The Shocking Truth About Doctors Retiring Early

Many doctors will not be able to retire early, comfortably, despite working very hard, even taking extra shifts and doing locums. Now this is not because they haven't worked hard or anything like that, but this is clearly due to one big issue, not having a clear financial plan, an actionable financial plan that can take them from the point they are to the point where they need to be. Now I'll give you an example. I met this wonderful retired GP who retired at 57 years of age and decided, you know what, I'm done. I don't want to carry on working in this area. Now I want to go travel the world. He had been traveling the world for the past 13 years with his wife and he said they've been doing it at no pace. Now I'm going to tell you more about this, but first of all I want to welcome you to moneywisedoctor.com Here we help doctors and healthcare professionals avoid making costly financial mistakes which are to help you to build a solid financial future by taking charge of your finances and having a clear plan of what you want your money to do for you. Now let's delve into this story. Now I met this 70 year old retired GP who retired, I mean after working for almost 30 years in the NHS. And the main thing I took away was that he started building his financial plan when he was about 27. So he did this for almost 30 years and when he was about 55 he said he discovered there changes in the government plan which didn't favor him tax wise, which was going to affect his financial plan negatively. So when he looked at his numbers he realized, look, I'm in a position to retire and I'll be fine. And he decided to take his retirement from then and for the past 13 years they've gone to 97 countries, traveling by water mostly and sometimes by air. And he said to me, look, I got stuck in the Caribbean during COVID so I don't really know what the regulations and the rules were in the uk. And I said, you know what, there are worse places to be stuck during the COVID pandemic. So well done on you. Now, despite details of the trips he shared with me, there are a few lessons which I drew out and I want to share those lessons with you today. Number one is to have a clear financial plan. No doctor or healthcare professional, dentist or nurse who I know, who has retired early, comfortably did it by chance. They all seem to have a clear financial plan from day one. They knew where they wanted to go and they knew where they wanted to end up and they knew that if the plan doesn't work, this is what they were going to do as plan B. So you need to have a clear financial plan. This is the starting point. Without that, it's going to be difficult. You're just going to have to go by the NHS plan, which is retired by 68 or 65, depending on what NHS pension planner you are on. Well, if you're not on the NHS pension plan as well, it's going to be even be a bit more difficult without a plan of your own. So that's number one, have a clear financial plan. Right, so that takes me to number two. For you to have a clear financial plan, you first need to understand where you are. So number two is understand your numbers. Now, as a healthcare professional, whether you're a doctor or a nurse or a dentist, when a patient comes to you and they have a medical problem, the first thing you want to do is to get the diagnosis. You want to understand the numbers and some of the things you might do depending on where you are. Me as a gp, I want to do the blood pressure, pulse, I want to check the heart rate, listen to the heart sounds, you know, listen to the chest and do some examination. In the hospital, you might do a bit more like, you know, do some bloods immediately, get a CT scan, you know, chest X ray or whatever it is you do in your department. So you want to do some numbers already that will give you an idea if you're worried that the person might be very unwell. Like, you're thinking about sepsis, you're thinking about things like, what is the new score, what is the early warning score? And that would help you to make a decision. Now, this is not so different when it comes to your finances. You need to understand where are you at the moment. Are you at risk of working far beyond when you want to retire? Are you doing okay? Are there some areas where you're doing much better and some areas that need improvement? So you need to know your numbers. Now, how do you know your numbers? There are a few ways you can do this, and the commonest way is one, you could talk to a financial advisor. Of course, you need to find one that is really good and not overpay for it. That would be one way to start. A good financial advisor that understand how the NHS works and understand your current situation might be able to help, but that's not the best way to start. I'll say, number two, you could go try to do your. Do it by yourself. Download some online calculators, try a few different things here and there, but that could be take quite a bit of time and you're not really sure of what you're getting. But the third and by far my favorite way will be to take a quiz. So there's a money wise doctor quiz which you designed last year. There's a bit of a scorecard. It scores you in different areas of your finances. It looks at your earnings, it looks at your investing, looks at your savings and it looks at things like security, insurance, whether you are properly covered in some areas. So taking that quiz could actually help you to figure out areas that you might need improvement areas that you might need to work on. And it takes just three minutes. Actually last week we did a video on how you can do the quiz quickly. It's available on moneywise doctor.com or you could look at the show link. If you look at the links below, you can click on it and do the quiz and three minutes to help you to understand where your financial situation is. So that's number two, understand your numbers. So remember, number one, have a financial plan. Number two, understand your numbers clearly. So the third point I took away from this was the importance of building your financial iq. So a lot of times why doctors and healthcare professionals fall into the wrong financial plan or end up paying so much for bad financial advice and they find out too late is because they haven't actually built their own financial iq. Now, you don't need to become a financial guru, you don't need to become a financial expert or anything like that. But you can do some little, little things. There are three main things you can do every year that could take you from here to there financially. Can take it to the point where you don't understand anything, to the point where you know clearly where you want to go. And I'll tell you those three things. Number one, you need to have a way to have a financial continuous development. So the same way you do your cpd, you do your continuous professional development and every year you learn something to renew your license, adult safeguarding, your BLS for basic life support. You need to have a plan for your financial cpd. Now there are a few ways to go about it. One I'll say is the annual book plan. So read a good solid financial book every year. Now if you look at my bookshelf, I have some all the way down and I have some upstairs as well every year and I have about 100, 200 books on Audible. I'll say read just one is enough. I understand your doctor, I understand you. Enough. I understand your healthcare professional. You're very busy, so I'm not asking asking you to read a hundred books like myself. You can read just one good book every year. Imagine you started reading one book from the beginning of your career till now. You'd have read like maybe 20 if you've been a medic for 20 years, or at least 10. But if over the course of a 20, 30 year career you read one book every year, you would have accumulated so much financial knowledge that it would be difficult for a financial advisor if they are not the right type to lead you astray. Now, there are multiple good books. I will do a separate video on the books to start with, but one good one I recommend is the Psychology of Money. You can check the link in the show notes or you can check it on Amazon. It's also on Audible. It's a very good book. You can start with that. There are many other books, where are the customers yards? Which is very good one as well. On my LinkedIn, I posted some examples of books I think you should start with. That's a good place to start. One book per year. Number two is the annual seminar plan. So every year aim to attend at least one good financial seminar. It could be a seminar, it could be a webinar, it could be a conference, it could be a convention. Whatever it is, it's really important to get together with other people who are heading in the same direction as you, who have the same value, who don't think it's a bad idea to talk about money as a medic, or who don't feel it's a bad idea to want to retire comfortably and early, who don't think it's a bad idea to want to become financially free early in your career so you can practice medicine for the joy of it and willingly rather than because it's a meal ticket. So one annual seminar or conference per year. Really important. Have a weekly newsletter or blog that you follow. So if you subscribe for a weekly newsletter or blog, something you follow every week, that would help you to keep up to date. When interest rates are changing, you can know. When there's a financial opportunity, you can know. Ideally, of course, I think it's better if this is a newsletter or blog or even a YouTube channel like this one that is catering directly for healthcare professionals and doctors. This means that it will help to keep up to date and it doesn't need to be anything detailed. It can be something you can read in 10, 15 minutes. Every week helps you to keep up to date, helps you to keep fit. So I suggest you go for that. Obviously I'm a bit biased and if you asked me for an option, I recommend moneywisedoctor.com and of course this YouTube channel. But there are multiple options out there. You can go out, subscribe to one or two or even multiple. You don't have to read all of them, but subscribe to a couple of them and you can follow that every week to get information that can help you to keep financially fit. So with all these things in place, having a clear financial plan, having your numbers, understanding your numbers, and also having a clear plan to increase your financial iq, you increase your chances of retiring early and quite comfortably and helps you to get to a financial position where you're no longer anxious or scared about your numbers. But you know that, you know what you're doing and you know your clear financial plan. And even if you have a setback, you still know how to get back on your feet. So now that you know what's your own financial plan, what age do you plan to retire and what is your plan to help that come to pass? Now drop your comments in the YouTube channel here and if you have a question, you have things you like to ask or you like videos about anything finance related to doctors or healthcare professionals, or anything financial that you like to ask or you like your video about, drop it in the comment here for me. Don't be shy to share these videos to your colleagues to help them to understand how to build a strong financial future. Well, thank you for sticking around and thank you for listening and till next time. Alright, bye bye.