Down-post I'll say more about what brought me here... didn't find the information I came looking for, but I found this interesting discussion. Since I now realize I signed up years ago, let me make my contribution to this glass half full thread.
I graduated optometry school a couple of decades ago with about 150K in debt. At the time it was the most in my class.
I got no parental help, hence the debt.
My net worth at graduation was precisely -150K.
I chose to live in one of the most high cost-of-living urban areas in the country, if not the highest. Needless to say it's also saturated with ODs.
I like listening to Dave Ramsey, as some posters allude to, but I think more than half of his advice is rubbish, and I'd be poorer if I followed it.
Same goes for all the practice management advisors in and out of school.
I've usually socked away maybe 15% of my income, but I don't go crazy about it. I don't want to mortgage my future for my present, but I don't want to do the reverse either (like FIRE practitioners advise).
I've visited 4 dozen countries and tried half the Michelin starred restaurants in the Bay Area.
I work 4 day weeks by choice, not because I can't find a job. Balance is key.
I'm most proud of this... I have
never made 100K from work in my life (up until last year, when I barely broke that figure).
And... I am also a millionaire.
You might ask,
How??? I'll tell you how. It's not rocket science. And it's not one single lucky investment. Though, as an aside, luck
always plays some role, and don't let rich people tell you otherwise. In my case, my wife and I have had some reasonably good luck; but we've also had some catastrophic losses along the way -like multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Based on experience and mistakes, I've just developed a few simple rules to live by. In this order.
1. Take care of your health first.
Forget everything else. If you have your health, you can recover from just about every catastrophe. If you don't have your health, your problems just cascade. It creates financial burdens, while impacting your ability to earn money to recover, creating a double whammy. Really, if you don't have your health, you have nothing. So do whatever you need to do to take care of your physical and mental health, even if it means less money in the short term. For example, I could quite easily make 50% more than I do now, but it would be penny wise and pound foolish.
2. Choose your partner wisely.
And I'm not talking about your business partner. One thing I've had going for me, is that my wife and I are both high income professionals. The US is on a long term decline in terms of living standards, and the days when a family can get by on one income are over. It absolutely sux, it's a political choice of a broken system, it doesn't have to be that way at all, but that's the way it is, and I can't do a thing about it except adapt. As such, a homemaker wife would be a dealbreaker for me. Most women, of course, understand this almost intuitively in choosing a husband, but I've seen so many male professionals dig their own graves (in many ways literally) by choosing the wrong partner. Your partner doesn't have to be a financial rock star, and neither of us are -at least not by Bay Area standards. But when one person is carrying the entire burden, it leads to a vicious cycle of financial difficulty, resentment whether you want to admit it or not, and ultimately stress and divorce. Which of course affects your bottom line even more, not to mention your health (see Rule #1 above). By contrast, the amount that two professional people together can accomplish given a bit of diligence, is astounding. Which brings me to...
3. Spend less than you make.
I mean, duh. Sure, you say, easier said than done with your 200K debt and 80K income!
A poster named "PGRG" posted a thread on what optometrists really make (a case study). I can quibble about some of his numbers being slightly pessimistic, but overall it's about right in terms of the lay of the land. Well, so what! Pair up. Pick someone emotionally stable with a good ethic. Now you've got two 80K incomes. Not too hard to find. A teacher can make that. A Muni bus driver in the Bay Area can make that. (which begs a different question, but I'll put in my two cents on that later). So anyway, once you have Rule #1 and Rule #2 down, following Rule #3 becomes mostly a matter of choice. Living on 80K is hard. Living on 160K is pretty easy even in the Bay Area. You don't have to go hog wild with the saving as my own life has demonstrated, to accumulate a crap ton by mid career... which in my case is looking more and more like late career -by choice.
There are other things that mostly come down to common sense. Like a healthy and balanced attitude toward debt. Not fanatical, but balanced.
Like paying off your mortgage for your Bay Area home that's at 4% like Dave Ramsey suggests?
Why on earth would you do that??? If you have the cash, like we do, better to put it into another property when the time is right. Of course if you have a second mortgage at 10%, sure, kill that sucker.
But going into massive debt to open a practice cold in a saturated area like one of my colleagues just did? Oh heII no!
But frankly, these are details compared to the 3 rules above. Follow just those 3 rules, and the chances that everything works out become extraordinarily high. Don't follow them, and well... almost every professional I know who's struggling, is struggling because they're not following one or more of those rules.
And notice I've said almost nothing about the practice of optometry as a profession. Because this stuff applies to everyone. It does beg the question, though. Why
not just be a teacher or a bus driver? I think there's certainly something to be said for that. Teacher is a very nice profession, IMO. I considered it myself for the longest time. And teachers are, btw, supposedly prodigious accumulators of wealth.
That said, I
like being an OD.
It affords me balance and flexibility, which is important because unlike most Americans, I don't define myself by my job, and I don't think it's healthy.
At the same time I'm helping people -I'm not building weapons, or putting non-violent drug users in prison, or ruining the environment by extracting fossil fuels, or designing apps that spy on people's private lives.
My job makes me move rather than sit for hours, while at the same time avoiding the kind of body-destroying injury that comes from manual labor.
For the most part, I don't have to deal with blood and guts (other medical professions), miserable patients who hate being there (dentists), smelly feet (podiatrists), repetitive stress injury (chiropractors), night shifts and infectious disease (nurses).
I don't have to work crazy hours like most people in tech or finance. Or doctors, for example. And unlike techies, my skills aren't obsolete within a decade.
And unlike tech or finance, my work has meaning. I'm not coding or pushing papers around.
When I don't know something, I kick it upstairs to the OMD. Even when I do know something, I still like to kick it upstairs. That's why they pay 100 times more than I do in malpractice insurance. I don't give a rat's behind about scope of practice -I like to sleep well at night not having to worry about whether that iritis will go south on me tomorrow. And I do.
When I leave the office, my work stays at work. And when I go on vacation two or three times a year, because I don't own the practice, I can tell them that I probably can't be reached because I won't have reception in the Swiss Alps or Uzbekistan. And that's what I do.
And they pay me good money to do this??? Somebody pinch me, because some days I think this has to be a dream.
But in case you're still thinking how the grass is greener on the other side, I read this not too long ago. For all their income, doctors have surprisingly low net worths, on average.
8 Ways to Grade How Well You Are Doing Financially as a Physician
I was
STUNNED when I read the above! What??? Physicians who retired -i.e., those who were actually able to retire -had an average net worth of $2-3 million? WTF are they doing? I'm much younger than than most retiring physicians, and I'm already there! So I suppose I could retire if I wanted to. Even more staggering... in my age group, turns out, I as an optometrist, would be well in the top 5% of all physicians -across all specialties. Not in the top 1%, but still.
I'm not saying this to brag. The reason I'm saying this is that these people make MUCH more money than I do. And yet they're not so wealthy at all. Someone on these forums (maybe the OP) was saying how tough it is on 100K, and 340K is generally going to be a lot wealthier than 100K even though there are exceptions. Well I am not so sure. I think that the reason their net worths aren't that high, is that they aren't following some combination of my Rule #1, 2, and/or 3. And I have a hunch that there are systemic reasons that make it harder to live by those rules. Maybe they feel they have to spend more to look like they're keeping up with the Jones's if they're "Doctors". Maybe their spouses don't feel they have to contribute so much because their (husband, most likely) is a Doctor. Maybe their work and education demands give them less time to budget. Maybe those same work demands make it harder to even keep up with their health. Working 60 hour weeks will do that, you know.
That's one thing I came here seeking. I would be curious to know what the average NET WORTH of OD's is, compared to MD's. I still haven't found an answer to that question. All I know is that I, for one, would not want to trade places with the MD's.
