Why I Started a Podcast — And Why You Can’t Afford to Miss It
Adapted from Episode 1 of The Financial Cocktail podcast. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or read the full episode below.
I have really been enjoying the podcast medium lately. Far more than blogs. Likely due to the ability to multitask while driving, working out, etc. Anyway, The Financial Cocktail blog is officially live. I stepped away from the blog to record podcast content.
I was able to record about a dozen podcast episodes over the past couple months. I’ll look to add them to the blog as they are released. New episodes every Tuesday. Probably some shorter Q&A or FAQ type pods on Fridays.
As always, reach out with suggestions, questions, and recommendations. Please enjoy the first podcast episode via audio or the text below…
Only 31% of U.S. households had a documented long-term financial plan as of 2025, and that number barely moves year after year, no matter how much people earn.
You spent years earning the most demanding credential in nursing. You passed boards. You walk into an operating room where lives hang in the balance before your morning coffee gets cold. And yet, statistically, there’s a 70% chance you don’t have a real financial plan. Not a vague idea. A plan.
So which camp are you in? The 70%, or the minority?
Why I Started The Financial Cocktail
I started The Financial Cocktail in 2022 because I kept hearing that high-income earners were struggling financially.
According to LendingTree, 38% of six-figure earners admit they could not cover a $1,000 emergency without relying on a credit card or borrowing money. Low-income earners, sure, I get it. But six-figure earners? One survey even found that 15% of households earning $1 million a year struggle to cover their bills. Those are real dollars.
Statistics like these sounded absolutely ludicrous to me. I couldn’t relate to them, even before I earned six figures. Then I saw what drives them: aggressively rising fixed costs, lifestyle inflation, student debt, and illiquid wealth. Together, they push many high-income earners, CRNAs included, into exactly this spot. That’s what led me to write about financial literacy.
Why Listen to Me?
You’re probably wondering what gives me the right to write about financial literacy. I have a few distinct advantages. I’m a self-made millionaire. I self-manage our family’s multi-million-dollar investment portfolio. And I’m currently a locum CRNA, so yes, there’s plenty of locum and 1099 content coming.
1. I’m still building wealth, not reminiscing about it
I’m not a retired 70-year-old reminiscing about the good old days. What worked in the 1970s doesn’t work today. Today, the essentials are expensive and the luxuries are cheap. Houses used to cost about three times the median annual income; today they cost closer to seven. Meanwhile, a TV that cost $500 in 1970 would cost thousands in today’s dollars, and today $500 buys an amazing 55-inch 4K TV.
2. The financial gurus aren’t talking to you
The big-name gurus don’t focus on high-income earners. Their content is for the average family of four earning $80,000 a year. It’s for the college grad with $20,000 in student loans, not the CRNA with $200,000 of debt. It’s for the 20-year-old fresh out of trade school who’s ready to start investing.
None of that is for you. You’re in a different tax situation, you carry a different debt burden, and you’re not 20 anymore, which drastically changes your investment horizon. So why follow advice that doesn’t apply to your situation?
3. Legacy investing strategies don’t fit your reality
You can try to copy Warren Buffett’s investment strategy, but let’s be honest: the railroads aren’t exactly outperforming big tech today. We now have far more data on what actually works for individual, self-managed investors. Doing well in personal finance and investing is no longer a good old boys’ club.
Everything is different, some for the better and some not so much. The old playbooks don’t account for today’s tax policy, interest rates, market conditions, or housing market. And too often, people apply their own experience to everyone. Those who were hurt in the 2000 dot-com bubble or the 2008 housing crash hold on to those experiences and ignore what the data says. I just can’t stand behind that.
4. There are more retirement accounts than ever
The landscape keeps changing. Individual retirement accounts (IRAs) arrived in 1975, and the 401(k) followed a few years later. Together, they effectively ended the pension era. It used to be that you stayed somewhere for an entire career and collected a pension that carried you through retirement. That’s not the world we live in anymore.
529 plans and the Roth IRA didn’t show up until 1996 and 1997. Health Savings Accounts arrived in 2004 and the Roth 401(k) in 2006. Now Trump Accounts, essentially a traditional IRA for kids, arrive in 2026. Each one carries a different value depending on your situation.
What’s valuable for the CRNA community isn’t what the gurus publish, because it doesn’t reach enough people. Why would a guru niche down to roughly 60,000 CRNAs when they could preach generic content to 100 million working people?
That’s why this show exists. It’s built for you, by someone doing exactly what you are doing, could be doing, or should be doing.
Financial Independence: What It Actually Buys You
Enough about me. Let’s talk about financial independence, the concept The Financial Cocktail is built around.
Financial independence is when your investment portfolio is large enough to sustain your cost of living without any additional earned income. That’s financial freedom. Work becomes optional, and your days can be filled with what’s truly important to you. Money is just the tool that gets you there.
What financial independence buys probably isn’t what you think. I want to move your mindset away from traditional retirement and toward three things that actually matter.
1. Your time back
Time is the one asset none of us can get more of. The most dangerous thing about a great CRNA salary is that it makes you feel like you have to keep showing up, because the money is too good to walk away from. The golden handcuffs are real, and financial independence breaks them.
You no longer have to work the nights. You no longer have to stay in the toxic department. You don’t have to take that locum assignment during your week off. Money in the bank is optionality, and optionality is freedom.
2. Security that doesn’t disappear with your next contract
Many CRNAs, especially 1099 and locum CRNAs, live in a world where income can evaporate with a single phone call: contract non-renewals, credentialing delays, health setbacks, facility closures, contract turnovers. True financial security means your lifestyle doesn’t collapse when a contract does.
The early Financial Cocktail blog posts covered the psychological weight of financial precarity, the quiet anxiety that follows high-income earners who haven’t built a real cushion. Income is not the same as net worth. The job of personal finance is to transform income into net worth, the foundation that builds financial freedom.
3. Options
Options are the most underrated form of wealth. They mean choosing your caseload, your schedule, your location, and your hours per week. They mean saying yes to the part-time position you actually want instead of the full-time role you need to cover your monthly overhead. They mean starting a business, taking a sabbatical, going back to school, changing careers, or simply breathing a little easier at night.
Financial independence isn’t about never working again. It’s about never being forced to work again, and never relying on earned income again. That difference changes everything about how you show up each day. When they need you more than you need them, you’re in control.
Why I Reject “Retire at 65”
I despise the idea of retiring at 65, for two reasons.
First, even after I reach financial independence, I’ll likely keep working in some form until the end of my days. I find a lot of purpose in work. I like work.
Second, 65 is an arbitrary age. Yes, there are milestones for accessing retirement money: 59½ for retirement accounts, 62 for Social Security, and so on. But why wait three-quarters of your life to reach financial independence? The high income this career brings is a blessing. There’s no reason to put your freedom off. Take control today.
The Problem Isn’t Income
The Financial Cocktail exists to promote financial literacy in the CRNA community. What’s the point of earning a top 5% income if you’re just going to live paycheck to paycheck at a higher altitude, with the same problems plus more zeros?
The problem isn’t income. High-income earners face a uniquely cruel set of traps:
Lifestyle creep
Tax inefficiency
No employer-sponsored planning guidance, especially for 1099 CRNAs
The false comfort a big paycheck brings
I’ve addressed many of these on the blog, and I’ll dig into them in future episodes.
Why Most CRNA Financial Advice Falls Short
CRNAs have a history of poor financial guidance, and it starts in your business class as an SRNA. Programs push financial advisors on their students. Those advisors don’t teach financial literacy; they invest your money. They talk about a big-picture plan, maybe meet or call once a year, and charge you significant fees to do it. Those fees eat up a great deal of your wealth, which we’ll talk about in a later episode.
Give someone a fish and you feed them for a day. The Financial Cocktail will teach you to fish.
Here’s where most advice falls short and what we do differently:
It’s built only for W-2 employees. Yes, about 80% of CRNAs are W-2, and we won’t ignore you. But generic advice completely ignores 1099 contractors, and plenty of W-2 CRNAs pick up locum work with 1099 income too.
It’s built for average incomes. That doesn’t translate to people earning a quarter million dollars or more.
It’s built for people with pensions. Pensions largely aren’t a thing anymore. That advice doesn’t help CRNAs navigating Solo 401(k)s, IRAs, backdoor Roths, and mega backdoor contributions.
What’s Coming on The Financial Cocktail
Every episode will be drawn from CRNA-specific content and the financial realities you’re living:
1099 vs. W-2: which structure puts more money in your pocket?
Backdoor Roth IRA: why you need it, when you need it, how to execute it, and when you might not need it
Solo 401(k) and the independent contractor life
LLC formation: do you need one or not?
Locum and travel contract negotiation: something I do regularly
Malpractice insurance
Public Service Loan Forgiveness: is it right for you, and when should you use it?
New grad topics: what to do with your sign-on bonus, and how to handle the jump from RN dollars to student “no dollars” to CRNA dollars to locum dollars, putting that money to work to build net worth
High-income tax planning strategies that actually apply to CRNAs
The compensation data will come mainly from the AANA Compensation and Benefits Survey. We’ll also use your numbers, and I’ll share mine.
Who Is The Podcast For?
This content is for you if you’re a CRNA, an SRNA, or a new grad who knows the clinical side but feels uncertain about the financial side. Maybe you’ve Googled “backdoor Roth IRA,” understood part of it, and closed the tab in frustration. Maybe you wonder whether you need an LLC. Maybe you earn well, even really well, and still feel like you don’t have your financial life together.
If you want content that respects your intelligence and your schedule, this show is for you. It will be direct, specific, and built around your life, not around a hypothetical $60,000 earner with a pension and a 401(k) match. We’ll focus on what actually moves the needle for CRNAs.
The Next Chapter
I launched The Financial Cocktail blog in October 2022 on a simple premise: CRNAs deserve better financial guidance than what’s out there. The posts that resonated most weren’t always the most technical ones. They were the ones that named what people were quietly feeling: the gap between income and wealth, 1099 confusion, the misinformation, and the creeping sense that money wasn’t sticking despite the big paycheck.
This podcast is the next chapter. Same mission, broader reach, more depth, and a little easier to take in. You don’t have to sit down and read; you can listen on your way to work.
Make sure you’re subscribed wherever you listen, whether that’s Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or somewhere else. Leave a review, and send your questions, topic requests, and your own financial wins and losses. This show is meant to be a conversation, not me lecturing into a microphone from a basement somewhere on a locum assignment. It’s a two-way exchange for the community.
You’ve put in the time to become one of the most skilled clinicians in the room. Let’s make sure your finances are just as sharp.
This post is for education only. It is not individualized financial, tax, or legal advice.
