Navigating a Financial Crisis by Cory Fawcett, MD: A Book Review

 

A FIRE’d surgeon, Cory Fawcett, MD, has written many finance books aimed directly at physicians. DH and I have enjoyed Dr. Fawcett’s books. The latest one, Navigating a Financial Crisis, is just as good, if not better than his previous books.

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How I Lost my Covid-15 pounds

People much wiser than myself recommend picking a word for each year. After the dumpster fire of 2020, I decided the word I needed for 2021 was HEALTH. I even wrote it across the top of our wall sized, yearly planner in big, block letters.

At the start of COVID, I stress-lost weight, then immediately gained back more than double. Going into 2021, I was determined to fit back into my clothes again (it’s frightening how living in one pair of yoga pants (or scrubs) lends itself to not realizing you can’t fit into the rest of your wardrobe!).

Here’s the list of things that helped me finally lose weight by the end of 2021. I hope you can find some helpful tips in case, like me, you’d prefer to start using the rest of your wardrobe again:

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A Healthier You in 2022: A Reading List

“If you don’t make time for exercise, you’ll probably have to make time for illness.”-Robin Sharma.

 

As I went about trying to Improve my overall health these past eighteen months, I focused on reading books about habits and how to think better. That’s because I knew if I could control my thoughts and manage my daily habits, then I’d see the quality of my life improve tremendously—which it has.

 

Only the most helpful books made it onto this list. Don’t worry, I won’t tell you about all 128 books I’ve read since the start of the pandemic. 😉 There are a lot of strategies I employed to be able to read so many books. First, I rarely watch TV and I read before bed.

 

The biggest reason I was able to ‘read’ so much was that I finally acclimated to audiobooks. I use the Overdrive or Libby apps with audio loans from our local library. On Amazon Prime Day, I also bought audio books on sale that our local library didn’t have.

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Why a FIRE Doctor Wants to Continue Working After We Re-enter our New Normal

(FIRE=Financial Independence Retire Early/Recreational Employment)

Why would a FIRE doctor who came out of retirement to work during a global pandemic want to continue working once it’s over?

Glad you asked. 😉

The first two blogs of this three-part series were the most emotionally difficult blogs I’ve written to date. Thankfully, this third blog was much easier to write since I have so many reasons why I want to stay in the medical workforce:

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An Inpatient Palliative Medicine Physician’s Experiences on the Front Lines During Covid-19

This 3 part blog series explores the experiences and thoughts for the physician FIRE community on why I left FIRE to return to work due to Covid. (FIRE=Financial Independence Retire Early/Recreational Employment)

In the first blog, I wrote about the difficult decision to come out of early retirement as a Hospice and Palliative Care physician to work on the front lines during a global pandemic. This 2nd blog post details what that return felt like and what I found when I went back into the hospital.

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I’m a vaccinated, frontline Physician who got breakthrough Covid. Here’s what it was like.

I’m interrupting this anemically-scheduled blog series to provide a public service announcement: I’m a vaccinated, frontline physician who still ended up getting Covid. If you qualify, get your booster asap, because getting breakthrough Covid wasn’t an experience I’d want to repeat. Here’s what it felt like:

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50 Nonclinical Careers for Physicians: a book review

If you’re burnt out from Covid and contemplating exploring nonclinical options, this book is for you. 50 Nonclinical Careers for Physicians is full of information on finding fulfilling, meaningful, and lucrative alternatives to direct patient care.

Books and Hikes are good for the soul. (Reader: please be aware there are Amazon affiliate links, that if you click, although they will not result in higher prices for you, could result in a commission that would go towards supporting this blog.)

Dr. Sylvie Stacy wrote a much more comprehensive, and up-to-date book than this book review I did here. Physicians in Transition was a dated compilation of twenty-five interviews with physicians who quit clinical medicine and explored other ventures as ways to not only make money, but find more fulfilling careers.

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Physicians in Transition: Doctors Who Successfully Reinvented Themselves (A Book Review)

“It is unlikely that your actual path through life will match the exact journey you had in mind when you set out. It makes no sense to restrict your satisfaction to one scenario when there are many paths to success.” – Atomic Habits

Fascinating read (Editor’s note: Please be aware there can be affiliate links in this blog, while bringing no extra charge to you, can provide a commission to support this blog)

This post may sound a bit tone-deaf in our current climate, as it explores physicians leaving clinical medicine. However, this blog was written last fall and is only now seeing publication as I have a one week break in my regular (fiction) writing schedule. And judging by the eye-popping number of “I quit” posts from doctors that I’ve seen recently in my Facebook feed—as well as reading a thought-provoking blog by a pharmacist who’s taking a COVID Sabbatical—I decided to go ahead and publish this post.

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