In today's episode, Cody and Justin are joined by the prolific Jim Dahle from the White Coat Investor. Jim came full circle from a middle-class Alaskan upbringing all the way to a successful physician with a blog that makes over $1M per year!

So how did he get there...

Well, that's what the episode is for so go take a listen, leave that 5-star review and give us some feedback!

Episode Summary

He feels like he made all the same mistakes you’ve heard everyone makes but he did so with small amounts of money and he did so early

After years of feeling like he was getting ripped off, he started reading through finance books at a used book store and was hooked

Then he started getting heavily involved with online forums

He also realized no one was doing this kind of education for doctors so he started White coat investor in 2011

He was a resident at age 29 and making around $37k per year

His first investment ever was $500 into options at age 10 that he got from a fund provided to Alaskan residents and lost every bit

His mom didn’t go to college but his dad was an engineer

They felt like they were middle-class where they didn’t go hungry or anything but after age 18 he was on his own

When he started college he took out a $5k loan for his freshman year but he used that for housing and got scholarships for tuition and would work the rest of the time for expenses

He got married at the end of his undergraduate degree but realized he wasn’t going to really be able to provide at the rate he was at

His wife’s family had a heavy military background so he decided to join the military to pay for his graduate degree in return for four years of active duty but he was able to enter active duty as a captain.

He would make Major just before getting out

His four-year obligation started at age 31 and would end at age 35

While he was on most of the same base pay as other officers he actually made more through incentives which totaled over $36k more per year!

If he would have stayed longer, he could have even had more bonuses but it still wasn’t near what he’d make on the outside

Now back to his forum legacy...He had a prolific amount of posts (10k+) over the course of 7 years with a special focus on physicians and military

His blog, starting in 2011, was actually at almost the exact same time as Mr. Money Mustache

The goal that started the blog was to make money and to help people get a fair shake on Wall Street

To stand up his blog he just taught himself how to build the website from the ground up

Then we transition into the mindset of high income earners such as Doctors

He goes through a few reasons why you find broke physicians

They’re often financially illiterate

They go from no money to too much money overnight

Expectations from coworkers, patients, and family that they should live rich

Huge student loan sums ($400k+)

No real work until ~31 years old

He gives us some rules of thumb to help avoid some of these pitfalls

The first is trying to stay under 1x for college debt

1 times your eventual income. Ex: Eventual income $250k = up to $250k loans are doable but strive for lower obviously

The second is understanding what your potential payments will be based on specialty because the pay can be very different but the school is often the same

With that being said, don’t burn yourself out because then you probably shortened your career length

Then we get deep off into taxes

The first step is just flat out understanding your taxes. You can do this by getting more involved in doing your taxes instead of just offloading it each year.

He calls out how most of these high-income earners aren’t familiar with some retirement accounts such as profit-sharing plans, individual 401ks, defined benefit plan, health savings accounts, and back door Roth IRAs

For Health Savings Accounts employers actually help you out with the contributions...