Having spent much of their 20s in medical education and training, physicians can feel they are behind in wealth building when looking at their peers in other professions.
Yet, any gap they feel isn’t due to their delay in producing significant income as much as it’s not understanding what to do with their income.
Physicians’ income gives them the ability to establish the lifestyle they desire for themselves and their family. How they approach financial planning now is what determines whether there will be a gap years later between their finances and achieving all of their personal objectives and goals.
Most importantly, before deciding how to secure their future, physicians need to understand why they are making the choices they make.
Wealth Is Grown For A Purpose. What Is Your Purpose?
Even the most resilient physicians, however, are susceptible to burnout brought on by stressful workplace process. The most common challenges they face involve workflow, autonomy, time constraints, technology and regulations. In addition, stress is increased when physicians don’t feel they are being heard, supported or included in management decision making.
Studies continue to be conducted across health systems and large practices to better understand and reduce the challenges physicians face. Many responsible for physician satisfaction and well-being are using that data to enact best practices in areas like teamwork, reduced clerical tasks and workflow that address the causes of physician burnout. But much of that is outside an individual physician’s sphere of influence.
Reduce personal stress by improving financial planning
- What if there were no limits to what you could provide your family?
- Which places do you and your spouse want to visit?
- What makes you relax more, a vacation house by a lake or on a mountaintop?
- What kind of advantages can you offer your children that will support and even enhance their life’s desires?
- What is your passion? How will you indulge it?
- What does retirement really mean to you, what will you be doing? How much will that cost?
- What do you wish your friends, family and children to remember you for? What do you want them to understand about you by the legacy you leave future generations?
Now what’s the real threat to turning your dreams into reality/achieving your aspirations?
Achieve Your Purpose
The gap that poses the biggest threat to physicians realizing their dreams is not having the right people in their lives to educate them on how to achieve their goals. And not managing to make the time to find those right people.
Investing time up front to find the partner that will help and educate you is the key to expert planning that will provide you the strongest financial foundation. Unfortunately, lack of time management leads many to find themselves down the road wondering if they can maintain their lifestyle and all that goes with it.
Rely On Experts As Patients Rely On You.
Just as your patients depend on your expertise to guide them to their optimal health, physician lifestyle planning provides the expertise to achieve your family’s healthiest financial future.
Expert planning develops a strategy that first anticipates problems that can arise and applies sophisticated techniques to develop solutions. It’s that expertise that provides the ability to avoid mistakes now that hurt your financial health down the road.
Understanding your true goals, physician lifestyle planning helps coordinate the most important pieces of your life and puts all of the various pieces together:
- Understanding your debt and identifying sound repayment strategies
- Taking care of comprehensive insurance planning that fits with your family needs
- Ensuring you have sufficient liquid assets in the event of an emergency, disability or any other unexpected turn of events
- Creating a tax management strategy that minimizes what you owe and maximizes what you can invest
- Saving for retirement through a diverse portfolio that extends well beyond your 403(b), 401(k) or 457(b)
- Ensuring your will and other estate planning affairs are in order—even if you are young (this is especially important if you have children)
Investing time now to partner with the right experts gives you confidence that your day-to-day decision making is supporting the future you want. No one wants to worry about future gaps between your finances and the lifestyle—and legacy—you and your family deserve.
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Asset Allocation neither assures a profit nor protects against a loss in a declining market. Consult your own personal attorney legal or tax counsel for advice on specific legal and tax matters.
The gap that poses the biggest threat to physicians realizing their dreams is not having the right people in their lives to educate them on how to achieve their goals. And not managing to make the time to find those right people.