Neville S. Willoughby, Licensed Agent with New York Life

08/28/2026

Healthcare professionals: What financial topic do you wish had been incorporated into your professional training?

I spent nearly 25 years in Navy healthcare. Now I’m looking at the healthcare profession through a very different lens.

I recently started reading The White Coat Investor by James M. Dahle, MD, and there’s a reason this book resonates with me.

I’ve spent most of my professional life around physicians and healthcare professionals. I understand the training pipeline, the workload, the culture, the long hours, and the delayed gratification required to reach certain levels of the profession.

And there is an interesting financial paradox within healthcare:

Some of the most highly educated and highest-earning professionals in America may receive remarkably little formal education about managing, protecting, and ultimately converting that income into wealth.

Consider the physician career trajectory.

Years of undergraduate and medical education can be followed by residency and possibly fellowship. Significant earnings may therefore begin considerably later than they do for peers who entered the workforce immediately after college.

Then the economics can change quickly.

Higher income. Higher taxes. Student loans. A new home. Family obligations. Disability and liability considerations. Retirement accounts. Investment decisions. Insurance. Practice ownership or partnership opportunities. Estate planning.

And one resource remains scarce regardless of income:

Time.

That combination makes financial decision-making especially important.

Working in healthcare taught me something else: physicians are accustomed to evidence, specialization, and multidisciplinary teams. You wouldn’t expect one clinician to be simultaneously the cardiologist, radiologist, anesthesiologist, surgeon, and pharmacist.

Personal finance deserves some of that same respect for specialization.

That doesn’t mean blindly outsourcing financial decisions. Quite the opposite.

One of my takeaways from this book is that financial literacy makes you a better consumer of financial advice. Understand the fundamentals. Ask better questions. Know what you own and why you own it. Understand the costs, risks, assumptions, and alternatives.

After spending nearly a quarter century helping support the healthcare mission, I find it pretty rewarding that this chapter of my career gives me an opportunity to serve many of the same professionals from a completely different perspective.

04/29/2026

Grateful to have Joel Steele ( ) with our office yesterday. Strong message, great energy, and a timely reminder that growth starts when intention turns into action. Appreciate you spending time with our agents and signing copies of Life Switch.

04/23/2026

Watching this and my daughter grabs my phone, starts looking at the video and says “Is that Dada?” 😂😩

04/23/2026

04/20/2026

The school system had 13 years with your kids.

They taught them to calculate the area of a triangle.

They taught them to analyze 19th century poetry. They taught them the periodic table of elements.

Nobody taught them what happens when you carry a credit card balance for 12 months.

Nobody taught them the difference between a Roth and a traditional IRA.

Nobody walked them through how a mortgage works, what term life insurance is, or why their credit score will follow them into every major financial decision they make for the rest of their lives.

I didn’t learn what compound interest was until college. Didn’t hear the words “Roth IRA” until I was sitting in a finance class wondering why nobody had mentioned this sooner.

I was 20 years old before I understood that money could grow on its own if you just gave it time and left it alone.

This isn’t a knock on teachers. Teachers work incredibly hard with what they’re given.

It’s a knock on a system that decided these subjects weren’t essential enough to make the cut.

I have four kids. They will know how compound interest works before they graduate middle school.

They will understand what a tax bracket actually means.

They will know how to read a pay stub, build an emergency fund, and think about money like an asset instead of something that just disappears every month.

Not because school taught them.

Because I will.

If you’re a parent, that responsibility falls on you too.

The system isn’t going to fix this anytime soon.