Financial Clarity for Doctors

Blog: How Does Tax Loss Harvesting Work?

This week's blog post walks through how to tax-loss harvest your taxable investment accounts to help reduce your overall tax liability.

Our weekly blog posts that can be found at www.theFinityGroup.com/blog, where you can also sign up for our newsletter to have our weekly blog post delivered directly to your inbox.

Blog: *URGENT* Student Loan “Limited Waiver” Program

This week's blog post, written by Braden Balocan, is about the temporary limited waiver student loan forgiveness program.  Deadline is October 2022.  Act now to take advantage of it!

Our weekly blog posts that can be found at www.theFinityGroup.com/blog, where you can also sign up for our newsletter to have our weekly blog post delivered directly to your inbox.

Financial Feedback Loop

In today’s episode of Financial Clarity for Doctors, Corey and Rachelle talk about one of the main reasons financial planning can be so challenging.  Unfortunately, you have to wait a LONG time to find out if you made the best choices.  When we are talking about long-term planning, the short-term success or failure of specific choices doesn’t matter quite as much.  So how can you tell if you’re on the right track?

Examples of this challenge include:

• Short-term performance of investments. Doesn’t really matter if it’s retirement money!  Only long-term performance matters.
• Consistent income from a rental property over time.
• College savings. How do you know you’re saving enough when you have no idea how much college will cost?

The bottom line is that we cannot always know that we are making the best or optimal choice for our financial plan.  You CAN know that you are making GOOD choices.  Good financial choices include things like saving more for retirement or putting extra toward debt.  We can only know which one was the optimal choice with hindsight, but we can know that both are a good choice now.

For more financial planning tips from Corey and Rachelle, find them on social media!
LinkedIn: @CoreyJanoff and @RachelleVanderzanden; Instagram: @CoreyJanoff and @VanderzandenRachelle; and Twitter: @CoreyJanoffCFP and @RachelleFinance 

Blog: Term vs. Whole Life Insurance

We're starting to record an audio version of our weekly blog posts that can be found at www.theFinityGroup.com/blog.  Be on the lookout for these to arrive in your feed each week.  

September is Life Insurance Awareness Month, so this week's blog is titled, Term vs. Whole Life Insurance, written by Corey Janoff.

Student Loan Forgiveness Update

In today’s episode of Financial Clarity for Doctors, Corey and Rachelle discuss the Biden administration’s recently announced student loan plan.  The biggest question on everyone’s minds is do I qualify for any loan forgiveness?  Chances are you may not qualify as an attending, but as a trainee, it’s very likely you do.

Some highlights of the new plan:

• Extended forbearance through 12/31/2022
  • They say this is the last time! Get ready to make those payments.
• $10,000 of loan forgiveness for single filers making less than $125,000 or households earning less than $250,000
• You can potentially receive double the award if you received a Pell Grant for some of your college costs
• Changes to payment calculations for some borrowers/loans
• To keep up-to-date on federal student loan announcements, you can subscribe to updates from the Department of Education

Also, for listeners working toward Public Service Loan Forgiveness, keep in mind that the temporary limited waiver for PSLF is ending October 31^st.  This was an opportunity to potentially have more loans forgiven or more payments counted.  If you have not looked into this yet, read more here:  PSLF Limited Waiver

For more financial planning tips from Corey and Rachelle, find them on social media!
LinkedIn: @CoreyJanoff and @RachelleVanderzanden; Instagram: @CoreyJanoff and @VanderzandenRachelle; and Twitter: @CoreyJanoffCFP and @RachelleFinance 

First Black Doctor at Her Hospital

Being the First Black Doctor at a Hospital

In today’s episode of Financial Clarity for Doctors, Corey and Rachelle are joined by their colleague, Antwon Weary and Sonya Williams, MD.  Sonya and Antwon both share their experiences of being a couple of the few black individuals in their work lives.  Antwon joined Finity Group as the first (and only) black advisor at the firm.  Sonya was the first black doctor ever at her hospital in rural Indiana.  Women and people of color are underrepresented in the financial services industry and in hospitals in rural America as well (surprise!).

Some of the topics they tackle include:

• Dealing with imposter syndrome
• How race and/or gender can affect you financially
• The value of mentors and colleagues
• How to recharge your batteries and stay connected to your roots

Often in business, we try to separate social and financial issues, but they are inherently connected.  It will take a multi-faceted approach to remedy the economic impacts of systemic racism and sexism, but one aspect of that is talking about it.  We want to hear your stories!  Reach out to us anytime.

For more financial planning tips from Corey and Rachelle, find them on social media!
LinkedIn: @CoreyJanoff and @RachelleVanderzanden; Instagram: @CoreyJanoff and @VanderzandenRachelle; and Twitter: @CoreyJanoffCFP and @RachelleFinance 

Finance Tips for Residents

Get your pen and paper ready!  In today’s episode of Financial Clarity for Doctors, Corey and Rachelle run through various tips for those of you getting by on a trainee’s salary (or maybe even student loans).  You may not be able to make huge strides toward your financial goals before you get that big bump in salary, but you can absolutely put yourself in a good position to hit the ground running when you do.

In this episode, you’ll find tips on:

• Managing your month-to-month budget
• Figuring out what to do with student loans
• When to look into disability and life insurance
• Renting vs buying on a resident salary
• How much to save and where

Bottom line, live within your means!  And then manage your debt and save as well as you can.

For more financial planning tips from Corey and Rachelle, find them on social media!
LinkedIn: @CoreyJanoff and @RachelleVanderzanden; Instagram: @CoreyJanoff and @VanderzandenRachelle; and Twitter: @CoreyJanoffCFP and @RachelleFinance 

The R Word

In the previous episode of Financial Clarity for Doctors, Corey and Rachelle talked about stock performance year-to-date.  Today they unpack one potential part of that decline – the fear of a “recession”.  The dreaded “R” word.  In reality, the stock market and the economy are connected but not the same.  A recession is a measure of the growth (or lack thereof) in the economy, while the stock market is related to how much we as investors think a share of a company may be worth.

As pundits, corporate leaders, and individual investors start to fear a recession, the stock market can go down in anticipation of a potential decrease in business revenue.  But what is a recession really?  And what might that look like today?

In this episode Corey and Rachelle discuss:

• How a recession is defined and measured
• How individuals can be affected by a recession
• Which things are worth worrying about and which are not
• How to offset some risks associated with a recession for yourself and your family

In the end, we care about how the economy is faring, but the impact on individuals is sometimes very small.  Medical professionals are often more insulated from some of the bigger risks of a recession including job losses.  Try to keep things in perspective and focus on the things you can control.

For more financial planning tips from Corey and Rachelle, find them on social media!
LinkedIn: @CoreyJanoff and @RachelleVanderzanden; Instagram: @CoreyJanoff and @VanderzandenRachelle; and Twitter: @CoreyJanoffCFP and @RachelleFinance 

 

Investment Return Expectations

Stock market got you down?  In this episode of Financial Clarity for Doctors, Corey and Rachelle chat about how expectations of stock market performance stack up against the reality we deal with from year to year.  How we deal with our expectations can have an impact on how we react to volatility, and therefore how our investments perform long term.

In this episode we’ll chat about:

• The average return is not the expected return each year
• How widely can returns actually range?
• How to anchor your expectations in the reality of a volatile market
• Diversifying across various types of companies

When it comes down to it, a lot of financial planning (including investing) is behavioral.  Generally, we have a stronger emotional reaction to negative outcomes than we do to positive outcomes.  The bad seems twice as bad as the good seems good.  For long-term investors, consistency is important, so we have to be very careful to keep all of this in perspective.

For more financial planning tips from Corey and Rachelle, find them on social media!
LinkedIn: @CoreyJanoff and @RachelleVanderzanden; Instagram: @CoreyJanoff and @VanderzandenRachelle; and Twitter: @CoreyJanoffCFP and @RachelleFinance 

Rising Housing Costs

In this episode of Financial Clarity for Doctors, Corey and Rachelle address one of the questions clients frequently ask them.  How much can we afford to spend on housing?  Whether you are renting or buying, housing costs have increased dramatically and that’s a big part of the overall inflation numbers.  If you locked in a mortgage at a low rate a couple of years ago, you may be sitting pretty, but for those that are renting or looking for a new place – everything is expensive!  Rents increased 10-15% in 2021 and housing prices increased by about 15% from May of 2021 to May of 2022.  When you pile rising mortgage interest rates on top of that, monthly payments have increased substantially.

In this episode we’ll chat about:

• Guidelines for how much of your income should be spent on housing
• Exceptions to the rule
• Separating wants vs needs
• The impact of housing costs on other parts of your financial plan
• How rising interest rates on new (and variable rate) mortgages translate to higher payments

And the best piece of advice we can give – buy the least amount of house to make you happy.  Housing will likely be your biggest expense, so if you can limit that, you will have much more money to put toward other goals.

For more financial planning tips from Corey and Rachelle, find them on social media!
LinkedIn: @CoreyJanoff and @RachelleVanderzanden; Instagram: @CoreyJanoff and @VanderzandenRachelle; and Twitter: @CoreyJanoffCFP and @RachelleFinance