High Income Is a Dangerous Bandaid
For years, I used my income to cover more immediate headaches. A higher-than-expected tax bill? I'd pick up more shifts. A $15,000 credit card bill from a splurge vacation? Same solution. It was the path of least resistance in my daily life, because the alternative — sitting down for a full, honest review of my finances — felt like it would take more time and energy than I had left at the end of a day.
Here's what I understand about that high-income bandaid now: it temporarily patched a minor symptom while leaving the actual underlying problem completely untouched.
The Symptom Isn't the Disease
Instead of being proactive — getting the financial equivalent of a regular check-up — I put off actually understanding how my medicine professional corporation, my personal accounts, and my investments interacted as a whole system. I treated each financial ache as its own isolated event, solvable with the same tool every time: work more.
That cost me. Not just in money, though it certainly did that. It cost me in time — the very thing I was supposedly buying back every time I picked up another shift instead of sitting down to actually understand my finances.
Why the Bandaid Feels So Reasonable
It's easy to see why this becomes the default. Physicians are trained to solve problems with effort and expertise — and income is the one lever we know intimately how to pull. Need more money? Work more. It's simple, it's within our control, and it doesn't require confronting how little we actually understand about our own financial structure.
But a bandaid applied to the same wound, over and over, never actually heals it. It just keeps the bleeding manageable enough to ignore.
What Financial Fluency Actually Buys You
If you feel overwhelmed at the thought of learning about your finances, I understand that completely. But the time spent building real financial fluency will prevent future headaches and give you back your personal time far more effectively than another shift ever could.
The habit worth building isn't "earn more to cover the gap." It's understanding the gap in the first place: why it's there, what's actually driving it, and how your corporation, your investments, and your personal accounts are meant to work together instead of quietly working against you.