I wanted to share a recent story

My two friends and I used to go free diving and spear fishing very frequently in med school. In first year, we would always go after anatomy class and then subsequent years whenever we could fit it in, including the first year of residency (those 1 day offs we always looked forward to!). We all had used, old spear fishing gear and some stuff that we just rigged together to make it work. We had old, beater beach cars (what we could barely afford) that were perfect because 1) we didn’t worry too much that they would get salt rust or sand in them 2) they didn’t have electronic keys so we could take the with us into the water 3) it was fine to put the fish in them. (One thing though is we were poor so we did worry about break-ins even though we only had a few coins or beach towels). And we were always so happy to catch fish or octopus because then we saved some money on a few meals.

Now, we are all in our mid 30s. We come back together to go diving again. We are driving the same beater cars because it doesn’t make sense to have anything different for going to the beach. And here we are, three financially independent docs walking down these dirt trails to the beach, with the same gear we had in med school-used and improvised stuff. $1 Old Navy slippers we can leave on the sand and be ok if someone took them or they washed away. In the water, we still get motion sickness and worry about sharks and eels and waves and drowning just like in med school. Our money has no power out there. We’re still happy to catch fish to save a few bucks on a meal. We take less risks in our “down time” beneath the water because some of us have kids and also because we don’t have the same lung capacity. And because we’ve all seen death in the hospitals face-to-face on a regular basis.

But the difference is we all have some aspect of financial freedom. I’m far less worried about my kids and wife if something happens to me out there than I was in my first year as an attending. And that’s because we all unconsciously followed the first chapter of The White Coat Investor’s advice-don’t live above your means. Once we hit attendinghood, that earning power turned into net worth pretty fast because we lived the same way we did in residency. We all can afford new dive gear (that was my literal dream in med school, I thought that was when I knew I had made it) but we prefer our old stuff-stuff we are comfortable using and has been worked in and confirmed to our bodies and skills.

There’s likely some ancillary lesson about that in being a surgeon too, but that’s for later. Just thought this was a cool thing to share as I thought about it walking away from the water.