The unexpectedly early death of his father set Dr. Jordan Grumet on a path to pursue a career in medicine and pushed him to develop a fierce focus on financial security, following the FIRE movement, which stands for “financial independence, retire early.”
But his work recently as a hospice doctor discussing end-of-life issues with his patients made him rethink the role money plays in all of our lives.
“The more I began to learn from my patients, the less certain I was about a lot of my ideas concerning frugality, saving, and investing,” Grumet, 49, said.
It also led to his new book, Taking Stock: A Hospice Doctor’s Advice on Financial Independence, Building Wealth, and Living a Regret-Free Life. He’s also a personal finance blogger and host of the Earn & Invest podcast he launched in 2018.
Grumet offered insights and advice in a conversation with Yahoo Finance. Here are the highlights of that conversation:
Book jacket
Why did you write this book?
As a hospice doctor working with people who have terminal illnesses and dying, I was getting some answers to life questions. They were looking at their lives as they were getting closer and closer to death and starting to answer some of those bigger life questions such as what was my purpose in life? What was meaningful to me?
And those were the exact questions that I was trying to answer when it came to money and finances — what is our money supposed to do for us? Money can’t really be the end-all goal. It’s somewhat of a false goal, because it doesn’t really have any deeper meaning than knowing that we’re safe. I felt like it would provide a unique vantage point about how to talk about money.
How did the FIRE movement impact your transition to hospice work and your financial podcast?
The FIRE movement has done lots of things for me, but maybe not what you’d suspect. The greatest thing for me about the FIRE movement is it gave me the vocabulary to understand my finances.
When I got to the point where I was burning out in medicine, I had this vague idea that I needed a certain amount of money in order to stop practicing medicine and start doing things that were more gratifying to me. What the FIRE movement did is help me frame this idea of what is enough money. And using that frame, I was able to start looking at my life and subtracting out the things that I didn’t like doing, the things that were creating friction, and adding in things that I did like doing, or adding to my sense of purpose, identity, and connections.
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