Crispy Doc

Dr. Academic To Community (ATC) is an emergency physician who was on an express track to an academic career when she and her husband started a family. Her goals evolved and she recalibrated her life accordingly. My fascinating interview with Dr. ATC proceeded in a non-linear fashion. A central theme was the struggle to balance career aspirations and intellectual passion …

Guelaguetza By sheer dumb luck, our trip coincided with the annual Guelaguetza celebration. It began in pre-colonial times as an event where representatives from far-flung villages came together in shared worship of corn and the deities that brought the harvest, and included exchanges of food and textiles as a form of reciprocity between villages. The event brings rural indigenous cultural …

I have a mea culpa: last summer was a huge experiment in family travel, and it’s only now dawned on me that I never wrote about the second installment of that adventure. Thanks to strategically cutting back my clinical load and obtaining advance approval from the scheduler in my physician group, we were able to travel for 5 weeks total, …

It was late at night when the bartender called last round. She was wearing a sophisticated little black dress, seated alone at a small table, when our eyes met across the room. Full of liquid courage, I made my way over, asked what she was drinking, and ordered two. I’d heard rumors about her before in the books I was …

I recently spent a weekend visiting my parents, and as other compulsive readers may relate to, I found myself sifting through their bookshelves in search of brain fodder. I became intrigued by the book, The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain The Rise And Fall Of Cultural Groups In America. The authors were Yale Law professors Amy Chua (who …

We recently hosted a friend of decades who had a fly-by-night trip through town. We collect weird friends like elderly mid-western matrons collect Hummel Figurines. We regard this label as high praise. One of the blessings of time is a loss of inhibition. This can be awkward, as in the dementia patient who grabs at anatomy he or she should …

Middle age shifts your perspective and broadens your frame of reference. Time has helped me accumulate multiple examples that demonstrate the evolution of both aspirations and exasperations. Then: Stasis is death. Seek novelty in every experience. Always keep moving. Now: Repetition creates opportunity for eventual mastery. Ritual lends comfort. Routine is a blessing. Roots form only when a seed stays …

I recently listened to the always engaging Jonathan Clements being interviewed on the White Coat Investor podcast, during which he explained a neologism I’d not heard before to refer to a type of rookie mistake I recognized for having committed it: naive diversification. As a quick review, diversification is a means of reducing portfolio risk. I own exclusively Apple stock …

I recently got a hot tip from a friend I trust and respect. Gasem mentioned that he’d enrolled in an online video course on creating a Financial Independence spreadsheet taught by blogger and math whiz Actuary on Fire (henceforth “AoF,” which I imagine to be the sound of a sucker punch to your cerebral cortex). He’d found it to be …

If you’ve read this or any other physician finance blog, odds are you’ve encountered Gasem. He is a retired anesthesiologist, a prolific writer with guest posts spanning the blogosphere, and his ubiquity and depth as a commentator has few rivals. Gasem now has his own blog at MD on FI/RE, where this piece was originally published, but he kindly permitted …