Earned income in retirement is awesome. It’s even better when it’s work you enjoy doing. Andrew, my financial advisor, is happy that I don’t have to dip into my investments at age 40. And I’m happy that I am engaged in work which I’m passionate about.
This is a series of “Income Posts” which I publish every month. In it I lay out how much money I earned each month and just go over the work involved and whatever else might be helpful.
January 2019 Income – $5,699
My total income for January was $5,699. All of this gross income which I earned as a sole proprietor. I earned this money from JustAnswer, my consulting client, and from digital products I sell.
JustAnswer – $2,409
Every month I get an email from JustAnswer which look like the screenshot below – isn’t it pretty?
I logged into JA every other day for 30 minutes each time. That’s a total of 7.5 hours – or $320/hour. I did the majority of this work from my phone when I was bouldering in the gym. I’ve learned to incorporate it into my gym routine – I get to rest between my climbing problems.
My workflow for JA is fucking clutch. If you’re interested in making money on JA as a physician then you can purchase my how-to guide. But honestly, you don’t need it. Not only have I written a fuckload of posts on the topic on this blog but it’s a rather intuitive platform.
I learned 2 new tricks about JA this month. I’ve been doing work for them since 2014 and I’m still learning new shit:
- I learned how to convert difficult customers into premium phone calls ($$$)
- I learned how to better utilize dictation on the go and with the app
Healthcare consulting – $3,000
For those of you who have been listening to my podcasts, I decided to cut back on my work with my consulting clients. Not because I don’t enjoy it but because I felt slightly taken advantage of.
You can listen to the podcast episodes I recorded regarding these payment issues. However, in the end it has worked out far more in my favor. I consulted 9 hours for the whole month and earned this $3k – an hourly rate of $333. The majority of this time was spent listening on meetings.
I wrote a blog post about my billing dilemmas with my client here.
Clarity.fm – $200
I am answering a lot of emails on this blog which hopefully is helping those who are reaching out to me. I keep debating whether to convert some of the email conversations into my clarity.fm paid services but I don’t feel right doing that – I have no idea why. Maybe because my greedy ass charges $10/minute doing that.
Nevertheless, it’s a good income for me and it’s a fair use of my time. Between this blog, the podcast, the healthcare consulting, cooking, the gym, the coffee shop, and starting my own health coaching business, I have like 7 minutes left in the day.
Digital products – $90
So lemme tell you guys how this works. This post I published today has a link to one of the products I sell on my “Shop” page. Every time I mention one of the products in a post, I sell something.
So it’s $5 here and $10 there and another $15 over there. In January I earned $90 which isn’t a lot but I’m not quite sure if focusing on green is my main motivation right now. We’ll see.
Other income sources
My other sources of income is another healthcare consulting client but we are currently in negotiations. I haven’t yet decided what I want to do with them. The work I’m doing with them is no longer interesting but it’s easy money – I’ll keep you guys posted.
I am also a telemedicine doctor for DialCare still. I keep them around because they are among the few companies which allow me to live abroad and do telemedicine. I have an international telemedicine tutorial for sale as well – by far my best-seller.
I also do telemedicine for Oscar which I got back into recently. I’m waiting for my new laptop to arrive from them. Really excited about getting back into Oscar. It’s a great platform and they are very engaged with their physicians.
Net worth update – $800,000
You can see from my net worth chart that I’m somewhere in the $800k range. This includes my condo, my retirement accounts, and my private brokerage investments (taxable).
I keep my student loans on there, which I paid off in 2015, just to remind me not to get into more debt again. But otherwise I have no debt.
I’m told that you cannot retire on $800k. That a physician needs at least $8M to retire comfortably. And if you’re not a physician, you need somewhere around $2.5M – definitely nothing less than $1.5M.
For the record, I retired in the middle of 2016. Take a look at that graph above to get an idea of my net worth was in 2016 and what it is now.