FINANCIAL WELLNESS: A 5-PART SERIES ON MANAGING MONEY WISELY
Financial Planning: An Important Part of Beating Burnout James M. Dahle, MD FAAEM FACEP
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ur medical education has taught us many things that we put to use every day. Unfortunately, financial literacy is usually not one of them. While physicians are high earners, many of us often don’t know the first thing about how to save, invest, and spend money wisely. The stresses of financial instability significantly impact our personal well-being. In order to help fill this knowledge gap, the Wellness Committee has invited Dr. James Dahle, founder of The White Coat Investor and fellow EM physician, to contribute a series of five Common Sense articles to address critical topics on financial wellbeing. Burnout has reached epidemic proportions, with some surveys showing over 50% of doctors are currently experiencing burnout symptoms. For many of those, burnout is having a severe effect on their personal and professional lives. While not exclusive to physicians, the unique stresses of health care have certainly kept doctors among the most burned out of professions. Surveys of the various specialties show that emergency physicians continue to rank near the top as a percentage of practitioners affected. The symptoms and causes of burnout are well-described elsewhere, but it is clear from years of research that causes are both systemic and personal, and thus the best solutions will address both aspects. Systemic solutions are more difficult to implement, but may be much more effective. Every physician should lend their support to systemic change and solutions
The largest financial asset of most physicians, particularly in the early career, is their ability to work.” to improve the profession and individual organizations where ever possible. However, in this article we are going to address just one alleviating factor for burnout—financial planning. The good news is that this solution can be implemented immediately and without support from any organization or any co-worker. The largest financial asset of most physicians, particularly in the early career, is their ability to work. That is, to exchange their time and effort for money at a relatively high rate. Most emergency physicians earn between $150 and $400 per hour. Over a full career, those earnings may add up to over $10 million. This asset needs to be protected. While most of us are aware of the need for disability and life insurance to protect this asset, few of us consider that burnout also puts it at risk. In fact, given its prevalence, a given emergency physician is far more likely to leave medicine early due to burnout than disability or death. Burnout is your greatest financial risk. Thus, all career decisions should be made with this risk in mind. You should ask yourself, “Will this decision make me more or less likely to burn out early?” Optimizing for career longevity is clearly the number one priority. That might mean working fewer shifts, leaving a toxic job, paying someone else to work your share of night shifts, or simply accepting the lower compensation that often comes with seeing fewer
patients per hour as an individual or even as a group. Financial planning is the process of aligning your working time and earned dollars with your personal values and goals. It involves setting goals, deciding how much money to dedicate to each of those goals, persistently investing money toward each of those goals in an intelligent manner, and protecting the assets you do have from loss. It is a single player game, you against your goals, and you do not need to beat your friends or even the market in order to reach your own financial goals. Doctors with clear financial goals and a written plan to meet them are far less likely to burn out, and should they do so, they are already in a financial position that allows them to do something about it. I am convinced that financially secure doctors are better partners, parents, and practitioners. Many doctors feel trapped in medicine. This trap often starts in medical school as they begin to accumulate student loans. Approximately three-fourth of graduating students paid for school using borrowed money, with a median amount at graduation currently between $200,000 and $300,000. However, many doctors owe even more and a $400,000 or even $500,000 student loan burden is no longer unusual. If managed poorly, those debts may still be hanging over their head during late career. Even once that student loan mess has
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