When a doctor writes you a prescription you cannot even read it. Forget understanding what he says! Do all doctors have bad handwriting?

Or is it that doctors are so busy that they scribble – after all it is meant to be understood by a fellow professional – the chemist?

Doctors are intelligent, smart, and extremely busy – is that why they scratch something on a piece of paper?

Anyway when the writes a Metacrome or a Hydrocyn or whatever I cannot read, and I do not understand it anyway.

What does all this have to do with financial planning? Doctors deal with financial planning also in a similar way. You cannot really give them new thoughts. If you meet a doctor who is already say 35 years old, he already has a lot of finance ideas – you have to chisel away at the wrongs and build on the positives that he has.

If he has been advised by a bank, it is easier. However if he is self taught, then it gets difficult to do so.

TO MAKE CHANGES IN A DOCTOR’S THINKING, you need to be a person of a high IQ, have good qualifications, and having grey hair helps. A surgeon is quicker to decide than a physician 🙂 . Really, I think this comes from training. A surgeon has to decide faster – the physician can ask for more reports.

So for a financial planner and doctor to start a relationship it is necessary to know each other. Most doctors have the same concerns – ethics, prices, other doctors doing unethical things, fees, rich clients not paying, poor clients not being able to pay. Collecting fees in cash. Many doctors collect fees ONLY by cheque. They are of course not the rule, they are the exception.

Doctors have also accumulated many advisers in their journey. Bankers, CA with half baked knowledge on investing, terrible advisers who discourage them from paying taxes, ….you need to find a way around this.

You need to speak in a manner that the doc accepts you. Most doctors are intelligent and savvy enough to understand what you are saying. You need to justify the choices, charge your fees (remember they earn fees too for time spent), and speak in a way that money is not everything in life. Doctors hate to be told that they are here to make money, but the fact that they worry about money is clear when they have a peer meet. Most of the talk is about a big hospital, BMW, a new farm house being constructed, new equipment worth Rs. X lakhs, Income tax raid…LOL.

So?

well…lets continue…