Every week I find a few great articles I feel are especially valuable. Following are this week’s best. I hope you find them as useful as I did.
This week’s favorites include are you saving too much money, how to beat the auto dealers at their own game with inside information, reading novels improves your patient communication skills, maybe a four day work week is better, and reasons doctors feel trapped in medicine.
Happy reading!
We all want our retirement years to be free of money issues. Since we are not sure exactly how much we will need, we run the risk of saving too much and missing out on what we could be doing with our money today. I wrote about this problem in my article Stop Putting Money in Your Retirement Plans. I also talked about it in a chapter in The Doctors Guide to Eliminating Debt. Now we have another author, Darius Foroux, discussing the same issue of Are You Saving Too Much Money? It is a fine line to walk. Save too much and miss out on fun today. Save too little and miss out on fun in retirement. I love the thought of asking yourself if you are constantly obsessed with the price of everything and how it affects your savings. If you are doing this, you are likely saving too much.
I am looking to replace my 17 year old car in 2022. I haven’t yet decided what I want. Whatever I get, I am going armed with this article titled Ex-Car Salesman tells All: How to Beat the Auto Dealerships at Their Own Game. It appeared on Money Under 30. If you are thinking about replacing a car soon, don’t do it before you read this.
Ever since I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, by C. S. Lewis, I have been hooked on reading novels. That first book lead me to read the entire Chronicles of Narnia set, several times. Until now, I had been doing it just for fun. It turns out we become better communicators if we read novels. Medical student Ruchi Desai fills us in with this Doximity article called Pick up a Novel. Your Patients May Thank You. Fiction is referred to as “the mind’s flight stimulator.” I read 40-60 books a year and at a 2:1 fiction to non-fiction ratio. Each January I publish a list of what I read in the last year and highlight the best ones. Clive Cussler has been one of my recent favorites. Who do you like to read?
Where did the concept of a 40 hour, 5 day work week come from? Is it really the best option? Maybe not. Yahoo news shares with us an article that says 4 days could be a better work week titled Can Four-day Workweeks Help Women? More Companies are Trying it Out. I know I feel a lot better with a significantly reduced work load. Many doctors mistakenly think they cannot work less. But most of my high performance coaching clients end up with a lighter work week and a better home life, without losing noticeable income, all in only three months. Maybe we are choosing to work too hard for the wrong reasons.
It is the doctor who feels trapped in medicine that made me write my third book, The Doctors Guide to Smart Career Alternative and Retirement. That book shows you some options. There are three phases: Improve the job you have, get a different job, or retire. The White Coat Investor shares with us Four Reasons Doctors Feel Trapped in Medicine (and How to Escape). If you feel trapped, you might consider starting with my book, or getting some high performance coaching from me or someone else. Just don’t stay trapped.
I hope you enjoy these articles as much as I did. I look forward to updating you again next week with a few more articles I find especially interesting. If you read an especially good article, send me the link so I can share it with others.
