The Sunday Best (10/9/2016)

The Sunday Best is a collection of a handful of posts I share with you each week. With so many informative and inspirational writers out there, I have no trouble coming up with a number of worthwhile reads each week.

Every featured post should be of interest to any physician seeking financial independence. Some will be written by your physician colleagues; others will be written by our friends and patients who share common goals and interests.

Presenting, this week’s Sunday Best:

 

How old will you be when you retire? Ten Factorial Rocks explores the effect of retirement age and asset allocation in a number crunching exercise named FIRE: How Long vs. How Much.

 

Speaking of asset allocation, Jim Dahle, MD, the White Coat Investor wrote an article @ Physician’s Money Digest aptly titled  In Defense of Bonds.

 

I often speak of money, but don’t say much about the things we do to earn that money. Anesthesia resident Charlie @ Life of a Med Student describes The Worst Trauma I’ve Personally Been In. He more than earned his just-above-minimum-wage salary that evening.

 

In an oldie but goodie, Matt @ The Resumé Gap gathers his thoughts as a free man in Reflections on Leaving Work.

 

All the cool kids are travel hacking now. The Mad Fientist has a great site for finding reward cards, and Alexi Zemsky, MD and Brad Barrett started a course and forum @ Travel Miles 101. Future Proof MD shared his rewarding experience with travel hacking in I Added Up My Credit Card Rewards and…

 

Over the summer, Freedom with Bruno gave us an update on life in the slow lane as an early retiree. Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Material Possessions.

 

How much does blogging pay? It depends… I share details in my quarterly newsletter, which will go out this evening, but here’s a list @ Emma Drew of 65 Online Income Reports from dozens of bloggers.

 

The Sunday Best requires me to read quite a lot. I enjoy it. I learn from others and after a while, I get the sense that I know some of you, even though I don’t. Not yet, anyway.

Another benefit of extensive reading is the exposure to many writing styles. There are some exceptional writers creating all sorts of great content. When I started this Best series in the spring, I occasionally struggled to find five articles I really liked. I wasn’t casting a very wide net.

Now, I struggle to narrow it down to a mere seven articles. And so I cheat. Like I did with a three-in-one up there, and a bullet point list of so many FinCon wrap-ups last week. It’s not my fault there are so many talented bloggers.

I’m a science geek with no writing background. In college, I was required to take one writing class. There was an offering called something like “Writing for the Health Sciences,” the perfect cop out for a pre-med who wouldn’t dare take one step outside of his comfort zone.

I remember a paper in which I made a cohesive argument for alcoholics to be allowed on the liver transplant waiting list, as long as they had shown they could maintain sobriety. I think that might be called foreshadowing, but we didn’t cover literary terms in the pre-med writing class.

I’ve got some catching up to do if I want to be a writer. “Every day is a school day,” as we would say in residency. In addition to dozens of blog posts, I try to read a few books. I just finished Stephen King’s On Writing, a sort of combination autobiography / “how to write good” book.

I’ll summarize his recommendations and share my favorite quote. Stevie says avoid the passive tense. Tell the truth. Adverbs are unnecessary and not needed. Avoid redundancy. Don’t repeat yourself.

I learned nothing.

He speaks very little about humor, which I found quite odd. I thought Misery was one of the top romantic comedies of my misspent youth, second only to The Shining (obviously).

Oh, and the quote:

“Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well.”

I like that.
I just started reading my next book, which is a perfect follow up to Steven King. It’s a collection of thirteen Halloween short stories called Pumpkin Spirits by Mark Milbrath. I’m screening it, and if I don’t think it will give my boys too many nightmares, I will share it with them.

I’m not sure what the over / under is on the right amount of nightmares, but the boys made it through the Harry Potter series without crashing our bed in the middle of the night, so I think we’ll be alright.

 

 

 

Have a great week!

-Physician on FIRE

Sponsor Spotlight

Highlighting the Sponsors that make this site possible and support its charitable mission.

PKA Insurance

Pradeep Audho is an Independent insurance broker and the owner of PKA Insurance Group Inc. He focuses on disability and life insurance. He represents most of the major disability insurance carriers. You can request a disability quote here. Quotes will be provided within 24-36 hours. His website has an instant quote engine for term life insurance rates from over 30 carriers. Click here to run an instant term life quote. Many of his clients are immigrant physicians and he understands the additional issues they may encounter when purchasing insurance products if in the US on a work-visa or as a non-US citizen.