Paging Financial Freedom

Smart Money Strategies for Physicians in Training

• Daniel • Episode 2

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In this episode of Paging Financial Freedom, Dr. Daniel Shin, a surgeon and real estate investor, and Lila Kaplan, a former Wall Street professional and certified financial planner, dive into the financial traps doctors face during residency—and how to avoid them. Together, they share personal stories, hard-earned lessons, and practical strategies to help residents and their spouses build a foundation for financial freedom.

The conversation uncovers the realities of low residency pay, mounting student debt, and the predatory financial advisors who target young doctors. Dr. Shin reflects on his own struggles during residency and how small, consistent investments added up over time, while Lila shares a shocking story of a financial advisor with 13 violations who scammed countless doctors. They emphasize the importance of financial literacy, protecting yourself from bad advice, and starting small with savings and tax-advantaged accounts.

With perspectives from both a doctor and a spouse, Daniel and Lila highlight how even small steps—like investing $100 per paycheck or avoiding lifestyle creep—can set doctors up for long-term success. Their mission is clear: to give medical families the tools to take control of their financial future and retire on their own terms.

Key Takeaways:

00:01 – Introduction to the podcast and the hosts’ mission to help doctors and spouses achieve financial freedom.

01:14 – Why medical training leaves doctors unprepared for financial security.

03:35 – Lila’s eye-opening realization about her husband’s low residency salary and debt load.

06:19 – The story of “Frank,” a financial advisor who scammed doctors—and how to spot red flags using FINRA BrokerCheck.

09:07 – The four major financial pitfalls for doctors: whole life insurance, fee-heavy advisors, predatory debt, and lifestyle creep.

12:52 – Simple strategies residents can start today: automatic savings, Roth IRAs, 403(b) contributions, and avoiding lifestyle inflation.

17:59 – Why starting early, even with small amounts, gives doctors a powerful head start toward financial freedom.

18:23 – Final takeaways: financial freedom begins with small, consistent money moves during training.



Links Mentioned in the Episode:

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00:01
Welcome to Paging Financial Freedom, a podcast about doctors and spouses and the journey to financial freedom through real estate and tax savings.  I'm Dr. Daniel Shin, a surgeon and real estate investor.  might know me on social media as the Doreenian Doctor or the founder of Sirius Real Estate.  And I'm Lila Kaplan, former Wall Street professional, certified financial planner,  and the person on a mission to retire my orthopedic surgeon husband in the next five years. I specialize in apartment investing.

00:29
helping doctors and their families build true financial freedom beyond their  W-2 incomes.  If you're interested in achieving tax-efficient financial freedom through real estate, you're in the right place.  Let's get started.

00:45
Welcome to Paging Financial Freedom. I'm Lila Kaplan, a former Wall Street professional turned real estate investor  and the wife of an orthopedic trauma surgeon. I've seen firsthand how demanding the medical world is,  not just for doctors, but for their families too. I'm here with my co-host, Dr. Daniel Chin, urologist, medical consultant, and fellow real estate investor. Together, we help doctors and their families achieve financial freedom through real estate,

01:14
tap strategies and smarter financial decisions. Thanks, Lila. So if you're a doctor or married to one, you already know that medical training prepares us for a lot of things, but I would argue that financial security is not one of them. So today we're going to talk about residency. We've all been through it. It's got long hours, high stress  and some real financial traps that a lot of doctors fall into during training. So

01:42
we're going to share what we wish we had known, the mistakes we made, and how you can start setting yourself up for financial success,  and Lila, your experience on the other side of the coin. Yeah, absolutely. And I'll be sharing a crazy real-life story about a financial advisor who has scammed doctors out of  lots of money and show you how you can avoid people like him. So let's get started. All right. Perfect. So...

02:10
Let's start with the basics of what we all remember from residency or for the listeners who are going through residency, you are experiencing right now. I would say by and large, residency is a pretty brutal experience. They cap the hours at 80 hours a week theoretically, but we know that that's an average. So some weeks are going to be way more and some weeks are going to be less, but in general, that's an ungodly amount of time that you're spending in the hospital and the clinic and

02:40
on the floor working, but this is also when these financial decisions start to creep in. You've got student loan payments,  you've got insurance pitches that Laila, I think you're going to talk about,  and you're actually,  earning a paycheck actually for maybe the first time in your life. So why don't we talk about it? You know, this is when I  met my husband.  met him when he was actually PGY2.

03:06
To be honest, I didn't know what residency meant. I thought that you guys were still students. I think most people don't know that after medical school that you guys are full-fledged doctors.  And I didn't realize that you guys made  really, really little money.  When I first met my husband, he accidentally left his pay step in my car  one day.  And I snuck a peek and I realized, oh my God, he was making...

03:35
40,000, maybe $50,000 at that time.  This was in Jersey City. So  I was just thinking they must be drowning in that student debt. How is he even surviving? Meanwhile, at the same time, I also see a lot of financial advisors and insurance reps and other salespeople taking them out for free meal and pitching them and circling them like sharks and

04:03
basically ready to sell them something that they don't really understand. Yeah, I remember actually I had a very similar starting salary. I was in Los Angeles  and I'm pretty sure my starting annual salary was $43,000 a year, which, you know, this was a little while ago, but still it was, it was a really low salary, even,  you know, nationally, uh, for some reason, a lot of the big cities seem to offer lower salaries than some of the, you know, other places you could go.

04:30
And I was just really thankful that I was actually already married at the time and my wife was gainfully employed. So together, you know, it was a lot more manageable, but I can imagine if you're on your own on that one resident salary, ah it's going to be a struggle to just to survive.  absolutely. I mean, I, we weren't married, but  Dan used to call me his sugar mama.  So he was lucky. He ended up, I had my own condo out of Jersey city, which

04:59
just so happened to be four blocks away from him. So he moved from 30 minutes away from his residency program to my apartment and he actually never left  after that. Nice. And we should probably clarify for the listeners that my name is Daniel, Lila's husband. I'll forget Daniel, but we're not married. uh I'm married to Zoe. Yeah.

05:28
So basically, that's a great point. I'm sure we'll be rehashing that many times in the course of the podcast, but it's probably a good thing to mention once in a while. Yeah, so basically, from my perspective, the real financial challenges were that the paycheck was quite low and it really didn't seem like an opportunity to start paying back the student debt.

05:53
But then we got a lot of pressure to start getting these insurance policies in place during residency because  basically we were told that if we didn't do it during residency, it would just get super expensive and more difficult later on. Yeah. And I can tell you same thing  out of Dan, my husband's residency program. So there's this one guy, I'll just say his name is  Frank.

06:19
So early in his residency, I kept on hearing about this guy, Frank, and he kept on marketing himself as the financial planner for doctors.  He definitely had a huge network  of  hospitals that he kind of do these sales pitches to.  From Pennsylvania all the way to New Jersey, he would give free talks to the residencies. He would take them out for dinner. He would give them  gifts.

06:48
And he would promise that he'd take care of everything, investments, insurance, and even taxes. It sounded too good to be true, to be honest. You know, I was working on Wall Street. I understand how brokers work. And so  I just did a quick search on FINRA broker check and  I was  shocked. I mean, this guy had 13 violations, which collectively um totaled about $1 million  in tax liens.

07:18
He also had trading in clients' accounts without their permission. I mean, it's totally insane. And these doctors are basically pouring money to this guy who's a complete criminal. So  I just feel like, you know, after that moment that I wanted to help doctors to understand not only about financial education, but also how to do sort of easy background checks.

07:45
I mean, the FINRA broker check literally took me two minutes, two minutes to find this guy and all of his violations. Wow. That is an  insane story, Laila. Wow. That is crazy. But I totally believe it because I remember when we were getting, you know, talks,  um, in residency from  essentially insurance brokers,  uh, we were glad to be there because remember we were pretty penniless. So they would buy us a nice dinner  and it would be a break from.

08:14
know, residency for those of us that can make it. So we would sit there and just  have a nice meal. And then it was very convincing, the presentations from these guys about various insurance policies and disability and all this stuff and life insurance.  And I remember signing on for an insurance policy, but I definitely did not even think to do a background check  on the insurance provider. Yeah, for sure.

08:39
I would say, you know, the rule of thumb for any doctors or any, you know, busy business or medical profession,  professionals,  if someone trying to sell you an investment or insurance that you don't fully understand, um it's probably not good for you or you need to take another step to understand what it is. So  I would say there are four financial pitfalls that, you know, any doctor should avoid.

09:07
uh One is getting into a whole life insurance policy immediately if you don't understand their  high commissions and very low benefit.  The second one is  fee heavy financial advisors. So I would check, always check on FINRA BrokerCheck as a free website. You go to brokertech.com and we'll um list the website in our show notes here.

09:35
put in their number and just basically see what type of violations they've had. Most brokers may have had two or three violations throughout their career, but anything beyond that, you should really be concerned. And then secondly, it's understanding how they're getting paid, whether they're getting paid based on commission or fee based. And then the next one is falling into high interest, dead end credit traps.

10:04
You know, as a doctor, I'm sure you guys have a lot of debt, student debt, credit card debt. You're not getting paid too much. Not sure how you guys are budgeting, Daniel,  or if at all,  but just really paying attention to the high interest rate, especially right now we're in such a high interest rate environment.  So don't get yourself in so much debt before you graduate from residency program and before you get a real paycheck.

10:34
Yeah, maybe we can pause and just touch on that a tiny bit because I think that for a lot of people going into residency, you've you're not making much money because when you're making that transition from medical school to residency training, you go from  making nothing actually negative something when you're paying tuition to making a paycheck, but it's such a small paycheck and you've got these huge expenses where a lot of people are moving across the country, which costs money and you're having to

11:01
Maybe outfit a new apartment or put down a down payment on a lease or something like that or a car. And I think a lot of people actually turn to credit cards and I didn't really even understand how credit cards worked. think until probably well into residency or I don't know exactly when I learned how they work, but I think a lot of people make that minimum payment. Not understanding that there's still compounding debt.

11:27
that increases so rapidly at those predatory credit card interest rates. Yeah, absolutely. And they'll give you a big credit. They'll see you as a doctor and they'll give you a very high credit and you feel like you have a lot of money, but really you're just in debt. um And I do know that most doctors,  they accumulate a lot of debt during residency and fellowship. Even in fellowship, you're not getting paid that much still.

11:55
um And then immediately out of fellowship, you guys,  well, not you guys, but you know, a lot of doctors end up buying a house immediately and buying, you know, luxury cars, go on luxury vacations when they should really be thinking about how do I pay off all this debt? Yeah, I think, I think that would be a really good topic for us to touch on maybe next podcast, the discussion of investing early versus, you know, living it up and you know,

12:25
trying to enjoy yourself a little bit. It's actually pretty controversial. There's like really strong feelings on either side of that coin. But if we table that, like what are some,  what do you think are some practical ways that residents  can start to get their financial future in order, even during residency when you're only making a little bit of money? Yeah, that's a great question.  So I think you can start small.  When I

12:52
started dating my husband and I realized he had no savings. He had a negative net worth. I was very concerned. um So I actually told him every paycheck that you have automatically transfer that into some kind of investment account. So I made him do a hundred dollars, just a hundred dollars per paycheck  initially. And I said, just set it and forget it.

13:17
I think at the end of first year, he actually accumulated a few thousand dollars that we were able to roll into  a Roth IRA, which is a great start. So a Roth IRA basically allows you to pay taxes now and use it as an investment vehicle where  anything that you accumulate in the future will be tax free. So that's a great investment tool. oh

13:43
The second one is using other tax advantage accounts like  403B for example. A lot of hospital systems do offer 403B. Make sure that you do full uh contribution to this plan if you can. It's basically free money for you. And then also just avoid lifestyle creeps. So what I mean by that is

14:06
Just because you're making some money doesn't mean that you have to spend it. So really think about how you're gonna spend your money wisely and save just a little bit if you can. I think that's such great advice because even just setting that little habit of just putting away a hundred bucks a month, you know, it really actually surprisingly can build up to a surprising amount by the end of residency because, you know, some residencies are three years, but mine was six, you know, some surgeons. My husband was five.

14:36
Yeah. And then you've got fellowship on top of that, right? So, you know,  it can really, there's a lot of time for compounding and regular investments to grow.  remember what I did. I think we did have a 401k actually, and there was a match up to,  you know, 3 % of your paycheck or something like that. So I just contributed up to the match because as you said, it's, essentially free money. If you, if you don't contribute up to that, then you're leaving money on the table. So  I just did that. could have.

15:06
done more, but I thought it was actually going to be too expensive to fully fund the 401k. So I just did up to the match  and  by the end of residency, surprisingly, it had grown to  I think over 20, $25,000, believe it or not. You know, it was actually a really good time, you know, in the market for the stock market and everything like that.  But um it just also shows that small regular investments over time can grow to a surprising amount.

15:35
And I mean, to be honest, Danielle, do you think that residents will listen? I mean, you were thinking way ahead beyond any residents would think right now.  I feel like my husband didn't think about it. And because I was in financial services that I kind of pushed him to do that. What do you think, you know, we can say or help them to realize for them to start taking that first step of saving and investing?

16:03
Yeah, I think it's a really good question because let's be honest, residency is so challenging that I would say  most people are not going to have very much bandwidth to  give towards thinking about financial future  and financial planning and investing and all that stuff. And honestly, maybe, maybe it's not the best time for it. Maybe you should be spending, you know, the majority of your time learning how to be a great physician. You know, I, I say that often, but I would say that, you know, the little tips.

16:32
that you gave are such an incredible headstart. know, just start thinking about it. Uh, start paying attention because what I've learned is that actually the most, one of the most important factors in investing is not just how much you invest. It's time in the market. You know, if you start right after med school,  uh, investing in the market  or, even just investing in your education,  all of that compound. you put yourself into a much, much better position.

17:01
by the time you're in attending and you're starting to make that real paycheck. Yeah, absolutely. You're so right. So honestly, even if any of the residents take just one piece of advice from this episode and any future episode, it could save you tens of thousands of dollars over your career. So we hope that our podcast is going to at least give you one tidbit each time so that you can

17:30
grow  and uh be successful and hopefully retire early like Daniel and also my husband who I'm trying to retire in the next five years. I think that's great advice. And one thing that I want to  tease for the future is that one of the questions I get a lot on social media is like, I am in residency now, but I'd like to start investing in real estate.  And I'm very torn about whether or not to actually recommend that for someone who's in residence.

17:59
residency training.  I would love to discuss that with you, Lila, at a future date. But maybe we can start wrapping it up here. So give us some final takeaways. Yeah, sure. So I would say don't let financial stress define your training careers. The early you start making money moves, the sooner you'll have real financial freedoms.

18:23
I've known lots of doctors who are still operating as 70s and  80s and I do not want to see that for you unless you really want to. But why would you want to? What do you think, Daniel? Yeah, I think some people, especially I've seen some,  you know, really wise internal medicine docs and really passionate surgeons,  they just love it, you know? So ah it's their identity, it's what they love to do and I have nothing against that. uh

18:52
But I do think that, you know, if you're in residency or you know a resident  or you're married to one, you know, please share this with them. Because if I could go back and change just one thing, it would be that I would have started  really investing in my financial education much earlier. You know, I was doing it sort of a little bit here and there, but learning about all of these things  can really change the trajectory of your financial future.  absolutely. So  we're just

19:21
getting started on this journey with you. uh Make sure you subscribe to us, leave us a review, and don't forget to grab your free resident financial survival guide at  www.pagingfinancialfreedom.com slash residence.  right. Thanks for tuning in to Paging Financial Freedom and we'll see you in the next episode.

19:43
Thanks for tuning in to Paging Financial Freedom, where we help doctors and spouses like you take control of your finances, invest smarter, and build a light by design.  If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe,  leave us a five-star review,  and share this with someone who needs to hear it.  And remember, financial freedom isn't just a dream, it's a decision, so let's get there together.