By Dr. Jim Dahle, WCI FounderI just spent the last couple of hours going over this year’s WCI survey results. This experience is always both humbling and gratifying. The survey is very important to us as an organization, and it drives what we do and how we do it. Each year, Katie and I are more mission-focused here at WCI, and we hope that carries over to the staff as well. That’s likely just a reflection of working less and less for money and more and more for purpose as the years go by and as our wealth naturally grows.
Thank you to all who participated in the survey. If you were one of the 20 T-shirt winners or one of five winners of the online courses we used to bribe you to take the survey, you have already been contacted (check your email) with your prizes.
The most surprising thing I learned in this year’s survey is that I have been mispronouncing ERISA for the last 20 years.
We ask some of the survey questions because I know I’ll be writing this post and that you will find the responses interesting. But most of the survey questions are just asking for feedback about how we can be better at fulfilling our mission. In this post, I’ll share many of the responses to both kinds of questions.
Who Are the White Coat Investors?
Let’s start with some demographic stuff and then some financial comparisons, shall we? Keep in mind the selection bias of this survey. These are WCIers willing to answer our survey. That generally means they’re a little more hardcore than most, they have been here longer than most, and they are likely wealthier and more financially savvy than most. Millions of people come to the website, listen to us, or see the stuff we put out on social media every month. And the survey is only 1,500 people.
You’re basically from all the states in similar proportions to state populations. So, lots of California, Texas, New York, Ohio, etc. Less than 1% selected “other,” which presumably means they’re not from the US.
Lots of different ages, but almost 2/3 of you are 30-50 and over half of you are under 40.
You’re mostly married, although there were plenty of requests on the survey for more stuff for single people.
You’re also still mostly men, despite the extensive efforts we have made over the years to help more women, including the FEW (Financially Empowered Women) group. We hope to see those percentages change a bit over the years as med schools are now (slightly) more than 50% women (and colleges are approaching 60% women).
Two-thirds of you are established in your profession and working full time, while the other third is divided between part-timers, retirees, and trainees.
You’re still mostly docs (72% physicians and 8% dentists), but we had 11 pages of other options making up the last 20%. The biggest slices were APCs at 3% and engineers at 2.5%. But there were plenty of tech workers, pilots, pharmacists, vets, attorneys, small business owners, and more.
I hope all of you 10+ year folks are rich by now.
Well, search engine optimization still matters, but just telling your friends about WCI or handing them a book works wonders. That gift could be worth millions to your friends and trainees. We’ll even give you bulk pricing on the books (email [email protected]).
Almost 3/4 of the docs are now employees. I’m a little bummed about that. I think that’s way too high a percentage for the profession and for patients.
There are lots of early career docs in the group—over 1/3 are less than five years out of training and about 2/3 are less than 10 years out.
What Do The Finances of WCIers Look Like?
Lots of you want us to stop talking about student loans on the podcast, but 30% of you still have them, so I guess we won’t.
I’m happy that most of you seem to be taking my advice to get rid of them within the first five years of your career.
Of those who do have loans, 3/4 of you still owe six figures, and more than 1/4 of you owe more than $300,000. Sobering way to start a career, isn’t it? Getting back to broke is still a worthy goal.
For 8% of you, we recommend booking a visit with StudentLoanAdvice.com.
. . . and 46% of you would benefit from taking one of our Fire Your Financial Advisor courses to finally get that written plan in place. I think I’ll stick in an ad for that right here.
Creating a written financial plan is one of your most important financial accomplishments. Take the course and learn how to do it.
The majority of you have two earners in your household.
And your personal and household incomes are all over the chart. I guess we’ll continue to produce content for “moderate-income” physicians (since almost half of you have incomes under $300,000) while still providing a safe place for people to find help with their “champagne” dilemmas (since 8% of you have seven-figure incomes).
Despite high incomes, you don’t spend that much. Almost 3/4 of you are spending under $200,000 a year, and 90% of you are spending less than $300,000 a year.
I guess we shouldn’t be surprised to see you accumulating wealth rapidly, as 88% of you are already back to broke, 60% of you are millionaires, and 5% of you are decamillionaires.
Twenty-two percent of you are financially independent.
But few of you are trying to FIRE in your 30s or 40s.
You almost all plan to retire as multi-millionaires, but a surprising amount (17%) are aiming to join the eight-figure club. Maybe we need to spend more time on dealing with estate tax problems.
You’re pretty hardcore DIY investors, but like me, most of you are paying someone else to prepare your taxes.
How Do WCIers Invest?
You invest in stocks, bonds, cash, and real estate, with a small percentage investing in speculative asset classes like crypto, precious metals, commodities, and collectibles. I was surprised to see more people invest in crypto than in small businesses, but the biggest surprise on this question was that 1.3% of you invest in options. Hope that works out better for you than it did for me (my first investment was an option contract).
What are you investing in now? Well, mostly index funds but also a surprising amount into individual securities. More of you real estate investors invest passively rather than directly, too. And for all those people holding gold, few of you are still buying it.
You invest aggressively, with more than half of you holding more than 75% of your portfolio in stocks.
But there are plenty of real estate investors, too, so you all can quit asking us to stop talking about it. (Actually, most of those complaints were about real estate ads, not real estate content. When we can get Vanguard, Fidelity, Avantis, and BlackRock to sponsor the podcast, I guess we’ll run fewer real estate ads.)
I get a bad rap sometimes for “hating on” financial advisors, but it turns out that’s you, not me. I estimate 80% of docs need a financial advisor, but apparently that’s only 20% of WCIers. Selection bias, I guess.
In fact, a huge chunk of you just want a “fair shake” on Wall Street.
How Do WCIers Insure?
Well, I guess this explains why our posts on DI get a lot fewer views than much of the rest of our content. If only the topic wasn’t so important. Here’s the link for the 8.3% of you that have been putting this off.
Nine percent of you have a whole life policy. It might have been fun to ask that 9% whether they’d buy it again.
How Does WCI Help You?
Well, the blog beat out the podcast this year. I was also surprised to see the WCI Forum beat out both the Facebook group and the WCI subreddit, especially given that each of those two online communities has about 100,000 members. X (Twitter) is apparently dead. We’ve got twice as many people who like getting real estate marketing emails from us than who like to follow us there. That’s interesting because, for a long time, Twitter was WCI’s largest social media following.
I’m actually thrilled that 13% of you have used Fire Your Financial Advisor. Selection bias, I’m sure, but I think that’s one of the most useful products we’ve ever made.
This was one of my favorite questions to ask. Apparently, 2% of you think stock picking is a great idea, and 1% of you think timing the market is the same. Add them up, and you get the same number who think we missed the boat with Bitcoin. “Live Like a Resident” still has its detractors, but I can’t figure out for the life of me what people think we’re getting wrong about student loans and disability insurance. Are these folks pro- or anti-PSLF? Or just against us telling people about it?
There’s a big chunk on real estate investing, but after reading the written comments, I think most of them just don’t like ads. I also can’t tell if they think we don’t talk enough about real estate or talk too much about it. There are a lot of you who feel strongly about it, though. I wonder if people would say the same thing if BlackRock sponsored all the podcasts.
The most important question we asked was this one:
I wish we had 100% 5s on this one, but I am proud that we increased from 66% last year to 71% this year and decreased the number of 1s, 2s, and 3s. We know our greatest asset is your trust, and we never want to lose that.
Referring you to the “good people” in the financial services industry is a big part of the business of WCI. Sixty percent of you have used at least one of our recommended firms. Insurance and surveys seem to be the most commonly used. Those lines that don’t show up above are student loan refinancing, mortgage agents, StudentLoanAdvice.com, real estate opportunities, credit cards, and burnout coaching.
We also sell books, courses, and a conference.
Twenty-one percent of you have taken an online course.
And 11% of you have come to the conference.
The Real Feedback
The free response questions don’t lend themselves well to sharing in a blog post, but we do read them all. Frankly, they’re often the most useful feedback we get. And sometimes they just make us laugh. Here are some of our favorites:
Jim would be a better podcast host if . . .
- Be a little nicer sometimes (my staff and family tell me the same thing but not necessarily about the podcast. Hopefully, I’m improving on this every year)
- Use more sarcasm to confuse people who are too serious (tempting)
- I love his dry sense of humor (how’s that for a backhanded compliment; it’s actually a frequent comment on surveys over the years. I might be a lot of things, but funny is not one of them)
- Cuss more! (probably not going to happen, but it would be interesting to see this survey the year after this one gets implemented)
- Not get hurt climbing (fully plan to implement this one in the future)
- I think that what sets Jim apart is that he is both knowledgeable and very likeable. He comes across as very genuine, earnest, ethical, and honest (Thank you for the many comments like this one)
This free response question cracked me up because all 1,100+ responses were the same:
What is your biggest financial challenge or worry right now?
The answers to this one were basically a long list of the topics we cover on this blog, from having enough for retirement to student loans to asset protection to inflation to burnout to lifestyle creep to buying our house to not ruining our kids. And Trump. Lots of Trump and tariffs.
How can we better serve you?
The most frequent answer was for us to work for free and get rid of the ads. Which is funny because if we ask you if you would rather pay a subscription fee, you say no. And our staff still says they’re not going to work for free. So, I guess you’ll still have to put up with the ads. There were a few comments asking for more diversity, too, like this one:
“You are doing better, but the founder is very clearly a white man. More women and non-white guests, maybe single, would give some more diversity.”
Thanks to frequent sunscreen use, I’m not going to get any less white and don’t have any gender-changing surgery planned, so these folks are talking to those of you in the WCI community who are not white males. We can always use more writers (email Josh at [email protected]) and great podcast hosts (email [email protected]). We still accept guest posts, we take anyone on the milestones podcasts, and we only have one WCI community with a gender restriction on it.
What is the best way for WCI to reach more people and help them take control of their finances?
We had 600 responses, most of which suggested things we are already doing. Apparently, we’re not doing them well enough for you to recognize we’re doing them, though. We’ll try harder.
What is one thing WCI is not doing but should be doing?
Some fun answers to this one included
- Organized hiking at WCICON (i.e., Red Rock 2026) (trying to pull this one off)
- Giving the silent followers since 2011 like me some free swag! I know, we’re silent. And will continue to be. Good luck finding us! (hopefully this person was one of the winners of the swag for filling out this survey)
- Post links to your blog posts on X (This one made me laugh because so few people ever came to the blog from X that we quit posting links to the regular blog posts there and just started taking the content directly to X)
- Take a stronger stand on governmental policy issues, even if it means being political. Tariffs used in their current way are idiotic to the economy and the dollar. Call out bad policy as it relates to investing and the economy (I fully expect approximately 1/2 of you to be offended all of the time as I implement this recommendation)
How has WCI made an impact on your life?
The answers to this one all made me cry. And yes, we’re going to use them in our marketing efforts (at least those where we were given permission to do so). Here’s one of literally hundreds of examples of nice things people said:
“I’m undoubtedly richer than I would be without it. And that financial richness obviously overflows into other areas of life, making me a better doctor and a happy person and a better father. Actually, you know what comes to mind the most: reminders of perspective in life. In the evening when I’m putting six kids to bed, it’s pretty exhausting and I just wanna be like go to bed and shut the door, but I don’t. I read to them even though I’m super tired because Jim convinced me to do that when he talked about the seasons of life and how if you want to read to them when you’re no longer tired and they’re 25, that ship has sailed. It’s too late. So I live a better life and I’m a better father because of Jim.”
Thank You!
Thank you once again for being part of the WCI community and for giving us feedback. Negative feedback is literally gold in this business, and we are grateful to you for helping us fulfill our vision and mission:
The Vision of The White Coat Investor
To serve as the most trusted, authoritative, and useful resource for financial information and services for doctors and other high earners.
Mission of The White Coat Investor
To strengthen and support The White Coat Investor community on the path to financial success by providing engaging, useful, and accurate content and connecting white coat investors with best-in-class financial resources to empower the creation of meaningful personal and professional lives.
Any additional feedback can be left in the comments below.
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