If we thought our life was ever going to reach some kind of steady state, 2025 was yet again not the year. Our finances were probably the least exciting part of the year, which is a good thing for us but doesn’t make for great financial blog fodder. Our personal and professional lives were full of developments, all to the good.
Our Finances
Our family reached some important financial and personal milestones a few years back when we sold our home in Maine and put the resulting windfall to work. Since then, we have felt financially secure in a way that neither my husband nor I have ever. We aren’t quite ready to retire and we still max out our retirement accounts, but we have definitely relaxed some of our vigilance around money. I still pack my lunch and buy used clothes, but my husband and I bought each other new skis for Christmas. We feel rich.
In part because we feel rich, I did less well in 2025 at keeping track of our finances. Fear is a great motivator. Also, Empower, the account aggregator that I used to track our savings, doesn’t seem to be accurate anymore, and I stopped utilizing it. I switched to manual spreadsheets, but I’m kind of half-hearted about keeping them updated. That should be a goal for 2026: keep better track of our money.
Our net worth continued to grow this year, largely thanks to the stock market. We stuck to our financial plan and ignored all the stock market machinations of 2025, and this was good both for our portfolio and our psychological health. Highly recommend.
While we don’t enjoy the same geographic arbitrage as physicians in the Midwest, it is easier to live within your means when the local dress code is “farmer’s market vendor.” We did less well controlling costs on our home renovation—which were approximately $500,000 all told, well above the $300,000 I had estimated. It was painful to watch that money flow out of our accounts, but we are incredibly fortunate that we had the money and the ability to re-accrue it by working at jobs we both enjoy. We plan to be in this house the rest of our days, and as my husband said, we will never again have to replace the roof because we will be dead before this one gives out. That's comforting.
More information here:
How Our Portfolio Performed in 2025 (Including Real Estate!)
Your Crystal Ball Predictions for 2026
Doctoring
I enjoyed my work at an academic medical center, which included teaching second-year medical students and precepting a first-year student. I continued to do a little hospitalist work, and I spent a total of five weeks working for a tribal health organization in Alaska doing general outpatient pediatrics. In August, a pediatrics resident came up with me for a two-week rotation, which had been one of my goals for the year.
My husband continued to work part-time (4-8 days per month) as a contracted employee at a local hospital and, at the same time, build his own practice. This started as a cash-only vasectomy practice, but it turns out there isn’t enough demand for vasectomies in our area to do more than break even on expenses. That part of the practice will continue, but he started seeing general urology patients—and taking insurance—in November.
Real Estate Investing
We bought an investment property, and everything went swimmingly. We also own a small office building that houses my husband’s private urology practice along with four additional practitioners that rent rooms: two NPs, one PT, and a nutritionist. We have visions of expanding the office building to meet demand, but those plans have taken a back seat to our biggest project: building an ambulatory surgery center.
The core group taking this on is my husband, an orthopedic surgeon, and a neurosurgeon. This has been a huge undertaking involving many meetings with architects, planners, and builders. The learning curve has been incredible. As of this writing, our Certificate of Need application has been submitted, and the partners have settled on a consultant and a building. The building and the business will be entirely clinician-owned, and the ASC will donate a percentage of care to under- and uninsured patients.
Our personal outlay, thus far, has been $5,000 seed money because the partners have been doing all the legwork themselves, and we figure we would have spent at least $100,000 on consultant fees up to this point. Our expenditures will obviously become a lot bigger, quickly, as we start to hire more people. We hope to break ground this year and start operations in 2027.
Planning for the Future
Hopefully, my husband and I will still be kicking around some years from now, but we do talk about the segue into retirement and about our kids’ inheritances.
We completed our estate planning in 2024 and started transferring our assets into the trust in 2025. Watch for my column on our estate planning process, which includes advice like, “Don’t forget to actually put stuff in the trust you just made.”
We don’t give our kids cash, but we have saved for their undergraduate educations (mostly in 529 plans) and we “match” any money they make into a Roth IRA. Since this can grow tax-free and eventually be used for expenses like a house purchase, I see this as a smart way to transfer our wealth to them while we are still alive.
On the Home Front
My oldest kid graduated from college and started graduate school in biochemistry. He says his goal is to make a killing in pharma and retire when he’s 40. That’s my boy. All three kids are happy, hard-working, and honest, and there is really nothing else I could ask for, ever.
My husband made about 40 gallons of maple syrup. Most of it, we gave away; the rest we ate. I help with our town’s elementary school Nordic ski program (GO SNOW LIONS!). I resolved to be more social in 2025, so one time, I hosted a book club.
We started the year with one dog and got two more; now we have three. That’s just math.
This is why we can't have nice things.
More information here:
You Should Invest Like a 50-Year-Old Woman
Living Our Lives in a Dual-Physician Income Household
Looking Ahead
I expect that the biggest professional and financial project for 2026—and maybe our whole careers—will be starting the new ambulatory surgical center. My husband, Mike, and his colleagues have now hired a consultant, but they will still have to navigate renovating a building and starting a whole business. At the same time, Mike and I will have decisions to make about how to fund our part of this. This plus the segue into retirement plus six more years of college tuition makes for an interesting puzzle. Good thing I like puzzles.
For 2026:
- I will keep better track of our money.
- I will continue to work in Alaska, and I will refine and solidify the resident rotation.
I didn’t go to WCICON last year, and I honestly missed it. I’m going back in 2026. If you go too, please find me and help me be social.
This is my fourth year writing a year-in-review and laying out some hopes for the coming year. Some goals I’ve met, and others I gave up on. Here’s to another year of self-improvement and/or self-acceptance. Happy 2026.
If you had New Year's resolutions for 2025, how did they turn out? Do you have any resolutions for 2026?