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This is the White Coat Investor Podcast
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Milestones to Millionaire Celebrating stories of success along the journey to financial freedom. All right, welcome back to the Milestones Podcast where we celebrate what you're doing and what you've accomplished and use it to inspire other people to do the same or to reach their goals. Step away from day to day public market volatility and consider diversifying with private real estate through MLG Capital's professionally managed investment funds. With more than 38 years of experience across multiple market cycles, MLG Capital applies a disciplined long term approach focused on capital preservation, income generation and tax efficient outcomes. Its Current Offering Fund 7 features an 8% cumulative preferred return, return of capital and a shared profit split. Eligible White Coat Investor participants may receive an enhanced 7723 split once group investments reach 5 million. Learn more at MLGCapital.com WhiteCoatinVestor today this content for informational purposes only is not an offer to sell or solicitation to buy any security. Investments in private offerings are speculative, illiquid and involve risk, including the potential loss of capital. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Please consult your financial, tax or legal advisors before making any investment decisions. This podcast is going to drop on June 29th and today and tomorrow. If you book a consult with studentloanadvice.com, we're going to throw in our continuing financial education 25 course that comes with CME. I don't know, it's like 15 or 16 credits, something like that of CME and it comes with over 30 hours of awesome content both about busting burnout as well as about maximizing your finances. And all you have to do is schedule the meeting. You don't have to accomplish the meeting today and tomorrow. All you have to do is schedule the meeting during June and you will get that thrown in as well. I mean the real benefit of scheduling the meeting is get help with your student loans. You can save yourself hours of research and stress. You can get answers to all of your student loan questions and you can have a professional guide you through the best options to manage your loans. Our experienced team has consulted with more than 3,200 borrowers on over 1.5 billion in student loan debt. Right? They know what they're doing. They are the experts at managing physician and similar high income professional student loans. And you can save hundreds of thousands, sometimes six figures by managing your student loans correctly. So go to studentloanadvice.com or you can, or you can go to whitecoatinvestor.com studentloanadvice. Either one is going to get you there. Book a consult by June 30th. We'll throw in a free course for you to get that consult. All right, we've got a great interview today. New topic we've never covered before on the podcast. I think you're really going to enjoy it. Some of you may say, oh, I wish I had that milestone. And many of us do wish we had that milestone. But if you do, it also comes with a downside. Let's get our guest on the line. Our guest today on the Milestones podcast is Christine. Christine, welcome to the podcast.
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Thanks for having me. It's a real honor. Thank you for what you do.
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Before we get into your milestone, let's just introduce you a little bit to the audience. Tell us what you do for a living, how far you are out of training, what part of the country you're in.
A
Sure. I'm currently in hematology, oncology. I'm on the east coast and I finished training in 2022, so about four years ago.
B
And I think we're doing a milestone here that we've never done on the podcast. I mean, this is episode 280 something. We've never done this milestone. So this is always exciting to us to do something new. Basically, the milestone you wanted to celebrate is that you got a windfall and didn't blow it, which is pretty awesome, what you've done with it. So let's get into the details. Let's talk about this windfall as well as the downside. The windfall came from an inheritance and what you've done with it to kind of set yourself up financially.
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Yeah, sure. So in 2021, my mother died of breast cancer, and it was unexpected for her. So before she died, my sister and I, she was not married, had access to her accounts and had no idea how much she had, but she had saved quite a bit throughout the years. It was like the millionaire next door situation. She had, including her house, about 3.2 million. So my sister and I split that.
B
Wow. So you're in training and, you know, you're not quite made an instantaneous multimillionaire, but pretty close. What? I mean, first of all, obviously sorry for your terrible loss. To lose your mother at such a young age is a terrible tragedy, as you know from your work, when you're dealing with this all the time. But, wow, what a gift. Let's step back for a minute. You said you were totally surprised by her level of wealth. Tell us a little Bit about how she managed money during her life and how she ended up being able to be a multimillionaire at, you know, a relatively young age. If she's your mother and you're, you know, still in training, presumably she's what, in her 50s, ish when she dies? Something like that.
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She was in her low 60s.
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Low 60s. Okay. Tell us a little bit about how she managed money.
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Yeah, and she's a. She's a good example of someone that I learned a lot about money from. She was very frugal throughout her life. She had also saved money and kept money for a long time. She had inherited some stuff from her grandparents long time ago. Never touched it throughout her life. She was working most of the time. She was active duty military until she wasn't. But she got her 20 years through reserves and whatnot to be able to qualify, and she just socked money away. She'd also do side gigs on the side. After one point, she and my dad split up and she worked on the side to be able to do things like go on vacations. But I don't feel like she scrimped on herself either. She was happy to splurge when it came to. She loved to be outdoors, she loved to exercise and good food.
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Yeah. Hard worker, a good saver. And despite a divorce, became a multimillionaire herself. Okay, so what was your net worth prior to this inheritance? In fellowship, I assume, like most, it was negative to 0. Ish.
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So I went back, and before she died, I actually had a net worth of over $100,000.
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Oh, okay. So how did you pay for medical school?
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I had a couple of things. I've been a frugal person, and that helped my dad because he was active duty and in the military. He used part of his GI Bill, not for his education, but for me, and that helped me with colle and I also with medical school. My parents had also set aside an UGMA for my sister and I, so I used that with college and medical school. My dad and my sister did give me some money, so I owed that. So anything I owed after I graduated medical school was to them, it was not to, like a loan.
B
Interesting. But they. They chose to. Rather than give you the money, they loaned you the money.
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Yeah, they loaned me the money for zero percent interest, so.
B
And so how much was that that you ended up owing family for medical school?
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$94,000.
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$94,000. And when you say you had a net worth of 100 at this point in your fellowship, that includes that $94,000?
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Yes.
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Okay, very well. So you were building some wealth yourself during training. That's not an insignificant amount of wealth as a trainee to already have. You were frugal and interested in this stuff and saving and investing, it sounds like.
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Yes, I was. I had spreadsheets from when I was medical school. I don't have those, but from residency and fellowship, I was looking back to the goals I had at the time, savings wise, as well as how much I'd spent on myself. And I was pretty pleased with myself back then.
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So this money you inherited landed in prepared hands. You were ready to do something good with this money when it came?
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Yes, it did. And I had also had made a written financial plan. I think it was in 2018 or 2019, thanks to the stuff I had read on the White Coat Investor, as well as Dr. Leif Dahleen's old. His blog site, the Physician on Fire. So it was helpful to, like you said, the money landed in hands. I was just like, okay, that's great, I know what to do with it.
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Very cool. So tell us what you did with it. I mean, you get whatever 1.6 million dumped on you as a fellow. Presumably some of that had to go to taxes. I suspect some of it was in tax deferred accounts. But tell us what you did with it.
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Well, my sister and I got some of that from selling the house. And with this house, we got a step up in basis, so there wasn't a whole lot of taxes, really. I beefed up my emergency fund. I did buy in early 2022 a used car with cash. And that was one of the sweetest things I've ever done, is just you
B
inherit 1.6 million as a fellow and you still bought a used car.
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Yes, I still buy a used car.
B
What was the car?
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It was a Toyota Prius. I had wanted it for years.
B
Awesome. Okay. All right, keep going. Tell us what you did with the rest of it.
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So I got that. I did loosen the purse strings a bit. Mostly it was because my sister, at one point, when I told her how little I would spend, she just looked at me and was like, what do you do on the weekends? And I was like, oh, okay. I guess I should be doing a little more enjoying myself.
B
You didn't tell her? I go to the hospital and see patients study.
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I just do like, I didn't really do too much. So that was a time of, yeah, I now have some money. I can, like, live a little.
B
You did increase your spending a little bit.
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A little bit. Yeah, the used car made up for a lot of that increased spending that year. But, yeah, I increased it. What I felt like was like, ooh, I'm living large. So I did that. My sister and I gave money to a woman who had been my mom's healthcare power of attorney. And she really did some good work because we weren't living in the state, so we wanted to be kind to her. I paid off my sister for her loans. I put big chunk towards my dad's loans, and then the rest, I invested it. Some of it was cash that I put in my emergency fund. Some of it went to a taxable brokerage account, but the other funds are now in an inherited Roth IRA and an inherited traditional that I've just let grow.
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You're stretching that as long as you can.
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I have 10 years because of the rules, and I will. I won't touch the Roth ira. But the traditional. I debate on whether I want to pull out at the end or do half at year nine and half at year ten, because there's a.
B
It's complicated, isn't it?
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It is. And there's a decent amount and I'm going to owe some taxes, but that's a good thing. That's a good problem to have.
B
Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so. And I mean, clearly you're financially literate. You're a saver, and I suspect you're probably saving some of your earnings now as well. Give us a sense. You're four years out now of training, you inherited a bunch of money, and now you're working and earning and saving. And of course, your money is growing. Markets have been pretty nice to us. Maybe not 2022, but since then, markets have been pretty nice to us. Give us a sense of what your net worth is now.
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3.9 million. $3.9 million.
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Four years out of training. I mean, you can do whatever you want with your life, right? You can practice full time, you can practice part time, you can practice not at all. You can change careers, you can do whatever you want. Welcome to my existential crisis. Fortunately, I didn't become financially independent until, I don't know, 12 or 13 years out of training. Not one year or four years or whatever out of training. And so that existential crisis didn't start so early for me as it has for you. How has this changed how you live your life?
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Yeah, that's a great question. So I reached that financial independence number, which was, I think, 3 million back in 2025. And it was around then I was feeling some burnout I would say from I was working full time, but I just felt like there were some things I wanted to do differently. I didn't really want to do call anymore because that was wearing on my sleep. So I made the effort to change things, to become what I am now, which is per diem. My last full day was at the end of May of this year. And so I decided to take a couple weeks off just because that was an option. And I'll go back to working two days a week, but I won't do call starting at the end of June.
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So you're going to work part time, essentially, you worked full time for four years?
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Yes, four years. I know that was a year under what you said for trying to build up your experience, but I was like,
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you read the blog carefully. I do worry about people going part time right out of training. I think solidifying clinical skills is important. And you got four years of doing that and now going to part time work. It's interesting. When I survey docs, you know, I ask them if I wrote you a check for more money than you're ever going to spend. 10 million, 20 million, whatever. What do you do tomorrow? And a third of them tell me they're not going to work tomorrow, they're done. But most of them, about 55% say I would work part time in some way. And you and I fall in that category when we have enough money to do whatever we want to do. We do still practice medicine part time and I like part time work so much. I have two part time jobs, so I think part time's great. But tell us why you decided you wanted to be part time at this point in your career.
A
Yeah, another good question. I still like medicine, especially what I do. And towards the end I felt like I was, it was like I was honing. I had honed my craft or still in that phase of I feel like I'm becoming an expert as much as you can be. There's so much amiss and you'll never know. But I just found myself going, I'd like to do this, but I'd like to also do it on the terms that I want to like practicing less. Like instead of four days a week, two to three days a week and then and not doing call just because that was something that didn't, didn't appeal to me to get woken up even if it was infrequent. I just didn't like having that hanging over my head.
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Yeah, I agree. I chose a specialty that's never on call, emergency Medicine.
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Yeah. So you can work some late hours.
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Yeah. As bad as it is. And it's not always fun to wake other people up in the middle of the night, but it beats being woken up, I'll give you that. Okay, so tell us a little bit about. I mean, you're still young, right? You're four years out of training. You got a long time to make this money last. Give us a sense of how you've chosen to invest it.
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Yeah. So I, in my written investors plan, it had things like my asset allocation, and that's changed throughout the years. I had higher stocks than bonds in the past, but I've changed that. So right now I have about 65% stocks and there's various allocations of what's us, what's international. I have 10% real estate and rents through Vanguard just because I've thought about crowdfunding, but I don't know, I feel like I'm kind of low maintenance in terms of real estate, so I like that. And then 25% bonds, and then I have a cash reserve just for sequence of return risk. I just felt like that would be a nice thing to have.
B
Do you feel like you'd be taking more risk if you hadn't gotten this inheritance?
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Yeah, probably true. I'd probably. Yeah, I agree.
B
Okay. What advice do you have, having been through this experience of having received an inheritance? Do you have for people leaving inheritances? What did your mom do, right? What do you wish she'd done differently, et cetera?
A
Well, I'll say I'll give her kudos to just all the stuff she did to make it easy. I was the executor. And so number one, she had a will. And right at the end, she was able to get a transfer upon death deed for the house, which was amazing in terms of bypassing probate. So that was great. I mean, she just did all the things. And as a result, she inspired some people who knew her to try to get their affairs in order. So that's important for someone who's going to leave an inheritance. Some things, these were minor things she had. I feel like she had one 403 that she didn't roll over. And it took some digging on my part to try to track that down. When growing up in a military family, you move around and she'd be a teacher here, then three years later, teacher there. So she had this plan from over a decade. Like she hasn't worked there in a decade. But I had to find. And then. But we ended up finding it. So I guess that's something to keep in mind for people is like where are, where are your monies located? And if you can consolidate that, that's great guess advice I'd give for someone who's in my position is there's a lot that can go on when you, if you receive an inheritance like that, not only from the emotional side, but having your financial ducks in a row can really help if you find yourself in this position so that you're not feeling like you're going to blow your money if you don't have a plan for it. I remember Josh Katzowitz's article in April 19th of this year where he referenced a Buzzfeed article where people got an inheritance and when within a couple of years it was gone. And that just made me feel sad because that is just not a thought that crossed my mind when I got this because I had that plan in place.
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I've often said you really only have to get rich once. You only have to get lucky once. You only have to have one business idea take off. You only have to get one inheritance if you know what to do with it if it hits prepared hands. And a lot of us will have some fortunate thing happen to us during our lives. That fortunate thing might be we were able to become a doc and have a good income, whatever it might be. But as long as you know how to manage money, you don't have to have multiple experiences like this. And I think you've demonstrated that very well. All right, any last advice you have for someone that might inherit money and how to decide how much to save for the future versus how much to spend now.
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I guess I'd say one thing is don't count your chickens before you hatch. I think it's a good idea to almost pretend as if you don't have this, because you never know what can happen. Certainly in my experience, my sister and I had no idea that this was the case. But I feel like it's almost like if you know something's going to happen, maybe you're not going to prepare as well ahead of time and lots of things can happen. So keep going on that good savings pathway, that financial pathway you're at. And if something happens like this, it's a bonus and you can roll it into whatever you want and then maybe you can do something different or cut back on what you're doing, like work.
B
Awesome. Well, Christine, I'm sorry for the reason of your inheritance, but I want to congratulate you on what you've done with it. You should be very proud of what you've done. And you basically have financial freedom from nearly the beginning of your career, which is a pretty awesome gift. And I wish you a wonderful life taking advantage of it.
A
Thank you very much. I appreciate it. I feel like my mom would be proud too, but she'd also want me to spend a little bit too.
B
Okay, that was a fun interview. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about, reading about, talking about this topic lately because we expect our kids to inherit a significant amount of money and we want them prepared for it. And this was really good to see somebody who was prepared to inherit money. Right. This windfall hit prepared hands and she did awesome with it. Right. And now she's got the financial freedom we're all seeking. Money has ceased to be a factor in her life and how she lives her life. And while that usually provokes some sort of an existential crisis in most of us, it's a pretty awesome gift to give somebody and something we should be grateful for and feel a little bit of responsibility not only to make sure we enjoy a life well lived, but maybe pay a little bit of it forward to other people. So great opportunity, I think, to hear from somebody who's inherited some significant money on top of her otherwise already significant financial success, given where she was in life. It's a good example of maybe what we should be doing when we get our windfalls. Let's talk for a minute about annuities. An annuity is really probably most easily thought of as some sort of an insurance or pension product available from a insurance company. That's the best way to think about an annuity. A lot of times they get confused with retirement accounts. A lot of times they get it confused with, with investments. But in reality, it's a separate kind of product that has some similar characteristics to both retirement accounts as well as investments. So the simplest type of annuity to think of as an example of what an annuity can be is what's called a single premium immediate annuity, or spia. And what this is is this is somebody who goes and takes a lump sum of money and gives it to an insurance company in exchange for a promise, a contract that the insurance company will pay them a certain amount every month for the rest of their life as long as they live, whether that's two years or whether that's 50 years, they're going to pay them that amount every month. And so that is classically what an annuity is. But its legal structure can be used to form all Kinds of other things. And so the problem is, because it can be changed to all kinds of other things, it gets changed to all kinds of other things. And they're made complex and they're made expensive, and they're made difficult to analyze, and they're made easy to sell. And so there's a whole slew, a whole industry of annuity agents out there who want to sell you annuities with all kinds of bells and whistles and want to swap you into new annuities where they'll get another commission over and over and over again. So you got to be a little bit careful about the annuity industry and probably get advice. If you're thinking about an annuity or considering an annuity, you need to get advice from somebody who is not getting paid to sell you an annuity. Annuities can make lots of sense in certain situations and certainly have some useful features, but they're oversold. You know, like lots of insurance projects, like whole life insurance, right? It's oversold. It's used way more often than it ought to be used. Annuities can be the same way. Okay? So annuities are taxable, but they're taxed in a different way than lots of other things. They're taxed differently from life insurance, they're taxed differently from retirement accounts, they're taxed differently from investments. They're taxed in all kinds of interesting ways. Basically, if you put money into an annuity outside of a retirement account, because you can also buy annuities with retirement account money, but if you put money into annuity outside of a retirement account, you don't get an upfront tax break like you would with a 401k or a traditional IRA. You don't get that upfront tax break. But as the money grows inside the annuity, it grows in a tax protected way, just like it would inside a Roth IRA, just like it would inside a 401k, it grows in a tax protected way. Okay? And when you take money out of the annuity down the road, the earnings are taxable, okay? It's interesting, though, how they're taxed, and it depends on if you have annuitized the annuity or not. Okay? What I mean by annuitized is you turn the lump sum into an income stream, right? You've said, okay, I don't want my $100,000 back, I want $600 a month back. That's what I want. And so if you've annuitized comes out partially taxable. Each one of Those payments comes out, part of it is your basis or the principal you put in there, and part of it is the earnings. That's called an exclusion ratio. Right? So some of the money that's paid to you is excluded from taxes. If you have not yet annuitized the annuity, it actually gets LIFO treatment. Last in, first out. So the earnings come out first. So if you just pull some of the money out of your annuity, the first dollars pulled out are all earnings. And they're taxable at ordinary income tax rates, not long term capital gains rates, not qualified dividend rates, and certainly not tax free like a Roth IRA might be. So that's the way annuities are taxed. If you buy an annuity inside your retirement account, it's taxed just like the retirement account would be. If it's a tax deferred account and you use some of the money to buy an annuity, when it pays out, it's all 100% taxable at ordinary income tax rates. If you buy the annuity inside a Roth IRA, when it comes out, it comes out 100% tax free. So a lot of people ask, are annuities a good investment? Well, they're not really an investment at all, right? They're a wrapper with some insurance features. So it's probably best not to think of them as an investment at all. Instead, it's good to ask yourself, what do you need? And does an annuity not only do what you need to have done, does it do it better than anything else? And I can really think of four possible situations where an annuity can do the job better than something else. The first one I mentioned earlier, a single premium immediate annuity. This is for somebody who wants to buy a pension from an insurance company, right? Maybe they have Social Security, maybe they have a small pension from a job. They want more of that kind of guaranteed income to put a floor under their spending in retirement. So they're willing to give an insurance company a lump sum of money in exchange for contracted guaranteed payouts the rest of their life. Unfortunately, you can't get these anymore that are inflation indexed for the most part. Sometimes there'll be an inflation adjustment, but it's not truly indexed to inflation like Social Security is. So it turns out if you're interested in buying these sorts of annuities, the best annuity you can get is just delaying Social Security at age 70 because it's priced better than the annuities you can buy from insurance companies. And it's indexed to inflation. So it seems silly to buy a spia at all if you're not deferring your Social Security to age 70. But some people add a spia on top of that and that's a reasonable use. Another reasonable use of an annuity is a dia, a deferred income annuity. Think of this as longevity insurance. Okay? You give the insurance company a lump sum of money in exchange for them paying you a lot of money starting in 10, 20, 30 years if you're still alive. And what this does is protects you from your own longevity. And the benefit of not getting any payments immediately like you would with an immediate annuity, is you get much bigger payments down the road. So after 10 or 20 or 30 years, instead of getting 5 or 6 or 7% of what's you putting the annuity back out, you might be getting 35% of what you put in that annuity 20 years ago each year because it had time to grow and the insurance company didn't have to make those payments along the way. So buying longevity insurance is a reasonable use for an annuity. The third reasonable use is what is called a myga, my g A a multi year guaranteed annuity. Think of this as the insurance industry's answer to certificates of deposit or CDs available at the bank. So basically, you lock up your money for a certain period of time, they give you a guaranteed interest rate on it. The interest is all taxable ordinary income tax rates, but it's not taxable until you're done with the annuity. And in fact, even if your annuity runs its term, if you exchange it into another annuity, you still don't have to pay the taxes on it. So until you actually take the money out, ready to spend it, that's when you pay the taxes on the earnings for those mygas. And so some people, especially at certain times when rates are higher than what you can get in a CD or you can get in a Treasury bond or something like that, they actually find these attractive and buy mygas. Finally, sometimes people find a use for a low cost variable annuity. Now, a variable annuity just has the annuity wrapper around it then basically puts an investment inside that wrapper. Often it's an investment that looks a lot like a stock mutual fund. This can be beneficial for certain types of highly tax inefficient investments, like maybe a real estate investment trust mutual fund that's just fairly tax inefficient. Might make sense to put that inside an annuity wrapper. It might be that the tax Protected growth over the years makes up for the fact that when you pull the money out down the road, you got to pay ordinary income tax rates on it. So for a very tax inefficient asset class, it can make sense to have it in a very low cost variable annuity. Sometimes people also exchange the cash value from a whole life or other permanent life insurance policy where they're underwater into a variable annuity when they surrender it and that allows them to grow back to their basis, back to the total amount they paid for the premiums, that whole life insurance, essentially tax free, and then they surrender the annuity. But in essence they save themselves a little bit of taxes and are able to make a little bit of lemonade out of lemons that came from a bad decision to buy a life insurance policy they shouldn't have bought in the first place. But there are also some unreasonable uses for annuities. Most variable annuities should be avoided like the plague. I'm not a big fan of fixed index annuities either, especially because those who sell them seem to masquerade them as being something like index funds, which are very different from fixed index fund annuities. And so I'm not a big fan of those or the way they're sold. In reality, your return that your payout on those is a lot more like what you would expect from a fixed annuity than what you would expect from an index fund. And the more complex the annuity, the less I like it. I want a straightforward annuity that not only you can understand, but you can compare and shop around from various companies. If one company is the only one that offers these features, it's hard to know if they're being fairly priced without that competitive aspect in the marketplace. So the more complex it is, the less I like it and the less you probably want to use it. So the bottom line is there are some reasonable uses for annuities, primarily as a method of providing guaranteed income in retirement and to protect against longevity. But just like with whole life insurance, this is a product that is easily sold inappropriately to unsuspecting investors. Step away from day to day public market volatility and consider diversifying with private real estate through MLG Capital's professionally managed investment funds. With more than 38 years of experience across multiple market cycles, MLG Capital applies a disciplined long term approach focused on capital preservation, income generation and tax efficient outcomes. Its Current Offering Fund 7 features an 8% cumulative preferred return, return of capital and a shared profit split. Eligible white coat investor participants may receive an enhanced 7723 split once group investments reach 5 million dol. More@mlgcapital.com Whitecoatinvestor Today this content is for informational purposes only and is not an offer to sell or solicitation to buy any security. Investments in private offerings are speculative, illiquid and involve risk, including the potential loss of capital. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Please consult your financial, tax or legal advisors before making any investment decisions. All right, we've come to the end of our podcast. We'd love to have you on it. We want to not only have the audience listening, we want to have the audience participating. You can sign up again@whitecoatinvestor.com Milestones until the next episode, keep your head up, shoulders back. We'll see you next time.
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The White Coat Investor Podcast is for
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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.
"What This Doctor Did with a Surprise Inheritance"
Host: Dr. Jim Dahle
Guest: Christine, Hematology/Oncology Physician
Date: June 29, 2026
In this unique episode of the Milestones to Millionaire series, Dr. Jim Dahle welcomes Christine, a young hematology/oncology physician from the East Coast, to discuss her remarkable and rarely covered financial milestone: responsibly managing and investing a windfall inheritance in her early career. Through Christine’s story, listeners gain insights into prudent wealth management, the emotional realities of unexpected financial windfalls, and the practical steps to prevent “blowing it” when luck strikes. The episode is both inspirational and highly practical for medical professionals and anyone facing a life-changing sum of money.
“This money you inherited landed in prepared hands. You were ready to do something good with this money when it came.”
— Dr. Jim Dahle (08:16)
“She was very frugal throughout her life... She had inherited some stuff from her grandparents long time ago. Never touched it throughout her life.”
— Christine (05:25)
“I did buy in early 2022 a used car with cash. And that was one of the sweetest things I've ever done.”
— Christine (09:19)
“I have 10 years because of the rules, and I will. I won't touch the Roth IRA.”
— Christine (10:48)
“You can do whatever you want with your life, right? …Welcome to my existential crisis.”
— Dr. Jim Dahle (11:40)
“I'd like to also do it on the terms that I want to—practicing less… and not doing call.”
— Christine (13:55)
“Having your financial ducks in a row can really help if you find yourself in this position so that you're not feeling like you're going to blow your money if you don't have a plan for it.”
— Christine (17:05)
“You really only have to get rich once. You only have to get lucky once… as long as you know how to manage money.”
— Dr. Jim Dahle (18:03)
“I feel like my mom would be proud too, but she'd also want me to spend a little bit too.”
— Christine (19:49)
Dr. Dahle reflects on Christine’s story as the ideal: an unexpected windfall managed by someone already responsible and informed about finance. He encourages listeners to get their own financial houses in order, whether facing an inheritance or simply aiming for early financial independence.
| Timestamp | Topic/Event | |-----------|------------------------------------------------------| | 03:06 | Introduction of Christine & her background | | 04:00 | Story of the inheritance and her mother’s finances | | 06:22 | Christine’s pre-inheritance financial status | | 08:24 | Christine’s financial plan and preparation | | 08:59 | What she did with the inheritance | | 09:19 | Buying her dream used car (Toyota Prius) | | 10:45 | Inherited retirement account strategies | | 11:08 | Achieving financial independence and life changes | | 12:55 | Transition to part-time, reasons, and reflections | | 15:04 | Portfolio allocation explained | | 16:13 | Advice for those leaving and receiving inheritances | | 18:44 | Closing advice on spending vs. saving windfalls | | 19:49 | Reflections on the value and responsibility of wealth|
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Christine’s story demonstrates the enormous value of being prepared—financially and emotionally—for unexpected windfalls. Her path illustrates that with financial literacy, thoughtful planning, and a steady hand, any large windfall can be leveraged to secure not just a lavish lifestyle, but long-term autonomy and peace of mind.
Whether inheriting, earning, or investing your way to wealth, the “White Coat Investor” message is clear: Prepare yourself, have a plan, live below your means, and be ready for the milestones life may throw your way.