As 2025 comes to a close, let’s sit down for an end-of-year round table to reflect on the themes that shaped the year and what physicians can take forward into 2026.
In this conversation, Daniel Wrenne is joined by Hugh Baker and Jackie Griggs to reflect on the recurring themes they saw throughout the year.
Listen in as they discuss the uncertainty driven by student loan changes, market volatility, political noise, and the constant stream of headlines competing for attention.
You’ll learn how many physicians managed anxiety around PSLF, investing during market swings, and making big life decisions without clear answers.
They also share thoughtful guidance on wrapping up the year with intention by revisiting goals, checking progress, thinking about giving, and preparing for known changes ahead.
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Links
- The Art of Spending Money by Morgan Housel
- The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
- Connect with Hugh Baker
- Connect with Jackie Griggs
- Contact Finance for Physicians
- Finance for Physicians
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Full Episode Transcript:
Jackie Griggs: Even clients just coming to me personally, and I’m not sure Hugh or Daniel, if you guys also had this, but being like, “I can’t look at the news, I can’t look at the media right now. Can you just tell me, are you concerned about PSLF going away or are you concerned about what tariffs might do the economy?” or whatever that issue is that they’re having fear stoked by what they’re reading, what they’re seeing, what people tell them, and just being like, “I need to put the blinders on. I can’t look at this all the time, but can you, as a professional in this financial world, tell me, are you concerned or should I be concerned?”
Welcome to Finance for Physicians, the show where we help physicians like you use money as a tool to live a great life. I’m your host, Daniel Wrenne, and I’ve spent the last decade advising physicians on their personal finances with the mission to help them understand that taking control of their finances now means creating a future where they can practice medicine where, when, and how long they want to.
Daniel Wrenne: Welcome, guys. I got the whole gang with me today. We have Hugh and Jackie with us.
Jackie Griggs: Hello.
Hugh Baker: Hello. Yeah, really excited to talk today. Normally, always really excited to talk to you, Daniel, but even more excited because we have Jackie with us today.
Jackie Griggs: I know. We haven’t had this group for a pod yet, the three of us. It’ll be fun.
Daniel Wrenne: Yeah, I think we’ll do great. We got a good crew, so Jackie and Hugh, both are excellent. I think we’ll bring a little bit of a different angle too. We’ll see how it shakes out. We’re gonna be talking about end of year, like 2025 wrap up, this’ll be coming out in mid or late December 2025.
So we’re gonna be covering how 2025 panned out, and you’ll notice—I guess this is not necessarily like 2025 specific. A lot of the things we’ll talk about are like recurring themes that seemed to happen every year. We’ll talk through specifically what has happened in 2025 and then also identify some of those general themes that happened and then we’ll wrap up with some things to think about for 2026.
‘Cause it’ll be here before we know it. Anyway, I thought we could start with some of the—we have the privilege of working with a bunch of physician families, and just in that experience, we tend to see these general themes start to emerge that kind of stick out. So I thought that’d be a good starting point is what are some of the 2025 themes, that you guys observed in your practice?
Jackie, you wanna go first?
Jackie Griggs: Sure. I would say overall, throughout this year, the biggest theme that I tended to see with everyone, which really trickled down and permeated to a bunch of sub-themes, was just uncertainty. Felt like there was a lot of uncertainty around what’s happening with PSLF potentially, what’s happening with people’s jobs when there were DOGE cuts, things like tariff housing costs.
To me, it felt like uncertainty was a very common theme for pretty much all of my clients throughout this year. Just a lot of different types of uncertainty that came up.
Hugh Baker: And going along those lines. I’d say the biggest thing that stuck out to me throughout the year, the biggest kind of pain in my rear end, was the SAVE plan and it getting eliminated, and what to do with all of the people that were on that plan.
Daniel Wrenne: Yeah, that’s super stressful ’cause especially early on, we don’t know what’s gonna happen. And then complete change in direction with student loans. I think that it seems like a lot of it for 2025, at least tied into the election and politics, actually. That was what I thought was unique about this year was that a lot of the things I saw with clients, maybe not directly, but ultimately tied back to politics and the fact that there was some big elections and change in leadership. So for example, the student loans, it was like, “What’s gonna happen with student loans? Who’s gonna get elected?” That was a big part of it.
People, I don’t know, in my experience, this year is the most anxiety I’ve ever seen with clients around elections. And so that was a theme I noticed is like their anxiety translated to their day-to-day, the election anxiety and the unknown with who’s gonna lead the country translated to they felt it in their own personal lives, which I’ve never really seen myself.
Jackie Griggs: I would agree with that. I think some of the political uncertainty did drive some of those other aspects of uncertainty that I mentioned, and like you already brought up the loan forgiveness. I don’t think I’d ever really encountered many clients asking questions about what’s gonna happen to PSLF prior to this year.
Felt like previously that was always a more certain thing in people’s minds.
Hugh Baker: Yeah. A lot of people were worried about that, and rightfully so. You made career decisions based on that and trying to get that loan forgiveness. Maybe you’ve stuck around jobs that you’re like, “I’m just gonna stick it out until I hit this 10-year mark.”
And all of a sudden, that’s in question, and you start questioning all of your other decisions. And it can really spiral outta control from there. But really just have to get back to focusing on the things you can control, and try to tune out all of the other noise.
Daniel Wrenne: Yeah, I was gonna ask, do you think the fear was merited?
Hugh Baker: I think based on—if you had that fear, you probably have a good reason for it. I don’t think there’s much fear that is unreasonable. I think if you experience things that people experience in their lives and something brings them fear. I think if you experience those same things, you would probably also feel the same way. But that’s just my personal opinion.
Jackie Griggs: I think those feelings were very valid, especially at certain parts of this year, worrying if PSLF might go away entirely. But then I do think throughout the year that rhetoric from the political side of things did cool. So I think things got a little bit better, but at one point, like he was saying with those experiences, I think that was a really valid concern.
Daniel Wrenne: Well, I think part of it—okay, so I would say it wasn’t merited as much as—and I have a different angle, I think. I’m not saying I don’t. I think it’s valid as well, but I think that our culture and media, especially our media like hypes stuff up so much that it translates to fear for people. And that’s what I mean by unmerited.
Like I think that our media system, especially this year just really pumped and the social media, all that stuff, just really amped up all the fear for people, which made it a little bit higher than I think it probably should have been. And that’s what I mean by unmerited.
Hugh Baker: The media can definitely stoke the flames, and that’s because they get paid when you click on articles, so there’s gonna be the nasty headlines.
But they did specifically target, or at least they tried to making payments in a medical, residency or fellowship not counts. So that was like specific, deliberate taking aim at a certain industry or type of person. So like I can totally get it from that standpoint. Now that didn’t come to fruition, but that was definitely there.
Daniel Wrenne: Oh yeah, that was legit. And that when they were talking about not counting in-training payments for student loans, that was a big, big potential game changer for a lot of people. Yeah.
Jackie Griggs: That could be catastrophic to a lot of the people that we work with in their plans.
Daniel Wrenne: Right. So that part of the fear selling in the news was definitely merited, but like 95% of it, like a lot of the other stuff, I think, was just over hype like crazy, and so I’m talking more broadly speaking, so that makes it difficult too because it’s like we need to pay attention to the what’s going on, but do you need to pay attention to what’s going on?
You can get down a rabbit hole pretty quick. It’s like all of a sudden you’re on social media falling all these economic influencers that are just selling fear, and it’s causing more anxiety than is necessary.
Jackie Griggs: Yeah, I think I’ve even seen that trickle over. Going back to the original question of themes that we saw this year is even clients just coming to me personally, and I’m not sure Hugh or Daniel, if you guys also had this, but being like, “I can’t look at the news. I can’t look at the media right now. Can you just tell me, are you concerned about PSLF going away, or are you concerned about what tariffs might do the economy?” or whatever that issue is that they’re having fear stoked by what they’re reading, what they’re seeing, what people tell them, and just being like, “I need to put the blinders on. I can’t look at this all the time, but can you, as a professional in this financial world, tell me, are you concerned or should I be concerned?”
Did you guys have as well?
Hugh Baker: Yeah. Let me be your anxiety sponge. I’ll suck that up for you.
Jackie Griggs: Professional anxiety sponges here.
Daniel Wrenne: I’ve never actually like thought of it that way, but that’s completely true. That’s like definitely a value-add of our service is being that anxiety sponge, I guess you could call it. Yeah. Now that I’m thinking about it, like that happens all the time where people are like just saying, “Should I be worried about this? Should this be a concern?”
That’s almost the norm of how it comes up. Or “Should I be freaked out about X, Y, Z?”
Jackie Griggs: Yeah. And I’m sure that people do that to physicians as well in their world where they’ll run like a full panel of blood work or something. And some things might be within the normal range, and some things might be a little high or low, but you can hopefully just go to your doctor and be like, “Are you worried about any of these? Should I worry about any of these?”
And if they are feeling like it’s fine, then hopefully it can take away some of that patient’s anxiety as well. And I think sometimes that is the role that we play. You don’t need to panic until we’re panicked.
Daniel Wrenne: Have you ever said yes to that?
Jackie Griggs: And we don’t panic.
Daniel Wrenne: Have you ever said yes to that question? “Should I be worried about X, Y, Z?”
Jackie Griggs: I don’t think there was any particular instance I can think of where I was like, “Oh yeah, you should be worried about this.” Hugh, what about for you?
Hugh Baker: Nothing’s really coming to my mind where I’m like, “Yeah, you should be worried about this.”
It’s more of let’s wait until things are official, and then we will just act on whatever information is official. But until then, let’s not change up our plans, right?
Jackie Griggs: Let’s not plan based on what we’re speculating could happen. Let’s wait until we actually know what’s happening.
Daniel Wrenne: So like for the SAVE thing you were talking about earlier, like that somebody comes to you, they’re like, “I’m freaked out about the same thing. Should I really be this freaked out. It’s freaking me out. What should I do?”
It’s like hold on. Let’s see how it plays out. Like nothing is set in stone.
Hugh Baker: Go ahead Jackie.
Jackie Griggs: Oh no, you go ahead.
Hugh Baker: I was just going to say that those are the hardest ones when you can’t solve it by effort in action. You have to wait on other people. Going back, so with the SAVE plan, the biggest problem was—and how did you get there? Maybe you’re somebody who is on revised pay as you earn, which turned into the SAVE plan and maybe since 2020, you haven’t had to update your income, and now you’re an attending and you don’t wanna update your income.
You want to keep paying like 150 bucks a month. Don’t wanna change and pay two grand a month, or whatever it is. The revised pay as you’re in plan turned into SAVE, and then SAVE got blocked. And then the biggest problem was they were not processing changes for people to get off of SAVE until in the last few months.
So a lot of people were stuck worrying. Maybe you even, you’re like, “Hey, I was planning to change jobs as soon as I got to this 10-year mark for PSLF,” or “I was planning on reducing my FTE status,” and now yes, maybe I didn’t lose any money ’cause I didn’t make payments toward it that don’t count. But I had life decisions that I was waiting on this.
So that’s another big piece of it that bothers people.
Daniel Wrenne: Yeah. I think the key point though, I think you mentioned this earlier, Hugh, is let’s focus on things we can control and act based on the information we have at that point in time, do the best we can. Focus on the things you can control.
So that was a good example of like it’s—you made the right decisions, things potentially are changing. But it’s completely outta your control. So you just have to roll with punches for a little bit. And I think that’s the case in a lot of these big, scary, uncertain economic changes, or even life changes.
Jackie Griggs: I definitely saw that a lot on my end as well in the investing world for our clients when we did have that volatility last spring on a lot of the tariff uncertainty discussions, and even throughout the year as those kind of sometimes flashback into the news.
We saw a lot of people who were worried about that uncertainty, especially as the market was going down and there was a lot more volatility than we’d seen recently, but I think that often we just have to coach our clients that this is going to happen and we need to control what we can control. And really, we can’t do anything about the market going down when there’s tariff discussions, but what we can control is not making a poor behavioral decision because of that, not letting fear drive our plans, and staying the course.
So I different side versus the student loan side, but even over on the investing side as well, I think there was a lot of needing to take a pause and not let the emotional things get the best of us when really we can’t control a lot of these things.
Daniel Wrenne: When was it down? Was that in March or…?
Jackie Griggs: Like March/April?
Hugh Baker: April 2nd was the tariff announcement. So the S&P went from around 5,670, and then six days later, it was under 5,000.
Daniel Wrenne: What’s that in percent?
Hugh Baker: It’s more than 10%, 13%. But here we are now, like six, seven months later, and we’re almost sniffing 7,000 on the S&P 500.
Did you have—
Jackie Griggs: It has been quite the year to stay the course.
Daniel Wrenne: Yes, for sure. Did you all have families inquire or propose changing the investments at that time, or even go into cash or more conservative investments? I know.
Hugh Baker: How about you, Jackie? Since you’re the investment expert.
Jackie Griggs: So that’s what I was gonna say is I did not have any of my own clients in that situation. Many of them expressed their anxieties about their—and asked about if they should make a change. But with all of them, I was able to talk them off the leg and say, we actually don’t recommend making any changes. We just need to stay the course here and see how it plays out.
But I do know that there were some other people who felt strongly enough to make some potential changes in their investments due to how they felt about it.
Daniel Wrenne: Yeah, that’s what I mean is that it usually starts with “I am concerned or anxious about this situation.” Tariffs, market, whatever.
And so natural reaction is I feel like “I need to make a change.” Typically that change involves like getting more cautious or safer, like gravitating towards safer because of the uncertainty, which is—so without intervention or whatnot from with you, a lot of times that’s how people end up making major changes to their investments when things get a little scary, and that’s a terrible decision.
Just to put that into context, Hugh just said like it was down 10%? And it was scary and people were freaked out about it. Some people were, but then what is it today, Hugh? What’d you say?
Hugh Baker: When I looked earlier, it was around 6,800. So that’s like up over 30% since that bottom.
Jackie Griggs: Yeah. And even on the year to date right now, total, so looking January 1st through today, for example, VTI, since we often use that as an example, is up 16% on the year despite having that significant drop.
AD BREAK
Daniel Wrenne: Let’s take a quick break to talk about our firm, Wrenne Financial Planning.
The goal of our podcast is to empower you to make better financial decisions, but sometimes the best financial decision you can make is to work with someone who understands your financial goals and has the expertise to keep you on track to reach them. That’s where Wrenne Financial Planning comes in. We are a full-service financial planning firm that works with over 400 physicians and their families across the country.
We charge a transparent monthly flat fee for our services and offer virtual meetings you can take from anywhere. Best of all, you’ll get to work with a team that specializes in working with physician families. So whether you’re starting out and wondering how you’ll balance your student loan payments and saving for a home, or you are established physician trying to figure out how to pay for your kids’ college and how much you need to save to reach financial freedom, we can help.
I’ll put a link in the show notes to schedule a no-obligation meeting with one of our certified financial planners. Wrenne Financial Planning, LLC is a registered investment advisor. For more information about our firm, please visit wrennefinancial.com. That’s W-R-E-N-N-E financial.com.
AD BREAK END
Daniel Wrenne: I already brought this up. I feel like a lot of the fear gets stirred up by media and the gurus and the big economic voices or influencers in the world or on even social media. And so I thought we could maybe talk about some of their predictions they had for 2025, and then maybe reflect on how well they’ve done.
Because if we’re gonna look at them as a source, I think it’s helpful to look at like how credible the information source is in the first place. So what comes to mind as far as like some of the big predictions that were coming out, or even just like the consensus at the beginning of 2025?
Jackie Griggs: I think we saw a lot of predictions around this time last year for 2025 of potential recession. We had high interest rates, talk of tariffs, all of that. So I do think that was something that got thrown around in a lot of prediction circles.
Daniel Wrenne: Yep. Inflation was another one. People were talking, and that was tied to the tariffs mostly, but the prediction, a lot of people were predicting that inflation would get worse than it already was, which it has not happened. That has not happened. Neither there hasn’t been a stock market decline. There hasn’t been a recession, at least in the traditional sense of how they define it.
Hugh Baker: I’m not really your guy for predictions. I do not pay attention to those too much, but I think one of the things that I was a little bit surprised about was mortgage rates being slow to drop.
I thought those would’ve come down a little bit quicker, and now there’s a lot of different forces at play and inflation still stubbornly a little bit above the Fed’s 2% target, so they haven’t dropped their interest rates very much yet. So maybe we’ll get to see some opportunities for refinancing, for people that have maybe bought in the last couple of years.
But for those people that have bought maybe five years ago, and you have the 3% rate, you’re not going to gave a chance, at least that I could see, for refinancing. But that’s been one of the things that I’ve been watching for clients specifically. So that’s why that’s definitely on my radar and just really surprised to see that hasn’t dropped very much at all on the last year or two.
Daniel Wrenne: Yeah, I was looking before, earlier today, the National Realtors Association predicted that mortgage rates would be average 6% in 2025 for 30-year mortgage, which they have not been, that they’ve been higher than 6% average. So that was definitely the consensus.
The beginning of the year, people thought in general that rates would go down for mortgages and stuff like that, and it has not panned out. There’s been a little bit of decrease, but it’s still like up and down.
Jackie Griggs: Have you seen if there are any 2026 rate predictions out yet?
Daniel Wrenne: I haven’t seen any.
I haven’t looked. My guess is that they’re gonna be lower as well. I know the predictions for long-term are lower, like the general consensus reducing rates trend over the next, five years or whatever. But I think a theme there or a takeaway there is that the gurus and the media are terrible at the predictions, especially the stock market.
If you’re curious about it, go look back at like predictions for the stock market. Nobody predicted what it’s done this year, and usually they’re way off. They might get, like generally, I think the predictions this year were like up a modest amount, like 6% or several percent.
II don’t know of anybody that was predicting 15% to 20% growth in the stock market. And so they’re especially bad, and the stock market just notoriously is very difficult or even impossible to predict the shorter period of time you look at. And so a year is just really short in the start market.
Any other big predictions that didn’t exactly pan out, or big surprises you guys observed from 2025?
Hugh Baker: I think we covered it.
Daniel Wrenne: I think wage growth was one more I was thinking about is there were some, and that has, this is probably more on the individual level. Like I know families I work with, some of them have brought up concern about I guess their future compensation as a result of the changes to reimbursement rates and that sort of thing.
I’ve heard that come up a lot. Now I know just with the families I work with, it is not panned out, but I know that certain types of physicians are gonna be more susceptible to that than others.
I think a lot of the physicians I work with are like self-employed. Probably more so than normal, and so there’s a little bit more insulation from that.
Jackie Griggs: Yeah, that’s an interesting one. I personally did not really see that concern from the families that I work with very much. I can’t really think of many people who brought that up as a discussion point throughout the year, but I have heard among others that that was something to be aware of or a potential concern.
Daniel Wrenne: Some other questions I wanted to throw out there for you guys. So as we’re looking at next year or wrapping up this year, what are some considerations that you guys can think of as far as like last minute considerations for this year to be thinking about? Maybe let’s just focus on that first. So wrapping up 2025, what are some things you guys would throw out as far as actionable things to think about for families that are trying to wrap the year up productively?
Hugh Baker: Jackie, you wanna start?
Jackie Griggs: Sure. I guess if this was me in that position, I would first want to look back at this previous year and see if I have maximized any sort of potential tax efficiencies that I wanna take advantage of within a calendar year.
Did I max out my retirement plans? Is there anything else I’m missing there? Any opportunities? Or need to do something like tax loss, harvest, if that’s available, things like that. As well as just take stock of what did I save throughout this year? Did I meet those goals? Did I set any goals for the year?
Was I intentional with my plan to try to really think what can I be changing maybe going forward? Hugh, what about you?
Hugh Baker: Yeah, I think all of those things, there’s like contribution limits and if you have the excess cash, you might wanna make sure you’re maximizing all the tax advantage accounts.
You’ve already—529 plans might be one to add there. If you haven’t maybe started saving for your kids’ college education, and that’s bothering you, maybe that’s a good year end thing to just go in and look at what’s your state’s deductibility limit and just start there.
But I think around this time of year in our household and somewhat driven by my wife, Carrie, is, we’re just reflecting back on how fortunate we are and what are some causes that we might want to give to, or money we just want to designate to charities and maybe not give it this year, but we have a donor-advised fund, and it’s about this time of year where we’re looking at what investments we have in our joint taxable account that have grown the most.
And move those over to our donor-advised fund to eventually give to charities, and we just talk about, there’s not a whole lot of science to it, but just an amount that we would feel comfortable giving. I think that’s a really good thing, really good habit to get into. Because physicians, yes, you have very hard job.
You also have very nice income and probably through your work, you see some of the challenges that I don’t see, right? Because the type of people that I’m working with day to day are probably in the top 10% or higher of earners. You might see some of those things and have people in your life maybe even that you want to help out.
And I think that’s always a really good thing to get into, and I tell you every time I move the money over to the donor-advised fund, I don’t feel bad. I actually feel pretty good about myself. So that’s a really good thing to think about too.
Jackie Griggs: Yeah. It’s a great year-end item.
Daniel Wrenne: Yeah, that’s one of those things I think like whether it’s paying off debt or giving or saving, all three of them, I’ve never had anybody I work with or felt it myself where they’re like regretting or complaining about the—they’re like, “I gave too much, or man, what I wish I wouldn’t have paid off my mortgage or wish I wouldn’t have saved so much money for my future.” People just don’t do that. So I think what I heard a lot, I guess the theme I heard emerge there is like revisiting goals. The easy thing to do. A lot of times people set their goals.
And then they end up in the gym in January and then like they stop by January 15th or something. And then by December, they couldn’t even tell you what remotely close to what their goals were. And so you’re talking about revisiting your goals and seeing how you’re doing and that’s like a big deal.
Like to be able to do that is—that requires having your goals front and center throughout the entire year.
Jackie Griggs: Yeah, that’s probably a good point. It shouldn’t just be a January or a December exercise to think about goals that should really be at the forefront of how you conduct yourself all the time ideally.
Daniel Wrenne: Yeah. I know when we work with families, like for example, Hugh was talking about giving. We’re gonna ask about those kinds of things. And when we know that there’s a giving goal, it’s already built into all the reports and numbers that we’re looking at, like it’s just incorporated.
So then that sets you up to be way more likely to be on track? First of all, it’s built in, so it’s gonna happen, and life gets busy, and you forget about things. And then when you do go back to look at it, you’re like, “Oh, okay, yeah, we’re on the right direction.” And it increases your chances of success.
And so when you get to the end of the year, now you’re like what about that giving is important? So I need to make sure I’m on track. Or where do we want to give to? And you’ve set yourself up to be able to able succeed at the goal. Ultimately, that’s what we’re after is to be more in alignment with those.
So as we wrap up, last point I wanted to go through is talking about 2026. So if we’re starting to look ahead for next year, what sort of suggestions or opportunities or challenges or considerations would you guys throw out as people, as we’re wrapping up this year and starting to think about next year, we’re not gonna talk about predictions. We’re just gonna talk about…
Jackie Griggs: You tried to make me do that last year and give market predictions.
Daniel Wrenne: Did I really?
Jackie Griggs: I’ve learned for this episode not to.
Daniel Wrenne: We don’t make market predictions.
Jackie Griggs: No, we do not. And I think that’s what I said last time, so I won’t be doing that.
But in terms of considerations for next year, I would probably even just pull this back to the point we were just talking about and start with what your personal goals are. What is it that you’re really trying to accomplish with your finances, and how do you prioritize those things? Are you most focused on retirement or education or buying a new home next year, or whatever that may be?
And to me, that kind of drives what our priorities and considerations are. Just having that plan, really.
Hugh Baker: Yeah. So for some people, it might be you’re just tweaking things a little bit, right? Like new 401(k) limits. So you’re adjusting it up a little bit. Maybe you graduated training last year. So you ramped up the percentage to be like super high to try to hit it by the end of the year.
Oh, you better adjust that in January, unless you’re gonna max out too early. Maybe you miss out on the match. If you do that, maybe you were doing Roth because you’re in a lower tax bracket, now you’re gonna be full-year attending income. Now you might wanna switch that to pre-tax. There’s a lot of different things that could be person dependent, but I think if I had to draw one particular challenge that I could foresee coming, and for some people it might be pushed to 2027, but that finally some people might have to update their income for student loan purposes.
Might finally be hit with that, like $3,000 per month payment. And that can present quite a bit of challenges. So make sure you look and see at least when is your scheduled date to update your income?
Daniel Wrenne: Are you saying might because you think there’s still a small chance that…
Hugh Baker: It’s going on five years now.
Jackie Griggs: Are you making a prediction?
Daniel Wrenne: Is that a prediction?
Hugh Baker: Timestamp it? Yes.
Daniel Wrenne: Yeah.
Hugh Baker: December 1st, 2025. But that’s gonna be huge. And it could be the student loans, it could be just another purchase that you’re planning to make.
But if that’s you, know what big fixed payment changes that you’re gonna have and practice the payments. You can automate it, the money, to a savings account, a taxable investment account. I don’t care where. Somewhere so that you get used to that payment and you have a place to cut from and you don’t end up in credit card debt because you didn’t practice it and get used to it and you just pretended like it wasn’t gonna happen. Yeah. So I feel very strongly about this. We do this with a lot of people that I work with. When you’re, let’s say you’re planning to buy a house. Doesn’t work that well if you’re trying to buy when you’re first year out of training, but practice that payment so you know what lifestyle changes you might have to make before you get in that situation, and you feel regret.
Jackie Griggs: Yeah. That’s such a good strategy, Hugh, and I know clients always appreciate having that suggestion ahead of time as well, whether that is the home purchase or whatever it may be, where maybe we want to not pull the trigger on that right away. Wait a year and make sure we can afford what that mortgage and all the other associated costs are going to be without making it feel like we have to pinch every penny or just feel overly strapped in other aspects of life.
So that’s a really great plan for 2026 is to look ahead to those big fixed payment changes, if there are any, and start practicing today.
Daniel Wrenne: Yes. Very good. Very good advice. The only other thing I’ll throw out is as you’re starting to think about goals for 2026, one of the exercises I like to utilize is—so normally the way it works is like you ask yourself or somebody asks you, or you’re talking about with your spouse or something, your goals, and it’s what are your goals?
And it’s “Oh, I want to retire by blah, blah, blah, or I want to save X number of dollars,” or I wanna, so let’s just say it’s the retirement one. “ I wanna be financially independent in 20 years.” That’s a common one. So that’s a lot of times where people leave it and then they move on.
But what I would say a better step is to do like an exercise where you just keep asking why. So you’re like why is it important to be financially independent in 20 years? And then that you always have to be like, “Hmm.” You gotta take a second to think about it. You’re like, “Well, because people retire.”
It’s what about, “Why is it important to you?” It’s because “I wanna retire.” “Why do you wanna retire? Why is that important?” The reason I bring that up just in an example of this, a lot of times what I’ve found with physicians, for example, is that sometimes the underlying reasons behind it are not exactly what you’re thinking about.
So a good example would be like, “I want to move. I wanna make more progress towards financial independence or retiring sooner.” And that might be great, but big difference if that’s just like what is a priority to you versus sometimes that’s driven because your job is burning you out so much that you gotta get out.
You’re like, “I’m burning out with my career. So being able to retire is like my escape.” So those are very different paths and would typically be addressed differently. So I think that’s a good exercise. Anytime you’re thinking about goals, it’s like peel back the layers of the goals.
‘Cause there’s underlying reasons behind them, and with your spouse, peel back the layers. They’re gonna have like different reasons or values or goals. Sometimes you’re not exactly on the same page, so you kinda gotta work through those things. Hopefully I’m not starting any fights or anything, but sometimes that does.
My wife and I were driving down to Nashville and we were talking about this particular issue and we got into some like fair fights, like some debates about, ’cause not all the things are go—we weren’t on exactly the same page with all the things, but we worked through it and came out on the end with a little bit more compromise, all right. Any other closing thoughts before we wrap up? Here’s to 2026.
Hugh Baker: I’ve got one suggestion. I just finished it. Read or listen to ‘The Art of Spending Money by Morgan Housel.’
Daniel Wrenne: Oh, yeah.
Jackie Griggs: That’s on my list. So I will take that recommendation into the New Year.
Daniel Wrenne: His other book is also fantastic if you haven’t read it. ‘The Psychology of Money,’ that’s what it’s called, right?
Hugh, would you read ‘The Psychology of Money’ first?
Hugh Baker: I don’t think you necessarily need to. I think it’s approaching it from a different angle.
Daniel Wrenne: Yeah.
Hugh Baker: Whichever one you will start with, if you will read one.
Daniel Wrenne: Those are great books.
They’re about the stuff that’s really important in your money. Like the psychology of money is and the behaviors and all that is where it’s at. All right. Thanks guys. It was fun getting together, and we’ll look forward to next time.
Hugh Baker: Thanks, Daniel.
Jackie Griggs: Yep, thanks. Have a good one.
No guests or clients appearing on the podcast received any form of compensation for their appearance and obtained no other benefit from us. It should not be assumed that every client has had the same experience.
