#134 5 Financial Hurdles To Be Grateful For

Foreign. Welcome to the Passive Income MD Podcast, where we talk about creating your ideal life through multiple streams of income. I'm your host, Peter Kim. If you enjoy hearing about this stuff, make sure to hit subscribe so I can bring it to you every week. Now let's get on with the show. Hey, everyone, it's Gratitude Week. I mean, I have to say, Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holiday of the year. We feel like we're pretty divided at times as a country, as a world. But I think that we can all agree that a good thing to do is look back at the past and look at the present and just be thankful and have gratitude for what we have and what we've gone through. In fact, they say that gratitude is the key to happiness. It's not always easy, but I try to spend a few minutes every morning to think about a few things that I can be really thankful for. To thank God, my family, my friends, whoever has helped me get where I am today. It's always easy for people to think about the good things and have gratitude for that. For the gifts, for the presents, for the successes, for the wins. But I also think it's really important for all of us to go back and think about the challenges we've had, the hurdles we've had to overcome, because without them, we wouldn't be who we are today, and we definitely wouldn't be where we're at. Because in those tough times, that's when most of the growth has happened in our lives, if we look back at it. And it goes back to that old saying, whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And I absolutely believe in that. So, because I talk a lot about finances, I thought it might be interesting to go back and look at some of the hurdles I've had to overcome and ultimately how they help me be where I am today. Now, to be honest, I feel pretty silly talking about some of these financial challenges, understanding that there are people that have far less and are in a much different place. Maybe they haven't been given the opportunities. So trust me, I understand. It's all relative. But here are five financial hurdles that I'm particularly thankful for. Number one, credit card debt. Now, back in college, I held all sorts of jobs. I shoveled snow for the local museum. I was a tutor, district manager for a coupon book. I was a telemarketer fundraiser for the college. I mean, I did all sorts of things. College is where I learned to grind and hustle. But I also found myself at that time in a ton of credit Card debt. I was one of those people that just sign up for all the free T shirts and the free things. And I at the colleges where they have those booths they have you sign up for credit cards and give you free items, I was that person who signed up for all those things. I didn't really understand how the finances worked. I never been taught, I had never looked into it, and so I just thought I had to pay the minimums. And next thing you know, I was in a mountain of credit card debt. I mean, I like to go out, I like to have fun. Next thing you know, I accumulated over $25,000 in credit card debt throughout college and early into med school. Eventually, after meeting my wife in medical school, she taught me there's a different way to treat credit card debt. I didn't have to just pay the minimums. In fact, I could pay them all off at once, take advantage of some of the credit card points and whatever benefits there were, but make sure I still didn't have any debt. At the end of the day, I just thought that was a different way of operating. I never heard about that. I thought everyone just paid the minimums. So when I decided to get that balance down to zero, it really felt insurmountable. It felt like a huge challenge that I couldn't overcome. Fortunately, I was able to take on some odd jobs. Even during medical school. I did some moonlighting or even shortly afterwards when I. I first started my training and I started putting all that money towards my credit card debt to pay that down. Eventually I got it down to zero. And since that point, I've always paid my credit card in full. Being in that place, being in all that debt, it taught me what it feels like to be under a mountain of debt. And I never wanted that again for myself or my family. So I still use credit cards today, but I use it for the travel rewards, the points, and now I utilize it as a tool to, to help me get where I want to be instead of being stuck under debt and being captive to it. I mean, I learned how reckless I was, and it was a great lesson and a hurdle for me to overcome. One of the other challenges I've had to learn to deal with is having student loans. I took out loans in college and in medical school like most of you did. I'm sure I was fortunate to go to a state medical school where my tuition was a bit lower than some of the other private schools. But still, I walked out with a decent amount of student loan debt. And by the end of School, I had a six figure sum, a six figure amount of student loan debt. And, and I just happened to go to a financial talk that was held at the school and they taught me all about student loan debt, about refinancing, how to consolidate, how to lock in lower rates, take advantage of the different products and opportunities that were out there. I learned about the concepts of amortization, about interest rates, about the concept of paying off versus investing when it comes to student loan debt. Ultimately all of that. I learned how to pay off student loan debt using cash flow, cash flow from some of my other investments. It taught me the power of using passive income to pay off your debt, to pay off some parts of your lifestyle. And that was an invaluable lesson for me to figure out how to use debt as a tool and to use it to get me the life that I wanted. And ultimately that led me to a place of financial freedom. Now, back in the late 90s, early 2000s, there was something called the stock market crash. It was a big dot com bubble crash. I don't know if you remember it. That happened to me at the end of college, close to where I started medical school. I mean, after graduation I spent a year as a research assistant and I remember there was plenty of time and I'd sit there looking at stock tickers and learning about stocks. At first I learned to day trade and it was doing really well. I thought I was good at it and I was picking stocks and riding the wave and times were great. Then the crash of 2000 happened and I lost so much of it, in fact, I lost 75% of the value of my stocks. It was a tough lesson to learn. What made it even worse was that I sold at the bottom. I freaked out just like everyone else did and locked in my losses. To this day I remember how humbling it was to go from a place where I thought I was amazing at making good investment decisions, picking good stocks, to losing so much of it. I mean, I just realized I'm not good at this. In fact, I learned that probably most people are not good at this. I'm sure there's a small minority who knows how to pick the stocks, but they have information, they study it, they do. Well, I realized that myself on my own and my own limitations of that. I learned that I probably wasn't going to be successful doing it this way. I learned my lesson at that time and since then I haven't tried to be the stock picker. I focused on real estate. I've learned about steady Cash flow. And that led me into that direction and I'm so thankful for that. Another challenging time when it came to finances was when I tried to buy my first home. By the time I finished my fellowship, my wife finished her training as well. One of the first things we wanted to do was buy our own home. I don't know about you, but many doctors, high income professionals, we delay gratification for so long. And one of the things we want to do when we first finish start getting that first job is that we want to settle down and buy a home. It's like a rite of passage and we all want to get there. We went out and found a home, we put an offer in, it was accepted. Here was the problem. We couldn't get a loan. We had a really difficult time and we realized nobody teaches us about these things, so nobody tells us about the process and how difficult it can be, especially early on in your career, to get a loan to buy a home. Fortunately, at that time, somebody pointed me to something called a physician home loan that they had used where you're able to use a lower down payment to have some more relaxed standards when it came to debt to income. Also when it came to our short work history, that was okay in this situation and ultimately we were able to buy a home. It was painful learning how to do that. But what I started doing was I started sharing that information with all of my other former colleagues, my former co residents. I started helping friends, friends of friends. And I realized that this is a service and something that's needed for other people. And so that actually led me to create my first true company. That's a company called Curbside Real Estate, where I learned that I can help people through the physician home loan process and the buying process, connecting them to trusted realtors and agents and just being a third party help for these people because no one teaches us how to do this. It made me feel like I was fulfilling a mission, helping and serving other people. And it was an amazing experience for me. It's what really started my whole entrepreneurial journey. It was a side hustle at that point, as now that business continues today. But it taught me so much about business, the impact I can have, the concept of side hustles, how to create other streams of income, and I'm so grateful for it. Again, all of this wouldn't have happened if I didn't have a tough time, a tough hurdle, those sleepless nights trying to get my own home and going through that process. And lastly, another financial hurdle, I had to Deal with was actually getting a footing at work, meaning that getting settled in my career and getting settled financially now. When I finished training back in 2011, we were still just coming out of the Great Recession. The market was pretty soft, especially for anesthesiologists. Things weren't great. We were a little overstaffed at the hospital I started working at. I couldn't get cases, really had a tough time finding my way into the rotation at work. In fact, at that time, also, I had friends who had come out of training, got into practices, and maybe the practices had been bought out by private equity. It'd been taken over by a hospital hospital, and people had been given ultimatums, take 30% less or move on to another job. Seeing all this made me realize that maybe my job and my life as a doctor, as an anesthesiologist, isn't quite as secure as I thought it'd be. I don't know if any of you experienced that back then. Through Covid, whatever it might be, I believe that security in medicine isn't what it used to be. What did I do in that situation? I figured out ways to create other streams of income, streams of income outside of medicine, so I could have the security that I wanted for myself and my family, so I could figure out how to live the life I wanted both in and out of medicine. I started learning about real estate. I started learning about how to own my own properties. I started learning how to invest passively through things like syndications and funds. Ultimately, I started to learn how to use the capital that I made from my day job, put it somewhere to invest, to create additional streams of income that would be steady, that'd be more passive, that wouldn't be necessarily tied to all of my time. If I didn't have the challenge at work initially, if I didn't have my friends telling me that they would have challenges at work, if I thought everything was perfect, it wouldn't have led me down that path to learn how to create those additional streams of income. And ultimately, that has allowed me to get where I am today. Now, it's funny. We all hope for good times. We all want times to be perfect. We don't necessarily want challenges or problems, but if we look back, we realize that those are the times that made us who we are today. It was when we faced rejection, when we failed, when we had those challenges to overcome, is we learned how to be resilient, to learn how to be resourceful, to get past those things, to ultimately figure out how we could get where we wanted to be. I knew I grew a ton during those times. I bet you have as well. So I'm so thankful for all the people and all the situations that have come up in my life. I'm thankful for you who were watching this, listening to this. You've been a part of my journey. I hope I can continue to be a part of yours. We have communities to help and support you. Thanks so much. Have an amazing week. Let's talk again soon. Bye. Enjoy the show. Let me know by dropping a review in the podcast app you're listening to us in. And if you haven't already, make sure to hit subscribe. Are you part of our community yet? Join thousands of physicians who are also on this journey to creating their ideal lives through multiple streams of income. You can join us on our Facebook group PassiveIncome Docs and you can always learn more at our website passiveincomemd.com thanks again for allowing me to be a part of your journey. See you next time.