This post concludes the MEconomics series. At first I considered running a few more posts within the series, covering some esoteric topics and case studies of other physicians I know, but I think I'll save these subjects for the future. I would rather stay close to my original intention of having the series focus upon my own financial profile than let it stray into a number of tangential issues.
The first four editions of this post series on my personal financial journey into medicine addressed borrowing, earning and spending money. Today, in Part Five, I'm going to examine a topic most doctors I know don't think about enough: retirement planning.
We've reached Part Four of this series of posts on my personal financial profile as a working doctor. Part Three presented my income scenarios for the first three years post-residency. I have been lucky enough to increase my income by about 58% since I first arrived in Rural, mostly by working a lot and taking on more hospitalist shifts. This week, I'll show you where that money is going by revealing my personal spending habits.
In Part Three of this ongoing series about my personal financial journey as a working doctor, I present a few scenarios of how I earn my income. (Yes, I do feel like a gerbil on an exercise wheel sometimes). In Part Two of this Series, I detailed how I accumulated medical school debt, and next week's edition will discuss my spending patterns and cost of living issues.
I want to emphasize the purpose of this series: to provide a real scenario of a doctor's earning/spending/work patterns so that people can understand concerns about the current state of physician compensation. I am not whining about how little I earn, especially in comparison to average U.S. workers. I consider myself very fortunate and I have a good life, thanks to my earning potential as a physician. However, I would like to disabuse the notion that doctors are all filthy rich and motivated entirely by money. I hope that providing a complete picture of one woman's financial profile--mine--will help ground the dialogue about physician compensation in reality.
Part Two of this series on physician compensation and my personal bottom-line addresses where all the difficulties begin: with medical school debt. Let's walk through the process of accumulating educational debt and estimate whether the published averages tell the whole story.
