PFFAP-PYP-23-0913-Physician Reirement Planning Sucks
Voiceover: [00:00:00] This show is for educational purposes only and is not personalized advice. Consult your tax advisor before taking action. All investments involve risk of loss. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Read show notes for full disclosure.
Welcome to the Physician Family Financial Advisors podcast, where physician moms and dads like you can turn today's worries about taxes and investing into all the money you need for retirement and college.
Nate: Hello, physician moms and dads. I'm Nate Reneke, Certified Financial Planner and Primary Advisor here at Physician Family Financial Advisors.
Ben: And I'm Ben Utley, Certified Financial Planner and Service Team Leader here at Physician Family.
Nate: Okay, Ben, today our topic is Physician Retirement Planning. And more specifically, the fact that it sucks and what to do about it. It sucks, huh? It's, it kinda sucks. Apparently, that's what we hear. You and I might like it, but nobody else does.
Ben: Definitely. [00:01:00]
Nate: So, uh, to set the stage, I'm going to, I want to talk about just what a retirement fund plan is. I think there's, you know, there's a lot of kind of right answers to this, but maybe specifically what an in depth one is. So what is a retirement fund plan?
Ben: Okay, so what is retirement fund planning?
Um, I'll just start by saying that the the object of a retirement fund plan is to know what to do And the order to do it in Right. And so any good plan, whether it's a plan to build a skyscraper or it's a plan to build retirement, starts off with a goal. Like where, where am I going? Right. So internally we call that the aim.
Uh, next thing it has is awareness, situational awareness. Like, um, you know. What accounts do I have available? What's my matching rate at work? Then there is usually some calculation to give you some idea about how much you need to be saving And then there are some action steps. Every plan has a plan of action If [00:02:00] in the absence of any one of those four you kind of don't really have a plan You have something that's plan ask or plan like But it really takes all four of those because you you want to know where you're going where you're at How it looks to get there and then what you got to do to actually take the steps to move forward
Nate: Yeah, I think the, the, the piece that stands out to me on what you just said, or maybe the missing piece in most people's semi plans is that where you're at, um, a lot of times you can get to like, I need a X dollars and I need to do this roadmap to get there.
But the, the really valuable part is, can I do that? Is that reasonable? Can I do a lot more than that? And so the situational awareness about, you know, sometimes folks might have student loans and they can't save as much in the beginning, but they'll be able to save a ton down the road. Yeah.
Ben: And so, and this to me is where it starts to suck, right?
I mean, [00:03:00] you're the awareness, you do an inventory of all your accounts and you realize that Wow, all I have is that leftover 403B from training and, you know, maybe a little Roth money that I put in as a kid or that I put in while I was, you know, in my, my residency. Just looking at it, I'm like, I'm, I'm not really starting with much, I don't have much here.
And then, and then to increase the nastiness of this. Usually they're student loans and the student loans are, you know, a quarter million dollars easily. And you just look at you like how am I ever gonna save and it's it's a little bit dispiriting, you know It's like oh gosh, and I remember doing this as a young financial advisor.
I thought okay We should always eat our own cooking. So I should prep my own plan and that's where I've discovered this I thought there's just no way I would ever be able to retire and I was thinking this is a person whose job was to write retirement plans You know,
Nate: I would say that I've been in that boat as of pretty recently, you know, um, but the cool [00:04:00] thing is, is that's a really good way for, I mean, we're kind of getting into our own jobs here, but it's a really good way for advisors to kind of cut their teeth because you have to get creative when you're young.
How am I going to do this? And you can do it. It just takes some creativity. You probably can't do everything. in the beginning, but you could do something. It certainly could do something. And if you can't do something, then you got to make some changes. And that's where the real valuable stuff happens. So there's some other things that sort of suck about planning.
Um, and we're going to address them not to rub it in, but mainly to kind of get past these things that sucks because it, while it does suck, it's really valuable. It's a valuable thing to have a real plan.
Ben: Kind of like a lower GI scoping or something. It's something you need to do.
Nate: Exactly. Yep. So, it sucks when you can't make as much progress as you'd like.
[00:05:00] But, um, what are some of the other reasons you hear, Physicians say, or kind of feel that they don't like the process.
Ben: Um, I think kind of getting organized is a barrier for a lot of people who want to approach constructing a financial plan. Um, you know, it's sometimes it's like we've had clients who've been with us for a couple of years and we built our balance sheet.
We've identified everything and then. Oops, I have this other account that I didn't know about, right, found money. So that, that leads me to believe that, you know, kind of making the list of everything that you have that goes into your plan is difficult. Right. Yeah. So here's another thing that, that I found, uh, actually I found this sucked when I built my own retirement plan, but I actually have this experience when I write or review a retirement plan for a client, particularly, uh, young physicians that are coming in and they're, you know, they're mid thirties, maybe they're a couple of two, three years into their career.[00:06:00]
When I look and I, and I say, okay, today's 2023, these people are probably going to have a 30 year career. So they're going to be 65. I look at 30 and I go, okay, that's 2053. Which is, you know, that's like three years beyond, uh, what the Paris Climate Accord talks about as carbon neutrality. Uh, you know, I also look at this through my lens and I'm like, that's, uh, I might be like 90 by then.
You know, I'll, I'll be almost dead. My kids will be grown up. I mean, I just, I just spiral off. It's, I don't know. It just, the, the feeling I get in my gut takes me back to when I was. Uh, in freshman chemistry, and I, I knew that if I didn't get the answer right on this question, I might fail the test and fail the class and never be able to achieve the outcome I was looking for.
Right. It just, it tightens up my chest. And I'm, I'm just thinking if I feel the suck there that I imagine, you know, physicians might feel the suck as well.
Nate: Yeah. So planning for your future is not, is not often very fun. I mean, it [00:07:00] is. It is a long term, you know, retirement planning is a marathon, and marathons, at the end, you feel this great sense of accomplishment, but during the marathon, I mean, it quite literally
Ben: sucks.
Well, I also think another sucky thing about it is that, uh, you know, retirement planning is not really a project, it's a process, right? So you think, I'll get my retirement plan and I'll follow it, blah, blah, blah. But then you change jobs or then you get a raise or COVID happens or, you know, a divorce or children come along and, you know, it kind of derails that.
So as I like to say, if Thomas Edison stopped planning when he, uh, when he wrote his first business plan, we wouldn't have had General Electric because they, they plan every year. And so it's a, a constant process. And I think that's kind of the. No, this lucky thing about it is it just, it kind of never ends.
It's something that's constantly there when it's done correctly. So it's not like you can just do it and [00:08:00] forget about it. Mm hmm.
Nate: Yeah. I've heard you compare planning to vacation planning for vacations. No fun being on vacations. Really fun. Yes. But you still have to do the planning. And another thing is planning for vacation tends to take up a lot more time than actually being on vacation.
Isn't
Ben: that right? Isn't that right? So true. I mean, cooking the meal always takes longer than eating the meal, right?
Nate: So obviously that, that is a difficult process. Um, it takes effort for many physicians. Money is just simply stressful. It's just a, uh, when you do a plan, you have to face reality. About your current situation and you're not always when you're when you're at least when you write your first plan You're not always it's not always easy money money Everyone thinks everyone in the outside world you and I both know this isn't the case that money is easy for physicians And it's not all it's not always the case.
Ben: Yeah I've seen even physicians that are [00:09:00] earning, you know high six figures and low seven figures and they're still very worried about it You know, I, I think it's hard for a physician to know how much is enough, like they could measure my blood pressure and see, you know, 120 over 76 and they go, that's good.
But you know, as a lay consumer or a lay patient, I wouldn't know what 120 means. I wouldn't know what 76 means. I wouldn't know that. Yeah. That's. That's fine. I'd be like, well, shouldn't it be like 200? I mean, don't we need a higher score? Or shouldn't that be zero? You know? And, uh, I think there's so many numbers that are floating around.
It's difficult to, for a physician to know, like, how much is enough? Or even, how much should I have right now? You know, so there's all kinds of, uh, you know, sometimes there's shame, or there's guilt, or there's, you know, all kinds of other emotions enter the fray that make it just, quite frankly, the word I hear is overwhelming.
And I don't know, I think being overwhelmed is, it sucks. Right.
Nate: Yeah, I have a, uh, I just [00:10:00] spoke with someone this week about the, their choice to take some time off, not, not time off, uh, work a little bit less for a while in order to spend more time with their newborn. And so it's a critical care doctor over in Washington.
And the question was, can I drop down to 12 shifts a month? And when we looked at the numbers, she had, she had no idea. And my question to her was, can you survive off of 400, 000 a year? And you and I look at that and we say, well, of course you can. We have physicians who make two 50. You
Ben: know, I thought you were gonna I thought you're gonna tell me she's going from like three to Two or something like
Nate: that.
Well, yeah her her spouse makes some money too. So, you know as an income, too so But that that shows you That if you're just following a plan blindly and all of a sudden you can't accomplish every little thing in the plan You can [00:11:00] feel lost right away And so you have to be able to adjust in these plans as a sort of life comes at you And so it's
Ben: like not know how to get all your stuff, right?
It's like you look at how well I how I ever make this happen and that just stops a lot of people in their tracks Right away,
Nate: right? Right and then they make a decision that I think would be worse than Not planning, which is they just keep working their fingers to the bone so they can make sure they get it all done, which is, we know that you
Ben: can adjust.
Take no action. That's the worst that happens. No action. Right.
Nate: Yeah. So, if it's so difficult, um, why bother? Like, why do physicians want to put themselves through this pain?
Ben: The reason that I hear most often is physicians want to know That they're doing the right thing with money and that doesn't necessarily mean Yeah, it doesn't yeah, exactly.
They want to be [00:12:00] responsible It doesn't necessarily mean that they're picking the right mutual fund or something like that. It's more like Um, there's this liability out there and they want to satisfy that liability or there's this empty box out there and they want to check the box and it's because like, I want to finish my homework so I can go out and play.
That's what I get out of the conversations and so they want to know how much they really need to save or how much they quote unquote should save so that they'll feel comfortable. And maybe that means that it gives them permission to spend some of the rest of the money, but maybe it just lets them feel done.
Mm hmm. Mm hmm.
Nate: Yeah, that the permission to spend the rest of the money. I call that balance. Yeah we talk a lot about balance in today's culture like balance with your time, but Balance with money is just a balance. It's just another balance of resources and For the for the people who want balance plans are terrific It's it is the [00:13:00] the the way that they can feel great in life, not just about retirement, but it's like, oh, I know I can spend the rest of this money and I'll be fine.
Right. So, that, that is super valuable. In fact, the people who want that, they are motivated to get planning done. But the other one, the people who say, you know, they just want to be done, it's a little more painful for them. It's just probably a personality thing, but they do want to check the box, but it's a tough box to check and feel good about.
So, they want to feel that they're being responsible. And I think it's important to sort of detail out what responsible means. Because depending on who your parents were, responsible could be don't spend an extra nickel and save every penny.
Ben: Or it could be... Or keep it all in the bank, right? Yeah, keep it all in the bank.
Or it could mean paying off your house before you do anything else, and that might or might not be the right thing. Exactly. So Nate, can I tell [00:14:00] a story? Yes. Please. Okay. Kids gather around. Yeah. Be seated. Crisscross applesauce and gather in and listen because Papa is going to tell you a story and this story is about me.
Okay. So I love doughnuts. I love. Most doughnuts, I love glazed, raised, that's my favorite if I'm going to a doughnut store. But the doughnuts that are most available to me are those little white powdered doughnuts. They come in a sleeve that's a six pack. I think it's funny, it's a six pack because that's how beer is sold.
So, my daughter's going to the grocery store the other day and she's like, Do you want anything? I'm like, Yeah, bring me some doughnuts. So, she wanders off to the store, comes back into the house, you know, when it's done. She says, hey, I got you some doughnuts. And I'm like, awesome. She says, I got a sack of them.
I'm like, Oh no, not a sack. I don't want a sack of donuts. I just want six donuts. Cause I need, I need help. And she said, so I know that you need them all. If I, if I just left them out and [00:15:00] indeed I would. Uh, so she said, uh, what I'll do is I'll just put some out and you can have them for dessert tonight.
How's that sound? I was like, Oh, that's awesome. She said, you want four or six? And I said, I want six. I've been thinking about six all day. Yeah. So she doles out these six and in a little package and sets them on the countertop. And she said, no, I'm going to take the rest of these donuts. And I'm going to hide them in a way that you will never find them.
And, you know, it's like between us, we had a donut plan and, you know, so I want some donuts. Now I want some donuts later. I know it's not good to eat all my donuts. Now it's terrible not to eat any doughnuts, right? That's, that's torture. So we, we had this doughnut plan and, you know, every night she'd say, Hey, do you want four or six doughnuts?
And nights it was four doughnuts and nights it was six doughnuts, which is a silly story. But here's the cool thing. When I finished my meal and I sat down with that little pile of doughnuts that my daughter had so lovingly put together for me. It was the total joy of being able to eat all of the donuts in the package without [00:16:00] regard for, you know, whether I was going to gain weight, whether it was too much or too little.
I didn't have the package there tempting me with regret and, you know, not knowing whether or not I should eat more donuts or not. It allowed me to really focus on the moment. And I think that that is the thing that physicians who have a solid, understandable, realistic, meaningful plan, I think that that is the thing.
thing that they really get from the planning process is knowing how much they must save right now so that they can feel comfortable maybe spending the rest of it. Right. Which is very different than eating all donuts or no donuts. So there's, there's my, there's my financial planning gone. Donuts story.
That's
Nate: great. That's great. So I, uh, I've never told the donut story, but I should probably tell the pizza story. It'd be the same story. Um, but when we get to this idea of some now, some later, I think a lot of times people can [00:17:00] mistake that for, uh, I'm doing an irresponsible thing cause I'm not saving a ton.
The reality is you have to save a ton, whether you have a plan or not. True. Right? So, six donuts now, and a sack of donuts, no matter which pile you're looking at, it's still a lot of donuts. Yeah. So, to the idea that this is somehow... Getting you away from doing the responsible thing. That is not true. We're just saying that you need to find where your line is and the line is still gonna for some people it's still gonna be Uncomfortable, but you're gonna get used to it You're gonna get used to that line and then you can spend the rest and that is what brings security to people's feet of their feeling of security to their savings So you still have to say a lot
Ben: Right?
That's like, what's the point of having money if you don't get to enjoy it? Right? I, I think some physicians are concerned that they're not saving everything or maybe they're not saving as much as they can, but there, there's an amount for everyone. There's a right number. And I think when you hit [00:18:00] that number, you get to relax a little bit, move on with your life, be present in the moment, don't have to worry about money so much and actually enjoy what you've earned.
Nate: Yeah. So let me, let me, uh, say. I'm going to go back to your example. Let me say what, what the, the, well, I guess the six donuts is what you ate. So that's what you spend. But let me tell you the amount that needs to be set aside. It's not an amount. It's a sort of how to not be irresponsible with money. This, these are sort of what you're looking at for in a plan.
Okay. So you want to make sure you're putting money in the right places, which will help you avoid. Really stupid tax bills to be honest. Yes. I mean, yeah, foolish tax bills.
Ben: You're gonna get all the tax breaks. You really deserve
Nate: Yes, and that is critical for physicians. Once again, the tax game for physicians is not a once a year I somehow pull [00:19:00] some strings and lower my tax bill really low It's a long lifetime game you're playing with taxes and you want to get the lifetime bill as low as you can exactly Hey, and then saving as much as you need to avoid Sort of catastrophic mistakes for retirement.
So You need to save in the right places to avoid tax bills and save enough To where you have a really solid plan in place where you're gonna have enough to spend in retirement and and hopefully Enough to kind of withstand some bumps in the road during retirement. So have a nice little safety margin in there as well, right Okay, so that is a really smart, prudent thing to do.
And that's what a plan should give you. It should give you a roadmap, where to save, and how much to save. In a nutshell, that's really all it is. So when the time comes, you have all the money you need for college and retirement. [00:20:00] That s why we say that. Okay? Okay. So, for people, there s a lot of physicians out there that don t have an advisor.
Or maybe they have an advisor through, um, one of the, the big companies, like a Vanguard advisor or something, and they re not getting a super detailed plan. What have you seen them do to sort of, uh, give themselves a road map? Uh, if, if, if their advisor is not writing that out for
Ben: them. Yeah, what, what you're describing are, are Either people that have an investment jockey, that's not really a planner, or perhaps they're very comfortable, you know, selecting their own index funds, but when it comes time to, you know, putting a plan together, like how, how should this all be woven together, what's the high level big picture, how do I make this coordinate and do the right thing, that's where they find themselves at a loss, because quite frankly, the investment side of this is the easiest thing.
If I were bringing someone on [00:21:00] board today as an employee and I wanted to teach them one or two things, I would begin with investing because it's the easiest thing. And then several years later, I'd move on to planning because it's, uh, it's varied. So um, I think in a case like that, um, what we see is, um, many people go to online calculators.
And, uh, you know, we did a study a couple years ago for online calculators when we were looking at revising our retirement planning software. What we found is that universally the, the calculators were good, but universally the calculators all gave a different answer. And this is something that I, I have heard prospective clients talk about.
Like I went here, I got this answer, I went there, I got that answer. However, um, I think that the online planning software is largely a black box. And I know this because I and our very talented retirement planning specialist, Chelsea, went through this together, [00:22:00] and we're scratching our heads about, okay, how does this algorithm work?
Is it, you know? Right. Yeah, exactly. What, what are the inputs? How many inputs? And what you find is that, that really good software has a lot of inputs because it can accommodate all these varied scenarios. Mm hmm. So. And as I've told people, okay, if you went online and you used a retirement planning calculator and you happen to select the perfect planning calculator for you and you happen to get exactly the right answer, the problem is that you would not know that you had gotten the right calculator and the right answer.
And as a result, you would not feel that comfortable gut feeling of doing the right thing that people are seeking. It's like a half answer. It's almost as if my kid is, uh, you know, they, they got what looks like the creep and cruds and I go down to the pharmacy and, you know, I get whatever over the counter remedy there is.
[00:23:00] But, you know, I don't know if this kid's got creep and cruds or if they've got some kind of strange cancer thing or something like that. There's always that lingering doubt in the back of my mind. And it's because, you know, I can, I can go to Dr. Google and I can get results on that, but I don't know if they're the right results.
and you know, it's, I'm treating a family member, so that's very important. And as a result, you know, the way that I feel good about these decisions is I actually consult a practitioner and I go to see mm-hmm. , my pa or I go see our physician and, and get the actual answer that I need. So I know like, okay, somebody has looked at this, someone has applied their experience, not just the knowledge that I can get off the internet, but, but their experience to say, to say, yeah, this is just creeping crud, or Wow, this is something we should look at.
Nate: Right. Yeah, um, tell, say the exact, I always have loved this example, so humor me for a second. What's the, the one degree off from starting point, uh, example, because if you're using a calculator and you, [00:24:00] and get it, they get it close, but you're one or five degrees off from, uh, getting from point A to point B.
How far are you away by the time you're 30 years down the road? Yeah, exactly.
Ben: One degree off or five degrees off, if you're, if you're trying to reach a distant point, you sight in for a mountain and then you have to hike through a forest and you get one degree off. It's no big deal if the forest is only about a mile, a mile wide, but if that forest is 30 miles wide and you're off by a degree, you might miss the whole dang mountain.
Right. Right. You know? So, and that's, that's a thing that's the risk of having a one time plan, and that's the risk of getting it wrong. But with that said, I love that, yeah, you do make progress, you know? Of
Nate: course. That's what I'm going to say. You know, there's nothing wrong with getting started on these calculators.
I mean, they're going to tell you to save, but it's just what I've seen is, is the feeling isn't there. So people will.
I've seen this very recently. [00:25:00] Physicians in there, they have a, a ton, and I mean a ton of money for retirement, which is great from a math perspective. But when you hear about the 15, 20 years it took them to build it, you think, wow, you were nowhere near balanced. In fact, they have lived in, they have lived in such Away that 20 years down the road.
I don't think there's anywhere possible. They could bring themselves to spend the
Ben: money Well, the thing that makes me sad about that is is usually those first 10 15 20 years are also the years when you have children at home When you when you have youth and energy You know when you're when your marriage is new and there's still a lot of romance in it before the kids have beaten all of It out.
Yeah, no, right that is the time to I've heard it said that education is wasted on the youth, and I feel like wealth is wasted on the elderly. They just sit on top of it and pile it up. The time when you [00:26:00] should be spending, and by should I mean to get the enjoyment out of your life. Is early on right, but you also should be saving because you get all this good compound effect So when I see somebody who has multiple millions of dollars and you know that most of that was savings I just think wow, there's some incredible opportunities out there In fact, it's it's what I call Buying things that money can't buy and the way you do that is with your your energy and your attention And, uh, kids in particular need energy and attention.
Spouses need energy and attention. And, you know, when you get to the end of the road, if you find that you have those things that money can't buy, it's because you did something other than just look at the money. You, you, you perceived balance and you, and you paid attention to the, the people that are in your life.
Nate: Right. Okay. Okay. So what I'm hearing and what, what I. In my bones, what I believe [00:27:00] is that a plan is extremely valuable and it's worth the effort. It's actually worth the time and energy to put it into the plan. You are putting time into your plan to gain time and energy in your actual life. Right. Where it matters.
Okay. Yeah. But I still know, even though I believe that, it takes, uh, it oftentimes takes physicians who are actual clients and we're writing the plans for them. It takes them a couple of years sometimes before they can really buy into the process and they still are sort of paralyzed by it all. So I want to.
answer the question for someone who is not emotionally ready or they don't feel like they're in a place to get a solid plan yet. Like, what can they do now? How can they make this suck less right now and make some progress while they're working up, I guess, the courage or the energy to do a real plan?
Ben: I think it is to [00:28:00] simply do the same thing you would do if you had a plan.
which is to do one thing. I mean, no matter what you do, you have to pick a thing to do at this moment. And I guess the difference between someone who's planned and someone who's unplanned is that if you're planned, you know the thing to do, and maybe there's two or three things you should be doing, and you know what to do next.
If you're unplanned, Usually, it's pretty obvious that there is one thing to do. So an example I can think of would be to get the whole match in your 401k, right? That's kind of obvious, but we still see physicians that are not contributing their 401k and they're not getting the match. I saw one just last month, couldn't believe it, right?
So this is standard boilerplate advice, but when you see that advice over and over and over again in print, you just need to like look down and go, did I do that? Right? And that's not a plan E kind of thing. That's a, that's a do the, do the thing that's obvious in front of you right now. You know, I want to improve my health.
What I do today, go drink two glasses of water. [00:29:00]
Nate: Yeah. Uh, here's another one for you. Talk about health. You know, I'm, I'm into health. When I first started my health journey, it wasn't go drink two glasses of water. It was never buy a candy bar. Yeah, just take something out rather than put something in, you know, pay off the, pay off the debt was my first thing that it was 401k, you know, then it's HSA, uh, max out that 401k rather than just get the match.
Then you can do IRAs. And then it's a taxable account. And then at that point, you're so far down the road, it would be great if you could just put a stamp on this thing and get a plan. But for today, all you need to do today is just get started. Have I ever told you the just get started story? I may have said it on the podcast.
It's one of my favorite stories. Let's hear it again. I'm sure it's great. Go ahead. I'm going to tell you again. So when I was 13 years old, my dad had, my dad had a lot of ideas. And I get my ideas from, from [00:30:00] being raised by my father. So father also, uh, financial advisor, you know, so I get a lot of stuff from him.
So he decided that to save money on a house, we were going to, to go through a company where essentially you build about 50 percent of the house yourself. And he told me and my brother, I want you to put in 1000 hours of work. Over the next year with me. So, uh, every weekend that I was with my dad, every, you know, a couple of weekdays after school, I go work with him and it wasn't really great work.
I mean, me and my brother were 13 and 14. So, there wasn't a lot of technical work we could do, but we could do something. Okay. And so, one day we showed up to the job site and there was an enormous, I mean, taller than me, pile of big sheets of plywood. And he said, your job today. Okay. Is to move that sheet of that that pile of plywood to the second story of the house.
[00:31:00] Oh And you know 13 I could barely my arms stretched out wide I could barely grab one piece of wood And so we go, okay, that's our job today And so he starts walking in he's going to do the fun stuff like lay tile and do all that the thought the real valuable yeah, and He walks out, he's moving stuff in and out of the house, and he walks out, and he sees me and my brother, and we're just standing there in a gravel lot, staring at the pile of wood, we're just staring at it, and he comes over, and instead of, you know, yelling at us, like, get to work, or something like that, he stands next to us, he looks at the pile with us for about two seconds, and he looks at us, and we look at him, and we're just, you know, scared to even start, and he said, you just have to start.
And You just have to start, you just have to start. And so from then on, I thought, okay, anytime a big giant marathon is in front of me, I know I just have to take that first step. Yeah. And then once you start, you know, you're [00:32:00] 25 percent of the way there, you're 50 percent of the way there, and you still may feel like it's a big task in front of you, but you're taking off chunks.
And I see this all the time in retirement planning. People will get to me and they'll go, you know, am I on track? They're still worried. Five, six, seven years into the plan. And I said, yeah, you are almost without a doubt. They're always Probably ahead of their plan, right? Because physicians have the capacity to save they do Yeah, and as soon as you start you can every year you can make a little bit more progress and and those early years When you're making a little progress mean a lot in your later years
Ben: Does so did did you get the whole palm
Nate: moved?
I did. Yeah. And it didn't take as much time as I thought. Fantastic. Much like retirement.
Ben: Dude. I can, I can breathe now. I was worried about you. Yeah.
Nate: Did you die? Did you die? I did not. Yeah. But I think, so, so the big takeaway for today's podcast is, is very simple. Do something. [00:33:00] Do something. If you're not, if you haven't started for retirement, you don't have to start with a plan.
Although that would be great. If you decide that's the route you want to go, you just need to do something. So 401k, high interest debt, HSA, it'll go down the list. Do something, and next year, do the next thing.
Ben: Nice. Okay. That's all for today, ladies and gentlemen. Until next time, remember, you're not just making a living, you're making a life.
Voiceover: Thank you for listening to the Physician Family Financial Advisors podcast. Are you getting all the tax breaks you really deserve? To find out, get your copy of the Overtax Doctor's Retirement Investing Checklist, available at physicianfamily. com forward slash go.
