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Reserve your spot for our next webinar →For physicians and their families
Medicine gives you serious earning power and almost no structural protection to go with it. High income, personal liability exposure, a late start on compounding and a tax profile nobody optimized. None of that is something the practice, the hospital or the group is responsible for solving.
If this sounds familiar
Nothing below is a diagnosis. It is the list of things people in your position say out loud once they stop performing confidence about it.
You started earning a decade after your peers and you have been trying to catch up ever since.
You have malpractice coverage and you assume that is the protection question answered.
Your retirement accounts were set up by whoever ran the group’s plan, and nobody has looked at them since.
Your tax bill is the largest line item in your life and no one has ever proposed a multi-year plan for it.
You have no idea what would happen to your family’s finances if you could not practice next month.
Where it usually goes wrong
Each of these is a way the instruments actually behave. None of them requires anybody to have done anything stupid, which is exactly why they are so common.
01
A malpractice policy answers one category of claim up to a limit. It does nothing about how your personal assets are titled, what a judgment above the limit reaches, or what an entirely unrelated liability could touch. Those are legal-structure questions, and a policy is not a structure.
02
High W-2 or practice income with few deliberate levers left is the default physician position. Retirement-plan design, entity choice, asset location and the timing of large deductions are all decisions, but only if somebody is making them a year ahead rather than in April.
03
The financial event most likely to end a medical career is not a lawsuit. Group coverage is often own-occupation only in name, taxable when it pays, and capped well below what the household actually runs on.
04
Beginning to save in your thirties rather than your twenties changes what the last ten working years have to accomplish. It makes the withdrawal and tax decisions matter more, not less, and those are exactly the ones no plan document covers.
What we would actually do
Every plan runs through all five layers of PILOT, in the same order, every time. What changes by audience is what each layer is actually looking for.
Look at what the portfolio is actually for now that the earning years are the asset. High income for a long time hides a lot of allocation drift.
Build a multi-year plan rather than an annual return: plan design, asset location, and where deliberate timing is worth something.
Test the plan against not practicing, by choice or otherwise, earlier than you intend to.
Look at titling, entity structure and the estate documents as one asset-protection question, drafted by the attorney rather than described by an advisor.
Read the actual disability and life policies you hold, and price what closing the gap would cost against what leaving it open would.
Greg wrote a book for exactly this
“Most Physicians Are One of Ten Mistakes Away…”
It has its own site, with the book and a short assessment on it.
Plain answers
No, and that conflation is the most common expensive mistake in this audience. Insurance transfers a defined risk up to a limit. Protection is about what is reachable in the first place: how assets are titled, which entity holds what, what a trust does and does not shield. Those are legal questions, which is why the attorney and the planner being the same conversation matters here more than for most clients.
It is one line of it. Maxing a deferral is a decision to pay the tax later, at a rate nobody has forecast, on a balance that will eventually be withdrawn on the IRS’s schedule rather than yours. That can be right or wrong depending on your bracket now, your bracket then, and what else you hold, which is a modeling question nobody has probably run for you.
It changes which levers exist, not whether the work is worth doing. Employed physicians have less control over plan design and entity structure and the same exposure on titling, disability, tax sequencing and estate documents.
Start here
A Clarity Map Session is 30 minutes, costs nothing, and produces a written picture of your income, your future tax bill and your estate documents. Whether you hire us afterward is a separate conversation.
30 minutes · No cost · No obligation
