to learn more and check out a class, visit moneymeatsmedicine.com/MDFU. All right, Justin, the way that I thought I'd structured the show is that I'm going to start with things that move the needle and then I'm going to alternate with things that have not moved the needle for me personally as I finished training. And the first one I want to mention is saving 30% of our gross income. A better way to say that is building wealth with 30% of our income when we finished training. So a good chunk of that went to just filling up the 403B at work when I first finished, but then a large chunk went $10,000 a month basically for 19 months to pay off $200,000 in student loans. And once those loans were gone, we continued saving 30% towards our future in building wealth. We increased our net worth something like $400,000 in 24 or 30 months. I mean, it was a massive number and this allowed us to then buy the home once all of our other debt was gone. We'll talk about that here in a minute. But once we were down to basically just the mortgage, then we bought the house and it allowed us to do that without really having any financial stress at all. And so this is one that I think actually does move the needle. Some people talk about living like a resident. I'm a bigger fan of taking a little bit of a lifestyle bump. When you finish, take 10% of the difference. I talk about the 10% rule in the book, but enjoy it. Take 10% every month of the difference between your pay and residency as an attending and you do deserve to bump your lifestyle a little bit. But that other 90% went towards this 30% wealth building. So I called it the wealth accumulation rate or war. And if I went back, I would absolutely do this again. Yeah, this is one of those things that whenever you sort of plant your little oak tree, you want to do it as soon as possible. The people that I advise that I think are in the toughest position are the ones who aren't going to be able to take advantage of the compound interest phenomenon. Yeah. Because of a latent life force, financial cataclysm, something happens that sets you way back. And then you've got to basically just brute force your way. And most of your wealth is going to be directly a result of your contribution rather than a result of the compound interest, the contribution that happens over time. So this makes perfect sense and good on you for getting after it early on. Yeah, I tell the story in one of the classes that I teach about the inventor of chess. And I've shared this on the show before. But basically the inventor of chess came to this very rich king. He liked games and he's like, great, thanks for giving me this game. What do you want in return? And he's like, not much. I don't want much. All I want you to do for giving you this game is giving one piece of rice on the first chess board piece or a square. And then two on the second, three on the fourth, there are 64 squares on the chess board, right? And I always ask the students that are in these lectures, residents, students, you know, in the medical school, MDF few students, how much does on that board when you get finished, right? And the answer is mind blowing. If you're listening to this, like, just try to think of a number in your head, it's not going to be big enough. It's 18 quintillion. I didn't even know what that number was. They had like five or six commas after it, you know, three zeros of comma, three zeros of comma. And it's basically more rights than exists in the entire world right now. Just by doubling it 64 times. And so that's the magic of compounding interest. But to your point, it's very hard to understand. It's very logarithmic in nature. So our brains don't naturally get that, but the sooner that you start investing in the market and the more that you invest, that compounding interest starts lifting heavy weights five, 10 years later. I mean, we're now making $200,000 a year or more from our investments that we've already got, not even from what we're contributing, moving forward. So that 30% matters a lot, highly recommended. One thing that did not move them needle for us is paying cash on cars, super controversial. The take that I'm about to give you. But we're not just a bunch of puppets. We actually have real opinions on the career of Dave Ramsey. That's right. Dave Ramsey lovers are going to not like this, but I bet he listens to this show, Jimmy. He does. He's actually right now to figure out how to correct all of the terrible advice he's given for the physician cohort, which you and I have picked apart over the years. Yeah, if he's about time he gets up to speed. Yeah, he would send me a season to sys letter. I'm pretty sure if he listened to the show. But my one financial faux pas personally is I'm a car guy. So we do everything else for the most part, 90% of the other stuff right that you should get right with your personal finances that we talk on the show. But I have a loan on my truck. My F 150 currently has a loan. It's at 5%. And most people from a purest standpoint, when we get down to the math, like, Oh, I should pay for everything in cash. You should never have debt. It's a terrible idea to do that. To save up the money, pay cash for the vehicle. And that's just the right way to do things financially. That's what people get preached at once you get into the personal finance base. What I'll tell you is that I'm a huge fan of getting the biggest bang for my buck, wherever that might be. And then the last nine years of my investing life since finishing training, the S&P 500 has returned 10 to 15% annually. So me not putting the money into the truck and instead investing it in the market has been a heroically strong decision because I've gotten multiples of that 5% back by investing. And I just mentioned that because this is something that people tell you all the time in the personal finance base. And I'll just say cash flow is more important to us. The ability to invest is more important to us. Liquidity is more important to us. And so yeah, we, despite having a $2 million net worth, I could easily pay for this thing in cash. We don't. And it's intentional. That said, if you don't pay cash for the car, and then you spend the money anyway and you don't build wealth with it, that's obviously a really terrible decision. So I'm not supporting that. Absolutely. And this is one of those things I would say I've changed my mind about. I've kind of raised that hurdle of like, you should never take out debt on something that is appreciating asset or personal asset or something doesn't have inherent value that's going to last. I went from that to like, a little more pragmatic in my old age, where, you know, three, four, five percent cash is king. So if I'm throwing 10 or 15% down on a vehicle purchase and I'm financing the rest at a number as high as four, five, six percent. And maybe I'm showing some recency bias is looking at the markets being on fire the last five years, which is fair. But I think I have planted a new anchor here on this conviction of my number has come up. In terms of the percentage, I find acceptable on a auto loan. Yeah. And the truth is that this isn't just a five year recency bias, right? The historical return in the stock market in the last 100 years is 10%. So accounting for inflation, let's call it seven or eight, that's still more than the five you're getting on the truck. And so again, if you just blow the money that you're not paying the truck off with or the car off with, that is obviously not wise financially. But if you decide very intentionally, I'm going to take a loan out, even like could pay cash for this thing, because I'm going to choose to invest the difference. I think that's really smart. And you know, inside MDF, you, I would say that cash flow is king, queen, and gesture of the court, right? It's the only thing that matters is cash flow. And we talk about a lot of different ways, how that applies. But let's move back to one that did move the needle since we're talking about loans was refinancing our house when the market was down. And for us, I think we went from like four in a quarter or four and a half down to like three. And so that refinance, some people look at it and realize, oh, it's actually cost money. It's going to cost a few thousand dollars free to refinance your house. But then that one or one and a half percent on our almost $500,000 home saved us at least $5,000 a year in interest. And so we didn't save a bunch of that first year. But then the last six, we've saved a lot. So $30,000 on interest. This one was one that was worth it for me. It moved the needle. I recognize that we're also now in different situations. But interest rates are starting to come down a little bit at least the last time I looked at it recently. Yeah. And so this might start to become a conversation for you, Justin, who took it out at seven percent or whatever it was. And maybe one quarter, there you go. Maybe it's getting down to five and three quarters or six. I think this one meaningfully moves the needle, particularly the more expensive your home is if you're in a high-costal living area, that one percent on a million dollar home, 10 grand a year. That's a lot of money. I did a purchase for a client the other day. And I saw five and three quarters. So rates are coming down a little bit. This is one of those things. There's going to be this sort of generational chasm where all the 32 year old doctors are going to look with envy at the 42 year old doctors and shake their fists and say like, you're getting your house on a parody of purchase price basis. The cash flow is just so favorable because the interest rate is like half. And it is what it is. It's a downstream effective. What the market has done in the last few years. And that's fine. You've got to just deal with the hand or dealt. And this is one way in which congratulations, Jimmy. But hey, things are down almost one half percent from the rates that you took them. And so I know we talked about a recent kitchen renovation on a prior episode. So I'm not sure that bakes into all this conversation. But I think that sometimes I can't speak for everybody. But for me, I can tell you that as a very busy physician entrepreneur, husband, dad of three things like this that come on my radar, I occasionally put on the back burner because I tell myself I just don't have the time. But if I told you that 1% was going to save you $5 or $10,000 a year in cash, like those are payments not going out of your paycheck. And you can invest those instead or take a trip somewhere and experience life with your family. You might all of a sudden say, well, you know what? That 1% that's worth it. It really is big numbers make up 1% matter a lot, particularly if the refinance is done in conjunction with a shortening of the repayment term. If you're going from a 30 year fixed at four to like a 15 year at three, the interest is reduced by a lot more than the ratio would suggest because of the shortening of the term. Yeah, so if you have a house at seven and a quarter or seven and a half and you can now get go get five and three quarters, might be something worth looking into because I really do think that moves the needle back to my controversial doesn't move the needle side of things. The second one I'll say, this is like, I don't know why I actually do know why, but this got placed on like this giant pedestal for physicians when it comes to personal finance that this backdoor Roth IRA is just the thing that you have to do. And I find that interesting because ultimately, I think the reason why this gets so much attention is because it's cool. Like you figure it out the way to still contribute to a Roth after you make a couple hundred thousand dollars a year and everyone tells you that you're not allowed to contribute to a Roth anymore. You read about the backdoor Roth IRA and you're like, Oh, a workaround. This is interesting. This is fascinating. And it's post tax money. Roth is the best money you can have. You'll hear people say that, which that part's probably true. And so it's so just in your face when you get to the personal finance space. But for me, when I realized that a, I was saving 30%, which I'll talk about why that was so great here in a second of one of my other things that did move the needle. But we stopped saving as much money. And so one of the very first things that came off in that situation was my backdoor Roth IRA because I realized that all of my pre-tax contributions and match for my employer or pre-tax, like I just said. And so I could use to diversify, not knowing what tax law will be in the future and put my money inside of my fourth or be in Roth. And so I still do invest Roth money. I just don't take it to the backdoor Roth IRA. Any additional money we invest outside of our employers. Now put a taxable mortgage count. You want to know why? Because this show is about financial freedom and financial independence. And at the end of the day, I don't want to have to wait until I'm 55 or 59 and a half to tap into my retirement account that is quite sizable at this point. I want to have access to money that I can look at and access now, right? And so for us, we prioritize retirement accounts at work and then additional money goes and taxable brokerage account because the backdoor Roth IRA, when you run the numbers, it's not as big a deal as you think. If you like this podcast episode, you're going to love the other shows over at the doctor podcast now. For instance, the scalpel in sword hosted by Dr. Lee, McGendron trauma, previous guests on the show who discussed conflict resolution, covers topics like industrial psychology and personal development ethics and you guessed it, conflict resolution and health care. Check out scalpel in sword. You can actually access the basis of your Roth without any penalty. So it's important to acknowledge that. But I would agree with everything you said, otherwise. And there are certain trajectories for doing the backdoor Roth every year versus doing a taxable investment account every year. And depending on the final disposition of the assets, there are certain cases in which is like almost parity where you're like buying an index ETF in the Roth versus maybe running an SMA in the taxable. There's tax else harvesting. You're adding cash ongoing. You get a step up in basis whenever that asset is received by the final recipients. And actually, in some cases, maybe it's better because there's no money in motion from a forced distribution after inheritance. So all this is to say, I totally agree, Jimmy, that taxable investing when it's done tax efficiently is very flexible. And in many cases, it's just about as good as the backdoor Roth. And there's all this sort of aura of, you know, I've had people literally hire me or at least say they want it to hire me because I heard about this thing called a backdoor Roth IRA afraid of the paperwork. Let me pay you thousands of dollars a year to do it for me, which I would always say that we have a saying what you get him with is what you have to keep him with. So I always want to make sure like, listen, you could do this yourself, read the blog. It's going to maybe save you $50 a year. It's not worth paying somebody all this just for the backdoor Roth, but there is this assumption, especially in the physician community that it's very powerful. And sure, it's worth doing when you can, but it's not going to save a sinking ship going down. If you told me that you were like me in that first couple of years after training, trying to save $100,000 a year, which is what we basically did. And you told me, Hey, I'm putting 24, five into the 401k or 4 through B you have offered, maybe you have a non governmental 457. You put another 25 ish in there. It's 24 five. I'm not going to the math. Let's call it 50 because it makes it easier. Right. So we have $50,000 in total retirement account. Your employer contributes, maybe matches inside of there. Where else can I put my money? The backdoor Roth IRA makes the most sense to go to next from a tax efficiency standpoint. And so, okay, great. We can put around $9,000 in there. So we're now at 59, maybe even HSA. You put another nine ish in there, right? And so all of a sudden, you still need to save $30,000 and you're still going to be contributing to a taxable brokerage account. But if you told me all I contribute to is the 401k or 4 through B at my work, where else should I put my money? I would say, Hey, honestly, it's a toss up between a brokerage count, which is easier to set up, easier to manage, provides tax loss harvesting benefits that you just mentioned. The backdoor Roth IRA is kind of a pain in the ass, right? You got to fill out the form 8606 every year. And like, if you do it wrong, which I've done before, and I converted it on the wrong date, and I had some interest there because I didn't realize that I could do it yet. And so the 8606 wasn't a bunch of zeros and whatever the other number is, depending on what year you listen to the show. For me, it became pretty quickly. One of those things I was like, you know, it's not a big deal. But I also feel like the first two things that I said didn't move the needle are personal finance sacrilege. I've just told you that it's okay. You don't have to go beat yourself up if you take money out on a loan for car or truck. That's actually not an unreasonable thing to do. And I just told you the backdoor Roth IRA is not that big a deal. And if you've been in the space for a little bit, you're like, this guy is just like, I'm just committing all of the personal finance sins for physician finance. So let's move back to the positive side of things because if you've gotten through my sacrilege, this is probably the one that to me is the most important. Justin, you know, I've talked about this concept on the show before coast fire. The idea that you save a lot of money early on. And when you save that lot of money early on, what it allows you to do because you start to build that snowball that's going down the hill and accumulating more snow very quickly is you can actually cut back and start saving less. And what that allowed me to do personally was go from saving $100,000 a year to saving more like 65 or 70. And with that $30,000 at a $300,000 salary, I could go to point nine FTE and my lifestyle wouldn't change. I would take home $30,000 less, but I was also saving $30,000 less. And so all of a sudden, I started doing the math and realizing, oh, I can actually not only afford to cut back to point nine, but I can afford to cut back to three days a week clinically. And so I haven't worked five days a week in medicine in like six years. And I started that journey when I went part time, I was massively burned out. I was on an eye depressants. I was having tons of life issues with my feelings about medicine and what my trajectory was and this arrival fallacy that I finally made it, but I wasn't happy and just the existential crisis that provides when you get there. And if you haven't, you will most likely a lot of doctor's struggle with that. So if you do currently struggle with, hey, I made it, why aren't I happy? That's normal. A lot of doctors have it's gone arrival fallacy. But for me, the cure to that was the ability to go part time and all of a sudden, when I started working three days a week, I liked going back to the hospital. I enjoyed medicine again. I had more control of my time. I didn't miss as many of my family events. And that all came from saving 30% early on so that I could coast fire, cut back, save less. And no, I was still going to get to financial independence and be able to retire in my 40s. Could not agree more. One area I've seen this apply is with physicians who, you know, maybe it's tapering your FTE or maybe it's like career pivot or launching a practice, depending on your specialty. I have clients who have, especially in the pain space they do anesthesia or anesthesia pain. And then maybe they want to start a pain practice or they want to do low combs and they do it like to interactically sort of different format. Sure. When you, for the first 10 years, diligently saved that big chunk of money, you can take a risk knowing that all I need to do, you know, we're talking about cash flow before all I need to do is cash flow enough to cover that monthly expense, whatever I need to pay my mortgage and pay the credit card bills and utilities, which you go from having to like stuff money into a 401k and doing the back door, like that big number to like all of a sudden now the number is much smaller. Like here are the expenses I need to cover. What do I need to do in order to make 10 or 12 or $15,000 a month instead of like 30, 40, 50, 60 gross? And it's yeah, it just, whoa, it opens up a whole universe of options. And what enables that is the saving up front and the awareness that, you know what, the miracle of compounding, like if you're 40 and you've already got a good running start or 45, 50, even like you can allow this to work for you over a long time frame. And of course, it is like statistically responsible. A lot of what we're doing in personal finances, assessing tradeoffs and like, there are tradeoffs, it's not risk free, but nothing is risk free. And it's a very reasonable course of action. Yeah. And a big part of this comes from knowing the numbers and recognizing what reality is because a lot of people, if you have indigent, they start to realize if you look at the numbers, oh, I've got a million dollars saved. My net worth is, I've got a million dollars in investible assets. And if we go to, you know, the rule of 72, right, which says how long does it take for money to double at a certain interest rate and you're getting 10% in the market? Well, take seven years, that million dollars, seven years can be two. And then another seven years, 14 years later, it's going to be four million dollars. If you never invested in other dime, that's coast fire. You can cut back because of that giant sum of money you've accumulated by putting that money away. And so when this change for me was when I actually looked at my numbers, if you're curious and you want to do that, there's actually a calculator I gave inside of MDF you, but you can download it for free if you're a podcast listener, which is moneymeatsmedicine.com/fire. And that will spit off a calculator for you and you just push your numbers in there, right? And like, how old am I? What age do I want to retire by? How much money do I have saved right now? And there's some stuff on the side you can fiddle with if you like, if you're a calculator, Excel, she kind of person, but as you do that, it'll tell you, hey, this is about how much money need to save each year, assuming that you get this interest rate return in the market. And for me, when I sat down and did that math, I was like, whoa, I've gotten to the point where I could choose to not save us another dollar moving forward. And I know with relative certainty, as much as you can have certainty in personal finance, which is not completely certain, but based on market history, based on what we know about money, investing, compounding interest, we would be able to retire at 55. If I never invested another dollar and we would be able to spend a lot of money. So that was what allowed me to cut back was the realization of my current situation, but you have to actually look at the numbers because you probably are telling yourself, as you listen to this, I'm further away than I think you don't know until you're on the numbers. That was my take. So back to the naughty list, the third one that I'll say, didn't move the needle enough for me. And I actually realized it before I participated was real estate. So I'm completing the trifecta of personal finance, acrolege now. This is different for everybody. Everyone has different goals. Everyone has different things they're trying to accomplish. And so there's a huge amount of FOMO in the real estate space for physicians. This could be syndications. It could be buying properties and managing those. For me, what I realized pretty quickly when I sat down and actually thought about it is my wife's a teacher. And she's a phenomenal teacher teacher of the year for our county. Like she's just a boss, right? And clearly put on this earth to teach the elementary school teacher. It is what God gifted her the ability to do. And so she has no interest in pursuing the partner spouse real estate professional status that gets thrown out there a lot like, hey, if you're a physician and your wife or a husband doesn't work, you can have your partner claim real estate professional status. You get all these amazing tax benefits, which is true. But there's no way I could have talked Kristen and doing that wasn't going to happen. Was working in medicine. I'm also an entrepreneur. So I've got money meets medicine as well. I didn't want a third job. I already have to, right? So for me personally, I didn't want to do this because it was going to be a third job. I could not convince my wife to have an interest in this. And you know what, we're going to get to financial independence in our 40s. Even though we didn't invest in real estate. So when people tell you, hey, you have to invest in real estate to get the financial independence in five or 10 years, that's actually not true. So this is one that gets pushed a lot, lots of foam around it. For me, it would not have moved the needle enough to participate in not saying it doesn't move the needle for others though. All I can say is, yes, I agree with everything you just said. There you go. Short and sweet. I love it. It's something that I do get flack for though. So if you're listening to this, you participate in real estate. You've seen the benefits of it, which there are very real benefits. I recognize that. Feel free to shoot me the email. I totally get it. I'm not anti real estate. I'm just anti real estate for me. So if you're listening and you sound like you have similar priorities or situation in your life. Maybe you feel the same way. If not, it does help a lot of people build wealth. The last one I'll end on going back to the good list. I'll end on a sour note is what I call a hybrid approach to FIs. This actually relates to the real estate comment and maybe we'll help flesh that out a little bit so people can understand as you're listening to the show. Creating nonclinical income for my family has been a massive boom. So even without the nonclinical income, we have been able to coast fire and so that would have happened regardless. But when I started doing the math, this is turning into a math episode, but several good tips here. When I started doing the math and I realized for every $10,000 of steady income that I produce for our family. That's $250,000 of that nest egg that I don't have to have saved from a traditional retirement standpoint. I won't go into the studies on where that comes from. But all of a sudden, I was like, Oh, lots of gold. If I got to $100,000 of income and for people listening, it might be real estate. This might be your nonclinical thing. But if I got $200,000, that's $2.5 million, I would not have to save. If that was income, I could rest reliably. Assured it was steady income that there's very good evidence to show that it would continue into the future. And so I call this a hybrid approach to FI. I'm all about saving traditional finance, putting money away in index funds, getting to your 25x rule for what your financial independence. Number is, but it has to be said that if you can reduce how much money you need to take from that nest egg someday in the future, it does reduce how much you need to save, which gets you there a whole lot faster. Totally agree with this as well. This is one of those, I would say the people that can pull it off benefit greatly. But it's a little further out on the branch from the trunk of like sort of the core competencies and personality of people that are gravitating to medicine because there's an inherent outside the boxness of business ownership and not the doctors can't do it. But it's not an inherent skill set. Sometimes it exists in parallel to like the rigorous, you need to be good at the system and the algorithm. And that's what quality control is. And that's what being an excellent physician is like understanding the paradigm. Business is much more non-linear. And so if you're going to run a business, Jimmy, you have built this business, you could talk about it obviously for a long time to explain how it's different from medicine. Many ways it's fundamentally different. The risk, return profile, the things that you do to succeed are just totally different. So I totally agree in my opinion, you can speak to that. But I think that this is a great idea. It does require an initiative. And often it requires that you get enough financial momentum to create space to have the sort of brain power to push in a different direction to begin to build those non-clinical opportunities. And this is where frankly, the real estate advertisers are like, they take advantage of they know doctors are looking for that. And they're like, hey, do you want non-clinical income just invest in this thing? And the money printing press will print money for you too, which, you know, sometimes it does, but not always. But there are opportunities that are more within your control. Not like I'm one of 250 physicians and subscribers to the department complex. It's like, oh, I'm a partner. I bought a thing or I started a thing and like, I'm running it. So I can tell if it's going to work or not. That's always my preference is if you're going to invest the big chunk of money in a thing that is concentrated, make it something you're in control of. So that at the end of the day, if it works or doesn't, you have no one to blame but yourself. For some people, they don't like they want someone else to be steering the ship. But for me and the people I'm counseling and say like, you want to be pulling the levers and pushing the buttons yourself. Yep. And so this is one of those things where it's completely optional. You don't have to do this. You can absolutely just save and low cost versus by index fund portfolio, put away 30% your growth salary every year and you're going to get to financial dependence really, really fast. And so this is completely optional. What I will say is that I do agree medicine is a straight line. Even if you have gap years for the most part, it's straight line. Go to high school, go to college, go to medical school, go to residency, maybe fellowship, join a practice or an academic group of some kind and employ position. Maybe, but the path is very clear. It's like you're a horse with blinders. Entrepreneurship is taking the blinders off the horse and now the horse can go in 360 degrees, different directions, wherever it wants to go because it's got to figure out the right path. And there's not a path in front of you. You're in a field. You don't know which direction to go. You kind of figured out as you go and that said, there's so much that I've learned from entrepreneurship that medicine never taught me that I'm so thankful for. That's actually changed my personality. He's changed the way that I view the world that have been massively beneficial, but a lot of those lessons were really, really hard. Lots of failure involved. Lots of external judgment, right? So if you don't like online patient reviews, I'll tell you running an online business is that on steroids for every 99% of people that I help. There's 1% that says really nasty things at a very personal level. I didn't know how to deal with that just based on my natural skill set who I am as a person growing up. That sort of thing. I learned that skill that you can either be judged or you can be ignored if you put yourself out there, right? You're either going to put yourself out there and you're going to be judged or you can to decide not to help people and be ignored. And I learned that through entrepreneurship. So that said, I do think that there's one thing uniquely beneficial for a physician when it comes to this topic. And I'll give you some examples of some lower hanging fruit that isn't starting an online business like mine. But one of the biggest benefit in my opinion is that most people view entrepreneurship or starting a business as Steve Jobs, starting Apple in the garage with no income, all risk, not necessary reward. And for physicians, you have a stable income, one of the most secure incomes that exist. And so if you're able to carve out the time to your point, it does take time, but if you're able to carve out that time, you're able to take this risk that a lot of people in life can't afford to take because of your stability in your income. And that allows you to build this thing on the side, this physician side gig, and if it grows legs, a lot of businesses fail. But if it does grow legs, great, you might start transitioning more your time to that, like I have, or you might decide, hey, this thing failed. And then I just get to step back on a dry land and never really have lost my footing because I had that stable physician income. So I do think that there's a unique benefit. So if you're listening to this and you're like, hey, I do want to speed up my journey, $10,000 a year, reducing $25,000 in savings, sounds great. $100,000, $2.5 million. I mean, it's a big number. This really does start to compound. There are some things that are lower hanging fruit, so medical malpractice work, right, chart reviews. You could do telemedicine, you could do consulting or coaching in your area of expertise. There are lots of people that want your views as a physician in your specialty. You could go into real estate. That's also a more traditional method. You don't necessarily have to go create a brick and mortar business on the side. That is going to completely take up 100% of your time and take all of the risk that's involved with starting a DPC direct primary care clinic. And you're giving up your very stable income to do so. That requires a certain amount of brass to take that risk. And I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I love it when people do stuff like that. But for every person who's a real soft spot for the DPC. I love it. I love it. This is what you avoid is taking on a $600,000 business loan and I'm pushing all my chips in. And we're going to do this thing without having proof of concept. I agree. I love the DPC model. I think it's going to change medicine. I think it's a huge benefit to it for those that it makes sense. It's a great idea. I will say that for every post I see on social media for people that I had a successful DPC clinic and can't imagine doing it different now. I see another post from a person who realized I went out and started this thing and all of a sudden that employment that I hated. I actually realized I like a lot because personalities are different. And once you start running a business of your own and realize I thought medicine was stressful running a business in my experience infinitely more stressful with anesthesia where when I make mistakes, people die. Business is stressful and so it's worth figuring out if you can. Well, all that to say like there are some people that go into business and then realize, oh, all those things that I hated about employment come with all these other benefits of things that I don't have to do anymore. I was having to do when I own my own business and they go back into employment and all of a sudden they're happy so it's different strokes for different folks like your personality is going to matter what you want it's going to matter how hard you want to work on it and the amount of risk you're willing to take is going to matter. But for the right person, this is something to move the needle. So as we head out of the show, don't forget if you wanted to learn individual class, bite size, less than hour lessons on personal finance, like creating an investment plan, simplifying student loans or even creating an online side gate since we just talked about that. So if you can go to money meets medicine dot com slash MDF you enrolling one of the individual classes over there and don't forget to go get your free calculator money meets medicine dot com slash fire or your free book money meets medicine dot com slash free book lots of calls to action but like to provide tons of value. So I appreciate all you being here and being a part of the community and sharing the show with friends. Justin and I will see you next week. Cheers. Justin Harvey is a certified financial planner at APM wealth where he helps anesthesiologist and pain medicine physicians. Dr. Jimmy Turner is a practicing academic anesthesiologist at Wake Forest in North Carolina. He's also a licensed insurance agent. However, either Justin or Jimmy are your financial planner, investment advisor or insurance agent. This show is expressly for general education and entertainment purposes only nothing should be considered financial advice. All views expressed are solely the views of the guests on the show and do not represent the views or opinions of their employer.