The Sunday Best (2/10/2019)

The Sunday Best is a collection of articles I’ve curated for your reading pleasure.

Expect most of the writing to be from recent weeks and consistent with the themes presented on this website: investing & taxes, financial independence, early retirement, and physician issues.

 

Presenting, this week’s Sunday Best:

 

 

Six or seven years ago, I spent most of my 17 weeks off from my primary job working locums three states away. That’s where I met Dr. Eric Larson, the President of the group at the time. We reconnected on his podcast, The Paradocs in Episode 033: Walking Away From It All. The FIRE Movement with Dr. Leif Dahleen.

 

I maintain that the FIRE Movement is Here to Stay in some form or fashion. Joe’s not so sure. From Retire by 40, Is the FIRE Movement a Fad?

 

Either way, I’ll keep washing out my Ziploc bags. Just kidding — I don’t do that (but I do reuse the ones I use for sandwiches). And why not? According to Beyond the Dollar, People Who Wash Their Ziploc Bags are More Likely to Be Millionaires.

 

Side Hustle Scrubs challenged the White Coat Investor’s readers to Stop Whining About Job Satisfaction. He followed that up with 10 Things More Productive Than Whining About Job Satisfaction (and the doctors who did them).

 

One “productive” thing (depending on how you look at it) some of those docs did is cut back, like Crispy Doc did. I featured the first four in this insightful series a couple months ago. Learn from four more like them:

• Docs Who Cut Back #5: Wealthy Doc
• Docs Who Cut Back #6: Dawn Baker, MD / Practice Balance
• Docs Who Cut Back #7: Loonie Doc
• Docs Who Cut Back #8: Jordan Craig, MD

 

Dr. Miko of Mind Body Miko cut back. Waaaaaaay back. Who knew that surgical training in Australia could be rougher duty than here in the states? The Ugly Side of Becoming a Surgeon. Ugly is a gross understatement.

 

Cutting back or quitting are not your only options. There are other career paths for physicians, almost all of which don’t involve blogging. From Enzyme Health, Alternative Career Ideas for Burned Out Physicians.

 

If you and your special someone aren’t on the same page financially, how can you find harmony? My friend Andy has been known to Budget Party and Cubert convinced his wife to join him in Early Retirement Bliss. Whitney Hansen has some additonal ideas. 4 Steps to Get Your Partner on the Same Financial Page.

 

This topic has much narrower scope, but it’s a question I hear often. From Laura of Every Day by The Lake, writing for Women Who Money (yes, money’s a verb now): What Can I Do With an Old 401(k)?

 

I reviewed a couple of FIRE books published in 2019 earlier this week. Financial Freedom and Playing with FIRE in Financial Freedom for Millennials. Congratulations to JHL and Kathy S who won copies of the two books signed by the authors!

 

Speaking of books, The White Coat Investor book is selling at the lowest price I’ve ever seen. At $10 a pop, you might want to pick a few up for your favorite med students or residents.

 

Yesterday, Passive Income MD proved that ladders aren’t just for firefighters, house painters, CDs, and bonds. How to Build a Real Estate Crowdfunding Ladder.

 

Twenty Nineteen

 

The year 2019 will be a memorable one for me, but that’s not what the heading is about. When I wake up post-call tomorrow, I will have 20 hospital shifts and 19 surgical center shifts left to work.

Not that anyone’s counting.

In reality, the 20 hospital shifts are 24 hours apiece and strung together 3 to 5 days at a time, the latter over the 4th of July holiday. Yes, Independence Day will be my final working holiday. In a way, I only have six hospital call shifts to go, but I don’t like to think of a 72-hour or 120-hour stretch as one shift.

So 20 and 19 it is. I reserve the right to work in anesthesia again if the desire hits me, but I’m making no particular plans to do so. I want to see how it feels to have a calendar with no workdays scheduled, and what it’s like to months on end without putting on a pair of scrubs.

I just finished reading Tanja Hester’s Work Optional, which I’ll be reviewing on Tuesday, and it’s given us a good framework to use to better envision what we want life to look like on the other side of this career.

In the short term, after waking up post-call and all done on August 12th, I anticipate spending about a week and a half in Michigan keeping tabs on the construction of our new home, returning back to Minnesota to visit friends, maybe having a retirement party, catching the Golden Gophers’ season opener at TCF Bank Stadium, chilling for a weekend at Camp FI Midwest over Labor Day Weekend before heading out to FinCon19 in Washington, D.C.

Like retired people tend to say, I’m not going to know how I ever found time to go to work!

 

A 1-Star Physician

 

Knowing that my name would eventually be associated with this site, I would occasionally Google my name to see what came up.

On the first page, there I was. A 1-star (out of 5) physician. One of the online physician rating sites had garnered one review of my performance and it was a complaint, of course, with a 1-star rating. I’m not going to name names, but the site rhymes with wealth glades.

The rating was from a person in Florida who, in 2016, complained about my office staff and waiting room time. Note that I haven’t worked in Florida since 2006 and have never had a clinic, office staff, or waiting room.

I contacted “Weatlh Glades” support, informed them that the rating was clearly in error and couldn’t possibly be about me, but they didn’t seem to care. After repeated attemps, I finally got a response. I was told that they had confirmed the review had met their criteria for display.

Really? Must be some really stringent criteria.

However, I was given an option for my “special situation”, which I imagine is an all-too-common situation.

“I contacted our Product Management team and asked them if we could deactivate your survey page. This is not a normal option but they are open to the idea in your case due to your specialty’s ethical responsibilities and constraints. It will allow the display of your profile it just takes away any option of surveys and of course all previous survey data would be gone as well.”

So now I don’t have any stars, but I’d rather have no reviews than one bad one that arose from somebody’s extended wait time in some random clinic in the Sunshine State.

There are other things you can do proactively to improve your online ratings. Have you ever listened to a podcast and had the host not ask you to leave a 5-star review? Think about it.

The impact of physician rating sites and social media are becoming more important than ever. These are frequent topics on sites like KevinMD, but where do you start? Dr. Jay Sridhar of the Retina Podcast and Dr. David Almeida asked me to preview a course they created to help physicians understand how to use social media and online branding to their advantage.

I thought the content was solid with a number of actionable tips, but as a frugal physician, I didn’t like the price point. Before offering the course to you, I asked them to cut the price in half.

Not only did they do that, but they gave me a $10 off code for my readers to use (discount code: physicianonfire), making the course a justifiable $39 business expense. If, after taking the course, you’re unsatisfied for any reason, you can request (and will receive) a full refund.

Check out Online Strategy for Physicians: Digital Media, Online Branding, and Online Strategies for Physicians

 

 

 

Have an outstanding week!

-Physician on FIRE