We have exciting news. The White Coat Investor has just received a fresh new look and a completely redesigned website.
The website is easier to navigate, so you can quickly find the resources, content, and trusted experts you want. It has fewer ads (as you’ve been asking for years) and is better organized, so you can find what you’re looking for as quickly and easily as possible.
Personally, I’m most excited about the increased functionality and speed. Doctors like high-yield stuff, especially emergency physicians like me. The site will not only help you quickly learn what you need to learn to regain control of your financial life, but it will also better connect you to the resources you need to do so. And of course it’s a lot more fun to watch.
The redesign has been “the baby” for most of our employees and has taken thousands of hours of work, and we’re excited about how it will better serve you. It may take some getting used to, but we promise it will be worth it. If something is clearly a step back from the previous version, please let us know and we’ll see what we can do about it. But after literally months of testing, we don’t think the changes are a step backwards. Something different yes (and no one likes change), but better once you get used to it.
The History of the White Coat Investor Website
Fifteen years ago, I started a blog to share what I learned about personal finance and investing. What started as a small passion project has grown into a trusted resource for physicians and other high-income professionals looking to take control of their financial lives. When I moved all the things I had been typing on internet forums for years to The White Coat Investor website in May 2011, it looked like this:
It was very basic and very. . . Good . . . brown. Brown on blue. And it stayed that way for about five years. Since it didn’t make any money for years, I was the tech guy (along with everything else) for a long time. And that was the best I could do. In 2016, WCI made enough money that we could outsource a little help on the technical side, and we did our first website redesign, including the creation of the WCI Forumour first of now four online communities. The site looked like this at the time:
Do you look familiar? Yes, now you know one reason why we embarked on a major redesign project two years ago. It now employs eighteen people (half of them full-time) instead of three part-timers, and it was time to bring the website out of the 2010s and into the 2020s.
After we burned out at WCI in 2019, when there were only five of us working part-time, we started hiring full-time employees starting in 2020. Our second hire? A Chief Technology Officer (CTO). I probably don’t need to tell you what his first comments were about what we had been doing in technology over the last nine years when I was CTO. Now our technical team has grown to three. Plus, we have someone whose sole job is to design and make everything we do as attractive and functional as possible.
But they were far from the only ones involved in this project. The project grew bigger and bigger until it finally swallowed up almost everyone who worked here, almost full-time for most of the last year. Thanks to the entire WCI team for their dedication to this project in addition to their regular jobs. You must be very proud of your work. I know I am.
Look how beautiful this is!
Click from page to page and you’ll notice a nice, consistent look. However, appearance is only the beginning. The website is faster, the menus are more functional and the site is much better at connecting you to the resources you need without annoying you and it frees up our staff to spend their time on activities that really matter to you.
What we do here
Thank you for being part of the White Coat Investor community. Thanks for reading blog posts, listening to podcasts, watching videos, participating in online communities, handing out booksusing our recommended resources, and especially to make money conversations less taboo in medicine.
We know that when physicians are financially secure, they are better partners, parents and physicians. The sooner people start learning about money, the greater the impact it can have on their lives. Thank you for being part of this journey with us.
I started The White Coat Investor blog in 2011 after becoming financially literate. I realized I had been taken advantage of by recruiters, lenders, insurance agents, real estate agents and financial advisors – and I was far from alone. I realized that if doctors didn’t learn this stuff, it would continue to happen year after year after year. As I tried to educate them on forums, it became clear to me that physicians were hungry for this information, and no one was teaching it to them in a consistent, organized, and unbiased manner.
As a company, WCI was for-profit from the start, but it didn’t make much profit. That first year I had just over $900 in income, and I wrote it all off. My goal was to earn €1,000 per month within two years. It was close, but I did it. Hardly.
Needless to say, it probably would have been a lot smarter for me to have worked a few extra shifts all that time instead of typing thousands and thousands of words on the Internet on a quixotic mission driven by a missionary zeal to give other doctors a fair shot on Wall Street. But I could see the income slowly rising, and more importantly, I could see the difference the message made in the lives of dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of doctors and other high-income professionals. Literally millions of people came to the website every year. I felt a sense of purpose and it quickly became clear that what we did as a community mattered.
It was doctors against Wall Street, and the WCI community was in charge!
In 2014 we published our first book, The White Coat Investor: A Doctor’s Guide to Personal Finance and Investing. That led to more growth and more opportunities to help. Since then we have published three more books, Financial Bootcamp, Guide for studentsAnd Asset Protection Guide– and we are working on a Guide for Residents that will debut in 2026.
Over time, fortunately, I learned that not every financial professional was out to take advantage of physicians. Most people need to borrow money, refinance loans, buy insurance policies and have contracts reviewed at some point in their careers. I also estimate that about 80% of physicians need, want, and should use a financial advisor and/or an investment manager. There are good people who have added a new layer to WCI’s mission: connecting physicians with good financial professionals they can trust.
A year after the initial website redesign in 2017, we launched The White Coat Investor Podcast to spread financial literacy, interview guests, and answer questions while you commute, exercise, and walk the dog. We’ve built on the podcast’s growth by adding Milestones to Millionaire Podcast in 2021, which celebrates financial achievements, no matter how small, with guests and uses them to inspire others to achieve their own milestones.
In 2018, we launched our first in-person conference, The Physician Wellness and Financial Literacy Conference, also known as WCICON. While guaranteeing 1,400 nights of lodging and hundreds of thousands of dollars in food purchases at a resort still feels like the biggest financial risk we take, it has become one of our favorite weeks of the entire year. It’s not just because we go to a sunny place at the end of winter and gather there as a community. Most of us don’t have people with whom we can openly talk about money in our daily lives, but those people surround you at WCICON. This event brings together a group of people who understand your world; who are eager to learn; who are willing to share their stories, support each other and have fun doing it. We’re doing it again from March 25 to 28 in Las Vegas.
2018 was a busy year as we also launched our flagship online course, Fire your financial advisor. This course was designed to support people interested in being a do-it-yourself investor, but it will also help you learn how to find and research financial professionals if you decide you want to delegate some of your financial duties. Fire Your Financial Advisor became available in 2024 Student And Resident versions in addition to our best-selling Well-being option, which includes the entire original course plus wellness content to qualify for CME.
For years people were asking us for a real estate course, so in 2022 we launched the No hype course in real estate investing.
Start planning white coats
Now, after fifteen years of talking about how the financial planning industry could better serve people and after seven years of teaching you how to manage your own finances through our course, we’ve come to realize that many WCIers needed something more. We are excited to build what we believe is the ideal financial advisory firm that will serve all types of investors. We look forward to providing sound advice at a fair price and serving high-income professionals with integrity, expertise and care.
It’s a risk to try something different, but the chance to build something better for a community we care so deeply about – and maybe even change the industry in the process – is worth it.
Although we are not yet accepting clients, if you would like to stay informed of our progress, you can sign up for a no-obligation interest list here. And if you know planners who would like to focus on giving good financial advice rather than finding or selling products, send them a link to the full vacancy here.
New look, but the same dedication to serving you
While The White Coat Investor has grown, our mission has not changed.
We are there for you. We’re here to give you accurate (and if you’re really lucky, somewhat entertaining) content to help you on your journey to financial success, celebrate your success, and inspire the next generation too. You got this!
We hope this improved website makes it easier to find educational resources and trusted experts.
Despite months of testing prior to launch, there are bound to be some things that didn’t transfer as well as we’d hoped, or that don’t look or function as intended. If you find these things, please let us know by commenting below or emailing us at [email protected].
We are very excited about this next evolution of The White Coat Investor and continue to serve you. Thank you for being a white coat investor.
Do you have any questions about the new site design? Comment below!
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