This book got on my radar when it was added to my book club’s meeting list for April 2024. Given the financial planner theme in a professional development book club, I assumed it would be about stocks (ownership of companies), and investing. Until I saw that the author is a hospice doctor. Then I was expecting it to be more like Dr. Edward Creagan’s “Farewell”, which is definitely worth a read and I’ve previously reviewed here. It was neither. Doc G, as Jordan Grummet, MD is known in this book and on his Earn & Invest podcast, spends the pages of his book educating through stories, talking about financial independence (with or without retiring early), and building the life you will have wanted when you get to the end of your ride.

Facts and figures

Doc G calls out a number of important details.

We aren’t financially prepared:

• 57% of people surveyed didn’t have enough cash to cover an unexpected $500 expense, in 2017.
• One in 5 people who lost their jobs or had their income reduced as of August 2020, couldn’t last 2 weeks. 38%, or almost 2 in 5, couldn’t last a month.

There is an upper effective limit:

• An ideal income point per a study published in 2010 was $75,000. But that data was from 2008-2009. Scale that up to March 2024 levels of inflation (the latest data was available for as I write this), and that’s $111,000 as a national average. Live somewhere with a higher cost of living index? Then scale that number up accordingly.

We work too much:

• Our culture promotes workaholism, consumerism, and keeping up with everyone else.
• Americans work and average of 47 hours a week, with 29% working weekends, 27% working nights, and 52% giving up at least some of their vacation (in a country where as little as 2 weeks a year is a standard).
  • For context, Germany and Sweden worked 35 hours, with Germany having 22% doing weekend work and 12% doing night work.

Paths to financial success

Doc G outlines 3 paths to earning and saving enough, with a parable about three brothers. These three paths are front loading, passive income and/or a side hustle, and working a job you love for the long term (referred to as a passion play). Front loading is common among those who don’t anticipate ever loving their job/career. Their greatest risk is death. “Passive” income and side hustles require so much extra work input, you can only undertake them after your regular job if you discover this path before you have kids or before you lose your health, and there’s a lot of hassle factor along the way. Working a lower paying job you love for the long term comes with risks of disability impacting your ability to earn, and that we’re all only one supervisor or leadership change away from hating our job or job loss.

Purpose

The purpose of spending should be for joy or for necessity, but not for fear.

Having both an emergency fund and a fun fund (aka a YOLO fund) helps us reconcile both the YOLO fallacy and the opportunity cost fallacy. This is something I’ve discussed with members of my family who are also tending towards the frugality end of the spectrum, that while it’s still not easy to spend money in the irresponsibility fund, it’s a lot easier to spend for fun from there than out of the general or emergency fund.

Time

We can’t buy time, we can’t sell time. We can try (within the bounds allowed by the jobs we have) to prioritize the way we spend that time.

Top Five Regrets of the Dying

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish I had let myself be happier.

and the related laments:

• I wish I had the courage to do…
• I wish I had the strength to say…
• If only I was brave enough to try…

I’ll leave it at that, and let you read more for a variety of scenarios that might connect with you.

Where I disagree

I had some key points of disagreement with Doc G, and I suspect those are based on the work culture in which he was in, vs what I’ve experienced as a non-physician and observed among my friends in Big Tech.

The disagreements were around why, and around control. Doc G was able to give up working nights and weekends, and give up his call schedule, when he was willing to cut back his income from physician with all of the extras, to more of a bare bones physician income, and gained back time while still being handsomely compensated. My experience as a salaried researcher has been that cutting back on FTE doesn’t equate to cutting back on hours, all you’ve done is gotten paid less. And my friends in Big Tech don’t have any options at all, it’s peddle to the metal until you keel over or get laid off in the next cycle. We aren’t working this hard and this long because we want to, we’re working this hard because our fields have given us no other choice.

And that brings me to the paths to financial success. If your career leaves you with no options for time or potential conflict of interest roles, then you can’t build a passive income or a side hustle while working that career, nor can you make the passion play of working your whole life. Your only option, in the short term, is the front-load sacrifice. BUT, and this is a big but, you aren’t restricted to that path for your whole life, just possibly that whole career. You can change your career, and change your strategy, hybridizing your path to financial independence.

Finally, I was surprised in a book by an MD to find that mention of physical and mental health didn’t appear until the last 1/8 of the book, and only took up 1 page. This is of much greater importance as a factor to preserve, because it can be hard or impossible to get back.

Discussions with Doc G

In addition to reading the book, my professional development book club also did a book club meeting on the book, which was attended by the author! Doc G was a thoughtful presence and you could appreciate his love of communication and storytelling. He did a great job answering our questions and summarizing our experiences while reading the book. Here are some of my key notes from that discussion with him, each paragraph is a snippet from that conversation.

What if at end of life, the dying’s wishes aren’t being honored?  How can we get that to go better? Often with medical advanced directives, family members say something completely different to the medical staff, and docs follow them.  Have deep conversations with a very carefully selected medical power of attorney.

How do we get that documentation to the hospital? To start, have it yourself. Have your financial and medical power of attorney, make photo copies for everyone.  Also give copies to your doctor, to your local hospital, etc.  Double and triple check, there’s so many ways that paperwork gets ignored or lost.

Be a lot more intentional about how we do things today, not just want to be aware of today, but also use your finances to live the life we want to live.  This is the gift of the dying – life is short, we have a finite amount of time to do what we want and become who we want.  Build a financial life around those important things.

Most people worry about dying a good death.  But Doc G finds that the people who die a good death generally lived a good life.  Money isn’t a reason, money is a tool.  Don’t loose track of that.  Focus on the important stuff, and be financially literate, and plan for retirement.

Be intentional about what that money is doing for you.  That’s the purpose of it.

Take something cerebral, turn it into something tactical.  Go from big ideas into every day usage.  What does it look like in every day life?  He got so much feedback from this book, that he’s written a second book coming out in January 2025, called The Purpose Code.  These are not meant to be easy questions, which is why most people skip them, and focus on the money.  But that’s even more of a reason why to double down, instead of walking away.

Purpose, identity, and connection, are very important to think about when you’re young.  So life review may not be best for them.  You don’t find your purpose, you build or create your purpose, around your anchors.  Regret is when it’s too late, but what would you not want to regret and not want to do.  Think about your job, there’s likely some piece in there that they do like, can you start developing the part of work you like and transition out of the things you don’t like.  Think about your childhood, even as a teen or young adult, you already have loves or joys of childhood that have already been pushed aside.  Create some sense of purpose by going back to horses, horse racing, etc, and build purpose around them.  Another method – spaghetti – throw a bunch of stuff against the wall, and see what sticks.  When something feels good, do more of it.  It’s been made into a really complicated thing, don’t let social media and marketing push surface level things on us, instead the things that light us up, what do we enjoy the process of doing.  Then purpose becomes joyful and abundant, instead of scarce.

Sometimes we do have to put our purpose and dreams ahead of money.  We have to do things right now.  And you don’t have to succeed, you have to have the courage to try.  Death is always with us.  If there’s something deeply purposeful for you, don’t put it off forever, do it now.

Conclusion

I couldn’t have said it better, so I’ll leave you with that. You have to have the courage to try, don’t put it off forever, do it now.