I have a running joke with many of my doctor clients. When I call, a nurse sometimes picks up and tells me the doctor is doing OT. In most offices in Singapore, OT means overtime. In a hospital it means the operating theatre. They usually laugh.
I work with a lot of doctors at different stages of their careers, including couples where both are doctors. Their money questions overlap with everyone else’s: time with their children, their own retirement, enough set aside for the people who depend on them. What is different is how a medical career runs, and the decisions that come with it. This page walks through the ones my doctor clients bring to me most often.
Why a doctor’s finances look different
Doctors are busy well beyond their patients. On top of clinical work, many sit more papers and exams than most professions ask for, some do research, and others are starting young families at the same time. Shift work and call days mean long hours and broken sleep.
The pay at the start is also lower than people expect, especially for junior doctors. There are some hard years before the career progresses, and they often overlap with the first family commitments.
For most, the income rises later in the career. By then, the habit of putting finances off for later is well set. I wrote about how that habit forms in Nobody Trains a Doctor to Think About Money.
Good at medicine, and still untrained in money
Getting into medicine in Singapore takes excellent grades and much more, and the doctors I work with are some of the most capable people I meet. In my experience, that ability does not carry over to financial planning on its own, and the job leaves little time to build it.
If a lawyer needs an operation, they find a surgeon, however capable they are. If a doctor needs legal help, they find a lawyer. I ask my doctor clients why their money should be any different.
When a doctor tells me they want to manage their own investments, I go through three things with them, which I call SIT: skills, interest and time. Doing it well needs all three. Some doctors enjoy investing and know it well. In my experience, few have all three, and time is the one most often missing.
One couple I work with are both busy doctors with children. The husband wanted to manage his own investments. I turned to his wife with a question, on purpose, because the time would come out of their life together and I wanted them both to see what it would cost. Say it takes two hours a week to learn, research and keep up with the markets. Where do those two hours come from, his work or his family? Which one would she agree to give up?
Only some things in life can be handed to someone else. Of the two, financial planning is the one that can.
Investing between shifts
Doctors who invest on their own tend to fit it in when they have time. Markets keep moving while you are on call, in surgery, studying for a paper or on holiday with your family, and you may not look at your investments for days or even weeks. A portfolio that needs you to watch it closely is a poor fit for those hours. It is better set up from the start to cope with the weeks you cannot look at it, with someone keeping an eye on it for you.
Some also watch only the share price, which is one small signal among many. The wider economy and the forces behind a market rarely get looked at.
In my experience, younger doctors take the most risk here. They have mostly invested through the rising markets of recent years, so they have not yet lived through a real downturn with their own money. Some pick up tips from friends with no training in this, and some put a large share of their money into cryptocurrency. I have seen a doctor borrow to buy highly speculative cryptocurrency and lose hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Others ask ChatGPT or read online and come away with a simple answer: just buy the S&P 500, or the STI, or tech. Each of these can have a place in a portfolio, and some of the portfolios I build for clients include the S&P 500, though never as the whole portfolio. Putting everything into one market leaves a blind spot. In 1989, by some measures, Japan’s stock market was bigger than America’s. The Nikkei index then fell about 80% over the next two decades, and its price only passed the 1989 level again in 2024, 34 years later. I am not predicting this for the S&P 500. One index is still one market. I explain how I choose between index funds and active funds in What an Index Fund Cannot Do.
Returns are what we see, and risk is what we don’t. More on this in The Risks Hiding Inside a Diversified Portfolio and Everyone Counts the Return. Almost No One Counts the Anxiety.
With a good income, many doctors also have a bank’s wealth team looking after part of their money. Some of the doctors I meet hold investments there that carry more risk than they realise. Most have done well in recent years, because markets have mostly gone up. What I check is whether they know what they own, and how it fits with the rest of their plan.
The landed home in your mid-30s
Many of my more established doctor clients save hard to buy an expensive home, often landed property, sometimes while still in their mid-30s. Some stretch to the limit, with the housing loan taking close to half of their take-home pay.
One couple in their 30s bought a home for more than $6 million, spent hundreds of thousands on renovation, and were left with less than $50,000 in the bank. That is a lot of risk in one place. Their savings for retirement and for their children’s education went on hold, which pushes back both when that saving starts and when they can afford to stop work.
People tend to treat their first home as an investment. A home you live in is hard to use that way, because you cannot sell it while you still need a roof over your head. I admire the commitment, though. A $20,000 monthly mortgage gets paid without a second thought. When I suggest $2,000 a month for retirement, suddenly there is a problem.
I do not judge anyone’s choice of home. I want it done responsibly, with the rest of the plan still standing. More in So Why Do People Still Buy Property? and The Millionaire With Four Years of Retirement Money.
If any of this sounds familiar, you can message me on WhatsApp and we can talk it through.
Cover that matches the loan
A bigger home means a bigger loan, and the protection often stays where it was. I have seen housing loans in the millions with life cover of around $300,000, and children depending on that income. Very few people sit down and work out how much cover they need, so gaps like this go unnoticed until someone looks.
When one of you steps back
Doctors often marry other doctors. In a lot of these households, one keeps pushing hard on their career while the other moves to a lighter path: a polyclinic, part-time work, or locum work as a GP. It can be a very good choice for a family, and it needs planning. If half the household income is going to drop or stop, you want to know the impact well before it happens.
Planning ahead is what makes the choice possible. Done early, it lets one of you take a sabbatical or work part-time without putting your long-term goals at risk. One couple I work with show how this can look. He does GP locums full-time at a little over $100 an hour, which can come to around $20,000 a month. She works part-time, and they take turns looking after the children.
More on this in Can You Afford to Step Back for Six Months?
Your children’s education, including overseas
Doctors usually want their children to have a good tertiary education, and some are thinking of overseas. Excellent grades do not guarantee a place in medical school here, and when a place does not come, the overseas route can be the way forward. All in, it can come to around $500,000 today, and around $1 million per child in 20 years’ time if costs rise by about 3.5% a year. With two or three children, that sum doubles or triples.
You will not know for many years which route your child will take, so the money for the overseas option needs to be building long before then. More in Straight As, and Still No Place and Your Child’s Education Should Not Cost You Your Retirement.
Moving into private practice
Somewhere between the mid-30s and mid-40s, a lot of specialists start thinking about private practice. It means a second job title: business owner, on top of doctor.
Different specialties build a private practice in different ways. An anaesthetist, for example, gets almost all their work through referrals from other doctors, and those doctors already have people they work with, so building that network as a newcomer takes time. Running your own clinic also brings payroll, rent, accounting and legal matters, most of which are new to a doctor.
There are a few ways in. Some open their own clinic, some partner with other doctors, and some join a healthcare group that runs operations centrally. Each needs a different amount of capital and comes with its own downsides. There can be a period before the income settles, so the move affects every other commitment you have. It is worth working through the numbers for your family before you decide.
Other paths a medical career can take
Some doctors go deep into their field, speaking at conferences overseas and building a name as a thought leader. That takes real effort on top of regular work. Others, often GPs, choose their own clinic or locum work for more flexible hours, and telemedicine now adds the option of working from home. Later in a career, some move into teaching or part-time and project work.
Each of these changes how much you earn and how steady that income is, and your plan has to change with it.
How I work with doctors
Many of the doctors I work with come to me with pieces already in place: policies bought years apart, investments in different places, a home loan, and plans for their children and retirement that nobody has looked at together.
My work is to bring all of it into one view, show you what each part is doing, and compare it against the alternatives before anything is recommended. Sometimes the right answer is that what you have is working. Sometimes it is to simplify, restructure, or free up money that is doing very little.
You do not have to move everything over to me. If you have a private banker or other policies you want to keep, that is fine. My role is to be the one person who looks at how it all fits.
Being busy is often the reason this has not been done yet. The effort is front-loaded: a couple of conversations and some information gathering, then periodic reviews. I stay your point of contact for advice, and my support team handles the paperwork and follow-through.
Where to start
The first conversation is just a conversation, about 30 minutes. We get to know each other, I explain how I work, and I ask about your situation. You do not need to have anything organised first. Bring whatever you already have, and we can work from there. Then we both decide whether it makes sense to go further.