Late Start, Big Lessons: Bill Yount’s Advice to Physicians

Daniel Wrenne: Hey, everyone. Today I’m speaking with Bill Yount. Bill’s a practicing ER physician and the host of the Catching Up to FI Podcast. In our conversation today, he shares his journey of transitioning into practice and experiencing major lifestyle creep, and we discuss how his lack of financial literacy and other major mistakes contributed to him ultimately being way behind on his financial goals and on the brink of burnout.

Fortunately, he was able to change course for the better, and so we discuss how he did that and what his life looks like today, and we talk about how he is now motivated to help others that are late starters to see that it’s really never too late to get started on a path to financial freedom.

Welcome to Finance for Physicians, the show where we help physicians like you use money as a tool to live a great life. I’m your host, Daniel Wrenne, and I’ve spent the last decade advising physicians on their personal finances with the mission to help them understand that taking control of their finances now means creating a future where they can practice medicine where, when, and how long they want to.

Daniel Wrenne: Bill. How you doing buddy? Good to see you.

Bill Yount: I’m doing great, Daniel. Thanks for having me on your show. So I understand you cater to positions. I happen to be one, but I may not be the most educated in your audience, or at least I wasn’t.

Daniel Wrenne: Yeah, you’ve had quite a interesting path. We were just catching up before we hit record. And the interesting thing about your story that I was most intrigued about is you’ve made this, I don’t know if it’s abnormal, but very unique transition from like spender type to savor type. You’ve been able to figure out how to save first, spend the rest, and that was not always how it was in your career and life.

And so I’m super curious about your story and how you made that transition because I think the change part is pretty hard for a lot of people to change from, especially the direction of Save first. It’s obviously pretty easy to change from Saver to Spender, but you did it the reverse way where you changed from Spender to Saver.

And so maybe we could start out with kind of a little bit of your backstory. I’d love it if you could share how you’ve gotten where you are today. You have a podcast that you now run. You’re financially literate. You know a ton about all this personal finance stuff, but it wasn’t always that way, right?

Bill Yount: No. As always, it starts with your childhood—mentorship, and I got no mentorship from my parents. I got no education at all, formally about personal finance and lived a life of that. A lot of physicians lead of deprivation, forced deprivation with low salary and high desires. And I came outta residency.

I’m an emergency physician. I got my first big boy paycheck and I didn’t know how to partition it, is what I say. I didn’t know to save first and spend last. And I classically ended up in a paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle. The new house, the new cars, leased cars, made all the big rock mistakes traveled extensively.

Fortunately, however, the best financial decision I ever made was—and your audience is gonna be shocked by this—but this is back in the day when I went to med school in ’88 to ’92, I went to my state school, which was a great financial decision because the tuition when I first started med school was 500 bucks a month, or not a month, but a year or a semester, sorry, a term.

Daniel Wrenne: It was cheap. 

Bill Yount: It was ultra cheap because I was in North Carolina and it was only the cost of living that was really required to go to med school. By the time I finished med school, it was probably 1500 bucks. A semester came out of it with credit card debt, but no real student loan debt. And that carried forward into residency where even during residency, I deserved the trips to decompress.

I didn’t necessarily live within my means. And that’s started there. And so exited residency with it doesn’t seem like a lot for physicians these days, but $30,000 to $40,000 of minor student loan debt and credit card debt. Paid that off, luckily in the first few years, but got married a few years later. And I married a physician. 

My wife’s a child psychiatrist. But one of the things that happened to us was we got caught up in the funnel of life by not knowing how to partition the paycheck. We got married, house cars, kids, and we had twins and one had significant developmental issues.

So we ended up focusing on that, and we were we always scrambled. It seemed like life was a scramble. There wasn’t any sort of controlled pace to it. And then 20 years later, we woke up and realized, wait a minute, nobody’s gonna take care of us but us, and I woke up around 49 or 50 because of a birthday, like a lot of late starters, which is our audience that we cater to in Catching Up to FI.

I went down the rabbit hole that a lot of physicians go down earlier in their career because they have to understand money because of the debt burden. They come out with it. It’s really forced and thankful for Jim Dally who has completely changed the landscape for physicians and high income professionals with his white coat investor, educating physicians early on about the right way to manage money.

He doesn’t reach everybody as we’ll talk about because physicians are notoriously bad with money and have targets on their back, and I’ve made every mistake in the book as we were talking about. The only lecture I had in residency was from a financial services company, not to be named, that gave us one lecture on finances and I succumbed to the salesmanship and bought whole life, bought into them as an AUM advisor, and it just went from there that we probably sent his kids to college before we sent our kids to college.

We didn’t take over our own money until around 50 when I started DIY-ing things. And physicians are educated in how to take care of people’s health, and they’re not educated in how to take care of their own wealth. They learn to live a rich life if they’re not careful, but they don’t understand what wealth was.

I didn’t know until age 50 what a net worth statement was. I didn’t track my expenses or budget. We saved last, as you said, we saved around tax time and we were savers of around 8% to 10% as best I can guess at the time, which is virtually catastrophic. Retirement is 50 years away with that kind of savings rate, especially when you start late as a physician.

Yeah, made all the mistakes, but we turned it around because we had no choice. We really just had no choice.

Daniel Wrenne: I’ll give y’all a hint listening, which company he worked for. If you listen for a while, you’ll know it happened to be the company I started out with, so you’ll know what company he was talking about.

The salesperson, AUM advisor. I’m curious, did they, was that person that you initially worked with because theoretically like the financial advisor is supposed to help you with money and so I know when I used to work in that organization, we would talk to residents and fellows and the y wanted, the mentality at that time was that they wanted to just hand that off.

They’re like, “I don’t want to deal with the money stuff. Like you just deal with it.” And so a lot of the people we worked with were those types. When you were working with those, that advisor in the industry, was there any level of value attained or was it like taken because there is, there’s a lot of high commission products sold and in a lot of ways it’s worse for people.

Bill Yount: Back then there was no value. And we did hand it off. Money was scary because I hadn’t learned about it. Investing was scary, it seemed, and the services industry makes it feel like it’s complex. There was no, nobody that took me aside when I started my first job and say, “Max out your 401k,” just like in the graduate, he says plastics, if you just say one thing to somebody where they peaks their interest that, okay, if I max out my 401k, I’ll be fine.

You don’t necessarily need to know as much. And you learn about the investing part later and people focus on the numbers and what do I invest in? And physicians try to make it complex when it’s really not complex at all. I started out complex when I took over my own portfolio and I worked back to a pretty simple three-fund portfolio.

It’s simple but not easy. And we like to, as physicians, make it harder than it really is. Yeah. And get into sort of complex limited partnerships syndications. And there’s a place for that if you get started early and have the capital to branch out and diversify into some of these other assets, but you really don’t need to.

A lot of physicians want to get into real estate or, they own their own business and there’s some advantages there, but I didn’t. I’m an emergency physician and I’m a contracted employee or independent contractor, and my first job didn’t teach me either about what to do. There was nowhere along the line was anybody that said, no human resources.

This is what, that’s one of the disadvantages of being a contracted employee, right? Really are forced to do it on your own. And a lot of people end up with a little bit conflicted advisors that are, it’s still probably 80% of the industry, if not 90% of the industry, people like yourself that are fee-only and or advice-only.

And there is a place for assets under management as long as you know what you’re getting into and know what you’re paying. But you gotta know what you’re paying for your investments. You gotta know what you’re paying for your advice, and you gotta know what you expect to receive from project-based management, hourly based management, which is where I recommend everybody goes.

Daniel Wrenne: Yeah. And I think it’s a combination of factors. At the end of the day when you mix financial literacy or financial illiteracy with a heavily conflicted service, there’s gonna be lots of problems emerged. I’m curious in the   early days of your career, did you feel like you were good, or did it just didn’t cross your mind much as far as like your finances, it was more of a, “We’re good, we don’t need to worry about it?”

Or what were your thoughts on finances? 

Bill Yount: Oh, no. Yeah. We’re rich, right? We’ve made it. We’ve gotten through all the, our twenties and early thirties and now we’ve made it and you live this rich life, not the millionaire next door life. It’s too easy. After deprivation and without education, as you say, you’re prey when you’re financially literate and I don’t know that med schools still do a good job of giving you a personal finance class.

You don’t get it in college. You’re starting to get it in high schools. There’s about 26 states that are required to deliver a semester-long personal finance class. Thank goodness, at least it’s starting. It should migrate up the spectrum. There are universities that require it. Paul Merriman and his Financial Education Foundation have created a model for financial education at college level with a semester required of personal finance.

So it’s there, it’s coming, but we’re still way behind.

Daniel Wrenne: Yeah, I remember when I started my financial planning business 2014, so I left the sales side of the industry and then had my Jerry McGuire moment and it was like, I gotta get away from here. And I had my epiphany and I was like, the people need transparent, like low conflict financial help or advice. 

And so I was like, I’m gonna try to go as far away from the industry as I possibly can, which is write us a check, and we give you advice. So like literally like check advice, check, fee for service, pure fee for service. So back then it was the problem. So I did that in 2014, and the problem we had was like a lot early on especially, they’re like, what do you mean I have to write a check?

It was this whole lack of awareness, so low of awareness that there was not even any, it was like shock to even think that there would be costs for financial services and financial literacy was really a lot lower than I think, especially in the medical market with physicians to where they were like, “No, I’m good with my free advisor and my lack of financial literacy.”

Bill Yount: They’re not free.

Daniel Wrenne: If you think you have a free advisor, that means you’re financially illiterate. 

Bill Yount: That was me. That was me. You don’t see the cost coming out of your portfolio and yeah. Now if you have 1% and you’ve got an AUM fee with a 1%, if you’re in actively managed funds, you are really hurting yourself with regards to millions of dollars that you could have if you approached it more prudently from a—financial literacy is a language we learned the language of medicine, we learn English.

But it’s a language that we all need to learn because it’s universal. It’s critical. How do you speak money?

Daniel Wrenne: You need to know at least the basics. You don’t need to be an expert, but there’s a whole lot of finance stuff. Like you start talking about investments and insurances and all that.

You don’t need to become an investment expert necessarily. But what we’re talking about is like baseline personal finance or financial literacy. That I think should be the expectation is that everybody has that at least foundational level of financial literacy. But I’m saying as I’m saying that, what do you think is the foundational, what is adequate?

If I’m listening to this, I’m like, oh yeah, I got that. Like how do I know I have that? It’s a language, but how do I know I’m financially literate enough? 

Bill Yount: The physicians focus on the investing part, but if you look at an investor policy statement, it’s comprehensive.

You have to learn about insurance. You have to learn first and foremost about disability and life insurance and what are the appropriate products to be in. And I got sold disability by the same company that sold me whole life. It’s not an occupation specific policy. And I didn’t know what kind of risk I was dealing with.

You gotta know about estate planning. You’ve gotta know about cashflow planning. You’ve gotta know about a giving plan there. There’s so many aspects to a financial plan. In order to speak the language, you need to know what a good financial plan or investor policy statement looks like, so that when the shit hits the fan and the market does what it’s done recently, you know what you’re gonna do and the numbers come last.

80% of this is mental, emotional, organizational. I always tell folks to pause first, plan second, and then pivot. A lot of people want to jump in, especially late starters, jump in and catch up by, “Okay, I need to take on a lot of risk in order to get where I want to go.” And that may not be the case.

Bitcoin isn’t gonna get you there. There is a standard progression for late starters that I’d like to illuminate. When you wake up, there’s a lot of shame, regret, remorse, anger. You can get caught in the past, but you gotta let go of the past and plant that tree that maybe should have been planted 20 years ago because you’re only gonna get healthier.

This is about financial health and backstops, and after that you end up in this rabbit hole thing where you dive down into it. I’ve got. Two shelves of books behind me here that I read because I was an analysis paralysis for probably a year, if not more, where I was too scared to take over my money because I had to know everything.

I had to go through financial school and you can read 1, 2, 3 books and know enough to speak the language. There’s few basic resources, a few basic podcasts and for physicians that are in your practice, t he White Coat Investor is a primary resource, or the Physician on FIRE website is another resource.

And whether it’s podcasts or blogs, when I wanna go to the Wikipedia of financial information, I just search “White Coat Investor” in whatever topic I want to learn. And there’s gonna be a very educated blog on that. That helps you say with, “How do I figure out a backdoor Roth IRA? And there were things that not only did I not know a net worth statement, I didn’t know anything. 

It is just catastrophic to think that, and I’m not the only one out there like this. I think that the average American and many physicians are late starters just because America lives on pushing spending into the future with regard to accumulating debt. We’re diabetic, we’re numb to it, and that’s just the way of life.

Yeah, it’s a way of life. We’ve got to do better. And the folks that wake up need to help the others that may fall behind. I think Jim publishes a survey every year that hasn’t changed in years, where 25% of physicians still make it to age 60 without being millionaires. And that’s just sad.

That is just catastrophically sad because you’ve shackled yourself to a job. And we should talk about burnout because that is a real problem in medicine these days. I’ll tell physicians.

Daniel Wrenne: Do you think the majority of burnout is tied to finances?

Bill Yount: I think it’s a huge part because people realize that I’m not where I need to be financially like I did and I can’t get out.

Daniel Wrenne: That’s stuck. You’re stuck to because the career is the money maker. 

Bill Yount: Yeah. It’s the debt burden that they start with because as Jim says, “You gotta live like a resident.” And it’s hard to do that for three to five years to pay off this massive amount of debt because you’re ready not to live like a resident. And do all the things that I did. 

And then I’ll tell people, pay off your debt in five and, work for the money for another 15 to get free. And so fundamentally, if you do that starting in your early thirties, look, you’re gonna be, by 50, retired early. 45 to 50, depending on how you do it.

The journey doesn’t change for late starters. It’s the same journey if you read the simple, what is it? So The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement by Mr. Money Mustache, Pete Adeney, who we got on our show, your savings rate and the growth rate in the economy is correlated to how long it’s gonna take you.

And we went, as we talked about before, from being single-digit savers without knowing at tax time what was left over. We saved to rapidly, within a year or so, 35% to 40% savings rate. And I was like, where the heck did all this money go? Because our lifestyle didn’t really change. It was just slipping through the sieve of life and I wasn’t tracking it.

It wasn’t budgeting, it just didn’t pay attention to where it went. And physicians are fortunate because they earn enough money, they can backwards budget. You can back into it. As long as you save what you need to save to get where you want to go and reverse engineer your financial life, you can spend the rest and enjoy it.

Daniel Wrenne: Is that what you mean by backwards budget is get the savings ironed out, and then back into what you’re able to spend, and then just make sure you spend it that level, and then you’re good?

Bill Yount: Yeah, live on half, live on 60%, save 30% to 40%, and you’ll absolutely get where you want to go in about 15 years.

It’s a virtual certainty. And that’s the backwards budget. When you’re lean and you don’t have a lot of money, it probably makes sense to forwards budget and, watch every penny. But as soon as you get to the higher income levels, as long as you hit your number saving and max out all your accounts, your 401Ks, your 403Bs, your Roth IRAs, your Roth 401Ks, your HSA, and you follow a pretty standard cashflow waterfall plan and fill up your buckets, as I’m sure you’ve talked about on the show, it’s a guarantee within 15, 20 years you’ll be free. And if you wanna still practice medicine, great. You can practice on your own terms, you can practice part-time and you don’t have to be humping it to make your nut so to speak.

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Daniel Wrenne: Let’s take a quick break to talk about our firm, Wrenne Financial Planning.

The goal of our podcast is to empower you to make better financial decisions, but sometimes the best financial decision you can make is to work with someone who understands your financial goals and has the expertise to keep you on track to reach them. That’s where Wrenne Financial Planning comes in. We are a full-service financial planning firm that works with over 400 physicians and their families across the country.

We charge a transparent monthly flat fee for our services and offer virtual meetings you can take from anywhere. Best of all, you’ll get to work with a team that specializes in working with physician families. So whether you’re starting out and wondering how you’ll balance your student loan payments and saving for a home, or you are an established physician trying to figure out how to pay for your kid’s college and how much you need to save to reach financial freedom, we can help.

I’ll put a link in the show notes to schedule a no-obligation meeting with one of our certified financial planners. Wrenne Financial Planning LLC is a registered investment advisor. For more information about our firm, please visit wrennefinancial.com. That’s W R E N N E financial. com.

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Daniel Wrenne: Yeah, I think there’s several challenges. Maybe the first challenge that comes to mind is every person I’ve ever talked to is like about their finances.

They say the same thing. They’re like, “It doesn’t feel like I spend that much. No matter, it’s funny ’cause it doesn’t matter, it’s pretty much independent of their income. It’s like everybody says the same thing. I don’t know where it all went. It doesn’t seem it doesn’t feel like I spent that much.

So there’s gotta be some level of awareness, whether it’s the, like you were talking about, the backwards budget, which is a more high-level awareness of where your money’s going or like a forward-looking budget or counting your pennies budget. Either way you gotta have some level of awareness ’cause I think that’s separate than financial literacy.

We got two things. We’re talking about financial literacy and then awareness, because I think I have worked with people that are very financial let’s say financial planners. There’s a lot of financial planners I know that are not doing very well with their personal finances.

Bill Yount: Oh yeah. It’s really interesting. You can have CEOs, there are people that can manage billions of dollars million but are bankrupt. 

Daniel Wrenne: That’s part of it. It’s simple. It’s not easy, like it’s straightforward, but it’s when you get in, put it into practice, it’s much more difficult.

So I’m curious your thoughts on that. The awareness part is I feel like that comes secondary to financial literacy. Ideally the financial literacy builds into awareness. ’cause you gotta have the financial literacy first, right? 

Bill Yount: Yeah, in order to talk to an advisor, and I think 80% of physicians are gonna work with advisors, which is good because you don’t know what you don’t know, and having a second set of eyes on things can really help you.

So I don’t discount that at all. I’ve been a DIY-er sort of in a forced sense because I couldn’t, I can’t afford to spend on a financial advisor now, but I’m leaning towards, now that I’ve gotten 80% to FI, and we can talk about where I started and where I came from. If you want, I don’t care.

I’m very transparent because transparency builds trust, vulnerability builds trust, and I think that’s what we’re doing with our Catching Up to FI show. First thing we did was tell our stories so that people feel safe in our community, just large, we have 17,000 people in the Facebook community that’s very active talking about being late starter and asking their questions.

And we have Bill Bengen in our community, Mr. 4%. He is there to help answer people’s questions. It’s really cool that we have the newbies there and the seasoned veterans, and the need is incredible. Nobody talks to late starters if you can search for it, who focuses on late starters on the financial independence journey.

And I felt that I couldn’t just hold onto this information for myself. I had to reach out to people and try and help them and it’s really resonated because we are a podcast that sees 5,000 downloads for a new episode, and you don’t realize what that is if you don’t understand podcasts, but it’s a lot.

That is a lot. We’re in the top 1% to 2% of the podcast.

Daniel Wrenne: Top 1%. Is that top 1%?

Bill Yount: In the world, and we’ve lasted two years, most podcasts only last 10 episodes. And so we’re reaching a big audience. We’re almost at a million downloads in two years. We’ve got this big community where people can interact.

So the need is there and we’ve seen exponential growth. We’re trying to, through podcasts like yours, reach the people that need to find us that aren’t in the five bubbles. So I know your audience is 90% educated, but I would encourage them to say, okay, if you don’t know what you’re doing and you can’t actively teach somebody unless they’re willing to listen. 

That was my problem. You can’t preach financial independence. The student is ready and the teacher will be there when they’re ready. And that’s true of personal finance because there’s a lot of shame involved.

“I should know about this stuff.” “I’m a highly educated person, but I’m illiterate,” and I know what it like, it’s to feel that you’re illiterate. And as far as the rest of the journey, you get to this middle ground after the shame and the rabbit hole where you gotta do the work and we call it the boring middle, where it takes time and you don’t have the advantage as much of compounding anymore.

So your savings rate has to be higher if you want to retire. For starting at 50 for me, 12 to 13 year journey had to be 40% to make it there. We didn’t start from zero, and I don’t know where we started quite honestly. I know where we are, but you get into the boring middle and then you get close to things and you see the end in sight.

You know what your 25 times expenses number is and your expected expenses in retirement that you’ve gotta meet. And for physicians, it’s not a small number. You get used to a more robust lifestyle. You’ve gotta get to $3, $4, $5 million of net worth if you wanna maintain your lifestyle.

Potentially more depending. I’ve talked to physicians. And it’s really catastrophic. A dual-income families cardiologist and his wife who is a lawyer and they have an income combined of $800,000 to $900,000, but they had a million-dollar mortgage, a home equity line of credit, couple hundred thousand dollars of credit card debt.

Kids that needed to go through college and they have this ultra-high income even in the physician space and they were broke. They were absolutely. 

Daniel Wrenne: It stressed out them wazoo probably, right? 

Yeah. They reached out to us because they found our podcast and they actually asked for some coaching, which we were happy to provide.

My co-host is A CFP, and what is it? 75% of our audience is female because there’s a lot of late starting in the female population with divorce and financial trauma, and we are victims of our own financial trauma. Heck, I didn’t wanna deal with taxes. ’cause my dad traumatized me with taxes. He was a physician at tax time and he got audited a couple times.

So I was like, I don’t want to touch this.

Daniel Wrenne: And you’re an independent contractor too, so that makes it even. 

Bill Yount: Yeah. Yeah. We have a tax preparer. I wouldn’t call ’em a financial planner, but we’ve done well from a tax standpoint and independent contractor allows you to do a lot of certain things.

And that’s how we have a high savings rate is because we have accounts available to us that W2 employees wouldn’t necessarily have and amounts that add up. So thankfully, yeah, we can shovel a lot into, and we have about a $500,000 income net of my wife’s overhead and we save $200-$225,000 a year. 

It’s enabled us to go from under a million of net worth to about 4.3. Now in nine, 10 years, we’re 80% of the way there. The point is you can do this, we want to get people to start at least by 50 so they can retire at 62, 63, which is the average retirement age.

And it’s hard because you want to have your financial wealth not necessarily crossover your burnout ratio. There’s a crossover point where you’re really struggling to get to where you want to go because you have to work longer than say some of your colleagues that got it right. There’s a lot of FOMO in the fifties where you see people who started in their 30s retiring to some other life or downshifting to part-time in their 50s, and you still working full tilt. It can be hard, and you can feel very alone. And that’s one of the reasons that Catching Up to FI has taken off is because people we’re doing this together.

They’re not feeling alone. They realize that there’s people like them that have done the same things and we learn from each other. We call it let’s catch up to FI together.

Daniel Wrenne: Yeah, there’s a lot of, I would say, maybe the majority of people. So the cardiologist that reached out to you. I’m just curious, in that sort of situation, I got a ton of “I’m behind and got a lifestyle issue.” I guess you could call that.

What kind of suggestions, where do you start on that?

Bill Yount: One of the big things we did, and that is painful, is when you lifestyle inflate, it’s easy. It’s kinda like it’s easy to gain weight. It’s hard to take off the weight. Yeah. And when you have to deflate, that can be painful. We went from a 4,500 square foot house and thankfully we became empty nesters, which made things easier and our kids’ college was paid for.

So we didn’t have that hung around our necks and we downsized from that to 2200 square feet. We downsized all the weight of the possessions we had. We bought used cars at a much lower price point. 

Daniel Wrenne: You went from new leases to used cars?

Bill Yount: Yep. And paying cash for them. 

Daniel Wrenne: And you downsized your house?

Bill Yount: And we downsized our house. We upped our savings. 

Daniel Wrenne: Started watching your lifestyle?

Bill Yount: Absolutely. And that can be very painful. And that was one of our, and that’s a powerful lever that you can pull, and unfortunately often needs to be pulled. You have to go back to living a little bit better than a resident sometimes the later you start, and that’s like I said, our lifestyle didn’t change that much.

And where did the money go? But we did get to a 30%, 40% savings rate with an income of $500,000 isn’t so hard. It really isn’t as long as you got the other bases covered. 

Daniel Wrenne: It reminds me a lot of dieting and exercise. It’s like you were saying, when you’re overweight and you have all the bad habits.

That’s where you’re at. The hardest point where it’s the most difficult ’cause it’s just difficult. But when you’ve done a good diet for a few months or you’re in the routine, you get the habits down, then it starts to get a lot more attainable, reasonable.

You hit your stride and the front end is very intimidating and difficult, but once you hit your stride, it becomes much, I wouldn’t say easier. It’s still challenging, but it’s manageable.

Bill Yount: You may talk about the debt snowball and the debt avalanche, but there’s a savings snowball. You put one foot in front of the other.

You’ve got this huge elephant that you’ve gotta figure out how to eat and you take one bite at a time and then it does escalate. It compounds. Your knowledge compounds; ask for help. Don’t just try and necessarily do it on your own. And we provide help in our community. Get a financial advisor that coaches you, guides you, teaches you, so that you’re not on your own.

In emergency medicine, we are largely lone wolves in our field, and physicians are often used to operating in their own space where we have to know everything, be perfectionist that get it right, but we don’t realize that there’s good enough. Perfectionists actually in finance, probably our enemy in many ways.

Daniel Wrenne: Yeah, it’ll set you back. There’s no perfect. We gotta lower the expectations.

Bill Yount: Exactly. Exactly. I fully agree. And, the message I want to get out there is, it is entirely possible to catch up. You gotta wake up and then it is possible to catch up in 10 to 15 years. You’re not lost.

And the wake up often happens before 50. Our audience is largely 40-year-olds that have gotten to that point. And they’ve overcome all the financial responsibilities necessarily, or they’re aware of all the financial responsibilities of being a new parent, a homeowner.

And you’re at the point where, okay, I can now pay attention to this. And if you start at 45, you’re fine. Yeah, you’ll be done, you’ll be done in your late fifties. 

Daniel Wrenne: Yeah, no problem. 

Bill Yount: Don’t lose hope.

Daniel Wrenne: And then early on when you started making good decisions, it’s very similar to dieting too.

It’s like you don’t lose weight or get fit after a month even. You start doing the good habits, but then it still takes a while to start to see results. But you gotta be tracking the results too. So you have to keep tabs on your personal finances or have some level of like awareness of your finances so that you can see that the stuff you’re doing is paying off.

Like the fact that you’re managing your lifestyle. Ideally you’re tracking your net worth so you can see the progress that you’re starting to make and then that just reinforces it becomes its own little snowball and you get motivation, but it all starts on that front end.

It’s a very difficult spot to be in on that front end. Like you said, with the shame and stuff like that on top of it, it makes it even worse. 

Bill Yount: There’s a lost generation out there, or a silent generation, and it is the Gen X-ers because we went from defined benefit plans to defined contribution plans, and I didn’t get the message.

Nobody said, I grew up with my dad was a state employee, there was a pension, and he saved on the side on his own. He never talked to us about money, but that, that changed. All of a sudden that changed. I fundamentally didn’t know what a 401k was growing up at all.

And so you we got lost. This whole generation got lost in that transition, which is one of the reasons the late starters are often Gen X-ers.

Daniel Wrenne: One of the other things I’ve seen happen, let’s say I’ve woken up to this personal finance and have started to do the right things and have awareness of my finances.

One of the things I’ve observed with people is that they, ’cause you got your career is like the generator of the income, which helps personal finances progress. They really start pushing the gas in the career. Pedal and go hard on making as much money as possible, go all in on that. Or even side gigs or like real estate or they basically put more emphasis on their wealth generation, we’ll call it, in order to accelerate all the other stuff they’ve now gotten like excited about.

And so it’s almost like they flip-flop and start to have problems because they are all in on, or have overcommitted on, ’cause that all takes time, and mental capacity. 

Bill Yount: There are extra jobs. A side gig is an extra job. Real estate is not passive. Largely it’s an extra job. It’s an extra job. I’m all about trying to lead a balanced life. You’ve gotta be present in the moment. You can’t let your past weigh you down, and we always push things off to the future. I see people that come into the ER that are like, okay, I just retired.

I’m in my sixties, I’m entering my golden years. They come into the ER and I get to diagnose them with metastatic cancer, you can’t push it off. You’ve got to live life as it goes. That’s why living on half an income, living on, 60%, 70% allows you to live life in the present, make the memories that people talk about and the experiences and not necessarily accumulate the stuff.

That’s probably where all my money went was accumulating stuff, right? That just weighs you down and doesn’t really bring you happiness. We’re on the hedonic treadmill, the rat race, and there’s something known as hedonic adaptation where, great, the new car feels good. The new car smell lasts a week or two until your kid vomits in the car, and then, it’s no longer a new car.

And it’s a thing to get you from place to place. There’s a reason why the physicians that drive Toyotas and Hondas are the millionaires next door. Honestly you can tell who is rich, but not wealthy often by the physician parking lot. 

Daniel Wrenne: Yeah. Yeah. That is a good indicator.

You’d mentioned Slow FI. I’d love it if you could break down. But Slow FI is. I like the sound of it. 

Bill Yount: Yeah, it’s again, leading the balanced life. You talked about people frugally down hitting it hard with all these jobs and wealth generation, but to what point? What are the goals?

What are their values? Do they not have any time to spend any money? It’s very easy for your lifestyle to inflate as your income inflates, unless of course you’re so busy that you’re burning out fast and you can’t spend it. For me, when, even though I’m a late starter, I downshifted my work to roughly a 0.8 because I couldn’t, run fast on that treadmill anymore because there was a physical limitation, fatigue. And you’ve gotta recognize that as you age, you’re in the capability to do nights, weekends, holidays diminishes. There is definitely a law of diminishing returns and it’s going to be harder and you want to plan for that.

That’s why it’s hard to get people to reverse engineer their lives. People who are financially savvy make an exit strategy when they’re starting out. 

Daniel Wrenne: It’s almost I don’t know if this, the way I think of it sometimes is that it’s like you have a max lifetime hours that you can dedicate to your career.

That’s not totally accurate. Everybody’s gonna be different, but it’s just a kind of a way I think about it. It’s like I’ve only got 10,000 hours to dedicate to my career. For example, if I’m young or something, how do you spread that out? And sometimes people just cram it in and they hit their capacity and it’s I’m done.

Burnout to me is like a, this is not, there’s probably exceptions to this, but one reason of burnout is I’ve pushed the limit on my hours and I’ve hit my capacity too. I’ve run too hard, too soon, and there’s an alarm bell going off my body that’s chill out, dude.

Like you still got a lot of time. Let’s spread this thing out a little bit instead of crushing it.

Daniel Wrenne: What’s the rush?

Bill Yount: Yeah, what’s the rush? And what are you going to do for the remainder of your life? We have a lifespan that’s, 80, 90 years and we have a health span that might be less than that.

Daniel Wrenne: And if you’re working all the time, you’re gonna be pretty immobile when you’re old because you’re not working out.

Bill Yount: Yeah. Again, that’s balance. There’s many forms of capital and health is one of them, and we tend to not focus on our own health as physicians.

We’ll focus on the medicine, not the finance, but what about social capital? What about emotional capital? What about community capital? Capital is not just financial capital.

Daniel Wrenne: I think having a different perspective on finances or mindset around finances, we gotta get away from the consumer mentality.

Let’s just, when you’re a consumer, you just spend it and so then you get used to it and then income goes up, and then you’re spending more and we grow up, like, how do I get there? 

Bill Yount: We grow up in that society.

Daniel Wrenne: That’s the culture where we’re in.

Bill Yount: That’s one of the problems. There’s systemic issues that we’re fighting against.

Debt is normal. Consumption is normal. And it creates habits. And we talked about habits earlier. You build on these habits and these habits can compound against you or they can compound for you.

Daniel Wrenne: Right. It’s like I got all this stuff that I gotta pay for. So I work a hundred hours a week and I have no time left ’cause I gotta keep going on all this stuff and then my lifespans gonna be diminished. I’m not gonna be happy and my health’s gonna deteriorate. As a result of this pursuit of all this stuff, material stuff, materialism.

Bill Yount: One of the things that physician families will do is they’ll put their kids in private school.

Why is that? And then they’ll pay for the most expensive colleges. They’re again, pushing off their retirement, and that’s another big nut people don’t talk about is, what are you doing for your kid’s school? And again, you’re holding your retirement hostage to wanting things that may not, where there’s a law of diminishing returns, it may not actually change. 

We talk about P=MD. I recommend to people going into medicine if they want to, go to the cheapest medical school possible where they’re gonna get roughly an equivalent education and they won’t have the debt burden.

Go to public school and if you’re not ready for college, go to community college. There’s no shame in that. And then transfer into another college, your state school, go to your state school like I did, and we’re gonna see that more and more. And those schools are becoming highly competitive. And people get it.

The generations now, Gen Z, Gen Y, they’re all more focused on lifestyle. I don’t want what the boomers and the Gen Xers did or had to do. I don’t want that. I want more balance. I want a slower approach to life, and physicians have the problem of, “What am I gonna do when I’m done with medicine?”

One of the things that sort of causes burnout is, we’re genetically entwined with being a physician as part of our identity, and your identity is so much bigger than that. What are your hobbies? What are you gonna do when you exit the building? I’ve seen physicians retire in their sixties, become alcoholics and die of liver failure.

It’s a real issue. Yeah.

Daniel Wrenne: And you gotta work on that before you retire. 

Bill Yount: Oh yeah. The transition starts three to five years before you retire. For sure. You’re always retiring as you’re working. You’re working towards that. It’s like a seesaw.

It’s a fulcrum, yeah. You get to the tipping point and great, you’re running downhill, but where are you running to? 

Daniel Wrenne: I like to think of like a nice vacation as like a taste of retirement. And it’s if you’re working all the time not taking any vacations, you’re not even close.

You don’t have to wait till you’re 65 to retire like you could be 40, 45, 50, 55 and take more vacations than you were the year before and you’re getting a, a little bit more of a taste of retirement.

Bill Yount: Yeah. One of the problems is that we can’t really take many retirements often for a month, two months, three months at a time because of skill-oriented things, and people worried about gaps in their employment.

Hopefully, you have an employer or a leader that is willing to negotiate these things with you. But since we’re very highly intellectual and skill-oriented profession, we can’t do what say, white collar workers can do. A lot of us can’t work remotely. If my butt isn’t in the chair, I’m not earning any money.

I don’t have a business that is generating other streams of income. And then as people often say, you need multiple streams of income. I’m fortunate that my wife works and works full time. She’s like a built-in disability policy for me. If, I were to stop working and there’s something known as Life FI where she wants to work longer because she loves her job and I’ve been ready for a while to exit the building and I’m planning on working till I’m about 62, 63 and, God love her, that she’s willing to work longer because that helps us make FI and you can’t forget as a late starter, also, social security.

It’s a backstop that people often don’t factor in. It’s going to be there in one form or another, and it’s an annuity that is inflation adjusted, that’s gonna make a huge difference in taking care of not an insignificant portion of your expenses. So don’t forget that as a late starter.

Daniel Wrenne: It’s bigger than I think people realize. At least the projected benefits at this point are, they’re not tiny. It’s a pretty substantial pension.

Bill Yount: And they gotta learn how to manage it just like anything else.

Daniel Wrenne: Yeah, I don’t like the projections of it, like the fact that it’s gonna have problems in a few years, but that doesn’t mean it’s gonna blow up. It just means they have some issues to deal with. 

Bill Yount: Like anything, there’s strategy around it. There’s a great calculator online called opensocialsecurity.com, where, okay, what’s the strategy in a two income family? Who takes it first? When do they take it? Who waits until 70? Especially in partnerships, what do you do if you’re single?

It’s not a started at 62 decision because I’m gasping. You want to, as a physician and a high-income earner because of longevity in life, have the high income earner, wait till they’re 70. There’s so many nuances to financial decisions that you have to educate yourself about.

That’s why it’s good to have a second set of eyes on things like yourself. 

Daniel Wrenne: Yeah. And your group as well. And I know the podcast has been a fun experience of getting out education’s important to people and that’s what you’re doing as well. Catching up to FI is your podcast, 

Bill Yount: Right. Yeah. I would encourage people to listen to your show, who are educated again, to share it with people, jump in anywhere. The content’s relatively evergreen. There’s, we call it a mindset, money, and life show. 80% of it’s mindset. We will go into the technical aspects and talk about things like risk parity, portfolios, complex portfolios, and how do you work a 72(t) tax, SEPP plan. 

If you don’t know what that is, it’s, hopefully I’m peaking your interest because that’s a tool you can use to retire earlier. So we’ll do the technical stuff, but we’ll do a lot of mindset stuff. And then we talk about life, because, we talked earlier about registered life planners and what people don’t realize is you don’t want a financial planner just to manage your numbers. 

They want to help you realize your dreams. And in many ways, they’re financial therapists because we all have our own baggage that we bring to money. And you have to unpack that baggage to unpack. Why do you have the habits you do, and how do we reorganize those habits into healthier habits?

So that you can retire early or buy that second home without having it as a burden on the beach. You can do all these things as long as you assess your priorities. And people don’t necessarily focus on what are my priorities? What is my money supposed to do? It’s a tool that helps me realize a robust life.

Daniel Wrenne: Right. It’s a tool. Net worth is not really—it’s important metric to track to, for example, see how you’re progressing. But the question is progressing to what? Progressing to more net worth in itself doesn’t do anything for you. 

Bill Yount: Yeah, and you know what? You reach your number. You can retire then what? For me. It’s gonna be podcasting. I see no end for this. And I probably will take better care of my health when I’m not working than I am now. And hopefully improve my habits there. And I will travel more with my wife and see my kids and be a grandparent, hopefully someday.

You want to have time for these things, and you wanna have the health in order to be able to do these things. And money without health is not wealth. 

Daniel Wrenne: rRight. Yep. Yep. You gotta think about all of it. Bill, it’s been fun catching up with you. I’ve appreciated you coming on. And make sure y’all listening, check out Bill’s podcast, especially if you’re later in your career. And I know that’s the focus area for your group. 

Bill Yount: Yeah, I mean you can reach out to me personally at bill@catchinguptofi.com. I love meeting new people. I love chatting about this stuff. That’s the best part about this financial literacy space. As an adult, it’s harder to make adult friends physically.

And it’s how do we live longer? We have community. That’s the number one thing, is to have a well built out community, a network, and I’d say 80% to 90% of my friends are in the financial literacy space. I see them virtually. I go to conferences like Bogle Heads, FinCon, Economy is a conference, and I see ’em every year.

And they become real fr friends in real life. I’ve seen my co-host of the show six times in the last six months because of the conferences we’ve gone to and our proximity. Yeah. Isolation when you retire is a real deal. That’s where depression comes from. And there’s a significant problem with depression as people retire, and I would say even more so for physicians because of this sort of being wrapped up in their world.

And then it is just like when your kids finished school and a lot of your friends were school based on their friends and parents of them. When you finish work and when I walk out the door for my last shift, I’m gonna be forgotten the next day. Yeah. And I’m not gonna carry necessarily my work friends forward.

So it is just like exercising your body. You’ve gotta exercise your relationships. If I may say so. 

Daniel Wrenne: Yeah. And that’s one of those things. You gotta keep up the exercise, you gotta hit the gym, you gotta text your buddy happy birthday, or you gotta keep up with your friends. It doesn’t happen by default. 

Bill Yount: Yeah. We’ve made new friends here today. I’ve gotten to meet you. Thank you for reaching out. Thank you for inviting me to be on your show. It isn’t just about my story, it’s about using my story to reach others, and I hope we’ve done so today.

Daniel Wrenne: Yeah, I think we have. I appreciate it, Bill. 

Bill Yount: All right, we’ll see each other hopefully soon and meet you in real life.

No guests or clients appearing on the podcast received any form of compensation for their appearance and obtained no other benefit from us. It should not be assumed that every client has had the same experience.