By Josh Katzowitz, WCI Content Director

The reason the subject of personal finance is so intriguing (heck, one of the big reasons the website you’re reading right now exists) is because you could fill a book (or several books) with all the ways you can invest and protect your money.

You can go with the tried-and-true, no-frills strategy of putting your money into low-cost index funds. You can speculate to your heart’s content. You can be as conservative as William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater and put most of your money into bonds or cash, or you can loiter on the street corner of Loosey and Goosey and take on as much risk and leverage as you can get (and maybe even more than you can afford).

If you make enough income and save enough of it, you’re probably going to have a fine life and a nice retirement, even if you go a little nuts with your investments. But most people who continue to log on to this site (read the blog, listen to the podcast, and inhale a course or two) are probably more in the Bogleheads mold, emphasizing “regular saving, broad diversification, and sticking to one’s investment plan regardless of market conditions.”

But not all physicians or other high-income earners take their cues from John Bogle, Dr. Jim Dahle, and their combined acolytes. Some have their own ideas about how to invest their money, and in its 2025 survey, Medscape sought to determine how physicians were playing this game.

The results probably aren’t surprising. As Medscape summarized, “Physicians wound up looking like a fairly conservative lot, even if they like to think of themselves as aggressive investors.”

When asked about where they feel comfortable investing their non-retirement accounts, 33% of the survey respondents said “securities,” 26% said “real estate,” and 7% said “non-medical businesses.” According to the survey, 21% of doctors aren’t investing outside of their retirement accounts, which could speak to a lack of financial knowledge that building up a 401(k) probably won’t be enough to lead you to financial freedom.

Here’s a more detailed look at where Medscape doctors are investing.

Compare that to the annual WCI survey from 2024. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison (WCI wasn’t distinguishing between retirement and non-retirement accounts), but it looks like the people who read this site take a more aggressive approach to investing in stocks and real estate but take a more conservative approach to precious metals, collectibles, and individual stocks (only 20% of WCIers say they buy individual stocks). Interestingly, both surveys have the same percentage for crypto investing.

Here’s what those respondents in WCI’s 2025 survey said. The data is fairly similar to 2024, but there apparently has been more interest in crypto and precious metals.

We’ve spent plenty of time in the last year or two distinguishing between DIYers (those who handle their investments themselves), validators (those who mostly do their own investing work but who sometimes want the advice of a financial advisor who can tell them whether they’re on the right track), and delegators (who will pay somebody else to set up and maintain their financial lives for them).

According to the Medscape survey, doctors split nearly evenly between those three options: 37% say “I make my own investment decisions,” 33% say “I consistently use professional advice,” and 30% say “I sometimes use professional advice.” That’s rather far off from WCI’s 2024 survey, where 65% of respondents said “I manage my own financial decisions,” 14.5% said they only occasionally get help from an advisor, and approximately 8%-10% said they “regularly use a financial advisor for all of my financial decisions.”

Here’s one other piece of interesting information from Medscape. Those physicians who earned less than $300,000 per year were much more likely to describe themselves as less aggressive investors. On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being “very conservative” and 5 being “very aggressive,” 47% of those who made less than $300,000 rated themselves as a 1 or 2, and only 15% rated themselves a 4 or 5. Meanwhile, for those who earned more than $300,000, 34% rated themselves as a 1 or 2, and 27% rated themselves a 4 or 5.

That makes sense in some ways, but as wealth management advisor Becky Vogt-Lundeed told Medscape, those who are earlier in their careers (some of whom might make less than $300,000 now but eventually will surpass that total) should be the ones who are more aggressive.

“I have noticed this with residents, fellows, new attendings; the less money they have, the more they fear losing it,” Vogt-Lundeen said. “But investing more conservatively at that age means they’re not getting the market gains they should, given their time horizon.”

What does all of this mean? It might be self-serving and braggadocious to say (and probably fairly obvious), but those who are a part of the WCI community are most likely the doctors who are going to get richer and reach financial independence quicker and easier. That just shows the power of financial literacy and how it could net you millions of dollars, just by knowing what to do with all of your money.

More information here:

Which Medical Specialties Are the Most Burned Out?

What Physician Specialties Have the Happiest Marriages?

Money Song of the Week

When I was in fourth grade, Poison was one of my favorite bands. I was big into 1980s metal (I hate the term “hair metal”), and along with Def Leppard and Guns N’ Roses, I rocked out to some of the biggest bands of that era as much as possible.

Somehow, Poison still survives today. Although much of the lyrical content of its tunes hasn’t aged particularly well, the band is still playing stadium shows (as an opener, at least) and making money.

And Poison nearly always plays Nothin’ But a Good Time, which tells the tale of a person who is living paycheck to paycheck but who still feels the need to party at all hours. Tell me, does it get much more hair metal than that?

As frontman Bret Michaels sings:

“Not a dime, I can’t pay my rent/I can barely make it through the week/Saturday night, I’d like to make my girl/But right now, I can’t make ends meet.”

Now, revel in some of the glammiest of the glam as we watch an MTV mainstay.

Poison is certainly an ‘80s metal success story. While a few bands from that era still exist (and even fewer can still pull in significant money on the road), tons of glam bands have been left behind and forgotten. And while Poison today certainly isn’t the superpower it was from 1986-1991, Michaels and his bandmates probably aren’t going hungry. Why? Because they were smart early in their careers.

Michaels also said this on Sirius XM, via Blabbermouth, in 2022:

“One of the biggest blessings that came from that is we held all of our publishing,” he said. “ . . . We had been offered these really small offers, and we were, like, ‘We’re already poor. Let’s just stay here and just hold on to controlling our career.’ And I go back to this now. That ended up being the biggest gem for Poison.”

Considering the band has sold tens of millions of records during its 40-year career, that must be quite a large gem.

More information here:

Every Money Song of the Week Ever Published

Tweet of the Week

The eternal question.

What do you think? Do the percentages of doctors and their investing habits make sense to you? Where do you stand with your investments?

[EDITOR’S NOTE: For comments, complaints, suggestions, or plaudits, email Josh Katzowitz at [email protected].]