WCI #322: Questions from Students and Residents

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.

It's White Coat Investor podcast number 322. As a White coat, you have valuable knowledge. Various companies want that knowledge and they're willing to pay you for it. That that's why we put together a list of recommendations for companies that pay you to take surveys. If you're looking for a profitable side gig for not too much effort, getting paid for surveys could be the perfect solution for you. You can make extra money, start a Solo 401 and use your medical knowledge to impact new products. One of the WCI columnists makes an extra $30,000 a year just doing these surveys. Sign up today and use a fraction of your downtime to make extra cash. Go to whitecoatinvestor.com mdsurveys you can do this and the White Coat Investor can help. All right, welcome back to the podcast. We're recording this on what's today June 12th and publishing it on July 6th. So it's July when you're listening to this. I just got back from a really cool trip I want to tell you about. A lot of people have heard of Zion National Park. This is one of the mighty five parks in Utah. People make treks from all over the world. You know, lots of east coasters, lots of people from Europe and the Far east come to Utah to see the national park. So one of which is Zion National Park. And hikers in particular are drawn to a couple of hikes there. You know, Angels Landing, which now is a permitted hike, as well as the Zion Narrows. You know, these both show up on top 10 hikes in the world all the time. And so it's very difficult to go to the Zion Narrows. If you want to hike the whole thing from top down, you have to get a permit. And it's not an easy permit to get. I've tried a few times over the last few years and haven't been able to get a permit. The last time I did that hike was 20 years ago. I was a resident and came up from Arizona and Katie and I did that hike. And so what that forces most visitors to Zion national park, which is like 6 million people a year now, to do, in order to do this hike is they ride the bus throughout the park, throughout the canyon, get to the end, get off the bus, and they walk a mile up this paved pathway called the Riverside walk. And then they get off the pathway into the river, the Virgin river, and hike up the river into the Narrows. Because what the Narrows is, is a river. It's a river running through some canyon walls that go up 500ft, maybe 1,000ft at times. Above you, very sheer walls. It's wall to wall water. And so it's pretty unique hike. The truth is, though, it's a brutal hike. If you do the whole thing from the top down, it's like 13 to 16 miles. And at the beginning, you're in and out of the water, doing a whole bunch of water crossings. Toward the end, you're just in the water, and you're in 6 to 12 inches of water. Walking on submerged, slippery bowling balls, smashing up your ankles, smashing up your toes. You're exhausted because it hikes like it's 30 miles long, because you're in water the whole time. And if you start getting blisters, there's nothing you can do about it, because anything you want to put on your blisters is going to wash right off. And so despite that, it's this super desirable hike that people want to do. It's very hard to get permits. But I learned something this year. The easy way to get a permit to do this hike is not to hike it at all. Float it instead of hiking it. And so what you can do most years, not in a drought year, but most years, for a few days or maybe if you're lucky, in a big snow year like this year, a couple of weeks, you can get a permit to float the Zion Narrows. It's not competitive. You just walk right up the day before and get it from the backcountry desk. And then you drive up and around. And when we went, the water level was 200 cubic feet per second. And they'll give these permits out anywhere between 150 cubic feet per second and 600 cubic feet per second. That's obviously the flow of the river coming down the canyon. Below 150, they'll let you get the hiking permits and they won't give you a floating permit. But above 150, you can get a floating permit. But at 200, it's still a relatively chill float. Yes, you have to get out when you get to the nasty rapids and walk past them, because there are a few nasty rapids in there. But the rest of it is probably only class 3 and very doable in a pack raft, which is what we took these cool little, you know, basically an inflatable kayak that weighs eight pounds. You can carry in your backpack. And we had to do the first four hours of hiking of it or so because there wasn't enough water in the top part until a big creek comes in and we inflated our pack rafts and did what's usually six or eight hours of hiking in a two hour float. And I don't think I'm ever going to hike the narrows again because floating it was so much better. Very cool trip. If you're going to Zion and you enjoy pack rafting or that sort of a thing, I would definitely look into it. You know, if you've never paddled anything, this might not be the paddle for you, but if you have some experience pack rafting and you're not trying to go at, you know, 600 CFs, it's, it's very doable and a pretty cool trip. Pretty special float. All right, enough about me. It's summertime, so I'm trying to get out and do cool trips. I'm an emergency doc, after all, and in a lot of ways we're all about the outdoors. All right, let's take our first question today. This one's from a med student starting in August. If you'd like to get your question answered on this podcast, by the way, you can do that whitecoatinvestor.com speakpipe. Just record it. We'll get it on. We'll get your question answered. Anyway, med student that's going to be starting here shortly has a question about student loans. Let's see if we can answer it.

Hi, I'm an avid listener and reader of the White Coat Investor and I'm excited to be asking my first question. So I will be a medical student starting this August in Providence, Rhode island. And my question is on student loans for medical school, which I'll be taking out in April. So as a bit of background, I will have to take out loans to cover tuition at my school. That's 67,300 per year. I'm planning on taking out federal loans. Although I do not know if I want to do academic versus private medicine, I still feel like public service loan forgiveness is the way to go, no matter what I eventually decide, even if that means staying in the hospital longer. I have the money saved to cover living expenses during this time, but I will not be making a sizable income during it. Besides, like picking up some shifts as an EMT, I also have about $10,000 in undergraduate federal loans. My question is, if I'm planning to go for public service loan forgiveness, should I take out loans for the full cost of attendance instead of just tuition. My worry is that if for some reason public service loan forgiveness does not work out like it gets dismantled governmentally or like the horror stories of people being denied, then I'll be stuck with hundreds of thousands of dollars more in debt versus the baseline tuition loans I have to take out. And secondary question, if I take out the cost of attendance loans, do you think that I should put the money that I've saved, you know, to pay for living expenses in a savings account or a mutual fund? Thank you so much for any advice in everything that you do.

Well, that is the very definition of moral hazard. Okay, now for those of you who aren't familiar with this term, this is an economic term. This has nothing to do with your morals. You are not morally deficient if you are experiencing moral hazard. All right? That's not what moral hazard is. Moral hazard is when there's kind of an unintended consequence of a policy. In this case, the policy is public service loan forgiveness. The intent of this policy is to help those with massive student loan burdens who have taken these very charitable jobs serving the public, but have this terrible student loan burden and help them to deal with that so they can stay in these public service kind of jobs. But what happens anytime you put in any sort of government policy, anytime you're giving out free money, which, let's be honest, this is what this is. That's what public service loan forgiveness is. It's free money. Not free because taxpayers are paying for it, but it's free money to the person getting it. It's like a big fat check for you. Anytime you're giving that out, there's going to be some unforeseen consequences, One of which is every medical student is now facing this dilemma. It used to be when you knew you were going to be paying back your student loans, that you would minimize how much you take out in student loans, because the less you take out, the less interest you pay and the sooner you can pay them back later. But now, with free money at least available, assuming you comply with the terms of public service loan forgiveness, new med students are starting to wonder, maybe I should take out all the money I can get and just hold on to it, or spend it. Even spend it on a car. A nicer car is useful in medical school. Maybe I can live in a nicer place. So a few things to think about here. One is the risk you've identified that something happens with your career. Maybe you don't match, for instance, or something Happens and you decide, I really do not want to stay in academia and I'm going someplace in my specialty. There are no PSLF jobs now. I've got to live somewhere. I don't want to live. Why did I do this? You've got that risk out there. That's definitely. The other thing to keep in mind is your contract. When you're signing these student loans, you are telling them, I'm going to use this money for school. That's what you're contracting to do when you take out a student loan. It's in the contract. So I think if you're going to sign a contract, you ought to obey the terms of that contract. Now, in your case, money's fungible. You can use the money you have in cash, or you can use the borrowed money to pay for school. It's really fungible. But for those people who are taking the money and investing it because they're borrowing more than they can even spend, you're really violating the terms of your contract and probably shouldn't do that. And then, of course, in the end, I'm a bit of a traditionalist. I think you probably shouldn't borrow money you don't need for school. So I would probably just take out what you need. I would not try to make some sort of windfall profits off the PSLF program. But it's a hard decision. I get that there's moral hazard. It's not illegal. I don't even know that it's unethical. I don't know that it's immoral. You'll have to decide that. But every medical student is now facing this dilemma given the terms of public service loan forgiveness. So good luck with your decision. I think it's a hard one to make and I'm sorry you have to make it. I think it's bad policy that you have to make it. But here's where we are in life, right? Okay, let's talk about a dentist now. At least a dental trainee.

Hi there. I'm Johnny and I'm a dentist. I'm also currently in a postgraduate program training to be a specialist in one of the fields of dentistry here in New England. I have to admit, this is not the first time I've heard of the white coat investor. My brother, who's in medical school, referred me to you guys a few years ago, but I've only really had the time to do my own research. Now I'm really in amazement and in awe of the community that you've managed to cultivate over the years. And I want to thank you for all the information you've shared through your blog and through your YouTube channel. Now, I'd like to admit here that I am in quite a unique scenario where I do not owe anyone any money, nor do I have any loans. And I'm trying to really improve my financial literacy, which I've really been able to do through the help of your blog and your YouTube channels and through other readings that I've found online. I wanted to ask you, for someone like myself, how do you recommend I prepare for the future? Do you recommend I take any loans to try to take advantage of the economic situation at the moment? Do you recommend not doing any of that, starting maybe a small investment somewhere? I'd like to hear any advice you can share. Thank you very much.

All right. I don't know that I've ever had this question. This is a great question. I find it fascinating. You think about financial literacy and how to get started, and the first thing you think about is borrowing money. You've done such an awesome job to this point. I don't know if that's from family helping you or scholarships or how you got to this point in your postgraduate training that you don't owe any money. That's awesome. I. And I don't know why you seem to feel bad about that. Like, you need to go borrow some money. You don't need to borrow money to get rich. That's not how most people get rich. Yes, you can invest with leverage, but for the most part, people do that because they have to do that. They don't do that because it's like something you have to do to go get wealthy. So, no, don't go borrow any money. You do need to become financially literate. There's lots of ways to do that. We have tried to spoon feed this to people in a course we have. It's called fire your financial advisor. There is also a version that qualifies for both medical and dental cme. That version is called Financial wellness and burnout prevention for medical professionals. It costs a little more. You can use your CME funds to buy it. But I recognize that everybody learns a different way. Some of us learn best from books and online forums. That's kind of me. That's my style. You know, the nice thing about that is it's kind of inexpensive. The downside is, you know, it's a little bit disjointed and you have to really dig around and kind of become a hobbyist to learn that way. Other people that are very much not hobbyists when it comes to finance. They go and hire a finance professional to help them and teach them this stuff. And that's also an option. We keep a recommended list of financial advisors, the White Coat Investor. But however you choose to do it, you need to get a written financial plan in place. That's the key. Once you have that plan, all you have to do is follow it and things get very simple after that. Katie and I have just been following our financial plan for the last two decades. We don't have to think about, what are we going to do. Are we going to go borrow some money or should we start some investments? We already have the investments. We just add money to it. Like this month, I took all the money we made last month. We paid our expenses, we put a certain amount aside for taxes, and the rest we invest. Whether that income came from investments, whether it came from my clinical work, whether it came from White Coat Investor, whatever, and it went into the investments we already have. I can tell you the four things I invested in this month. I invested in Vanguard Total Stock Market etf. I invested in the Vanguard Total International Stock Market etf. I invested in the Vanguard Small International Index Fund etf. I can't remember what that one's called, but that's what it invests in. And then I invested into a municipal bond fund. That's where the money went this month. Those were the things that were behind in our asset allocation. And so that's what we invested in. But it's super easy. We just follow the plan every month. Every month. We have additional income every month. We invest it every month. We're wealthier than the one we were before. Obviously, in a bear market, that doesn't necessarily happen, but most of the time we're wealthier than we were the month before. And that's how you do this. It's not that complicated. So figure out how you learn it. Sounds like you like the YouTube channel. Watch the YouTube channel. All the podcasts are there, plus a whole bunch of other stuff. If you like the blog, read the blog. There's a Start Here tab on the blog. Go to that. Read the basic stuff. It'll help you. I wrote it with you in mind. You are the avatar that I'm writing blog posts to when I write blog posts. If you like forums, we've got them in three flavors. There's a classic forum@forum.whitecoatinvestor.com, we've got a subreddit. If you're into Reddit, check It out R whitecoatinvestor if you like Facebook I don't know why people like Facebook, but I know a lot of you like Facebook. There's like 90,000 of you in the White Coat Investor Facebook group. Then go to the Facebook group. You can ask and answer questions and discuss stuff there. The communities are there to help you learn and yes, you'll have some abrasive interaction every now and then with somebody in there. That's just the way the Internet is. But you can learn there. If you like podcasts, we have two podcasts. We have the Milestones to millionaire podcast where we do interviews with people who've had some sort of success. We want to inspire others to do the same thing. We tend to combine those now starting this year with a discussion of some of the basics of finance, kind of a back to basics approach on that podcast. And we have this podcast where we do both interviews with authors and financial advisors and authorities out there in various topics, as well as answer your questions, the ones that are left on the speak pipes. So if you like podcasts, listen to the podcast. We've been trying to get you financially literate for the last 12 years and I know you got referred to us and that's fine. Student is ready, the teacher will appear. But the nice thing for you is there's a 12 year backlog of all this stuff and you can go back and you can search for the topic you're interested in and it's just in time. Learning all this stuff's here to help you become financially literate. But no, the first thing you should do is not to run out and take out another loan. That is not the secret. If you've got some additional income, if you've got some additional money on the side that's just sitting in cash right now, yes, you need to invest it. Before investing, you should have some sort of a written investing plan rather than just willy nilly selecting investments though. So let us help you try to get an investing plan in place. Okay. By the way, I mentioned that course everything's going on sale. This has kind of been a tradition. Start of the medical year is always July 1, you know, and we got a sale going until July 10. So just a few more days after you hear this, this thing drops on July 6th, so you only have to the 10th. But everything's 20% off at WCI. All of our online courses, that includes fire your financial advisor and the version with the CME, but also everything else. CFE 2023, that one's on sale. 20% off the real estate course. That's a huge discount. 20% on that because that's our most expensive course. All the books at the White coat investor store. 20% off our merch. Yeah, we got T shirts and stickers and all kinds of stuff. Right. If you go to whiteconinvestor.com store, you can see all that merch. All of that can be purchased. Many of those courses can be purchased with your CME money. So that's like Monopoly money you can use to purchase real courses. So you should check those out. And it's great. So be sure to check out those options if you're going to be buying, especially this month. The time to do it is before the 10th. 20% off. Yep. Great sale. All right, here's a question about our favorite subject, whole life insurance. It's a medical student asking the question, though, so let's take a listen. My name's Tyler. I'm calling from the Northeast. I had a quick question. I think this has been addressed before. My parents transferred a whole life insurance policy to me when I was in medical school. Once I got married. I'm now 35, married, one kid, fresh out of fellowship, working, doing urgent care. I transferred the whole life insurance policy into a variable universal life policy. After doing some reading, not sure if that was the correct action. That's what I did. The Death benefit is $100,000. And currently the net cash value is $6,693.29. Annual premium is $300. I would like to get rid of this as I feel like I have better use for that money. But I was hoping to get your thoughts. Thank you so much for what you do. Okay, Tyler, good question. Sorry, I thought you were a medical student. I guess you got the policy given to you as a medical student. Lots of parents do this. They think they're doing you a favor by giving you a whole life insurance policy. And I don't know who's selling it to them, whether it's Northwestern Mutual or Gerber or who it is. But they suckered your parents into buying this thing for you. And your parents did it with the very best of intentions for you. So I think the most important thing to do here is to recognize that, that they are doing this with a lot of love and sacrifice in a lot of cases, because many of our parents are not all that well off sacrifice to try to give you a leg up in life. And so the most important thing in this whole discussion around these gifts of whole life insurance is to say thank you. To thank them for what they've given you. It's really a very nice gift. In essence, they've given you $6,000 or $7,000. That's what's happened here. You can do whatever you want with that six or seven thousand dollars though. You do not have to keep it in a whole life policy. They will not be upset. You do not even have to tell them that you cashed out of the whole life policy. You could exchange it to some other insurance product, a variable annuity, a variable universal life insurance policy, a long term care policy. You could exchange into all kinds of other policies. But the truth is you probably don't need any of that stuff. And we're talking about a very small policy. I mean, your cash value is only $6,000 or $7,000 here, right? There's no sense in messing around with these exchanges into a variable annuity to try to, you know, save the basis and get a little bit of tax free growth out of that. There's no point. This is 6,000 or $7,000. So make sure you've got your big fat term life insurance policy in place, right? You're a brand new attending, you've got a spouse, you didn't mention what your spouse does, but you've got a kid, you got people dependent on your income. If you die, it's a financial catastrophe for them. So you need a big fat life insurance policy, not $100,000 and they'll burn through that pretty quick if you died. You need a term life policy, something that's going to last for the next 20 or 30 years until you're financially independent. That's going to pay them a seven figure amount if you die. A million dollars. Kind of the bare minimum for an attending physician that has other people depending on him or her. Most white coat investors have probably got two, three, maybe even $5 million in term life insurance. So the first thing you need to do is make sure you have that in place, whatever your amount is and how much depends on what your spouse is going to do if you got disabled or if you died rather. And maybe some people need less than others, depending on what you have or what your spouse does or what your lifestyle is like. But get that big policy in place first. And then what you do is you simply surrender this rinky dink little vul that some dirtbag sold to you after some other dirt bag sold your parents a whole life insurance policy and you walk away with your 6,000 or $7,000 and you use it to pay off your student loans, or you use it for a down payment on your dream house, or you use it to pay off your car or your credit cards, or you use it for your backdoor Roth IRA this year, your spouse's backdoor Roth ira, or you don't technically put that money in there, but you live on that money while you use the money you were living on to go in there. Because it has to be earned income. Of course that goes into a retirement account. But my point is you have a better use for this money than a vul. As an attending straight out of fellowship, the chances that this is the best use for your money is essentially zero percent. There's no way this is the best use for your money right now in your life. So take it out of there and use it for something else. If nothing else, you can put in a 529 for that kid. Because the truth is, what your parents should have done, if you can go back 20 or 30 or 35 years, whenever they bought this thing, what they should have done is put this money in a UGMA account or a 529 or something where it would have grown. Because if you go back and actually figure out what your rate of return was on this policy, it's going to be embarrassing. It might even still be negative after 20 or 30 or 35 years because these little tiny policies, all the premium gets eaten up by the fees and so they tend to have these terrible, terrible returns on these tiny little policies sold to parents. But yeah, you don't want to keep this thing, you need to get rid of it. So get rid of it and use the money for something else. No big deal. Just make sure you have term life insurance in place first. All right, our next question I think actually is a medical student. Let's take a listen.

Hi, I have a question in regards to filing taxes as a fourth year medical student. So I am starting residency on July 1st and I had during fourth year I had some free time. So I actually did some part time jobs and made maybe a total of like $2,000. And I've been reading all on your blog, which has been extremely helpful. But a lot of the advice given was to provide to file your taxes right after you graduate medical school and basically be able to put that you made $0. However, I made, like I said, maybe a few thousand, definitely under 3,000. So my question is, should I still file my taxes since I have that income or should I just not file them at all? And thanks.

All right, great question. You have gotten the right advice. Unfortunately, you don't understand why that's the right advice. So let me explain to you why this is the right advice. You are correct that you want to file a tax return for the last year that you spent the whole year in medical school. And what that means is it's the year that you spent the last half of your Ms. 3 year and the first half of your Ms. 4 year. So if you graduate in 2023, we're talking about filing taxes for 2022. And the reason you want to do that is because when you go to certify your income with the government for income driven repayment programs and for public service loan forgiveness, you want to be able to show that you had a very low income. And the easiest way to do that is just show them your tax return from the prior year. And that's why you want to file that taxes. Okay, if you don't have student loans, this doesn't matter, but 75% of medical students have student loans, most of which are federal. This matters. File a tax return. Your fourth year, in your case, you made a little bit of money. Good for you. It's true. You actually can make money in medical school for most people. That's the summary between first and second year, maybe last half year, fourth year, those sorts of time periods. It's not your OB rotation during your third year, obviously, but you can make a little bit of money in med school and that's good. It helps keep your loans down. But you'll obviously have to declare that on your taxes. Now, you probably don't have to actually file a tax return. The IRS doesn't require it, but they do allow you to do it. And you won't owe any taxes because you only made a couple grand. So no big deal. There's no tax cost to doing this. The tax return will be very straightforward and it'll only take you a few minutes to file it. But you should file it. So you have that to show the government so you can keep your IDR payments low, at least after you get through the grace period. And that can help you to get more money forgiven via public service loan forgiveness. It can also just help your cash flow as an intern to be having to make lower payments. And every now and then you end up with these crazy moments like the pandemic, the people that certified their income from their Ms. 4 year. Way back at the beginning of the pandemic, that was basically what the student loan the Department of Education folks used for their income throughout the whole pandemic. And it doesn't really matter too much since they put the rates at 0% and the payments at $0. But that's what people have been using to certify their income. So even as they come back into payments this fall, they might be making payments based on their MS.3 income, even though they're now out of residency. So it can be very beneficial to your cash flow and to maximizing your forgiveness. So keep that in mind. Yes. File your taxes. Don't worry about the fact that you made two grand. It's not going to make much difference. Your payment's still going to be very, very low. It's going to be slightly higher than if you had $0, probably maybe not even that. I'd have to run the numbers to know for sure. But don't let that stop you from filing. Still file your taxes even though you made a couple grand. All right. And thanks, by the way, I get great hope from seeing medical students. I just wrote a letter of recommendation for a pre med student who's trying to get into medical school. It gives me all kinds of hope for our profession to see such idealistic people matching into their specialties going into medical school. I hate that that idealism tends to get beat out of us somewhere in that process, but gives me great hope to see wonderful people still going into this great profession. All right, next question. Is somebody that's got a house in medical school. That's cool. So let's listen to their question.

Hi Jim. My wife just matched into residency in North Carolina for her intern year and then in New Jersey for the last three years. I will be a high earner as well as spouse, not in medicine, but in other fields in software development. We currently live in North Carolina in a house that is paid off and it's worth 400k. And we don't plan on buying a house in New Jersey, given your advice on buying a home during residency. And we'll only be there for three years after we move there next year. We need to decide what to do with our home here. Do we want to rent it out? Do we want to sell it when we move to New Jersey? We have never managed a property before, so we would probably use a property manager if we decide to keep it and rent it out. And I don't know if it makes a big difference, but we don't see ourselves moving back in here after residency is over. And I sort of wanted you to help me discuss the pros and cons of renting the house. Out and versus selling it and investing in the stock market. For instance, I like the idea of keeping it just to diversify into real estate, which is a type of investment that we don't currently pursue. But I also see the fees of property management to be sort of a waste given that we'd be renting out a home here and paying rent at New Jersey. So I'd like your opinion on it. If you have something to help me out. Thank you again for what you do.

Wow, what a great and fortunate situation to be in. Sell the house. That's my advice. Let's talk about the pros and cons. The main benefit of holding onto this house is you have a real estate investment. Maybe, you know, I can't remember where you said this house was. Maybe in that community home prices go gangbusters and it doubles in value in the next four years. You know, that's the, that's the pro of holding onto it. You know, something like that could happen. I don't know that I'd count on that happening, especially with the direction interest rates have been going. But something like that could happen. You get some experience about being, you know, learn a little more about real estate investing. That's not a terrible bad thing to have some experience. I think your experience is probably going to be bad though. Most people have a bad experience when they are renting out a house that is in another state. Because you're being a long distance landlord, you can't drive by and check on it every time something goes wrong. You gotta pay somebody to go out there and do it. You gotta trust the property manager. And that's like one of the hardest things to hire of all financial professionals. It's just not that fun. Number two, it's incredibly risky, right? Your entire real estate allocation is in one property that's not exactly diversified. And you don't sound like you want to get into real estate investing. If you wanna get into real est investing, maybe the way to do it is to take half the money out of this house and use it as a down payment on another house. So now you've got two properties and hopefully one of them near where you live. But that's going to be hard with all the moving around going on in the next couple of years. But I'm not getting the impression that that's something you really want to do right now. And the truth is now is probably not the time to do it. I would certainly tell your spouse that you're busy during your training, your internship, your residency. You're busy. You don't need the distraction of being a real estate investor on the side. Get your training, become a good doc. You can do real estate investing later. It's much easier. You have more time and you have more income and so it's not nearly as risky for you and it just works out okay. So the cons, you could lose money on this house. You're definitely going to have serious hassle with it. Yes. You're going to have to pay property management and everything else that happens out there. You're not going to be very diversified. Lots of cons here. I think the cons outweigh the pros. So I would sell it. But the big risk, of course, that everybody worries about is what if home prices go up a lot and now I have trouble buying a home. Well, that's not going to be a problem for you. This thing's already paid off. You've got two high earners here. You've got a big chunk of change. Even if you don't even really invest this money, it's certainly going to be enough to be a good down payment on your doctor home when you you're done. And it might even pay for the entire home, especially if it grows significantly. So what would I do with it? Well, I would try to make it grow. You know, you're going to need it in four years though, so maybe not crazy risky investment. You might even want it 100% in stocks. You might want to put it into a mix of half stocks, half bonds or a third stocks, third bonds, a third cash, something like that, that maybe an income focused fund like a Target retirement income fund. These sorts of investments that aren't maybe as volatile as something else. Another approach that somebody might take is they say, hey, this is real estate. Let's put it into something that will do well if real estate does well and if it does poorly, because real estate does poorly, that's okay because then maybe I'll be able to get my house a little bit cheaper as well. That's an option. You could put it into a real estate investment. I don't know that you're going to qualify as an accredited investor and have access to one of the private real estate funds. So you're probably limited to something like the Vanguard REIT index fund. But that's not only 100% stocks. It is a fairly volatile sector of stocks and so bad things can happen there. I lost 78% of my investment in that fund in the 2008 meltdown. So I don't know that I can in good faith recommend you put your whole house fund in there. But that would be one approach that some people take. I would probably just put it into a mix of stocks and bonds and cash. Maybe even do something like a four year treasury bond or a four year CD so the money's there when it comes time for you to buy a house again, that's not crazy. And you'll make whatever 4% or 5% on it a year. It'll be a little bit bigger than when you got there. Probably keep up more or less with inflation between now and then. Maybe not inflation of houses because we don't know what that's going to be, but general inflation. But I'd sell it. I'd invest the money and not worry about it and enjoy renting for the next couple of places you live until you get into your longer term jobs and the jobs like you and you like the jobs. And it's time to buy a house again and I think you'll be glad to have all that cash sitting there ready to do so. All right, a quote of the day today is from Ayn Rand. Something's controversial. Turns out this is the author of Atlas Shrugged and a bunch of similar books. The really conservative people think this is like the Bible. Liberals just think she's the devil. But I don't even know if it's a she. It might be a he. I don't know. Is ain't a she name or a he name. It's a woman. Yeah, I think it's worth a read. I thought it was interesting. If nothing else, you'll understand what people mean when they say who is John Galt or Atlas Shrugged? I think that's worthwhile as a little bit of a financial education. But be aware, it's a fairly conservative person that wrote that book. But I agree to her with her quote, which is money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. And I don't see how anybody can disagree with that, no matter what their political persuasion. All right, let's take our next question. This one's about marriage.

Hi, Dr. Dali Basak from Illinois here. First of all, thank you for all that you do. Since I found the White Coat investor about a year ago, it's truly changed my life and I know it has done so for many of your listeners. So my question is, my partner and I of seven years have recently gotten engaged and although we don't plan to have a ceremony in the coming two years, we have considered getting legally married for any tax benefits. So I was wondering if you could expand about tax benefits of being married and any downsides for some context. My partner is finishing residency this next month and starting as an attending hospitalist at 240,000. I am an MBPhD student and my yearly stipend is $34,000. And I have three more years left of training. I would appreciate any insight if there are any tax benefits to us being married. Thank you again for all that you do, and I look forward to listening to your response.

All right, it's a good question. What do I get a lot. It's actually one of my least favorite questions. I hate this question because it reduces something that I see as being very valuable, very important, very special in my life to dollars and cents. And I kind of hate that. But I get the question. People ask it all the time. There are both tax benefits and tax penalties getting married. And so, you know, just like we can't expect people, as I was talking about at the beginning of this podcast, we can't expect people to ignore the fact that PSLF is out there when they're deciding how much to borrow for their student loans. We can't expect people to not think about the financial implications of getting married. And there are many. In your case, I suspect getting married is going to lower your overall tax bill. This is mostly because your husband is going to pay less in taxes because he's going to be able to pay taxes on most of his income as a married filing jointly rather than a single. It's actually going to raise your tax bill, but the overall effect will be lower on the taxes paid because of the huge difference between your incomes. So I have no doubt that getting married is going to save you some tax money. It could cause a few issues with student loan management, but I don't think that's an issue for you guys. You're on an MD PhD program, so I'm assuming you don't have much in the way of student loans. And for him, is the high earner filing married, filing singly and enrolling in pay probably isn't going to be the right move for him. So I don't think there's a lot of downside here financially for you guys to get married. But this isn't like it's a mystery, right? Go get some tax software, put your money, put everything in as though you're married, and then put it in as though you're single and run the numbers and see what the difference is. And I would bet that it's going to come out to be a pretty significant difference. Thousands of dollars in taxes. But I would not tell you to get married for tax reasons. And I wouldn't tell you to not get married for tax reasons. It's like having a kid for tax reasons. Yeah, there's some tax breaks associated with having kids, but if you're having kids for the tax breaks, you're doing this all wrong. Same thing with marriage. So seven years. You guys know each other well. You know whether you want to spend the rest of your lives together or not, if you do, go get married. If you don't break up and go find somebody else. But seven years is plenty of time. You guys should go get married and quit worrying about the financial implications of it. You guys are going to do just fine financially. Even if this were going to hurt you financially, I would still tell you, go and get married. If you guys are going to be together the rest of your lives, it's a beautiful thing. And in your case, I think it's actually going to be good financially. Now there are some people out there, they get married and actually cost some money and I think it's a lot harder decision for them. But for you, I, I can't see any way this is going to cost you more money to be married unless you turn around and get divorced. So if this is right, you love each other, you can be together forever, then go get married. As a white coat, you have valuable knowledge. Various companies want that knowledge and they're willing to pay you for it. That's why we put together a list of recommendations for companies that pay you to take surveys. If you're looking for a profitable side gig for not too much effort, getting paid for surveys could be the perfect solution for you. 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