Why Lawyers (and, Really, All Kinds of People) Can Benefit from WCI and Retire Early

I recently retired at 59 after a 35-year law career, leaping into the retirement abyss on February 29, 2024.

I started following The White Coat Investor many years ago. Everyone can use WCI, not just doctors. As a bonus, non-physicians like me get to learn something about the lives—and salaries—of You People with White Coats. You could call me a longtime lurker, though that is not known as a good thing in law (and, I hope, not in medicine either).

Lawyers and doctors are alike in some ways. You are MDs; we are JDs. You have CME; we have CLE. We both have malpractice insurance. We both may ultimately own a business with partners, investing capital and sweat. We both often help people through a stressful challenge they would have preferred to avoid.

Lawyers are also different from doctors in some ways. As any doctor will tell you, lawyers spend less time in school. As any lawyer will tell you, we get almost zero training before we start “practicing,” unlike doctors. We may have more disposable income than doctors early in our careers, but like you, we often have plenty of debt from grad school. No, most of us don’t do malpractice work. I love doctors, I swear. I have never sued one, I promise. I have friends who are doctors.

Lawyers don’t have residency or internship, but we have a kind of apprenticeship. At the large “Big Law” firm where I started in Washington DC in 1989, we were “associates.” Law school didn’t even remotely prepare us to be a lawyer, but, luckily, we couldn’t seriously injure anyone with our mistakes. Thank goodness, because we made plenty. If we were fortunate, we found a mentor or two, or they found us. We worked plenty hard, but we never did 36-hour shifts like residents because that is obviously nuts (I know, I know, “but continuity of care!”).

You and I have probably faced many of the same issues: where to live, whether to specialize, how to save and invest, how to balance stressful work with raising a family (my wife and I have three grown daughters), how to enjoy life and also build a career, how to save for college and retirement at the same time, and how to stay healthy. Legal and health problems weigh heavily on people, and being in a profession dedicated to trying to help takes its own toll. Like doctors, lawyers sadly suffer from a disproportionately high incidence of stress-related problems like depression, alcoholism, and addiction. You may have seen stress-induced health problems in the lawyers you treat.

Mistakes (and Corrections) I've Made

There was zero financial education when I was in school, and I’ve made plenty of mistakes. Once upon a time, I decided we should buy whole life insurance. I bought a few ill-advised “dot.com” shares in the late '90s. My wife and I made wills after our second daughter was born and then neglected to update them until very recently. If we died any time in a 20-year period, our third daughter would have seen herself referred to only as “subsequent issue.”

My wife and I also did some things right. We ditched that whole life policy early and converted it to inexpensive term life insurance in case we died when our girls were young. Those old internet shares were useful “tax-loss carry forwards.” Above all things, we spent less than we made, never carried credit card debt, and saved and invested in a very low-cost way. Right after we got married in 1997, we started automatically depositing a fixed monthly amount in our brokerage account. We dollar-cost-averaged our way into an S&P 500 index fund monthly for years (automatically investing it the day after the deposit came in) and raised the monthly deposit over time. We bought and sometimes added to 15-20 individual stocks, most of which we still hold today.

What we did wasn’t hard or complicated. We were DIYers allergic to investment expenses and just “bought and held.” I maxed out my 401(k) for 35 years and so did my wife during her 10-year career. We opened 529 plans for our girls very early, contributed what we hoped would be enough every month over seven years, and then stopped contributing and let the accounts ride. We also had fun. We bought a small second home in the mountains where we spent great family time and where our girls learned to ski. We took some trips that we all will remember forever.

More information here: 

How PAs and NPs Can Make Doctor Money

Life and Financial Lessons from a ‘Bad Ass’ Nurse

Realizing It Was Time to Leave My Job

One day about five years ago after an especially exhausting period at work, I realized we really had “enough.” Two of our girls were already in college. The 529s had grown enough to pay for the schools they chose (as well as a graduate degree for our oldest, it turned out). Because of the 529s, our expenses actually went down once they went to college.

And when retiring suddenly didn’t seem quite so far off, I started reading WCI and Morningstar with a different eye, focusing on issues that didn’t matter as much until I started to think about leaving my job. We got more deliberate about asset allocation and down-shifted from what had been 100% equities over many years. Recently, we invested in a bond ladder for the medium term so we shouldn’t be forced to sell any equities if the market bites us with sequence of returns risk.

Deciding to retire was not too difficult. I’ve really enjoyed my career, my co-workers, and my clients. Parts of my job continued to energize me, but overall the work lost a little luster as I passed my 30th year in practice.

More information here: 

A Pre-Retirement Financial Checklist

Here’s How Much Money People Think They’ll Need to Retire – And Why Some Will Need to Work Forever

How I Went from a Negative Net Worth in My 30s to Early Retirement

How I Knew We Could Retire

On the financial side, the numbers told us we could make the leap (and we got a flat fee advisor to kick the tires, confirm where we thought we were, and help us think about issues like asset allocation). We downsized three years ago after our “subsequent issue” went off to college. Now, after spending and saving more or less on autopilot for 30 years, we will have to adjust to a world where we spend down our portfolio. We’ll have to create a “retirement paycheck” (and with markets making many all-time highs in recent months and a CAPE well above 30, we’ll for sure temper our return assumptions).

Buckets appeal to me (even if they are just psychological), and WCI’s The Buckets Strategy for Retirement post (among many others) was very helpful and thought-provoking. We have a year or so of our base expenses in a money market and more years in a mix of very low-cost defined maturity bond ETFs that should provide greater predictability for those years than a general bond fund. The rest will ride in low-cost index funds and individual stocks we have held for a long time; those throw off dividends that currently cover a meaningful fraction of our spending—which, though tax-inefficient, feels OK right now. We can adjust over time.

On the non-financial side, I have plenty of adjusting to do (and my wife has at least as much with me home more often). Retirement books, blogs, and podcasts all say a version of, “Make sure you plan as much or more for the non-financial side of retirement, knucklehead.” That’s excellent advice, but it was very hard for me to do when I was still working full-time. So far, I have dusted off the road bike I hadn’t ridden in three years (since flying off it and separating my shoulder) and got myself ready for a long, four-day ride in the mountains in June. I’ve had the time to read a stack of books. We are about to take the first of several trips that have long been on our list. I am also thinking about volunteering opportunities and maybe a side gig.

In addition, my wife has recently been spending a lot of time taking her mother to medical appointments, and we visited my 83-year-old parents, who have decided to stay in their old, three-story townhouse with staircases that are steep beyond all human understanding. We are watching our girls take jobs, decide where to live and who to spend time with, and begin to make their own way—just as we hoped.

My wife and I will probably have plenty of adjustments to make, and there will no doubt be a few surprises along the way (some lawyers prefer to call them “developments”). I know for sure that if you had told us 30 years ago when we met that we would be here now, we would have said that sounds pretty good.

Whether you're a doctor or whether you worked in another field, is retiring early something you'd like to do? Is it something you actually can do? What is your plan to get there?