A MD As A Financial Planner?

Is your financial planner a physician? I didn't think so.

After finishing medical school and residency, I was suddenly making a lot more money but I had no clue what I was doing with my finances. I didn't know about retirement plans or where to invest my money. I didn't even know what an estate is.

So I did 2 things: I hired a financial advisor at Smith Barney and I started picking stocks on my own...after all if I graduated from Johns Hopkins medical school, one of the top med schools in the world, picking the winning stocks was easy, right?

Well a few years went by and then my wife got out of her residency training (she's a Hopkins med school grad also and West Pointer) and then we had kids, and all of a sudden I started looking more closely at my finances and realized a few things:

1. My financial advisor was NOT acting in my best interest. All he was doing was selling me products to get a commission. It's like me choosing a drug for a patient just so I get paid more instead of simply being paid a fee directly.
2. My financial advisor wasn't providing any advice.  I needed to know whether I have enough insurance, whether I'm saving enough, what to do about my kids' college funding and so on.
3. An insurance guy sold me insurance products I didn't need and he appeared to suffer from point #2 also.
4. My financial life was becoming more complicated and I needed to organize it, simplify it, and enhance it.
5. I didn't have the knowledge and training to manage my finances. There wasn't even a single hour in med school or residency devoted to financial planning.

And that's when my passion for financial planning and investment management was born. As my situation became more complex, I started reading voraciously about the academic studies on investing and numerous other aspects of financial planning.

BUT SOMETHING ELSE FUELED MY PASSION EVEN MORE.

I noticed that lots....and I mean LOTS....of doctors didn't know how to manage their finances either.  And to make it worse, the physicians who hired financial advisors were being ripped off.  We were being taken advantage of by financial advisors that have no intention of acting in our best interest.

That made me really mad.

After working so hard and sacrificing so much in our lives, doctors deserved better from their advisors. And we needed someone who can truly relate to us, understand our situation, and actually act in our best interests just like we act in the best interests of our patients.

So I decided to become a financial planner for doctors.

Comments

[Greg Bledsoe]

Great article, Setu. Glad we have you around. Physicians need sound, honest financial advice.

[Setu Mazumdar, MD]

Greg, thanks for the comment. In medical school and residency we don't get a single minute devoted to personal financial planning. I think that's crazy because once we're done with our training, personal finance is one of our top worries.

To make things worse the vast majority of financial advisors and insurance agents prey upon up like vultures and rip us to shreds. It's time to turn the tables and expose the truth. And that's what I plan to do here: tell physicians the truth.

So the question is. "Can YOU handle the truth?" Stay tuned.