DIY Investing: Where It Works, and Where It Quietly Costs You
One of the real problems I ran into with DIY investing wasn't picking the right funds. It was knowing how to adapt when the government introduced new tax rules. Once our wealth started moving into seven figures, spread across several different account types, it became genuinely difficult to track how each rule change affected the whole picture. As a result, I was never fully confident I was making the right call.
The Tennis Player Analogy
At some point, I realized that doing our own finances was costing us more than it would cost to find the right people to do it properly. I kept coming back to a saying that stuck with me: even the best tennis player in the world still needs a coach. That reframing gave me the space to actually look for a wealth management team — one that understood tax, income, and investments as one interconnected system, and that took a genuinely multidisciplinary approach to accelerating wealth-building rather than treating each piece separately.
The Two Kinds of DIY Physicians
If you're managing your own finances right now, I think you fall into one of two camps.
The first camp doesn't actually want to be doing it themselves — they simply haven't found people they trust enough to hand it off to. If that's you, that gap is exactly what I built ElevateMD to help close: finding the right people, so you don't have to keep doing it alone by default.
The second camp genuinely believes they can manage it all themselves. To that camp, I'd say this: investing, incorporation, and tax planning together form a more complicated system, given the Canadian tax structure, than any one person can reasonably give full credit to on their own. Once you understand the actual complexity underneath it, it becomes clear that DIY management tends to spring leaks — stealth wealth thieves you may not even know exist, precisely because the full complexity of the system isn't visible from the outside.
DIY Isn't Just About Finding the Cheapest ETF
A lot of people equate successful DIY investing with finding the right investment at the lowest cost — a good ETF, diversified sensibly. For the busy, high-net-worth physician, that's only a fraction of the picture. Effective wealth-building also depends on how tax treatment interacts with each holding, and that goes well beyond the basic RRSP-versus-tax-sheltering question. It's the interdependence — how your income, your corporation, your investments, and the overarching tax rules all affect each other simultaneously — that makes this genuinely difficult for one person to manage well on their own, no matter how sharp or well-read they are.
Where That Leaves You
If you're a reluctant DIYer, the path forward is learning the right questions to ask a financial advisor, so you can actually evaluate whether you're getting the expertise and service your situation calls for.
If you genuinely enjoy managing your own investments, there's nothing wrong with continuing to do so. But, it's worth recognizing that there's more complexity working in the background than the surface-level "pick good ETFs" model accounts for, and that a team behind you could be catching silent wealth killers you're currently missing entirely on your own.