Your Salary Isn't the Problem. This Is

Most doctors don't have an income problem, they have a leakage, financial leakage problem. You may earn up to £120,000 a year and still feel behind. Why? Because tax, poor structure, missed allowances, and inefficient investing quietly erode your wealth. Now, this course exists to stop that bleed, not with hype, not with shortcuts, but with a calm, structured system that protects what you earn and helps you grow it intentionally. Now, if you're ready to stop leaking and start building properly, let's begin. You know this envelope. This is where financial anxiety starts for many doctors. Right now, you're on one of two paths to your financial future. The first pathway leads to stress. You're reacting to tax bills you did not anticipate. You're unsure whether your pension contributions are right. You're not fully confident about your investing strategy. In fact, you might even have cash sitting in the bank, but you're unsure if you should be doing more rather than just sitting for inflation. Now, for some of you, there's a quiet anxiety that something is leaking and you do not quite know where. So this is Camp 1. This is the first pathway that many doctors and healthcare professionals are on. Or you are on the second pathway. You have a clear, long-term tax-efficient investing strategy. You understand how tax efficiency, insurance, tax planning, and, you know, estate planning, all of it works together to help you to build your financial future. Your decisions are intentional. Your money is working hard, very hard, harder than you work, and work itself becomes optional over time. If you are currently on the first pathway, this course is designed to move you to the second pathway. It can save you years and years of confusion and potentially hundreds of thousands in avoidable mistakes. And well, if you're fortunate enough to be already on the second pathway but you feel stuck, this will help you to refine your strategy and accelerate your progress towards your financial goals, whether it's early retirement or whether it's just making work to become optional. Now, this course is not just theory. It's created from real experience of tax-efficient investing that I've done over the last 21 years that helped me reach financial freedom as a doctor. And say goodbye to my NHS GP job 4 years ago. These are the same frameworks that I have now taught to over 2,000 doctors in masterclasses, conferences, workshops, and as well as in my best-selling personal finance book, The Money Wise Doctor, which was a bestseller on Amazon on retirement planning, investing, and personal finance. Now, in this course, we're going to cover How you can be tax efficient and stop leaking your income through overpaying taxes without even knowing. How to start investing without taking unnecessary risk. How to protect your financial future and your family's financial future. We're going to go in-depth and cover it all. Now, here's the uncomfortable truth. Most doctors and dentists and healthcare professionals make big financial mistakes, not because we're careless, not because we're reckless, but because nobody ever taught us how the financial system actually works. And there's a lot of data to support this. One of them is from the MoneyWise Doctor poll. Over the last 2 years, about 1,300 doctors and healthcare professionals responded to the MoneyWise Doctor poll, and the results have been very, very revealing. 71% said they feel financially behind for their age. 67% worry that they won't have enough to retire comfortably. Now, 6 out of 10, that's about 60%, say they feel investing is too risky or too complex. And then 41% have no emergency fund, no savings to cover 3 to 6 months' worth of living expenses. So if their income suddenly dries up, it's going to be a bit of a problem. Now, a staggering 55% have no life insurance or income protection insurance in place. Now, these numbers are worrisome, and remember As medics, we are not irresponsible people. We are some of the most educated and hardworking professionals in the country. So how come we have these massive financial gaps and risk of making huge money mistakes? Well, it all goes back to a large gap in our training. Zero financial education despite years and years of rigorous training. And this already puts many of you, many professionals like you, at a big disadvantage. So the goal of this course is to plug that gap, to solve this problem for you. And I'm doing it totally for free at no cost. If we've never met before, hi, I'm Dr. Andy Egwim. I'm a former NHS GP. I've been a doctor for over 15 years and I've also been an investor for about 21 years now. In fact, I started investing in my late teens. I'm an entrepreneur and the author of The Moneywise Doctor. You've already seen that the Moneywise Doctor, which became an Amazon bestseller in multiple categories, including investing, personal finance, retirement planning, you know, and money management. Now, understanding tax-efficient investing and building the right personal financial systems helped me achieve financial freedom and leave my salary GP job while I was in my my 30s. Now, after I achieved financial independence, many of my colleagues wanted to know how I did it. I was inundated with calls, text messages, DMs from friends, and emails. In fact, it became a little overwhelming. So in February 2023, 3 years exactly from when I'm making this course, I started a simple blog to share my journey on moneywisedoctor.com. Now, this grew into a weekly newsletter that is read by thousands of doctors across the UK and Canada and other places, followed by a podcast, and the rest they say is history. Since then, I've been privileged to teach thousands of doctors, dentists, healthcare professionals how to stop making costly financial mistakes, how to avoid leaking tens of thousands through overpaying tax and poor financial systems, and how to start making confident, informed financial decisions without overwhelm, without letting bad players in the financial system rip you off. This entire course is about giving you the same clarity and structure, and it's totally for free. Now, there's no hype, no shortcuts. It's calm, it's practical, it's kind of like clinical system that helps you take control of your finances and stop being anxious about money for the rest of your career once you have the skills. So why does this course exist in the first place. Why on earth will I invest so much of my precious time and resources to make this free course for you? Well, I created this detailed course as a thank you to thousands of you medics that have followed our journey for the last 3 years on moneywise-doctor.com. I made the course because medics are among the most skilled and hardworking professionals in this country. Everywhere I've been, okay, every country I've been, yet we are never taught how money works, which is really crucial about being adult. We learn how to save lives but not how to secure our own financial well-being, and this often leads to frustration and dissatisfaction. Many medics, senior doctors, end well, yet the system of tax, pensions, debt, inflation, and complex rules quietly erodes any progress we believe we are making. And as an IMG doctor myself who moved over to the UK about a decade ago, I experienced the same confusion myself. There were lots of conflicting information online, and when I thought I might speak to, you know, financial advisors, many just turned out to be glorified salespeople hawking their financial products, interested in commission before compassion. I had to learn the financial system the hard way myself, and I'll share these lessons with you in this course totally for free. Because they helped me reach financial freedom and, um, help me hit my goals after almost 2 decades of investing. I started around 19 and I did that into my 30s. Now, no professional like you should have to navigate this alone. This course exists to give you that clarity, structure, and guidance. So these are the things that we're going to cover. Before we go any further, let me briefly explain step by step what we're going to cover and how to get the most value out of this course. We'll start by identifying why doctors and medics in general struggle with money despite earning a decent income. And this is not to blame or shame anyone. I made some of these mistakes myself along my career. It's not about being more disciplined. No, we're not talking about being more disciplined here or sticking to unrealistic budgets or living miserable, stingy lifestyle. No, you can have fun, enjoy your life and still save. We will use a systematic, proven approach that I've shared to understand how often we make poor financial decisions and how we can approach our own financial planning and decisions with clarity. So from there, you can build your own automated financial system, something that runs quietly in the background of your life, a system that organizes cash flow, reduces friction, and removes financial anxiety instead of constantly reacting to problems. So this is your own financial strategy. Only after that foundation is in place do we move into core building blocks, including tax efficiency in depth, using my simple ABCDE framework to make sure that you're not overpaying taxes. 2, we look at careful common sense investing. With tax-efficient wrappers like ISAs, pensions, and, and whatever you use. For instance, in Canada they have TFSA. So you want to avoid taking unnecessary risk when you're investing. Number 3, we look at debt— what to prioritize, what to pay off, what to ignore in the meantime. Number 4, financial protection— what insurance do you actually need and what can you ignore? Then we go deeper, even deeper into investing calmly without hype. Without taking unnecessary risk. We'll look at investing for busy professionals like doctors based on a number of criteria like your goals, your time horizon, your risk tolerance, and your capacity to bear loss. We'll be using real-world examples, looking at things like index funds, stocks, bonds, property, commodities like gold, and alternatives, showing where each fits and where they don't. Only then do we go deep into pensions, looking at things like the NHS pension, personal pension like SIPPs or SSAS, how they interact and how they combine intelligently to help you hit your goals. We also talk about estate planning and inheritance tax so that what you work hard to build over these years doesn't unnecessarily end up losing 40% to the government as inheritance tax. Then we zoom out and look at practically at financial freedom, what it really means for you as a doctor or healthcare professional, and how to approach it without burnout fantasy or assumptions. And finally, we'll talk about strategic generosity, how to give generously, intentionally, without financial stress. And hey, to respect your time, this course is clearly structured. You can go sequentially or jump straight to the sections you need the most. So I've put some timestamps in the descriptions so that it's easy to navigate. If you want this to be more than just another video that you watch and forget, let's do a couple of things. Get a notebook nearby and watch it with one or two colleagues so that you can keep yourselves accountable. And if looking for support from peers, like people like you who are on the journey to financial freedom, you may join the Moneywise Doctor community for free, and the link will be in the description through MedScan. So now let's begin. 1. We look at why doctors struggle with money and why it's not your fault, what you can do about that. Let's clear something up. Most financial mistakes doctors make are not because they are reckless. They are not because doctors spend too much. Most doctors I know are not extravagant. They're not because doctors don't care. They happen because decisions are often made without clarity, without understanding clearly what, what they're doing. You delay decisions, you outsource blindly to experts, or you react emotionally when something goes wrong. Now, none of those are good strategies. Nothing wrong with using experts, but you need to know what you need so that you know when you're getting the right person. Now, from the outside, doctors are expected to be doing well. Good income, you're top of your class, stable career, respected profession, you're a bright person. So there's an unspoken assumption by society, family, and even sometimes yourselves that money shouldn't be a problem. But internally, many doctors— I've spoken to thousands of doctors— are behind. You're unsure. You are anxious about getting it wrong. You're embarrassed to ask basic questions because you think, well, I should have known this by now. And that creates unnecessary silence. I regularly see doctors earning well into six figures who don't understand their tax position. And that means whenever they see a letter like this, they panic. You don't know if you are saving in the right account. You don't understand your pension. You have your money sitting in the wrong place. Losing value to inflation. I mean, the change in value that happens over time, that means the money you save is not having the same, you know, buying power. Now, this is not a discipline problem, it's a systems problem. And outsourcing it could be tempting, which is not a bad thing to hire experts. Many doctors try to solve this by outsourcing everything. I have an advisor, I have an accountant. You hire an accountant, you hire an advisor, and you hope it all gets sorted Nothing wrong with using experts, but outsourcing is not wrong, but outsourcing without understanding creates dependency and puts you in a position where trust unfortunately could be abused. And this happens, and many doctors have been taken advantage of by financial salespeople disguised as advisors. And that's part of why I started moneywise-doctor.com, to share this thing so that you watch out. Anxiety then starts to creep in. You don't understand. You don't know whether the advice you're getting is good, bad, or just simply only good for the advisor's financial future, not yours. You don't know what questions to ask. You don't know when something doesn't feel right. And sadly, the financial industry doesn't operate like our medical field. I mean, in medicine, ethics are drilled into us. We don't only ask, is this legal? We go a bit further to ask, is this right for the patient? Is it ethical? We go beyond what is just legal, just doing my job, to what is ethical and best for the patient. In finance, the incentives are often very different. The bar is frequently just legal compliance, not ethics. Unfortunately, that's the truth. You can trust an advisor, but you must verify everything. This is totally different from medicine, where there's a lot of mutual trust. Unfortunately, doctors have been burned when they transfer that same trust that we have in medicine to some bad players or incompetent professionals in the financial industry. They are really good ones and they are worth their weight in gold, but there are also those that really, really are not great. From experience, I've seen many doctors get burned by the financial industry in 3 big ways, mainly 3. One, non-specialist advisors. These are the ones, they may be well-meaning, but they're unfamiliar with the specific issues and nuances with doctors' finances, like the NHS pensions, locums, tapered allowances, 60% tax trap, and all that. 2. Legal but unethical advice. These are the type of advisors that are just optimized for fees, not outcomes. They care more about their juicy commissions even if it's not in your best interest. Sometimes they are restricted advisors. Number 3, compliance-only accountants. So some accountants do nothing for your tax efficient strategy. Your tax returns get filed correctly on time, but there's no proactive tax strategy to make sure you are not overpaying tax. And that might mean that you are leaking thousands in taxes because no one is pointing out these things to you. And I've seen that with a lot of doctors who say, well, I wish someone told me. Now, financial education is important to help you to tell the difference. Without financial education, you have no way of telling whether you're getting good advice. And that's what this course is for, is to help you to understand how to be in charge of your own financial future And if you then need to hire some help as an accountant, advisor, insurance, whatever, you know exactly what to watch out for. Now, before we go further, let's address an elephant in the room. Lifestyle inflation. There's another pressure that doctors face especially. It's not extravagance, it's just expectations. You think this should be the type of house a doctor should live, doctor's car, doctor's lifestyle. You know, you may feel there's a level of lifestyle you should be living irrespective of what your actual finances are doing. I don't have anything against— I love a nice car. I've got a couple of them out there, but it's not about greed. It's just pressure. Sometimes pressure from family, society, but most times it's just imaginary in our head. We may find ourselves trying to live large to impress people who may not even care about us. They don't even notice what you're wearing or what you're driving. And when spending increases without strategy, 3 things happen. Your freedom starts to reduce, your stress massively increases, you are stressed all the time, and your flexibility and options start disappearing because you want to do extra work to meet up. Let me give you a simple example. Dr. Raj was a new NHS consultant I chatted with, made a few moves that looked harmless but suddenly put him in a financial tight corner. As soon as he was appointed as a consultant, he felt it was time to upgrade. After all, these years of sacrifices. And you can't blame him. After all these several years of study, med school, residency, through his postgraduate training, he felt he had arrived and he had to show it so everyone knows, okay? So he upgraded his house, obviously moved to a nicer house. He bought a new car, upgraded, and his gym membership. Nothing extravagant, all deserved, well deserved. Within months, he had to add some extra locum shift just to stay afloat. And in a few months he had to work several extra shifts just to keep up, and his taxes went up as well. Same income, same income, but now less freedom. He has more income, less freedom. So it's not just about earning more, it's about earning more with a careful strategy to make sure you're able to keep more of it. Now, many doctors believe, I just need to earn more and to solve everything. But earning more without an intentional financial structure, it just creates a few issues. Number 1, it increases your tax liability. 2, it triggers hidden tax traps we are often not aware of. I've written a lot about the 60% tax trap. There are a few others. 3, it adds more complexity to your life. And in many cases, I've seen that it could also increase your stress. Having talked to hundreds of doctors about these things. Now, this doesn't mean that earning less is better. No, that's not what I'm saying. No, not at all. But earning more with an intentional financial tax-efficient strategy is far better. Let me explain this. I like to use practical examples. Dr. Anna is a GP who crossed over £100,000 in adjusted net income, but she felt worse off. Her salaried income plus her additional income from locum shifts pushed her into the 60% tax trap zone, and I'll explain that a little bit more. She was not even aware of this at first until she attended one of our Moneywise Doctor masterclasses, which was entirely free. And if you're just hearing of our 60% tax trap, this is how it works. For every £2 over £100,000, you lose £1 of personal allowance, and then by the time you get to £125,140, your personal allowance is entirely gone. Add frozen tax thresholds, dividend allowances, so many tax changes that happened, and it feels punishing to earn more. And this is why it's important to understand and diagnose where these leaks are. Now, talking about diagnosis, because that's where we start. Even as clinicians, we would never treat without diagnosing. If a patient walks in, don't just prescribe. Yet many of us do that with our finances. Without a clear understanding of where the issues are, we end up with haphazard approaches to sorting out our finances. And that's why I created MedScan, and I have that right here in my book, but you can also get it for free online. It's like your financial early warning score for doctors. MedScan, it looks at cash flow, the money that comes in and goes out, your emergency fund, debt management, strategic spending, compounding and investing, and allowances and tax efficiency, and of course, necessary financial protection. If you want a quick 3-minute snapshot of where you might be leaking financially, MedScan is linked in the description and is also pinned in the comments. You can go there and check straight away. It takes under 3 minutes, and over 1,300 doctors say it gave them clarity and control. With their finances. So diagnosis first before you then start trying to address the structure. Right now, take a breath. You're not behind. You've not failed. You're behind because no one taught you the financial system. In the next section, we'll build that system calmly, practically, and specifically. You build it for yourself the way you like it. You're exactly where you need to be, and we're going to look at the next session now. Now, if you found this course useful, don't keep it to yourself. Let's be generous here. Think of 2 colleagues who are probably leaking financially right now, anymore paying a lot of it out in tax. Go ahead, share it with them. But if you want personalized clarity, go ahead and take the Financial Health MedScan Quiz right the link there below. It takes you 3 minutes. It shows you where your biggest financial risks are, and you'll be able to find it and fix it. Check the link below to get it. And hey, if you'd like to explore working more closely with me, you can apply with the link. The application form is in the link in the description, or go ahead and email support@moneywise.com. I will take it from there. Let's build properly. All right then, Let's jump right back to the course. Now, before we talk about investing, before we talk about pensions, before we talk about tax strategies or financial freedom, we need to talk about systems. Okay? Because without a clear financial system, everything else becomes confusing, fragile, and stressful. Now, this is where doctors go wrong. We jump straight to what should I invest in. I get that question all the time. How do I reduce my taxes? Is this pension good or bad? I get— I even got a few emails like that today, um, from moneywise— support@moneywisedoctor.com. But we often skip the overall operating system, looking at everything holistically. Here's the truth: without an operating system, even good decisions can fail. You need You need a good financial operating system, and it's not about willpower. You need automation. It's not about willpower or discipline. It's about creating systems and automation, and it's not that difficult. I'll show you how to do that. A budget is telling your money what to do. Automation is making sure it actually listens, so you don't have to use the brainpower and discipline. Most doctors are not bad with money. We are disciplined. Or we're responsible, we delay gratification for years just to qualify. So the problem is not just about the behavior. The problem is friction. Friction. If every financial decision requires remembering, deciding, logging in, second-guessing, it will eventually fail. Not because you are lazy, but because you're human and you're busy. In medicine, we don't rely on memory for critical processes. We use systems. We have checklists, we have protocols, we have defaults. Your finances deserve the same treatment. And that's why I created the AMASS framework that has already been a game changer for thousands of doctors. And I address that in Chapter 2 of my book, The Moneywise Doctor. Now I'll explain to you here. AMASS stands for Automated Monthly Allocated Savings System. Now, this is not a budgeting trick. It's not a motivational idea. It's a simple system for your money that I use and hundreds of doctors, thousands of doctors already use. And M.A.S.S. answers one critical question: How do I make progress automatically without always thinking about money? Without thinking about money every day? Here's the core principle, and it's deliberately simple: Pay future you first automatically. Then invest automatically. I'll explain. Just like tax is deducted before your salary hits your account, just like pension contributions happen before you can even spend a dime from the money, AMaaS creates your own personal deduction that goes into your savings pot and your investments in a way that you don't have to think about it. Now, at the heart of that AMaaS is a simple allocation I call the 80/20 split. You know about 80/20 already. 80% of your take-home pay goes to lifestyle, bills, living life, making sure you enjoy your life and you do whatever. But 20% of your take-home pay always goes to your freedom fund to buy your freedom. Now, if you've never heard of a freedom fund, let me explain. This is something I did for several years. The freedom fund has one big goal, and that's to help you speed up your journey to financial freedom and early retirement if you want to retire early. I've not had a job for the last 4 years now, and I've not had to change my lifestyle. Now, the Freedom Fund is not a single pot. It supports 3 priorities in this order: 1. Clearing high-interest debt like credit card debt, 22%. 2. Building emergency fund and savings. And 3. Investing for your long-term financial growth. It's not rigid, but it's a system that helps. For some people, it may be 20% of your net income that goes into your freedom fund, and for some others, it could be 25% or even more. You have to decide what works for you, but what is important is that you have a system in place and you automate it. Make sure you don't have to think about it. And here's the key insight: when savings are automated, your lifestyle has a way of adjusting automatically. Thousands of doctors in Moneywise Doctor community have already proven this. They've tried it out. They don't feel deprived, they don't feel restricted. They simply stop leaking money when they automate their saving and investing. And this works for a reason. If you wait for the end of the month to see what's left, to know what you save, there will be nothing left empty. AMAS flips the order because your money is under a lot of pressure. There's so many bills. What you do is you remove the money before before it becomes available for spending and lifestyle creep, and you avoid lifestyle inflation. That's the 20%. You don't need discipline, you don't need willpower, you don't need to be good with money. You just need a system that runs in the background, a system that works, and you can use a mask, copy it, and use it yourself. Now, there's a second thing I also suggest to doctors: the 12-month rule. Let's look at it. It's a powerful rule that will surely help you improve your finances and give you a bit of margin. Okay, I call it the 12-month rule. Here's how it works. When your income jumps, either you finish training or you got a new job or you picked up a new role, um, for instance, if you've just finished your residency, you've gone from being a GP trainee to a GP, your salary will obviously go up. Okay, or you became a partner, you are moving to a new job with a higher income. Our instinct is to upgrade immediately. You know, you know, get a nice new, you know, watch. I've got a nice one here as a gift. Upgrade immediately. Upgrade your car. Upgrade everything. Don't do it. Delay the upgrades just for 12 months. Not forever. Just long enough to have that extra income to build some capital, create some financial margin, and establish your AMAS properly. Have some money going in there. A practical example: a GP registrar earning £65,000 finishes training, moves to a salaried GP role earning £88,000 per annum. That's more than £20,000 difference. Now, if you follow the 12-month delay plan, in 1 year, that extra income can help you invest either in your pension or ISA, or eliminate some really nasty debt like credit card debt, that can be high percentage, and you can create an emergency fund. This allows you to start on a solid financial foundation. One year of delayed gratification can buy you decades of financial flexibility. Now, here's a case study of someone buying back their time just by practicing some of these things. Dr. Farah, um, was a GP partner for that, earning a solid six-figure income, so above 100K. On paper, she was striving. Dr. Farah was doing okay. In reality, she was just exhausted. 85% of her take-home pay, she was already spending it on fixed commitments, lifestyle costs, you know, supporting family, school fees, mortgage. She described it perfectly in her own words when she reached out. She said, I upgraded my life and downgraded my health. Downgraded my freedom. It felt like a treadmill. When she started working with us in the Moneywise Doctor community, she rebuilt everything around this AMASS framework by taking these 4 steps. 1, she capped her lifestyle expenses at 80%. She automated— number 2, automated 20% into her pension ISA investing funds. Number 3, she reviewed her financial protection, income protection, and the rest. And 4, she linked her overpayment of her mortgage to her mask. Within 6 months, 3 things happened. 1, she was able to drop her workload from 8 sessions to 6 sessions, giving her more flexibility. 2, her savings increased by almost 100%. It almost doubled. 3, her sleep improved and her financial anxiety levels dropped. She shared with me that, in her own words, for the first time in years, she didn't feel financially trapped and she felt she had options to engage in other interests she wanted to work on, like women's health. So amass is not about being frugal. It's just to clarify something that is important and automate it. Amass is not about cutting joy from your life. You can still enjoy your life. It's not about living cheaply when it makes you miserable or saying no to everything. Nope. That's not my goal here. I like to enjoy my life. It's about intentional spending. You still enjoy your life, but you just stop spending accidentally. You stop having insensible loss of money. Remember insensible loss of heat? Yep. And once a mask is running, something powerful happens. A senior GP partner told me that she tried this today when we are speaking. She became calmer, more intentional, She's more strategic about her financial growth. She's more organized. I'm so proud of her because progress is happening quietly in the background. So that's why I talk about amass before you start to invest, because if you try to invest without amass, you start panicking during market crashes and dips when the market wobbles because you don't have an emergency fund. You stop and start. You're losing to compounding and you're not taking advantage of compounding. I might sell at the wrong time. AMAS creates stability. It ensures that one, your cash flow is predictable, and two, your emergencies— when there are emergencies, because we all get emergencies— but they shouldn't derail your investment and your plan. So you want to be able to invest in a boring, consistent way. But boring is good, it works out all right. So at this point, you now have clarity from MedScan. If you haven't done the MedScan quiz, just check link, go ahead and check if the streaming is— but you have clarity from MedScan, structure from AMAS, so you should no longer be guessing. You should no longer be reacting. Just like in medicine, once the patient is stable, we move to protection. That's exactly where we're going next. Let's start looking at protection and start moving towards the treatment plan. In the next session, we'll look at protecting what matters. All insurance covers are not equal. There are some that I ignore. There are others that I, I kind of like, I'm religious about. And I'll explain this next, because growth without protection is pretty fragile. Now let's look at the next thing. That will be insurance, income protection insurance, life insurance. What do you need to protect? Do you need to buy insurance for your boiler? You need to buy insurance for, obviously, your microwave. Now, before we go further, let's address something basic. I talked about protection, and that's what we're going to address. In medicine, you don't walk into a high-risk environment without PPE, personal protective equipment. You don't intubate without checking the oxygen. You don't start treatment without safeguarding the basics. Yeah, when it comes to our personal finance, many doctors are walking around financially exposed without realizing it, and the consequences can be devastating. Now, the most valuable asset you own is where you should start with your protection. Let's start with the fundamental truth. Your most valuable financial asset is not your house, your pension, or your investments, or even that crypto account that you have. It's your ability to earn an income. Everything else flows from that. If your income stops, your savings are depleted, your investments get sold at the worst time because you need the money suddenly. Your long-term plans can all collapse if your income stops. And yet, in the Moneywise Dr. Paul, which I mentioned earlier, over 1,300 medics, okay, 41% of them had had no emergency fund out of this number. 55% had no life insurance or income protection insurance. Now, this is not negligence, it's just lack of clarity. Most times I've seen this pattern repeatedly. Doctors avoid discussions around income protection, life insurance, and all that because it feels a bit pessimistic, like you're saying something wrong is going to happen, God forbid. It feels uncomfortable, it feels like something bad has to happen. There's also a false sense of invincibility, like I'm healthy, I'm insured through work, through NHS, I'll sort it out later. But in medicine, you know better than anyone that illness is unpredictable. Accidents don't ask permission. Timing is rarely convenient. I mean, I was unwell just a couple of weeks ago. I didn't plan it and I had to change my plans. Protection is not pessimism, it's being very wise. Now, the 3 risks doctors underestimate— these are the 3 major risks doctors consistently underestimate. I think you should protect against. One is illness or injury. Many times it's not even catastrophic, it may not be dramatic, but it can have a big, big, big impact on your finances. Often something simple like, I know a GP who developed back problems, back problems. And I've had doctors who develop burnout, mental health strain, even someone develop post-viral fatigue. It was enough to reduce their work hours, especially if you're a locum, enough to stop your locum work, enough to disrupt your income. And yes, there's NHS sick pay if you're in the NHS pension, which is great. While it's very helpful, is not a long-term solution. So illness or injury is the first financial risk that we often ignore. We should address that. Number 2, protect your dependents. The second risk we often miss is dependents. If someone else relies on your income, if you have a child or partner, um, family members relying on your income, um, then the question is not do I need life insurance, do I need insurance cover. The question is what happens if I'm not here or if I'm not able to work, who provides for them. The third risk is timing risk. The third risk is timing risk, one of the risks that we miss often. Even short disruptions can be damaging if you have no protection in place. Okay, missing 6 months of income. I had a locum GP who damaged his knee, couldn't work. I missed 6 months of income. It was a very difficult time and it was during a market downturn and he had to sell some of his shares just to get out some money to meet his bills. He was carrying some debt as well on a high-interest credit card, high fees caught. That itself can undo years of progress. So your financial PPE, there are a few things that actually matter. Let's, let's just be clear, it's not about buying every insurance product available. Some of them are a waste of time and a waste of money. Is about appropriate targeted protection. You look at things that could be catastrophic. So what's important? Obviously, number one layer is your emergency fund. It's your first line of defense. Now, if you've got a job like NHS job, it's 3 to 6 months of your essential expenses covered. You save this up so that if you need— for example, if you need £2K to cover your living expenses, your emergency fund is about £6,000 £12,000 saved in a tax-efficient account like a cash ISA. For locums or self-employed doctors, I'll go for at least 6 months, especially if you have no sick pay. Like, I'm kind of like self-employed, I work for myself, so I have to have a good emergency fund. That money is not for investment. Don't give it to your cousin to invest in crypto. Don't use it to buy property. It's for resilience. It belongs in a cash account like a cash ISA, an easy access account boring accounts. An emergency fund prevents you from selling investments in panic. It prevents you from going into a debt spiral or even just making stress-driven decisions that will turn out to be costly mistakes. That's for life insurance. That's for emergency fund. Number 2, your income protection. I think it's a cornerstone when it comes to financial protection. Income protection is the most misunderstood and most important form of COVID for doctors. It protects your income, your lifestyle, your long-term plan. Now, the key points about it that you need to understand whether you need it or not: NHS sick pay is time-limited. It could be up to 6 months if you've worked about 5 years. So income protection policies differ widely in quality and coverage. The cheapest is often sometimes the worst. You need to get the right one. It has to be— it's not any occupation, it has to be your own occupation. It matters hugely for you as a clinician. For instance, a surgeon who can operate, you know, you want to cover yourself as a surgeon. As a GP, you want to cover yourself as a GP, or as a radiologist. If you can't report, you don't want to be asked to go and work as a receptionist. So income protection will cover you. They'll pay a percentage of your income if you can't work due to your health. There's an example of Dr. Michael, a 38-year-old anesthetist. Healthy, active, busy guy. He developed a neurological condition that temporarily affected his fine motor control. He wasn't permanently disabled, but he couldn't safely work for over a year while it was still being investigated. Because he had appropriate income protection, his income continued. His mortgage stayed paid. His investments stayed intact. He didn't have to sell them. I talked about Dr. Ruth Mashin, who was a radiologist who also ended up with an eye condition, similar issues, on my podcast. Without that policy, it would have been a bit difficult. So if you check the Moneywise Doctor podcast on YouTube, we talked about— I interviewed Dr. Ruth Mashin. She was a radiologist who developed an eye condition. Corneal neuralgia and couldn't work. Eventually, this led to the end of her medical career, but she landed on her feet. She had her income protection in place. She got it very early in her career so that even when the NHS sick pay ran out, she wasn't left hanging. Now, the income protection bridged that gap for her until she retired from the NHS on account of ill health. But not under pressure. Thankfully, she now has a fantastic new career that she loves, but that decision to have her income protection in place before things went wrong saved her from unnecessary financial stress and even at the risk of having to lose their home. Number 3, life insurance is the next thing. It's simple, it's not emotional. Life insurance is not about fear, it's about responsibility. In my opinion, again, like I said, if someone depends on your income, life insurance is non-negotiable. The goal is not to make anyone rich or to make dependents rich if you're not here. The goal is to clear debts, replace that income that was providing, and buy time for them to grieve without panicking about whether they're going to lose the house or if Junior will be able to go to, you know, the school you wanted Junior to go to. Yes, so it's nothing fancy for a start. If you need help, speak to an advisor, an insurance advisor, to help you to work out what you need. Number 4: Wills. Estate planning. This is often ignored until it's too late. Without a will, the government would decide what happens to your estate. We don't have time here to go into intestacy rules, but just know without a will, anything can happen. Delays are common. Outcomes may not even reflect your wishes. At minimum, have a valid will. Sort out your guardianship provisions. Update your beneficiaries. This is not advanced planning. This is basic financial hygiene. Now let's look at some common mistakes we make as doctors. These are some of the common mistakes we make when it comes to financial protection specifically. Let's address those traps. One is over-insuring, buying products you don't understand, you don't need, that benefits the advisors more than you. They tell you it's an investment and it's an insurance. No. Insuring things that are not catastrophic is another one. For instance, why on earth will I buy insurance for my microwave or dishwasher, especially if you don't even have basic income protection insurance? If my microwave gets damaged, I can replace it without thinking about it. But it's not as easy to replace your income, especially if you're injured, unwell. So that's one mistake over-insuring. Two, under-insuring. Like, either you have no insurance or you're under-insured. They are relying on NHS sick pay, which is quite limited. It's generous, but it's limited. There's some— for some people, there's vague employer cover that disappears when they leave the job as well. And some people rely on hope. Now, don't treat protection as an afterthought. Protection is not something you do after investing, in my opinion. And also, in my book, I address protection before investing. It's what allows you to invest confidently, because once protection is in place, emergencies don't derail your plan and volatility feels manageable. That way investing becomes predictable and boring. And boring investing is successful investing. If you do it over a period of time, it compounds well. So protection is not about pessimism, it's about optionality. Okay, so at this point, again, let's check what we've done so far. You have clarity from the MedScan. You've seen where you're leaking, you see where you can fix. If you haven't done it, check the link and just do the MedScan quiz. You have structure from from a must, you have your financial PPE, so you are no longer fragile. You're getting ready to do investing and tax efficiency and all that. But let's first address a big elephant in the room— debt. Okay, not all debt is bad, but if it's not managed well, it can be damaging. In the next section, we'll talk about crushing debt without shame or stress and how to decide what debts to focus on and clear aggressively and what debts to keep strategically and not worry too much about them and how debts fit into your calm, long-term plan. Now, hey, before you move on, let's pause for a moment. What is one crack, one leakage you've identified in your financial system? Write it down. Now decide when you're going to fix it. Seriously, put a date and decide when you're going to fix it. If you want help identifying the rest, take the MedScan assessment. That will help you to find out which other areas you are leaking. Already over 1,000 medics have done it and used it to gain clarity around their finances. And look, if you may, you may apply to work with me with the application form in the link below, or just email support@moneywise-doctor.com if you need more support and guidance and handholding. But don't just watch this and do nothing. Information without action is just entertainment. All right then, let's jump right back to the course. So now that we've put protection in place, we need to address a major source of financial stress for doctors, and that is debt. Debt is one of the most emotionally charged topics in personal finance, especially for hardworking professionals like medics. Everyone thinks, oh, doctors and dentists are flush with cash. Nope, a lot of doctors are in deep debt, not because doctors are reckless, but because many of us carry debt longer, later, and more silently than people realize. Let's clear the shame first. Look, this is not about shaming. Debt is not a personal failure. For doctors, it's often a structural consequence of the system, and I'll explain this to you. Now think about it, you've had years of delayed earnings before you start earning. You have to go through all this training, then there's student loans. Some people got their student loans into their 30s. There's postgraduate exams. Some people have had to move countries, relocation costs, moving cities or countries. Then it's a late start, it is a late start to your peak income. Many doctors only start earning properly at a stage when their peers, especially even their peers, they've earn better than in school, already own their own homes, are already investing. Their peers already have assets. So you're already accumulating debt quietly. Now, this course is not about guilt. It's about clarity and control. But one key thing to understand is that not all debt is equal. Before you jump into tackling debt, let's remember not all debts are equal. This is the first principle to understand and differentiating them. Debt is not binary, it's not good or bad. From the point I look at it, it's not good or bad by default. Debt sits on a spectrum. It could be productive, it could be destructive. Examples of destructive debt, it will usually be high interest rates, consumer-driven, it destroys cash flow, and it adds stress to you and offers no long-term benefits. One clear example I'll show you: credit cards, credit card debt, overdraft, high-interest loans, buy now pay later. Now, there are productive debts: low interest, long-term, often linked to assets, manageable with a plan, with a clear plan. If you have a very clear plan, an example is obviously mortgage, some student loans, obviously, structured business borrowing. Now, the mistake many people make is treating all debt as the same, or even just getting into debt but avoiding the conversation entirely. Now, high-interest debt is the enemy of financial progress. It's hard to become financially free if you have high-interest debt. It's like the opposite, it's compounding against you. And I gave an example with credit card debt. It reduces your optionality. Look, if you have a credit card charging you 27% interest, 30% interest, paying it off is a guaranteed return. So rather than thinking about making an investment that will give you 10%, think about paying off that credit card. So this is why even if you look at the SCRUBS framework, which we'll talk about later, is our approach to investing, it prioritizes paying off high-interest debt. Now there's an example I remember. Dr. Ben was a GP registrar. I've changed his name obviously, um, for privacy. Um, he was earning a decent income, not a massive income, but for GP registrar, not too bad. Um, he had about £7,000 on his credit cards. He had a car loan he bought on PCP. He had no emergency fund. He was investing small amounts, but he was constantly stressed. And after he went through our masterclass, suggested, look, focus on crushing out this 27% debt, forget about investing for now, and then build an emergency fund. And he did exactly that, and it took him 6 months. His stress levels dropped immediately. Investing, when he started again, felt easier because then he had crushed the debt, he had some savings, and he had financial protection in place. Now I'm just going to mention mortgage because it's usually the large, long-term, emotionally loaded debt. A lot of times doctors feel torn between should I overpay my mortgage aggressively or should I invest in the stock market instead? Hey, there's no universal answer here. It's a debate that keeps going on. But there's a framework I used to think about it. I look at it from an approach, a point. Here's how I think about the mortgage strategy. I ask myself 3 questions, okay? What is the interest rate? Because if the interest rate is very low, it's a totally different discussion than when it's super high. Low interest rates behave very differently from highly variable one, high variable interest. If it's low and fixed, fine. Then what's your attitude to risk? What's the psychological approach to it? Some people don't mind, they can sleep well with a high debt. Other people, no. Now the next thing is, will overpaying reduce your optionality? Do you have to raid the emergency fund to overpay and then not invest? So I think for most people, modest overpayments, automate it and balance it with investing, is usually a good approach. It's not all or nothing. So I don't know, can you tell me in the comments so far, if you've been watching, what would you do? Would you rather focus on overpaying or would you just, well, go ahead and, you know, just pay the regular mortgage and invest the difference. I think a lot of the issues in personal finance is not just about optimizing or mathematical decision, is the one that gives you peace. So it's quite emotional, a lot of psychology involved. Some people want to pay down their mortgage so that they can sleep well at night. But irrespective of whether you have mortgage debt or credit card debt, the most dangerous position to be is having a high debt with no plan in place, no emergency fund, no protection in place, because that's where panic decisions can start happening. And that's where if anything goes wrong, you might have to start liquidating those investments. And then you have to think about that from the point of how can you manage it? It's manageable when the cash flow is clear, there's a protection plan in place, you've automated the repayment. And there are multiple approaches you could use to, you know, manage the debt. Don't think about it from the point of, oh well, I'm overwhelmed now, there's nothing I can do. And it's not about, no, never borrow again. It's not about you never getting into debt. It's about having a clear plan. One of the commonest approaches, which I've written about in my blogs, is the snowball method. Obviously, the snowball method is is more psychological than mathematical, is where if you have multiple debts— and I've seen many doctors in our community who have tried this and it helped out— if you have multiple debts, they start from the smallest one, they pay off that smallest one. Let's say you have a debt of £200 to £2,000, start with the £200, and that gives you the momentum, the psychological, you know, boost. Then you go ahead and pay off the next one of £300, and then that can help you keep working till you get to the highest depth. That may not be mathematically optimal, but for many people that works just fine for them because it helps them from a psychological point of view to build up. That's the snowball method. But also there's the avalanche method. The avalanche method is what someone that is logical, someone that is not that emotional— that's the type I actually prefer. The avalanche method looks at all the depth and thinks about which of them has the highest interest rate. You know, that's the optimum mathematical approach. For instance, if you have a credit card debt of £2,000 and it's 27% interest rate, and then you've got like a car payment of £20,000 that you have to pay down, this car payment, but the interest rate is 10%, it makes sense to go after the credit card debt because that's one that is actually, you know, draining you entirely. So whichever method you decide to use to pay off debt, I would usually suggest to go back to the same principles— AMAS. So Automated Monthly Allocated Savings System. Remember the 80/20 principle, the 80/20 approach. 80% of your income can keep— can still fund your daily lifestyle and whatever you do. But the other 20%, you want to automate it to go towards paying off debt first and then saving before you think about investing. I see people trying to invest. You're trying to invest in the stock market, you're trying to invest with your friend or colleague who is buying property and investing in property. The problem with that, they're giving you 10% return, 15% return, but you've you got a debt of 27%, do the math. Look, that's where the delta is. If you pay off the debt of 27%, um, that is automatically netting you, you know, kind of like a guaranteed gain. So that's what I'll go for. Think about it carefully. As much as possible, you want to have flexibility. One of the reasons I was able to walk away from my salary GP job and I haven't needed a job for the last 4 years is because I avoid consumer debt. I try to pay off every car, and after that I just buy cash. If I can't afford it, I'll just drive what I have. I mean, I like a nice car and I buy the one I can afford. But think about it, even if you've got a mortgage, don't necessarily need to go for the biggest mansion. Um, you might just buy what you need because a lot of times people eventually sleep into debt because they're thinking, well, we can pay it off over time. So just keep things manageable and that way it gives you flexibility. Right. Well, I hope that has been helpful so far. If you're finding this useful, if you're finding this course helpful, don't enjoy it alone. We spend a lot of resources, research, and time going into making this a useful course for you. So go ahead and think about 2 people you think it might help to colleagues and just share this with them. You can share it on WhatsApp, you can just copy the link and send it to them, or you can even watch it together so that you can hold each other accountable. The next session is really, really interesting. We are going to jump into a big issue that actually drains medics in the UK, and it's about taxes. If you want to go ahead, um, I think it was Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of US, and a notable inventor and all that, that said that nothing is certain except death and taxes. So taxes is a big deal. And I've done a very practical framework I call the ABCDE of taxes that helps me to comb through all the system, make sure that I'm not leaking through taxes. And even in chapter 5 of my book, The Moneywise Doctor, is absolutely dedicated to taxes, basically walking through it from the ABCD framework. And that's what we're going to look at next. All right. Hey, I've put significant amount of thought and research and resources and real-world experience into making this for you. This is not surface-level content. It's structured so that you can actually implement it. If you're finding value genuinely with it, Don't consume it quietly and alone. Share it with a colleague you think will find real value in it. That way, you're also helping them to take charge of their finances and build their financial future. That's generosity. The goal is not just about getting more views. The goal is getting better informed medics taking charge of their financial future. All right, then let's jump right back to the course. Right from the front, let's say this piggy bank is my savings on my investment. From the front, it looks fine, it's strong, it's intact, it's growing. But there's a crack at the back, and that's where money is leaking from. There's a crack at the back, and this is exactly what happens to many medics when it comes to taxes. There's a little crack at the back and you're losing from there, okay? Most times we don't have an income problem. The income— I'm not saying is the highest, but there's often a leakage problem we haven't fixed. You get an income, but tax is leaking quietly in the background year after year. Not because you were careless, not because you were reckless, but because the UK tax system and most places reward structure, not effort. As doctors, we're trained to work harder, work harder, and when something feels tight, we just work a little bit harder. But when it comes to tax, working harder can actually widen the cracks. Okay, so today we'll seal those cracks. Okay, let's put this down. I call this the ABCDE of tax efficiency. I mean, I was looking for ABCD, I found a little toy that has ABCD on it, but the ABCD of tax efficiency, looking at a structured approach we use in our Tax Hack X-Ray sessions, it has saved hundreds of doctors from overpaying thousands in taxes just by following a step-by-step systematic approach. A is allowances, B business structure, C clawback defense, D is deductions, E is exit and estate planning. So let's start with A, and when we're done with this, you stop panicking next time you get a brown envelope like this. A just looks at allowances, is use it or lose it. It. It's a rule. Allowances are portions of the tax system that belong to you. You are allowed to claim those things. If you don't use them, they don't roll over, and most of them by the end of the tax year is gone. They are not refunded later. HMRC doesn't write you letters to remind you to claim your allowances. No, it just simply disappears. And I see doctors lose thousands every tax year, just the same way. Now, there are a few things to watch out for when it comes to allowances. Number 1 is the personal allowance trap. Okay, now everyone receives a tax-free personal allowance. This is the income level at which you pay zero tax. So if you earn just about that amount, you don't pay any tax. It's currently £12,570 for the 2025-2026 tax year, and it has been that way for the past few years. But once you're adjusted net income crosses 100K, that allowance begins to disappear. You lose £1 for every £2 you earn above 100K. In fact, by the time you reach £125,140, it's all gone. So this creates that infamous and notorious 60% effective marginal tax rate. I still remember the first time I understood this. It didn't feel fair. At that point, any income you make, let's say you made this £20, then you're going to eat about— you're going to keep about £8 of it. So many people don't know that already they are losing their personal allowance. They just notice that they're working hard and it just seems like they're running around on a treadmill. Many consultants, GPs, locums fall into the 60% tax trap from just doing a few extra shifts without planning. It's not the extra shift, it's just not planned that is the problem. 2, your ISA allowance. Every adult in the UK gets about, gets £20,000 ISA allowance each, each tax year. Children get £9,000. It's use it or lose it. Now you can use your £20K and split it between maybe £4K in a lifetime ISA if you prefer, so that you can get the full £1,000 bonus from the government as long as you're using it for buying your first house or for investing for retirement, and you can split the remaining £16k between your Cash ISA and your Stock and Shares ISA. Now remember that from 2027, the Cash ISA is only going to be having an allowance of £12k. If you invest outside an ISA, you might generate enough capital gains that you end up paying up to 24% capital gains tax, especially if you're a higher rate taxpayer. Now the next allowance Number 3 is pension allowance, and it's currently £60,000 for 2025-2026 tax year. Now, pensions are very powerful tax tools, and they are available to doctors, healthcare professionals. For 2025-2026, annual allowance is £60,000, and anyone can use them, you know, but you have to account for your own contribution from your workplace, from your SIP if you've got a private pension, and the government tax relief so that you don't exceed the £60,000. But if you have used up all your allowance and still need to add more money to your pension, there's still an opportunity to do that. It's called carry forward. Okay, with carry forward, you can use any unused allowance because most people don't use up all their allowance anyway because you may not be able to— you may not have the money for that. But if you have extra money in any year, you can use your previous tax years is carry forward. Now that could actually save you thousands in taxes, but it just means that you don't get to see that money till you are 55 if you are using a SIP, and it's been increased to 57 in 2028. And if you are using like NHS pension, for some people it's going to be 68 years, and for some other people might be a little bit earlier before you see it. Now the next allowance is the PSD, the Personal Savings Allowance. And I know most doctors think about PSA, prostate-specific antigen, it's like a community joke. No, PSA is referring to your Personal Savings Allowance, and that's the amount of money you can save and generate interest without paying taxes. Any interest above your PSA is taxable unless the saving is held in a tax-free savings account like a cash ISA. So if you save money generate interest, you have to pay. So how much is the PSA? How much can you generate without paying tax? Well, the current figures for this tax here for basic rate taxpayers is £1,000 interest tax-free. For higher rate taxpayers is £500, and for additional rate taxpayers, zero. Any interest they generate has to be taxed. So be careful if you're just saving money, you think it's okay, well, this is fine. Check whether you are paying so much in taxes from the interest you generate. I remember a doctor walking up to me and saying, wow, thank you for your presentation. I went to speak in a conference, a doctor's conference, and said, I've saved about £100,000 over the last several years. They weren't able to invest. They were worried about investing. And I asked, where are you saving it? They said a regular savings account. And then I said, well, you're paying tax on the interest. They said, I didn't realize that. I said, no wonder my tax code has been changing. So your tax code could change because HMRC could go directly to your account, you know, through your tax code and actually take the tax on that interest. So think about all those things. Of course, there's a marriage allowance as well. If you can transfer some of your, your personal allowance, if your income is less than £12,570 and your partner is a basic rate taxpayer, you can transfer some of your marriage allowance and backdate it for years. Of course, there are other allowances like the capital gains tax allowance. It's called annual exempt amount. It's currently £3,000. So normally, if you sell shares or property with gains and it's outside an ISA, you have to pay capital gains. It could be up to 24% for a higher rate taxpayer or 18% for a basic rate taxpayer. But what many people miss is that, well, the first 3,000 is tax-free. But again, easy to miss. If you sell at a loss, you can also register the capital loss with HMRC, but you must do it within 4 years. Why do you register it? If you register within 4 years, then indefinitely you can claim any gains against that loss in the future. If you miss that 4 years, that's it, you can't claim it again. So if you're missing it, that means you're really leaking money through, through other areas, because when you make a gain in the future, you have to pay. So that's all about A. Now let's look at B. B is business structure. A was allowances. B is business structure. Now this might not be for everyone, but if you're a doctor or healthcare professional and you meet the criteria for IRO 35 to work outside IRO 35, meaning you can work off payroll You have to think about whatever you do, whatever businesses you do, would it qualify to work through a company? Okay, and that might give you some tax flexibility, but never forget you have to still pay corporation tax on your profits, which is 19% for profits below £50,000 and 25% above that. Okay, now if you've got a limited company, think about after corporation tax, you still have to pay dividends. But for most people, this could be more flexible, and that could actually save them money. But there are other ways to extract money from your limited company. The 3 main ways is: 1, your company expenses. You buy equipment, you could buy like, um, things that you need to run your business. You could even take a capital allowance to buy an electric car if you require it for your company business, staff salaries, and software, and so much more. In the tax hack, we dove into 25 things that you could actually use your limited company for. Pension contributions, even things like your relevant life plan, that's life insurance. So that's expenses, one. Two is salary. You can pay yourself a salary if it's the only source of income. 12,570 means no taxes at all. But if you already have other sources of income, you pay yourself a salary, you still have to pay tax at your marginal rate. Number three is obviously dividends. So dividends are basically your share of the profit. If you are the only shareholder shareholder, you get 100% of dividend, but then you have to pay dividend tax on it. Now the dividend tax is based on your tax band, and you might have heard that is rising in this coming tax year, 2026-2027 tax year. The new rate will be for basic rate taxpayer will be 10.75%, for higher rate taxpayer it will be 35.75%, and the additional rate taxpayer remains at 39.35%. So thinking about the right mix of dividend versus salary is really important to make sure that you don't end up overpaying taxes. C is for clawback, avoiding tax traps. So the UK system has tax traps. If you cross them unintentionally and your tax rises, then your taxes will rise faster than you expect. We've already talked about the 60% band, that's a £100K zone. Then there's also the high income child benefit charge above £60,000. So if your adjusted net income is above £60,000, you have to pay back some of that child benefit, and at £80K you've lost most of it, right? So basically there's the annual pension allowance as well. You could actually have pension annual allowance taper if your threshold income is £200K, above £200K, or your adjusted income is 260K, um, you could lose some of your annual allowance and it can shrink all the way down from 60K to 10K. Now these are not minor details, they are structural cracks. You need to know when you're approaching those thresholds so that you can do something about it. And what can you do? Pension contribution, gift aid donation, timing of taking the income, and careful structuring. So that's A, B, and C. Now D Deduction. This one frustrates me a little bit because it's a low-hanging fruit. Many medics lose thousands due to ignoring this. I'll give you an example. Dr. Mo, he's a GP. He messaged me last year. He had never claimed tax relief ever on his professional expenses. GMC fees, indemnity, exam, professional subscriptions, BMA, mileage— he had not claimed. So this time around, he went back 4 years, including including the current year, and was able to claim about £9,500. Now, this is not some special advanced strategy, and HMRC, they will not write you a letter. HMRC will not write you a letter to say you've not claimed tax relief. In fact, I've made a video on how to claim tax relief on professional expenses. It's totally free on my YouTube channel at Moneywise Doctor. Go over there, use it, and claim your tax relief. Now, so that's D. E, you look at estate planning and exit. So start thinking about inheritance taxes. Is your life insurance policy— is it in a trust? Are you going to have to— I mean, if your family inherits stuff from you, they have to pay a massive 40%. Do you have a will in place? If you don't have a will, the state decides. So estate planning is not about debt, it's about being proactive and protecting what you've built. It's about basically thinking about things like lasting power of attorney and the rest of it. So think about it carefully. So overall, tax efficiency is not about loopholes, it's about structures and systems, sealing the cracks of your foundation before you start building higher, even before you start investing. You can't out-invest poor tax structure. So before you start chasing returns, stop the bleeding through taxes. If you're unsure where you're leaking, which allowances you're missing, whether your structure makes sense. This is why the MedScan exists. It takes 3 minutes to check your financial health score, and over 1,300 doctors have already completed it, identified their biggest financial leaks. You'll find it linked below and also pinned in the comment section. So now that we've sealed the cracks and avoided backstraps. Let's jump into investing. We can start finally building. In the next section, we're going to look at the investing protocol. I've been investing for 21 years and it's helped me get into— it helped me get to that financial freedom. But now I'm going to show you how you can approach investing from a calm, systematic, no-hype way without anxiety, in a way that makes sense without you having to spend so much of your time or effort as a doctor or busy healthcare professional. So come along for the next session. And of course, if you're finding this very useful or you're finding something that you think might be useful to a colleague or a friend, feel free to hit that share button and get them invited to watch it absolutely for free. All right, let's talk a little bit about investing now. All right, so Part 6: Investing— How to Become an Automatic Millionaire. Before we start, a quick but important note: I'm not a financial advisor. This is for education only. It's not personal financial advice. I don't know your full situation, your goals, or your risk profile. So use this basically to learn the principles and then apply them thoughtfully, or get advice if you need it. Right, now that I've got that out of the way, let's jump right in. Let's make investing investing simple and straightforward. Let's remove some of the meat around it because there's a simple way to do this and there's a hard way to do it. I'll be upfront, I've been investing for over 20 years and I've been through 3 market crashes and I've learned quite a few things. One big thing I've learned is this: most of us professionals, doctors, don't fail at investing because we're not intelligent. Most times we fail because investing gets overcomplicated. Complicated. And when something feels complicated, we delay it, we avoid it. So in this session, I'm going to show you a calm, step-by-step way to invest that is designed to be simple, one, passive, two, evidence-based, tax-efficient, and most importantly, automated. So I'm assuming at this point you, you have— you've done the basics, like you have a basic emergency defensive fund, you've been through the previous sections of the video, you have a high, you know, you have your high interest under control, and you're investing through the right tax-efficient accounts like your ISA and SIP or TFSA if you're in Canada, or Roth IRA if you're in the US. But now let's focus on the actual investing itself. So step 1, let's look at active investing versus passive investing. What do they mean? So basically, when you look at investing, there are two broad styles of investing. There's active investing, which is where you are trying to beat the market. You're trying to figure out, hmm, which stocks will do better, will outperform the market, which funds will do better, which sectors will win, what to buy, what to sell, and when to move and when not to move. That's active investing. That can look like picking individual shares of companies, or it can look like picking a fund manager and hoping they outperform the market. Good luck with that. Either way, the goal is the same. You want to beat the market. You want to beat the average market performance. You don't want to just be average. Now, passive investing is a bit different, very different. Passive investing is when you stop trying to outsmart the market. Instead, you're buying the whole market, like buying the whole haystack. A common way to describe it is rather than trying to find the needle in the haystack as you might do in active investing. You buy the whole haystack. That's what you do in passive investing. You accept average. And average sounds a bit boring, but boring is powerful because when you buy the market, you're not trying to beat it. You're not trying to outperform the market. Basically, you're trying to mirror the market's average performance. You're simply capturing the return of the market over time, and that's it. The reason passive investing works really well for busy professionals like doctors, dentists, um, healthcare professionals in general is quite simple. It's easier to automate. It removes decision fatigue. It protects you from panic. It protects you from dramatic headlines. It protects you from the urge to meddle and mess things up. Look, at the end of the day, passive investing is not I'm not lazy. I mean, in Chapter 6 of my book, I describe both types of investing in The Money Wise Doctor, but I look at passive investing in the book as systematic approach rather than speculation. And that's why it links perfectly to AMASS. Remember AMASS in Section 2? Automated Monthly Allocated Savings System. AMASS is about making the right thing automatic so you don't have to think about it. Now let's look at index funds and ETFs, because a lot of people talk about index funds. But before we talk about index funds and ETFs, let's understand the word properly. What is an index? What are indices? Now, an index is simply a list. That's it. A list of houses on your street could be an index. Yes, a list of topics at the beginning of a book could be an index. That's it. So if you look inside the book, you might see a list of topics. A list of students in your year group. That's an index. So that— just understand that clearly. So it's just a structured list used to organize or measure something. Now let's bring this into investing, because a lot of people talk about index funds but don't understand exactly what it is. In the stock market, an index is a list of companies grouped together to measure performance, and there are usually different criteria for grouping them. And this is where a little football analogy might help. So think of the Premier League table, okay? It's a list of the top football teams, obviously in England. It ranks them based on performance, right? That's performance. Note that if most of the teams are winning, the league looks strong. Obviously, if most are struggling, the league looks weak, especially when it goes to— when teams from the Premier League goes to Champions League. Now the league table is like sort of like the scoreboard. Now let's bring it back to investing. The S&P 500 is like the Premier League of the large US companies. It tracks 500 of the biggest companies in the US, but so it's based on what we call capitalization, the size. Now the FTSE 100 is like the top division of the UK companies. The NASDAQ is like a league heavily dominated by tech— technology teams. So you see things like Apple, Nvidia, and the rest of them, then the NASDAQ. So an index is simply a structured list that tracks how a group is performing. That's it. Now, what is an index fund? Okay, now you understand what an index is. An index fund is a fund designed to copy that list. It tries to mirror that list. Now, instead of trying to guess which one team will win the league, will it be Chelsea or Manchester United, it just buys the entire league table. That way it's just a bit harder to lose. It holds all the companies in the index. So if the league does well, you do well. If the league struggles, you feel the pain too. You're not trying to beat the league in this instance. You're trying, you're participating in it. You're trying to capture the average league performance. So that's it. That's an index fund. Now let's talk about ETFs because this is another thing people mix up. ETF stands for exchange-traded fund. An ETF is simply a fund that trades like a share on the stock market or stock exchange. That's an ETF. Basically, you can buy and sell it during market hours just like a stock. That's it. But here's the important part: an ETF can be passive or active. But most of the ETFs people talk about that you hear Um, usually passive ETFs that track an index. So you might buy an S&P 500 ETF, you might buy a FTSE All-World ETF. So when someone says, I invest in ETFs, that doesn't tell you enough. The real questions are: which ETF? What index does it track? Is it global, country-specific, or sector-specific? It could be like just in tech. What are the fees? Is it broadly diversified? Is it well diversified? Because not all ETFs are equal. Some track the whole league, some track just one small division, and some charge more than others do to do the same job. Understanding the difference is where smart passive automatic investing begins. You need to understand that difference. Okay, now that we understand ETFs and index fund, you need to know that not all index funds are equal. This part matters because most people say stuff like, well, just invest in an index fund and you'll be fine. Okay, which one and which type? Well, index funds can be global, like I said. They could be country-specific, like US. They could be sector-specific, like tech sector. It could be ethically screened, fade- it could be accumulative, it could be distributive. Let's break that down. So a global index fund like the FTSE All-World, it tries to give you exposure across many countries and companies. It could be thousands of companies, while a country-specific index fund might focus on one region like the FTSE 100 for UK or the S&P 500 for US. I think Nikkei is for Japan, and there's quite a few of them. So a sector-specific fund might focus on tech, might be energy, healthcare, or property, any sector. Those can perform well in certain periods, but they can also increase your concentration risk. Why? Because they reduce your diversification. Now, some funds are also screened, like for example ESG funds. That's— yes, I think it's Environmental, Social, and Governance. These funds may exclude some companies involved in maybe fossil fuels, weapons, or other areas depending on the type of screen they're applying. Similarly, there are halal funds, and this matters because some of, some of you in my audience, some people watching my, um, my videos and my content are Muslim, and some of the doctors in my community as well. They want to invest in a way that aligns with their faith and principles. So halal funds typically screen out companies companies involved in things like alcohol, gambling, pornography, interest-based financial businesses, and other prohibited areas according to the faith, the Muslim faith. So the point is this: fund selection is not just about returns— how much more am I going to make? It can also be about values, ethics, faith alignment. And this is all legitimate. It all depends on your personal preference and values. But it also means that you must understand what you're buying because screens can actually change the portfolio and that can change performance and diversification. It can narrow your diversification, it can lower your returns. Yes, that's all important. Another thing to look at, another important concept is accumulation versus distribution. Now an accumulation fund automatically reinvests the dividends inside the So the dividends are not paid out to you, they are reinvested. That accelerates compounding. It's a strong option for people who are still in the wealth-building phase, especially if you're just starting to invest, you're still building your finances. That could be a good option. Now, distribution funds, on the other hand, pay out dividend to you. That can be useful if you're in the phase where you want the portfolio to produce an income. Maybe you retired, a pensioner. For example, later in life, or if you are just drawing down your pension, you might want a distribution fund. So again, it depends. So this, you could have an S&P 500 as accumulation and a distribution one. So you need to know. The key is knowing the difference because you don't want to accidentally choose a distribution fund when your goal is compounding, or choose an accumulation fund when you actually want income at that stage of your life. Very important. A lot of people mix them up. Now, how do you choose a fund without getting overwhelmed? Because there are multiple funds, thousands of funds. Let's keep this simple. When you are choosing a fund, ask: what does this fund invest in? Number 1. 2, is it diversified the way I want, across industries, sectors, and all that? What does it cost? Is it accumulation or distribution? Does it align with the values or screens I care about? If that's something you usually consider when you invest. Now let's talk about cost, because this is where many investors leak money quietly like a broken faucet. The annual cost of a fund is often described as the total expense ratio, that's TER. Sometimes some platforms will call it ongoing charges figure, OCF, the same thing. Different providers provide a provide— they could provide similar exposure but end up charging you as much as 3 times for similar funds. Now, some active funds also charge a management fee, which could be anywhere between 1% to 3% or even more. You might think, hmm, it's only 1%, but 1% compounded over 20 years can become tens of thousands of pounds that could actually have helped you retire bit earlier. Sometimes it could even be hundreds of thousands depending on your portfolio size. Now fees look small but they compound and they are compounding against you. That's compound interest working against you. So you want the lowest fees or low-cost index funds. Not because cheap is always the best but because costs are guaranteed but investment returns are not. Now the next thing is looking at platform options and what I call the 3 lanes of investing. Most platforms will give you 3 broad options. Lane 1 is DIY. I'm team DIY. You choose your own funds, you build your own portfolio. This is the lane I fall into. This is the lane I've been investing in for the last 20 years, okay, 21 now. And honestly, this is the lane many doctors in the Moneywise Doctor community who have been through our investing academy understand how to invest. This is the lane they prefer once they understand the basics and the risk and know where to avoid. Because this is not rocket science. Hey, if you could understand anatomy and biochemistry, neuroanatomy, you can understand investing. I know that. Lane 2 is pre-built portfolios. Sometimes they are called ready-made funds or selected portfolios. Um, you answer a few questions, they place you into a model portfolio You pay an extra fee for that convenience. Okay, now this can work well for some people, especially if you want simplicity and guidance and you don't think you have the time to learn how to invest, even a few hours. So that might work for you. Now, lane 3 is fully managed investing. You hand over the money, they manage it for you, and the fees are typically the highest here. A lot of times. It could be like a financial advisor or wealth manager. Now, I'm not here to say one is always right, one lane is always right. I want you to be aware of what you're paying for because some people end up paying 2%, 3%. Sometimes there's other fees without any superior performance when compared to the average market returns that a passive investor will get in just investing in regular funds, and that can seriously slow down your compounding because that fee goes out before the money is even invested, before it's compounded. So when you pick a platform, consider a number of factors. I'll say these 4 factors, maybe a bit more. 1, the fees. 2, ease of use. 3, support level. And 4, what lane you want to be— lane 1, 2, or 3. Of course, now the next thing is to reduce your risk through asset allocation, diversification. That's Risk management. Let's zoom out a little bit now. The biggest driver of long-term result is not picking the perfect fund or stock, it's asset allocation. Really important. That means how much you put into equities—equities just means stocks—how much you put into bonds, how much you put in cash, whether you include property or alternatives like gold, silver, or whiskey, or whatever wherever it is people buy these days. Diversification is about not depending on one thing, not one company, not one sector, not one country, not one bet. Now, some of you will be tempted by higher risk opportunities, of course, and you can consider this in your asset allocation. Startups, maybe crypto, single tech company stocks, biotech, AI, and the rest of that. I've invested in similar opportunities as well. I've done some angel investing in startups before. I've been approached by founders. I still get approached by founders all the time. Now, the world— that world itself, the risky investment can have massive returns, but it also comes with massive risk, because risk and reward are two sides of a coin. It needs the right position sizing. In simple terms, if it's higher risk, it should usually be a smaller part of your portfolio. Don't make it a massive part of your portfolio because if you lose, you lose big and that's it. Now some people use what I call a core and satellite approach. I didn't invent this, it's not, it's not that new. Core is the boring engine and then broad diversified index fund could be your core. That's the main thing. If you look at chapter 6 of my book, The Moneywise Doctor, I describe this method. Now that can have the core stuff and then you can have your satellites which will be maybe more riskier things. There will be smaller ones so that even if those go wrong, that's not the end of the day for you. Very important. Now let's look at something really powerful, what I call pound cost averaging. It's a very common term, but I want us to make it practical. One of the biggest mistakes investors make is trying to time the market. When is the right time to buy? When is the right time to sell? Is the market going up or down? You wait, you hesitate, you overthink. You say, I will invest when the market settles down, but the market never settles down. There's always something. Maybe there's a trade war, maybe there's some embargo, maybe something happens. So rather than do that, here's a strategy that I want you to understand, and it aligns perfectly with the AMAS system, the automatic system, and works well for busy professionals like doctors and dentists. It's basically regular automated passive investing every single month. You invest the same amount of money every month. In the UK, we might call it pound cost averaging. In the US, Canada, Australia, you might hear dollar cost averaging. Same thing. The idea is simple and is not new. It's straightforward. Let's say you invest 500 every month. Alright, this is not up to 500, but let's say you invest 500 every month. If the market is, is down, your regular $500 contribution buys you more units. If the market is up, your regular $500 contribution buys you fewer units. But over time, the average price, it smooths out, so you don't have to guess what time to buy. But the real benefit is not necessarily mathematical. The real benefit is behavioral, it's psychological even. It removes emotion, it removes decision paralysis, it forces you to be consistent, and the most important thing is you can automate it. Because this is where automation becomes your superpower. This is how I know people who have become automatic millionaires without knowing that much about the market. The principle of automatic investing can help you become an automatic millionaire because when you pay your rent, for example, it happens automatically. Automatically. When you pay your council tax and bills, it happens automatically. When you pay your phone bill, energy bill, you're doing it by direct debit. So why would you not pay your future self automatically by setting up an automatic system that pays yourself and then invests it? This is what I want you to consider building: a direct debit that moves money automatically from from your account to your investing platform. Then inside the platform, you would have then set up auto invest, which allocates it to your chosen funds, the funds you already prefer. We've already talked about funds. So direct debit moves the money into your account, it auto invests, then puts it to work. And that's a simple system. You build it once, then you can set it and forget it. It's growing your in the background. It's removing it. It removes the need for willpower. It removes the need for decision. This is what makes wealth building calm, and that is why passive investing works so well with my AMASS strategy. Because AMASS is about structuring your money so the right thing happens in the background. You don't have to rely on motivation. You don't have to remember because you don't you don't have to fight yourself. That's what happens when you take it automatic. Now I'm going to look at something else. Investing for your children. Because on moneywise.com, we get a lot of inquiries. People ask, how do I invest for my child? Let's talk about kids. This is an area many families unintentionally lose years of compounding. Look, if a child has a 20-year horizon before they need this money, that is long. That means volatility, the ups and downs of the market, it feels less scary because there's time to recover even if the market crashes, you know, in the process. So if you're saving for your children, the bigger question is not only how much, it is also where. Because you might decide to put it in a cash account, but cash can feel safe, but inflation is real and time is powerful. You want time and compounding to work for you. For example, let's keep the math simple. So if a parent is investing £100 per month for 18 years, and the market is delivering an average of around 7% annually, that could build into a significant pot of money by the time your child is an adult at 18 or 20. Not because of genius, but because of time plus consistency. And that's the point. That brings in compounding to work for you. The earlier you start, the more compounding does do the heavy lifting. Really important. Now let's bring it all together. So the calm investing approach looks like this. I'll just summarize it for you in a way that is practical. 1, you choose the right account for your tax situation, whether it's ISA or SIP or TFSA. 2, you pick a diversified fund that approaches, that approaches, that matches your goals and your values. 3, you go for low fees, the lowest fees you can get. 4, 5. Understand accumulation vs. distribution. 6. Set a direct debit. 7. Turn on auto invest. 8. Review quarterly or annually, not daily. 9. Stay invested and let compounding do the work. Because time in the market beats timing the market. Now, this is not about excitement, it's about outcomes. I want you to remember this line, even if you don't remember anything else. The medics, the doctors and dentists who become quietly wealthy, the ones I've seen in my Moneywise Doctor community, they don't outsmart the market. They just remove themselves from the process by automating it, and then they get, get along with their business, continue being amazing doctors. Now, why are we doing any of this? What's the whole point of investing, tax efficiency and all that? It's not just to have a bigger number on the screen. That will lead me to the next section of the course that we're going to talk about. The idea is you want to build financial freedom, you want independence, so your money starts working harder than you do, so you have options, so work becomes a choice, not a trap. This is what the next section is about. In fact, it's one of the sections, it's chapter 7 in the Money Wise Doctor book, and someone says that is one of the best chapters you read. It's about how to define financial freedom, how to measure it, how to work deliberately towards it. And hey, if you need help to connect these dots, to build your own personal financial system, you can head over to moneywisedoctor.com/medscan. If you want to understand where you're leaking money right now and what to prioritize, take the med scan quiz. It's linked below. So right All right, let's get to the next chapter. And of course, if you want to attend any of my free investing masterclasses, it's moneywisedoctor.com/masterclass. See you in the next session. Hey, this course is completely free and I hope you find it useful, but let's not benefit from it alone. If it's helping you, please go ahead and share with someone else, hopefully a colleague who needs to understand their finances and take charge of their financial futures. And that way you're spreading the generosity as well. All right, then let's jump right back to the course. So financial freedom, I mean, chapter 7 of my book is all about it. So does it really matter for doctors? There's a lot of talk about financial freedom and financial independence online, and you hear phrases like financial independence, retire early. That's FIRE. You hear FIRE number. My FIRE number, escape the rat race. And then, yeah, over the last decade, the FIRE movement has gained real momentum, and it influenced my early investment journey as well. But some of the ideas are really, really useful. I agree with them, and some of the maths is sound, but much of the language simply doesn't land well for doctors and serious healthcare professionals, especially if it's a 17-year-old old standing next to a Ferrari telling you how they achieve financial freedom. So before we go any further, let's define the terms properly so we're on the same page, because if we don't agree on what we are aiming for, the strategy will never feel right. Now, financial independence versus financial freedom— these are two terms often used interchangeably, but they are not the same, at least from where I am. Financial independence is a mathematical concept is not a state of mind. It means your investments can cover your essential living costs without relying on earned income. So you don't need a job. That's it. It's a number, it's a calculation, it's a balance sheet equation. Okay. But financial freedom, on the other hand, is a lived experience. It's how money affects your life, your stress levels, your decisions, your time. Your energy, you, you've got to the point where you make decisions irrespective of the financial stuff. So you can be financially independent mathematically and still feel trapped, and I've seen people like that. And you can still have financial dependence and have some level of freedom. So what most doctors actually want is not independence in the abstract. I know you want freedom in real life, so Why the traditional FIRE narrative falls short for most doctors is because the classic FIRE narrative—financial independence, retire early—focuses on extreme savings rates, early retirement, stepping away completely from work and moving to Bali or wherever. And for some people, that's appealing, that's lovely. But for many doctors, not really. Most doctors I've worked with in the MoneyWise Doctor Mastermind mind. They don't hate medicine. They don't want to escape work, and they don't dream of doing nothing, sitting on the beach. For many of them, what they want is a little different. They want freedom and the option of choosing to do fewer sessions. They want more control of their time and schedule. They want safer working conditions. They want the ability to walk away when something no longer fits. And that's part of why I was able to take out a year to write this book, is because I was free. So instead of retire early, we use a different frame. My Moneywise Doctor definition is work optionality. So in the Moneywise Doctor framework, the goal is optionality— work optionality. So work optionality is to get to a point where you work because you choose to, not because you must. I mean, I left when I was less than 40, so I couldn't just sit on the beach. So your income can supplement what you do without dominating it. You can say no without financial fear. You can choose exactly what you want to work on. It doesn't mean stopping work altogether, and it could be that for some people. It just means leveraging. That shift alone affects how you practice medicine. Now, this is what it looks like in practice. For most doctors, financial freedom would usually look like something like being to reduce your clinical sessions without panic to explore other things, avoiding burnout decisions, not feeling forced into extra locum shifts just for cash flow, taking time off without anxiety knowing that it's not going to damage your finances, being able to sleep better around money. It's quiet, it's not flashy, it's deeply stabilizing, and importantly, it's progressive. It doesn't necessarily have to be a Ferrari or private jet. So financial freedom is a spectrum, not a finish line. This is crucial. Freedom doesn't arrive all at once. It develops in layers. I'll show you the stages. Stage 1 is stability. Bills automated, sorted, emergency fund in place, no constant dread around money. But now there's a next stage. Stage 2, resilience. Investments are compounding. You've got your financial protection covering the downsides. You have ability to absorb shocks. You have the insurance and all that. But stage 3 is another level. It's optionality, being able to reduce your sessions, reducing your work, choosing environments you want to work. Most doctors never get to stage 3 because they never fully secure stage 1 and stage 2. And then there's other levels as well where money is not, is not the issue. So this course exists to change that. Now, without any fantasy, let's look at the numbers. Let's look at the maths. Financial independence is not only about replacing your full income, it's about replacing your baseline lifestyle costs. So if your essential annual spending is £40,000 and your investment returns can sustainably generate that, you're functionally independent. For many doctors, this becomes achievable through time in the market investing, tax efficiency, consistent investing, and compounding over time. Not shortcuts, not speculations, not stress. Now I'll give you a real example. I had a doctor, I'll just call her Dr. Helen because I don't want to use her real name. She was in her early 50s when she was thinking of retiring. She wanted no night shifts, She wanted fewer clinics, not 5 days a week. She wanted space to breathe. So when we worked backwards from that goal by aligning her pensions, her personal pension, her ISAs, her automated investing, she reached the point— it took her a few years— where her investments covered her core costs. Her salary was nice, but it became optional. She could live without it. She still works right now, but it's different. And she's now doing other things in health tech. She said to me, I stopped feeling trapped years before I stopped working. So that's financial freedom. Everything you've learned so far matters because of this. This is where the system comes together. You're not just doing tax efficiency en masse and all that investing protection. You're doing it because you want it all to come together to the point where you you are taking charge of your financial future. But all the pillars are important. This is why we don't chase investment returns first. This is why we build the structure and then you go from there. Here's the thing, the system does not pause. Inflation continues, tax drag compounds, energy changes with age, and you might not be able to do the same shift. But you don't need urgency. What you need is to be intentional about it. So the earlier you build that optionality, the more flexible your career becomes. Okay, so this is just to help you to think about it from a holistic point of view. And once that freedom is defined properly in your mind, the next question becomes unavoidable. How do my pensions actually fit into it? Like, if you have the NHS pension, you've got like a personal pension, like a SIP or SASS, Then you're looking at your retirement age. When do you want to retire? That's where we're going to next. In the next session, we'll look at pensions from a clear, calm point of view without unnecessary, you know, anxiety or worry. That's what we're going to be jumping into next. Let's continue. Let's go from there. If this course has helped you, comment below with one insight that changed your perspective. Not just for yourself or for me, but someone else who might just be scrolling along. Maybe a colleague might be unsure whether this is worth their time, and your comment will be what will help them to see it. You never know who needs to see it. And if you want to take the next step, complete the MedScan scorecard, the quiz with the link in the description or also on the comments, because it's really important to get that clarity first, then structure, then growth. The quiz will help you find areas where you might have gaps. All right then, let's jump right back. So I'm back with this again, pensions. We're going to look at pensions from a holistic point of view. And for many doctors and dentists, pensions are where their confidence around money quietly disappears. If you open a pension statement, you scan the numbers, you put it back into the drawer because you don't understand, not because you don't care about your future, but because no one ever explained to you how this all fits together with the investing, tax efficiency, and everything. But leaving it off is dangerous because pensions are not just about retirement. They are one of the most powerful tools you have for tax efficiency, for protecting future income, and basically for reducing workload earlier than expected. Your pensions, you can use it to create options. You can use it to create work optionality, and I'll show you how. Now, if you misunderstand your pensions, then you don't just lose growth, you lose choice. Here's a core problem with how we've been thinking about pensions as doctors. Most doctors have one of these three beliefs. One, the NHS pension will take care of everything. Will it? I've spoken to some retirees 2. Pensions are too complicated. I'll deal with it later. 3. I don't trust pensions. After all, the rules change. So these are like the third camp. Now, all these three could lead to the same outcome: passive decision-making in an active system. Because not deciding is already a decision. And pensions punish passivity if you do nothing. The NHS pension is powerful, but not complete. Let's start with that. Is a great pension, defined benefit and all that. It's not bad at all. In fact, it's one of the best defined benefit schemes in the UK. I know that because I used to be a member of the NHS pension before I stopped, you know, working a salary job. It provides you with inflation-linked income, so it's adjusted with inflation, longevity protection, partial survival benefit, and then eHealth benefit. But it also has some problems with complexity complexity, political risk, backstraps, and inflexibility. Crucially, it was never designed to be your only tool. I mean, I've made a video on my channel about the NHS pension, but what the NHS pension actually is, is it's not a real pot of money somewhere. It's a promise of a future income. It's a number. It's guaranteed by the government of your state. So you are accruing a slice of guaranteed income. It's payable at your normal retirement age, okay? Normal retirement age. Now that normal retirement age is now linked to the state pension age, okay? Which is like sometime your later 60s. It means that your retirement age— there's a bit of uncertainty, policy risk, and there's less control. State pension age could also change. Now for many doctors in their 40s The idea of working full-time until their late 60s feels a bit unrealistic to them. This is where anxiety creeps in, even in their 30s, 40s, 50s. Now, there are some tax traps to watch out for. The NHS pension interacts with tax in a way most doctors were never, never told about. Example, there's an annual allowances breach if you cross 60K. You could lose annual allowance. There's a tapered annual allowance. There's growth even when your income doesn't rise, which can push you across the annual allowance, okay? And your pension could trigger tax bills. I've seen some senior doctors receiving unexpected 5-figure tax bills without doing anything wrong. They didn't earn anything recklessly. They didn't invest wildly. They just didn't know how the system worked. They had some extra payment through like Macleod, and they were pushed into a higher, you know, across the annual allowance. So you cannot ignore your pensions. Now there's also personal pensions, which I think are really important for doctors. Personally, me, I have to have one. So personal pensions give you control, they give you flexibility, they give you the planning options that the NHS pension does not. Um, they are not a replacement, If you can get the NHS pension and still get a personal pension, it's great. It's a counterbalance. An example is SIP, Self-Invested Personal Pension. It allows you to choose how your pension is invested. It allows you to control contribution timing. It allows you to manage withdrawals strategically. And for a higher-rate taxpayer, SIPs are powerful because contributions receive tax relief. At your marginal rate. They also reduce your adjusted net income. They can help you avoid the 60% tax trap, okay, because you can contribute and reduce your adjusted net income. Look, we've worked with doctors who use their SIP to reclaim their personal allowance, so it dropped below 100K adjusted net income. It reduced their marginal tax rates, and it can help smooth income across volatile years, even in retirement. The pension, like, SIP is a— it's like part of your financial planning to the financial strategy. You have to think about them carefully. Of course, there are others like the stakeholder pension, is capped in charges, not so popular these days, um, it's quite limited. Okay, now if you're a doctor with a rising income and a complex tax situation, or you use a limited company, then you have to think about pensions from a private personal pension. Um, you really need it to be able to do a few things. Now, small self-administered, um, schemes, SAS, another type, but this usually will work better for business owners, directors, and maybe some locum doctors too. That's not the most popular one I've seen doctors using in the Moneywise Doctor community, but you can invest invest in property if you prefer. And you can lend— you can actually lend money from your pension to the company. You can lend money from pension to your company, but you have to be careful to do it right. These are— they can be quite powerful, but they are not beginner tools. SaaS in particular, they sit later in your journey once the fundamentals are secure. Now I'm going to mention lifetime ISAs. It's not technically a pension, but it's often misunderstood. It's brilliant. Lifetime ISA or LISA, it can cause a lot of pain and confusion. Let's be clear, it's not a pension, but it acts like some sort of pension in some specific situations, and I'll explain what I mean. The government adds 25% to whatever contributions you make into your LISA up to £1,000 per year. So that's the maximum you get. The contribution is £4,000 £1,000, but there are some strict rules. You must use it to either buy a property or for retirement. The maximum property has to be, um, £450K, or you use it for retirement at 60. If you take it before then, then you could get a penalty and you might get less than the money you put inside. So usually most people who bought their first home, they don't plan to take their lifetime ISA till retirement, and your lifetime ISA could be cash cash. It could be stocks and shares. I prefer stocks and shares. Now, the real question doctors should be asking is not just about which pension is best. I always ask people, ask me, which SIP should I use? The real question is, how do I combine these tools— my NHS pension, my SIP— to buy my time back? This is where most advice fails because it depends on your goals, risk tolerance, capacity to bear loss. If you're looking at it from a strategic Fifth point, a well-designed pension strategy will often include something like your NHS pension for guaranteed income, even though you get it later in life, your personal pension for flexibility— you can even get it from 55, 57 from 2028— your ISA, stock and shares ISA, and your tax planning to reduce leakage. This allows you to be able to have a phased retirement. You can reduce your sessions when you pick up your personal pension. And this gives you more choice rather than obligations. I've seen doctors step back 5 years earlier because they could access their personal pension and they had other investments without increasing their total risk because they knew that at 65 they'll get their NHS pension. Okay, so I remember Dr. Simon— again, I've changed Dr. Simon's name just to protect their privacy— but he's a GP partner in our community. When he started out, he thought his NHS pension would be enough. He was quite close to retirement. But when we modeled it out, his retirement age, it seemed like the NHS pension would not be enough for his lifestyle, what he wanted. So he had to start making additional pension contributions with a SIP and also automated investments into his ISA and had to also get some targeted professional tax planning advice. He created a 10-year bridge, um, and he couldn't stop working, but he had to just start working differently, investing differently, that, that changed everything. It gave him a sense of control. It gave him a sense of direction because pensions are not just about old age. They're about control. They're about timing. They're about flexibility and it's giving you options. So they're about designing a future that matches your energy, not just your age, because you might be 68 and you want to fly around the world and someone else wants to sit on the beach in Spain. So once you understand your pensions properly, the next question becomes inevitable. How do property, mortgage, alternative assets like gold and the rest of them fit in? Especially when doctors are being encouraged to buy property. There's always someone trying to sell you property, encourage you to leverage debt or chase passive income. By the way, there's nothing passive about being a buy-to-let landlord. So that's where we're going to look at next. Property, mortgage, alternative investments— what belongs in your portfolio and what do you— can you ignore? So let's continue. We'll go to Part 9: Property, Mortgages, Alternative Investments— what belongs in a doctor's portfolio and what can you ignore because of your busy schedule? So that's what we're going to go and look at next. Well, we invested hundreds of hours building this course If it added value, please go ahead and share it. Send it to one of your colleagues, even just one of your colleagues that you think it to be genuinely useful for. That alone expands the impact and you— it makes you part of what we're doing here. Then go ahead, if you want to check whether you're leaking anywhere financially, do the MedScan Quiz. And if you want more structured support, email me at support@moneywise.com. Or fill out the application form below if you're looking to work with me. But don't drift, decide and take a step either way. Okay, all right then, let's jump right back to the course. Okay, so property mortgages and alternative investments— what belongs in your portfolio and what should you not bother spending your energy? So at this stage in this course, we are getting closer to the end now, a pattern usually emerges. One, you understand tax efficiency now, you understand pensions, you understand investing fundamentals. The next question is almost inevitable. Should I buy more property? Should I buy property? Should I pay off my mortgage faster? What about buy-to-lets? And what about gold? What about crypto? Should I invest in startups? All the things people keep talking about, exciting stuff. And this is where many good financial plans quietly go off track. Now, it's not because property or alternatives are bad. I've invested in all those things as well. But it's because if you add it without the basic framework, you can get lost in the weeds. In the UK especially, property is treated as safe, which is not always, sensible, not always, inevitable, not always. There's a deeply ingrained belief that if you're a professional, you should own property. And for doctors, that belief is amplified. You are seen as stable, reliable, you know, low risk. The lenders look at you, they think you're low risk. So mortgages are easy to access for most doctors and healthcare professionals, and leverage is quietly encouraged. Borrow more money, you can borrow more. But Well, easy access does not equal good strategy. Property is not an investment just by default. It could be, but there's a critical distinction. Your home— like, I've got a couple of them— is not primarily an investment. It is a shelter, it's stability, it's lifestyle. It could become an investment over time, but treating your home like a growth engine is often where many doctors and dentists miscalculate. I've seen some doctors who overstretched themselves to buy the right house. They locked themselves into high fixed income, fixed mortgages. They reduced their flexibility at exactly the stage when they need that flexibility most. Now, the issue is not the house, it's the timing and the scale of the house. Let's look at mortgages for instance. It's a tool, but it's not a moral obligation. Let's talk about it properly. A mortgage is leverage, is money you borrow, nothing more, nothing less. It can amplify your wealth if you use it correctly, or it can amplify your stress if you don't use it properly. There's no universal rule that says pay off your mortgage as fast as possible, because people say I paid off my mortgage in 2 years. And there's no rule that says always keep a mortgage and invest instead. The correct answer, whether you want to pay off mortgage more or invest invested depends on interest rate. This is what I think about. My tax position, income stability, emotional tolerance for risk, and your broader financial system. So I'll give you a common scenario. I'll use Dr. Helen as an example, a consultant who became obsessed with clearing her mortgage after watching a YouTube video. Every spare income went into overpayments. She ignored stock market, ISA, pensions, She felt virtuous that she was paying off her mortgage, but she was anxious. When she stopped, we were chatting about it in the Moneywise Doctor community. Her mortgage rate was really, really low, like 0.9% or something. She was a higher rate taxpayer. She locked that mortgage in earlier on. She had no accessible investment. She had reduced debt, yes, but also reduced options. By the time she rebalanced everything, she had capped her mortgage over payments and rebuilt her ISA liquidity. So she was now maximizing her ISA and investing in the stock market. That gave her more flexibility. Now, if you look at buy-to-let, a lot of doctors I know have gotten burned in buy-to-let, and it deserves special caution. It's often sold to doctors as passive investments. It's tangible. Worst-case scenario, you can move in there and live there. How many houses do they live in? They say it's safer than stocks. In reality, buy-to-let is operational, is hands-on. I know because I've owned buy-to-lets. I own buy-to-lets. It's tax-heavy, it's not liquid, it's increasingly regulated, and recent years have brought reduced mortgage interest relief. There's a higher stamp duty, increased compliance costs, higher interest rates as well. So many doctors are surprised to learn that there are real returns are far lower than expected. I remember the story of Dr. Mark— again, names changed— he's an anesthetist in our community. He bought 2 buy-to-let properties. On paper, good rental income, rising valuations in his property value, but in reality, by the time he had to pay tax, tax dragged down his returns. I wasn't using a limited company, so plus the stress, maintenance time consumed when he calculated the true return after tax, cost, effort, stress, it was barely worth it for him, and it wasn't even beating inflation. So he wasn't failing, the asset was not matched to his life goals and where he was. So property can still make sense, but with clear rules. Now property can belong in your portfolio. I've got property in my portfolio, but when your core finances are stable and tax efficiency is understood, and your risky exposing yourself is deliberate, not accidental, and the leverage is controlled, you're not borrowing too much money. So property can still support your overall system as a means of diversification, but it's not the main thing for most people. Then let's talk about alternative investments, because people say, I can't believe no one is talking about gold or spices or whiskey. Now, it could be hard commodities commodities like gold and silver. It could be crypto, startups, private equity. It could be niche assets. I put all of them under alternative assets, okay? They feel super sophisticated, attractive. They promise diversification. They sound smart. But look, alternative investments carry specific risk for you as a busy doctor in particular. Look at gold and commodities. Gold is not a growth asset. I'm not saying buy gold, but it's just a hedge against inflation. It's a store of value. It can help to reduce the volatility in your portfolio. It can protect purchasing power, but it does not compound like stocks. I've been in the stock market for 20 years. Nothing compounds like stocks. Gold belongs as a small stabilizer, not the core of the engine. Now, crypto and speculative assets. Of course, crypto has had ups and downs depending on what you believe, it's not a real investment. It's a speculative asset. I'm not saying it's immoral, but it does— let's be honest, it's not a real investment. So even if you decide to take a bit of it, you should not expose a massive amount of your investment. Now, if crypto exists in your portfolio, I'll usually take a very small percentage, 5% of my portfolio, and then I'll mentally write it down stuff. I'm not relying on it. Anything else is like gambling with your future stability. And if it goes 100x, fantastic. Then there's startup and angel investing, which I've done a bit. This is where high earners often get caught because they're trying to use SEIS, EIS without understanding it. But when it comes to startups, remember, you don't know what will happen to that company. It's a very, very high chance that it might fail. So any capital you're I'm putting there is illiquid, returns are skewed. So I'm not saying don't invest in startups. I've invested in startups, but there should be things you do after you've secured your main ISA, SIP, and the rest of them, and it's with money that you are prepared to lose entirely. So they are not a replacement for boring, effective, long-term investing. Okay, so there's a filter that I teach that you could use to look at whether investing in something make sense for you. So before any property or alternative investment, ask yourself, does this increase or reduce my flexibility? Does it improve or worsen my tax efficiency? Does it require massive amounts of time and attention? And does it align with my life, not just my income, my values as well? So if the answer introduces stress, complexity, or dependency, it probably doesn't belong yet. Look at the bigger picture. For most doctors, you're not going to fail financially because you lack intelligence. No, that's not it. You're bright already. Most doctors fail because assets are added before they build the system. So they start borrowing money, buying property, get into a bit of a complex situation. That's not the idea. Your core portfolio should feel boring, intentional, support your goal for work optionality is not to impress your colleagues or satisfy your ego or follow trends. So really, really important. You can have fun also, but keep your investing boring. So once you look at alternatives and property, you can space them correctly. Ask yourself anyway, when it comes to stocks, investing, and all that, what is this all for? What are your goals? Where do you want to go with it? Because that will be the Star. That takes me to the final section, Part 10: Strategic Generosity, Legacy, and Designing a Life That You Feel Filled and Happy With. So that's going to be Part 10. It's a short, short, maybe the shortest bit of it all. And then I hope you enjoy it, and I'll see you in the next section, Section 10. Right, it's me here. Before we move into the final section, let me ask ask you something. How many doctors or dentists or healthcare professionals do you know who are brilliant clinically, working really hard, but not sure their money is working as hard as they do? I know quite a few. If this course has clarified things for you, it can do the same for them. Just takes 30 seconds. Forward it to someone who should not be figuring out this alone. I mean, we go through med school and no one ever teaches us anything about finances, but you can be a hero for them. Just share it. All right then, let's jump right back to the course. Now, this section might feel a little bit different from other sections. So far, you've built your tax efficiency, you're very wealthy now, you've invested carefully, but life is more than just what's in your bank account. And this is the point I talk about strategic generosity. Money is just the medium. What we've been talking about is basically at some point you're going to think, well, is this all it's all about? And what fills that void for many people is strategic generosity. So it does— I know you're already giving, and I know many doctors want to give. Obviously you went into medicine because you want to give back to the community. Um, you want to give to people. But now I'm talking about doing it from a strategic way, and it's still tax-efficient way. That it doesn't feel pressured, it doesn't feel rushed. If you're from a similar background as me, um, there's something called black tax where sometimes if you turn out to do well, you might need to support lots of family and friends in order to get them, you know, going in life. And we're happy to do that, but for some people it feels like a lot of pressure. But you want to look at giving from a strategic point of view. I'll read this brief line from my book, Chapter 10 of my book, Strategic Generosity: Wealth Beyond Money. It says, money is not the destination. Money is the tool that supports the life that truly matters. Now, every framework in the book and in this course exists to create the same outcome, the space for a meaningful, connected, and fulfilling life. The longest study, and I put this also in the first page of Chapter 10, the longest study of adult happiness ever conducted is a longitudinal study, followed some adults right from when they were kids. It was the Harvard Study of Adult Development. It followed participants for more than 80 years, and after decades of data, the conclusion was simple and surprising. The strongest predictor of happiness, health, and longevity was not income was not intelligence, was not status, was not success. It was the quality of relationships. It's not the size of the house, the size of the pension pot, the size of your investments. And one of the ways you can actually support sort of those relationships— I'm not saying you have to give to have good relationships, but think about your family, think about your friends. If you've been fortunate and been blessed, giving is one of the ways you can actually impact their life. But does that mean you should, you know, accede to every request? Everyone who wants something, they could just write you a message and you become like a public ATM? No. I use an approach I've used it right from when I was 22, when I had my first company. I call it strategic generosity. How do you do it? You give like an NGO. How do NGOs operate? When I worked in an NGO, there's a budget, there's a strategic goal. If you request for any funding from donors, they give you based on the need you have, if it's in line with the goals they have. What that means is that you don't do knee-jerk generosity. You have a plan. Let's say every month, the same way you've automated your investing and your saving, you can also automate your giving. Giving, you can create what I call a G bucket, a generosity bucket that you automate a percentage of your income which goes in there every single month. Now, if someone is requesting money to support them, they're going through a very difficult time or a challenging period, and you think, well, yeah, you should support them. You could draw from that G bucket. That way it doesn't— you don't feel pressured. Don't feel stressed, don't feel like you're being stretched too thin. There are other options. Um, there might be other people who approach you, they want to buy a nicer car, or maybe someone is asking for money for something frivolous. They might not meet the criteria. Remember NGOs, they have to look at what you request in the proposal. And that month you might say, well, for this month there's someone else with a higher need, a better need, I'm going to support them. Um, at this point in time I can't help, but maybe next month, who knows. But you want to allocate a percentage of your income. You don't have to do this, but it makes your life easier if you decide this percentage of my income, 5%, 10%, whatever you decide, is going to be for strategic giving. Then you know that that is already decided. Now, if you work through a limited company, actually you can give through your company, and that can be deducted against tax. If you give to a UK charity, a UK-based charity, whether you do it through a limited company or personally— one, if you do it personally, you can do Gift Aid, and that can help reduce your adjusted net income, which helps with things like the 60% tax trap. And if you work through a limited company as well, if you have some corporate profit before you declare any dividends, you before you even pay corporation tax, you can decide to give to support causes, charities. It could even be a religious organization that you support as long as they are UK registered. That can also reduce your corporation tax. So in a way, you are doing well and you are doing good at the same time. So giving is not something you do, you know, like randomly. You want to be strategic, you want to plan it. You want to have the ability to say, well, this is what I want to do with my giving. I've got a friend who is currently funding a scholarship for some children in, in Nigeria and in his community, and that's his strategic giving. But we've had other initiatives we funded. We have people who fund buildings of projects, and there are people who may not do something big, but they might actually to support one person to get through a difficult time. So really important, think about giving from that point because it's part of the whole thing, not just about taking and taking and taking. Well, you've come to the end of it all. I think you've managed to get to this point. If you've gotten to this point, bravo, bravo. I just want to say well done for getting to this point. I hope you can— you're going to implement the things you've learned. And if you've gotten to this point, think about one or two colleagues. I'll say at least two colleagues who you think might benefit from this course. We've invested a lot of resources, time, strategy, you know, kind of research to provide this free course. Feel free to share it with them. That's about generosity again. That's about giving. Don't just take it alone. Secondly, make sure you're taking some action straight way. For anything, make a checklist. This is what I'm going to do. Do I need to claim tax relief for my professional expenses? Go ahead and do that. Remember, you don't need to become a financial expert. You don't need to get everything 100%. What you need is basically structure. You need clarity. I need a system that works quietly in the background. So this is what you should be working towards. So with each goal, even if you are trying to make sure you're not overpaying taxes. Money should support your life, not dominate it. Now, if you want to check your financial well-being score, if you want to check your financial health score, it's a bit like, um, I described earlier, like your financial news score, your early warning score. Um, check the link in the description for the MedScan. The MedScan basically helps you to look at areas of your financial structure that you might not have looked at. And also, I'm also going to put it in the comments so you can find it easily. It takes you about 3 minutes to go through, okay? And look, um, Moneywise Doctor, um, now supports thousands of doctors across UK and Canada in making smarter financial decisions, making sure you are tax efficient, making sure that you're investing properly without taking unnecessary risk. If you If you need help along these lines or for any of these things, feel free to reach out to us. It's support@moneywise.com. And feel free to attend one of our free masterclasses. It's moneywise.com/masterclass. Now, I want to hear what you think about this course. What resonates with you? What did it help you to do? I'm going to come back and read all the comments, and I hope you manage to share it with your friends as well. All right then. Speak to you later, and I hope you crush it, and I hope you get to the point of your financial well-being that you are financially free to make your decisions. Now, before I leave, my team is going to ask me, why didn't you remember this? The Moneywise Doctor is a book I wrote sharing my experience and insights around taxes, investing, and basically financial well-being in general, and my journey to financial freedom. I documented it in this book. It came out right off the bat. It's less than 100 days since the book came out, but within the first few days, it hit the Amazon bestseller for investing, personal finance, and even retirement planning. Now, if you want to get a copy of The Money Wise Doctor to solidify some of the things we've discussed in this course, if you head over to www.moneywisedoctor.com moneywise.com/book. The website will be on the screen somewhere and the link will also be in the description. You can go and get a copy of the book. I hope that helps you as well. And I think it's also available on Amazon, but if you get it from moneywise.com, so that you can get all the bonuses and everything, right? But if you've got any questions about any of the things I've explained here, ask me in the comments on the YouTube channel or wherever you're watching this video. We'll come back, we'll respond to it, or email us support@moneywise.com. Obviously, if you ask any questions here in the channel where you're watching it, um, we'll give you a response to it as well. All right, thank you for staying with me so far. Cheers, bye-bye!