WCI #293: Life after Financial Independence

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.

This is White Coat Investor podcast number 293. Did you know that the White Coat.

Investor not only has a podcast and a blog, but several books that will help you on your way to financial independence. The these books cover topics such as asset protection and minimizing your taxes to keep more of your hard earned money. They discuss plans for insurance, housing spending, student loan elimination, investing and estate planning. You can learn how to become a millionaire within five to 10 years of leaving residency and how to invest in a sensible, low cost and effective manner with or without the assistance of a financial advisor. There's even a book geared directly toward medical and dental students so you can start optimizing your finances or early in your professional journey. Find the book that is right for you at the WCI store, at shop.whitecoatinvestor.com or on Amazon. You can do this and the White Coat Investor can help.

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You have enough.

So let's get them on the line to talk about that. Our guests on the White Coat Investor podcast today are Dr. Nisha Mehta, the founder of Position Side Gigs, and Dr. Leif Dahleen, the founder of the Position on Fire. Welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having us.

Thank you, Jim. Good to be back.

We've known each other for a long time and I thought this would be a really fun conversation to have. It's purely gonna be about life after financial independence. The three of us have had a great blessing in our lives to be able to be financially independent in our 40s. And, you know, the interesting thing about the personal finance space is there's lots of, of material out there teaching you how to get rich, how to get financially independent, how to become wealthy. There's very little out there that talks about how to be wealthy and how to live after you're financially independent. And so I thought we'd talk a little bit about that today. But I think perhaps we should start just giving readers or listeners, those who maybe don't know you that well, to talk a little bit about your journey to financial independence. And Leif, why don't we start with you? You're the one most close associated with the FIRE movement. And let's just give a short, you know, recap of what it took for you to become financially independent in your 40s.

Sure. I'll, I'll be pretty brief because I think a lot of your listeners have heard this story before. But essentially I went Straight through undergrad, medical school, residency, finished when I was 30, started doing locums, like the day after I finished residency, basically the Monday after, I think I finished on a Friday. And, you know, for two years I made great money and all of my expenses were paid by locums, agencies and the hospitals that were hiring. And so I got used to saving most of my income right off the bat those first couple of years. And when I settled down into a, quote unquote permanent position, you know, I'd already been in that habit for a couple of years. So I would say on average, over the course of a 13 year anesthesia career, I probably saved half or more of my income. Some years were more, some years were less. But given a pretty good run in the stock market, that actually included a really terrible run early on in my career, which turned out to be a good thing because that allowed me to invest when the market was down and ride it all the way up throughout about a 10, 15 year the bull market. I realized by the time I was about to turn 40 that I had enough money to maintain our relatively modest lifestyle. And I say relative for a physician because we were spending a bit under a hundred thousand a year once all of our debts, including mortgage and student loan debts, were paid off. And it occurred to me that I didn't have to work if I didn't want to. And that was a shocking revelation. At age 39, I worked for another four years and of course started writing about it. And that's how the physician on fire thing came to be. But ultimately I did leave medicine behind three plus years ago in the summer of 2019, and been enjoying life in a different way with a lot more freedom since then.

All right, thank you, Nisha. You want to tell your story?

Yeah. So my story, I guess, is not as we didn't really set out to, to achieve financial independence. And we started out early, kind of in scarcity mentality, I guess. You know, we were both, we got married relatively early. I was 24 when I got married. My husband and I have been dating for five years since college. And, you know, we started out as two residents in New York City, actually an intern in New York City and I was still a fourth year med student. And so we got used to living very frugally, very early on because we were living in the city on, you know, $47,000 between the two of us. And so we started out just for that first six to seven years when we were living in New York City. We're just very used to like, you know, we walked instead of taking the subway because $2 on the subway was just, you know, we were like, do we need to. Can we just walk? And so we, we did that for a long time. And I think that sort of mentality still sticks with you even when you don't need it anymore. And so when my husband, I was doing my radiology residency, my husband was doing his general surgery residency. And then we moved to North Carolina. When my husband matched at Duke for his plastics fellowship, I took on a faculty position at Chapel Hill. I was still on an academic salary as a radiologist. Again, we both had student loans. It didn't feel like there was a lot of money going around. Although our cost of living dramatically decreased once we left the city. We had kids. My first kid was during my third year of residency, so we already had a child then and then. And then my second one was my first year as an attending, so it never felt like there was a lot of money to go around. My husband's still a fellow, and honestly, we didn't have time to spend it either because both of us were working so much. You know, I was on faculty with grant funding with two young children, and my husband was home maybe four or five hours a day, if that. I'm not kidding when saying that my second child had legitimate stranger anxiety with my husband cry when my kid, when Prague would come in in the middle of the night and he'd be like, why are you in my mom's room with me? So, you know, we were just. We wouldn't have the time to spend. And so we actually, you know, we'd always been really good about saving and saved as much as we could and put as much money away in retirement as we could. And we were fortunate enough to graduate at a time where our student loans I think were 2.1% or something like that. And then once we made our first on time payment and, you know, set up auto pay and made six months of on time payments or something, our student loans went down to less than 1% or less than 2%. I'm sorry, it's like 1.6% or something. So we paid those off really early while my husband was still a fellow and I was still an academic attending. And then, you know, and then we just launched into this like dual physician lifestyle, which was a very big difference. But we were still living in the same way. You know, I still have the same car today that I had when I was, you know, a fellow. And so. And that's not the case for my husband. My husband likes cars and has a very nice car. So, I mean, we pick what you like, obviously, and I'm totally okay with it. But we didn't lifestyle inflate very much at the beginning. And all of a sudden we had a plastic surgery fellow or a plastic surgery income and a radiologist income. And so, you know, I started this side business that was also making quite a bit of money. And so we went from not having a lot of money. My realtor always likes to laugh. When we arrived in Charlotte, we were still in residency mentality, kind of, and we were renting for two years, and the houses that we were looking at then versus even two years later than that were very different. And even now, the house that we live in is probably a lot less than what other people with our income would probably make. And so I think we just kind of were in that mentality for a while, and that was a surefire so sort of way to financial independence for us because we were making so much and we were saving such a large percentage of it. We were not living frugally. I mean, once we. Once we had the two attending salary, you know, we did stuff. We started taking nicer vacations, we started having more freedom and going out for dinner, things like that. You know, I mean, we didn't. We stopped thinking about budgeting, but, you know, we spared the major expenses and spent a lot of money on the easy things to make our life better. And by doing that, I think it was 37 when we reached our financial independence number. And it's just been, I think, for us, we both love what we do. Clinically, the desire is not to leave medicine for us. I've certainly cut back as I've focused on some other things, but we both really love what we do. I don't think I could buy my husband out of the OR if I tried. So I've given up on trying. But we take more vacation days. He ends his days earlier when he wants to end and his days earlier. We've dropped things that don't make us happy. So, you know, I no longer take any call. My husband has dropped procedures that he doesn't like or like certain types of call that he doesn't like. So we've tried to improve our lifestyle, but, you know, we're very happy doing what we're doing. And so I don't. I don't see us leaving medicine anytime soon, but certainly practicing on our own terms, which is. Which has been really great.

Yeah. And I think listeners are Fairly familiar with my story. So just from a fi perspective, you know, you talk about making $47,000 as a trainee. That sounds really good. When I signed on for residency in 2003, the salary was 34.

But were you living in New York City?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, $34,000 in Tucson does go a little further, for sure.

We were living on the Upper east side on 96th Street. So, yeah, it was a little bit different on Park Avenue.

So we come out of. We come out of residency in 2006. At that point, we had one child, one in the oven, and Katie was staying. I did not have this huge income coming out. I owed some time to the air Force, and I was making about $120,000 a year. And so we were definitely living frugally. I think the best our savings rate ever got was one year when I had a deployment. I think we saved about 65% of our income that year, but most of the time it was less than that. And so it took us a few years longer than it took either of you to become financially independent. We became millionaires seven years out of residency, so I would have about 38 at that point. So that would have been 2013, and then it was about 2018 when we became financially independent. And it's kind of squishy, you know, at the end there, you know, are you financially independent? Well, you slowly start spending a little bit more now you're not financially independent anymore. So there was a year or two there where it was kind of squishy whether we were actually financially independent. But now clearly. So, you know, four or five years later. But, you know, it's interesting to hit that mark early in your career, you know, before mid career, really. And then, of course, the existential crisis begins, what you're going to do with the rest of your life. But. All right, well, let's turn to a subject that a lot of retirees find themselves in as they're approaching retirement, as they move into retirement, whether they're early retirees or not, which is what I call one more year syndrome. And this can last this period of time can last quite a while. Leif, you want to talk a little bit about what one more year syndrome is and what you did to get over it in order to actually punch out a medicine.

Sure, sure. So, yeah, one more year syndrome is when you realize that you've probably reached that financial independence number and your portfolio will support you for an indefinite period of retirement. But you're a little unsure because there are question marks, because what If I decide to spend a bit more money when I have more free time, what if the market goes kaput and drops 20% like it did this year? What if, what if? You can ask a lot of what ifs now. A lot of those what ifs are really already answered because the idea behind safe withdrawal rates is that they kind of assume just about a worst case scenario. And that's why it's not the 6% withdrawal rate, it's a 4% or maybe 3.5% withdrawal rate that you, that you start with and that you kind of base that financial independence number on. But you know, just to be on the safe side, to be a little more conservative and give yourself a little bit of a cushion, you decide, gosh, if I can work one more year, save another $100,000, I'll have one less year to support myself in retirement and then I'll be in an even better shape. And I get it. Because if you again use that 4% rule, an extra 100 grand, well that's $4,000 a year that you can spend every year indefinitely. If you set aside maybe 2 or 300,000 because you earn a lot of money and save a lot, or you work a couple one more years, now you're looking at an extra 10 grand, maybe an extra 15 grand a year, something like that. And while that, that could buy, you know, box seats at the football stadium or that could buy an extra trip to Europe or Asia every year. Right. And so it's pretty easy to convince yourself that a little bit more, a little bit more is a good idea. And I did go through some of that and I worked about, yeah, for one more years. But when I discovered I had financial independence, it wasn't a goal I had been working towards. It wasn't a plan to get out early, it was just saving for something, investing because I want to see my money grow and then realizing, oh, now I have options, I have. The challenge of choice, I think was the title of the article you recently wrote. What do you do when you have that ability and that, that opportunity? So for me we really based my exiting medicine and my wife was staying at home, you know, primarily with our kids and, and, but we, we, we based my timing to leave my job around the kids age and what we thought would be a good time for them to be out of school and traveling and, and learning from experiences and learning, you know, out in the world, which is what we've done the last three and almost three and a half years. So. Yeah. So how did I get over it. By saving way more than we needed now, we're now living on what would be more like about a 2% withdrawal rate if we were actually withdrawing money.

All right, let's talk a little bit about the role of additional work after fi. Each of us are doing something that we're actually getting paid for still after financial independence. And I'm curious how you each view the role of work in your life, even though you really don't need the money. Let's start with you, Dr. Mehta. Can you talk to us about what role work plays in your life now?

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, to the point of one more year or whatever, you know, one thing is it never really goes away, right? You could always have a little more cushion. You could always. My dad is a cardiologist. He retired. We forced him to retire during COVID at the age of 70. And, you know, he was still kind of like, should I work one more year? Kind of like, are you crazy? Like, you are fine. But that discomfort with not making something after you've been used to making a lot is also something that's very different in terms of, like, now I'm going to be digging into a savings account, and I've never had to dig into savings to do things that I have. Or maybe you're not because you're getting so much money from your pension or your, you know, your Social Security or whatever, but it's still a very different feeling than having a paycheck planned in. In your. In your bank account every time. And I think we're still at the point where we're kind of like, there's a comfort in money coming in. And, you know, there's money that's coming in through real estate investments. There's my. Like to leave's point earlier, we were fortunate to make a lot of money during a time when there was a great market to be investing in. And so that money amplified quickly. And we don't anticipate that same sort of amplification maybe over the next few years or whatever. So there is a little bit of an adjustment. But I think we all know objectively we're fine. And I remember sitting down with my dad when he was making the decision and saying, dad, let's go through every worst case scenario. You are fine if you retire. And for him, it wasn't just the money. It was also, this is a big part of my identity and this is what I want to do. And so it was really hard for him to take that step Back. And to this day now, I'll get side gig opportunities for cardiologists. And he's like, hey, maybe I could. And I'm like, no, no, you're retired. You're done. Like, enjoy your life, you know. But I think there's some of that in all of us where we, like, we still want to be productive and we still want to do things, and there are still things that are really important to me. The money is not one of them anymore. So, you know, I only do things that make me happy. And I think that that's the big shift that we've sort of taken on is kind of, well, we don't want to stop working. But if there's something, you know, I was telling my husband a few months ago, he was complaining about something and I was like, listen, like, you've been complaining about this for three nights in a row now. Maybe this needs to come off of the plate, right? Like, we are fortunate enough. I mean, everybody has bad days and we're always going to have complaints every once in a while. But if there is something in our lives that is causing regular sort of, hey, this is something that's stressing us out or this is something that we complain about, well, we're in a fortunate position where we can take that off the plate. So at some point, it's our fault if we're complaining because we have the ability to get rid of that thing. So I think that's been the biggest, like, decision maker for us. Is, is this something that is causing regular sort of unhappiness or stress or strife or, you know, arguments or whatever? And if so, that. That just has to go because there's no reason. Like, if we're hearing ourselves complaining, we only have ourselves to blame because we, we are in a very fortunate position now, you know, and so I'm kind of like, if it doesn't have to do with like, health, happiness, you know, like, the priorities have to be health and happiness, basically. And then everything else is, you know, do it because you love it. But if you don't love it, then, then why are you doing it? Like you. There's just no point. So I think for us, that's been the guiding principle is do the things you like and do the things that bring you joy and don't have money be the reason. So if there's something that, like somebody that I'm working with that I just really don't enjoy working with or who's constantly trying to lowball me or whatever, I just, I have a low threshold to walk away from the table at this point and just say, you know what? This is just not something I want to do anymore. And knowing that I have the freedom to do that is really, really important in kind of keeping things balanced in terms of, hey, I want to do this, but I also don't want it to dictate my family's overall happiness anymore.

Yeah, I think that's a good tip for me. It kind of got to the point where I started asking, well, what do I want to do with my life? Just because I have money now didn't change that plan. And it was interesting because I didn't know that until I got there. I'm like, well, how much of what I'm doing in medicine am I doing for the money? And it turned out I definitely was working night shifts for the money. I did not actually enjoy those. And so that was a beautiful thing to be able to drop my night shifts. Was I working as much as I was at the time, partially for money? Absolutely. But when I cut back on the shifts, then all of a sudden it wasn't about money. I was glad to do it. I've still got my partners now asking me, when are you going to retire? Why are you still here? And the answer is, I didn't go through all this in my twenties just to be able to walk away at the earliest possible moment. And I don't know whether they think I'm crazy still because of that or not. They still let me come in and work shifts. So I had a shift yesterday. I spent 8 hours in the ER yesterday, took care of a car wreck from an accident that was literally right in front of the hospital, which was a pretty bad one. So there's a pleasure to work. The way I look at it is if work is not keeping me from doing anything I want to do, and it gives me a little bit of structure to my life, makes me feel like I have some purpose, why not keep doing it? I wrote a blog post about adding adventure to your life. And by the time I was done with the blog post, my staff wouldn't even let me run it. They're like, you cannot run this post, because all this post is going to say to your audience is, I have an awesome life and you don't. And if I can take enough trips in one year that I can't even tell my audience about them and yet still work, you know, well, what's it really keeping me from doing? And what we've found is the limiting factor that keeps Us from doing even more play, even more travel, et cetera is our kids, our kids lives, our kids schedules, making sure they're in school enough. More so than, you know, work. Work is not the limiting factor, particularly since WCI work and in particular can, you know, be wedged into different time periods. It's very time independent and it's very location independent. We can work from just about anybody or anywhere in the world with cell phone coverage. And so it's only my shifts that I have to be in a certain place at a certain time. Most of the other work, I can move around quite a bit at my convenience.

I think that's like such an important point in terms of just. It's funny because we all love the heart of what we do. I think majority of us love the heart of what we do. Physicians and it feels really good to go to work and be a physician. And like everybody, I mean, I always tell everybody my clinical days are my favorite days of the month now because they are actually the least stressful of any of my days. I go in, I like, I get to see my friends that, you know, I worked with and I was working full time. I work per diem at the same place now. And, you know, I go in, I see everyone, I get to hang out. I like, go into a room and I'm a radiologist, right? So I literally go into a room, a dark room, and I like, turn off the lights and. And then I just turn on the images and like, my, my mind goes into autopilot mode. My team knows they're not allowed to contact me. It's like I exist in a vacuum for 10 hours that day. And it's kind of nice to just shut out the world and be in the zone. And that's like, I love those days and I won't give them up. And it is a very different feeling going to work because you want to be there as opposed to knowing that you have to be there. I mean, I feel like before I, before I switched to per diem, every week was an act of survival in terms of like, okay, Monday morning, I gotta make it till Friday night, and then, you know, and then we'll get to start to do fun stuff again on the weekends. And so being able to go to work right now feels like a privilege. And it's actually like a luxury for me. I mean, they're some of my best days of the month.

I feel like, yeah, for sure. I can relate to that. My life in a lot of ways is much less stressful. While I'm in the er, it's someplace you're comfortable, it's someplace you're competent. You know that anything that comes through the doors, you have the skills to take care of. And that's not always the case when you're pursuing other things that are new and you don't have as much experience with. Okay. So I wrote a blog post the other day called the Challenge of Choice, and it came from a book by that same title that talked about getting what you want and what life's like after you get what you want. And it's a little bit, you know, it's a little bit like the Cheesecake Factory menu, if you've ever been to the Cheesecake Factory. Right. I much prefer to go to. To some catered event where there's three things on the menu, right? There's a beef dish, there's a fish dish, there's a vegetarian dish. But you go to the Cheesecake Factory and you've got 250 choices on the menu. I mean, it takes you 45 minutes just to read the menu. And that's kind of what the challenge of choice is. After Fi. You can do anything. And that can be overwhelming, I think, for a lot of people, including me. Has this been difficult for you, Leif, to have the challenge of choice thrust into your life?

Has it been difficult? No, it's been wonderful. Yeah. Relished in that freedom. But I did read and enjoy that article, and I think I would enjoy reading that book because you can do anything with your time, so you can do what you want to do, and hopefully that makes you happy. But of course, other people are going to be looking at what you're doing and making judgments about that, too. And so internally you're thinking, well, am I wasting my life? Am I wasting my talents? Am I wasting all those hours we put in in our 20s to become physicians by not doing position work anymore? And so that can eat at you a bit. But I've found the freedom to be very satisfying. And I think I've done a pretty good job of kind of not caring too much about what other people think and doing what I think is best for my family. And, you know, I think we're going to talk more about travel, but that's. That's been a big part of what we've done.

We.

We actually hung out with Nisha and her family down in Florida about six or eight months ago, and we've been, I don't know, all over the world. So. Yeah, no, that, that, that big Wide open menu. I find it to be invigorating.

How about you, Nisha?

I agree with Leif that it's a privilege and that it's exciting and it's, you know, it opens up this world of potential. But I will also say that I do find it stressful sometimes because it is sort of, you know, I think we go through this very pre prescribed pathway through medicine where everybody kind of tells us what we're supposed to do with our time and when we're supposed to do it and all of a sudden to have a lot of options and try to figure out, you know, how do I navigate kind of like all these different priorities in my life now that I have the ability to allot time to, you know, what is the amount of time I want to spend to make sure that we have dedicated family time every day? What is the amount of time that I want to spend on, like, some of my other passions? Like, you know, I really enjoy advocacy and health policy and, you know, but now that I have all this time, should I be spending 10 hours on that a week? Should I be spending two hours on that a week? Should I be spending, you know, and then everyone has a pat opinions, right? All of a sudden, like, I realized that everybody's got opinions about what I should be doing and judgments about what I should be doing. And like, leaf, I don't really care what a lot of the people who are not close to me say. But you know, when my mom says something or my dad says something or, you know, my husband says something, I'm kind of like, oh, okay, well, like, you know, how much of that do I need to take into consideration too? And it is, you know, everything in life has an opportunity cost, right? I mean, one bucket here is still something out of a bucket elsewhere. So if I decide that I want to spend 10 hours working this week, then does that mean I don't get to read a book for fun this week or whatever? I mean, you'll always find things to fill the time. And I think it forces you to examine your priorities in a way that you've never had to prioritize them because you've never had time. And so I think it's really made me think about who I am and who I want to be and what I want for my family. And that is a little bit stressful. Before I could kind of hide behind the fact that it was like, well, if the kids had cereal for dinner, like we were in survival mode. That's okay. Like we made it through the day. And now I'm like, well, I do have the ability to spend an hour and a half making dinner if I really want to. Is that something I want to do, you know, or am I wrong for not spending that time? So it's funny when, when those kinds of choices come up, they're not stressful, they're not like, they're not, you know, life altering things, but it's more on your mind to kind of be more intentional about your time and, and that can, that can sometimes force you to have sorts of decisions about, you know, the decision for me to go to per diem was really stressful. You know, I knew I didn't need my full time job, but I also loved my job and I had a really good job, which is hard to find in medicine these days. And I felt really bad, you know, potentially giving that up. And there was this question of like, well, are they going to use me per diem or are they just saying they're going to use me per diem, but then they're not and then I'm not going to get to practice anymore. Like, I knew I didn't want to go to a different system and learn a new thing. So it's always stressful to make big changes in your life. And I do think it requires a lot of like we prag and I had to have a lot of talks about what is it that we want now that we have the ability to do this. Like, should he be cutting back? You know, should he be changing his schedule? Should he be taking. I mean, it took me a really long time to force him to take his seven weeks of vacation. Like that was, that was hard for him because his work is an identity for him. And you know, it did mean that he would be making a little bit less. You know, he gets paid on production, so could he afford to do it? Yes. But did he necessarily want to? Like, you know, who's. What is. How do the dynamics change when both people are making the same amount of money or one person's making more than the other and who gives up things? I mean, all of those things start coming up because you're making decisions not because you have to, but because you actually have to think about how much money do I want to make. Which is a very different mentality than I come out of residency and I just got to make as much money as I possibly can because I got loans to pay and things to do.

Yeah, I can certainly relate to that. And I think it's easier to look at your spouse and say, I think our life would be better if you work less. I think that's a really easy thing to say. I think it's a little bit harder to look at yourself and say, our life would be better if I work less. I think those are two very different things. The other thing I wanted to talk about today with regard to family is that all of us are still doing some work. And some of the time, at least that means taking time away that could be spent with your kids now. Right. Society tells us we should spend as much time with our kids as possible. Quality time and quantity time. But there are times when work can interfere with that and when you don't need the money from work, it feels a little bit different. Like last night I had a presentation when I came home from my shift to some docs in Hawaii. You know, it's 5 o' clock in Hawaii, but it was 8 o' clock in Utah. And so I spent the evening, or a good chunk of the evening, you know, teaching docs in Hawaii how to become financially literate. And that is time that I could have spent with my children. My children were all home at the time. And I'm curious how you feel as you do work during time periods when you could be spending time with your kids. How does that feel? Leif, do you ever do any work while your kids are around?

I do, but the kids have to do some work too, right? They've got their own thing, so they've got their schoolwork, they've got music. They both play musical instruments every day we make them run and go to swim and play tennis and do all these things. So, you know, sometimes I feel like they don't have time for me. You know, even when we're on a cruise ship, I'm like, hey, do you want to play some ping pong?

No.

No. We're going to go see our friends, you know, up at the kids club. Okay. All right. So, yeah, I think we have. I have. My wife and I have, you know, a lot more time to spend with our kids. And we do spend a lot more time with them than probably 90, 95% of other parents. So there's no reason to feel guilty for those occasional times when we are occupied with other things. And so, no, I think that we're doing a pretty good job and trying to set a good example. And to your point about the times where you actually are doing work when you could be hanging out with them doing certain things, they should realize that some work is being done to provide you know, this wonderful home that we live in and these vacations and trips that we take and the money is coming from somewhere. Right. And so they see you work, they realize, okay, yeah, that's how that works.

Yeah. What about you, Nisha?

I don't know if it's like the mom in me and the mom guilt in me, but I mean, I. The one thing that I have been super protective of now that I have switched my job situation is that I, you know, I pick up the kids from school every day and then I'm with them until basically bedtime if at all possible. I mean, there are exceptions to that. Occasionally, like you, Jim, you know, I'll have evening events or something like that and that'll be a time for Parag to be upstairs with the kids. But we try to make sure that now, like, that we have the ability to spend time with the kids and honestly and with each other too. Right. Like if the kids are showering, Parag and I will go every day and go take a walk for 35 minutes or 40 minutes or whatever and catch up on each other's time. And so I have been better about putting boundaries on work because I think that that's something that for me at the end of the day to feel good about the life that we've created, I need to kind of know like that we're making the most of it. And so like that means that I usually start working at 5:30, 6:00 clock in the morning, but I'm done by 2:30, 3:00 clock. And then I'm. I'm with my family for, for the times where they're there with me. To your point, I mean, Leaf, your kids are homeschooling right now, so they're around a lot more. But like my boys are gone and Parag is gone working between until at least 3:30 or so. And so that time is my time, but then after that my time is their time.

Yeah, for sure. It can be a challenge. All right. Here's another one that I find particularly difficult. I don't know if you guys can relate to this or not, but I get this sense sometimes and it makes me feel very anxious just knowing that I'm not immortal. Not only not immortal, but not going to, but that I'm going to age and I'm going to lose ability, physical ability as I get older. And there's a lot of things I want to do in my life. I enjoy adventuring. Might be rowing, might be canyoneering, might be climbing. A lot of these Things that I want to do in my life, I'm not going to be able to do in my 60s or 70s or 80s. And I feel this angst to get out there and do these things. And it's all recreation, Right. It's not work, it's recreation, but things that I can do now but not later. And that almost provides a source of stress in my life, making me feel like I got to get out. And this is from someone who spent literally 100 plus days last year either sleeping under the stars or in a foreign country traveling. So it's not like I'm not getting out doing stuff, but I often feel this pull to get out and do it even more because I know there's only a limited number of years before I won't be able to do those sorts of things.

Does that ever cause either of you any stress?

You know, that's a ringing endorsement for early financial independence right there. You know, you see and you hear so many stories of people that always want to do, to do such and such, and, you know, and then they have a heart attack, you know, a week before they were about to retire. Yeah. So does it cause me stress? No, because I made the same decision you did to eliminate certain, you know, I eliminated, you know, the physician work entirely. And that gives us the time to go out and do these things while we're young, while we're capable, before we have our hips replaced and our knees replaced or whatever it may be that will slow us down someday. So, yeah, that's where I'm at. How about you, Nisha?

Well, I'm not as adventurous as Jim. I'm not out there canyoneering or anything like that. But I do feel very strongly that every day, you know, like, we actually have, like, this tradition now that I've kind of implemented in our family just for myself. But at the end of every day, we have to say one thing that, like, was really awesome about the day. And I've kind of told myself, if I can't say that one thing that was great, then I'm again, I'm doing something wrong. And so whether it's like, just all the things that I couldn't do when I was in the thick of it, I'm like, I gotta do one thing that I couldn't do. Right. Whether it's I called a friend and talked to them for fun, or whether it's I read a book or I took a bath, or I, you know, like, I did something that I wouldn't have been able to do and for me, as a radiologist, like, honestly, even the fact that I can, like, sit and work and look outside of the window and see, you know, North Carolina's got a lot of wildlife, and it's always running around in my backyard. And that, for me, is, like, a really nice thing because I spent a lot of time boxed up in a room that was, like, dark and had no windows. So, you know, I think that it is really important to me to make sure that we're making the most of every day. And I think, as physicians, like, we know better than anyone that tomorrow is never guaranteed. Jim, I'm sure in the ER you were constantly sort of faced with just, you know, and the same thing with radiology. Like, I'm always coming across these diagnoses in young people, and it's a constant reminder that you got to kind of make the most of everything. And we've had a few, like, scares within our family over the past few years. My husband got into a really bad car accident. Accident while he was sitting in traffic. And some guy came barreling down the highways, 89 years old in a trailer and smashed into the back of Craig's car. And literally, the car looked like an accordion. And how he got out of that car alive, I don't know. But, you know, there was two days in the icu. Like, I mean, it was just. It was. I think they were life sort of eye opening, things that were kind of like, you know, we do a lot in medicine where we delay gratification for a long time. And I think it's important for all of us to kind of make sure that. That we're living our lives while we're doing those things, whether we're financially independent or not. Right. Like, it's just important to make sure that you don't always assume that there's a tomorrow.

Yeah. All right. I want to turn to one other subject before we finish this podcast, and that is the subject of travel. All of us have done a fair amount of travel in the last few years. Enough travel that, you know, any normal person that looks at how much travel we've done is normally pretty intensely jealous. We do it a little bit differently. My travel tends to be pretty high paced. Leif's done a fair amount of slow travel. But what I want to talk about a little bit is this idea that lots of people have that they want to retire so they can travel. And then how much is too much travel when you have the time to do as much as you want? How do you decide how much you actually want. So let's start again with you on this one, Leif. This has been a big part of your identity, a big part of what you've written about the physician on fire. So let's talk about travel and its place in your life, how other people maybe view travel and how you decide when you're doing enough.

Right, right. So when I left medicine, my kids were I believe, 8 and 10, maybe close to 9 and 11 years old. And they're 12 and 14 now. And so our travel is always, basically almost always family travel. It's the four of us going places. And so we're incorporating education and culture and all of those things into our boys curriculum, giving them a good worldview, hopefully to be well rounded individuals as they grow up. And so our ideal I think when we started out was maybe four to six months at home, which is northern Michigan, and with some domestic travel in there, and then maybe six to eight months of, you know, big travel, being far away, traveling for months at a time. That got interrupted by Covid, obviously, but we've still been able to do trips of two to three months length. We started braces for my older son, phase two of orthodontics when Covid hit because we knew we wouldn't be traveling that much. So now we can only go away for about eight weeks at a time. But we've taken four trips of four to six weeks this year, I think a total of about five months of travel so far in 2022, most of that overseas. And you know, one thing we've realized is the more we're away, the more difficult it is to really have a, a solid relationship with, with, you know, friends at home and to be part of a community back at your home base. You know, and there are people that travel full time, they sell everything, they retire, they take off and they just go from place to place with a backpack and a rolling suitcase or something and no home base. And I just can't imagine not being able to go home. That's not the lifestyle that we want. Certainly I don't think that's great for, for the kids to not, not have a, a home that feels like home and a safe, secure place. But it's a, it's an evolving kind of thing. And we're about to go back to traditional school as my older son enters high school. And so we'll probably get more embedded in the community and strengthen those ties to local people and perhaps organizations and whatever we decide to do with our tie. But I've enjoyed being Away up to a few months at a time and really just getting immersed in other places.

Have you felt like you've crossed the line to too much travel at any point in the last few years?

Nope, hasn't happened.

All right, Nisha.

We're not exactly in the same position because my husband still does work full time and he can't be away from the practice for three weeks at a time or four weeks. It's not like ER or radiology where I can group my shifts and then have an extended period of time off. So for us, we are taking his seven weeks of vacation now, but we are also doing a lot of weekend travel, which is something that is very different now that we can afford it. You know, we will spend the money to get away once or twice a month on the weekends and maybe we'll take one day on either side or something like that. But we do a lot more of that kind of travel than, hey, we're going away for three weeks at a time or four weeks at a time just because, you know, we're still in it in terms of the medical lifestyle and vacation constraints and call schedules and things like that. So, you know, we, we've really made it a concerted effort to go visit friends, go visit family, go to like random places that we haven't been and just go for three or four days and get away for a weekend. But, you know, our kids are in traditional school. My, my husband's still working. So we, we don't, we don't exceed that seven week amount for travel. And, and a lot of that is, you know, we'll take a few weeks concentrated and then the other ones are sort of spread out over family events and, and weekend trips and things like that. So I don't necessarily think that we've, I would like to be doing more travel. I always tell my husband he's the weakest link and he needs to, you know, because I can work from anywhere. But I don't think that there is such a thing as too much travel. Except to your point, Leif, about you don't want to feel like you're escaping from your real life so much that you don't have a community at home and you don't maintain the connections with the people that mean a lot to you at home. And sometimes we will feel that where.

Yeah, you do miss out. You know, family, family things, friends, all of that. You come back, you're like, oh, well, that happened. What, why didn't I hear about this? You know, you're out of Sight out of mind.

Yeah. I think like this summer, you know, we spent. We spent a lot of time. We did. We took some big trips. We went to Greece for two weeks. We went, you know, we did, we did some things. And we were gone pretty much every weekend this summer. And we realized like, we hadn't seen our friends in Charlotte for three months basically throughout the summer. And we were like, okay, that was probably a little bit much like we. It's been a really long time since we've seen the people at home. So I guess there's a balance. But I don't know. Travel is our favorite thing to do in terms of being able to do something that we couldn't do before because of money. And so I'm not at a point where I would say we do too much. I would still love to do more.

Yeah. So I've had a chance to really experiment with this over the last few years. The longest trip I've really been gone and unplugged from was my Grand Canyon float trip. That was 23 days off the grid. You know, no cell phone coverage. You know, I was sending a satellite message on my inner reach to my family, you know, 18 characters a night or whatever, you know. But that was unplugged. And it took about six months to prepare for that. You know, it was just to. In order to get everything ready to be able to go and do that sort of a trip took a lot of preparation. But one week trips are easy. They've been easy. You know, to take a one week trip is very easy for an emergency doc, you wedge all your shifts into the rest of the month. And so I've been doing that my whole career. And what I've been able to do as, you know, as I cut back on shifts is do more and more and more of those. And what I've discovered is that I have crossed that line where I'm like, I don't want to travel anymore. I'm doing some travel for work, obviously out doing speaking gigs or whatever and doing some travel just to go on an adventure and some travel with family and some travel just with Katie. And I have definitely crossed that line multiple times where I'm like, I'm traveling too much all of a sudden, you know, I can't do the volunteer work I do at church. I'm having to rely on my assistant coaches where I coach my son's hockey team. I'm missing all kinds of games and practices. I'm missing my own hockey games. You know, I'm not I live at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains, where I can go skiing and climbing and mountain biking. And I go three or four months, and I'm like, I haven't even been mountain biking this summer, you know, because I'm spending all the time when I'm not working somewhere else, traveling, you know? And what I've discovered is there's a certain amount of traveling I like, and beyond that point, it's not that fun for me, you know? And the problem is my spot. Where that is comes before Katie's spot. Katie likes traveling more than I do. And so the solution is she's starting to go on trips without me. You know, she goes on trips with friends or whatever. They're going to Kenya, Tanzania next fall. They're going to climb Kilimanjaro and go on a safari. And she'll be gone for two and a half weeks. And I'm going to stay here. I'm going to spend time with the kids. I'm going to spend time with working and probably not going to be doing any other recreation just because the kids are going to be here. They're definitely the limiting factor in just how much travel we can take. But there are definitely times where I get toward the end of the year, and I'm like, I just want to stay home. You know, I haven't been home and had a day off now for weeks and weeks or whatever it might be. And so I hope everybody gets that opportunity to travel so much that they're like, I don't want to travel anymore, and I need a month or two of not going anywhere sometimes just to want to go do it again. You know, for example, this month we're going to spend a week in Jamaica. We're just going to spend a week in Colombia. And if I look back over the last couple of years, we've had more months like that than we have had months where we didn't go anywhere. So I think it's one of those things that everybody thinks they want to travel more, and I encourage you to travel more until you get to the point where you realize maybe it's not all that, particularly when you're having to be back in a week. Our kids are not homeschooled. We cannot take them to Columbia and continue their education the way Leif has set up these slow travel trips. We got to get back at a certain point, whether we're getting back to the kids or getting the kids back to their thing. Really, we've only got eight or 10 weeks in the summer to be able to really be away as far as they go. But even then, they've got camps they want to be at. They've got activities with friends. They're playing on sports teams. And it's very hard, I think, to completely unplug a whole family and move them away for two or three months. And that has to be a real major goal, really something you very much want, because there's a lot of things you have to give up in order to do that. Sort of travel.

Yeah. And I think the kids, you know, I mean, like, our kids are now at an age where, like, they've got basketball practice, they've got tennis practice. You know, like, they. They also are building things where. And they have friendships that they want to maintain. So they're also kind of like, you know, they used to go to my parents for a few weeks every summer, and now they're kind of like, well, like, maybe we'll just go for two weeks because we don't want to be away from our friends for longer than that or whatever. And so, I mean, as they build their own lives, I think we're also kind of shaping what we do around that. And then I think the other thing is all of us, all three of us have other projects also that we're working on, and it's hard to get away and then constantly get back into the mode of if I'm in the middle of an advocacy thing or something like that, nothing stops just because I go on vacation. So there's always this question of how far. How am I planning my vacation so that I can truly be off the grid? And I'm not at a point yet where I can be truly off the grid for long, long periods of time between the different things that I want to do. And for me, the free time is also. Where can I. I don't know. I really enjoy the advocacy stuff, and I really enjoy the health policy stuff and some of the other stuff that I'm doing these days. And so I still feel like I have a job. I just. It's not as defined as it used to be, but there's still a lot of stuff that I feel like is my responsibility right now. Every time you want to get away. To your point, Jim, like, you got to plan to be away, and sometimes that is more exhausting than you feel like you need a vacation from your vacation from your planning for vacation. And so.

Leaf's over there smiling because he's like, I don't have to do that. What are you talking About. And it's true. What I found is that you do have to plan to get away.

The fatigue of travel comes when you're doing three days here, two days there, five days here, bouncing, bouncing, bouncing. So what has worked for us is to spend one to two, up to four weeks at a time in one place, in one Airbnb, in one city, and then exploring everything there is to see there. But not every day. Maybe every other day, every third day, you do do, like, something big. And other days you just, you know, maybe you take a walk or a run, go to the park, go out to eat. But it's not like we have to do all the sightseeing and see everything you can see in Athens in four days. Because we have four days. It's like, no, we're here for. Like you said you were in Greece for a couple weeks, but maybe you're bouncing around from island to island.

No, we just sat in creek.

There you go. So that's nice. That's. That's how you don't get tired of travel.

And that was. Yeah, that was nice. I think that we have actually slowed down our travel quite a bit now because we're like, you know what? We're going to have the time, we're going to have the weeks. We don't need to go to a country and do everything that we need to do. We're going to pick one city, hang out there for a while, really get to know it, and then come back to the way to do it, you know? So our travel has definitely slowed down over the last few years in terms of saying, let's just pick one place. Let's stay there for a week. Let's really get to know it, or stay there for two weeks and really get to know it. So that has been. Been really, really nice. But I know Jim and I were joking around yesterday that you. You do things right in the sense that you're really enjoying your fi. Life. I don't. I don't know that either one of us has quite gotten there yet, but.

Hopefully, yeah, it's difficult when you go someplace and you're like, you know, like, we did this trip to the Balkans this fall. You know, we're there in Sarajevo. Chances that I'm going back to Sarajevo ever again in my life are low. I'm almost surely not going back there. And so when I'm there and I'm there for 48 hours, it's like I either see it now or never. And that is hard for me to put my feet up and hang out in the hotel lounge all evening when it's like, or I can go see something I'm never going to see again. And so I think a lot of us feel that way when we travel and it makes it hard to do the slow travel thing just because, you know, you're only going there once probably, you know, maybe if it's Paris or something, you'll be there multiple times. But, you know, there's a lot of destinations we go to that we're probably only going once in our life.

Yeah.

All right, well, our time has come short. I appreciate both of you coming on and talking with our audience about life after fi, how it involves work, how it involves travel, how it involves children, particularly when you, you reach those milestones relatively early in your career to talk about angst and stress and what it looks like when it's not financial. And I appreciate you both coming on. You can learn more about Dr. Mehta's work at physiciansidegigs.com you can learn more about Dr. Daleen's work at thephysicianonfire.com thank you for coming on the podcast, both of you today.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you for having us. It's been a lot of fun. I look forward to seeing you in person at wcicon. I think we'll all be there.

Yes.

Awesome.

Aaron. All right. I hope you enjoyed that presentation. I hope it's fun to hear about people who have made it and how life maybe doesn't get super simple afterward. That it's still complicated. Even when you take off the I need to work for money piece of life out of it. It can still be complicated. It can still be difficult. You still have problems. You might be first world problems, but the truth is all we ever talk about on this podcast, our first world problems. So did you know that the White.

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