White Coat Investor

Let’s dig in as we discuss physician incomes, our debt burden, and the personal finance failures that often lead to a high-earning physician living paycheck to paycheck. The reason for this very wide range is that some physicians (like a pediatrician or general internist) might earn $150,000 to $200,000. like Shaq who spent $1million of his signing bonus in a single day – physicians are as inclined as a professional athlete to spend every single penny. You can’t spend a dime more unless you want to spend another day, week, month, or year away from that ideal life you designed in step 1.

Just like the relationship between investing accounts (think different types of luggage) and investments (think different types of clothing), pretty much any type of real estate can go into any type of investment structure. If you’ve decided that you’re willing to pay a little more in fees (to be fair, the expenses of the companies and the properties they own are not included in the expense ratio of the mutual fund), be a little less diversified, and deal with a little more hassle, we’ll keep moving through the flowchart. It basically comes down to your accreditation status (accredited investors either have $1M in investments or make > $200K/year), how much you have available per investment (while still maintaining a reasonable level of diversification), and whether or not you like picking your own properties. Minimums on these tend to be high, so if you can’t meet them and maintain diversification, your only options are access funds which will lower your minimum investment in exchange for an additional layer of fees, and the private REITs.

Here is a partial list: At any rate, until recently Katie and I had $60K ($10K/month, about what we would be spending if we quit going on vacations every month) set aside in either our high-yield savings account or more recently, a money market fund as an emergency fund. I was updating the spreadsheet one day and as I went through the various accounts I realized we had hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting around in cash. There was also money that just needed to be moved into investments and some of it was money we leave in the checking accounts to ensure we can make payroll and don’t bounce checks. I keep a minimum of $15K in our personal checking account and another $15K in the business checking account, just to keep from bouncing checks and payments.