We’ve Never Felt So Rich, But Am I Losing Track Of Our Money? Wrapping up in 2025 and Our Goals for 2026
If we thought our life would reach some sort of steady state, 2025 was not the year yet. Our finances were probably the least exciting part of the year, which is good for us but doesn’t make for financial blog fodder. Our personal and professional life was full of progress, everything was good.
Our Finances
Our family hit some important financial and personal milestones a few years ago when we sold our home in Maine and used this practice. Since then, we have felt financially secure in a way that my husband and I have never experienced before. We’re not quite ready to retire and we’re still very much reaching our retirement accounts, but we’ve definitely loosened our money-watching. I still pack my lunch and buy used clothes, but my husband and I bought each other new skis for Christmas. We feel rich.
Partly because we feel rich, I did a little better in 2025 in tracking our finances. Fear is a great motivator. Also, Enable, the account aggregator I used to track our savings, no longer seemed accurate, and I stopped using it. I switched to manual spreadsheets, but I don’t want to keep them updated. That should be the goal of 2026: keep better track of our money.
Our value has continued to grow this year, mainly due to the stock market. We stuck to our financial plan and ignored all the stock market antics of 2025, and this was good for our portfolio and our mental health. Highly recommended.
While we don’t enjoy the same territorial conflict as doctors in the Midwest, it’s easier to live within your means when the local dress code is “farmer’s market vendor.” We did a low-cost master renovation of our house—about $500,000 all told, more than the $300,000 I had estimated. It was painful to watch the money come out of our accounts, but we are very lucky to have the money and the ability to earn it back by working at jobs we both enjoy. We plan to live in this house for the rest of our days, and as my husband said, we will never replace the roof again because we will be dead before this one comes off. That’s comforting.
More info here:
How Our Portfolio Performed in 2025 (Including Real Estate!)
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Doctor
I enjoyed my work at the medical school, which included teaching second-year medical students and receiving first-year students. I went on to do a little hospital work, and spent a total of five weeks working for a national health organization in Alaska doing general pediatric inpatients. In August, the children’s resident came with me for a two-week exchange, which was my goal for the year.
My husband continued to work part-time (4-8 days a month) as a contract worker at a local hospital and, at the same time, built his own practice. This started as a cash-only vasectomy practice, but it turned out that there wasn’t enough demand for vasectomy in our area to more than break even the cost. That part of the practice will continue, but he began seeing regular urology patients—and taking insurance—in November.
Real estate investment
We bought an investment property, and everything went well. We also have a small office building that houses my husband’s private surgery practice and four additional doctors who rent rooms: two NPs, one PT, and a nutritionist. We have ideas to expand the office building to meet demand, but those plans have taken a backseat to our biggest project: building an automotive surgery center.
The main group that takes this is my husband, an orthopedic surgeon, and a neurosurgeon. This was a huge project that included many meetings with architects, planners, and builders. The learning curve was unbelievable. As of this writing, our application for a Certificate of Need has been submitted, and our partners have settled on a consultant and building. The building and business will be wholly owned by the physician, and ASC will donate a percentage of care to underinsured and uninsured patients.
Our personal capital, so far, has been $5,000 in seed money because our partners have been doing all the work themselves, and we think we’ve spent at least $100,000 in consultant fees so far. Our costs are obviously going to be very high, very quickly, as we start hiring more people. We hope to be successful this year and start operations in 2027.
Planning for the Future
Hopefully, my husband and I will still be kicking some years from now, but we are talking about the separation between retirement and our children’s legacies.
We completed our estate planning in 2024 and began transferring our assets to the trust in 2025. Check out my column on our estate planning process, which includes advice like, “Don’t forget to put things in the trust you just made.”
We don’t give our kids cash, but we put aside for their graduate education (mostly in 529 plans) and we “match” any money they make into a Roth IRA. Since this can grow tax-free and eventually be used for expenses such as buying a house, I see this as a smart way to transfer our wealth to them while we are alive.
Home Front
My oldest child graduated from college and started biochemistry school. He says his goal is to kill at the pharmacy and stop when he is 40 years old. That’s my boy. All three kids are happy, hardworking, and loyal, and there’s nothing more I could ever ask for.
My husband makes about 40 gallons of maple syrup. Most of it, we gave up; the rest we ate. I help with our elementary school Nordic ski program (GO LIONS!). I decided to have a community in 2025, so at one point, I held a book club.
We started the year with one dog and got two more; now there are three of us. That’s just math.
That is why we cannot have good things.
More info here:
You Should Invest Like a 50-Year-Old Woman
Living Our Lives in a Two-Income Family with Doctors
Looking Forward
I expect that the biggest financial project of 2026—and perhaps all of our operations—will be starting a new outpatient surgery center. My husband, Mike, and his partner have now hired a consultant, but they still have to go around fixing the building and starting the whole business. At the same time, Mike and I will have decisions to make about how to finance our part of this. This and the phase of retirement and six years of college education make for an interesting paradox. Good thing I like puzzles.
For 2026:
- I will follow our money better.
- I will continue to work in Alaska, and I will refine and strengthen the resident rotation.
I didn’t go to WCICON last year, and I honestly missed it. I’m coming back in 2026. Please also find me and help me be social.
This is my fourth year writing an annual review and setting expectations for the coming year. Some goals I have achieved, others I have given up. Here’s to another year of self-improvement and/or self-acceptance. We wish you the best in 2026.
Doctors train for years to learn about medicine. But financial literacy was not part of the curriculum. That’s where White Coat Investor comes in—by offering tons of entry-level information to get you started on the right path. We have a FREE email series called WCI 101 that reviews the basics in bite-size chunks. You can check out our Start Here page to learn all about personal finance for doctors. You can also use our frequently asked questions for more information. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when learning about finances. WCI is here to help!
If you had 2025 New Year’s resolutions, how did they go? Do you have any resolutions for 2026?
