Ep 168 Financial Planning for Emergency Physicians Emergency Medicine Cases

On EM Cases over the years, we’ve talked a lot about the various ingredients for enjoying a fulfilling career in EM. If I stop and think about it, that’s really what EM Cases is all about: learning how to be a better health care provider by sharing our knowledge in an engaging and effective way, so that we can all go to work feeling good about what we do, save some lives and improve outcomes. But you can’t really come up with all the ingredients of enjoying a fulfilling career in EM without talking about money. And it’s something we don’t often talk about at work. It seems almost sinful to talk about money – after all, in EM it should be all about taking great care of patients, right? Well, I’d argue that it’s really challenging to take great of patients unless we’re somewhat comfortable with our financial situation – because if we’re practicing EM just to make money, we’ll probably end up very unsatisfied and not take good care of patients. And if we hardly think about money at all and don’t have a good financial plan, we might end up having to work for way longer than we ever intended – and run the risk of burning out.

With the help of Dr. Matt Poyner, a Canadian EM physician who’s dedicated the latter part of his career to helping other health care providers think about their financial planning so that they can have a more fulfilling career, we will cover earning, spending, saving and investing wisely and answer questions such as: What is time affluence and how should it guide our financial planning? Why should our goal be financial independence rather than retirement? What are the 4 evidence-based cornerstones for financial planning for happiness? What is the 4% rule for figuring out how much money one needs to be happy? How should we approach spending in a way that is sound? When should we start saving and how much should we save through our careers? What is more important: how much we save or our investment returns? How much do you need to be financially independent or retire? What are the first steps of financial planning? What are the advantages and disadvantages of having a financial advisor vs DIY financial planning? What are the biggest risks for investors? What are the first steps to becoming a DIY investor and many more...



Podcast production, sound design & editing by Anton Helman

Written Summary and blog post by Matt Poyner, edited by Anton Helman April 2022

Cite this podcast as: Helman, A. Poyner, M. Financial Planning for Emergency Physicians. Emergency Medicine Cases. April, 2022. https://emergencymedicinecases.com/financial-planning-for-emergency-physicians. Accessed [date]

Beliefs about money that hold doctors back in their financial planning

One belief about money that hold some doctors back from financial planning is that personal finance and investing are too hard/complicated for the average doctor to learn. Any physician with a little interest and a little time can understand personal finance and take control of their own money.

Many studies have shown that people are not very good at predicting what will make them happy. Most of us are tempted to spend too much. This is understandable.  We tend to spend with the assumption that nice things will make us feel nice, but the contentment is fleeting and we quickly adapt to nice things.  They become our new normal - lifestyle inflation. But some doctors have the opposite problem. They’re super frugal because they think that they’ll feel happy if they just have 3 or 5 or 8 million dollars. Having more money doesn’t change the way we think about money. The solution to both of these is to reflect deeply about what we want our money to DO for us and then make a plan around those values.



Time affluence and financial planning for emergency physicians

“Time affluence” is feeling like you have enough time to do the things you...