White Coat Investor Founder Jim Dahle Won't Quit Until Doctors Stop Getting Scammed

“Doctors start out with their net worth in such a big hole that just getting back to zero is no small task.”

Jim Dahle is an emergency medicine doctor in Utah — but you probably know him as the guy behind The White Coast Investor, a trusted site for personal finance guidance for physicians. Jim provides clear, actionable advice about dealing with debt, building wealth, and other aspects of money management. Since launching his blog in 2011, Jim has expanded the White Coat Investor brand to include books, a podcast, conferences and online communities — all centered around the financial lives of doctors.

In this episode of How I Doctor, Offcall co-founder Dr. Graham Walker talks with Jim about starting the White Coat Investor, and how, nearly 15 years later, he is still as determined as ever to help physicians — whether that means protecting them from scammers, teaching them investing strategies, or even advising them on choosing a specialty that suits their goals.

Throughout the conversation, Jim shares practical financial tips and mistakes to avoid. Here are seven pieces of advice that every physician can learn from:

1. Your income might peak sooner than you think

“For emergency doctors, we have this step where we go from a resident income to an attending income. That might be the highest income we ever see.”

In most professions, people earn more money over time; their salaries grow as they gain experience and seniority. But that’s not always the case in medicine. Particularly in shift-based specialties like emergency medicine, physicians often make the most money earlier in their careers, because that’s when they’re more likely to take undesirable shifts and do extra call. Later on, physicians are typically less open to this kind of work.

For that reason, Jim says your income as a physician might peak earlier than you expected. It’s important to account for that possibility in your financial decisions, and not to assume you can spend now and save later, because once you get used to a lifestyle, it’s hard to go backwards.

2. Learn how to spot a financial scammer

“The financial services industry is actually out there hunting you. It's Captain Ahab and you are the whale.”

There are a lot of people and firms looking to make money off physicians, because of doctors’ earning potential. Be on alert for self-described financial “advisors” who push their products on you, as well as firms that stoke fear in order to sell expensive asset protection plans.

3. Don’t defer, and other loan tips

“[Med students] don't figure out early enough if they're going to be going for a job that qualifies for public service loan forgiveness or if they're going to be taking a regular job that hopefully pays more.”

For many years, Jim advised medical students not to borrow more than they needed to, and to use some of their own money to pay for med school if they could. But his guidance has changed, because about half of doctors today go into public service jobs that qualify for loan forgiveness. It’s smarter for them to save their money and have taxpayers foot their med school bill.

Jim mentions a few common loan-management mistakes, including deferment. Waiting until after residency to start repaying loans, Jim warns, can cost doctors hundreds of thousands of dollars.

4. Keep living like a resident

“You can buy anything you want on a physician income for the most part. Not everything you want, though. So you've got to decide — you can have early retirement, or you can send your kids to private school, or you can have the biggest, fanciest, nicest house. But you can’t do it all.”

Many young doctors want to get their loans forgiven, but it’s not the only way to get rid of debt on a reasonable timeline. Another option: Pay back your loans in full, without assistance. It might seem like a crazy idea, but Jim says it’s not — as long as you live like a resident. That means keeping up a thrifty lifestyle, even when you’re making “attending money.” If you send $200,000 a year to a lender, Jim points out, loans shrink quickly.

But a lot of doctors do the opposite. They come out of residency and already have a home mortgage and car payments. Then their loans come due, and they realize a $400,000 salary doesn’t stretch as far as they thought. Keeping up with the Joneses makes it hard to build wealth.

5. Decide if you’re a DIY-er, a delegator, or a validator when it comes to investing

“Sometimes people in that middle group really are the ones who don't have much success at all because they never get it done.”

One of the first questions to ask when you’re developing an investment strategy is whether or not you need a financial advisor. Jim separates doctors into three investing categories:

Do-it-yourself-ers can’t imagine paying someone else thousands of dollars a year to manage their money. This approach is the cheapest and most time consuming. Delegators are eager for a money person — they want an advisor to hold their hand through financial planning and manage all their assets. Validators are somewhere in between. They want to pay a reasonably low fee for an advisor to check-in sporadically.

The validator path is the least viable, Jim says. But some people who start out as validators become DIY-ers. Those who’ve made the switch, Jim has found, say they paid financial advisors for one year longer than necessary because they lacked confidence in their ability to go it alone.

6. Decide with intentionality about your tolerance for debt

“Some people are very anti debt. And getting rid of their student loans as soon as possible, even if they invest nothing, is really important to them.”

“Debt vs. investing” is one of the most complex questions in personal finance. And there’s no universally correct answer, Jim says — it comes down to your tolerance for debt, which varies significantly from one person to the next.

On average, Jim says, doctors want to pay off their loans once they’re five years out of training. Hitting that goal requires a plan. And once you have a plan for loans, a mortgage-payment plan comes next.

7. Be OK with the downsides of your job

“At this point I'm financially independent and I'm still practicing medicine because I love it. I like to be there helping people on the worst days of their lives.”

Jim says the key to choosing the right specialty is making sure you can tolerate the unique downsides that come with it. In emergency medicine, for example, you work when most people are off (holidays, weekends and evenings) and discharge a lot of patients without a diagnosis. If you can’t deal with an unconventional schedule and constant uncertainty, then the ER isn’t the place for you. These aspects of the specialty don’t bother Jim — he’d choose emergency medicine all over again. (Plus, he’s been offloading his night shifts for years … )

To connect further with Jim, connect with him on LinkedIn here and follow everything White Coast Investor related at https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/.

To make sure you don’t miss an episode of How I Doctor, subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also read the full transcript of the episode below.

Offcall exists to help restore balance in medicine and improve the wealth and wellbeing of physicians. Sign up for Offcall here to bring about more physician compensation transparency and join our physician movement.

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Transcript

Jim Dahle:

This stuff works. People pay off their student loans, they pay off their mortgages, they become millionaires, they become financially independent. They cut back at work, they leave a toxic job and go to a good one. All these things that doctors want to accomplish in their life, somebody has done it before you.

Graham Walker:

Welcome to How I Doctor, where we're bringing joy back to medicine. My guest today is up there with Dr. Glaucomflecken as a recognizable name in medicine. The White Coat Investor, Jim Dahle is an emergency physician like me, turned financial educator and the founder of the White Coat Investor, probably the most well-known book and financial platform for physicians.

Over the years, Jim has made it his mission to help doctors break free from the financial traps that often plague us and the profession and build sustainable wealth. It should come as no surprise that a fellow ER doctor would write a book that is relatable and practical. If you've ever been overwhelmed by student loans, you're unsure about investments or where your money should be going, this episode is for you.

Jim, welcome to How I Doctor. Thank you for being here.

JD:

Thank you and thank you for that kind introduction.

GW:

People certainly probably know the White Coat Investor better than they know Jim Dahle. Maybe, can you just give our listeners a background on who you are? Where do you come from? How did you get into this?

JD:

Sure. I always think it's fascinating. I get called the White Coat Investor, right?

GW:

You do, yeah.

JD:

The idea when I started the blog was that you were the White Coat investor. It was the reader of the blog, not the writer of the blog that was the White Coat Investor. So it's always been kind of funny over the years how I get introduced that way.

I'm still practicing medicine, so I have two part-time jobs essentially, and I love both of them for different reasons. I love switching back and forth between them. But I grew up in Alaska. I don't think I left the state three times before I went away to college at 18. Went through college, went to med school at the University of Utah, and the job that worked out for me ended up being back in Utah. We didn't think we were coming back to Utah, but ended up coming back here, and now we've raised four kids here.

I just find that work's also a meaningful part of my life, so I still do shifts in the ER, and I'm still doing the White Coat Investor now, what, 14 years later.

GW:

Jim, you started the blog in May of 2011. I was in my last year of residency. And then you published the book in 2014. Was the book always a planned thing, but a blog was easier to get started? How did you decide blog and book were the ways you would talk about this and promote it?

JD:

Even to this day, blogging is my favorite thing to do. I don't think of myself as a podcaster, even though I probably touch more people with my podcast than the blog.

I was always trying to run the White coat investors as a business. I had this crazy idea that it was going to provide passive income. Eventually, it did provide income, but it's never been passive. A lot of my audience, it said, "It needs to be a book, needs to be a book, needs to be a book." So I actually wrote the first book mostly while driving to Denver. My wife was driving. We were going there for a wedding, from Salt Lake to Denver, and most of the book was written on the way.

GW:

The book has one of the highest Amazon reviews ratings I've ever seen. You have 5,000 reviews and 4.8 stars. That's a really big accomplishment. What do you think has made it such a success?

JD:

Well, I didn't lie in it. I just told the way it was. I'm like, "Here's the way it was. I want to help you. Here's the information you need." I kept it short enough that people could get through it. I think part of it is I already had a devoted audience. Obviously, lots of those reviews came from people who liked what I was doing.

Saving Income Early in Your Career

GW:

Broadly speaking, why do you think physicians have such a hard time with money management, especially in those early years, say, right after fellowship or as a new attending, for that first five years?

JD:

Well, the main problem is doctors are people.

GW:

If we just got rid of that, we'd be so much better.

JD:

Yeah, that's exactly it. We make the same mistakes everybody else makes. We just tend to do it with larger sums of money. We borrow more, and then we earn more, and we pay more in taxes and we have to save more for retirement. So when we make a mistake, it's a bigger mistake usually.

Doctors are in a unique place in that they start their career late, and particularly for emergency doctors, we have this step where we go from a resident income to an attending income. That might be the highest income we ever see, that first income we get coming out of residency, just because we're willing to work more shifts, and we're willing to work more night shifts and that sort of a thing. And then the income trends down throughout our careers.

Well, that's not the way most careers look like. If you get outside of medicine, most careers, you start earning something in your twenties, and you don't start with a mountain of debt hanging over your head. You progressively make more and make more and become more financially literate as you go. Whereas doctors just get thrown right into the fire, right from the beginning. We've got big practice loans and student loans. We don't have anything saved for retirement, and we have all these great uses for money and not enough money to do them all, whether that's maxing out a Roth IRA or upgrading that beater we've been driving since we were a med student or saving up an emergency fund. We have all these good things to do with money right when we come out, and it's really hard to prioritize them.

GW:

Well, I'd be making less money because of inflation. I'm not seeing as many raises, or I'm just not working as many hours usually.

JD:

It's usually because you're not working as many hours. Now, this is fairly specific to the shift-based specialties. A lot of other specialties are building a practice, and their income actually goes up with time. Yes, there's probably inflation raises if you're an employed emergency physician.

But most of us are not interested in working as much at 55 as we were at 35.

GW:

What?

JD:

We're not as willing to work the undesirable shifts and take as much call. The truth is lots of us don't make more money 20 years into our careers than we're making toward the beginning. And you need to manage your finances that way. You can't just say, "I'm going to spend it now, and I'll save later." Well, later you might have even less income, and I tell you what, it's pretty hard to cut back your lifestyle. Not that hard to increase it at all, but it's hard to cut it back.

GW:

I certainly remember hitting, I don't know, 35 or 40, and just being like, "I could not do 5 in a row, 5 nights in a row." Shout-out to our nocturnalists that do that because it's challenging.

Jim, you said that we physicians tend to make the same mistakes, maybe just with larger sums of money. How do you think physicians get taken advantage of? And what do you think are the biggest offenders?

JD:

The financial services industry is actually out there hunting you. It's Captain Ahab, and you are the whale.

GW:

You are the whale, yeah.

JD:

They're coming after you. They actually use this term in the industry, whales. We want these high-net-worth people that we can churn their accounts and generate all these commissions from them.

There are actually people out there who, it's not that they don't want you to succeed, they just want to make money off of you. They're not always looking out for your best interests. Sometimes they're pretty ignorant actually. They hold themselves out as a financial advisor, and mostly they're just selling products to you.

Sometimes it's a firm that wants to make you scared about getting sued and losing everything. They sell you these super-expensive and complex asset protection plans that involve overseas trusts and family limited LLCs in Wyoming or Alaska or New Hampshire or whatever. They just take advantage of your fears, and you end up with these weird things in your financial life.

I was talking with a doc who's on the cusp of retirement, who has 40% of his nest egg in whole life insurance policies because there was no one around to warn him. He actually has a substantial chunk of his nest egg in something that probably should have had three times higher returns over the years.

Managing Student Loans: Strategies and Mistakes to Avoid

GW:

Wow. What mistakes do you see new doctors make when they're trying to manage their student loans?

JD:

It would help if this didn't change every month. For many years, I've told people, "Hey, don't borrow more than you have to, and if you have money going into med school, maybe you ought to use some of that money to pay for med school and invest in yourself."

Well, now something like 50% of doctors are in public service loan-forgiveness-qualifying jobs. The right financial answer, the right mathematical answer for that 50% is not to spend your own money. It's to spend the taxpayers money and have the taxpayer pay for your med school. I actually answer that question differently now than I did 10 years ago.

The mistakes people make, they borrow too much. They spend money they maybe shouldn't be spending. They don't pay attention to it and get a plan in place. They don't figure out early enough if they're going to be going for a job that qualifies for public service loan forgiveness, or if they're going to be taking a regular job that hopefully pays more and refinancing their loans and paying them off. Maybe they don't enroll into the right income driven repayment program.

We actually have a company, StudentLoanAdvice.com, to answer student loan questions because just the management of them has gotten so complicated over the last five years. There's some truisms. If you can borrow federal loans instead of private loans, you should do that. That's still true. If you can get somebody else to pay back your student loans instead of you, you probably ought to let them do it. That's going to be a truism. Pretty much every doc coming out of med school needs to be enrolling in an income-driven repayment program and not going into deferment or forbearance. That is almost always a mistake. If you're paying your student loans back yourself, you're sure you are, you're not going for a forgiveness program, you can go ahead and refinance your student loans and have more of your payments going toward principal instead of interest. All those things are still true.

GW:

Yeah. Jim, just for our medical student listeners, deferment or forbearance would be you finish medical school, you start residency, but you have decided to not start paying back your loans because you're a resident, and you're not making much income. You're saying that you should not do that, generally speaking.

JD:

Yeah, it's a terrible idea, terrible idea. You can basically do that anyway. All you do is you file a tax return your last year that says you have zero income. Now your income driven repayment program, whichever one it is that's still available, your income's zero, your payments are zero. And those $0 payments count toward public service loan forgiveness.

These people that go into deferment, they come out of residency five years later, they're halfway done to public service loan forgiveness, and they have no payments because they went into deferment. It's a tragedy. It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to doctors to make this mistake.

GW:

Do you get a sense that the medical schools are giving this relatively accurate general idea of how they should be managing their student loans when they become a resident?

JD:

The answer is almost universally no. It's not to say that's the case for all med schools. There are a couple that have a financial planner on staff. There are a few that have an optional finance course that you take as an MS4, which I think is a great time to become financially literate.

GW:

Oh, interesting.

JD:

This is my mission in life, is to make sure no student comes out this school while being a financial idiot. For the most part, people aren't getting this. Or worse, they're getting misinformation. They're getting some whole life insurance salesman coming in, masquerading as a financial advisor and-

GW:

Yeah, offering free lunch or dinner or something.

JD:

Yeah. Telling them something, and then at the end it's like, "Come see me so I can sell you some whole life insurance" or whatever. That's far more common.

GW:

Say I am a physician that has a lot of, very large student loan debt. I have 3-, 4-, $500,000, and that's accrued over private undergrad and medical school as well. How does a physician claw their way out of a number that is that large?

JD:

Well, I love that you think a 3- or 4- or $500,000 burden is a large one. A few years ago, I would've agreed with you. Then I keep running into docs with literally million-dollar student loan burden.

GW:

Oh gosh, wow.

JD:

It's not unusual at all to meet a two-doc couple that owes 800, 900, a million, 1.1, those sorts of numbers.

There's really two main, well, three main pathways. The first one is you contract with somebody to take care of your medical school costs. It might be the military. I had the Health Professions Scholarship Program. MD/PhD works similarly. National Health Service Corps works similarly. Indian Health Service works similarly. Basically, somebody else is paying for it in exchange for your time.

Another way is to get somebody else to pay for it. It is usually the taxpayers, usually public service loan forgiveness. You go do your residency, you do 3 years of residency, 3 years of fellowship. You stay on as faculty for 4 years. That's 10 years of public service. The rest of your federal student loans are wiped out, tax-free. It works very, very well for a lot of doctors. You have to be an employee of a non-profit or government entity.

And the third one is to pay them back. This is not a crazy idea out there. It might seem crazy these days, but it is not crazy. The way I tell people to do it is with 4 words, and you've heard these before. The words are live like a resident.

The idea is you come out, you're making attending money, whether that's 250 or 400 or 800,000, and you still live a lifestyle, something similar to what you were living as a resident. Maybe instead of spending $60,000, maybe you're spending 80. Maybe you're spending a hundred, fine. You're spending a hundred, you're making 400. Maybe a hundred is going toward taxes. So 400 minus a hundred, minus a hundred, you got $200,000 left to do something with.

And I'll tell you what, $300 or $400,000 in student loans goes away very quickly when you're sending $200,000 a year to the lender. It works very, very well.

But doctors, it's hard to do because they're people. By the time they come out of residency, they've already bought this home that's now $900,000, they've got to make the mortgage on it. And they've got two Teslas on payments. And all of a sudden their student loans come due, and yeah, you find out that your money doesn't go as far as maybe you thought $400,000 was going to go.

And if you really blow it, you end up being one of these docs that gets to the end of it all, gets to the end of their career and has a net worth, everything you own minus everything you owe, of less than a million dollars. I think the surveys show 11 to 12% of docs don't even have a net worth of $500,000. That's one year's income for lots of doctors.

Building Wealth by Being Intentional

GW:

Jim, why do you think physicians struggle with wanting to keep up with the Joneses and get the two Teslas. Is it really a human psychology of deferred or delayed gratification? Is that the thing that causes us to do this?

JD:

Yeah, there's a little bit of entitlement. You can buy anything you want on a physician income for the most part. Not everything you want though, so you've got to decide. You can have early retirement, or you can send your kids to private school. Or you can have the biggest, the nicest house, or you can fly first class to Europe three times a year. But you can't do it all. You've got to decide which of those things is most important to you.

I'm not surprised to see doctors struggle to build wealth. But I think a great part of it is there's just no intentionality. No one ever taught them how to, number one. And number two, it doesn't take that much effort, but they're not putting in the effort required to do it.

Working With Financial Advisors and Setting Investment Goals

GW:

Jim, let me move on to investing strategies a bit. The way you break it down in your book and your blog and everything is you can actually get pretty far by keeping it really simple as well. How do you typically break it down for people and explain that that's going to give you similar returns to a expensive fancy advisor?

JD:

Maybe the first question is do you need an advisor or not? My guess is 20% of docs are do-it-yourselfers at heart. They just do everything. They do all kinds of stuff themselves. They can't imagine paying somebody thousands in fees every year to help them manage their money. That is a totally viable path. It's the pathway I took. It's obviously the cheapest path, but it's probably the most time-consuming path as well.

On the other end of the spectrum, and I'd guess this is probably 30% of doctors, these are people we refer to as delegators. They want a money person. They want to turn this over to somebody that's going to help them do their financial planning, hold their hand, buy them dinner twice a year, meet with them 4 times a year at the office, and manage their assets for the next 30 years.

There's a big, huge chunk in the middle that doesn't really feel competent to do it themselves, but doesn't want to pay the delegator prices. They try to pick something in the middle. These are people we call validators. They just want to check in with somebody every year or two or three, and they're willing to pay them a thousand dollars or $3,000 or something for those. That isn't a pathway that is viable, but there are a lot fewer advisors that will help with that pathway. Sometimes people in that middle group really are the ones who don't have much success at all because they never get it done. That's the way to fit into the financial advisory space.

But as far as what you're doing, it's the same, whether you're doing it yourself or whether you have professional assistance to help you. It's not about picking investments. Picking investments is step four of investment planning. If I knew what was going to be the best-performing investment over the next 20 years, I'd just tell you to put all your money in that. But I have no idea.

The process starts with your goals, and it has to start with your goals. A good goal would be, "I want $3.5 million for retirement on January 1st, 2052." That is a goal that we can work toward and major progress toward and know if you achieved it or not.

Once you have that goal, the next thing you consider is, "Well, what kind of accounts am I going to invest in to get to this goal?" And if it's retirement, you're probably using a Roth IRA and the 401k and maybe the 457(b) they offer at work and maybe a taxable brokerage account. Those are the accounts you're going to use. That's fine. If you're saving for college, it's probably a 529. If you're saving for your home down payment, it's probably just a regular taxable account that you can take money out of anytime you like. So first your goals, then your accounts.

The next thing you choose is what's called, in professional terms, an asset allocation. All that is is your mix of investments, how much is going to go into stocks or real estate or bonds or Bitcoin or Beanie Babies or whatever you choose to invest in. And then you re-balance back to it every year or so. You keep those percentages the same, and once you have those percentages, choosing the investments is actually really easy. It's not hard to choose investments if you know need to put 30% of your money into US stocks. Well, you can go buy a mutual fund, called an index fund, that just buys all the US stocks. And if you look at the data, it turns out that that's going to beat almost all of the professionals out there that are trying to pick stocks that are going to perform better. The majority of your portfolio probably needs to be in index or index-like mutual fund investments. That's just an intelligent way to invest. That's the way smart millionaires, that have been doing this for decades, do it.

GW:

It's interesting, Jim, because we spend a lot of time coming up with really well-thought-out plans for our patients. We have the ability to do this and be thoughtful, but we don't tend to do it, I think, in finance nearly as well obviously. I wonder if there's some human psychology or some physician psychology around not wanting to admit that we don't know something, that that's maybe part of it.

JD:

People do become do-it-yourselfers. Some people start out as validators and become do-it-yourselfers. What they tell me, the people who've done this successfully, is that their confidence lagged their knowledge by about a year.

GW:

Wow.

JD:

They paid the advisor for one more year because they just weren't sure. I think that happens a lot.

The Complex Question of Debt vs. Investing

GW:

Jim, do you typically have a pathway, where you recommend if somebody has additional income, they've set up their emergency fund, they're paying down their student loans. Is there a pathway that you'll use, either that you've written out or even just is in your head?

JD:

You're asking one of the most complex questions in personal finance, which is debt versus investing, really. And the answer is not the same for everybody. It comes down to your tolerance of debt. Some people are very anti-debt, and getting rid of their student loans as soon as possible, even if they invest nothing, is really important to them. It's a weight that sits on their shoulders.

GW:

It's an emotional... Yeah, it's an emotional thing.

JD:

Other people are like, "Eh, my loans are 3%. I'm going to hold onto them and invest, and I think I can probably out-invest 3%. Right now, I can put it in a Money Market and guarantee it'd make more than 3%."

There's benefit to doing that, to dictating what people should do because it makes for a very simple plan that can follow very easily. But it involves lying to them, that this is the best way to do it. I have a problem doing that because there is a best way for them, but that way might not be the same as it is for their partner.

I really think you do need to go step by step. I think, in general, people want to be done with their student loans by about five years out of training. So you need a plan that's going to allow you to do that. That might be putting $8,000 a month toward your student loans for the first three years.

Once you have that plan, set it aside, and look at your mortgage plan. Well, when do you want to be mortgage free? I'm like, "Well..." Maybe you don't care that much about it. Maybe you're like, "Oh, about the time we retire." That's probably 20 or 30 years away so we can go on the slow track with the mortgage. So let's invest everything extra we can carve out of the budget.

I recommend people put 20% of their gross income toward retirement every year. I think that's really the minimum for docs that want to retire after a full career, to maintain the same lifestyle and retirement that they had before retirement.

Communities Help You Stay the Course in Long-Term Investing

GW:

Can you share some success stories of people from your community, who feel like they've achieved financial independence, or they paid down that student loan debt? Are there things that make you really particularly proud that you were able to help this person?

JD:

Yeah. We do a podcast we call the Milestones to Millionaire podcast. It drops every Monday. Our regular podcast drops on Thursdays. Literally, every one of them is somebody celebrating a financial milestone. Some of them are kind of silly milestones, like somebody came on recently, and we celebrated that they were able to pay cash for a car. Other times we're celebrating people getting back to broke. Doctors start out with their net worth in such a big hole that just getting back to a net worth of zero is no small task.

This stuff works. People pay off their student loans, they pay off their mortgages, they become millionaires, they become financially independent. They cut back at work, they leave a toxic job and go to a good one. All these things that doctors want to accomplish in their life, somebody has done it before you and likely been featured on that podcast.

The communities are great, and we've got 4 communities. We've got the White Coat Investor Forum that's on our own website there. We've got a Subreddit, White Coat Investor's Subreddit. We've got a White Coat Investor's Facebook group for those of you on Facebook. And then, we have a unique group we started a couple of years ago we call the Financially-Empowered Women or the FEW. They have events, most of which are webinar-type events, but they also do one live at our conference every year. Just a community of all women, where they can address, in a non-confrontational way, some of these questions that they just feel more comfortable asking their questions in a group full of women. So the community aspect, I think, is really helpful because it's a long-term process. You got to stick with this for 5, 10, 15, 20 years. It helps to have a few buddies walking along with you.

GW:

I love that. Yeah, I think it does feel like if you had additional support and help from colleagues, probably goes a long way to preventing you from trying to keep up with the Joneses.

JD:

Yeah, and it affects investing behavior as well. If all you read was your social media feeds, you might think that everybody has all their money invested in Bitcoin and Nvidia. All of a sudden you're like, "Oh, I got to put all my money in those." Being in a community can help you to stay the course with your long-term investing plan because even if you have a good plan that's going to work just fine if you stick with it for 15 or 20 or 25 years, if you don't stick with it doesn't work fine. Having a few friends to help you stick with it when times are tough, I think, is pretty valuable.

GW:

Jim, I've got just some rapid-fire questions to wrap us up here. What is your secret for physicians to retire as not just millionaire, but a multimillionaire?

JD:

When you first start making the big bucks, have a plan for them. Know where your first 12 paychecks, when you get paid as an attending, are going to go. So you're starting right from the beginning. Compound interest has all this time to work on you. You're going to be having an adequate savings rate from the beginning of your career. And guess what? If you will do that, it is not hard at all to accumulate multiple millions and retire very comfortably.

GW:

Jim, what do you think the best and worst parts of our specialty, emergency medicine, are?

JD:

Oh. The important thing when choosing a specialty is to make sure you're okay with the downsides. Okay, so here's the downsides of emergency medicine. If you're lucky, one out of five of your patients isn't going to pay you. Another one is you will work when other people aren't working. Most patients go to the ER in the evening, so most shifts are evening shifts. You'll work evenings and holidays and weekends and nights.

If you take care of your money by mid-career, you can do some things about that. I basically pay other docs in my group to work my share of the night shifts. I only work day shifts now. I still got to do my share of weekends and holidays, but... This is a downside of emergency medicine. If you're not aware of that, you're not going to be happy about it.

GW:

Get away, get away,

JD:

You're not going to be happy about it.

If you cannot deal with uncertainty, it might not be the place for you. You will discharge a lot of patients home without a diagnosis. You will probably see more undifferentiated complaints than just about any other specialty. And you got to like doing that, doing the diagnosing, and being okay when you don't get a diagnosis.

But it's been a great career for me. I would choose it again. I love the specialty. I still love practicing it. At this point, I'm financially independent, and I'm still practicing medicine because I love it. I like to be there helping people on one of the worst days of their lives.

GW:

What's one medical myth that you wish would disappear forever?

JD:

How about the one that you got to send anybody with elevated blood pressure to the emergency department? Can we do that one?

GW:

Let's do that one.

JD:

My goodness.

GW:

I'll second you on that.

JD:

If people only knew what we were doing in the emergency department for them. Maybe we're writing a prescription for Hydrochlorothiazide before we send them back to the primary doc. But there's a good chance we're just sending them back to the primary doc.

GW:

Well, Jim Dahle, thank you so much for joining me today. This was really fantastic. Jim, where is the best place for people to find everything that you do with White Coat Investor and otherwise?

JD:

Whitecoatinvestor.com is the hub for everything, whether you're interested in our courses or books or coming to our conference or going to the podcast or the YouTube channel or social media. You can find it all at whitecoatinvestor.com.

GW:

Jim, thank you again. It's a real honor to get to meet you and talk with you. Really appreciate it.

JD:

Thanks for having me on.

GW:

Thanks for joining me today. For insights into how doctors can better manage their money, head to offcall.com/podcast. Make an account on Offcall to confidentially share your details about your work. And sign up for our newsletter, where you can hear more about the latest trends we're seeing in physician pay.

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This has been and continues to be Dr. Graham Walker. Stay well, stay inspired, and practice with purpose.