Last week, I had the pleasure of chatting with Dr. Stephanie Zhou on her Breaking Bad Debt YouTube Channel. Stephanie and I have co-lectured about finance for physicians over the last couple of years. She also founded the Canadian Physician Financial Wellness Conference. If you missed last year’s great line-up, hopefully you’ll join us in the fall.
We have had some great conversations offline about finance, career, and work-life balance. Our perspectives are complimentary (early family medicine vs the second half as a subspecialist). Today, we share some of that with you, focused on how I handled my early practice & how I have been implementing my retirement plan.
0:00 – Intro
1:07 – What Dr. Soth is doing in retirement now
5:38 – Dr. Soth’s Career as an ICU Doctor
9:32 – Getting Married & Having Kids
13:14 – Starting The Loonie Doctor Blog on the Side
27:09 – When did you become Financially Independent?
32:24 – Talking to wife about retiring early
34:51 – Deep Dive into Dr. Soth’s Tax-Efficient Investment Portfolio
39:36 – Asset Allocation of Dr. Soth’s Portfolio
42:49 – Bonds – why don’t you have them?
46:31 – Preparation before retirement
51:47 – Whole Life Insurance in Retirement Planning
56:32 – IPPs: Was that in your retirement planning?
58:58 – Best/Worst Investment? Marriage Advice?
Ground Covered In This Episode About Retirement Planning
Early career as an intensivist.
What intensivist work-life is like and how we improved that. How we balanced getting married, having kids, and busy careers. It will be different for everyone, but I share how it unfolded for us.
Plans change as you change.
How my career and flirtation with FIRE has unfolded. I struggled with work-life balance. Financial independence has been a great tool for me to affect change. That changed the “retire early” part for me. For now.
Starting a blog and blogging as a side gig.
There are lots of bloggers out there and stories about physicians and their side gigs. We discuss how that has worked for us with the financial and time investment.
Knowing when you are financially independent.
We moved away from a specific number and shifted our processes.
Co-ordinating with your spouse.
Always do this. Build and grow compatibly whatever stage you are in. How we try to foster that in our relationship.
How our investment portfolio is organized.
We have built a tax-diversified portfolio to mitigate risk, income split, and give us more options.
Our current asset allocation and thoughts behind it.
We have a bit of an unorthodox asset allocation. Find out why and how I plan to move forward.
Portfolio changes as retirement approaches.
I discuss why we don’t have a bond allocation anymore. There are other ways to manage sequence risk as retirement approaches. Find out what we did.
Thoughts on permanent life insurance and Independent Pension Plans.
We have some permanent life insurance. Find out how it fits in and what I have learned about that. We don’t have an IPP, but it could be valuable for some people. I discuss my thoughts on why decided against it.
Some rapid-fire personal questions.
You have to make it to the end to get the dirt!
Other Great Episodes From Breaking Bad Debt
Stephanie has been building some great videos about personal finance for physicians. I actually link to some of them in my posts where they naturally fit. However, here are a few other great episodes & a few highlights from our last Physician Wellness Conference (hopefully to entice you to join us for next year).
Always enjoy your insight and grateful for your contributions!
Thanks BC Doc. I am learning as I go.
-LD
Pure gold presentation. Thanks for taking the time to simplify such complex issues for physicians!
Allocating more of my full stock portfolio now to brokerage GIC’s and short term money market ETF’s getting 4.5%. Looks like rates may go up to 6% soon.
Planning to hit the ejection seat in 5-10 years !