MtoM #252: Psych Resident Maxes Out Spousal and Personal IRAs and Finance 101: Boosting Your Income

Summary

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Episode Overview

White Coat Investor Podcast – Milestones to Millionaire #252
Title: Psych Resident Maxes Out Spousal and Personal IRAs and Finance 101: Boosting Your Income
Date: December 8, 2025
Host: Dr. Jim Dahle
Guest: Matthew, Psychiatry Resident (PGY4)

This episode centers on Matthew, a psychiatry resident who has managed to max out both his own and his spouse’s Roth IRAs while supporting a family of four on a resident income. The conversation unpacks his step-by-step financial journey, practical strategies for boosting income as a trainee, and the importance of financial literacy and intentionality early in medical careers. The latter portion of the episode features Dr. Dahle’s Finance 101: actionable advice on how boosting one’s income can accelerate all other financial goals.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Matthew’s Background and Milestone Achievement (03:05–04:26)

• Background:
  • PGY4 psychiatry resident in the Midwest.
  • Married with two kids; spouse is a stay-at-home parent.
  • Sole earner supporting a family of four on resident income.
• Milestone:
  • Maxed out both his Roth IRA and his spouse’s Roth IRA for the first time in 2024 and on track for 2025.
  • “That is not a small percentage of a resident income. I mean, this represents something like a 25% savings rate or something, right?” – Dr. Jim Dahle (04:04)

2. The Path to Financial Literacy (04:26–05:32)

• Early Attitude Toward Money:
  • Grew up in a middle-class, financially stable but not financially literate family.
  • Became interested in personal finance after exposure to the White Coat Investor community in medical school.
• First Steps:
  • Opened a Roth IRA as a PGY1 to begin his investing journey.
  • “I just decided to open a Roth IRA and see what I can put towards it and start my financial journey.” – Matthew (05:32)

3. Income Growth Through Moonlighting (06:25–08:22)

• Income Evolution:
  • Year 1: $30,000
  • Year 2: $65,000
  • Most recent year: $152,000 (via lucrative moonlighting in psychiatry)
• Moonlighting Details:
  • Works with a local healthcare system, rounding on inpatient psych units, typically weekends and some overnights.
  • “Psychiatry… there’s a lot of opportunities… to moonlight in inpatient psychiatry facilities and otherwise.” – Matthew (07:21)
• Community Impact:
  • Both helps the community by filling a vital need and advances personal financial goals.

4. Savings Rate and Balanced Lifestyle (08:22–10:45)

• Savings Rates:
  • Progressed from 26% in early residency to 45% of income currently.
  • “My savings rate last year was about 35% of that income… for this fiscal year, my savings rate has been about 45%.” – Matthew (08:36)
• Lifestyle & Balance:
  • Despite high savings, family enjoys vacations and spends intentionally.
  • Money conversations focus on priorities, with Matthew’s spouse supportive of “paying ourselves first” while also allocating funds for family enjoyment.

5. Money Conversations with Spouse (09:30–10:45)

• Division of Labor:
  • Spouse happy to delegate financial management.
  • Discussions focus on intentional allocation: saving first, fun later.
• White Coat Investor Tools:
  • Used WCI’s “resident waterfall” as a guide for financial priorities.

6. Long-Term Goals and Security Focus (11:28–12:09)

• Motivation:
  • Financial stability and flexibility are top priorities.
• Goal Timeline:
  • “I’m hoping to be financially independent probably hopefully by age 50, 55, something like that.” – Matthew (12:09)
• Host’s Optimism:
  • Dr. Dahle predicts Matthew will reach these goals sooner due to high savings rate.

7. Protection: Insurance and Loan Strategy (12:57–15:30)

• Disability & Life Insurance:
  • Bought own-occupation disability insurance in first residency month; term life insurance as well.
  • Plans to upgrade as income increases.
  • “Disability insurance, I got that first month in residency.” – Matthew (12:57)
• Student Loans:
  • ~$220,000 in federal loans at ~5.6%.
  • Flexible approach: will consider PSLF, employer repayment options, or aggressive paydown based on first job offer.

8. Advice for Medical Students (MS4s) (15:30–17:42)

• Financial Education:
  • “Educate yourself… It was certainly a lot easier to educate myself about financial literacy than it was going through medical school.” – Matthew (16:00)
  • Recommends WCI book, blog, and podcast.
• Geographic Arbitrage:
  • Prioritized residency programs with a lower cost of living and moonlighting opportunities.
• Becoming the ‘Finance Guy’:
  • Now the go-to for money advice among peers.

9. Host’s Reflections – Boosting Your Income (17:52–22:45)

• Core Message:
  • “Most people dramatically overestimate the difficulty of doubling their income.” – Dr. Jim Dahle (18:27)
• Practical Strategies:
  • Consider moonlighting or side gigs (“even if you only make $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 a year more…how much faster do you become a multimillionaire?”).
  • Don’t be afraid to change jobs for higher pay.
  • Ask for a raise and periodically assess your worth on the job market.
  • Consider entrepreneurial ventures or online opportunities.
• Mindset:
  • “Pay attention to your income. Care about what your income is. Take simple steps to increase your income when you can, and… it helps in reaching all of your other financial goals.” – Dr. Jim Dahle (22:30)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Maxing Out IRAs as a Resident:
  “That is not a small percentage of a resident income. I mean, this represents something like a 25% savings rate or something, right?”
  — Dr. Jim Dahle (04:04)

• First Steps Into Finance:
  “I just decided to open a Roth IRA and see what I can put towards it and start my financial journey.”
  — Matthew (05:32)

• Savings Discipline:
  “My savings rate for the first couple of years was about 26% of my income… for this fiscal year, my savings rate has been about 45%.”
  — Matthew (08:36)

• On Family Conversations About Money:
  “She was totally on board with, you know, I said, I would like to be intentional about paying ourselves first…once we cover all of those things, then whatever we have left over we spend on fun stuff.”
  — Matthew (09:30)

• On Income Doubling:
  “Most people dramatically overestimate the difficulty of doubling their income.”
  — Dr. Jim Dahle (18:27)

• Medical Student Advice:
  “Educate yourself…It was certainly a lot easier to educate myself about financial literacy than it was going through medical school.”
  — Matthew (16:00)

• Intentionality in Residency Location & Job Selection:
  “Geographic arbitrage was something I really considered when I chose a residency. And then I also ranked programs that would allow me to moonlight.”
  — Matthew (16:38)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Timestamp | Topic | |-----------|-------| | 03:05–04:26 | Matthew’s current life & Roth IRA milestone | | 04:26–05:32 | Financial literacy journey in med school & residency | | 05:32–06:25 | Opening first Roth IRA, early contributions | | 06:25–08:22 | Income evolution and moonlighting in psychiatry | | 08:22–09:22 | Savings rates and intentional use of extra income | | 09:30–10:45 | Conversations with spouse, use of WCI tools | | 11:28–12:09 | Motivation, goals for financial independence | | 12:57–13:55 | Disability and life insurance planning | | 14:02–15:30 | Student loan management plans | | 15:30–17:42 | Financial advice for medical students | | 17:52–22:45 | Dr. Dahle on boosting your income and practical strategies |

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Takeaways and Tone

• The episode is encouraging, practical, and action-oriented—audible optimism pervades Dr. Dahle’s guidance and Matthew’s story.
• Emphasis on starting early, educating oneself, and being intentional with both earning and spending.
• Open sharing of details (exact savings rates, moonlighting structure, family communication) makes this episode actionable for listeners at any career stage.

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Transcript

[Matthew]

This is the White Coat Investor Podcast Milestones to Millionaire celebrating stories of success along the journey to financial freedom.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

This is Milestones to Millionaire podcast number 252. Psychiatry resident maxes out personal and spousal Roth IRAs. As a white coat, you have valuable knowledge. Various companies want that knowledge, and they're willing to pay you for it. That's why we put together a list of recommendations for companies that pay you to take surveys. If you're looking for a profitable side gig for not too much effort, getting paid for surveys could be the perfect solution for you. You can make extra money, start a Solo 401, and use your medical knowledge to impact new products. One of the WCI columnists has made an extra $30,000 in just a year doing these surveys. Sign up today. Use a fraction of your downtime to make extra cash and sign [e-mail] mdsurveys do surveys also works. You can do this, of course, and we're here to help you do it. All right, we've got a recommended list for tax strategists that you should be aware of. If you go to whitecoatinvestor.com tax strategist, you can get there or just go under the recommended [e-mail] but for many doctors, particularly employees, your tax situation can be very straightforward. And we highly recommend the benefits of at least once using TurboTax or a similar software program, do your own taxes, and kind of learn the parts of the tax code that are relevant to you. But for those who desire professional help, you got to understand that there's two sides of tax aid. There's tax preparation, the actual filing of the forms, and there's tax strategizing, planning done in advance to lower your tax bill. And it seems everybody wants the latter for the price of the former. And that's not exactly the way it works. But tax strategists, they specialize in this proactive planning. They specialize in making changes in your business structure, your financial life, your retirement accounts, in order to lower your future tax bills, if that's something you're interested in. If you've got a complicated financial situation and a large tax bill, even that higher cost of hiring a tax strategist could add value to your life more than the cost of the fees of hiring them. You can find both these types of people, both tax preparers and tax strategists, on our tax page under the recommended [e-mail] okay, we have got a great Episode today. It's fun to talk to people early in their career about their milestones. It's fun to, you know, celebrate with them because you get to see the end from the beginning. I can see the end for them. They have a hard time imagining it, but when I talk to them about their habits and I understand how financially literate they are as a resident, I know where this pathway leads and it's a pretty good place. So let's talk with Matt and find out where he's at and what he's done so far. Stick around afterward. We've got a special topic to talk to you about.

Our guest on the Milestones to Millionaire podcast today is Matthew. Matthew, welcome to the podcast.

[Matthew]

Happy to be here, Dr. Dali, thanks for having me.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

Tell us where you are in the country, where you are in your career, what you do for a living, et cetera.

[Matthew]

Yeah, so I'm a psychiatry PGY4. I'm currently in the Midwest, so I'm still in training. Haven't left yet.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

Okay, very cool. And what's your family status?

[Matthew]

I am married. I've got two kids, a four year old and a six year old.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

Okay, four year old and six year old. Is your spouse working?

[Matthew]

Nope, just me. So she stays at home.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

Okay, so one earner, four people in the family.

[Matthew]

That's correct.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

This becomes very relevant as we get to your milestone. Tell us what milestone you have accomplished.

[Matthew]

Yeah, so I applied several months ago, but the milestone I wanted to celebrate is I maxed out my Roth IRA and my wife's Roth IRA last year, and I'm on schedule to do the same for this year as well.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

Awesome. Congratulations. That's pretty awesome. You're both under 50, I assume?

[Matthew]

Yes. Yes, we are.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

So that's 7,000 bucks times two for this year. That's $14,000. That is not a small percentage of a resident income. I mean, this represents something like 25% savings rate or something, right?

[Matthew]

Yeah, I mean, I think we'll talk about savings rate in a bit. So it's not just a resident income, but yes, it's a significant portion of my resident income, for sure.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

Yeah. Well, let's get into it. Tell us why this was important to you, how you did it. Tell us about your financial journey.

[Matthew]

Sure. So, you know, my financial journey was interesting in that I've always been a saver. I don't know where I learned that because my parents didn't talk too much about money, but they were definitely folks who tried to live within our means, didn't live lavishly I grew up middle class, but went on nice trips. But my parents didn't do a lot of financial education in regards to finances investing, other than opening a bank account. So I was pretty naive. I think, like, a lot of medical students are getting into medical school. I just knew I'm going to take out loans and paid off somehow. And then fourth year medical school, a friend of mine was really familiar with the White Coat Investor podcast and the. And your books. And so he got me a book and I read it and I was like, I just took a liking to it and I was like, this is fun. I like learning about this. So I think just coming into residency, I set a goal. I'm going to become financially literate and financially responsible. And I just decided to open a Roth IRA and see what I can put towards it and start my financial journey.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

Very cool. So you used to. You opened a Roth IRA as a PGY one?

[Matthew]

I sure did. I didn't put much in it.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

We should have brought you on the podcast to celebrate that. That's a worthy one. Okay, Very cool. And so last year, 2024 is the first year you maxed it out.

[Matthew]

That's the first year I maxed out mine and my spouse's.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

Okay.

[Matthew]

I actually maxed mine out the first time. My first full year of residency.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

Okay, so you've been doing this for a little bit. You're making progress here. How much you got in Roth IRAs now for your family?

[Matthew]

Currently, we've got about $40,000 in Roth and I've got about another 30,000 in.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

A 401 that you contributed to during residency. This isn't from before medical school or anything.

[Matthew]

I had nothing before medical school. My net worth coming out of medical school is negative 220,000.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

Okay.

[Matthew]

All from my loans for medical school.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

Yeah. Now, granted, you're in the Midwest, you're not in the Bay Area, but there's still four people living off this income. Right. So did you boost your income somewhere or what have you done income wise? The last few years?

[Matthew]

I've started moonlighting. I started moonlighting halfway through my second year and that I found an opportunity that was very lucrative for moonlighting, and that has helped me boost my income significantly from second year onwards. So I went through, and I kind of in preparation for this, I went through my income ranges, savings rates, all that. So first year coming out of residency or coming out of medical school, into residency, I made $30,000 on my resident income. Second year I made about 65,000. But last year, my gross income was 152,000.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

Okay, so this is a pretty good moonlighting gig you've got going on.

[Matthew]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

Well, is it doing something in psych? What is it?

[Matthew]

It's psychiatry. So psychiatry. I think if you have any psychiatry listeners, which I'm sure you do, there's a lot of opportunities within psychiatry to moonlight in inpatient psychiatry facilities and otherwise in psychiatry emergency departments, that sort of thing. And so I, I partnered with a local psychiatry company or a healthcare system that has multiple psych units. They needed help rounding on the weekends on their inpatient units. And so that's what I do. Typically I will round one weekend a month, sometimes one to two weekends a month in addition to some overnight stuff.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

Boy, if that makes for more psych unit, inpatient psych units, or more especially peds, inpatient psych units, I am all for it because that is our biggest medical need in my metro area is just inpatient peds psych beds. We got kids sitting in ERs for seven days at a time before we can get them admitted. It's just crazy.

[Matthew]

So, yeah, I think that's the universal problem of just not enough beds. Too many patients.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

Yeah, for sure. Okay, well, I'm glad that's helped you as well. Not only helping the community, but helping you to, you know, boost your finances. So what does this mean with this increased income? What does that mean for your savings rate since you started earning more?

[Matthew]

Yeah, so I think my savings rate stayed about the same. It's actually. Well, it's increased quite a bit. So my savings rate for the first couple of years was about 26% of my income. And then my savings rate last year was about 35% of that income. That's between savings in a high yield savings account and retirement. And then currently, for this fiscal year, my savings rate has been about 45%.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

You are a good saver. You're aware of this, right? You're going to have a problem later in your life. You're going to have a problem where you're going to have figure out how to spend money. Yeah, it's come, it's common to lots of white coat investors, but you know, you don't have it yet, but you do this for another 10 or 20 years, you're going to have this problem. So it's a, it's a good problem to have, though. It's lots of fun trying to solve it.

[Matthew]

Yeah, that's the, that's the problem I hope to have.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

Yeah, for sure. Okay, so tell us about these money conversations. You have with your spouse. Yeah.

[Matthew]

So, I mean, I'll be honest. My spouse, money, money is a, is not something that she likes to talk about or that she is excited to learn about necessarily. She's happy to kind of delegate a lot of that to me. But a lot of our conversations have been about what do we want to do with our money, how do we want to be intentional about where we spend our money? And she was totally on board with, you know, I said, I would like to be intentional about paying ourselves first. Let's, let's put some money away for retirement. Let's put some money in a high yield savings account so we have an emergency fund. I kind of showed her the resident waterfall that you have on the White Coat investor website and said, hey, I kind of want to follow this, use this as a bit of a roadmap for how we allocate our funds. And she was totally on board with that. So we kind of pay ourselves first, make sure that we're saving some and then once we cover all of those things, then whatever we have left over we spend on fun stuff. So even though we've been saving a lot, that doesn't mean that we have been denying ourselves things. So we went on a nice 10 year anniversary vacation earlier this year. We just got back from Disneyland last month. So we've been using extra income to, you know, still enjoy our lives, but certainly reach our goals first. Pay ourselves first before spending on the fund.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

Yeah, clearly some intentionality is easily seen there because you do worry about that. Right. When you see a dog spend or saving 45% of their income, especially, you know, if their spouse isn't quite as interested in stuff, especially if they're in residency. You worry, oh, is the spouse, you know, really wishing they could spend more and feeling deprived and that sort of a thing. So it's good to, to talk about that and be intentional and go, hey, we can do this because we took care of business and the rest we can spend. What do we want to spend it on? And, and address those sorts of things along the way as you go. For sure. Okay, well, most people in residency are not saving as much as you are saving. What are your long term goals that make you want to be such a, such a big saver?

[Matthew]

That's a really good question. I don't know if I've thought that far ahead. I've got some kind of shorter term goals. I think I just want to be, I want to feel financially stable. I want to make sure that I feel I can Send money when I need to, I can travel when I want to, I can donate money to the causes that I want to donate to and not worry about whether I'm going to be able to pay rent the next month or if I'm going to be able to. If I have some unexpected expense, will I be able to afford it. I just like that security to be able to do what I want, when I want. So I don't know If I've thought 10, 20 years down the road. I'm hoping to be financially independent probably hopefully by age 50, 55, something like that.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

You realize it won't take that long if you keep saving 45% of your income, right?

[Matthew]

Well, now you're making me feel very optimistic saying that, because I don't. It still seems very far away, but I'm hopeful.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

Well, the fun thing about this is especially doing these milestones podcasts, right? I get to meet people at all kinds of stages, right? So when I meet somebody at mid career that's been saving 45% of their income, I know what that looks like. Now, you haven't yet experienced that. Maybe you listen to it vicariously through the podcast or whatever. But I know what road you're on. I know where this road ends and it's a pretty awesome place. So you're gonna be pretty happy about that. Okay, so tell me that you have taken care of business in the other important areas of a resident financial life. You're the only earner in the home. Tell us about your disability and life insurance.

[Matthew]

Sure. Disability insurance. I got that first month in residency. So I looked at the website, I found a, you know, independent broker, went through them, decided on a, on a plan, and I took out my disability insurance almost immediately. So that's been a monthly spend since the beginning of residency, which I plan to increase as my income increases. I haven't increased it yet because I also have a, I know it's not a great thing to have a group policy or the group policy, I can't rely on it fully. But the group policy through my residency is actually fairly generous and would cover my full resident salary for a long time. So I didn't feel a need to increase the disability insurance with the moonlighting increase. And then along with the disability insurance, I also got a term life insurance policy that I took out 20 year term. I figured 20 years should be enough for right now. And once I hit my attending salary, I plan on probably getting another maybe 15 year term that will kind of carry me through when I become financially Independent.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

Yeah. Wouldn't surprise me if you hit those numbers before 15 to 20 years. So that wouldn't surprise me at all. Okay, what about a student loan plan?

[Matthew]

So student loan plan, that's a little up in the air right now. My plan was to pay it off myself or pslf. I know based on my income and my amount of loans. So I think I said earlier I have about $220,000 in student loans, all from the federal government, all from medical school. I was thinking about doing PSLF because I wasn't sure what my job is going to be. And right now there's further. For a long time, there's the student loan pause. My loans haven't grown until, you know, just a couple months ago and the interest is now starting to accrue. So it's really going to determine or be determined by my first job if my first job has some kind of loan repayment plan. You know, if they, I know some jobs will give you a sign on bonus and will pay X amount for student loan repayment, then I will just plan to pay off my loans in however many years they give me of loan repayment and I will just add extra payments on top of that to pay it off. I don't plan on keeping these things long term and if that's the case, then I may refinance my loans. I don't have a high interest rate. It's about 5.6%, which I think is low or on the lower end for some of these loans. So I don't really feel a great push to need to refinance to just like 1.5% lower than that. But if I get a job that is PSLF eligible with no loan repayment, I may just hang on to them and go over pslf. But either way, I've been saving. So in case I want to, I might just have a lump sum and just drop a hammer on them. But it's really dependent on that first job. What's it going to look like?

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

Okay, There is an MS.4 out there somewhere listening to this going, this guy's got it all figured out. I want to be like him. When I'm a PGY4. What advice do you have for that person?

[Matthew]

First thing first, educate yourself. I feel like I knew something about saving, but I couldn't. I can't say I knew anything about money finances when I was a PGY4, all I knew was throw some money in a savings account.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

You mean an Ms. Board? You clearly know something about it. Now as a PGY4.

[Matthew]

Oh, I think I know it as PGY4. Let me clarify. But as an MS.4, I feel like I was pretty naive. And what I did is I educated myself. I got myself a copy of the White Coat Investor book and then I started reading the blog, I started listening to the podcast. And honestly, I'm not an expert in any of this stuff, but just doing those things gave me enough confidence to just start doing it myself. I've kind of become the finance guru amongst my resident class. A lot of them will come to me for questions about disability insurance, questions about life insurance, questions about high yield savings accounts, investing, opening a Roth ira. And I love being that guy that everyone's like, oh, man, I can just ask Matt, he can help me out. He knows. And it didn't take a tremendous amount of effort. It was certainly a lot easier to educate myself about financial literacy than it was going through medical school. I can tell some. I can tell an Ms. For that. And then once you educate yourself, I would say just come up with a plan. Decide what your priorities are. So coming into residency, my priorities, I wanted to be a place that I knew would have a good cost of living. So geographic arbitrage was something I really considered when I chose a residency. And then I also ranked programs that would allow me to moonlight. So I knew that I wanted to work hard, I knew I wanted to make a little extra money. And so when I matched to the program I matched at, I was really happy because I knew that the lifestyle would be good. I will get a lot of clinical training in different settings. And then starting in PGY2, I could moonlight and get that extra experience and make some extra money. And my family's really happy here too. So I think making those priorities from the beginning was a great. Was a great step for me. And then allowing for some fun, once you get your ducks in a row, you can, you can spend some of your money, have some, have some fun with it.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

Yeah, absolutely. Good advice. Well, Matt, thank you so much for being willing to come on the podcast and share your success with others so we can use it to inspire them to do the same.

[Matthew]

Thanks for having me.

[Dr. Jim Dahle]

Hope you enjoyed that interview. Clearly, Matt is on an awesome pathway. It's pretty exciting to see people at that stage of their career so financially literate, right? My financial awakening was kind of mid residency or so when I'm like, ah, I'm being ripped off by financial advisor and I keep getting ripped off by everybody. And I started reading books and lear this stuff and becoming the Go to guy in my residency. So it's exciting for me to see somebody else going down that same pathway so early in their career. Now, what I wanted to talk to you about was exactly what Matt has been doing. One of the things he's been doing, he's been doing a lot of good things, which is boosting his income. And there's lots of ways you can boost your income. Of course we're going to talk about some of those ways, but I want to emphasize how useful this is as a financial tactic. I am convinced for the general public out there that most people dramatically overestimate the difficulty of doubling their income. Now, I get it. It's harder for some people than it is for others. But for some reason, when people sit down and start doing financial planning, they assume they can make all these changes in their budget and all these changes in their investments, but never think that they can make changes in their earning. But the truth is, the higher your income, the easier all this other stuff becomes. The easier it is to wipe out debt, the easier it is to save, the easier it is to build, you know, income. The easier it is to invest, the easier it is to do all this stuff. The more you make. It's just way easier. And so we should consider this when we're talking about how to increase your savings rate and how to invest your money, we should also be talking about how to increase your income. It matters. It just makes things a lot easier when you make more money. I don't know how many times in my life, it's a whole bunch of times that I've doubled my income. It doesn't always happen quickly. Sometimes it takes a while. Sometimes your income even goes down. But, you know, actually concentrate on that as part of your financial planning, as part of your written financial plan is worthwhile. So let's talk about some of the ways that our typical audience can increase income. We mentioned one of them with our sponsor of this episode, right? The surveys. You can go take surveys even if you only make 10,000, 20,000, $30,000 a year. Well, how much faster do you become a multimillionaire if you're saving an extra 10 or 20 or $30,000 a year, right. A lot faster. It makes a big difference for most docs, making typical doc income that might boost your, you know, annual savings by 50%. It's huge. But there's also the more simple things, right? In today's corporate world, people change jobs every two or three or four years, right? Especially the people who want to get ahead and why is that? Because you usually get a raise when you change jobs. So changing jobs is one way you can increase your income. Doesn't always work. Obviously there's no guarantee you're going to get a higher income when you change jobs. But be open to it, right? Especially if you like the job better. A lot of times you find a better situation. People you prefer to work with, things you prefer doing, and you get paid more. It's a win, right? So don't feel like you're stuck in the same job for the next 30 years. You're not right. In our employee doctor world, where more and more docs like 3/4 of us now are employees, well, if they treat you like labor, you ought to act like labor. And if somebody's willing to give you a 30% raise, maybe you ought to go work for them. Right. Give your two weeks notice or whatever your contract requires and you go and work for those other guys. Right. Something else you can do is maybe at the same time or different time is just asking for a raise, Right. Sometimes we go years without asking for a raise and we're not getting paid anywhere near what we're worth. It's a good idea to know what you're worth not only when you sign that initial contract, but also periodically throughout your career if your income is not increasing, at least with inflation, there's probably an issue. Right? So those same, you know, contract review companies we referred you to when you first came out of residency, you can go back there and talk to them about your current contract, figure out what other people are making that are doing the same thing you're doing, have them review your current contract, maybe make some suggestions. Right. They only charge a few hundred dollars for that. And it doesn't take much of an increase in your income to have that be a massive value add in your life. You can start a side gig, right? Be some sort of entrepreneur. It's not for everybody, I get that. But what if I'd never started the White Coat Investor? How different would my financial life look now? It would look very different. There'd be a lot of things we've been able to accomplish and do and causes we've been able to support that we never would have been able to do if I hadn't just started typing crap into the Internet one Monday morning when all my friends were at work and my spouse was doing her thing and I didn't have to work until that evening at the hospital. You know, you can start a side gig. You can do something, you know, lots of them fizzle out. And that's fine. That's the nature of small businesses. But sometimes they don't fizzle out. Sometimes they grow into something great. So pay attention to your income. Care about what your income is. Take simple steps to increase your income when you can, and you'd be surprised how much it helps in reaching all of your other financial goals. As a white Coat, you have valuable knowledge, and various companies want that knowledge. They're willing to pay you for it. That's why we put together a list of recommendations for companies that pay you to take surveys. If you're looking for a profitable side gig for not too much effort, getting paid for surveys could be the perfect solution for you. You can make extra money. Start a solo 401. Use your medical knowledge to impact new products. Sign up today and use a fraction of your downtime to make extra cash. Go to whitecoatinvestor.com mdsurveys you can do this. The White Coat Investor can help. All right, this has been another episode of the Milestones to Millionaire podcast. We'd love for you to apply and come on it. You can do [e-mail] Milestones. We'll celebrate any milestone with you. I don't care if it's building a comic book collection. I don't care if it's maxing out a Roth ira. I don't care if it's getting back to broke. Whatever it is, paying off student loans, becoming a millionaire, becoming a multimillionaire, becoming financially independent, giving a million dollars away, Whatever. If it's important to you, we'll celebrate it with you. And we're going to use it to help other White Coat investors to do the same. See you next time on the podcast.

[Matthew]

The hosts of the White Coat Investor are not licensed accountants, attorneys, or financial advisors. This podcast is for your entertainment and information only. It should not be considered professional or personalized financial advice. You should consult the appropriate professional for specific advice relating to your situation.