Need To Earn More

We brought my kids for a check up yesterday afternoon. When we got out of our doctor's clinic, we found that our friend and fellow ophthalmologist Dr. JCN was holding clinic in the room just right across our doctors'! We just had to say hi!

Since we have not seen each other for months, we talked about a lot of things. One of the topics that cropped up was the fact that there seems to be less patients nowadays. Of course, we know from previous history that even health care has seasons. Like it's low season near Christmas and near school opening, and high season during January - February. It's just exceptionally low right now, because of a combination of factors -- school opening, economic downturn (people having less money for healthcare), swine flu (people not wanting to go out of their homes unless really needed), etc. Although we've always thought that health care is a priority, sometimes people just hold off spending on health care because of other concerns.

Which brings us to our concern, with the economic downturn and the lessening of patients, we get to earn less. And with prices of necessities going higher, school tuition fees rising (I have 1 kid in toddler school) and overhead expenses in having a clinic, we doctors have to have an alternative source of income and investments in order to have a fallback in times when our income is low. It also pays to put in any extra cash we come by into our mutual fund account while the value is low and to look for a few ways to earn on the side so that we'll have a comfortable nest egg for emergency and retirement purposes.