We’ve been running a survey on sign-up asking about our subscribers’ financial goals over the next twelve months.

We’ve got to hand it to you, many of you are very realistic in your plans. However, a handful of you are what’d we call “Dreamers” (see the four money personalities from an earlier article).

The Dreamers of this group stated goals like:

“100K in a side hustle”

“Be set for life”

“Lake home”

Mind you, this is over the next 12 months!

This is a safe space and we don’t aim to stomp on your dreams, but there are more realistic ways to plan your financial life.

While these goals aren’t entirely out of the question for experienced attendings, it’s difficult for us to write an article on “How to Buy a Lake Home” when most of our readers just want to build their emergency savings account.

After analyzing more survey data, we thought it’d be useful to learn how other physicians think about money, as it’s such a taboo topic in a profession that often commands some of the highest median salaries in the U.S.

So here’s a quick analysis of the 150 most recent responses from our sign-up survey. Let’s start with the top 3 categories for the question “What is your financial goal over the next 12 months?”:

Goals focused on retirement planning, investing, wealth building, and passive income.

Real quotes include:

It’s a good idea to take a step back from our daily work to remember why we’re saving for retirement at all.

We’re biased, but a really good concept to start with is in the world of investing, retiring and financial independence is a concept called “Die With Zero.”

You don’t need to read the book, but you should understand what your “Rich Life” actually looks like, and what sort of retirement savings or investments are needed to make this reality. Sometimes, you should even pull some of those bucket list items to the present.

Goals centered on building savings, emergency funds, and reaching specific savings targets. Examples include:

It’s good to have a clear number for which to aim. We commend the readers who know what they’re aiming for in 2026!

Goals aimed at eliminating student loans, credit card debt, and becoming debt-free. Examples include:

We shared earlier this year that average medical school debt is reaching $241,000+, so there’s no doubt in my mind that learning how payoff debt is of high importance to our community.

We’ll share more debt data and loan education in coming months.

1. Med students are retirement-focused early: 79% of med students who responded to our survey want retirement planning content despite being years from earning physician salaries. This is actually smart financial planning!

2. Student loans still haunt attendings: 30% of attendings who responded still want student loan management content, suggesting this pain point extends well into their careers. It’s a concerning sign of the times.

3. Goals shift dramatically by career stage:

Based on the survey data, 36% of respondents selected Video/Audio Content (Podcasts, YouTube, etc.) as their preferred content type.

We don’t have plans for a YouTube channel anytime soon, but we’re open to hearing to changing our content format to suit your preferences better.

Medicare Finalizes 2026 Physician Fee Schedule — Specialists Face Broad Cuts

CMS released the 2026 physician fee schedule on Nov. 3, confirming a system-wide efficiency adjustment that reduces payment for thousands of non–time-based services.

Procedures, diagnostics and many hospital/ASC services take the biggest hit, while E/M, maternity, behavioral health and telehealth are exempt.

Primary-care organizations praised the shift; specialty groups warned of significant margin pressure, with certain facility-based services projected to see mid-single-digit to double-digit reductions.

For MD readers: expect tighter economics for surgery-heavy and hospital-based practices in 2026, and a comparatively stronger reimbursement position for office-based primary care.

If you’re a physician with heavy procedure load, it’s never been a better time to start tracking your productivity and compensation metrics.

RVU Tracker arms you with the data you need to reconcile with admins, come to the negotiation table stronger, and get paid your worth.

Start tracking your work RVUs today. Download on iPhone.

In a bit of a meta moment, we’d like to briefly talk about this newsletter and our plans.

Healthcare is rapidly changing, and we want our content to reflect the modern reality of being a physician in todays’ healthcare landscape. We’ll continue to build tools for physicians like RVU Tracker, but we’ll likely reduce these newsletters to once a month.

We want to arm physicians with knowledge on personal finance and these newsletters do a good job of summarizing a lot of knowledge into consumable bites.

However, they’re pretty surface level, and don’t dive deep into the wide range of specific interests you all care about. This is all to say that we’re still thinking through how to deliver the best content to you so that you can learn, have a laugh and focus on your financial goals.

If you have ideas, we’re all ears.

Best,

M&H