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The key to financial success as a doctor – staying hungry

Posted on September 29, 2018January 30, 2021 by SmartMoneyMD

We all know the importance of compound interest in building wealth. The fuel for compound interest is time—the longer you are committed the greater chance your investments will grow. This applies not only to financial growth but also to essentially everything else. As a rule of thumb, the more you study for a test the better you ought to do. The longer you have practiced medicine, the more likely you will have brand recognition by the public. If you bought a few homes in remote parts of Astoria, New York in the 1970’s, your properties will still be worth a lot without any effort. Time builds. Time erodes. The key is to strike a balance.

The hungriest doctor gets the best dinner

The medical training environment can make even the most satiated student hungry. I’ve witnessed, during medical school, a seemingly mundane presentation on bezoars evolve into a history lesson on surgical management of gastrointestinal obstructions to the cocaine addictions of William Halsted. That’s right. This five-minute presentation after morning rounds probably took an all-nighter to prepare. I sure felt sorry for the student who had to present a topic after this gunner.

The longer you can stay hungry, the higher the chance you can achieve your goals. There are studies on successful people, with the most successful people having characteristics nearing hypomania and insomnia. If you are in that category, you are engineered to be highly productive. The rest of us normal people will undoubtedly run out of gas if we operate at 110% all of the time.

If we want to become financially successful, we really need to tap into that hunger and stick with the plan as long as possible.

Financial success is multifactorial

We already have the formula for financial success—spend less than you earn. If we can stay hungry on both our earning and savings power, we can accelerate toward financial freedom sooner.

Staying hungry on your earnings is not easy. Early into your career as you are still mastering the clinical routines, nuances in the workplace, and billing terminology of your work, you are hungry. Everything is still new and hopefully challenging. Most of us in this period are building our practices and are building up to our earning potential. Eventually your routine becomes routine. Perhaps you max out on your earning potential at your job, or worse yet, start earning less. For instance, Hospitalist medicine is one field that often plateaus early in one’s working career and become dependent upon quality metrics for bonuses. If you are finding that you are losing your hunger for earning, it’s time to figure out how to continue your financial success.

You could explore secondary responsibilities in your existing job, like participating in quality review committees. Sometimes these extracurriculars come with certain stipends—more money in the bank. Alternatively you could start exploring alternative income streams to build upon your income.

One of my colleagues decided to cut back on his work schedule to four days a week. This was a means to reduce exposure to stress in the workplace, combat burnout, and prolong his overall working career. Due to logistics in his work situation his income dropped by more than 20% for going down to a 0.8 FTE, but he is much happier. Doing so will likely prolong his working career by at least another five years—five more years of working income to help build the retirement fund.

On the savings front, it is easy to loosen the reins as we build our net worth. Maybe we decide to upgrade to a nicer car when we hit our first million, or a larger house when we hit two. Junior might need to enroll in private school or join the lacrosse team. One method to remain focused on saving is to stick with your financial plan.

Creating a financial plan is one of the fundamental steps in achieving financial success. Part of the plan should include how much of your income you intend to allocate to savings. As long as you meet your savings goals, you can feel less guilty about making larger purchases. As your income grows with your career, you can adjust your expenditure guidelines in your financial plan.

There’s really no rocket science in financial success as a doctor. Focus on your career. Create a plan for success. Stick to the plan, and modify as needed. It doesn’t matter if the plastic surgeon in your hospital is getting rich from real estate ventures or time shares. Getting rich doesn’t have to be sexy.

Physician pawns in the healthcare system

Posted on September 22, 2018January 30, 2021 by SmartMoneyMD

Doctors and other caretakers are the pawns of the healthcare system. We provide the services that allow hospitals and medical groups to bring in big revenue. Unless we are contracting directly with insurers, doctors will never realize the true financial firepower that we have. As the healthcare environment evolves, we are seeing fewer individual physician-owned groups and more conglomerates. The larger the system that we belong in, the greater number of layers of complexity we face.

The WSJ recently published an article discussing contracts that large hospital systems have with insurance companies that theoretically reduces competition and obfuscates costs. Basically there are two conclusions of the article:

Hospitals can make agreements with insurance companies that prevent the insurance company from offering contracts to competitors without including them.
As a patient, it is common not to know the cost of a medical treatment until you get the bill. Many families with high deductible plans suffer since they cannot shop around for the best price.

These are interesting and valid points but it is impossible to understand the complexities of the healthcare system in one’s entire career, yet alone one article.

Neither the hospitals nor the insurance companies are victims

The WSJ article paints a negative view of mega hospitals as aggressors who prevent competition by restricting insurance companies from negotiating with lower cost providers. There is indeed something awry with restrictive language in contracts, but we have to realize that this is simply a business. Of course McDonald’s wants everyone to eat their burgers. If the insurance company is willing to make an agreement, you’d also bet that they are benefitting too. The insurance company always wins. It doesn’t matter what they sell, whether it’s life policies, health policies, whole life policies…the math always works out in favor of the insurer. The patients and healthcare workers on the field are actually the ones that suffer.

Think about it…if Hospital A is willing to accept less pay than Hospital B for the same services, clearly Hospital A has figured out how to lower costs: (1) Hospital A is able to operate more efficiently and (2) Hospital A pays its workers less. Don’t forget that you, the doctor, is the worker getting less pay for the same work. Your work is paying for the management to make the rules. If you don’t like what they are doing, then you have the choice to leave. The hospital will always be able to find someone else to replace you.

Pawns, after all, are dispensable but needed to win the game.

There’s nothing wrong with being a pawn in a big company

Doctors get the short end of the stick

Those of us involved with direct patient care have all encountered situations where patients leave our practice due to changes in their health insurance. It’s an interesting phenomenon like a reluctant break-up: the patient claims that their doctor is great but due to a change in their health insurance, they have go elsewhere to an unknown entity. It doesn’t matter if the doctor has taken care of them for decades either. Money talks louder than one’s health, but that is the unfortunate truth of healthcare.

I’ve certainly had colleagues who have had patients tell them that their prices are “too high”. Ironically these price differentials may be a difference between a $50 copay and a $35 copay office visit, all dictated by an insurance contract beyond the control of the individual physician. Sometimes plans that require the lower copay actually generate bigger bills on the backend and pay the doctor less, which isn’t obvious to the patient. If I were only paid the copay to evaluate whether someone needed to get a carotid endarterectomy, I would have quit my job long ago and become an organic farmer. This situation reflects the confusion in an opaque healthcare system. If my patients are coming to me for their knee surgeries because they think that I am the most economical option, there is something wrong with the system. Healthcare shouldn’t be a race to the lowest bidder.

The case to untie yourself from the system

In American chess, there is a rule whereby pawns can become promoted to whatever piece the player chooses once the pawn reaches the end of the board. This is called, “pawn promotion”. It’s about time that doctors find a way to get that pawn promotion.

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We each have to define what our pawn promotion means to us. Does it mean financial independence? Does it mean putting yourself in a position to effect healthcare change? Is it a way to lift our fellow physicians from the shackles of our profession? I certainly don’t want to spend the rest of my career clicking through radio boxes and drop-down menus so that someone else can tell me how meaningful my quality of care is. It’s time for doctors to wake up and figure out the best way we can use our skills to benefit our patients without shortchanging ourselves.

The key to physician success: it’s okay to be missing out

Posted on September 1, 2018January 30, 2021 by SmartMoneyMD

It’s human nature to be social. The collective sensation of being in a group or organization helps us belong. We see this in school, where kids band together for activities. We see this in the doctor’s lounge, where the anesthesia guys chat about the latest hospital gossip. Occasionally we see the loners who shed the collective mentality and shine through their own path. If these novel beliefs are compelling enough for the masses to adopt, then the long wolfs become mainstream.

There has been a push over the last year in the online physician community to venture into seemingly radical pursuits, like trying to retire early. Other more tempered pursuits seem to revolve around doctors finding self-sustaining means to escape medicine itself. Multilevel marketing, real estate, side hustles, and other income-producing hobbies are the rage. I am always amazed at how motivated my peers are. The irony is that sometimes it seems like more effort is put towards pursuing something outside of medicine. Nearly all of the side hustles that I’ve encountered don’t require having gone through the pain, time, and intelligence of medical training.

I had a classmate in medical school who finished his medical degree and a year of internship before joining a huge medical consulting firm. I never really knew why he did that, since medical school isn’t exactly a walk in the park for most people. Unless he ends up in the C-suite of a major hospital or healthcare behemoth, it is difficult to justify the financial advantages of the career route that he chose. Fast forward to today. He’s not exactly in the C-suite, but he has a similar income trajectory as most doctors his age and a much greater potential to impact healthcare that most of us will never even dream of doing. Go big or go home, as one might say.

Dare to be normal

Most people would prefer to live according to their own terms, and blend into the crowd. This applies to doctors as well. Some of us are workaholics; some of us want to do the minimum amount possible. But average is still somewhere in the middle. I only know a handful of doctors who actually love booking elective surgical cases the Friday after Thanksgiving or rounding on patients every weekend. Everyone else just wants to be able to play a round of golf on their off-days, and take their families out on a road trip in a nice U.S.-made German-branded SUV.

Not missing out on this would mean more inches to your belt.

Not every doctor wishes to own a dozen homes, a private jet, or a Maybach. On the other end of the spectrum, most doctors aren’t going to want to pack up their medical practice, travel the world for weeks at a time, and homeschool their children. It’s okay to teach your kids about World War I by renting an AirBNB in Sarajevo, but a textbook will probably do just fine.

It’s important for practicing doctors to focus on what is important to their family and careers. There is a lot of noise in the online community with anecdotes of doctors who are able to build an escape route out of envious medical careers that most people would only dream of being in. There is nothing wrong with being a doctor working 55 hours a week, taking call every fourth weekend, and earning a comfortable living.

There is nothing wrong with being out of the loop

Fear of missing out, or FOMO, can be self defeating. It doesn’t matter what your colleague down the hall is doing with the latest real estate craze. You might be missing out on the biggest financial opportunity of the day, but you could also be missing out on the biggest flop. Just because your roommate quit her stable job as a gastroenterologist to join a startup doesn’t mean that you need to find some radical way to prove yourself. The key to success is to keep your head in the game. You are already a physician. You have a better income and lifestyle than many other professionals. Don’t sabotage it. Hone your plan for a successful career and follow it.

Doctors need to transform their careers into hobbies

Posted on August 11, 2018January 30, 2021 by SmartMoneyMD

I have some friends who love cars. It’s not like they’ve had any formal schooling on cars, but they seem to know a disturbing wealth of minutiae about them. Engine manufacturing nuances. Why the crossover line of a particular make looks like an anthropomorphic version of its brethren. To them, possessing knowledge of a topic that likely serves no benefit to meeting their basic life needs creates enjoyment in life. What is amazing is that this passion can sometimes develop into something more substantial and actually serve as a means to pay one’s rent. Who doesn’t want to be the next telecommunications major (some parents would consider this a “party” degree) who lands his own television show because he was able to carve out a niche out of millions of others wanting to do the same thing?

Somehow I doubt that my friend’s affinity to Lamborghinis will ever materialize into anything beyond a way to spend his money.

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Doctors, on the other hand, are in an interesting predicament. Our careers are very empowering, and have potential to confer incredibly high levels of satisfaction through healing others. Our skills can also command relatively high financial compensation. It really does sound too good to be true. What’s not to like about career satisfaction and money?

Medicine is a flawed profession

Some of my more cynical colleagues will ask, “What’s there to like about medicine?” We all have our stories about how healthcare can go wrong, and why we don’t like it. Some of us tolerate these flaws more than others, but none of us truly enjoy dealing with them. I frankly can’t figure out if healthcare systems outside of the U.S. actually have it better. Do doctors in Canada bask in a universal care system while relegating themselves to lower income? I find that difficult to believe since I know plenty of specialists in Canada who quadruple their governmental incomes through privatized means of medical practice. Those of you in the know, please sound out in the comments!

It always looks fun until it becomes your daily job.

Example Case

One of my coworkers spent his entire career dedicated to medicine. He worked long hours, missed many of his children’s milestones, and went on trips to provide healthcare to much needed parts of the world. He was very successful during his early career, and essentially practiced medicine the last decade of his career solely because for the enjoyment of caring for others. At the time of his retirement, he still was very proficient in his clinical abilities but he loathed the ancillary aspects of daily practice. Salary cuts, paperwork, meetings—all of this began to drain his vigor in medicine. Fortunately he planned his financial future well, and hung up his hat in style.

Interestingly enough, within several months of his retirement he secured a volunteer position giving care to the indigent, and ramped up his charitable work with medical mission trips that constitutes nearly full-time “work”. That’s right, no monetary compensation for doing nearly the same job that he was doing while in clinical practice.

He is living proof that medicine is a profession/calling that can produce happiness if some variables can be eliminated. By doing so, the practice of medicine essentially was transformed into his hobby.

Medicine as a calling rather than a job

There are several characteristics of medical practice that need to be met in order for it to be considered a hobby:

Ability to walk away from it without any financial or lifestyle impact
Ability to return to practice without much impediment
Freedom to choose how to diagnose and treat our patients with minimal restriction by governing entities
Practice that challenges our mind

As in the case with the retired doctor, medical volunteer work typically fits the bill. Volunteers often have limited resources but also are not restricted by regulations that govern typical medical practice. The work is challenging as it applies our medical knowledge to unfamiliar situations. Our time with volunteering is finite, so there is a clear time where we can walk away from it all.

How do we untie the shackles of our medical career? Everyone is in a different situation, and you have to figure out how how to make the best out of your situation.

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For all of us, the first challenge is to reduce your dependency on your medical career for your lifestyle. It is not the mindset that most doctors expected to have, but we are in an ideal position that allows us to do so. This isn’t a calling to get out of medicine! You don’t have to give up your decade of training to run a food truck! Remember that medical practice still gives you great financial firepower. The key is to use that to your advantage to become more financially independent. Once that becomes realized, you will realize much more flexibility in your life.

Go ahead. Take that step, and find your formula to transform your career into a hobby.

Zero expense ratio funds, and what that means to me

Posted on August 8, 2018January 30, 2021 by SmartMoneyMD

Last year I opened an investing account with Charles Schwab, mainly because they offered a total stock market index fund with an expense ratio of three basis points (0.03%). In contrast, my equivalent fund investment at Vanguard had a five basis point expense ratio (0.05%). That’s a difference of a measly $200 annually for a $1 million investment. Soon afterward, Vanguard lowered its expense ratio to 0.04%. I guess that over twenty years of investing, the numbers do add up…maybe.

The concept was fascinating enough, but the other perk about Charles Schwab’s investing account was that its checking account offered free ATM withdrawals worldwide. That’s right. If I needed Euros in Paris, Francs in Switzerland, or Won in Korea, I could get free-free withdrawals! This was essentially the cheapest way to obtain foreign currency, and I also didn’t have to worry about over withdrawing a currency for the fear of having to make another ATM transaction. Fee-free ATM withdrawals alone is a reason to have an investing account with Schwab.

Fidelity steals the show

Fast forward to last week, where Fidelity announces two of their funds with zero expense ratios. Fascinating. In the investing world, there are two crowds: (1) those who just want to come out ahead to feed their families, and (2) those who analyze everything to the finest detail. I can’t figure out which camp I belong in, since I clearly do more than dumping my earnings into some fund, but I also can’t stand making spreadsheets. Like most people, I also feed into the hype when new products become introduced. Compared to Schwab’s 0.03% expense ratio, I’d “save” roughly $300 a year on a $1 million investment by contributing to the new Fidelity zero-expense fund.

How much analysis should we put into this? Does this really change how we should invest?

Numbers aren’t everything

Expense ratios are important as long as the differences are significant enough to impact your financial future. Once we start dealing with difference of several basis points, you have to be dealing with big numbers in order to make a difference. It may be a tough sell pushing for a difference of several hundred dollars of savings per million dollars invested. It’s definitely not enough for me to move invested funds to another with a lower expense ratio.

But low expenses are only beneficial if the investments fit your financial plan. For instance, I currently invest in SCHB, a broad market ETF that roughly tracks the Dow Jones Industrial Average with an expense ratio of 0.03%. Vanguard, as far as I know, does not have any similar fund for the Dow. If you really get down to the gritty details, having accounts through multiple custodians might help if you like tax-loss harvesting (for the record, I do not tax-harvest). This is another reason why I keep my Schwab account open and active.

**Is free really that good?**

Fidelity’s new offerings aren’t necessarily going to impact my investment choices significantly, although I plan to contribute new investments to their zero-expense index funds. What’s not like about free? I already invest in their total stock market index fund, which had an expense ratio of 0.04% before Fidelity dropped it to 0.015%. What would be interesting to see is how the fee-free index fund compares to its existing 0.015% expense fund (FXTVX). How different will the tracking errors be, and are there going to be nuances with how the fund managers handle transactions that make the free fund less efficient? Only time will tell.

To my surprise, my DJIA fund tracks pretty well to the real index

The financial plan

We should always stick with our financial plan until it makes sense to change it. The success of Fidelity’s new move into zero expense ratio funds is yet to be seen, but it raises eyebrows. If I start contributing more of my assets into their management, perhaps I would be more inclined to use their services. I like their 2% cash back credit card with no strings attached. The software interface is simple to use, and I already use their services to purchase T-bills for short term growth.

I recently made a purchase order for FZROX. The success of this fund will be pitted against FSTVX (Fidelity’s Total Index Fund), and VTSAX. Let’s see how good those fund managers really are with tracking errors.

In the meantime, if you’re bickering over 0.015% you had better reconsider your local barista’s daily latte.

How not to overthink your investments

Posted on August 4, 2018January 30, 2021 by SmartMoneyMD

I cringe every time patients pull out the non-traditional medicine card, and use their experience as proof that they have discovered a natural elixir that modern medicine has selfishly kept under wraps. If you deal with direct patient care, then you’ve seen it.

“Your misaligned vertebral body is causing that searing back pain, paresthesias, and borderline paralysis. Let’s fix it by realigning that bone. Never mind the metastatic disease that’s going on.”

“Sure, those thirty nutritional supplements aren’t really medicines, and your primary care physician has personally approved every single one of them. “

Doctors, unfortunately aren’t immune to lapses in our judgment either. When ideas catch on, whether they are right or wrong, it is difficult to be convinced that there is an alternative. When these judgment errors involve financial decisions, the consequences can be be devastating.

One of the doctors who I work with really has his head in the right place. He knows that the most common money issue that doctors struggle with is spending. He is a single doctor within the first five years of his career, and has a frugal mindset. As a single-person family, he gets to call all of the shots. Expenditures, earnings, and savings. Financially this might be the second best scenario, aside from having a partner who can also contribute to the family net worth.

This guy rents a flat in a modest part of the city, drives a beater car, and has no educational debt. He has limited living expenses otherwise, and even wishes to become financially independent early in his career! He saves a remarkable 80% of his income! I wished that I had as much insight back then that he has now!

The alternative investment bug

For some reason, he is suspicious of the government, the stock market, and common real estate dynamics. It is always good to have a degree of skepticism in big brother, but we also aren’t necessarily living in a completely lawless society [yet]. He contributes to his 403b account, but that is the extent he utilizes tax-advantaged savings. Fair enough, as most employed doctors aren’t going to have that much tax-advantaged space anyway.

Where does he invest his earnings? It was fascinating to actually learn about what non-traditional options we have to keep our hard-earned cash.

Gold and precious metals

Precious metals can be traded directly on the stock exchange. The ticker symbol for gold is GLD. I suppose that precious metals are generally a stable commodity, although I don’t foresee anyone truly hitting pay dirt on these investments. He tells me that he keeps some precious metal investments in the form of jewelry, and the rest in various secondary exchange markets.

Diversifying in the wrong options can be harmful to your health

Speculative land investments

Land is plenty, and you will always be able to find someone who is willing to sell you a part of their land. Some of this land could theoretically be used to develop housing. More rural parcels can also be rented out for hunting grounds as a means to generate revenue. The true speculators are looking for land that might have valuable resources that could be harvested. Maybe your plot of land has unknown shale reserves for natural gas. Think big.

Cryptocurrency

Yes, let’s find the hottest unregulated currency and bet big. Think Bitcoin. We all wished that we had started mining Bitcoins when the concept was first discovered. Wouldn’t it have been great to have had a lot of Bitcoins when each was trading for $1000?

Local Business

Local businesses helping each other out can help communities thrive. We see this in local banks offering loans to small businesses as a way to stimulate the local economy. You can actually be the bank for local businesses by investing in their success. Perhaps one of your friends is building the next brewery in town, and needs a backer. That backer could be you.

Can you be too clever with your financial future?

My financially conscientious colleague actually invests in all of the aforementioned categories. It is very impressive that he has had the energy to research the options and pull the trigger to make the purchases. All of the investments were made using all-cash offers. Nothing is leveraged, but he also keeps a relatively narrow emergency fund which he justifies by having a stable job.

I have a difficult time reasoning through this logic. There is little liquidity or cash flow in his investments. The investments themselves are working passively through appreciation. Aside from cryptocurrency, there is a low but real chance that any of the alternative investments will result in complete loss. However, it is also possible that none of investments will amount to much. Appreciation of property, land, or even stable currencies like precious metals may never materialize. Land is only worth as much as what someone else is interested in paying.

I asked him about bonds, CD’s, T-bills and other fixed rate investments that require essentially no legwork. “Too boring, and too risky, ” he says.

Clearly there is a disconnect. Fortunately he is early in his career, and he is yet to accrue the bulk of his net worth. My take? If you’ve put in the effort to enter a stable career in medicine, you’ve won the game. There are always opportunities to be creative but it would be prudent to make sure you don’t flush your potential down the drain with diversifying too much.

Do you have coworkers who invest heavily in alternative investments?

The financial Achilles heel conundrum of doctors

Posted on July 28, 2018January 30, 2021 by SmartMoneyMD

The most common hurdle that doctors have to becoming rich is overspending. The notion that good income guarantees great buying power not only delays building financial worth but also confines doctors to lengthier careers than needed. The solution, in a nutshell, is to make sure that we make prudent financial and career choices to complement our financial velocity. Easy, right?

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The reality is not so simple. Psychology is fascinating. Human behavior can function, at times, stochastically, yet can be very much predictable. Most people entering the field of medicine know that they ought to end up with relatively high incomes. Does a potentially high income actually harm our financial choices? Is the promise of high income a financial Achilles heel for doctors? If we can tackle this belief, we’d be able to secure a smoother path to financial success. Let’s look at two scenarios:

Wealth begets wealth

There is truth in the saying, “the rich get richer”. The best way to have wealth is to be born into it. Your hand is loaded with face cards, and if you are prudent with your life choices you can bring home the entire pot. When I was in medical school, my net worth was a solid negative six figures. Common financial choices I faced included whether to get the combo meal at Five Guys or just a burger so that I could cut the cost of my lunch down by half. Do I take the flight with two layovers in order to save $50? I lived in the present, and that meant finding out ways to reduce my student loan burden. Even with an income as a resident, I had no desire to borrow from “future me” for a better lifestyle because that would mean having less to repay my student loans.

One of my classmates frequently bought real estate thousands of miles away. He played the stock market in residency, and ran apartment rentals he owned on the side. We live in America. A $50,000 resident salary can fortunately be leveraged for the right investment. But I am probably too conservative to risk my residency salary for greater riches especially if I’m going for the burger without the drink. While I may never know his financial situation, I doubt that he solely relied upon his salary for his activities.

Likewise, one of the radiologists I know bought a $1100/square foot apartment in upper Manhattan straight out of residency. Six months later, he bought the adjacent unit and combined both units together. Radiology is a high-paying medical field, but this endeavor clearly had backers.

Once I am out of this cone, I will be unstoppable!

Those who began with greater financial firepower are generally more willing to take bigger chances. Sure they can stand to lose more, but they can gain a whole lot more with the appropriate risks. In this scenario, the thought of becoming a doctor made no impact on a one’s financial decisions.

What about everyone else?

I have a coworker who has an uncanny ability to borrow from her future self. Mercedes in residency. House in residency. Nicer house with world-class vacationing as an attending. Vacation home on an island. As far as I know, she doesn’t utilize balance transfer checks or credit card debt. But I cringe at the number of big ticket expenditures she is able to make without much second thought.

The fascinating aspect about appearance is that no one else would have any idea how much net worth exists behind the facade. I asked her recently how she was able to manage a seemingly envious lifestyle, and she bluntly replied that it was because she knew that she doctors earned good money. The mindset was cemented long ago, and she knew to borrow from future self.

This mentality actually is quite common most of my coworkers, although all of them have certain degrees of financial compunction. Several of them proudly proclaim that they contribute the maximum amount to their 401k’s, and still have plenty to go around. The problem is that saving solely through a 401k is insufficient at the spending rate that most doctors are accustomed to. Why don’t we realize it?

Are doctors delusional about their earning potential? Some of us truly are, but the majority of us are simply misinformed. You don’t know what you don’t know. Until you sit back and do a few simple calculations, you won’t really know how much or how little your bank account has. Only then will you be able to protect your financial Achilles heel.

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