Welcome to our annual report on how The White Coat Investor is doing in fulfilling our mission. We also report annually on our conflicts of interest. Given that WCI will have its 15th anniversary this May, this is the 15th of these state of the blog posts. Transparency is one of our most important values here. While that transparency hurts our business every now and then (look at the 100 other physician financial blogs that sprang up a decade ago), we know that your trust in us is our most valuable asset, and we guard that trust as carefully as we can. The name of this post is kind of silly now since WCI is far more than a blog, as you will quickly realize as you read through all of the cool things that happened in the last year.

Thank You for Being Part of Our Community

The White Coat Investor is, more than anything else, a community of doctors and other high-income professionals helping each other to be successful in finance, their careers, and their lives. I can only do so much, and even together with a great staff, we can only do so much. The rest of the awesome work going on out there in the community is being done by you. So, thank you. Not just for what you're doing in your career, but for your participation in this community. Your work matters. Truly. I wish I could share with you all of the “thank yous” I've seen just in my email box last year, and then you'd know the importance of what we're doing here.

Cool Stuff That Happened in 2025

Let's review all of the exciting stuff that happened in 2025.

#1 New Website

Perhaps the most important thing that happened was our new website being launched. While nobody likes change, the amount of grumbling about it was so amazingly low that it is a real testament to the work done by numerous members of the WCI staff on this project over the last couple of years. Take your victory lap; you deserve it. The website looks great, it runs great, and it serves more people better than ever before.

#2 Financial Boot Camp Podcast

Plenty of people discover WCI for the first time every year. Some of those folks are “podcast people,” meaning they prefer to learn via podcast. We've taught the basics in book, blog, and email format in the past, but for the first time in 2025, we set up a dedicated way to teach the basics in podcast/video format. We refer to this as the Financial Boot Camp Podcast. It's both a separate podcast and an add-on to our Milestones to Millionaire podcasts on the main podcast feed. Enjoy!

#3 Practice Management Recommended Page

For years, we have had recommended pages for just about any kind of financial service you may require, but now, we have a new one—practice management. Check it out!

#4 WCI Perks

Since the early days of the COVID pandemic, we've had a page that listed discounts for healthcare workers. We massively upgraded that in 2025 with “WCI Perks,” available to all WCIers that offers serious discounts on ALL KINDS of services. The most impressive discounts are probably with cell phone plans and travel, but check it out any time you're buying anything new.

#5 Released a New Online Course

Continuing Financial Education 2025 was released in the spring. It qualifies for 17 hours of CME but includes 40 hours of content you can watch or just listen to podcast style.

#6 White Coat Insurance Pays Off

A couple of years ago, we transitioned one of our product lines, insurance referrals, to a new structure. In an effort to serve WCIers better, we needed to have more visibility into what was actually happening to them when we referred them to our recommended agents. We wanted to make sure they were being sold the best insurance policies they needed and nothing else.

Naturally, we also wanted to make sure we were being paid fairly for those referrals. It turned out the best way to ensure both of those occurred was to simply share the sales commissions paid to the agents. We wouldn't get paid unless they got paid, but more importantly, we would become aware of exactly what they were getting paid for. Well, it turned out they weren't legally allowed to share commissions except with another insurance agent. So, we started an insurance agency, and now White Coat Insurance Services is essentially one of the largest physician disability insurance agencies in the country despite not selling policies directly.

This position has allowed us to do all kinds of things behind the scenes, influencing agents and insurance companies to do the right thing for WCIers for decades to come. We've also been exploring other ways in which we can help WCIers with their insurance needs beyond disability and term life policies, such as malpractice and home/auto policies. While there were some short-term costs, uncertainty, and risk associated with this structural change, I think, now that we're 2-3 years into the process, we can declare it a success in every way. Better service for WCIers, more profit for WCI, and real change in the industry for the better.

#7 White Coat Planning

An even more exciting change here at WCI involves another of our important “product lines,” referrals to financial advisors for those who need one. There just are not enough financial advisors out there offering good advice at a fair price for doctors and other high-income professionals. We keep partnering with the few we can find, and then they fill their practice in a year or two with WCI referrals. That results in them no longer needing to advertise at WCI, but more importantly, it results in them no longer taking on new WCIers as clients. That means we run out of places to send WCIers who need advisors. We need firms doing things the right way that can scale to meet the needs of hundreds of thousands of doctors. That doesn't exist, so we're building it.

We call it White Coat Planning, and you can read more about it at the link. Imagine a financial advisory firm created from the very start that does the right thing and scales up to do the right thing for more people every year. Planners want to plan, not “prospect” for more clients. The best advisors, the ones you really want advice from, don't want to sell. So, we thought we'd create a firm where they spend their time planning, not selling, and serving white coat investors the right way. It's pretty exciting for them, for us, and for you.

Right now, we've hired and are training planners, and we will soon be taking on new clients. While we can't take on clients any faster than we can hire and train advisors properly, we see this as a way to serve you better and to really change the industry. Either most other advisors have to change their practices and do things the right way, or all the clients are just going to move to White Coat Planning.

If you're interested in signing up for the no-commitment client interest list, you can do so here. If you're a planner interested in this awesome opportunity, you can get more info here. We are currently accepting applications for February interviews, and we will continue to hire new planners every few months.

The Numbers

WCI had another very successful year. Our website traffic is up 2.6% year over year. Pages on the website were viewed almost 8.5 million times. Pretty awesome. If you're in this space, you know that's actually pretty remarkable to have growth at all, given the 2025 changes in the Google algorithm and the rise of AI content, search results, and chat. The number of people in the WCI online communities (WCI Forum, subreddit, Facebook Group, and Financially Empowered Women–The FEW) increased by 14% (almost 30,000 new people). The subreddit now has 117,000 members (31% growth). The Forum is the oldest online community, and it's about to turn 10 years old.

Here's how many new people followed WCI on social media in 2025: 43,526, a 36% increase over the prior year. Instagram was the big winner with 68% growth—78,000 people now follow us there. Over 28,000 new people subscribed to our email newsletters in 2025, a 51% increase over the prior year, and 15,000 people signed up for one of the four live webinars we did last year (one each for students, residents, attendings/everyone, and real estate investors). The student Masterclass for 2026 is coming up on February 19; sign up here.

Here's how many people applied for the WCI Scholarship last year: 1,447, another huge increase. WCICON attendance increased in 2025, and it's set for another big increase this year. There's still room, both live and virtual, so we hope to see you in Las Vegas on March 25-28. We passed out tens of thousands of copies of The White Coat Investors Guide for Students again last year as part of our WCI Champions Program (it's maybe the most important thing we do all year). WCI profits were up 18%, the best growth we've seen in quite a while. We've almost recovered from the economic events of 2022.

Our most popular posts in 2025 were:

  1. The Backdoor Roth IRA Tutorial (as usual)
  2. How the One Big Beautiful Bill Act Will Affect Doctors (the most popular one written in 2025)
  3. Retirement Plan Contribution Limits (updated each year as soon as we dare)
  4. How Much Do Doctors Make (everyone loves comparing incomes)
  5. 150 Portfolios Better Than Yours (now with 200 portfolios)
  6. How to Do a Backdoor Roth IRA at Fidelity (if you do these at Fidelity or Schwab, please send me screenshots to update those posts)
  7. Retirement Spending Is Ridiculously Tax Advantaged (also new in 2025)
  8. How Trump's $100,000 H1B Visa Fee Will Affect Doctors (a hot topic in 2025)
  9. Doctors Don't Owe Society Anything (a fun rant about physicians feeling guilty about everything from parental leave to dropping call to early retirement)

Our Financial Educator of the Year award went to Dr. Viraj Modi. Winners of the WCI Scholarship include Narayan Dhimal, Catherine Shaw, Blanca Morales, Sesa Doshi, Nick Hakes, John Stalnaker, Aryan Abazari, Baylor Wiggins, Matthew Babayev, and Kendalynn Friend.

Staff Changes

We have a new staff member here at WCI, Miri Avinoam—a content marketing specialist, a graduate of FYFA, and our first new hire in a few years. We hope she feels part of the family very quickly. I'm looking forward to meeting her in person soon. White Coat Planning, a separate company, has hired a bunch of people, too, and if all goes well, it will continue to hire lots of people in the future.

We were all a little sad to see Andrew Paulson sort of leave WCI as StudentLoanAdvice.com becomes part of White Coat Planning. But we're thrilled to have that student loan expertise extended to all of the planners there. Nobody retired, and nobody quit in 2025. Our grand total of staff members actually leaving WCI over the last 15 years is still just two (one retired and one quickly realized remote work was not for her). Everybody is looking forward to the WCI staff retreat in Belize this year.

White Coat Investor Conflicts of Interest

This is probably the most important part of this post, even if it doesn't change much year to year. The White Coat Investor is a for-profit business. We believe this is the structure that helps us most to fulfill our vision and our mission, which we focus more on every year.

WCI is owned entirely by Katie and me, and the beneficiaries are Katie, our children, and a charitable foundation. While we share profits with our staff members and give lots of them away, there are no other owners or investors to whom we answer. Our conflicts of interest are unchanged from last year and include:

  1. We are incentivized to run content that relates to our advertisers’ businesses more frequently than other content. The content team is mostly separate from the business team, but the conflict still exists.
  2. We are incentivized to accept guest posts from financial professionals who advertise with us more frequently than those who do not, despite our policy to judge guest posts purely on the basis of the content. We do our best to follow it. We run very few sponsored posts and only to fund the WCI Scholarship, and even those generally have exceptionally high content quality.
  3. We are incentivized to recommend you purchase term life and disability insurance policies through our recommended agents.
  4. We are incentivized to recommend you refinance your student loans when perhaps it would not be a good move for you. I don't think we've ever done this, but we are certainly incentivized to do so.
  5. We are incentivized to recommend you seek out professional help with insurance, financial planning, investment management, student loan advice, purchasing and selling real estate, negotiating contracts, managing your practice, getting burnout coaching, and preparing your taxes when perhaps you could do some of that on your own.
  6. Since we have real estate investment advertisers, we are incentivized to discuss real estate investments more frequently than we otherwise might or more than we discuss traditional investments like index funds or alternative investments for which we do not have advertising partners.
  7. We are incentivized to accept advertisers who do not meet our high standards for recommendation to friends and family. We are constantly vigilant to minimize this conflict.
  8. We are incentivized to recommend you read financial books, including and especially our own.
  9. We are incentivized to recommend you take our financial courses and those of our affiliate partners.
  10. We are incentivized to recommend you attend WCICON.
  11. We are incentivized to encourage you to purchase from the WCI Store.
  12. We are incentivized against recommending content by others who have the same affiliate marketing partners or who compete for the same advertisers.
  13. We are incentivized to recommend you use the WCI Forum over other forums, the White Coat Investors Facebook group over others, the WCI subreddit over other subs, and the Financially Empowered Women (FEW) group.

OK, I think we've just about beaten the conflicts of interest horse to death, but in summary:

  • We are a for-profit business.
  • WCI is not a fiduciary, fee-only financial advisor (but we will refer you to many, including White Coat Planning soon).
  • We have conflicts of interest even though our heart is in the right place.
  • We are very transparent about our conflicts of interest so you can evaluate what you read/hear in the appropriate context.

WCI Resources You Should Know About

My head is spinning just to think of everything we've done in the last year. Over the years, I've learned that many of you have no idea about a lot of the stuff we're doing. So, I'm going to include a list of links to all of the resources (most of which are free) that we have put together for you over the years.

Overwhelming, isn't it? Sorry, we're just trying to help you in whatever way you prefer to be helped. Every one of these resources exists because at least one of you asked for it.

How You Can Help

  • Tell others about The White Coat Investor and share content: The younger they are in their career, the more likely they are to know about it, but there are still plenty who don't. A quick text or email link to a podcast or blog post could be life-changing.
  • Subscribe and like on YouTube: Popular stuff becomes more popular.
  • Leave a 5-star review on Spotify or Apple: Or whatever podcast player you use. Same principle.
  • Give us feedback: Both about content AND about advertisers. The reason WCI is so useful to you now is because so many WCIers have provided useful feedback over the years. Negative feedback may not be fun to hear, but it's way more useful than the positive kind. Like you, we prefer to get negative feedback privately. You can still just email us at [email protected].

What do you think? How did WCI help you last year? What surprised you the most?