Physician financial literacy is dismal. In the past, many physicians got their first introduction to finance from insurance salesman or financial advisors who give presentations over a free steak dinner.
My medical school’s attempt at teaching us personal finance was to have a financial advisory firm give a half-day lecture about student loan management, budgeting, and investing. While the advice wasn’t inherently bad, I don’t think many of my classmates retained much from the talks.
The plethora of physician personal finance blogs, podcasts, forums, and Facebook groups are rapidly improving physician financial literacy among those who care about it, but many physicians are comfortable with simply hiring a “finance guy” to handle their finances. The quality of this financial advice ranges from excellent to horrendous.
Even if you rely on an advisor to handle your personal finances, you should still be an informed investor and understand and make the final decisions about how your money is handled.
A Simple Solution: Ask It On The Test
However, there’s one simple, easy solution that will rapidly increase physician financial literacy among medical students and residents:
Introduce a mandatory physician personal finance course to the medical school or residency didactic curriculum, and add a few questions to the USMLE or specialty licensing exams. You’ll see physician literacy skyrocket in no time.
Talk to any medical student who has graduated in the last 15-20 years, and they’ll tell you the increasing importance of the USMLE exams. I felt like my first two years of medical school was one really long board prep for the USMLE Step 1 exam. The amount of medical information that we need to learn is vast, and unfortunately, we have to focus on what’s on the test.
Putting questions on these licensing tests will force students to learn the exam topics. Most physicians didn’t go to medical school to learn statistics or medical ethics, but pretty much every medical student went into the Step 1 exam knowing the formula for test sensitivity and the ethical principle of non-maleficence, because it was going to be on the test.
Counterarguments Against Adding Personal Finance Questions To Licensing Exams
It’s not directly related to medicine
Some may argue that personal finance is not directly related to medicine. How you invest or budget won’t help you decide what medicine to prescribe your patients. However, financial stress often contributes to physician burnout, which is not good for physicians, patients, or society. Improving financial literacy among physicians will indirectly improve the medical care our profession provides to our patients.
Physicians will cram it and then forget about it
I bet most of you crammed all of the lipid storage disorders into your brains for biochemistry during your 1st semester of medical school. You also probably never heard about any of those disorders ever again once you finished Step 1.
It certainly is possible that for many medical students or residents, personal finance will be one more thing that they have to memorize to get a few more questions right on their exam, only to dump it from their brains on their drive home from the test. But everyone will eventually have to deal with money and personal finance, and the principles they would learn from a personal finance course in medical school or residency will lay a foundation to help them make a lifetime of good financial decisions, with or without the help of a financial advisor.
The topic is too broad
Personal finance can be an overwhelmingly broad topic. From budgeting to investing to insurance to student loan management and retirement topics, there’s no shortage of questions that could be asked on a test.
However, I wouldn’t expect medical students to be tested on the tax treatment of ETFs versus mutual funds or the details of the PAYE vs. REPAYE programs.
It’s about teaching and testing the core personal finance principles. Save a significant portion of your income, especially early in your career. Minimize investment fees. Diversify your investments. Borrow wisely.
Conclusion
It’s critical for medical students and residents to learn the basics of personal finance and investing. The increasing number of online opportunities to learn physician personal finance is great, but it likely reaches only the minority of physicians who probably would have figured all this stuff out anyway.
Introducing personal finance as part of the medical school or residency curriculum is a necessary step to increase physician financial literacy. Adding a few questions to the USMLE or specialty licensing exams would give medical students and residents an additional source of motivation to learn these basic, but important, financial principles.
What do you think? How was personal finance and investing taught at your medical school (if it was taught at all)? Do you think the USMLE or physician specialty licensing societies should add a few personal finance questions to their board exams?
Financial literacy may be one of the most important topics in the life of a physician, lawyer or other professional, but it isn’t taught in school.
Fortunately there are a lot of great physician blogs like yours helping to educate those in your profession who are willing to seek out the information. I just started my own blog to do the same for lawyers, who don’t have the same community of support in the personal finance space.
However, that only addresses the needs of those who know enough to ask. Financial literacy really needs to be a part of high school and higher education.
Love the idea of adding fininacil literacy to the curriculum and then testing it. It would surely capture peoples attention. But I also agree with your self criticisms that it is largely outside the scope of medicine. No one teaches us business management, how to teach or how to negotiate a fair salary either. All would be greatly useful to any clinician.
That being said, we should do it anyway!
Do you know if anyone who has created medical school or residency personal finance curriculums?
Really novel idea and I love it. You know how many times I have been stopped in the hallway and asked about the Krebb’s cycle? Exactly nada. And yet that is on the USMLE. So if something as ridiculous as asking med students to know every step of the Krebb’s cycle can make it on the exam, then financial questions should definitely have a place. Plus being financially savvy makes for better docs in the long run and can prevent burnout.
Provocative idea, although I’d prefer financial literacy be offered as an elective course that students rave about and pursue based on motivation rather than an additional mandate tacked on with good intentions but executed poorly.
In the ED, we have to conduct a number of mandatory screens and provide information required by law. Ever hand a 90 year old an informational pamphlet on child safety seats? It’s become de rigeur to ensure compliance with state mandates in our department.
I’d suggest that just as motivated students will tell you about the best undergrad courses they took, getting a charismatic speaker to engage them in finance would be the key to hooking them early.
I think we’ve just discovered your exit strategy from medicine, WSP.
My name is Tom Peacock from USA, I want to say thank you to Dr Emu for the good thing he has done for me, Though am not sure if this is the best forum to show my joy and happiness for what he has done for me but i can’t hide my happiness and my joy so i have to share it with people, my marriage got crashed about two years ago and i tried all i could within my power but to no avail. I saw a post and testimonial about the good things Dr Emu has been doing so I decided to give it a try. though he is always a busy man but when he responded back to my email, he gave me 48 hours for my marriage to be restored really just like he said my marriage was restored since then I am happy and i am living happily i am so grateful to Dr Emu you can always email him here: {emutemple@gmail.com} or WhatsApp: {+2347012841542}
TRACE AND RECOVER YOUR LOST CRYPTO THROUGH ULTIMATE HACKER JERRY.
Learn more;Web http://www.ultimateshackjerry.com
Last year I stumbled across a cryptocurrency platform Advertisement online and I felt compelled to watch them since I had little knowledge of how profitable cryptocurrency is. I was immediately intrigued by it and decided to invest with the investment firm., on my first trial, I deposited $113,000 to the platform.My profit had accumulated so quickly after 48hrs that I became more interested and decided to add $215,100 to my initial investment.on attaining my profit target I requested for withdrawals. This company then began asking for more funds to activate my withdrawals.This made me suspicious, so I decided to consult a Crypto Expert. I came across Ultimate Hacker Jerry who advised me that I had been scammed but was also an Expert in Crypto Recovery Services. This expert Ultimate Hacker Jerry was able to recover all my Crypto a total of $328,100.I must recommend this erpert to any Scam victim that has been defrauded and have your Crypto recovered back by Ultimate Hacker Jerry.
CONTACT;Mail Ultimatehackerjerry@seznam. cz \
Whatsapp +1(520)282-7151.
HOW I FINALLY RECOVERED MY LOST CRYPTO: I lost all my crypto to a fake investment scam to someone I met online. I started searching for help legally to recover my funds, and I came across a lot of Testimonies about HACKER STEVE. I contacted him, providing the necessary information and it took him and his team of experts about 36 hours to locate and help recover my stolen funds. I am so relieved and the best part was, the scammer was located and arrested by local authorities in his region. I hope this helps as many out there who are victims. I strongly recommend Steve professional services for assistance with swift and efficient recovery (Crypto, Credit card, Forex, NFT, etc) on Gmail: Hackersteve911@gmail.com | https://hackersteve.great-site.net/
BE SMART AND BECOME RICH IN LESS THAN 3DAYS….It all depends on how fast
you can be to get the new PROGRAMMED blank ATM card that is capable of
hacking into any ATM machine,anywhere in the world. I got to know about
this BLANK ATM CARD when I was searching for job online about a month
ago..It has really changed my life for good and now I can say I’m rich and
I can never be poor again. The least money I get in a day with it is about
$50,000.(fifty thousand USD) Every now and then I keeping pumping money
into my account. Though is illegal,there is no risk of being caught
,because it has been programmed in such a way that it is not traceable,it
also has a technique that makes it impossible for the CCTVs to detect
you..For details on how to get yours today, email the hackers on : (
atmmachinehackers1@gmail.com < Tell your
loved once too, and start to live large. That's the simple testimony of how
my life changed for good…Love you all .