I don't want to work in this field anymore, but with the salary that I make, I don't see how I can make a career change.
That's a comment I received in my life after medicine, Facebook group. And I'm guessing it's something that you can relate to.
Chelsea:
One of the big reasons I noticed healthcare professionals feel trapped in their current career is because of the money. You have this belief that nothing will pay what I make clinically. I've had messages from people saying like, at this point, I feel like I want out of medicine completely, but I'm the sole income for my family. So changing is daunting. And what's underneath that, the underlying belief is that nothing will pay what I make clinically. We essentially think that the salary we earn in clinical medicine is this holy grail and we'd be hard pressed to find it anywhere else. But the idea that nothing will pay what you make clinically is completely inaccurate.
And in today's episode, you'll learn why it's simply not true. That nothing will pay what you make clinically. you'll learn How you can start carving a pathway towards. A career that is both financially sustainable. And personally fulfilling. You're listening to life after medicine, the podcast for health professionals who want to make a difference, make a living, and still have the freedom to enjoy their lives. My name is Chelsea Turgeon, and my mission is to help you, the lost health professional, find your authentic path to helping others and generating stable income without having to sacrifice your own health and happiness in the process.
Chelsea:
nothing will pay what I make clinically. Now, I get why you think that. So we're essentially taught that the pathway to a high paying job is through this long, arduous path to getting a degree, training in a field, and then finally you qualify for this place where you receive a good paycheck. Especially in medicine, We work for so many years unpaid for a while to get to the point where we do start to earn this salary. So we think that the only way to make a similar salary would be to go back to school to put in another 10 years of work. And so we extrapolate, unless we want to do that, nothing else is going to pay what we make clinically. Or maybe you think that because you're looking at a job listing and seeing the annual salary listed for certain jobs that you think you're eligible for are nowhere near what your clinical salary is. And so then you adopt this belief that nothing will pay what you make clinically, or that it would be hard to find that same salary elsewhere. That earning six figures outside of clinical medicine will be difficult and rare. But let me ask you, if you break it down hourly, do you really make that much money clinically we tend to not calculate all of this unpaid time that we're spending charting. We take it home charting. We spend it looking up patients for the next day. Like that all is work time that most of us are not even counting. We're only counting the stuff that we're doing at work. But if you actually went through and broke it all down hourly, amount of time that you work, you probably don't actually make that much. So we're going to do a little exercise, just do some math for you. There's a good resource on White Coat Investor that actually has like what do physicians make on an hourly basis. I'm going to use some of the figures from there, but I also did my own. So I'm taking OBGYN annual salary on the figures from White Coat Investor was 224, 000. Then I put it through this formula that deducted taxes. So the annual take home pay after taxes was 158, 286. The average working hours per week of an OBGYN was reported to be 61 hours per week. You want to do your own calculations, obviously. So I'm assuming that we're working 61 hours per week and then assuming that they're working 48 weeks out of the year. So that gives actually four weeks of vacation. That's 53 per hour. That's not a ton. It's not horrible, but it's not a ton. 132, 000 deduct from taxes, then that's 90, 000 take home. average of 52. 5 hours per week of working that adds up to 36 per hour. I invite you to do your own calculation of that. Take your annual salary, deduct your taxes, get your take home pay. How many hours per week are you working? How many weeks of the year are you working? What does that actually add up to per hour? So if you actually break it down hourly, there's plenty of other ways to earn that kind of money doing many other things. For example, I was making 60 per hour that's after taxes I was teaching biology to Chinese kids remotely. 60 per hour. I was making more than an average OBGYN or family practice doctor per hour when I was teaching biology to Chinese kids. Right? So, the thing I want to point out here is is not to make you depressed that you're not earning a lot, but to say that not all dollars earned are equal. So dollars earned is only an important metric if you give it the proper context. And in this case, the proper context is how much time does it take you to earn that, right? How many hours does that take of your life? What is it costing you to earn that money in terms of life satisfaction, personal fulfillment. So working in a job that you don't enjoy or that has high levels of stress is not benign. It does come at a cost, so it can take a toll on your mental and physical wellbeing. And that needs to be factored in. There's actual financial costs of that. Let's say you have to go to therapy because you need to learn how to deal with your stress and anxiety. You need to pay for massages because you're stressed. Self care. Maybe you need to pay for coaching because you need help with your mindset. maybe it's taking a toll on your relationship. So then you need to pay for marriage counseling. Maybe because you're so unhappy, you just, you need to let off steam. And so you go shopping, you, are so unhappy that you need to take these really elaborate vacations to try to forget about your life, right? So that all adds up. Those are actual financial costs, but then there's also intangible costs that on the strains on your relationship, the strains on your health.
So when you're thinking nothing will pay what I make clinically or just thinking that it will be hard to earn the same amount of money in another job. You can't just look at the figure of what you earn, because that's not an accurate metric. You have to look at the dollars earned in the context of what does it cost you to earn those dollars?
Chelsea:
When you're believing nothing will pay what I make clinically, What I want you to ask is, but am I actually making that much clinically? And what am I making when I factor in how much time it takes me to make that and what it costs me to make that. And then another question to ask is, do you need to earn what you make clinically? Or is what you're really worried about or interested in financial stability? Like, do you need to actually match your salary or do you just really want financial stability? Like, what are you actually interested in? And so then the question becomes, how do you find a role that is financially sustainable and personally fulfilling?
Well, there's several steps to this and I'll go through a few of them right now. So first and foremost, you have to connect to yourself and establish your own personal financial priorities that are not based in comparison and what everyone else is doing. You have to get clear on what it is exactly that you're looking for when it comes to income, how much income do you need or want to make. What does that money buying you? Where is it adding to your overall happiness? You want to ask yourself some brutally honest questions?
Chelsea:
is that double doctor house that's chaining you to a primary care role that's draining worth it so that you can afford your mortgage payments? Is that the move? Is that the vibe? Is that really worth it for you? You have to become bold enough to set your own financial priorities that are in alignment with who you are and what actually brings value to your life. So you have to be willing to create your own personalized financial priorities that match your values and your overall life goals and then make decisions in alignment with that. Another piece is you have to release and rewrite all of your old ideas around money and stories about what earns money and start realizing that money goes. Where value flows and anytime you're adding value to the world, you can earn money in exchange for that value. And so you have to start looking for evidence of people who are earning a stable living in jobs outside of clinical medicine, who are earning a stable living, doing work they enjoy, who are earning a stable living in ways you maybe didn't even know existed, but that actually sound like really cool or interesting jobs, but you have to start being open to that and start looking for evidence of that. When you start connecting to yourself and identifying your own financial priorities and then releasing and rewriting your current limiting ideas and mindsets around money, that's when you can find a role that is both financially sustainable and personally fulfilling. So let me ask you, do you want to continue believing that nothing will pay what you make clinically? Do you want to continue feeling trapped in these golden handcuffs? Or do you want to identify your true financial priorities, your values, and pursue a career that provides you the financial sustainability and the personal fulfillment? If you're interested in the second option, which I feel like is most people are really, why would we want to stay trapped?
Then I want to invite you to book a call with me so we can have a conversation that will help you see more possibilities and solutions so that you don't have to stay trapped. You can click the link in the show notes or head to coach Telus md.com/call to book your. call. So, is it true that nothing will pay what you make clinically? Is it true that working in clinical medicine is the only way for you to earn a stable salary. As you can tell from this episode. No, none of that is true. That's all completely false. There's so many ways to earn money, make a stable living that don't require you to be in a job. That is causing you. Stress or pain that's causing you to feel. Lack of fulfillment. There's always going to be ways for you to earn money and serve the world that don't drain and cost you your soul. And it's one of my favorite things in the world to help you find those, to help you find ways to make a difference, make a living, and have the freedom to enjoy your life because that. It's a hundred percent what you deserve and the world is a better place when we're all doing work that. we enjoy.
