Category: Finance

I have been thinking about early retirement for a while now. Eight years, in fact, ever since one of my partners retired early and put the idea in my head.

The closer I get to financial independence, the more I am thinking about what I would like to do. My planning is complicated by the nature of my work: being a primary care physician isn’t solely shift-work. If I am gone for 2 weeks out of the month, or for 3 months at a time, someone still needs to take care of the patients when they call in with problems.

Shift-work (hospital medicine) is a little easier if I want more days off, but comes with other challenges, like the expectation to put in long hours for many days in a row.

I decided to walk through some of the different flavors of FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) and see how they might work out for me, as an Internal Medicine PCP.

Last week I read a post, which I now can’t find, basically daring people who write about donor advised funds to put their money where their mouth is.

I seriously doubt that person was writing about me, but I took the sentiment to heart, anyway.

My father in law is definitely getting older.

He was never particularly organized, but in the past few years, he has gotten much worse.

In particular, paying his bills has become more of an issue. He has the money (he made sure we knew), he just doesn’t take care of his obligations.

Every year, for almost 20 years, I have completed the same financial tasks: reviewing the spending for the year that has just ended, updating my (our) new worth, and reviewing my (our) spending goals for the coming year.

I reviewed the net worth and spending goals 2 weeks ago in my yearly financial check-up. Today I go through our yearly spending.

Inquiring minds may wonder: why in the world have been you going through your yearly spending for 2 decades? What you can you possibly get out of this exercise by this point?

Every year, around January 1, I do two exercises related to my finances: calculate my net worth, and review the prior year’s spending. I have been doing this for years–long before I met Mr. PiN–so I talk about my finances, though it has really been our finances for some time.

While it is certainly pleasant to see totals moving in the right direction, I find the most helpful aspect of the exercise is to reflect on where we are as a household, and consider next steps (not resolutions!).

This year, going through the finances is taking a bit longer than usual. I finished the net worth calculation early, but the spending review is taking much longer.

Instead of going through both topics at once, I will be splitting them up: this week, the net worth discussion; soon (hopefully next week) a review of our spending in 2021.

I won’t be giving exact numbers, per Mr. PiN’s request, but I hope that going through this exercise with me may be informative for you.

This week winter hit our area, with bad roads and cold temperatures.

I also saw a huge uptick of COVID cases (likely Omicron spread by gatherings at Christmas and New Years).

Between one thing and another, when Mr. PiN announced we were out of eggs, I asked him if he would please arrange a grocery delivery instead of spending time battling traffic and tons of shoppers (who aren’t necessarily masking).

Since we haven’t really done this since the end of 2020, it was a somewhat different experience for us.