Your dream house should not become the reason you lose financial freedom. Physicians tend to be detail-oriented and data-driven folks. You have to be if you want to be a great clinician, surgeon, or medical researcher. And, in my experience, that mindset often spills over into their investing style, especially for those who enjoy doing it themselves. Paying attention to those details is important, absolutely. It can save a lot of money over the long run. But it is also s

Behavior Gap: difference between expected and actual investor outcome I recently got an email from a fellow physician finance enthusiast/professional, Dr. Kenneth Kim. Kenny is a physician, an enrolled agent (EA), a professional tax strategist, and a blogger who does a great job teaching other doctors about taxes. I encourage you to check out his blog here. Anyway, he sent me a couple of interesting articles comparing the investment returns of the two major types of retir

Doctor dragged down by anchoring bias Have you ever noticed how the first number you hear tends to shape everything that comes after it—whether it’s the price of a house, a job offer, or even your retirement target? That’s not just a quirk of human thinking; it’s a well-documented psychological phenomenon called anchoring bias. It affects our financial decisions more than we realize—quietly influencing what we think something should be worth, what we feel we deserve to earn,

We all like to think of ourselves as smart, savvy, and rational, right? As physicians, we undergo extensive education, endure grueling training, scour medical research, attend cutting-edge conferences, learn from colleagues, and continuously hone our craft—all so that we can make the right decisions at the right moments that might literally save lives. And when our patients do well, we feel a well-earned sense of pride. We helped save that person’s life. But what happens when

In his excellent book, The Behavior Gap, Carl Richards explains how our own behaviors are often the greatest threat to long-term financial success. He defines the “behavior gap” as the difference between the returns we could earn by simply holding a portfolio of stocks or funds and the lower returns we actually earn. Why the gap? Because we interfere in our own success. We let our psychology get in the way. Behavioral finance is a fascinating topic to me, and I’ll be explorin

The sky is falling! At least it kind of feels that way if you are paying attention to the stock market and watching the value of your portfolio plummet. The S&P 500 index has lost over 17% since its record close on February 19, 2025 at $6144.15 to the April 7th close at $5074.08. That is a quite a dip in less than two months! In times like these, it is very tempting to get out before things get worse and before you lose more money. But before you start clicking “sell” on al