#45| Money Guidance That Matches Medicine: Aligning Advice With Your Life

We sit down with Lauren Oschman of Vestia Advisors to demystify how to choose a financial advisor who truly understands physician life, from RVUs and contracts to maternity leave and disability. We dig into independence, credentials, and fee models so you can interview with confidence.

• What real financial planning includes beyond investments
• Why independence and conflicts of interest matter
• CFP and ChFC credentials and specialized expertise
• Fee structures explained: commissions, AUM, flat fees, hybrids
• How physician finances differ and why stakes are higher
• Risk management, asset protection, and insurance fit
• One question that reveals decision support through change
• How to connect with Lauren and find more resources

If you are interviewing a financial advisor, Lauren recommends starting with these five key questions:

1. Do you work with doctors? If so, how many?
Understand their experience with physician households and how familiar they are with the financial realities of medical careers.

2. What will you actually do for me?
Go beyond investments. Ask for real, practical examples of how they support clients in areas like contracts, compensation, loans, disability claims, maternity leave planning, and more.

3. Are you independent?
Clarify whether they provide unbiased advice or are tied to a specific bank, insurance company, or private equity structure.

4. What are your qualifications?
Look for respected designations such as CFP or ChFC, and ask about any specialized credentials that may be relevant to physician families.

5. How do you get paid?
Understand their fee structure and identify any potential conflicts of interest in how they earn compensation.

Follow Lauren on Instagram or visit her website for contact details and to learn more about her services.

If this conversation was meaningful to you, feel free to reach out or share it with a friend, your partner, or another physician spouse navigating similar decisions. Also, please consider subscribing or leaving a review to help more physician families discover the show. 

Connect with me on Instagram or email me at amanda@abtnhomes.com with your thoughts, topic ideas, questions, or even guest suggestions.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

All right, friends, welcome back to Behind the White Coat. Today's episode is one that I have been excited about because it's actually round two conversation with somebody you already know and trust around here. Lauren Oshman is back on the podcast. And if you listened to her last episode, you already know she has a gift for making money conversations feel less overwhelming and way more doable. Lauren is the partner and CEO of Vestia Advisors, and she specializes in working with physician families, especially women physicians, helping them align their finances with real life, real values, and real seasons. Today we are getting very practical. We're talking about how to choose a financial advisor and different ways advisors are paid. Because let's be honest, this is one of those topics that people know they need to understand, but often don't feel comfortable asking about. So if you have ever wondered, how do I even know if an advisor is right for us? What should I be asking before signing anything? Or why does this all feel so confusing? This episode is for you. Lauren, welcome back to the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:19

Thank you so much. That was a lovely introduction.

SPEAKER_00 1:23

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:24

You feel so good right now.

SPEAKER_00 1:25

Yeah. No, we are happy to have you. And I know the last time that you were on, I could have talked to you for hours. And I actually had friends that had reached out to me after the initial podcast, which I know they ended up reaching out to you as well. I've talked with several listeners. I know, I know. And obviously the need is there. I know that I had additional questions. I had people reach out to me for additional questions. And so that's why we needed you to come back. And I'm just grateful that you agreed to come back on.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Oh my gosh. Yeah, I was so happy that you asked. I'm excited about this.

SPEAKER_00 1:59

Yes, yes, me too. So I'm gonna just jump right in and uh start with some questions for you. So when a physician or a physician family is starting to look for a financial advisor, what are the non-negotiables they should be paying attention to? And beyond like credentials or titles, but what are some things that they should be paying attention to?

SPEAKER_01 2:21

This is such a great question. I just I love this topic overall because you're exactly right. It's almost, you know, I always kind of think about the physician, like I work with physicians all the time. I'm talking with physicians all the time. And I think about how little I know when I foray out into the world of choosing a doctor. So normally, because occupationally, I understand the landscape of medicine and different specializations and all that. So I usually know what type of specialist I'm looking for. I think average population probably doesn't even know that. But then how do I actually know if someone is good at what they do and is more importantly going to be able to do what I need and what I'm looking for and who's someone that I'm going to be able to trust with something that's so important to me, which I mean, in this case would be my health. Or in the case of what we're talking about today is your money. It's really important and the stakes are high. And so I think sometimes what feels right is just to do nothing because you don't know how to go do something. So I have five questions that I recommend that you ask in the course of interviewing an advisor. And some of these would come up, I think, if you Google questions to ask a financial advisor, some of them maybe wouldn't. And I think about this through the lens of a physician family looking for an advisor. So the list is gonna be a little bit different than maybe generically, what should I ask an advisor? The first one, I think the most important question to ask, and this is not, I mean, to your point, it's not fees, it's not credentials, it's not anything like that. Do you work with doctors? And if so, how many? Like what is the representation of physicians in your financial planning practice? Right. The reason that's important is because if an advisor, and typically an advisor will work with somewhere between 80 and 120 clients, depending on kind of what their structure for support is and all of that sort of thing. So that's a typical number. Let's say they're working with 100 clients, two of them are physicians, and they have engineers and teachers and farmers and business owners and, you know, all these other types of special or occupations thrown in there. Right. It's going to be hard for them to keep up with the changing landscape of medicine and how that ultimately impacts your household finances. Or to think through, I mean, the the most recent tax bill change or tax law change is a great example of most of the big changes there impact business owners. And there are physician business owners, certainly, or maybe spouses of physicians who are business owners. So we know our way around that, but there are small things in that new tax bill that actually have meaningful implication for certain physician households.

SPEAKER_02 4:48

Right.

SPEAKER_01 4:48

And so we're always looking at things through the lens of how does this impact the typical physician household so that we can bring doctors the relevant information that they need to know and the considerations that should be on their mind.

SPEAKER_02 5:01

Right.

SPEAKER_01 5:02

So I think 20% of your clients are doctors. You probably have a better sense. For us, over 90% of our clients as a firm are physicians. For my personal practice, I have one client that's a non-physician. I consume healthcare news. I'm listening to what's going on in different specialties and different, you know, how private equity is impacting medicine, how that's impacting physicians, because that impacts so many of our clients that we can't not pay attention. Yeah. So I think that's probably the most important question to ask is do you work with doctors? And then understand what's their comfort level around physicians and physician things.

SPEAKER_00 5:40

Right. And understanding that. Because I think also not only with you having over 90% of your clients being physicians, but having a background, you know, within your family of knowing the family dynamics and physician family dynamics, I think that helps because it's not cookie cutter, right? And what works for physician A doesn't necessarily work for physician B. Their finances could be different, their goals could be different. Where they are in training as opposed to being out of training could be really different. So I think you having that understanding makes a huge difference as well.

SPEAKER_01 6:13

Yeah, I think that's a great point. I'm glad you added that because my father is an interventional cardiologist for those who maybe didn't listen to the last episode. And so I grew up in around medical families as a part of a medical family. I understand the chaos, craziness that comes along with that. And how much is often on the non-physician spouse, or you know, if it's two physicians and the child care demands and, you know, just everything that's pulling families all different directions. We train our service team to understand that doctors are some of the busiest people that you're going to find. Their spouses in supporting that level of what they do and how they work are some of the busiest and just all over the place people that you're going to find. And so we need to bring value to physician households, we need to be really diligent and proactive with our follow-up. We need to make sure you know if something is like, hey, this has a hard deadline or it's going to cost you money or something like that, versus this one's totally fine to kick to our next conversation that's planned three months from now.

unknown 7:12

Right.

SPEAKER_01 7:12

And so just understanding how to meet physician families where they are, I think you're right, largely comes from my background seeing that firsthand.

What A Good Advisor Actually Does

SPEAKER_00 7:19

Yep. And I would also like to do a little plug. Lauren, having that understanding, her schedule really works around you as a physician, physician family, where she does have some late nights. We just met last night. So she really has a true understanding, um, not only from the family side of things, but also then the financial side of things too. So I just wanted to give you a little plug for that.

SPEAKER_01 7:43

Yeah, love that. Thank you. So the second question, and again, we're not at credentials or fees or anything like that yet, is what will you actually do for me? So a lot of times, if I'm in a room full of physicians and I ask what I'm a financial planner, what does that mean to you? What do you think that I do? Most of the room goes to investment management, portfolio management, stock picking, something like that. It's a small part of what we actually do for the families that we work with. We do it and I believe we do it well, but it is such a small part of what we do. So if I'm thinking about just in the last two weeks, things that I have helped physicians with. And if you looked across our team, I mean, goodness, this list would be long enough. We could fill the whole podcast with this. Shopping out rates on a construction loan and down payment amount. Like we had a family that really needed to have a certain percentage down payment for this construction loan for their dream home. The bank that they were initially connected with wasn't going to be able to make that happen. And so I got on the phone and I was reaching out to different bankers that I know, getting who they knew. I did that work and then delivered to the doctor what they needed to move forward with the project. Reviewing the financial structure of a contract. I have a doctor that's considering a new job. And so I'm not an attorney. I'm not reviewing the legal ease in the contract, but looking at the financial structure. Just last night, I had a client who was saying, we found out that we're really being underpaid for our productivity. I said, How many RVUs are you doing? By the way, this is another plug. If your compensation is RVU driven and your financial advisor doesn't know what an RVU is, that's a good indication that they don't work with a lot of doctors. So I said, How many RVUs do you do? I just pulled up the data because we subscribed to those data sets, showed him he's producing in the 90th percentile. His pay is just a hair above the 50th. So we start looking at like what are the dollar per RVU conversion factors that they probably need to be negotiating for as they're renegotiating their contract with the hospital?

SPEAKER_02 9:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:39

Planning for the finances of maternity leave. So, you know, I have a client that just had her first baby. She's a very busy surgeon looking at not just the actual time she's going to be on maternity leave, but then also she's very productive. She's one of the highest productivity surgeons in that group. And so we know that her next 12 months of productivity is not going to be what it normally is, meaning that those productivity bonuses are going to be lower as well. Oh, and then I had a surgeon who had to file a disability claim. So he started to have, he's actually going to be on a future episode of our podcast because, you know, I think this is a topic that's really important that surgeons understand. But he just from a lot of wear and tear on the joints in his hands has gotten to the point where he can't do surgery at anywhere near the volume he needs to be able to do to collect the pay that he needs for his family, helping him navigate that claim. He's still gonna be working full-time in hospital leadership and collecting 100% disability payout for not being able to be a clinically practicing surgeon. None of that was investment related. All of that was things outside of investments, but very crucial that impact the household finances. Also got a call from a doctor here locally who finishing up a construction project again of their dream home and it went over budget, which is was not totally unexpected. Yeah, but they were freaking out because they were like, we don't have the cash. I had planned for this and kind of scrolled a little bit away for them. Um, just we, I mean, we've been working together for a really, really long time. So we had talked about this. I was like, I'm gonna park a little bit just in something safe, high interest bearing. That way, if we need some extra money at the end, it's there. But they were really concerned about too, if the mortgage payment ends up being more than what we had projected, what are we gonna have to give up in terms of the other things that are important to our family? And so we scheduled a meeting kind of last minute to walk through their scenarios, walk through their long-term plans, walk through their cash flow, and just make sure that they felt really confident. Cause I mean, they were very panicked and that's what they needed in that moment. So understanding and getting those granular examples of if I hire you, what are you going to do for me?

SPEAKER_02 11:39

Right.

SPEAKER_01 11:40

And making sure that that's something that you are actually going to find helpful and worth a monetary investment for your family. Because if you want all of that or whatever that looks like for you, and then the advisor that you hire is a stock picker, you might do great in terms of stock returns, but you could be missing so much in all of those other areas to where ultimately that's working against the return that you're getting because you have, you know, kind of this leakage of inefficiency everywhere else.

SPEAKER_00 12:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:07

So a lot more than just investments. Yes, ideally. And then the next couple of questions do kind of get into structure and credentials. I really like asking the question, are you independent? I think this one's really important, particularly for physicians, because I run into a lot of physicians that work with a financial advisor who ultimately is an agent of an insurance company. I am licensed to help with insurance because physicians often need term life insurance or disability insurance. We're an independent company. I am one of eight partners that own our company. So if you need term life insurance, I can go to the market. And there are hundreds of companies that offer term life insurance. We can look at based on your health situation, based on how much coverage we need, costs that we're able to pay. We can go find you the best option. I might bring you a different company for you versus your partner or your spouse because your health situations might be slightly different. So, same thing with disability insurance. There are, depending on the time we're talking, five or six companies that do good own occupation coverage for doctors. We'll go get quotes from all of them. We'll look at the ones that are most cost effective. We'll look at anything in your situation and help show you why the one we think is best for you is a good fit. I think it's really important to know that you're getting unbiased advice in that way, not, oh, we didn't have to go any further than insurance company A because they had a solution for you. But it's like, is it the most competitive? Is it what you need? Does it have the coverages, you know, the details that you need? We don't know. Then the other thing that's come in, I know this is something that's very relevant in medicine as well, is private equity. So there are also a lot of financial advisory firms that are owned by a much bigger entity or have, you know, they don't own the company, it's private equity that owns the company. And I'm not necessarily saying that's bad. I am saying I think it's important to understand. Are you independent? What does that look like? Are there conflicts of interest? If your financial advisor is at the bank and the bank owns certain mutual funds, then that's probably what's going to end up in your portfolio. And again, if that's the best fit for your portfolio, that's not necessarily a deal breaker, but it is something that you should be aware of because you should know that whoever's working for you is truly working in your best interest, going to the market, finding the best fit for your needs. Right. Yeah. No, that's a good point. Yeah. So I think that one's really important. I would ask what their qualifications are. The two kind of gold standard designations in financial planning, certified financial planner, is the one that most people have heard of. The CFP board puts a lot of money into commercials and marketing and all that. So most people have run across that. There's also one that I think is less well known, but is just as good. I mean, they're very equal. The chartered financial consultant, so CHFC, those are interchangeable from an industry perspective. The curriculum is the same. The CFP comes with kind of a board-like exam. Like there's a comprehensive exam, one where there's multiple right answers and you have to choose the best answer for the question.

unknown 15:11

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 15:12

So that's how this certified financial planner designation works. The CHFC has all of the same coursework, a couple of extra classes added in, actually, and no comprehensive exam. So you're getting the same knowledge from those two credentials. They also both come with an uh, you have to certify that you are acting ethically and you have to re-certify that every time you renew those designations. So I think that gives you some good assurance as well that that advisor has had, it's crazy to say that you have had, you know, you need to have training in ethics, but we do as well. Exactly. Especially when we are talking about money and there are conflicts that exist in money and all of that sort of thing. So the CHFC or the CFP, I think is a good thing to look for. It's again, it's not necessarily a deal breaker because if you find an advisor that has been working with doctors for 15 plus years and they have glowing testimonials from doctors that you trust that work with them, they could be very well qualified to serve you without having one of those designations. But I think the designation is a good thing to look for if you're kind of starting cold. And then there are all kinds of other more nuanced things. Like I'm a certified divorce financial analyst. We've, you know, since the pandemic especially been meeting more and more physician couples that are maybe going through divorce. And so, you know, I was like, we need to have this expertise on our team, someone who understands how to think through these things, how to value the assets, how to think about the tax implications of asset division. And so I have that certification. We have other advisors that are credentialed for specific situations. And so we've really tried to build the bench strength of our team. So even if I cannot talk through all of the nuances of like a business exit, and we have some physicians that are, you know, selling their practices to a hospital or, you know, they are experiencing an exit. We have a certified exit planning advisor on our team. So I think just understanding like what are the qualifications of the advisor that you're hiring and also the resources that they have available to them is really helpful because I mean, physicians are so intelligent. You need to make sure that the people that you're hiring can keep up with you.

SPEAKER_00 17:09

No, I think that's great. And I would love to put those five questions in our show notes. And then that way people can kind of dig a little bit deeper on that. I know you did kind of a high bird's eye view. Yeah, I talked fast. Yeah, no, no, no. It's great, but a high bird's eye view of those questions. But I think it's a great starting place for somebody that maybe doesn't know or they're starting to look into hiring someone, at least it gives them a little bit of a starting point.

Independence, Conflicts, And Credentials

SPEAKER_01 17:37

Yeah, no, I love that. And that's four of the five. The fifth I know you're about to ask me. So I'll Yeah, go for it. The fifth one is how do you get paid? Yeah. What is the fee structure? How am I going to be paying you? How do you make money? And the reason for asking this question, I think, is to understand, like, you know, number one, does the fee seem reasonable? But that's very hard to tell if you have no frame of reference to understand how our industry works and how advisors typically get paid. The bigger thing is to understand where are there conflicts in that fee structure? Because again, if the advisor is mostly commission driven, then them getting paid for the time that they're spending with you and the work that they're doing with you depends on you buying something from them. So we want to make sure, and there is no, when we're talking about money, there is no such thing as a conflict-free fee structure. At least I believe. But you need to understand what those conflicts are and the fees need to be transparent. The fee structure needs to be transparent. You need to know what you're paying and how that advisor is getting paid. I'll back up. There are three ways that advisors typically make money. Number one is I mentioned it already, commissions. This is, I'll say, an older school way of compensation for advisors. I still see them every now and again where there are mutual funds that come with commissions for advisors buying and selling them. And so that is a way that advisors can get paid. If they offer insurance products, some of these things could be like, you know, certain things like whole life or, you know, universal life, things like index life, things like that. The insurance industry comes with commission. I mean, I would love to get rid of commissions altogether in everything we do in our business. I can't do that because our clients have said, we want you, like we trust you. We want you to help us find the best disability insurance. Right. Well, to do that, we have to get a commission. What we've done is those all go to a central pot. Advisors do not make any direct commissions at our company. And so that's how we've tried to kind of mitigate that conflict that could exist in that structure. And again, you're seeing the quotes from the different companies. You understand why we're guiding you the way that we are, but commissions are a big way that advisors get paid. The second is for investment management fees. So a percentage of investments that they manage for you. The third structure is flat fee. So those are kind of the three main structures that you'll find out there. And then there are tons of different combinations thereof. So I talked a little bit about the commissions. Investment management fee is probably the most common now. Like that is the one that is most prevalent today. And that's usually a percentage of the total portfolio that an advisor manages for you. It's not the amount that you make, it's the total amount that they manage. And I actually think that's okay. Sometimes people are like, well, wait, if I'm losing money, I still pay a fee. You want your advisor paying attention in a bad market. It could be very important. They should be selling to save you taxes. They should be rebalancing at the bottom to make sure that you're positioned well for the ride back up. So I think it's okay that that fee is assessed on the portfolio value in an upmarket or a down market, but understanding what that amounts to, because it's not all the same. So you'll see advisors that charge as high as 2% for an investment management fee. And then there can also be some fees in the funds and things like that that are in your portfolio. So that can end up being a lot. Typically, what you'll see is around 1%, give or take, but around 1% is pretty typical. A lot of the advisors that charge 1% for investment management will also kind of, I'll say, throw in the financial planning. So they will do some financial planning for you. But again, you're asking that question, what are you going to do for me to understand what's the extent of financial planning you're going to do? Because you're being paid to manage my assets. And those aren't necessarily the same thing. The flat fee is exactly what it sounds like. You pay, you know,$10,000 a year for the investment management, for the financial planning, all of the above. That one's very straightforward. I like it because you know exactly what the advisor's making because they're just getting what you pay to them. So it's the most transparent of all of them because that's coming out of your checking account. Whereas that investment management fee usually comes out of the actual investment accounts. And so it can be a little harder to track. There are a lot of firms that will do a combination. We're one of those. So we charge half a percent to manage investments. We couple that with a monthly fee for the strategic advice and financial planning. There's a reason that we do that. And it all goes back to our physician clients. So if we were one of the investors. Investment management firms. Like we charge 1% to manage investments. Then I would have to say no to an early career physician who came to me without$500,000 plus for me to manage. Because I wouldn't, I would, I know that I would put so much into helping them navigate building a strong foundation and getting all of the pieces of the puzzle filled in outside of investments. And I wouldn't be making any money because they don't have any money yet. And the last thing I want is me thinking, I'm going to tell you not to pay off your student loans, or I'm going to tell you not to make this decision because I need you to put that money into an investment account so I can get paid. Right. I don't want that. I don't want you thinking that. I don't want to think that I want to feel like we have the same priorities. I want to be able to grow your money, but also give you really great advice. And so us having that hybrid fee structure. And again, I don't think any of these fee structures is necessarily right or wrong. Probably the biggest argument that the commission is like the interests aren't really aligned there. But I think whether it's investment management, whether it's flat fee, whether it's a combination of both, I think those can all be okay. It ultimately boils down to is it going to meet your needs? Are you going to ultimately make, and no one can guarantee that you're going to make more than you pay. But we try really hard as we're working with someone in the earlier stages of a relationship to quantify that value. So if I know that we're going to make some change with the investments that's going to save you$1,000 a year in taxes, then that's one step closer to kind of earning that fee that you're paying to us. And so I think, you know, kind of having an understanding. Some of the value is not quantifiable, it's not numerical, but kind of having an understanding of where are you going to be picking up that value, both quantifiably and not. I had a client that I think she had had a friend that had maybe talked to me and was like, oh, that sounds kind of expensive. She was like, honestly, I don't care. Like I've never had that thought. I don't care because I know that we're on track for everything that's important to us in our life. And I know that we don't have to think about it very much at all. And that's what we wanted. And that's why we hired her. Sure. So I don't think any fee structure is necessarily right or wrong. It's is that advisor going to be able to do what you need them to do? And are they going to be paid adequately to do it so that you know they're going to be around for a really long time to continue adding that value for you?

SPEAKER_00 24:18

Right. No, and I'm glad that you went over that and discussed it. Cause I also feel like those fees probably change over time, depending on what that client's needs are, how complicated their finances are, their work structure, if they've got a family versus if they're on their own or it's a double income. And maybe, you know, their spouse is another physician or owning a business. And so that fee structure probably changes as well, right?

SPEAKER_01 24:44

Yeah. And I love that you bring that up because I think we're all conditioned to think about time. We're paying for someone's time. And when I go to the doctor, I have never thought about paying a doctor for their time. In fact, like as time goes on, you spend less and less time with your doctor. And I know so many doctors are like, oh, we want to spend more time with you. I'm paying them for the expertise that they're bringing in that time. Right. So it's almost like I'm so busy and have so much going on all the time. If I can show up and talk to someone for 20 minutes and they can solve my problem and send me on my way, that's what I'm paying them for. It's that expertise that they're bringing. And so, you know, it's not just if you're hiring me, it's not just that I'm a certified financial planner, certified divorced financial analyst. It's that I've been working with doctors for 15 years. So it's not, I mean, I got surprised last week with something that I'd never seen before that rarely happens, but I have a really good sense of what matters. So if someone comes to me with a problem, I can cut to the chase really quickly. I know what matters. I've seen others navigate it. And so I think we're ultimately doing adding more value and less time because of the expertise. And that's ultimately what you're paying for.

SPEAKER_00 25:53

Yeah. No, I'm glad that you added that and couldn't agree with you more. So thank you. Yeah. So I wanted to go back to your question of what is your experience working with physicians and how many of your clients are physicians. So since you specialize working with physicians, how is advising a medical family different from advising someone with more of a traditional career path?

SPEAKER_01 26:16

That's a good question. There, I mean, there are so many ways. Your typical advisor is not thinking about RVU productivity and compensation thresholds and all of that. Number one, the numbers are bigger. So there are typically more zeros in physician scenarios in income, in how much you're spending for childcare and how much you're going to spend on a house and how much you're paying in taxes, how much liability insurance you need to be carrying around. The magnitude is bigger than with a typical financial planner's clients. So your typical financial planner is working with high net worth retirees. So it's those who need to actually take distributions out of their portfolio, or they're working with kind of the high earners, not don't have a portfolio yet. Doctors are in between those two. Doctors build portfolio assets really quickly. They also make a lot of money and the stakes are high because they don't start making that money until 35. You know, so I opened my first retirement account when I was 21 and started putting money into it. And I got all that time for those earnings to compound in that account. For physicians, like when I talk to a room full of medical residents, I'll tell them I count it as a win if they can get out of training without credit card debt. Like if they can break even and not have to use credit cards to get out of training, to me, that's a win. Yeah. What that means is they enter practice at 35-ish, depending on what you do, starting at zero and actually starting negative if you want to be making up for last time, right? Yeah. And then with the student loan. I mean, when I meet with a new physician, new to me physician, I'm expecting them to have about$250,000 in student loan debt. They say a higher number, I'm not scared by that because I've seen it. If they say a lower number, I'm feeling great because we're often planning for more. There are a lot of advisors that you could go out and say, I have 250,000 in student loan debt, or physician couple, you say we have 700,000 in student loan debt. They would have trouble getting their mind around that and understanding whether or not that was surmountable. For me, that's a Tuesday. Yeah. Yeah. And I have the confidence that we can handle it. So I think the magnitude of the numbers is bigger with physicians and the stakes are higher because we don't have as much time. Most doctors don't want to work till they're 65 plus. They would like to be done between 55 and 60, but they're starting at, like I said, around 35. And so we don't have very long to make good decisions, get things on track, and ultimately be delivering what you want to get out of your life. And so I think that's really important. And then the other thing that I think is really important to have a good understanding of is the risks associated, not just with being a physician in the hospital, but being a physician out in the community. So if a physician rear-ends someone just driving around town and that person is in, you know, maybe a tough financial situation, you're wearing scrubs and your physician ID tag, that could be a recipe for disaster if you don't have the right liability coverage in place on your car insurance. It's really important to have an advisor that knows how to look out for those risks for you and knows how to help you cover those. Because simple things, like in Tennessee, you can title an investment account, joint between spouses, as something called tenants by the entirety. That's not the default. If you just set up a joint account, it's going to set up a different way. If you specifically say I want tenants by the entirety, then you'd have to both be named in the same lawsuit for that account to be accessible to creditors.

SPEAKER_02 29:42

Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 29:42

Why do I know that? Because my clients all walk around with a lot of liability. And part of my job is to help put protections around their money.

SPEAKER_00 29:51

I love that you take care of the protection side of things. And we said, you know, big picture of stuff as opposed to just investments, which I think a lot of us have that thought whenever we are talking about financial planning. And so you have opened my eyes to so many other avenues when it comes to talking with a financial planner and things that I need to have in place and updated, right? Maybe we put it in place uh when we were in our 20s during training, and now things have definitely changed. So thank you for covering that.

SPEAKER_01 30:22

Oh, absolutely. Thanks for asking the questions. And I mean, you can see I get excited about these things. I can talk about it all day.

SPEAKER_00 30:28

So yeah, no, and again, I'm sure we'll have more questions after this and have to have you come back. So if a listener walks away remembering just one question that they should ask a potential financial advisor before hiring them, I know you gave your list of five, but just one question. What should that be?

How Advisors Get Paid

SPEAKER_01 30:48

Yeah. So this is I'm gonna give you a bonus here because I think the five are really the pillars of what you need to understand to evaluate whether or not that person is gonna be a good fit and is gonna, again, be able to bring that expertise that you need as a physician. You don't have time to waste. So I was kind of looking at this as like, what's one thing that we could add that's a little bit more nuanced, but I think cuts to the chase of like, can this person support you in the way that an advisor should be supporting a doctor, my opinion. And I think that question is how will you help me make decisions as things change?

SPEAKER_00 31:21

That's a really good one.

SPEAKER_01 31:22

Because I think the one, and I just had, so I had someone reach out to me. She's a surgeon in California. She'd heard me on a podcast or something. And so she had reached out and she said they they had had a bad experience with an advisor like early in her career. And so they had been DIYing, doing their own investments, doing their own everything. And she was like, I think I need to hire someone just to do a checkup. She followed me on social media. She'd gotten to the point where she was, you know, she had decided that she trusted me. And so she was like, Is that something that you do? And I said, you know, I love that you're looking for that. I actually don't do one-time financial plans. So I was like, Can I talk to you a little bit more about how we work and what things would entail? And then you can decide. If you're like, nope, I'm gonna go find someone to do a one-time plan, I'll refer you to someone I trust. But, you know, maybe you'll think that what we could help with is ultimately a better fit. And she was like, Yeah, yeah. So we have this conversation. And by the end of it, she said, you know what? She said, I have been thinking about doing this one-time plan for five years now. And the reason I haven't moved on it is because I've never been sure it was the right time. So she was feeling all this pressure on like when is the right time to get a check-in?

unknown 32:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:33

And it ultimately boiled down to life changes all the time. And some of those changes we anticipate. So if you have a kid going off to college, or you know, we anticipate that kind of change.

SPEAKER_02 32:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:42

Some changes we don't anticipate. Like you're really burned out in your current job and you have to get out of there and go somewhere new. And in that case, there's a lot going on in your mind. You need someone to help you have an objective perspective to be sure you're making a good decision.

SPEAKER_00 32:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:57

Some of those things that come up are completely outside of our control, like tax laws change or estate planning law changes, or reimbursement rates change. You know, so if you're a cardiologist and you know, reimbursement rates cut for your biggest money-making procedure, your pay could be decreasing. And so now we have to figure out how to do the same thing with less. And that's completely outside of your control. So I think understanding, because doing a financial plan, managing a portfolio, that's one thing. And that's where people's minds go when they think about financial planning. If I'm asking a question to say, because I would want to hire someone that I'm gonna trust for a really long time. Like I think of the doctors that I trust. And I, when I say I trust them, like I trust them. I'm not gonna Google anything, I'm not gonna look anything up. Yeah. I might ask them about something that I saw or something that a friend is talking about, but ultimately, like, I just know they know me, they know their stuff. And whatever they tell me, I'm not gonna be able to do better than. Sure. And that's I think the relationship that everyone should have with a financial advisor because all this stuff is so important. And so you can ask that question and have them paint the picture of like, how are we gonna work together to make sure that as life changes, we make decisions together, we make good decisions we feel confident in, and ultimately I stay on track for the things that are really important to me. Then I think that's gonna give you a really good sense of whether or not that's gonna be someone that's a good fit for you.

SPEAKER_00 34:24

Yeah. And I think that's great advice because, you know, now that you have opened my eyes to what your financial planning is, I feel like it is way, way more than financial planning, but it's life planning. And I really feel like you encompass all of that. And so so thankful that we connected, that we found you, and that you are sharing your knowledge with all of our listeners.

SPEAKER_01 34:48

Yeah. Same, same goes to you. I know I've sent some doctors to you who are in situations where I'm like, they just need someone, again, someone who's not going to be thinking about the paycheck or the commission, but who's gonna be thinking about that doctor's life, helping them think objectively about decisions in the landscape of real estate and all that. And I've always been able to trust you to be that person for you know, physicians that I send your way. And so I love being able to help each other in that way.

SPEAKER_00 35:11

Thank you. I so appreciate that. And thank you for being here again for a second time. And for the listeners who are listening and want to get in touch with you or have questions, potentially want to work with you. Do you service all over? Do you have certain areas you service?

SPEAKER_01 35:29

Great question. So we have, I'm one of eight advisors on our team, and that number is growing, which is great and so exciting. The growth that we've seen as a company is amazing. So we have really, really wonderful advisors. And I try to match people with someone that I know is going to be a great fit based on the expertise that you need, based on, you know, kind of what you're looking for. And so we work with, I mean, we have doctors currently that are active clients in 46 states around the country. We can work with you anywhere. Um, we have really great networks with accountants and attorneys all over the country. And so we can make good local connections if you need those in most cases. So, I mean, you can find me our website, bestiaadvisors.com. There's a contact us there. And so that's a great place to send in a request, and then we'll talk from there. You can also follow me on Instagram at medmoneymaven. I post financial education there, and so that's a great place just to kind of keep up with things that you might be thinking about. You can always DM me there as well. And then we have a podcast called Doctor's Eyes Only, where we often talk about topics related to physicians and money. And more recently, based on listener demand, we've been talking about like what are ways that you can get outside of the traditional kind of clinical path in medicine, because so many doctors are looking for ways to have more flexibility in life while they're still being able to bring in like good income for their families. And so we've been exploring some of that too.

SPEAKER_00 36:48

So you can find us in all those places. And I will make sure to put all of that in the show notes. So thank you again, friend, for being here.

SPEAKER_01 36:55

Oh, yeah. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_00 36:56

Yes. So, Lauren, this has been such a helpful conversation. And I love how you always bring clarity without fear and strategy without pressure. And I know this episode is going to help so many people feel more confident walking into these conversations. For anyone listening, we'll link Lauren's information in the show notes so you can learn more. Follow along or reach out if this episode sparked questions for you. And as always, if this episode helped you, send it to a friend, a partner, or another physician spouse who is navigating these decisions too. Lauren, thank you again. And I will definitely be in touch to have you back on again. Sounds great. I'll look forward to it. Yes, and thanks to all our listeners. And until next time, that's a wrap on this episode of Behind the White Coat. I hope today's conversation left you feeling more understood and supported. If you enjoyed this episode, I would love for you to subscribe, leave a review, or share it with another physician spouse. Your support helps more of us to connect. Keep in mind this podcast is for you. So let's keep this conversation going. DM me on Instagram at Amanda Barron Realtor with your thoughts, topic ideas, questions, or even guest suggestions. I would really love to hear from you. Thanks for spending part of your day with me, and remember, you are never in this alone. See you next time.