Highlights of Year 5: My Blog is Back Alive

When I started the Loonie Doctor in the fall of 2017, I was in oscillating stages of burn-out. Fortunately, the negative forces that pushed me there also caused me to pause and look around. I started paying more attention to what I, and my family, were sacrificing for diminishing returns. It was eye-opening and helped me to gradually rediscover a better balance. That process also gave me a new purpose. To share what I have been learning. It has been three years since I gave an update on the blog, but much has happened and I also want to give a peek at what I have in store for you.

What the heck happened?!?

When I left off with my last annual review at the end of 2019, I had big plans. As I had eluded to, we were at a crossroads regarding financial independence. What many don’t talk about with financial independence is that arriving there may not be an event, it comes in many flavors. Still, flirting with financial independence raises a big new problem. What to do with it.

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FIRE can make the usual mid-life crisis more explosive.

Choices are hard because you want to make good ones. Financial independence means that you can’t just say that you have no choice. Of course, FI was arriving for us around the age where many people have a mid-life crisis as they look behind and ahead at their lives. Couple that to financial independence, and BOOM! Explosive mid-life crisis. Way worse than a corvette and a comb-over.

Many people would have looked at our lives and think that we subsequently blew it all up. I was working full-time in an enviable clinical position and Chief of my Department with opportunities to advance. Instead, I cut back to full-time and made clear my intentions to take a pause on the leadership side.

We sold our huge country estate in the conservation area near where I worked and downsized to a moderate-sized house in a more average cost-of-living area. Our kids finished up their private school years and switched to public school. We literally got rid of a barn full of motorized toys – I mean serious work equipment.

Those choices were deliberate and we started execution of that plan in the fall of 2019. The pandemic unfolded just as we were moving and putting our monster house up for sale. That evil virus threw some wrenches in to the plan, but it has turned out well in the end. I hope to finally share our reasoning and lessons learned this coming year.

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The pandemic gave my blog a rest, but it is now revitalized.

The pandemic also caused my blog to go into a medically-induced coma as I had to ramp up my clinical and leadership roles.

That honestly un-burnt me out for a while. My skills were suddenly in demand, pushed in new directions, had a clear purpose, and were appreciated again. Well, that is quickly gravitating back to baseline now post-pandemic. I went down to half-time this past summer and the torch for my admin role is soon to be passed on.

With a little defibrillation and CPR, I revived The Loonie Doctor in September with a renewed sense of purpose.

The Loonie Doctor Mission is even more important now.

While I wasn’t blogging over the pandemic, I did spend time working with other like-minded physicians in developing and delivering financial wellness content in different formats. That helped me to further hone my mission and core messages. I also had to update my blogroll extensively due to blog births and extinctions.

While the pandemic helped to unburn me out, it has ravaged most of our colleagues in healthcare. A huge part of my ability to control burn-out has been my strong financial position and awareness of how to use it. This makes the mission of The Loonie Doctor to empower and inspire others to do the same more important than ever. Fortunately, over the last few years I have been able to collaborate with others rowing in the same direction using different media. Here are a few of them:

A More Organized Loonie Doctor

With the reboot, I have also decided to be much more deliberate in the content roll out. My goal is to have a comprehensive resource that is also organized into different sections and levels. That way, you can more easily get started if you are totally new and move through the material in a logical sequence. There are two main sections that I have been building out.

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Core Financial Curriculum

This section is based off of the curriculum that I have been delivering in live sessions, but with more details, links to evidence, more diagrams, and better jokes. While many people gravitate to investing when they think about finance, it is just one plank of building wealth and using it for maximum positive impact.

Investing is like a cool-looking power tool that you can use. Learning how money works, how to set goals, and how to use money towards them is like the reading the blue-print and instructions. Sure, you can just pick up the tool and go. However, you are less likely to get the result that you wanted and more likely to lose some digits along the way. I am probably about half-way through the core curriculum and will continue to roll this out over the year.

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DIY Investors Hub

The core curriculum helps with your financial planning and relationship with money. However, most people still find the investing aspects of a financial plan the most intimidating. A key part of that is trying to link together the basic knowledge required, the real-life actions, and some moral support.

So, I built the DIY Investors Hub to try and address the common barriers that prospective DIY investors encounter. It has basic training and an interactive step-by-step guide all linked together. With lots of “just-in-time” education, tools, and screenshots. This actually took several years and a few do-overs to build and I hope that people will use it to make their DIY investing journey better and easier. So, please share it with others considering DIY investing. Even veteran DIY investors can pick up some interesting tips and additions to their knowledge base.

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The Whole Enchilada

My focus previously was on advanced content that was hard to find elsewhere on the internet. Particularly, issues faced by high-income or incorporated professionals. That is still the lense that I write through. However, I hope to have a much broader impact by building up from the basics. The advanced content has been re-organized in the whole enchilada section.

I am extensively re-writing and refreshing the old advanced content and I have a lot of new advanced content planned. Part of the inspiration for the new content I am planning comes from the time spent building more advanced calculators and simulators. You can find some of them in the revamped financial calculator section.

I have learned a lot about efficiently paying salary vs dividends, building tax-efficient portfolios, and retirement drawdown strategies by building the relevant calculators. It will take many articles to explain what is happening under the hood, why, and to illustrate it with some case studies. That will be where I head next in the advanced curriculum of the site.

Blog Traffic

Most Popular & Most Under-Rated Posts

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Top 3 Posts

These were the top posts, by traffic, in 2022.

#1 Investing Through a Professional Corporation was by far the most popular (~9K views). I did an extensive re-write of this core knowledge post. I updated some tired-looking charts, but also added and changed many parts to better highlight how investing with a corporation works and could fit into a larger plan.

#2 Value Your Time Using Your TiMER proved quite popular. Knowing the after-tax value of your time is a key piece of information to make better financial decisions for both the earning and spending sides of the ledger. I also think the embedded calculator was fun (and surprising) for many readers to see how efficiently they exchange time and money.

#3 The Earning & Spending Trap fortunately got a lot of traffic. I am relieved because we are set up perfectly to take the bait and it is a hard one to get out of. Hopefully, this article helps prevent some tricky extractions.

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Top 3 Under-rated Posts

These are three posts that I thought were pretty important or good, but got very little traffic.

#1 & #2 are related. They were my articles about giving. I actually don’t approach this topic from a preachy-do-gooder standpoint. It is good, but learning to give well is a financial skill to make you happier. There is good evidence to support that and even how to maximize your satisfaction returns.

Giving tax efficiently can also redirect some of your dollars to things you care about rather than what the Government chooses. It can also be used to shift money out of your corporation into your personal hands more tax efficiently.

Perhaps these posts just had low traffic because they were relatively new. I think that they are the type of articles that people will come back to at the right time. The donation and tax efficiency post has a calculator and flowchart that are way more useful than anything else I have seen out there.

#3 Spending & Debt: A Chat With Future-You. The conflict of spending now vs later underlies many of the dilemmas we face in allocating our dollars. If we spend those dollars before we make them (debt), then our future-self pays the bill.

Framing it this way and considering how you will feel about it later is a great way to balance FOMO with SALO (Still Alive Later – Older) when you have to earn the already spent income. Future-You may seriously thank you for spending their money. Or they may have other words to share.

Plans for 2023

First of all, thanks for reading all the way to the bottom of this post. For those of you who have stuck with me through the pandemic, an extra thank you. I have plans to flesh out the Core Curriculum this year, support people using my DIY Investor Hub, and return to writing about some more advanced topics around investing and incorporation too.

One of my priorities is to revamp my Corp vs RRSP vs TFSA Calculator to make it more user-friendly and add a couple of features. It is a key illustrative device for long term planning and I know that a number of planners use it to show their clients. I have also been testing Robocorp SWAT (advanced portfolio builder) with semi-random returns over long periods and the results are pretty cool. Those tasks are extremely labor-intensive. So, I don’t have a timeline yet, but keep following The Loonie Doctor and you will be first to know.

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