Today, we are talking with our friend, Dr. Cory Fawcett. Cory is an author many times over, and he has a newly published book called
. We know how prevalent burnout can be, and Cory has some great advice for how to avoid burnout while finding real joy in what you do. He practices what he preaches, and we hope this conversation inspires you and gives you some practical advice you can bring into your life and your practice.
Dr. Cory Fawcett’s journey toward retirement began long before he turned 50. As early as medical school, he was already planning his exit, setting age 50 as his target for financial independence. This long-term vision shaped his saving habits and life choices. He emphasized that this kind of goal requires preparation far in advance. Starting at 50 with the idea of retiring the next year simply doesn’t work for most people. But by the time he hit 50, he realized he didn’t want to stop working altogether. What he wanted instead was to slow down. As is so common, recovery from night calls became more difficult with age.
His initial plan to cut back at his group practice was thwarted by partners who insisted on full-time surgeons only. This led him to follow through on his plan to retire from the group and begin exploring alternative paths. A serendipitous experience helping a struggling doctor in a small town opened his eyes to the emotional fulfillment of locum tenens work. He discovered that traveling to underserved rural hospitals brought him joy and gratitude from others and also a renewed sense of purpose. After being so inspired by this experience, he sent out letters to small hospitals in three neighboring states, and the response was overwhelming, confirming the demand for his services.
Cory embraced locums for several years, gradually scaling back from 2.5 weeks a month to one week a month. Along the way, he also launched a financial education platform for physicians called Financial Success MD, where he wrote books and helped other doctors avoid financial mistakes and burnout. Two key events nudged him to fully leave medicine. The first was winning a nonfiction book award, and the second was realizing during a routine appendectomy that his slowing practice might endanger patient care due to skill atrophy. Faced with the choice to either ramp his practice back up or exit completely, he chose the latter, grateful for the gradual ramp that made the transition smoother and emotionally easier.
Interestingly, the same group that had rejected his part-time request later invited him back as a locums doctor. This change in stance happened once the practice was faced with the reality of Cory’s departure. It highlights how flexible arrangements can suddenly appear when it’s inconvenient to lose talent. He intentionally priced his locums services below market rate—not for financial need, but to maintain flexibility and pick the jobs he wanted. Because he was financially independent, he had strong negotiating power, like insisting on a pager instead of phone-based communication to protect his off-hours. This freedom is a powerful testament to the importance of financial readiness.
Financially, locums proved more lucrative than his full-time role in private practice. Although his practice income was on the lower side for a surgeon due to his rural location, 12 weeks off per year, and a struggling local economy, his locums work paid better while allowing for more time off and autonomy. Ironically, none of the physicians he coaches earn less than he did, yet many struggle with money due to lifestyle inflation or poor planning. He emphasized that even in low-cost-of-living areas like his, prices can spiral, and how you choose to spend your money impacts you no matter where you live.
Ultimately, Cory’s story is not just about retiring from medicine but about retiring with intention and control. His methodical ramp-down, driven by values and backed by financial preparation, can be a model for other docs to follow—especially those in high-demand, shift-based fields. Whether you’re a surgeon or an emergency physician, his journey illustrates that, with foresight and adaptability, it’s possible to write your own script for the second half of life.
Cory’s seventh book, A Doctor’s Guide to Finding Joy in Your Work, emerged from a deeply personal motivation. It was sparked in part by two encounters—one with a man from his Monday men’s group who was puzzled by how detached and impersonal modern medical care felt and another with a family member whose physician failed to follow up during a hospital stay. These moments led Cory to reflect on the loss of joy in the medical profession. He drew a distinction between “opus” work—fulfilling, purposeful labor—and “labor,” which is routine and draining. He felt that many physicians were drifting from an opus to a labor, losing the deeper meaning that had originally drawn them to medicine.
The decision to write the book was cemented after he gave a lecture on finding joy at a physician’s conference. The strong response to his talk convinced him to shift gears and write about this topic, even though it wasn’t next on the list with his publisher. Unlike his previous books, he felt a true urgency and personal drive to get this message out. His passion was reignited when he met a pediatrician at a non-medical conference who was still fielding patient calls 24/7, even while on a luxury retreat 200 miles from home. The pediatrician resisted every suggestion made to reclaim control of his work-life balance. This encounter crystallized the concept of inertia, the powerful tendency in medicine to stick with the status quo simply because “that’s how we’ve always done it.”
Cory said this inertia is particularly dangerous because it convinces physicians that they have no agency, especially those employed by larger systems. Doctors once had autonomy, often running their own practices. Now, many are beholden to administrators far removed from patient care, sometimes in different states entirely. One of the book’s central ideas is the “Aha Moment” when a physician realizes they love or hate something at work but then ignores the insight. Cory encouraged doctors to do more of what brings them joy and actively reduce or eliminate what makes them miserable, instead of blindly enduring it.
He shared a powerful personal example where for years, he dreaded Mondays after being on call all weekend. These days were chaotic with surgeries, inpatient rounds, and a full clinic schedule. Every Monday, he thought about how much he hated Mondays after call, and yet he did nothing. Eventually, he asked his office manager to keep his post-call Mondays free from clinic appointments—an idea she instantly accepted. It was a simple fix but one he ignored for years due to inertia. Once implemented, it transformed a dreaded day into a manageable and even pleasant one, without any negative financial impact.
Cory emphasized that even employed physicians can advocate for change. The key is to frame proposals from the perspective of the employer: “So what? Who cares? What’s in it for me?” Instead of focusing on personal discomfort, present how the current situation negatively affects the team, the patients, and ultimately the organization. If presented this way, changes are far more likely to be approved, even in bureaucratic environments.
Cory revealed that although he never experienced full burnout, he had come dangerously close early in his career. Just 8-10 years into practice, already debt-free, he found himself overwhelmed with frustration toward the hospital system. He took a one-month sabbatical with the goal of identifying the root of his anger. He determined that the feeling was bitterness. A conflict with hospital leadership had left him resentful, which bled into every patient interaction. Realizing this, he forgave the person involved and even donated to a project they were working on as a gesture of closure. Letting go of that bitterness allowed him to fully enjoy medicine again.
He also described a near-breaking point during his first month of residency. After losing five patients to gunshot wounds over one brutal, sleepless weekend, he felt like a failure and questioned his place in medicine. It was only thanks to a compassionate fellow who took his pager and gave him time to rest that he recovered and reframed the experience. That moment taught him to ask for help and to stop internalizing the weight of every outcome. He acknowledged that many physicians never get that lifeline, and some, sadly, don’t recover. The unrelenting pace of medicine offers no time to process grief, which adds up and wears down even the most resilient doctors.
Cory’s experience underscores that burnout doesn’t always come from laziness or a lack of toughness. It often stems from caring too much, carrying too much, and lacking permission to step back. Through both his personal anecdotes and professional observations, he said that joy can be restored. But it requires intention; perspective shifts; and, often, a willingness to push against the inertia that dominates modern medicine.
In this final segment of their conversation, Dr. Jim Dahle and Cory explored a common but deeply personal challenge among physicians of realizing they don’t love their job, often soon after training ends. Cory emphasized that this dissatisfaction isn’t necessarily rooted in the job itself but in how individuals interact with it. He argued that people often misattribute their discontent to the entire profession when, in reality, it’s usually one or two specific factors that are bothering them. His book encourages a process of self-inquiry, particularly by asking a series of “why” questions to uncover the true source of unhappiness.
To illustrate this, Cory shared a moment in a hospital where he encountered two physicians performing the same job under the same conditions. One doc expressed joy, and the other complained bitterly. The difference, he explained, wasn’t in the job but in their mindset and response to stressors. By asking “why” repeatedly—e.g., “Why do I hate being on call?”—physicians can eventually isolate the real issue, such as lack of sleep or overwork, rather than blaming the entire job. Identifying the root cause opens the door to fixing it rather than fleeing to another job that might present the same problems.
They also discussed difficult relationships with supervisors, which is a common source of stress in today’s medical environment.Cory suggested that rather than just being frustrated and continuing on, write down 10 potential solutions. Thinking creatively often reveals new strategies that weren’t initially obvious. These changes can have a huge impact on overall job satisfaction. Cory noted that people often quit jobs because of bosses, not the work itself, and he believes that once the real issue is identified, there are usually practical changes that can be made. Whether it’s shifting responsibilities, renegotiating terms, or even changing teams, many of these solutions become accessible when physicians drop the “that’s just how it is” mindset. He encouraged doctors to challenge the inertia that keeps them stuck in dysfunctional systems and to act intentionally on what they discover through honest self-reflection.
Ultimately, this discussion focused on the idea that fulfillment in medicine isn’t about abandoning the profession but about realigning your relationship to it. Through reflection, creative problem-solving, and a willingness to challenge the status quo, physicians can rediscover the joy that brought them into the field in the first place.
Today, we are talking with a CRNA who has reached a net worth of half a million dollars. She has followed the white coat way, lived frugally, and saved a healthy portion of her income, and she has watched her wealth grow over time. She has a supportive partner who has always been on the same page.
When we talk about “cash” in personal finance, it means more than just the physical bills in your wallet or safe. Cash also includes the money in your checking account, which plays a critical role in day-to-day expenses covering things like groceries, gas, or bills. It’s totally normal to keep some cash in your checking account even though it earns little to no interest. This money provides flexibility and liquidity for regular cash flow needs. While it’s true that there’s an opportunity cost when this money isn’t earning interest, it’s a necessary part of a stable financial system—both for individuals and businesses.
For money that you don’t need immediately, like savings for a house down payment in the next year, it’s better to use options that offer a return without taking big risks. High-yield savings accounts and money market funds are two smart choices. High-yield savings accounts, usually offered by online banks, often pay 3%-4% interest and come with FDIC insurance for peace of mind. Money market funds, available through brokerages like Vanguard or Schwab, may offer even higher yields. While they lack FDIC insurance, they invest in low-risk, short-term instruments, and they are considered very safe. Some types even offer tax advantages, like Treasury or municipal money market funds, which may be exempt from state or federal taxes depending on your situation.
For longer-term cash savings where liquidity isn’t a top concern, other tools like certificates of deposit (CDs) or Treasury bonds may offer slightly higher returns. CDs lock up your money for a set term, while Treasury bonds can be tailored to match when you’ll need the funds. Buying individual Treasury bills directly from the government is another safe, though slightly more cumbersome, option. The key takeaway is to balance accessibility with earning potential. Keep enough in checking for everyday use, and then let your surplus cash work for you in smarter, higher-yielding vehicles like money market funds or high-yield savings accounts. Just don’t let fear or perfectionism paralyze you. It’s OK to leave some money idle if it provides peace of mind.
Today’s episode is brought to us by SoFi, the folks who help you get your money right. Paying off student debt quickly and getting your finances back on track isn’t easy, but that’s where SoFi can help—it has exclusive, low rates designed to help medical residents refinance student loans. That could end up saving you thousands of dollars, helping you get out of student debt sooner. SoFi also offers the ability to lower your payments to just $100 a month* while you’re still in residency. And if you’re already out of residency, SoFi’s got you covered there, too. For more information, go to sofi.com/whitecoatinvestor. SoFi Student Loans are originated by SoFi Bank, N.A. Member FDIC. Additional terms and conditions apply. NMLS 696891
Transcription – WCI – 421
INTRODUCTION
This is the White Coat Investor podcast where we help those who wear the white coat get a fair shake on Wall Street. We’ve been helping doctors and other high-income professionals stop doing dumb things with their money since 2011.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
This is White Coat Investor podcast – Finding Joy in Your Work with Dr. Cory Fawcett.
Today’s episode is brought to us by SoFi, the folks who help you get your money right. Paying off student debt quickly and getting your finances back on track isn’t easy. That’s where SoFi can help. They have exclusive low rates designed to help medical residents refinance student loans. That could end up saving you thousands of dollars, helping you get out of student debt sooner.
SoFi also offers the ability to lower your payments to just $100 a month while you’re still in residency. And if you’re already out of residency, SoFi’s got you covered there too. For more information, go to sofi.com/whitecoatinvestor.
SoFi student loans are originated by SoFi Bank, N.A. Member FDIC. Additional terms and conditions apply. NMLS 696891.
It’s interesting. We really appreciate SoFi as a sponsor. We’ve been working with SoFi here at the White Coat Investor for like 13 years. I can remember a time many years ago when I flew out to San Francisco and literally sat down with their entire C-suite. They’re a much bigger company now, but it is the only NMLS number I’ve ever memorized, but that one I’ve got. It’s a little annoying to have to read it off each time we do this podcast, but we are grateful for the partnership with SoFi and they’ve certainly helped out a lot of White Coat Investors over the years.
QUOTE OF THE DAY
Dr. Jim Dahle:
All right. Our quote of the day today comes from Morgan Housel, and I love Morgan. Wish we could afford to bring him back to the conference. He’s too expensive now. He became way too popular after his last book, but he said, “Financial success is not a hard science. It’s a soft skill for how you behave is more important than what you know.” And that is the truth. Personal finance – 90% personal, 10% finance. 90% behavior, 10% math.
Thanks to all of you out there for what you’re doing. I had a rough shift this week. I don’t like having young people come in and die in the ER. It’s not a good day when that happens, especially when everything else is going crazy in the ER and it’s a super busy day anyway. And maybe some other patient interactions have not been awesome. And I know every now and then you also have a bad day.
We actually had a bad day today at the White Coat Investor. While we’re recording this, we had to replace a camera. We went back to our old camera because our new camera went on the brink, which is never very fun, especially since tonight we’re recording a big resident webinar. We’ve got 4,000 residents signed up for. Even here at WCI, we have bad days. Thankfully, nobody dies when we have a bad day here. That’s not the case for your work. Thank you for being willing to engage in that.
We have a great guest here. He’s been on the podcast before. He’s been at WCICON multiple times. It’s Dr. Cory Fawcett. I love Cory. He does a lot of great work and we had a great discussion about his latest book. So let’s get Cory on the line and get this started.
Our guest on the White Coat Investor podcast today is Dr. Cory Fawcett, the author of the book, among other books, “Finding Joy in Your Work.” Welcome back to the podcast, Dr. Fawcett.
Dr. Cory Fawcett:
Hey, thanks for bringing me back. I love being here.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Cory, you’ve written a bunch of books. How many have you written now?
Dr. Cory Fawcett:
Seven.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Seven books. And you didn’t write any before you retired. This has all been post-retirement work for you.
Dr. Cory Fawcett:
Yes. When I retired, I worried that I might need a purpose. I’ve been type A, go, go, go all the time. And to shut that off, I was worried, how would I handle that in life? And I needed a purpose. And so, I set up a business and started writing books to teach doctors about finance, very similar to what you were doing. And it gave me purpose and it kept me going. If you’d asked me before I retired, if I would ever write a book, I would have laughed.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Now you’ve got a series. You’ve got a whole series of books. Pretty awesome stuff.
Dr. Cory Fawcett:
A whole series of books. You never know what’s going to happen when you change something in your life and you move a new direction. You might think you know what’s going to happen, but until you get there, you don’t know what’s really on that other side.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Cory, I love your story. In fact, so much so that last week, I spent last week canyoneering in Southern Utah, exploring slot canyons with friends, one of whom is a surgeon.
Dr. Cory Fawcett:
Well, that’s a surprise.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah, exactly. A surgeon about my age, a little older than me. And I used your example in a long discussion we had on a three and a half hour approach to a canyon. We talked quite a bit about what you’d done in your life. I think your story’s really instructive for a lot of docs out there. And so, I think before we get into talking about your latest book or any of your books, I want to talk about you.
THE RAMP TO RETIREMENT
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Let’s go back to when you were, I don’t know, 48, 50, 51 or so, and talk about what you were doing in your life. And I want you to kind of tell us the story from then until now, because I think a lot of people dream about retirement. They dream about early retirement. And I think it’s very instructive to hear from somebody who has done it, who is doing it.
I’m not retired. I’m clearly working, maybe not quite full-time, but between the two jobs, I’m working something close to that. And I think it’s an example that I can’t use personally for my life. I want them to hear from you. So start us back at, I don’t know, age 48 or something. Tell us your story.
Dr. Cory Fawcett:
Well, to tell the story right, we have to go clear back to medical school because it started there.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
All right. Well, let’s make the first 20 years a little faster though.
Dr. Cory Fawcett:
It will be real fast. But in medical school, I was laying out my life. What would the rest of my life look like? And it was at that time that I had set age 50 as the date of retirement. And from that day forward, I had been planning that at age 50, I would be in a position that I could retire. I would have saved enough. And I began that plan way back then.
You can’t start at age 50 and say, I think I want to retire next year and then start planning for your retirement because you don’t have enough runway to get your plane off the ground in savings unless you’ve been serendipitously saving a lot.
Now fast forward to it’s nearing retirement. And I saw that point coming. I’m 50 years old. I said I was going to retire when I’m 50. But you know what? Back then and now you’re not the same person. So here I am in 50. My plan says retire, but I didn’t really want to retire. I kind of liked what I was doing. It was kind of fun.
But what I really want to do is kind of cut back. Can I work a little less hard now? Because I was noticing call nights were getting tough to recover from. The older I got, the more days it took me to recover from an all-nighter. When I was in residency, I could do an all-nighter and sleep good the next day and I was good to go. But by the time I was 50, it would take two, three days to recover from being up all night. And so, I could see the writing on the wall. As you get older, you can’t keep up the pace that you could do when you were young.
And so, I wanted to cut back, but my partners, they said, “No, we only want full-time surgeons in the practice.” And so, I said, well, I don’t want to be full-time anymore. I need a different pace. I told them I was going to retire at the end of the year if they’re not going to let me be part-time.
And then I searched for “What do I want to do with myself?” And I didn’t really know outside of medicine what I wanted to do, but I had just done some locums work to help out a resident who was in trouble. He had two partners and the three of them were in a small town and two of them quit in the same month. And he was suddenly the only doctor in town and he was just swamped. He called and said, can any of you guys come help me? And I thought, well, that would be fun.
I went and did a week working with him. And it was so eye opening. People were saying, “Thank you. Wow. I can’t believe you’re here helping him so that he can stay here with us longer.” And it was really joyful to be there. It was like, gave me a new spark. And so I thought maybe that’s what I could do in my retirement years was just to go around and help these doctors in small towns where there’s just one doctor and he has to get some relief here and there. How does he get that? I could be that guy.
And so, I actually went on a seven week vacation, a few months before I was going to retire. And I sent a letter out to every small critical access hospital in the three states surrounding me and thought when I get back, if I get a response, that’s what I’ll do. If I don’t get a response, I’m going to be retired in a couple of months. And I got more response than I could even handle. There was so much demand for help in those places.
I took that on and I did that for a while. And then I had this interest of, but what’s, what am I going to do when I quit this? Because this isn’t going to last forever either. And that’s when I started My financial Success MD idea to help doctors and teach them what I learned in this path through my life, how to save money, how to stay out of debt. That’s what the books are about.
And then I began that and two things happened at the same time that really shifted my gears again to do this and give up medicine completely. I had just come back from an award ceremony where my first book was given a nonfiction book of the year award. And on the way back, I was talking to my wife, “Is this a sign that says maybe I should just go with that now?”
I get back and I’m doing a simple appendectomy. And for the first time in my life, I said to myself, “What’s the next step?” And the light bulbs went off. I wasn’t doing enough medicine in these little bitty hospitals, one to two weeks a month to keep my skills at the level they needed to be at. If you do enough appendectomies, you’re never asking yourself the next question because you’re on autopilot.
But if you slow the number down too far, it’ll get to where you start asking, “What was I supposed to do next?” And I realized that I was on a slippery slope. I had to do one of two things. I had to either stop practicing before I got too far down that slope, or I had to up my practice so that I was doing more numbers. Because those little hospitals, they don’t do very much work.
And so, I decided I wasn’t willing to go back to being a higher level surgeon, and I decided to let go. I was very happy to have had that three-year ramp as a locums doctor, where I was able to go from full power, type A, working full time, 60 hour a week doc, down to not working anything. And I believe that that ramp really saved me. If I hadn’t ramped it down like that, I think I would have missed medicine if I just stopped it completely one day.
And so, that ramp gave me a really nice exit from medicine, where I slowly eased out. I started at about two and a half weeks a month, and then went down to two weeks a month, and then one week a month. And it became pretty clear after three years that I was ready to move forward. I was financially ready. So whenever I said yes, it was the time.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Perfect. That’s exactly what I wanted you to talk about, that concept of a ramp. And this ramp is very easy to form for a hospital-based, shift-based specialty. When you’re an emergency doc, when you’re an intensivist, when you’re a hospitalist, when you’re a radiologist, when you’re an anesthesiologist, creating that ramp is pretty easy. Now some partnerships are harder than others, but it’s pretty easy.
Surgeons have a much harder time with it. And I think you’ve shown the model. The model is, first you go to your group and you say, you still want me even if I’m part-time? And a lot of them will say, “Oh, well, that’s a whole lot better than having to hire somebody else. Let’s see if we can make that work.” And some will do what your partnership did and say, no, we only want full-time docs. And you can go looking on the locums circuit. And there’s lots of locums work out there. There’s an unbelievable amount of locums work out there.
Dr. Cory Fawcett:
It was more than I can handle just in these three states right around me. And that was just looking at the little bitty hospitals.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah. You can basically write your own ticket. You can create your own ramp that way. And so, I think for pretty much, if a general surgeon can do it, any specialty can do it. You can build a ramp to retirement.
Dr. Cory Fawcett:
Let me tell you a funny thing that happened though. My partners who said, “We don’t want any part-time doctors.” The moment it was real and I’m leaving, and then they found out I was going to do locums. They said, “Well, if you’re going to do locums, could you do locums for us?”
And suddenly they hired me back as a locums doctor working one weekend a month so that I would still take the amount of call I had been taking. It’s like when the rubber met the road, they changed their mind. And if they would have just changed their mind a little sooner, I’d have just been part-time with them.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah. I’m curious if they paid you more as a locums.
Dr. Cory Fawcett:
No, no. I set my locums price lower than market price so that I could have plenty of options and pick whatever I wanted to do. I didn’t actually need to get paid. I’d already passed that point where I was financially independent. And now I was just working for purpose and I love to do it.
I set a low price so I could pretty much write my ticket wherever I went because they knew they’d have to pay way more than what they were paying me to get somebody. So they would do just about anything I asked them to do. They wanted me to use my phone for texting. That’s how they got their doctors. I said, no, I want a pager because when I leave, I want to be able to turn off my pager. I don’t want you paging me tomorrow when I’m in Florida sleeping in and some nurse thought I was still available.
And so, they were happy to get me a pager because I was way cheaper than them hiring the locums. To be in that position, you have way more power to negotiate when your finances are under control. You don’t worry about losing your job.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
So give us a sense. What did your clinical income look like over those three years?
Dr. Cory Fawcett:
The interesting thing is I’m as a locums working two and a half weeks a month. I was making more money than I had been making full-time working in my practice. And I was undercutting the price that I could have gotten. You can work half-time as a locums and make more money than full-time in your practice, at least in my practice.
Now my practice wasn’t a lucrative practice. I lived in a small town that was depressed in the timber industry area. And the timber industry all got shut down by the environmentalists. And so, there was a lot of unemployment. And I took 12 weeks a year off vacation. All of that combines, my income wasn’t high for a surgeon. All of the surgeons that I coach, I’ve yet to have somebody come and ask me for financial help that actually made less than I made when I was working.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
There are some benefits to that though. You did enjoy a pretty good cost of living in your town as well.
Dr. Cory Fawcett:
Yes, the cost of living is better here, but it’s still kind of high. A few years back, we made the list of one of the top 10 cities in the country to live and that ruined the cost of living here because everybody started moving here and house prices skyrocketed. We went through a period of double digit house price increases per month when that happened.
You never want your town to be on that list of the 10 best places to live in America because you just get flooded. And afterwards, two, three years later, you are not one of the 10 best places to live anymore because everybody came here. It’s like telling people where your fishing hole is. Now all the fish are gone.
USING REAL ESTATE TO REACH FI
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Now you did something else that’s kind of interesting compared to lots of docs. In that small town, you decided to not only invest in mutual funds, but you were a direct real estate investor. I think over the course of 20 plus years in your career, you ended up buying six or so small apartment buildings and manage them yourselves. Give us a brief overview of that journey and how it contributed to you becoming financially independent by 50.
Dr. Cory Fawcett:
My grandmother was a real estate investor. She had an eighth grade education. I used to say my grandmother because my grandfather died when I was a teenager. And so, he had got it started. They would buy some real estate and when grandpa died, I noticed grandma never needed to get another job. She was making enough money from the real estate that it was okay. And so, I always had in my mind, I wanted to do that. And I was her oldest grandson. So I helped around the place. I learned a lot about how to take care of places.
And when I finally became debt free, we had a discussion, “Well, what are we going to do with all this money that we used to be paying towards debts?” And we just said, “Well, I wanted to get into real estate. Now is the time, let’s do it.”
We bought our first apartment complex. It was a 31 unit complex. And what we set out to do was for one year, we would do everything that you have to do to take care of something. We took care of everything. We mowed the lawn, we pulled the weeds, we did the painting, we did everything so that I understood fully what went into that. And then at the end of the year, we hired out other people to do those things. And I backed off and just became the manager of the places.
And as the manager, if you do it right, it’s supposed to be a passive investment. You can do as much or as little as you want when you own a property. You can hire it all out, let everybody else do all the work, which is what I do today. Or you could do all the work yourself. We did that for 12 months just to get a feel for what everything was. If somebody came along and says, “Well, it’s going to take this to do that.” – No, it isn’t. I know because I did that three months ago in another apartment. I know what it takes.
So you don’t really have to do that step, but it was the step I wanted to do because my goal was someday when I retired, I would do all those things at the apartments. I would be the maintenance man. I would do that stuff. The problem is when I retired, I wanted to travel around the world and I couldn’t be the maintenance man if I’m in Paris.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
I’m sure everybody’s very surprised to see that goal changed.
Dr. Cory Fawcett:
Yeah. It’s funny if you make goals way out there, by the time you get there, you’re not the same person who made those goals. And so, you need to be flexible enough to realize that your goals may change as you age. And suddenly I didn’t want to be that guy. Today I do nothing with the apartments. I just farmed it out completely to a property management company. And basically they just send me a check every month. They don’t even send me the check. They deposit it directly into my account. I can be on a six month world cruise and the money just keeps going into the account. It was really nice.
We did that. And initially when we made that change, I still liked doing some of the stuff that was there because you need something outside of medicine to do with yourself. You need some kind of a hobby. You need something that allows you to take the stress down while you putter with it. Some people garden, some people play a musical instrument, some people are photographers or woodworkers, but you need something.
And there were some parts of running the property that I enjoyed and I kept a few. I worked about 10 hours a month on that so that I did a few of the things and the rest were all farmed out until I gave the whole thing to the property management people when I retired and let them do it.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
One of the things I see real estate investors struggle with, and some of them don’t have any insight into it at all, but you didn’t have any trouble with this. And that is the concept of enough. With real estate, the urge and the books filled with hype urge you to when you start getting more equity in the property, we’ll take it out and buy another one and-
Dr. Cory Fawcett:
Keep going. Keep going. One more.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Keep going and keep going. I have 200 and 300 and a thousand doors under management. At some point you decided we’re just going to pay off the debt and have the cashflow and not buy more properties. Tell us about your thought process and enough.
Dr. Cory Fawcett:
It wasn’t my thought process. It was my wife’s thought process because I was the guy out there looking for one more. I just want one more, one more. It was fun for me. It was like hunting. “I’m looking for that piece of property. There it is. I got it. It’s mine.” I was out looking. We had had five at this time, five properties, 64 rental units, I think it was.
And I was looking at this other one. I came to my wife, “Oh, I found another good one.” And my wife said, “Why are you looking at more property?” I said, “Well, it’s a good one.” She says our goal when we started buying property was that my retirement plan was to have enough cashflow coming through the property to completely pay for my expenses and have a backup of seven figures in my retirement plan invested in the stock market. That was my goal.
My wife says that our goal was just to have enough cashflow to take care of us in retirement. We have that already. It’s not there today, but we can see rents are going up. We’re paying down the debt. She said, why don’t we just pay off the ones we have and stop playing this game of hunting down? Because every time I hunt down one, it takes up some of my time I could have spent with the family.
And so, she put the brakes on it. And we decided that when we look at the numbers, we really do have enough to take care of us for the rest of our life and probably to take care of the next couple of generations as we pass this down. And so, I stopped. I never bought another piece of property after that. We had enough. If you run in a race, nobody crosses the finish line and puts their hands in the air and then keeps running. They say, “Okay, we did it. We’re done. Let’s go have a beer and take a break.” And it was her that put the brakes on me.
I would have probably gone down that path of just keep getting more and more. It just cringes me when I see somebody saying, oh, I’ve got 1,500 houses under contract. I’m thinking, “What a waste of your time. You could have stopped a long time ago. What are you doing?”
I had more things I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to have fun. I wanted to go out and do some things and travel. And if I keep this going, one more key just comes with a little bit of headache no matter how you do it. If you spread your investments over 30 different companies in 30 different brokerage firms, that’s a lot of paperwork you’re going through all the time. If you consolidate it and realize when enough is enough, your life will be way better.
THE DOCTOR’S GUIDE TO FINDING JOY IN YOUR WORK
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah. Well said. All right, let’s talk a little bit about your book. You’ve got seven books now. You’ve got “The Doctor’s Guide to Real Estate Investing for Busy Professionals.” You’ve got “A Guide to Loving Your Time Share: “How to Get the Most for Your Money and Family Funding Experiences.” “The Doctor’s Guide to Smart Career Alternatives in Retirement.” “The Doctor’s Guide to Eliminating Debt.” “The Doctor’s Guide to Starting Your Practice Right.” “The Doctor’s Guide to Navigating a Financial Crisis.”
And the latest one, “The Doctor’s Guide to Finding Joy in Your Work: A Path to Personal and Professional Fulfillment and Creating a Life You Love.” Why this book? Why is this the seventh book? Why is it not the first one? What motivated you? Writing a book is not a small amount of work either. What motivated you to do this book?
Dr. Cory Fawcett:
There were a couple of things that happened. One was the guy I meet in a men’s group on Monday mornings and one of the guys there had gone to the hospital with his wife and he had said, “I don’t understand why doctors… It’s not the same as it used to be. When you go see your doctor, that’s not the same experience. What’s going on?” And he got to thinking about that.
And the other one was a relative who called and he was in the hospital and said, “I don’t know what’s going on. Could I have the doc, my doctor call you and fill you in so we could talk about it?” And the doctor said, yes, but the doctor never called me. The doctor was just too busy and left, was gone for a few days.
Those things made me think what’s wrong? And it came to me that we just lost the joy of being a doctor. It’s become drudgery. There’s two words for work in Latin, opus and labor. And an opus is something that you do for fulfillment, like being a doctor, a teacher, a musician. And a labor is something that’s just work for work’s sake, like digging the ditch, working on an assembly line.
The problem is I saw that doctors are converting their life and their dream from an opus type work to a labor. And they lost the joy that we have in having an opus, something where you do special things for people, something where you change people’s lives. That got lost in the assembly line that began to happen.
And when we combined that with, I did a lecture at your conference on this topic, finding joy in your work. I decided when I came back from that, from the response I got from people that I wanted to change gears. This was not the next book I was supposed to write. And my publisher was already pushing for, “Okay, it’s time to start the next book. And this is what it was.” We had kind of a list of what we were doing.
And I said, you know what? No, I want to write this. It spoke to me, this topic that why don’t doctors have joy? And we decided we would do it. And she said I’ve never seen you this excited to write a book. I was not a book writing kind of guy. That wasn’t something that excited me, but this book did. And then I was contemplating, how are we going to put it together?
And I went to a conference that had nothing to do with medicine. And I sat serendipitously next to a doctor. It may be we were the only two doctors in the whole conference. It wasn’t a doctor conference. I didn’t know he was a doctor. I sat there and he puts two telephones next to his dinner plate at this beautiful resort. We’re there for a whole weekend, all expenses paid at this thing. And I said, “What’s the deal with the two phones?”
And I learned he was a pediatrician. He takes care of his patients 24/7, 365. He is never off. He lives 200 miles away. He’s 200 miles away from his practice, sitting in a beautiful resort, and yet he’s got two telephones at the ready. He is not off. He is not at the resort. He is really still back home working. I said, oh, man, I should help this guy out. And then we started talking about stuff.
But everything I said, he had some reason why that won’t work for me. “No, can’t do that. No, no.” And his whole life was set down to, “I got two more years to put up with this, and then I’m going to retire.” He was just willing to put up with everything.
As we walked back to our room, it dawned on me what the problem was. And the problem is inertia. An object in motion keeps going that way until an energy is put into it to change its direction. Or an object at rest stays that way until an energy goes into it to get it to move. It’s a powerful force. And you know what it looks like in medicine? That’s the way we’ve always done it. When you say that, you’re stuck.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
But you know what? It makes you wonder. These people have observed, maybe you’ve observed, that maybe doctors used to find more joy in their work than they do now. Are doctors different? Have they changed? Do different people go to medical school? Or is this more the forces in medicine and healthcare interacting on those doctors in a different way? Is it that fewer of us are self-employed and now we have an employer telling us what to do and making us run faster on the treadmill? What’s changed? What’s different from 20 or 30 years ago that you think doctors have more trouble finding joy in their work now?
Dr. Cory Fawcett:
I put a list in the book as my answer to the guy who said, “Why are doctors different?” There are so many things that have changed about the life of being a doctor that I think it’s all of the things you mentioned. Those are all good points that take the joy out of your life. And the thing that’s happening is that we just put up with it as if that’s the way it’s going to be. And that concept of “That’s the way we’ve always done it”, or “My boss won’t let me do it differently”, that concept didn’t used to exist in medicine because we were the boss. We decided what we were going to do.
Now we decide what our boss says, and our boss may not even live in the same town that we do. They may be even in a different state. Somebody else is running this place that you work for.
And so, what I thought about and probably the main new concept in this book is what I call “The Aha Moment.” And that’s when you say to yourself, I love X, I hate Y, or I wish Z. And what we do is something at work happens, and we say that, “Oh, I hate this.” And then we just go do it anyway. We just ignore the fact that we just told ourself the secret to our happiness. You do less of what you hate and more of what you love. You’ll be way happier. If you just told yourself that you hate this, stop, write that down, and figure out a way to do less of it or get it removed from your life.
It’s just silly what we do. We tell ourselves the secret to our happiness, and then we ignore it. And a great example from my life as a general surgeon, I worked from Friday morning to Monday morning for my weekend. By Monday, I had 10 new patients in the hospital, two of them need surgery, and I have a full day booked in clinic. That day was so miserable. I would wake up Monday morning, every Monday morning after call, I would wake up and say, “I hate the Mondays after call.” And then I would just go do that Monday. And I would cancel a whole bunch of patients, and my office staff had to do that, and the patients didn’t like it, and I didn’t like it.
Nobody liked that day because it was just chaos. I got to get these two people in the operating room in the operating room’s schedule, which doesn’t correspond with my office schedule, and I’m canceling patients, and there’s no place to put them because we’re booked solid. And one day, I woke up on that Monday, and I said, “I hate the Mondays after call.” And then I said, “I wonder if I could fix it.”
Three or four or five years, I don’t remember how many years it was, I had been going on and on, hating the Mondays after call and doing nothing. And I thought about it, and I came up with an idea that the real problem with Mondays isn’t that I was on call. It wasn’t the call. It was that I electively filled Monday full of patients, knowing that this is going to be a problem, and yet I still filled my clinic.
I walked into the office manager that morning, and I said, “Look, these Mondays after call, these are a disaster. You guys are having to cancel half the patients. We don’t know where to put them in. It’s a bunch of work for you guys. The patients hate it. Some of the people have already arrived to the office, and they can’t see me, and they’ve got to go back home, and they’ve made arrangements. This is terrible. From now on, we know a year in advance when I’m on call on the weekend. Every Monday after my call, I want that book to be a day out of the office. You don’t book any patients that day.”
You know what she said? “Okay.” That was it. That’s all it took for me to solve this horrible problem that I’ve been dealing with and just going right on ignoring the fact that I hate this and doing it anyway. All I had to do was fight inertia a little bit, instead of that’s the way we’ve always done it, and do something to make the change.
Once we canceled all those patients, that became a great day because the only thing I needed to do on that Monday was round on 10 patients and do the two surgeries. I didn’t even have to set an alarm that morning. I could sleep in because I wasn’t going to be the first case doing the cases today. They’re going to be worked into the day somewhere. I could go in at my leisure, make rounds, set up the time we’re doing the case. It became a great day that day after call. It took me years of saying, “I hate this” before I finally took action.
I think doctors don’t think they can take action because they work for somebody who’s telling them what to do. They believe they just have to do that and they can’t fix it. I think that’s not true.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
I’m curious if that particular change even impacted you financially. Did you make less money because you weren’t having those crazy Mondays?
Dr. Cory Fawcett:
No. I still saw all those patients. It’s just that they didn’t have to get rebooked. I didn’t see them on that day. When they were booking them in the first place, they called to see me. It wasn’t that I wasn’t going to work that Monday. I’m still making rounds in the hospital. I’m still going to do two operations. It’s just that day turned into an operative day for me instead of a clinic day. I didn’t notice any change in my income.
In fact, when I tell that story, they often say, “Yeah, well, that works for you because you were in private practice, but I can’t get my boss to do this.” I tell you what, I guarantee you that if you go to your boss thinking these three things, so what, who cares, and what’s in it for me, because that’s what your boss is thinking. You think it from your boss’s point of view, and you make this request for a change based on what’s hurting your boss the way it’s going, you have a great chance of successfully making this change.
But we tend to go to people, tell them “What I want. I need this. This is bad for me.” They don’t really care if it’s bad for you. Because you’ve been doing it for years, so it can’t be that bad. You seem to be doing it.
But when you go to the boss and say, “Do you realize that the office staff has to rebook half of my patients on these Mondays? The patients are mad. The office staff is already busy. They’re upset about this. People have gotten elder care set up or child care set up or taken the day off work, and now they’re pissed, and they’re writing bad reviews because they’re getting rescheduled. They might have needed medicines renewed, but now they’re rescheduled for six weeks out and can’t get that. Then the office staff is dealing with that.
It’s a disaster on multiple levels. We got to not have me in clinic that day because I got so much work to do in the hospital. I can’t be trying to prioritize my hospital patients versus my clinic patients. Everyone’s losing in this deal, and you’re not going to lose any money in this because we’re rebooking those patients anyway. I’m still going to see them.”
If you approach it like that, what’s in it for them, they are way more receptive of making this happen than if you just tell them you need something different. There are ways to approach it, even when you’re an employee, that you can get things done.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Now, burnout is essentially endemic, a pandemic even, in medicine right now. When they survey doctors, over 50% of them in many specialties will say they’re feeling symptoms of burnout. Did you ever experience what you would describe as burnout during your career? If so, what changes did you make to get to the point where you were 50 plus and still enjoying what you were doing?
Dr. Cory Fawcett:
I never experienced what you would call burnout. I’ve experienced some other bad things that made me not like medicine and make some changes, but I from the beginning worked to try and avoid burning out. That’s why I took 12 weeks of vacation a year.
Burnout itself wasn’t a problem, but there was a time when I was so mad at medicine and so upset that I almost quit. I was only maybe eight years into my practice and 8, 10, somewhere. I was already debt-free. I had already become debt-free. Every time I saw my office, I was upset. Every time I saw a hospital, I was upset. All this was a problem. I couldn’t figure out why. It’s akin to burnout when you don’t really know what’s going on, but you just can’t take it anymore.
I ended up taking a little sabbatical. I need a month off. In the month off, I wanted to do two things. I wanted to figure out why I was so upset about being a doctor. And I wanted to read the New Testament during that month. People talk about this notion. They were reading the Bible, and something jumps off the page like a neon sign to them. That’s what happened to me. Like a neon sign on the first day, there was what the problem was. The problem was bitterness.
Something had happened to me recently that involved the higher-ups in the hospital. I was really mad at them for what had happened. I didn’t realize I was so bitter about this, but every time I saw a patient, it reminded me of this problem, and I was mad. I did a quick study on what you do about bitterness. And forgiveness was the answer. I needed to forgive that person that did this.
I did that, and then made a big cash donation to a project that person was working on, just to prove to myself, “I forgive you for this. I’m letting this go.” It was like I was drinking poison, wishing he would die. Bitterness doesn’t work in your life. It ruins your life, doesn’t hurt them. He didn’t even know that I was upset, I don’t think.
And once I did that, I was good to go. I did experience burnout as a resident. My very first month out of medical school, I was on neurosurgery. My first weekend on call, I had five gunshot wounds to the head. All five of them died. I ran the code. It was unsuccessful, and they all died. I had to talk to the patient’s family. My staff wasn’t super supportive. They made me do all the work, and if I couldn’t handle it, then they’d step in. We consisted of me, a first-year intern, and a fellow, and the staff member. That’s all the neurosurgery team was. They made me do all the work.
And so, by Sunday of that weekend, I had not slept. I had multiple deaths. It felt like I was a failure because I’m supposed to save all these people, and they all died. This was on top of all the other patients that were on the service. I literally broke down and cried and told my fellow, we had lunch together, and I said, “I can’t do this anymore. Maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a doctor. I don’t know what to do.”
He talked to me about it, and he realized that I was taking it personal. I was responsible for all these people’s deaths. As we talked about who’s responsible, it wasn’t me. It was the attending who’s responsible for these patients and what’s happening, not me. I’m the new guy. This was eating me up, and I hadn’t had any sleep.
What he did, he says, “Let’s just give you a break.” He took my pager and says, “You go to the break room, and I want you to sleep. I’ll come get you in six hours, and we’ll go from there.”
I got some sleep and realized it’s not all on my shoulders, and I should ask for help. I should have been asking for help during all this time, but I thought I had to do everything. When I came back from that, I was a new person, and I never had that problem again.
I would say that was very akin to a burnout episode that a lot of people had. And I could see why somebody would commit suicide when they look at that situation, where I thought, I just killed all these people. Don’t have any sleep. You think the world’s on your shoulders, and you can’t handle it. That’s a terrible place to be. I think there are a lot of doctors who’ve been through that and didn’t have somebody reach out and say, “Hey, listen, that’s not the way it is. The world’s not on your shoulders.” It was that talk with that fellow that day that probably saved me from quitting medicine that weekend, thinking that this is not what I signed up for.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah. I can certainly relate to that. I had a rough shift in the ED yesterday, including a young person that came in dead and stayed dead despite our resuscitative efforts. It certainly does start adding up when you get it shift after shift, day after day, call after call. Burnout certainly is affecting a lot of people.
Dr. Cory Fawcett:
You don’t get a respite. The guy dies, and you can’t process that at all because the nurse walks in and says, “Hey, the person in room six needs you.” You just have to go on to the next thing. You never got a chance to decompress what just happened. You just get forced into the next one. That’s not how they do it in other professions. If you had a death, they give you a moment to get over that. You can even see a counselor if you want, but not us.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
It’s interesting because my next patient yesterday was the deceased’s partner who came in, was upset, began having chest pain. That was my next patient. It’s not only moving on, it’s doubling down sometimes. It does add up for docs after a while.
ADVICE FOR AVOIDING BURNOUT AND DISLIKE OF YOUR JOB
Dr. Jim Dahle:
It’s interesting. Medicine is a long pathway. You enter this thing as a premed at 19 or 20 or whatever. By the time you come out of the pipeline, a lot of times, especially if you’re specialized or you had some gap years, you’re in your mid-30s. Even as a traditional student, you’re a different person at 35 than you were at 20. A lot of people find themselves just barely out of training going, “I don’t love what I’m doing.” What advice do you have for that person in the book to help them find joy in their work? There are a lot of people that say, I hate my job.
Yeah, there’s a club for that. It meets at Fridays down at the bar.
Dr. Cory Fawcett:
I hate my job. But here’s the thing I want you to think about. It isn’t the job you hate. This is a big mistake. People will say, “I hate my job.” I had that day, I was ready to quit medicine. I hate my job. If you quit and just got a different job, you’re probably going to hate that one, too, because the same thing that was making you hate this one is probably going to go forward, because it’s more about you and how you’re handling things.
What I would recommend that you do is ask a series of why questions. There’s a whole chapter in the book about asking why. What you want to know is, what is it about my job that I hate? If you can identify the piece that’s the problem, you can fix that piece. It’s not the job. I can give you a great example of this. I was about to do a colonoscopy. I’m next. I was in the middle of the day. There were other people doing colonoscopies ahead of me. I wanted to walk over to the colonoscopy room and ask them, “Where are we at? When will you be ready for me?”
As I’m walking through here, I walked by one of the colonoscopists in one of the rooms who walked by me complaining, “I hate this job.” He was pretty down and upset. They booked too many of them for me today. Something went wrong with the last one. It took him too long. He was just griping and grumbling about how he hates this job.
I went on by him. Right after that, as I’m still walking through the room, the other room guy, that doctor, came out and said, “Oh, man, I love this. This is so great. I love doing colonoscopies. It’s so fun.”
I realized at that moment, these two doctors do exactly the same job in exactly the same facility with exactly the same staff, exactly the same rules. Everything is the same. One doctor walks by me and says, “I hate my job.” The other doctor walks by me and says, “I love this.”
It’s not the job. It’s the same job for both of these guys. If you quit your job, someone else is going to take that job thinking it’s going to be a great job. It’s not the job. There’s something about the job that’s bothering you. If you ask this reason why, why do I hate my job? Well, I hate being on call. Why do you hate being on call? Because they don’t get enough sleep. Why do you not get enough? If you keep asking these whys until you don’t have another answer, you’re going to get to the root thing that bugs you. There’s usually something bugging you.
Like me, I hated my job when I was having the bitterness problem, but I didn’t realize I was having a bitterness problem. It was only after I really analyzed the job, what’s going on here? Why do I hate my job? What’s happening here that I realized I was mad at somebody and I was transferring that to my job. It wasn’t the job I was mad at. It was the thing that was happening in my job. Those you can usually fix.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
It’s interesting. I’ve heard people don’t quit jobs. They quit bosses. What advice does your book give in dealing with a challenging boss?
Dr. Cory Fawcett:
There’s not a specific section on a boss, but it’s more of asking yourself or listening to your aha moments. If your aha moment was, “I hate my boss. Oh, I hate something.” Okay, write that down because we want to do less of that. “I hate my boss.”
Now, I have a chapter called the list of 10. When you see a problem, like “I hate my boss”, you first do the whys, go through there and figure out what it is you don’t like about this thing. What’s the real problem? Then you make a list of 10 ways that you can fix this problem. Because it’s probably not your boss. It’s something your boss is doing. There’s a particular thing they’re doing that’s getting under your skin. And you’re letting it get under your skin.
The cool thing about forcing yourself to write 10 ways I could fix this. Maybe it’s your boss is making you work on your day off. Maybe that’s what it comes down to. Okay, 10 ways I could not have to work on my day off. What happens is most of us think of one or two things, and we stop right there. That’s the quick, easy, common answer. You say, “Well, that one won’t work, and that one won’t work.” Then you quit and move on.
But when you force yourself to write 10 ways you can do it, by the time you get to the middle of that list, you’re really thinking outside the box. What could I really do to solve this? How could this be better? By the time you get down to number 10, you’re just putting some stupid thing on the list, so you’re done. The first ones aren’t any good.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
It’s all about number five and six.
Dr. Cory Fawcett:
Five and six, right in the middle in there, there’s an answer that could solve the problem. If you can ask yourself a series of, “Why do I hate my boss?” and if you can figure out that answer, then you can potentially solve the problem. Most people get to be a boss because they’re good at what they’re doing, but they do have personalities, and they do have ways they do things, and they may not be the same as the ways you do things.
If you can figure out which of the things that are happening in your job that your boss is part of that are pissing you off, you’re mad at this guy or girl, but if you can figure that out by asking a series of why questions and then go through your list of 10, you can usually solve this and make that better. If it’s something they’re doing that you don’t like, you can find a way that you can get around that, or not have to do that, or get that assigned to somebody else, or get yourself assigned even to a different boss.
There’s so many ways that you can make changes in that relationship, but if you don’t overcome inertia and you don’t get rid of it, that’s the way we’ve always done it. If you will act, you can find what’s usually bothering you about that.
I’ve done that with other friends that aren’t my boss. I’m really mad at somebody. Well, what is it that I’m really mad at? If I go address that, usually you can solve the whole thing and it goes away. If you just ignore it, you just keep being mad forever. You just really got to act, but you got to act on the right thing. You don’t want to climb a ladder and then find out you put it on the wrong wall.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah, for sure. Well, our time is now short, Corey. You have done a fantastic job assisting doctors these last eight plus years, and I’m sure your latest book will continue down that important work pathway. Those of you who are interested in it, you can find this on Amazon. We’ll have a link in the show notes. It’s called The Doctor’s Guide to Finding Joy in Your Work: A Path to Personal and Professional Fulfillment and Creating a Life You Love. It’s available now. You can buy it this instant. It’s not even very expensive. The Kindle price is less than $5 and the paperback is less than $20 on Amazon as I’m looking at it right now.
Cory, thank you for writing this book. Thank you for being an advocate for doctors and their careers and their finances and congratulations on the success you’ve had and using it to assist others to find that same success.
Dr. Cory Fawcett:
Well, thanks. It’s nice to get a pat on the back once in a while. We need that.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
All right. I hope you enjoyed listening to Cory as much as I did. Cory’s got a lot of wisdom. He’s done a lot of things right in his life, and I think there’s a lot of lessons there that White Coat Investors can take away, and I hope we not only talked about his book, but also talked about his example and how that can be applied in your life.
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Personal loans are generally used to solve cash flow problems. Some of those are very reasonable uses for these loans, things like residency job interviews, relocation expenses, these sorts of things. I don’t want you buying a car and keeping this loan for 20 years to pay for your car.
That’s probably not a reasonable use for a personal loan. But if you’re going to buy a car for three months and pay the thing off, that’s probably fine. If you’re consolidating 30% credit card loans, it’s probably a good use for a personal loan. There are some reasonable uses. Please don’t get in the habit of just borrowing money to borrow money.
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They said, “WCI has made a tremendous impact on my financial life and overall well-being. Jim and the whole WCI team always provides honest and sound financial advice. After listening to several WCI episodes a couple of years ago, I ultimately had the confidence to fire my financial advisor.” He puts “advisor” in quotes. Sounds like maybe it was a product salesman. “And became a do-it-yourself investor. Since then, I’ve listened to every WCI podcast that is available and taking control of my finances. I can’t thank you and your team enough.”
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Okay. That’s it for today. Keep your head up and shoulders back. We’ll see you next week on the White Coat Investor podcast.
DISCLAIMER
The hosts of the White Coat Investor are not licensed accountants, attorneys, or financial advisors. This podcast is for your entertainment and information only. It should not be considered professional or personalized financial advice. You should consult the appropriate professional for specific advice relating to your situation.
Transcription – MtoM – 224
INTRODUCTION
This is the White Coat Investor podcast Milestones to Millionaire – Celebrating stories of success along the journey to financial freedom.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
This is Milestones to Millionaire podcast number 224 – The CRNA hits half a million dollars.
Today’s episode is brought to you by Doc2Doc, a lending solution built by doctors for doctors. We understand the unique financial challenges you face from match day to residency and beyond. Our tailored loans like match day relocation and in-training loans help cover moving costs, consolidate credit card debt, or tackle life’s unexpected expenses.
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All right, welcome back to an episode of the Milestones Podcast. We’d love to have you on this podcast. You can apply at whitecoatinvestor.com/milestones, and we’ll celebrate any milestone with you, no matter how big or how small, and use it to inspire others to do the same.
We’ve got a great interview today. Stick around afterward, and we’re going to talk a little bit about investing cash and what your options are when you really need to make sure you get the money back when it’s done being invested.
INTERVIEW
Our guest today on the Milestones to Millionaire podcast is Kelsey. Kelsey, welcome to the podcast.
Kelsey:
Hello, it’s great to be here.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Tell us what you do for a living, what part of the country you’re in, and how far you are out of your school.
Kelsey:
I’m a certified registered nurse anesthetist, the CRNA. I graduated school in 2022 in December, I’m two and a half years out, and we just moved to Arizona.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Arizona, one of my favorite states, very cool. All right, well, you have hit a net worth milestone recently that you should be very proud of. Tell us what net worth milestone you recently hit.
Kelsey:
A half a million, $510,000 to be specific.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Awesome, congratulations on that. This was really fun because there’s usually a gap between our application when we actually get somebody on the podcast. And in the application, it said $450,000, and I’m like, I bet she’s half a million now. And sure enough, you are. Okay, tell us a little bit about who’s on this journey with you, family, kids, any of that.
Kelsey:
Yes. I have a husband, and he’s been on this journey with me for 10 years now, no kids yet.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Okay, so give us a sense, last three years, and maybe before then, if he or you were working prior to going to CRNA school, give us a sense of what your incomes look like over the years.
Kelsey:
Yeah, this last year, we hit $427,000. $367,000 was mine, and $60,000 was my husband. The year prior was $273,000, and then before getting into school, or during school, it was my husband at $145,000, and then $115,000 for 2021.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Okay, I’ve noticed his income has gone down significantly. Is that because he’s taken on some additional responsibilities, or just changed jobs?
Kelsey:
Definitely a lot of responsibilities. He is a carpenter, and so he’s had to move over the years as I’ve gotten into school, changed jobs. And so, starting up a business takes time, and so he kind of took a hit.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah. Okay, when you came out of school in 2022, what was y’all’s net worth? I’m assuming you maybe paid for some of that school with some debt?
Kelsey:
Definitely. Me and my husband were talking about this, and we believe we were actually close to zero. We have a home in Utah, and we had some equity from that, but as far as our student loans went, I had $140,000 in student loans.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
And how much do you still have in student loans?
Kelsey:
Zero.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Zero, you paid them off in three years, essentially. Congratulations on that milestone, too.
Kelsey:
In March, actually, is no debt at all.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Very cool. Was this a goal? Was it your goal to pay off your student loans in less than three years or something?
Kelsey:
Our goal was five years, and we just moved to Arizona. We were in Oregon for the last two years, and we sold our home, and we did well. And we used all that money to pay off all of our debt.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Very cool. Very cool that that worked out for you. All right, other than that, obviously using some home equity to pay off debt helped, but tell us about your secrets to success. How have you gotten to half a million dollars just three years out of school?
Kelsey:
A few things. When I graduated, I had two people talk to me from my colleagues, and one of them said, right now, Kelsey, you need to put money into retirement. You need to max out today, not next year, not the following year. And I remember that being really scary because I had debt. We had a house mortgage, and I was like, “I don’t know if I can make that work.” But we did. We prioritized putting money into retirement.
And then my other colleague said, you need to listen to the White Goat Investor. And so my husband was on board, and we started from your very first episode two and a half years ago, and we listened to all of them. It was our weekly thing, whether we were on a road trip or we were at the gym, we were both listening to the White Coat Investor. And that definitely helped us stay on the course because we always had this someone in our ears telling us that we needed to pay off our debt.
And so, that was our secret to success. And also just us being on the same page. If I didn’t have a partner that wanted to do this together, then I think it would have definitely made it difficult.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah, for sure. You’ve listened to 220-ish of these milestones episodes in the past. And how many of them did you listen to before you’re like, “Someday I’m going to be on that podcast, and I’m going to talk about my success?”
Kelsey:
Honestly, I didn’t know that I would ever be on this. I thought it would be an amazing goal to have. And like I said, we had a five-year plan, and I was really hoping that the five-year plan was going to work. And then we had a change of moving and selling our home. And my husband, as soon as we paid off our debt, was like, you got to apply to Milestone to Millionaire.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah. Okay, take us back because you guys have been together for a while. Take us back to this decision to go to CRNA school, where you’re like, “It’s going to cost this much money, but when I’m done, honey, I’m going to make $200,000 or $300,000 or $400,000.” Tell us about that discussion and how you guys came to make that decision together.
Kelsey:
Yeah. Actually, when me and my husband were dating, we were 20. And I told him, I said, “I have a goal. I’m going to CRNA school. And you can either, you either know that and you stick with me, and it’s going to be a hard decade or you don’t have to.” And he was on board.
And throughout the last, like I said, 10 years between nursing school, moving to get ICO experience, and then getting into grad school, he has never once complained. And he worked 60 to 80 hours a week while I was in grad school to pay for life. We didn’t pay for my student loans, but he paid for life. And I was on rotations in different states, and that was all paid for by him. He just was super motivated for me to go to school and then also to just have a good attitude and that this is what it is, and we’re making our future better.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah. And he’s certainly put in lots of work, like lots of physician spouses put in during med school and residency and so forth, and is now starting to reap the rewards of it. He now has a partner that’s making $300,000 plus. This is not a bad reward for all those sacrifices.
Kelsey:
Yeah, he’s definitely living good now. He actually just got a golf membership, and so I’m happy for him that he finally gets to relax a little bit.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah, very cool. So what does he shoot? Do you have any idea?
Kelsey:
Oh, I have no idea.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Very fun. Very fun. All right. There’s people out there like you that they’re just coming out of CRNA school or they’re just coming out of residency. They owe some student loans, their net worth’s maybe zero if they got some partner that’s been busting their butt for a few years, but more likely negative. They want to do what you’re doing. They want to start rapidly building wealth. What advice do you have for them?
Kelsey:
I think my biggest advice is just starting now. Like I said, I remember feeling very overwhelmed that this was not doable, that we were never going to finish paying off our debts, and just starting was the hardest thing. So just do it. Start now, and slowly but surely, you will push through and be at zero.
And then, like I said, too, listening to a podcast, whether it’s the White Coat Investor or another financial podcast, having that play once a week helps really keep you on goal and on track for getting out of debt.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Very cool. Kelsey, what other advice do you have for other White Coat Investors out there that maybe are struggling? They want to build wealth. They’re not building wealth as quickly as they would like. What could they change maybe that would help them be as successful as you?
Kelsey:
I think just starting. I think the hardest thing to do is just to start, because you can look at your retirement accounts. You can look at your debt, and you’re like, “Oh, this is small, or it’s large.” Your debt’s large. Your retirement’s small, and it doesn’t feel like it’s doing anything. But starting somewhere is only going to help it. And so, just having that mindset to continue on, month after month, to just put something aside for saving or put more money towards your student debt is, I think, the best advice. And just having someone to be there to support you, because it is a hard journey. It’s not easy to get out of debt.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Write that check. Send it to a lender, even if it’s $200.
Kelsey:
Yeah, every little bit.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Go read your 401(k) plan document and figure out how it works. It’s not that complicated. You can figure it out. Very cool. All right, well, what’s next? What financial goal are you guys working on now?
Kelsey:
We would love to retire early. Just continuing on with where we’re at, continuing to save money and put more money into stocks and helping grow that so that if we want to, we can retire early is probably our next biggest goal that we have.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Awesome. Well, congratulations to both of you on your success.
Kelsey:
Thank you.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
We appreciate you coming on the White Coat Investor podcast and sharing it with others and hopefully inspiring them to also meet their personal financial goals. We’ll let you go, but congratulations. I know you’ll get to your next milestone soon.
Kelsey:
Thank you. Appreciate it.
FINANCE 101: INVESTING CASH
Dr. Jim Dahle:
I hope you enjoyed that episode. I talked to you at the beginning about cash. And when we talk about cash, there’s lots of different things we’re talking about. For some people, that literally means the green stuff sitting in a safe in your home. So that if the excrement hits the ventilatory system, you can get your hands on a few hundred or a few thousand dollars and you can get out and you can use that to buy gas on the way out or groceries or whatever.
But in general, when we’re talking about cash, we’re talking about something that’s a little bit less liquid than that. Now, most of us have some recurring expenses and we need to make sure we have reasonable cashflow in our lives. So that means having some money in our checking account. Someplace where you can use your debit card, that your credit card gets paid off with every month, that you can go make withdrawals and make deposits and write checks and that sort of thing. So that’s going to be some of your cash as well.
Now, the downside of a checking account is you’re not making any money on it, which is not an insignificant outcome if you’ve got thousands or tens of thousands of dollars sitting in there. That’s a real opportunity cost. That is money that could be earning something. Whether it’s 3 or 4 or 5%, it could be earning something, but it is sitting there to facilitate your cashflow.
And it’s all right to have that. Don’t beat yourself up about that. All people and all businesses have a certain amount of cash sitting around earning nothing. And that’s okay. That is not going to make the difference between you being financially successful or not successful.
What I really want to spend time talking about is the next level. Whether you want to call it an emergency fund or whether it’s money that you don’t need for a few weeks or a few months or a year or two where do you invest that.
If you’re saving up for a down payment for a house you plan to buy in six months or 12 months or 18 months, that’s really not money that should go get invested in risky assets. You certainly don’t want it in anything illiquid like some real estate property, but you probably don’t want it in the stock market either. Even though the stock market is pretty darn liquid.
You put it in an index fund, you can pretty much have your money back in your checking account three days later, but it might drop in value 40% in the meantime. And if the return of your principle matters a lot more than the return on your principle, well, those are times when a cash investment is appropriate.
Now, two of my favorite cash investments are high yield savings accounts and money market funds. And these work very similarly. They’re basically a savings account for lack of a better term. With a high yield savings account, it’s generally through a bank. Something like Ally Bank. It’s usually a primarily online bank. And these days they might be offering you 3% or 4% to have your money in there. That’s way better than your checking account. Your checking account’s paying you nothing. And this thing’s paying you 3% or 3.5% or something like that. So it’s way better.
And you can usually transfer money back and forth within one to three days. No problem. Just transfer it back and forth. As long as you don’t need the money today, it’s going to be fine to have it in there.
Now, the high yield savings account has one benefit over a money market account, a money market fund at someplace like Vanguard or Fidelity or Schwab or something like that. The benefit is FDIC insurance. That’s not worth that much, but it’s worth something. On up to $250,000 to $500,000, the federal government actually stands behind your deposit. So if the bank fails, you still get your money.
Now, it’s not like that’s a huge risk over with a money market fund. Say you’re a Vanguard. And you’re worried, “Oh, Vanguard’s going to fail.” Well, there is something called SIPC insurance. SIPC insurance essentially makes sure you can get a little bit of cash even if your brokerage fails. But the difference with the brokerage is your money’s actually invested in something. It’s not just sitting in an account of Vanguard. It has been used to buy something that has value. And eventually you’re going to get the value out of that thing.
And so even if the brokerage fails, you still own stuff via the fund, whether it’s a stock mutual fund or it’s a bond mutual fund or it’s a money market fund. Money market funds invest in very short-term bonds. They essentially can guarantee the buck. You won’t lose principal. In fact, there’s a very huge deal they talk about a money market fund breaking the buck. There’s a little discussion about this in 2008, but even in 2008, no retail money market fund broke the buck. And even the ones that did were commercial only. And there was like a 1% loss. It wasn’t some huge deal.
The nice thing about money market funds is in normal times, they’ll pay more than a high yield savings account. And I would call this a relatively normal time because right now, money market funds will yield more than a high yield savings account.
The other option, the other cool thing about them is there’s different types of money market funds. For example, you can get one that invests only in treasuries. So you’re essentially backed by the US government that way. It’s basically the same as FDIC insurance if you do that, but it is also state tax free. That’s a benefit. If you’re in a high tax state, you might like a treasury money market fund, especially if it’s paying about the same as a prime or a federal money market fund or some other option like that. And you also get out of the state taxes. So the after tax yield might be even better.
The other option you have is a municipal money market fund. And these are federal tax free. I suppose if you had a state specific one and there aren’t very many good ones of those, but if you had a state specific one, it would also be state income tax free. And so even though it offers a lower yield, your after tax yield might be higher, especially if you’re in one of the higher tax brackets. So that’s another advantage of money market funds over a high yield savings account.
Now, people talk about other options. They talk about very short term bond funds. And yes, your principal’s pretty guaranteed there, but it can drop a little bit when interest rates change.
People also talk about just buying treasury bills directly from the treasury. And that’s a very cash like investment, but it’s not really cash. It’s going to take a few months or a few weeks or whatever for that treasury bill to mature. Theoretically, if you had to sell it, in the meantime, you could lose some tiny amount of principal on that.
Plus there’s the hassle. You got to go and buy them. You got to wait for them to mature. You got to sell them or whatever. You got to roll the ladder of them. It’s just not as quite as convenient as using a money market fund or a high yield savings account.
There are other options if you want to guarantee your principal, but you’re okay not having liquidity. You don’t need the money for six months or a year or two years or whatever. You got a couple of options. One is the certificate deposit from bank. And theoretically, that’ll pay a little bit more than a high yield savings account. Those are highly variable, of course. So you have to kind of shop around.
The other option is just to buy a treasury bond. If you know you need the money in a year and you know you don’t need it before then, you can buy a one year treasury bond and that’ll pay a little bit more than a money market fund. If it was two years and three years, you’d get a two year or three year treasury bond.
Lots of different options for your cash. The general rule is figure out how much you need for your cash flow needs, and a little bit of emergency kind of stuff and keep that at home or in a checking account. And beyond that, make sure you’re getting paid something for your cash, whether you’re using a high yield savings account or whether you’re using a money market fund.
I’m a little bit partial to the ones at Vanguard. They do tend to have a little bit higher yield than the ones at Fidelity and the ones at Schwab, especially when it’s just your settlement fund. This is the way Schwab makes some of its money and keeps its other fees low is by it basically doesn’t pay you much on your settlement fund, whereas Vanguard does. So it’s one really nice thing about Vanguard.
Make sure you keep your cash in a smart place, pay a little bit of attention to it, but don’t get all obsessive compulsive about it. You don’t want to be bouncing checks because you’re trying to keep too much money in the savings account and not enough in your checking account.
SPONSOR
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Today’s episode is brought to you by Doc2Doc, the lending solution built by doctors for doctors. Whether you’re a fourth year student preparing for residency, transitioning into practice or an experienced physician, Doc2Doc offers tailored financial products for every stage of your career. Our loans cover relocation, consolidate debt and address life’s unexpected expenses.
With quick online application, no prepayment penalties and a history of funding millions for the White Coat Investor members, Doc2Doc makes financing simple and stress-free. We’re here to support your journey from training to practice. Visit whitecoatinvestor.com/doc2doc to learn more.
All right, that’s it for this episode. Tune in next time. And until then, keep your head up, shoulders back. You’ve got this. We’re here to help you along the way.
DISCLAIMER
The hosts of the White Coat Investor are not licensed accountants, attorneys, or financial advisors. This podcast is for your entertainment and information only. It should not be considered professional or personalized financial advice. You should consult the appropriate professional for specific advice relating to your situation.
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