Welcome to The Broke Professional! This is the first post on my first blog. Lots of firsts. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Syed and I am a broke professional. I also know that I’m not the only broke professional out there. Getting a professional degree is great, but in the past few years it has become a little less great mainly because of rapidly increasing tuition leading to large student loan debt balances after graduation. Having a large negative net worth after finishing school is becoming commonplace nowadays.
Before going into much more detail, let me give you some background information about myself. I am currently working as an optometrist for a national corporation. I graduated optometry school in 2009 with all the potential in the world along with what seems like all the student loan debt in the world. Receiving my first paycheck as a doctor was a great day, but it came with a sudden realization: I’m going to be paying off my student loans for a very, very long time if something does not change. This really spurred me into action to learn as much as I could about money, student loans, investing, taxes and everything in between. I devoured and applied as much knowledge as I could since becoming a professional. The bottom line is I really wanted to optimize my education by learning the best way to handle my new-found money.
Naturally, discovering something as revolutionary as changing my financial health led me to talk about it with other optometrists and other professionals in general. What I have found is that many of my peers do not have much interest in getting to know about their finances, let alone try to improve them. For example, many doctors and professionals I have spoken with have not taken the time to contribute any money to their company’s 401k retirement plan, despite knowing that they can receive a matching contribution from their company. This seemed more like a psychology issue that a strict financial knowledge issue so i started learning as much as I could about money and psychology and found some very fascinating things. This is one area I will try to emphasize in my posts as well.
Why do we handle money the way that we do and what can we do to improve our situation? This will be the overall theme of my blog and I hope it will lead to much discussion and, most importantly, implementation of ideas that produce real results in people’s lives. This site is not only for working professionals but for anyone with interest in personal finance.
One last point I would like to make is about the actual phrase “personal finance”. Right there in the name it says finance is personal, meaning everyone’s situation is different and there is usually no one size fits all answer for everybody. There are certain principles that hold true for everyone such as don’t spend more money than you have and try to maintain positive social relationships. But most financial decisions need to be tailored to each individual situation. I don’t have all the answers, but I will try to provide as much objective information and direction as I can, but it is only through discussion and looking honestly at one’s own situation that a person will find the right answer for their problem. This is a principle I try to apply to myself as much as I can and I hope others will also.
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