SD Version - Financial Planning Needed for a Dentist - Basics Part 4

@Dr Bhavdeep Ahuja
Basics Part 4
We use finance in innumerable everyday financial scenarios like making a budget for household or even our clinic. Finance accords us a more narrow focus towards our own hard earned money. Doctors and Dentists need to give time to gain knowledge of assets and liabilities by undergoing a basic training / workshop on financial literacy. As health professionals, we tend to keep on working till we are physically able to and we think there is no such thing as retirement age and thus, we won’t need a huge retirement corpus. Unfortunately, we are wrong. What we need actually is an investment strategy to preserve wealth after crossing the age of 55 (can be kept at 60 as well) instead of taking aggressive investment decisions. We also need to have a contingency fund equivalent to six months of household expenses with adequate health covers for self and spouse. Personal finance management is a term that covers managing our money along with saving and investing. It encompasses budgeting, banking, insurance, investments, retirement planning and tax planning. We all face investment and financing dilemmas but having a firm grasp of finance always helps make those decisions. All of us deal with finance especially in our clinics and hospitals as we need to be able to make the financial argument for managing our budgets. Many of us more or less immerse in the sheltered world of medicine and dentistry for several years for our education. After graduating, we face immediate entrustment with a significant debt sometimes along with a meager startup income. It is no wonder that many of us squander all our money in enjoying life trying to compensate for those extra ‘study trapped’ years of life, instead of sensibly investing for the future or paying off our loans. Thus, our medical / dental syllabus needs some basic personal finance training during our educational years. It may, however, seem counter-intuitive but the time to learn the basics of financial management is during education when we don’t have any income. That way, we can come out smart, straight away and know immediately, how we want to manage our finances and the further choices in career and life can be chosen based on our interests and not based on the finances we have.