White Coat Investor Course Review: Fire Your Financial Advisor!

How did you learn best in college and medical school?

Were you a book person, reading and highlighting textbooks?

Or were you a Powerpoint person, flipping through slides over and over until its contents seeped into your brain through osmosis?

Did you attend class lectures live, or did you just use the note-writing service and listen to the lectures on your own time in your home at double-speed?

The WCI Course: Fire Your Financial Advisor!

There are lots of ways to learn physician personal finance. There’s my blog, WCI’s blog and many other general and physician-specific personal finance blogs.

Podcasts are a way to get physician personal finance information in an audio format, but it’s usually too specific for doctors who just want a high-yield review of the important topics.

In Fire Your Financial Advisor!, Dr. Jim Dahle at The White Coat Investor has published, to my knowledge, the first comprehensive online course to teach these important topics. It’s the (taped) lecture way to learn physician personal finance.

[Full disclosure: Dr. Dahle provided me a free copy of the course to review. I am also a moderator on the White Coat Investor forum. I will get a referral fee from WCI (at no additional cost to you) if you decide to purchase the course through my affiliate link.]

Course Content

The course runs through all of the major topics in physician personal finance. It discusses financial advisors, insurance, housing, student loans, behavioral finance, creating an investment plan, estate planning, and asset protection. It’s really an end-to-end, high-yield overview of physician personal finance.

Format

The modules are a mix of in-person video, where Dr. Dahle faces the camera and speaks to you directly, and screencasts using Powerpoint slides. There are also walkthroughs of certain topics like how to buy term life insurance.

For those of you (like me) who loved listening to medical school lectures at an accelerated speed, you can watch the videos at up to 2x speed.

The overarching goal of the course is to help you form a complete financial plan similar to what a financial advisor might charge thousands of dollars to write for you. All of the content is geared toward that goal in mind.

Style

There is no humor or flair in this course. That’s because this is serious stuff. Dr. Dahle is not trying to entertain you; he’s trying to educate you.

The course moves fast, and I think most physicians will need to rewind and rewatch some of the more dense videos multiple times. That’s a strength of the online format — you can review the videos that didn’t make sense a second or third time if necessary.

Review Tests

Each module has review questions to ensure that you’ve retained the content. It truly is like a course you took in medical school or for a standardized test. The questions are not trivial. But the questions are not designed to boost your ego, but rather to ensure that you are retaining as much of the content as possible. There are detailed explanations after every test, which you should review to make sure you understand the material.

What If You Have Questions?

While WCI does not have formal “office hours” like a college course, he is available by e-mail to answer any questions you might have. There’s also the WCI forum where you can post your questions and get answers from Dr. Dahle and thousands of other forum participants.

White Coat Investor Course Cost

The WCI course is expensive. There’s no doubt about it. But at $499, it’s significantly less expensive than what Kaplan charges for their MCAT courses or what Doctors-in-Training charges for their Step 1 course.

And if you are not generally interested in investing and personal finance, the value you get from the course is worth the price. The difference between investing well and investing poorly can be worth millions of dollars over the course of your career.

Could you get similar information from a book, like Dr. Dahle’s best-selling book? Most likely. Could you get more advanced information on my blog or the Bogleheads forum, all for free? Yes.

But the question is how much you value your time. I’ve talked about how valuable it can be to trade your money for time, and if you don’t enjoy reading investing books or browsing internet forums and financial blogs for fun, then the course is a great investment.

If you buy the course, you can feel comfortable knowing that you will be satisfied with the course. If for any reason you are unsatisfied, WCI allows you to return the course, no questions asked, for seven days after you purchase the course.

Overall Review

The Fire Your Financial Advisor! course is perfect for the physician or high-income professional who wants to handle their own finances, but does not want to read books, blogs, and forums. It includes only the “high-yield content” of physician personal finance.

Conclusion

How did you study for Step 1? You probably purchased First Aid for the USMLE Step 1 early in medical school and crammed that into your brain. For physician personal finance, Dr. Dahle’s book is like First Aid — packing all of the important physician personal finance principles in a short book.

Consider Fire Your Financial Advisor! to be the full-length review course that you might have taken with Kaplan for the MCAT or Doctors-in-Training for USMLE Step 1. Certainly, many of us didn’t take the expensive courses. We got the scores we wanted using only review books.

Of course, the people who did the absolute best on medical school exams knew the textbooks well and had more than just a basic knowledge of the material. There’s plenty of advanced information on my blog, Dr. Dahle’s blog, and various forums if you want to delve deeper into these personal finance topics and master physician personal finance.

If the Wall Street Physician or White Coat Investor blog are full-length textbooks and the White Coat Investor book is the First Aid review book, then Fire Your Financial Advisor is the Kaplan review course. If you learn best through structured review courses, then Fire Your Financial Advisor! is your way to learn physician personal finance.

Again, if you’re planning to purchase this course, you can support the Wall Street Physician blog (at no extra cost to you) by using my affiliate link.

What do you think? Did you use a review course for your standardized tests? Did you learn best through reading textbooks, listening to lectures, or using review books?