I'm a Multi-Millionaire Doctor Unmotivated to Work Another 13 Years

Renee is in San Jose. Hi, Renee. How are you? Good afternoon, Dave. Thank you for taking my call. Sure. What's up? I'm 47 years old and I need help finding motivation to work for another 13 years until I'm 60 years old. I'm going to try to preempt your questions. I have about 2.1 million in various 401ks and about 1.6 million in stocks and bonds and a 20k savings emergency fund in my bank. As I said, I'm 47 years old. I've never married, no kids. I support my parents who are in their 80s and I have no debt. My three houses are paid off and I've paid off my medical school loans. I make about 200k a year as a doctor and in the context of my parental caregiving responsibilities, I met with a financial advisor last year to ask how it would be financially if I had to stop working in order to care for my parents in the setting of COVID and she said I could stop working and have enough money to support myself. Now, if I work another 13 years until I'm 60 years old, I'll get free health insurance for the rest of my life and I can start receiving my pension at age 60 years instead of at age 65 years. What do you like about your work? What do you not like about it? Thank you for asking. I love my job. I love seeing patients. I feel so blessed. It's such a privilege. If I had to take care of my mom, I don't know if I could work at the same time. I wouldn't want to put her in a nursing home because then I wouldn't be able to see her. You don't need motivation to work for 13 more years if you love everything about it. What is it you don't like? What do I not like? Well, work is overwhelming these days in the setting of COVID. I always work more than my paid hours and I accept that. If I truly didn't feel the need to work, I might go to music school. I play the piano and the violin and it's always been a dream of mine to apply to a music conservatory. Yeah, you know, Renee, here's the deal. You're a renaissance woman. $3.7 million, you're a doctor and now you want to go to a music conservatory. Is there anything this woman can't do? You're amazing. Yeah, everybody's going, oh, I feel a little bit worse about myself, but Renee, Dave's right. You don't need motivation. You need a mission and I think you've got to say it's okay. I think you have to let yourself off the hook. I've heard these calls before. Is there some sense of, and I don't want to use the word guilt in the normal sense that we use it with a, like you did something wrong, but there's some sort of guilt or shame that you have when you allow yourself to envision not being a doctor because you do love taking care of patients, but you've got this other side of you that you want to explore. Is there some sort of guilt or shame you're dealing with? I wouldn't call it guilt or shame. What would you call it? Lost opportunity. Yeah. All right. So if in the next 13 years I develop arthritis or lose my hearing, will I regret not having taken the chance of getting my skills in place? The answer is yes. I think the answer is yes. That's what I hear. What do you think the answer is? Think it's yes? You think you'll regret it? There's a high chance I would regret it. I mean, there are other outlets for music. It's just that our local orchestras and string quartets aren't meeting currently. All right. Let me ask you this really quick. Let me ask you this. What kind of a doctor are you? General practice? Is a specific type of medicine you do? I'm an OBGYN. I deliver babies. Okay. That's awesome. So therein lies the extra hours, right? You just keep delivering babies. I think you're at a position professionally and financially where you could draw back a little bit and not work as much as you are and begin to pursue some of this. Cut your practice in half. I agree with that. And pursue and get the best of both worlds. Get the joy of delivering babies that you still have joy from and you love your patients, but you're just doing too much of it and it's got you boxed out of doing other things you want to do. Cut your practice in half. You can afford to do whatever you want to do. If you're asking us mathematically, you're a financial advisor is right. You could quit your job and you can figure out a way to live on $3.7 million. I think you struggle through here. But I think you get too much joy and satisfaction from your medical career. I think you just structured it to where it's eating you alive. It's just eating into what you really want to do. I think you do what Dave says, Renee. Here's why. Let's say you cut back on the practice. Guess what? There's always going to be more babies. So you can ramp up. This isn't a risky situation here. Dial in a little bit. Are we going to have a COVID generation that are all born because people are at home? Renee's the one to ask. I think we're seeing that, aren't we, Renee? A baby boom? Actually, it's the opposite. People don't want to be around each other. There is some increased domestic violence, unfortunately. Yeah, I knew that. But economically due to job loss and uncertainty, health insurance loss, we've actually seen a decrease in the number of babies born per month. Yeah. Wow. Okay. I never thought about it. Wow. Okay. So anyway, yes, I would pull back. I would give you permission to cut your practice roughly in half or more. The only reason I wouldn't quit completely is I also think you'll regret that because I think you get a level of joy out of this. Yes, I agree with that. Thank you for that. The three of us are on the same page. So I used to make over $300K, which was my base pay. And I have given up operating, which is doing surgery on women. And as of last year, I did give up labor and delivery. So I'm no longer on call on weekends, nights and holidays. So I went from full-time, which is in doctor's world, 80 to 90 hours per week, to part-time, which is about 50 to 60 hours per week. And that gave you some relief. But you're still going hard. You're still going hard. And so I don't know what portion of the practice. I don't know how to parse out an obese practice. But I would parse it out in some way to where you cut back to, I don't know, whatever you want to call it, 30 hours or whatever. I would keep my toe in that water, though. I don't think I would walk away cold. And I don't think you have to, to explore the music stuff. Because as you said, some of the music is coming back a little slower than other areas of the culture. And so I got lots of friends in the music business here in Nashville, and they were kind of wishing that it was going better. A lot of them are struggling. So, yeah. This is The Ramsey Show.