Self care is...
- Recognizing that you must know yourself and pay attention to yourself before serving others - at work and at home. It's being attentive to YOUR particular physical, mental and emotional needs.
- Maintaining your health by keeping up appointments with a doctor, dentist or other wellness practitioner.
- Ensuring your ability to tackle challenges each day by gaining energy through nutritious food, exercise, and adequate sleep.
- Preventing defaults on your emotional bank account. And one type of withdrawal that could easily lead to a default is having problems with your real bank account.
Self-care frees you up to focus on what's most important to you
About a year and a half ago, I published this post about financial wellness. Well, I'm back on the soapbox after being motivated by a great group of financially-minded physicians in the social media sphere. We all descended on the FinCon Money and Media Expo last month, and it was an awesome display of what community can do.
I don't consider myself a financial blogger; my focus is wellness with an emphasis on how we should better know and take care of ourselves as busy women physicians. Money is a huge source of stress for many of us. Just like gaining self-knowledge, gaining financial knowledge will improve your self-care and in turn your overall health and happiness.
Figuring out how to do this in a time-efficient and effective manner is the crux. There's a TON of information out there, and it can be confusing. Here are some resources that I've found useful for learning more about finance, especially at pertains to women physicians, from some awesome ladies that I met at FinCon:
- BC Krygowski writes about downsizing and avoiding the dreaded lifestyle creep that seems inevitable as physicians transition from residents to attendings and grow their families. Ever felt like you're outsourcing everything in your life because you have no time, which in turn means you have to work more to afford the outsourcing? She and her husband (both doctors) transformed their lives over the years from New York McMansion owners to a more simple existence for their family - which translates to both of them working much less than they used to and traveling + writing much more (she also writes fantasy books).
- Eliza Minimal MD "retired" from medicine before she even turned 40 to pursue the things she's most passionate about: educating her children and traveling to far-off places. She's now back seeing dermatology patients in a clinic 1-2 days a week because she missed the mental challenge of medicine, but she exemplifies a life of minimal, intentional living. She recently published a very powerful post about stories we tell ourselves, that we're "haves" or "have-nots", and how they're completely up to us.
- Barbara Hamilton blogs at Tired Superheroine about financial wellness and navigating work-life balance as a female physician in a male-dominated field (interventional radiology). Check out her blog for practical tips about time management and simplifying life as much as possible with a young family and a leadership role in her practice.
- Bonnie Koo of Wealthy Mom MD spent years working at Morgan Stanley before attending medical school and training as a dermatologist. Her blog focuses specifically on money issues for women physicians - considerations for high income earners, blended families, couples with a significant earnings differential, etc. I've been interviewed for her "Real Women Physicians" series, and I've also guest posted on her blog to discuss parenting issues around money.
Bonnie happens to be offering a new course this fall called Money for Women Physicians*. It's an 8 week, live interactive course that marries financial education with mindset coaching only open to women physicians. A big bonus: completion of the course also awards 5 CME credits, which means you can use CME funds or pretax educational accounts for the tuition. Enrollment is only open this week (October 7 through October 14), so if this is of interest to you, please check it out!
I consider all of these ladies to be not only blogger colleagues but friends. They're examples of women employing financial empowerment as a means of self care. I hope you find as much inspiration in their stories as I have!
* The link for the MWP course is an affiliate link, which means that if you purchase the course through this link, I receive a fee. You are welcome to go through other means, but using this link in no way changes your purchase price or course experience.
Financial intelligence is certainly crucial for physicians.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, while the writers featured in this post are admirable in their financial wisdom, they are in a markedly different place than the majority (only KC Krygowsky is in an average pay specialty but her husband is a physician as well), and trying to follow them can be disheartening and even depressing at times.
Interventional radiologists and dermatologists are among the highest paid specialists, and they make up an absolutely tiny fraction of female physicians. Their reality does not map onto 99% of us. Additionally, a good number of us are married to non-physicians whose incomes are significantly lower.
Those of us who graduated about 10-15 year ago and are in the "standard" specialties (the vast majority of us either IM or FM), who did not have jobs at large investment firms before going to med school, and did not have mom and dad paying for our education, have a very different reality.
We were stuck paying student loans (at >6%, regardless of our credit). We have kids who are now teens or pre-teens (if we were crazy enough to have them in residency) and need money for college (and will not qualify for any help because mom makes too much money) in just a few short years. We saw our pay stay stagnant yet housing prices and cost of living soar in the past decade. We have seen the rise of the administrator/management class in every organization where we work with their balooning directives and mandates and metrics and also salaries/bonuses, while our autonomy, freedom, free time and effective income have shrunk. How do we fight back financially from this?
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