106 | Bryan Jepson | EM physician and financial planner | Living rich vs living wealthy | Attributes for financial success

Bryan Jepson MD and CFP, author of The Physician's Path to True Wealth: 12 steps to gaining control over your money and your time – you can find it on Amazon and at this website for free Bryan Jepson MD, CFP® | physician finance

Disclaimers:

This is not specific financial advice, this is general education. Talk with your own advisor or schedule with Bryan to get specific advice 

The earlier you can get financially literate and work on a plan the better

Bryan is an emergency medicine physician, along his journey in medicine he also spent 5 years working in Autism before coming back to EM full time

The covid pandemic and a feeling of stagnation and desire to keep learning prompted Bryan to pursue a master’s degree in finance 

Bryan finds familiarity in his role as a physician to his role as a financial planner. You listen to the client and come up with a plan that fits their needs

Bryan talks about the difference between riches and wealth; discretionary income is the income above your mandatory expenses – and what you do with that extra income is how you become wealthy or rich

Riches are the material things you may spend that money on, car, house, toys

Wealth is the money you could spend but instead save or invest instead

The goal is to create assets so that your income is no longer needed. Buying back your time

When you have true wealth, you can make decisions with your time

Working towards being financially independent prevents burnout

Choosing to work vs working because you have to is easier, and makes you a better provider

Key attributes to develop to be financially successful: Be patient – assets grow slowly. Be consistent in investing. It is boring. Be honest with what you know and what you don’t know so you can spend some time educating yourself. Courage, because it does take some risk taking to invest instead of just saving

If you keep all your money in cash, you are guaranteed to lose purchasing power

The longer your time frame the better the stock market will perform for you

Creating discretionary income is difficult at lower incomes levels. But I do still believe you can retire from EMS. One way that I was able to save and invest as a paramedic was working overtime

Having higher incomes does speed things along but it is not the cure for financial problems because we all have a tendency to spend what we make – fundamentally it’s the same problem

We talk about the vehicles we drive and how we have utilized them to save more money

But spend money on