Our guests on The White Coat Investor podcast today are our good friends, Dr. Nisha Mehta, the founder of Physician Side Gigs, and Dr. Leif Dahleen, the founder of the Physician on FIRE. They are people who have been very successful relatively early in their careers and are now faced with what I called in a recent blog post, the Challenge of Choice. We're going to be talking today about the challenge of choice in life after financial independence, life after you have enough. This is a very interesting discussion, and we think you will really enjoy it.
In This Show:
Journey to FI
Dr. Jim Dahle:
The three of us have known each other for a long time, and I thought this would be a really fun conversation to have. It’s purely going to be about life after financial independence. We have had a great blessing in our lives to be able to be financially independent in our 40s. The interesting thing about the personal finance space is there's lots of material out there teaching you how to get rich, how to get financially independent, how to become wealthy. There's very little out there that talks about how to be wealthy and how to live after you're financially independent. I want to talk a little bit about that today.
I think perhaps we should start just giving readers or listeners, those who maybe don't know you that well, to talk a little bit about your journey to financial independence. Leif, why don't we start with you? You're the one most closely associated with the FIRE movement, and let's just give a short recap of what it took for you to become financially independent in your 40s.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
I'll be pretty brief, because I think a lot of your listeners have heard this story before. But essentially, I went straight through undergrad, medical school, residency, finished when I was 30, started doing locums immediately after I finished residency. For two years, I made great money, and all of my expenses were paid by locums agencies and the hospitals that were hiring. I got used to saving most of my income right off the bat, those first couple of years. When I settled down into a “permanent” position, I had already been in that habit for a couple of years. I would say on average, over the course of a 13-year anesthesia career, I probably saved half or more of my income. Some years were more, some years were less. I was given a pretty good run in the stock market that actually included a really terrible run early on in my career. That turned out to be a good thing, because that allowed me to invest when the market was down and ride it all the way up throughout about a 10- or 15-year bull market. I realized by the time I was about to turn 40 that I had enough money to maintain our relatively modest lifestyle. I say relative for a physician because we were spending a bit under $100,000 a year once all of our debts, including mortgage and student loan debts, were paid off.
It occurred to me that I didn't have to work if I didn't want to. It was a shocking revelation at age 39. I worked for another four years, and of course, started writing about it, and that's how the Physician on FIRE thing came to be. But ultimately, I did leave medicine behind three-plus years ago in the summer of 2019 and have been enjoying life in a different way with a lot more freedom since then.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Nisha, do you want to tell your story?
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
We didn't really set out to achieve financial independence, and we started out early with a scarcity mentality. We got married relatively early. I was 24 when I got married. My husband and I had been dating for five years since college. We started out as two residents in New York City, actually an intern in New York City. I was still a fourth-year med student. We got used to living very frugally very early on, because we were living in the city on $47,000 between the two of us. We did the frugal thing for a long time, and I think that sort of mentality sticks with you even when you don't need it anymore. I was doing my radiology residency, my husband was doing his general surgery residency, and then we moved to North Carolina when my husband matched at Duke for his plastics fellowship and I took on a faculty position at Chapel Hill. I was still on an academic salary as a radiologist.
Again, we both had student loans. It didn't feel like there was a lot of money going around, although our cost of living dramatically decreased once we left the city. We had kids. My first kid was during my third year of residency, so we already had a child then. My second one was my first year as an attending. It never felt like there was a lot of money to go around because my husband was still a fellow. Honestly, we didn't have time to spend it either, because both of us were working so much. I was on faculty with grant funding with two young children, and my husband was home maybe four or five hours a day, if that. I’m not kidding when I’m saying that my second child had legitimate stranger anxiety with my husband. When my husband would come in the middle of the night my baby was like, “Why are you in my mom's room with me?”
We didn't have the time to spend. We'd always been really good about saving and saved as much as we could and put as much money away in retirement as we could. We were fortunate enough to graduate at a time when our student loans, I think, were at 2.1% or something like that. Then, once we made our first on-time payment and set up auto pay and made six months of on-time payments, our student loans went down to less than 2%. It's around 1.6%. We paid those off really early while my husband was still a fellow and I was still an academic attending. Then, we just launched into this dual physician lifestyle, which was a very big difference. But we were still living in the same way. I still have the same car today that I had when I was a fellow. That's not the case for my husband. My husband likes cars and has a very nice car. We pick what we like obviously, and I'm totally OK with it. But we didn't lifestyle inflate very much at the beginning. Then all of a sudden, we had a plastic surgery income and a radiologist income. I also started the side business that was also making quite a bit of money.
I think we were just in that mentality for a while. And that was a surefire sort of way to financial independence for us because we were making so much and we were saving such a large percentage of it. We were not living frugally. Once we had the two-attending salary, we did stuff. We started taking nicer vacations, we started having more freedom and going out for dinner, things like that. We stopped thinking about budgeting. But we spared the major expenses and spent a lot of money on the easy things to make our life better. By doing that, I was 37 when we reached our financial independence number.
We both love what we do clinically. The desire is not to leave medicine. I've certainly cut back as I've focused on some other things, but we both really love what we do. I don't think I could pry my husband out of the OR if I tried. I've given up on trying, but we take more vacation days. He ends his days earlier when he wants to end days earlier. We've dropped things that don't make us happy. I no longer take any call. My husband has dropped procedures that he doesn't like or certain types of call that he doesn't like. We've tried to improve our lifestyle. We are very happy doing what we're doing. I don't see us leaving medicine anytime soon but certainly practicing on our own terms, which has been really great.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
I think listeners are fairly familiar with my story. Just from a FI perspective, you talk about making $47,000 as a trainee. That sounds really good. When I signed on for residency in 2003, the salary was $34,000.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
But were you living in New York City?
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Thirty-four thousand dollars in Tucson does go a little further, for sure.
We came out of residency in 2006. At that point, we had one child, one in the oven, and Katie was staying at home. I did not have this huge income coming out. I owed some time to the Air Force, and I was making about $120,000 a year. We were definitely living frugally. I think the best our savings rate ever got was one year when I had a deployment. I think we saved about 65% of our income that year, but most of the time, it was less than that. It took us a few years longer than it took either of you to become financially independent. We became millionaires seven years out of residency, so I would've been about 38 at that point. That would've been 2013. Then it was about 2018 when we became financially independent. It's kind of squishy at the end there. Are you financially independent? You slowly start spending a little bit more—now you're not financially independent anymore. There was a year or two there where it was kind of squishy whether we were actually financially independent, but now it's clearly so four or five years later. It's interesting to hit that mark early in your career, before mid-career really. Then of course the existential crisis begins. What are you going to do with the rest of your life?
More information here:
Are You Moving Toward or Away from Financial Independence?
‘One More Year' Syndrome
Let's turn to a situation that a lot of retirees find themselves in as they're approaching retirement, as they move into retirement, whether they're early retirees or not, which is what I call “one more year” syndrome. This period of time can last quite a while. Leif, do you want to talk a little bit about what “one more year” syndrome is and what you did to get over it in order to actually punch out of medicine?
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
“One more year” syndrome is when you realize that you've probably reached that financial independence number and your portfolio will support you for an indefinite period of retirement. But you're a little unsure because there are question marks. What if I decide to spend a bit more money when I have more free time? What if the market goes kaput and drops 20% like it did this year? What if, what if? You can ask a lot of what-ifs. Now a lot of those what-ifs are really already answered because the idea behind safe withdrawal rates is that they assume just about a worst-case scenario. That's why it's not the 6% withdrawal rate. It's a 4% or maybe 3.5% withdrawal rate that you start with and that you base that financial independence number on.
But just to be on the safe side—to be a little more conservative and give yourself a little bit of a cushion—you decide, “Gosh, if I can work one more year, save another $100,000, I'll have one less year to support myself in retirement, and then I'll be in even better shape.” And I get it. Because if you, again, use that 4% rule, an extra $100,000, well, that's $4,000 a year that you can spend every year indefinitely. If you set aside maybe $200,000 or $300,000 because you earn a lot of money and save a lot or you work a couple “one more” years, now you're looking at an extra $10,000, maybe an extra $15,000 a year, something like that. And wow, that could buy box seats at the football stadium or that could buy an extra trip to Europe or Asia every year. It's pretty easy to convince yourself that a little bit more, a little bit more is a good idea.
I did go through some of that, and I worked about four “one more” years. I had financial independence, but it wasn't a goal I had been working toward. It wasn't a plan to get out early. It was just saving for something, investing because I want to see my money grow and then realizing, “Oh, now I have options. I have the challenge of choice.” What do you do when you have that ability and that opportunity? For me, we really based my exiting medicine around the kids' age and what we thought would be a good time for them to be out of school and traveling and learning from experiences and learning out in the world, which is what we've done the last almost three and a half years. How did I get over it? By saving way more than we needed. We're now living on what would be more like about a 2% withdrawal rate if we were actually withdrawing money.
Additional Work After FI
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Let's talk a little bit about the role of additional work after FI. Each of us are doing something that we're actually getting paid for still after financial independence. I'm curious how you each view the role of work in your life, even though you really don't need the money. Let's start with you Dr. Mehta. Can you talk to us about what role work plays in your life now?
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
To the point of one more year, the thing is, it never really goes away. You could always have a little more cushion. My dad was a cardiologist. We forced him to retire during COVID at the age of 70. He was still saying, “Should I work one more year?” We kept saying to him “Are you crazy? You are fine.” But that discomfort with not making something after you've been used to making a lot is also something that's very different in terms of, “Now I'm going to be digging into a savings account, and I've never had to dig into savings to do the things that I have.” Or maybe you're not because you're getting so much money from your pension or your Social Security or whatever, but it's still a very different feeling than having a paycheck land in your bank account every time.
I think we're still at the point where there's a comfort in money coming in and there's money that's coming in through real estate investments. To Leif's point earlier, we were fortunate to make a lot of money during a time when there was a great market to be investing in. That money amplified quickly, and we don't anticipate that same sort of amplification maybe over the next few years. There is a little bit of an adjustment, but I think we all know objectively we're fine. I remember sitting down with my dad when he was making the decision and saying, “Dad, let's go through every worst-case scenario. You are fine if you retire.” For him, it wasn't just the money. It was also, “This is a big part of my identity, and this is what I want to do.” It was really hard for him to take that step back. To this day, I'll get side gig opportunities for cardiologists, and he's like, “Hey, maybe I could”, and I'm like, “No, no, you're retired, you're done. Enjoy your life.”
I think there's some of that in all of us where we still want to be productive and we still want to do things and there are still things that are really important to me. The money is not one of them anymore. I only do things that make me happy. I think that that's the big shift that we've taken on. I was telling my husband a few months ago, he was complaining about something and I said, “Listen, you've been complaining about this for three nights in a row now. Maybe this needs to come off of the plate.” Everybody has bad days and we're always going to have complaints every once in a while, but if there is something in our lives that is causing regular sort of, “Hey, this is something that's stressing us out, or this is something that we complain about,” well, we're in a fortunate position where we can take that off the plate.
At some point, it's our fault if we're complaining because we have the ability to get rid of that thing. I think that's been the big decision-maker for us. “Is this something that is causing regular unhappiness or stress or strife or arguments or whatever? If so, that just has to go.” If we're hearing ourselves complaining, we only have ourselves to blame because we are in a very fortunate position now. The priorities have to be health and happiness. Everything else is do it because you love it. But if you don't love it, then why are you doing it? There's just no point.
For us, that's been the guiding principle. Do the things you like and do the things that bring you joy and don't have money be the reason. If there's somebody that I'm working with that I just really don't enjoy working with or who's constantly trying to lowball me or whatever, I have a low threshold to walk away from the table at this point and just say, “You know what? This is just not something I want to do anymore.” Knowing that I have the freedom to do that is really important in keeping things balanced in terms of, “Hey, I want to do this, but I also don't want it to dictate my family's overall happiness anymore.”
Dr. Jim Dahle:
I think that's a good tip. For me, it got to the point where I started asking, “Well, what do I want to do with my life?” Just because I have money now, it didn't change that plan. It was interesting because I didn't know that until I got there. I thought, “Well, how much of what I'm doing in medicine am I doing for the money?” It turned out I definitely was working night shifts for the money. I did not actually enjoy those. It was a beautiful thing to be able to drop my night shifts. Was I working as much as I was at the time, partially for money? Absolutely. But when I cut back on the shifts, then all of a sudden it wasn't about money. I was glad to do it.
I've still got partners now asking me, “When are you going to retire? Why are you still here?” The answer is, I didn't go through all this in my 20s just to be able to walk away at the earliest possible moment. I don't know whether they think I'm crazy because of that or not, but they still let me come in and work shifts. There's a pleasure to work, and the way I look at it is if work is not keeping me from doing anything I want to do and it gives me a little bit of structure to my life—makes me feel like I have some purpose—why not keep doing it? I wrote a blog post about adding adventure to your life, and by the time I was done with the blog post, my staff wouldn't even let me run it. They're like, “You cannot run this post, because all this post is going to say to your audience is I have an awesome life, and you don't.” If I can take enough trips in one year, that I can't even tell my audience about them and yet still work, well, what's it really keeping me from doing?
What we've found is the limiting factor that keeps us from doing even more play, even more travel, are our kids, our kids' lives, our kids' schedules, making sure they're in school enough. Work is not the limiting factor, particularly since WCI work can be wedged into different time periods. It's very time-independent, and it's very location-independent. We can work from just about anywhere in the world with cell phone coverage. It's only my shifts that I have to be in a certain place at a certain time, most of the other work I can move around quite a bit at my convenience.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
I think that's such an important point. I think the majority of us love the heart of what we do as physicians, and it feels really good to go to work and be a physician. I always tell everybody my clinical days are my favorite days of the month now because they're actually the least stressful of any of my days. I go in, I get to see my friends that I worked with when I was working full time. I work per diem at the same place now. I go in, I see everyone, I get to hang out, then I go into a room and work. I'm a radiologist. So, I literally go into a dark room, turn off the lights, and then I just turn on the images and my mind goes into autopilot mode. My team knows they're not allowed to contact me. It's like I exist in a vacuum for 10 hours that day, and it's kind of nice to just shut out the world and be in the zone. I love those days, and I won't give them up.
It is a very different feeling going to work because you want to be there as opposed to knowing that you have to be there. I feel like before I switched to per diem, every week was an act of survival in terms of, “OK, Monday morning I have to make it until Friday night. Then we'll get to start to do fun stuff again on the weekends.” Being able to go to work right now feels like a privilege, and it's actually a luxury for me. They're some of my best days of the month.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
I can relate to that. My life in a lot of ways is much less stressful while I'm in the ER. It’s someplace you're comfortable. It's someplace you're competent. You know that anything that comes through the doors, you have the skills to take care of. That's not always the case when you're pursuing other things that are new and you don't have as much experience with.
The Challenge of Choice
Dr. Jim Dahle:
I wrote a blog post the other day called “The Challenge of Choice,” and it came from a book by that same title that talked about getting what you want and what life's like after you get what you want. And it's a little bit like the Cheesecake Factory menu, if you've ever been to the Cheesecake Factory. I much prefer to go to some catered event where there are three things on the menu. There's a beef dish, there's a fish dish, there's a vegetarian dish. But you go to the Cheesecake Factory, and you've got 250 choices on the menu. It takes you 45 minutes just to read the menu. That's kind of what the challenge of choice is. After FI you can do anything. That can be overwhelming, I think, for a lot of people, including me. Has this been difficult for you, Leif, to have the challenge of choice thrust into your life?
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
Has it been difficult? No, it's been wonderful. I relish that freedom, but I did read and enjoy that article and I think I would enjoy reading that book because you can do anything with your time. You can do what you want to do and hopefully that makes you happy. But, of course, other people are going to be looking at what you're doing and making judgments about that, too. Internally you're thinking, am I wasting my life? Am I wasting my talents? Am I wasting all those hours we put in in our 20s to become physicians by not doing physician work anymore? That can eat at you a bit. But I've found the freedom to be very satisfying. I think I've done a pretty good job of not caring too much about what other people think and doing what I think is best for my family. I think we're going to talk more about travel, but that's been a big part of what we've done. We actually hung out with Nisha and her family down in Florida about six or eight months ago. We've been all over the world. That big wide-open menu, I find it to be invigorating.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
How about you, Nisha?
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
I agree with Leif that it's a privilege and that it's exciting and it opens up this world of potential. But I will also say that I do find it stressful sometimes because I think we go through this very pre-prescribed pathway through medicine where everybody tells us what we're supposed to do with our time and when we're supposed to do it. Then all of a sudden to have a lot of options and try to figure out how do I navigate all these different priorities in my life now that I have the ability to allot time to make sure that we have dedicated family time every day? What is the amount of time that I want to spend on some of my other passions? I really enjoy advocacy and health policy, but now that I have all this time, should I be spending 10 hours on that a week? Should I be spending two hours on that a week?
Then everyone has opinions. All of a sudden, I've realized that everybody's got opinions about what I should be doing and judgments about what I should be doing. And like Leif, I don't really care what a lot of the people who are not close to me say, but when my mom says something or my dad says something or my husband says something, I do think about how much of that I need to take into consideration. Everything in life has an opportunity cost. One bucket here is still something out of a bucket elsewhere. If I decide that I want to spend 10 hours working this week, then does that mean I don't get to read a book for fun this week or whatever? You'll always find things to fill the time. It forces you to examine your priorities in a way that you've never had to prioritize them because you've never had time.
It's really made me think about who I am and who I want to be and what I want for my family. That is a little bit stressful. Before I could kind of hide behind the fact that I could say, “Well, if the kids had cereal for dinner, we were in survival mode, that's OK. We made it through the day.” Now I do have the ability to spend an hour and a half making dinner if I really want to. Is that something I want to do, or am I wrong for not spending that time? It's funny when those kinds of choices come up. They're not stressful. They're not life-altering things, but it's more on your mind to kind of be more intentional about your time. That can sometimes force you to have all sorts of decisions. The decision for me to go to per diem was really stressful. I knew I didn't need my full-time job, but I also loved my job and I had a really good job, which is hard to find in medicine these days. I felt really bad potentially giving that up. There was this question of, “Are they going to use me per diem or are they just saying they're going to use me per diem, but then they're not? Then I'm not going to get to practice anymore.” I knew I didn't want to go to a different system and learn a new thing.
It's always stressful to make big changes in your life. Parag and I had to have a lot of talks about what is it that we want now that we have the ability to do this? Should he be cutting back? Should he be changing his schedule? It took me a really long time to force him to take his seven weeks of vacation. That was hard for him because his work is an identity for him. It did mean that he would be making a little bit less. He gets paid on production. Could he afford to do it? Yes. But did he necessarily want to? How do the dynamics change when both people are making the same amount of money or one person's making more than the other, and who gives up things? All of those things are coming up because you're making decisions, not because you have to, but because you actually have to think about how much money do I want to make? Which is a very different mentality than I come out of residency and I've just got to make as much money as I possibly can because I have loans to pay and things to do.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
I can certainly relate to that. I think it's easier to look at your spouse and say, “I think our life would be better if you work less.” I think that's a really easy thing to say. I think it's a little bit harder to look at yourself and say, “Our life would be better if I work less.” I think those are two very different things.
More information here:
8 Things to Do with Financial Independence Besides Retire Early
Is Taking Time Away from Family to Work After FI Okay?
Dr. Jim Dahle:
The other thing I wanted to talk about today with regard to family is that all of us are still doing some work—some of the time, at least. That means taking time away that could be spent with your kids. Now, society tells us we should spend as much time with our kids as possible, quality time and quantity time. But there are times when work can interfere with that. When you don't need the money from work, it feels a little bit different. Last night, I had a presentation when I came home from my shift to some docs in Hawaii. It was 5pm in Hawaii, but it was 8pm in Utah. I spent the evening or a good chunk of the evening teaching docs in Hawaii how to become financially literate. That is time that I could have spent with my children. My children were all home at the time. I'm curious how you feel as you do about work during time periods when you could be spending time with your kids. How does that feel? Leif, do you ever do any work while your kids are around?
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
I do. But the kids have to do some work too, right? They've got their own things. They've got their school work, they've got music, they both play musical instruments every day. We make them run and go to swim and play tennis and do all these things. Sometimes I feel like they don't have time for me. Even moving around a cruise ship, I'm like, “Hey, do you want to play some ping pong?” “Nah, now we're going to go see our friends up at the kid’s club.” “OK. Alright.” My wife and I have a lot more time to spend with our kids, and we do spend a lot more time with them than probably 90%, 95% of other parents. There's no reason to feel guilty for those occasional times when we are occupied with other things. So, no, I think that we're doing a pretty good job in trying to set a good example.
To your point about the times where you actually are doing work when you could be hanging out with them doing certain things, they should realize that some work is being done to provide this wonderful home that we live in and these vacations and trips that we take. The money is coming from somewhere, right? They see you at work, they realize, “OK, yeah, that's how that works.”
Dr. Jim Dahle:
What about you, Nisha?
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
I don't know if it's like the mom in me and the mom-guilt in me, but the one thing that I have been super protective of now that I have switched my job situation is that I pick up the kids from school every day and then I'm with them until basically bedtime, if at all possible. There are exceptions to that occasionally. Like you, Jim, I'll have evening events or something like that and that'll be a time for Parag to be upstairs with the kids. But we try to make sure that now that we have the ability to spend time with the kids and, honestly, with each other, too. If the kids are showering, Parag and I will go every day and go take a walk for 35 minutes or 40 minutes or whatever and catch up on each other's time.
I have been better about putting boundaries on work because I think that's something for me, at the end of the day, to feel good about the life that we've created. I need to know that we're making the most of it. That means that I usually start working at 5:30 or 6 in the morning, but I'm done by 2:30 or 3. Then, I'm with my family for the times where they're there with me. To your point, Leif, your kids are homeschooling right now so they're around a lot more. But my boys are gone, and Parag is gone working until at least 3:30 or so. That time is my time, but then after that, my time is their time.
Making the Most of Life Now
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Here's another one that I find particularly difficult. I don't know if you guys can relate to this or not, but I get this sense sometimes and it makes me feel very anxious just knowing that I'm not immortal. Not only not immortal, but that I'm going to age and I'm going to lose ability, physical ability, as I get older. There's a lot of things I want to do in my life. I enjoy adventuring. It might be rowing, might be canyoneering, might be climbing. A lot of these things that I want to do in my life I'm not going to be able to do in my 60s or 70s or 80s. I feel this angst to get out there and do these things. It's all recreation. It's not work. It's recreation with things that I can do now but not later.
That almost provides a source of stress in my life, making me feel like I have to get out. This is from someone who spent literally 100-plus days last year either sleeping under the stars or in a foreign country traveling. It's not like I'm not getting out doing stuff, but I often feel this pull, to get out and do it even more because I know there's only a limited number of years before I won't be able to do those sorts of things. Does that ever cause either of you any stress?
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
That's a ringing endorsement for early financial independence right there. You see and you hear so many stories of people that always want to do such and such and then they have a heart attack a week before they were about to retire. So, does it cause me stress? No, because I made the decision to eliminate the physician work entirely, and that gives us the time to go out and do these things while we're young, while we're capable, before we have our hips replaced and our knees replaced or whatever it may be, that will slow us down someday. That's where I'm at. How about you, Nisha?
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
I'm not as adventurous as Jim. I am not out there canyoneering or anything like that. We have this tradition now that I've implemented in our family. At the end of every day, we have to say one thing that was really awesome about the day. I've told myself, if I can't say that one thing that was great, then again, I'm doing something wrong. Whether it's I called a friend and talked to them for fun, or whether it's I read a book or I took a bath, or I did something that I wouldn't have been able to do when I was in the thick of it. For me as a radiologist, honestly, even the fact that I can sit and work and look outside of the window. North Carolina's got a lot of wildlife, and it's always running around in my backyard. That for me is a really nice thing because I spent a lot of time boxed up in a room that was dark and had no windows.
I think that it is really important to me to make sure that we're making the most of every day. I think as physicians, we know better than anyone that tomorrow is never guaranteed. Jim, I'm sure in the ER you are constantly sort of faced with that, and the same thing with radiology. I'm always coming across these diagnoses in young people, and it's a constant reminder that you have to make the most of everything. We've had a few scares within our family over the past few years. My husband got into a really bad car accident while he was sitting in traffic, and some guy came barreling down the highway who was 89 years old in a trailer and smashed into the back of Parag's car. The car literally looked like an accordion. How he got out of that car alive, I don't know. But he was two days in the ICU. I think those events are eye-opening. In medicine, we delay gratification for a long time. I think it's important for all of us to make sure that we're living our lives while we're doing those things, whether we're financially independent or not. It's just important to make sure that you don't always assume that there's a tomorrow.
Is There Such Thing as Too Much Travel?
Dr. Jim Dahle:
I want to turn to one other subject before we finish this podcast, and that is the subject of travel. All of us have done a fair amount of travel in the last few years, enough travel that any normal person that looks at how much travel we've done is normally pretty intensely jealous. We do it a little bit differently. My travel tends to be pretty high-paced. Leif's done a fair amount of slow travel. But what I want to talk about a little bit is this idea that lots of people have that they want to retire so they can travel. How much is too much travel? When you have the time to do as much as you want, how do you decide how much you actually want?
Let's start again with you on this one, Leif. This has been a big part of your identity, a big part of what you've written about at the Physician on FIRE. Let's talk about travel and its place in your life. How other people maybe view travel and how do you decide when you're doing enough.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
When I left medicine, my kids were, I believe, 8 and 10, and they're 12 and 14 now. Our travel is almost always family travel. It's the four of us going places. We're incorporating education and culture and all of those things into our boys' curriculum, giving them a good worldview hopefully to be well-rounded individuals as they grow up. Our ideal, I think when we started out, was maybe 4-6 months at home, which is Northern Michigan, with some domestic travel in there. Then maybe 6-8 months of big travel being far away, traveling for months at a time. That got interrupted by COVID obviously, but we've still been able to do trips of 2-3 months length.
We started braces for my older son, phase 2 of orthodontics, when Covid hit because we knew we wouldn't be traveling that much. So, now we can only go away for about eight weeks at a time. But we've taken four trips of 4-6 weeks this year. I think a total of about five months of travel so far in 2022, most of that overseas. One thing we've realized is the more we're away, the more difficult it is to really have a solid relationship with friends at home and to be part of a community back at your home base. There are people that travel full time. They sell everything, they retire, they take off, and they just go from place to place with a backpack and rolling suitcase or something and no home base.
I just can't imagine not being able to go home. That's not the lifestyle that we want. Certainly, I don't think that's great for the kids to not have a home that feels like home in a safe, secure place. But it's an evolving kind of thing. And we're about to go back to traditional school as my older son enters high school. We'll probably get more embedded in the community and strengthen those ties to local people and perhaps organizations and whatever we decide to do with our time. But I've enjoyed being away up to a few months at a time and really just getting immersed in other places.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Have you felt like you've crossed the line to too much travel at any point in the last few years?
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
Nope. Hasn't happened.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Nisha?
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
We're not exactly in the same position, because my husband still does work full time and he can't be away from the practice for three weeks at a time or four weeks. It's not like ER or radiology where I can group my shifts and then have an extended period of time off. For us, we are taking his seven weeks of vacation now, but we are also doing a lot of weekend travel, which is something that is very different now that we can afford it. We will spend the money to get away once or twice a month on the weekends and maybe we'll take one day on either side or something like that. But we do a lot more of that kind of travel than going away for three weeks at a time or four weeks at a time just because we're still in it in terms of the medical lifestyle and vacation constraints and call schedules and things like that.
We've really made it a concerted effort to go visit friends, go visit family, go to random places that we haven't been, and just go for three or four days and get away for a weekend. But our kids are in traditional school. My husband has seven weeks of vacation, and some of that is a few weeks of concentrated travel. The other ones are sort of spread out over family events and weekend trips and things like that. I would like to be doing more travel. I always tell my husband he's the weakest link because I can work from anywhere. But I don't think that there is such a thing as too much travel except to your point Leif about you don't want to feel as if you're escaping from your real life so much that you don't have a community at home and you don't maintain the connections with the people that mean a lot to you at home.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
Yeah, you do miss family, family things, friends, all of that. You come back and you're like, “Oh, that happened? What? Why didn't I hear about this?” You're out of sight, out of mind.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
This summer, we took some big trips. We went to Greece for two weeks. We were gone pretty much every weekend this summer. And we realized we hadn't seen our friends in Charlotte for three months basically throughout the summer. That felt like it was probably a little bit much. I guess there's a balance, but I don't know, travel is our favorite thing to do in terms of being able to do something that we couldn't do before because of money. I'm not at a point where I would say we do too much. I would still love to do more.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
I've had a chance to really experiment with this over the last few years. The longest trip I've really been gone and unplugged from was my Grand Canyon float trip. That was 23 days off the grid, no cell phone coverage. I was sending a satellite message on my inReach to my family with 18 characters a night or whatever. But that was unplugged, and it took about six months to prepare for that. In order to get everything ready, to be able to go and do that sort of a trip took a lot of preparation. But one-week trips are easy. They've been easy. To take a one-week trip is very easy for an emergency doc. You wedge all your shifts into the rest of the month and you go. I've been doing that my whole career. What I've been able to do as I cut back on shifts is do more and more and more of those.
What I've discovered is that I have crossed that line where I'm like, “I don't want to travel anymore.” I'm doing some travel for work, obviously, out doing speaking gigs or whatever. And I’m doing some travel just to go on an adventure and some travel with family and some travel just with Katie. I have definitely crossed that line multiple times where I'm traveling too much. All of a sudden, I can't do the volunteer work I do at church. I'm having to rely on my assistant coaches where I coach my son's hockey team. I'm missing all kinds of games and practices. I'm missing my own hockey games. I live at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains where I can go skiing and climbing and mountain biking and I go three or four months and then realize I haven't even been mountain biking this summer because I'm spending all the time when I'm not working somewhere else traveling.
What I've discovered is there's a certain amount of traveling I like, and beyond that point, it's not that fun for me. The problem is my spot comes before Katie's spot. Katie likes traveling more than I do. The solution is she's starting to go on trips without me. She goes on trips with friends. They're going to Kenya, Tanzania next fall. They're going to climb Mount Kilimanjaro and going on safari and she'll be gone for two and a half weeks and I'm going to stay here. I'm going to spend time with the kids. I'm going to spend time working and probably not going to be doing any other recreation just because the kids are going to be here. They're definitely the limiting factor in just how much travel we can take.
But there are definitely times where I get toward the end of the year and I just want to stay home. I haven't been home and had a day off now for weeks and weeks or whatever it might be. I hope everybody gets the opportunity to travel so much that they don't want to travel anymore. I need a month or two of not going anywhere sometimes just to want to go do it again. For example, this month we're going to spend a week in Jamaica, we're going to spend a week in Colombia. If I look back over the last couple of years, we've had more months like that than we have had months where we didn't go anywhere. I think it's one of those things that everybody thinks they want to travel more. I encourage you to travel more until you get to the point where you realize maybe it's not all that, particularly when you're having to be back in a week.
Our kids are not homeschooled. We cannot take them to Colombia and continue their education the way Leif has set up these slow travel trips. We've got to get back at a certain point, whether we're getting back to the kids or getting the kids back to their things. Really, we've only got eight or 10 weeks in the summer to be able to really be away, as far as they go. But even then, they've got camps they want to be at, they've got activities with friends, they're playing on sports teams. It's very hard, I think, to completely unplug a whole family and move them away for two or three months. That has to be a real major goal, something you very much want, because there are a lot of things you have to give up in order to do that sort of travel.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
I think our kids are now at an age where they've got basketball practice, they've got tennis practice. They also are building things, and they have friendships that they want to maintain. They used to go to my parents for several weeks every summer, and now they're kind of like, “Well, maybe we'll just go for two weeks because we don't want to be away from our friends for longer than that.” As they build their own lives, I think we're also kind of shaping what we do around that. Then I think the other thing is all of us have other projects that we're working on. It's hard to get away and then constantly get back into the mode of if I'm in the middle of an advocacy thing or something like that, nothing stops just because I go on vacation. There's always this question of, “How am I planning my vacation so that I can truly be off the grid?” I'm not at a point yet where I can be truly off the grid for long, long periods of time between the different things that I want to do.
I really enjoy the advocacy stuff and I really enjoy the health policy stuff and some of the other stuff that I'm doing these days. I still feel like I have a job. It's not as defined as it used to be, but there's still a lot of stuff that I feel like is my responsibility right now. Every time you want to get away, to your point, Jim, you have to plan to be away. Sometimes that is more exhausting and you feel like you need a vacation from your vacation, from your planning for vacation.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Leif is over there smiling because he's like, “I don't have to do that. What are you talking about?” And it's true.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
The fatigue of travel comes when you're doing three days here, two days there, five days here, bouncing, bouncing, bouncing. What has worked for us is to spend 1-2, up to four weeks at a time, in one place, in one Airbnb, in one city, and then exploring everything there is to see there but not every day. Maybe every other day, every third day you do something big and other days maybe you take a walk or a run, go to the park, go out to eat. But it's not like we have to do all the sightseeing and see everything you can see in Athens in four days because we have four days.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
Our travel has definitely slowed down over the last few years in terms of saying let's just pick one place. Let's stay there for a week, let's really get to know it, or stay there for two weeks and really get to know it. That has been really, really nice. But I know Jim and I were joking around yesterday that you do things right, in the sense that you're really enjoying your FI life. I don't know that either one of us has quite gotten there yet, but we will hopefully.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
It's difficult when you go someplace that you won't ever go back to. We did this trip to the Balkans this fall. We were there in Sarajevo. Chances that I'm going back to Sarajevo ever again in my life are low. I'm almost surely not going back there. When I'm there and I'm there for 48 hours, it's either see it now or never. That is hard for me to put my feet up and hang out in the hotel lounge all evening when I can go see something I'm never going to see again. I think a lot of us feel that way when we travel, and it makes it hard to do the slow travel thing just because you're only going there once probably. Maybe if it's Paris or something, you'll be there multiple times. But there are a lot of destinations we go to that we're probably only going once in our life.
More information here:
Travel Hacking 101: How to Travel the World for Free
Our time has come short. I appreciate both of you coming on and talking with our audience about life after FI, how it involves work, how it involves travel, how it involves children, particularly when you reach those milestones relatively early in your career, to talk about angst and stress and what it looks like when it's not financial. I appreciate you both coming on.
You can learn more about Dr. Mehta’s work at physiciansidegigs.com. You can learn more about Dr. Dahleen’s work at physicianonfire.com. Thank you for coming on the podcast both of you today.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
Thanks for having us.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
Thank you for having us. It's been a lot of fun. I look forward to seeing you in person at WCICON. I think we'll all be there.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
I hope you enjoyed that conversation. I hope it's fun to hear about people who have made it and how life maybe doesn't get super simple afterward, that it's still complicated even when you take the “I need to work for money” piece of life out of it. It can still be complicated. It can still be difficult. You still have problems. It might be first-world problems, but the truth is all we ever talk about on this podcast are first-world problems.
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Full Transcript
Intro:
This is the White Coat Investor podcast, where we help those who wear the white coat get a fair shake on Wall Street. We've been helping doctors and other high-income professionals stop doing dumb things with their money since 2011.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
This is White Coat Investor podcast number 293.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
PearsonRavitz are disability and life insurance advisors founded by and for physicians. This White Coat Investor recommended agency grew out of one MD's experience with a career-changing on-the-job injury.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Today, PearsonRavitz serves the medical community in all 50 states. At PearsonRavitz, they help you as a doctor safeguard your most valuable asset, your income so you can protect the most important people in your life, your family. PearsonRavitz makes human connections before they make quotes. Go to www.pearsonravitz.com/wci today to schedule your consultation with a PearsonRavitz advisor.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
All right, welcome back to the podcast. We're glad you're here. Thank you for the work you do. It is valuable and we appreciate it.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
A couple of things I want you to know about, that you may or may not know about. We have a coaching service that helps with burnout. 50% plus of doctors have burnout symptoms these days. This service is called Burnout Proof MD, and you can learn more about it at a free webinar on January 12th. You can sign up for that at whitecoatinvestor.com/burnoutwebinar. It'll be on January 12th, but I think you'll get it sent to you recorded even if you don't make the live version. So, sign up for that.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
The other thing is we have some partners that want your opinion. They want to pay you for your opinion. And so, the way they do that is they offer you surveys and they will pay you if you take the surveys. You can find out about those companies by going to whitecoatinvestor.com, going to the “Recommended” tab, and then scrolling down to where it says “Surveys for Money.” And obviously, we get paid too, if you sign up there. This is part of the way we support the site.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
These are sponsors of the site, but they are willing to pay you for your opinion. And so, if you're looking for a side gig, whatever it is, you need a little bit of extra cash, you got some time, you're not doing anything with, or you just need some 1099 income to open a solo 401(k), that is a great option for you to do.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
All right. Our quote of the day today comes from Warren Buffet who said, “I don't look to jump over seven-foot bars. I look around for one-foot bars that I can step over.” And I think there's a lot of wisdom there. Don't try to make things too hard in your life. The truth is that becoming wealthy is not that hard to do. It's not that complicated. So, do the things that are relatively easy and straightforward and sure-fire to get there rather than gambling it all on red or the latest crypto asset.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
All right, we have an excellent discussion today. I've got two of my good friends, people who have been very successful relatively early in their careers and are now faced with what I called in a recent blog post, the Challenge of Choice. So, we're going to be talking today about the challenge of choice about life after financial independence, life after you have enough. So, let's get them on the line to talk about that.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Our guests on the White Coat Investor podcast today are Dr. Nisha Mehta, the founder of Physician Side Gigs, and Dr. Leif Dahleen, the founder of the Physician on FIRE. Welcome to the podcast.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
Thanks for having us.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
Thank you, Jim. Good to be back.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
We've known each other for a long time, and I thought this would be a really fun conversation to have. It’s purely going to be about life after financial independence. The three of us have had a great blessing in our lives to be able to be financially independent in our forties.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
And the interesting thing about the personal finance space is there's lots of material out there teaching you how to get rich, how to get financially independent, how to become wealthy. There's very little out there that talks about how to be wealthy and how to live after you're financially independent. And so, I thought we'd talk a little bit about that today.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
But I think perhaps we should start just giving readers or listeners, those who maybe don't know you that well, to talk a little bit about your journey to financial independence. And Leif, why don't we start with you? You're the one most closely associated with the FIRE movement, and let's just give a short recap of what it took for you to become financially independent in your 40s.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
Sure. I'll be pretty brief because I think a lot of your listeners have heard this story before. But essentially, I went straight through undergrad, medical school, residency, finished when I was 30, started doing locums the day after I finished residency, basically the Monday after. I think I finished on a Friday. And for two years I made great money and all of my expenses were paid by locums agencies and the hospitals that were hiring.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
And so, I got used to saving most of my income right off the bat, those first couple of years. And when I settled down into a “permanent” position I had already been in that habit for a couple of years.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
So, I would say on average, over the course of a 13-year anesthesia career, I probably saved half or more of my income. Some years were more, some years were less, but given a pretty good run in the stock market that actually included a really terrible run early on in my career, which turned out to be a good thing because that allowed me to invest when the market was down and ride it all the way up throughout about a 10, 15 year bull market.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
I realized by the time I was about to turn 40 that I had enough money to maintain our relatively modest lifestyle, and I say relative for a physician because we were spending a bit under $100,000 a year once all of our debts, including mortgage and student loan debts were paid off.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
And it occurred to me that I didn't have to work if I didn't want to. And that was a shocking revelation at age 39. I worked for another four years and of course, started writing about it, and that's how the Physician on FIRE thing came to be. But ultimately, I did leave medicine behind three plus years ago in the summer of 2019 and been enjoying life in a different way with a lot more freedom since then.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
All right. Thank you. Nisha, do you want to tell your story?
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
Yeah. My story. We didn't really set out to achieve financial independence and we started out early kind of in a scarcity mentality, I guess. We got married relatively early. I was 24 when I got married. My husband and I have been dating for five years since college. And we started out as two residents in New York City, actually an intern in New York City. And I was still a fourth-year med student.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
And so, we got used to living very frugally very early on because we were living in the city on $47,000 between the two of us. And so, we started out just for that first six to seven years when we were living in New York City. We were just very used to, like we walked instead of taking the subway because $2 on the subway, we were like, “Do we need to? Could we just walk?”
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
And so, we did that for a long time and I think that sort of mentality sticks with you even when you don't need it anymore. I was doing my radiology residency, my husband was doing his general surgery residency, and then we moved to North Carolina when my husband matched at Duke for his plastics fellowship, I took on a faculty position at Chapel Hill. I was still on an academic salary as a radiologist.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
Again, we both had student loans. It didn't feel like there was a lot of money going around, although our cost of living dramatically decreased once we left the city. We had kids. My first kid was during my third year of residency, so we already had a child then. And then my second one was my first year as an attending.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
It never felt like there was a lot of money to go around because my husband was still a fellow. And honestly, we didn't have time to spend it either because both of us were working so much. I was on faculty with grant funding with two young children and my husband was home maybe four or five hours a day, if that not. I’m not kidding when I’m saying that my second child had legitimate stranger anxiety with my husband. When my husband would come in the middle of the night and he'd be like, “Why are you in my mom's room with me?”
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
We wouldn't have the time to spend. And so, we'd always been really good about saving and saved as much as we could, and put as much money away in retirement as we could. And we were fortunate enough to graduate at a time where our student loans, I think were at 2.1% or something like that. And then once we made our first on time payment and set up auto pay and made six months of on time payments or something, our student loans went down to less than 2%. It's like 1.6% or something.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
We paid those off really early while my husband was still a fellow and I was still an academic attending. And then we just launched into this dual physician lifestyle, which was a very big difference. But we were still living in the same way. I still have the same car today that I had when I was a fellow. And that's not the case for my husband. My husband likes cars and has a very nice car.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
We pick what we like obviously, and I'm totally okay with it, but we didn't lifestyle inflate very much at the beginning. And all of a sudden, we had a plastic surgery fellow, or a plastic surgery income and a radiologist income. And so, I started the side business that was also making quite a bit of money.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
We went from not having a lot of money. My realtor always likes to laugh. When we arrived in Charlotte, we were still in residency mentality kind of. And we were renting for two years. And the houses that we were looking at then, versus even two years later than that, were very different. And even now, the house that we live in is probably a lot less than what other people with our income would probably make.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
And so, I think we just kind of were in that mentality for a while. And that was a sure fire sort of way to financial independence for us because we were making so much and we were saving such a large percentage of it. We were not living frugally. Once we had the two-attending salary, we did stuff. We started taking nicer vacations, we started having more freedom and going out for dinner, things like that. We stopped thinking about budgeting. But we spared the major expenses and spent a lot of money on the easy things to make our life better.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
And by doing that, I was 37 when we reached our financial independence number. And it's just been, I think for us, we both love what we do clinically. The desire is not to leave medicine. I've certainly cut back as I've focused on some other things, but we both really love what we do. I don't think I could pry my husband out of the OR if I tried. So, I've given up on trying but we take more vacation days. He ends his days earlier when he wants to ends days earlier.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
We've dropped things that don't make us happy. I no longer take any call. My husband has dropped procedures that he doesn't like or certain types of call that he doesn't like. We've tried to improve our lifestyle. We are very happy doing what we're doing. And so, I don't see us leaving medicine anytime soon, but certainly practicing on our own terms, which has been really great.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah. And I think listeners are fairly familiar with my story. Just from a FI perspective, you talk about making $47,000 as a trainee, that sounds really good. When I signed on for residency in 2003, the salary was $34,000.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
But were you living in New York City?
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah, yeah. Well, $34,000 in Tucson does go a little further for sure.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
Yeah, we were living on the Upper East Side on 96th Street. So yeah, it was a little bit different on Park Avenue.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
We came out of residency in 2006. At that point we had one child, one in the oven and Katie was staying at home. I did not have this huge income coming out. I owed some time to the Air Force and I was making about $120,000 a year. And so, we were definitely living frugally.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
I think the best our savings rate ever got was one year when I had a deployment. I think we saved about 65% of our income that year, but most of the time it was less than that. And so, it took us a few years longer and it took either of you to become financially independent.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
We became millionaires seven years out of residency, so I would've been about 38 at that point. That would've been 2013. And then it was about 2018 when we became financially independent. And it's kind of squishy at the end there. Are you financially independent? Well, you slowly start spending a little bit more, now you're not financially independent anymore. That was a year or two there where it was kind of squishy whether we were actually financially independent, but now clearly so, four or five years later.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
But it's interesting to hit that mark early in your career, before mid-career really. And then of course the existential crisis begins. What you're going to do with the rest of your life?
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Well, let's turn to a subject that a lot of retirees find themselves in as they're approaching retirement, as they move into retirement, whether they're early retirees or not, which is what I call one more year syndrome. And this period of time can last quite a while. Leif, do you want to talk a little bit about what “one more year” syndrome is and what you did to get over it in order to actually punch out of medicine?
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
Sure, sure. Yeah, “one more year” syndrome is when you realize that you've probably reached that financial independence number and your portfolio will support you for an indefinite period of retirement. But you're a little unsure because there are question marks. Because what if I decide to spend a bit more money when I have more free time? What if the market goes kaput and drops 20% like it did this year? What if, what if? You can ask a lot of what ifs?
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
Now a lot of those what ifs are really already answered because the idea behind safe withdrawal rates is that they kind of assume just about a worst-case scenario. And that's why it's not the 6% withdrawal rate. It's a 4% or maybe 3.5% withdrawal rate that you start with and that you kind of base that financial independence number on.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
But just to be on the safe side, to be a little more conservative and give yourself a little bit of a cushion, you decide, “Gosh, if I can work one more year, save another $100,000, I'll have one less year to support myself in retirement, and then I'll be in even better shape.”
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
And I get it. Because if you, again, use that 4% rule and extra $100,000, well, that's $4,000 a year that you can spend every year indefinitely. If you set aside maybe $200,000 or $300,000 because you earn a lot of money and save a lot, or you work a couple “one more” years, now you're looking at an extra $10,000, maybe an extra $15,000 a year, something like that. And wow, that could buy box seats at the football stadium or that could buy an extra trip to Europe or Asia every year. And so, it's pretty easy to convince yourself that a little bit more, a little bit more is a good idea.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
And I did go through some of that and I worked about four “one more” years. But what I discovered, I had financial independence, it wasn't a goal I had been working towards. It wasn't a plan to get out early. It was just saving for something, investing because I want to see my money grow and then realizing, “Oh, now I have options. I have the challenge of choice. I think it was the title of the article you recently wrote. What do you do when you have that ability and that opportunity?
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
So, for me, we really based my exiting medicine and my wife was staying at home primarily with our kids. But we based my timing to leave my job around the kids' age and what we thought would be a good time for them to be out of school and traveling and learning from experiences and learning out in the world, which is what we've done the last almost three and a half years.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
How did I get over it? By saving way more than we needed. We're now living on what would be more like about a 2% withdrawal rate if we were actually withdrawing money.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
All right. Let's talk a little bit about the role of additional work after FI. Each of us are doing something that we're actually getting paid for still after financial independence. And I'm curious how you each view the role of work in your life, even though you really don't need the money? Let's start with you Dr. Mehta. Can you talk to us about what role work plays in your life now?
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
Yeah. To the point of one more year, whatever, one thing is, it never really goes away. You could always have a little more cushion. My dad was a cardiologist. We forced him to retire during Covid at the age of 70. And he was still kind of like, “Should I work one more year?” Kind of like, “Are you crazy? You are fine.”
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
But that discomfort with not making something after you've been used to making a lot is also something that's very different in terms of, “Now I'm going to be digging into a savings account and I've never had to dig into savings to do things that I have.” Or maybe you're not because you're getting so much money from your pension or your social security or whatever, but it's still a very different feeling than having a paycheck land in your bank account every time.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
And I think we're still at the point where we're kind of like, there's a comfort in money coming in and there's money that's coming in through real estate investments. To Leif's point earlier, we were fortunate to make a lot of money during a time when there was a great market to be investing in. And so, that money amplified quickly and we don't anticipate that same sort of amplification maybe over the next few years or whatever. So, there is a little bit of an adjustment, but I think we all know objectively we're fine.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
And I remember sitting down with my dad when he was making the decision and saying, “Dad, let's go through every worst-case scenario. You are fine if you retire.” And for him, it wasn't just the money. It was also, “This is a big part of my identity and this is what I want to do.”
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
And it was really hard for him to take that step back. And to this day now, I'll get side gig opportunities for cardiologists, and he's like, “Hey, maybe I could”, and I'm like, “No, no, you're retired, you're done. Enjoy your life.”
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
But I think there's some of that in all of us where we still want to be productive and we still want to do things and there are still things that are really important to me. The money is not one of them anymore. I only do things that make me happy. And I think that that's the big shift that we've sort of taken on as kind of, “Well, we don't want to stop working.”
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
I was telling my husband, a few months ago, he was complaining about something and I was like, “Listen, you've been complaining about this for three nights in a row now. Maybe this needs to come off of the plate.” We are fortunate enough. Everybody has bad days and we're always going to have complaints every once in a while, but if there is something in our lives that is causing regular sort of, “Hey, this is something that's stressing us out, or this is something that we complain about”, well, we're in a fortunate position where we can take that off the plate.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
So, at some point it's our fault if we're complaining because we have the ability to get rid of that thing. I think that's been the big decision maker for us. “Is this something that is causing regular sort of unhappiness or stress or strife or arguments or whatever? And if so, that just has to go.” Because there's no reason, if we're hearing ourselves complaining, we only have ourselves to blame because we are in a very fortunate position now.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
And so, I'm kind of like if it doesn't have to do with health, happiness, the priorities have to be health and happiness basically. And then everything else is do it because you love it. But if you don't love it, then why are you doing it? There's just no point.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
I think for us, that's been the guiding principle is do the things you like, and do the things that bring you joy and don't have money be the reason. If there's something, somebody that I'm working with that I just really don't enjoy working with, or who's constantly trying to low ball me or whatever, I have a low threshold to walk away from the table at this point and just say, “You know what? This is just not something I want to do anymore.”
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
And knowing that I have the freedom to do that is really important in kind of keeping things balanced in terms of, “Hey, I want to do this, but I also don't want it to dictate my family's overall happiness anymore.”
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah, I think that's a good tip. For me, it kind of got to the point where I started asking, “Well, what do I want to do with my life?” And just because I have money now, it didn't change that plan. And it was interesting because I didn't know that until I got there. I'm like, “Well, how much of what I'm doing in medicine am I doing for the money?” And it turned out I definitely was working night shifts for the money. I did not actually enjoy those.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
And so, that was a beautiful thing to be able to drop my night shifts. Was I working as much as I was at the time, partially for money? Absolutely. But when I cut back on the shifts, then all of a sudden it wasn't about money. I was glad to do it.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
I've still got my partners now asking me, “When are you going to retire? Why are you still here?” And the answer is, I didn't go through all this in my 20s just to be able to walk away at the earliest possible moment. And I don't know whether they think I'm crazy still because of that or not, but they still let me come in and work shifts. So, I had a shift yesterday. I spent eight hours in the ER yesterday, took care of a car wreck from an accident that was literally right in front of the hospital, which was a pretty bad one.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
And so, there's a pleasure to work and the way I look at it is if work is not keeping me from doing anything I want to do, and it gives me a little bit of structure to my life, makes me feel like I have some purpose, why not keep doing it?
Dr. Jim Dahle:
I wrote a blog post about adding an adventure to your life. And by the time I was done with the blog post, my staff wouldn't even let me run it. They're like, “You cannot run this post, because all this post is going to say to your audience is I have an awesome life, and you don't.” And if I can take enough trips in one year, that I can't even tell my audience about them and yet still work, well, what's it really keeping me from doing?
Dr. Jim Dahle:
And what we've found is the limiting factor that keeps us from doing even more play, even more travel, etc, is our kids, our kids' lives, our kids' schedules, making sure they're in school enough, more so than work is not the limiting factor, particularly since WCI work in particular can be wedged into different time periods. It's very time independent and it's very location independent. We can work from just about anywhere in the world with cell phone coverage. And so, it's only my shifts that I have to be in a certain place at a certain time, most of the other work I can move around quite a bit at my convenience.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
I think that's such an important point in terms of just… It's funny because we all love the heart of what we do. I think majority of us love the heart of what we do as physicians, and it feels really good to go to work and be a physician. I always tell everybody my clinical days are my favorite days of the month now because they're actually the least stressful of any of my days. I go in, I get to see my friends that I worked with and I was working full time. I work per diem at the same place now. And I go in, I see everyone, I get to hang out, I go into a room and I'm a radiologist.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
So, I literally go into a room, a dark room, I turn off the lights and, and then I just turn on the images and my mind goes into autopilot mode. My team knows they're not allowed to contact me. It's like I exist in a vacuum for 10 hours that day, and it's kind of nice to just shut out the world and be in the zone. And I love those days and I won't give them up.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
And it is a very different feeling going to work because you want to be there as opposed to knowing that you have to be there. I feel like before I switched to per diem, every week was an act of survival in terms of like, “Okay, Monday morning I got to make it until Friday night. And then we'll get to start to do fun stuff again on the weekends.” And so, being able to go to work right now feels like a privilege and it's actually like a luxury for me. They're some of my best days of the month, I feel like.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah, for sure I can relate to that. My life in a lot of ways is much less stressful while I'm in the ER. It’s someplace you're comfortable. It's someplace you're competent. You know that anything that comes through the doors, you have the skills to take care of. And that's not always the case when you're pursuing other things that are new and you don't have as much experience with.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Okay. I wrote a blog post the other day called “The Challenge of Choice”, and it came from a book by that same title that talked about getting what you want and what life's like after you get what you want. And it's a little bit like the Cheesecake Factory menu, if you've ever been to the Cheesecake Factory.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
I much prefer to go to some catered event where there's three things on the menu. There's a beef dish, there's a fish dish, there's a vegetarian dish. But you go to the Cheesecake Factory and you've got 250 choices on the menu. It takes you 45 minutes just to read the menu. And that's kind of what the challenge of choice is. After FI you can do anything. And that can be overwhelming, I think, for a lot of people, including me. Has this been difficult for you Leif to have the challenge of choice thrust into your life?
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
Has it been difficult? No, it's been wonderful. Yeah. I relished in that freedom, but I did read and enjoy that article and I think I would enjoy reading that book because you can do anything with your time. So, you can do what you want to do and hopefully that makes you happy. But of course, other people are going to be looking at what you're doing and, making judgements about that too.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
And so, internally you're thinking, “Well, am I wasting my life? Am I wasting my talents? Am I wasting all those hours we put in, in our 20s, to become physicians by not doing physician work anymore? And so, that can eat at you a bit.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
But I've found the freedom to be very satisfying. I think I've done a pretty good job of not caring too much about what other people think and doing what I think is best for my family. I think we're going to talk more about travel, but that's been a big part of what we've done. We actually hung out with Nisha and her family down in Florida about six or eight months ago. And we've been all over the world. So yeah, that big wide-open menu, I find it to be invigorating.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
How about you Nisha?
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
I agree with Leif that it's a privilege and that it's exciting and it opens up this world of potential. But I will also say that I do find it stressful sometimes because I think we go through this very pre-prescribed pathway through medicine where everybody kind of tells us what we're supposed to do with our time and when we're supposed to do it.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
And all of a sudden to have a lot of options and try to figure out how do I navigate all these different priorities in my life now that I have the ability to allot time to what is the amount of time I want to spend to make sure that we have dedicated family time every day? What is the amount of time that I want to spend on some of my other passions? I really enjoy advocacy and health policy but now that I have all this time, should I be spending 10 hours on that a week? Should I be spending two hours on that a week?
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
And then everyone has opinions. All of a sudden, I've realized that everybody's got opinions about what I should be doing and judgements about what I should be doing. And like Leif, I don't really care what a lot of the people who are not close to me say, but when my mom says something or my dad says something, or my husband says something, I'm kind of like, “Oh, okay, well, how much of that do I need to take into consideration too?”
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
And everything in life has an opportunity cost. One bucket here is still something out of a bucket elsewhere. So, if I decide that I want to spend 10 hours working this week, then does that mean I don't get to read a book for fun this week or whatever? You'll always find things to fill the time. And it forces you to examine your priorities in a way that you've never had to prioritize them because you've never had time.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
And so, it's really made me think about who I am and who I want to be and what I want for my family. And that is a little bit stressful before I could kind of hide behind the fact that it was like, “Well, if the kids had cereal for dinner, we were in survival mode, that's okay. We made it through the day.” And now I'm like, “Well, I do have the ability to spend an hour and a half making dinner if I really want to. Is that something I want to do or am I wrong for not spending that time?” So, it's funny when those kinds of choices come up, they're not stressful. They're not life altering things, but it's more on your mind to kind of be more intentional about your time.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
That can sometimes force you to have sorts of decisions. The decision for me to go to per diem was really stressful. I knew I didn't need my full-time job, but I also loved my job and I had a really good job, which is hard to find in medicine these days. And I felt really bad potentially giving that up. And there was this question of, “Well, are they going to use me per diem or are they just saying they're going to use me per diem, but then they're not? And then I'm not going to get to practice anymore.” I knew I didn't want to go to a different system and learn a new thing.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
So, it's always stressful to make big changes in your life. And I do think it requires a lot of. Craig and I had to have a lot of talks about what is it that we want now that we have the ability to do this? Should he be cutting back? Should he be changing his schedule? It took me a really long time to force him to take his seven weeks of vacation.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
That was hard for him because his work is an identity for him. And it did mean that he would be making a little bit less. He gets paid on production. So, could he afford to do it? Yes. But did he necessarily want to? How do the dynamics change when both people are making the same amount of money or one person's making more than the other, and who gives up things?
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
All of those things are coming up because you're making decisions, not because you have to, but because you actually have to think about how much money do I want to make? Which is a very different mentality than I come out of residency and I just got to make as much money as I possibly can because I got loans to pay and things to do.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah, I can certainly relate to that. And I think it's easier to look at your spouse and say, “I think our life would be better if you work less.” I think that's a really easy thing to say. I think it's a little bit harder to look at yourself and say, “Our life would be better if I work less.” I think those are two very different things.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
The other thing I wanted to talk about today with regard to family is that all of us are still doing some work. And some of the time at least, that means taking time away that could be spent with your kids. Now, society tells us we should spend as much time with our kids as possible, quality time and quantity time. But there are times when work can interfere with that. And when you don't need the money from work, it feels a little bit different.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Like last night, I had a presentation when I came home from my shift to some docs in Hawaii. It was 05:00 o'clock in Hawaii, but it was 08:00 o'clock in Utah. And so, I spent the evening or a good chunk of the evening teaching docs in Hawaii how to become financially literate. And that is time that I could have spent with my children. My children were all home at the time.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
And I'm curious how you feel as you do work during time periods when you could be spending time with your kids. How does that feel? Leif, do you ever do any work while your kids are around?
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
I do. But the kids have to do some work too, right? They've got their own things. So, they've got their school work, they've got music, they both play musical instruments every day. We make them run and go to swim and play tennis and do all these things. Sometimes I feel like they don't have time for me. Even moving around a cruise ship, I'm like, “Hey, do you want to play some ping pong? – Nah, now we're going to go see our friends up at the kid’s club. – Okay. Alright.”
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
My wife and I have a lot more time to spend with our kids and we do spend a lot more time with them than probably 90%, 95% of other parents. So, there's no reason to feel guilty for those occasional times when we are occupied with other things. And so, no, I think that we're doing a pretty good job in trying to set a good example.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
And to your point about the times where you actually are doing work, when you could be hanging out with them doing certain things, they should realize that some work is being done to provide this wonderful home that we live in and these vacations and trips that we take, and the money is coming from somewhere, right? And so, they see you at work, they realize, “Okay, yeah, that's how that works.”
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah. What about you, Nisha?
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
I don't know if it's like the mom and me and the mom guilt in me, but the one thing that I have been super protective of now that I have switched my job situation is that I pick up the kids from school every day and then I'm with them until basically bedtime, if at all possible.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
There are exceptions to that occasionally. Like you Jim, I'll have evening events or something like that and that'll be a time for Craig to be upstairs with the kids. But we try to make sure that now that we have the ability to spend time with the kids, and honestly, with each other too. If the kids are showering, Craig and I will go every day and go take a walk for 35 minutes or 40 minutes or whatever, and catch up on each other's time.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
And so, I have been better about putting boundaries on work because I think that's something for me, at the end of the day to feel good about the life that we've created. I need to know that we're making the most of it. And so, that means that I usually start working at 05:30, 06:00 o'clock in the morning, but I'm done by 02:30, 03:00 o'clock. And then I'm with my family for the times where they're there with me.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
To your point, Leif, your kids are homeschooling right now so they're around a lot more. But my boys are gone and Craig is gone working until at least 03:30 or so. And so, that time is my time, but then after that, my time is their time.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah, for sure. It can be a challenge. All right. Here's another one that I find particularly difficult. I don't know if you guys can relate to this or not, but I get this sense sometimes and it makes me feel very anxious just knowing that I'm not immortal. Not only not immortal, but that I'm going to age and I'm going to lose ability, physical ability as I get older.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
And there's a lot of things I want to do in my life. I enjoy adventuring. It might be rowing, might be canyoneering, might be climbing. A lot of these things that I want to do in my life I'm not going to be able to do in my 60s or 70s or 80s. And I feel this angst to get out there and do these things. And it's all recreation. It's not work, it's recreation, but things that I can do now but not later.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
And that almost provides a source of stress in my life, making me feel like I got to get out. And this is from someone who spent literally a hundred plus days last year, either sleeping under the stars or in a foreign country traveling. So, it's not like I'm not getting out doing stuff, but I often feel this pull, to get out and do it even more because I know there's only a limited number of years before I won't be able to do those sorts of things. Does that ever cause either of you any stress?
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
That's a ringing endorsement for early financial independence right there. You see and you hear so many stories of people that always want to do such and such and then they have a heart attack a week before they were about to retire.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
Yeah. So, does it cause me stress? No, because I made the same decision you did to eliminate certain… Well, I eliminated the physician work entirely, and that gives us the time to go out and do these things while we're young, while we're capable, before we have our hips replaced and our knees replaced or whatever it may be, that will slow us down someday. So yeah, that's where I'm at. How about Nisha?
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
Well, I'm not as adventurous as Jim. I am not out there canyoneering or anything like that, but I do feel very strongly that every day, we actually have this tradition now that I've kind of implemented in our family just for myself. But at the end of every day, we have to say one thing that was really awesome about the day. And I've kind of told myself, if I can't say that one thing that was great, then again, I'm doing something wrong.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
And so, whether it's just all the things that I couldn't do when I was in the thick of it, I'm like, I got to do one thing that I couldn't do. Whether it's I called a friend and talked to them for fun, or whether it's I read a book or I took a bath, or I did something that I wouldn't have been able to do.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
And for me as a radiologist, honestly, even the effect that I can sit and work and look outside of the window. North Carolina's got a lot of wildlife and it's always running around in my backyard. And that for me is a really nice thing because I spent a lot of time boxed up in a room that was dark and had no windows.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
So, I think that it is really important to me to make sure that we're making the most of every day. And I think as physicians, we know better than anyone that tomorrow is never guaranteed. Jim, I'm sure in the ER you are constantly sort of faced with, and the same thing with radiology. I'm always coming across these diagnoses in young people and it's a constant reminder that you got to kind of make the most of everything.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
And we've had a few scares within our family over the past few years. My husband got into a really bad car accident while he was sitting in traffic, and some guy came barreling down the highway who was 89 years old in a trailer and smashed into the back of Craig's car, and literally the car looked like an accordion. And how he got out of that car alive, I don't know. But he was two days in the ICU.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
I think they were sort of eye-opening things that were kind of like we do a lot in medicine where we delay gratification for a long time. And I think it's important for all of us to make sure that we're living our lives while we're doing those things, whether we're financially independent or not. It's just important to make sure that you don't always assume that there's a tomorrow.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah. All right. I want to turn to one other subject before we finish this podcast, and that is the subject of travel. All of us have done a fair amount of travel in the last few years, enough travel that any normal person that looks at how much travel we've done is normally pretty intensely jealous. We do it a little bit differently. My travel tends to be pretty high paced. Leif's done a fair amount of slow travel.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
But what I want to talk about a little bit is this idea that lots of people have that they want to retire so they can travel. And then how much is too much travel? When you have the time to do as much as you want, how do you decide how much you actually want?
Dr. Jim Dahle:
So, let's start, again with you on this one Leif. This has been a big part of your identity, a big part of what you've written about at the Physician on FIRE. Let's talk about travel and its place in your life. How other people maybe view travel and how you decide when you're doing enough?
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
Right, right. When I left medicine, my kids were, I believe, 8 and 10, maybe close to 9 and 11 years old, and they're 12 and 14 now. And so, our travel is almost always family travel. It's the four of us going places. And so, we're incorporating education and culture and all of those things into our boy’s curriculum giving them a good worldview hopefully to be well rounded individuals as they grow up.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
And so, our ideal, I think when we started out, was maybe four to six months at home, which is Northern Michigan and with some domestic travel in there. And then maybe six to eight months of big travel being far away, traveling for months at a time. That got interrupted by Covid obviously, but we've still been able to do trips of two to three months length.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
We started braces for my older son, phase two of Orthodontics, when Covid hit because we knew we wouldn't be traveling that much. So now we can only go away for about eight weeks at a time. But we've taken four trips of four to six weeks this year. I think a total of about five months of travel so far in 2022, most of that overseas.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
And one thing we've realized is the more we're away, the more difficult it is to really have a solid relationship with friends at home and to be part of a community back at your home base. And there are people that travel full time, they sell everything, they retire, they take off, and they just go from place to place with a backpack and rolling suitcase or something, and no home base.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
And I just can't imagine not being able to go home. That's not the lifestyle that we want. Certainly, I don't think that's great for the kids to not have a home that feels like home in a safe, secure place.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
But it's an evolving kind of thing. And we're about to go back to traditional school as my older son enters high school. And so, we'll probably get more embedded in the community and strengthen those ties to local people and perhaps organizations and whatever we decide to do with our time. But I've enjoyed being away up to a few months at a time and really just getting immersed in other places.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Have you felt like you've crossed the line to too much travel at any point in the last few years?
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
Nope. Hasn't happened.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
All right. Nisha?
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
We're not exactly in the same position because my husband still does work full time and he can't be away from the practice for three weeks at a time or four weeks. It's not like ER or radiology where I can group my shifts and then have an extended period of time off.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
For us, we are taking his seven weeks of vacation now, but we are also doing a lot of weekend travel, which is something that is very different now that we can afford it. We will spend the money to get away once or twice a month on the weekends and maybe we'll take one day on either side or something like that. But we do a lot more of that kind of travel than, “Hey, we're going away for three weeks at a time or four weeks at a time” just because we're still in it in terms of the medical lifestyle and vacation constraints and call schedules and things like that.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
So, we've really made it a concerted effort to go visit friends, go visit family, go to random places that we haven't been, and just go for three or four days and get away for a weekend. But our kids are in traditional school. My husband's still working, so we don't exceed that seven-week amount for travel. And a lot of that is we will take a few weeks concentrated. And then the other ones are sort of spread out over family events and weekend trips and things like that.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
So, I don't necessarily think that I would like to be doing more travel. I always tell my husband he's the weakest link because I can work from anywhere. But I don't think that there is such a thing as too much travel except to your point Leif about you don't want to feel as you're escaping from your real life so much that you don't have a community at home and you don't maintain the connections with the people that mean a lot to you at home. And sometimes we will feel that where…
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
Yeah, you do miss up family, family things, friends, all of that. You come back, you're like, “Oh, that happened? What? Why didn't I hear about this?” You're out of sight, out of mind.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
Yeah. I think like this summer we spent a lot of time. We took some big trips. We went to Greece for two weeks. We did some things and we were gone pretty much every weekend this summer. And we realized we hadn't seen our friends in Charlotte for three months basically throughout the summer. And we were like, “Okay. That was probably a little bit much.”
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
So, I guess there's a balance, but I don't know, travel is our favorite thing to do in terms of being able to do something that we couldn't do before because of money. And so, I'm not at a point where I would say we do too much. I would still love to do more.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah. I've had a chance to really experiment with this over the last few years. The longest trip I've really been gone and unplugged from was my Grand Canyon float trip. That was 23 days off the grid, no cell phone coverage. I was sending a satellite message on my inReach to my family and 18 characters a night or whatever. But that was unplugged and it took about six months to prepare for that. In order to get everything ready, to be able to go and do that sort of a trip took a lot of preparation.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
But one-week trips are easy. They've been easy. To take a one-week trip is very easy for an emergency doc. You wedge all your shifts into the rest of the month and you go. I've been doing that my whole career. And what I've been able to do as a cut back on shifts is do more and more and more of those.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
And what I've discovered is that I have crossed that line where I'm like, “I don't want to travel anymore.” I'm doing some travel for work, obviously out doing speaking gigs or whatever. And I’m doing some travel just to go on an adventure and some travel with family and some travel just with Katie.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
And I have definitely crossed that line multiple times where I'm like, “I'm traveling too much. All of a sudden, I can't do the volunteer work I do at church. I'm having to rely on my assistant coaches where I coach my son's hockey team. I'm missing all kinds of games and practices. I'm missing my own hockey games. I live at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains where I can go skiing and climbing and mountain biking and I go three or four months and I'm like, “I haven't even been mountain biking this summer because I'm spending all the time when I'm not working somewhere else traveling.”
Dr. Jim Dahle:
And what I've discovered is there's a certain amount of traveling I like and beyond that point, it's not that fun for me. And the problem is my spot where that comes before Katie's spot. Katie likes traveling more than I do. And so, the solution is she's starting to go on trips without me. She goes on trips with friends or whatever. They're going to Kenya, Tanzania next fall. They're going to climb Kilimanjaro and going to Safari and she'll be gone for two and a half weeks and I'm going to stay here.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
Wow.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
I'm going to spend time with the kids. I'm going to spend time working and probably not going to be doing any other recreation just because the kids are going to be here. They're definitely the limiting factor in just how much travel we can take.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
But there are definitely times where I get toward the end of the year and I'm like, “I just want to stay home. I haven't been home and had a day off now for weeks and weeks or whatever it might be. And so, I hope everybody gets that opportunity to travel so much that they're like, “I don't want to travel anymore.” And I need a month or two of not going anywhere sometimes just to want to go do it again.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
For example, this month we're going to spend a week in Jamaica, we're going to spend a week in Columbia. And if I look back over the last couple of years, we've had more months like that than we have had months where we didn't go anywhere.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
I think it's one of those things that everybody thinks they want to travel more. And I encourage you to travel more until you get to the point where you realize maybe it's not all that, particularly when you're having to be back in a week.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Our kids are not homeschooled. We cannot take them to Columbia and continue their education the way Leif has set up these slow travel trips. We got to get back at a certain point, whether we're getting back to the kids or getting the kids back to their thing. Really, we've only got eight or 10 weeks in the summer to be able to really be away as far as they go. But even then, they've got camps they want to be at, they've got activities with friends, they're playing on sports teams.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
And it's very hard I think to completely unplug a whole family and move them away for two or three months. And that has to be a real major goal, something you very much want because there's a lot of things you have to give up in order to do that sort of travel.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
Yeah. And I think our kids are now at an age where they've got basketball practice, they've got tennis practice. They also are building things, and they have friendships that they want to maintain. They used to go to my parents for a few weeks every summer and now they're kind of like, “Well, maybe we'll just go for two weeks because we don't want to be away from our friends for longer than that” or whatever.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
And so, as they build their own lives, I think we're also kind of shaping what we do around that. And then I think the other thing is all three of us have other projects also that we're working on. And it's hard to get away and then constantly get back into the mode of if I'm in the middle of an advocacy thing or something like that, nothing stops just because I go on vacation. There's always this question of “How am I planning my vacation so that I can truly be off the grid?” And I'm not at a point yet where I can be truly off the grid for long, long periods of time between the different things that I want to do.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
I really enjoy the advocacy stuff and I really enjoy the health policy stuff and some of the other stuff that I'm doing these days. And so, I still feel like I have a job. It's not as defined as it used to be but there's still a lot of stuff that I feel like is my responsibility right now. Every time you want to get away, to your point, Jim, you got to plan to be away. And sometimes that is more exhausting than you feel like you need a vacation from your vacation, from your planning for vacation.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah, Leif is over there smiling because he's like, “I don't have to do that. What are you talking about?” And it's true.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
What I found is that…
Dr. Jim Dahle:
You do have to plan to get away.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
The fatigue of travel comes when you're doing three days here, two days there, five days here, bouncing, bouncing, bouncing. And so, what has worked for us is to spend one to two, up to four weeks at a time in one place, in one Airbnb, in one city, and then exploring everything there is to see there but not every day. Maybe every other day, every third day you do something big and other days maybe you take a walk or a run, go to the park, go out to eat.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
But it's not like we have to do all the sightseeing and see everything you can see in Athens in four days because we have four days. It's like, no, we're here for, like you said, you were at Greece for a couple weeks, but maybe you're bouncing around from island to island.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
No, we just sat in Crete for a few weeks.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
There you go. So that's nice. That's how you don't get tired of travel.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
Yeah, that was nice. I think that we have actually slowed down our travel quite a bit now because we're like, “You know what? We're going to have the time. We're going to have the weeks. We don't need to go to a country and do everything that we need to do. We're going to pick one city, hang out there for a while, really get to know it and then come back.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
Yeah. That's the way to do it.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
Our travel has definitely slowed down over the last few years in terms of saying let's just pick one place. Let's stay there for a week, let's really get to know it, or stay there for two weeks and really get to know it. So, that has been really, really nice.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
But I know Jim and I were joking around yesterday that you do things right, in the sense that you're really enjoying your FI life. I don't know that either one of us has quite gotten there yet, but hopefully.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah, it's difficult when you go someplace, like we did this trip to the Balkans this fall. We were there in Sarajevo. Chances that I'm going back to Sarajevo ever again in my life are low. I'm almost surely not going back there. And so, when I'm there and I'm there for 48 hours, it's like I either see it now or never. And that is hard for me to put my feet up and hang out in the hotel lounge all evening when it's like or I can go see something I'm never going to see again.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
And so, I think a lot of us feel that way when we travel and it makes it hard to do the slow travel thing just because you're only going there once probably. Maybe if it's Paris or something, you'll be there multiple times. But there's a lot of destinations we go to that we're probably only going once in our life.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
Yeah.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
All right. Well, our time has come short. I appreciate both of you coming on and talking with our audience about life after FI, how it involves work, how it involves travel, how it involves children, particularly when you reach those milestones relatively early in your career, to talk about angst and stress and what it looks like when it's not financial. And I appreciate you both coming on.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
You can learn more about Dr. Mehta’s work at physiciansidegigs.com. You can learn more about Dr. Dahleen’s work at physicianonfire.com. Thank you for coming on the podcast both of you today.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
Thanks for having us.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
Thank you for having us. It's been a lot of fun. I look forward to seeing you in person at WCICON. I think we'll all be there.
Dr. Nisha Mehta:
Yes.
Dr. Leif Dahleen:
Awesome.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
All right. I hope you enjoyed that presentation. I hope it's fun to hear about people who have made it and how life maybe doesn't get super simple afterward, that it's still complicated even when you take off the “I need to work for money” piece of the piece of life out of it. It can still be complicated. It can still be difficult. You still have problems. It might be first world problems, but the truth is all we ever talk about on this podcast are first world problems.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Our sponsor today, PearsonRavitz, they are disability and life insurance advisors founded by and for physicians. They are White Coat Investor recommended agency grew out of one MD's experience with a career-changing on-the-job injury.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Today, PearsonRavitz serves the medical community in all 50 states. At PearsonRavitz, they help you as a doctor safeguard your most valuable asset, your income so you can protect the most important people in your life, your family. They make human connections before they make quotes. Go to www.pearsonravitz.com/wci today to schedule your consultation with a PearsonRavitz advisor.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Don't forget about that Burnout Proof webinar. You can sign up for that whitecoatinvestor.com/burnoutwebinar. That'll take place January 12th. It'll introduce you to that coaching service, and that community that can help you with your number one risk to your physician income.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
The truth is, you can ensure against death, you can ensure against disability. You can't ensure against burnout. So, if you're even starting to have an inkling of burnout, I recommend you check that out. Learn some tips and techniques and things that can help with that so you can have career longevity so all your financial stuff works out better when you can work longer and enjoy your work for long.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Also, don't forget about our survey partners. They want your opinion. They will pay you for it. Go to whitecoatinvestor.com under the “Recommended” tab, “Surveys for Money”, and you can sign up with them there.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Thanks for those leaving us a five-star review or telling your friends about the podcast. Our recent review saidd, “I highly recommend the great host, great guests. Amazing content.” Five stars. Thank you very much for that review.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
For everybody else, keep your head up, your shoulders back, you've got this, and we can help. We'll see you next time on the White Coat Investor podcast.
Disclaimer:
The hosts of the White Coat Investor podcast are not licensed accountants, attorneys, or financial advisors. This podcast is for your entertainment and information only. It should not be considered professional or personalized financial advice. You should consult the appropriate professional for specific advice relating to your situation.
“At some point, it’s our fault if we’re complaining because we have the ability to get rid of that thing.” Thank you! Going to work on putting this mindset into action (with care of elderly parents at this point in our life).
So much has been discussed about physical activities, especially traveling, during the go-go years after retirement.
Mental activities to acquire DEEP understanding of knowledge, such as music, art, literature, can be more challenging and rewarding. To be able to appreciate at a profound level, one should learn to perform the skills. This capacity generally diminishes as we age.
Great tip. I have this weird dream to become a talented violinist. The cards are definitely stacked against me (not musically talented), but maybe one of these days I’ll get started.
Thanks for the thoughtful discussion. It is a weird feeling and blessing to work through the ‘challenges’ of FI. This is exactly where I am. I have just resigned from a position that has been sucking the life out of me and it is liberating. But sorting through all the guilt of what is expected of physicians is surprisingly difficult. After a break from clinical work, I would love to find the right job that gives me balance and makes me excited about medicine again. This sabbatical is only possible because of my financial independence. Thanks WCI.
Thank you for the great perspectives. Enjoyed your last comment about becoming a violinist. I’m a 71 year old gastroenterologist still working. Wow. That is so shocking seeing that in print. But I started college as a violin major along with my premed courses. I’m finally retiring in one year and hope to pick the fiddle up again. I strongly encourage you.