The Physician's Guide To Financial Wellness Trent DeBruin, Andrew Musbach

In this episode of the podcast, we discuss five of the most common investment mistakes people make: 1) Waiting for the “right” time to invest, 2) Anticipatory selling, 3) Buying into (or buying more of) the latest “hot” stock or investment trend, 4) Concentrating in one stock or one area of the investment universe, and 5) Chasing income, yield, or a similar theme. 
For each mistake, we explain what drives it, how it typically materializes, and what you can do to avoid falling victim to it. The universal theme underlying each mistake is human behavior and emotion, which makes for an interesting discussion of how to fight our natural survival tendencies that, unfortunately, don’t serve us well as investors.
Resources & People Mentioned Episode #48: Lump Sum of Cash to Invest – All at Once or Gradually?   Episode #53: How to Manage Your Retirement Paycheck During a Market Decline Download our guide: The Toolkit for Optimizing Your Finances as an Employed Physician Download our guide: The Financial Checkup Connect With Trent and Andrew https://mdwmllc.com  Follow on LinkedIn Follow on Facebook Subscribe to The Physician’s Guide To Financial Wellness
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In this episode of the podcast, we do a deep dive into the topic of health insurance. We start out by reviewing some of the key definitions and terminology related to health insurance. We then transition into discussing how to think about your health insurance coverage and how that thought process changes over time. 
From there, we move on to a breakdown of the two key phases of health insurance (pre-65 and post-65) and talk about the planning opportunities that are available within each phase. And lastly, we wrap up our discussion by explaining how to apply the information and framework of this episode to your own situation in order to create the best health insurance plan for you.
Resources & People Mentioned Episode #25: Planning for Healthcare in Retirement  Download our guide: The Toolkit for Optimizing Your Finances as an Employed Physician Download our guide: The Financial Checkup healthcare.gov Connect With Trent and Andrew https://mdwmllc.com  Follow on LinkedIn Follow on Facebook
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In this episode of the podcast, we dive into the always-fun topic of life insurance. We start out by sharing an overview of life insurance and discussing the purpose of it. We then transition into the three general life stages (early-career, mid-career, and late-career/retirement), explaining how your life insurance need changes at each stage and sharing tips and strategies for how to ensure that you have the coverage you need, for the time you need it, while paying as little as possible for it. 
Resources & People Mentioned Episode #14: Insurance for Physicians – What Types & Amounts You Actually Need Download our guide: The Toolkit for Optimizing Your Finances as an Employed Physician Download our guide: The Financial Checkup Connect With Trent and Andrew https://mdwmllc.com  Follow on LinkedIn Follow on Facebook Subscribe to The Physician’s Guide To Financial Wellness
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When it comes to saving and investing for retirement, we all have a certain amount of tax-advantaged saving space available to us through a combination of employer retirement accounts and personal retirement accounts. However, for many physicians there comes a point where you’re maxing out all of these retirement accounts and still have money left over to save and invest, so it’s natural to wonder “What’s next?” in terms of where you should then allocate money. For us, the answer is often a taxable investment account, and in this episode, we explain why.
Outline of this episode  What’s the best place to save and invest after Retirement accounts are maxed? [0:23]
The drawbacks of taxable accounts [2:35]
Why these taxable accounts are preferable to cash or doing nothing [5:44]
There are some attractive tax aspects to these accounts [13:01]
Legacy planning can be simpler and can save funds with these accounts [19:26]
Recap [23:20] What a taxable account is and how it fits as an option For those of you who have maxed out their tax advantage accounts, and we strongly advise maxing out these accounts before using this, a taxable account is the next best option. We'll start out by clarifying the terminology since as with many other areas of personal finance there's no shortage of jargon here. For the purposes of our discussion, we'll refer to it as a taxable account, but you'll also commonly hear it referred to as a brokerage account, a joint account, or an individual account, but it's essentially an account that you can open similar to a bank account. However, unlike a bank account where you earn a set percentage of interest based on the amount of money in the account with a taxable account, you can invest the money in mutual funds, ETFs, stocks, bonds, et cetera, with the expectation that it'll grow over time. These are easy to open and can provide good benefits over time.
The drawbacks of taxable accounts  Obviously, you don’t get the tax benefits from these accounts that you would with typical retirement-focused accounts. You’re going to make contributions to these accounts with money that’s already been taxed and you will also pay taxes on the growth of these accounts, over time. There are nuances, including qualified dividends, the interest paid on municipal bonds, and a few others. You can also pay taxes on the gains you make when selling these investments. Money invested here won’t grow as much as you would experience in non-taxable accounts.
What you’ll like about taxable accounts You get a higher return on your investments. Not limited to cash, so you can invest with the potential of higher returns. While there is no guarantee that any investment will provide profitable returns, there are historical numbers we can consider. Historically, stock market returns average annual returns of around 10%, while the bond market has historically provided an annual return of around 5%. Historically, inflation has ranged between a 2% to 3% increase, so cash, which historically only provides around a 2% return, doesn’t yield any return when adjusted for inflation. These accounts provide you the opportunity to earn a higher return, but they also provide great flexibility when it comes to your investments, much greater than what you'll experience with tax-favored accounts. You’ll also experience SOME tax benefits in certain situations or with certain types of investments.
Resources & People Mentioned Episode #20: The Waterfall of Retirement Savings by Account
Episode #45: A Deeper Dive on Roth IRA Conversions
Download our guide: The Toolkit for Optimizing Your Finances as an Employed Physician
Download our guide: The Financial Checkup
Connect With Trent and Andrew https://mdwmllc.com 
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When it comes to financial planning, there’s often a fair amount of “low-hanging fruit” in terms of easy ways to save money. In this episode, we discuss seven of these items. Whether it’s parking your cash in a high-yield savings account, shopping around home & auto insurance, harvesting losses in a taxable account, revisiting your life & disability insurance relative to your needs, evaluating your health insurance options versus your usage, rebalancing your investments, or optimizing your credit card benefits, by implementing a few simple tweaks and strategies the cost savings can really add up.
Resources & People Mentioned Episode #19: The “Other 20%” of Successful Investing Download our guide: The Toolkit for Optimizing Your Finances as an Employed Physician Download our guide: The Financial Checkup Connect With Trent and Andrew https://mdwmllc.com  Follow on LinkedIn Follow on Facebook
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In this episode, we share our list of ten things to do if you’re within ten years of retirement. The list includes taking inventory of your financial situation, reflecting on your current vision of retirement, projecting your future expenses in retirement, understanding your healthcare options, running retirement projections to see where you stand, taking advantage of tax-advantaged retirement accounts and catch-up contributions, revisiting your investment portfolio and asset allocation, checking in with your spouse or partner to see if you’re on the same page, and doing a “trial run” of retirement to see how it feels. We’re big proponents of planning, and the earlier you address some of these things the more time you give yourself to do proactive planning, implement beneficial strategies, and make any necessary adjustments to ensure that your retirement ends up aligning with your ideal vision of it.
Resources & People Mentioned Download our guide: Retirement Timeline – Key Dates & Opportunities Download our guide: Retirement Checklist – A Guide to Planning for Retirement  Episode #25: Planning for Healthcare in Retirement  Episode #50: Having a Plan for Long-Term Care Episode #51: Making Sense of Your Retirement Projections Episode #39: Should You Change Your Investments as You Approach Retirement? Connect With Trent and Andrew https://mdwmllc.com  Follow on LinkedIn Follow on Facebook
Subscribe to The Physician’s Guide To Financial Wellness
on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and Google Podcast