Christine Benz: Hi, and welcome to The Long View. I’m Christine Benz, director of personal finance for Morningstar.
Jeff Ptak: And I’m Jeff Ptak, chief ratings officer for Morningstar Research Services.
Benz: Our guest on the podcast today is Leif Dahleen, who heads up the popular Physician on FIRE blog. Leif retired from his career as an anesthesiologist at age 43. Since that time, he has been blogging about his own financial independence, retire early journey, sharing early retirement and investing guidance with other professionals who might also wish to retire early. He attended the University of Minnesota for his undergraduate and medical school education, completed an internship at Gundersen Lutheran in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and finished his residency at the University of Florida.
Leif, welcome to The Long View.
Leif Dahleen: Thank you, Christine. I’m very happy to be joining you today.
Benz: We’re happy to have you here. Now you trained as an anesthesiologist, which is a grueling and expensive course of study. What were the pivotal events that prompted you to consider early retirement after practicing anesthesiology for a relatively short period of time?
Dahleen: Yeah, you’re right. The training, if you include undergrad, you’ve got four years of undergrad, four years of medical school, four years of residency–it’s 12 years all together, and I practiced for about 13. So, they’re almost equal in that regard. But honestly, the main drivers for me was realizing that we were financially independent. I didn’t know what that term meant until I read about it in an article online talking about this guy named Mr. Money Mustache, who was blogging about his early retirement. And I looked at the numbers–it said you needed about 25 times what you usually spend. And at this point, about almost 10 years into my career, we had paid off all student loan debts, we had paid off our mortgage. We lived in a relatively low cost of living area in northern Minnesota at that time, and we were spending about $70,000 a year. That doesn’t include some things like charitable giving, or health insurance, which was provided by our employer at the time. But I looked at that $70,000 and multiplied by 25 and looked at our retirement accounts and my taxable brokerage account. …….
Source: https://www.morningstar.com/podcasts/the-long-view/117
