Residency Trained You to Handle Anything — Except Your Own Money

You can operate. You can deliver a baby at 3am. You can spend sixteen hours on your feet making decisions that actually matter, then drive home, fall asleep, and do it again.

Then as soon as you get your staff job, you quietly realize that you don’t know what to do with all that money showing up in your bank account. Your corporation has retained earnings sitting in a chequing account earning essentially nothing. You know vaguely that you should “do something” about your finances but every time you start looking into it, it’s overwhelming, someone’s trying to sell you something, or there’s just genuinely no time.

This isn’t because you’re careless. It’s because your job taught you how to do the work that leads to a paycheque but didn’t teach you what to do with it. Now what?

The good news: there are more options available to Canadian investors today than at any point in history. The not-so-good news: it’s hard to know where to start and a lot of options look the same but are actually very different. It’s hard to decipher what’s what. That’s by design as there are a lot of people who benefit financially from that noise.

Before you can optimize anything — for example, your portfolio, your tax, or your insurance — you need to make one foundational decision: how am I going to manage this, and with whom (or not)?

That decision has real long-term consequences. Getting it wrong doesn’t necessarily mean disaster, but it can mean a material difference in your net worth through paying for advice you didn’t need, leaving money in structures that aren’t giving you good returns, or ending up with a financial life spread across five institutions with no coherent view of any of it.

Here’s an honest, unsponsored look at what’s available.

The Options

1. Full-Service Wealth Management Advisor

What it is: A person who works with an institution — either what’s called a dealer or an investment manager (the various types of institutions will be another post). Dealers are typically at a bank-owned firm like RBC Dominion Securities or an insurance company like SunLife. They provide investments and may or may not provide financial planning as part of the relationship. Sometimes the financial planning costs extra and you may need to ask for it. MD Financial Management, owned by Scotiabank, sits in this category and markets specifically to physicians.

Pros: Personalized service, someone who knows your situation, handles implementation for you. Physician-focused advisors understand incorporation and OMA group benefits and have seen enough doctor files to give contextually relevant advice. The main value, in my view, is that you have a person to call when there are bad days in the market and will talk you through it.

Cons: Advisors aren’t equal to the brand of the institution. They’re essentially independent businesspeople operating on an institution’s platform, and it makes a huge difference who you get. Great advisors are worth their fee, but it’s pretty hard to tell who that is because they don’t really have a true ‘track record’ like investment managers do. Also, their fees are higher than the DIY method. It’s typically an AUM (assets under management) fee model, but there’s also the transactional fee model (pay-per-trade) which involves a lot of stock tips and creates an inherent conflict of interest. Depending on the institution, advisors can only recommend products on their firm’s shelf. Minimums can be high for newer physicians still building assets.

Best for: Physicians who genuinely don’t want to think about it, have substantial assets, are comfortable with the fee-for-convenience trade-off, and have a high-trust relationship with the advisor (not just the institution).

2. Fee-Only Financial Planner

What it is: A Certified Financial Planner (CFP) who charges by the hour or a flat project fee and sells no products whatsoever. This is different than the advisor because they are giving you a roadmap whereas the advisor is mainly selling investments. They give advice; you implement it yourself and/or you go to other service providers like advisors to buy the investments, insurance, etc.

Pros: There’s usually no inherent conflict of interest. Their only incentive is to give you good advice. Often the most rigorous and personalized planning you can get. Some specialize in physicians and understand professional corporations, RRSP/TFSA optimization, and physician-specific insurance nuances.

Cons: It’s advice only. There’s no handholding through implementation, which means the gap between having a plan and executing the plan is on you. For a busy physician, that gap can be wide. Periodic engagements also mean the plan can go stale between visits if your circumstances change.

Best for: Physicians who want unbiased, expert guidance and are disciplined enough to follow through independently.

3. Robo-Advisors

What it is: Automated, algorithm-driven investment platforms. Wealthsimple is the dominant Canadian example and has one main competitor in Questwealth. These are low-cost, easy to use websites that build and rebalance a diversified portfolio based on a risk profile questionnaire.

Pros: Very low cost (typically 0.4–0.7% all-in including ETF MERs). Genuinely good for straightforward accumulation inside registered accounts. No minimums to get started. Removes emotion from investing and doesn’t take much time or effort.

Cons: They are one dimensional — they manage a portfolio, not a financial life. There’s no incorporation strategy, no tax planning, no insurance review, no retirement projections — but they do have a basic projection, which is helpful. For a physician with a professional corporation, a mortgage, and a complex income structure, a robo-advisor is one tool in a toolkit, not a complete solution.

Best for: Somebody with a simple situation that doesn’t want to spend a lot of time on it and only check in every so often.

4. DIY Investing

What it is: Self-directed investing through a discount brokerage like Questrade, Interactive Brokers, or a bank-owned discount platform. It’s up to you to do your own planning, build your portfolio, choose and manage your own investments — typically using low-cost index ETFs — and rebalance monthly.

Pros: Lowest cost option available. Maximum control. For a physician with a professional corporation, self-directing the investment portfolio inside the corp can save meaningful dollars at scale. A growing body of evidence suggests most DIY index investors outperform actively managed funds over the long run simply by minimizing fees.

Cons: Time and knowledge intensive to do well. There’s no financial planning component, so that still needs to come from somewhere. Behavioural risk is real: without someone to talk you through a downturn, poor timing decisions are more likely.

Best for: Physicians who enjoy this and have the time — or as the low-cost execution layer for a plan built elsewhere.

5. Combination Approach

What it is: Using more than one of the above intentionally. Common combinations: fee-only planner for strategy + robo-advisor or DIY for execution; full-service advisor for corporate complexity + DIY for registered accounts.

Pros: Gets closer to covering all the bases. You can access unbiased planning advice without paying AUM fees on your entire portfolio.

Cons: Fragmented by nature. Your planner sees the plan, your brokerage sees the portfolio, your accountant sees the corporation. Nobody has the complete picture, and coordinating between them is on you.

Best for: Physicians who’ve done some homework and want to be intentional about cost and quality across different parts of their financial life.

What I Actually Did (And What I Learned)

Full disclosure: I’m the founder of YouGotThis, and I’m not a physician — my wife is. I’m a CFA charterholder with a background in institutional investments, which means I came into this with more financial fluency than most. And I still found this frustrating.

Watching my wife move from residency to staff physician, I had a front-row seat to exactly what’s described above: the income arriving fast, the corporation set up reactively, the accounts spread across multiple institutions, the underlying question: what’s the best way to set up the multiple phases of our finances? There wasn’t a clean answer until I spent a few years and a significant amount of time on this. I had the knowledge to build a plan. What neither of us had was a single place where the whole picture lived.

What we ended up doing was hiring an investment management firm for the portfolio, hired a tax accountant that specializes in physicians and then I did the plan and everything else on my own. That may be unique as I know how to model out our lives and I’m a nerd about that kind of stuff.

It was the right combination on paper. But it was fragmented in practice. My plan lives in an Excel spreadsheet on my laptop. The investment accounts are at an institution with only that. The corporation and accountant are its own silo. Every time something changes — for example, a new income year, changing the portfolio, refinancing the mortgage, etc. — there is a knock-on effect that changes 5 other things.

That’s what I built YouGotThis to fix. Not to replace your advisor or your brokerage, but to be the place where your complete financial picture lives — investments, budget, debt management, retirement projections, saving for education, estate planning — so you can actually see whether you’re on track. Built specifically for professionals with complex financial lives who’ve outgrown the generic tools and want to understand their own finances, not just be told what to do.

If any part of this resonates, then take five minutes to see what your picture actually looks like.