Category: Investing

The Backdoor Roth Point / Counterpoint: A Must-Do or Meh?

BDR-featured

Is the Backdoor Roth one of those moves that every high-income earner should be making? Or is it a marginally beneficial play that you can take or leave as an investor? I made an argument that suggested the latter, showing that the marginal benefits of doing the backdoor Roth paled in comparison to other smart money plays like taking advantage of travel rewards. However, when I later ran the numbers over many decades, I was able to show that the […]

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How Are These Physicians Creatively Generating Passive Income?

I used to think that passive income was more or less a myth. I was so down on the concept that I would usually put the term “passive” in quotes when talking about this so-called “passive” income, like I did just now. It’s not that I didn’t believe in it; it’s just that I thought the term was overused and not representative of the active manner in which people set up these income streams. Dr. Peter Kim changed the way […]

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Teach Your Kids About Money with the Bank of Mom and Dad

How do you teach your kids about money? It’s a great question. We all want the best for our children, and that includes not making the same money mistakes we’ve made in our own lives. I don’t have all the answers, but I feel we’re doing a few things right. We’ve been parents for eleven years now, and we’ve got about nine years left with at least one child at home with us. I can’t believe these years are more […]

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Investing in Retirement: The 3 Big Issues

SWR

Your job as an investor isn’t done the moment you stop earning a paycheck. You may have reached your magic number in terms of a retirement nest egg or monthly cash flow, but you’ve still got to manage that money throughout the rest of your life. Hopefully, by the time you are ready to retire, you’re aware of the potential pitfalls and how to handle them. Life can throw curveballs, though, so it’s best to be prepared for both the […]

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Practical Investing Advice for Doctors: The Pareto Principle

pareto principle

Simple investing is smart investing. I don’t apply the Pareto principle to my investments, but if I did, I’d still be in a good place financially, and it would save me a fair amount of time. Instead, I put in the additional 80% of the effort to hopefully eke out a slightly better result. I enjoy the challenge and like to tinker and optimize. I also realize most people are not like me. Dr. James Turner describes the Pareto principle […]

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Investing with Alpha Investing: An Overview

Alpha Investing

Last month, I made my first investment with Alpha Investing, a private real estate crowdfunding platform that focuses primarily on private multifamily and senior living real estate investment opportunities. They have also offered investments in student housing, self storage, office, and have made one investment each in each of two real estate funds (as opposed to individual projects), one multifamily and one commercial real estate debt. Value-add multifamily investments are the most frequent type of investment available via the platform. […]

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Understanding The 4 Main Commercial Real Estate Investing Strategies

four real estate strategies

Today, I present an educational post from Dr. Peter Kim. I certainly learned a lot just reviewing it and preparing it for publication. Rather than focusing on the different types of deals (debt, preferred equity, equity), he’s focusing on the different types of strategies. Value-add is pretty self-explanatory, but the others have meanings that are not obvious from the names, and nomenclature is important in real estate investing. It’s a whole new vocabulary. If you’re interested in learning a whole […]

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Stupid Doctor Tricks: Physicians’ Biggest Financial Mistakes

stupid doctor tricks

Listening to The White Coat Investor podcast the other day, I heard him talk about how there are brilliant physicians out there who scored 270 on Step 1 of the USMLE that cannot invest their way out of a paper bag. It’s sad but true. Intelligence and success in one arena does not foretell success in all aspects of life. In fact, the more one focuses all energies on one discipline, the more likely other areas are going to be […]

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Why Paying Down Debt Aggressively Was the Worst Financial Decision I’ve Ever Made

This weeks guest post is written by Matthew White with White and McGowan. Their firm is unique in that they handle financial planning exclusively for physicians and dentists. Equally distinguishing, is that Blake McGowan is not only a financial advisor with the firm, but he’s also a practicing physician. You can read Matthew and Blake’s story here at KevinMD.com to see how the two came together to form White and McGowan more than five years ago. The firms’ vision aligns […]

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What You Need to Know about Fundrise and DiversyFund

crowdfunded

Today’s guest post comes from Fred Leamnson of Money With a Purpose for the Money Mix website. I met Fred briefly at FinCon, and we’ve communicated several times since then. His well-written posts have landed on The Sunday Best several times now. Fred is an advocate for those dealing with opioid addiction, the effects of which have greatly impacted his family. He devotes an entire section of his website to overcoming adversity. I respect his willingness to share his son’s […]

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Life Goal: To Lose a Million Dollars

In the Great Recession, I lost tens of thousands of dollars. I was just a few years into my anesthesia career and hadn’t had a lot of time to build up my investment accounts. I had been maxing out a SEP-IRA and setting aside a bit of cash, but that was about it. The backdoor Roth didn’t exist, I didn’t have an HSA, and I wouldn’t start a taxable account until after the market had started to rebound in 2010. […]

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Top 5 Lessons from Sports on How to Be Better With Money

Minnesota Hall of Fame

Alright sports fans, listen up! Dr. James Turner has been listening to more than his share of SportsCenter, and believe it or not, he’s learned a thing or two about how to be better with money in the process. You see, the keys to success that apply to one discipline often translate to numerous other endeavors. Do you think Shaquille O’Neil was more successful on or off the hardwood court? It may be true that one thing led to another, […]

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Managing Risk With Fixed Income: How to Buy Zero Coupon Bonds

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Today’s guest post on the mechanics of selecting and purchasing U.S. Treasury bonds comes courtesy of the man behind Reaching the Crest. His blog has been dormant for quite some time now. I think he’s been too busy taking a deep dive into the investing world to create new content of his own! As you will read several times, he is a member of my fatFIRE Facebook group, a community I created for readers interested in a bigger budget style […]

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7 Risks of Real Estate Investing

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Real Estate investment often project rosy returns. 8% to 12% or more is not an uncommon expectation in crowdfunded and other real estate investment opportunities. These strong returns, however, are far from guaranteed. If they were a sure thing, there’d be little reason to invest in anything else. I do, of course, invest in other asset classes. Diversity is a good thing; it’s a good way to spread your risk around. It’s not just investment real estate that comes with […]

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529 Plans: What You Need to Know About College Savings Plans

529 Plan MN

Happy 5/29 Day!   Shortly after our children were born, we started 529 plans to get a head start on college savings. Before they could walk or talk, these lucky kids had thousands of dollars invested in a tax-advantaged account with many years for that money to compound before they might need it.   I say “lucky” because the vast majority of kids don’t have a 529 plan. Greater than 97% of families in the United States don’t use them, […]

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An Early Retiree Creates and Shares His Investment Policy Statement

SIS_IPS

Today’s guest post is from Robert @ Stop Ironing Shirts.  He recently declared early retirement from a 15 year career in finance.  Robert struggled with walking away from career paying $300,000+, an income level only achieved after ten plus years of on the job training after his undergraduate degree. He is married to a veterinarian who hung up her white coat a couple of years ago, and he recently recapped the process of giving his early retirement notice, sharing people’s […]

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What to Do with Suboptimal Assets in Your Portfolio

Kids receiving gifts

If you’ve got an ideal investment portfolio and you’re perfectly content with your asset allocation (the percentage of stocks and bonds),  your asset location (where those funds are located, ideally in the most tax-efficient manner) and the choice of assets you hold, this post is not for you. If, on the other hand, you are human and have made less than optimal choices in the past, or someone made them for you, I’d like to share some strategies you can […]

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12 Ways to Simplify Your Taxable Brokerage Account

My taxable account might be my favorite account. It holds about half of our retirement assets, is immediately available, and is more flexible than any other account we own. When I first opened one, I didn’t have a guide like this. I bought actively managed, tax-inefficient funds. I didn’t know what tax loss harvesting was. It was far from optimal, but at least I was saving and investing the leftover money after maximizing all of my tax-advantaged options rather than […]

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