Financial induction for new doctors

It’s that grand time of year where we usher in a new cohort of doctors. To my new colleagues – welcome! Let us ignore the recent furore over financial turbulence in the medical world for the time being. Instead we’ll focus on the fact that you’ll soon enough be enjoying the satisfaction, some of you

Pension party put on hold

There’s a whole host of heads buried in the sand when it comes to personal finance. Unexciting topics such as financial planning for your retirement and the intricacies of pension schemes are only likely to push heads, shoulders, knees and even toes further into the silica. Indeed, pensions are about as interesting as watching paint

Vindication? Or warning sign?

I recently experienced a personal novelty; an emergency. Though my working life is (sadly) rather replete with the emergent, outside of the four hospital walls I’d never before become unstuck by the vicissitudes of bad luck. One of my very first posts was about the financial pitfalls of cars, so it was perhaps fitting that

Why FIRE is no mental health panacea

It’s widely appreciated that financial woes negatively impact the mind, not just the bank balance. “It is difficult to disentangle the inter-relationship between debt and mental health, but the links are clear” (Mind) Causality may be murky, but the association is not. Financial turmoil is stressful, detrimental to one’s mental health and indeed even fatal.

Doughnuts and dollars

Doughnuts are hardly allegorical, though perhaps at a push you could conjure up some vague symbolism. The ring-shaped doughnut could represent the circular nature of life and death, the inexorable march of time in the universe, the futility but majesty of it all. The jam-filled doughnut is perhaps a lesson in not judging books by

Message in a bottle

If you could write a message in a bottle, one that would float down the river of life and be found by your future self, what would you write? In wonderland As I wrangled with this latest cerebral provocation from SQ HQ, my initial thought was of how futuristic a self should I speak to.

Twelve percent

The past year has given me, and I’m sure many others too, pause for thought about the way we live our lives. In more recent months I’ve engaged in some hefty type two thinking, reflecting on my financial past (its evolutionary nascency) and future (plans for the endgame, or lack thereof). I’ve dwelled on the

Learning

Our lives are too short to be able to learn everything through our own experiences. A degree of how we behave comes from lessons learned through the experiences of others. Assimilating these lessons into our own schema is a process; listening, reading, empathising, weighing, reflecting, adopting or rejecting. Second-hand experiential learning is an invaluable skill.

The MVP

When I first decided to start investing there was an information overload. Which platform? Which funds? What asset allocation? How much to contribute? Pound cost average or lump sum? The desire to make things ‘perfect’ from the off was overwhelming. Guaranteed decision fatigue. You may well have felt the same. Eventually I decided that I

The Con Is On

Readers of a certain vintage may remember the BBC’s TV series ‘Hustle’. A team of con artists, led by affable frontman Mickey Bricks, channel their inner Robin Hood to steal from wealthy, immoral or otherwise unsavoury ‘marks’ …and keep the money for personal gain. I previously lamented my lack of income diversity. How best to