When I first saw a blog several years ago, I couldn’t believe it! Here was a blog, written by an anesthesiologist, that made many of us believe that as physicians it was possible to retire early. Today I got to interview the man, behind the Physician on Fire website, Leif Dahleen MD.
We’ll discuss whether it is still possible to retire, in light of a bad economy and crippling medical school loans. If you aspire to retire early as well, do not miss this interview!
Dr. Leif Dahleen’s Physician on FIRE Website
https://www.physicianonfire.com
Physicians on FIRE Facebook Group
https://www.facebook.com/groups/physiciansonfire
Transcript:
Mike Woo-Ming: Hey guys, this is Dr. Michael Woo-Ming welcome to another edition of BootstrapMD. I’m so excited for this next interview. I’ve been hunting this man down. I’ve been a big fan of his for years, and I’m so excited to finally get him on the program. If you have been in the. This kind of weird space that we’re in for physicians doing other things, investing.
I’m sure you’ve come across his website. This gentleman retired from medicine at the age of 43. Can we achieve financial independence actually several years earlier, he started the website physician on fire to enlighten, educate and entertain other high income professionals while discussing money matters of all sorts.
He’s happily married with two kids. He lives in the Northern Michigan and he travels frequently as a family. We had to. Hunt him down because he was traveling to all these incredible countries and just living that life of fire. So I’m so happy to have on the program. Dr. Leif Dahleen! Leif, how are you doing my friend?
Leif Dahleen MD: Hi, I’m doing great, Mike. And thank you for the incredibly kind introduction. And yeah, you did hunt me down and we found each other in Phoenix you a month or two ago. Happy to see your smiling face once again.
Mike Woo-Ming: At the time of the recording, it is Doctor’s Day. So Happy Doctor’s Day!!
Leif Dahleen MD: Happy Doctor’s Day to you!
Mike Woo-Ming: So is there a Doctors On Fire Day? Are you going to, is that something that’s coming up? I haven’t seen that just yet.
Leif Dahleen MD: In my Facebook group, I put an image up, one of those happy doctor’s day things that are. Yeah, Google. And I said, this JPEG is the only thing you’re going to get most likely so enjoy it. Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Woo-Ming: That’s pretty much, I haven’t gotten any gifts today, but who knows, I think, I’ve been in this, I’ve been retired for medicine in 2004. And when I saw your blog, like I knew about white coat investor and then your blog came out and then.
I really didn’t know how to react, to be honest with you when it, when I saw it or you’ve gotten the same response, because here was a physician who, who claimed, we didn’t know, your name wasn’t out, that he had retired from medicine, whichat a young age, which was almost, I’m thinking of a better word for this, like heresy?
Yeah. I know when I retired and my story is I retired and then now back in as a practice owner, but I had been out for several years and I knew how my response was for my family and just from my colleagues. And so seeing a blog like this was. It in retrospect, it was really illuminating and I’m thinking of a better word, but it… represented freedom for many doctors who are out there who didn’t know that it was even possible. And I and leave and be honest with you. I don’t think we would be in a situation where these days with all of these Facebook groups and we’ve got Peter Kim’s side and Mike could investor. You guys being pioneers in that. So I do want to commend you on that.
Leif Dahleen MD: Thank you.
Mike Woo-Ming: But, so tell me, how did this all start from you? T tell me your background for those who haven’t heard it before. How did we end up, how did you become Physician on FIRE?
Leif Dahleen MD: For. Yeah, sure. That’s a great question. I didn’t plan on retiring early necessarily. I’ m a my Minnesota guy went to undergrad and med school at university of Minnesota.
Now I’m a Michigander and I understand you were a Michigander…
Mike Woo-Ming: You’re actually, are you up here or?
Leif Dahleen MD: A little more on the index finger, but bigger? Okay. Yeah, we’re at, we’re an LP in a Michigan, which is very close to a. Wife’s family is and where she grew up. So that’s how I ended up over here.
Mike Woo-Ming: That’s probably the only few Northern Michigan towns I know.
Leif Dahleen MD: Yeah. Escanaba I’ve been through there many times. Also Marquette and I did some locums work in Ishpeming Michigan, which is just west of Marquette. But those are upper peninsula towns. We’re technically below the Mackinac bridge and below the bridge were known as trolls, because. trolls live under the bridge.
Mike Woo-Ming: You still get access to good fudge.
Leif Dahleen MD: Yeah. It’s close by. Yeah. But back to the question at hand yeah, I went through did an anesthesia residency after medical school and went to the University of Florida for that. That’s where I met. My wife did locums for a couple of years, get to try out different practice types and hospital. Sizes. I was at a VA hospital where they did transplants and everything under the sun. I went to some small community hospital. Found that suited me better. And that’s where I did know most of my positions.
Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah, you didn’t do the traditional thing that most doctors do is “all right. I’m ready to sign a contract with this hospital and I’m going to be there for the next 20 to 30 years.”
Leif Dahleen MD: No, I didn’t. No. I went to the ASA meeting, which is the American Society of Anesthesiologists. Intern, I believe in, and maybe a couple more times before finishing residency and I walked around the exhibit hall and saw these tables. There was a global medical staffing offering locums in Australia and New Zealand, which I thought was fascinating.
And other companies with jobs all around the country that, a lot of them are like a try before you buy type of situation where you go there and you learn what it’s like to work. And often they clearly a hundred percent of the time they have staffing needs or they wouldn’t be hiring locums.
And often times they’re looking for permanent staffing and just don’t have it. Haven’t been able to recruit those positions. It’s a working interview for the most part. And I worked a number of different places for one thing. I didn’t necessarily know what the real world would be like.
Residency is always at this tertiary care center and a. You’re basically in the room doing your own cases. And in the real world, you’re doing a lot of supervision. Maybe you might work with CRNs, you might work with anesthesia assistants, residents, et cetera. I just wanted to try out different places.
And then a very, more practical reason I chose that path was that my fiance at the time now wife was going to match is a dietician into a program. Very similar to the way that we matched into residency. And you don’t know where until you get your letter and open it up. And lo and behold, we were going to go to Pittsburgh for nine months and I say, We were engaged in the newly married.
I didn’t want to live apart. And so I was able to find locals work there in Pittsburgh. And we tried out some other places where we thought we might want to live, including Northern Minnesota and Northern Michigan. And, that ended up being two of the three places that I worked full time for a number of years for each of them.
And we worked other places too. It was a cool way to have our all expense paid trips around the country in as little as one week at a time in some cases. But generally I prefer to work for several months at a time and we’d get a furnished apartment and rental car provided per diem for food and everything.
So my living expenses those first few years were like, like nothing,
Mike Woo-Ming: Now were… you talk about your background, did you come from an affluent background or… what kind of background did you do? You grew up?
Leif Dahleen MD: Yeah, I used to think of it as upper middle-class, but now I’ve come to learn. That means like luxury cars and huge houses. That sounds more like upper-class to me, but I would say we’re somewhere in between middle and upper middle, maybe for the Midwest it’s upper middle, but my dad was a dentist and we had a cabin up north in Minnesota. But we also, My dad liked to be frugal in certain ways.
So we would stop at thrift stores and hit up the garage sales every weekend and look for great deals, things that we could turn around and make a profit on, or just collect. And we’d take vacations. We take long road trips for example, or take advantage of a deal where you fly to Florida in the spring and then drive back a rental car a week later because they would offer a really good deal as the rental car companies wanted to move those cars up north for the summer.
Anyway, things like that where my parents were, good bargain shoppers. Taught us the value of money. We worked quite a bit growing up, mowing lawns when we were too young to get real jobs. And then I worked at a grocery store as soon as I turned 16. Yeah. So again, we weren’t hurting for money by any means, but I also think I learned good money habits in the way that we did grow up.
Now thinking about, working in your job, unlike most doctors they’re out trying to get the, I don’t want to stereotype, but most of them when they come in. They want to get that expensive house. They want to get the the super expensive Mercedes or Lexus or Tesla or whatever you have in there.
Mike Woo-Ming: It sounds like you didn’t follow that path.
Leif Dahleen MD: And no. Oh, it was, two years, like I said, we’d spent next to nothing. I kept my little one bedroom condo in Gainesville, Florida. And we actually started renting that out after a year, just moved what little belongings we had into my wife’s mother’s garage.
And but after. Two years of doing that. And once we were married and expecting our first child, we started to build a very nice home and we did build 4,000 square feet on the water really nice place. Four years later, the hospital went under in a small town and there was no one to buy our what, might’ve been the nicest house in town.
So that, that set on the market for a long time, when we did finally decide to sell it after. Using it as a seasonal rental and that sort of thing for awhile, but yeah, long story short. We did make that one financial move, I guess in hindsight it was a mistake, but it didn’t feel like one at a time.
We really thought that would be where I spent my career, 20, 30 years working in this small town in Northern Michigan about an hour and a half north of where we are now. But yeah, that didn’t happen. So the car. I’ve never been a big car guy. I know some people are just not my thing. I’d rather walk or bike.
If I can, a car is a utilitarian kind of thing. It gets me from point a to point B. I don’t get too excited about the maker model. I drive a new center model.
Mike Woo-Ming: We’ve gone investing in something that’s going to depreciate the minute you purchase it. Exactly.
Leif Dahleen MD: Yeah. And I knew I was poor. I finished residency.
Thing other than, some home equity, because 2006 had gone up, so the condo was set. It mine were pretty small. I went to, like I said, public school, undergrad and medical school had scholarships that more than covered undergrad. And and about 60,000, I think my wife had about 15,000 in student loans.
Now this was back in 2018. To so 20 years ago, so these numbers sound tiny, but the average at the time, I think was around 90,000. So I had less than the average, but I also lived awfully frugally as a as a med student. I had a beat up old car. I lived with roommates and not the greatest apartments, yeah. Then didn’t take out any loans that I didn’t need to pay for it.
Mike Woo-Ming: What was the point of saving? Where were you looking at retiring early or was it just a way that I really don’t need to buy a lot of stuff?
Leif Dahleen MD: Yeah. I’d say it was more of the latter. I didn’t know what I was saving for.
I just knew that I didn’t have any reason to, and I want him to see my net worth grow. Like I, I learned about, again, I mentioned. Parents taught me some good values in terms of money management. And my dad taught me the rule of 72, which is how long it takes for your money to double at a given rate of return or interest rate.
So I knew that if I got, let’s say 8% on my money, it would double every nine years. If I got 12% on invested money, it would double every six years. And even, as a. And resident looking at jobs, paying wow, like $250,000 a year, $300,000 a year. I knew that was on the horizon and I was like, I’m going to save a lot of money and that’s going to double and that’s going to double again and I’ll be a multimillionaire someday.
By the time I actually got out of residency into the real world, the jobs were even better than I had imagined. And so I didn’t necessarily know what I was going to do with millions of dollars. It wasn’t until. 2014 or so that I discovered the concept of financial independence and realized that, oh, I can use this money to buy freedom, to buy back time and, location independence, the ability to travel.
Like you mentioned, in your introduction, taking our kids around the world. And that sounded much more appealing than. 2:00 AM labor, epidurals, and long, long days in the hospital. So that’s the that’s the route that I decided to do.
Mike Woo-Ming: So you could have invested in a lot of things in front of when I read the stock market or a Vanguard is what got you interested to talk about? There’s a lot of places where doctors can be investing. Why was that the best route for you?
Leif Dahleen MD: Again, going back to my parents, one thing my dad did in medical school at the time, I guess I was not thrilled with life. I was in a surgery rotation somewhere on the internet. I found something about swing trading and I was reading about this and I sent my dad an article and he said, he sent me a book.
It was Andrew Tobias’s The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need. And I read that and then. Introduced me to what investing should look like. And to me that means index funds as the bulk of what you invest in. Now, in the back of the book, he mentioned two companies that he believed were excellent T. Rowe Price and Vanguard.
And I thought T Rowe price sounded quite Regal. And he mentioned that Vanguard was kind of a, no-frills sort of a low budget kind of deal. And I actually went those two real price. Sounded, I don’t know. It sounded more appealing in the final chapter of the book when I revisited it, once I had some money and and it turns out after six or seven years, I took a closer look at everything.
And that was in like an S and P 500 fund paying expense ratio of about 38 basis points. If I remember 8.3, 8%, and I realized Vanguard was charging like 90% less. And. And I looked at, and I invented, I invested in some mutual funds that were of funds, but they’re all actively managed.
I didn’t do everything right. From the get-go for sure. But I also didn’t make any really big mistakes. The thing I did right. Was save a lot of money and invest it. I didn’t invest it perfectly. No one does, no one can really do a perfect, but I would’ve done things differently in hindsight.
But again not super costly mistakes. And I do believe and still believe. The US stock market is a great place to put the bulk of your money. And that’s where most of mine is.
Mike Woo-Ming: Even this year.
Leif Dahleen MD: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Stock market, I think it’s up on the year finally. I’m sure it took a little dive at volatility is part of the price you pay for long-term results.
And I think just understanding, where the stock market has been over many decades and all of the tribulations. It has seen and recovered from gives me confidence that most continues to continue to see strong returns from the stocks. You’re investing in companies that do wonderful things for people and make great products and provide services that we all use.
Mike Woo-Ming: Now, when you invested heavily, what kind of give me an example of what percentage you were actually putting into investing and how much percentage where you go to paying your bills and other expenses?
Leif Dahleen MD: Yeah. Every year is different. There’s no such thing as a normal year. At least it seemed like for us in doing locums for a couple of years, building a big house, I cost a lot of money and that hospital going bankrupt, finding another job, realizing that wasn’t a place we wanted to spend.
Yeah, the rest of our career move, finding another job back in Northern Minnesota. So the percentage wise, I would say anywhere from probably 30 to 60% given, depending on the year, maybe 20% on a year where we had a lot of expenses, I like to pay for cars with cash and it’s when locums made some extra money, even during my vacations, when I had full-time jobs but yeah, towards the end, when things are stable, the last five or six years, we had paid off our house by then we were spending maybe 70,000 a year, not counting certain things like charitable giving, but just food, lodging, travel, bills, utilities, et cetera. That was maybe… 20% of what I was bringing home. When we’re saving maybe a 70, 80%, not counting taxes, I’m talking net not gross because 30, 35% goes to taxes, but from what’s left, I saved most of it. When I didn’t have any other big expenses,
Mike Woo-Ming: Take me to the decision when you. decided you wanted to retire. Tell me, what was your thinking process then? Was it one day you decided, was it that one year decision? How did that work for you and your family?
Leif Dahleen MD: Yeah the first, it was that realization like a, is this really possible and spent a lot of time reading, all the safe withdrawal rate studies and. .. Kind of verifying in my mind that this was a real thing. We had enough money to make it work, and then did some spreadsheet work to project out because I had just moved about a year earlier to Minnesota and I was happy to be back home and it was the best job I’d ever had. So I was in no hurry to leave.
I thought maybe we’ll come up with a five-year plan. And our kids just started at this a really good grade school at a gifted program. And we figured well about the time they’re in middle school, I will have been here five or six years and it might work out just really well. I want them to have a nice cushion and it turns out that we had, at some point, double, what I had five years early by the time I actually did leave my job. So I felt very secure by then. And of course, as we’ve talked about a little bit, I did start a website too, and that as turned into a source of income as well. And yeah, it was just a lot of conversations with my wife, like what we wanted life to look like.
She was excited that the idea of traveling. Yeah, weeks and months at a time, rather than quick vacations, where you hit up all the tourist spots really quickly and then race home, and then you’re supposed to be here. Now, my wife didn’t work much. She did teach a nutrition class like one night, a week kind of thing for a couple of years.
And now she probably works now more than ever. She does all the verification for our physician. Only Facebook group. There are a lot of people trying to sneak in that are not physicians that want to have access to us. So she spends an hour, maybe an hour or two some days just working on that for me.
But no, she’s stayed home to take care of our kids. We have two boys they’re now 11 and 13 years. When I retired now almost three years ago, I guess they would have been eight and 10. So yeah, she was home with them until they went to school and they were in public schools until I left my job. And since then we’ve taken over. Primarily my wife has taken over their education.
Mike Woo-Ming: Now I know when I first retired, I have that conversation with my wife and. A lot of, I did have spreadsheets back then I had to do a lot of convincing. And then they were on board. Then the conversation with my parents was another thing.
And my mom still, to this day thought, “you’re nuts” that, “you’ve got some mental things” and just from many doctors out there, cause I’m not the only one where we are. Being a physician is so in wrapped what we do and I’m sure you’ve come across this as well. How old are those conversations?
And even now these days, you’re a doctor and why aren’t you working? Why aren’t you. For me picking up my kids or, why aren’t you doing this? Or what kind of doctor are you who doesn’t work even, college roommates, so that I’ve had say, I’m not sure what exactly what you’re doing now, or at least when I was retired, how are those conversations going?
Leif Dahleen MD: The one that I was most concerned about was the one with my parents. I remember when I was accepted to medical school, they offered a percentage of the class and I think it was somewhat merit-based. They asked if we wanted to take early summer anatomy and then we could be TAs and help teach anatomy to the rest of the class.
And at first I accepted. But then it was like my last summer freedom before what I knew would be a long, difficult slog of medical school and residency. And I was having a great time and I just don’t let parents I think I don’t want to do this summer anatomy program. It’s just, I don’t really need to I can take anatomy with everybody else.
And I remember my dad was like, do you even want to go to medical school? You want to be. Yeah. I just want to have a little fun this last summer before it gets crazy. So when the time came 20 years later to tell my parents that I was considering retiring early I didn’t know how that would go, but it went really well.
Actually, my dad had retired by then. I think he had a different outlook on, how much time you get on this planet and everything else and said, “Hey, if you can afford it, Do what makes you happy.” And we had conversations about finance. Like before, before I started a blog, he was probably the only are they, my mom and dad were the only people I talked to about, money matters.
And no, I’ve found a lot more people that I can talk to about that. But yeah, no, it actually went well. And then as far as other people, friends, distant relatives Maybe some have found my site and read a lot of things or listen to podcasts or whatnot. But I don’t get any real pushback.
No one seems to be particularly upset by what I’m doing so that a lot of people know I have this other thing that I do, on the website and that, so I don’t know if they really realize or get the facts. That’s all just bonus just to, it’s gravy. I didn’t need to do that in order to retire from medicine.
And I think that’s the question I get most often is yeah, you retired, but that’s because you have this thing. Oh no. I had probably more than twice as much money as I needed to retire, with a high five figure, low six figure annual spend, which has plenty of money in Northern Michigan.
But yeah, no I’ve been very pleased with the reaction. Like public with my name and decided not to be anonymous. There was, it was like crickets, no one really cared or noticed, which was how I wanted it.
Mike Woo-Ming: So let’s talk about that because I was interested too, is first off you to, why did you decide to create the website and two, why did you go anonymous at the beginning?
Leif Dahleen MD: Yeah, but circling back to that question, I never really answered it earlier, but I had read about financial independence realize that was something that we had. Gave us amazing opportunities to retire. If I wanted to, or take a lower paying job or work less, or, basically when money is no longer a concern that opens up a world of possibilities and it was a concept that isn’t taught in schools.
It wasn’t anything I really thought about retirement is something to do when your kids leave the house and they’re on their own. And. You’re getting older and don’t like working all those hours. But no, I just wanted to share the message on people to know what it means to be financially independent and what that can do for you.
So I read a blog called Mr. Money Mustache. That led me to a handful of others, including one by a physician Dr. Jim Dolly, who writes the white coat investor. And. I saw what he was doing. I saw what other people are doing. I didn’t really see anything in the fire space. Financial independence retire early from a higher budget, higher spend approach.
Not that we’re, among doctors, very high spenders, but among the, fire crowd, I guess I would say. More of a quote-unquote fat fire where lean fire means you are very low budget. If that fires on the other end of that spectrum. And we do like nice things. We spend more than the average American household, but less than the average American doctor.
So we’re somewhere in this kind of odd place. But I found out that I enjoyed writing and I initially set out to write like once or twice a month and it ended up being once or twice a week. And. And it just has taken off from there.
Mike Woo-Ming: What I like about it too, is you’re very transparent. Some of the little pushback you get, you actually, I know about it. Cause you actually leave it on your website. You left a few of the comments that may not be as flattering that are on there was that was a conscious choice.
Leif Dahleen MD: I’ve deleted very few comments. I delete the spam, there’s just random stuff that links to garbage, but yeah, if someone’s critical, that’s good feedback in general. And I can usually explain why I think that perspectives is a little off and maybe they don’t know my whole story don’t know exactly what I’m doing. I had a post about donor advised funds not long ago, which is a vehicle where you donate.
To an entity that holds the money and it can remain infested that entity is a charity. And once the money is there, it can only go to other charities. They have to be 501c3 registered IRS charities. But I like to use that as a mini foundation. We’ve been building up the balance in that while donating from it.
We only donate maybe five to 10% of the balance, but the balance is now inaccessible like a half a million dollars. And I got shit for that from some random comment or as “oh, you guys just do rich people. It’s just a tax write off.” It’s okay. Yeah. I get to deduct maybe 37 cents for every dollar I give to it.
And I can’t give that money back and it will go to charity. That’s the only destination for it, and I’m like, I don’t think he knows that. No, we pay the salary of a physician now donated like a bunch of money to COVID causes Ukraine more recently, we’re trying to do good with the money I’m making online.
And a bulk of the profits end up being donated and I think that’s a good thing, but yeah. So if someone’s gonna write some hate, I’ll be like, okay. Yeah. But here’s the other side that maybe you didn’t realize.
Mike Woo-Ming: Exactly. And following up on that one question about when you decided to tell us the decision when you decided to out yourself, is it just like continuing, just just being transparent,
Leif Dahleen MD: It wasn’t my decision. It was Jim Dolly’s. He said, so we partner pretty early on. He liked what I was doing, and I liked the exposure that you would be able to give me. He bought a small piece of my company and we’ve been working together in some cross promotional ways and different things since 2017. And he had his first white coat investor conference in 2018 and he said, you’re going to be on the big stage.
Leif DeLeon MD. This’ll be your coming out party as I got I. Okay. I’m like first, let me make sure I let my colleagues at work know that is part of my plan. So that was one of the factors that went into my being anonymous initially, I didn’t know for sure that I would truly follow up and retire early.
It was an idea I had that I was exploring and writing everything out really helped me… firm up, what I wanted out of life and what I wanted early retirement to look like. But of course I had to let my colleagues know and I didn’t want to be writing the site about, “Hey, I’m gonna retire in a few years. And I saw this thing online about you not working with us anymore pretty soon. What’s this about?” So I wanted them to be the first to know. Once I talked with my chief and some of my colleagues there. Then I felt comfortable putting my name out there too. You always worry about what are people gonna think.
And most people don’t think much.
Mike Woo-Ming: And usually are not thinking about you at all.
Leif Dahleen MD: They’ve got their own things going on. Like I go, huh? That’s good. That’s cool. All right. Whatever.
Mike Woo-Ming: You’ve got quite a big following and many, you probably get a lot of questions. I want to be like, do you leave?
How can I get started? What are some, maybe three or four things that you could recommend for someone coming out, they want to retire early.
Leif Dahleen MD: Yeah I would start with not having that attitude, right? I would hope that you can enjoy because no matter what, unless you get a big inheritance or, get really lucky with a moonshot kind of investment, you’re going to be working for a decade or two minimum.
And so figuring out how to enjoy the job. Are doing, you went to medical school for a reason, went through residency. This is supposed to be the good part. It gets better and it really does. So that would be the first thing, but to put yourself in a position to become financially independent then you just need to focus on growing the gap between what you earn and what you make.
And honestly, over the first five, 10 years, how much money you have invested. Is going to be depend much more on how much you saved and invested in much less on your investment returns. Now over 20 to 30 to 50 or a hundred years, your investment returns make a huge difference, obviously. But initially it’s just brute force savings and you’ve got to pay off debt.
You’ve got to invest, you’ve got to live and you’ve got to have some fun. And I think there’s a tendency among. Many people and physicians are certainly not immune to this, to equate expensive experiences, expensive items with just being happier. And that’s not always the case, and you can look at big studies on happiness from country to country.
There was a study and this is now 10 or 15 years old. So inflation has changed the numbers, but making more than about 70 grand a year, didn’t seem to make people a whole lot happier, maybe a little more life satisfaction. So people have equated that to maybe spending more than about 70,000 a year.
Does it make you all that happy? Maybe it’s a hundred thousand now after inflation. And obviously there are easy ways to, refute that anecdotally, but also when you think back on some of the happiest times in your life and the things that have brought you the most joy, was it hanging out in college meeting, your future partner, camping trip, playing games with your kids, all these things that really don’t cost a lot of money necessarily.
And I learned to be selectively frugal, spend. Bringing the most joy and as far as investing, yeah, I like VT, sax and chill. I don’t have the t-shirt, but I’ve seen it. That’s a good one. Which would be the Vanguard total stock market. Like I said, index funds and and I think it’s all right to use a little bit of play money.
Whether it’s for your own business, someone else’s, an individual stock. I just wrote a blog post on this that published the other day. I think, maybe up to 5% of your invested dollars could be in that moonshot deal. When you have a little bit more, you can take some more chances.
Mike Woo-Ming: What’s your opinion on cryptocurrency?
Leif Dahleen MD: I don’t know where it’s going. Some brilliant people have said that it is the future. Some equally brilliant people have said that it should be worthless. Really doesn’t have any intrinsic value and the use cases are difficult to find. So I am somewhere in the middle and I don’t profess to know which way it’ll go.
But I don’t want to miss out entirely. So I do have some investments in companies that will do well as crypto does. Cracking is an exchange and I was able to invest in that pre it’s still pre IPO because that’s still, I don’t know, in the future, if at all. And I invested in a company called Republic, which republicans.com does.
A lot of funding for startups helps attract investors to different types of startups. And they also do crypto and tokenization of assets and whatnot. They’ve got a pretty diversified kind of. Business model now. So those are companies that will be well as crypto does. As far as directly owning it, I don’t have Bitcoin.
I don’t have Ethereum. I did invest a small amount, a few thousand dollars in a pre-seed round for a token that apparently is worth 10 times what I put into it. Although I don’t have liquidity options at this point in that yet. So I’m dabbling, and. We’ll see where it goes. I’m as curious as anyone, I read a lot about it, but I don’t have any strong opinions because people that know more than me have very strong opinions in very different ways.
Mike Woo-Ming: Okay. Gotcha. This has been amazing. So what’s the plan for a Physicians On Fire for 2022?
Leif Dahleen MD: The same as always, thankfully we’ve been able to travel again and that’s been good. We go to Europe for a month in January. We spent part of February and most of March and Florida and south America.
And we’re doing a two week cruise after spending about a week in Texas. And. Some time in New York city, Boston, Maine. So I’m not sure if you’re asking about me or the website, but it’s one in the same sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. So just continue on putting out, content four or five days a week, something for just about everyone we’ve got interview series.
My original thoughts stuff on investing taxes travel, you name it. Yeah. We’ll keep an eye.
Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah, you’ve got the really great stuff, guys, if you want a good read too. I love what you wrote about when you were traveling during COVID than in history or experiences. That was that was really enlightening and Leif the great writers.
Go to his website, physicianonfire.com. Check out if you’re a physician you can get on his Facebook group. If you’re not. His wife is going to kick you out. So don’t even try. It’s a great place to put up some good posts and inspiring, and as a great community. If again, thank you so much for joining us on the program today.
Leif Dahleen MD: Thank you, Mike. I appreciate the introduction and the the invite and the conversation was quite good. Appreciate you sharing my story with your readers and watching.
Mike Woo-Ming: Thank you so much and thanks all of you. And again, if you want to be inspired, don’t just read it. If you want to start implementing these things, learn about finance, go and study all these things.
Whether it be stocks, whether it be crypto, whether it be real estate, invest, find mentors are actually doing it. And don’t just read about it. Keep moving forward.