As a medical professional, I can relate to your current financial standing. You’ve managed to work your way into your current, high net-worth position(s) and are earning “good money”. Like me, in your earlier years, you probably assumed that all you had to do was work hard each day, climb that proverbial ladder of success to a high-paying career, at which point all your financial problems and “tales of woe” would be over.

As medical practitioners, many of us practicing in this industry see a six-figure income. However, such an income also places you in one of the highest tax brackets in the country. With such a heavy tax burden, and the normal and customary expenses of daily life, accumulating wealth becomes a seemingly far-fetched and uphill struggle.

What’s more, having cash parked in a bank account is not an effective wealth-building strategy; thanks to inflation, cash tends to lose its value over time. More disturbingly, with your current living expenses, not to mention the retirement of your large student debt from medical school, is perhaps why doctors rank as the largest industry group of high-income earning professionals, yet who are not millionaires.

The unfortunate truth is that income is not the same thing as wealth. The famed Dr. Thomas J. Stanley, author of The Millionaire Next Door, perhaps put it best when he said: “If you make a six-figure income each year and spend it all, you are not getting wealthier; you are just living high. Wealth is what you keep”.