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:
This post has a built-in FIRE calculator with a graph that changes with the inputs. From Engaging Data, Will Your Money Last If You Retire Early? Visualizing Longevity Risk.
Side Hustle Scrubs discusses the various sizes of FIRE and introduces the BMI (Banked Money Index) in a fun post discussing withdrawal rates and more in My Morbidly Obese FIRE.
Mr. Crazy Kicks FIREd a couple years ago, and he’s made as much from his blog this year as most physicians make in a workday, so you don’t call the internet retirement police! Reflecting on Two Years of Early Retirement.
EJ at Dads Dollars and Debts talks about life after a different kind of FIRE. He discusses the options of rebuilding on site, rebuilding elsewhere, or taking the money and runnin’. Find out what they chose to do after the Tubbs fire in Options for Living After a Fire.
Why would any physician want to pursue FIRE (the freedom kind, not the kind that burns)? Smart Money MD asks and answers, Why Do Young Doctors Hate Medicine So Much?
Is it the pay? No, we’re paid awfully well, as the Wall Street Physician points out in How Much Do Doctors Make? Takeaways from Doximity’s First Annual Physician Compensation Report.
Perhaps some of these burned out, well-paid, angry doctors would benefit from a break. The Locums Life highlights the benefits of a career break in Physician Burnout and the Locum Tenens Sabbatical.
The Fiology page has really taken off, with more than 25 lessons full of links and resources to help you understand all that is FI. A couple of them resonated with me (and happened to include me — a great way to be featured here, by the way):
- Â Lesson 20: Geoarbitrage: Moving Closer to FI [cue the music: “the closer I am to fiiii-hiiii, yeah… credit to Ruth Berman who sang this at Camp FI]
- Lesson 23: Should You Pay Off Your Mortgage? [my vote is for Yes]
ESI Money has learned a few things from a bunch of fellow millionaires, some of whom are retired, and some that are not. Here’s five more of them.
- Millionaire Interview #61
- Millionaire Interview #62
- Millionaire Interview #63
- Millionaire Interview #64
- Millionaire Interview #65
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Happy Doctor New Year!
Sixteen years ago today, I was a brand new intern. I had moved into resident housing, passed my first of many ACLS courses, and was both excited and anxious to start my medical career in a transitional year program with an M.D. behind my name.
Fifteen years ago today, I was a brand new anesthesia resident. I had moved into my swanky downtown condo, survived a broken down U-Haul incident in western Kentucky, and was excited and anxious to spend some time paired up with a senior resident behind the blue curtain, working the dials of the anesthesia machine.
I’ve got a couple of gifts for you to help you with your financial literacy education.
First, a free book to help you understand and manage your medical school debt. This comes from Dr. Ben White, and he’s offering his student loan e-books for free through the end of the month. These normally sell for $10 apiece, and you can have them in exchange for your e-mail address.
Second, The White Coat Investor has knocked $75 off the price of his signature course, Fire Your Financial Advisor. This represents the third different use of the word “fire” in this post, but this time we’re talking about learning everything you need to know to make your financial advisor an unnecessary redundancy.
Discount Code: INDEPENDENCE
This code gets you 15% off, and the offer expires at the end of next weekend. Based on the testimonials and how few past students of the course have requested their money back, it’s clear people are finding good value with this purchase. If you disagree, take advantage of the 7-day money back guarantee.
Going Back to Full-Time Work
I’ve been touting the benefits of part-time since before I started my part-time schedule nine months ago. It’s been great and I highly recommend it.
That being said, I’m going back to full-time work.
What?!?
Yes, it’s true, but it’s only temporary. One of my five partners received his marching orders for a four-month military commitment overseas. Amongst ourselves, we devised a plan to cover the schedule in his absence without bringing in and training locums coverage.
This is a voluntary change that will take place over the winter. When spring arrives, I’ll return to my usual 7 days on, 3 weeks off type of schedule until my replacement arrives after his residency graduation a year from now.
When I am working full-time, I’ll be working 60% to 70% more than I’ve gotten used to, which equates to a couple extra 24-hour hospital shifts and a few more days at the surgery center each month. It’s still a very manageable schedule, especially when compared to the schedules I kept 15 and 16 years ago.
Subscribe and receive my quarterly newsletter tomorrow!
I’ll be putting together my quarterly newsletter which details my online revenue, blog stats and more. Find out how I’ve already exceeded last year’s revenue and am on pace for a six-figure profit in 2018. My revenue reports are reserved exclusively for those who subscribe to the site. If you don’t like multiple e-mails a week, I also offer a weekly digest.
Have an exciting week!
-Physician on FIRE
18 thoughts on “The Sunday Best (7/1/2018)”
Thanks for the share. I’m impressed that you managed to hire a resident as your replacement over a year in advance. Does he/she know your online persona?
-WSP
Not as far as I know. I’m surprised more people haven’t called me out now that my name is out there after the WCI conference. It just goes to show how few people we actually reach, I guess.
In a typical month, I have about 50,000 unique visitors and there are around a million physicians practicing in the U.S. The vast majority have never seen my site.
Best,
-PoF
4 months is a countable number of days. Thanks for supporting our troops!
And 13 months is countable, too — that’s where I’m at and I suspect the time will fly by.
Cheers!
-PoF
That is so nice of you to be willing to go back to full time for four months. Sounds like you have a congenial and good group of docs you work with. I hope it’s not too busy for you during those four full time months.
Thanks, RocDoc! The end of the year does tend to be busy as people get their elective procedures in before 12/31 after meeting their deductible. Things tend to slow down quite a bit in January.
Cheers!
-PoF
Hopefully the next time you go from part time to full time it will be to full time retirement 🙂
Cheers, and thanks for the mention!
Full time retirement. I like it!
You’ve gotten to be pretty good at it, I see.
Cheers!
-PoF
It’s great that your work is flexible like that. Full time work for 4 months doesn’t sound too bad. I really admire your partner’s commitment to work overseas. Hope it all goes well.
It’ll be over before we know it and I’ll finish out the spring and summer working my lovely part-time schedule. After that, I plan to be no-time. Sounds like a dream!
Best,
-PoF
I think it is great that you are willing to pitch in and go back to fulltime when needed. I’ve been part-time since January and I honestly can’t imagine ever going back to fulltime. I guess I could do it for a few months, but it doesn’t sound pleasant. I hope you post about that experience.
I’ll be sure to write about it — the bummer is that we won’t be able to get away as much during the long, cold winter. But knowing it’s my last winter as an employee, I know I can manage.
And like I said, this full-time gig is a much friendlier schedule than the one I kept as an intern and resident.
Cheers!
-PoF
Love the list of articles you rounded up! Time to catch up on some reading this Sunday morning 🙂
And wow… 15 years since starting anesthesia residency! Did it seem like those 15 years flew by fast? In a year from now, when your replacement joins the group, are you hanging up the medicine hat for good?
The time really has flown by. Residency doesn’t seem like it was all that long ago.
To answer the question, I will keep an active license for a bit and will renew my ACLS and PALS within my final year so I’ll have the option to continue working if I would want — if I did, it would likely be limited locums with no call, but I might just be done completely.
Best,
-PoF
I’m honored to be included amongst such great authors. Especially since you’re part of the reason my BMI keeps ballooning. With you returning to full time work your fatFIRE may become morbidly obese! Thankfully scrub pants are very forgiving.
Yeah, in that sense, I’m getting chubbier by the day!
Gotta love those scrubs. Just don’t wear them home. Scrubs in public is a shameful look.
Cheers!
-PoF
Great round up. I really liked that article by Big ERN. I planned on featuring that in my monthly checkout this month. It was well thought out and I loved the air plane analogy. We don’t want to just make it, we want to make it while being able to sleep at night.
Now to go and check out some of the others.
TPP
Thanks, Dr. PoF for not judging that totally click-bait title! And I’m glad folks enjoyed the airplane analogy. Perma-travel does that to you: you come up with a lot of travel analogies! 🙂
Cheers!
Big ERN