Wealth Mantra for Health Gurus (Doctors)

Wealth Mantra for Health Gurus

No two prescriptions are same for similar symptoms, same is with financial plan of doctors!

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The medical profession is noble work. As a doctor, your sole concern is to take away the miseries of the suffering person. Your selfless service has never been oriented towards publicity or financial greed. This is the reason your profession is considered "special" in financial planning.

Believe it or not, financial planning is almost nowhere to be seen in a doctor's priority list. I'm not saying it out of the blue. Curofy conducted a poll asking doctors about their priority. Out of 1820 doctors who responded, about 60.4% of them said they prioritise their patients over everything else.

Only the remaining 26.3% of them said they would prefer their family first. This shows how selfless you serve the community.

Financial challenges faced by doctors:

• Doctors start their career very late.

The young medical practitioners start earning when they are almost 30 because of a long training period. You don't have much time to concentrate on planning your finances because the initial earning phase mostly involves paying off educational loans.

• Your life is full of "emergencies of patients."

Saving and investment strategy needs time, but you don't get that time because you are always under pressure to perform. You are so busy healing others that it's obvious to forget what's ailing you in your finances.

• Strong professional commitments.

Your patients trust you for your professional commitment to excellence. Thus, you need to continuously seek-out, analyse, and apply the best available science and evidence to make the right patient care decisions, continually update procedural and clinical skills, and acknowledge personal limitations; thus, financial planning is often overlooked.

• You don't adopt any "money earning" approach.

Doctors choose this field because they want to help people, not because they want to have a multimillion-dollar house, go on a world tour, or drive a Porsche. Your primary focus is your patients' well-being and not to make money by marketing your skills.

• A doctor's career comes with unpredictable ups and downs.

You make many sacrifices and never complain about it, and the current pandemic was the proof of it. Be it a pandemic or a typical day at work; this profession is unpredictable. Even if you manage to get some time with such a profession, one individual can't follow all the changes in the markets, taxes, health care regulations, trust, estate options, and insurance. It is quite understandable by now why doctors don't have time for personal planning.

According to a 2019 survey by Physicians Research, a typical medical practitioner works 51-hour a week and can attend to 20 patients a day. They get little to no time to do economic research on investment, let alone the type of comprehensive planning that yields long-term results.

Being a doctor, your economic cycle is different, and so are your financial goals!

You will agree that you start with a regular salary late, and hence your social life and events also get delayed. Your beliefs, norms, values, and social backgrounds are totally different that affects your life decisions.

Here are 3 things that doctors want the most:

• Setting up a private clinic:

I'm sure you don't want to set up your clinic to earn more. Instead, the main motive behind it is to create a space that helps you treat your patients better. Setting up a clinic is a huge investment because it requires cutting-edge machines, skilled staff, a well-equipped environment, etc.

• Pursue specialised courses abroad:

Doctors choose to pursue specialised courses only from the top international universities. It is because international universities offer a plethora of research options for you to get better with your theoretical and practical knowledge and skills to treat patients with rare diseases. Thus, this goal also needs a huge investment.

• Do specialisation:

The human body is enormously complex. The specialisation is a way to understand better certain areas of the body and how they function. Thus, the complexity of the human body leads to specialisations. Being a doctor, you tend to choose one or multiple focus areas.

Therefore, you need a massive sum of money to do specialisation from a reputed medical college. If you notice, your goals contribute to a noble cause. With these, you want to enhance your skills, knowledge and means to provide better selfless service. As a financial expert, we understand, to achieve all these goals, doctors need money. Your contribution to humankind is commendable.

9 Special Financial Planning Tips for Doctors

Doctors should take the following steps to ensure smooth and proper condition of the finances:

1. Define your goals properly and start financial planning as soon as possible. It is quite normal to take a lot of loans in the process of becoming a doctor. As soon as doctors start earning, they have to pay their debts. Thus, it is sure to lose the balance in between. So, we would always suggest you go for secured loans and not personal loans. It is because secured loans give you higher borrowing limits, lower interest rates, and an extended repayment period.

2. Financial planning is about creating wealth to address significant life milestones, such as setting up a clinic, getting married, giving your children the best education, and funding their higher studies. Most importantly, financial planning helps you lead a stress-free life in your late 60s. Doctors can build wealth through prudent investments in equities, PMS, etc.

3. You should have a diversified investment portfolio. It creates a hedge against volatile markets and helps establish financial security. One of the ways to go about it is through mutual funds. Holding one mutual fund gives you a stake in 50 companies. If 20-25 companies are not doing well, the rest can compensate for your losses.

4. You should not deposit all your money in the bank. The banks are continually cutting their interest rate. It is the same as keeping your money in a piggy bank because inflation and tax take all the earnings, and the person ends up getting almost nothing.

5. Real estate cannot always be the right decision for you. It is because real estate falls under the asset class, which means there will be a time of outperformance and underperformance. The uncertainty that comes with this option doesn't make it a smart financial investment for you and your family.

6. Your life is very precious to us. Therefore, we would suggest you go for the proper term and indemnity cover. A professional indemnity cover protects doctors against any legal liabilities that may incur as a part of their practice.

7. You should realise that your services can never go out of demand, whichever way the country's economy is going. Hence, you can afford to take higher risks in your investment portfolio that give you huge returns. But most of you are not aware of this and invest almost all your money in low risk, low return products.

8. There is no such thing as retirement for doctors. You can carry on with consultation for as long as you want. Thus, most doctors don't need a huge retirement corpus or an aggressive investment strategy. What you actually need is the right investment strategy to preserve your wealth after the age of 60.

9. Finally, for female doctors, financial wellness is essential to ensure an independent, empowered, and promising future. It's been found that female doctors are often ignorant about managing their finances. If you are a female doctor, you don't have to depend on your father and husband for financial management anymore. You have been changing trends and setting new benchmarks. Thus, financial empowerment and security are crucial to embolden your stand.

Conclusion:

Doctors have a very tight schedule and lead a busy life. As a physician or employee of medical practice, your primary focus is to remove our miseries and ensure our good health. Likewise, you need to focus on your finances to grow your wealth, manage the taxes, and have a healthy, wealthy, and secure financial life.

Since doctors want to make us healthy, we want to make them wealthy!