In a preceding post, a guest poster argued that doctors are rich, should consider themselves such, and should be proud of their financial success.
In this post, I'll argue that:
- Very few doctors are rich.
- Those who consider themselves rich are likely to not end up so.
- A high income, while helpful in the journey toward financial success, does not by itself constitute financial success.
Nobody Ever Said Doctors Were Financially Average
In the heart of his argument, our guest poster compares a highly paid physician, who makes nearly 50% more than the average doctor, to the median US household income. Setting up a strawman argument is an easy way to make sure you win the argument. This misrepresentation of my argument is significant. I consider physicians, dentists and similarly highly paid professionals to be solidly upper-middle class, not “average.” If your definition of rich is “more than average” then I will concede, doctors are rich. But when you appropriately compare doctors to engineers, accountants, and successful business owners, then I see far less difference than the average American seems to see.
I think of my father, who recently retired from a full career as an engineer during which my mother was a stay-at-home mom for nearly all of it. The first few decades he worked for his state government, and then in the last decade of his career, he gradually phased out by working as an independent contractor.
He has a pension and health care, which if you tried to buy today on the open market, would be worth $1-2 Million. During his last decade of work, he also qualified for Social Security and using a SEP-IRA, acquired a decent-sized nest egg. By anyone's standard, he has a comfortable retirement. He never needs to work again and can essentially do whatever he likes with his time in retirement.
My in-laws (accountant and school teacher) are in a similar position with a military pension. In fact, when I was in the military, I knew a number of nurses who had entered the military as a medical technician at age 17-18 and were retiring as a nurse or a PA at age 37-38 with an inflation-adjusted pension for life, including health care. Most of them went on for a second career, but if they were frugal enough, they were essentially financially independent at that point.
All of these folks had nice houses, boats, planes, automobiles, and took fun vacations. There are plenty of doctors who not only aren't retiring at 38, but still have a negative net worth.
Eliminating Poorly Paid Docs From Your Analysis Leads To Inaccurate Results
My illustrious opponent in this debate chose to eliminate doctors that are poorly paid from his analysis, choosing instead to use a physician with an income of $289K per year to illustrate his point. He decided not to consider family physicians or academic physicians in his argument. He apparently also decided not to consider military physicians, pediatricians, internists and many of their subspecialties either.
The average physician salary is $200K. If your analysis assumes doctors make 50% more than the average doctor, how many doctors are you really talking about? According to the AMA, 360K of the 703K doctors in the country are in family medicine, pediatrics, internal medicine, and the lower-paid pediatric and internal medicine subspecialties. Another 44K of the doctors in the higher paid specialties are in academics, research or other non-clinical positions. This doesn't even count poorly-paid military doctors and other government employees. My opponent's analysis neglects over 57% of physicians, as if that doesn't matter! And I haven't even mentioned the 130K general dentists in the US with an average income of ~ $150K.
My opponent also glosses over the fact that medical student loans are not only high, but they are rapidly climbing due to skyrocketing tuition, the elimination of subsidized loans, and high loan rates (try getting a student loan for med school now for less than 6.8%.) I get emails on a weekly basis from physicians who are starting their careers with a negative net worth of $300K for a single doc to as much as $450K for a pair of married docs. My opponent glosses over student loan payments (“just $15K a year”) perhaps because he is thinking about HIS student loans, not the loans of those coming out of training now. If you owe $300K at 6.8%, amortized over 10 years, that's an annual payment of over $42K a year. Not significant? You be the judge.
Compound Interest and the Late Start
My opponent also minimizes the effects of “the lost decade” for physicians, where they are in training and their peers are earning money and stuffing it into 401Ks. Many financial books use an example similar to this one: Joe starts putting in $10K into his 401K starting at age 25 and stops contributing at age 35, investing a total of $100K. Bill puts $12K into his 401K from age 35 to age 55, investing a total of $240K. Which ones ends up with more money at age 55? If you assume a return of 8% a year, Joe ends up with $729K and Bill ends up with $593K, despite investing nearly 2 1/2 times as much money. My opponent thinks this effect is “less relevant.” Again, you be the judge.
Yes, other professions sometimes have a delay due to training. A college graduate might not start working until age 22. With a master's degree, he might be 24. But that's far different than a pediatric endocrinologist who, assuming she went straight through school and training, doesn't get out of fellowship until age 32. In my experience, it is very rare to find an attending level physician under 30 years old. Does the average physician have more discretionary income than the average American? Absolutely. Does he have more than a typical upper-middle-class family? Not really, especially when you consider the effects of higher taxes, the late start, and the high debt burden.
Physician Income Decline
Physician income levels continue to fall. Look around you. There are primary care practices failing every day in this country and the doctors are contracting to become hospital and other ACO employees. Anyone that thinks doctors will make more as hospital employees than they used to as private business owners prior to the many regulations that have been placed on them in the last 10-15 years is delusional. Just this month, physician Medicare payments were cut 2%. Student loan costs are going up, the training isn't getting any shorter, and reimbursement is going down. Even if you believe that physicians are currently “rich” based on their income, surely it's easy to see a period of time in the future when they will not be so.
Most Doctors, Like Most Americans, Can Get Rich
Now don't get me wrong. I believe that nearly every doctor can, and should be “rich” at some point. But it surely isn't automatic, and it doesn't come just by virtue of magically graduating into a high income. It happens the same way it happens for accountants, engineers, teachers, small business owners, and other upper middle class Americans. You have to carve out a certain percentage of your income (and make no mistake, the percentage is higher for doctors due to their late start and higher tax burden) and use it to build wealth. Money is fungible. Income can be used to acquire assets. Assets can be used to produce income. In my opinion, a “rich” person doesn't have to work. They can live just fine off what they already have. There are far too many doctors working in their 60s, and even 70s, because they HAVE to.
Responses From Sermo Poll
I posted a poll on Sermo, a physician-only forum, asking if doctors are rich. 82 doctors responded. 34 thought doctors were middle class and only 3 thought doctors were rich. 27 said it depends on the specialty, 8 said it depends on their financial habits, and 7 said it depends on when they graduated from medical school.
An Occ-Med doc said:
Doctors are rich in ego and stupidity and have poor insight of what constitute wealth and richness. We are just highly-skilled, overworked, manual laborers.
A Pediatrician said:
200k?? Bahahahahahahahahahah!!!!!!!!! Ahem . . . but as long as I can keep a roof over my head, walk into a grocery store and buy whatever I want without having to use coupons, travel a couple times a year, and keep myself in a nice wardrobe . . .then yeah, I'm rich.
A Neurologist said:
We are the working well off. Not rich. I have job security based on people being crazy and having a warped sense of what is truly pathological vs. what is subjective and meaningless. I can work as long as I'd like and will always earn a pretty good salary. It's not easy money by any means though and I still have to watch where all my money is going.
An Allergist said:
I am in the 40th year of earning a pay check at 56 and yes I am rich but most who worked 50 hour weeks with lots of hard labor and good common sense to not overspend could be in the same position . My CPA wife has been a great help to the success of my material world. I think I deserve it but am grateful too.
A Family Doc said:
I've never made more than $130K a year my entire career, and most years less than that, some years far less than that.
A Pediatric ENT said:
Distinctly upper middle class. I have a place to live, a decent income, and some savings in the bank. I can eat what I want and don't have to budget if I feel like a decent meal or a night out. I'll never be “rich”, or “wealthy” in my eyes, but it's a good life.
An Endocrinologist said:
While there is no one single rule, most frugal persons will feel rich most of the time, and most spendthrift persons will feel poor most of the time. …….. regardless of their bank balance.
An Emergency Doc said:
One and only way to define wealth: How long could you get by if you had no income at all starting TOMORROW? Doctors are both rich and poor and everywhere in between—although on the surface some may appear “rich” because they have lots of material things and big ticket expenses (country club, private school, etc) they may be broke and/or vastly overestimate their financial situation—simply because they don't know what wealth is.
Another Emergency Doc said:
I essentially live paycheck to paycheck
A Surgeon quoted Martin Luther:
“The rich” are everyone who has one penny more than I do. “The poor” are everyone who has one penny less than I do.
I'll Be Rich Soon And I'm Grateful
Now, a bit of a personal note. I'm not rich yet, but I'll be there soon. There's no doubt my wife and I have been blessed with the ability and desire to work hard, reasonable intelligence, and good health. Our high income absolutely has a lot to do with that. But our financial habits have at least as much impact. We budgeted, saved, invested, insured against catastrophe, and gave money away when I was earning $20K a year. We budgeted, saved, invested, insured against catastrophe, and gave money away when I was earning $40K a year. We budgeted, saved, invested, insured against catastrophe, and gave money away when I was earning $100K a year. We continue those same habits now. The difference between what we've earned and what we've spent is what is making us wealthy. A decent income is a necessary, but not by itself sufficient, condition for becoming wealthy. Without reasonable habits of frugality, even a very high income will not make someone rich.
If you live like a resident when you first get out of residency, grow into your income slowly, and invest wisely, you'll find that you have plenty of money with which to have a comfortable life, save for your retirement, and help others. You don't have to be some kind of a miser. Put 20% toward retirement, and spend or give away the rest. If you have a high debt burden, had a late start, or you want to retire early, maybe save a little more. It is very doable. If, on the other hand, you believe you're rich just because you have a high income, and then start living like it, there's a good chance you'll never get there.
Great article
You could read the recent post on getrichquack called ‘ Do you recognise the symptoms and signs of doctoritis’ which has a similar flavour!
As usual defining what you are talking about is essential. I define “rich” as being able to do whatever you might desire without considering money. By this definition very few are rich. Now if you use distribution of income then many doctors would be considered rich, and that is how many progressives think and act.
In your first section you compare engineers, accountants, and nurses from the last generation to doctors from the current generation. What do the numbers look like when you compare professionals who began their careers at the same point in time? The doctors who began practicing medicine around the time your parents started working had a much higher inflation adjusted income (for my specialty, the average private practice physician in 2013 makes half of the salary – adjusted for inflation – of someone who practiced in 1988) and significantly lower student loan debt burden. And is it still common for engineers and CPA’s starting out today to be offered generous pensions as they were offered in the past?
I don’t know all that much about engineering or accounting, but there was a recent discussion on the Bogleheads board of a two engineer couple. The husband made $300K and the wife made $200K. Sounded an awful lot like medicine to me.
Is that a typical income for an engineer? My cousin’s an engineer, and though he makes good money, I don’t think it’s anywhere near that level though he’s only been working for 5 years. If two to three hundred grand a year is a common salary, I’d definitely group them in the same category as doctors.
Definitely not typical for engineers. They may be engineering managers or Veeps, or own their own engineering firm.
I don’t think it’s typical, but I don’t poll engineers about their salaries very often. These two engineers were in management, and I assume that’s why the salaries were so high. It’s important to realize that there are lots of professions that make good salaries that don’t carry the stigma of being automatically rich like physicians.
I’m in tech in the Bay Area and from my experience management doesn’t necessarily mean higher salaries than engineers – It’s definitely possible that an engineer might report to a people manager who’s making less than them. However, engineers, if they want to stay in tech roles, might find their career growth plateauing at some level, whilst the managers might get promoted into high echelons and make way more.
My feeling is an engineer’s salary can take off earlier than a doctor, specially if they went to top schools and got hired by some of the big tech companies in the bay area. However, IMO, most of the people get to the big bucks around about the same time as doctors – in their early to mid thirties. So, it might be an appropriate comparison between engineers and doctors.
I wish WCI had more engineer stories – I know it’s aimed at doctors, but since I discovered this blog in March, it’s been of unbelievable value to me. I’m currently thinking about taking the Fire Your Financial Advisor course because I’d like to learn and write down my financial plan. However, I’m wondering if it’s too tailored towards doctors. For instance, it covers malpractice insurance that doesn’t really apply to me (I don’t think), and doesn’t really cover RSUs and Stock Options, which doesn’t really apply to most doctors.
There’s a one week money back guarantee. So try it and see. But 95% of this stuff is the same for everyone.
You’re right that it doesn’t have a lot on stock options.
There is nothing “middle” about middle class.
“Everyone wants to believe they are middle class…But this eagerness…has led the definition to be stretched like a bungee cord — used to defend/attack/describe everything…The Drum Major Institute…places the range for middle class at individuals making between $25,000 and $100,000 a year. Ah yes, there’s a group of people bound to run into each other while house-hunting.”
—Dante Chinni
The range is actually a little larger than the quote above. And there are multiple ways to evaluate classes (living standard, pure income, social values met). Most use an income model. The below is from Wikipedia.
“According to these class models the lower middle class is located roughly between the 52nd and 84th percentile of society. In terms of personal income distribution in 2005, that would mean gross annual personal incomes from about $32,500 to $60,000
The “professional class”, also called the “upper middle class”, consists mostly of highly educated white collar salaried professionals, whose work is largely self-directed. Household incomes commonly exceed $100,000. Class members typically hold graduate degrees, with educational attainment serving as the main distinguishing feature of this class.”
While they don’t give an exact upper range for Upper middle class, if you look at salary distribution it appears to be the 85-95% of personal income distribution, which corresponds to income of $62,000 to $166,000.
We all THINK we are middle class but the reality is the “middle” class doesn’t even start until the 50th percentile at best. Of course that data is skewed greatly by non-earners.
The best definition I have come across is that the middle class consists of households earning between 3 & 12 times the poverty level, or those making between $45,000 – $180,000.
By those standards the only doctors that are truly middle class are family doctors and pediatricians. You math not think you are rich but you actually probably are. Now you may not be wealthy at all (due to debt) but you have a high income and a high income potential in the future. Most would consider that rich.
To add on the 95% of income is roughly about $175,000. So what is really the “upper MIDDLE class”
You also need to talk about what income you’re using. Doctors fall into a different place depending on if you use gross income, adjusted gross income, or taxable income. Those three numbers are VERY different for me. For instance, using your $175K figure, my gross is way above but my taxable is way below.
I want to say those numbers are gross income but I am not positive. They could be taxable…
Thank you for this great post! I will be graduating medical school next month with over 300k in student debt from undergrad, masters and medical school and it is very troubling how everyone I come in contact with assumed I am “rich.”
I should add, that is actually 300k+ in student loans, consumer debt to cover a long grueling interview season, and ZERO saved for retirement. Too boot, with a five year long residency I will be in my mid thirties by the time I can start paying off this debt and saving for retirement and my children’s college educations. I hope that many people read your article, and realize that while we as doctors will have an adequate disposable income, by the time one pays $2500 a month to student loans, and 30% of their salary for savings to make up for the lost decade of life, we will be living a solidly middle class life.
I apologize for the typos as well, but my phone’s autocorrect was not helping.
“we will be living a solidly middle class life.”
I think you hit the nail on the head. What I was trying to point out above is that most physicians may not actually be “middle class” however they live a middle class lifestyle due to their debt
Even with $30,000 in annual loan payments, and thousands more in “increased savings”…you still have about 10 times the discretionary income that a middle class family has
It is simply a ton of money you are receiving any year, you have gobs extra unless:
1) You want to retire at 50, unlike middle class Americans who work into their 60s and 70s
2) You want to have an extremely luxurious retirement, unlike middle class Americans
I think I side with WCI on this debate, though I can see how a reasonable person could look at it from either side. I think if one looks primarily at the paychecks coming in each month there’s a tendency for doctors to feel rich. Those who look at their overall financial situation are more likely to feel middle class. I think one of the best things a new attending can do is to find ways to “hide” his income from himself. My wife and I started doing this by making double mortgage payments on a 15 year loan immediately after completing residency and buying our home. From there we’ve progressed to adding in automatic savings in retirement plans, 529s and taxable investment accounts. By the time the paychecks arrive they are already being hidden away in places where they are difficult or impossible to spend on a “rich” lifestyle. Living a more modest lifestyle is a lot easier when you don’t have a lot of extra money that is easily accessible. And consciously increasing your savings rate each year is a good way to prevent the lifestyle inflation that can so easily sneak up on you.
As a dentist, i may have a lower income than many/most doctors.. the 150K figure cited in this article is a little low, the ADA’s recent figure was like 180K that just came out in the journal last month.
But as a dentist i didn’t have residency, so i started working at 23 (not unlike many other regular college graduates) so my compounded savings get to add up.
my school bills were a lot lower, i’m already education debt free and have been for years.
I don’t feel rich, but I certainly feel a lot richer than at least 6-7/10 people.
There is more to life than money, and what i can tell you is that there are definitely ways i could make more money… i could work weekends, i could work 50 hour weeks, i could start up a dental assisting school and make money teaching weekend classes.
But I don’t do those things, because time and leisure are as important or moreso to me than net worth.
The sub 40 hour a week lifestyle, free evenings and weekends, and vacation are worth tons to me and make me feel really rich.
But since I would define “rich” as someone who can make money while they are sleeping, can make almost any decision within reason without consideration for finances, and most importantly – rarely has to do anything they don’t want to do… i’d say that’s a microscopic slice of people.. definitely a slice i’d love to be a part of, but realistically unless I hit powerfall that’s not going to come until my mid-50’s
First statistic that seems odd is where family doctors are lumped together with all “internal medicine subspecialties”…such as cardiologists. I also have no idea why dentists are brought into this.
Overall, I eliminated both many highly paid surgeons and lowly paid family doctors to get at the majority of doctors in the middle of compensation. Even if you take all physicians, the most recent 2012 Medscape data reports: “Physicians who are board certified earned a mean of $236,000”
http://www.medscape.com/features/slideshow/compensation/2012/public
Which is only $14,000 away from the $250,000 I used for my example.
Investment returns:
Planning for 8% a year, every year, for 20+ years straight is unrealistic, in fact many people who expected those kind of market returns are dealing with fiscal shock. Furthermore you are having someone put all of their discretionary income into their savings, if the physician put all of his discretionary income for 20 years he’d have several million in his account even with a 0% return.
Doom and Gloom:
Doctors in the 1960s said Medicare was going to ruin their profession in a few years and turn them poor, yet here we are nearly 50 years after Medicare was passed and everyone is still standing in the best paid merit-based career. Physicians are only a small part of healthcare costs, there is a lot of fat to be cut in healthcare before they severely curtail doctor’s compensation down to anywhere close to middle class.
Sermo poll:
This is my favorite part, where an ER doctor says he lives “paycheck to paycheck” which I’d love to see on paper. This reminds me of several articles written in 2008/2009 by hedge fund managers about how they aren’t that rich. They included items such as how expensive their maid was, their nanny, taking their teenage kids out to dinner every night, expensive private tutors, and lamented that they had no money left after they spend it all!
This is the same overall feeling I got from reading this response, if WCI’s income doubled to $500k, he’d still be on here saying he’s not rich, I bet many people from the sermo poll would still say they are middle class even if they were making $1 million a year. It’s moving the goal posts again and again.
I think conversations like this make us look out of touch.
Probably right. I think what it comes down to is that a highly paid physician or a two physician couple are playing a very different financial game than a relatively poorly paid one physician family. I assure you when I was a military doc, paid taxes in the 15% bracket, and had a shooting in front of my house I wasn’t even sure I was middle class. I feel much richer now.
It makes for an interesting discussion even though there’s obviously not a right answer. I think it’s worth thinking through for each of us individually. In some ways the guest poster is absolutely correct. Sometimes I still can’t believe I get paid as much as I do for what I do. I love to see the disposable income that hits my bank account each month and decide how to invest it, save it, or give it away. Then I go out and mow my own lawn and wave to my neighbors- a salesman, an engineer, a business owner etc. As many commenters on both posts have noted, without a clear definition of rich, you can’t really tell where anyone falls.
You get paid what you do for what you do because there’s a very select few people in the world willing and able to go through all the time, tests, courses, and residency to achieve that job.
For that you deserve to be paid a lot more than someone who barely passed or didn’t complete high school or got a degree at university of phoenix online.
Never lose sight of that.
You gave up years of your life with your nose in a book while other people partied and had fun in high school, college, etc so you could treat them medically later in life.
People only get paid in life for select skills. Intelligence and willingness to dedicate years of your life to academic excellence is a skill set.
You’d be paid a lot more if you were a lefty with a 90 mph fastball that could hit the strike zone, could kick a ball through the uprights at a 90% clip under pressure, could hit a baseball 3 times out of 10 against major league pitching, could write catchy top 40 music, or could write code well enough to create a popular social network.
That’s how society determines value. Supply and demand.
I don’t see the need to puff oneself up as so special and amazing that you deserve your high salary.
It involves mostly luck, along with skill and determination. It’s funny that many physicians who talk about how their superior determination and intellectual fortitude…also won’t spend 30 minutes looking over their finances because it’s “too much hassle” or simply can’t understand finance and get taken in a scam.
A little humility would go a long way here in making sure physicians are improving rather than damaging their reputation.
If you were born in a North Korean gulag, it is basically impossible to become an American physician, same for large parts of the world. That’s incredibly luck right there.
You were also lucky to be born without a severe disability, and went through your childhood without any debilitating incidents. I saw a woman once who was raped and impregnated by her uncle when she was 14, I’d say that makes it pretty hard to become a physician.
You also have to have a natural aptitude for many of the subjects covered on the MCAT, boards and medical school subjects. Some doctors have failed history courses or many other fields that luckily had little to nothing to do with becoming a physician.
Pretending that all doctors did no partying and had zero fun in high school while everyone else goofed all constantly shows you are either not paying attention to what you are writing or never made friends with people in medical school.
Doctors deserve to be highly paid, but it’s not because everyone else is so stupid and lazy while doctors alone are tireless paragons of wisdom.
by that logic all success is luck based.
you are just lucky enough to be born, born with a skillset, not have any life altering horrible setbacks, etc.
well.. better to be lucky then good, eh?
Out of touch how??? Do you pump your own gas, do your own shopping, and generally live in the real world? Then you are not out of touch. [Minimally related politically inflammatory comment removed.]
If a baseball player had a blog where he advocated why he deserved millions, im sure that it would look even more out of touch with reality. I dont find comparing ourselves to such situations helpful.
Im very familiar with what i have given up and what i have earned. Id do it all over again.
In most states, you pretty much have little choice but to pump your own gas unless you have a butler. When i need a gas, i buy it. I never think, do i have enough money in my account to cover this.
I think we should make more than most people in this country. How much more, i dont know but i do think these types of conversations make physicians look greedy. I also doubt that it will help prevent any reductions in salary in the future.
you must have forgotten, i too have that military background although im more optomistic on folks doing hpsp then you seem to be. I like mowing the yard as well although i dont do the fertilizing anymore. I wasnt doing as good a job as the services that do it and it wasnt much cheaper even if you ignored my time.
With today’s HPSP deal, if you do a 4 year residency or less and went to a private med school or expensive state school you come out looking pretty good.
– They get paid twice what I got paid less than 10 years ago in school.
– They get a monster signing bonus which would have pretty much eliminated most of my debt at the time had they had one.
– I ran the numbers for StudentDoctor.Net a few years back. The value of the current scholarship is over 60K a year. Couple that with much better pay and benefits in residency and you do okay. Where you get hurt financially is if you stay in the service in just about any field other than PEDS or FM. (Which happens to be by far the highest retention fields).
I’m mostly in agreement with that assessment. I do typically feel its best for a short term stent and not a 20 year career (peds is probably the best field to stay in). There is also a potential benefit of residency selection if you play your cards right. Its only a select group of people who do these programs and thus if you really want to get into a competitive field then you have a fairly high chance of eventually getting in even if you arent the best applicant (although u cant be a dirt bag). You may need to do a field tour but in the civilian sector if you cant match the first time then you pretty much are never going to match. Finally i will say that my patients appreciate my previous service more than my fancy ivy league undergrad or my fellowship.
I agree.
I agree that HPSP is a far better deal than when I signed up in 1999. Mostly because tuition has gone up though!
Don’t forget moving expenses associated with residency and possibly fellowship, state licensing fees, travel expenses for job interviews, and travel expenses and fees associated with board exams. Solo, you may be able to pay down debt, save, and invest while incurring these expenses, but you will likely use a credit card or two if you have a few young ones to care for. Also add on a year or two for those docs switching specialities, as occasionally happens.
That said, and as annoying as this becoming-a-doc process is in light of what some (myself included) consider unfair tax policies in the US and a public perception that the doc is rich despite debt, it can be encouraging to consider your income on a global scale. 150K after tax for a family of four puts you in the richest 1.3% of the world. I can’t vouch for the website I from which received this data, but my past research suggests these numbers are a decent approximation. http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/why-give/how-rich-am-i
Great Article. I do think 289K quoted before was way too high. My wife is a rheumatologist in academic setting and make 120K and works even on 8 weekends in a year, on the contrary, my sister in law will start her career at 28 yrs with 130K, and has done MBA and works 8 to 5:00 with no calls and all weekends off.
I think money is one aspect, the amount of work and hard work we as physicians have done is way more compared to many other job profiles. Not only the late start in career, student debt, but working hours, working weekends and unaccounted unpaid work of patient call backs and answering calls from home or at night when you are suppose to be “free” makes our income way less.
yes we have a decent life, but income relative to work is less
Looking at this article just out of curiousity. The doctor I had used for my 2nd loss pregnancy seemed to be doing well. Looking on the internet, he had sold his million dollar beach home two years ago and has 5 kids. His wife never experienced any miscarriage from what I heard. Cost of a transabdominal surgery or worst a surrogacy doesn’t look good for me. Money wise, I have no options.
Did you have some sort of a question or are you suggesting your doctor should pay for your surrogacy since he has a million dollar beach home?
All that education didn’t help me. I mean…why did I have to experience two same incidents? I suggest live up to the profession.
Your ads are cropping the content on mobile phones using the chrome browser. Have you thought of using a mobile based theme?
Recently switched themes, I think the problem is fixed with the newer posts.
I know physicians who work hard and make a lot of money, but when it comes to financial common sense, they are often lacking, just like I am lacking in physician skills. Physicians make a lot of money and they pay a lot in income taxes which makes them frustrated. To reduce their income tax bill, they will often make bad investments where they lose it all, which makes them even more frustrated.
I have familiarity with both the engineering and medical side (i.e. I’m an MD who is a software engineer). 200k is way more than the average engineer’s salary. In some rural areas like where I’m from, it is more like 50 – 70k. Most people use the extremes on the engineering side as a comparison too. Most engineers also do not get pensions or even stock (unless you work for the FAANG- Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, or Google companies).