[Editor’s Note: I originally posted this within a couple months of starting the blog. It has remained one of the most popular pages on the entire website, so I thought I’d give it a revamp, splitting up the original super-long post into 4 separate posts, making it easier to read, and categorizing some of the mistakes. Don’t worry though, all 175 of the biggest financial mistakes are still here!]
Whenever possible, it is best to learn from the financial mistakes of others rather than your own. For example, I’ve made the mistake of using a commissioned financial advisor who sold me crappy, expensive, loaded mutual funds; I’ve bought whole life insurance, and I’ve incurred unnecessary taxes in a taxable account due to not fully understanding the kiddie tax laws.
Luckily, these mistakes pale in comparison to financial errors made by some of our colleagues. A recent thread on Sermo revealed a lot of the big financial mistakes other physicians have made before you, and I’ve detailed them below in this and the other 3 posts in this series:
Stupid Doctor Tricks Part 2
Stupid Doctor Tricks Part 3
Stupid Doctor Tricks Part 4
Consider this a financial “Morbidity and Mortality Conference.” Painful to listen to sometimes, but better than having to make each mistake on your own. Add your experiences as a comment at the end of this post.
Doctors’ Biggest Financial Mistakes
#1 Getting Ripped Off
- Working with a “financial planner” who specializes in working with physicians and almost got me into whole life insurance
- Overpaying for legal advice ($3500 to review an employment contract)
- Buying a universal variable life insurance policy as an “estate plan”
- Investing with Bernie Madoff
- Listening to brokers/financial planners/coin dealers
- Not realizing that the goal of brokers is to take your money and make it theirs
- Giving OTHERS control of substantial sums of MY money
-
Turn someone else’s financial headaches into your cure for success with money.
Hiring an expert to manage my money. This guy charged 1% per year on the balance. Got a call from the fraud division of the FBI and they seized all my money. After about 2 yrs sweating got it back without interest. Taught me to learn about investing. I decided I may not be a pro, but I won’t steal my own money
- Investing (before I learned about personal finance) through a professional who gave “free” advice steering me to load mutual funds and life insurance with high fees
- Listening to an attending during med school for stock pick advice
- Paying a lawyer to do my tax returns for 10 years . . . He charged $10,000 for a return that a national tax preparation company does for $1,500 or less
- Allowing myself to get talked into a variable annuity when I was a chief resident. Bought it at roughly market peak; it sank with the market in 2001-2002; paid lots of charges and surrender charges when I got rid of it three years later to buy my first house, and due to nature of variable annuity, I didn’t even get to write the losses off on my taxes… Stay away from those RIPOFF variable annuities; get a tax-deferred or even taxable account like everyone else
- Relying on money managers for too great a percentage of my net worth… It’s best to learn enough to oversee a lot of your assets on your own
- Bought front-loaded mutual funds
- Getting ripped off to the tune of 11 k for a real estate closing by my lawyer who charged by the hour. Took his fees right out of the mortgage check before I ever saw it
- Buying time share, buying a variable annuity, buying whole life insurance and depending on brokers to make financial decisions
- Stock tips from friends, relatives, or cab drivers should be avoided at all costs Those free financial newsletters are just scams. What they touted are probably their own holding which they will sell when your rush to buy them pushes up the stock price transiently before they fall off the cliff.
There is a common theme here and it is one I tackle frequently on this blog. You need to be very aware of how, and how much your advisors are paid. This includes financial planners, stockbrokers, insurance agents, realtors, attorneys, accountants, and investment managers.
As a general rule, people don’t go into these fields for the same reason firemen and kindergarten teachers choose their jobs. There is no Hippocratic Oath among financial professionals. It is your job to understand how much you’re paying and whether that is a fair price. Understanding how the person advising you makes their money also helps you understand their conflicts of interest.
#2 Insurance Issues
- Not buying disability insurance
- Mentioned a few divorce-related situational depression issues resolved in the past on a disability insurance application
- Not getting OWN-OCCUPATION disability insurance on the first day of residency
- Bought too much useless, expensive insurance
Well, no one said they wished they’d bought more life insurance. Of course, there’s a real survivorship bias there. All those dead guys who should have bought more aren’t here to tell us. Buy plenty of the insurance you need and avoid the insurance you don’t.
#3 Personal Finance Issues
- Using credit cards
- Buying too big of a house
- Should have listened to Dave Ramsey and completed his course about 8 years earlier
- Spent too much on a wedding
- Credit card debt in med school
- Marrying a fiscally irresponsible spouse
- Spending $600 to replace the clutch on a $1000 car then donating it to charity 2 months later
- Sending my kids to a private college in the future (50K a year, what a waste!)
- Quitting one job before I had another (thankfully savings helped me through that transition)
- Buying a used jeep and not noting it was burning out its engine from an oil leak
- Not being aware of recurring automatic charges. I signed up for AOL when it first came out. Had automatic recurring credit card charges of $24.95 a month for over 14 years (wife paid the bills) for essentially nothing that you cannot get for free now. Just stopped it when our credit card had to be changed.
- Not saving as much as possible early in my career to take advantage of compound interest
- Allowing lifestyle to creep upwards with increasing financial success
- Keeping the house in the divorce — I had to spend $76K repairing it to then short-sell at a >$200K loss. I’ll be paying on the loan I had to take for the repairs for the next 15 years
- Giving my daughter a credit card (for “emergencies”) when she entered college in Boston
- Not starting 529 plans for kids early enough, not investing aggressively enough
There you have it. A lot of accumulated experience that may save you thousands. Add your experiences to the comments below.
These are mistakes made every day by millions of people. They aren’t particularly specific to doctors, but doctors certainly make them as much or more than other people. Spend less than you earn, be wise with your cash, and if, heaven forbid you get divorced, take the 401K, not the house.
This is the end of Stupid Doctor Tricks Part 1 of 4. Continue on to Part 2. Or better yet, leave a comment below noting one or more of your own financial errors. Too many of us feel that talking about money is taboo, so we just keep making the same mistakes over and over again.
What are your biggest financial mistakes? Share your experiences and let others benefit from them, just as you’ve benefited from seeing others’ mistakes.
Hi!
great summary/post its a ton of valuable information that i’m glad to be learning before my wife leaves residency in a year.
Here are mine
– not maxing out 527s and 403bs in residency so we can convert to a roth later
– not truly understanding the impact that taxes have on compounded returns
– trying to save too much money that I ended up wasting time
– having no clue about disability insurance and other types of insurance doctors should get early
things that we did right:
– keeping our living expenses low
– becoming a fan of warren buffett
– avoiding the real estate crash
Do you mean 529 plan? A 527 is a tax-exempt political organization. If so, 529s can’t be converted to Roths, they basically already are Roth education IRAs. The 403bs could be converted though.
some of the comments are a little silly. im pretty sure people attempt to find the correct spouse and the ideas on avoiding children are a little ridiculous. maybe over time one can try and better categorize these issues so they are easier to digest and search. my huge mistake is falling for a 412i/e plan with Guardian. This link does a reasonable job of explaining the problem.
http://lifeauditors.com/editorials/white-paper-412e-db-plans.htm
@rex good point on the categorizations. (I personally found the quips pretty hilarious.)
But I did actually take this list, paste it into a notepad and separate out “non-doctor specific mistakes” to “mistakes that are doctor specific” so that I could see just the doctor specific issues.
Being a boglehead wannabe, it was useful to see since I already felt pretty confident on the general mistakes.
@whitecoatinvestor
Oops i meant 457. goodness…all these numbers….cant keep them straight
Interesting. There should be post here about what things doctors should do (like roth ira, start savings asap) and which ones to avoid (annuties, huge emp contarct fees etc)..
Silver-
You must have missed the rest of the blog/website.
I guess he feels this should be your full time job. I’m impressed with the speed you are currently bringing out articles and that overall you make a real attempt to reduce bias. I personally think most residents are going to have a hard time contributing to a Roth but maybe things are different now. I lived paycheck to paycheck and was fairly frugal. Still it’s a good goal and some likely can do it.
Interesting read, i like this site. WCI is a straight forward interesting character. Great advice.
obviously like your website however you need to check the spelling on several of your posts. A number of them are rife with spelling issues and I to find it very troublesome to inform the truth nevertheless I will definitely come again again.
Fantastic List! lol. Even if you aren’t a doctor. I’m forwarding this to all my buddies.
Sorry about the spelling Vegetarian. Many of the financial errors on this page were directly copied and pasted, including the spelling mistakes. At least they’re not in doctor handwriting!
Hi there, I found your site by way of Google while looking for a similar topic, your site came up, it seems to be great. I’ve bookmarked it in my google bookmarks.
Great list, brand new out of residency in July. Lots of good advice on here. Started reading and googling when my financial advisor was charging a $100/month “retainer fee” as well 1% for all investments. Got a little concerned. Now I am more concerned after reading your blog. I have 3 appts with new guys this week and am loading up on the interview questions for them. I am taking your advice to heart, reading, listing and learning as much as I can.
Wow!! Did number 8 on “Get ripped off” really happen to you. That’s crazy!
Remember this list is generated from responses from dozens of doctors. Thankfully very few of these things have happened to me personally!
Glad to hear it. Some of these are horrific…
– Recommending a VA to a resident???? That’s criminal.
That are some cool ways to rip some one off.. The karma – that goes around comes around …
A comment on Financial Advisors–most will want to take control of all your money and charge you 1% per year, to invest in mutual funds that have fees and high costs, with no assurance that they will actually succeed in making money for you in the end. I recently found a CFP who works on an hourly basis and my wife and I are planning to meet with this person to ask specific question, such as, are we on track for retirement, should we alter our insurance plans, what can we do to reduce taxes, etc. The initial get-acquainted meeting is free. Once we come up with actions plans I will just implement them myself. I think this approach has the benefit of lower costs, more control, and my wife (who is also a physician) and I will be on the same page, so to speak. The CFP we found has a set menu of fees for various levels of advice and planning, so costs are fixed and known up-front. Few financial planners operate this way but I found this web site helpful to try to locate one in your area:
http://www.fpanet.org/PLANNERSEARCH/PlannerSearch.aspx
There is a network of 350 hourly financial advisors called the Garrett Financial Network who all work for hourly fees. But you’re right, it’s a rare model because it’s a tough way for them to make a living, and it’s tough to keep people coming back when the client has to physically fork over $200-800 every time they come see you.
Wow, this site is great. Found it on a CNN news story.
When reading this article, I thought I could add, what I consider one of the greatest barely known things by higher income earners, that being that a person could still get money into a roth with the method you had mentioned on this site. Looks like you beat me to it. It’s crazy how few people know this.
My spouse is a Doc. We’ve been through some of the mistakes mentioned above. Some to add in addition (may be repeats):
No maxing out our Roth contributions during residency
We missed a lot of opportunity in putting away, tax free forever retirement funds.
Wasting our time with a few junk advisory firms. Edward Jones, charging us a 6% fee to fund our IRAs, and then working, albeit briefly, with a “doctors only” financial advisor firm (L-O-L). I love how they act that they are specialists in tune with Doctor’s needs. No, they just know that every single doc likeley needs advice.
Wasting time, and allowing a life insurance salesman to steal air from our home on 2 occasions, both times, because it was difficult (for the wife) to say no and throw him out. My wife’s # was given to a donkey from Northwestern Mutual who spoke endlessly as to how a whole life policy was the solution to all of the world’s problems. Their policy was outrageously overpriced. They were aggressive and over the top in their sales approach. They even nagged phone numbers out of my wife for people to prospect. After that experience, we agreed that I would be the “NO man” and would stop all that crap before it got to them trying to hustle us.
We also made a big mistake when we relocated. We looked at houses for 4 days straight. The realtor, who was affiliated with my wife’s place of employment, showed us houses all at the highest end of our range and beyond. We ended up settling for an ok house and compromised in too many areas. We should’ve rented for 1 or 2 years and then taken our time to get exactly what we wanted. Now, we’re constantly trying to decide if we should look for the perfect home or try and be content in the one we now have. I know 2 docs that rented for 1-3 years and then got exactly the home they wanted when they decided to buy. I really wish we did this.
Some things we have done right:
I have been burning a lot of time working to understand and apply the tax code to our situation. No one cares about your money as much as you do, bottom line. For instance, once you hit a certain income threshold, your student loan interest is not deductible. If your rate on a student loan is 5% and is non-deductible, it’s true interest rate, to reflect the real cost of the money is much higher than other deductible debt, like a mortgage. Also, knowing how to fund a ROTH, despite the government’s punitive approach to successful people is great. Why would you invest into something that’s going to be aggressively taxed and not into something that will not?
We funded 529 plans for our kids this year and will save almost $1,000 in tax because of it.
Captured favorable tax consequences from relocating for her new job. Most, if not all of our moving expenses were deductible when we moved.
I’m looking forward to reading up here quite a bit. Thanks for putting it together and investing your own, limited time into it!
The more I read on this site, the more impressed I am with the depth of knowledge and almost always agree (except for the below). When I went in for an exam this week, I was reading an article on my iPad and showed your blog to my doctor. He did ask, “HOW does he find the time to do it?” I’ve been wondering the same!
In the above article you state,”…and if, heaven forbid you get divorced, take the 401K, not the house.” I couldn’t disagree more and, in fact, almost always encourage clients to take the house, if possible. Here’s the rationale: A 401k is taxable, proceeds from the sale of a residence (unless it has greatly appreciated) is not. And in divorce, assets are equalized as nearly as possible. So why would you advise against keeping a house appraised at $500k (instead of a $500k 401k) & then investing the proceeds? It’s basically a penalty-free, tax-free conversion of taxable to after-tax dollars.
That’s a good point Johanna. I can certainly think of times when it would be better to take the house. But bear with me here. You have to consider all the factors.
A fair divorce settlement would have to equalize the two assets. You’d have to take the value of the house, subtract out the mortgage, the costs of fixing it up and selling it, and then the taxes (if any) due on its immediate sale. Then you’d take the value of the 401K, subtract out the taxes and penalties of immediately liquidating it, and look at what’s left. Now you can compare apples to apples
But I submit that most people in a divorce probably don’t do any of those adjustments. Instead, they’re thinking of the house in non-financial terms – it’s the family nest where the kids are in schools and neighborhoods and churches with people they like. It also comes with liabilities, a mortgage payment due every month, insurance, maintenance, utilities etc. The 401K on the other hand, has no maintenance costs, and as long as you don’t liquidate it immediately, can have pretty low liquidation costs, especially if it is a Roth 401K. The 401K is also much more likely to increase in value in future years.
So yea, a $500K paid-off house liquidated immediately is probably worth something like $450K. A $500K 401K liquidated immediately is probably worth $300K. So take the house if that’s the situation. But if you’re comparing a $300K 401K and a $500K house with a $300K mortgage, I’d take the 401K. In the long run, the 401K will be worth more and you can liquidate it slowly in retirement without penalty.
Spooky how some of these are so familiar to me.
My biggest financial mistakes were: 1)taking buy-out by the “management” company that took over our clinic as stock – and holding it as it fell; and 2) not using the fee-only financial adviser I already knew for several years, trying to manage our savings and investments on our own. I finally did go back with his firm and that is the best financial decision I’ve made.
I’m glad you’ve found a good fee-only financial adviser you like!
Wow, it’s great that you have posted mistakes that you felt you have made. Many can learn from your experience. However, I also want to stress that everyone is unique. Not breaking even on Whole Life insurance? Serious? Whole Life insurance is to protect your loved ones in case of loss of life / income. It will break even when you die. It sounds like you’re viewing it as a sole investment. The benefits from Whole Life can vary greatly. I would highly recommend you speaking to your Financial advisor again.
Peace,
Steven Chao
One of the big downsides of a whole life insurance policy, a combination insurance/investing product, is that it may take a decade or more to break even (premiums paid=cash value), especially on a poorly designed policy. That can be a big bummer for people who really only had a temporary life insurance need anyway. I certainly count it as one of my bigger mistakes. I was still down 35% after 7 years.
One of the issue is that Whole Life Insurance should not be observed as INVESTMENT! If it is a sole vehicle as investment, then it SHOULD and WILL BE taxed. Whole Life insurance provide death benefit. If you have a Million in your stock portfolio, you will bet exactly ONE MILLION back (taxable), while a life insurance will use up much less to insure to pay your beneficiary ONE MILLION (non-taxable) + ADDITIONAL INVESTMENT (taxable) that you have placed else where…. Seriously missing the point of reducing the physician’s risks.
Everyone dies. It is simply a matter of when. Therefore the solutions are different for everyone. FYI, if you take the past 20 years, some Whole Life returned better than S&P Index. Like I wrote earlier, Whole Life Insurance is not an investment, but a vehicle to better use your $. It allows you to protect with a premium, yet allows you to divest the rest of your income toward areas of your choice… I haven’t even started with additional area of dividends and cash-value and non-taxable benefits…. If it is so bad, then why do nearly EVERY millionaire with taxable inheritance own Whole Life Insurance if they can. So ask yourself, what do they know that you may have missed?
many of the Whole Life Policies have an annual internal rate of return of 5.5% and higher (non-income taxable). That is comparable to a mutual fund with taxable net return (excluding fees) of around 8%… fyi, the GEOMETRIC AVERAGE for S&P 500 for the past 10 years is 7.6% (not yet taxed => after tax => 4.8%), for the past 50 years is 9.8% (after tax => 7%)… In another words, you are willing risk your hard earned $ for that extra 1.5%???? SERIOUS????? that is why money is always diversified. And that is why WHOLE LIFE – if you qualified has always been a vehicle recommend by responsible financial planners as one of the tools…. Unlike the self promoting TV shows lobbying for eyeballs.
Sorry, I rant.
Peace,
Steven Chao
Have you read the posts on this site about whole life? Your concerns and arguments have all been addressed dozens and dozens of times. They don’t need to be rehashed here. Perhaps this is the best place to start:
https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/debunking-the-myths-of-whole-life-insurance/