By Josh Katzowitz, WCI Content Director
Traveling halfway across the world to a country with different food, different beliefs about the way to live your life, and different thoughts about money allows us to soak in an entirely new culture and how the people in that culture view finances and mental well-being.
It's a country where you can gaze at some of the most historical sites on the globe; where you can eat shawarma and falafel for five days in a row and hardly get tired of it; and where you can, as our tour guide said, “recharge the battery of your identity.” There are lessons that are as plentiful as desert rocks that can be picked up, examined, and stored away in your pocket for future observation.
In July, my family traveled to Israel on a group trip. My wife and I had been there 22 years earlier, but this time, we got to share the experience with our children and my in-laws. It was a trip rich with meaning and experience, a trip filled with food and merriment, and a trip loaded with memories and meaning that will last a lifetime.
And there were lessons, financial or otherwise, to be learned that can apply to The White Coat Investor audience. Here were six that I discovered while we were 7,100 miles away from home.
#1 Be Ready to Negotiate and Bargain
In many places in Israel—especially in the spots where you buy souvenirs, jewelry, or art—negotiating is expected as part of the transaction process. Me? I’ve never liked bargaining. I don’t think I’m particularly good at it, and I don’t like the rigamarole of this conversation:
Me: “Hey, this is as marked at $50. But to be honest, that’s out of my budget. Can you do $35?”
Seller: “That $50 is already 15% off! But $35? That’s impossible. [Sighs.] I can’t do that. [Let’s out small groan of frustrating.] I could maybe sell it to you for $45.”
Me: “Jeez, I don’t know. [Rubs back of my head in frustration.] I really don’t want to go more than $40. Um, hmm. Can you do $40?”
Seller: “Nope, I can’t do it for so little. [Furrows eyebrow, adjusts his glasses.] Let’s do $42.”
Me: “It’s a deal!”
Aside from car showrooms and maybe pawn shops, bargaining isn’t a part of most American’s everyday lives. You pay what the price tag says. But in Israel, this kind of bartering is expected.
I blew it with my first chance while negotiating a taxi ride for my in-laws outside Jerusalem’s Old City. Well, it wasn’t a negotiation at all. The driver said the five-minute ride to the hotel would cost 50 shekels (about $13.50). I accepted it like a chump (in reality, the driver probably would have accepted 30 shekels).
But later in the trip, I negotiated down a necklace for my son from 898 shekels (about $240) to 850 shekels ($229), a solid if not spectacular victory, and a few days later in Safed, I convinced the clerk that because we were buying multiple pieces of jewelry, he should give us a 20% discount instead of the 15% he had already offered. We settled on 18%.
Even if you dislike negotiating like I do, it’s still worth playing the bartering game. Even if you’re only saving a few shekels at a time, hey, that’ll buy you even more shawarma and falafel.
#2 Much of the Country Shuts Down for the Sabbath – and It’s Great for Mental Wellbeing
From Friday evening to Saturday at sundown, much of the country goes into hibernation. That’s because many Jewish residents observe the Sabbath, aka Shabbat, meaning they can’t drive cars; shop; use their phones; write, erase, or tear; turn on or off anything that uses electricity; or cook and bake during those 24 hours.
I don’t observe those rules, because I’m not a religious man and because I wasn’t raised in that lifestyle. But I can see the appeal from a life-balance perspective. We drove the streets of Jerusalem on Saturday, and traffic was non-existent. As our tour bus passed by orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, we could see scores of men and women walking to their destinations in the 95-degree heat, we could see children riding scooters in the street, and we could see families gathering just to be present.
No electronics and no list of chores to complete. Just the entire day to reflect.
I was only an outside observer, but I also felt a sense of peace. For those 24 hours, you don’t need to worry about checking your email or mowing your lawn or driving your kids to their soccer games. You’re actually not allowed to do those things. So, why not sit back and relax and spend time with those you love? In a secular world of non-stop distractions and never-ending cultural cacophony, it must be wonderful to just simply be.
My favorite observance during this holy day? In the country’s hotels, one of the elevators is designated “the Shabbat elevator.” It stops at every floor without the occupants having to do anything but walk on and walk off. All day long, the elevator stops at the lobby. Then, it stops on the first floor. Then, the second, and the third. Once it gets to the top, it stops once again at every floor on its descent.
The reason why? Those who observe the Sabbath aren’t allowed to press the elevator buttons, and in the Shabbat elevator, that’s not a requirement. How those who observe Shabbat can get around the fact that electricity takes them to their destination is complicated. But the Shabbat elevator is a fun workaround.
On Sunday, Israel was back to normal. People got sucked back into their phones. Traffic tied us up for hours. All the distractions returned. But for those 24 hours of observing Shabbat, you could feel relaxed and refreshed. To have a set time to do that once a week is probably a wonderful part of Israeli life.
More information here:
When Everything Clicks into Place: How Foreign Travel Can Make You a Better Doctor
#3 Spend Extravagantly Where You Want, But Go Cheaper If You Don’t Care
We were told before the trip that finding a laundromat near our hotels would be nearly impossible, and when you’re on a 12-day trip and you’re bringing one large suitcase and one carry-on, having enough clean clothes to last you the entire journey can get dicey.
We were staying at some of the most high-end hotels in the country. But we also didn’t want to spend hundreds of shekels just to do a little bit of laundry. Call it a little bit of thriftiness on a really nice vacation.
Below is the laundry list from our hotel at the Dead Sea, where it would have cost 19 shekels (about $5) to clean a pair of pants, 10 shekels (about $2.75) per T-shirt, and 7 shekels (a little less than $2) per undergarment.
Were the prices outrageous? Not really (unless you were paying $29 to clean a suit). But I also didn’t want to spend a bunch of money just for a couple days of clean clothes.
We ended up taking the travel laundry suds that we brought with us from home and washed a few pieces of clothing in the bathroom sink, rinsed them out, and placed them on our hotel deck to dry. One of the other families in our group found a laundry service that cleaned five kilograms of their clothes for $50. Again, not life-changing money, but on a group tour where everybody wore outfits multiple times without the benefit of a washing machine, there wasn’t much need to spend the extra money for something that wasn’t imperative.
My new motto: Stay at the Waldorf Astoria in Jerusalem, but make sure you can set up your own laundry service in your hotel room.
#4 Doctors Can Save Money on Housing . . . by Living at the Hospital
While enjoying a lunch cruise on the Red Sea (where, sadly, shawarma and falafel were not on the menu) near the borders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, I got into a conversation with our tour guide, Ami, about being a doctor in Israel. His daughter is an ENT resident, and he said she actually lives on the hospital grounds.
She and her family reside in an apartment that might cost $1,000 per month (compare that to spending $2,000 per month in a normal location in the same city), and her child goes to kindergarten on the grounds. From my understanding, it’s comparable to living on an army base.
While living next door to where you work certainly limits your choices, Israel doesn’t offer physician mortgage loans like you can get in the US. Plus, people are expected to put down 33% for a house down payment instead of 20%.
While Israeli doctors are almost assuredly in the upper middle class, most are not making the kinds of salaries that high-earning physicians in the US can earn. Interestingly, a physician shortage has become an issue, because, according to the Israel Journal of Health Policy Research, there has been “a decrease in the supply of physicians in Israel resulting from the declining flow of immigrant physicians from the former Soviet Union” and because 38% of residents in a recent survey said they would leave the country to practice medicine.
That seems to be particularly true in Family Medicine. One day, Ami asked his daughter why she wanted to go into ENT and not into FM (where salaries are rising to compensate for declining participation), and she said, “Family Medicine is too boring.”
More information here:
How to Add Adventure to Your Life
#5 Global Entry Is a Must When Traveling Internationally
Whenever I travel internationally and return back to the US to clear passport control and customs, it’s always pleasantly surprising how much time Global Entry can save us. Pay $100 total for five years to this Customs and Border Protection program (which also includes TSA Pre-Check), and after you’re pre-approved, you get expedited clearance whenever you return to America.
In 2022, we traveled to Atlanta from Jamaica, and even though hundreds of people were stuck in the passport control line, we literally had no wait and sailed directly through. Coming back from Israel to New York City, the overhead signs said that the wait time was approximately an hour. Not for Global Entry. There wasn’t a single soul in the Global Entry line, and the whole process took us less than 30 seconds to complete.
Seriously, there might not be a better deal in all of international travel.
#6 You’ve Got to Make Yourself Comfortable
A married couple on our trip brought enormous suitcases with them, and we later learned that part of the reason for their oversized luggage was that they always travel with ergonomic pillows.
Turns out they’re both dentists, and they schlep around those pillows because it helps their necks and backs stay healthy. After reading this disability insurance piece from WCI columnist (and former dentist) Tyler Scott, I now understand why it was imperative for them to make sure they sleep the right way. Their income and wealth depend on this little bit of inconvenience.
More information here:
Do What Others Aren’t Willing to Do
Money Song of the Week
In the Eastern European town of Anatevka at the beginning of the 20th century, there were hardly any rich men or women. In the 1971 classic film “Fiddler on the Roof,” you had a milkman, a tailor, a matchmaker, and a town beggar. None had loads of money. True, the town butcher was considered wealthy, but otherwise, the Anatevka residents could only dream of being rich.
When Tevye, the milkman who has five daughters, finishes up his chores for the day, he has a conversation with God and fantasizes about having a small fortune. In “If I Were a Rich Man,” Tevye sounds like he knows exactly what he’d do with it. As he sings,
“I'd build a big tall house with rooms by the dozen/Right in the middle of the town!
A fine tin roof with real wooden floors below,
There would be one long staircase just going up/And one even longer coming down,
And one more leading nowhere, just for show!”
It’s not just the staircase to nowhere, though. If he were wealthy, his wife could have a double chin and scream at their servants all day and night while the most important men in town would come to fawn all over him.
Unfortunately for Tevye, this isn’t a rags-to-riches story. This is (SPOILER ALERT) more of a rags-to-banishment story that ends on an unhappy note.
The man who played Tevye in the film and on Broadway and in the West End for decades, legendary Israeli actor Chaim Topol, died in March 2023. But he played an important role in showing, according to Real Clear Markets, how important economic growth is to society:
“‘Fiddler on the Roof’ is set in the year 1905. It is instructive to think about what it meant to be rich in 1905, as many people today would find Tevye’s view on being prosperous staggering. In this song, Tevye sings about wanting chickens and other small farm animals in his yard, a well-fed wife, and some free time. This would not sound rich to the average American today.
“However, the song presents a realistic view of what dreams of being well-to-do would have seemed like in 1905. The average poor person today in America and most first-world countries today has an income that is considerably higher than Tevye’s, and may even be wealthier than the lifestyle Tevye dreams about. In this way, ‘If I Were a Rich Man’ is incredibly valuable for showing us the genius of economic advance. We’ve made so much progress that the average poor person in first-world countries today is incredibly rich by 1905 standards.”
Tweet of the Week
Wrong way. #BTC pic.twitter.com/R3PemeMEg2
— The ₿itcoin Therapist (@TheBTCTherapist) August 18, 2023
As of the close of business on Thursday, Bitcoin was priced at $25,769. But hey, there’s good news. YTD, it’s still up 55.59%.
What lessons have you learned from recent travels? Would you like to read more travel adventures from WCI columnists and readers and the financial lessons they've learned? Comment below!
[Editor's Note: For comments, complaints, suggestions, or plaudits, email Josh Katzowitz at [email protected].]
Awesome post! Love going to Israel. For those interested, there will be two CME availabilities in the near future, so you could turn your travel into a business travel (tax advantage) and make professional connections:
1. American Healthcare Professionals and Friends for Medicine in Israel Emergency Preparedness Course Nov 11-16: https://apfmed.org/programs-emergency-disaster-course-lp/?fbclid=IwAR3bgh2Kc_Pp4s2JNZ-DBowIo0KoXogDh-lIIf2kWKQomryMSp8ffEfO7zo
2. Psychedelic Medicine Israel Dec 10-13: https://www.psychmedisrael.com/
I enjoyed the read. I am headed to Israel for my second group tour in November and loved it the first time around. The food was splendid! Yes it was a different aura during the sabbath. Reminded me of my growing up – our church encouraged a day of rest: we didn’t shop, and we minimized chores and frequently took a nap. I still try to practice that and find it helpful from a physical and spiritual standpoint.
There is no better value in travel than Global Entry! Every time we go through customs or often just when we go through Pre-Check, my wife and I say to each other, “$100 for 5 years, we’d consider paying that every time!”
I dunno. I must be going to different airports at different times. While I find PreCheck to be well worth the money, I don’t think I’ve had one time yet when I wished I had GlobalEntry. It’s not terribly expensive so it wouldn’t take very many times to be worth it, but it’s definitely not “Precheck for international travel” in my experience.
All I know is that on my last four international flights (Dominican Republic, London/Paris, Jamaica, Israel), I’ve spent, thanks to Global Entry, a combined total of about 2 minutes going through US customs when I re-entered the country. It’s probably saved me a total of 4-6 hours on those four trips. If only you could use Global Entry when returning from a Disney cruise!
The little known secret is if you use the Mobile Passport Control app you usually get through as fast as Global Entry
This is a frustrating post. The experience should have been qualified as applying to white and Jewish Americans traveling to Israel. This experience is certainly not accessible to my American physician family and definitely not to the many American physicians who have Palestinian heritage. When a nation denies the people it occupies the ability to travel to access life-saving medical care, a physician’s website shouldn’t be pretending as if the experience of every white American tourist is universal, it most certainly is not. Even Human Rights Watch has formally declared Israel an apartheid state and I expect more from my physician colleagues at TWCI.
Sarah,
1.Most developed countries, incl. Israel and the US, reject thousands of visa applications each year based on security risk assessments associated with the individuals applying for them. It’s the right of Israel to select those whom it wants to welcome for a visit or allow to travel thru its borders
2. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, no matter what some organizations, and even offshoots of the UN with a clear political agendas, state
3. It sounds like you don’t necessarily have a warm and fuzzy feelings toward Israelis and Israel- why on earth would you ever want to go there?
Exactly, you could have just qualified that your post is for white and Jewish Americans.
Sarah – the reality on the ground is much, much different then your biased response.
Did you know that easily half the ward in one of the biggest pediatric units in the country was all kids from GAZA? I know this because I was a medical student there and witnessed it myself. How about the multitudes of palestinian patients getting treatment in Israel cancer centers. How about the recent child who was saved miraculously without a second thought? (https://www.timesofisrael.com/hadassah-surgeons-reattach-boys-head-to-his-neck-after-internal-decapitation/).
What would happen to a palestinian who wandered into israel for the day (obviously not trying to murder jews, just wandering around)? they would enjoy themselves for the day. Yet a Jew wanders into palestinian areas? they would probably be lynched. Leave your biases to yourself.
I’m curious at your trying to point out someone else’s bias, without acknowledging your own.
Did you wonder why so many children are in the hospitals? Have you looked at the stats of how many Palestinian children have injured or even killed by Israeli troops? As a medical professional I’d hope you understand that anyone can write inspiring stories about an outlier does not represent the majority of what is going on.
Americans (who look Muslim, or may have Arab heritage) often don’t get permission to visit Israel, and if they do, sometimes after hours of interrogation/search. We don’t always have the privilege of visiting.
I’ll bet it’s a little easier to go other places in the Middle East though. Probably works both ways.
100%. Jews are not allowed in the majority of Arab/Muslim countries. And Arabs in Israel have more rights than the majority of Arabs in other countries, especially if they are women or homosexual.
Sometimes – but there are also plenty of Muslim/Arab countries that commit atrocities (against Muslim/Arabs, as well as against others) — I’m happy to call this out too
I’ll tell you why those kids are being treated, mainly genetic diseases. All at the expense of the Israeli taxpayer. And yes, I know the statistics very well. But your blame is misdirected. It should be on the Palestinian government and hamas. They have been using these poor children as pawns in their political game. Israel does not try to harm children, the opposite. I personally know soldiers who have died because they put themselves in harms way to avoid Palestinian civilian casualties.
While I appreciate the post trying to talk more about financial considerations when traveling, I also am disappointed in the choice of country given the current apartheid state (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/) and humanitarian crimes committed by Israel.
Would this post have gotten approved if the writer had traveled to Russia?
Can one travel to Russia from the US these days? I don’t think so. I’m super jealous my wife got to go a few years ago but I haven’t been.
Amnesty is a joke. They are incredibly biased and have been proven over many times as such. Ask any of the Arabs living in Israel if they would rather live under control of the palestianians or the Israelis.. you’ll get your answer.
Many (all?) news agencies are biased – there are plenty beyond Amnesty who state this.
And I’m not saying I agree with (or condone) violence on either side, but acknowledging that Palestinians are being forced off their land as well as subsequent human rights violations is unarguable.
Just goes to show that one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.
Geronimo
Osama Bin Laden
Hamas
Zelensky
Putin
I suspect this post is now going to make the third edition of our “Most Controversial Posts” series. Most of which we never expected to be controversial when written and published. I mean, the article was about negotiating and getting Global Entry and somehow all the comments are now about a century long conflict that wasn’t even mentioned in the article.
Hey Sarah, I’ve kept myself from entering the comments section thus far. Even though I disagree with your assertions that Israel is an apartheid state and we could spend hours going around and around about which people should own which parcel of land and whether a two-state solution is the right path, I appreciate you keeping your arguments respectful (in contrast, I got an email from a reader who said he was disappointed in me and this post and then finished the email with “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”).
I’m not sure we’d want to publish a story written about Russia or North Korea at this point, but I think most other countries would be fair game. If a reader or columnist wanted to write about their trip to Egypt or Jordan or Saudi Arabia or China, I’d certainly consider it. Most every country we’d write about would have had plenty of its own problems anyway.
Just to make it clear, there was no political or Zionist language in this column. That wasn’t the point of it. And I, like many other American and Israeli Jews, don’t agree with much of what the current Israeli government is doing, politically speaking. Israel is where I happened to go and these are the financial lessons I happened to learn while being there. If somebody had financial lessons they learned from their trip to, say, Syria or Japan or the UK, I’d certainly be interested in taking a look.
I find it fascinating that the three women commenting, and all with similar comments, all are named Sarah, named after the wife of Abraham.
I would never come to TWCI for political education. Especially when someone can say something as stupid (and factually untrue) as “100%. Jews are not allowed in the majority of Arab/Muslim countries.” Even more stupid, because TWCI is not posting an article on travel to Arab countries (to which a white and/or Jewish American would be able to travel with rare exception).
I do come for financial advice. And if you want to post such a post as this, I will again say, that you should have said it’s limited to white and/or Jewish Americans who want to visit Israel, not the rest of us. Someone said I was biased, we all have our biases. I believe your experience in Israel was 100% true, but you should have the insight to know that it was true for YOU. And that your fellow physician colleagues are not all white and/or Jewish and that many of us would have or have had VERY different, upsetting, hurtful, discriminatory experiences, or we’ve not been allowed to visit at all.
Right, Israelis and Jews are allowed to go to most Arab/Muslim countries as far as I know. But there are plenty of places in Israel where Jews are not allowed to go because they’re Zone A cities/towns and under the control of the Palestinian Authority: Bethlehem, Ramallah, most of Hebron, the list goes on. We drove by a number of them when we were in the West Bank.
As you know, every article we publish on WCI limits the audience and has biases. The stuff we write about student loans doesn’t apply to retired physicians. The stuff we write about that talks about families and children might not apply to somebody who is single. The stuff we write about disability insurance doesn’t apply to me as a non-doc.
I don’t feel we need to have some kind of editor’s note before every post and column laying out the limitations and biases that the author might have or that the readers might believe the author might have. We know and I know you know that not every article/column that we publish is for our entire audience.
If somebody didn’t want to read about a trip to Israel, well, the headline of the column points out pretty well what it’s about.
One other thing: It’s not just Jews—American or otherwise—who travel to Israel to visit. Plenty of Christians and Muslims do as well. So, I’d refute your repeated assertion that only white, American Jews could find truth in this column.