Five Years Later: White Coat Wisdom with Dr. Jim Dahle

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The Bolden financial planning platform, formerly New Retirement. Create a financial plan for free@bolden.com. Welcome to Bolden youn Money. I'm your host, Steve Chen. And today we're catching up with someone who's no stranger to the podcast, Dr. Jim Dali. He's an emergency room physician and founder of the White Coat Investor. Jim and I first Talked back in January 2019, and we talked a lot about his own journey through building financial resiliency and building towards financial independence. And we talked a lot about what it is especially for doctors to go through their own journey as they go through medical school, how they deal with debt, and how they set themselves up to be on a great path over the course of their whole lives. And so I wanted to kind of loop back and check in five years later to learn more about what's developed with Jim's life and also with White Coat investors. So with that, Jim, welcome back to the show. I appreciate you joining us.

Yeah, it's wonderful to be here. It's been a little while, but it's good to be back.

Yeah, you're looking good. And we met at Bogleheads a couple of years ago, so it was great to meet you in person. One of the reasons we reconnected was I saw your post about your climbing accident, which was almost a year ago. Right. In August 2024. And it seemed like that really had a big impact on your life and would love to get your take on how that affected your thinking and if it's affected the way you're approaching life at all.

Yeah. Interesting the way you phrase that, how it's affected my thinking. Right. Because frankly, I'm lucky to be alive.

Right.

I had pretty serious injuries from this fall, including fractures of, you know, all the way across my face, separated my skull from my face and leaked all the fluid that my brain's supposed to be swimming in out my nose. Aside from, you know, spine fractures and rib fractures and, you know, nasty wrist fracture and shoulder separation lacerations and those sorts of things. So it was a pretty big trauma, you know. So it's my first time in my life being disabled. I was definitely disabled from work, at least for a few weeks, and really took several months off. And so that was, you know, that's a sobering time. I'm back at work now. I can do all the work I want to do, both in the emergency department as well as here at the White Coat Investor. But it does feel as if one chapter of my life has closed and another one has opened in that respect, if for nothing else than recreational activities. Right. I mean, my wrist is probably not coming back to 100%. So am I going to be climbing as hard as I used to? No. Is there a whole list of things on my bucket list that I'm probably never climbing? Yes, there is. And so it does feel over the last year that I've moved a little bit from my youth to middle age. And I turned 50 this summer and maybe I should become middle aged much sooner and instead of, you know, pursuing these pursuits like climbing mountains. But it does feel like I've. I've turned a little bit of a page that year, this last year, at least in my recreational pursuits. But I like to think I was living pretty intentionally before then. So it's not like, oh, I gotta quit working and spend more time with my family or playing or something like that. I was doing all that stuff before. So I think I have pretty good balance on life and. And that balance is pretty similar now to how it was a year ago.

Yeah. I've heard that doctors actually make terrible patients. Do you think you're a good patient?

You know, I'm actually thrilled with how I was as a patient. I had a pretty bad head injury, obviously, aside from the CSF leak and all the fractures. You know, I was badly concussed. And so I was asking the same questions over and over again for several days. And that beautiful thing about it is I'm reassured that I'm not a mean drunk because I spend most of the time in the ICU thanking people repetitively for taking care of me. So I was actually kind of happy to hear that. At least I was, you know, nice about my. About my head injury. So I think I wasn't that bad of a patient.

Yeah, well, I can see that. Yeah, you had this. You approached it with a sense of gratitude. Like, I saw your YouTube video. I watched that yesterday, and you talked about the kind of heroes of your life and people who came to help you out. And from actually hearing you firsthand, it sounds like this injury was even more material. I didn't realize how injured you were.

Yeah, there were two helicopters involved in getting me from that mountain to the trauma center. And it was pretty amazing, actually, that I got there in less than three hours from the injury, but it was. I definitely needed a trauma center. There's no doubt about that.

It sounds like it's not slowing you down that much because right before we got on, you were talking about, you're going to go canyoneering and coming up.

So, yeah, I'm pretty excited. It's my first trip canyoneering since before that fall, so I'm a little nervous about it. But I think I'm ready to go and able to travel and doing other fun stuff, playing hockey and skiing. And I was out running yesterday, so I'm happy I can still do lots of fun things that I enjoy.

What is canyoneering?

This is an interesting thing that a lot of people that don't live in this part of the country have never heard of. But along the Colorado Plateau, which is basically southwestern Colorado and southern Utah and northern Arizona, there are slot canyons that are basically formed by water running through sandstone. And exploring those slot canyons is the sport known as canyoneering. It involves rappelling and swimming and route finding and hiking and teamwork, some climbing. And so it's. It's a lot of fun for those of us who do it, but it's definitely a niche sport. I've been a lot of very cool places that people have no idea exists, even when they go to national parks like Zion or Arches or Grand Canyon.

I was reading A Walk in the Park. I was just looking it up by Kevin Fedarko. Have you read that book?

I have not.

It's about him hiking the entire Grand Canyon. So there is some of this discussion of slot canyons and stuff like that. And they first start out, and they're totally unprepared. He used to river raft it, and he's like, oh, I can river raft the whole thing. But then I think I. Hiking.

Hiking, it's a different job because you got to change levels as you hike through it. And the changes of the levels is the challenging part. Aside from the fact that this thing's like 260 miles long or something.

Exactly. Maybe you can take this on. This could be one of your bucket list things.

I've looked at a lot of that terrain. In fact, just a couple of weeks ago, we were out at Toroweap with the kids for spring break and peering over the edge. This is the only place of the Grand Canyon where you can really look over the edge and look directly down at the river. And at that point, the canyon is about 2500ft high. But it's. It's a pretty impressive viewpoint.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. We hiked Mount Whitney with my oldest son when he was 13, and, like, that goes to 14,000. I remember we kind of got up the saddle and looked over, and you're looking down, like 4,000ft. It's pretty crazy. I'D never seen anything like that. And you really are like, wow, that.

East face of Mount Whitney is a fun climb, too. I got a chance to do that. It's been quite a while. It's been decades, actually, I think, since I climbed Mount Whitney. But we came up that face. It's longer than we thought it was going to be, that's for sure.

That's the biggest thing I've ever done. And, like, I just remember going from. I think you start at 8, then you go 10 to, like, at 12,000. I was like, oh, right there. And like, and then I'm slowing. Like, my pace of making progress slowed to our crawl. It took us forever to get to the last part of it.

Yeah, it's pretty impressive how altitude will affect you until your body gets used to it.

Has this affected your. You know, you talk about the chapters, right? One closing and I guess the next one. How do you think about the next chapter? And, like, has your orientation about the work that you're doing and the why behind your work changed?

You know, it's interesting. I just got a feedback from a bunch of our employees. They tell me I'm much nicer now, and I'm like, was I a jerk before? I didn't realize it, but so apparently I'm nicer than I used to be. I'm also told that I'm much more mission focused. I think that's been a gradual change over the years, and I think that comes just with building wealth. When you have enough, you stop caring about more money quite so much. Well, what else am I going to leave this planet besides a little bit of money? Because at this point, we're not going to spend all of our money. We've got to figure out where that's going to go when we're done. And what else do I want to do? What do I want to do with the rest of my life? I'm not quite 50 years old, and I. I feel like I've still got a lot I can give. So I'm definitely more focused on purpose and mission and those sorts of things. You know, as you become financially independent, you start reading different books. Instead of reading, you know, how to invest, how to get wealthy, you start looking for books which are much less common on how to be wealthy. And so I've been reading books this year like the Purpose Code and Die with Zero. And what do you do when you get what you want, you know, those sorts of books? And I suspect that's probably affected the way I think about some of this stuff as well.

Any big takeaways from those books? I mean, Die With Zero people have talked a lot about. I haven't heard of the Purpose Code, but I'll check it out.

Die With Zero's big takeaway is most people are dying. The wealthiest, they've been their entire life. And he sees that as a huge tragedy. The older you get, the less well you can exchange money for awesome life experiences. So he actually advocates that you actually hit your peak wealth between age 45 and 60 and at that point your wealth's declining because you're using it for good. You know, whether that's experiences for yourself or people you care about or giving it away to charity or whatever. His idea was basically, yeah, really Die With Zero. Now that's kind of an unattainable goal. But as a mindset, I think there's a lot of value there for those of us who have accumulated wealth and maybe aren't using it in the best way we could.

No, it's a great insight. Yeah, I can totally see that. I've seen some stuff too around. You need to look at a lot of people, track their net worth, right? Is it going up into the right. But they also need to track the same time, how much human capital do they have left and what's your probability of being alive? And a lot of folks are, yeah, they're indexing to like, I want to have plenty of money when I'm 95. And then.

And what exactly do they think they're going to be doing with the money at 95? Right. I mean, part of life is just balancing current you current with the needs of future you. And that can be challenging for sure.

When you think about your own time. Right. There's your work, your family, the white coat investor, which is like a larger conglomerate of things. Are there other big things that you're putting your energy into?

I mean, I have some volunteer work through our church and community and that sort of thing. You know, one of the fun things about getting to this stage of my career and this stage of our family is to see my wife get all excited about career, like stuff. For example, she ran for office last year. She is an elected member of the district school board. And so she's been having a heck of a time being on the school board. Of course, that's not always a. Can be a thankless job and you get a lot of flack when you're on the school board. And so it's been fun to watch her pursue some of her interests as well. That's probably been one of the bigger changes in the last year for us.

Do you think you'll run for public office?

No, I think I'm completely unelectable now. With 3,000 or 4,000 blog posts and 500, 600 podcasts out there, surely any political opponent I ever had would be able to just find something that would keep me from ever being electable, that I said on some podcast or something. So I don't think so. I'm not really interested in it, number one. Number two, I'm pretty sure I'm unelectable.

I don't know, I think you seem pretty electable. How has it evolved over the past? You've been doing this for a while. I think you started in 2011, right? It was like a blog, and then I know you've bought other properties and podcasts and YouTube and stuff like that, and courses. How do you see it evolving?

The mission really hasn't changed much at all. The goal is to be the spot for docs, you know, docs that want to learn about finance or want referrals to financial service professionals or companies. Basically, we want to help docs stop doing dumb stuff with their money. When I say docs, I'm also talking about other high income professionals. And frankly, 98% of it's the same for everybody, right? Be honest, that part hasn't changed at all. Now mostly what we've done is realize that some people like to learn in different ways than others. Some people like online courses, some people like video, some people like audio, some people like written stuff, some people want email newsletters, other people want books or they want to go to a live conference. And so we try to package up the same information into whatever way you like to learn and give it to you that way. That's a lot of what we've done over the years. Years of white coat investor. And most of it at this point is just keeping it going, knowing that every year 30,000 people come out of medical school and they still need to know the stuff that last year's people needed to learn. So I don't know that we have dramatic changes. You know, we're always trying to figure out ways to serve people a little better, whether that's bringing one service in house or taking one out of house or finding a different person to refer to. But for the most part, it's similar work to what I was doing a decade ago.

Do you think you're going to keep running it for the foreseeable future? Would you ever consider selling it I'd consider selling it.

You making an offer. I mean, we can retain it for sure, but as I get further in life, I care less about the money that offer would bring in as much as trying to figure out how this thing can outlive me. And that part's a little bit trickier, it turns out, than just figuring out evaluation to sell it for sure.

It's hard. Well, I'm glad you're making progress and you're doing good work in the world, which is awesome. So I thought we could talk a little bit about just what's happening in the world a bit. I know it's been a kind of a crazy time, and we're personal finance.

Experts, but I guess I should ask when does this run right? Because it feels like everything's changing day by day here in April of 2025. Every day is different than the day before, politically, for sure.

It is basically impossible to keep up with it. I did a podcast, I tried to get in front of it early on, like right after Liberation Day tariff thing. And we rolled a podcast Tuesday morning and we put it out like Wednesday evening. And in that time, like, the market moved or the Dow had moved like 2,000 points, or there was like a 10 swing one day and a 15. I mean, it was crazy, you know, like, everything changed.

So there was one day in there which was probably the most profitable day of your life. If you're like most people, right. The market went up 10% that day. And if you multiply 10% by the amount of money you have in stocks, that's probably more money than you've ever made on any other day of your life. You know that's true.

Yeah. I'm thankful I took what I know is our suggestions, which is just stay the course and don't sell. I mean, I do remember talking to friends and just seeing online. People were freaking out like they normally do. Some people were thinking about is selling, and I think some people probably did sell the day before, you know, or whatever. It's really. It's hard to kind of watch that happen. Yeah. But do you have any take on what happens here? Do you think things will settle down or do you think this continues on for a while?

Well, my crystal ball is cloudy as usual.

Right.

I have no idea what the future holds. I don't know what interest rates are going to be in a year. I don't know what the Dow Jones is going to be at in a year. I don't know which asset class is going to outperform others. Or how Bitcoin is going to do, or how gold's going to do or anything like that. And I think it's fascinating that people ask those questions. They think somebody knows. Right. When all evidence is to the contrary, then nobody knows and nobody's going to know. And you really ought to quit asking the question because you're not going to get any sort of useful information as an answer. And if you're not convinced of that, I would suggest you start keeping a journal. Right. Write down your own predictions. Write down the predictions of others. Be as specific as you can. Then go back and look at it in three months and six months and a year and two years. And it won't take you long before you convince yourself that you need an investing method that doesn't require you to be able to predict the future to be successful, because you almost surely do not have that ability. And if you do, there's no way that you should only be managing your money. Right. You should be managing billions of dollars.

I think that's a great point. How do you get this insight that, like, it is impossible and I know you can read and stuff like this? I think people are so. They want to be able to explain things, so they want stories. And I feel like that's what a lot of financial services gives. It's like gets in front of you, like, hey, here's what's happening. Do this or that. You can be confident because I'm telling you what to do. And the reality is, nobody knows. Yeah.

I mean, what we need to have the proper perspective is experience. And you can get a certain amount of experience in your own lifetime, but what you should really ideally do is borrow experience from history. And I think it's important to understand financial history. You know, I mean, every time something crazy happens in the markets, it feels like this time it's different. It will always feel like that. It's supposed to feel like that. In some respects, it is different. Right. We've never dramatically increased tariffs like they've been increased in the last month. That's never happened before. It is different this time in that respect. But markets are resilient. Markets have had shocks like this before. And once you go through enough of them, you realize that you've seen this movie before and you know how it ends. Right? Right. In 2022, we raised interest rates like 4% in a few months. That had never happened before. It led to the worst bond market returns that we've ever had in a single year in 2022. And it felt like this time it's different. In 2020, we had a worldwide pandemic. People were keeling over in China, in ICUs, in Ireland, or not Ireland, Italy. And it was starting to hit New York City. It felt like this time is different. And where were we at a year later? Where were we at five years later? Right. The markets are resilient. Companies that were profitable five years ago are mostly still profitable today. These are the most profitable corporations in the history of the world. And if you go back through history like this, you realize that you expect a 20% drop in the stock market on average, about once every three years. Well, when was our last one? It was three years ago. We're down. I don't know what it is today. You know, as we record this 13, 14%, something like that. This is an expected event. If you didn't expect this, you don't understand what you're doing investing in stocks, they drop like this from time to time. And that's just part of the game. The point is, this is money you're not going to spend for 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 years. Is it likely to still be down 50 years from now? No, it is not. So you just got to learn to stay the course. Jack Bogle was famous for saying, this is my most important advice. You know, if there's one thing you gotta understand, so you gotta pick a reasonable course and you gotta stay with it through thick and thin. And I think that's still really good investing advice.

It feels like you learned this pretty early, you know, as you got started. You were, I know, involved in Bogleheads really early on. It's like, how did you get started in your own journey here and kind of come to these realizations?

I got mad. That's what happened. I realized I had been taken advantage of. Not with a lot of money. I didn't have a lot of money. I could have lost everything I had, and it wouldn't have been a lot of money. But I was mad because I felt like the financial services industry was taking advantage of me, that every interaction I'd had with them had ended up badly. You know, a realtor, a mortgage lender, twice a recruiter, an insurance agent, a financial advisor. I just had felt like I'd been ripped off. And so that motivated me to learn. And I started reading. I lived across the street from a used bookstore, and I went over there and started grabbing used financial books. And I'd read them. I read a whole bunch of terrible financial books. There are a lot of really bad financial books out there. But I read some good ones. And after a while I realized, well, the good ones are saying the same things. And one of the early ones I read was called the Four Pillars of Investing by Bill Bernstein. He's a neurologist turned kind of financial guru. And, and one of the four pillars was learning financial history. And so he went through that and he loves writing about history. He's done all kinds of history books, financial history books kind of stuff. But once you get that perspective over centuries of financial markets and developments and stuff, you just look at the world differently. It's almost like you feel like you have a superpower looking around, you're like nobody else understands that this is going to go away in a few months. And that's the truth. Yes, sometimes things change that are dramatic, that make a difference for centuries. You know, at the end of the Bronze Age, for instance, a bunch of Eastern European civilizations really tanked and nobody came back for centuries. But since then, the markets have been pretty darn resilient. And I wouldn't bet on the end of the Bronze Age again. You know, you're probably much more likely to get something the equivalent of the dot com crash.

When you've studied history, do the problems that led you to get mad, did they persist? Were they existing back then? Was there kind of a lack of transparency and a lack of alignment?

Well, another one of the pillars in Bernstein's book was, you know, learn how to interact with the financial services industry. And you realize that, you know, the people that go into financial services, you know, this isn't 100% true, but it's generally true. They're not the same people that become kindergarten teachers. Right. They have a little bit different motivation. And you really have to put your business hat on when you walk into the financial services world and realize people are there to make money from you and you are the source of their profits. And so you got to be a little more on your guard and realize that maybe you ought to treat some of those people as though they're a criminal trying to rob you. And when you have that mindset in place, then you just interact a little bit better with the financial services industry.

It's so funny talking to you. I mean, I agree with what you're saying.

And also, and also, you know, you somewhat work in the financial services.

We interact with the financial services. I mean, like, I'm in financial services and. But we, but I interact with the, the community. And I do think these issues persist just because of how the, the Industry operates, which is generally. It's kind of opaque. And yeah, you are the product versus the customer.

@ least the information is out there. Now, prior to really the Internet, probably this information wasn't out there. You had to go dive through obscure periodicals in the library or read books to really get a scrapbook sense for how this stuff works. At least now, if you want to learn it, it's pretty quick to.

Learn. Well, I think it's changing. I mean, like, I remember I was reading back our podcast from 2019, and I, you know, when I first met you and Tim Ranza was getting going with Next generation personal finance, and like, that's become a thing, and now he's educated, I think, 50,000 teachers and they're teaching 5 million kids a.

Year. It's.

Incredible. So literacy, financial literacy is getting taught, which is great. The information is out there. I do think it's a generational thing. I. I really feel like the millennials are smarter than Gen Xers and the Gen Z's are smarter than millennials, and the Alphas are probably going to be smarter than.

The. And hopefully that keeps going, you know, but it's pretty awesome when you think about, you know, it's a little bit like, you know, reaching doctors. What we're trying to do is help doctors be more financially literate. I think it actually does improve patient care. And likewise, if you just make the teachers more financially literate, they'll naturally teach it to their students. And so you really get this multiplier effect where you end up helping a lot more people than you think you are initially.

Yeah. As you've built wealth, you know, you talked about how your orientation around purpose has changed. Do you feel like things are getting more complicated? I know that you probably have to think more about your estate and taxes and stuff like that. Is life getting more complex for you or are you keeping it.

Simple? This is a challenge for us. Me, because I'm a hobbyist. I mean, I'm like, all right, like, one of the things I did a few years ago is we added some I bonds to our portfolio, right? I bonds are cool. They're inflation index. They work a little bit differently from tips, but they're cool. The problem with I bonds is you can only buy, you know, $10,000 of them a year. So it really doesn't work to add I bonds to your portfolio once you're already wealthy. And so I went through all this trouble of opening up treasurydirect accounts. One for myself, one for my wife, one for our trust and Bought I bonds every year, and here I am three or four or five years later and still have an insignificant amount of our portfolio in I bonds. Is there anything wrong with I bonds? No. Can they be a meaningful part of portfolio? Absolutely. Are they a meaningful part of our portfolio? No. All they're doing is adding complexity to our lives. We are getting no portfolio benefit out of having what we have in I bond, you know, so you start thinking about things like that going, we got to simplify things like this. So we look into simplifying things a lot now. But is our financial life complex? Yeah, it.

Is. What are some of the things that you do to simplify your.

Life? Our financial.

Life? Yeah, your financial.

Life. Well, for instance, you know, I filed in 12 states a couple of years ago. Well, last year I filed in nine, and hopefully this year it'll be six or seven. So that simplifies my life somewhat, obviously reduces my tax preparation costs. But. But I have to be a little bit careful which private investments I invest in if I don't want to be filing in multiple states, where those investments are located and whether they do some sort of composite return and those sorts of things. That's one example of something that maybe people don't think about going in, but can make your financial life a little more complex going out. The other thing I think about from time to time is starting like a rental property empire. I think it's a great way to build wealth. I think it's a good way to preserve wealth. I think it's worked for many, many people. It's not something I need in my life, though. And if I start buying a bunch of direct rental properties, all it's going to do is give me a whole bunch of schedulees to file on my taxes and phone calls and things to deal with. Whereas we've already got a reasonable investing plan, if we follow is going to work just fine to meet all of our financial.

Goals. When you invest, is it primarily, it sounds like you're doing some private alternative stuff, direct investing that you've done. And then you've got stocks and bonds and. And you've got your.

Business. Yeah, I mean, our investment portfolio is kind of boring. It's 60% stocks, 20% bonds, 20% real estate. That's what it's been for years and years and years. And. And I don't try to go, oh, the tariffs are hitting. Should I put more in international real estate? Nope, a third of it. Or international stocks? Nope, a third of it's in international stocks. It was in 2006 it was in 2016, it will be in 2026. And sometimes international stocks will do better than US stocks, sometimes they won't. I don't know when that's going to be. So I'm just going to keep the same percentage year after year. And the beautiful thing about that is all the stuff I don't have to listen to or read or think about. And there's a lot of power in.

That. When you think about your positions, is it really like, I mean you chop it up in equities across international, domestic, large caps, whatever it is, some mix, but it's pretty.

Straightforward. It's pretty straightforward. I mean we do a little bit of small value tilting in our portfolio have for years. That hasn't paid off by the way. I mean a total market approach or even a growthy large growth approach for the last five plus years has definitely been more profitable than a small value tilt. But because of that tilt we have four stock funds, Total stock market fund, the total international stock market fund and a small value US fund and a small value international fund. That's our stock funds. That's 60% of our portfolio. Now because of a lot of it's in a taxable account, I have, you know, each of those has a tax loss harvesting partner. So I may have eight funds in that taxable account but it's four asset.

Classes. Do you do the tax loss harvesting stuff.

Yourself? Yes, I do all the portfolio management myself. It's one of those things that number one, it's not that hard to learn I don't think. And so I learned it early on and I've been doing it ever since. When you do it with a four figure portfolio, it's no big deal to do with a five figure portfolio or six or seven or whatever. It's the same game. So I find it easy. And secondly, I'd just be unhappy with if someone else was doing it, I'd be hassling them, I'd be a terrible client. So might as well just take care of.

Myself. And how often are you rebalancing.

And trying to capture rebalancing I think is totally overrated. Everyone gets into the ideal way to rebalance using some sort of back tested thing thing. And the truth is nobody knows. Nobody knows. And there probably isn't an ideal way. Should you rebalance in some way at some point? Yes, if you're doing something to rebalance, you're doing it right. Don't go any further than that. If you're trying to rebalance every Week, you're just creating work for yourself and you're probably hurting your returns more than you're helping. So don't make this too, too complex. So mostly I just direct new money at whatever is lagging and try to bring the portfolio back in the direction of being balanced and that's good.

Enough. And how about tax loss.

Harvesting? You know, I've done lots of tax loss harvesting over the years. I did a little bit more this month. You know, obviously the market's going crazy. It's pretty easy to tax loss harvest right now. At this point, I have more tax losses that I'm ever going to use against my ordinary income. So barring a sale of our house or a sale of the white coat investor, as a business, I'm never going to use up all of my tax losses. So I'm pretty cautious about getting more. Now. I do grab more when they're easy to grab, but I make sure it costs me nothing to get them. But does tax harvesting add a little bit to a portfolio? Sure, but it's up there with.

Rebalancing.

Right. This is a relatively minor portfolio task. The big problem people have, the reason people aren't wealthier than they are is they don't put more money in their accounts. You know, and when you compare rebalancing and tax loss harvesting and stuff to figuring out a way to make more money and save more money, more of it in your accounts, they're pretty small chump change kind of amounts and.

I guess in terms of building taxable wealth. So you do generally save in your tax deferred first or you come when you're saving money. Are you kind of like Roth tax deferred and.

Taxable? Yeah, I don't see any reason to put money in a taxable account until you've maxed out your tax protected accounts. So the first thing we fund every year is our HSA. You know, that's usually January 2nd. We're doing backdoor Roth IRAs on January 2nd and 3rd. And I try to max out any 401ks available to me early in the year as well. And after that I got nowhere else to put another in a taxable account. So it used to be we didn't even have a taxable account and now it's our largest account. So that's a good problem to have. It's hard to complain about that. That just means we made a lot of.

Money. That's awesome. And you obviously make money as a doctor, but you're also making money through the business Essentially that's what's driving it. And I guess you're capturing returns from, for your real estate stuff, you're getting distributions from.

That. Yeah, I mean we have, we have portfolio income, dividends and interest from stocks and bonds. We have real rents from some of the private real estate investments. We have occasional capital gains and then of course business income from the white coat investor. And the white coat investor pays my wife and I both a salary and I have a little bit of clinical income.

Too. That's good, well diversified, good job. That's amazing. Yeah, I feel like owning a business completely is like the lowest risk path for wealth building in this country. It's very tax efficient and through that and just through kind of running a profitable company, you can do incredibly.

Well. I would not argue with that point that you can do incredibly well. I think it can be the most profitable way to use your money, to use your time, et cetera. I would not describe it as the lowest risk way though. I think there are far lower risk ways to build wealth. Maybe not to such an extreme. Obviously if you're going to build the next meta, the next Alphabet, then you know, you're not going to do that, be in somebody else's employee. But you know, I've thought a lot about what is the most reproducible way to build wealth in a relatively short time period. And I think it's using a reasonable amount of leverage and building a portfolio of short term rental properties. Is it another job? Yes, it is another job, but you can eventually outsource a lot of the, a lot of the parts of that job. You know, it's a really reasonable use of leverage that can further boost your returns. And, and the truth is you're running a hotel business, not just a housing business. But you know, I, I think it's got a lot going for it. If your goal is to get rich quick, I think that's one of the more reproducible ways to get there. And it's not quick. It's not in two months it's going to be five, 10, 15 years. But I think it's one of the more reproducible ways to do it as opposed to trying to start the next white coat investor. I mean since we started, started this, there's been another hundred plus physician financial blogs out there. Only about three or four of them have ever made any significant amount of money at all. And none of them have been as successful as the White coat investor. I would say trying to do this is the risky thing, whereas you know, there's lots of other ways to build all the wealth you're ever going to want without taking that sort of.

Risk. Yeah, I think that makes sense. But, you know, franchises.

Or. Oh, yeah, they've already been proven right. You don't think your Subway is going to make money? The subway is going to make money. Put it on the right corner and it'll make $80,000 a year like the other Subway, you know, and you buy enough of them, you'll have to be a Subway.

Millionaire. Yeah. And I think I agree with you on real estate, but it is a job. It's like, that's like building a business. I mean, you know, you do it for 10 or 15 years and you end up with whatever 100 doors or a thousand doors or whatever it.

Is. For sure. It's. It's building a business, no doubt about it. I just think it's one that's a little more reproducible. You can get help from people who have done that same business just in a different location. They don't mind helping you at all because you're not competing with them. Whereas if you're trying to build the next bold in, you're competing with the entire planet. It's just a, you know, it's more.

Challenging. Yeah, I know, I know. It's interesting. How about your family and your kids? So I've seen this with my friends. As they get wealthier, it's like they start to really think about how much they disclose to their kids about what they have and what might happen and how do they keep them aligned in terms of, like, making sure they're motivated. Right. And not going to blow.

It. Yeah. So estate planning becomes much more important to you as you build wealth and as you become older. There's no doubt about it. And for a lot of people, estate planning means talking to an attorney and putting some papers together. For us, estate planning is a lot more significant than that. It involves teaching our children and getting to know our children and talking to our children about when they're going to inherit money and why and how and those sorts of things. Because you can really blow it. You can really ruin somebody by giving them the wrong amount of money at the wrong time in the wrong way. So our estate plan is essentially four chunks that each of our kids will get. And the first one, I think, is what most people find very interesting, which is what we call the 20s fund. And it's a relatively small percentage of what they're likely to inherit. But it comes to them in the form of a Roth IRA for money they've earned as teenagers that we basically give them, you know, pre rental match on 529 to pay for college, a UTMA account they can use for whatever they want in their 20s, and then an HSA. Because there's a cool thing you can do with HSAs these days where while they're still on your family plan, but they're actually not your dependent, you can put in a family contribution for them. So that's the four parts of their 20s fund. And we get to watch them and see how they use this money. And there's only one of them in their 20s now, but we get to see how they use their money and whether they can handle inheriting more money.

Later. How do you keep visibility to their money or the money? Like, do you still have access to the.

Accounts? Well, up until they turn 21, I mean, I'm controlling it all. It's all custodial accounts. As they turn 21, you know, the access goes away, but you're still talking to them about it and that sort of thing. Basically, if they can't manage money, they're going to inherit the later inheritances in a different format than they would. Right. They're much more likely to get as a special spendthrift trust kind of inheritance than a lump sum kind of inheritance. And then we tell them, you got to have a career, you got to go do something because you're not getting any more money from us until you're 40. And so they get a chunk at 40, a chunk at 50 and a chunk at 60. And the idea there is, you know, three strikes you're out. If you blow it, you got to blow it three times. And, you know, the first one probably pays off their mortgage, and the second one maybe makes them financially independent. And the third one, they're just managing for the next year generation. That's kind of our plan for now. You know, after reading Die With Zero, he really advocates for inheritances between 26 and 35, which is earlier than we were planning to really give significant amounts of money. So maybe if they, if they prove that they can handle it, maybe they'll get some money a little bit earlier. But right now, if we got hit by a bus, they wouldn't get anything other than their 20s fund until they turn.

40. Yeah, I think it's, it's so interesting. Like as you have more money, you can, you can afford to be more generous and it can change people's lives. You know, there's someone in my family and you Know, he's in his 30s and he's like, they want to buy a house. And you know, they've been saving up their money, but like they've got relatives that have more money that are probably never going to use their money. If you, if we could pre inherit some money, that would be really helpful for us. But also they're working hard, they have a career and all that.

Stuff. That is true money. Money at 30 is way more useful than money at 50. I don't need an inheritance from my parents now. It would not help me whatsoever. Know, I'd just be managing it for the next generation. So there's a lot of wisdom there in, you know, kind of that die with zero philosophy to give inheritances early and give to charity early and spend your money early, you know, when you can really still get maximum memories and life experiences out of it. Obviously you have to balance that with not eating ALPO in your 80s. But most Americans just don't save enough money, let's be honest. But of those who do, very few of them that figure out how to spend it well, that transition is a lot harder than most people think it is. You go from saving money to spending.

Money. Yeah. Do you see that in your community where people coming to you now because as you, you must be having doctors that have going through their careers, Right. And they, you're 20 years into this. 20, 20 plus years into it. You know, they're hitting retirement or whatever. They're, they're getting to that point. Are they showing up and saying, hey, I need help with this, I got to think this.

Through? Yeah, for sure they are. You know, a lot of them, even if they started at the beginning of their career with me, when I started doing White Coat Investor, you know, they're getting to the point where they're starting to think about early retirement, those sorts of things. They're in their 50s now. And so definitely people are thinking about that. But this is a challenge. For many years I've been writing about how there's five money activities you got to master. You know, there's earning, saving, investing, spending and giving. And the truth is, almost nobody's good at all five of them. Naturally, if you're a natural saver like I am, you usually get pretty good at earning and saving and investing, and then you suck at spending. So for five plus years, five or 10 years, I've been trying to get better at spending. And I'm not just talking about spending money, I'm talking about spending money well, on things that actually make Me happier that improve the lives of others that, you know, I'm getting a good deal on, for instance. And those sorts of things, you know, spending can take just as much work as saving money.

Does. Well, many people are good at. They're able to spend lots of money, but they don't necessarily spend it well and they get going on that early versus the.

Saving. It's a real bummer to blow a bunch of your money on something that doesn't even make you.

Happier. That's right. Understanding that about yourself is super important. There's a dirt bike sitting in my garage because my middle son made some money in the summer and he's like, I'm going to spend two grand on a dirt bike. I'm like, whatever. I think he enjoyed having it, but he's not necessarily getting maximum utilization out of.

It. Yeah. The worst part about it is it's in your.

Garage. I know, exactly. I guess last question on the estate stuff because this stuff resonates a lot. But when you zoom out, how do you think about the mix of what is going to your family? Sounds like family and charity is where your money's going. Is it going anywhere.

Else? Not really. Although we've made a significant point of giving to nieces and nephews. So we funded, I don't know, 35 529s. I think one of them has been cleaned out. So far only one niece and nephew is actually graduating from college. 35 529s. So we've offered them a match on any money they earn themselves and put in the 529. We give them a two to one match. And so that adds up to chunk of change every year when there's 35 of them. So that's been a cool way, but that's basically what we've done. We've done charity and we've got plans for our kids and then we've reached out to the nieces and nephews. I'm sure down the road there'll probably be something for grandkids as well. But yeah, charity versus family I think is the decision most people are struggling with. How much do you leave to.

Each? Yeah, I'm going to study these five activities in terms of things to master with your money, which is good. You know, as we kind of close out here a little bit about. We appreciate you guys have been partnering with us at Bolden, at White Coat Investor and would love. I don't know if you have any feedback from people that are using the platform or things that you're seeing. Are people getting value from it.

There? Yeah, I think so. I think people find it useful. People love calculators, you know, they love anything that will project things out. And it's good to do that, especially if you don't feel super comfortable, you know, using a financial calculator or a spreadsheet. You know, if you're a total money nerd, you probably figured out how to do those things. But most people aren't total money nerds. They would like a little bit of software to help them make these hard decisions, you know, and there are so many hard decisions out there. Two of the hardest ones are, are the Roth question, right? Whether do Roth or traditional contributions, whether to do Roth conversions. That's a hard one. Another hard one is paying off debt versus investing. Right? These are hard decisions. And having any sort of a platform or software that can help you to inform those decisions. Obviously there's still lots of value judgment and variables you don't even know for years and years that go into these decisions. But to have a little bit of software that can help help with that, I think it provides a lot of value to a lot of.

People. Yeah, that's really how we are thinking about it. Like how do we help people get educated, kind of see what's possible, make informed decisions about what to do next? You know, this kind of next best action for my money is like the perpetual problem across all of these platforms. And that's what, that's something that we're definitely working on. Any other big things that you think that your audience would love to see in this.

Area? I mean, what everyone would love to see is one very inexpensive program that does everything for them. So they never need an accountant, they never need an attorney, they never need, you know, a financial advisor and just take care of it all for them. You know, I mean, that's what people want. And it's fun to see the developments in the fintech space. I saw some software the other day that combined filing for an LLC with filing your taxes and did both of those services for you. And so it's interesting to see what people are coming up with. But I think the successful platforms and software pieces are can be continually adding more features as the years go on. And especially with the advent of AI being able to, you know, add maybe even an education component into that AI Education right now I think is very hit or miss. You never know what you're going to get when you type into it. But you know, I suspect over the years that's going to.

Improve. I think we're getting closer to this point where you're going to have more people that are better and simpler tools that do more for you. Are you seeing the impact of AI in your business right.

Now? Well, only, you know, as the AI engines steal from us. That's the problem when you're a content creator is AI takes from your content and doesn't necessarily give you any credit for it. If you type something into Google and you get the AI answer at the top, you no longer have to go to that website. That website now doesn't have a chance to show you advertisements or make any money. So I think it really might have a very negative effect on real content creation out there. But we'll have to see as the years go by what.

Happens. Are you blocking the AI engines right.

Now? No, not currently blocking them. Thought about it and there may come a time when we need to do something like that, but hopefully this all sorts out in a way that it becomes beneficial to the people actually creating the content. Because let's be honest, right, AI is not necessarily creating. It's not great for creating stuff. It's great for compiling and synthesizing stuff, but that all has to be created by.

Somebody. Yeah, there's an emerging like AI SEO, Search Engine optimization or AI eo. Right. I don't know if it's material yet, though. We have the same problem. I think every content creator is running into this right now and it is a bummer. I totally agree with you that AI is not innovating new stuff. It's consuming and regurgitating things, which can be great for some people, but necessarily great for the people who are creating the.

Content. Yeah, it's. It's probably going to contribute to the, you know, over the last 15 to 20 years, it's probably been a downslope in how many people read blogs and that AI will probably accelerate that trend, I would.

Imagine. Yeah. Awesome. Well, look, Jim, this has been great. Do you have any questions for me or anything I can ask you about or.

Answer? I don't think so. I just appreciate all you're doing to help White Coat investors to reach their financial.

Goals. For everyone listening, we will link out to White Coat investor. You know, Jim, thanks for being on the show. It's been great to get your insights and we'll also any reviews or feedback to this are super appreciated for both of us. And thanks for taking the time to listen to Bold in your money. And Jim, thanks for being on the.

Show. Thank.