The White Coat Investor’s Guide for Students: A Review | White Coat Investor

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The third book in The White Coat Investor series was just published this week. As is traditional, I thought I would both announce and review it here on the blog. First-year medical and dental students should read the whole post carefully as there is a special giveaway for them in the post.

The White Coat Investor’s Guide for Students: How Medical and Dental Students Can Secure Their Financial Future is now available on Amazon in paperback. The price is listed at $29.99, meaning Amazon will likely sell it in the $25-$27 range. The Kindle version is also available (again just $9.99). An audio version will be out in a couple of months.

While both the original book (The White Coat Investor: A Doctor’s Guide to Personal Finance and Investing) and the second book (The White Coat Investor’s Financial Boot Camp: A 12-step, High-yield Guide to Bring Your Finances Up to Speed) are often given to medical and dental students, they’re really more appropriate for residents and young attendings. This book is squarely aimed at the student. There are three parts to the book. Here is the Table of Contents:

Introduction

Part 1 – The Financially Savvy Student

• Chapter 1 – Why Money Should Not Be Your Primary Motivation
• Chapter 2 – You Do Not Get a Pass on Math
• Chapter 3 – How to Choose a Medical or Dental School
• Chapter 4 – How to Pay for Professional School
• Chapter 5 – Why You Should Be a Thrifty Student
• Chapter 6 – How to Live on Loans
• Chapter 7 – The Advantages of Being a Non-traditional Student
• Chapter 8 – How to Choose a Specialty – Physicians
• Chapter 9 – How to Choose a Specialty – Dentists
• Chapter 10 – Avoiding Financial Catastrophes
• Chapter 11 – Preventing and Combating Burnout
• Chapter 12 – How to Choose a Residency Program
• Chapter 13 – Why a Dentist Should Not Be Afraid to Open a Practice

Part 2 – Managing Finances During Residency

• Chapter 14 – Why Renting Could Actually Save You Money
• Chapter 15 – Student Loan Management During Residency
• Chapter 16 – Investing During Residency
• Chapter 17 – Protecting Your Most Valuable Asset
• Chapter 18 – Got Dependents? Get Life Insurance

Part 3 – The Next Step: Achieving Financial Literacy

• Chapter 19 – Stocks, Bonds, and Mutual Funds (Financial Literacy 101)
• Chapter 20 – Taxes and Retirement Accounts (Financial Literacy 102)
• Chapter 21 – Financial History (Financial Literacy 103)
• Chapter 22 – Numbers You Need to Know (Financial Literacy 104)

An Invitation 

As you can see, the bulk of the book is all about what to do during medical and dental school to optimize your current and future financial situation. However, I felt it was also important to include a few chapters to at least get people started as they move into the first year of post-graduate training (or practice for general dentists).

The third section is unique and covers a lot of material you will not find on the blog, on the podcast, in the online courses, or in any of the other books. This is what I consider basic financial literacy education. I broke it down into four “100” level chapters and four more “200” level chapters (Financial Advisors, Insurance, Contracts, and Real Estate Investing).

Then I looked at the length of the book. The original WCI book was 160 pages. Boot Camp, including the appendices, was 205 pages. This thing was well over 300 pages, basically twice as thick as The White Coat Investor.

So we decided to pull four chapters out of the book and put them into a PDF. When you buy the book, you simply enter your email and the website automatically sends you the last four chapters and signs you up for our newsletter. As always you can unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time with the click of a button. The remaining book has a little over 260 numbered pages, plus another 25 or so in the front matter.

The foreword for the book is written by the esteemed Rick Ferri, current president of the John C. Bogle Financial Literacy Center, and a speaker at WCICON20.

If you are a student, I would encourage you to buy the book today. If you know a medical or dental student, this would be a very useful gift for them.

 

The White Coat Investor’s Guide for Students: The Review

Now for a completely unbiased review of the book. It is superb. I would give it six stars if I could. The writing is superior to what you will find in either of the other two books. Obviously, an author is going to get better after writing constantly for years, but it is more than that. The arguments are more clear, pronouns are more inclusive (or mostly eliminated as is the current style), and the organization of thought and flow is top-notch.

The book is also a lot prettier. The layout and images are more professional (this will really be noticed on the Kindle version where images are particularly tough to do well), there are endnotes and references, and every chapter is summarized in a”main ideas” section at the end.

The beloved Additional Resources feature at the end of each chapter is also preserved. However, every link in the print book also now includes a QR code. Remember, these students are all far more tech-savvy than I was in school. They can simply scan the QR codes and pull the link up right on their phone as they read.

The content itself is high-quality and high-yield as you have come to expect from The White Coat Investor. The author nicely balances the fact that doctors should not be primarily motivated by money with the fact that they cannot ignore it completely. He argues forcefully that students living on student loans should not feel guilty whatsoever about doing so (as long as they have a reasonable plan to take care of it after school), but at the same time, will be glad they did what they could to minimize the size of that debt. He includes up to date information about how students are paying for school, what they owe, and how much each given specialist is likely to make after school.

There are also a bunch of chapters you might not have expected, such as a chapter on burnout. Realizing this affects a large part of the profession is important. There is a chapter that is all about the advantages and disadvantages of a non-traditional student. Apparently, some people consider me to be non-traditional since I didn’t start med school until I was 24, but it turns out that’s actually probably still below average. There is also a chapter arguing that most dentists who want to be financially successful and paid for their schooling primarily with loans ought to give very serious consideration to owning their practice.

Chapter 19 (Stocks, Bonds, and Mutual Funds) is probably not going to be anyone’s favorite chapter. However, many of the reviewers who read it thought it was really important information that many of them had never seen anywhere else. It finally helped them to understand what stocks and bonds really are.

Chapter 21 contains material I’ve never covered anywhere else. Not the blog, not the podcast, not the course. It was fun to research and write and I think financial history is more important than ever to understand in order to comprehend today’s markets and stay the course with a reasonable plan. Even non-students are likely to find the book worthwhile just to get the eight financial literacy chapters at the end. They’re almost as long as the entire first WCI book.

 

The Giveaway to First-Year Students

Yes, we’re selling this book on Amazon. Yes, we hope lots of medical and dental students buy it. We’re still running a for-profit business here. But that wasn’t the only reason I wrote it. You may have noticed that during the 2020 Scholarship Week that we didn’t give away a box of books to every member of the winners’ classes like we have in the past. That was deliberate because we knew we had this new book coming out.

Instead of just giving it to five classes of students, we’re going to give a copy of this book to every first-year student at every MD school, DO school, and dental school in the country. There are about 22,000 first-year MD students, about 8,000 first-year DO students, and about 6,500 first-year dental students in the country. And we’re willing to give every one of them a copy of this book. That’s a 36,500 * $29.99 = $1,094,000 value. We’re literally giving away over a million dollars worth of books here. However, if just 10% of them will read it and apply the information in their lives, it will likely be worth at least a few hundred thousand dollars to each of them. By giving away a million dollars worth of books to first-year students, we can eventually help create over a billion dollars in increased doctor wealth. This might be one of the greatest things we ever accomplish here at The White Coat Investor.

 

Becoming a Champion

However, we’re not going to mail out 36,500 books individually. Sorry. Nor are we going to send them to the medical and dental school Dean’s offices and hope they pass them out to you. We’re only going to ship them to a volunteer “champion” in the first-year class to distribute to their classmates.

If you are selected to be the champion for your class, we’ll ship the books directly to you and we’ll include a WCI T-shirt for you. If you send us back a picture of you and your classmates with the books, we’ll ship you a WCI Yeti tumbler too! All you have to do is be a full-time, first-year student in good standing (yes, we’ll check) and promise to distribute them. We’re going to tell your classmates who you are, so if you just go sell the books on eBay they’re not going to be very happy with you.

June 1, 2021, Volunteer Deadline!

This is your chance to be the hero to your classmates, but you only have until June 1st to volunteer. Then you and your classmates will have to buy your own books. No, we’re not giving out Kindle copies. No, we’re not giving out audiobooks. Just paperbacks.

If you would like to be the White Coat Investor Champion for your FIRST YEAR class, take charge of this book distribution, and get some free swag, you can sign up below. If this goes well, we may do it again this Fall with the new class of first-year students.

I Am a First-Year US MD/DO/Dental Student and Want to Be the Champion for My Class!

Overall, the new book is well worth $29.99, but when combined with changing the lives of tens of thousands of young doctors, it might be the most important thing The White Coat Investor ever does.

Buy The White Coat Investor’s Guide for Students Today!

What do you think? Have you read the book? What did you like about it? Comment below!