WCI #225: Q&A - Single Income Docs, Insuring Jewelry, Best Time of Year to Retire, Over Saving in a 529

This is the White Coat Investor podcast where we help those who wear the white coat get a fair shake on Wall Street. We've been helping doctors and other high income professionals stop doing dumb things with their money since 2011. Here is your host, Dr. Jim Dahli. This is White Coat Investor podcast number 225. Large families with single income insuring jewelry, best time of year to retire and over saving in the 529. Welcome back to the podcast. We're recording this one on August 13th. It's going to run on August 26th. It's been actually a couple of weeks since we recorded a podcast. I spent part of that in Oregon at a cabin that belongs to my wife's uncle, as well as a trip up with my wife and some friends to climb Mount Moran and the Tetons. It's been a great summer. It's interesting to try to balance having two jobs with trying to live a fire. Lifestyle becomes very different, I think, than a lot of people's lives are. But just like before we were trying to do that. Balance is always a challenge. Always a challenge. And you know, we had an interesting discussion with a friend while we were up in Jackson. You know, the truth is there's always somebody richer than you. And so we had this great discussion with this friend about NetJets, which is basically a service where you have a private jet and you know, you give them six hours notice, they'll come pick you up, take you basically anywhere in the. In North America. America. And it costs of course, thousands of dollars an hour, but it's great because they fly in, you don't have to go through, you know, TSA and the terminal and you know, you're basically met by a private car and you don't have to deal with anybody else being on your flight. It's very Covid safe and you know, there's no layovers or hassle with the airport at all. So it was really interesting to get a glimpse into how some people actually live their lives. But it was a good reminder to me that there's always somebody richer than you. If you're like most doctors, nobody taught you anything about personal finance or investing during your undergrad, professional school or residency. Even though your family and perhaps even your business rely on you to be the chief Financial officer, you have never been given the tools to succeed. Enroll in WCI Financial Boot Camp, a free educational email series, and learn to convert your high income to wealth. You will learn the basics of investing, saving, insurance and more. Your high income alone will not lead to financial success. But as always, we want to help you on your financial journey. Go to whitecoatinvestor.com financialbootcamp to sign up today. You can do this. And the White Coat Investor can help. All right. Gotta love that. Let's talk about some of the things going on here at the White Coat Investor. We have our scholarship program. It's about to wrap up. So those of you who volunteered as judges, your work's about to begin. But for those who are submitting to get the cash for the WCI scholarship, you have until August 31st at Midnight Mountain time to get your submission in. Only professional students enrolled full time in a professional school located in the United states for the 2021, 2022 year and in good academic standing are eligible. Yes, we check that you're not only enrolled, but that you're in good academic standing. They have to be brick and mortar schools. No online schools. We've got over $76,000 in cash and prizes raised and we're going to give it all, all the way. You can still donate to the scholarship if you like. You can still volunteer to be a judge if you like. Just send an email to scholarshiphitecoatinvestor.com with the words volunteer judge in the subject line. You have to be a working or retired professional. You can't be a student or a resident and be a judge@the whitecoatinvestor.com scholarship. You can donate money to the scholarship. 100% of the money we raised goes to students. If you would like to apply for the scholarship, it's whitecoatinvestor.com scholarship application. All right, in case you don't know, WC Icon 22 registration is going to open Tuesday, September 14th at 7:00pm Mountain Time. This is going to be an awesome conference. It's in Phoenix this year. It's in Phoenix February 9th through 12th, 2022. And we've got some great speakers lined up, some great keynotes, some awesome breakouts. We've got great events. It's going to be a big wellness focus with, you know, events after classes. I think there's going to be a pickleball tour and some golf stuff and some awesome stuff going on at this great resort in northeastern Phoenix just north of Scottsdale. But really looking forward to it. But the truth is this thing's probably going to sell out and it's probably going to sell out quickly. So if you want to come, set a reminder in your phone Tuesday, September 14, 7pm Mountain to get on there and sign up the last time we did this. A third of the conference was sold out in seven minutes and the whole thing was sold out in 23 hours. Maybe it'll be faster this time. Maybe it'll be slower. Maybe it won't even sell out. Who knows? But I suspect it probably will. And pretty quickly now we'll have a virtual option as well. But that's not quite the same thing. So if you want to come to the live version, make sure you get on there right at 7pm on September 14th and get signed up. All right. We're going to talk a little bit later with Gretchen Green in this podcast. She's the one who runs our partner course on becoming an expert witness. So if you have interest in that, be sure to stick around at the very end of the podcast. We're going talk with her for a little bit. She's having a sale on her course. It's going for just a few more days. It's going to go through August 30th, and then the course goes live on August 30th. So that's a $3,000 course. But if you want to get into this kind of side gig, this new thing you can do with your expertise that you already have and probably earn a higher hourly rate than what you're doing practicing medicine, this may be very worthwhile course for you and well worth the money you spend on it. But we'll be talking with her a little bit later in the episode. All right. I wanted to do a book correction. Okay. This year we sent out hundreds of thousands of the White Coat Investors Guide for Students. Okay. And there was a bit of an issue in the book, actually a relatively minor issue. But if it matters to you, it matters to you. So I want to issue a correction on that. In the section about the National Health Service Corps, the book said your commitment is two years of service for each year of scholarship received. That's not true. It's year for year, just like the HPSB scholarship and you do have a minimum of two years. So if you only take out one year of commitment, you'll owe two years. But if you take out four years, get paid four years on that scholarship, then your commitment's actually only four years. So let's get that correction out there so people know it's always been right. In the blog post, I knew that is the way it was, but for whatever reason, screwed it up in the book. So we'll get it fixed in future books. But for those of you who have a copy of the current guide for students, note that error that's in it. Let's talk for just a minute about those contracts. Scholarship's really the wrong word for these. These are contracts. And I include the Military Health Profession Scholarship Program. I include the National Health Service Corps Program. I also include really an MD, PhD. Each of these, you know, sounds like a scholarship. But a scholarship is when somebody just writes you a check. Kind of like the white coat investor scholarship. Here's some money. Enjoy school. Thanks for what you do. Right. That's what a scholarship is. These are contracts. For example, the Health Professions Scholarship Program. Hpsp. This is the military program. Basically, they give you a living stipend. It's just over $2,000 a month while you're in school. They pay for all your books and fees and tuition. So the theory is that you can come out of medical school without debt. Well, that sounds great, except you have a debt, you have a time debt. You owe the military four years of active duty. Not to mention you do also have to go through the military match, which has its own peculiarities with it. So how does the military work? Well, it generally pays you less than what you would make as a civilian doc. So they give you the money up front, but it's really not additional money. So if you want to be a military doc anyway, it makes sense to take out the HPSB scholarship. In fact, if you want to spend your whole career in the military, you're probably better off going to USUs, the military medical school, financially speaking anyway. But if you don't actually want to be a military doc, you're not coming out ahead financially by doing this. Unless you are in a very low paid specialty, going to a very expensive school, or you really don't manage money very well. But the truth is, most of us, if we'll live like a resident, we can pay off our student loans in less than four years and have actually a shorter commitment than the military. And when you're living like a resident, nobody's going to deploy you to the other side of the planet either. Kind of similar thing with National Health Service Corps. If you want to work in primary care in an underserved community, whether that's inner city or whether that's rural, then this is a great route to go. You might as well get the money. It'll help you pay for your schooling, you know, and you're going there anyway, so you might as well get it. But if you don't actually want to do that sort of service, this is not a good idea. Don't sign up for it. Okay. You know, chances are you can just live like a resident and be done in less time than you would owe to the National Health Service Corps. Same thing with an MD, PhD, right? You're gonna spend a number of years in school not making 200,300, $400,000, whatever you were gonna make as an attending physician, because you're spending that time on your PhD. And that money could easily be used to pay off your loans again if you live like a resident when you come out of school. So if you wanna get a PhD, you might as well do an MD PhD program. But if you don't want to do a PhD, this is not a good way to pay for medical school. Hope that's helpful. All right. A couple other things I wanted to talk about. I want to talk briefly about inflation. Okay. Inflation's been a little bit interesting this year in that it kind of spiked up. Okay. If you look at the numbers in January, year over year, inflation was about 1.4%. In February, it went to 1.68%. Then in March, 2.62%. April, 4.16%. May, 4.99%. In June, 5.39%. And then recently in July, when they reported the numbers, it was 5.37%. I hope this means it's peaked because inflation up over 5% is really not good for our economy. It's not good for your savings. When all you're making in your savings account is 0.6% and all you're making on your bonds is 1 or 2%, you're actually losing money there after inflation. But hopefully the Fed is right. They've been saying, hey, this is just transitory. It's going to. The rate is going to come back down, and hopefully it will. Maybe it's already peaked, but keep an eye on that as the months go on. The student loan holiday was extended. It's now extended not just through September 31st, but now through January 31st. I was kind of surprised. I felt like the economy had kind of recovered enough that they didn't need to keep doing this. But it sounds like they're going to do it at least one more time. They're describing this as a final extension, but I guess maybe nothing's final until it actually happens. But in total, this is going to be over 22 months of student loan holiday. 0% interest on those federal student loans, no payments due. And this has been a massive stimmy check for those of you who owe large amounts of federal student loans. If you've been going if you're an attending, if you've been attending the last couple of years, going for public service loan forgiveness, I mean, if your payments are two or three thousand dollars a month, you basically just got handed a check for 40 to 60 thousand dollars. That's what this student loan holiday means to you. Even if you are paying back your student loans and they've been at 0% for a couple of years, let's say you have 6% loans, $200,000 of them. Now that's $12,000 a year in interest that you haven't had added to your loans and you haven't had to pay. So that's a $24,000 stimulus there for you. That's better than most businesses got in PPP stimulus money and certainly better than most individuals got with their $1200. So this has been a pretty massive stimulus. I hope you've been able to enjoy that. I guess it's going to come to an end though, eventually, as all good things must. But be prepared for that. If you're planning on paying off your loans, you know, you probably need to be thinking about getting those refinanced come the end of January. Look especially at SOFI and Common Bond. They are trying to do special deals to entice you to refinan before that time common bonds giving you six months, zero percent when you refinance. So if you refinanced in November, December or January, you might even be able to extend that 0% period for a period of time there. Be aware there's lots of fine print associated with those programs, so make sure you read it all. We've tried to keep it up to date on our whitecoatinvestor.com student loan refinancing page. So take a look there and get the details for those programs. All right. Let's talk for a minute about a request I had come in by email. This was Any chance you all could feature a special episode for single income docs with large families that is 4 to 5 plus kids early in their careers? Thanks. Well, that's me, right? I mean I was a single income doc for a long time until Katie started working for the White Coat Investor a few years ago. And I guess we're a large family. It doesn't feel like a large family here in Utah, but we have four kids and so for a long time we're, you know, in early career and so I feel like I can talk about this from personal experience. It doesn't seem very unusual at all to me. I Guess there's lots of dual income families. There's lots of two DOC families out there. There's obviously lots of families with fewer kids than we have, but this seems like regular life to me. So can you make it as a single income DOC with a large family? Absolutely. I mean, look at me, right? I came out of residency in 2006. Yes. I didn't have student loans, but I was also only making $120,000. That's all the military was paying me, $120,000 a year. It was a little bit tax advantaged, but at $120,000 a year, there's only so much tax you'd be paying anyway. And we had one kid when I got out of residency. Katie was pregnant with our second one, and a couple of years later, we had our third one. So there we were, living in a little townhome, trying to live like a resident for a few more years to build some wealth and pumping out the kids. I was driving a beater, a true beater. Katie had a nicer car, she was driving. And then about three years out, we bought a Sequoia that I'm actually still driving. But what advice can I give you in this situation? Well, here's the deal. The average American household's making about $60,000. So even if you're on a single income, single physician income, you're probably making at least $150,000, probably more like $200,000, maybe $300,000. That's five times the average American household income, the median American household income. And so there's still plenty of money there with which to build wealth. Now, you've got a few things hanging over your head. Chances are, if you went through training with a bunch of kids, you probably got more debt than the average bear. And so you need a plan to take care of that. And it's a little bit harder to live like a resident when you have a bunch of mouths to feed as well. And so maybe you have to give yourself a little more of a raise when you come out of residency than you otherwise would. But you've still got to hold the line. You still got to take care of business. You got to save up down payment for your dream home. You got to pay off those student loans within two to five years, you got to start maxing out those retirement accounts and catching up to your college roommates. And the way you do that is holding the line on your spending and doing what you can to get your income up. Now, a lot of times that means a Buy in to a partnership. Maybe for a dentist it means buying practice. Maybe it means working a lot of hours. You know, live like a resident doesn't just reflect your spending, it also reflects your hours. And the harder you work in the beginning, the easier things get. By mid career, you also have fewer retirement accounts available. You can still do a spousal backdoor Roth IRA, of course, but you don't have two 401 s. You're certainly not going to get a spouse's 401 A or 403 or 457 or defined benefit plan or whatever. But chances are at this point you're probably only maxing out retirement accounts anyway. It's pretty hard to get a lot of savings above and beyond that while you're still taking care of student loans. So those are your big focuses. Keep your family first. But at the same time, you've got to keep a lid on the spending or you'll get in trouble. And by mid career you'll be like a lot of docs. I know. I know a doc with seven kids who's same stage of career as me, working 16 night shifts a month. And why? Because they spend a whole lot more money than we do and that's the life they've chosen. But he's going to be working a full career and probably not having nearly as nice of retirement. Now. The kids are having a pretty nice life right now, but there are consequences to living your life like that. So when the kids are young, they don't know the difference and you might as well save some money. Hope that's helpful. All right, let's take a question off the speak pipe. This one from Diana. Let's take a listen.

Hi Dr. Dali, thank you for all that you do. I'm a pulmonary critical care doctor in Illinois and I have a question about 529s. Since physicians are high income earners, I don't often hear people discuss the implications of saving too much for college. How do you know if you're over saving in your 529? If you meet your child's college savings goals before, say age 16, should you convert all of your equities to cash to avoid risk in the market? And should you stop funding it even if your state provides a tax benefit? For example, in Illinois, for households that are married filing jointly, we receive a tax benefit for up to $20,000 of our 529 contributions. Would love to hear your thoughts on these issues. Thanks again.

Great question, Diana, and thanks for what you do. Critical care Medicine is important and difficult. A lot of difficult situations in critical care. This one's easier to deal with than Critical Care 529s. It's great to put money in there. It's great to save money for college and education, but don't prioritize it over your retirement. Easiest to help people from a position of strength. So make sure retirement first. And if you got extra, then you can start saving for college. But in general, how do you know if you're saving too much? You don't, because you don't know what that kid's going to spend. Right. Like, for example, I've got a kid right now that thinks she's probably going to go to either a state or a private school here in Utah, and the tuition is going to be 5 to $10,000. I got way too much in her 529 to pay for her undergraduate education. The whole thing twice. Probably she could do with what's in the 529. But she's also talking about going to medical school, and there's not enough in that 529 to pay for her to go to four years of medical school, even if she finds a really inexpensive medical school at this point. So I don't know if I have too much or not enough because I really don't know what her career plans are going to be. And so good luck with that, you know, decision of how much to actually put in there. And of course, without knowing that, it's impossible to know if you should stop putting money in, if you should scale back, how aggressively you're investing it, et cetera. But here's the deal. Here's what the escape valve is. The relief valve is for an overfunded 529, presumably you're going to care about your grandkids just as much as you care about your kids. And so chances are, if there's money left over after your kid's done with college, you're going to leave that in the 529. And when they have kids, you're just going to change the beneficiary. And because there's probably multiple kids, it's going to be divided in half or in threes or fours. And so it's going to be just fine, even with the additional compound interest to be able to cover their education. And I suppose it could even the beneficiary could even be changed. Again, what you probably don't want to do is pull the money out and use it for something else. The penalty on that and the fact that gains are now taxed at ordinary income rates rather than capital gains rates does not make that a great way to save for retirement or any other goals other than education. So when you put money in a 529, think of it as this is a commitment to family education that I'm making. It may not be used by the next generation, but it's eventually going to be used by somebody down the line for education. And I hope that's helpful to you. If you're the type that you want to have the exact amount and you want to pay for all their schooling and you're really worried that the stock market's gonna crash as they get to be, you know, 16, 17, 18, then you might want to dial back how aggressively you're investing it. But I'm really aggressive in my 529s. And the reason why is, let's say there was a market downturn right as they started school. What's the big deal, right? I got plenty of cash flow. I can just pay for that year or the year first two years out of cash flow, then use 529 for later years. And so I feel like I might as well take advantage of that tax free growth. That's really the benefit. 529. And I invest my 529 pretty darn aggressively. All right, great question. Let's talk about investing extra money. Now we've got a question from Josh on the speak pipe.

Hello Jim, longtime listener, first time caller. This is Josh and I'm a university employed academic emergency physician from Georgia and I'm in my late 30s. My question is regarding where to invest, quote unquote, extra money. I have a sufficient emergency fund. I'm saving sufficiently for my retirement with a generous employer match maxed out 403B, a backdoor Roth IRA for myself and my wife and an HSA intended to use during retirement. My wife also has a 403B that is partially funded. I have no desire to retire early. I am putting up to the tax deduction limit into a 529. I have a 30 year mortgage which I'm putting extra principal in to pay off in 20. I have no student loan, car or any other debt after recently paying for my cars. I have extra money that has not been allocated as part of my investment plan. I'd like to save for something in the future such as a home renovation, lavish vacation, or even to invest in a real estate syndicate or something like that. None of these have true timelines, but rather when I get the money, I'll spend it on something. Sticking it on a savings account doesn't make sense. And I prefer it have a chance to grow till I have enough for whatever I want to spend it on at that time. Do you have suggestions for how to invest this money? Would you tell me to stop being stupid and put more in retirement accounts that have room of 529 or something else? Thanks for your time.

Congratulations, Josh. You win. This is where we're all trying to get to, right? We've got extra money coming in that we don't actually need to meet any of our financial goals. So there's lots of things you can do with that. In your case, you've still got a mortgage, you can pay off the mortgage, right? If nothing else, that'll give you a 2% or 3% return. It's guaranteed return and it will improve your cash flow down the line. Now, even if you are sure you want to work for 20 or 30 or 40 or 60 years or whatever, you know, that may change and you may really appreciate having that cash flow freed up down the line. So I'd give pretty serious thought to throwing some of that extra money at the mortgage you mentioned. It sounded like that you hadn't maxed out your retirement accounts. I guess I would encourage you to do that as well. If you have that much retirement account space available to you and you're saving more and you don't have a finite goal for this money yet, that's a great place to put it. There are tax benefits, there's asset protection benefits, there are estate planning benefits. Retirement accounts are great places to save extra money. Likewise, you ought to look at your, you know, education, saving goals. Are you meeting them? If you are, then you don't need to put more money in a 529. But if you have extra money, maybe you can meet those goals even earlier than you were otherwise planning to. And then of course, it's always okay to spend some money. If you want to go spend some money on a fancy vacation or you want to buy a Tesla or whatever, you can go and do that. If you're not sure, you just think down the line, maybe at some point you might want something like that. I'd still encourage you to just invest it according to your long term plan. You can always liquidate that investment. You know, it's going to be a tax penalty, obviously, if you have it in your retirement account, but you can always liquidate the investment, pay any taxes due and spend it later. But what usually happens is you simply. Since money is fungible, you simply take earnings from later and you stop investing at that point and use that to pay for your home renovation, or you use that to pay for, you know, your luxury vacation or your Tesla or whatever. But I would encourage you to actually make finite plans. Say I want to, you know, do a home renovation that's going to cost me $250,000 two years from now or whatever, and set that up. Figure out how much you need to be putting toward it every month. And maybe that eats up your entire extra that you've got carved out of your budget at this point. But if you just think you might want to do a home renovation at some point, then I wouldn't even bother starting to save for it. Until you're sure that's something you want to do. I hope that's helpful. It's a good place to be. But it's a dilemma a lot of us struggle with. You know, how much do we give? How much do we spend? How much do we save toward retirement? How much do we save toward college? How much do we put toward debt? You know, there's no right answer to any of this. It all comes down to your financial priorities, your written financial plan, and what you want to do with your life and your money. So I hope that's helpful. Congratulations on your success and thanks for what you do. Thanks to all of you for what you do. I mean, you're listening to this podcast presumably because you have high income, and high income jobs generally are difficult jobs that you spend a long time training for. You know, it was interesting. I saw a tweet this week from somebody that said, I didn't know residency was going to be this hard. And I'm like, yep, it's this hard. It's really hard to go through residency. And many of you have done it, and you should be proud of what you've done. But you deserve, by virtue of having gone through something that the vast majority of people on the planet cannot do. You deserve to be earning a pretty decent income, and you deserve to be financially secure. So take those steps now with your high income to make sure that you do become financially secure. All right, this one comes in via email. A question about insuring jewelry. I was wondering about your thoughts about insuring jewelry. I hear you always say that you don't believe in insurance when you can self insure. Well, my wife's wedding engagement ring is about $22,000 in value. I pay $258 per year to insure it. She barely wears it out of the house anyway. If it got lost, we would be annoyed but definitely not incapable of replacing it. Would you pay this $258 per year to wear it more comfortably? Well, here's the deal. $258 a year is not going to break you. Right. This isn't going to affect your finances one way or the other. The right answer, the academically right answer is if you can afford to replace something, you shouldn't insure it. You should self insure it. But I confess, we have a policy on my wife's ring which is worth dramatically less than that particular ring because we were broke when we bought it. And I think we pay something like five bucks a month to insure it. I just never turned it off, I suppose is why we still have that policy. But you mentioned some at the end that she wears it more comfortably knowing it's insured. And if it makes her more comfortable to wear it out and about, I just pay for the insurance. Otherwise realize it's just one of those risks in life if she loses it. All right. A quote of the day today comes from Thomas Edison said we should remember that good fortune often happens when opportunity meets with preparation. All right. Our next question is also off the speak pipe about timing retirement in the calendar. You this is from Susie. Let's take a listen. My husband is a urologist and would.

Like to retire next year. But we are wondering, does it make.

A difference whether you retire halfway through.

The year, the end of the year in March? We have never seen that question addressed.

Yeah, I think you're better off retiring partway through the year rather than at the very beginning of the year. And the reason why is just like that year you came out of residency where you had half a resident income and half an attending income, you end up with half an attending income. And there's a lot of tax planning that can be done in a year that you have less income. Right. You can still max out retirement accounts, but all of a sudden now there's room for Roth conversions and that sort of stuff. And so I think it makes a lot of sense to retire at some point during the year. Now in the medical world, your partners or your employer, whoever, will really appreciate it if you don't retire until July or August because that tends to be the time that doctors change jobs. That's the time people are coming out of residency and fellowship and they're available to come and work and replace you. And so I know my partnership really appreciates it when people retire in July and August. But the truth is you only get so many summers in your life, and so it makes a lot of sense, if you like to do a lot of stuff in the summer, like I do, to maybe retire before summer hits, maybe April or so. So I think those are probably the two main times I would think about retiring would be Aprilish and August. Ish. But I think those are both probably smarter times to retire than January 1st. But you know what? If you got enough money and you're sick of working and you're just ready to get out the door, you know, January 1st works, January 1st works, and that's perfectly fine as well. But I'd try to have at least part of a year of work there. All right, I think it's time to get Gretchen Green on the phone here. Let's get her on. And let's talk about being a medical expert witness and how you might add that to your multiple streams of income. All right, Dr. Green, welcome back to the White Coat Investor podcast.

Thanks so much for having me back.

So, for those who might have missed your previous interview, can you tell us briefly about yourself?

Absolutely. I'm a diagnostic radiologist. I've been in private practice in North Carolina since 2016. I'm sorry, 2006. Time flies. And I now teach a course to help teach physicians how to become expert witnesses.

So you're an expert?

I am. And the great thing is, so are all of our medical colleagues. That's one of the biggest blocks that people face is realizing that they already have the skills to do this work. Just as when a patient comes in the door, you either know what to do, you're going to figure it out. It's the same exact situation with expert witness work.

And why do you think doctors are attracted to doing expert witness work?

I think there's two major draws. The first is that it's a great way to supplement your income. It's very time and financially efficient. So in three hours a week, using a standard hourly billing rate of around 600 to 900 an hour, you can make six figures at a side gig in one year. It's not difficult to do again using those skills. And the other, better part of it, I think, which is why people stay with the work, is that it's so intellectually fascinating. Every case is a new opportunity to learn. I really enjoy working with attorneys. I learn something from every case, and it helps me be a better doctor, too.

In what ways do you think it's helped you improve your practice?

Because we need as experts to support our opinions with literature. I stay on top of medical literature. I know differences in different areas in the countries or where it may not exist or we have a lot of common practice. And I stay on top of my learning some always learning new things.

Now we've gotten some great feedback about the course from white coat investors that took it last time and obviously if you can turn this into a six figure side gig, the course, both the time and the cost of the course is a great investment. But what has the course changed over since the last time we we mentioned it on the podcast here.

Yeah, the course has continued to evolve as we have now more tools at our disposal for collaboration remotely. It took a while for attorneys and for courts, I think, to change some of their practices, but now so much has gone remote that a lot of the barriers that people worried about before would they have to travel, would they have to take extra time out of their schedule, those have been reduced further and it's really leveraged people's time, I think more efficiently as we've been able to use more of our remote tools like video conferencing for depositions and now possibly even for trials. I've also found that using zoom with attorneys has really enhanced my communications. I'm able to review PowerPoints of images in a way that literally the image says 1000 words. And attorneys have really come to appreciate that a lot and see value for their understanding of cases.

So what should somebody taking the course expect? I mean, what happens when you take the course?

My intent is for this course to help you avoid a lot of the pitfalls that that are there that you might encounter if you learned it by trial and error. You'll find a lot quicker success and a lot greater confidence knowing a roadmap from a how to course like this, rather than some of the negative feelings that you get from kind of finding your own pitfalls along the way. We take eight weeks each week has a recorded module and a live Q and A opportunities also in Facebook groups for interaction and collaboration with other experts and physicians. By the time you get to the end of it, you'll know how to start getting your first case, how to enhance your marketing to grow your practice, and how to think strategically ahead about really being an owner of this as your own business. I think as now we see statistics of 70% of physicians are employed, not practice owners. There's never been a better time to have something in your life like this that gives you flexibility and the ability to have ownership of what you do. We touch on all of those things, including that mindset of building something new, using again those skills you already have.

Have you had any students that have kind of transitioned to expert witnessing as the main gig and are now practicing less?

We've definitely had students who have transitioned and have reduced their clinical time, who have supplemented their hours doing expert witness work. People have made amazing progress so fast. I have one student, remember, this course has only been around for a year now, but I've got one student who's actually going to trial next month in a case.

Cool. So if you're interested in taking this expert witness course, you can sign up for that@whitecoatinvestor.com ExpertWitness. Anything else they should know about it before we let you go?

I would just emphasize that there's never been a better time to put your skills to work in a way like this. You just apply that same principle that when a patient walks in the door, you have the knowledge and expertise to know what to do. With uncertainty comes opportunity. Now with the delta variant, I think a lot of us are struggling with that feeling of uncertainty, not only with our jobs, but with our lives in general. This is just one way that you can recoup the cost of the course with one case that you get. It's very low risk and it's just a great opportunity for people to take this measure of control and really take pride in what they do and enjoy the work.

Awesome. Well, thank you for coming back on the White Coat Investor podcast and thanks for developing this great course.

Thanks so much for having me back.

All right, that was great to talk to Gretchen. If you are interested in that course, you can go to whitecoatinvestor.com expertwitness and sign up for that. It's not the cheapest course. It's 3,000 bucks. It goes live on August 30, but it may be worth thousands and thousands of dollars to you going forward. If you're really interested in being an expert witness, remember, sign up for WCICON 22 September 14th. That's a Tuesday at 7pm Mountain is when that will open up. And don't forget those of you who want to apply to get or to judge the White Coat Investor Scholarship. That's whitecoatinvestor.com scholarshipapplication or sending an email with volunteer judge in the subject line to scholarshiphitecodeinvestor.com if you're like most doctors, nobody taught you anything about personal finance or investing during your undergrad, professional school or residency. Even though your family and perhaps even your business rely on you to be the Chief Financial Officer. You have never been given the tools to succeed. Enroll in WCI Financial Bootcamp, a free educational email series, and learn to convert your high income to wealth. You will learn the basics of investing, saving, insurance and more. Your high income alone will not lead to financial success, but as always, we want to help you on your financial journey. Go to whitecoatinvestor.com financialbootcamp to sign up today. You can do this and the White Coat Investor can help. Thanks to those of you who've left us a five star review and told your friends about the podcast. Our most recent one is from Ombre down the Way Said the Best Financial Podcast this podcast does an excellent job of helping people like me avoid stupid mistakes. I previously thought I knew a lot, but I didn't know what I didn't know. Every podcast has at least one thing that helps me improve my finances. Thank you for sharing your knowledge. Keep your head up, your shoulders back. You've got this and we can help. We'll see you next time on the White Coat Investor Podcast.

My dad, your host, Dr. Daly, 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.