First post - we fired our financial "advisor," next steps?

[wa2106]

welcome man!

Thanks Bro!

Not sure OP is a man...

[Koi1217]

Nope! I'm not but I did live in California so am used to it.

[Ozarka]

Hey there! I'm sure it can be overwhelming and stressful but just wanted to say kudos to you for taking (back) control of your finances. Just keep in mind as long as you're moving in the right direction then you're making progress. You got this!

[STATscans]

Before figuring out all that other stuff I would try to figure out why you have so little saved given your age and incomes.

Is there a ball park number chart for where physicians should be at certain age in NW? There are tables on the internet for NW versus age, but they are for the person who started working at age 22 and not commanding 200k plus a year income.

There should be one for physicians.

[Koi1217]

This is a great question. I'm always curious about geoarbitrage and what kind of situation we would be in were we not in Boston and before that the SF area. Was listening to the WCI podcast with Dr Nisha Mehta from the spring and they were talking about the choice of location. I wonder esp with the Boston and NY areas that have such heavy medical industry how people manage the HCOL vs savings vs income.

[extremerouge]

Is there a ball park number chart for where physicians should be at certain age in NW? There are tables on the internet for NW versus age, but they are for the person who started working at age 22 and not commanding 200k plus a year income.

There should be one for physicians.

In one of the WCI books I think the formula was NW= yrs in practice*income/4

[Tim]

NW and retirement savings are different. If you are using the 25 times gross as your bench mark for retirement , ROT would be :

year working x gross x 20% for retirement only.

Gross - taxes - retirement @ 20% = spending
This is where NW and HCOL come in. Not much left for wealth accumulation beyond retirement savings. Rationalization of an expensive house being wealth accumulation. Lower gross and higher housing is the disadvantage of the coastal HCOL areas. Geographic arbitrage allows higher comp, lower housing and additional savings/investing.

[Tim]

In one of the WCI books I think the formula was NW= yrs in practice*income/4

This would be 25% savings. 20% retirement + 5% wealth.