Wealthy Mom MD with Bonnie Koo | The Truth About Your Clinical Income

186: The Truth About Your Clinical Income

One of the most common things I hear from my clients as well as from women physicians in general is that they’d love to work less, but they can’t take the financial hit of losing their clinical income. We'd love to work less especially for those of us with kids at home, but we feel trapped because we need our full-time income to survive.

However, there are a few things we need to address here. The idea that if you work less then you’ll earn less is just a thought. I know it feels true to you right now, but there is a whole world of opportunity you aren’t considering when your only focus is the money you receive for your clinical work as a physician.

Tune in this week to discover how it’s possible to work less without taking a massive financial hit. I’m sharing why your current income level is always temporary, your clinical income is never guaranteed, and I’m giving you some practical tips for working less, spending more time doing what matters to you without earning less money in the process.

Learn more about Money for Women Physicians, an exclusive money coaching program to get your money and mindset working for you.

What You'll Learn from this Episode:

Why your lifestyle should not depend on your full income.
Some of the specific money mistakes I see physicians making.
Why your current income is always temporary.
How you can use your physician brain to generate extra streams of income.

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:

Read the transcript

Welcome to the Wealthy Mom MD Podcast, a podcast for women physicians who want to learn how to live a wealthy life. In this podcast you will learn how to make money work for you, how you can have more of it, and learn the tools to empower you to live a life on purpose. Get ready to up-level your money and your life. I’m your host, Dr. Bonnie Koo.

Hello, everyone, welcome back for another episode. So today I’m talking about something that I can’t believe I haven’t talked about. I’m sure there’s been some of the ideas sprinkled into my prior episodes, but one of the most common things I hear not just from my clients, but other women physicians that I talk to between speaking and et cetera, is basically some form of I would love to X, but the money.

A lot of it is they want to work less. I mean, that’s what it comes down to. We are so overworked as physicians, we would just love to work a little less, especially if we have young ones at home. But so many of us feel trapped because of the income that comes in with a full-time job and thinking that less money will basically suck for a number of reasons, right?

So a few things I want to talk about with this topic. Now, obviously, that is a thought that you can’t work and that your money will be affected. I know it feels very true to most of you listening, but hear me out. The first thing I want to say about that is your lifestyle should not depend on your full income. This is especially true if you are a two income household.

I see this a lot when both people are not necessarily physicians, but both people work. And that both incomes are required to sustain your current lifestyle because that is just a recipe for, I don’t want to say disaster. But the truth is we all know that active income, your job, isn’t guaranteed and things can happen all the time. And so having a robust reserve, also known as an emergency fund is critical.

But also if your mortgage, and I think that’s the biggest expense for most of us, if your mortgage, if you’re private school tuition for your kids, et cetera, if that is dependent on both incomes, that is not setting you up for success. And so I want to take this concept in terms of your full-time income, whether or not you’re the primary breadwinner, or if you’re single this applies to you as well. Because like I said, we don’t want you to be in a position where you have to rely on your full-time income to support your life.

I also want to remind you all that we all used to be residents making a lot less money, and that most of the country lives on much less income than our physician income. This does not mean that you should not want a great lifestyle or be able to pay for the things that you want to pay for. But please don’t do it at the expense of your current financial situation or even your future.

Now, now that I’ve sort of given you sort of my spiel about that, now I want to talk about sort of those of you who really do want to work less and you don’t want to make less money overall, because you know that extra income will provide either the quality of life that you want or the money that you need to invest. And so the first thing I want to say is if there is a temp, well, of course, there will be a temporary loss of income.

Actually, notice the word temporary. I just went right into temporary. Less income, let’s say you decide to work one day less a week, you know, go 0.8. That loss of income, that less income is temporary. Your current money situation is always temporary. And I really can’t harp on this concept a lot because what I’ve seen a lot is when you’re thinking about working a little less and that subsequent loss of income, our brains feel like that’s going to be forever.

And so when we sort of project that loss of income into the future, into the permanent future, of course that’s going to not feel good. And I also know it’s not going to feel good even if you know that it’s temporary. But what I do know as well, is that most of you are overworked. And when you’re overworked, you just don’t have any extra mental space, whether it’s for you, whether it’s for planning or whether it’s for your family. And so that’s why I know that many of you want to work less.

And who doesn’t want to work less? Or maybe you would just want some additional flexibility so you’re not tied to going to your office every day, right? You want some more time flexibility. And so I talked a little bit about this in the last two episodes and so I’m just going to reiterate it, so many ways to you Is your physician brain to create income.

I think one of the best ways to do this if you want to stay at your current job is to simply work less and do something like expert witness work. I think this is something that’s really under utilized, under thought of. It’s such a great way to make additional income because your per hour rate is much higher than your current clinical job. And it gives you so much flexibility because you can do it from home.

Now, obviously, there is a ramp up period because you have to find a case to work on. But it’s the type of thing that once you start expert witnessing, other lawyers will start calling you because they know you’re available as an expert witness.

I do have an episode with Dr. Gretchen Green, who does teach positions, how to do this. How to start from really A to Z. In addition, she has such a robust network of lawyers that she will also help you get started by those introductions. I think that’s an important thing in general, learning the thing and having access to connections.

We do that inside my paid program, Live Wealthy, in that whatever I recommend, I usually have a vetted resource or person to talk to versus just saying invest in real estate. And I will give you specific names to look into to work. It doesn’t mean you have to work with them, but at least it gives you some concrete steps that you can start immediately.

Now, back to the less money is temporary and the mental space that most of us are just wanting to have, right? When you work less, you have more time to figure things out. But when we’re focusing solely on the loss of income, it can just really stop us from seeing the big picture, right? You are not going to be making less money forever, unless that’s something that’s okay with you. Great.

But if you don’t want to make less money than you currently are and you want to work less, you need to listen. What I have found, and this is not just me, but when you are completely at capacity, mental capacity and having decision fatigue and just having burnout and all the things that come with overworking, if you’re parenting et cetera, you cannot be creative. You cannot think outside of the box. You literally just don’t have any more mental space to think.

And my clients who have decided to work less because literally they’re on the verge of burnout, aside from taking care of themselves, they have found that ideas just start coming to them. They’re able to talk to other people, network, attend some conferences and really spend the time to kind of figure out how to create more money, how to invest their money smarter and to literally think beyond your clinical income, which is what the last episode was all about.

But you can’t do that when you’re overextended and exhausted. So the thought I want to offer you is that what if working less is what’s required for you to make even more money? I’m going to repeat that. What if working less is what’s required to make even more money? Again, this is temporary and I want you to consider that your quality of life, your financial future may actually depend on you making less money temporarily.

Now, my version of this for myself is that becoming an entrepreneur was definitely making less money in the short term. Now I didn’t quit my job and decide to be an entrepreneur. I actually was starting my side gig while I was still working full-time as a dermatologist.

Now, I have not replaced my clinical income, although every year I get closer and closer. And, of course, I could supplement that with working part time. I’ve just decided at this time it doesn’t really work for my current lifestyle. And what I mean by that is my time freedom, my time flexibility. Once you’ve tasted that, it’s really hard to go back. And you will figure out how to make things work in the meantime.

So I know in my bones and I have enough entrepreneur friends to see that this can be true for me that this period of making less money is what’s required for me to make even more money. Of course, it’s not always easy because my brain will offer, “Well, maybe you should work again or maybe you should just work full-time again.” And that is not a wrong decision, it’s just, at this time, not the right decision for me.

So I want you to brainstorm at least 10 ways you can create money. Again, this is hard to do when you’re overworked. And what if you just told yourself I’m going to go part time because I want to. And if at some point you need to work more to bring in income because you either haven’t quite figured it out or you would like more income while you’re figuring it out, you can always go back full-time. It’s always available to you, okay?

Other ways to sort of free up your clinical time, and many of you do this already, is to get admin time by taking on some leadership or different roles where you will get admin time in return. Now, of course, this means you’re still working full-time. But a lot of my clients have found that just breaking things up, you know, working less so that there’s less of that sort of seeing so many patients and all the work that goes on with that, that this really gives them some breathing room.

Again, so many options. I’ve given you a few. You can obviously switch to locums or per diem. I think of per diem as a local locums so you don’t have to travel. I think of locums as mostly traveling to a different place. Although you can definitely find a local locums job.

Now zooming out again, I really want you to think of how do you want your life to look like? And I want you to think in terms of your time lifestyle, your flexibility lifestyle. Do you want more time flexibility? Pretty much the answer is yes to everyone I talk to, right? Like do you want the ability to go on a trip or go to a conference and not have to get your call covered or move mountains to figure out how to do that?

I know physicians where the call schedule is figured out a year in advance. That is really crappy flexibility, right? And so I know that if this is new to you, the concept, or just really taking on thinking about how you can make this work, well, the first thing is to notice I said how. Even that question, if you ask yourself that question every day and brainstorm 10 ways you could do this, how can I make this work? That is such a powerful question for your brain.

Any how question is a powerful thing for your brain because when you keep telling it, “I can’t do this because of money,” that’s what you are creating. That’s what’s going to continue. Remember, if nothing changes, nothing changes. And change is hard. It’s so much easier to keep doing what you’re doing, even if you don’t like it, because you don’t have to do anything, you don’t need to expend more time and energy, mental et cetera in order to keep going.

So how can you make this work? How can you go part-time? What if going part time is how you’re going to figure out how to make more money and also give you the rest that I know you so deserve and want? Versus just sort of accepting and thinking there isn’t another way because of money.

And, like I said in the beginning, if your current lifestyle is dependent on you working full-time, whether it’s you, whether it’s you and your partner’s income, I want you to take another look and figure out how you can make it so that that is not true.

I see so many people buying a home where they really need both people’s income to make it work. And I just really advise not to do this. So if you’re someone who doesn’t own a home, but you are looking, please do not take on a house that you would not be able to afford if there was a sudden loss of income. And I don’t mean like 100%, but let’s say 30%, right?

I know there are sort of rules of thumb about what percentage of your mortgage or rent should be based relative to your income, and I really want you to take this advice. I just see this a lot where people are buying more house where they can, I don’t want to say barely afford, but that loss of income will really jeopardize their ability to pay your mortgage. Of course, there are other things like how you’re spending your money in many different areas as well.

Okay, so that’s really what I wanted to talk about today. I really want you to think about how you can work less. I want you to understand that this is temporary. I want you to understand that this might be what’s required in order for you to make even more money or even just make the same amount of money you’ve made working full-time. How there are so many ways to do this, and how freeing up your mental space, your workload is going to help you figure this out.

So many of my clients have been able to do this. When I say able, they have decided to make that jump to work a little bit less. And the things that have unfolded since have been amazing. I was going to say miraculous, I guess it is miraculous because they had no idea that they could do this and that other types of opportunities were available to you.

All right. I hope this has inspired you to take action and to consider going part-time and to start asking yourself how can I make this work? I’ll see you next week.

Hey there, thanks so much for tuning in. If you loved what you heard, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts, I’d love for you to leave a review. Reviews tell Apple that this podcast is, well, awesome. And it will help women find this podcast so that they too can live a wealthy life. And finally, you can learn more about me and what I do at wealthymommd.com. See you next week.

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Wealthy Mom MD with Bonnie Koo | How to Create Multiple Streams of Income as a Physician

185: How to Create Multiple Streams of Income as a Physician

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Over the course of this podcast, we’ve explored what it means to find financial freedom as a physician and the different options available for you to up-level your money. Since this show is on the crux of hitting 200 episodes, I thought I’d take it back to basics this week by diving into why creating multiple streams of income matters in the first place.

Who doesn’t want multiple streams of income? We know it’s the key to minimizing anxiety in our lives around money and finding financial empowerment faster. The hurdle most physicians face is the how and why behind creating additional streams of income, and this is what I’ll be walking you through on this episode.

Join me today to learn why having multiple streams of income matters, and the truth about all the different ways you can diversify your income as a physician. You’ll hear how physician job security isn’t what it used to be, how to begin shifting your mindset around your money-making ability, and why this will take a leap of faith.

Learn more about Money for Women Physicians, an exclusive money coaching program to get your money and mindset working for you.

What You'll Learn from this Episode:

How physicians often have a limited view of what’s possible.
Why there’s now less of a sense of job security among physicians.
The alternative streams of income available to physicians beyond patient care.
Why most physicians don’t take advantage of the ability to create multiple streams of income.
How I make multiple streams of income as a physician entrepreneur.

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:

Read the transcript

Welcome to the Wealthy Mom MD Podcast, a podcast for women physicians who want to learn how to live a wealthy life. In this podcast you will learn how to make money work for you, how you can have more of it, and learn the tools to empower you to live a life on purpose. Get ready to up-level your money and your life. I’m your host, Dr. Bonnie Koo.

Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode. So it is full-on fall here. It’s actually the end of October here, and so we all know that the days are just getting shorter and shorter and shorter. I feel like I podcasted about this but maybe it was on my social media, but last winter I actually bought these glasses called Luminette. L-U-M-I-N-E-T-T-E, something like that.

I have no conflict of interest with them, but the reason why I bought these glasses is because I definitely get a little more depressed during the winter, and I know many of you do as well. And so most of you have probably heard of a traditional light box that you can buy that has like, they’re like measured in something called Lux, L-U-X, like 10,000 Lux or whatever it is. And it’s a measurement of light to simulate the sunlight during the winter when it’s dark in the morning.

Anyway, I got offered that, but the reason why I bring this all up is that I have discovered a podcast, it’s not new but new to me, called The Huberman Lab, H-U-B-E-R-M-A-N, I am currently obsessed with this podcast. Dr. Huberman is a neuroscientist at Stanford and he just has these podcasts that go really deep into the science, the neuroscience of lots of many topics.

And the first several are about how our sleep cycle works and how light is so important. And he just nerds out and I love it. So if you’re a physician or just someone who loves to get nerdy like that, you will love it. He has pretty long episodes because they are so full of information. In fact, some of them I’ve had to listen to twice, it was that much information.

But anyway, the reason why I’m bringing this all up is that he talks about how getting that morning light and specific type of light in a specific amount, again, that’s where the Lux thing comes in, in terms of regulating your sleep and mood, et cetera. Now, you all know this, but it just made me realize that I don’t have to wait until like December, I think that’s kind of what I was thinking. Like, oh, I have to wait till it’s actual winter before I start using these glasses.

But after I listened to that episode I started wearing them in the morning because I wake up between 6:00 and 6:30am on the East Coast and it’s dark. The sun doesn’t rise until, I don’t know, 7:15 or so. And, of course, in his podcast he says the easiest way to do this is to actually get outside during sunrise. And that’s just not feasible for most people. It’s not really feasible for me, especially when it gets cold outside. The last thing I want to do is go outside.

So I started wearing these glasses. I know that was kind of a long-winded, totally random introduction. But when I started telling people about the glasses that I have, a lot of my friends and even people on social media were really interested. So I just wanted to bring that up again.

Another thing that I’ve been using these glasses for is for jet lag because, again, one of the ways to beat jet lag – And actually, in that podcast I just mentioned he has a whole podcast on jet lag and shift workers and how to deal with that. So I’ve actually been using that when I travel time zones. I used it when I went to Paris and I definitely felt like it was helpful. Okay, totally unrelated to today’s episode.

So today I’m actually going to do a replay of episode number four. In fact, I wasn’t planning on doing that, I just wanted to record a podcast about why it’s so important to have multiple streams of income. At this point we’re almost at 200 episodes, which is kind of crazy to me. And I already talked about this very topic in episode four, but that was a long time ago. And if you are a recent listener, it’s unlikely that you’ve gone through every one of my episodes.

And so the only thing I really want to add to this episode is how I love to describe investing now. It’s taking today’s cash flow for tomorrow’s cash flow. I want to talk about the concept that I teach my clients inside my paid program, the wealth table concept, and how important it is to have multiple streams of income.

Now, when people are asking me, well, how long will it take? Different types of streams take different amounts of time and effort. And I really want all of you listening to consider that this is a must, not a nice to have, okay? And so I’m going to be going over the mindset around this, why you should definitely do this. And I would love for you to get started before the end of the year. And what I mean by that is to decide what stream you’re going to work on. And what if you could take three action steps before the end of the year?

I give some examples on the podcast and I have several podcasts talking about sort of the different types of streams that are available to you. We have quite a few podcast episodes on real estate with special guests, on passive and active, and then we also have a few episodes on entrepreneurship. So this is a great sort of introduction and orientation to the concept, and then you can move on to some of the other podcasts that I have.

Speaking of which, I’m actually in the middle of creating a podcast guide, because I know many of you are new to the podcast. And like I said, there’s almost 200 episodes, so kind of a lot to wade through. And so my goal with this guide is to kind of give you a framework of how to approach the podcast and sort of give you specific podcasts to listen to, to kind of get you oriented and so that you can start taking some action.

Okay, so here is the episode, Think Beyond Your Clinical Income.

I am super excited about today’s topic because it took me a long time to even consider this as something I could do. My hope is that it will inspire you to get started. What am I even talking about? I’m talking about thinking beyond your clinical income. In other words, creating multiple streams of income. I have heard this concept so many times, but it wasn’t until recently that I truly understood why, or how, or even what it really meant.

Now that I’m actually saying this out loud, I feel a little stupid, because who doesn’t want multiple streams of income, right? One thing I’ve learned as a physician is that most physicians, we often have a fixed mindset. We kind of are somewhat narrow-minded in terms of what we think is possible.

When we talk about working as a physician, at least for me, when I was in residency I thought my only choices were to find a job in academics or find a job in private practice. And yeah, I knew there were things in between. But basically, I just assumed I would do patient care and that’s all I would do pretty much 100% of the time. It’s so interesting to look back at that time.

I’m talking about our jobs, obviously. I like to joke that job stands for just over broke, because if you think about it – Or let me ask you, if your job suddenly dried up, and up until recently physician jobs were pretty much secure, would you be okay? Is your physician job your only source of income? Or is it the main source of income in your family? Because assuming you’re a two parent household or two partners in a household, you both might be working, but maybe you’re the breadwinner as a physician.

Up until recently physicians really enjoyed amazing job security, and multiple things have changed slowly over time. For example, most physicians, outpatient like me for example, we often opened up our own shop immediately after residency.

But in the past 10, 20 years or so that’s changed. We’ve come to have more of an employee mindset and an employee model, whereas we just want to find a job. We’re not really interested in starting our own business. I really wonder why that started changing. Now, obviously, if you are in a certain surgical field, you often do work for a hospital, but there are several private surgery groups that just contract with the hospital.

Back to the original question, how secure really is your job as a physician? And with the recent pandemic we’ve found out that our jobs really aren’t as secure as we think. I like to imagine our income as a table, think of a table, let’s say a round table just for illustration purposes. And think of the table having traditionally four legs, but you can have as many legs as you want. And each leg represents a stream of income.

If you’re a typical physician working in a typical patient care job, you have maybe one leg for your physician income anyway. And I’ll talk about how most of us have a second leg for retirement and things like that, but let’s just talk about our physician income. Most of us only have one way we make money as a physician. And there’s nothing wrong with that, by the way. I just want to present that there’s multiple ways to go about this.

If you think about it, there’s so many ways to make money as a physician. I talked about private practice, I talked about academics. Now I’m a dermatologist, so my view might be a little skewed. But I also could have done research and got paid grants, maybe apply for the NIH. I know many physicians who also work in research and they also still see patients as well, but they’re making money in a few different ways.

A lot of doctors also do consulting on the side, whether it’s for pharmaceutical companies, whether it’s for startups, things like that. You can also be on advisory boards because your knowledge as a practicing physician is super valuable to many companies. And I’ve done a few consulting gigs here and there for companies to talk about medications.

We all know that some people do some telemedicine on the side. You’ve seen people doing surveys. Don’t forget that things like moonlighting and locums, I would consider that a separate stream of income if you have another stream of working as a regular physician. You might have your regular four or five day a week full-time job, but maybe occasionally you add on some extra shifts with moonlighting or maybe you do locums. I know people doing that for sure. I would consider that separate streams of income, okay?

Anyway, you get the point. There are so many ways to make money as a physician. There are so many options besides good old patient care. In fact, I think in this day and age it’d be remiss to not think about other ways to bring money using your physician brain.

Okay, so I think I made that point clear, you can have multiple legs just using your “physician brain.” Now, most of us have at least one other leg to stand on, the stock market. I hope all of us have retirement accounts. With a lot of employers, even during residency, you get an automatic 403B or 401K. And oftentimes, they’ll automatically sign you up and put a small percentage for you.

Obviously, you can go in and change that to zero if you want. I actually did that. I don’t recommend doing that, by the way. We do have a second leg, and that’s the stock market. And that’s usually via retirement accounts, so 401K’s, Roth IRAs, IRAs, even brokerage accounts. We all know that it takes a long time for that leg to firm up. Meaning that if I lost my job today, I do have a stock market leg, but it’s not going to really pay me all that much.

At least for me, and I think for many people, we think of our stock market accounts as something that’s going to pay us in “retirement,” like after age 50, or 60, or 70. So we’re not really worried about it providing income for us right now, but we’re actively putting money into it and letting compound interest do its thing.

But as you know, or maybe you don’t know, compound interest, it just takes a long time because you need two things for compound interest to work. You need time and you need an interest rate. And the third thing is you need your contribution or your principal.

And so, unfortunately, you can’t really speed up the time. You can play around with the interest rate or rate of return a little bit by your asset allocation. But at the end of the day, it generally takes years, if not decades for this leg to become firm and provide you with a steady stream of income.

I think you’re starting to see the point of this round table with legs. You want to have as many legs as possible. At least four, don’t you think? If not more. And you can add on as many as you want. And it seems like it would be a lot of work, but I just showed you earlier that even with just your “physician brain,” you can have multiple legs in the sort of physician brain category.

Let me give an example of mine. I can make money seeing patients as a dermatologist, and I’ve certainly done that. I also do some teledermatology, that’s a little stream of income as well. I don’t do surveys, but I certainly could. I have done consulting in the past. I’ve done some advisory board stuff in the past.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that some doctors also do casework for lawyers. You can testify on behalf of a physician. You can also just review cases. So there’s just so many ways you can use your physician brain to make money.

This concept of multiple streams of income, it’s simple and it totally makes sense, right? But how come so many of us don’t do it? My take is most of us, we’ve been taught our whole lives that money wise, all we had to do is to study hard and get a good job, especially if you’re a physician, right? We were told, you’ve got to study hard to get into a good college. Get good grades so you can get into medical school and so forth. You always had to work hard and study hard to eventually become a physician.

I find it really strange that there’s this concept in our society that you want to do, AKA your job, has to be tied to one primary source of income. And so when you ask little kids what they want to do when they grow up, the real question, I think, is to ask how much money do you want to make? And that might seem bold, and maybe you’re feeling like, oh, did she even say that? But that’s because a lot of us just have weird, and I would say negative, money beliefs because of the way we were brought up.

But that’s really the question we’re asking. We are asking, what do you want to do? Do you want to be an architect? Do you want to be a physician? Do you want to be a fireman? But all of these things, they’re tied to a certain range of income. I know there’s a range, especially among physicians, right? Some of us barely make six figures and some of us make over a million dollars. So there’s a range, but there is pretty much an agreed upon range for each career choice.

I actually think this is where we get into trouble because why does your life passion, what you want to do in your life, your gifts you want to share with the world, why does that have to be directly tied to your ability to make money? I actually think we could separate that. I’m going on a bit of a tangent right now.

Have you noticed that no one has really questioned that sort of societal teaching that your job has to be tied, one stream of income, or that your life’s passion, your life’s work has to bring in the majority of your income. And I’ll be honest, when I first heard about the concept of multiple streams of income, I just assumed it wasn’t for me. That’s something only rich people do.

And maybe you’re thinking the same thing. Or maybe you assumed your job is secure. I think it’s safe to say that we don’t know what’s going to happen, short-term or long-term, but what’s certain is that we and life is always changing. And that’s just the way it is. Even though today I might think I’d like to work “forever,” 20 years, 30 years as a physician full-time, and that I like working hard right now, it doesn’t mean I’m going to think the same things in five years, 10 years, or even just next year.

We’re always changing. And things happen, like having children or having a life event like someone close to you pass away. Suddenly our priorities change rapidly. What am I doing, or I should say what is my family doing right now for sources of income? At the time of this recording it’s actually during the pandemic, and so I’m not seeing patients right now.

I am doing some teledermatology, so I’m still using my physician brain to bring in some money. I’m not doing surveys. I haven’t really looked into anything else in terms of my physician brain. I obviously have Wealthy Mom MD, and it is a profitable business. But even within this one business, or this one umbrella of Wealthy Mom MD, the business makes money through multiple streams, literally.

One stream is I coach physicians one on one. And so that’s one stream of income. I also have an online course, Money For Women Physicians, that also brings in money as well. I make money through affiliate marketing.

For those of you who don’t know what that is, that means that if you buy something through me by clicking on a link, at no extra cost to you, I may get a percentage or a flat fee when you buy something through Amazon, for example. That’s probably what a lot of us use. The commissions for Amazon are pretty low, however, unless you have high volume.

If you buy, for example, I’ve partnered up with other physician entrepreneurs who sell courses that I think are useful for my readers that have to do with money, I will get a commission from that as well. So that’s my affiliate income stream. I also have a few sponsors. I used to have a lot more, but I’ve sort of whittled that down to just a few core sponsors. So that’s another stream of income.

I am planning some live events, including a retreat and a conference. So that will be, once again, another stream of income. I do some speaking. I wouldn’t say it’s a huge source of income, but I often do get paid for that.

So as you can see, even though it’s one business, Wealthy Mom MD, there are multiple ways that the business makes money. And I’m always thinking, how else can I create income that’s not going to be necessarily related to affiliate income, or my course income, et cetera? I’m always looking for ways that I can create streams of income that are unrelated or just separate so that I don’t have to rely on any one stream.

As of this recording, I’m actually working on a skincare line. So stay tuned for that.

Okay, so I hope we’re all in agreement that having multiple streams of income is key. And yes, we should all be interested in doing this, right? I’m guessing you probably have a lot of questions. Questions like, well, how do I get started? How much time will it take, because I don’t have a lot of time? Is it worth it? And I don’t have any money to get started. These are totally valid questions. But before I even go into them, I think it’s really important to sort of take a step back and think about why.

Why are you even interested in having multiple streams of income? Now, I realize the surface answer is, well, to have more money or to have more security. What does that security do for you? What mouths are you trying to feed? I think for many of us, it’s pretty simple. We just want freedom, we want peace of mind, we want security. We want to feel like we can always take care of our families, things like that. And some of us have bigger goals. And that’s super awesome.

I think if you kind of go to that core why, you know, what’s the point of all this, because otherwise it’s really easy to get lost in the details, it’s really easy to stop and get stuck because let’s just be honest, I wish there was a very easy way to make money super fast, but that’s not the case. If that was true, we’d all have multiple streams of income and you wouldn’t need this podcast.

But the truth of the matter is, things that are worth doing usually take some effort, there are going to be obstacles in the road. And so this is also why I decided to become a coach, because I started to see that it was critical to be able to handle these mental roadblocks because pretty much 99.99% of the time, they’re roadblocks that only exist in your head. They’re actually not real, based in reality.

But here’s the good news, you are a physician. What does that mean? That means I know you can do hard things. You had to in order to become one. There are so many obstacles on our path to becoming physicians. And I want to remind you, when you got into medical school, when you got that acceptance letter, didn’t you truly believe that you would become a physician? You didn’t quite understand or you didn’t quite know the how.

Yes, I know that you knew medical school is four years. Residency is three to seven years or more depending on the specialty. I knew you understood the sort of basic pieces and there would be all these tests involved. You didn’t know exactly what you were going to learn in terms of the day to day stuff. You didn’t realize exactly how it was all going to fall together, because you couldn’t have known that, right? You didn’t know what your rotations would be like.

Sure, you may have heard from people who have gone through it before, but every school is different, every experience is different. And so that’s kind of the analogy that I like to give. You just have to commit that you’re going to create multiple streams of income. You might not know the how, and that’s okay. And in fact, I’ll say it’s actually not as important as you think it is. But it’s so funny, in some ways, our brains can’t see that it’s possible unless we know all the exact steps to get there.

But I want to remind you that you did not know all the exact steps to become a physician, yet you believed you would become one after you go into medical school. That is having that leap of faith that you know you’re going to get there without having to know all the itty bitty details.

Hey there, thanks so much for tuning in. If you loved what you heard, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts, I’d love for you to leave a review. Reviews tell Apple that this podcast is, well, awesome. And it will help women find this podcast so that they too can live a wealthy life. And finally, you can learn more about me and what I do at wealthymommd.com. See you next week.

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Wealthy Mom MD with Bonnie Koo | Locums & Side Hustles for Physicians with Dr. Carrie Reynolds

184: Locums & Side Hustles for Physicians with Dr. Carrie Reynolds

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One thing I see so many doctors wanting to do is give themselves some breathing room while they figure out what they really want for their lives. How can you take a break without experiencing a significant loss in your income? Making the switch to locums is an amazing place to start.

Locums provide time freedom, and you could possibly make more money than you already do. I have my own experience of shifting to locums, so I’m sharing all of that this week. To get you started finding a side gig that works for you, I’m sitting down with my friend and fellow physician, Dr. Carrie Reynolds, who is a specialist in showcasing the lucrative side work that physicians can undertake.

Tune in this week to discover how switching to locums could change your life. I’m discussing side hustles with Dr. Carrie Reynolds, and we’re showing you how to start thinking beyond your clinical income and sharing some options available to you. Carrie is sharing why she decided to switch to locums and hasn’t looked back since.

Learn more about Money for Women Physicians, an exclusive money coaching program to get your money and mindset working for you.

What You'll Learn from this Episode:

What I love about locums.
How to get more information on locum opportunities near you.
What you can expect to get paid for locums, and how to avoid getting low-balled.
How Carrie became super passionate about helping docs with their side gigs.
Some examples of amazing physician side hustles.
Common misconceptions about locums.
How to decide what you want to do differently in your career.

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:

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Welcome to The Wealthy Mom MD Podcast, a podcast for women physicians who want to learn how to live a wealthy life. In this podcast you will learn how to make money work for you, how you can have more of it, and learn the tools to empower you to live a life on purpose. Get ready to up-level your money and your life. I’m your host, Dr. Bonnie Koo.

Hey everyone, welcome back. So today I have an episode on all things locums. This episode was actually recorded quite a while ago when I started this podcast back in 2020, but the reason why I wanted to reprise it is that this topic comes up a lot for my clients.

One of the things that many of my clients, members of Live Wealthy, are working on is to give themselves some breathing room and figure out next steps. And what I mean by figure out next steps, I don’t mean they’re trying to quit medicine, but people want a break. And I think one of the best ways to do this without a significant loss of income, and honestly, quite frankly, probably an increase in income is to make the switch to locums.

At least temporarily, right? You could always stop because the nature of locums is that you’re basically a contractor so you can stop whenever you want and you can do some pretty significant negotiation for your hourly rate. Typically you’re paid an hourly rate, but I also know, for example, I have a client who is a laborist, she gets a flat fee for the shifts that she does.

I think locums are really underutilized or just not thought of by a lot of physicians because we’re so used to working at a sort of full-time employed job with a large group. But as many of you know, I did do two locums and it really provided a lot of freedom and flexibility and a lot of, frankly, time when I was not working. Like weeks at a time and actually sometimes even at least a month. What could you do if you had those kinds of breaks built in?

And when I say what can you do, I think of it more as alleviating mental space. Giving you some time and space to just really think about what you want to do, get some projects done, spend more time with your family, et cetera.

What I also really loved about locums is that it’s a discrete job. So there’s a start and end date, generally speaking, and you really don’t have to take work home with you. You know what I mean? And so in this episode I have my friend Carrie Reynolds on and she is the host of the Hippocratic Hustle. She also has a couple of other podcasts, but this is the main podcast for women physicians, and I think she just revived it after a long hiatus.

So the question people always ask me is, okay, how do you find these jobs? How do you know how much you’re going to get paid? Now, I believe there are some locums specific groups out there, but you can also just post this in your community physician group or your specialty group.

Many of us have Facebook groups for specialties because you want to know what people are getting paid, right? Because if you work with an agency, and I’ll talk about that in a second, they will generally low-ball you, which makes sense, right? So you really want to get clear on sort of what the range is and what you can negotiate for.

And it’s not just about the money, right? There’s other things you can negotiate for like paying for travel and putting you up. That’s pretty standard and so it’s really important to know what’s standard and what may not be standard but is worth asking for.

So the two locums positions that I did, they flew me there because they were not near my home. One was in Seattle, one was in Hawaii. They basically gave me a place to stay and I believe they both – Yeah, the Hawaii one definitely provided a rental car. I’m not sure if Seattle did because I don’t think I always needed a rental car. But basically transportation.

They don’t pay for gas or food, which is fine because you’re going to pay for that anyway. I do believe they might be deductible, you’ll have to talk to your CPA, I just don’t remember off the top of my head if they are.

Another thing that’s great about being a locums is that generally speaking you’re a 1099 employee, which means you’re not a W2. And what this means is a few things, a few considerations I should say. One is you’re going to have to put money aside for taxes and you’re also going to want to keep track of expenses you can deduct.

They can be significant, right? So anything related to being a physician. So that could be your license fees, your board certification fees, any conferences that you go to, home office space if you do have one, computer, internet, that sort of thing. And if you are someone who wears scrubs and or a white coat, that’s also deductible as well. As long as it’s something you can only wear as a physician, right? Like you can’t write off regular clothes, basically.

And something that I think it also provides that is really great in terms of your finances is that it gives you the ability to open an individual or solo 401K. I think I have an episode on 401Ks. I don’t know if I specifically talked about self-directed 401Ks, but let me put that aside for a second.

So an individual 401K, what’s nice about it is that you get to pick the custodian, like Vanguard, Charles Schwab, et cetera. And you can roll over all of your previous 401Ks, 403Bs, pre-tax IRAs as well, all into one place. And I think just to simplify finances, one of them is to really just combine like accounts.

Now, another thing you can do is open a self-directed 401K. And what this is, is it’s a 401K where you can invest in other things besides the stock market. So I have one, for example, and I have been able to invest in real estate syndications and you can do so many other things that are non-traditional. You can buy crypto with it, for example.

And so what I like about this is that it gives you access to capital to invest in these types of things because what a lot of my clients say is they want to get involved in passive real estate investments or other alternative investments but they simply do not have the cash laying around. Most of us have a decent amount of money inside of our retirement accounts, we just are unable to access it for other things.

There’s a reason why it’s affectionately called money jail. And so a self-directed 401K is one way to tap into that money jail so you can use the money for alternative investments.

So, to summarize, a few reasons why I think locums are great, at least to try out, is, one, you’re going to work a lot less because you’re generally like one week a month. They’re all different, so I don’t want to generalize, but sometimes they’re just one week a month, sometimes they’re a few weeks at a time, like in terms of a stint. The two locums assignments I did happened to be covering two maternity leaves, and so that was fantastic.

You get to visit places that you may not have been able to visit before. I mean I got really lucky in terms of the locations that I decided to choose. And here’s the thing, there are so many locums jobs, and so you are bound to find one that works for you, your schedule, location, and I know if you’ve got children that’s also a consideration, right, because you might not want to be away from your children that long. And so there’s lots of different ways to do this. And then, finally, it gives you some extra options when it comes to money, investing it, et cetera.

People always ask how do you find these jobs? Now, I can really speak to my experience as a dermatologist, but there are agencies, there are some big ones out there that you probably have heard of. They probably already emailed and reached out to you already. Find out by talking to colleagues. Ask around, who’s done locums? Ask that person, they might have a specific contact.

Now, you’re going to get paid the most if you avoid an agency because they take a big cut because the hospital or employers pay them a lot of money, and so they take quite a hefty fee. And then the question is, well how do you find these types of positions?

And also locums, you can also think of it as a per diem job. A per diem job, I think of it as like a local locums, you work sort of as needed or when they need help. And again, per diems are generally directly through an employer.

And so I’ve had clients actually figure this out with their current employer, they want to leave, they don’t want to work full-time anymore, but they still want to stay involved. And the thing is, your current employer, if they do have the need for more physicians, they’re much rather going to want to have someone who already knows the system and is in the system, right? And so you have that sort of leg up in that regard.

But again, post in your actual local physician group, just ask around because people have this knowledge. I get messages not too infrequently from other dermatologists. I haven’t done it in a while so I really don’t have much advice except some common agencies, my former contact at the agency, but again, it’s best not to go through an agency in terms of pay.

All right, here’s the episode.

Bonnie: So the reason why I brought Carrie on to the show today is I want to talk about side hustles. So as you recall, in a previous episode titled Think Beyond Your Clinical Income, I talked about how many physicians sort of only see their only source of income as direct patient care. But there’s so many options.

And I actually think that everyone should pursue multiple streams of income and think beyond their current physician job. And so a lot of times people ask, “Okay, that makes sense. I should do that. But what should I do? What can I do? I need ideas. I want examples.”

And so I usually tell them, “I have a perfect resource for you.” And it’s Carrie’s podcast, The Hippocratic Hustle, because she basically interviews mostly women physicians who are doing amazing things outside of sort of traditional clinical medicine. And so she started in 2017, is that right?

Carrie: Yeah, I think so.

Bonnie: So how many people have gone on? Do you know the number?

Carrie: I have over 100 episodes now and probably over 70 or 80. I actually need to count that. That’s a really good question.

Bonnie: So, basically at least 70 ideas or so?

Carrie: I think so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And even if someone came on twice, there’s probably two ideas there. So at least 80 ideas.

Bonnie: Yeah, and it’s so amazing what women have been doing. Women physicians do things that I wouldn’t even think of. And I think that also goes to show that so many physicians, they really think they can’t do anything else besides what they do as a doctor. And so I think we forget that there are other things out there besides medicine because we’ve just been doing it for so long.

So one guest that’s really memorable to me, Carrie, is the one who I’m trying to think of. It’s been a while. The one who helps women or men marrying Persians.

Carrie: Oh, yes, she is awesome. Oh, my gosh, I’m drawing a blank, and it kills me that I’m forgetting her name right now because she’s a good Facebook friend. But she married a man whose family background was from Iran, from Persia, and she had to go through the whole marriage process.

And so she ended up deciding, well, it was hard enough for her to understand the traditions and the culture that she didn’t want other people who were going through the same thing to have to try to reinvent the wheel. So she wrote a book about wedding planning for Persian weddings. So, yeah, it’s apparently a really popular book for couples that are going through that. So, yeah, of all things, exactly.

Bonnie: I mean, what an amazing resource.

Carrie: Yeah, for someone who needs something like that, it’s perfect. She said it’s doing pretty good. And then that actually ended up snowballing into a whole another career that she has on the side, which is cultural communication counseling and coaching for people who are doing business with people in the Middle East.

So it even went beyond weddings into a whole other business. So it seemed like something she was just doing for fun on the side, it ended up being a whole other branch of her overall career and who she is. So, yeah, amazing.

Bonnie: I think that’s a perfect example of just getting started with an idea because you don’t know what the end goal will be necessarily. It’s not until you get started that – You just gave a perfect example, starting with this book, and now she’s doing consulting for business. So I think it’s pretty amazing what can happen once you sort of allow yourself to even pursue something different.

Carrie: Yeah, and her name is Christen Behzadi. She’s a physician in Texas. So, yeah, it was a really, really fun episode. I love that episode.

Bonnie: Yeah. We’ll be sure to link that episode in the show notes. So going back to you, Carrie, can you tell us how this podcast idea even started? So you started in 2017. So what was sort of the inspiration for you to even do this? Because I will tell you, as someone who just started a podcast, it’s a lot of work, man.

Carrie: Yes, it is. It is. I know it’s like anything where people are making things creatively, whether it be a blog or YouTube show or a podcast. It looks so easy when people are doing it. But then when you actually realize what they’re doing behind the scenes, there is so much more to it. So it is.

So I started in about 2017. At the time, I had been attending for about three-ish years, maybe 2.5 years. And it was about that time where I had really settled into my job. It felt relatively easy, you know. I mean, there’s always challenging patients that you have, so there’s always something new that you’re doing in medicine. But for the most part, it was, you know, the same sort of patients. It was getting a little bit boring, it was getting a little routine.

And I don’t know about you, but when I was going through all of my training, I mean, whether it be from undergrad to med school to residency to fellowship, there’s always these like 3 to 4 year blocks that we are doing these things. And we’re always looking forward to the next step that we have coming up.

And I think it was in this job that I had that I was like, “What’s the next step?” And I didn’t have a next step and I didn’t have a goal. And I was looking for goals professionally within my job there as far as could I advance myself in the private practice that I was in? Could I join some committees? Could I do a few things on the side that might resemble that next step that I was looking for professionally? But unfortunately, where I was, there just weren’t a lot of options for that, so I really felt a little bit stuck and a little bit bored, honestly.

Bonnie: Yeah, and so for those of you who don’t know, I think that’s around the time Carrie and I met, at least virtually. So I don’t know if everyone knows the story, so I want to see if I can remember it.

Carrie: Okay.

Bonnie: It seems like decades ago, but it really wasn’t.

Carrie: See if you have a good memory.

Bonnie: So my memory is I think I helped you with something. I connected you to Jim Dahle actually, the White Coat Investor, right?

Carrie: Yes, that’s right.

Bonnie: You were having an issue about something. And I guess he ended up emailing you back.

Carrie: Yeah, because he’s a really responsive guy. He’s really good with email.

Bonnie: Yeah. He still replies to emails, amazingly.

Carrie: Yeah, I’m horrible, he’s great.

Bonnie: I can’t imagine the volume he gets at this point.

Carrie: Yeah, exactly.

Bonnie: So that happened. And then, not too soon after, a box of toffee showed up at my apartment.

Carrie: That’s so funny. I have a friend who was doing this thing since he was an attending and he was making a little bit more money. You know, he was a recent graduate, but he was making more money so he started sending chocolates to friends for Christmas and stuff. And I thought, well, that’s really nice. I thought that was kind of cool because we were getting chocolates for him for Christmas.

And then I thought, well, I should do that, too, but as a thank you gift for people who are doing nice things for me. And so I thought, well, since Bonnie really helped me there, I’ll send Bonnie some chocolates and I’ll send Jim some chocolates. I totally forgot to send it to Jim, but I just sent it to you.

Bonnie: We won’t tell him.

Carrie: Yeah, so sorry, Jim, you didn’t get your chocolates. I’ll have to just send them over and he will be like, why are you sending me this? But I still think it’s a great idea. And I, honestly, I haven’t done it too much since I sent you the chocolates.

Bonnie: All right, well, we loved them. We just kept them in the freezer because they were really tiny ones, so it felt like it wasn’t a big deal to have a little piece of toffee. So we’d dig into the freezer and then one day they were gone.

Carrie: Yeah, I know, and then it’s sad. It’s really sad, exactly. But I think it’s fun. It’s a fun little thank you and it’s really funny that it was memorable for you because I think it was not too much longer after that I was basically brainstorming about what to do with my podcast and who I wanted to have as guests. And I thought, well, Bonnie. At the time you had been really vocal and obviously one of the biggest helpers on the Facebook group that we were part of.

So I mean, you were like Facebook famous at the time, right? So I just decided, well, if I’m going to have someone with a personal finance twist talk about money, then Bonnie would be an obvious choice. So I wasn’t sure she was going to say yes. But I emailed you, and you were like, yeah, sure.

Bonnie: Did I even have a blog at the time?

Carrie: Yeah.

Bonnie: I think I had just started it, the first rendition.

Carrie: I think you had just started. Like, maybe it had a few posts or something. Yeah, exactly. It was pretty fresh.

Bonnie: So tell us how the podcast idea even came to you.

Carrie: Yeah. So I think it came to me because there’s a lot of Facebook groups that we’ve both been into. Some of them had tons of people, and I think I was part of maybe three that were most important to me. It was the Physician Moms group. It was the Women Physicians Personal Finance group. And there was the Women Physician Entrepreneur group. And between those three groups, there were often people who would post on those groups about what they were doing.

And I remember there was one memorable time when there was someone who had just left her private practice and opened a solo practice. And people were asking her, “How did you do that? How did you get up the guts to leave your group and do all this stuff?” And she was typing her response, and it was so fast that there were typos and you could just see that it was like a stream of consciousness. And she was trying to teach everybody what she did.

But, I mean, in a Facebook group in a little post, that is not the place where you can really express yourself and get all those ideas out at once. So I thought it would be awesome if we could hear this as a podcast. And I for one, I’m a huge podcast fan. So I’ve been listening to podcasts for years, and I thought I would like to hear this as a podcast. I thought, well, are there any physicians out there who are doing this? Is there anything like this?

So I searched Apple podcasts and at the time, and still, it’s really hard to find good podcasts sometimes. Especially if you’re looking for something very specific. Sometimes the discoverability of podcasts is very difficult to find, even if it exists. Apple has improved that somewhat, but definitely three years ago it was really hard to find things and I couldn’t find anything.

I couldn’t find anything that was related to physicians doing a side gig or a project or business or things like that. And so I had that little spark in my head. I’m kind of the type of person if I’m in a group of people and someone asks for a volunteer and no one’s sitting around, I probably will end up putting my hand up and volunteering. I don’t know. It’s just like no one’s volunteering, I better just do it.

So once I got that thought that I should just do it, I was like, well, I have to do it now. So that’s basically how the podcast got started.

Bonnie: I actually, do you remember you telling me that’s how it started. You were seeing people posting things and you were like, we need a better way to collate all these great ideas into one. Because, as you know, with Facebook posts especially, this is a comment. I’m assuming.

Carrie: Oh, yeah, a lot get lost.

Bonnie: You see it one day. And if you didn’t see it that day, it’s gone. And searching for things in Facebook is also difficult too.

Carrie: Yeah, and I thought, well, that’s a shame that she went through so much to type all that and get it out.

Bonnie: Now it’s gone.

Carrie: And now it’s gone. I have no idea how to find that post again.

Bonnie: And then these days, we’re just in so many Facebook groups. I don’t remember where posts are. I’ll read something and when I try to go back and search, I’m like, “Ah, what group was it in?” Then I just give up.

Carrie: Yeah, Unfortunately, Facebook is just so huge, and the bigger the group, the worse it is, right? So it’s almost like you’re a little better off in a group of like, 3000 or 4000 people because I think there’s enough information there but doesn’t get overwhelmed by the volume. But everything has some value to it.

Bonnie: Now that you’ve interviewed over 70 mostly women physicians, is there anything that surprised you about their hustles. Have you seen themes? And I guess I’m just trying to get a sense of how my readers, what they can expect when they listen to the women saying what they’re doing.

Carrie: I think a lot of people have found that there’s some passion that they’ve always had in their life that they want to get back to, or there’s some passion that ends up being an offshoot of something that they’re doing professionally.

For example, I’m thinking off the top of my head, Make Merry is a lingerie company that I interviewed, I do believe her name is Doctor Katie Deming. And I interviewed her on the show. She was a radiation oncologist, and she found that there were women coming into her clinic with breast cancer who were having really sensitive skin issues and they couldn’t wear regular lingerie.

Apparently, they make this lingerie for people with these problems that are really frumpy and ugly, and she was like, “Well, this is horrible.” A 40 year old woman is coming in, she wants something comfortable and pretty. So she had a passion in her past for fashion design; she’s always been really fascinated by that. I don’t think she had ever really done it professionally, but just almost as a hobby or just something that she liked to think about and read about, that sort of thing,

She decided these ladies need a garment. I know what kind of government they need. I’m interested in making items, fashion items, I guess. Ended twisting all that into something that’s both an offshoot of her passion personally and also of her professional work.

So I think that’s a great example of how she was able to kind of mix that up and make a product. I just saw it on her Facebook that her lingerie won an award for best type of bra for this sort of situation and that sort of thing. So she’s doing amazing work and really helping people and making some really pretty bras in the process. And she definitely was one who was saying that doing the side business is like fueling my passion and helping support me professionally and emotionally at the same time.

Bonnie: Well, first of all, I think physicians are perfectly poised to notice problems and come up with solutions. That’s kind of what we do all day, right?

Carrie: Yeah, that’s so true.

Bonnie: We’re discussing a problem and then we are giving solutions in terms of medical advice, right? But that skill set is translatable to so many things. And I think that’s actually a key point, you notice a problem and you try to come up with a solution, usually either for yourself or in the case that you just said, it’s for her patients. So I think that’s actually a great point right there that you actually might have a solution that hasn’t been given.

Carrie: Yeah, I think that’s a great point that we’re problem solvers. And even if it doesn’t relate professionally to what you’re doing. Like that example of the Persian wedding planner. I mean, we’re helpers at heart. We want to help people. And so I think that’s all coming from who we all are. At the core of who we are is to help people.

So if you find someone who needs something, we want to fulfill that. Whether it be helping them with money, like you do, or helping them plan their wedding.

Bonnie: Yeah. So what have you learned so far after a few years of podcasting? Is podcasting your side hustle? Has it given you inspiration to work on other things?

Carrie: Yes, it’s part of a side hustle. I mean, a lot of people assume that many people who are successful with podcasting and what’s the definition of success in podcasting? Actually, that is a whole can of worms to answer that one, too.

But many people assume that people can make a lot of money podcasting, and there’s really unfortunately not a ton of people who are making a ton of money being podcasters. Really the ones who are making money on them are the ones who are already famous, I think, you know as far as nationally known personalities and things like that.

So it’s not the easiest thing to make money on as a singular task. But it can be quite successful for using it as some sort of promotional tool or advertising tool for something else that you’re selling, such as a course or coaching business. Or, you know, even the Persian wedding planner. I don’t think she has a podcast, but if that was something she wanted to promote, then having a podcast about that topic would be great. And I think people had a lot of success using podcasting as a means for that, so that’s one thing.

As far as success with podcasting, monetarily it’s a little bit difficult to make a ton of money. Especially at the beginning I just tried to break even. When I first started getting rolling with this, I didn’t want it to take any of my family’s money to support the podcast because I still have student loans that I’m paying off and stuff like that. So it’s not fair to use this quasi-hobby/business and start taking away from my family’s finances.

So I’ve always tried to at least break even with my finances and then maybe a little bit on the side because it takes a ton of time. And unfortunately our value, many times, comes from seeing patients, and that’s where we really can make the best money for our time is seeing patients. So when I think about that, I really don’t make very much money per hour that I’m working on the podcast at all.

Bonnie: What you said about it’s not easy to make money as a podcaster, well, it’s not what you just said. But, for example, remember when blogging was kind of the thing? Everyone was trying to start a blog because people had seen bloggers make money. Then, everyone kind of jumped on and assumed they could make money too. The same thing there, you have to have the traffic. Meaning you have to be popular. You need eyeballs for advertising.

So I find it fascinating how the models have changed over time. And so if you’re looking at a podcast as making money by itself in its own sort of vacuum, like a blog, I do agree, you have to get sponsors. It’s kind of the same sort of model, so there’s different ways to look at it. I guess what you said is more about marketing tools or what I call lead generators.

So this is kind of a mini business lesson for those who are looking for a way to market your services as a coach. Obviously, I’m a coach, I do coach people. I have an online course that I sell. So, for me, the podcast is a way to get my free, valuable information out there because I also know that most people won’t ever pay me, which is totally fine. But I still want to be able to teach them and give a “free” or low cost resource for people.

It’s a way for people to get to know me to see if, I guess, it’s worth paying for is one way to say it. And it is also part fun, right? Because it’s fun to have your friends on, like Carrie, for example, on the show. But I do agree, if I was just doing it purely for its own self for money, it would probably not be worth my time to do that.

Carrie: Right. When I think about as far as the value from the podcast is there’s tons of intangibles. Like a lot of intangibles that I’ve gotten from doing the podcast. And actually, one of the things that’s actually more tangible than intangible is that I had my now-good friend Cheri Wiggins. She’s a PM&R physician. She came on the show to talk about a product that she created.

After we got done doing the interview, we started talking about what she does for physician life, which is she is a locums doctor. At the time, I had no idea what being a locums doc was about. And she had said outright, she was like, “This is the best job I’ve ever had.” And I had this whole preconception in my head that locums was for people who couldn’t get real jobs.

Bonnie: For weirdos?

Carrie: For weirdos, exactly. I don’t know why I had that thought, but, you know, so I didn’t really understand what locums was all about.

Right after we recorded the show about the product that she was creating I said, “Can we just record this? This is great information.” And so she was like, “Sure!” So that whole episode turned into how she got into the business of doing locums. And from that one episode with her, I decided to quit my job to find a locums job myself, to basically go out on the road and become a locums doc.

So I’ve been doing that for, oh my gosh, I’ve been doing that for almost two years now. Financially, if we want to talk about financial rewards, that has paid leaps and bounds. I mean, I get paid so much better doing locums with working less and having better quality of life and better satisfaction with my career overall.

I mean, that makes doing the podcast worth it. Even if I was paying for every episode out of pocket, I mean by far, yes. So there are kind of intangibles that come around from doing something like putting yourself out there, that sort of thing.

Bonnie: Yeah. No, I think that’s a great point. Putting yourself out there because you’re meeting, the nature of your podcast is that you’re interviewing people. So you’ve talked to 70 or 80 plus people.

Carrie: I know, I hope it’s right. I better count.

Bonnie: So you’re getting ideas and you’re getting new ideas and thinking about how the whole locums thing. Actually, we have another episode with Carrie coming up about locums. I think because of you, I switched to locums if I really have to think about it. So isn’t that crazy?

Carrie: Yeah.

Bonnie: From that one episode, right?

Carrie: Yeah, all from that one episode. So the trickle down, I mean, and I’ve definitely gotten emails from other people who have listened to the show and not even just locums, but, like, “Oh, someone did this, and so I decided to do this. And now it’s really great, thank you so much.” That sort of thing. So the trickle down effect, I guess, probably is greater than I even realized.

So again, I guess it comes back to wanting to help people. And I just hope every story that I put out there gives someone some sort of idea that maybe they could do something a little bit different with their career.

Bonnie: Yeah. So what other hustles have you been pursuing since the podcast? I know you’ve been up to lots of things.

Carrie: Oh, yeah, I think I had to think about it for a second. Like, what am I doing? Oh, yeah. So I recently got licensed to be a real estate agent here in Colorado. So I’m a licensed real estate agent.

Bonnie: Awesome.

Carrie: This is so funny. And, you know, that came from me going, at one point maybe two years ago someone said, “Oh, if you weren’t a physician, what would you do?” And I think I was like, “Oh, yeah, I’d be a real estate agent, I guess.”

Every time I’ve bought and sold my house, I’ve been so fascinated with the process, and it’s kind of like being a lawyer, but a little bit lighter version of being a lawyer. I also would want to be a lawyer, I think. But then I think if I actually went to law school I would get overwhelmed, and I don’t think I’d actually want to do it. But in my head, it seems like a fun idea. And every time I buy and sell a house, I’m just so fascinated with the real estate and the pricing and all that stuff.

So someone said, “What do you want? What would you be if you weren’t a physician?” I said, “A real estate agent.” And then I thought, well, why can’t I be a real estate agent? That’s actually something that’s relatively achievable even while being a physician. So I really didn’t have a strong plan at the time.

I talked to Peter Kim, who also is a licensed real estate agent.

Bonnie: I don’t think I knew that.

Carrie: Oh yeah. So he was really encouraging. He was like, “Yeah, totally go out and do that, man. It’s pretty ‘easy.’” And yeah, it kind of is. But actually, being a real estate agent itself is not easy; doing the school work when you’re a physician is easy. I mean, we went to medical school, so we’re really good at tests, so it’s not that hard.

Bonnie: I think that’s a great point, Carrie. There aren’t that many things that are really hard for a doctor. If you finished medical school, you finished your training, there’s so much stuff that you’re capable of.

Carrie: I mean, I’ve talked to some people on my podcast who went to law school after they went to medical school, too. So, yeah, I mean, it just takes time and it takes, you know, a little bit of effort and putting your time into something new. So that sometimes can be hard, but yeah, you can really do anything. As a physician on the side, you can do anything.

Bonnie: So tell us more about this real estate thing. So what are you doing with it? Are you actually using it? What was your idea?

Carrie: Yes. So I am a real estate agent with Your Castle Real Estate here in Denver, Colorado. But my side name for it is Hippocratic Homes. But my goal ultimately is to help any physician who’s moving in or out of the Denver market to help find a home here in Denver or the greater Denver area and the metro area, because the market here is really fast paced and it can be really hard.

And as physicians, when we’re moving – After fellowship we moved to Denver from Kansas City, and it was so hard to shop for houses because we really only had a chance to come out here, I mean, maybe one day, maybe two or three times before we actually bought our house.

And it’s just so hard to buy a house in that environment where you really don’t know the neighborhood. You don’t know the school districts. You don’t know the commutes. You don’t know the traffic patterns. You don’t know anything.

And when we moved here to Denver, our real estate agent really didn’t know how to answer those questions. I was really good at finding the answers, so it wasn’t a big deal for me, But I thought a lot of people don’t have the bandwidth to understand all this. I want to help them when they’re moving into Colorado. So anyway, that’s my goal. So if anybody is moving to Denver and needs a real estate agent, I’m your girl.

Bonnie: Well, Carrie, that just brings up what we just talked about earlier. You had a solution to a problem, right? You became a real estate agent to help busy physicians move.

Carrie: oh, I see what you mean. Yes, of course. Of course. Yes, yes, that was right. That was the problem that I felt that I had. And I have a solution for that problem. So yeah, you’re right. I didn’t even think about that. I am helping people. Again, it comes back to us being helpers. You’re right.

Bonnie: Yeah. Awesome. So we’ve got the Hippocratic Hustle, Hippocratic Homes, and don’t have another offshoot?

Carrie: I do because I can’t stop. Hippocratic Holiday. So Hippocratic Holiday is a podcast for physicians, not just ladies, but any physician who wants to come on the show and share a story of their trip or the adventure. And basically, I just really wanted a way to hear stories about people’s adventures. Mainly because, again, I’m on another physician travel group on Facebook, and it’s so hard for people to express exactly what they did and also to then review that again when you’re like, “Oh, someone went to the Amalfi Coast. Where did they go? I knew I saw that. What was that?”

So I wanted just another reference for people who are planning their trips. Honestly, when I was looking through Apple Podcast trying to find podcasts that would fill this kind of thing that I wanted to listen to, I had a really hard time because a lot of times when people are doing these sorts of podcasts, they’re digital nomads.

They’re in their twenties or whatever, and they’re making podcasts about just traveling the world and not having home. And they’re just basically podcasting and blogging and YouTube-ing about these things. But very few of us could be digital nomads. I'm not going to say, I’m not going to have a digital nomad on my show because I know a few physicians who are now basically traveling the world and essentially not staying put in one place, so they exist, too.

But the majority of us have, like, three weeks of vacation, and we really have to spend it wisely. And we all have this pent up desire to kind of get out and see the world. I know I did.

We finally took our family on our first international trip last year, and I had been dying to because I studied abroad in France. Once upon a time, I spoke French fluently, and so I have a strong desire to introduce my daughter to other cultures, but with medical school and work and all that stuff, we just have very limited time to do that. So the Hippocratic Holiday is a great way to kind of get some ideas for different places you can go. Or just a little bit of escapism, if that’s what you need too.

Bonnie: Yeah, I know. It’s like an inside joke. Like I don’t even know where she is half the time. Because between locums and I feel like you’re always traveling now. Like, maybe you are always on a trip.

Carrie: Yeah, there was a moment where I was always traveling.

Bonnie: Yeah, not right now.

Carrie: Yeah, exactly, in the times that we’re at right now. But definitely itching, itching to get back out. We had plans to go to Hawaii again for our 20th anniversary and plans to go to Italy again. And so there’s a lot of places I want to go with it, right now I can’t go. So I really can’t wait to get back out there.

Bonnie: What do you think your first trip is going to be?

Carrie: Oh my gosh. Well, quite honestly, I think my first trip is to take our camping equipment to go camping in Colorado. I think that’s probably gonna be our first trip, which wasn’t something that we necessarily were going to do. But this summer, I think it’s definitely going to be a stay close to home kind of vacation situation. And we do have a whole bunch of camping equipment. So it’s time that we used it.

Bonnie: I actually love camping. At least I say, I do. I grew up camping. I don’t think Matt’s a huge fan.

Carrie: Oh, you guys should come out camping. We’re car camping, we’re not doing anything too hardcore. We have a very plush –

Bonnie: Glamping.

Carrie: Yeah, pretty much glamping. Which is funny, because my husband and I used to backpack and stuff like that. So we used to make fun of car campers. But now it’s like, whatever you’re outside, I don’t care.

Bonnie: Awesome. Well, I think we uncovered a lot of awesome information and hopefully inspired folks not to just listen to your podcasts to get inspiration, but just even hearing us talk. And I think I love that, you know, at the core of who we are is we want to help people, that’s why we went into medicine. And so I see that as a common theme in terms of all the hustles that all the physicians are doing with their time right now.

And so, Carrie, tell us how people can find you.

Carrie: Yeah, well, you can find the podcast Hippocratic Hustle and Hippocratic Holiday anywhere that you get your favorite podcast. So it should be there. Also, hippocratichustle.com, hippocraticholiday.com and hippocratichomes.com are all where you can find all those things too.

Bonnie: Awesome. We’ll be sure to link to all that in the show notes.

Carrie, thank you so much for being here, it was so much fun.

Hey there, thanks so much for tuning in. If you loved what you heard, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts, I’d love for you to leave a review. Reviews tell Apple that this podcast is, well, awesome. And it will help women find this podcast so that they too can live a wealthy life. And finally, you can learn more about me and what I do at wealthymommd.com. See you next week.

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Wealthy Mom MD with Bonnie Koo | How to Be a Better Parent with Hope Seidel MD

183: How to Be a Better Parent with Hope Seidel MD

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Today, I'm joined by my parent coach, Hope Seidel. We've been working together for a while now, and I truly believe that what Hope shares will change every parent's life. Kids don't come with an operating manual; they have different needs, and it's super important to get some help in discovering how you can be the best parent you can possibly be.

Hope Seidel, MD, is a mom of two young adults, a pediatrician, a certified parenting coach, and a passionate advocate for children’s wellness. In addition to her pediatric practice, she started Parent with Hope in 2020, a private coaching business where she works 1:1 with high-achieving parents to create more connection with their kids, confidence in their parenting, and wellness in their homes.

Tune in this week to discover how a parenting coach changed my life and how Hope Seidel's work could change yours. We're discussing our experiences as parents, our role in parenting our children, and we’re diving deep into discipline, understanding our children’s behavior, and Hope is sharing her amazing advice for parents who want to show up differently.

Learn more about Live Wealthy, an exclusive coaching program designed for successful women who want to be confident.... and be rich.

What You'll Learn from this Episode:

Why working with a parenting coach has been some of the hardest but most important work of my life.
How kids, just like all humans, want to be seen and heard.
Some of the well-intentioned things we do that are actually invalidating our children’s life experience.
How our kids show us the places we need to heal ourselves.
Why punishment isn’t an effective way to teach your children about their behavior.
How to start seeing where your child’s behavior is coming from.
The impact of the language we use around our children.
How to show up as the kind of parent you really want to be.

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Welcome to The Wealthy Mom MD Podcast, a podcast for women physicians who want to learn how to live a wealthy life. In this podcast you will learn how to make money work for you, how you can have more of it, and learn the tools to empower you to live a life on purpose. Get ready to up-level your money and your life. I’m your host, Dr. Bonnie Koo.

Hey, everyone. So today you are in for a treat because I have one of my coaches on the show. So I had my first coach on the podcast several podcasts ago, so you might want to check that out. It’s with Dr. Sunny Smith. And in fact, it was two episodes and they’re both like an hour because Sunny is not known for her brevity. And we literally would have talked for a third hour, but I had a hard stop because I had a client call.

But anyway, today’s conversation is not an hour, although I think it’s more like 40 minutes. But it’s with my parent coach, Hope Seidel and I guess we’ve been working together for, it’s been more than a month, maybe it’s been two months. But it’s something that I think every parent needs to know as a resource, like whether you hire a one on one coach or join a parenting program.

I personally think every parent out there needs this type of support. Kids don’t come with an operating manual, and every kid is different. If you have more than one kid, you definitely know this. I only have one, although my bonus son is 17. But every child is so different and they have different needs and they’re going to require different ways of parenting. I wish there was one right way to parent and it would work on every kid, but unfortunately that is not the case, as I’ve learned with my son.

And whenever I tell people that I have a parenting coach, it has been the hardest work of my life because a lot of the work is actually more me and not so much Jack, and just really understanding how it is for a child. Like how the world looks to them, and you’re going to hear us talking a bit about that towards the end of the podcast.

And so if you’re a parent I just want to say, it’s so hard, you’re doing a great job. And you’ll sort of hear in our conversation, the type of parenting that we both are on board with. Some people call this conscious parenting. I don’t think gentle parenting is the term because I feel like that almost has a connotation that we’re being soft parents. And that’s not what it is at all.

But some books that I have really enjoyed reading to help me with all this is Dr. Becky Kennedy’s Good Inside, and she actually has a pretty low-cost parent membership. I’m trying to think of some other parent, oh, How to Talk So your Kids Will Listen and how to Listen So your Kids Will Talk. That book is more for a bit of age nine and up is my guess.

So I actually just ordered the same book, but the version for little kids, ages four to seven because a lot of the examples from the other book were just not applicable to Jack’s age. But the first chapter in that book is really about validating kids’ emotions. And we talked about that a little bit, but not as much as I would have liked.

And so I just want to put that here, that kids want to be – Well, I think all humans want to be seen and heard. And so if you know that, that’s what your kids want, they want to feel validated. And we often will invalidate their feelings by simple things like if they get hurt, they’re like, oh, no, no, it’s okay, you’re okay. And that seems so benign, but that teaches a kid that their feelings aren’t valid. That their feeling hurt isn’t valid, right?

And so that’s just one example of things that we do that are well intentioned, but actually are very invalidating to our kids. Anyway, I could talk about this forever. It’s something I’m really, really into right now. If you and I have had a conversation, chances are I’ve mentioned that I have a parent coach and that I’m just going down the rabbit hole because, obviously, I want to be a good parent.

But I think one thing I’ve really learned, and also the decision to send Jack to a Waldorf school is, I don’t want to focus on just creating a smart, successful kid, which I think was the focus when we were younger. I really want to help Jack be a good human. A good human who is wanting to do good in the world, that has confidence, that wants to just help people. And I don’t really know how to say it, but I just want Jack to be a good human. Of course he is. I think all kids are, and then our job is to guide that process into adulthood.

Anyway, here’s my conversation with Hope.

Bonnie: All right, Hope, welcome to the podcast.

Hope: Thank you for having me. I’m so excited.

Bonnie: Yeah, I’m excited too. I’m always excited about all my guests because I think they’re all wonderful and have so much to contribute. But when I talk to people that I have a parent coach, some people are not confused in a bad way, they’re just like, “What? That’s a thing?” And then some people are like, “Oh my God, I need one too.”

So, first of all, I didn’t even know parent coaches existed. I knew there were parenting courses, but I guess that would make sense that you could hire people. But I feel like maybe the word is getting out. So tell us a bit, introduce yourself.

Hope: I can definitely do that. So I am first and foremost, a mother. I have two kids over the age of 20, which is impossible to believe. And I’ve been a general pediatrician for the last 22 years. And I’ve always had a strong passion for connecting with parents. I really feel like wellness starts at home.

And so even though I’m in the business of being a pediatrician and managing kids wellness, I noticed over time in my pediatric practice that so many of the issues that I was seeing in children, not ear infections and cancer and things, but so many of the issues that were coming up in kids’ homes were parents struggling with what was normal developmentally and how to handle boundaries and noticing when their kids trigger them.

Parent coaches probably are different. So my coaching involves creating norms and giving guidance and anticipatory guidance, because that’s what I’ve been doing for a long time. But a lot of coaching is trying to better understand the mindset of parents as they come into parenting, right?

Like how they were parented and what they make their kids’ behavior mean about their kids, about them. Expectations and sort of ways in which we hope our kids would show up. What we’re in charge of and what we’re not, how to control things, what we’re in control of.

And so I do a lot of work with parents on tons of different things, depending on where their pain point is. And some parents hire me just because they want to be more intentional in their parenting and want to come up with a better way to do what they’re already doing pretty well. So it really just depends on the client.

Bonnie: And if you think about it, kids don’t come with manuals. How would I know what to expect? These things, how would I know what the milestones are, right? But then there’s a whole like, well, how do you actually parent? No one really talks about that, but you do hear about strategies that focus on kids behavior.

So let’s talk about that first, because I think a lot of the traditional parent advice was focusing on kids behavior. And one thing I’ve learned, even before working with you, is like all behavior is communication. I actually went to this parenting coaching class when I was at Miraval and I remember him saying that and it really stuck with me.

And then knowing what I know as a coach, it makes sense. Like their behavior, there’s something behind the behavior. So let’s work on that versus just trying to, quote unquote, “fix” the behavior. So what are your thoughts on that and how traditional parenting and the shift that we’re seeing now?

Hope: Well, there used to be a very high priority placed on obedience, right? Compliance and obedience, and that is usually directed towards managing a child’s behavior. And I think that there’s a lot of costs to that, but the bigger issue is that we can accidentally, in focusing only on our kids’ behavior, shut down the part of them that caused it, to your point.

I mean, all of our kids’ feelings are really, or a need that they have, if they’re hungry, or tired, or if they’re sad, their behaviors don’t always look consistent with that. Like if you and I are angry, maybe we’re going to yell. But if a child is tired, maybe they’re going to cry, which can look like sadness to us. Or maybe they throw something when they’re really frustrated.

And so just disciplining the part of their behavior that we don’t like, that makes us feel like bad parents, that is not what we’re teaching our children, or whatever narrative we have, really cheats them out of learning how to better handle the cause of what caused the behavior to begin with.

Bonnie: So talk a little bit on why punishment is not effective. Because even though I think most parents have accepted that hitting your kids or spanking is not okay, compared to when I was being brought up that was considered normal. Actually, this is random, but I remember in preschool, the owner’s son was in my class and we would actually hear him spanking him sometimes, like in the back room. Like that does not happen, right?

So tell us a bit about why that has shifted. Why is punishment, quote unquote, “bad?” What’s the data or the thinking behind that?

Hope: Well, punishment works. I mean, it just aborts behavior and it doesn’t teach anything.

Bonnie: Yes, that’s what I meant.

Hope: So, I mean, just to be clear when you want to shut your kids down, I mean, many kids who are well behaved in our society are afraid of getting in trouble. The current sort of sophisticated way of thinking about managing or teaching our kids is remembering that punishment doesn’t teach, right? It just stops a behavior that makes us uncomfortable, and then the child is still left without the skill set to be able to shift into a more attractive or acceptable behavior in our family system.

And so I think that parents get a lot of feedback that when they hit or when they scream, or when they finally lose their mind or when they take their phone away, or they do whatever they’re going to do to get their kid to stop, we can’t make our kids do something or not do something. We can just make them sorry with punishment that they didn’t make the right choice.

And so I think that the current thinking, Bonnie, is just that we need to do a better job of using these opportunities when our kids, quote, “mess up” or they behave in a way that is unacceptable to us, to use that as an opportunity to teach. I mean, think about every time in medical school or when you were in residency, if you got berated when you didn’t do something well, it creates shame. No one learns in shame.

Bonnie: Yes, totally. So I actually wanted to talk about this at some point, so this is perfect. Yeah, punishment aborts the behavior, doesn’t teach and it creates shame, right? Because I still see in so many mom groups like timeouts. And a lot of people still think those are effective. And I don’t know if we talked about this, Hope, but I stopped doing timeouts.

Well, I did them because the book I had told me to do them. And people in the Facebook group said that’s what you should do. But he genuinely freaked out when we did it. And I asked him after the fact once, basically he said something about being afraid of being left alone, like being abandoned, or I think he actually used the word kidnapped one day. But just noticing that that was really detrimental for his mental health to do that.

Every kid will obviously react to different things, right? But I think the bottom line here is that shame is not a useful tool. And the example you gave, if we were berated all time, like shame does not change anything and they can’t learn.

Hope: Well, it either teaches them to be afraid or it teaches them that there’s a cost to their feelings. We’re not creating an environment where they can really practice a new behavior. And what happens is, to your point earlier, if we don’t recognize that every behavior is coming from an unmet need or a feeling, they don’t get a chance to experience their feelings. We accidentally say to them with our punishments, how you feel is not important, even if that’s not what we’re saying with our language.

Bonnie: Yeah. Can you explain exactly what you mean by an unmet need?

Hope: So an unmet need might look like they’re hungry, or they are thirsty, or they’re tired, or they’re frustrated. They aren’t getting attention from us sometimes. So think about the times when your kids are bugging you or nagging you or interrupting you on the phone, right? Sometimes that looks like a behavior, maybe they’re banging on something when you’re doing an activity where you don’t want to be interrupted, and that unmet need could just be attention. That’s all that they need.

And so one of the things that we’ve talked a lot about together, and I often say with my clients is this idea that if we’re just genuinely curious about what the behavior is about, and managing our own frustration in the moment if the behavior is irritating to us or triggering, you know, if we have thoughts that it’s not a behavior we want.

But really being curious about where it’s coming from, sometimes we can offer to our kid, I see that you’re hitting, are you frustrated? I see that you’re hitting, are you hungry? You can be curious about what the issue is. And that way, you’re not saying the behavior is okay, but you’re able to find out what the need is that they have underneath and address that, which often will abort the behavior without the need for any kind of discipline.

Bonnie: My therapist actually said that, she said, most compliant kids are scared. And that’s why they’re compliant.

Hope: Yes.

Bonnie: What do you think about that?

Hope: I 100% agree with that. I think that one of the things that parents do a lot is they look to other kids. And they say like, how did they get a kid that’s so obedient or compliant or does so well? And I’m not saying every kid that is compliant or who listens correctly or whatever is scared, but a lot of children know the cost of their voice.

And so many of the parents, especially the parents who I take care of who are professionals or physicians, like you do, really want to raise resilient and bold kids who speak their mind and contribute to the world. And part of that involves them doing that in our homes, getting feedback from having an opinion.

And when we tell our kids that isn’t how respect looks or we get frustrated when they exert their independence or tell us when they don’t like something and say no, we’re really chipping away at that long game we have of wanting them to be productive adults that say what they want, that know how to create boundaries for themselves, that excel.

And so I’m not sure if that answered your question. But I do think that shutting a kid down feels good to us when the behavior is uncomfortable, but there’s a very high cost to that in terms of our long game.

Bonnie: I mean, if that’s the takeaway point, if there’s just one takeaway point, I think that would be it. And then also, I don’t want people to think just because, you know, we’ve all lost it, right? And so I think, especially for my audience, we want to be perfect at everything. And so if we do yell or lose our crap, then we feel like awful parents, right? And so I think a lot of what you helped me with is just giving myself grace. Like I’m not going to be perfect, right?

Hope: Yeah, and I also think parents, there’s two issues that you bring up. The first is that physicians in general and professionals are very outcome driven. And so our metrics matter, and so how our kids are turning out, we use as evidence against ourselves all of the time, right?

When they have a normal behavior that’s coming from an unmet need or a feeling, we’re doing that, right? And we can easily catastrophize that into all the places, where they’re going, how they’re going to turn out, or judge ourselves because we’re really not showing up perfectly. And so you’re on point about that. It’s very confusing in parenting because we can’t use the metrics that we use that make us successful in our careers often.

But the second point I want to make is that, and I think you and I have spoken about this as well, the idea that our imperfection can really be a beautiful opportunity for our kids, because we’re all going to half the time be really not great at something, and so are they. Our imperfections can allow us to be compassionate to our kids, when half of the time they’re having a rough time.

And our imperfections can be an invitation to teach our kids what repair looks like. To be able to say to our kids, like I did not show up as the mom I wanted to be today. I’m really sorry, I really shouldn’t have yelled at you. And I was frustrated and that’s not your fault. I’m in charge of how I feel and I made a mistake.

Imagine, I think, for any of us even as an adult, how powerful that would be for our parents even now to say to us, I don’t really like how I showed up in this moment. So I think even when we’re not perfect, Bonnie, people underestimate the power of repair. It’s so important for our kids, and it’s not better than doing it right, I don’t think.

Bonnie: Yeah, I’m so glad you brought that up because that’s definitely not something our parents ever did, was apologize.

Hope: Yes.

Bonnie: I’m pretty sure that never happened with me. And I remember when I first read about how powerful repair is, it definitely felt weird to me. But I’ve done it with Jack and I remember this one time where I said it, I really do believe it makes an impact because he just hugged me.

Hope: It’s so respectful, yes. It’s so respectful. And I’ll tell you what else, it may have not happened to you yet, but it will. The better you get at repairing, you’re actually giving your kids a very specific way of apologizing about being accountable. You’re giving them a language that really allows them to use again when they make a mistake.

So many times I’ve said something to my kids and then they’ve come up and made an error or spoke to me in a way that we all have agreed is not okay. And when I just give them a minute and they come back up, I notice they use the very same language that I used with them. It’s extremely impactful for them and so respectful.

Bonnie: Yeah, I mean, I feel like this is basically an example of how they’re always watching and we’re modeling behavior for them always, right?

Hope: Always. Yes, always.

Bonnie: I think we can all agree, so for those listening who are parents, that we all want to be the best parent. I don’t even know if the best parent we can be is the right thing, but the parent that we know we want to be. Because I think all of us have, like deep down, what good parenting looks like, right?

I just think most people just don’t have the tools, which as a coach kind of makes sense because so many of us weren’t taught. When I say tools, I mean, emotional regulation and being able to examine our thoughts and to just think about how, I don’t want to say change because we’re not trying to change everything.

And so what I have found through this work, and when I say this work, working with you and just reading all the parenting books, like the modern ones that teach what we’ve been talking about versus punishing or whatever, this work is mostly ourselves. Not so much like what can we do to change this behavior for our kids, which is what I think a lot of people think parenting is.

But it’s really working on ourselves so that we can, it’s not just modeling better behavior for them. But it is like being the parent you want to be naturally by doing the work ourselves. Am I making sense?

Hope: You totally are. And listen, this is the best thing about having kids, and there’s so many amazing things. But one thing, if you choose to accept the invitation, right, is that our kids show us where we need to grow and heal.

They poke the parts of us that are sad from our childhood, that are – I hate the word trigger, I feel like it’s so overused. But they do kind of trigger the spaces in us that need healing or that were never heard as a child. They show us places where we’re trying to undo the parenting that we had or unintentional ways in which we’re modeling the same kind of parenting that we had and how uncomfortable that felt.

And so I love working with parents so much and I love seeing how your child is reminding you on how to get closer to yourself to heal parts of your parenting, the way you are parented, I mean. And I think they’re such amazing teachers for us. And many parents really aren’t so much looking for tools, although they are, they just think that there’s a right way to do it.

And a lot of the work that I do with parents, when we pay attention to what your kids are bringing up for you, is allowing you to see what feels the most right for your family. We all have different values, we all have different priorities, things that are important to me as a parent are just not important to you.

And when we start looking out at all the other people and wishing our kids were different, we get farther away from ourselves and it’s a lot harder to figure out what feels right for us. And that really is the most important thing.

Bonnie: Yeah, so switching gears here a little bit, one thing that I tend to do, and hopefully I’m not the only parent like this, is does it seem like some parents have it easier? I mean, that’s probably true, right? But it seems like some parents know what they’re doing because their kids seem – Well, just like you were saying, we judge the parents based on their behavior, right?

Hope: We judge the parents based on their kids, right? Let me give you an example, and I didn’t come up with this thought, but I’ll answer this question I think what you’re saying. Which is we have this – So there’s a really great book called The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, that is written by Wendy Mogel, and this is her idea that I’ve embellished.

But it’s this idea that when we get our kids, they’re like a packet of seeds with no label. And we don’t really know what we’re growing, right? And so we plant our seeds and we water them and we just kind of watch. And we’re like, oh, that’s cute. What’s going on there? And some people are growing these really robust seeds and some of us are growing like cilantro.

Bonnie: Hey, what’s wrong with cilantro?

Hope: I love some cilantro.

Bonnie: Okay.

Hope: You cannot have Mexican food without cilantro, in my opinion, unless you have that soap problem where it tastes terrible. But anyway, I love cilantro. But if you’re going next to a sunflower, it’s really easy for you to look over and say, what are they doing right? Their flowers are killing it.

And the thing that comparison does in our parenting, or reading a generic book that tells you what to do, is that it doesn’t recognize that the seeds are predestined and some of us are growing flowers that are more delicate. Some of us are growing plants that are prickly, like my daughter is kind of cactus-y, and so my son is a sunflower. So it’s easy to get mad at what we’re growing, but it’s not necessary.

Some of us have kids, or plants if you want to use that metaphor, that are trickier to grow correctly. But when we’re wishing it was something different, when we’re judging it for not growing correctly, we make it harder. It’s actually not that hard to grow cilantro, not that I’ve ever done it. But it probably isn’t that difficult if you know exactly what soil to have.

A good friend of mine grows orchids and I think they’re impossible to grow, but she knows exactly what to do and so it’s not tricky for her at all. And so when you know what you’re growing and you’re paying very close attention to what you’re growing, it’s actually quite easy. It’s when we’re resisting what we have that things get even harder than they need to be.

Bonnie: Yeah. I think also there’s a lot of like, at least for me it was like why is Jack, Jack? Not like there’s something wrong with him, but it’s like, yeah, sometimes I wish he was an easier kid, for sure. You know?

Hope: Yeah. Yeah, it’s always fun when I have parents, especially in my pediatric office, who get a child that they find more challenging the second time around after they’ve had a very easy, bright, easy to grow flower first. And all of us make it mean we’re doing something wrong.

And let’s just be honest, I mean, to validate what you said, some kids are definitely trickier to parent than others, and that just is what it is. I think that that’s not a matter of opinion. But when you understand your child and you’re really invested in teaching and learning and you amend your control, you amend your health, you amend your soil, when you become someone that is just more attentive, you tend to get a kid that is easier.

A lot of kids respond to our disconnect with who they actually are in a way that doesn’t look so great usually.

Bonnie: Yeah, I definitely argue with reality sometimes because I’m like, he was such a chill baby. He was so great.

The things that are challenging with my son are also his greatest strengths. Like he has so much energy. He’s so kind and he’s definitely a funny kid. So it’s like, yeah, when I think of the whole package, of course I love him and I think he’s amazing. And, as you know, there’s certain things that have been challenging with him.

Okay, and then I think what’s hard for me is the way I was parented, right? I was parented by parents who, more my dad than my mom, who just yelled and hit.

Hope: Yeah, and that’s the toolbox you’re trying to draw from, right?

Bonnie: Yeah, I definitely find myself losing my shit more than I’d like to. It’s a lot better now that I’ve been working with you and just like really noticing and also trying to model to Jack like taking deep breaths or even just saying out loud how I’m feeling, just to model with him.

Hope: Yeah, you and I have talked a lot about how our sympathetic nervous system gets really activated when our kids are really doing behaviors that we don’t love, right? And so sometimes, to your point about really managing us, sometimes our best parenting doesn’t come when we’re activated.

And so when we calm ourselves down when our kids are really behaving in a way that is not acceptable to us and we’re really activated and we don’t pause and take a breath and sort of calm our nervous system down, we tend to show up as the parts of our body that remember our parents. Like we just do our default because our body remembers how bad yelling felt.

If your son is screaming and your dad always screamed at you, the odds of your nervous system being okay with that are really low. And so it requires this constant attention to what we need in the moment, looking at our unmet needs, which isn’t always available to us. We don’t have the time to have these special, beautiful conversations with our kids when we’re getting out the door or when we’re coming home from a busy day at work and we’re exhausted and our buckets are empty as well.

So I do think it’s really important to give ourselves grace and recognize that we’re coming up with our own unmet needs and we are also sometimes parenting from an empty bucket. And that is a tricky place to parent from. And it’s just our reality, especially as full time physicians, you know?

Bonnie: Yeah, I feel like there’s so much we could talk about, but then this would be like a multi-hour –

Hope: Hours, I can do.

Bonnie: Hours, yeah. I just want to say this, I think I told you this the other day, but I just think this is a funny illustration because maybe they want to try it at home. I told you how we switched roles the other day, right? Wait, did I tell you this? I told my other coach.

Hope: No.

Bonnie: Because I have two coaches I forget who I tell sometimes. No, so the other day, one of the things that is almost always a struggle is getting him to brush his teeth. Not always. So yesterday was particularly challenging and he did not want to brush his teeth. And it’s so funny, like when I think about how a kid’s brain works they’re like, well, I don’t want to do it so I’m not going to do it. That makes total logical sense, right? Anyway, that’s besides the point.

So I said, “Hey, let’s play a game. You’re mommy, I’m Jack.” And he was like, “Yes, this is perfect.” So then he’s like, “Brush your teeth.” And I said no. And then he said, “Your teeth are going to fall out.” And I said no, and then I lied on the floor because that’s what he does. And then he said, “The tooth fairy is going to give you so many treasures if you brush your teeth.”

Now, the reason why I’m laughing is this is stuff that I say to him. So he’s literally repeating my words. And then it kind of went on, eventually he brushed his teeth. But what it showed me was that they’re constantly being told what to do and I realized that really sucks.

Hope: It does.

Bonnie: I could not imagine someone telling me what to do all day, that’s one of the reasons why I’m an entrepreneur now, because I don’t want anyone telling me what to do.

Hope: That’s so good. That awareness is on point. And being a kid is really hard. Like, imagine if we just remembered that all the time, how much access we would have to compassion and empathy for them. They don’t get to do anything. We tell them what they’re going to have for dinner. We tell them when they’re going to go to bed. We tell them what they can and can’t do and what the rules are. It’s hard.

Bonnie: Although I don’t think I actually tell him the Tooth Fairy gives treasures. Part of me feels like, oh, he’s telling me what he wants.

Hope: I hope you used it as evidence that he really is receiving messages from you, because sometimes it can feel like your kids aren’t hearing you at all. And so to hear him say exactly what you said must have felt a little good too, yeah?

Bonnie: Yeah. But eventually he did brush his teeth because I think he thought it was such a fun game.

Hope: I love it. Play is a really beautiful way to access connection with your kids because connection always results in compliance when you do it well. And what you did in that moment, is you really connected to what he needed, and it usually will result in improved compliance.

Bonnie: Yeah, actually, we should talk about that real quick because I’m definitely not someone where play is natural. We’ve talked about this, like it’s definitely not my nature to be playful. So I do, I find it challenging to do it. And I feel stupid is really the best way to describe it.

Hope: Oh, that’s interesting, yeah. I don’t enjoy it, to be honest with you. And I think that’s okay. I used to spend a lot of time as a young parent feeling jealous or feeling like I had to play Monopoly and do all the things. I try to use play in different ways. I think being playful is like sometimes cooking, which I really do love. You don’t always have to be sitting down on the floor and playing toys with your kids.

However, even if you don’t like it, it is a very valuable connecting skill. And if it’s mind numbing to you or you feel like you don’t have the time, most of our kids don’t need a lot of time but one on one time that’s playful can feel really powerful for them. And I used to do play with books because I could make funny noises, but I really wanted them to read and I wanted them to sit and read with me. And reading was something that I could easily do without feeling exhausted.

And so I would use a lot of play with that, or storytelling. So don’t get limited to one kind of play. You don’t have to play Legos with your kids in order to create connection. What you did the other night was brilliant, and that was play.

Bonnie: Yeah, I think for him, play is doing something fun. Not so much playing with his toys, it’s like playing games or role playing. I don’t even know how this game came out, but he likes to play this game called police and prisoner. And like, the prison is like the area behind his bed. So he tells me to go to prison, to jail.

Hope: Very nice.

Bonnie: And then he’s the police guy and he’s on the bed. And then this is the game, it’s not really a game. It’s basically like he falls asleep and then I break out of jail. That’s literally the only game and we just do it over and over again and sometimes we switch roles.

I think that type of playfulness is what he craves. And I get it, it’s not natural to me. I’m embracing it more, but again, it’s definitely not my natural state because I’m the serious type. Matt is definitely the more playful, funny, that type of guy. But yeah, this is definitely challenging, but I’m trying to do it more because I could see how much he loves it.

Hope: And it’s an easy give, you know? It’s not that hard. It’s just a practice that doesn’t come naturally to you, you have to do it on purpose. And I wish I was more playful, too. I have friends that sit for hours and play with their kids on the floor. And that has just not been something that’s always been a skill set of mine. I don’t make that mean I’m a bad parent, but I do have to work harder at it.

And I think all of us have skills that are trickier for us than others. That doesn’t have to be a problem.

Bonnie: Is there anything that you want to say that we just haven’t gotten to?

Hope: The amount of pressure we put on ourselves to do parenting right is probably the take home that I think is most important. I think parenting is a process and we’re looking to constantly readjust. And we’re talking about parenting a person that changes every day, every year, that’s constantly evolving, that has no frontal lobe.

And so trying to really access curiosity on why it’s tricky for us and why things are difficult for our kids, instead of needing them to fit into some neat expectation that we have really allows both of our growth, which is the whole point.

There’s not an outcome that we can control anyway. We can’t control other people, we have no way of knowing how our kids are going to end up. And when we’re really focused more on the now and how we’re not yelling or managing our own impatience or repairing in the moment, we’re constantly cultivating a child who is more emotionally aware and feels connected to us.

And that’s really what I think all of us really want, we just sometimes go about it in the wrong way.

Bonnie: All right, Hope, how can people find you?

Hope: Well, I coach parents. I mostly coach professionals and a lot of physicians one on one. And you can find me at my website, which is Parent with Hope at parentwithhope.com. And I’m also on Instagram, I post stuff all the time, @parentwithhope. I’m on Facebook too, but if you like to just scroll on Instagram, you can find me there.

So I take a select amount of clients. I don’t like to be too crazy full, but I do have a lot of parents that I do kind of deep work in.

Bonnie: All right, thanks so much for being here.

Hope: Thank you for having me.

Hey there, thanks so much for tuning in. If you loved what you heard, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts, I’d love for you to leave a review. Reviews tell Apple that this podcast is, well, awesome. And it will help women find this podcast so that they too can live a wealthy life. And finally, you can learn more about me and what I do at wealthymommd.com. See you next week.

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Wealthy Mom MD with Bonnie Koo | Thinking Outside Your Practice with Dr. Zwade Marshall

182: Thinking Outside Your Practice with Dr. Zwade Marshall

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Just like physicians, entrepreneurs solve problems where there is a need, so it isn’t surprising when people take on the role of both. If you’re wondering how you can start a new business while already being a full time physician, this is the episode for you.

I’m joined by Dr. Zwade Marshall, an anesthesiologist, interventional spine specialist, and entrepreneur based in Atlanta, Georgia. He's the founder of Doc2Doc Lending, which is an exclusive lending partner for physicians and dentists who are in all stages of their careers. Dr. Zwade is here to share his personal story of becoming an entrepreneur and how the right support, plan, and mindset got him there.

If you want to discover your capabilities outside of being a physician, tune in this week for my conversation with Dr. Zwade Marshall. We discuss how to have more control over your income, how Doc2Doc Lending can guide you through transitional career points, and how the best businesses are usually birthed from personal experience and need.

Learn more about Live Wealthy, an exclusive coaching program designed for successful women who want to be confident.... and be rich.

What You'll Learn from this Episode:

Dr. Zwade’s journey of becoming an entrepreneur while continuing his physician practice.
How to approach entrepreneurship from your own personal experiences.
How to have a positive, beginner mindset.
Doc2Doc Lending’s practice, offers, and application process for physicians and dentists.
The impact of responsible credit behavior.
How to create and lead a team.

Listen to the Full Episode:

Follow me on Instagram
Dr. Zwade Marshall: LinkedIn
Doc2Doc Lending
PIMD Con
Peter Kim

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Welcome to The Wealthy Mom MD Podcast, a podcast for women physicians who want to learn how to live a wealthy life. In this podcast you will learn how to make money work for you, how you can have more of it, and learn the tools to empower you to live a life on purpose. Get ready to up-level your money and your life. I’m your host, Dr. Bonnie Koo.

Hey everyone, welcome to episode 182. How are you all doing? I just got back from PIMD con, or Passive Income MD Conference, and that was in Los Angeles. This is the third or fourth time that it’s been happening. And, obviously, there was a year where it was virtual because of Covid. But I really love this conference and I actually recommend this to most of my clients.

And it was originally just a real estate conference, but this year he added an entrepreneur track because people who invest in real estate tend to become entrepreneurial. And also Peter Kim has this entrepreneur community, so it made sense to kind of combine it into a live conference.

So I actually had the honor of speaking on something that I don’t usually speak on, because usually my talks are on money, obviously. And my talk was actually on marketing and selling because I was on the entrepreneur track. And so that was really fun to talk about because marketing and selling, if you’re listening and you’re in business, it’s something that most of us struggle with and also it’s a new skill that we have to learn.

And in order to be a successful business, you have to master how to market and sell yourself, otherwise, you’ll just be a best kept secret. And I would even just recommend, like learn to love it, okay?

So it was so fun to meet a lot of people. If you’re listening, maybe I got to meet you. And it was fun to see some of my clients, my prior clients, and just to kind of see what they’ve been up to.

Okay, so today I have a guest on, Dr. Zwade Marshall. And he’s an anesthesiologist. And I wanted to have him on because of a story of entrepreneurship, like I don’t have too many of those people on my podcast, but it’s money related. So I also knew it would be a resource that many of you may need, or at least keep in mind. And I’ve been recommending it to a lot of people who I could tell could use their services.

And so the company is called Doc2Doc Lending. And basically, what it sounds like is they provide personal loans exclusively for physicians and dentists. And, you know, really filling the need or bridging the gap between residency and relocation or being in a pinch, paying off credit card debt, et cetera, because their interest rates are lower than a credit card thing.

So I have had a few friends who needed access to capital for a number of personal reasons. And so it’s just nice to know that this exists and that it’s a company that understands doctors. And so I just wanted to put it out there for you, because I definitely have my share of clients who have a decent amount of credit card debt.

And besides the shame and embarrassment, which I coach them through, having access to a resource like that where they can consolidate debt and be at a much lower interest rate, I think that’s really valuable to know about. So that’s why I have him on. And I’m sure you’re going to get so much value out of it.

And I do have a referral link if you’re interested in applying for one of their loans. My link is wealthymommd.com/doc2doc. And that’s D-O-C, the number 2, D-O-C. And just in case you’re not familiar with what an affiliate link means, it just means that if you sign up for a loan with them, I will get a small commission, but at no extra cost to you. So once again, that link is wealthymommd.com/doc2doc.

All right, here’s the show.

Bonnie: Welcome to the show.

Zwade: Thank you so much for having me, Bonnie.

Bonnie: Yeah, I’m excited to talk to you. And we were just talking, we missed each other at PIMD con.

Zwade: It was huge and it was fun and engaging. I met a lot of cool people and it’s just a great way to spend a weekend.

Bonnie: Yeah, it’s not often that we get to hang out with like-minded physicians. And also, I think it’s a great opportunity to meet doctors of all specialties because usually we’re just going to the boring specialty conferences, right?

Zwade. Absolutely. There’s also a kinship amongst entrepreneurs where we just kind of want to help each other because we all kind of know what it feels like to have that burn of anxiety when you’ve jumped off the porch and there’s no parachute. And you’re trying to make things work and people who’ve lived it as well. It’s validating and it’s also cathartic.

Bonnie: Yeah, you said jump off the cliff. I feel like I’m constantly jumping off cliffs. Just when I think I landed, there’s another cliff.

Zwade: Yeah, it’s self-imposed though because then you get your reps and you know what you’re good at. And it feels a little less frightening with each subsequent jump.

Bonnie: Yeah. I mean, this is what we signed up for, right? It’s frightening but also exhilarating, right?

Zwade: Yeah.

Bonnie: So okay, I definitely want to talk about your story, I know it’s going to be so inspirational to everyone. And so let’s just start with that.

Zwade: Thank you so much. I’m Dr. Zwade Marshall. I’m an anesthesiologist and interventional spine specialist based in Atlanta, Georgia. You’ll hear a little bit of an accent when I say certain words. I was born in the Caribbean, in Guyana. I moved here when I was an adult.

Well almost an adult, I was 17 years old. Went to Emory for college, medical school and business school. I racked up a ton of educational debt because of it, still less than the average medical graduate though. I was at $212,000 and the average is pushing closer to 230,000 now. It’s kind of scary.

But then I left med school here in Atlanta to go to Boston. I went to Harvard for my residency and fellowship. Then I moved back to Atlanta to open my practice. I was an employee at a large private equity back pain group for four years prior to building out my own surgery center, now with two locations.

I’m beginning to see the dream come to fruition in the practice, but then also in my extracurricular gig, which is the lending company for doctors.

Bonnie: Right, extracurricular, I’m like, oh, that’s only an extracurricular? Well, obviously, you going to business school helped with all this, right? Or at least have the mindset to be entrepreneurial.

Zwade: It really did. And I don’t think it’s for everyone. At the time that I chose to go to business school, I was still in medical school. So I did the dual MD/MBA bit. There’s less risk and it’s less expensive doing it that way. If you’re already in practice and you’re thinking about going to business school, you have to consider not just the cost, but the opportunity cost of earning what many doctors make, it’s well into the six figures, right?

At my time, though, it helped me change the lens through which I viewed the world. So I became conversant in the language of commerce, I understood what EBITA means. And the business guys and the finance heads, they like to throw out acronyms to keep people confused. And much of it is pretty simple if you understand the underlying premise.

But I became kind of conversant in that world and was able to kind of think through problems with solutions that enabled me to become a leader and lead teams of people that have subject matter expertise that I don’t have, but I know how to ask the right questions and determine when there’s substance and when there’s not so that I can make good thoughtful decisions.

Bonnie: Yeah, definitely, I think that’s where a lot of doctors, not me, that go into private practice or building something similar that you have, they have no idea how to create teams, lead them, and I know hiring and firing is always like the bane of most businesses, right?

Zwade: Most certainly.

Bonnie: Yeah.

Zwade: The people component is always the hardest part.

Bonnie: Yeah. And you can learn it. Like I have an assistant who’s part time, but I’ve been through many assistants and it’s been a learning experience just to learn how to hire. Like the hiring process, really, if you know how to do it correctly, you can really get at least the best person. But, obviously, you don’t really know how they are until they start working for you.

But I kissed a lot of frogs and also learned how to train them properly. Because a lot of people, they’ll hire someone and then they get frustrated because they think the person should read their mind.

Zwade: That’s right.

Bonnie: You have to be willing to train them, give direct feedback, and it’s hard. But now I’ve gotten very comfortable with direct feedback. And I think a lot of doctors are, you know, side gigs are super popular, whether or not they’re doing it intentionally because they’re trying to create a source of income.

But one thing, because people always ask me like, I’m not really entrepreneurial. And I think it really starts with seeing a problem and then wanting to come up with a solution to solve it, right? That’s what we do as entrepreneurs. And so is that what happened with you with your extracurricular?

Zwade: Absolutely. I think it’s always easiest when the entrepreneur is going to solve a problem that he or she lived because you can understand the customer experience. And if you are that customer, you’re in that seat, you don’t have to stretch to empathize with their plight, and you can really create a tailored solution that can truly solve their problem.

My personal mantra is hire slow and fire fast. You really invest the time upfront learning the person, the candidate, and sharing a part of yourself with them. So between the hiring process and then to the point you made the onboarding process, it’s laborious. It takes up an investment in your cash, but more importantly, in your time.

And it’s really hard to sometimes see the future and how that time investment will pay dividends when you hired someone to kind of offload the burden of time and you’re having to put up all that upfront spend. So know that if done well, it’s worth it.

Bonnie: Oh, can I pause you for a second? I just want to say something else based on what you said about what are the values, what’s the culture of your company? Even though I’m just one, I have values and a culture that I want to cultivate and that to hire someone who also matches that.

Because, again, it’s “just” an assistant, but I want her to be bought and I want her to really believe in the company’s mission because they’re going to be better employees if they believe in what you’re doing, right? So I thought that was a good point.

Okay, go on.

Zwade: I moved from Atlanta to Boston, as I was describing before. And this is kind of like my origin story of the company, Doc2Doc Lending. I was going from what’s considered to be a low cost of living city, Atlanta in Georgia, to one of the most expensive rental markets in the country. It was Boston, it was really Brookline, Massachusetts, where that Harvard hospital Brigham is located.

And I needed first, last month’s rent, broker fee. And a third of all relocating residents, I had student loan debt that was north of $200,000. I had income as a resident that was 54,000 bucks a year, which in hourly rate is $13.12 an hour. And my FICO score was sub 700, not because of bad behavior, but because of the toll that educational debt takes on your credit profile.

I was surprised to realize that banks would not give me a loan. Or if they did approve me they gave me a credit card interest rate, which felt unfair. I mortgaged my youth, basically, being in medical school and training. And now I’m being penalized for the cost of it all.

Bonnie: I mortgaged my youth, I’m going to have to use that.

Zwade: The time that we were in the library, that we’re in the hospital, that we’re studying is the time when all of our peers and our friends are building families and buying their first home. By the time we graduate, they’re in their second home for many of them. And our schedule is not our own.

So there’s all these sacrifices that we make and yet we’re not a sympathetic customer, because let’s think of doctors as kind of the superhuman beings that do well financially. So at Doc2Doc we understand that career arc and we underwrite our loans more thoughtfully and specific to the doctor experience.

So we don’t just care about FICO scores and about debt to income ratios, we give our physicians credit for how many years they have left in residency. We care about the specialty that they’re in. We care about their free cash after they pay their expenses.

And we really do want to reward borrowers for on time payments, the ones that are responsible with their debt, and help them to understand the impact of responsible credit behaviors and how it can help put them in a place of accessing capital cheaper in future.

Many hospitals, their credentialing process includes a credit score check, and so helping folks understand the impact of revolving credit card debt compared to installment debt and how one can be really negative and the other can be really positive, but depending upon how you use either of them, it can harm or help you.

It’s part educational, what our company does. The real kicker here is that we’re helping folks find access to money at a time when very few other people would allow them loans.

Bonnie: Yeah, well, let’s backtrack a bit because you kind of just jumped into Doc2Doc because so many people are like, well, what are they talking about? And so do you want to describe exactly what the company does?

Zwade: Absolutely, sure. So it’s Doc2Doc Lending, and we are an exclusive lending partner for physicians and dentists, we lend to no one else. The company was really created to help doctors from the time they match into residency.

So if you’re a fourth year medical student with a match letter in hand, that’s when you first become eligible for our loans. And we’ll lend to any physician with an active board license or active license to practice through retirement.

The most common borrowing reason right now is for debt consolidation. People are trying to consolidate their high interest credit cards into a personal loan. Oftentimes we’re used for transition costs or for a practice buy-in for a partner loan in their surgery centers. We can provide a number of lending options depending upon the use case.

Bonnie: I just want to make sure I understand. So you said you lend to physicians and dentists only. They first become eligible when they have their match letter in hand, so I guess that’s some time in March. And as long as they’re a holder of a medical license or board certification, which one is it?

Zwade: Active license.

Bonnie: Active license. Do they have to be actively practicing?

Zwade: They do not know, no.

Bonnie: Oh, that means I’m exam eligible, I didn’t know that.

Zwade: Yes. They couldn’t have been disbarred. Yeah.

Bonnie: Maybe you were going to get to this, but what’s the minimum loan and the maximum loan?

Zwade: Yeah, so if the physician is still in training, in residency or fellowship, they’re eligible for between five and $25,000. And if they’re in practice, it’s between five and $100,000. It’s a three minute online application. It’s meant to be frictionless, we know doctors are busy. You can get information on the back end of our app. We can offer approval terms within a matter of minutes of that submitted application and we can fund the loan in a matter of days after approval.

Bonnie: Okay, and the repayment starts right away?

Zwade: So they’ve got one month to begin paying after we fund the loan. And if they’re in training, we allow them to have interest only or deferred payments during the course of their residency or fellowship.

Bonnie: So it sounds like it’s really, like you said, customized based on where they are. So, obviously, in residency it’s like basically what you’re saying is we understand that they don’t have attending salaries, so it might be tough for them to do the full payback.

And then what are the interest rates? And I’m sure, it varies depending on a bunch of factors.

Zwade: It does, yeah. And we’re in a high interest rate environment, just nationally right now with the way the Fed rates have been hiked. Our best rate is 8.9% and our worst rate is 19.9%.

Bonnie: Okay, when I was a medical student, and I’m pretty sure they don’t do this anymore because that’s probably why you guys are in existence now. I actually was able to take out a loan before I had the match letter. Basically, I forget, I think they called it a residency loan.

It was by Citibank, and basically it was money so that I could go to the interviews, right? Because it’s an expense to fly and stay in hotels. I think we forget that, right? And I remember having friends who were like, “Oh my God, I can’t afford this.” And they were just like begging people just to crash with them.

I remember a friend of mine asked if she could crash with my boyfriend because he lived in Chicago and I was living somewhere else. And she met him, so it’s not like she was a total rando, you know?

Zwade: Right, did you say yes?

Bonnie: But she was like, “Can I stay with him? Because I don’t want to pay for the hotel.” So yeah, I was able to get a loan, I can’t remember the amount, it was more than 10,000. Maybe it was 15,000. And the interest rate, and this is years ago when the interest rates were stupidly low, right? So I think it was like 3% or something super low. And then I remember telling people about it, and they’re like, oh, you can’t do that anymore.

Zwade: Yes. So, many of those programs no longer exist. There are a few that still do, but they require school certification. So it depends upon how much money you have left in your financial aid allocation oftentimes. And if it’s full, then it requires a co-signing of a parent or a guardian.

And there’s some seasonality to our borrower needs. If it’s spring, it’s a lot of residency relocation. The folks that match into residency need to move or even the residents that are going to fellowship or folks becoming attendings because many jobs now are not paying a relocation bonus, a sign on bonus.

Or if they do pay it, it requires you to start working first. And after the first month is done, your first check includes that bonus payment. So they’ll use our loan to kind of float their expenses until the first payment comes in.

And one of the best features of our loan is that we have no prepayment penalty. So we don’t penalize folks for an early payoff and we encourage them to do so whenever they can. If they overpay in any given month, we apply that directly to the principal to reduce the interest that accrues over time.

Bonnie: Are people using it for down payments?

Zwade: Well, yes and no. Investors are. In a true residential borrowing situation, you can’t borrow money for a down payment for a residential loan, if that makes sense. But if they’re doing a real estate flip, they’ll use our cash to bridge initial contractor expenses until they do the cash on the refi.

Bonnie: Like a hard money loan almost?

Zwade: Exactly right.

Bonnie: Okay. Yeah, and your interest rates are lower than most hard money loans.

Zwade: Exactly.

Bonnie: Yeah, I didn’t get a relocation allowance for my move. And I was moving from California to New York. I can’t remember, I’m like, how did I do that? I know, flying is flying, but I had to put down one month’s deposit and, obviously, rent is not cheap. And I was like how? I’m assuming my parents helped me because I can’t remember. But yeah, I imagine that not everyone has family support to be able to do that, you know?

Zwade: Yeah. So what’s funny is that my employer did fund mine from residency into my first job. I was always invited back to speak to the residents at Harvard about transition to practice, and I would kind of coach them on how to negotiate for relocation bonus, and the sign on bonus and the things that I did.

And I ended up employing one of the graduates from my program. And so she’s using my advice against me. And in all fairness, I ended up paying a relocation bonus for her because she did an effective job.

Bonnie: Smart girl.

Zwade: Smart girl, she did well.

Bonnie: Yeah. Okay. I actually recommended you guys to one of my friends who is going through a divorce and her money was literally locked up because of it. And she’s a very high paying physician, so I was shocked that she didn’t have access to her capital. I don’t know, basically I remember we were just texting and I was like, how are you doing? Just like checking in with her. And then she told me that she basically doesn’t have money and was freaking out.

And then I was like, well, you should check these people out. And then a week later she thanked me because she said she needed that money to float her until her money was freed up, basically.

Zwade: That’s right. And it’s a sad reality of the medical profession that the divorce rate for us is higher than the general public. And that’s already pretty high, 50%. And we see quite a few applicants that are in that scenario.

In truth, it’s also one of the leading reasons for defaults within our community. Bankruptcy related to divorce and debt that a spouse would have accumulated in a partner’s name, and then they don’t want to continue to pay on that loan.

Bonnie: All right, I’m trying to think if there’s anything else that I wanted us to talk about. Like I said, entrepreneurs, what we do is we solve a problem and there is a need. And just like you were saying, when you’re that person that you’re solving for, it does make it easier.

Definitely for me I was that person who didn’t know anything about money. It was hard to find a resource, especially that was specific for women, because a lot of the resources out there assume you’re a man and things are different for women, for a number of reasons.

And so that’s kind of how my business was born. And Peter Kim’s too right? Do you know his origin story, by the way?

Zwade: No, I don’t.

Bonnie: I’ll just tell you real quick. So he’s an anesthesiologist, too. He, I think, was doing well because anesthesiologists generally get paid pretty well. And I think one day there was some reorg and then he realized that he had no control over his income really.

Zwade: That’s right.

Bonnie: And then that’s when he started seeking out answers and he was proactive about it. And then he said there was a group of older doctors that seemed really happy and then he asked them like, what’s the secret? And they said, oh, we invest in real estate.

Zwade: Yeah.

Bonnie: So then he was like, oh, let me look into real estate. So that’s how that was born.

Zwade: Passive Income MD was born. I can certainly relate to that. I’m anesthesia as well and I’ve always known I wanted to own my own practice in the future and I’ve had this entrepreneurial bug. But what accelerated the path for me leaving an employed role where I was pretty well compensated, to owning my own business is the fact that Covid happened. And this is now March of 2020.

And within a matter of weeks of the pandemic being announced, my employer at that time decided to cut the salaries of all the physicians by 50%. Well in our line of work, you’ve earned your salary three months prior because of insurance payments.

And so it was a convenient way for an institution to cut costs by blaming the pandemic when they were looking to kind of preserve profits. And that loss of control over my income was what inspired me to leave and do my own thing.

Bonnie: Yeah, I think the pandemic really showed physicians like, wow, our jobs are not as stable as I thought. And I’m sure you know the trend of physicians being employees from the get go, that wasn’t the case back in the good old days of medicine, as they say, right? Basically everyone was like, yeah, you open your own practice.

And now people just want to be an employee now, right? There’s pluses and minuses of being an employee versus an employer. I understand both sides now, having been an employee and being an employer.

But is there anything else that you think or that you wanted to say that we just haven’t had a chance to talk about yet?

Zwade: I thought this was great. I think a lot of your audience members are thinking about entrepreneurship. And I’ll tell you that as physicians, we had a pretty rigorous journey to get to where we are and that they shouldn’t underestimate their ability to learn new things, to adapt, and to just be resilient in the face of our new challenges.

And so we are lucky, for the most part, to have a pretty stable income base when we’re beginning. And so don’t underestimate the ability of your background and training and rigor within thinking to be successful at something new. And so go for it.

Bonnie: I totally agree because a lot of doctors think the opposite, that they don’t have any other skills, that they don’t know how to do this. And since I coach on money, they’re like, “Oh, money seems so hard.” I’m like, listen, money is not med school hard.

Zwade: That’s right.

Bonnie: And neither is business, right?

Zwade: That’s right.

Bonnie: I think we’re just not used to being a beginner again and so that’s frustrating.

Zwade: Sure.

Bonnie: And then, yeah, I see so many doctors who are like, well, I don’t want to do this anymore, but I don’t have any other skills. I’m like, what are you talking about?

Zwade: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right.

Bonnie: Yeah, that’s why conferences like Peter’s, I think, are so great, because you meet people, and they’re not necessarily entrepreneurs, like they might just be doing real estate or they just like being in this community because these are doctors who are really looking to improve their lives and have that growth mindset. So it’s contagious. And I think people just go and really get inspired and get ideas.

I never thought I would be an entrepreneur. They are like smart people. I’m just going to be an employee and do my own thing. And then obviously, that’s not the case right now. So I think anyone can do it, just like you said. And we have the drive, the discipline. We’re not afraid of hard work, and so that’s really what it takes to be successful.

All right, so I’m really glad we did this because I know there’s always a need for capital. I have a lot of clients who are wanting to invest in surgical centers, but they don’t have like $100,000 laying around or whatever the investment is. So it’s just nice to know there’s an option versus like, oh, I don’t have the money, so I can’t do this.

All right, so we’ll link in the show notes how to get to you and we’ll go from there.

Zwade: Thank you for having me, this was fun.

Hey there, thanks so much for tuning in. If you loved what you heard, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts, I’d love for you to leave a review. Reviews tell Apple that this podcast is, well, awesome. And it will help women find this podcast so that they too can live a wealthy life. And finally, you can learn more about me and what I do at wealthymommd.com. See you next week.

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Wealthy Mom MD with Bonnie Koo | The Brain-Body Connection with Dr. Ali Novitsky

181: The Brain-Body Connection with Dr. Ali Novitsky

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When we talk about mindset, we generally talk about identifying thoughts that aren’t useful and intentionally thinking more useful thoughts. However, we aren’t just a walking brain, so it’s time to take the conversation down to the wisdom that lives in our bodies, which is especially helpful when we’re stressed. To help me bring this topic of the brain-body connection to you, I have the perfect guest to share her expertise.

Dr. Ali Novitsky does an amazing job of combining thought work with body work. Ali designs health programs specifically for physicians, giving her clients the tools they need to achieve optimal mental, emotional, and physical health.

Tune in this week to discover how to form a deeper connection with your body. We’re discussing what it means to ground yourself when you’re stressed, how you can start practicing body work alongside thought work, and why bringing in this physical aspect as you work on your mindset will transform the way you think and feel about money.

Learn more about Live Wealthy, an exclusive coaching program designed for successful women who want to be confident.... and be rich.

What You'll Learn from this Episode:

How Dr. Ali Novitsky helps her clients gain optimal emotional, mental, and physical health.
The specific exercise Ali offers women to feel better about the bodies they’re in right now.
Why the body is important in helping us process emotions.
How fitness and mental health intertwine.
What grounding yourself when you’re stressed means.
A grounding practice for calming yourself when your nervous system is activated.
Dr. Ali Novitsky’s advice for anyone who wants to form a deeper connection with their body.

Listen to the Full Episode:

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Dr. Ali Novitsky: Website | Instagram | Podcast
The Life Coach School
Tony Robbins
Calm App
Tamara Levitt

Disclaimer: The content in this episode is not financial advice and is provided for educational purposes. Please consult with your licensed financial advisor for professional advice. Wealthy Mom MD does not advocate for the purchase or sale of any security or investment.

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Welcome to the Wealthy Mom MD Podcast, a podcast for women physicians who want to learn how to live a wealthy life. In this podcast you will learn how to make money work for you, how you can have more of it, and learn the tools to empower you to live a life on purpose. Get ready to up-level your money and your life. I’m your host, Dr. Bonnie Koo.

Hey, everyone, welcome to episode 181. Even just saying that, to me, it sounds crazy that I’ve recorded 181 episodes. Well, close to it anyway, sometimes I do replays when I think there’s value in replaying them. Because if you’re a new listener, you probably haven’t gone back and listened to all 181 episodes.

So today I have a special guest, a dear friend of mine, Dr. Ali Novitsky. I’ve known her for, actually I’ve known her since I was living in Philadelphia. So that was at least six years ago, because we moved there right after Jack was born.

Anyway, the reason why I want to have her on is most of the things I talk about and even inside Live Wealthy, and even in my private coaching practice, it’s really working on your mindset, working on your thoughts, identifying unuseful thoughts, and intentionally thinking, like thinking on purpose more useful thoughts.

Now, in the money world I call these expensive thoughts versus money making thoughts. And expensive thoughts, kind of like what it sounds like, they’re thoughts that literally cost you so much money.

And so back to Ali, she incorporates body work with thought work. And this is something I haven’t really talked about and so I really wanted to bring this to light because you’re not what I call a brain in a jar. Like you’re not just brain, thinking, overthinking. Like there’s this whole other part of you, AKA your body, that we normally don’t even talk about or access because so much of our inner wisdom comes from listening to our body.

And so when a lot of my clients have trouble “listening” to their inner voice or looking within themselves, that is all body work in terms of accessing. It’s not in your brain, okay? It’s not like a sentence that pops up in your brain like, this is the right decision. It’s like really grounding yourself, we’re going to actually talk about what that means, how you can start practicing it, and how important it is for if you do have a coach and you’re working on your mindset actively, that bringing in that physical and this will be helpful.

Now, Dr. Ali will actually be at the Live Wealthy conference, the money and wellness conference for women physicians in March of 2024 in Miraval Arizona, it is currently sold out. I will say, at this point it’s highly unlikely you would get off the waitlist, the waitlist is pretty long at this point. But if you are going and you’re listening, I’m going to see if I can have Ali do some sessions with us. It’s just some logistics I have to figure out.

But if you are coming, you’re definitely in for a treat to do some live body work with her. But we’re going to talk about it and give you some ideas on how to incorporate that. And if you’re inside my Live Wealthy program, or even if you’re a private client, we’re going to have Ali come in and do sort of a session with us. So you’ll definitely get the details when we do that.

Okay, here is Dr. Ali Novitsky.

Bonnie: Welcome, Ali Novitsky.

Ali: Hi, thanks for having me. I love chatting with you, as usual.

Bonnie: I know, it’s so fun to finally have you on the podcast. So why don’t you introduce yourself?

Ali: Yeah, so I’m Ali Novitsky and I am, well, a neonatologist by training. However, I currently do not practice neonatology. I, for the past six years, have been working mostly with just women physicians with optimal health. So mental, emotional and physical health. And then recently became board certified in obesity medicine, which has been awesome because while I don’t do the actual medication part, I use all the other principles within the work that I do.

So that’s been really, really fun. And I spend my time doing that, traveling around, going to some conferences, and raising two girls. And we have a dog now, so it’s pretty busy.

Bonnie: Was the dog a pandemic acquire?

Ali: Absolutely she was.

Bonnie: I’m sure the kids love him, her?

Ali: They do love her and she’s extremely high maintenance. And so it’s funny because my husband never wanted a third kid. So as soon as the second one was born, he ran to the doctor and had a little procedure done. And then we got this dog and she is literally more high maintenance than any of the kids.

Bonnie: Oh gosh.

Ali: Yeah.

Bonnie: So, Ali, I’ve known you for quite a few years at this point. It’s been really cool to kind of see things change. Okay, maybe you’ll see like a snippet of the video, but you can’t see Ali’s arms, her arms are amazing. So I’ve seen the transformation. Not that your arms sucked before, but now they’re really defined and awesome and I envy them.

Ali: Love you. Oh my gosh. Yeah, I mean, well if we’re chatting about arms, so one of the things that happened when I first started work in the coaching world, my business started as mind/body marriage and kind of the theme behind that was like the mind/body connection, but also we talked about relationships. So it was a little bit confusing.

And so my focus wasn’t this real heavy health focus for women physicians at that time. But we did talk about health. And then what I realized is, what am I really passionate about doing? What do I really want to do? And why am I not doing that? And really, what it comes down to is I’m obsessed with nutrition and I’m obsessed with exercise.

I mean, it literally started as something that was not healthy as a younger person. I definitely had body image issues. I had weight issues. I had over exercising issues, under eating issues. And through that work in my own healing, I came to a place where I really felt my calling to help others coming from a very body positive, body acceptance approach.

And so I think once I made the decision that that’s really what I love doing, and why am I not just doing that? You know, I was like, and I think that I will also follow my own principles. And so for the past two years, even though I’d always been fit, I really came into my own authentically with finding my authentic body. And it really came down to just committing to just really simple things.

And then I kind of just took those really simple things and started teaching other people these really simple things.

Bonnie: Yeah, including arms.

Ali: Yes. And again, it’s not rocket science. It’s literally just doing a little bit of weight training, eating a good bit of protein and keep doing that.

Bonnie: Yeah, did you know there’s an arm coach in the LCS world?

Ali: What?

Bonnie: I’ll tell you later. I don’t follow her, but I think she literally calls herself the arm coach, just as kind of like a marketing niche. But it is like, you’re like, “Oh, an arm coach, I need that.” But obviously, she doesn’t just work on the arms because that would be weird.

Ali: I’m like, gosh, that’s a really cool idea. I never thought of that.

Bonnie: But it’s just really specific, right? And I didn’t mean to talk about arms the whole time, but I do think that’s an area of the body that women have issues with. I definitely have issues with my arms. So we can talk offline about how you can work my arms.

Ali: Yes. Okay, so I love that let, so let’s go there for a minute. Because I think that yes, in general women have issues with every part of their body. And so one of the exercises I’ve recently been offering, and I’m going to actually, because it’s super easy so I’m just going to tell you right now.

So we’re so hung up on numbers, and it can be anything from how much we weigh, what size our pants are, what our waist circumference is, what our arm circumference is, how much muscle we have, how much body fat we have. And it’s all these like numbers that we don’t really have control. Well, I don’t want to say that we don’t have any control over, but we basically stand on a scale and we get a number.

What I’m trying to kind of help people do is to define their own number. So I say in your body that you’re in right now, what is your number? It’s not a scale number. It’s literally on a scale from 1 to 10. How much do you feel that you’re in your authentic body? And people that are following principles that serve them in their nutrition, serve them in their exercise, and even we can go beyond that and talk about how much mindset work they’re doing and emotional work they’re doing.

If they can tell me that they’re a nine in their body, yet they don’t weigh what they think they should, then they’re at a huge disadvantage because they’re not honoring that they’re probably authentically where they need to be. And so I think that this idea with this acceptance piece, it’s like we are all different. We all have different body types. And I hate to say, I mean, it’s genetic, it is so genetic.

I mean, where we store body fat is completely genetic. I used to always be so upset because I’m very flat-chested. And I’m like, oh man, I’m so flat-chested. And the advantage is that I don’t store a whole lot of body fat in my front area. So my stomach never had an issue with getting more definition there because I don’t store body fat there. And so, right, but I never honored that I was more obsessed with, oh gosh, my training bras are too big, you know?

Bonnie: Yeah. So actually, let’s talk about that. I remember you and I talking briefly, is this the mesomorph thing that we once talked about?

Ali: Yeah, yeah.

Bonnie: Let’s just briefly talk about that because I remember you telling me what I was. But yeah, I don’t know how many types there are, I’ll let you do it.

Ali: You’re a mesomorph, for sure. So they’re somatotypes. So the three body types, somatotypes. So ectomorph is going to be your naturally thin body type. So this is the body type where they were a kid, they could eat whatever they wanted and they would have comments made towards them like, they might be 50 pounds soaking wet. And just like always just, you know, a smaller bone structure, don’t carry a whole lot of body fat at first until we get a little bit older. But just definitely lower muscle mass even, so just naturally thin.

Mesomorph is more of your muscular body type. So this is the body type where they tend to evenly distribute muscle and also body fat, tend to be pretty even up and down. Strong, so like kind of strong naturally, tend to excel at things that require functional body movement. And again they usually lose weight and gain weight kind of in the same pattern.

And then endomorph is the body type that tends to store additional body fat. They just tend to have a little bit of a higher body fat percentage, and not a big deal. There’s not one body type that’s better than the other and most of us are a combination of.

So the most common body type is going to be a meso/endo combination, which is somebody who has a good amount of muscle mass. And they also like to store a little bit of body fat. So that’s the population that I, in the past, would work with a lot because those are the women that are typically thinking I weigh too much, and it’s that whole thing.

And I also want to say that it doesn’t matter what your body type is, you can be a naturally thin person, it doesn’t make you immune from having body issues, right? We think that it does because society would probably say, oh, an ectomorph is going to be accepted more. It does not make us immune.

So yes, those are the body types. And the reason why I like them is because they will influence our BMI and our weight. And this is the number that we have so much hang-up on, but we really don’t understand actually, what could be normal for our body type.

Bonnie: Yeah, no, I love that because also it sounds like knowing what it is will help you sort of customize. It’s like you know kind of what your body needs, versus a one size fits all, right?

So I’m just curious, are you saying that ectomorph, it’s harder for them to put on muscle or do they have to work harder?

Ali: Absolutely.

Bonnie: Is that what you’re saying?

Ali: Totally. Oh my goodness, yeah. So actually, my women, the really cool thing that I’ve seen in the transition of my business is that I work with a lot of ectomorphs now. And it’s because they’re like, oh gosh, I just had my DEXA scan and my bone density is low. And they start getting nervous and so I’m getting a lot more women coming to me for that.

But yes, ectomorphs, actually they early on in their life will have lower muscle, but also lower body fat percentage. So they’ll appear very lean, you might even see good musculature because their body fat is low. What happens over time as things start slowing down, and again, once we hit 30 we start losing muscle mass.

So if you’re an ectomorph that’s losing muscle mass, you’re going to start to see that you’re going to gain body fat. And they’re like, oh my gosh. All of a sudden they say, I never had this before. And now I have this. And so they have to work harder to gain that muscle back and then also maintain muscle.

So that’s the hard part too, is just to maintain muscle as a woman over the age of 30, you actually have to work to even maintain it. To gain it is way more challenging and the results are very slow, especially once we hit about 40.

Bonnie: Yeah. Everyone listening is like, God dammit.

Ali: I know, I know. I’m like, yeah, do you want to hear the crappy part about it? Here we go. But I will also say that a lot of people think, oh great, now I’m going to have to work out for hours and this is just going to be super hard. And that’s actually not true.

In fact, I used to lead all the exercises for an hour in length. Over the past year, we’ve decreased everything to 30 minutes. And so I would say that 30 minutes three times a week is actually going to be somebody who gets an A plus, plus, plus, plus, on their chart. I would say if you’re doing 30 minutes once a week of strength training, you’re going to at least maintain muscle mass.

Bonnie: I feel like since, I don’t know, since I could remember, I think the day of several hours a week, one hour plus a week of weightlifting, and maybe it’s different for men. It’s sort of not what we’re doing anymore. Like, oh, actually, you can get the same benefits by doing a lot less. And now they kind of know what’s effective. Obviously, this is what you do, so you know probably.

Because I think everyone listening is like, who has time for even one hour, three times a week, right? But 30 minutes seems very doable. Okay.

So one thing I thought would be fun to talk about is, so obviously, all the coaching I do is really focused on your mindset. I don’t really do somatic work, per se, but emotions are somatic. And that is something I’m learning more about, because I think it’s really easy to – Well, since we both coach physicians, they don’t want to think about their emotions or their bodies, right?

And one thing I’ve learned, and I know we talked about this before we started the podcast, is the body is so important in helping us process emotions. And to even take a step further, it’s like the movement is so important. So let’s talk a bit about that and how fitness helps you access that.

And not to make it more complicated because we all know people who are like gym rats, but their minds aren’t necessarily managed either. So let’s talk about that.

Ali: I love this question. It’s so good because one of the things that typically happens, I’ll say, in the work that I do is women might come in and think that they want to start exercising for a physical result. And then they’ll soon find that they’re actually not exercising for a physical result anymore. They’re actually doing it because of how it emotionally makes them feel.

And so one of the things that I got into personally a lot, I mean, I learned, obviously, the model and I really love the CBT component. But there’s Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, which is DBT, which is a derivative of CBT.

So it really focuses more on the emotional aspect and there’s four components of it. So it’s distress tolerance, emotional regulation, interpersonal communication, those are the three big ones. And there are four components of it and the other part is just along the lines of mindfulness.

Okay, so it’s mindfulness, emotional regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal communication. So the idea is that these emotional regulation techniques have everything to do with grounding. And one of the strongest emotional grounding techniques that you can ever do is to move your body. Just move your body. So whether it’s taking your steps, doing your strength training, whatever it is, and especially moving your body in nature, completely grounding. And when we can ground ourselves –

Bonnie: Can I stop you for a second?

Ali: Yeah.

Bonnie: Let’s define grounding.

Ali: Yeah. Okay, I love this. So picture an electrical circuit and there’s nothing to ground the circuit, right? So if you don’t ground an electrical circuit, what’s going to happen? It’s going to explode. Humans, if humans aren’t able to become aware of where they are currently, to be able to kind of decide what are the state of affairs that exists within you right now, where is your stress level, then if we’re not taking that check-in on where’s my stress level, we’re going to explode.

And that’s when people become overwhelmed, become burned out. They’re completely reactive. They’re irritable. They’re taking on behaviors that completely pull them away from what they want for themselves.

Bonnie: So when you talked about the nature of things, I’m assuming that you bring in sort of like nervous system work?

Ali: Yes.

Bonnie: Explain that a little bit. And I’ve talked briefly about it, but I really haven’t. And this is something I’m learning about. So why don’t we talk about how the nervous system, obviously physicians know what that is in terms of physiologically, but what it means for emotional work and how it’s important.

Ali: Yeah, no, I love it. So, basically, when we’re thinking about our prefrontal cortex, right? And so we take in the information, and a lot of times because we’re so programmed for negative bias, meaning in any circumstance we’re going to probably believe that it’s negative versus positive. We’re probably going to think that the shoe is going to drop versus a miracle is going to happen.

And so what typically happens is when we perceive a circumstance, we’re going to hit the next level, which is going to be where our stress hormones get released, right? So it’s going to, kind of, hit that area of our brain where it’s like, okay, fight or flight. Let’s let off the stress hormones.

And then what happens then is whenever that happens, the next part we kind of call on our hippocampus for old memories. So basically, the tendency is we’re going through this feedback loop of circumstance, we get triggered, and we kind of go to this space where we bring in old memories. And so we kind of stay stuck.

So where emotional regulation can kind of come in and how we can tripwire this, particularly with movement, is a lot of times really using breathwork. And so I use breathwork all the time and I have particularly brought it into my workouts combined with also core exercises. And I’m going to talk about that in a minute because it’s breathwork and activating your core together, which actually we think provides a tremendous amount of grounding and emotional regulation as it relates to exercise.

But the idea is, if we can pause in that moment where we’re noticing that we are in fight or flight, and instead of kind of digging into those old memories to kind of just ramp up that fight or flight, if we can just pause and kind of do the opposite and stimulate the parasympathetics by breathing.

So usually it’s like five deep breaths. If we can stimulate that angle, we can almost tripwire and reprogram ourselves to instead not go through the fight or flight, but instead go ahead and stay in this more neutral position. And then we can start to pull more of the tools to really ground ourselves to an even lower stress level.

Bonnie: Sounds amazing.

Ali: But that sounds complicated, right? Because what we do in the exercise realm is essentially like, let’s say you’re doing squats. So what we’re doing is when you activate the core, so this is the other thing I wanted to tell you about your core.

So any kind of core and abdominal work activation, and I don’t mean we’re going to go to 100 setups, I mean, you can activate your core standing up. Those same muscles innervate the area of the brain where our emotions live. So in other words, when you do core work you are accessing really the same part of your brain where you’re going to kind of generate more of those memories to create the emotion, those thoughts to create the emotion.

And so it’s the simple breathing patterns we do through the movements with core activation. And also, this is like the simplest thing you can do, if you literally just press your feet without shoes on into the ground, that is like one of the easiest ways to perform a grounding technique. You literally are just feeling the earth push against your feet and your feet push against the earth. And you just stand there, a little bit of core activation, take a couple of deep breaths. That’s the easiest way to really physically regulate yourself in a way that will then allow more emotional regulation.

Bonnie: So why would somebody want to do this?

Ali: Because the reason for activating the area where you can find more emotional regulation will allow us to access, the term I’m going to use is not my term, it’s actually like copyright by somebody else. But they say, wise brain.

We know that the lower we can bring our stress level and the more emotionally regulated we can remain, we will access the thoughts in our brain that we actually want to create, to really elevate our lives. And so we call it our wise brain. So I put it this way, when I was a brand new coach, oh my gosh, I feel really bad for my clients.

When I was a brand new coach, they would come and there would be these thought spirals and I literally was listening and I didn’t know when to interject, and I didn’t know when to stop. And then the next week, they’d come back with the same thing. Okay, so over time, I realized it’s because when they were trying to solve the problem, they were completely emotionally dysregulated.

Bonnie: Or disconnected even, right?

Ali: Totally. Yeah, so I’m like, okay, I’m not going to get anywhere with them if I keep them dysregulated and I’m trying to give them new thoughts or help them create new thoughts. So then I started wising up a little bit. I’m like, we need to regulate them.

So what I found is when we do, and my work incorporates the grounding, so I ground them and I help them learn how to ground so that when we come to coaching and actually work on the mindset, they can access the nonjudgmental thoughts, the flexibility in the mindset, the growth mindset. And they get better results overall just by working on that grounding piece. So that’s why I’ve really embraced why it’s so important.

Bonnie: Yeah, so what it sounds like to me, and tell me if I’m misunderstanding, is that I’m just going to call it the physical work kind of creates the optimal environment to do mindset work.

Ali: Absolutely. So before I got, and I use an app now, but before I had the app we used to do live workouts. Now, when Covid kind of took a backseat, people got their lives back so it didn’t work as well. We used to do our strength training workout and then we’d follow it immediately with the coaching call, like as a group. Because the idea was let’s regulate everyone and then let’s go ahead and work on the mindset.

And it really works. And now what we do is we still have the workouts, they’re shorter, but typically they’ll be doing the workout a little bit earlier, and then we come on the call. So it’s always this idea that we’re working on emotional regulation constantly.

Bonnie: It’s like the warm up almost literally.

Ali: It’s the warm up. That’s a great way to put it. Yep, exactly.

Bonnie: Okay, this is so interesting. I think this is such a good conversation because, like I said, this is sort of an aspect, and what I’ve found in the coaching world that we’re in I think there is a lot more awareness, that you can’t just coach on thoughts, right? Like, it’s not so simple and isolated like that. Like I think of energy and physicalness.

You probably know this because you’ve been doing this for a while. Do you know how Tony Robbins talks about state?

Ali: No.

Bonnie: He basically, I think it’s like your thoughts, but then your body has to also be involved. So that’s sort of one of his things.

Ali: I love that. So one of the things similar, well, the way that I interpret it is that, for me, it’s because personally for me this is how I respond. And so, for me, I’m in my head all day long. So for me just to stay in my head all day long I’m like, this is not fun. I don’t want to coach. This is thinking, I don’t like it.

So what I realized and what I’ve been trying to help people do is our higher self or our inner knowing or what we know to be true, let’s lead from what we know to be true. And let’s use our mind to just confirm it. And how I help people do this is I say, notice where you are with your natural energy.

And let’s say you have a decision to make, right? If the decision is going to be a good decision that your higher self, your inner knowing agrees with, your energy is going to feel full and built up. If you feel like you’re completely drained with the opposite, right? Like let’s say that there’s the decision and then you’re like, okay, but if I make this choice it all of a sudden feels deep and heavy in your gut, you already know that it’s not a good decision.

Use your brain for confirmation versus trying to out think it all the time and then just let your body follow. I think we lose that mind/body connection if we don’t sometimes lead with our body first.

Bonnie: I imagine, just because we both coach women physicians, which means they’re literally hanging out in their brains probably 99% of the time unless they’ve done this work. I’m assuming some of the work or introductory work you probably have to do with your clients is to even get them reconnected to their body.

Ali: Which can be a yes. And I have to tell you that it’s been such an interesting journey, which prompted me to get more educated on a lot of trauma work, right? Because, I mean, when somebody doesn’t feel safe in their body and you’re asking them to connect with their body, that’s a big ask. So there’s a lot of things.

So I have my resources of referrals where I’m like, okay, I think we’re going to need to do a little more work here. I love this coach for this, let’s do this. Because sometimes to even get connected with your body, there’s all these obstacles to even go there, but yes.

Bonnie: Yeah, and it sounds like you kind of have the ability to kind of know when someone needs a little extra help for that.

Ali: Absolutely. And to also give the space that it’s not a comfortable journey when we are trying to kind of get into our body more and to trust. I mean, I think that’s the biggest thing. It’s that trusting what we know to be true, I think that can be challenging.

Bonnie: Oh, 100%. Yeah, I think that’s a challenge for just humans, is that we lean so much. And also what’s valued in society is our brains. And so we learn to sort of lean, especially physicians, right? Because that’s all you’re doing during medicine, is you’re using your brains. And then I’m not a surgeon, obviously, so I can go to the bathroom when I want to, for example.

But when you’re in training, you’re kind of trained to just ignore certain body signals because you have to do XYZ. So going to the bathroom is a good example, also sleep. So that just creates a lot of dysregulated humans.

Ali: Well, you’re so right about that. I mean, that sleep thing is huge, right? It’s like that, because I always talk about if we really want to wipe out that ability to make good decisions, drink a whole lot of bourbon and don’t sleep. And also be a doctor. Those three things alone, you’re going to do really well with, and then we just beat ourselves up. We’re like, why didn’t I make a better decision?

No, it’s not your fault. You did the best that you could with the tools that you had. But when this is wiped out, when your ability to make good decisions is wiped out, it’s difficult.

Bonnie: Yeah, and I wonder if it’s even harder for doctors, because we’re making so many decisions a day compared to normal work people, whatever that means. But you know what I mean, if you’re seeing like 30 patients a day, it’s like 30 decisions you’re making.

Ali: Yeah, it’s the massive amount of decision fatigue that occurs just with your daily job to the point where I can remember when Mark and I, you know he’s a doctor as well. But we would be ordering dinner and we would just look at each other like, what do I want? I don’t know. I don’t know what I want, right? Because you’re so tapped out, you don’t even know what you want to eat.

Bonnie: That’s why I love tasting menus, to be honest. I wish there was a takeout version. Like, don’t give me this, but just surprise me.

Ali: I think that actually, that’s a really good idea.

Bonnie: Yeah, for people who just don’t want to think about it. Yeah, I love tasting menus for that exact reason. Or if I go to a restaurant where someone else has been there, I just tell them to just order. I’m sure I’ll like it. Because I also don’t have super strong, picky, you know there’s a few things that I won’t like. But generally speaking I’m pretty minimal, so I just love it when someone just takes over and does that for me.

Ali: I am absolutely in agreement on that, yes.

Bonnie: Okay, so are you saying that we should all do – I don’t know, what do you call this pre-work? Do you call it a grounding exercise thing? I’m assuming you have kind of a name for this?

Ali: Yeah, so I typically say that – Well, okay, this is how I want to say it, because I don’t want you to get the idea that like, anytime you’re going to coach or anytime you’re going to work on your mind, you first need to take all this time to ground yourself. It’s not that either.

So I like to say that I use a stress scale 1 to 10, right? 10 is super high stress and 1 is like you’re sleeping. And the idea is it’s not like how we define stress, it will be more like your symptoms. I know when I’m at a stress level of seven, I’m going to isolate. I’m literally not going to talk to anyone because I’m so tapped out. That’s my symptom of a stress level of seven.

So I’m not going to go through the whole scale, but what I will tell you is that it’s almost like we want to prophylactically ground ourselves. So we almost want to institute something every single day of our lives that’s going to keep us at a lower stress level. When we do that by default, we’re going to be more grounded. So you don’t have to say okay, I’m going to meet with Bonnie on a call, I’ve got to my grounding.

Bonnie: I better do my little pre-exercise.

Ali: Yeah, no. I mean I did that in the past because it made sense for what I was doing. I will tell you though, having a consistent practice, so some ideas – This is what I like to say, however your stress comes out in terms of symptoms. So, for example, I know somebody who’s symptom is their hair is getting twirled like this. They’re super stressed and they’re twirling their hair, this is a symptom.

So their body wants to move with stress. So I typically say, notice when you get really stressed what your tendencies are. Your grounding technique is going to be something that satisfies whatever it is that you do. I am very restless when I’m stressed. For me, it’s movement. So daily movement for me. I’m not saying I’m going and working out all day, but I’m going for a 10 minute walk at least.

I know that if I can incorporate something that will address how I react to stress ahead of time, I’m going to pretty much always be ready, I’m always going to be primed. And remember, the lower that you are on your stress, the easier it is going to then be able to also adapt another grounding technique.

And grounding techniques can be anything from looking around the room and naming five things you can see. I mean, it literally can get super simple. Having on a fabric that you and just kind of like feeling, if you’re a sensory person feeling the fabric. So notice what senses.

People who are super sound sensitive, some real light music might be super grounding. But I would say know what your thing is and do it as often as you can.

Bonnie: Yeah, well, it’s funny, you were talking about the look around the room. I did that with a previous coach and she told me the reason why it’s so effective is it basically is physiological, right? When you’re in an activated fight or flight stress response, think about it, it’s all about your brain is like we have to focus, we have to understand the danger. So it’s like a very single focus.

But when you’re sort of widening your gaze and looking around, it tells your brain like, oh, we’re safe. That’s what I learned about that.

Ali: Yeah, you’re totally right. It tricks the amygdala. So it takes you out if fight or flight by tripping the amygdala. But you’re exactly right, what your coach said, by looking around you’re proving that you’re safe.

So I usually do, it’s 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. So it’s five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can feel, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste. Nobody will ever go all the way down to one if you’re doing it right. Most people can’t get past the five things you can see.

But all of those things just trip that amygdala which, again, is going to take you out of that fight or flight. And that’s grounding. Grounding is coming out of fight or flight.

Bonnie: Yeah. All right, so what I’m hearing is that it’s not like there’s one way. We kind of have to figure out what it is for us. One thing that helps me, and I notice when I don’t do it, is like even a five minute meditation is helpful just to sit still. I actually use the Calm app and my favorite person is, Tamara Levitt.

Ali: Okay, yeah.

Bonnie: I don’t if you’re familiar with Calm. Her voice is just so soothing to me.

Ali: I love that.

Bonnie: If one out there wants to try it. And so everyday, she has like a daily, it’s called the daily calm. And it’s just five minutes, it’s short. I’m just like anyone can do it, anyone has five minutes, right? We’re scrolling for hours, so you can do five minutes. And she just grounds you, gives you a few minutes of quietness.

And then she always has an amazing quote. There’s like a theme for each call. So today I did it, it was about aloneness versus loneliness. And she kind of explained the connection. So she gives you a little mini lesson.

Ali: That’s awesome.

Bonnie: And then a quote, and then she kind of wakes you up, right? In five minutes. It’s amazing. The longer I do it, the better. But for me, it’s like I’m intentionally spending time quieting my brain. And when I haven’t done it in a while, like today, my brain is just like going in 30 million directions. And, obviously, it’s about noticing it and kind of like bringing yourself back to Earth and trying not to do that. Because high-functioning women tend to be kind of anxious.

Ali: Oh, 100%. I love that you do that.

Bonnie: All right. Is there anything that you think we haven’t said that you think would be useful?

Ali: Gosh, this was so good. I love talking with you because I feel like we said a lot. I think the biggest take home here is that as high-achieving women, right, women physicians, we are going to fall into the all or none so often. All or none thinking is a phrase, a term, a thought distortion that we all talk about. We all know what it is, that polarized thinking. Yet, it’s the one that we always go back to.

And so I think that the best thing I could say is just make the next best decision. So if you feel like there’s something in your life, like your health, or maybe you have a business in your business, or maybe your job at work or a relationship. Instead of going into those extremes, like if it’s a relationship, “this person never respects me.” Try to find that flexibility and that middle ground.

And remember, the idea is just make the next best decision no matter what it is. Like what you said with your meditation, the five minutes. You’re like, I know if I do this for five minutes, I’m going to feel better. This is the next best decision for me today. You didn’t say I’m going to meditate on top of a mountain over a stream for three hours. No, you said I’m going to do a five minute calm meditation.

And so I think ultimately, results come with small consistent actions. That’s it.

Bonnie: Yeah. Oh, one thing I want to say is, it’s kind of a joke but not really. Do you think my clients would get richer by doing more grounding?

Ali: I actually do. I think they would. And this is why I think they would, because a lot of times, think of it, like whenever we’re doing business or whatever, there’s a lot of different thoughts that come in that are going to make us flighty, that fight or flight. And so imagine if we’re grounded and we can really hold onto all of the empowering thoughts that I know you’re helping them create, to create exactly what they want.

So they’re going to just be able to access those thoughts more often. So yeah, I 1,000% think so.

Bonnie: Yeah. All right, I think we’re going to need you to guest coach in our program.

Ali: Totally. We’ll do it all. We’ll do the stress scale. We’ll do emotional regulation. We’ll do grounding, because the thing is they’re not hard concepts. It’s just getting in a routine to do them.

Bonnie: A habit.

Ali: That’s it.

Bonnie: Yeah. Yeah, cool. All right, this was so amazing. Thank you so much for being here and it’s nice to see your face again.

Ali: Thanks for having me.

Bonnie: I know people can’t really see what we’re doing, but we’re on video.

Ali: Yeah, no, I love chatting with you. This was amazing. I really appreciate being on. Thank you.

Bonnie: Yeah. So how can people find you?

Ali: Super easy, so recently we have actually rebranded just to kind of represent more of what we do. And so our brand is The Fit Collective, and it’s super easy. It’s just fitwomancollective.com. And on Instagram, I’m Ali Novitsky MD, and that’s kind of it. But fitwomencollective.com is where you can find my podcast and programs we have and it’s kind of a one stop shop. So super easy to get there and check it out.

Bonnie: Okay, cool. Thanks so much for being here.

Ali: Thank you so much. See you soon.

Hey there, thanks so much for tuning in. If you loved what you heard, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts, I’d love for you to leave a review. Reviews tell Apple that this podcast is, well, awesome. And it will help women find this podcast so that they too can live a wealthy life. And finally, you can learn more about me and what I do at wealthymommd.com. See you next week.

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Wealthy Mom MD with Bonnie Koo | Money Goals: Get Specific to Get Results

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Having concrete financial goals is super important. That might sound obvious, but I’ve noticed that a lot of women tend not to have concrete financial goals. We often have goals like going part-time, being able to retire, and wanting to travel more. While these are all awesome goals, they’re actually pretty vague.

How do you know when you’ve actually reached your goal? This is why having a concrete number in mind is one of the most useful ways to set goals for your financial freedom. I’m giving you the easiest ways to set yourself up for real success when it comes to identifying and achieving your financial goals.

Tune in this week to discover the value of having measurable goals, whether in relation to income, savings, or anything you want more of in your life. I’m sharing one simple question you can ask yourself to get clear on the actions you need to take in relation to achieving your goals, and how to make prudent decisions around your financial goals.

Learn more about Live Wealthy, an exclusive coaching program designed for successful women who want to be confident.... and be rich.

What You'll Learn from this Episode:

Why you need concrete figures around your financial goals.
How to set more measurable financial goals for yourself.
3 things to consider as you start setting financial goals.
The filters I use when I’m setting financial goals.
Why you need to become comfortable with risk as you begin intentionally growing your wealth.

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Disclaimer: The content in this episode is not financial advice and is provided for educational purposes. Please consult with your licensed financial advisor for professional advice. Wealthy Mom MD does not advocate for the purchase or sale of any security or investment.

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Welcome to The Wealthy Mom MD Podcast, a podcast for women physicians who want to learn how to live a wealthy life. In this podcast you will learn how to make money work for you, how you can have more of it, and learn the tools to empower you to live a life on purpose. Get ready to up-level your money and your life. I’m your host, Dr. Bonnie Koo.

Hey, everyone, welcome to a new episode. So I literally just got off a coaching call from my program, Live Wealthy. And there’s been a few things that have been coming up and I was like, I really need to do a podcast episode on this and use my life as an example.

I always think examples, whether they’re true or not, are so helpful in solidifying concepts because otherwise it’s all theoretical, right? And so one of the things I’ve been talking about a lot inside my program is how important it is to have concrete financial goals. It sounds obvious, but what I’ve noticed with a lot of women is that we don’t always have concrete goals.

We have goals like, well, I want to be able to go part-time. I want to be able to retire. Or I want to be able to travel more. And those are all super vague, but they sound awesome, right? Because it comes down to, well, how do you know that you reach that goal? And it really comes down to kind of a concrete number.

And so I want you to think of financial goals in two ways. And I think this is the easiest way, obviously, there’s multiple ways to think about it. But how much income do you actually want per year? And I think sometimes thinking about how much income you want per month might make it sort of easier to wrap your head around.

And by when? By when do you actually want this? And then a third thing that I think is really important is what are you going to do with this? Or why do you want this much money? Because remember, money is a tool, right? So it’s a tool to help us live the types of life that we want, whether it’s to travel more, whether it’s to be able to send your kids to private school or pay for college, right? It’s a tool to help you reach those types of desires, wants and needs.

So I think this is really important to really think about that. And I think it’s really easy to focus on the money goals. But again, I also want you to focus on the non-money goals. So let me give you an actual example from my life.

Now, of course, I have money goals, like an income goal. But I also have priorities when it comes to that type of money. For example, I have not been practicing clinically, like going to a job, for a few years at this point. And so at this point, I have tasted what it’s like to have relative time freedom, flexibility, ability to do what I want and when. And that is something I’m not really willing to compromise on.

I’m willing to compromise it to a point, but really not a lot. And, to me, that includes not just having, for example, a regular job where I’m going to have to have a limited amount of vacation. I would never do that, even if that meant making a lot of money. And I’ve had offers to do that.

And I will tell you, like for a day or two I kind of had this, like, oh, I should do that because that money will be so great for XYZ. We could have more money for investments. It could help us do a down payment. Definitely that desire really kind of got a little, I don’t want to say out of control, but just kind of almost clouded my judgment, okay?

And ultimately, I decided that I do not want to work full-time. Even if I could do that in three or four days a month, I just don’t want to be beholden to having to work a certain amount of hours, having limited vacation, having to ask for time off. That is not something I ever want to do ever again. So that’s a really important priority or filter that I have when it comes to making decisions financially.

And so one of the questions that I think is really important to answer when you’re presented with an investment opportunity, or just even what are the decisions I need to make now and what actions do I have to take to reach those financial goals?

And basically, it comes down to this simple question. Based on my current financial goals, does this investment, does this decision, does this action, kind of all the same thing, does it make sense? Does it actually help me reach that goal? And does it make sense with my current lifestyle priorities or other priorities that you might have?

That question alone is going to pause and slow you down so that you actually think about it. One of my clients was telling me how she gets a lot of emails for deals. We’re talking about mainly real estate syndication deals. And it’s so easy to have FOMO, especially if there’s a deal that a lot of people are going into and they’re hyping it up a lot. So easy to have FOMO and be like, well, I need to invest in this right now. This deal looks great.

Again, this question will help you pause and think about it because there’s a few parts, right? When you’re evaluating a decision to invest in something, yeah, the returns are important. And even if it’s a very, I don’t want to say attractive, because if it’s so attractive why wouldn’t you invest in it? But still, you want to put it through that filter of does it actually help me reach those goals in a way that I want to?

Now, one of the parts of my lifestyle priorities is, besides time freedom and flexibility, is also traveling a lot. And it’s so funny, because I know I talk about traveling a lot on this podcast. And if you know me personally, it’s something that is really important to me. But I go through phases of whether I want to travel.

I’m actually in a phase right now that I think will last until the end of the year anyway, where I actually don’t really want to travel a lot. It’s annoying to go to an airport, even though I have Clear and PreCheck and all the things that make things easier to get through an airport and onto the flight. But it’s tiring, too.

And also, I’ve realized I don’t really want to be away from my family so much. I used to travel a lot for work, and I would rather do more travel for vacation. Like I already have two trips planned this fall for speaking engagements and I’m happy and thrilled to be able to do that. But I’ve decided I’m not going to say yes to any other engagements for the rest of this calendar year.

I’m excited to take the only vacation planned with my family, which is not till the end of the year, December. And so I’m thinking maybe I need to have a little, even if it’s just two nights to get out of town with my family to spend time with them. But because I do love to travel, and I like to travel in style generally speaking, having the income to do that is one piece.

But this is also why I love credit card points, because it allows me to basically pad that income need or actually take away some of those income goals because I am able to get a certain amount of travel through credit card points. I actually added up how much free travel I’ve gotten through credit card points this year and that’s actually like almost $40,000, which is kind of insane when you think about it.

Now it would have been, I wouldn’t even say more, but I probably could have gotten more out of it, meaning like more travel opportunities if I chose not to fly business class to France, for example, or choosing to stay at really nice hotels in Paris. I could have used a lot less points, leaving me more points to do some other travel.

But my priority is to fly very comfortably and stay in nice hotels. But if that’s not one of your priorities or needs or wants, because you would rather be able to actually take more trips, then you’re going to use points differently.

This is why personal finance is personal, because not everyone’s going to have the same goals, right? And so I think that’s really important. So I really don’t like when there’s these cookie cutter generalizations of how you should invest or how you should spend your time, because we’re all going to have different desires.

And then another thing I want to say about this decision making process is that your goals are going to change. I would say just count on your goals changing over time.

Now, one of the skill sets that’s going to be really important with making these decisions is your ability to make decisions quickly and then take action quickly, meaning not too much time between the decision and taking action, these are the things that are really going to move the needle.

And it comes down to a few things. You do have to learn about the investments to see what’s available and educate yourself so that you do make prudent decisions about what you invest in. But then a critical skill set is to have the ability to manage the discomfort with risk and decision making, okay? And mindset around fear. And yeah, being scared to invest in something new.

And what I’ve seen a lot with my clients is that we all want certainty, myself included. We all want certainty that a deal is always going to work out and that you’re never going to lose money. And so what I’ve been offering to, not just myself but to my clients, is like I would just assume that you’re going to make some decisions that result in outcomes that you did not want.

And for money it kind of basically comes down to losing money or maybe the money payout taking a lot longer than you think. Because, of course all of us want a guarantee that that’s never going to happen, but it’s just not possible. Even with the stock market because I find a lot of clients think investing in index funds is safe and have relatively low risk, but even that, there’s nothing risk-free, okay?

And then I find a lot of people stalling and making decisions because they’re scared to lose money. But I also want to say that is risky. I actually want you to consider that it’s riskier not to invest. And so I think the work in terms of feeling better about risk and decision making is actually to just accept that it may never feel great.

Actually, everyone I know, when they invest in something, pretty much, I mean we all have different thresholds, there’s a certain level of discomfort involved with every decision, with every evaluation of risk. I don’t think the goal is to ever feel 100% sure about a deal working out. Because if that’s where you think you need to be, you’re probably never going to get there and you’re going to slow down your wealth creation dramatically.

Now, one thing I want to point out is I think it’s really easy, and maybe I have actually done a disservice to you, that everything can be solved with mindset and that you should do your best or only work on mindset. And that’s only part of the deal, right? It’s okay to make a decision to change a circumstance if it makes certain thoughts easier.

Let me give an example because I know that sounds really vague and abstract. So, one thing about my business, and if you own a business you know business is not guaranteed. 90% of businesses fail and it’s not a consistent income, like a paycheck. And I go through periods where I’m really stressed out about my ability to make money or feel pressure as the main breadwinner of my family. Matt does have a job and he contributes.

But I’ve noticed that recently I’ve had a lot more stress and pressure and feeling like I have to make money in the business, which are not great thoughts to have. It actually is detrimental to my ability to make money in my business. And I’ve worked on my thoughts a lot. I’ve gotten coached on it, yada, yada, yada.

And I’ve just decided recently that I’m going to change some of the circumstances because I do not want to spend so much brain bandwidth on stress and fear that actually takes me away from my ability to make money and to, frankly, be better at business and be a better coach for my clients.

And then also, what I’ve decided is that I never want to lose the ability to work as a physician. And the longer you don’t see patients, the harder it is. And especially with, I’m assuming, surgical specialties including anesthesia, the longer you’re out of practice, the harder it is going to be. Is it going to be impossible? No, but the barriers are going to be higher.

Now, outpatient, like dermatology, I think is a little bit easier because I’m not doing complicated procedures where there could be really consequential outcomes. And I haven’t seen a patient in person since the end of February 2020 and I haven’t done clinical work since the end of 2020. So it’s been a good two and a half years. And it’s interesting, at some point I made a decision like I’m never going to go back, I’m retired.

I would even say that because I thought it was cool to say that or I felt good about that. And I did feel good about it at that time. And so here’s another point I want to make, you are allowed to change your mind. You are allowed to make a new decision. And that’s okay. It doesn’t mean that you made the wrong decision. We are always changing and evolving.

And so what I’ve decided is that I want to work clinically part-time. There’s so many permutations, like I could do locums a few times a year. We decided as a family that that wouldn’t work for our family because being away, because most locums jobs I’d have to travel to literally be away for maybe weeks at a time. We just decided that doesn’t work for our family. Although, in terms of being able to work only just a month out of the year is obviously very attractive. But in terms of logistics, it doesn’t work.

So I went through a few permutations. At the time of this recording, I don’t have a job contract signed, but I am talking to a bunch of practices, including some telederm practices. And what’s going to help me guide the decision is going to be some of the questions I just mentioned before, which is like, does it help with financial goals? 100%, because one of the things I realized is I need capital to be able to invest more, right? And so I want to have access to capital faster.

So having that income is going to help. Also, it’s going to help me calm my mind around my business. And then also my son is starting private school and he has some needs, like therapies that are, unfortunately, cash out of pocket. And unfortunately, my health insurance does not cover any out of network services. It also doesn’t count towards my deductible, which sucks, but that’s my current insurance circumstances.

And so I never want to feel like I can’t afford it. I never want to have to think twice about being able to pay for the support that he needs, or me or Matt, frankly.

And again, I didn’t want to lose the ability to see patients. I didn’t want to have to have so much time lapse that it’s going to be hard. Now, thankfully, it hasn’t been hard, it hasn’t been difficult to revive my licenses. I was really scared of having to reapply all over again, which is such a slog and so unnecessarily.

That’s a whole nother conversation. Like why do we need to have specific state licenses? I know there is that, I forget what it’s called, but there’s that sort of agreement between many states where it’s much easier to get a license, thank God. And thankfully, I’m still board certified until the end of 2025 because it’s a 10 year cycle for dermatology. I think that’s how it works for other specialties.

So I’m in the process of getting all that together. I feel great about this decision. And I definitely have a lot of fear and discomfort. And my fear and discomfort is basically, what if I hate it? What if it sucks? The great thing is I can always quit again. There’s a plan B.

I don’t think it’s necessary to have a plan B, but I have also just accepted it’s normal to have some trepidation around this decision. It’s something new. But also, one thing I’ve also had to remember is, of course I can do this. Of course I can find the right environment, the right practice where it’s going to be enjoyable to practice again.

And I’m actually, to be honest, what surprised me is that I actually am excited to practice again. I am such a different person now. I have all these coaching tools, I think I’m going to be happier as a physician. And I actually think I am a much better physician for my patients because of the tools that I have gained over the years.

So that’s what’s going on in my life. And using that as an example to talk about how to think about financial goals, your non-financial priorities and the timeframe. And again, you can always change your mind. You might decide you need less money, you might decide that you want more money, and you might decide you want it sooner. And that’s all fine and there are multiple ways to get there.

But it’s hard to make decisions, it’s hard to make informed decisions when you don’t know where you’re going. And if you’ve heard some of my prior podcasts where I talk about goals, I want you to think about goals as it gives you a direction. And the timeframe informs what decisions you need to make, what actions you need to take in a timely manner, okay?

So goals are guideposts. And also what goals aren’t are ways to beat yourself up if you don’t reach the goal. Because let’s say you have a goal of $10,000 of non active income in five years. If you reach it in seven years, who cares? But you wouldn’t have made those decisions if you didn’t have that income goal and timeframe goal, okay?

So I hope this was super valuable to you. I know it’s been valuable for me to go through some of the decisions that I’ve been making lately, including which deals and investments to actually do. All right. I will talk to you next week.

Hey there, thanks so much for tuning in. If you loved what you heard, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts, I’d love for you to leave a review. Reviews tell Apple that this podcast is, well, awesome. And it will help women find this podcast so that they too can live a wealthy life. And finally, you can learn more about me and what I do at wealthymommd.com. See you next week.

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Wealthy Mom MD with Bonnie Koo | 5 Steps for Auditing Your 2023 Goals

179: 5 Steps for Auditing Your 2023 Goals

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Once September rolls around, it can feel like it's all downhill until the end of the year. This is the time of the year when any goals you have that you haven't yet achieved start getting put aside because it feels like December is right around the corner. It's time to revisit my episode about conducting a mid-year money audit and apply these lessons to anything you wanted to achieve in 2023.

This mid-year audit isn’t about beating yourself up for not achieving your goals yet. However, auditing your goals gives you a timely reminder of what you wanted to create, why you wanted to pursue your goals, and also shows you that there’s plenty of time left in 2023 to make sure you complete everything you set out to do!

Tune in this week to audit your progress so far in 2023 and decide what you can achieve over the remainder of the year. I’m sharing my five-step process for auditing your goals, showing you why it’s never too late to start setting goals, and giving you the advice you need to start deciding on exactly what you want to achieve in the closing stages of this year.

Learn more about Live Wealthy, an exclusive coaching program designed for successful women who want to be confident.... and be rich. On Sunday, September 17^th 2023, I’m holding an open house. So, if you want to get a behind-the-scenes site tour of Live Wealthy, click here!

What You'll Learn from this Episode:

My step-by-step process for auditing your money and your goals.
The important differences between being interested and being committed.
How to overcome the mental obstacles standing between you and your current goals.
Why it’s never too late in the year to start setting goals.
My favorite time to start setting goals.
The unhelpful thoughts your brain will offer you as you assess your progress on your goals.
How to see the success you’ve already created, and what’s possible for the future.

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:

Disclaimer: The content in this episode is not financial advice and is provided for educational purposes. Please consult with your licensed financial advisor for professional advice. Wealthy Mom MD does not advocate for the purchase or sale of any security or investment.

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Hey, if you’ve been curious about my Live Wealthy program, the money coaching program I specifically designed for women physicians, you’ll have the opportunity on September 17th, Sunday, at either 12 pm or 8 pm eastern. This is your chance to find out everything about the program.

I’m going to do a behind the scenes site tour of the program, you’ll actually see what the program looks like. I’m going to answer all of your questions and you’ll get to meet current members who will talk about what they have accomplished since joining the program.

So, if you have been curious, if you have been thinking of joining, this is for you. To sign up, go to wealthymommd.com/open, O-P-E-N. I will see you there.

Welcome to The Wealthy Mom MD Podcast, a podcast for women physicians who want to learn how to live a wealthy life. In this podcast you will learn how to make money work for you, how you can have more of it, and learn the tools to empower you to live a life on purpose. Get ready to up-level your money and your life. I’m your host, Dr. Bonnie Koo.

Hello everyone. So, at the time of this recording, actually the Monday before this comes out, my son started kindergarten today. It is such a big transition, and I don’t think I realized what it was. I think I may have talked about this on the last podcast or two podcasts ago. How when I was not a parent, that basically all of us who are parents now but when we weren’t we thought we were better parents than the actual parents. And now we know that is not true.

But the reason why I’m bringing this up is because pretty much everyone is back to school. I think where I live, the northeast, is the latest. And in fact, Jack’s school is even later, it started the week after Labor Day. But what I realized is it is already mid-September, which is kind of crazy, right? Because I don’t know about you, but I feel like once September rolls around when school starts, after Labor Day it’s kind of all downhill, right?

It’s starting to get cold. I live in the northeast, actually last week it was in the 90s but generally speaking things are going to be cooling down significantly. And I don’t know what is happening, obviously some type of global warming, but it has been going from really hot to really cold very quickly here in the fall in the northeast.

So the reason why I’m saying everything goes downhill is that whatever goals or things you were so hyped up to work on this year, this is when they die. And when I say this is when they die, it’s like they get put aside. For many of us they were put aside when the summer started, frankly, or even earlier than that. But they really, really go to die around now because things just get busy.

Then in October, if you celebrate Halloween with your kids. I haven’t yet, but I think this year I’m going to have to do some kind of costume thing. Then we’ve got November, where everyone is getting ready for Thanksgiving, then there’s Black Friday. And then December, it’s like forget it, it’s done.

So that’s why I wanted to redo or rather have you guys listen to this episode about doing a mid-year audit, specifically about money but I want you to apply this to anything that you are thinking of actually doing this year.

And I want you to ask yourself, not why have I let it die, because that’s just a question that’s going to create thoughts that beat you up. But it’s more like, hey, I had these goals, I had these things that I really wanted to take action on and work on, there’s still plenty of time left. In business speak there’s more than a quarter left. Q4 doesn’t start until October, so you’ve got more than a quarter. That is a lot of time. That is enough time to get some serious momentum in before the end of the year.

And so I hope this podcast is going to sort of, I don’t want to say relight the match under your ass, but just kind of get you thinking about it and reminding yourself, hey, these are some things that I said I wanted to do. Maybe it’s as simple as recommitting, it could just be as simple as reminding yourself that you had a goal.

I don’t know about you, but I forget my goals all the time. One of the reasons it’s so important to write them down and have some kind of periodic reminder to just read the goals that you had. I’m not being sarcastic, this is a thing for me anyway.

And so if you’re listening to this on the week of September 11th, if it’s past, no worries. But if you are listening the week of September 11th, maybe it’s actually the day it came out. I’m speaking in future tense, so September 14th, Thursday is when this episode comes out. And you have been wanting to work on your finances and you haven’t joined my program, Live Wealthy, I really want you to come do my live class this Sunday the 17th.

We’re doing it twice, 12 pm and 8 pm. And whether or not you join Live Wealthy, of course I hope you do, it’s so much fun and it’s amazing. But even if you don’t, attending is going to put back that laser focus on the money goals and dreams that you’ve been thinking about, maybe even before January, right?

Because I am going to show you and talk about the program, but I’m also going to be showing you, if you didn’t know already, why it’s so important to start taking steps. Why it’s important to work on this. Like part of me is just like, “What is the whole point of money if it’s not going to be a tool that you use to enjoy your life?”

And so that’s your invitation. Go to wealthymommd.com, that’s my main website. You’ll see a link up top that’s a banner, you just click on it and it’ll take you right to the sign up page and I’ll see you this Sunday.

All right, get ready for a mid-year audit.

It’s 2020 and it has been quite the year so far. Most of us were not planning for a global pandemic. Well, the good news is we still have about six months left. It’s not too late to get back on track. And if you didn’t make goals, it’s not too late to make some.

Now, before I walk you through a five step process to do a mid-year money audit, let’s just take a moment to even talk about goals. Why make them? Why bother? I know some of you resist making money goals or any goals in general. You’re tired. We’ve spent our whole lives achieving so much. More goals? I hear you. I get it.

One thing I’ve learned over the past few years is that it’s not even so much about reaching the goal. I know it sounds trite. It is about the journey. It’s about who you become. Goals force you to get out of your comfort zone and to grow. Otherwise, you kind of stay the same. That’s how I look at goals, including money goals.

All right, so let’s get started. Here are the five steps in general, and then I’ll take a deeper dive. Number one is that you need to remind yourself what the goals are or create goals if you haven’t. Step two is to examine the data. Step three is to identify what you’ve done well. Step four is to identify what isn’t working. And step five is to create a plan going forward.

Step one, first you need to remind yourself what the goals are. If you made them back in January or maybe the end of the year – Personally, my favorite time to kind of think about goals for the following year is actually October or November before things get crazy with the holidays. Dig them out, they might be buried somewhere. Hopefully, you wrote them out because that’s such an important step when you’re creating goals, is to write them out and not just think about them.

If you haven’t made goals, this is your opportunity to do so. Like I said, I recommend you write this out. Don’t just think about it. Maybe your goals were something like maxing out your retirement accounts. Maybe you don’t even think about those as goals because they are automatic for you. But those are goals.

Maxing out your 401k, or 403b, or your Roth IRA, for example. Maybe it was to buy rental properties. Maxing out your health savings account. Maybe it was to pay down debt, et cetera. Write them all down.

Step two is what I like to call examining the data. I want you to put your objective, scientific hat on right now. This is not your judgy brain, your scientific brain. Meaning what has been done? What hasn’t been done? This is not the time to judge yourself. We’re simply gathering data points so you can objectively see if you’ve made progress or not.

Let me give you some examples because sometimes our brains will offer up thoughts like, “Well, I haven’t made any progress.” Is that true? Maybe you bought a book. Maybe you read a book. Maybe you opened up that HSA account and put some money into it. It all counts.

Step three, now I want you to take off that scientific hat and ask yourself, what have you done well? I want you to notice how our brains immediately want to point out how we aren’t on track, what we’ve messed up, or maybe you want to start feeling bad about what you haven’t done. This is automatic.

I like to always start with what have you actually done well? Force yourself to ask that question. And you’ve definitely done something well, I promise.

Step four is to identify what isn’t working and what you can learn and what you can improve, but not from a judgmental place. Not from a, oh, I’m so bad with money and more of the same, but from a, what can I learn from this place. How can you create a strategy around all of these things?

Step five, create a plan going forward. We still have about six months left in the year. You know, a few things I’ve learned about goal setting, I think I heard Brooke Castillo say this. We overestimate, or we tend to overestimate what we can do in the short term, like in a week, for example. All of us grossly underestimate what we can accomplish in the long-term, like six months, a year, and a lifetime.

Let me give you an example from my life on how I did this mid-year money audit. Like many of you, I had to remind myself what the goals are because life got busy, lots of things happened this year. Even I kind of forgot what our goals were.

One of our goals from last year, actually for the end of 2019, was to buy a rental property. And some of you may know that was a goal of mine, but it didn’t happen in 2019. And it’s so easy to go into, “Oh, I didn’t do that. I messed up,” et cetera. I just want to offer that those types of thoughts, that type of thinking is just not useful because it doesn’t have you do anything about it.

It doesn’t help you examine why you didn’t accomplish that goal or why you didn’t take action towards it. Now, I said earlier it’s not so much about reaching the goal. It’s about who you become and how you grow as a person and how you deal with the obstacles that come up. I will say, if you pick a goal, that’s “too easy” , it's not that there’s anything wrong with that. It just doesn’t require you to grow and do something new.

For me, for Matt and I, buying a rental property, our first one was going to be something new and it was going to take something, especially for me since I had a lot of fear around real estate. I’d keep saying, “We’re going to do this,” but I would keep not doing that. And so I saw that as an opportunity to take a look under the hood of my brain to see why I keep not doing this.

And honestly, the reason was fear. I built up all this fear in my mind that it was going to be hard, that it was too complicated. And then when I got coached and coached my software around it, I realized that yes, they were excuses superficially, but that my fears were sort of out of proportion to the reality of things.

And what I found interesting is that once I actually committed, not just sort of say, “Oh yeah, I want to do this,” because a lot of us make goals like that from a place of, “Yeah, that would be nice,” but truly commit and take action from that commitment. Once we actually started, I realized that it really wasn’t that hard.

Dr. Letizia Alto, a friend of mine and one half of Semi-Retired MD, even says that real estate is not med-school hard. Us physicians can do hard things. Real estate is not one of those hard things. That was kind of a long-winded story, but I just want to share it with you because I know many of you are also afraid to invest and maybe you’re also afraid to invest in real estate.

When I put on my objective scientific hat around examining the data, examining to see if I had made progress with buying a rental property it’s so automatic for my brain to say, “You have not made any progress around this.” Is that true? Was that true? Of course not. We had made tons of progress.

It’s funny, our brains look at the goal and whether it was done or not. And if it’s not, then we kind of go into what I call all or none thinking where it’s like, “Well, the goal wasn’t met so you haven’t made any progress and you’re a failure” type of thing. When I was able to sit back objectively, there was a lot that we had done to get closer to that goal.

So, for example, we had met with an investor agent. We had taken the Semi-Retired MD course Zero to Freedom with Cash Flowing Rentals. We had started just networking and meeting other people who were also investing in real estate. All of these things count.

And then the next step I talked about, step three, was to identify what you’ve done well. And pretty much I’ve mentioned them already. I had read some books, done some courses, talked to some people, et cetera.

Step four, identify what isn’t working. I talked about this a bit earlier when it came to sort of my personal goal about real estate. What wasn’t working was mainly mental issues, meaning fear, not taking action. These were some of things I had to really examine and get coached on and coach myself around.

And what I’ve learned with all goals is that each of these sorts of mental obstacles, they are opportunities to create strategies. Meaning when my brain goes into fear mode – And here’s the thing, everyone feels fear around something new or something different. It’s the normal human response.

The problem is that most of us think that when we do feel fear, we think it means something’s gone wrong. We think it means it’s like a signal that we shouldn’t do it, that there’s actual danger. I think it’s easy to think that when you see people who are doing things that you want. For example, Leti and Kenji, it’s really easy, even for me, to look at them and think they must not be scared. They must not be feeling what I’m feeling.

That’s simply not true. All human brains will offer up fear when something new is happening. It’s a normal thing to happen. The strategy I created was to honestly write down on a piece of paper when I start feeling scared about investing in real estate.

I wrote a few things down and I’ll share some of them with you. I wrote down, “It doesn’t mean something has gone wrong. It’s just my brain being my brain.” And I also wrote down some alternative beliefs to anchor me. Things like “Fear means I’m doing it right. I can still take action.” Things like that.

Step five, create a plan going forward. We ended up buying our first property by the time of this recording. And so we met that one goal. But since we still have six months left, I thought it was time to work on some other real estate goals.

Even though we bought the property, there’s still work to be done on the property. We’re going to rehab it and we’re going to hopefully do a cash out refi so we can put that money into another property. I guess I made a new goal to acquire a second property within the next six months.

Now it’s your turn. I also have a bonus money audit for you here as well. Make sure you do an income tax audit as well. What I see all too often is people getting really upset when they’re slapped with a large unexpected tax bill. This should never happen. All of us should be doing mid-year tax planning, whether you just gather some information so your accountant can do it for you, or whether you do it yourself.

Simply here are the steps to do a mid-year tax audit. I don’t want anyone to ever be surprised at tax time. You need to gather all of your income so far in 2020. For most of us, that’ll be gathering pay stubs, et cetera. And then you have to make best guesses at your income for the rest of the year. I know it’s not always possible to fully know, but you have to take your best guess. And it’s better to overestimate rather than underestimate.

And then you simply plug in the data into a tax projection calculator. I’ve linked you one that I like in the show notes. You also need to get the information, not just the income, but also the taxes you’ve paid. Because if you’re a W2 employee, taxes are taken out automatically. If you’re an independent contractor, you have to save or put money aside for taxes, and you should be making quarterly payments.

Once you do this projection, you’ll get a good idea whether you are on track or not, meaning whether you need to put more money aside or whether you need to put less money aside. If you’re not on track and you have a lot of taxes you’ll owe if you don’t make changes, well, guess what? You’ve got six months to course correct.

I recommend this process for what I consider simple personal income taxes, where you have sort of standard W2 or 1099 income. If you own a business, whether it’s an S Corp or a pass through entity, I personally recommend you work with a CPA. Yeah, you can do it yourself, I guess I just feel like it’s probably not worth your time to do this, and you’re probably not an expert.

I have an accountant. I also have a bookkeeper for my business. This is something my CPA does with me every summer. I am never surprised at tax time. The goal is to “break even” or maybe owe a little. I know many of us love getting refunds. I don’t. I’d rather get the money beforehand. A good CPA will also run different scenarios based on what’s happening in your life and business and the circumstances of the world.

I hope this was useful for you. I hope that you truly do make some time to assess your money goals for the year and to create some new ones.

Hey there, thanks so much for tuning in. If you loved what you heard, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts, I’d love for you to leave a review. Reviews tell Apple that this podcast is, well, awesome. And it will help women find this podcast so that they too can live a wealthy life. And finally, you can learn more about me and what I do at wealthymommd.com. See you next week.

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Wealthy Mom MD with Bonnie Koo | Insurance: What Physicians and Entrepreneurs Need to Know with Larry Keller

178: Insurance: What Physicians and Entrepreneurs Need to Know with Larry Keller

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I've spoken before about the types of insurance you need to protect your money. This week, I've got my agent for life and disability insurance, Larry Keller, on the show to discuss the nuances of insurance and why you need it right now, especially if you plan on having children.

Even if you’re single, if you intend to have children at some stage in your life, you need life insurance. It’s cheaper now than it ever will be in the future, and if I hadn’t been insured when I was, I’d be paying a whole lot more than I am now. We’re also talking about disability insurance, which is something most people tend to overlook, but it’s definitely worth considering, especially if you’re moving into the world of entrepreneurship.

The last thing you want is for your loved ones to have to pick up the pieces if something unexpected happens. Tune in this week to discover everything you need to know about getting properly covered. We’re discussing why even people who aren’t working need life insurance, and why disability insurance is super important for entrepreneurs.

Learn more about Live Wealthy, an exclusive coaching program designed for successful women who want to be confident.... and be rich. On Sunday, September 17^th 2023, I’m holding an open house. So, if you want to get a behind-the-scenes site tour of Live Wealthy, click here!

What You'll Learn from this Episode:

Why insurance planning might not be fun, but it is important.
Everything you need to know about life insurance.
Why we often overlook disability insurance, even though it's super important for entrepreneurs.
The big problem with delaying getting life or disability insurance.
What to consider if you’re thinking about getting disability coverage or life insurance.
Why, even if one person in a family isn’t working or earning, they’re still worth covering with life insurance.
What disability insurance looks like for entrepreneurs.

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:

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Lawrence Keller: Website | Email
139: How to Protect Your Money

Disclaimer: The content in this episode is not financial advice and is provided for educational purposes. Please consult with your licensed financial advisor for professional advice. Wealthy Mom MD does not advocate for the purchase or sale of any security or investment.

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Hey, if you’ve been curious about my Live Wealthy program, the money coaching program I specifically designed for women physicians, you’ll have the opportunity on September 17th, Sunday, at either 12 pm or 8 pm eastern. This is your chance to find out everything about the program.

I’m going to do a behind the scenes sit tour of the program, you’ll actually see what the program looks like. I’m going to answer all of your questions and you’ll get to meet current members who will talk about what they have accomplished since joining the program.

So, if you have been curious, if you have been thinking of joining, this is for you. To sign up go to wealthymommd.com/open, O-P-E-N. I will see you there.

Welcome to the Wealthy Mom MD Podcast, a podcast for women physicians who want to learn how to live a wealthy life. In this podcast you will learn how to make money work for you, how you can have more of it, and learn the tools to empower you to live a life on purpose. Get ready to up-level your money and your life. I’m your host, Dr. Bonnie Koo.

Hey everyone, so today I have a special guest. So a few episodes ago I talked about some of the top insurances that you really need to consider and get. And so for those of you listening and you did not have adequate life insurance and maybe you were considering disability insurance, so I wanted to have Lawrence Keller, we call him Larry on the show.

So he was actually my agent for my life and disability insurance. And we’ve known each other since, apparently, since I was a resident. I almost forgot that. So he has seen my whole pivot from dermatologist to life coach full-time. So that’s kind of fun that we’ve known each other that long.

So I wanted to have him on to talk about some nuances. So we do get into the weeds a little bit, so if you get lost, don’t worry. I don’t expect you to understand everything, but there are a few things that hopefully I’ve highlighted for you during this episode.

But really, the bottom line is if you are a woman and you plan to have children, you need to get life insurance now, even if you’re single. You may choose to have children without a partner. Regardless, if you plan to have children and you’re a woman, get life insurance.

It’s pretty inexpensive for a woman, we’re talking about term life insurance. And you’ll find out why that is the case and why waiting until you become pregnant or after can increase your premium dramatically. And I’m going to share my story where if I didn’t get insured when I did, my premium would have more than doubled.

And we’re going to talk about disability insurance. And mainly I talk about it in the context of physicians and dentists et cetera, but for those of you listening who are not and if you’re a lawyer or also a coach like me or an entrepreneur, you definitely want to listen.

It’s not something we think about a lot and it’s really something you should consider because no one thinks they’re going to get disabled or die. We know that’s going to happen at some point, the dying part anyway. But we don’t really think about that. And mainly because of what I do and what I know in terms of finances, I’ve already started thinking about like, what is my business succession plan? Like, what happens if I can’t coach? What if I become disabled?

Now, I have created a coaching practice where I can easily hire other coaches to do the group coaching for me inside my program, for example. Obviously, I wouldn’t be able to coach my one on one clients and I would have to transition them to somebody else. But if you are an entrepreneur and you’re listening, it’s something you need to think about, right?

Estate planning is for your personal stuff, but then the business side has that as well. I don’t know if it’s called business estate planning. Maybe it’s called business succession planning, but something I really want you all to think about.

And this isn’t fun stuff to think about, obviously, but it’s so important. The last thing you want to happen is for your loved ones to have to pick up the pieces and not have enough money for them to move on. And I think it’s a tragedy when I see that. I hate it, it’s so awful and can be prevented by getting insured, okay? All right, listen on.

Bonnie: All right, Larry, welcome to the show.

Larry: Thank you so much. I am very glad to be here.

Bonnie: We’ve known each other for a while. I think we first met when I was just starting a blog, right? Isn’t that right?

Larry: It was even before. It was just when you were finishing residency.

Bonnie: Oh yeah, yeah.

Larry: You were in California and then making your way back to the northeast.

Bonnie: Oh my god, I kind of forgot that. So that was 2015-ish. Time flies.

Larry: That definitely sounds about right, yes.

Bonnie: Yeah. So you knew me pre-blog, and now a lot has changed in that time, obviously.

Larry: Yeah, all good stuff. All good stuff.

Bonnie: So the reason why I wanted to have you on the show is to talk a bit more about life and disability insurance. I just did an episode a few episodes ago where I just kind of went over the basics and why people should consider it. I’m always surprised, I just assume people know to get this but, as I’m sure you know, people might know but it’s just like one of those things you’re like, oh yeah, I’ll get to that. And they never get to it until it’s too late, right?

Larry: All the time.

Bonnie: So my goal is to kind of put it out there, educate people, and maybe a reminder like, hey, I haven’t gotten this yet, maybe I should do it. For example, Matt, my partner, does have a small life insurance policy that, actually, I think you did. And then we decided to get additional because he was marked as a smoker back then, which obviously totally messed up his profile or whatever you call it, even though he had quit.

But I guess since he had quit in a short amount of time, after a certain amount of time had passed we were able to get some more insurance.

Larry: Yes.

Bonnie: Yeah, but it took him like six months to fill out the paperwork because he was like, I don’t want to do this right now, yada, yada.

Larry: It’s never fun.

Bonnie: Yeah.

Larry: Someone has to lead you down the path to a certain extent. Once it gets going, it’s easy. But I mean, think about it, how many people are super motivated to go out and say, what happens if I get too sick or hurt to work? What happens if I pass away? They’re not exciting topics, but at the end of the day it goes back to offense is something that’s great to talk about, but defense is what wins championships.

So in my world, even being a certified financial planner professional, I always look at it as the defense first and then we go on the offense. And the truth of the matter is, if I wasn’t in this industry, I can’t tell you that I’d be different than any of your listeners. Like I’m going through my day to day, whether I’m an entrepreneur or whether I’m a physician, I’m dealing with stuff at home, I’m dealing with my personal life. When do you find time to fit it in?

And unless you’re really specific in terms of, I want to make sure that I get this done, it’s too easy to push off and put on the back burner, and you’re right, it just doesn’t get done.

Bonnie: Yeah. And then that includes estate planning too, right? One of the things that doesn’t seem urgent until you die.

Larry: Yeah. I mean, I always tell people when it comes to disability insurance, either you always think that it’s never going to be you and by the time you realize that you need it, you probably can’t get it. And it usually will be the result of either a diagnosis, or I say this tongue in cheek, or you got lucky and it wasn’t you, but it was a friend or a family member. And basically your takeaway from that is this could have been me, now let me get myself adequately set up.

Bonnie: Yeah. Okay, so let’s dive in. So what I wanted to talk about today is basically life and disability insurance. I think it’s pretty obvious why people need it, but maybe not. I was wondering, is there anything different about life insurance for higher-income earners?

Now, my audience is mainly women, and that’s who I coach. So I do also want to touch upon the difference between men and women. I know some of them, but I figured you know a bit more than me. So, first question, anything different for high-income earners except that we should buy more life insurance?

Larry: Yeah, I mean, if you have a high-income earner or you have a dual executive couple, or a physician and an attorney, they’re both working and if that’s the case and they’re both earning substantial incomes. If they’re not using both of their full incomes to either save or spend or meet their goals, you probably don’t necessarily need as much.

But let’s say you only had one person in a couple working and one stayed at home. A lot of times this never even gets talked about. Because they are at home and they’re not bringing in a paycheck doesn’t mean that they’re not worth anything. In fact, they’re worth a substantial amount.

So I always look at it as if I had a couple, A and B, and B is staying home and A is a powerful executive and they’re out there working. If something happens to the stay at home spouse, if the kids are young the working spouse now either has to work less, has to hire someone, they can’t work to the same extent that they used to.

So we really need to get life insurance to allow this person to work less or potentially take time off. And the only thing that’s really going to allow that is money. And if you can’t self-insure, that’s where the insurance companies come in.

Now, thankfully, as you know, for the most part term life insurance is a pretty inexpensive proposition. And the premium rates for females based on age, assuming you have a male and a female and the age is the same, the premium rates for the female is going to be significantly less. So they can buy a lot more coverage for less money, assuming that they’re approximately the same age and approximately the same health, qualifying for the same category.

Now, one negative, and I know you preach this, for females is if you’re even thinking about becoming pregnant, you want to buy your life insurance before it ever happens. And it’s not that we’re going to charge you more because you’re pregnant. We make certain assumptions as to a weight gain, as to how many pounds someone might gain during pregnancy. However, if you run into a situation where you’re diagnosed with diabetes –

Bonnie: I was.

Larry: Gestational diabetes, that can become a significant issue. And suddenly you go from, if you qualified, potentially the best underwriting classification with the lowest premium rates, to now you’re in, if the company offers it, the third best category, which is standard plus non tobacco. And if they don’t offer that category, now you’re in the standard non tobacco category.

And percentage wise, the difference from the first category to the fourth category is a doubling. And that’s sticker shock.

Bonnie: Yeah.

Larry: You know, hey, and if I don’t know and then someone says, oh, but I didn’t tell you, I had gestational diabetes, that’s why my rate is so much higher. And I’ll know that after the fact. Had I known, I wouldn’t have shown that person the best category. I would have shown them the third or the fourth best category to manage their expectations because no one likes to get a surprise like that. A pleasant surprise is okay, but not having to pay more as a result of it.

Bonnie: Yeah. So this is an interesting point, right? Because it’s already something that people kind of put off, and then to have the foresight as a woman to be like, well, I do want a family someday, especially if she’s single and not dating someone, so it’s not on the immediate horizon. They’re not thinking, I should get life insurance.

Larry: No.

Bonnie: Except for me, I got it before I even met someone, but I’m an unusual cookie, right?

Larry: Yes, absolutely. I mean, here’s three times that I’ll tell you that someone should absolutely have it. So number one is there’s a family history. So there’s a family history of diabetes, I don’t have it, but maybe my siblings do or my parents do. If it hasn’t hit me yet, I’d like to buy a policy before it hits me to lock into the lowest premium rate.

The second one is I have someone that I care about, that relies upon me. So if I’m working and I’m paying a mortgage, and my spouse is at home working and they’re not deriving any income, well, yeah, I should have life insurance to take care of them to make sure they can make the mortgage payment because they probably can’t do that on their own without me.

Another one is, if you’re an entrepreneur, or you’re a physician, or an attorney, or a dentist, and you’re going to start your own practice and you’re looking to get a loan from the bank, I will tell you no one thinks of this. As they went to the bank maybe they had a couple of competitive quotes.

And then lo and behold the bank says, we’re ready to approve your loan and you’re clear to close on such and such date. But by the way, Bonnie, before you do that, we need you to take out a life insurance policy that is going to be collaterally assigned to us. So in the event you pass away and you can’t pay this back, we get our money back.

So what does that actually mean? Let’s say my death benefit is a million dollars, the loan that I’m taking from the bank is 250,000. It just means the first 250,000 goes to the bank. The balance goes to my beneficiary. Now, as I pay off, that loan, less is going to the bank and more is going to my beneficiary. And ultimately when I pay the loan off, I should go back to the bank and have them sign a release to get rid of that collateral assignment because they are no longer owed anything.

Bonnie: That’s such a good point. So are you saying that this is pretty typical of banks to ask for a life insurance policy?

Larry: Very typical.

Bonnie: I mean, it kind of makes sense.

Larry: It makes complete sense, especially among physicians and dentists. And a lot of the times but not all of the time, the same bank might ask for disability insurance where they are either the named beneficiary or, again, we’re using a collateral assignment for some type of monthly benefit.

So if my monthly payment is $5,700, the bank will literally say, Bonnie, you have to have a disability insurance policy that’s going to pay at least $5,700 either directly to us, or you can collaterally assign that to us.

Now, a trick here is you really don’t want to use your personal individual disability insurance policy to assign that to the bank, because that’s money out of your pocket. Ideally, that’s money that is going to help you maintain your expenses, other than the loan, in the event you’re disabled. So you can buy what’s called a disability business overhead expense policy.

Bonnie: Oh yeah, I’ve heard this.

Larry: It’s really if you’re self employed or if you’re in a small practice you would actually pay this through your practice, take an income tax deduction. Because you did that, when the benefits come in they would be taxable, but because you’re using it to pay your business expenses, it’s deductible again and the net result is a wash.

You can go one step further. You could say I’m only doing this to protect the bank so I can get the loan. I don’t really care about the rest of my expenses. Certain policies you can buy a standalone business loan protection policy. As long as it’s a minimum amount for a minimum term, it’s pretty inexpensive.

So a very popular combination for someone taking out a loan in a professional capacity would be a term life insurance policy coupled with a business loan protection policy. But if I was doing real planning, I would say you should also do that, but now you should have your personal disability insurance policy, you should think about a business overhead expense policy for everything aside from the loan.

And then you can get a little bit more interesting. So let’s say I was a plastic surgeon. And these days so much is driven by social media and I had a social media person in my office, they did everything for me. And I’m the surgeon, but they’re getting me my patients. Well, if that person becomes disabled or dies, my influx or my funnel of new patients could stop pretty quickly.

When that happens, my income starts to go down. So I can literally buy a key person disability insurance policy to cover that individual, which would allow me time to find somebody else and not have a significant financial loss as a result of it. And the same thing is true, I can buy a life insurance policy.

Bonnie: Yeah, I probably learned this from you, Larry, this sounds familiar.

Larry: Yeah. There is key person disability insurance, key person life insurance, but again, that’s going to be really more for your business person that has employees. A lot of cases, let’s look at a life coach, let’s look at a solo attorney, let’s look at a physician that’s doing locums. They are the business.

Now, they may or may not have expenses. If they have an office, obviously, they have expenses. If it’s locums, most of that is going to be covered anyway. So now it’s if something happens to me and I’m too sick or hurt to work, regardless of what you do, it sounds glamorous. I need an own occupation disability insurance policy that protects me if I can’t do what I’ve been trained to do.

And that’s the way it’s always been marketed, primarily to physicians and dentists and attorneys. But at the end of the day, if you’re working for the income, you’re nothing more than a highly educated, maybe highly motivated money machine.

And if you don’t have enough assets where you could say, I don’t need to work anymore. I’ve hit financial independence. I’m good, I can self insure, you need to have some means of income coming in. And one of the most effective ways of doing this is buying disability insurance, right? So it’s so simple, but it’s so often overlooked.

Bonnie: Let’s talk about, I know in the physician sort of sphere, disability insurance is talked about a lot. But I don’t seem to hear about it in other careers.

So just to give you an example, Matt, he does get a certain amount of disability insurance through his job and he could have opted for more. We decided not to because I think it was actually, it may have been income replacement. I don’t remember, but it was good enough that we felt like we didn’t need more for him.

Larry: Yeah.

Bonnie: So why does it seem to be, I’m not even sure popular is the word, but why does it seem to be more talked about in certain professions versus the life coach industry, for example?

Larry: Yeah, I mean, it’s almost like what I’ll call the red pen theory, right? So if I called you when you were a PGY1 and I’m like, Bonnie, Larry Keller here, I’m not sure if you’re aware but all the top dermatologists, they all use a red pen, and it happens to be with this specific company. It’s not even on your mind. You’re like, that’s great. Go away, I have other things to do.

And then someone else calls you, maybe six months later, oh, Dr. Koo, I don’t know, are you using the red pen? I’ve got to tell you, the top dermatologists, they all use that red pen. It’s almost like a magnet for gaining patients. And you’re like, no, I’ve got to tell you it’s not really on my radar. Thanks for checking in.

By the time I call you again or someone else calls you again, you’re like, oh, you’re calling me about that red pen, right? I know, the top dermatologists, they all use that. That’s like a magnet for patients, right? And now you’re kind of preset for that message.

So why is it that we go after physicians and dentists and attorneys? And I’ll emphasize physicians and dentists a lot more than attorneys. In theory you guys see bad stuff happen every day, right? You’ve got your emergency medicine physician, you’ve got your anesthesiologist, you’ve got your pain management physician, you’ve got your surgeon. They’re all for the most part trying to solve problems.

So in a patient encounter, you know what to do. But by the same token, you almost have to disassociate your own mortality or morbidity from that. So in the back of your mind you’re like, I see this every single day. The dentist, they’re working in a really small area, they’re bent over, they have shoulder problems, they have neck problems.

Now, again, like I said, the time that you finally know you need it, it’s probably too late. And it doesn’t mean you’re uninsurable when the insurance company says, Bonnie, nice try, we don’t want you. But there are something called exclusion riders where the insurance company says we’re willing to insure you, but we’re not going to insure something you have already.

So let’s say you have a little numbness and tingling in your hands. And I get you a policy and I say to you, Bonnie, great news, the insurance company has approved you. We’re going to cover you for everything except for your hands, wrists or forearms.

You’re going to come back to me and you’re going to be like, really? You know what I do for a living, right? I’m like, oh yeah, you’re a dermatologist. You’re like, yeah, I use my hands, wrists and forearms all the time. And I’m trying to understand this, but you’re telling me if an accident or a sickness prevents me from using my hands, wrists or forearms, short of something like a trauma or a laceration, you’re not going to pay me? I’m going to be like, no, you got that correct. Why would I ever buy that?

And I’d be like, well, Bonnie, if you look at the medical dictionary, pull out every page that talks about a hand, wrist or forearm condition, it’s a bunch of pages. But look at what’s left, that’s a significant amount of pages. So I know you’re not happy, no one likes to be told that they are not perfect.

If it’s not a chronic condition, we might come back and tell you we’re willing to reconsider and potentially remove the exclusion rider in the future if you remain asymptomatic and treatment free. But it’s not, hey, I’m not going to take my policy because my hand, wrists and forearms aren’t covered. You’ve got all these other things to worry about too.

Bonnie: Like TBIs, like brain injuries.

Larry: Yeah, that would be absolutely covered. A lot of things you’ll find about would be like the back and the spine, right? So if I’ve got a disc herniation at L5, S1 and I did an MR. Now we’re going to say it’s something that’s degenerative. Well, degenerative means we’re never taking that exclusion rider off. And we tell you, again, laceration or fracture, you’re okay.

Really, what’s the alternative? There really isn’t much. You either accept the risk and decline the policy, or you transfer the risk and you just know that what you had before you met the insurance company is likely not going to be covered.

So you see the physician, you see the dentist, the business owner, a lot of times they make even more money. They’re entrepreneurial, but part of the way we as agents position the sale to the physician and the dentist and the attorney is, hey, this policy is own occupation.

If you’re a trial lawyer and you can’t work as a trial lawyer, you can work as an estate planning attorney. You can draft documents and you can review contracts, and we’re going to pay you your full benefit because you can’t do exactly what you were doing immediately prior to your disability due to an accident or sickness.

Entrepreneurs do so many different things, do they actually need the own occupation definition? And the answer is it depends upon how they feel. So there’s a lot of policies, and I’ll flip into the language here.

Bonnie: Also, we can talk about mine because, obviously, when I got it, it was for me being a dermatologist. And I no longer practice and I’m a life coach. I actually asked you recently, because my annual premium was coming up and every time I see that leave my bank account I’m like, ugh. It’s $7,000 a year, my premium.

Why don’t you tell the audience what you told me about keeping it versus getting rid of it?

Larry: Yeah, so the nice thing is once you are approved by the insurance company for a coverage amount, even if your income goes down due to a job change, the policy by itself is what’s known as non cancelable and guaranteed renewable. They can’t take it away, they can’t change the premium rates.

You can get rid of them, they can’t get rid of you. You can potentially make changes. You could extend the waiting period, which is the number of days that you need to be out of work, either totally or partially if you have that rider, before benefits become payable. You can reduce the benefit amount. You could potentially remove the cost of living adjustment rider which increases your benefit after disability has lasted for a year, if you have that.

But a key takeaway is that the definition of total disability is always based on the duties you are performing, not your job title, immediately prior to your disability. So if you said, hey, I bought this when I was Bonnie Koo dermatologist, had you become disabled at the time you were performing the duties of a dermatologist, full benefits would be payable.

If you then decided to become a life coach, full benefits would continue to get paid plus whatever you earn as a life coach because that was not an occupation that you had at the time of claim.

Then we look at it and we say, well, what if I have more than one job? I am a life coach, but at the same time I am a dermatologist and maybe in my mind I want to transition out of dermatology and solely work as a life coach. Then what happens? Well, now you want to have a partial or residual disability benefit, which takes away the all or nothing.

And typically, what we would say is, well, Bonnie, we get it. You had two different jobs, one was a clinician doing dermatology and dermatologic surgery. One was really working as an executive and a life coach. And if you’re disabled and you can’t do job A, but you can still do job B, now we say, well, what percentage of your income have you lost? We’re going to pay you benefits proportionate to your loss of income.

And there’s some general rules like, hey, as long as you lost 15 or 20% or more compared to your pre disability income, that’s the threshold. And again, it’s got to be due to an accident or a sickness, not that I just feel like I’m changing my job duties around. We’ll tell you, we guarantee we’re not going to give you less than half of your benefit for the first six or the first 12 months of a claim.

If you lose more, we’ll give you more. And if you lose so much, more than 75% or 80%, we’ll give you everything for that month, because really how much are you doing if you’ve lost that much?

Now, for your clinician audience, which will be MDs or DOs, Berkshire, which is a guardian company, about five years ago they introduced a unique definition. And they call this the enhanced medical specialty definition.

So let’s go back to our same example. I’m Dr. Bonnie Koo dermatologist, but at the same time I’m Dr. Bonnie Koo life coach. And you’re disabled at a point where more than 50% of your income is derived from hands-on patient care, where you’re interfacing with a patient to diagnose and treat them.

Well, initially, we would say, well, she’s got two jobs. She can’t do one, she can still do the other. She’s not totally disabled, she’s partially disabled. But with this definition, Guardian says wait a second, we’re going to take a step back. If more than 50% of her income was derived from hands-on patient care prior to her disability, we’re going to deem her totally disabled, pay her her full benefit because she can no longer do hands-on patient care.

Now you can balloon up your life coach practice, even to the point that you no longer have a loss of income. And rather than getting a partial benefit, Guardian would give you your full benefit.

The same thing is true of a surgeon. So we would say, hey, you know what? You’ve got surgical duties, you may do chart reviews, but if at the time of disability more than 50% of your income was derived from invasive or surgical procedures, and typically invasive or surgical procedures involves making an incision that’s routinely done by you, typically involves anesthesia and respiratory assistance, and you can no longer do those procedures, we’ll call you totally disabled and you’ll get your full benefit.

So a good example might be, yeah, let’s go for it. An orthopedic surgeon that also has a large IME practice. And it happens to be more than 50% of their income.

Bonnie: What’s IME?

Larry: Independent medical exams. So they’re just doing exams for insurance companies, checking out the patient and writing up their findings. But it’s not doing surgery. And something happens to them and maybe they are now diagnosed with an essential tremor. They can’t do surgery anymore. If they had two jobs, that of a surgeon and that of an IME physician, we would say, you had two jobs, you can’t do the surgery, we’ll pay you partial benefits.

But under Guardian’s definition they would say, hey, if more than 50% of your income was derived from invasive or surgical procedures, you could still do the IME work, you can do that 100% of the time now, and we’ll still give you your full disability insurance benefit rather than a total benefit.

Bonnie: Okay. Just using me as an example. So I have a policy through Principal, if I can’t work as a dermatologist I will get my full benefit, even if I am a successful life coach and able to make money?

Larry: Correct.

Bonnie: So I’ll still get my full benefit with my current own occupation. And it sounds like there are different nuances in terms of what policies will pay you based on the type of insurance. I’m not going to summarize everything we just talked about.

Larry: Yes.

Bonnie: Now, let’s talk about my case right now, because I haven’t practiced medicine in, oh my god, it’s going to be three years soon. I stopped during the pandemic, which was early 2020. I didn’t realize it was that long. And I am 100% a life coach/entrepreneur. So what does my insurance cover now?

Larry: Now you’re going to be covered as a life coach and entrepreneur. So the insurance company is always going to say it doesn’t matter what you were doing when you bought it, we use that to determine your occupational classification, which impacts your premium rates. But the definition of total disability is always based on what you were doing immediately prior to your disability.

So let’s say, we’ll go out on a limb, you bought this when you were a dermatologist, that’s all that you were doing. You’re not disabled, but you say, you know what, I’m done with dermatology. I want to become a professional chef. I’m going to be the next Giada. And we would never insure you as a professional chef.

Bonnie: Really? Why?

Larry: No guaranteed salary.

Bonnie: Oh, I see, I see.

Larry: You’re playing with knives. But because you bought your policy as a dermatologist, you keep all the same terms, you keep the same benefits, you’re still in your own occupation.

Now, if you’re disabled, and you can’t work as a professional chef, assuming that’s what you were doing immediately prior to your disability, full benefits. If you could somehow go back to clinical dermatology, that income would not be used to reduce your benefit in any way, shape, or form.

Bonnie: I’m just guessing insurance policies had these things in place because most physicians probably didn’t change their occupation, right?

Larry: No, most did not. So let’s say you were a straight up entrepreneur. And you said I know that I need disability insurance, but I don’t really have any special physical skills. I’ve got mental skills, but my job is pretty basic. I meet with people and I talk. And if I can’t do that, really, what else am I going to be able to do?

So you can elect a lesser definition. So own occupation will read something like this, you’ll be deemed totally disabled if you’re unable to perform the material and substantial duties of your occupation. And the material substantial duties are just the things that you do day in and day out that really can’t be taken out of your occupation.

Bonnie: Like me talking. If I can’t talk, I can’t coach.

Larry: Yeah, if you can’t talk, you’re done. In fact, there’s another provision that says if you lose your ability to speak, you’re done. And if you can’t get that back, we usually say loss of sight in both eyes, hearing in both ears, arm and a leg, both arms, both legs, one hand and one foot, we’re going to presume that you’re disabled and it doesn’t matter what else you do.

If you can be a life coach typing stuff out on a computer and never speaking and making more money because people feel bad for you, it doesn’t matter, full benefits are going to be payable. So the first one is the own occupation, one that says if you can’t do the material and substantial duties of your occupation period, you’re totally disabled, full benefits.

Bonnie: How are they determining what the material and substantial, because I feel like for medicine it’s probably pretty outlined. But are they going to know what the material and substantial duties of a life coach/entrepreneur are?

Larry: You’re going to tell them that.

Bonnie: But why would they just believe what I say? I’m just curious.

Larry: Yeah, well, you’re going to have your billing for your clients. So you’re going to show them that and you’re going to say, hey, my typical day is I get up at whatever, on a good day I go to the gym. I hit my computer, 7:30 or 8:00 I start responding to emails. I’ve got group coaching. I’ve got individual coaching. And now if you look at my schedule, I have this accident or sickness, I’m under the care of a physician, my physician and I have had a discussion of what I can or what I cannot do.

If I can still work in a similar capacity but I have to reduce my hours and now I’m coaching fewer people, that means I’m going to bill less. That means my income is going to go down. Maybe I’m not totally disabled, because I’m doing some but not all of my job duties. Or I could do them all, I just can’t do it for the same number of hours.

So that’s where that residual or the partial disability benefit comes in. So if you look at it as an entrepreneur, you might say I don’t really need an own occupation policy that’s going to allow me to be disabled as a life coach and go do something else. That’s probably not going to happen. I don’t want to pay for that.

So you might opt for a lesser definition that we call a modified own occupation, or it’s also known as a loss of earnings policy. The only difference is it’ll say, Bonnie, we’ll call you totally disabled if you’re unable to perform the material and substantial duties of your occupation and you are not gainfully employed.

So if you can’t work as a life coach and you choose not to do anything else, now you’re not gainfully employed, you get everything. If you choose to work and you say, well, I can’t be a life coach for whatever reason, and this is substantiated in my medical records, but I’m going to do something else, now you are actively employed. If your policy doesn’t have a residual or partial benefit to make up for loss of income, you would literally get no benefits at all.

So the best type of policy is going to have an own occupation definition that allows you to work in another occupation and still get your full benefit. Or if you’re an entrepreneur and you say, I just don’t need that, my job is pretty basic, then you want to make sure that your policy has a loss of earnings definition that’s going to cover you if you choose not to work and you can’t do what you were doing. And it’ll pay you benefits proportionate to your loss if you return to work in your job or in another job at a lesser capacity.

Now, a big one and, again, this is getting into the weeds. But entrepreneurs don’t think about this. So let’s say you were out of work for a year. Couldn’t work as a life coach, you really couldn’t do much at all. Well, these people are probably going to go to someone else.

And they’re going to say, Bonnie, I love you but there’s no way I’m taking a hiatus for a year, and I don’t even know if you’re ever going to come back. In the meantime, you’ve been so great and my coaching experience has had such a positive impact on my life, I’ve got to go find someone else.

So they do that. Thankfully, you recover. You come back to your practice, I mean, it’s just you. You send out an email and letters to your coaching clients about your triumphant return. You’re thrilled about this. And you don’t get a lot of response. So then you send up a follow-up email, hey, I just want to let you know I’m back. When can we schedule your session?

And now they know that you’re following up so they say, I guess I’ve got to tell her something. Bonnie, thanks so much. You’re awesome. My life changed so much as a result of you being my coach, but in the interim I’ve met someone else. And now your heart sinks.

Bonnie: I’ve met someone else, it just sounds funny.

Larry: And you’re like, you know what? It’s going to take me time to go get new clients. So I’m not sick physically. In fact, my doctor says I can work as many hours as I want, I can do everything I used to do. I just don’t have any money because my former coaching clients have all left.

And, in fact, even referrals that I was getting from my existing clients and my other centers of influence that were giving me clients, that’s all kind of dried up. So I’m about as well rested as I’ve been. I feel fantastic. I’m making no money.

Well, ideally, your policy should have a recovery benefit. Very often this is built into the residual rider and it says if you were totally disabled and now you’re going back to work and you are experiencing a loss of income due to your prior disability, we are going to continue to pay you proportionately the same way we did when you were working on a limited basis.

And I see a lot of people will miss that in their policies, especially if it’s something that’s optional. So a great example is specific to Principal, and they’re going to be changing their policy next year.

But specific to Principal in the state of California you can buy a recovery benefit, it’s an option. The longest recovery benefit is three years. If you’re like, hey, you know what? Three years isn’t going to cut it, if I go down at my prime it could take me 10 years to get back to the income level I was at before, then I would say don’t buy that policy. Look for one that’s got an unlimited recovery benefit. So there’s definitely some nuances.

Bonnie: Basically they should call you and talk about their situation with you.

Larry: They should call someone.

Bonnie: There’s just so many nuances. I know the basic ones that everyone should basically have. I think this is such a great discussion. I know sometimes it can be dry if this is new to everyone. But now that I’ve been a coach for a while, and solely a coach, a lot of my friends are entrepreneurs and coaches.

Some of them actually are physicians who became coaches, and I don’t even know if they had a policy in place before. But they don’t think about this. And no one thinks they’re going to become disabled. Now, we talked about earlier how life insurance is less expensive for women, but disability insurance, it flips.

Larry: Yes.

Bonnie: So that’s an important point.

Larry: There is a potential workaround to this. And this is what’s known as a gender neutral or a unisex rate structure. Now, it doesn’t mean you have to identify differently than what you are. I had a conversation and the person said, but this is what I am. I’m like, this is the rate structure. We’re still saying that you are your gender, it doesn’t matter.

And what this is, it’s kind of a hybrid rate between the male and the female.

Bonnie: I think that’s what I got. I think I had the unisex policy.

Larry: Yes, that’s exactly what you’ve got. And typically it’s the result of an employer/employee relationship. And it doesn’t mean you’re in a big practice. So currently, some of the companies, let’s just take a very small law firm, you have one female attorney and you’ve got one paralegal, and you’ve got two people just in the office doing general administrative duties.

Well, I might say to the attorney, look, if you buy a policy for yourself, it’s going to be X dollars. But if you buy a policy for yourself and two other employees that work for your practice, not as independent contractors, they’re W2 employees, and you can offer it to them, or you can pay for it for them. And it’s probably better if you pay for it for them.

Your policy can be what I’ll call the real policy, maximum benefits, benefits to age 65. And for the other people, currently, it says the premium prior to a discount only needs to be $200 annually.

So here you are, I’ll make it up, your premium is a couple thousands dollars a year, and now you can buy two policies for two out of your three employees. If you want you can do all three, and it’s $200 a year. You’re going to pay it through your business, at least there, so that’s going to be income tax deductible. And now your premium goes down by 40 to 50%.

I would take that deal all day, every single day. If the employees leave, you don’t have to continue their policies. You can say to them, hey, if you want, I was paying for this policy for you. If you want to continue it, you can. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to. You still retain your unisex rate and your discount.

Now for physicians, they don’t really do that so much anymore. But for entrepreneurs and attorneys and executives that’s available. You might also find I’m in a big company and if I work for a very large company and it’s not medical, you could probably get a unisex rate there as well. And it might even exist and you don’t even need to do anything to do it.

So, like you said, what does this all mean? It doesn’t mean anyone has to work with me, it just means find someone that’s qualified that does this every single day because I can tell you if a discount exists, I will find it. If there is a way to make a discount to reduce costs, I will find it.

Unlike medicine, unlike coaching, where you can charge different amounts based on your experience and people are either going to pay it or they’re not going to pay it. And someone might say to you, well, Dr. Koo, your rates are really high. And you could say, I’m a certified life coach for physicians and I’m a physician myself. Yeah, my rates are high because I’m really good at what I do and I know exactly what you’re going through.

In my world, there is no difference in the cost of a policy if you go to a newly minted insurance agent or an experienced insurance agent. The rates are the rates. Other than that, the only way one person can beat somebody out is to either know of or have access to a discount that the other person doesn’t. Otherwise, if we quote the policy the same way with the same discounts or no discount, the premium rate is going to be the same.

It’s kind of like the iPhone, it is what it is. So I look at it as like, well, why would I go to someone that’s inexperienced, when I can go to someone that is experienced and it’s not going to cost me any more. And my overall experience as a potential client is probably going to be a lot better. And it’s not that they don’t know what they’re doing, but whether it’s medicine or coaching, the one thing that can’t be replicated is experience.

Bonnie: 100%. All right, so I know we covered a lot. So for those of you listening, in case you’re like, this all sounds like stuff I need. I have no idea what Larry just said, which is totally fine.

Larry: Totally fine.

Larry: Larry, how can people reach you?

Larry: So you can always email me. I will tell you, if I am awake I will probably respond to you within a couple of minutes.

Bonnie: This is true, by the way.

Larry: Yeah, unless you’re emailing me at like three o’clock in the morning and I’m fast asleep. So it’s L Keller, L-K-E-L-L-E-R, @physician, no S on the end, financialservices.com. I am absolutely keenly aware that not all of my clients need to be physicians. The planning is the same, the process is the same. You can always call 516-677-6211.

If you’ve received quotes and you’re trying to figure out, is what I’m getting what I should be buying? Are there ways I can tweak the quote to better meet my individual needs and goals and budget? Just use me as a resource. That’s what I’m here for. Thankfully, when you’re in the industry for a long time, it’s different than being a hand surgeon when you start, right?

When you’re a hand surgeon in the beginning of your career, it’s anything you can get your hands on. And then as time goes on, you’re like, I’m not good at that, I’m excellent at this. This is what I like, this is what I’m good at, this is where I’m going to use my efforts and my talents.

Bonnie: Perfect. And then we’ll have your information in the show notes. Click on the link in the podcast and it’ll go to my website and the information will all be there. So I think it’s just important to note that they don’t have to be a physician to work with you. So my entrepreneur friends can call you and you can help them.

Larry: Yes, I absolutely can help the entrepreneur friends. They’ll be looking for, for the most part, same things, same discounts, same process, no problem at all.

Bonnie: Yeah, a lot of my entrepreneur friends do have employees, so I think that, I don’t want to call it group, but basically some kind of group discount is going to be available to them.

Larry: Yeah, the technical term is we’ll go multi-life.

Bonnie: Multi-life, I know there’s so many terms here.

Larry: Yeah.

Bonnie: Okay, is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you think they need to know?

Larry: I would say, this is on the physician side, self-prescribing is not good. Prescribing for your spouse is not good. Part of the underwriting process is answering medical questions, and behind the scenes the insurance companies do a prescription drug check.

Bonnie: I was shocked at how much they knew about me. They were like, why don’t you take Cipro and blah, blah, blah? I’m like, I don’t remember. And then I remember on one of my annual physicals they noted a mole. And they didn’t say anything was wrong about it but they were like there was a mole, you need to go to a dermatologist and get a skin check.

And being Korean and my risk of skin cancer is extremely low, especially since I didn’t grow up as a farmer or surfer being in the sun all day. So I just thought it was hysterical, but at least I was a dermatologist so it was very easy to get that done during my office hours.

But yeah, they really sift through your history with a fine tooth comb.

Larry: Yes. So we do our prescription drug check, that’s routine. We will routinely request medical records. If your physician or practitioner tells you that you need to get something done and you don’t get it done, we’re going to want to make sure that that is done before we’ll consider you for insurance. If you were recommended to get a colonoscopy and you just haven’t gotten around to it, we’re going to want to make sure that you do get the colonoscopy and we see those results.

If you plan on taking up any hazardous activities, so I would say deep scuba diving, jumping out of planes, rock climbing, mountain climbing, racing motocross on a track, you want to make sure that you buy your policy before you partake, or almost think about partaking in any of these things.

Because once you have your policy, again, I’ll use the technical term, it’s non cancelable, guaranteed renewable. We can’t take it away. We can’t make any changes. You can get rid of us, we can’t get rid of you.

So you want to make sure that once you have your policy, you can increase your benefit, that’s going to be contractual, as your income rises, if you qualify to have an increase option rider on there. But don’t give the insurance companies a reason to put on exclusion riders or limit coverage if you do not have to.

And here’s another big one. Someone is in the middle of underwriting, so what does this mean? They applied for their disability insurance, they applied for their life insurance, everything is moving along. We’re doing the prescription drug check, we’re getting medical records. And lo and behold, in the middle of this process someone decides to go get a sleep study. Well, no good can come of that.

If you’re diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnea and you’re given a CPAP prescription, we’re not going to insure you anytime soon. So make sure that you kind of have your house in order before you start seeking out help, or I was just curious, I’m going to go see someone. Just make sure that once that process starts, let things simmer down, get your approval, put your policy in effect and then you can go seek physicians out.

Bonnie: And go skydiving or rock climbing.

Larry: Yeah, do all that stuff. Because they’ll ask you if you intend to do it, so, obviously, you want to be truthful on your application. But if you have no intention of doing it and five years later you wake up and you’re like you know what would be pretty cool? I’m turning X number of years old and I’d like to jump out of a plane. Maybe I’ll survive, maybe I won’t, but I’ll give it a shot. That’s okay, at least you have your policy locked in.

Bonnie: That’s hysterical. I have gone skydiving once. And I actually think, I don’t remember, I feel like they asked me that. And I did say I did and then they were like, do you ever intend to do it again? I was like, absolutely not. I don’t remember, it’s been so long ago it’s vague.

Larry: Yeah, then you’re okay. If you told them I plan on doing it March 15th for the Ides of March celebration and you’re applying in January, they’re either going to exclude for that or they might even tell you we’re going to wait and you can apply after you do that.

With disability, if it’s something they can exclude for, they’ll do it. Then once you do it, you survive, you tell them you’re not doing it again and they would potentially remove that exclusion rider.

Bonnie: That’s funny. All right, so I think what I really want to sum up here is if you’re a woman, get life insurance if you’re thinking about getting pregnant. So I remember I got a million dollars before I even had a partner. And then once I did and knew that I wanted to become pregnant, I got another million, I forget exactly what I got. And thank God I did because I did develop gestational diabetes.

Larry: Yeah, so now your rates are looking stellar. Like you got a sale price. It is a big, big difference. And then disability insurance, again, buy it before you become pregnant because if you buy it when you are pregnant, we’ll insure you, but we’re not going to cover pregnancy or complications of pregnancy.

If you have no complications and you deliver and then you go back to work, the companies vary here, 30 days or 90 days or more with no restrictions, then we’ll remove that exclusion rider for future pregnancies. But, again, if you don’t have to have the exclusion rider, it’s better to not have it at all rather than having it and trying to remove it. Not that having it and removing it is a difficult process, but why have to go through more work?

Bonnie: Exactly. And then one thing I wanted to iterate in case people don’t know is that the younger you are, the cheaper these policies are. So basically, don’t wait until – Well just don’t wait because you are the youngest you’re going to be today.

Larry: The youngest and the healthiest you’re going to be. I mean, when someone calls me and they’re my age and they’ve been a physician for a very long time, I almost say, where have you been all my life? You almost have to go out of your way to avoid people like me to not have coverage by the time you’re in your mid 40s or early 50s. And physicians and dentists, you guys are marketed to so early in your careers that I can tell you it all goes back to by the time you know you need it, it’s probably too late.

I’ve had three surgeons recently, a little bit younger than me, that reached out, none of them are insurable. One was an issue with Covid and continued fatigue. Another one has positive markers for arthritis. So do your homework, no one’s going to force you to do anything. Do your homework, get your quotes, figure out what you want or need. And then from there, you decide how you want to move forward.

And anything, whether it’s disability insurance or life insurance, to a certain extent, is customizable based on your individual needs and goals and budget and your philosophy.

Bonnie: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for being here and being an incredible resource. Again, we’ll link in the show notes how people can reach out to you if they want to have a conversation or want their policy that they’re about to get reviewed to get an expert set of eyes, because Larry has been in this industry for quite a few decades.

Larry: Yeah, 32 years, right out of college. So, in my mind I’m still young, maybe some days not so much when I look in the mirror. But yeah, thankfully I started early, so I’m still young with a lot of experience behind me.

Bonnie: Yeah. All right, well thank you so much for your time.

Larry: Thank you for your time, as usual. Enjoy the afternoon and we will chat again.

Bonnie: Yeah.

All right, due to some legal stuff I have to read you some disclosures for Lawrence Keller, you totally can just skip over this but legally I have to say these things. Okay, this material is intended for general public use. By providing this content Park Avenue Securities LLC and your financial representative are not undertaking to provide investment advice or make a recommendation for a specific individual or situation or to otherwise act in a fiduciary capacity.

Lawrence B. Keller is a registered representative and financial advisor of Park Avenue Securities LLC PASOSG:355 Lexington Avenue ninth floor New York, New York 10017. 212-541-8800. Securities products and advisory services are offered through PAS, member of FINRA SIPC.

Financial representative The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, otherwise known as Guardian, New York, New York. PAS is a wholly owned subsidiary of Guardian. Physician Financial Services is not an affiliate or subsidiary of PAS or guardian. AR insurance license number 1057229, California Insurance license number 0C37340 2002-148357 expires on 12/2024. Thank you for listening.

Hey there, thanks so much for tuning in. If you loved what you heard, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts, I’d love for you to leave a review. Reviews tell Apple that this podcast is, well, awesome. And it will help women find this podcast so that they too can live a wealthy life. And finally, you can learn more about me and what I do at wealthymommd.com. See you next week.

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Wealthy Mom MD with Bonnie Koo | 4 Ways to Save and Invest for Your Kids

177: 4 Ways to Save and Invest for Your Children’s Future

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How can you use your money to set your kids up for the future? Today’s episode is all about how you can save and invest for your family if that’s something you can afford to do. Saving to pay for your kid’s college tuition is a wonderful gift, but lesson number one here is not to start saving and investing for your kids at the expense of your own financial planning.

If you’re looking for a simple way to save for or invest in your child’s future, I’ve got you covered in today’s episode. I’ve created a relatively easy system around saving for my son’s college, and I’m sharing my tips with you today.

Tune in this week to discover four ways you can start saving for your child’s future. I’m discussing your best options for saving money on taxes, helping your money grow, and giving you all the considerations we need to make when we’re investing and saving for our kids.

Learn more about Live Wealthy, an exclusive coaching program designed for successful women who want to be confident.... and be rich.

What You'll Learn from this Episode:

Your options for banking products when saving for your kid’s education.
How to save and invest for your child’s college tuition without paying taxes on the returns.
Extra state-specific considerations that could save you money.
The details of my specific savings and investment plan for my son’s college tuition.
An amazing way for entrepreneurs to save on taxes by employing their kids.
Some common mistakes to avoid that will slow the growth of your money.

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Disclaimer: The content in this episode is not financial advice and is provided for educational purposes. Please consult with your licensed financial advisor for professional advice. Wealthy Mom MD does not advocate for the purchase or sale of any security or investment.

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Welcome to the Wealthy Mom MD Podcast, a podcast for women physicians who want to learn how to live a wealthy life. In this podcast you will learn how to make money work for you, how you can have more of it, and learn the tools to empower you to live a life on purpose. Get ready to up-level your money and your life. I’m your host, Dr. Bonnie Koo.

Hey, everyone, welcome to another episode. I am back from almost a month of traveling. I was in Paris for 10 days. And as soon as I came back we, the family, went away for about five days. We went up to Boston, visited my sister-in-law and some friends who live up there. And now, I guess I’m getting ready for my son to start kindergarten, which is in a few weeks.

And I will tell you, before I had kids when I would hear about parents feeling nervous about kindergarten, I’d be like, really? It’s only kindergarten. And now that I’m a parent, I get it. And anyone who’s listening who’s a parent, I think we can all relate that we thought we were better parents before we were parents. It’s kind of funny and ironic. But anyway, that’s where we are.

So yes, I am feeling nervous and excited. We enrolled Jack in a totally different type of school. It’s an outdoor program. I’ve had to buy all this gear that I never even heard of. I’m not even talking about going to REI, like brands that I’ve literally never heard of.

And it makes sense that there are clothing lines specifically for kids who are outdoors every day, because obviously they’re going to go through a lot of wear and tear. And so it’s been interesting and expensive.

And so I’ve been looking for hand-me-downs because I don’t really want to pay that much, considering I’m going to have to get multiple rain pants for Jack because we might lose some and some might just get beyond repair, right? So that’s what’s going on over here.

All right, so today I wanted to, speaking of kids, talk a bit about what’s available for your kids in terms of saving and investing money for them. So the big caveat here is that do not do this at the expense of your own financial life or retirement. Meaning, so here’s the thing, many of the clients I work with are thinking about this mainly in the context of paying for college.

And I think it’s a wonderful gift to be able to pay for your kids’ college and maybe even graduate school. But please do not do this at the expense of your financial independence because there’s a saying, and it’s true, they can always take out loans for school, there is no such thing as a retirement loan, okay?

So again, this is a nice to have, a wonderful thing to do for your kids. And again, do not do this at the expense of your own retirement. Okay, now that said, I do some of these things and so I’ll tell you a bit about my experience and sort of the ease around doing it. So I’m going to go over four different ways to do this.

So the first thing is opening up a regular brokerage account for your kids. Now, many of you listening probably have a regular taxable brokerage account for yourself. And in case you’re not sure what that means, it just means a regular account where you invest in stocks, et cetera that’s not inside a tax protected account like a 401K or 403B or a Roth IRA or regular IRA.

So you can do this for your kids. Now, they have different names because they’re basically a custodial account, meaning that you are the custodian. You have full control over the account until your child becomes of age. It’s not necessarily 18, it actually depends on the state. So some states it’s like 21, sometimes it’s 22, it just depends. But let’s just use 21 as an example, and you’ll have to look up the rules for each state.

Now, the account has an acronym. It can be called a UTMA or a UGMA, and that’s state specific but they’re basically the same thing. It stands for, actually I forget. Something like a uniform trust minors account, but basically a brokerage account for kids.

Now, I have one for Jack and ours is at TD Ameritrade, you can open it wherever you want. And so the common custodians, when I say custodian this time, that means in the context of like the bank, right, is TD Ameritrade. Although at the time of this recording, actually, it’s probably going to be Charles Schwab. Charles Schwab bought TD Ameritrade and I keep getting notifications to open my Charles Schwab account because it’s all getting transferred there.

So let’s just say Charles Schwab, Vanguard, Fidelity, I’m pretty sure they all allow you to do this. So you just open an account, it’s pretty simple. Enter a few things, enter their information, their meaning the kid. And what I’ve been doing is I haven’t really been contributing much of my own money. Maybe a little bit, I can’t remember, Jack is almost six now.

But whenever he gets money gifts, and grandparents tend to be, at least ours are pretty generous with their birthday gifts. So I just literally just directly deposited that money into his account. And what’s great is I can literally do a mobile check deposit like you can for your regular checking account. So I’ve just been doing that and investing it on Jack’s behalf.

Again, when he becomes of age, let’s say 21, he gets full control over it legally. I guess technically you can just tell them they don’t have it, but I don’t know why you would do that. So that’s what we have for him. That’s number one.

The second thing you could do is the typical sort of college accounts you may have heard of, 529s. And there’s something called a Coverdell ESA as well, I’m going to talk about both of them. So these are tax protected accounts. I want you to think about them as a Roth IRA specifically for education and related qualified expenses.

I probably should have talked about the Roth IRA first since I’m comparing this to a Roth IRA, but that’s okay. So, a Roth IRA is you put after tax money in and then it grows tax free. And then when you take out the money, it’s tax free. So you only pay taxes on the money once, your earned income.

Okay, so a 529 and Coverdell ESA is basically a Roth IRA for education. So you contribute money to your 529, I’ll explain more about what I mean by what these accounts are. You invest it, typically there’s pretty much a limited list of funds. And hopefully 10, 20 years later you have a nice sizable amount there and then you can withdraw the money to pay for your kid’s college.

Now, 529 plans are state specific. And what I mean by that is, let’s say you’re like, okay, I want to open up a 529 for my kid, how do I open one? You don’t just go to Charles Schwab or TD Ameritrade like I was mentioning before, you open up one through a state. It does not have to be the one in your state, which I know can be confusing. Like, okay, why does every state have one?

It’s because some states will give you a little bit of a tax break if you open one, but each state has different rules. So, for example, this may have changed because this information is a few years old, but you just look at the rules for your state.

So when I lived in Pennsylvania for a minute, they also offered a tax deduction, it was very minor, like in the scheme of things it’s like you’re saving 300 bucks, right? But still, hey, $300 in taxes you don’t have to pay, all the better, right?

They allowed you to use any state 529. But some states will say we will only give you the tax deduction if you use our state 529, okay? Now, every state has different types of funds you can invest in. So if you live in a state that does not give a tax break, or you live in a state with no income tax so it doesn’t matter anyway, then I would say here are the sort of top most popular 529s, and I’ll tell you why in a second.

So the New York one is pretty popular, Nevada and Utah. And the reason why is that – So New York, that’s actually where Jack’s 529 is. They invest in Vanguard funds and the expense ratios for the funds are pretty low.

Nevada also uses Vanguard, and at the time of this recording at least, when you open one through Nevada, it actually will show up on your Vanguard account. So if you already have Vanguard accounts, like for example I have a brokerage and a Roth IRA at Vanguard, when I log into that I will see the 529 there. Versus with Jack, even though they’re invested with Vanguard funds, I have to log into the specific New York 529 account.

Now, Utah is popular because I believe they also offer Vanguard but they also offer access to, and I can’t remember, the name escapes me, but certain funds that otherwise are only available through a financial advisor. I believe the name is called dimensional funds, but I don’t want you to get too confused or overwhelmed about which state to use.

So here’s the algorithm that I’m going to recommend to really simplify this process for you. So, first of all, look up does your state offer a state income tax deduction? If the answer is yes, what are the rules? Do you have to use that state’s plan? If the answer is yes, then use that state’s plan. Simple, right?

Okay, if you do get a state income tax deduction but they don’t care where you have it, then your choices are New York, Utah or Nevada. If you already have Vanguard accounts in your name, just open the Nevada one. I’m all for simplicity and it’s simpler if that account is just automatically on your Vanguard dashboard, right? It’s one less account to log into.

And if you don’t have a Vanguard account, then just pick. Just do literally eeny, meeny, miney moe. It really doesn’t matter, okay?

Now, if your state does not offer a state income tax deduction, I would, again, pick one of those three, Utah, Nevada, New York. Again, it doesn’t matter. Just literally pick one, it doesn’t matter. Okay, so that’s sort of the algorithm for that.

Now, what is a Coverdell ESA? So the Coverdell ESA, or ESA for short, I think it stands for educational savings account. It was around before 529s were invented and it’s basically similar, but the contribution limits are very, very low.

Now, I wasn’t even going to mention a Coverdell ESA because there’s really no point in opening one because of some recent changes with the 529, but I just wanted to mention it for completeness. But very low contributions, like 2 or $3,000 a year. There are income limits.

So I just want to mention it just so I covered everything, but I would just say forget about it. Now, I have one for Jack, we don’t contribute to it any longer. I’m not even going to talk about it now.

Back to the 529. Now, 529s are very attractive because, like I said, you put money in, it grows tax free and as long as you withdraw it for a qualified educational institution and qualified expenses, it is withdrawn tax free. And so that’s very attractive, right? So if you start a 529 very early, it has 18 plus years to grow, right?

And here’s a fun fact, you can actually open one before they’re born, it would just be in your name as if you’re opening your own 529. So if you’re someone who really likes to plan ahead, if you’re listening and you don’t have kids but you know you’re going to, you can open one in your name. I actually did that, I think a year before Jack was born I think because New York gave a tax deduction. And the taxes in New York are so high, so I was like, why not? It wasn’t a lot, but I opened one.

And here’s what I want to say about what if your child does not go to college, right, because then you have all this money socked away. Because that’s a question that I get a lot.

Number one is you can change the name of the beneficiary. So let’s say your kid ends up not going to college or for some reason it is not used, you can give it to a niece or another family member, or literally anyone. So that’s an option. So basically, you’re gifting it to somebody else.

You could also use it. Now, I’m not suggesting you’re going to go back to college or grad school just to use it, but there are some interesting institutions where you can use it at. Let me give you a few examples.

So there’s actually a website where you can search eligible institutions. But just a quick search here, like you can go to culinary school, for example, if you wanted to learn how to cook. And there are some study abroad programs.

And your kid may not go to college, but you might be having him go to private school, like K through 12. Now, you can use it for that. I would say when Jack was born, that actually wasn’t the case. They just added that pretty recently. But most people would advise against doing that because then the money is not going to really grow, right? And so it doesn’t really make sense to put after tax money and use it for K.

I’m not saying that you should never use it for private, like a secondary school. But maybe wait until they’re in high school, right? I think that just makes sense.

Now, what are the contribution limits for a 529? Now, the contribution limits are basically the gift tax limit. And for 2023, the limit is $17,000. Now, many people get really confused about the gift tax, and it makes sense because, first of all, the name makes it sound like the recipient pays a tax. But that’s actually not true.

I have a whole podcast episode on that, episode 22. So we will link that in the show notes. But if you have a podcast app, just search for gift tax and you will find the podcast episode. I don’t want to spend too much time on it. But basically, the annual contribution limit for a 529 is the gift tax limit of $17,000.

Now, there’s a special law, or provision rather, that you can actually front load a 529 five years at a time. So 17,000 times five. So that comes out to $85,000. Now, even better, if you’re married you and your spouse can actually both do that. So you could potentially pop in $170,000.

Now, if you are in a place where you can do this, amazing. But if you’re not, don’t worry about it. But let’s just say as soon as your child is born, you front load that account with $170,000 and let it grow for, let’s just say 18 years. In fact, I’m going to just do a quick calculation here just to illustrate how much it could be.

And what I’m doing here is just using a simple compound interest calculator. And I made some assumptions. I basically said years to grow 18. The interest rate of 10% compound interest. Now that’s going to grow to some obscene amount, like a million dollars, and obviously you probably hopefully do not need that for your child’s education. And again, this is going to be for, I guess, K through 12, college and graduate school.

So actually, potentially, if your kid goes to private school through graduate school, you could potentially be spending a million dollars. But most of us probably aren’t going to do that.

Now, this special rule where, again, I said you can front load five years of the gift tax limit, so at the time of this podcast in 2023 the gift tax limit is $17,000, times five. Now, what that also means is that you can’t contribute again to the 529 for another five years. But you probably wouldn’t want to. Plus there are actual contribution limits.

And so this is a state by state thing, so some states won’t let you contribute beyond, let’s say 200k. But they typically range between around 200 to 500k in terms of contributions, which means the money you put in, not the total amount in the account. Most parents I know that contribute to 529s have not front loaded, or maybe they just front loaded a little and they make annual contributions here or there.

The great thing about 529s is that you can have family members also contribute. So grandparents, uncles and aunts, that could be a great way for them to gift money to the child. Jack gets invited to birthday parties, I have not seen any parent give out this link, like, hey, we would appreciate a contribution to the 529, but I guess you could do that too, technically.

And I believe there are a few credit cards where, I think it might be Fidelity, whatever you charge, there’s a cashback that goes into the 529. But I don’t recommend that because I think credit card points are way more valuable.

Okay, let me just summarize because I know I threw a lot of information at you just now. Okay, I want you to think about a 529 plan, an educational account for your kid, as a Roth IRA for your child. You put taxed money in, it grows tax-free. And when you withdraw it to use for qualified educational expenses, tuition and there’s some other things on the list, and it has to be at a qualified institution that the IRS recognizes, then you can withdraw it tax-free.

And if you contribute early on, like when your child is born, especially if you front load it, it can grow to a very sizable amount by the time you need it for college. You can use it for private school K through 12, but generally speaking, I probably wouldn’t recommend doing this because then you’re just drawing on the money that could grow for college. And let’s just face it, college expenses are insane. Like totally insane.

I can’t even imagine what it’s going to cost for Jack. When I went to medical school, and I went to a private school, I went to Columbia, the tuition was $40,000 for medical school. College tuitions are insane now. Actually, I was having lunch with a friend and she told me that her kid’s private school college is $80,000 of tuition a year. To me, that’s insane. I don’t even think Columbia is at that amount right now.

But I do think we’re going to have a little reckoning, hopefully a big reckoning with the amount colleges pay. I think it’s crazy. And so I just can’t imagine it’s going to keep increasing. It’s obviously increasing way faster than inflation, like there has to be a cap at some point, right? Because the way it’s going now, by the time Jack goes to college tuition is going to be like $500,000 a year, which, who can afford that?

Okay, now let’s move on to a Roth IRA. Now, your child can have his or her own Roth IRA. Now, just like a regular Roth IRA like you might have, your child needs to have earned income, okay? And earned income is not chores, like a real job, okay?

So they could be babysitting. They could be mowing other people’s lawns. If you have a business, you can employ them, but it has to be for legit work. You can’t pay them like $500 an hour to clean your office, right? That’s just not what you would pay a normal cleaning person, right?

And I think the litmus test is like, would you pay someone else that amount of money for the job your kid is doing? And if the answer is no, then you’re probably overpaying them, okay?

Now, I also have a podcast episode on Roth IRAs and anything with the name Roth in it, because there’s Roth 401Ks and Roth conversions, and I have found that it’s very confusing. And so podcast episode 14, so one of the earlier podcasts, it’s from 2020. Listen to that and you will understand all things Roth.

Back to a custodial or kids Roth IRA. So, again, most of you with kids, this will probably not apply until, let’s say high school, because that’s usually when kids get a job if they get a job, right? And so babysitting or, like I said, mowing lawns or shoveling snow, or maybe they get a job at the local bookstore.

When I was in high school I worked at a bookstore and at a pharmacy and at a library. Not all at the same time. The library I do remember paid me $4 an hour. I think the pharmacy paid me 6 or $8 an hour. And the bookstore I can’t remember. But anyway, all those earnings can go into a custodial Roth IRA.

And just like a regular Roth IRA, you can’t contribute beyond the earned income. So let’s say your child makes $2,000 during the summer for whatever work they’re doing. Let’s say Jack ends up doing that, he’s six so clearly he’s not mowing lawns. But let’s say when he’s 16 he mows lawns and he makes $2,000 a summer, which is probably a lot but let’s just roll with it.

That means the max that he could contribute to his Roth IRA is $2,000, right? He can’t go beyond $2,000. Now, here’s something I want you to consider, because if your child is making $2,000, I’m pretty sure they are not going to want to put that whole $2,000 in their Roth IRA, right?

Kids are working so that they have some spending money, right, to go to the movies, to hang out with their friends, et cetera. But money is fungible, so you can just contribute the $2,000 for them, and they can keep the $2,000 for spending money.

Basically, what I mean is that it doesn’t really matter where the money comes from, but the earned income has to be legit and it has to stay, or rather if it’s $2,000 like the example I just gave for Jack mowing lawns, you can’t contribute more than $2,000, okay?

Now, it’s up to you how you want to do it, but I’d probably recommend that they have some skin in the game, right? Because I think this is such a great teaching opportunity of compound interest and finances and all that stuff, right? So maybe it’s something like, hey, if you put 25% of your earnings into the Roth IRA, I will pop in the rest. So that means you’re doing 75%. I’m just thinking out loud, but I think that’s probably what I would do with my son, you want them to have some skin in the game.

Of course, you could just do it for them. No judgment, it doesn’t really matter. But I just think as a teaching opportunity it would be, I think, just a good habit for them to just assume that they should always be investing a portion of their earned income. And again, you can open this anywhere that allows you to open up a custodial Roth IRA. Vanguard does it for sure.

Now, the last thing I want to talk about is this, and this is more in the context of paying for college but, obviously, it’s applicable for lots of other things. So let’s say your kid is in college and college is stupid expensive. Let’s just say you’re spending $50,000, just to make the numbers nice and round, a year in tuition.

Now, obviously, if you’re cash flowing that, meaning you’re paying it directly out of your income or whatever, savings, your money is going to be taxed at a much higher rate. Most of you listening are high income earners, you might even be in the top tax bracket. And so if you are, you’re paying quite a high percentage on your taxes.

Now, you have to remember the federal tax brackets are graduated, and so this is a common misconception. And so the tax brackets, let me just look this up real quick because they change every year. So it starts at 10%, and tops off at 37%. But if you’re at the 37% tax bracket, which is an income of close to 600k or more, that doesn’t mean all of your money is taxed at 37%.

Now, that’s a common misconception. Only part of your income is taxed at 37%. But let’s just say for the purposes of this illustration, your percentage tax is, I’m just going to say 40% because that’s a blend of federal and state, okay?

Let me just backtrack a bit because I’m probably confusing everyone. Let’s just say you make a crap ton of money and you are paying 40% taxes on your income between federal and state. I know it’s a tragedy when that happens, right? Okay, so that means for every dollar you make, you get 60 cents, okay?

So contrast that with your kid. Let’s say your kid makes 30k a year. Now, not only that, but you’re paying your child $30,000 a year salary for working in your business. Now, this is really powerful and here’s why, your business pays your child $30,000, which is a deduction on your business, right? And then that $30,000 is income for your child. But since they only make $30,000, they’re paying a lot less in taxes, okay?

And so that top tax bracket for federal is 12%. Let’s just say it’s 15% for federal and state, versus your 40% in the illustration I just gave you that you’re paying. And what that basically means is your child gets to keep a lot more of that money in taxes versus if you made that same $30,000, right? Because your $30,000 is part of you making multiple hundreds.

And so this is a, I don’t want to say fancy, but this is a way to save on taxes and use that money to pay for your kid’s college with money that has been taxed significantly less than the money that you would contribute directly.

Of course, you have to have a legit job for your child. But I know many of my clients, you know, if you own your own practice or you own your own business like I do, this is something you can definitely do and think about for the future.

All right, so those are the four different things I wanted to talk about today regarding putting money away for your child. Of course, there are other ways to do this, like if you own a real estate business you can buy them real estate in their name, you can teach them about it. I think that’s actually a wonderful way to teach your kids how to create wealth, get them involved in your real estate portfolio when they’re older and they can understand the terms more.

And I definitely know some parents who buy their child a home for college and then the child, or I guess they’re an adult when they’re in college, they can have roommates and that money from the roommates can pay for the mortgage. So there’s so many ways to do that if you own real estate and business.

Okay, so let me just summarize what I just went over. The first thing I went over is opening a brokerage account for them, called a UTMA or UGMA. And it’s like a regular brokerage account and you can contribute, family can contribute, whatever you want to do for that.

The second thing I talked about was an educational account, like a 529. And I want you to think about it as a Roth IRA for education. You can use it for K through 12, but my recommendation would be to wait until at least high school if you’re doing private school or just wait for college that way you have almost two decades, or at least a decade of compound interest working.

And you also have the ability to front load it to about $170,000 when the kid is born. Most of us probably won’t do that, but it’s nice to know that you can front load it if you need to or if you want to, rather.

Okay, the third thing I talked about was opening a custodial Roth IRA for your child. This requires earned income. So if your child is making money babysitting, mowing lawns, or maybe even working inside your business and they get paid a legit income, they can contribute up to the amount that they earned as long as it’s not beyond the Roth IRA contribution limit, which is usually around, at this time around $6,500.

And then, obviously, they can invest that. Or rather you’ll invest that money for them, and a great way for them to put money away. Can you imagine, think about it, if your child starts contributing to a Roth IRA at age 15, I mean, we’re talking several, several decades of compound interest. Insane, right?

The last thing I talked about was paying your child, adult child a salary, like 20 or $30,000 a year to work for your business, maybe you own a practice. And use that money to pay for college because that money is taxed significantly less than your tax bracket.

All right, I hope this was very helpful. And hopefully maybe you will open up some type of account for them. All right, I’ll talk to you next week.

Hey there, thanks so much for tuning in. If you loved what you heard, be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And if you’re listening to this on Apple Podcasts, I’d love for you to leave a review. Reviews tell Apple that this podcast is, well, awesome. And it will help women find this podcast so that they too can live a wealthy life. And finally, you can learn more about me and what I do at WealthyMomMD.com. See you next week.

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