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About the Guest:

James (Jim) Dahle

Founder of The White Coat Investor

James (Jim) M. Dahle, MD, FACEP, FAAEM is a practicing emergency physician and the founder of The White Coat Investor. He did his undergraduate work in molecular biology at Brigham Young University and then attended medical school at the University of Utah. Following medical school, Jim did an emergency medicine residency at the University of Arizona. He then spent four years serving the United States Air Force practicing medicine on four different continents. Upon leaving the Air Force, Jim joined a practice in suburban Utah where he practiced community emergency medicine.

After multiple run-ins with unscrupulous financial professionals early in his career, he embarked on his own self-study process to become financially literate. After seeing the benefits of financial literacy in his own life, he was inspired to start The White Coat Investor to assist his colleagues. At the time, there was nobody providing unbiased financial education to doctors at any point in their training. Now, more than a decade later, financial wellness is widely recognized as a critical life skill for all physicians and similar professionals. Dr. Dahle remains committed to the original mission of The White Coat Investor to “help those who wear the white coat get a fair shake on Wall Street.” He currently serves as the CEO, a columnist, and the host of the podcast.

About the Episode:

For episode 81 of Entrepreneur Rx, I had the pleasure of sitting down with fellow emergency medicine physician Jim Dahle, founder of The White Coat Investor. The White Coat Investor is the most widely read, physician-specific personal finance and investing website in the world. In addition to the blog, he has authored four books and hosts two weekly podcasts.

Jim shares his journey to financial literacy after negative experiences with unscrupulous financial professionals early in his career. He explains how he embarked on a self-study journey and started The White Coat Investor to provide unbiased financial education to doctors. Jim highlights the reasons why physicians often struggle with money management, including the lack of education on finance and the taboo surrounding money talk in the medical field.

Then, Jim discusses the different pathways to wealth for physicians, including the default pathway of working as a physician and investing in index funds, the reproducible entrepreneurial pathway, and the hardcore entrepreneur pathway. He also addresses the challenges faced by physicians who are living hand to mouth and offers advice on how to start building wealth.

Jim concludes the episode by discussing the impact of The White Coat Investor and the importance of financial literacy in medical schools. He shares his belief that physicians should still pursue medicine if they have a passion for it, but they should also prioritize financial education early in their careers.

Entrepreneur Rx Episode 81:

Jim Dahle Audio.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Jim Dahle Audio.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

John Shufeldt:
Hello everybody, and welcome to another edition of entrepreneur, where we help health care professionals own their future. Hey, everybody, welcome back to another version of entrepreneurship. I'm really excited to have Jim Daly. Today. I was on his podcast as well called The White Coat Investor. Jim Daly is a practicing board certified emergency medicine physician. He is the founder of White Coat Investor. He did undergraduate work in molecular biology at BYU. Then he did medical school at University of Utah and did an residency at U of A in our own state. Here. He spent four years, then serving in the United States Air Force on four different continents. After leaving the Air Force, he joined a practice in suburban Utah, where he continues to practice emergency medicine. But what we're talking to him about is after multiple run ins with moderately unscrupulous financial professionals, and early in his career, he embarked on his own self-study process to become financially literate. And after seeing the benefits of this financial literacy in his own life, he was inspired to start the White Coat Investor to assist his colleagues. And at that time there was really nobody and kind of still is nobody, providing unbiased financial education to doctors at any point in their training. And now, more than a decade later, financial wellness is widely recognized as it should be, as a critical skill for physicians and other similar professionals. Dr. dollar remains committed to the original mission of the White Coat Investor to help those who wear the white coat get a fair shake on Wall Street. He currently serves as a CEO, a columnist, and as you will soon see, a hell of a great podcaster. Jim, welcome to the show.

Jim Dahle:
Thank you. It's wonderful to be here.

John Shufeldt:
Thanks. All right, so as I mentioned a little bit ago, there's a lot of people, myself included, are going to want to be when they grow up. So I think going back and telling your story from the start so people can start saying, yeah, that makes sense to me. What I always tell people is, look, if I can do this, anybody can. So it gives them some peace of mind. Tell us about your premed career. I know it was in molecular biology, as I recall.

Jim Dahle:
Yeah. Molecular biology. I had no interest in business or finance or investing or any of that when I was a kid, when I was in college, even medical school, it really wasn't until halfway through residency that I was interested in this stuff at all.

John Shufeldt:
I was a sociology major. I took zero business classes. Did you take anything in college?

Jim Dahle:
None. The only math class I had was a semester of calculus. Yeah.

John Shufeldt:
So they're not quite prepare you for what you ultimately spend a lot of your time doing. Okay. Was there any entrepreneurial drive going through college or medical school? Did you have that bug? No.

Jim Dahle:
No interest whatsoever in being an entrepreneur. I was not one of those kids with the lemonade stands. You know, I had a few jobs as a kid, but I was always an employee, you know? I mean, a paper route was probably the first one, but never really thought about starting my own business, to be honest with you. Wow.

John Shufeldt:
You literally did 180 degrees. Did you think coming out of medical school you did residency at U of A, correct?

Jim Dahle:
That's correct. I was at the University of Arizona in Tucson for residency.

John Shufeldt:
All right. We have some co friends that were in residency with you. So you did an emergency medicine residency and you got out. When did it start. When did you realize that you better get your act together on this finance piece.

Jim Dahle:
It was probably halfway through residency. You know it's a busy time. You're working 80 hours a week or whatever. And I just realized that I'd been ripped off again. I got mad, I had hired a financial adviser that I thought was fee only. It turned out they were fee based. So I got to learn the difference between those. And it made me mad. So mad that I told myself, if you don't learn this stuff, you're just going to keep getting taken advantage of over and over and over again. And that was really what inspired the whole thing. You know, that wasn't the first bad interaction I had with the financial services industry. That was probably the sixth or seventh. And every type of professional you could think of realtors, mortgage lenders, insurance agents, recruiters, you know, financial advisors, they all kind of ended the same way with me feeling taken advantage of. And so at first it was just self survival. I just wanted to learn this stuff so I'd quit being taken advantage of.

John Shufeldt:
I literally had the exact same thing happen to me where I'm like, hey, I thought we were in this together. I thought I would hourly. And all of a sudden I realized that you're getting stiffed on the other side of this equation as well. What was your experience?

Jim Dahle:
Well, that experience didn't lose that much money. I mean, it was probably a few hundred dollars was probably all it was. But I had decided when I was on a road trip, one of those few vacations you get during residency, and I was in a bookstore, and I saw a mutual funds for Dummies by Eric Tyson, and I said, oh, I own some mutual funds. I should learn a little bit more about them. And that was when I learned how mutual funds charge fees. I learned about commissions. And I'm like, oh, I'm sure I'm in no load mutual funds because my advisors charge me fees. That's how I'm paying him. Then I found out I was paying him both ways and that was what started it all. I started researching and figured out I'd better learn more about this stuff now.

John Shufeldt:
Did you go back and confront them and say, wait a minute, how is this proper?

Jim Dahle:
I did I did confront him and I said, how's this work? And he said, well, like I told you in the beginning, which, to be fair, he did. He said, you're paying me for my advice. And then if you want me to implement it to. You'll pay me for that? Well, that's what he viewed the commissions, as was the implementation payment. Got it.

John Shufeldt:
You know, I've been in financial planners and literally within about five minutes, they try to sell me something. And it's generally a life insurance policy or some sort of policy where they get really high commissions. And I always tell them, look, I'm happy to listen to you. I will pay you for your advice on an hourly basis, but don't try to sell me something particularly out of the gate. And they literally cannot help themselves.

Jim Dahle:
Well, the problem is there's really no definition. There's no legal definition of a financial advisor. Right. And so people of all kinds of different professions can call themselves financial advisors, whether they are actually in the business of selling their advice or whether they are in the business of selling mutual funds or selling insurance or whatever. Right. And so all those people can call themselves financial advisors. There's no really rules against it, right?

John Shufeldt:
Okay. So halfway through residency, you're on a road trip. You have your aha moment. You go back and front the guy. When did you say to yourself, you know what, if this is me, I'm sure there's a lot of people like me out there who were high income earners, or at least potentially someday. But we don't have a really great idea how to manage the money we're making. When did that aha moment hit you?

Jim Dahle:
Okay, so this is 2004, right? This is a long time before I started the White Coat Investor. And at first it was just learning. I was just learning. I was picking up used books at a used bookstore, reading every finance book I could get my hands on. I was participating on internet forums, and after a couple of years, there was kind of a gradual transition made where I realized I wasn't learning so much as I was teaching others, and I realized that doctors didn't know this stuff. I might not have known everything, but I knew more than 99% of doctors did. And I was teaching on, you know, the forums and the student doctor network forums and the Bogleheads forum. And after a few years of doing that, I got sick of typing the same thing into forums over and over again. But you know, this was something I enjoyed. I enjoyed talking about it. I enjoyed learning about. I enjoyed teaching others about. It was something I felt not only passionate about, but almost a missionary zeal to get this information to other doctors. But I was sick of typing the same thing over and over again. So I thought, well, I'll start a blog and then I can just post a link where I've already answered this question 100 times. And that was kind of the initial foundation of the white coat investor in 2011 was just to be able to, you know, centralize all those answers. I'd been given people to these questions I had on internet forums for some reason. I also got excited about that time, about this idea of passive income, and I thought a blog would provide me passive income. Well, it eventually did provide some income, but it's never been passive. So that was kind of the origin. It was founded as a business from the beginning, but I didn't know anything about monetizing a blog at the beginning. So it was all learned as you go, right?

John Shufeldt:
Well, as you already know, that's entrepreneurism for me. When I started, I want to figure out a way to earn money while I'm sleeping. And that's always my analogy, because being an emergency medicine, if you're not in the Ed, you're not making money generally. When did you get that realization that there's got to be some alternative? You need another backstop. I always call it practicing medicine. And did you hit your and in 2011 with this.

Jim Dahle:
No, I mean, I thought it'd be cool to make a little bit of money online, but I had no no plans, no expectation that it would ever even rival my clinical income, much less surpass it. Did I like the idea of making money when I slept? Sure. Who doesn't like that idea? Everybody likes that idea. I mean, that's why we invest, right? But that certainly wasn't the plan. My goal, I said, if I'm not making $1,000 a month after two years, I'm going to give it up. And I was going to go do something else. Probably build a direct real estate empire was probably my alternative plan, and I barely made that right after two years of working, you know, if not full time. It was certainly a heavy part time on this. For two years I was making $1,000 a month. This is while I'm an attending physician, right? I'm an emergency physician. Physicians make pretty good money. Yeah. And this did not rival it in any way, shape or form. This was a waste of my time financially for at least the first several years.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, most of these startup businesses are. I'm in a little bit jump to the end here because I have my own perspective on this. What is your belief why physicians are often poor money managers?

Jim Dahle:
There's a few reasons. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this and writing about this, and one is the type of person that goes into medicine, okay? The people that become kindergarten teachers and become nurses and become doctors are not the same people that go into insurance sales and go on to Wall Street as financial analysts or as investment bankers. They're not the same people we're wired differently. Dike Drummond likes to call us light workers, and there's a lot of truth to that. Then we get into medicine and we learn to trust other professionals. We assume that they've also sworn the Hippocratic Oath, and we can trust them to do the right thing for the patient, even if it's not the right thing for their pocketbook. And so we assume that all professions are like this, and that's just not the case. It's not the case in the business world. It's far more cutthroat than that. We get no training in business finance investing. It doesn't happen in college. It doesn't happen in medical school. It doesn't happen in residency. It doesn't happen after residency. And so it's just pure ignorance. It isn't that people aren't smart and can't learn it. It's that they never learned it. Nobody taught it to them. They didn't think it was important. And worse, there's a taboo in medicine, particularly about talking about money. It's looked down upon. You're not supposed to think about money. You're not even supposed to know how much you're charging patients or how much their drugs cost. You're supposed to be this, you know, detached person making recommendations. And so that taboo is surprisingly hard for people to overcome. And then the financial services industry contributes to it as well. They look at us as whales. We have a big target on our back. They're trying to harpoon us due to our high income. And so they're actively working against our best interest financially.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah. So I think those are all dead on. And one more thing I would add to it is that many of us think, how hard can this be? Medical school is pretty hard. It was for me. Getting the medical school is pretty hard. You know, I can learn this. So I think there's a little bit of arrogance like, these are all the people that were out partying on Friday nights when I was studying organic chemistry, so I got this. I don't often think we really, if we're willing to take advice a some finding somebody rational and competent and sincere to give it to us. But oftentimes it's like, no, I can figure this out myself. I don't need anybody else to do it. And so I found a lot of physicians who just don't think it's all that difficult until they get way upside down, and then they realize they've gotten taken advantage of.

Jim Dahle:
You know, it's really interesting. I see it both ways. I see people who are underconfident and people who are inappropriately overconfident. Right. And until you really become educated and understand what's going on, it's hard to get your confidence level right. You know, a lot of people are just scared to open their own Roth IRA, and they run out and pay somebody $10,000 a year to help them with very basic financial tasks. And on the other end, you see people who think that they're the world's best stock picker in the next Warren Buffett and some sort of a genius that's going to be a gazillionaire, you know? So I think it's important to get your confidence level right.

John Shufeldt:
What was one of your biggest aha moments in going down this entrepreneurial track that you've been down?

Jim Dahle:
I think one of my bigger aha moments came probably in the third year of work on The White Coat Investor, and it was when I realized that I was sitting on something very valuable at that moment. It was the number one hit on Google for physician mortgage. And I'm like, I'm not making any money from this web page. Why am I not making any money? So I literally called an emailed a bunch of physician mortgage lenders and said, hey, you want to advertise here? You know, and they're kind of skeptical. And I'm like, tell you what, I'll make this such a good deal. There's no way you'll turn me down. And I offered them a listing there for $100 for a year. Wow subsequently sold that same listing for 100 times. That in later years dramatically undervalued. That was a big aha moment. Realizing that. And that was the year when I first really learned how to monetize a website. And without abandoning the principles and the missionary zeal that drove the mission of the white Coat investor, I also found a way for it to not only make a living for me, but to make a living for others, such that we could accomplish even more toward the primary mission.

John Shufeldt:
Now, at this stage, you advise physicians to look, there's a way to do this passively. You can do it through real estate investments. You can do it through mutual funds and stocks and what have you. Or go down the entrepreneurial path and do what you did.

Jim Dahle:
Well, I think there's really three pathways to. A wealth for a physician. One is what I call the default pathway. It's very easy. It's very reliable. You work a career as a physician. You work hard and obviously negotiate your salaries and those sorts of things. Don't be an idiot about your career, but you work hard. You squirrel away 20% ish of your gross income, you invest it in some boring index funds, and after 15 to 30 years, you're going to be a financially independent multi-millionaire. It's just not that hard. It works very, very well. The second pathway is what I call the reproducible entrepreneurial pathway. And this might be opening a series of franchises. This might be building a real estate empire. These are businesses you own that are very reliable, that many people have done, that you don't have to be the best in the world at to still be successful. People will teach you how to do this. You can learn it and do it, and be just as successful as the last doc that tried it. And that pathway will cut a number of years off this pathway to financial independence. It's going to take a new set of skills. It's going to take some additional education, it's going to take some additional work, but it's probably going to be faster than the default pathway.

Jim Dahle:
You can obviously screw it up. Any real estate investment can be a bad investment. You can get overleveraged and end up bankrupt, but it's not that hard to do. The last pathway is far more difficult, and this is the hardcore entrepreneur pathway, where you're trying to do something that's never been done or trying to do something better than anybody else has ever done it, and that's much harder to do. It has no limit on what it can earn for you, and that's pretty awesome and pretty exciting for people who are natural entrepreneurs and love this sort of stuff. But the risks are very high. I mean, almost all of these businesses fail within just a few years, and it's actually a pretty rare one that really is successful. And so those are the three pathways. But the beautiful thing about the white coat investor is it had an unlimited runway. I didn't need the income. And so I could wait years to get this thing off the ground. It really wasn't abandoning the first pathway in order to chase the third pathway, and that provided me the opportunity to do things the right way from the beginning, take a long term perspective, and eventually be successful.

John Shufeldt:
I think emergency medicine physicians have two things going for us. I'd love to hear your perspective. One is that we're able to schedule our shifts around other things, and the other one is, generally speaking, most of us have some level of risk tolerance because when you give somebody a paralytic, when you're going to intubate them, there's some risk there. And if that's not acceptable, you don't give the paralytic and B, you're probably in the wrong profession. What's your sense on the gig physicians like we are?

Jim Dahle:
I mean, I think that's true. We're also very good at taking care of whatever rolls in the door, not just in the emergency department, but in our lives. And there's a lot of things that come rolling at you when you're an entrepreneur and you've got to be able to deal with them. And so having a calm demeanor and the experience to do things you've maybe never done before, based on them being somewhat like something you've done in the past, I think is very valuable. But the time thing is real. I mean, this is way easier to do if you're an anesthesiologist or an emergency physician or a hospitalist because you get weekdays off as an emergency doc, most of your shifts are in the evenings if you're working all the shifts, if you're a typical emergency doc and you work plenty of nights and weekends and holidays, and so that leaves you a whole bunch of weekdays when the business world is working to work in business. I found myself with Monday and Tuesday mornings off at home while my kids are in school and my wife's doing her thing. My friends are all at work and I'm like, what am I going to do with this time? So I started typing random crap into the internet. You know, I don't know if this would have ever worked if I was working 9 to 5 like a typical professional, and that definitely has something to do with it. It also allows you to cut back. It's just easier to cut back and go part time in those specialties. Like right now I'm working about 0.4 FTEs, and that's way easier for an emergency doc than it is for a general surgeon who's a solo doc and a solo practice.

John Shufeldt:
Totally. I've had this experience, and it's happened so frequently that I need to ask about it, since you're the expert on this. So I'm 63. I've been more folks around my age come to me and they are physicians and they are living literally hand to mouth like they're saying, hey, you know, I know we're getting paid on Thursday. Can you can I get paid on Tuesday because I can't pay my rent or I can't pay my mortgage or whatever it is? Have you seen that? And are they coming to you for help? Because I've been directing them to you for help, whether you know it or not.

Jim Dahle:
Absolutely. Every now and then, every few months we get paid a day late, you know, as a partnership, for whatever reason, the accountant gets behind or whatever. And our pay comes a day late, and our managing partner is always very apologetic about getting it out. And because he gets feedback from docs in the group that this is a problem and if you're getting paid one day late is a problem with your financial life, you are doing something wrong. But this is very common. If you look at surveys of doctors, they do surveys and ask doctors, what's your net worth? You know everything you own, minus everything you owe. And if you ask this to docs in their 60s, you will find that 11 or 12% of them have a net worth under half $1 million. That's everything. That's the house. That's the retirement accounts, the investments, the cars, the stuff, bank accounts, everything. Less than half $1 million after 30 years of physician level paychecks. I mean, that is what financial failure looks like in the physician world. Nobody should have that happen to them. A quarter of doctors in their 60s are not millionaires. These are people that have made six, eight, $10 million during their career and they don't have one of them left. So yeah, there's absolutely are a lot of docs living hand to mouth. I sometimes I call it. In a blog post this week, the Santa Barbara Student Loan Plan, and it's basically a doc who borrows $400,000 for student loans and then buys a house on a 0% down mortgage in Santa Barbara, buys a Tesla on credit, and then once everything kicks in, they realize everything they're making is going toward payments and nothing is going toward wealth building. And if they stay on that path, if they don't fix that, they're never going to build any wealth. It's just math. That's the way it works.

John Shufeldt:
I literally have people I know well, there's 75 years old, 73 years old, and I can't retire. How is that possible? Just like you said, you've had this physician level learning for 40 years. Mind boggling.

Jim Dahle:
I mean, I knew a hospitalist who had clinic, I don't know how many days a week, but several days a week and was working 15 overnight 12 hour hospital shifts a month in addition to running clinic. And this guy was in his late 60s. I'm like, what are you doing? Right? And you delve into the details and it involves multiple divorces and multiple alimony payments and lots of bad financial decisions compounded over decades. But it certainly happens frequently. And a lot of times docs wake up at 50 or 55, and there's still time to make a huge difference in their financial lives. Sometimes they get to 70, and after a career as a doctor, they're living on Social Security, often with crippling debt hanging over them.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, it's really amazing. So, you know, I've read all your stuff and go over your 20% rule. This one I really liked because as you said, if you do nothing other than take 20% of your gross income, not with your car payment, house payment added in, but 20% of your gross, or about 35%, 30, 35% of your net. And you squirrel that away and no load mutual funds without any market timing at all. You'll, generally speaking, do very well over 15 to 30 years. I think it was numbers used. What happens if they're 50 years old? They have a much shorter time horizon for them to go over your invectives for that.

Jim Dahle:
Well, I mean, you can sit there with a financial calculator and run out what happens. But obviously the more time you have, the better it works. Basically at 7% or so, your money doubles every decade, so if you only have one decade left, your money's only going to double once. If you have 2 or 3 decades, your money can do a lot of the heavy lifting. If you don't have 2 or 3 decades, you have to do all the heavy lifting by just brute force saving. But is it still worth doing if you're 50 or 55 or even 60? Sure. You know, what's the alternative of having nothing? And of course, even an investor that starts at 60, they've still got 20 or 30 years of investing ahead of them. They're not like done investing. It's not like you pull it all out when you retire and leave it in cash the rest of your life. You've still got plenty of years of investing ahead of you.

John Shufeldt:
I'm going to put you on the spot here a little bit. What are you looking at for next year? Because, you know, I've been to multiple financial seminars and just in the venture capital world, it seemed like next year there's going to be a tough year. Are we facing some headwinds given your knowledge base?

Jim Dahle:
You know, the interesting thing about this is that people try to predict the future, despite all the evidence showing that it's folly to do so. Right. If you go back five years and look at what people predicted, then none of them predicted what happened over the next five years. Why are we trusting them now to predict the future? So I really have no idea what's going to happen next year with interest rates, or with inflation, or with stock market returns or real estate returns or the entrepreneurial market, much less politics or war or those sorts of things. They're unknown and unknowable. And once you recognize that investing becomes far easier, you simply pick a static asset allocation and you maintain it, something that's likely to do well enough over a multitude of possible future economic scenarios and stick with it. And every year, something will do better than something else, and you buy less of what did well and more of what did poorly and rebalance back to your original asset allocation. So pessimism sounds very sexy, right? When people are pessimistic about the future, it sounds like they know what they're talking about. They sound sophisticated, whereas the optimists sound like pollyannas. But the truth is, the history of investing should be titled The Triumph of the optimists, because the optimists are right far more often than the pessimists.

John Shufeldt:
So what's been the SNP's year over year mean? It's about about 13% since inception.

Jim Dahle:
Oh, don't think it's quite that high. The numbers I've seen for the US stock market, if you look at the longest term data we have are about 10% average annual returns. If you annualize those, they're about 9.5%. If you adjust them for inflation it's about 7%. That's about what you should expect out of stocks in the long run.

John Shufeldt:
Very good. Are you still telling people to go into medicine? Sooner are you telling people not to go into medicine? And I always tell them, if you love medicine, hands down 100%, I would do it again every day of the year. How about yourself?

Jim Dahle:
I'd do it again. I mean, I'm financially independent now and still practicing medicine. I must love it, right? So that's what I tell people. I'm like, don't let people scare you out of medicine. Because when I was applying to medical school, everybody told me the golden days of medicine are past. You know, it's going to be terrible. There's HMOs. This is the 90s, right? And it's going to ruin everything. Well, you know, medicine seen changes or there are some things that are worse and some things that are better. Absolutely. But at the end of the day, it's a pretty noble calling to be there and helping people on the worst day of their lives. And I wouldn't take that away from anybody who's interested in it. That said, if somebody can be talked out of medicine, they should be.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, yeah, that's a great way to look at it. I always say, if you wouldn't cut off your arm to do it, you probably shouldn't be doing it.

Jim Dahle:
You just need that motivation or you're never going to get through your intern year.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, well, you never get through a lot of things in life that are difficult without it. So now you have physicians who are coming to you. What do you tell them? What's the best way to start to go down this path of financial literacy?

Jim Dahle:
Well, I think it depends on how you learn, right? Some people like podcasts, some people like blogs, some people like online courses, some people like books or videos or whatever. You got to learn this stuff. What we've tried to do at the White Coat Investor is package it up into whatever format you prefer to learn, whether it's on social media, on Facebook, or whether it's watching YouTube or whether it's reading the book. We've tried to put basically the same information into all of those formats to help those who learn best in that format. So the first thing is just become financially literate and try to develop your financial discipline. And as you learn, you'll quickly see the areas you can improve in your financial life.

John Shufeldt:
If you had a lot of people come back to you and say, thank God for what you've, you've educated me because I could see you've probably made kind of the pebble in the pond sort of impact on a lot of people. With the information you've been now putting out for more than a decade.

Jim Dahle:
I'll bet we get a dozen or more emails a week that are basically effusively thanking us for what we've done. You know, almost every podcast question we get includes a thank you at the beginning. And that's very gratifying to see. You know, there's about a million doctors in the United States. And I figure we've probably made a pretty significant impact on 2 or 300,000 of them. And I figure the value of becoming financially literate early in your career for a doctor is probably about $2 million. And if you multiply $2 million by 250,000 doctors, that's a lot of value we've created over the last 11 years.

John Shufeldt:
Well, it's actually even more than that because you've created value for their kids and their kids kids. And then all the patients they've continued to be able to treat with a much clearer mind because they have one less thing to worry about. I mean, I see folks struggling in the emergency department just because they have a lot on their mind. And it's not always the patient first, because they have all sorts of other pressures. So realistically, I think you might even be underselling that, even though it's a huge number. So very cool.

Jim Dahle:
Yeah, I mean, for sure, I agree with you. I think that a financially secure doctor is a better physician, a better parent, and a better partner.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, totally. What can we do to get this knowledge into medical schools? I was talking to them medical students on kind of entrepreneurism and things. And I think for a lot of them, they're like, we never even thought about this. We don't want to think about it. We don't see in our future. But for some of them, it was kind of an aha moment, and it was a little disappointing that it was because I think we can kill two birds with one stone if we teach them to have better financial literacy early, because it's less burnout, more career longevity. How do we do that?

Jim Dahle:
Well, a few things we've been trying. One is just having the information available when they're ready to learn. It's just in time, learning whenever they're ready. That website's there, that podcast is there, that YouTube channel is there, that book's there. It's ready for you. So that's number one is just having it available all the time too. We have put in place 3 or 4 years ago what we call the WCI champions program. And all that is, is us trying to get a copy of the White Coat Investor's Guide for students into the hands of every first year medical and dental student in the country. And so far, we've been able to get it to about 70% of them each year. Wow. So that's a lot of docs who are getting this information right at the beginning of their career. The way we do that is we have a champion from their class volunteer. From every first year class. If they will volunteer to pass out the books, we'll send them the books along with a little bit of swag just for their effort to to pass them out. And that's it. That's the whole program. Just having someone hand you that book early in your career, I think is very valuable. Now does that make them read it? That doesn't make them read it, but at least they had the chance. I think another big thing is to have docs, real docs that they know talk to them about finance. You know, maybe come in for a lunch and learn during their first or second years, talk about it for an hour on the rotations. You teach your 5 or 10 medical students on the rotation. You can spend a half hour at some point during that month long rotation talking to them about finance and just one at a time, a little bit of a personal ministry. You'd be amazed how much of a difference you can make in the doctors around you, and we try to support that too. We give out an award every year to docs who have been doing just that, giving lectures or just doing it informally.

John Shufeldt:
That's very cool. Well, Jim, this has been wonderful. Thank you. This is going to resonate with a lot of folks who listen to this podcast, and we'll have everything in the show notes. But just where can people find out more about you? So best to start.

Jim Dahle:
Yeah the hub is white coat investor.com. But we've branded everything white coat investor. So whatever you like, whether it's Twitter or whether it's Instagram or whether it's YouTube, it's all called White Coat Investor.

John Shufeldt:
Very good. Well, I really appreciate the time you spent doing this. Thank you and congratulations on your success. You really set a high bar. So it's very cool.

Jim Dahle:
It's my pleasure and thanks for having me here. Thanks for.

John Shufeldt:
Listening everybody. That was another edition of entrepreneurs. That was a lot of fun for me. I hope you got a lot out of it. You can find Jim easily at White Coat Investor, and there is a lot to learn from the material he's put out, and I refer to it very often for myself. Thanks for listening to another great edition of entrepreneur to find out how to start a business and help secure your future, go to John Shufelt webmd.com. Thanks for listening.

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About The White Coat Investor:

The White Coat Investor is the most widely-read, physician-specific personal finance and investing website in the world. It is the premier resource for high income professionals looking for unbiased information about all things financial or simply a referral to a trusted professional providing good advice at a fair price. What started as a simple blog has grown into a multi-media company that will provide you the financial information you need in whatever format you prefer. Whether you learn best from a blog, newsletter, book, podcast, videocast, online course, social media, forum, or live conference, the White Coat Investor is here for you. Doctors and similar high-income professionals provide important benefits to society. They should not be ashamed of their high income nor targeted by unscrupulous financial professionals for it. The White Coat Investor can help you to become financially literate and disciplined, which will allow you to spend your time and effort on your patients, your family, and your own wellness. We truly believe that a financially secure doctor is a better partner, parent, and practitioner.

Key Takeaways:

  • Discover the importance of financial literacy for physicians and how it can lead to increased wealth accumulation.
  • Explore the various pathways available to physicians for building wealth and achieving financial security.
  • Understand the common financial struggles that physicians face and learn strategies for overcoming them.
  • Gain practical strategies for teaching financial literacy to physicians, empowering them to make informed financial decisions.
  • Learn about the positive impact that financial security can have on physicians’ lives, including reduced stress and increased job satisfaction.

Timestamped Summary:

00:00:05 – Introduction
Introduction to the podcast episode and the guest, Jim Dahle, who is a practicing board-certified emergency medicine physician and the founder of The White Coat Investor.

00:03:48 – Motivation to Learn Financial Literacy
Jim shares his motivation to become financially literate after multiple negative experiences with financial professionals. He realized the importance of learning about finance to avoid being taken advantage of.

00:06:35 – Starting The White Coat Investor
Jim explains how his passion for teaching others about finance led him to start The White Coat Investor. He wanted to provide unbiased financial education to doctors who lacked resources in this area.

00:07:55 – Monetizing The White Coat Investor
Jim discusses his initial goal of making some passive income through his blog. He didn’t expect it to surpass his clinical income but was determined to make at least $1,000 a month after two years of hard work.

00:09:03 – Financial Success and Alternative Plans
Jim reflects on the financial success of The White Coat Investor and how it exceeded his expectations. He also mentions his alternative plan of building a direct real estate empire if the blog didn’t work out.

00:12:25 – The AHA Moment of Realizing the Value of The White Coat Investor
Jim shares his AHA moment when he realized the value of his website, The White Coat Investor, which ranked number one on Google for physician mortgages. He approached physician mortgage lenders and offered them a listing on his website for $100, later selling the same listing for 100 times that amount.

00:13:45 – Three Pathways to Wealth for Physicians
Jim discusses the three pathways to wealth for physicians. The first is the default pathway, which involves working a career, saving a portion of income, and investing in index funds. The second is the reproducible entrepreneurial pathway, where physicians can own businesses such as franchises or real estate empires. The third is the hardcore entrepreneur pathway, which involves pioneering new ideas or outperforming others in a specific field.

00:15:41 – The Benefits and Challenges for Physicians Pursuing Entrepreneurship
Jim explains that physicians have the advantage of being able to schedule their shifts and having a level of risk tolerance. However, the time availability may vary depending on the specialty. He also highlights the challenges and risks associated with entrepreneurship, emphasizing the need for additional skills, education, and the possibility of business failures.

00:18:00 – Physicians Living Hand to Mouth
Jim acknowledges the common problem of physicians living hand to mouth, struggling with financial stability despite their high earning potential. He mentions cases of physicians in their 60s with a net worth below half a million dollars.

00:24:35 – Importance of Motivation and Financial Literacy for Physicians
Motivation is essential for success in medicine, and if someone can be talked out of pursuing a medical career, they probably shouldn’t be in it. Developing financial literacy is crucial, and there are various resources available to learn about personal finance. Becoming financially literate early can have a significant impact on a doctor’s career, with an estimated value of $2 million.

00:25:50 – Impact on Physicians and Beyond
The White Coat Investor has received numerous emails and gratitude from doctors who credit the information for improving their financial situation. The impact of financial literacy extends beyond individual physicians, as it positively affects their children, patients, and overall well-being. Financially secure doctors are better healthcare providers, parents, and partners.

00:27:02 – Integrating Financial Education into Medical Schools
The challenge lies in introducing financial literacy education into medical schools. By making resources readily available and establishing initiatives like the WCI Champions program, which provides books to first-year medical and dental students, the White Coat Investor aims to equip future doctors with essential financial knowledge. Real doctors can also play a vital role by discussing finance with medical students during rotations.

00:28:41 – Personal Impact and Supporting Financial Education
Personally handing a book like “The White Coat Investor’s Guide” to medical students can make a significant impact, even if they don’t immediately read it. Additionally, having experienced doctors speak to students about finance can be highly influential.