Physicians and specialists
You started earning ten years after your friends did
High income, a shorter runway, real exposure if you cannot practice, and less time than almost anyone to think about any of it.
Sound familiar
What people in your position bring us
The runway is shorter than the income suggests
Training and fellowship pushed real earnings into your thirties. The savings arithmetic that works for someone who started at 23 does not apply, and the compensating factor is a rate of saving most people never attempt.
Your income is the asset, and it is under-protected
For a surgeon or interventional specialist, a hand injury can end a career while leaving you fully able to do other work. Whether your policy pays in that scenario depends on wording most people have never read.
Group coverage does less than it looks like
Benefits are often capped on base salary, which can exclude production and bonus income. When your employer pays the premium, benefits are generally taxable, so 60% on paper can land closer to 40% in your household.
Tax exposure with few remaining deductions
Large W-2 income, sometimes 1099 income alongside it, and limited deductions. What is left is deliberate timing: retirement plan sequencing, charitable bunching, and where you hold which assets.
Debt and building wealth at the same time
Loans still outstanding while you are trying to fund retirement, a house, and college. The right order depends on rates and your specific plan rather than a rule of thumb.
Partnership and practice decisions
A buy-in, a partnership track, or an ownership stake changes your tax picture, your retirement plan options, and your risk. These decisions are usually made under a deadline.
Aging parents, and you are the medical one
Families turn to the physician. Long-term care planning is a financial conversation as much as a clinical one, and it usually starts too late.
Your schedule leaves no room for this
Clinic, call, charting. The planning that would help most is the planning there is no evening left to do.
Where we start
Where we usually start with physicians
With your disability policy, because it is the largest unprotected exposure in most physician households and the fastest thing to establish. We read the actual definition of disability, check what income counts as covered, and work out what would genuinely reach you after tax.
Then the tax picture, since a high income with few deductions makes timing the main available lever. Retirement plan sequencing, charitable timing, and asset location get set up to run each year rather than being reconsidered from scratch.
After that it is the long arc: what the shorter runway means for a target date, how the debt fits, and what happens if you want to cut back to four days at 55. Those are the conversations that need the most context, which is why we want your story before your statements.
The work that follows
What we usually end up covering
- What this involves →
Disability planning
For a surgeon or interventional specialist, the ability to do one specific job funds everything else. Group coverage rarely protects it as well as people assume.
- What this involves →
Tax strategy
Most tax advice assumes you own a business. When your income is a paycheck, the levers are fewer, and using them depends entirely on timing.
- What this involves →
Retirement income
It is the question most people ask late and quietly. Answering it properly takes an afternoon, and the answer changes how you feel about the next ten years.
- What this involves →
Life insurance & cash value
The useful order is obligation first, product second. Most people meet it the other way around, which is why the subject carries so much suspicion.
- What this involves →
Investment management
Allocation is a consequence of what your money has to do and when. Reversing that order is how people end up with a portfolio that has nothing to do with their life.
- What this involves →
Estate & legacy
Most estate problems we find are not missing documents. They are documents that no longer match the accounts, the titling, or the family.
Free tool
At what age does work become optional?
The question most people ask late and quietly. It has a specific answer, and five inputs will get you close enough to know whether the date is where you assumed. If a business is the asset that funds it, there is a field for what a sale would net.
- Age today
- 45
- Invested
- $1,200,000
- Added each year
- $90,000
- Spending target
- $180,000
- Work becomes optional
- 61
How this starts
Three steps, and the first one costs you an hour
Step 01
Tell us your story
About an hour, no cost, no obligation to do anything afterward.
- How you got to this point, in your own words. Career, family, the decisions that shaped the last ten years.
- What keeps your attention at odd hours. Usually it is more specific than money in general.
- What success looks like to you. Not a number we hand you, the version you would describe to a friend.
- Who is already in your corner: your CPA, your attorney, anyone else we should be working alongside.
Straight about money
The first meeting is free
If we go ahead together, planning carries a fee, and you will know the number before you commit to anything. For households above $1 million in assets we manage, it is typically waived.
Straight answers
Physicians & specialists: common questions
An own-occupation policy pays benefits if you cannot perform the material duties of your own specialty, even if you can earn income doing something else. For a surgeon or interventional specialist that distinction is decisive, because a policy defined around any occupation may not pay if you remain able to work in a different clinical or administrative capacity.
Often not. Group definitions of disability tend to be less protective than an individual own-occupation policy, benefits are frequently capped and calculated on base salary rather than total compensation including production, and employer-paid benefits are generally taxable to you. Reading your specific policy document is the only way to know what you actually have.
It depends on the interest rates, whether any forgiveness program applies to you, your employer match, and how much liquidity you are carrying. There is a straightforward version of this analysis and it takes one meeting. What does not work is treating it as a matter of principle, because the arithmetic differs enough between physicians that a general rule is usually wrong for you specifically.
Yes, and it is worth doing before you sign. A buy-in changes your tax situation, the retirement plan options available to you, your liability exposure, and your liquidity for several years. We model what the decision means for your household cash flow and long-term plan, and coordinate with your attorney and CPA on the terms.
This material is for general educational purposes only and is not intended as tax, legal, or investment advice. Neither GGM Wealth Advisors nor Cambridge provides tax or legal advice. Please consult a qualified professional about your specific situation. Estimates are illustrative, based solely on the figures you enter and simplified assumptions. Your actual results will differ.
Let's start with a conversation
Bring whatever is on your mind: a vest date you are unsure about, an offer you are weighing, a business you might sell in three years. Nothing to prepare, no cost, and you will leave with something useful whether or not we end up working together.