finance
The more I learn about doctors and their finances and the more I talk to other docs, the more I see several recurring themes that cause them to have difficulty reaching financial success.
This one begins early for most medical students as they get into the habit of living beyond their means. Student loans, car loans, credit card loans, vacation loans, and poorly designed mortgages.
Saving 10% is the general rule for most people (although even that might be a little low given our current low-expected-return investing environment), but most people also have 40 years to save for retirement.
Most doctors are smart enough to either learn about the tax code and do their taxes themselves or hire a good accountant to do the job. But finding a few bucks here and there at tax time is missing the forest for the trees. The big gains are found in changing your tax behavior throughout the year.
Starting over is expensive. There is nothing a doctor can do that will impact his finances as much as a divorce. It isn’t unusual for a doctor to lose his home, a large chunk of his savings, and his future income stream (to alimony and child support). It is hard to recover from that.
Not only do most people (doctors included) not have enough of the types of insurance they really need (primarily life, disability, and liability -professional and personal), they have too much of the types they don’t need.