Most physicians retire with a million dollars less than they should, and most never notice it is gone. Hernan Moscoso Boedo, an economics professor married to a physician, looked at the data and found that doctors invest like people who earn half as much. The reason is not intelligence. It is distance from the financial world, the same distrust that makes a layperson refuse a vaccine.

⏱️ Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:28 The dinner party that started the research
1:21 What the data says about how doctors invest
2:27 Why a doctor is like a vaccine skeptic
4:54 The three ways physicians lose money
6:00 The house that got hit by a hurricane
9:00 The million dollars you leave on the table
12:17 Why doctors default to real estate
13:00 The one fix that takes two hours
15:29 Should you ever pay a financial advisor
16:41 Be the wife of Warren Buffett, not Warren Buffett
17:47 The real number, 29 percent of your wealth
20:00 What an established physician should do today
22:08 Take home messages

About this episode:
Hernan Moscoso Boedo is an economics professor specializing in macroeconomics, and his vantage point is unusual because he is married to a physician and spends his social life around doctors who keep asking him what to do with their money. After a dinner party where the conversation turned to a vacation house in Florida, he went to the data and found that physicians, despite holding the highest income and the most years of education of any group, participate in equity markets like people who earn half as much. His explanation borrows the Nobel-winning lemons problem from the used car market and reframes it through vaccine skepticism, arguing that doctors avoid finance for the same reason a layperson distrusts an injection, they cannot see the institutional protections that make the system safe. He breaks the cost into three parts, the one percent advisory fee that compounds into roughly half the loss, the overconsumption and reduced savings that come from believing money does nothing, and the suboptimal allocation into real estate that sometimes literally breaks, like the apartment one doctor bought in Puerto Rico just before Hurricane Maria. The total comes to about 29 percent less wealth at retirement, the difference between two and a half and three and a half million dollars. His fix is almost insultingly simple, open a brokerage account, buy a plain diversified ETF, and stop trying to beat the market. He compares learning it to residency, you get your hands dirty with a little money first. He closes by asking physicians not to give up the fruit of all those long hospital nights out of fear of something they could understand in an afternoon.

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