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:
In my Financial Freedom post, I mentioned the rising cost of health insurance as one of many reasons to consider striving for More than Enough. The Grizzly Mom & Dad explored the topic in posts throughout the week. Welcome to Healthcare Week.
Does one become a curmudgeon mere days after retiring? Apparently so. In one of what I assume was one of many rants that day, but the only one that became a post, recent early retiree Mr. Groovy from Freedom is Groovy explains why Robert Kiyosaki and Tony Robbins Bug Me. That’s cool… the FIRE community needs its own Andy Rooney.
Our EM physician friend @ Choose Better Life gives a nice book report on a book geared towards helping us learn how to create habits for creating a…. wait for it… Better Life. Read her take on Gretchen Rubin’s Better Than Before.
The White Coat Investor dished up some serious wisdom in random fashion via this truthful post: 25 Pearls About the Financial Life of Physicians.
In an oldie but goodie, the venerable Jim Collins @ jlcollinsnh doles out additional pearls in his Manifesto.
Our Australian friend the Productive Physician has created a comprehensive guide to attending a conference, which is something I did this last week. Here’s the thorough and Ultimate Guide to Getting Ready for a Conference. I’ll be sure to refer to this one before the ASA Annual Meeting, which I’ll be attending next October.
What do couples fight most about? Money. The Finance Superhero doesn’t want to waste his Superpowers breaking up another fight, so he wrote this for you: Money and Marriage: How to Talk About Money With Your Spouse.
Medical student Leah Croll @ Motivate MD proves she is wise beyond her years, quoting Dumbledore and reflecting on her education. Whether your love or hate the Blue Devils, you really should read Why Not Watching Enough College Basketball is My Greatest Regret.
“Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt, Michael” – Stuart Smalley. “All Time High ain’t just the theme song to Octopussy” – Physician on FIRE. People like to hoard cash when markets hit an all time high. Ben Carlson at A Wealth of Common Sense offers some perspective in Don’t Be Afraid of All Time Highs.
As this post is published, I am 36,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean, heading back from a week-long education meeting in beautiful Maui, Hawaii. I would love to share pictures, but the site won’t let me. Wordpress is cooperating once again. Hooray!

We had three excellent speakers and 20 hours of lecture. I attended all of them, a feat that few accomplished judging by the late morning crowds in the lecture hall. When the hospital is footing the bill, I figure the least I can do is show up. I’ll give the morning beach-goers the benefit of the doubt and assume they studied the lectures that were shared with us electronically.
A meeting like this is tailor made to those of us with generous CME allowances. I’ve said it before, but the free travel is one thing I’ll miss when I’m no longer employed by a hospital. Fortunately, I can afford to take a trip like this without the health system’s generosity and without the need to attend lectures.
Dr. P, it was a pleasure to meet you and I wish you and your partners nothing but the best. I’ll be sure to let you know if I find myself in your neck of the woods in the future.
Have a great week!
-Physician on FIRE
Sponsor Spotlight:
VISTA Staffing Solutions is a leading provider of short-term locum tenens, extended placements, and permanent physician search services and is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. It operates across the United States and Internationally. VISTA Staffing Solutions was founded in 1990 as a temporary physician and locum tenens staffing company and has diversified to offer full physician staffing solutions designed to provide hospitals, medical practices, and government agencies with optimum staff. Through the company website – vistastaff.com – locum tenens physicians are able to search for current positions, in wide range of settings, across all states and internationally, contact the expert recruitment team, and learn more about VISTA and its approach to staffing.
9 thoughts on “The Sunday Best (11/6/2016)”
Thanks for the shoutout, PoF! I’m humbled by the mention.
Wow, life must be rough…a week long in Hawaii. Probably all expenses paid. Boy, you physicians sure have the tough jobs! 😛
In all seriousness, thanks for the Sunday Best as usual. There was a couple blogs I’d never seen before! Thanks.
Thanks for including me, PoF! I’m honored. The Andy Rooney of the FIRE community. I like that! But I don’t have bushy eyebrows.
I often feel like I’ve been rather spoiled being raised in Southern California. I’ll talk to so many peers who think that there’s a big pit of nothingness in between here and New York. And I think that’s sad. My grandfather eventually retired in a Denver suburb after spending most of his post-Navy life here in California. I’m sure he would have preferred to stay local, but his wife wanted to go to Colorado. I had a blast visiting them over the years and I felt like it was just a very different vibe than what I experience in SoCal.
Geographic arbitrage is huge if it works in your favor. Yet I know so many people with no desirable job skills that run to New York or San Francisco because it’s “their dream”. I don’t understand it, but even those people seem to make it work somehow.
it makes sense that they would need to offer more incentives to doctors to live in “less desirable” areas. It’s too bad that isn’t the case in most fields. As a single dude with no obligations, I’d be on the first plane to Souix Falls if I could have the same income with 1/3 of the expenses. Ha. It would drastically speed up the FIRE timeline.
Nice to meet you too, PoF! Thanks for meeting up with one of your readers. I’m halfway back home now. Not quite as warm in the Midwest, but I enjoy having four seasons (and geographic arbitrage!)
Thanks, PoF. LOL. I am pretty predictable 🙂
As for the picture-sharing, give it a day and it might fix itself. Wordpress wouldn’t let me upload photos a few months back. I restarted the computer, tried a different browser and different formats… nothing doing. The next day it was fine.
Glad you had a wonderful vacation and can’t wait to hear more about it.
You are welcome – my wife was able to download Better than Before to her Kindle via the public library. I read the few pages on being a “Questioner” which describes me all too well.
And you are right about the technical difficulties. After an exhaustive troubleshooting session at the Lahaina Sports Bar, where I emptied my Tmp folder @ Bluehost and disabled every plugin in Wordpress (two suggestions to fix the “file could not be written to disk” error), everything is fine today. Except me, that is. I’m fueled by 3-4 hours of intermittent sleep on a red-eye and unable to make out whether or not the daylight savings change will help or hurt me.
Cheers!
-PoF
Thanks for the shout out!
Appreciate being listed alongside such luminaries!
Cheers.
Glad to have discovered your site. Perhaps we’ll connect in Australia someday.
Cheers!
-PoF