10 Money Rules for Doctors and Healthcare Professionals 2024: Financial Wellness, Part 1

Are you a doctor or healthcare professional who keeps wondering how your hard earned money seems to slip through your fingers? Do you sometimes worry that you've not secured your financial future? And you wonder how you can organize your finances while you're busy trying to save lives? Well, if that's the case, today is your lucky day because we'll be sharing 10 money wise rules for doctors and healthcare professionals who want to take charge of their finances and plan a solid financial future. Stick around. Start with Rule 1. Be your own chief financial officer. I mean, as doctors, it's easy to be busy and forget about planning financially for your life. But you need to become the chief financial officer of your life. You're the one in charge. You're the one making the decision. I mean, you can hire advice as if you need to hire a financial advisor, an accountant or lawyer, whatever you need. Or even you can end up doing it by yourself if you get the right education as we hope to provide you with a moneywisedoctor.com but at the end of the day, you understand that you're ultimately responsible for planning your financial future and ensuring the financial well being of you and your family. So it's really important that you make that decision to say, from today, I'm going to take charge. I'm the one in charge and I'm going to make the right decisions confidently. You can do this. Don't be intimidated. You went to med school, you went to nursing school. You're a smart person, you can manage it and we're here to help you. Let's jump right into Rule 2. Rule 2. Invest in your own financial education. Your financial CPD. Just as a medical doctor or as a nurse or whatever your profession is, your renewal of your license is highly dependent on you being able to have what we call continuous professional development. In the same way investing in your financial education is important. It cannot just be by watching one video, reading one book for the rest of your life. You said no. But also at the same time, understand that you're busy and I've been, I've been there myself. So I understand you cannot set aside unlimited time to improve your financial knowledge. So there are three simple ways I've found to be very helpful. 1. If you could set aside time every year to read at least one single financial book that will help to boost your financial iq. A good financial book. It doesn't matter which one. There are quite a few of them. Recommend the moneywisedoctor.com through the newsletters. Read one good financial book every year. Two if you attend seminars, one or two seminars every year, even one should be enough. Financial seminar might be locally, you might be online, you might be in a conference, you know, attend a financial seminar to keep you updated. Now, number three is very simple and most time is free or cheap. Subscribe to a newsletter or a website or a blog or YouTube station, whatever platform that you're happy with that will deliver to you weekly financial information strategies in a very simple way that you can digest on the go. That way you stay financially fit and well. Because if you ask me which one I recommend, what do you think the think I recommend? Moneywisedoctor.com of course, I think it's one of the best online for doctors and healthcare professionals. But there's a plethora of options for you to check online. Just make sure it's a station or a platform that's giving you the right information and not just trying to sell you investments in cryptos or one funny thing or the others. Right, so are you ready for the next one? Let's jump right into rule three. Three is an emergency. Have an emergency fund. Have an emergency fund is an emergency. When we talk about emergencies as doctors and nurses, the first thing that comes to our mind is emergency trolleys, oxygen, IV fluids and you know, all of that. But there's another emergency emergency fund is just as important, like your financial safety net, just as you keep an emergency bag or emergency trolley or a grab bag, you keep it there even when there's no emergency, just in case. The same way your emergency fund is some money that you need to keep aside just in case things don't go as planned or if things come up. And when people ask how much do I need to save as an emergency fund? I say it depends. For instance, in my own case, I found an emergency fund to be very useful when I decided to leave my salary job full time as a salary JP to work on moneywisedoctor.com and other personal and family project. So having a good amount of an emergency fund gave me that sort of assurance that even if whatever I'm doing did not turn out to become financially viable, at least I had something to fall back on. But the general rule of thumb is to keep at least three to six months worth of your living expenses in a savings account. As an emergency fund, it could be that, who knows, maybe you might need to replace your tires or somewhere it's leaking in your house. Or for some people, they suddenly found that they they can't work for a while. So your emergency fund is sort of like your fallback plan. So that's rule three, make sure you have an emergency fund. When you're ready, you jump straight to Rule 4. Rule 4 Secure your retirement by setting aside 15 to 20% of your income for retirement. Now what do I mean by this? Basically is ensuring that when your income is hitting your account, set it up automatically. That 15 to 20% of it goes out directly to go into a fund that is set aside just for investing for your retirement. Now you can set up a direct debit or a standing order or, or set it up with your bank. But you don't want to do this manually because then you now need to be disciplined or remember you might find out that is harder. Just assume that the money is not there. If it's landing into your account automatically, 15 to 20% of it going into a fund which you can then use to invest for retirement. I mean in subsequent videos you can look into how to what sort of options can look at investing and all that. But at the moment the main key point of Rule 4 is to make sure that retirement planning, you're planning for it by setting aside 15 to 20% of your income or retirement. Now, when you're ready, let's tackle how to avoid or how to prepare for financial disasters as Rule 5. Rule 5 Shield yourself against potential catastrophic financial disasters. What does that mean? Basically, safety, ensuring against the downsides. Risk management is essential. Nobody expects or prays for things to go wrong, but things do go wrong. So it's important to look at things like insurance, how to protect your most valuable asset management, which is your ability to earn. For most of us, that's your most valuable asset. So income protection, critical illness covers, those are things that as a doctor, you need to protect those downsides. And when we get inquiries on moneywisedoctor.com a lot of people ask, do I really need to have a life insurance? I'll say, well, if anyone is dependent on your income for their sustenance, if you don't have a life insurance, if things go wrong, they might be in a very difficult place. So get on moneywisedoctor.com or wherever, find financial advisors or insurance advisors, speak to them to get advice on what you need. So it's really, really important to make sure that that is covered. Now there's the other side, which I like to address. A lot of people end up buying insurance for things that are not catastrophic. For instance, if your iPhone or your Samsung phone, whatever should drop into the toilet, it's not a disaster. It'll be Easy. It will be easy for you to replace it most times. Times as a doctor and nurse it might not take up to a month worth of your salary to replace it, except you're using a very expensive phone. So it's really quite key to understand and separate what is catastrophic if your holiday is cancelled or if the microwave you bought botany in curries or wherever becomes damaged. Most likely it's not catastrophic, it's not going to ruin your life, it's not going to have a major impact in your life. It might be an inconvenience, I may make it a bit upset set, but you'll probably be able to replace the microwave. So I don't tend to buy any insurance for things like that. Obviously if you own a home, there's home insurance. I can, you can have your building and content insurance to cover those things. But generally I wouldn't go around buying an insurance for my toaster. I rather focus on making sure that I have a big life insurance policy, a very decent income protection policy. So these are things I need to take to think about. I mean there are other kinds of insurance as well. Things like your medical defense, obviously you practice in the uk, you need to have your medical defense insurance, make sure that that's covered. If you've got a business or if you are a private health care practice, obviously the other insurance you need to get like a public liability insurance, I mean make sure that you get adequate insurance to cover you. In fact, at some point I would usually also take out a legal insurance, legal cover insurance. I mean before we had any retainership in terms of lawyers, just in case you get sued, then that insurance covered you and we found it quite beneficial in the past. So it's really, really quite key as a doctor to make sure you cover for the downside. So the first half of our money wise rules. But don't click away just yet, we've got the remaining five rules to cover in the next video. In the meantime, if you found this tip to be helpful, be sure to smash that like button and subscribe and hit the bell icon so that you get alerted by YouTube whenever I upload new videos. At the end of the day, don't forget that financial literacy is a skill that every doctor healthcare professionals needs to have. There's been quite a lot about in the news and junior doctor strikes. And while we can all agree that doctors and healthcare professionals are not paid anywhere near as much as they should be paid, but we can also agree that we can make the best use of whatever resources we have to make sure that we're optimizing it and making sure that our families and ourselves are being taken care of and are financially well. All right. Till the next time, remain money wise.