Jim Dahle was ticked off. Not incensed, exactly, but definitely perturbed.
He was doing his residency at a hospital in Tucson, fresh out of the University of Utah Medical School. His specialty was emergency room medicine. Since most of the ER work was at night, that freed him up during the days to focus on how he was going to spend the money that would come rolling in once he finished his apprenticeship and became a full-fledged doctor.
He’d hired a financial adviser to help him negotiate the stock market, only to discover that he was not just paying a fee to the expert, but also a commission for the stocks he was buying.
“I didn’t realize that; I thought I was paying for advice,” he says. “He wasn’t cheating me. I’m sure that was probably disclosed somewhere in the paperwork. But I didn’t like the relationship. It didn’t feel right.”
It wasn’t the first time.
“That incident caused me to look back over interactions I’d had with all kinds of different financial professionals. Every time, I ended up being taken advantage of in some way, or feeling like I was being taken advantage of.”
This time was the final straw.
“I just decided then and there, I’ve got to learn this financial stuff, or they’re just going to keep taking advantage of me.”
That’s how “The White Coat Investor” — a cause to help doctors “stop doing dumb things with their money” — came to be.
It started with Jim buying books about finance at the secondhand bookstore across from the apartment he and his wife, Katie, shared in Tucson. Besides learning the basics of money management, he discovered “that I was as passionate about this personal finance stuff as I was about medicine.”
Through the remaining years of his residency, followed by four years paying back the United States Air Force for putting him through med school, he became a financial autodidact. During lonely deployments outside the country, he went on internet forums to bounce his investment ideas and opinions off other doctors.
“What I found is they were just like me,” he says, “biology majors who went to medical school and then residency and came out usually heavily indebted and started making all kinds of financial mistakes.”
Soon, “I realized I was doing a lot more teaching than I was learning.”
Shortly after coming to Utah in 2010 to work in the ER at Holy Cross Hospital in West Jordan, Jim started a financial advice blog. When viewership began to climb, he was able to place a few ads that resulted in his “free advice” bringing in a few dollars a month.
Then, as doctors began to realize there were no hidden agendas, or fees, “it just blew up,” says Jim. “Within a couple of years, it was the most widely read personal finance and investing website aimed at doctors in the world.”
Desperate doctors were rushing to the ER doc.
“The irony, of course,” Jim points out, “is that you’ve got this subset of really, by reputation and definition, smart people — because you’ve got to be a smart person to get into medical school, pass the test and all that — and that’s the group you’re tutoring because they’re kind of dunces in this one area. They can talk about your blood vessels all day long, but you throw out ‘Roth IRA’ and they’re flummoxed. It’s a foreign language to them.
“What doctors need is the very basics in personal finance, and nobody teaches it to them in college or medical school or residency.”
By 2018, the demand for “The White Coat Investor” advice became so great that Jim cut back his ER shifts so he — and Katie, who has been part of it from the beginning — could devote the majority of their time to expanding the WCI services.
From the blog came a podcast, a YouTube channel, a weekly email newsletter, followers on every social media site, four books (and counting) and periodic CME (continuing medical education) seminars (all can be accessed by going to whitecoatinvestor.com). In 2020, Brett Stevens, a businessman with a proven track record, was brought on board to run and expand WCI.
What hasn’t changed through all the iterations is the goal: “to help doctors stop worrying about money so they can concentrate on what really matters in their lives — their family, their practice, their patients and their own wellness.”
Jim points to statistics that “show that about 50% of doctors will tell you that burnout is having a severe impact on their lives. My advice to them is ‘Why don’t you cut back to full time?’ So many of them are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week. If they can get their financial ducks in a row, they can work 40 or 50 and a whole lot of burnout will probably go away.”
When you break it down, “the entire point of financial freedom,” Jim says, “is to be able to do what you want.”
In his case, that means having one foot in finance, the other in medicine.
“I’m a little bit ADD,” he says. “That’s why I’m an emergency doc. It’s exciting. I don’t know what’s going to happen when the day starts. It’s incredibly rewarding. And I’m good at it. And I also love finance. And I love helping doctors be more successful at doctoring by helping them with their money. That’s what we’re trying to accomplish. So two part-time careers — that’s just perfect for me.”