Finance – Page 10 – Physician In Numbers

Future Me, April 2021

I started this series of posts at the end of October 2018. I had just cut back my hours from full time to 90%, and wanted to use my new free time wisely. Some of that time was to relax, but I also wanted to improve my fitness, make my home a more pleasant place to stay, and work on becoming a more well-rounded human being.

My last update was in January 2021, with a number of wins, and several misses.

So how have I done with my new goals? Read on for the latest update, covering the first 3+ months of 2021.

Rising Tides

In the past few months, I have been checking my investment portfolio, and seeing it increase. A lot. This has sparked thoughts of retiring much earlier.

After working many weeks in the hospital this winter, I am quite tempted. The thought of staying home, sleeping in, not worrying about COVID exposures from people who can’t be bothered to wear their mask properly–it’s all quite alluring.

Maybe I can think about retiring soon? My nest egg is growing on steroids this year. And yet…

What Is A Good Budget For Intern Year?

It’s that time of year: Match Day has come and gone. Congratulations to all the students who matched!

Now it is time for a large number of graduating seniors to make decisions related to their first year as doctors.

If you stopped here for this post, then I am guessing you may have some concerns about making a budget for your internship year.

Though that time is long passed for me (I won’t say thank goodness, as it was a very exciting time), this question of what to budget in your first year as a doctor is something that I keep chewing over. I have written about it before, but am still trying to put things together in a better way. We will see if this year I can do better.

To read my prior attempts at answering this question, please see:

What Does Saving 20% Get You?

Last week I read this post by The Prudent Plastic Surgeon, which starts out calling a savings rate of 20% “pretty much mandatory” for building wealth. I think this is a fine goal. He writes that paying down debt should count, as it improves your net worth (which it does).

I wasn’t so sure. After all, if your plan relies on saving and investing 20% of your money for 30 years in order to build up your nest egg, then using some of that money to pay off debt should, in theory, mean that you come up short.

As I was walking this weekend, I was thinking about this more and more, and was getting more and more annoyed. I figured it was time to bring out the numbers and see how this worked.

A Tale Of 4 Stocks

This is another do as I say, not as I do post.

If you read a lot of financial independence blogs, you will see, over and over again, advice to buy a low cost index fund if you are going to invest in the stock market. It is very good advice, and you can read more about it in posts by JL Collins, and The White Coat Investor, among others. They lay out their arguments in a very logical way, bolstered by graphs and spreadsheets.

That is not this post.

This post goes through my personal experience with buying individual stocks, and the various ways this has come back to bite me in the butt.

Building A Better Life

When I had first started reading about FI/RE (Financial Independence Retire Early), it was mostly about cutting unnecessary costs and saving lots of money. I devoted a lot of my brain space to these ideas, even if I did feel that some of those “unnecessary” costs were important to my life (they stayed).

Even going gung-ho on the project, I could see that it would be many more years until I could retire in the style to which I aspired (Physician on Fire would eventually christen it “Fat FIRE.”)

Not too long into my journey, however, I came across this piece by The White Coat Investor: Using a Venn Diagram to Decrease Burnout. The posts from WCI have much catchier titles these days, but this article has stuck with me for 5 years.

Inspired by that Venn diagram, I have tried making a change or two to make my life better. After nearly a year of the pandemic, and a significant increase in my investment accounts, I am thinking more seriously about changes to build a better life now, rather than waiting for the future.

Paying For Schools

This weekend I had a lot more free time, and enjoyed long conversations with my sister and brother, both of whom have school-aged children. We talked about other things, but the cost of school popped up with both.

Mr. PiN’s Low Spend Challenge: How Did He Do?

As you might recall, in early November, Mr. PiN decided to set himself a spending challenge. He was going to limit his spending for an entire month to $300.

I was hoping that not only would we save plenty of dough, but he would stay out of the stores (he was going shopping multiple times a week, at a time when COVID cases were rising in our region).

I had planned to report on his efforts in December, but then work and life got in the way.

The various outcomes of the challenge are reported below.

Future Me, January 2021

My last update was in September 2020, with a number of wins, and several misses.

So how have I done with my new goals? Read on for the latest update, covering the last 4 months of 2020.

Happy New Year. Now What?

As I have mentioned before, every New Year I update my (our) net worth, decide how to allocate savings over the year, and also review the spending for the year.

This all gets done only around January 1, give or take a few days, which means that getting the final numbers is big deal here in the PiN household. It is how I track the progress we are making in growing our nest egg, and how I keep track of our yearly spending–which dictates how large a nest egg we will need to retire.

When I ran the numbers for 2020, I found some mixed results. I am still chewing over the numbers and what to do going forward. I hope by writing this out, I may help not only myself, but also others who are trying to figure out how to improve their financial situation.