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This is the White Coat Investor Podcast, Milestones to Millionaire.
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Celebrating stories of success along the journey to financial freedom.
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This is Milestones to Millionaire podcast number 272. This podcast is sponsored by Bob Baiani at Protuity, an independent provider of disability insurance planning solutions to the medical community in every state and a longtime White Coat Investor sponsor. Bob specializes in working with residents and fellows early in their careers to set up a sound financial and insurance strategy. If you need to review your disability insurance coverage or to get this critical insurance in place, contact bob@whitecoatinvestor.com today by emailing infoortuity.com or by calling 973-771-9100. All right, if you're sick of trying to make spreadsheets and calculations that do what you want them to, you should check out Bold in. It's perfect for DIY investors to take control of the variables that impact your wealth, retirement, timing, and long term. Even with the free version of the software, the financial plan it generated was actually far higher than what I've seen come from many people who call themselves financial advisors. When combined with a financial literacy course such as our Fire your financial advisor course, this could be a powerful tool for someone looking to bridge the gap between hardcore DIY financial planning and paying thousands to a financial advisor. Check it out@whitecoatinvestor.com Bolden all right, this is the Milestones to Millionaire podcast. We feature you. We feature you and your successes. We use them to inspire others to do the same. And some of my favorite episodes on these have been those that tell the rest of the story. And this is one of those episodes, so I hope you enjoy it. Our guest today on the Milestones to Millionaire podcast is Cody. Cody, welcome to the podcast.
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Hey, thanks so much, Jim. It's really nice to be here. Been thinking about this for a long time.
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Yeah. What I found out and I feel bad because I'm not that good with names and faces and I'm even worse. Since my fall, Cody's been to my house. Cody was a medical student here locally and actually came to like dinner with a doc many years ago where I dispensed some financial advice and apparently he took it to heart. He learned it and so this is another one of those Rest of the Story podcast. So, Cody, welcome, welcome to the show and introduce yourself a little bit. Tell us what part of the country you're in, what you do for a living, how far you are out of training.
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I'm a neurologist. I graduated my fellowship in clinical neurophysiology in 2024 and have been working in central Montana ever since.
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Central Montana. Not Timbuktu, but not that far from it, right as some people like to think. It's not quite the Great White north, but it's halfway there. How do you like Montana?
B
Oh, I love it. It's so nice and open. There's so much to do around here and it's been great.
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Yeah, don't say that too loudly. We used to say that about Utah. Now everybody's moved here, so tell them it's not a good place to live and they shouldn't come for sure. And then you can keep it to yourself. Okay, we're celebrating a great milestone today and that milestone is basically, you crushed your first year. It's taken us a few months to now get you on the podcast, but we want to, on your first year out of training, tell us all the awesome stuff you did during your first year and how you prioritized those things.
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So leading up to the first year, I knew that there was going to be this big swing in my finances after going from a resident fellow salary to selling our house, getting an attending salary, getting sign on bonuses and things. And between all of those, there was about a million dollars switch swing in my income. So as we were approaching this and I'm thinking about what that means, I'm like, well, if I'm going to have almost a million dollars pass through my hands, I should not have student loans at the end of that. And among other things. So I completely paid off my student loans. I was part of the save program and so it was on hold for forever. So I just started stacking cash in money market mutual fund and got up to the point where I had enough to pay them off in full. And in this last August when the government was like, all right, you know, party's over, it's time to start paying these things again. I got on and made one massive payment and student loans were gone.
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That's my favorite number of student loan payments. That's great.
B
Well, I literally, that was pretty much the only student loan payment I made because it went on pause when I was an intern and I had not had to make payments up to that point because I had just gotten out of medical school. And the first year you don't really need to make payments if you're on the income driven repayment. That was literally the only payment I really made to my student loans was paying them off.
A
It's funny you mention that because I only ever made one Student loan payment too. I borrowed a student loan from my freshman year of college in 1993 and paid it off with one check in 2010. So I totally get that. But tell us about how much did you have in student loans?
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So the max was about $280,000.
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$280,000. How did you come up with $280,000 between residency fellowship and your first years in attending?
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I'll give you kind of the rundown of my financial history and I might kind of shed some light on this. So actually, when I met you back in, it must have been 2017 or so, I knew nothing about personal finance. It was not on my radar at all. I just took my student loans and was working on it. I actually went to dinner at your house because I thought I wanted to be a EM doc at the time. And my advisor was like, there's this emergency med doc doing dinner with doc. He also has like this financial blog. I don't really get it, but you could go talk to him. So I really regret not talking to you more about finance because I had no idea what my co investor was at the time. Fast forward to 2021. We had our daughter and I was looking at our bank accounts and they were decreasing and I'm like, oh man, I need to look. So I actually budgeted out everything, found out we were losing like 700 bucks a month to just not keeping track of our finances. So at that point I'm like, oh yeah, there was that guy I met that one time and he had a book that he gave me a copy of when I was at his house. And so I started thumbing through the white coat investor book and then listening to the podcast.
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Yeah, people don't read it, but they don't throw it away either. That's what I've found. It's true.
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I've still got it. So I started listening to you. I listened to Dave Ramsey, the money Guys, and just started learning a few things. Now I had stumbled into the happy accident of buying an apartment when I was in med school. And you know, the market in Utah has just gone crazy over the last, you know, I guess it's like seven or so years by now. So I was able to buy that for 165,000, sold it for 250,000, rolled that into kind of a fixer upper house in New England where I did my residency and was able to sell that house. So I bought it for like 220, sold it for like 445 or some ridiculous Number because between Covid and fixing it up, we built a lot of equity there. And so then when we sold that, we had about $250,000 in equity. So that was one of the big chunks. The other big chunks came from getting my job and looking for somewhere that was willing to help pay off student loans. So my current job where I'm at, they gave me a sign on bonus of about 60 grand, which is fantastic. But they also did a loan repayment program where they paid off another big chunk of my loans and that's essentially forgiven back to me over the course of my contract. They don't have non compete agreements in Montana and so they make the golden handcuffs pretty thick by doing other stuff like this. So anyway, so between that, between my first year's salary and some moonlighting things, yeah it was about a, it was about a million dollars swing in net worth and I was able to pay it off. I think by the time I had gone through my bonuses and stuff, it was about 120ish thousand that I actually paid on that student loan payment.
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Let's talk about that contract, right? I mean you had to go get this job, you were in New England and you decided Montana's cool, I want to go to Montana. You had to get this job across the country and negotiate a contract and you apparently did it well enough to get a signing bonus that made a huge financial difference in your life. Tell us a little bit about the process you went through getting that job.
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Yeah, well getting a job as an attending is such a huge decision. Way more so than like buying a house or something like that, which you think of as like your largest transactions. But this is like buying a new house every year that you work at the place. So I really went into it wanting to have as much information as possible about like what is this job going to be like, what is it going to pay, what is my day to day going to be like? Am I going to like the place? I'm going to like the area. So I think I over applied to a lot of different places. I applied to jobs in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Washington. And I think I did six in person interviews where I was basically flying from place to place seeing all these places. Then I did an additional four or so tele interviews.
A
Sounds like residency all over again.
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It really was. I was well trained for it and pretty much each of those gave me some sort of contract to either review or a job offer. So I had a very good idea of what people were paying and what it was gonna End up looking like if I took each of these jobs, and there's a huge difference out there. One of the first jobs I interviewed at, if I'd have taken that job, I'd be working about the same amount that I am now, but making about half as much.
A
Wow. I mean, I've always said the range in any given specialty is way broader than most people think. And that's a good example of it happening.
B
Another thing with getting a job, and this is actually advice that was given to me from one of my mentors, shout out to Dr. Jason Richards. He's also a white coat investor fan. He said that one of the hardest things about getting a job is trying to pin down what the job description actually is. What are you actually going to be doing? It sounds like it's easy, but you have to really dig into the details. So I was really grilling all of these people. They have, you know, their main, like, ringer type person who takes you into the room and like, I'm gonna give you all this nice stuff and we're gonna give you this bonus and we're gonna do this. And it's like, okay, well, what am I gonna be doing? Oh, whatever you want. Don't worry, you can do whatever you want. I'm like, well, what does that mean? And, you know, then it turns out it's whatever you want within this very confined box of what we want you to do. So anyway, I found this wonderful job. It actually wasn't the highest paying job I was offered, but it came with everything I wanted. And I'm extremely happy here. I make good money. Like I said, I paid off all my loans and completely debt free, except for our mortgage, which is, you know, our house is about 500,000. We owe, you know, about 240 something. So we have more than 50% equity in a house and we're in a
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really good spot now. 500,000, you know, used to seem like a lot of money for a house. That was more than I paid for the house that you came and ate dinner at, you know, when I bought it back in 2010. But it's not that big of a house anymore in a lot of places. Do you consider yourself to be engaging in geographic arbitrage? Moving from the northeast to Montana where you can get yourself a house for half a million?
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A little bit. It's certainly not like the typical Dr. House. It's not a mansion by any means. It's big, ish and nice. But there's two aspects that. So, yeah, housing is way Cheaper in Montana, that's for sure. Also, this house was also a little bit of a fixer upper and needs a lot of things. That's just not something I was worried about doing. And so, you know, immediately some of the sweat equity we put into it have probably raised it up to be a 6, 6 to $700,000 house. You know, in my experience, there's just been opportunities to try to maximize real estate a little bit.
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Tell us about your house buying decision. You went around, you did all these interviews, you decided this one, you wanted the job. When did you buy the house, How'd you buy it, et cetera.
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Yeah, so we bought the house. Right as we sold our other house, we just rolled the equity straight into it. This would have been in spring of 2024. I had flown out to Montana a couple of times and gotten a feel for the various neighborhoods and, like, where I'd want to live. And I met several real estate agents, found one that I really trusted and seemed to give good advice. And then I actually didn't see our house until well after we had bought it. But back in New England, they were like, oh, this house came on the market, we think it's way underpriced. And so I did just a video walkthrough with my real estate agent and then had my dad, who's a contractor, he actually drove up to Montana from Utah to go inspect it and approve it. And I had done a similar thing when I bought the house in Rhode island as well. So it was like, I guess I bought a few houses without actually seeing them. And it's worked out every time so far.
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Now, a lot of times I tell people, hey, don't buy a house in med school and residency. It's a good time to rent, rent for a while, make sure you like the job and a job likes you. Before buying a house, you went ahead and took that risk each time, and that risk paid off for you. You made money in med school far more than we made owning an apartment in med school under the little condo there close to the University of Utah, we made the difference between selling and buying was only $3,000. And when you add in the transaction cost, we didn't actually make any money on that. You made money on your med school house, you made money in your residency house. What would you tell somebody else considering taking on those same risks? Do you have a different attitude about it than I did where I lost money buying a house in med school or as you made money, do you think you just got lucky do you think it's something that if you have your contractor dad go look at, you got a good chance at coming out? Okay, what advice would you give to somebody else considering owning houses throughout the training pipeline and right away as an attendant?
B
I think there's a few facets to that. Yes, I definitely got lucky with the first house and I would not recommend anybody do what I did as far as buying the first condo while I was in medical school because for one, I didn't have an income. So the financing was very like rinky dink. For the down payment, I actually took out a loan from my parents business. And then for the financing of the actual house, it was a wrap from a real estate agent who it was on like a four year bubble or something and very like looking back, it was completely insane. But I knew nothing at the time. They were just like, oh yeah, you can buy this house. And fortunately it worked out for me. But I will say to the person who's listening to this, who's like thinking like, oh, should I buy a house? If you've not done that before, think of like all of the stuff you own in your current situation. Now imagine timing it by like 10. You know, every house you know you have, every appliance, every screw and nail, every fleck of paint is constantly degrading and has an expiration date. And if you're not ready to deal with that because, you know, you're in residency or in medical school, it's a lot to, you know, own a piece of property. So really, you know, my advice would be don't go in unless you've got a good financing plan, unless you really know what you're getting into. Now I grew up around contractors. I'm kind of the black sheep in my family because I went academic. Everyone else is either a car dealer, owns a car dealership, or is a contractor. So whenever I go home, it's my job to like dig the hole or do like the non skilled contracting work. So anyway, so to me, like looking at like a Rhode island house needed a ton of work and pretty much every room in that house was redone. But to me that was like, okay, well this is doable. But I'm also willing to replace the toilet. I'm willing to go to Home Depot and pick up a fridge and install it and stuff like that. It's a lot of work if you want to do it cheap. So you either have to have a lot of money or the willingness to put up with the house.
A
All right, do you know what your net worth was when you came out of training versus a year later.
B
Yeah. So actually write everything down. So I'll take you through the things. So I got back to broke in November of 2022, hit $100,000 network in 2023. And mind you, a lot of this is house equity at that point. Yeah. So out of training, that would have been somewhere probably between 100 and 200,000. And then as of November 2025, I hit the $500,000 mark.
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So very successful first year to see it go up that rapidly. Okay, so one of the challenging things for every brand new attending is you've got about 12, good use, not enough money to do them all. What were your priorities for your finances in that first year? If you had made out a budget for the whole year, and how much was it going to go toward retirement and how much towards student loans and how much toward other stuff? What were your financial priorities?
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Yeah, so my first goal was to have a robust emergency fund so that no matter what happened with loans, I would have the money to, you know, because we're moving cross country, this new house, something breaks, something does that. We had plenty to cover any emergency that came up. So that was goal number one. Goal number two was to get the student loans out of my life. And, you know, and that happened pretty quickly. I actually probably had enough money to pay those off a bit of time probably before I started as an attending, but it would have meant, like liquidating everything. So that's why as the attending, I was like, okay, I'm just going to stack up enough money that I could cover these without having to dip into my other, you know, brokerage investments. And then the priority after that was to start making a plan for where my money is going to go after I've fulfilled those first two things. So which mutual funds am I going to be invested in? How much of my net worth am I going to invest? And everyone kind of has a different number. Percent. I think your number is 20% for how much you should be investing Money. Guys is 25. Dave Ramsey's 15 year go on the higher end. So I've been saving what it's like 28%. Ish. So that was the next goal, was to start making a framework for all the money to go in. Because for as much as I focused on money these last few years, my goal is to not have to think about it at all and just have it be in the background. It makes me think of like Forrest Gump, where he gets the letter from Lieutenant Dan, he's like, he invested my money in some fruit company and he says we don't have to worry about money anymore. One less thing, and that's kind of what I'm hoping for, is just to have a robust financial plan that I can just put it on autopilot. Not to worry about money. Seeing patients and not having to worry about like my billing so much. Being able to just say, okay, well what do they actually need? And then not worrying about the billing at all until it's actually done. Like that's kind of my goal is money. I don't want it to be an issue.
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You know, one of the challenging things I often tell people, live like a resident, right? Give it a year, give it two, give it three, whatever. How close to your lifestyle? You know, not counting the house, obviously, although you had a house in New England. How close do you think your lifestyle was your first year out of training to your last year of training? How much did you inflate your lifestyle?
B
I mean, definitely a bit. But I mean, when I say a bit, it's like, you know, we buy a name brand peanut butter and stuff like that. We've gone on a lot more vacations, a lot more date nights, a lot more just living life a little bit more. As far as like our month to month expenses, our four walls really haven't changed. You know, if you include all the stuff that we need to, to get through the month, you know, it's the exact same as it was before, but then we have those extra things added on minus the 28% or whatever we're investing.
A
Four Walls, I think is a phrase I hear a lot from, from Dave Ramsey. You're talking about your housing, your utilities, your food and your transportation. So basically you're living like a resident. Add on a couple of vacations and obviously you're saving a lot more for retirement. You're paying a lot more off in debt, but pretty darn close to living like a resident. That allowed you to increase your net worth by hundreds of thousands. You're well into the positive now just from Smart Financial Management. Well done. You should be very proud of yourself. You've crushed it. It's been a great first year as an attending, the most important financial year of your life. And I'm sure there's going to be some awesome stuff in the future. It won't be long before your biggest problem is figuring out how to spend and give all your money away. Congratulations on that. We thank you so much for that. What advice do you have for somebody that wants to do what you did, say they're a second year resident or whatever, and they're like, oh, I'd love to be where he's at in just a few years. What advice do you have for that person?
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It's really not hard. I think it's just paying attention. After I just started looking at finance and I don't know that that much about personal finance, but the few little principles I've learned combined with the kind of money that you can make as an attending physician can really put you way, way ahead of the bell curve as far as we need. So I'd say don't stress about money so much. Just learn a few of the basics and that's all you need to do and then you can focus on whatever the heck else you to want.
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Very good advice. Well, thank you, Cody. Congratulations on your success. I'm sure we'll hear from you again on a milestone in the future. Congratulations. Thank you for being willing to come on and share your success with others to inspire them to do the same.
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Well, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate being on the show and like I said, I've thought about this for a long time of wanting to be on the milestones podcast. So getting to finally actually do it has been pretty incredible. Thanks so much.
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Okay, that was fun. It's always good to hear the rest of the story, right? He was over at my house and 2017 or 2018 or 2019 or something like that. I'm sure I said something about finances that dinner. Even if he was mostly focused on specialty, the way those dinners are set up is people who are interested in emergency medicine come over and we talk about emergency medicine, what life's like and et cetera. Obviously he changed his mind, went into neurology, but apparently I planted a little seed during that dinner about finances and he took it and ran with it. So yeah, it's pretty awesome what you can accomplish when you actually know a thing or two about personal finance and investing. And he's crushed his first year. It's so important to get started on the right foot. Makes a huge difference down the road. I mean, these guys are going to have so many options by mid career for what they want to do with their lives, with their careers, with their practice, et cetera. It's not even funny. It's going to be really great for them and I'm super happy for them. I almost want to schedule a date in 12 years to bring them back on the podcast and tell us, well, what happened at that point, he's probably going to be financially independent and have that house paid off and be working half time. I mean, who knows what he's going to be doing by then. But it's pretty fun to see people as they progress through their careers and through their financial progression through the milestones, if you will. What is an emergency fund? An emergency fund is a pool of money that you can readily access to keep you from having to go into debt in the event that an emergency comes up. Now, the tricky part about an emergency fund is how do you define an emergency, right? What is an emergency really? And we can think of some examples that are pretty good emergencies. For example, let's say your air conditioner goes out, right? And you're living in Houston and it's July. That's an emergency, right? I mean, it's literally life threatening to not have AC living in Houston in July. And so that's something that you might pay for using an emergency fund. Likewise, let's say you get a call that grandma's on her deathbed, right? And you need to buy some plane tickets and you got to get there today. You know, that's not going to be a cheap plane ticket and you're going to need some money to buy it. That kind of money can come from an emergency fund. Now what's not an emergency? Well, let's say you heard about the latest Taylor Swift concert and the tickets are kind of expensive and you don't have the money to buy them unless you raid your emergency fund. Well, that probably doesn't qualify, does it?
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Right.
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So you got to be careful tapping an emergency fund. If you're just using it as your slush fund, it may not be there when you have a real emergency. Now, classically, an emergency fund is composed of an amount of cash equal to something like three to six months worth of your usual household expenses. So if you're spending $5,000 a month, an emergency fund would be something like $15,000 to $30,000 sitting in cash in an account that you can get to very easily. Now, how many months should you have? Well, one month is better than none, and obviously six months is better than four. But in a lot of ways, the way doctors think about this is they think about their long term disability policy. Now, a lot of doctors don't have a short term disability policy and most of their long term disability policies have a 90 day waiting period on them. However, those policies don't start paying until a month later. They're paid in arrears after the month is over, and so it's really four months before you'll start getting payments from your long term disability insurance. So four months is a pretty reasonable period of time for doctors to make sure their emergency funds will last. But keep in mind, when something bad happens, there's often some additional expenses as well, whether they might be medical expenses or other things. So having a little bit more than that is not a bad thing. Now, an emergency fund ought to be a pretty big priority early on in your financial life. Even a resident physician ought to have some sort of an emergency fund. It's obviously going to be smaller because a typical resident is spending less than a typical attending physician. But you know, when you become a resident and you start making money, this should be a pretty big priority, maybe even the number one priority when it comes to what to do with the money that you don't have to spend this month. Of course, there are a lot of other competing priorities when you're just starting out in life. Maybe you have a credit card that's charging 29% interest. Obviously that's also a huge priority. But I'd still encourage you to save up some tiny sort of emergency fund, maybe $1,000, even before you go after debts like that. It's kind of silly to take your $1,000 and put it toward a 29% debt, only to go out and take on another 29% debt. So theoretically, even a tiny emergency fund can help you as you adjust those major, major priorities as your financial life gets started. Now, how long do you have to really put it together? Well, the sooner the better, and the less you spend and the more you make, the sooner you'll have your emergency fund. But I certainly think it's appropriate to try to get this emergency fund in place in less than a year, less than a year after you come out of med school, and probably your new, larger emergency fund within a year of finishing your training. So try to put that together. You don't want to be saving up forever. If it takes you seven years to save up an emergency fund, I'm sorry, you're just not saving enough money. Because when you're done with the emergency fund, you're going to move on to other savings goals, like saving for retirement or college. And, and if it takes you years to save up an emergency fund, you're just not going to be saving enough to reach those other goals. You need to find ways to boost income and decrease spending so you can get this in place. Where do you keep your emergency fund? Well, some people Keep it in multiple places, right? Maybe some of it's in your checking account, maybe some of it's cash you actually keep at home. But the bulk of it is typically kept at some sort of institution that's actually going to pay you some interest on your emergency fund. A really popular place is a high interest savings account or a high yield savings account. And all that is is a bank and there's a number of them out there. Ally is a popular one, for instance, that'll pay you the going rate on money. Whether that's 3% or 4% or 5%, they'll pay you something close to that. You don't want it sitting in a savings account at your credit union paying you 0.1% though. You want it somewhere where it's going to pay you some interest. Obviously the return of your principal is more important than the return on your principal when it comes to an emergency fund. But at least get paid some simple interest while you're doing it. Some people might also keep it in a bank cd. Maybe they have it in a one year cd. And if you really have to rate it, yes, there's a penalty for that. You might lose a few months of interest. So maybe that keeps you from rating it for silly reasons and you earn a little bit more money on it than you would in a high interest savings account. But I think one of the best places to keep your emergency fund is a money market fund available at Vanguard or Fidelity or Schwab or someplace like that. Vanguard's funds usually have the highest yields and that's where I have a brokerage account. And so that's where we keep our emergency fund most of the time. Sitting in cash at a money market fund. And you can raid that pretty easily, right? Within a day or two it's back in your bank account and you can spend it. Yeah, it's good to have a little bit of cash on hand at the house, but usually within a day or two, that's plenty to be able to get to your emergency funds. Especially if this is money you need to live on for one, two, three months, having to wait two days to get to it is not going to cause you any problems. Some people feel bad about the fact that they're only earning cash interest rates on their emergency fund. And the truth is you shouldn't. Right, because it's all about the return of your principal when it comes to your emergency funds. Don't get tempted to start investing this money into bonds or even into stocks. You don't want to be fighting. You need your emergency money right after a 40% drop in the stock market, this terrible bear market, and you need to raid your emergency funds at the same time. You don't want that to happen. Leave it in cash. That'll allow you to invest the rest of your money more aggressively and you'll make up for it in the long run. Just remember that the return of your investment is more important than return on your investment. Hope that's helpful. It's worth keeping an emergency fund for just about everybody. I mean, if you're a retiree and you already have millions sitting in your taxable account, that does function in some ways as an emergency fund. But even retirees typically keep a fair amount of money in cash that they can access readily without having to worry about market fluctuations. And that's what an emergency fund is. This podcast was sponsored by Bob baiani at Protuity. OneListener sent us his review. Bob has been absolutely terrific to work with. He always quickly and clearly communicated with me by both email and or telephone, with responses to my inquiries usually coming 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@whitecodeinvestor.com Protuity. You can also email infoprotuity.com or call 973-771-9100 to get disability insurance in place today. All right, keep your head up, shoulders back. You've got this. We'll see you next time on the Milestones to Millionaire podcast.
B
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.
How to Start Strong as a New Attending Physician
Aired: April 27, 2026
Host: Dr. Jim Dahle
Guest: Dr. Cody (Neurologist, Central Montana)
In this episode, Dr. Jim Dahle sits down with Dr. Cody, a neurologist who recently transitioned from fellowship to attending in central Montana. The focus is on the crucial financial decisions faced by new attending physicians, especially in that pivotal first year out of training. Cody candidly shares his journey from student loan burden to significant net worth growth, highlighting real estate wins, contract negotiation, strategic living habits, and the practical steps he took to establish a strong financial foundation. Listeners are offered practical and motivational guidance for making the most of their first attending year.
On student loans:
“That was literally the only student loan payment I really made...was paying them off.” — Cody [04:40]
On negotiating the first job:
“...getting a job as an attending is such a huge decision. Way more so than buying a house...this is like buying a new house every year that you work at the place.” — Cody [08:38]
On rapid net worth growth:
“I got back to broke in November of 2022, hit $100,000 network in 2023...as of November 2025, I hit the $500,000 mark.” — Cody [16:02]
On lifestyle creep:
“I mean, definitely a bit. But I mean, when I say a bit, it’s like, you know, we buy a name brand peanut butter and stuff like that. We’ve gone on a lot more vacations, a lot more date nights, a lot more just living life a little bit more.” — Cody [19:12]
On his overall approach:
“For as much as I focused on money these last few years, my goal is to not have to think about it at all and just have it be in the background...one less thing.” — Cody [17:39]
Dr. Dahle’s praise:
“You’re well into the positive now just from Smart Financial Management. Well done. You should be very proud of yourself. You’ve crushed it. It’s been a great first year as an attending, the most important financial year of your life.” — Dr. Jim Dahle [19:46]
Parting wisdom:
“Just learn a few of the basics and that’s all you need to do and then you can focus on whatever the heck else you want.” — Cody [21:13]
The conversation is candid, practical, and encouraging, balancing technical financial advice with personal anecdotes. Cody’s journey shows that with mild risk tolerance, attention to opportunity, and basic personal finance know-how, the transition to attending can be a time of monumental progress. Dr. Dahle’s signature encouragement underscores the power of starting strong, making intentional choices, and remembering that “just a few basics” can set any new high-earner doctor on a path to financial freedom.