MtoM #6 - Millionaire Status - Automatically

This is the White Coat Investor Podcast Milestones to celebrating stories of success along the journey to financial freedom. Here is your host, Dr. Jim Dali.

All right, welcome to Milestones to Millionaire Podcast number six, and this is going to be a great one. We're here with Corey the Millionaire. The White Coat investor is proud to introduce our no Hype Real estate investing course, which will provide the framework for developing further knowledge and experience as you progress in your real estate investing career. We call it an introductory course because there's always more to learn. But this is no short, superficial course. There are over 200 lectures and videos adding up to more than 27 hours of content by over 15 different instructors. We think it just might be the best real estate course on the planet. Continue your wealth building journey today with the no Hype Real estate Investing course@whitecoatinvestor.com courses. You can do this and the White Coat Investor can help. So, Corey, welcome to Milestones to Millionaire Podcast.

Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.

Well, we're excited to have you here. Let's start at the beginning. What's your specialty and how far are you out of training?

I'm in hospital medicine and I'm about nine years out of training right now.

Okay, and what is your approximate net worth?

$2.8 million.

$2.8 million. Congratulations on that. What's that divided up into? How much of it is in retirement accounts, investment, your house, et cetera. How would you divide that up?

I have about 1 million in my primary home and in two investment properties, and the rest is in equities and bonds.

Okay, and what's been your range of income throughout your career?

My husband also works as a hospitalist. So our income has ranged depending on whether I'm working part time or not, from about 300 to 500,000. Most recently it's been about 400,000.

Okay, and how many of those years did you work part time?

I would say maybe about half.

About half. Okay. And how long did it take you to become a millionaire? Do you recall when you first crossed the seven figure threshold? How far were you out of training at that point?

So I'd been tracking my net worth on Mint since I started, and I think it took me about five years.

About five years. So you beat me by a couple of years. Congratulations on that. And what would you say were your secrets to success? How did you become so wealthy?

You know, I think one of the things that I did was that I automated everything. I think one of the best finance books ever written was Ramit Sethi's I will teach you to be rich. So I put everything on automation. My investments and my savings and everything else. So I never had to think about making the decisions. And it always just happened. And then the other thing is, I think I was particularly motivated. Just got a residency. I had just had my baby. I was feeling really burned out. I said to myself, I don't think I'm going to make it 30 years doing this. And so I realized that I needed to do something drastic so that I would be okay.

And did it work? Did saving all that money, did becoming more wealthy, did that affect your level of burnout?

It totally has. After I paid my house and I had the college saved up for and a good start on retirement, I was able to cut back to halftime at work. I have to say, I enjoy working again. The level of the amount that I was working has made all the difference for me.

Now, obviously, you're going to be able to retire early if you so desired. Do you think you will?

I don't know what's going to happen to me. The nice thing about getting close to financial independence is that you do have so many options. I'm not sure if I'll take the boards again in 10 years. I may. I may not. I'm working on my mba. I'm running marathons. I have other interests now. So we'll just kind of see what happens. Right now I see myself working part, part time for the foreseeable future because I enjoy it. I enjoy the social interaction with my colleagues. But, you know, I don't know what I'm going to be doing in 10 years time.

Yeah. Now you don't acquire a $2.8 million net worth even on an income of $400,000 in nine years without being on the same page as your partner. How did you and your partner get on the same page toward this goal?

My husband was just really tolerant about me taking the lead and telling him that we need to make some sacrifices and buying a house that was maybe a little bit smaller than our income could afford and making sure we maxed out all the available retirement accounts and college savings accounts and everything every year. Neither of us has a huge luxury lifestyle, so it made it kind of easy. He's not a huge spender.

Now, let's go back to that moment when you came out of training. You probably have pretty good mint records. Do you remember what your net worth was when you came out of training?

Yeah, it was negative $140,000.

And so from there to a million dollars in five years. Pretty impressive. So did any of this come from your parents? Did they pay for any of your schooling? Did you get any significant inheritance?

My parents paid for my undergraduate, but for medical school I took out loans. And no, I haven't gotten any inheritances.

And how much debt do you have?

Currently, I just have the two mortgages on my investment properties, so that's about $200,000.

And what do you drive now, and how does that compare to what you were driving six or eight years ago?

So for eight years after residency, I drove the same car that I drove through residency, which was the Nissan Sentra. And then about a year ago, my husband decided he needed to get a Tesla, so I got his old car, and he has a Toyota Hybrid RAV4, and that's what I currently drive.

So for eight years, making $400,000 a year, you're driving a Sentra. Did anybody say anything to you? Do you remember?

Yeah, I think my husband was like, that's not a doctor's car. But mostly I got a lot of admiration from my peers for sticking with it and just driving it into the ground. So I didn't feel bad at all.

Awesome. So what advice do you have for those who are a decade or two behind you? Maybe somebody coming out of residency this year wants to be where you're at nine years from now. What advice do you have for them?

I would just say put everything on automation, educate yourself in an ongoing manner. I think signing up for newsletters like from the Humble dollar from white Coat Investor, and then reading them religiously so that you know what to do with your money. And then you will naturally kind of make good decisions going forward. And I think the motivation has to be there. And you have to be willing to sacrifice a few things to not live in the doctor's house to drive a Nissan Sentra for a while, and then eventually you can have those things. Eventually you can have the Tesla. Eventually you can upgrade your house. It's the same message that you always tell your listeners. There's no great secret.

So which Tesla is it?

We got the Model Y.

Okay. All right, all right. Okay. So do you and your partner have any children?

I have one. Yeah. I have a nine year old.

So how did you balance being a parent with becoming a millionaire?

I don't think I balanced it particularly well. I mean, because I was so burnt out after residency and working full time and Ari was a newborn. I wasn't sleeping. I don't think I was 100% there. As a parent. And so that's really one great thing about working part time is I have been able to be there for him and be the parent that I've. That I should have been before and have always wanted to be. So, you know, a lot of people can do, a lot of women maybe can do it all, but, you know, that wasn't the case for me and, you know, I really needed to cut back at work and free ups and hours so that I could be there for him.

So it turns out you're human like the rest of us, huh?

It turns out I'm human. That's right.

I think we all feel that way about trying to balance that home life, trying to balance a career and trying to get it right. But I think a lot of times there's a lot more guilt both from society and self imposed sometimes on women regarding those issues. No doubt about it. I think there was probably some discussion about that last night in the breakout meeting for the White Coat investor conference. All right, so tell me about your upbringing. How did that affect how you manage money?

You know, I don't think I got a lot of financial education growing up. My father was a physician, but money was not really something that we discussed. And so really I kind of educated myself after I came out of residency once I was bringing home a larger salary and I needed to know what to do with, with all the money that I was making.

You looking into ways to change that with the next generation?

I am. You know, I have already signed up for a program called Famzoo, which is an allowance program and they get little credit cards that they can use to manage money. But mainly I think the big difference with how I raised my son is I'm just, you know, my parents didn't want their kids to worry about money, so they never talked about it. But with my son, I'm being very open on talking about things like that, talking about why we don't maybe drive as fancy of a car as his friends parents have and just being very opening up my personal finances to him so that he can hopefully make good decisions going forward.

Awesome. Well, congratulations on your success. This is really very remarkable. Nine years out of residency, $2.8 million net worth. It's really impressive what you've done. Congratulations on your success.

Thank you.

And thank you for coming on the My Code Investor podcast. You're very welcome. All right, so some takeaways from her story. I mean, it's pretty incredible if you add up $400,000 and you multiply it by nine. What does that work out to be? Well, that's only about $3.6 million, right? So they made $3.6 million. Despite paying all those taxes and all those living expenses, they've still got 2.8 million of it, which is really quite remarkable and shows a dedication to paying down debt, to investing regularly, to not messing with those investments. So they continue to grow and keeping that lifestyle under control. So it's really a pretty impressive story, but really something that anybody out there in this audience can do. The White Coat Investor is proud to introduce our no Hype Real Estate Investing course which will provide the framework for developing further knowledge and experience as you progress in your real estate investing career. We call it an introductory course because there's always more to learn, but this is no short, superficial course. There are over 200 lectures and videos adding up to more than 27 hours of content by over 15 different instructors. We think it just might be the best real estate course on the planet. Continue your wealth building journey today with the no Hype Real Estate Investing course@whitecoatinvestor.com courses. You can do this and the White Coat Investor can help. Keep your head up, shoulders back. You've got this and we can help. We'll see you next week on the Milestones to Millionaire podcast.

My dad, your host, Dr. Dahl, is a practicing emergency physician, blogger, author and podcaster. He is not a licensed accountant, attorney or financial advisor. So this podcast is for your entertainment and information only and should not be considered official personalized financial advice.