Episode 24. Physician on Fire, MD -- Achieving Financial Independence

Doctor Money Matters

Welcome to another Doctor Money Matters episode. This is a great episode. I got to interview one of the superheroes of physicians and finance, the Physician on Fire, the anonymous anesthesiologist who started the very popular financial blog by the same name.

In this episode we talk about how he decided to go down the FIRE (financial independence, retire early) path, his plans now that he has reached FI (financial independence), and his advice for those who are interested in following this path.

We also get into some detail about how he calculated the numbers to determine he had achieved his goal. We also took some questions from social media and discussed his brewery investment and his own personal beer brewing hobby.

A couple of the concepts discussed in this episode:

• Geographic arbitrage -- Practicing in a low cost of living area while making a great income allows you to save more faster.
• Sequence of returns risk -- The idea that what happens to your assets (the total returns) around (immediately prior to and immediately after) retirement can determine how comfortably you can withdraw from your overall asset pool.
• Savings rate -- how much you should be saving as a percentage of post tax income. He challenges people to live on half your take home pay if you want to reach FI sooner. He has now reached a 75% savings rate after reaching FI as he doesn’t have a mortgage or doesn’t need to pay for disability insurance
• Donor Advised Fund -- An investment account that set up can make charitable contributions to via donated stock or other assets. This account can then continue to grow via the market and you can choose to make your charitable contributions over time.

Clearly this mindset has resonated with many people as the FIRE community has exploded. PoF’s website has demonstrated significant growth over its 2 year existence and he has provided valuable resources for those interested in these topics.

I want to thank PoF for joining us on the podcast. I encourage you to visit his Physician on Fire blog where you can get very valuable information.

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Thanks for listening and please leave us positive reviews and continue to share this podcast with your colleagues.

Some other physician hosted podcasts that I recommend are:

Docs Outside The Box

The Hippocratic Hustle

The Happy Doc

Doctors Unbound

The White Coat Investor

There are many others, so please support your physician colleagues.