State of the Blog 2020

It’s that time of year again. Starting in 2012, we here at The White Coat Investor have thanked and updated the members of our community on the progress made in the last year. As usual, 2019 was our best year ever in nearly every respect. Thanks to all of you who have even the tiniest amount of responsibility for that. If you told even one person about the site or book, answered one question on the forum or Facebook group, or used the site to find a financial service provider you needed, THANK YOU.

Just as I have the last three years, I’m going to talk about the state of the blog in terms of the three missions of The White Coat Investor:

Help those who wear the white coat (and other high-income professionals) get a “fair shake” on Wall Street
Feed my entrepreneurial spirit
Connect high-income professionals with the relatively few “good guys” in the financial services industry

# 1 Getting a “Fair Shake” on Wall Street

Let’s run through some of the ways in which 2019 was better than 2018.

The White Coat Investor Blog

The biggest parts of The White Coat Investor “Empire” are the blog, the newsletter, and the podcast. The blog was first and honestly what I enjoy doing the most. On Mondays and Fridays, we publish new material I have written. On Tuesdays, we have been reposting “classic” articles from the past. Most readers are seeing them for the first time. Wednesdays we have a guest post. On Thursdays, we publish the podcast show notes for that week. On Saturdays, we republish a post from our WCI Network partners The Physician on FIRE, Passive Income MD, and The Physician Philosopher. On the seventh (first?) day, we rest.

In a 52 week year, that adds up to approximately 312 posts of which approximately 104 were new posts by me, 52 were old posts by me, 52 were guest posts, 52 were old WCI Network posts, and 52 were podcast show notes. There were 5 sponsored posts in there somewhere (100% of the proceeds were donated to the scholarship) and the top 5 scholarship winning posts.

The grand total of posts and pages on the blog portion of the site is 1,857. A typical blog post is now read by 13-26,000 people by email or on the site. The entire site had about 13,600,00 page views (22% increase) by 2,889,365 unique individuals (45% increase) in 2019 and has had approximately 47 million page views by 9 million people since its inception in May 2011.

The most widely read post I wrote this year was Why Tesla Owning Doctors Hate Me back in July, which I find hilarious since it would not surprise me if I bought a Tesla in the future and we’re including 3 garage electric car plugin ports in our big renovation right now. The most widely read guest post I published this year was called Stop Whining About Job Satisfaction by Side Hustle Scrubs. I got a lot of hate mail on that one.

The comments section of the blog is always lots of fun. Over the last 8 years, the blog has accumulated 74,272 legitimate comments, about 11,000 of them this year.  Yes, I read every single one of them. In fact, it turns out that I’ve written 20,591 of them myself. An interesting factoid readers may not realize is that 9 out of 10 comments on the blog are spam. I’ve had 681, 130 spam comments on the blog since I started. Luckily the software is about 99.7% accurate at screening it out so we never see it.

Thank you to Jill for all her hard work here. Without her work, there would only be half as much content on the blog as there is.

The Newsletter

This is a FREE monthly email newsletter sent out about the first of every month. If you’re not subscribed, you’re really missing out.

Besides an update on what we’re doing at WCI, we review the best financial articles for high-income professionals on the web each month, provide a market review, and have a “special tip” which is basically a super-secret blog post that never shows up on the site. In addition to that monthly newsletter, the email list has three other options — getting every blog post by email, getting a weekly summary email of the blog posts, and our Real Estate Opportunities list, a new addition this year which already has 1931 people on it. The monthly newsletter currently goes out to 39,576 people, an increase of 82% from last year.  We had a big increase this year when we added FB Group members to it. Signing up entitles you to the FREE 12 email Financial Bootcamp course.

Speaking Engagements

Something else I’ve been doing for years is going out and meeting you personally and trying to speak to groups of physicians, dentists, and others. It’s enjoyable from the time I step off the plane until I get back on, but I’m not going to pretend traveling is my favorite part of WCI. I did my first one in 2012 for $500 plus expenses and have been raising prices ever since, mostly to try to limit the number of these I do to about a half dozen a year. I failed again this year in my goal, having done 18 ranging from Grand Cayman to Anchorage.

I also had quite a few podcast appearances. There is a huge need out there for doctors to teach each other about personal finance and investing at medical schools, conferences, and grand rounds. I cannot possibly meet this need, so thank you to those of you who are stepping up to help. I know the pay sucks, but there are some people who can only be reached this way. One of my goals this year was to put together some slides for you to use to give these talks, which you can find here.

Financial Educator of the Year Award

In order to give you even more incentive to teach each other personal finance, I put up the cash for an award for a doctor educator teaching peers about finances. The winner was Gaurava Agarwal, MD who won $1,000 cash.

Freelance Writing

I continue to write for ACEP NOW (5 articles published this year). I think I wrote another article or three for somebody, but I honestly can’t remember. It’s all a blur.  I did have 52 posts republished at Physician on FIRE, Passive Income MD, and The Physician Philosopher.

Books

The White Coat Investor: A Doctor’s Guide to Personal Finance and Investing continues to sell hundreds of copies each month. Sales actually went up this year from 12,829 to 17,638  (37% increase) after the second book was published. Since it was published almost 6 years ago, we’ve sold 86,319 copies. It still ranks 4th and 24th in its categories. The Kindle version still ranks 2nd and 2nd in its categories (behind Jack Bogle’s Little Book of Common Sense Investing and This is Going To Hurt by Adam Kay if you must know). The audiobook ranks 3rd in its category. Overall, it is ranked 3,106 on Amazon (i.e. the 3,106th best selling book on Amazon), an improvement from 3,512.  The book has 1,038 reviews, 95% of which are 4 or 5 stars.

 

The White Coat Investor’s Financial Boot Camp: A 12 Step High-Yield Guide To Bring Your Finances Up To Speed was published on February 25, 2019. We sold 10,393 copies. It ranks 17th and 55th in its categories (6th and 8th on Kindle and 5th on Audible). It has had 48 reviews, 100% of which are five stars.

Thank you to Katie for lots of hard work managing book sales this year.

Social Media

We made a big effort here this year. We now have 18,830 Twitter followers (43% increase). Our tweets had 1.66M impressions in December. We now have 13,677 Facebook followers. (52% increase). We have 187 followers on Pinterest (503% increase) and 5,075 followers on Instagram (568% increase). 395,374 people came to the website from social media this year, an increase of 26% over the prior year. Thank you to Michelle for lots of hard work here and thank you to you for following/liking/pinning/sharing WCI on social media. It really does help spread the message.

Reddit

The r/whitecoatinvestor subreddit had a great year. We now have 2,757 subscribers (203% increase.) We are getting almost 17,000 pageviews a month from over 3,000 people now. We made some improvements there this year.  Thank you to Michelle and RadOncDoc for your work moderating there.

White Coat Investors Facebook Group

The private WCI Facebook Group continues to grow like crazy.  We now have 36,001 members (204% increase) who made 157,837 (365% increase) 33,976 comments and 307,240 reactions (560% increase) on 8,969 posts (333% increase.) The concentration of so many white coat investors in one place makes for some pretty awesome results. Maybe this year the advertisers will figure out that sponsoring that group is the best advertising deal we offer. Thank you for following the group rules there and thank you to Michelle, Donna, Greg, Bill, and David for your work moderating there.

The Scholarship

Allison Neeson, 2019 Grand Prize winner!

The WCI Scholarship is something we’re very proud of around here. The WCI community, including readers, sponsors, and staff all pitched in to give over $90,000 in cash and prizes away to deserving professional students. 10 winners were selected from over 651 students by 79 volunteer judges. The top 10 all received their choice of a WCI online course. The top 5 all received a copy of a WCI book for every member of their class, plus cash (the winner took home $42,660).  If you missed the winning essays, you can catch them again here.

Grand Prize Winner- Allison Neeson
2nd Place- Momina Mazhar
3rd Place- Evan Mercer
4th Place- Oluwatomisin Bello
5th Place- Iman Khan

We’d also like to give a special thank you to the Platinum sponsors for this year’s WCI scholarship (contributions of $6,000+)

Larry Keller (Physician Financial Services) – Disability and Life Insurance
Bob Bhayani (Dr Disability Quotes) -Disability and Life Insurances
Splash Financial – Student Loan Refinancing
W. Ben Utley (Physician Family Financial Advisors) – Financial Advising
Alexis Gallati (Cerebral Tax Advisors) – Strategic Tax Planning

We expect to do the scholarship again this year, so stay tuned this summer.

The Forum

The WCI Forum had a pretty good year, although it was soured by events at the end of the year. First, the forum basically broke in October and became unusable. I took the opportunity to completely revamp the software behind it, but then for some reason, we lost the ability to track how much it was being used for about 6 weeks. Despite that, we still had a 17% increase in pageviews on the forum (which accounted for 43% of the traffic on the site.) We have 8,521 registered users on the Forum (46% increase). We had 621 threads started in December, with a total of 6,192 posts.

I love the community that has developed there. Like any financial forum, the regulars tend to be hobbyists, experts, and maybe even fanatics. Nevertheless, crowdsourcing advice like that will surely keep you from making any of the usual financial mistakes. A special thank you to our moderators: ACN, canadianoutlaw, DMFA, Doc Spouse, Hank, Hatton, jfoxcpacfp, Jim, nachos31, and Peds. We couldn’t have a forum without them. A special thank you to Nina and her team for helping us to move the forum onto new software.

The Podcast

 

I can’t believe we made it through another year of producing a podcast for you every week. There is so much work going into that it’s unbelievable. Given my full plate, all I do is sit behind the microphone. Everything else is taken care of by someone else. Thank you to Cindy for all she does here (lining up interviews, doing the shownotes, and coordinating everything and also to Wendel for doing all the editing.

We have now put out a total of 138 episodes, including 52 from this year. Total downloads for the podcast are 3,463,911 (126% increase) and an average of 25,100 per episode (43% increase). We estimate we have 40,683 subscribers. It is ranked # 38 among investing podcasts by iTunes, ahead of podcasts like Ric Edelman, the Bogleheads, Meb Faber, and Steve Forbes. I haven’t caught Dave Ramsey or Clark Howard yet though.

Our top three most downloaded episodes were all produced this year and include:

#100 (4/4/19) How to get rich as a doctor — 33,456
#107 (5/23/19) The Four Pillars of Investing with Bill Bernstein, MD — 32,510
#109 (6/6/19) Passive Investing and Financial Advisory Fees with Rick Ferri — 32,415

Thank you to those of you who have left us questions on “The Speakpipe” this year. It’s been fun having your voices on the show. If you’d like your question answered on the podcast, leave it here.

The YouTube Channel

Our YouTube channel continues to plod along, although I’m still not a Youtube star. Guess I’m too ugly and boring. We put up 75 videos this year and now have 4,200 subscribers (213% increase.) We’ve had 101,600 total views this year (276% increase) for 14,300 hours of watch-time (377% increase). Our top video was the one about How to Fill out Form 8606. Thanks for subscribing, liking, and sharing. It does help spread the message. Thanks also to Wendel for doing the video editing.

The WCI Network

The WCI Network of blogs is a group of bloggers that are working together to further the mission of The White Coat Investor. There are now three members, Physician on Fire , Passive Income M.D., and The Physician Philosopher. They all had great years this year. Highlights include Physician on FIRE getting a higher Alexa ranking than WCI, PIMDCON, and TPP starting a podcast. I’ll let them share the details:

Physician on FIRE

Physician on FIRE has been around since early 2016. The site’s pages have been viewed 7.4 million times, with 2.8 million of them coming in 2019.

It was an eventful year, as I officially put the RE in FIRE, retiring from medicine at 43 in August. My family and I spent two months in Mexico shortly thereafter, and we are currently on another two-month adventure in Spain. Don’t worry — I’ll be back in time to attend WCICon2020.

In addition to the website, I also connect with readers via email and social media. Some stats as of 1/1/2020:

Email subscribers: 9,040
Twitter: 15,921 followers
Facebook: 4,452 likes, 5,240 followers
Physicians on FIRE Facebook group: 17,978 physician members
fatFIRE Facebook group: 9,301 members
Instagram: 1,968 followers

The number that I’m most proud of is 214,586. That’s the number of dollars donated as a result of Physician on FIRE’s charitable mission. The actual number I’ve donated is over $300,000 as we’ve given away more than half of the profits to date.

We are now funding the salary of a physician I worked with a couple of times on a medical mission in Honduras, we donated $100 each to 130 charities as requested by site readers and sponsors, and we continue to grow our donor advised fund, a charitable account that will make grants to charitable organizations for decades to come. I appreciate your continued support!

Passive Income MD

Passive Income M.D. was created in 2016 to help physicians and other high income professionals achieve financial freedom through multiple streams of income, focusing heavily on real estate investing and entrepreneurship. We joined the WCI Network at the very end of 2017, and in 2018, we hit the huge milestone of having over one million page views in a calendar year.

2019 was an amazing year of continued growth where we published 150 posts, grew our Facebook Group, Passive Income Docs, to over 10,000 physicians, launched our course, Passive Real Estate Academy, and held our very first sold-out conference, Financial Freedom Through Investing in Real Estate.

We look forward to an awesome 2020 where we’ll continue to build on last year’s momentum by adding a Facebook Group for all high-income professionals & students, Passive Income Professionals, as well as by launching the Passive Income M.D. Podcast in February.

I’m extremely grateful for my partners in the WCI Network (White Coat Investor, Physician on Fire, The Physician Philosopher), loyal readers, and ambassadors of the site. Thank you for continuing to spread the word and for helping us make an impact one reader at a time.

The Physician Philosopher

The 2019 year was a breakout year for The Physician Philosopher blog, and 2020 is looking to be even bigger with the introduction of the Money Meets Medicine podcast. More about that in a second, though. The Physician Philosopher blog was created in November 2017. Two years later the site now has 2,000 email subscribers, ~3,000 twitter followers, and an increasing number of page views each month. In February, The Physician Philosopher’s Guide to Personal Finance was published. Medical schools are now purchasing the book, which maintains a 5-star review on Amazon, for their graduating classes. Then, in April the blog joined forces with the WCI network. Everything has continued to grow exponentially since that time, including both page views and blog income.

Looking forward to 2020, the biggest news on the horizon is the creation of the Money Meets Medicine podcast where we teach you the personal finance lessons you wish you had learned in medical school. I will host the show and it will be co-hosted by Ryan Inman, a fee-only financial advisor. Combining the experience of a practicing physician & finance blogger with a financial advisor should prove to be both entertaining and educational. Make sure to subscribe on your podcast player of choice!

Physician Wellness and Financial Literacy Conference

We did not have a conference in 2019, but are prepared for WCICON20 in March in Las Vegas. We filled the conference in 22 hours this time, but actually ended up going through the whole waiting list. We’re still full but now have a very short waiting list. You can still get on it if you like. This conference will be dramatically expanded in both content and participation. We are planning on 775 people (up from 300 previously).

You can still get the WCICON18 videos, but probably not for much longer. Be sure you’re subscribed to the newsletter to get all the latest about conferences.

We are very seriously considering making this an annual affair, but it is going to require some hiring to be done. Katie is doing a fantastic job keeping the balls in the air here, but we all have our limits.

Financial Bootcamp

This is our “freebie” to entice you to sign-up for the free email newsletter (as if the newsletter isn’t enough?) The goal was to help people catch up to the long-term WCI readers as quickly as possible. Obviously, it’s been expanded and placed into book form, but the free version is still available just by signing up here. You’ll get one email a week for 12 weeks. If you follow the directions in each email, 3 months from now you’ll have your financial ducks in a row.

We updated all of these emails (thanks Jill) when we moved to our new email provider this year. We lost track in the changeover of how many people have taken this course, but it’s certainly North of 25,000. Did you miss a few emails in the series? You can find them here.

Sign-up today!
Fire Your Financial Advisor – The Online Course

This course continued to be a big success in 2019. This 7-8 hour course consists of videos, screencasts, handouts, quizzes, and tests that will help you develop your own financial plan that you believe in. Even if you decide not to “Fire Your Financial Advisor“, the first module will help you choose a good advisor and get the most out of your advisory relationship. You can then be 100% positive you’re getting good advice at a fair price. Reviews were consistently excellent. We have had a grand total of 2,117 students go through the course.

If you’d like to be our next student, enroll ASAP! $499 might seem expensive, but considering the thousands of dollars that even a low-cost advisor would charge to educate you and put together a financial plan for you, it’s a bargain at twice the price. We consider this price to be the resident/military price, we just give it to everyone! There’s also a no-questions-asked, 7 days, 100% money-back guarantee on this course. About 4% of students take us up on it, usually saying “I already knew this from reading the books, reading all the blog posts, and listening to all of the podcasts.” That’s how good the course is.

We have plans to put out a new course here, but don’t let that keep you from buying this one. You will be able to upgrade to any new course for the difference between the two prices.

Enroll in Fire Your Financial Advisor today!
Future Efforts

Well, we didn’t accomplish any of our big projects that I hoped to do late in 2019. I didn’t finish the revamped version of Fire Your Financial Advisor, the course I had planned for residencies, or that tax book I keep talking about. No great excuses, but the new and improved forum, podcast improvements, too many speaking gigs, our home renovation project (that turned into a part-time job just making decisions), and some travel all contributed to accomplishing less than hoped. Frankly, the main problem is we should have hired more help sooner, and that’s on us.

The future efforts list looks similar to last year, but with new hires, it should be much more accomplishable. It takes more and more effort each year just to keep what we have done so far up to date and useable.

Word of Mouth

One of the most important things the White Coat Investor community does is share this information from one colleague to another in hospitals, clinics, schools, and residency programs. Attendings share with residents, who share with interns, who share with students, who in turn share with attendings. I hear about more and more of you all the time who are starting Finance Interest Groups at your schools and putting a finance curriculum into place. Others give lectures to trainees and colleagues once or twice a year.

Every little bit of shared financial knowledge counts and perhaps within a few more years doctors will no longer be viewed as marks, whales, and suckers by the financial services industry. You have been and will continue to be a huge part of our growth simply by sharing something that has impacted your life in a meaningful way with others that you care about. Thank you!

Every little bit of shared financial knowledge counts and perhaps within a few more years doctors will no longer be viewed as marks, whales, and suckers by the financial services industry.

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Mission # 2 Feed My Entrepreneurial Spirit

The White Coat Investor, LLC continues to feed my entrepreneurial spirit. Katie and I, as the sole owners, continue to make more money than we ever imagined possible. This has allowed us a lot of privileges we never expected including:

Giving away more than I ever made as a physician to charity and people in need
Providing high-paying, flexible, autonomous jobs for more people each year
Helping others to build their own businesses through partnerships
Building something that has affected the lives of hundreds of thousands, in turn saving many of them tens of thousands or more
Doing a major home renovation paid for with cash saved over the course of less than a year
Saving and investing a ton of money for the future
Changing how we spend money in many ways

Over the years, it has been fun to learn how the business world works, to have my own successes and failures in developing and marketing products, and to attempt to manage and inspire others. More than any other year, this one has been particularly challenging dealing with growth, taking advantage of opportunities, and avoiding burnout. Against my better judgment (time-wise, liability-wise, and financially), I have continued my half-time clinical practice. But something has to give at times, and too often that has been my own wellness and those things that matter most in my life. I put on a little weight (okay only 5 pounds but I was planning to lose 5 or 10) and spent less time with my kids and doing things I love than I probably should have. Aside from when I was in the military, I don’t recall ever really being burned out on clinical medicine, but I certainly have experienced business burnout (I can’t really say blogger burnout since I still prefer blogging to many activities in my life).

Our present course is no longer sustainable, so we had a big decision to make over the last couple of months. WCI had to go one way or the other. It had to do less (thus freeing up our time to do those important things we were neglecting) or it had to do more (and thus generate the revenue to pay for the help we needed to free up our time to do those important things we were neglecting.) After much thought and prayer, we decided to go bigger and are in the process of hiring, starting with a Chief Operating Officer whose primary job is to free me up from running the day to day business. This person will primarily be behind the scenes, but I expect will be the most important hire we ever make.

Another big challenge this year has been protecting our intellectual property. We have two trademarks and plenty of copyrighted material. People have stolen our book and sold it for their own profit. People steal the material off our website. Most importantly, financial firms infringe on our trademark, confusing our community and using the brand we have built to sell products we don’t even like. Some episodes seem more innocent than others, but given the recognition and value The White Coat Investor brand now has, it seems silly not to protect it.

Where’s the Financial Report?

Each year since 2012 we have provided a rather detailed financial report of the revenue, expenses, and profit that The White Coat Investor, LLC has made. My goal in doing this had been to provide transparency about my own financial conflicts of interest, especially when I have been so vocal and critical of those in the financial services industry. I stopped doing it last year to avoid providing a blueprint for competitors, in order to maximize the value of the assistance I was providing to WCI Network members, to avoid distraction from our primary mission to help you get a fair shake on Wall Street, to avoid attracting lawsuits, and to keep my kids from being kidnapped and held for ransom.

This year we increased top line growth by 71% and bottom line growth by 88% (looks better than it is because we got the WCICON20 revenue in 2019 but most of the expenses will be in 2020). Sorry, that’s all you get, but if you follow the blog closely and read between the lines when we talk about our own spending, investments, and giving efforts you can probably get a pretty good idea how WCI, LLC is doing financially. If it continues to grow (and we hope it does), it will allow us to provide more jobs, spend a little more money, pay even more in taxes than we already do, and become increasingly generous. We still feel very passionately about our first mission and we have found that if we mostly concentrate on that, the second mission seems to take care of itself.

Our Financial Conflicts of Interest

These haven’t really changed that much over the years, but it is good for both you and me to review them periodically. We try to be cognizant of them when making business decisions, but since we’re not willing to do this for free, there’s no way to eliminate them completely. Each of these really is a conflict, so don’t just skip through them haphazardly. Recognize that in these matters, my recommendations are less trustworthy than they would be without the conflict.

I am incentivized to run content that relates to my advertisers’ businesses (and especially those with whom I have an affiliate marketing relationship) more frequently than other content.
I am incentivized to accept guest posts from financial professionals who advertise with me more frequently than those who do not, although the only “sponsored posts” this site has ever run are those by the five platinum scholarship sponsors each year (and 100% of that revenue goes to the scholarship recipients.)
I am incentivized to recommend you refinance your student loans when perhaps it would not be a good move for you (which is awfully rare if you’re not going for PSLF.)
I am incentivized to recommend you seek out professional help with insurance, financial planning, investment management, student loan advice, purchasing and selling real estate, negotiating contracts, borrowing a practice loan, and preparing your taxes when perhaps you may be able to do that on your own.
I am incentivized to recommend alternative investments such as real estate over boring index funds.
I am incentivized to accept advertisers who do not meet my high standards for recommendation to friends and family.
I am incentivized to recommend a fee-only advisor who charges AUM fees when a flat fee advisor may be less expensive.
I am incentivized to recommend you use a physician mortgage loan over a conventional one.
I am incentivized to recommend you read financial books, including and especially my own.
I am incentivized to recommend you take my financial course and those of my affiliate partners.
I am incentivized to recommend you attend WCICON either in person, virtually, or preferably both!
I am incentivized against recommending content by others who have the same affiliate marketing partners or who compete for the same advertisers unless I am a partial owner of their site.
I am incentivized to recommend the content of Physician on FIRE and Passive Income MD and The Physician Philosopher.
I am incentivized to recommend you use the WCI Forum over the Bogleheads and other forums and the White Coat Investors Facebook Group over others.

Perhaps the most significant criticism that can be leveled at me is that I recommend you get your financial advice from fee-only advisors and yet I essentially function as a commissioned salesman in many respects. This is simply how affiliate marketing works, which is the primary way most successful online “infopreneurs” make their money. Sure, I suppose selling my own books, courses, and conferences is somewhat “fee-only”, but when I sell someone else’s books, courses, or conferences, I’m a commissioned salesman. Same thing with some of our advertisers in some of our product lines (insurance, advice, refinancing, etc) where I get paid for referring you to financial service companies.

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

However, we share this “blame” together. I must take some of it, because I am not willing to do this work for free. If I were not paid to do it, I would not do it, at least not anywhere near the level I am currently doing it at. However, you must also take some of the blame, because you are not willing to pay for the content that I am currently giving you for free. I could make the blog, newsletter, podcast, etc a subscription (i.e. fee-only) service, but when I survey you, fewer than 1% say they would be willing to pay for it, and those who would aren’t willing to pay very much. So I would only be helping a tiny fraction of those I am helping now. I’d make less money, do a lot less good, and probably quit. Seems like a bad idea to me, but if you want to try to compete with me using that payment model, I wish you the best of luck.

Mission # 3 Connect You With The Good Guys

Our partnerships and relationships continue to grow. Although many doctors wish they never had to interact with a financial professional, the truth is that all of us will multiple times during our life. It might just be a transactional thing like drafting a will, refinancing student loans, getting a mortgage, or purchasing insurance, or it might be a long-term relationship with an attorney, financial planner, or investment manager. The good news is that there are some good guys (and gals) out there who offer good advice at a fair price. Every time I run into them my faith in humanity is restored a little bit.

I’m proud to have not only built up The White Coat Investor, LLC but also to have had a major impact on the business of a fair number of my advertisers/partners. We are the major source of referrals for many of them and are proud to be helping them to feed their kids and send them to college. A major part of our mission is connecting you with these people when you need them. We create value for them, by sending them great clients, and we create value for you, by making sure you’re not getting ripped off.

Meanwhile, we’re slowly doing what we can to run the bad guys out of business and to bring costs down. I turn down lots of advertisers. Most of them are shocked when I do so as they feel they are running good businesses and offering good service, but this is one of the few ways I have to improve the financial services industry. Those decisions likely cost us thousands of dollars, some of which would go to great causes like my staff, the WCI Scholarship, and my favorite charities. But it just isn’t the right thing to do. Sometimes that feedback changes how the firm does business, sometimes it doesn’t, but at least I’ll be able to sleep at night.

Caving in Costa Rica with the family

At any rate, when you do have need of these services, I would appreciate it if you would at least consider using those who advertise on the site. They’ve had some preliminary vetting by me and some ongoing vetting by your fellow readers. You can find most of them under the recommended tabs at the top of the site. Lots of new additions this year among Real Estate Investing Companies, legal services, and tax services. We also made a major revamp of the recommended insurance agent and financial advisor pages to make them more useful to you.

Student Loan Refinancing
Mortgage Lenders
Independent Insurance agents
Financial Planners and Asset Managers
Real Estate Investing Companies
Realtors
Student Loan Advice
Contract Negotiation and Legal
Practice Loans
Tax Strategists

Thank you for your feedback, good and bad, on these firms. If you’ve had a particularly good experience with someone that we’re not currently partnering with, please send them our way. Or, if you can provide some of these services, feel free to get in touch with Cindy (at) whitecoatinvestor.com to start the process.

We had a wonderful time serving you in 2019 and look forward to doing so for many years to come. We hope your life has been enriched by our hard work. May The White Coat Investor continue to help those who wear the white coat get a fair shake on Wall Street, feed my entrepreneurial spirit, and connect our community with the good guys in the financial services industry.

What do you think? What did you enjoy most about WCI in 2019? What are you looking forward to in 2020? How can we improve? Comment below!

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