B (4:00)

Happy to be here.

A (4:01)

Tell us what you do for a living and what part of the country you're in and how far along you are in your career.

B (4:07)

So I am a PGY4 Interventional Radiology resident in the Southwest US and we're

A (4:15)

going to celebrate multiple milestones today. Tell us what you guys have accomplished.

B (4:19)

Yeah, so I really only figured it out when we were doing our end of year financial review. But we paid off my wife's car, maxed out mine and my wife's Roth IRAs, we paid down about $7,000 of her student loans, and I actually also recently opened my own Solo 401k and started funding that.

A (4:41)

Congratulations. Are you doing some moonlighting then?

B (4:44)

Yep. That's kind of how we were able to do a lot of this.

A (4:47)

Yeah. It's amazing when your income goes up, how much easier all this financial stuff is, huh?

B (4:51)

Yeah.

A (4:52)

Okay, tell us, what does your spouse do for a living?

B (4:55)

She's in pharmacy. Works as like a pharmacy tech, writing prescriptions for long term care facilities.

A (5:02)

So a normal job, for lack of a better term.

B (5:05)

Yeah, more or less. Yeah.

A (5:06)

She's not, you know, another interventional radiologist has been out of training for four years or something?

B (5:11)

No, she doesn't want anything to do with that.

A (5:14)

Okay, so. So when did you guys start getting interested in all this financial stuff?

B (5:19)

So I got interested in medical school. It actually first started, I want to say it was like my third or fourth year. It was during COVID I remember, actually, I couldn't find the email, but I remember I had sent you an email a while back, being like, what do I. What should I do? And I was kind of annoyed.

A (5:38)

I bet I can find this email. Let's see.

B (5:40)

I remember it was, it seemed like kind of a snarky response and it was just like, you're going into radiology, you're going to be fine. That was kind of helpful to take some of that stress off. But I tried to dabble in some investing during med school, but it was a difficult time and obviously with not much money, but just trying to listen to podcasts, read blogs, books, but just kind of been doing that over the last few years.

A (6:08)

Yeah, very cool. Yeah. I see this email Exchange, it's from November 14, 2020, a little while back. And it is a little snarky. So that's typical for most of my emails. But very cool. I said something like, if you told me $650,000 in student loans, or you told me you were going into preventive medicine, that's a different scenario. But $250,000 in radiology, no problem. You're going to pay this back within a couple of years of getting out of training. Pretty awesome. And ever since then, you've been doing better and better and better. Okay, so tell us about these conversations you have with your spouse about how you guys manage money.

B (6:44)

So we aren't perfect, but we try to kind of sit down at the end of every month. I kind of nerd out and have a spreadsheet. I have like a tracking app that tracks all of our spending and where we're putting everything. We've kind of set different categories to basically track what we're spending each month, what we're putting away and see kind of like where we're at with our spending. Just to try to not get too ahead of ourselves, we were doing okay with our income. We were both actually previously married, so both of us divorced and we just remarried. And I know she had said from her past relationship there were some not so great financial habits and practices from her past marriage. And so really just trying to kind of start on the right path, moving forward and build those habits during. During this time so that when I do finally become an attending, we can kind of just hit the ground running and get to where we want to be.

A (7:44)

Okay, well, tell us a little bit about your income. You mentioned that you've been doing maybe a little bit of moonlighting now, but give us a sense of what the household income has looked like the last few years.

B (7:54)

Yeah, it's changed. So I went back to try and kind of calculate it. So when I started residency in July 2022, for that year, our combined income was just over 50,000. She'd worked the whole year. I only worked half the year. Then halfway through my PGY2 year, we actually got about a 10% raise. The student union advocated for a raise, so that added about 6,000 to my PGY2 salary. So end of 2023, our combined income was just under 80,000. 2024 was about 110,000. That was when I started moonlighting. And then just this last year, I've kind of ramped up a little bit and the total gross was about 150 after the adjusted gross income from taxes this year was just like 119,000.

A (8:46)

And what does a radiology resident do for moonlighting?

B (8:49)

So a lot of it is contrast coverage, just sitting and babysitting the scanner. But there are some interpretive moonlighting opportunities, basically like reading studies and getting paid for that. Obviously have to do it within reasonable work hours. So a lot of it right now is mostly just like contrast coverage.

A (9:10)

And you may even be allowed to sleep during contrast coverage. Are you.

B (9:14)

You could a lot of it. I'm preparing for boards right now, so it's usually just a paid study block.

A (9:20)

Yeah, well, that's almost as good, right? I mean, that's pretty good. Double use of your time there for sure. Okay. But clearly, you know, you guys have not yet hit the big bucks, right? Everyone's always saying you always have these high earners on the Milestones podcast and maybe someday we'll have you back on when you are a high earner. But Maybe not quite there yet. Give us a sense for where your family is sitting financially. Have you calculated your net worth recently?

B (9:49)

Yeah, I actually tried to. That's why I say I kind of nerd out on it and keep track of it. So I updated it today. We are sitting right at negative $250,000.

A (10:01)

Negative 250. And give us a sense what's that worth? Tell us about the liabilities and the assets.

B (10:05)

Yeah, so 325 of that is in loans. My student loans are at about 312,000 now. I've got about 4,500 left on my car. Like I said, we paid off my wife's car about a year ago now. And then my wife still has about 7,500 left on her loans. And then as far as assets, we have about just over $65,000 invested and then about $9,500 in cash. So about $75,000 in assets.

A (10:36)

Yeah, you guys are doing great. You should be very proud of yourselves. Okay. You may not know yet, you may not be close enough to your attending job, but how do you expect you're going to manage those student loans?

B (10:47)

I plan on just trying to pay it down as quickly as possible. My wife does not like the idea of having debt, even if there is, you know, a plan, you know, long term, or whether or not I can out earn in the market, you know, by, you know, investing the difference. But the goal is for sure to pay them down in less than five years, possibly within three years outside of training.

A (11:10)

But you don't anticipate a public service loan forgiveness qualifying job?

B (11:14)

No, the goal is to go, you know, private practice. My wife and I have talked about this and we're on the same page where we currently rent our house. We're just going to keep renting essentially until the loans are all gone. And then, you know, once we're out of debt there, then we'll look at possibly building or buying a house or whatever.

A (11:32)

What are you guys investing in now?

B (11:34)

Right now it's mostly just index Funds, S&P 500 and some growth index stuff and then some random tech stocks here and there from when I dabbled in med school that aren't really doing a whole lot, but just kind of holding onto it.

A (11:50)

Well, if you've had them since med school, they've probably done something.

B (11:53)

Well, I made some not smart decisions to some of them.

A (11:59)

Got to learn that lesson either ourselves or vicariously. For sure.

B (12:03)

Yeah, it wasn't large sums of money, so it's not like it's hurting me right now.

A (12:09)

That's how I feel is I made all my mistakes early on with small amounts of money. That's the time to make them for sure. Well, very cool. You guys are doing awesome. You should be very proud of your financial literacy and your financial discipline and all the debt paying off you're doing and starting to invest and all that. What advice do you have for somebody out there that's maybe a couple of years behind you, or maybe they're in training too and they're like, oh, I got to get on top of this stuff. I'm not doing any of this stuff he's doing. What advice do you have for them?

B (12:35)

I think the biggest thing that has helped me, obviously, has been being able to moonlight. And I know outside of radiology there's moonlighting opportunities. I had a buddy who's an attending now, but he did physical medicine rehab. He moonlighted a lot. I know there's emergency med docs that have moonlighting opportunities during residency. I think finding a way to do that and supplement that income has really helped take a lot of the burden off. And then a lot of what I was just taught growing up, just living within your means and not spending more than you make. There's a lot of colleagues that I know that have ridiculous car payments or are paying significantly more for their rent than we are. And we have a family, and a lot of these friends and colleagues are single or don't even have kids. There's a lot of decisions that you can make as far as where you live, what you're paying for your month to month expenses. But on the flip side, I think we try not to limit ourselves too much. We know that once I'm an attending, we're going to have the income. And so we do still try to have fun during residency. We just came back from Disney World last week where we probably spent more than we should have, but we're still within our goals for what we're trying to do. And so especially during residency, it's hard and I think it's important to still have fun. But whatever we can do to develop those habits early, I think will pay off long term.

A (14:01)

Yeah, for sure. Moderation in all things, right? Well, Dylan, congratulations on your success. You guys have done awesome. Should be very proud of what you've done and what you're headed toward. And we're excited to maybe hit you back for another milestone in a few years and see you again on the podcast. Hopefully I'll be less snarky by then. I'm getting a little better as the years go on. For sure. It's really fun to go back and look at an old email and then put a, you know, a face to the name. So I appreciate you pointing that out.

B (14:29)

Yeah, no problem. Happy to be here. Appreciate the opportunity.

A (14:34)

All right. I hope you enjoyed that interview. I love closing the loop with people. You know, when they come back after 10 years, after I sent them an email or after they came to the conference or, you know, after they took one of our online courses or listened to me speak somewhere and just tell us how it's changed their life. It's really fun to hear. And this story's fun because everyone's always like, oh, we don't want to hear from the people that make a gazillion dollars a year. We want to hear from the people that are more like us. There's somebody still in training, right. Spouse isn't making tons of money, and they're accomplishing what most who listen to this podcast would consider pretty modest goals, right? Maxing out Roth IRAs, paying off a car loan, that sort of thing. Throwing a few thousand dollars to student loans, getting a moonlighting gig. These are not, you know, DECA millionaires by any means. But the truth is, milestone by milestone, we all make our progress toward our financial goals throughout our lives. And even those who accomplish relatively small milestones can inspire those working on the big ones. So we're appreciative to them for coming on. And of course, if you want to come on this podcast, you can sign up@whitecoatinvestor.com Milestones I mentioned at the beginning. We're going to talk for a few minutes about crypto. So let's do that. We're going to talk about crypto, cryptocurrency, crypto assets. This is a huge category of assets out there, but when most people think about it, most people are thinking about the leader in this category, bitcoin. So most of the comments I'm going to make today refer to bitcoin, but most of them also apply to other crypto assets. Obviously, there's differences between the thousands of crypto assets available out there and bitcoin. And if you really get into this space, you can learn an infinite amount of material about all of these. But I want you to understand the basics of investing in these sorts of assets. Let's start with the pros. Okay? The first pro of investing in Bitcoin or Ethereum or any of these crypto assets is you might just get fabulously wealthy. Okay? It's entirely possible. Right. If I had bought a few bitcoin when I first learned about it in 2011 and waited until, you know, the beginning of 2025 to sell it, I would have made a great deal of money. Now, I would have had to hold it through some seriously volatile times, but I would have made a lot of money if I could do that. So I've run into a few people out there that really got into this stuff a few years ago, put a lot of money into it, sometimes swapped around and traded a little bit and ended up being fabulously wealthy. One guy I think was in his 20s, was worth $50 million. So that's one of the exciting things about this. And let's be honest, the reason why most people get into it, right? They watch these exploding charts of it going through the roof, and they say, I got to get me some of that. And that's why they get interested in that investment. Is it possible? Yeah, it's impossible. It's possible for this to happen to you. I think most people that invest in it don't get fabulously wealthy on it for various reasons, but it is possible. Another pro about it is that you're going to learn more about it. When you invest in something, you pay more attention to it. So if you really want to learn about this stuff, I'd encourage you to put a little bit of money into 10 or 15 different crypto assets or cryptocurrencies. You're going to learn. You're going to learn a whole bunch of money about it. You don't have to put a ton of money into it, but just a little bit, and you'll pay a little more attention to it and you'll see how it really works. Certainly, if you're thinking about getting serious, putting something like 5% of your portfolio into it, it doesn't hurt to mess around with little tiny amounts for a while to learn more about it. Better to make all your mistakes with a tiny amount of money, I assure you. Okay. Another pro of bitcoin is that you can smuggle money. Now, that sounds criminal, right? To smuggle money. But you know what? Imagine you were in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and you want it out, and you want it out with a substantial portion of your wealth. So you're sowing jewels and gold into your clothing and trying to get out of the country. Well, you know what works a heck of a lot better than that? Bitcoin. Bitcoin works a heck of a lot better than that. It's way good for smuggling money. This might be why some criminals like to use it, but it works very well. In fact, that might be the best use case for bitcoin is to flee a terrible political situation with some or most of your wealth. And so I think that's a really cool, really cool use case for it. And even if it's some tiny percentage of your wealth, like I don't recommend, even those who are serious about this put more than a single digit percentage of their portfolio into it. But even starting over with 5 or 10% of your money is huge compared to starting with nothing. Okay. Another great pro of crypto assets is capital gains tax treatment. Right. You know, people wanted to say it was a currency, right? That everyone was going to be buying pizza and gas with it within a couple of years. That didn't really pan out. Nobody's buying pizza and gas with bitcoin these days. Yes, there's probably a pizza place somewhere that'll sell you a pizza for some tiny percentage of bitcoin, but nobody's really doing that. Part of the issue is the US Government decided, okay, this is an investment, we're going to give a capital gains tax treatment. Okay, well, that's cool because not all speculative assets like bitcoin get capital gains tax treatment, right? Precious metals get collectibles tax treatment. That's a higher rate than capital gains tax treatment. So that's a really cool aspect of crypto assets. Another cool tax aspect of them is that there's no such thing as a wash sale with bitcoin. Your bitcoin goes down 70% in some terrible crypto winter. You can sell it, buy Bitcoin back 10 seconds later and claim that loss on your taxes. Now, like any other capital loss, you can only use $3,000 a year of it against your ordinary income. But you can use an unlimited amount of it against capital gains and carry an unlimited amount of it forward over the years. So that's better than stocks, right? Stocks, you gotta wait 30 days, one month, right. To avoid having a wash sale on a tax loss harvesting transaction. So that aspect of crypto is a little bit better than mutual funds or stocks, et cetera. Another cool thing about it is that it has low correlation with other asset classes. Yes, it tends to be viewed as a risky asset. So when risky assets go down, stocks and real estate, et cetera, it tends to go down a little bit more. But in reality, it doesn't have much correlation with anything else. You invest in stocks, bonds, precious metals, real estate, whatever. Right. It has pretty low correlation with all that stuff. And that's a good thing in a portfolio when your asset classes have low correlation with each other. Another really cool thing about crypto bitcoin in particular, is blockchain security. It's a really cool invention, right? There's lots of ways it could be used. People are still trying to sort out all the ways that it can be used. But decentralized records of ownership, it's never really been hacked in that way. Exchanges have been hacked and bitcoin's been stolen that way. But as far as the blockchain breaking down, it's never really happened. So that feature is really pretty cool, and it's an exciting invention. Another pro of crypto and crypto assets is you can trade them 24 hours. You don't have to wait till the markets are open, basically four times as often as you can trade a typical security. You can trade crypto assets naturally. There's lots of cons. The first one that comes up on my list is that it's a speculative asset. What do I mean by that? Well, I mean it doesn't produce anything, right, in that respect. It's like gold or other precious metals. It's like forex investing in other currencies. It's like empty land that you can't rent out for whatever reason. You're basically relying on somebody else to pay you more for it down the road. It's not going to produce any interest, any profits, any earnings, you know, no rents, nothing like that. It's just is value, right? You're speculating on future value when you invest in this. And, and that's not a place lots of us like to put lots of our money. The second one is that it's just super volatile, right? The downturns are huge and they seem to come every couple of years now. Nobody minds volatility so much when it's going to the moon and skyrocketing. But this sort of an investment requires you to be very tolerant of volatility. And most investors are not. They panic, sell when things go down sharply. And if that's you, this is not an investment for you. I'm not sure I can tolerate the volatility of bitcoin. And I've been investing for two decades relatively successfully, but I don't know that I can tolerate that volatility. You've really got to have what those in this world like to, to describe as diamond hands in order to hold onto it through the frequent downturns in its price. Okay? The third downside is it Has a fairly long, steep learning curve. I mean, I suspect I know more about Bitcoin than most of the people that own bitcoin. But it's relatively complicated by comparison. It makes a typical stock or bond mutual fund just look downright simple, right? Don't invest in stuff you don't understand. And I suspect only a tiny fraction of crypto asset investors really have more than a superficial understanding of their investment. So if you really want to invest in this, I would recommend you spend some time learning about it. I think that'll help you stay the course. The serious volatility it's got. But people who are in it say you got to read for a thousand hours before you really understand it. I don't know, maybe I've read a thousand hours about bitcoin over the years. But if you don't want to spend a thousand hours reading about this stuff, then maybe this isn't the asset class for you. Another issue with it is counterparty risk. So where are you going to put your Bitcoin? All these crypto brokerages, for lack of a better term, don't have the greatest reputation. A number of them have been hacked. Many of them gone out of business, gone bankrupt. Turned out their founder was a fraudster, whatever. That's a pretty serious risk. Now, if you take it off the exchange and put it into what's called cold storage, that brings its own risk. It's easy to lose the keys and that sort of a thing, but you can't eliminate that counterparty risk. Otherwise you're going to be dealing with this counterparty risk. And you buy a mutual fund at a brokerage, it at least gets some securities. Investor protection Corporation, SIPC protection. It's only up to half a million dollars, but at least there's some fraud protection there that doesn't really exist at Coinbase or other crypto exchanges. Another big downside is there's a lot of manias and scams, right? People just go crazy, it's going up, I gotta get some. Well, that's not generally a great time to be buying investments. And of course, anytime you have some sort of an alternative, it attracts the scammers, it attracts the fraudster. And so there's quite a bit of that. Crypto investing really is the wild, wild west still, and you got to be careful about that. Another downside is regulatory issues. Some issues have been worked through in the last decade. There's still plenty that haven't, and they're still trying to sort out how it's going to be regulated. How it's going to interact with our government and other governments. And sometimes there's surprises in how things get decided as the rules change over the years that can have serious effects on the value of your investing. Okay. Another downside is it's relatively unproven. Right? This stuff hasn't been around that long. Bitcoin was invented in like 2009. Lots of people didn't even hear about it until 2015 or even 2020. This is not the same as stocks that have been around since the 1600s. Right. We've got very good stock market data that goes back a century or two centuries even. You just don't have that sort of investment history with crypto assets. It's all relatively short time period feels like could be easy come, easy go. We'll look back on it 50 years from now and a lot of these projects are just going to be gone. They'll have gone to zero. We don't know which ones will still be around. The real winners may still not have been invented yet. We just don't know. It's unproven. So that's a downside of these investments. One of the issues with cryptocurrencies in particular is most of them do not scale well. Everybody can't use them all at once. Slow transactions cost money, they subtract value. It's a serious limiting factor in the everyday use of crypto assets of any kind. Hopefully this can be solved with further technology and computing speed, but at present it's just not there yet. It works at scale for a speculative asset. It doesn't work at scale for any sort of a real currency. Another issue is there are some security risks, right? I mentioned losing keys, I mentioned exchanges can be hacked, et cetera. So you gotta be careful with those as well. Now, the real question everybody has is what's going to happen with crypto? Is it going to go up, Is it going to go down? What's it going to be worth in 10 years or 50 years? The truth is, I have no idea. I have no idea. If I was forced to guess, I would expect that it continues to be around in some form. I think cryptocurrencies are gonna become more useful as time goes on. I don't know which one's gonna be the best one, 10 years or 20 or 30 years. You know, the bitcoin fanatics believe there's no way anybody's ever gonna catch up to bitcoin. I'm not so convinced. But have I seen its replacement? I certainly have not. So I have no idea. If you want to speculate on its price, I'd recommend you limit it to no more than 5, maybe at the most 10% of your portfolio. That way, even if it goes to zero, you still got 90 or 95% of what you saved and invested for retirement, and it's not going to cause you to be eating alcohol in retirement. On the other hand, if you believe in this stuff, you think it really is going to be worth a million dollars ten years from now. You think that's a very good chance that's going to happen. I would recommend that you don't just put like $500 or $5,000 into it. Put 5% of your portfolio into it, right? Make it enough that it's actually going to make a difference in your financial life. Not so much that it's going to tank if you're wrong, but enough that it's going to make a difference. And I think that's probably something like 5% when it comes to a portfolio. Hope that's helpful to you and helps you to understand crypto this podcast was sponsored by Bob Bayani at Protuity. One listener sent us this review. Bob has been absolutely terrific to work with. He's always quickly and clearly communicated with me by both email and or telephone. The responses to my inquiries usually come in the same day. I have somewhat of a unique situation and Bob has been able to help explain the implications and underwriting process in a clear and professional manner. Contact Bob today by emailing infoorotuity.com, calling 973-771-9100 or going to whitecoatinvestor.com Protuity get your disability insurance today and if you're not sure if you have the right stuff, it's a great opportunity as well to have it reviewed and be 100% sure. Keep your head up, shoulders back. You've got this. We'll see you next time on the Milestones to Millionaire podcast. The White Coat Investor Podcast is for your entertainment and information only and should not be considered financial, legal, tax or investment advice. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. You should consult the appropriate professional for specific advice relating to your situation.