About

About Me

I am the one Millennial left in the world who has never had avocado toast. I love being an orthodontist as well as a skier, backpacker, distance runner, wife, and mom. I am a big believer in the value of part-time work, international travel, and epic outdoor adventure. I spend my free time sending GIFs to people and figuring out how much espresso I can drink without having an anxiety attack.

You can read some FAQs about me in this post. 

About the Fam

I met my husband while I was training at the University of Chicago and he was working nights as a cop. It was love at first coffee date, and he proposed a year later in the Grand Canyon. Six months after that we got married on Coronado Island and then jetted off to Australia to spend our honeymoon finding out if “stingers” can get through wetsuits (yes).

We have two boys, which I highly recommend if you enjoy hearing announcements like “There’s poop in my sock!” and “I lost all of my blood!” (I am not making these up.)

We live in a gorgeous mountain town and spend our free time adventuring in the amazing wilderness areas of the American West, consuming loperamide in exotic international destinations, and watching superhero movies while eating Thai food on our couch.

About This Blog

This blog is named “Doctor in Denim” for a bunch of random reasons that you can read here.

I did not start blogging with the intention of making money off of it. I make enough money at my day job, and I’m not looking for side hustles at this point in my life.

I started this blog in part because they say to write what you want to read, and what I wanted to read about was the financial decisions of my fellow doctors. Turns out that it’s pretty hard to find that info in any sort of useful detail online. Sure, you can find general advice and average numbers and percentages and people who will try to sell you their particular thing for financial success, but it is really hard to find any doctors’ actual debt numbers (I’m talking about all debt, not just student loans – those averages are easy enough to find) or annual spending or anything similar.

I’ve found that my moderate-to-high-income peers – who are also often very high-debt – often do not feel super comfortable talking about their money in any capacity – particularly personal debt and spending – so it makes sense that they’re not publishing and promoting this information online.

Another reason (maybe the most significant reason?) I started this blog is that I knew that putting real data from our lives, including details of our debts and spending, out into the world where anyone could read them – even if no one ever did – would force us to focus in on where our resources are going, what really matters to us, and whether those two things are lining up.

Again – I really feel this is important – I have no intention of trying to make money off of this or making myself famous in the doctor world or becoming the next big mommy blogger. In fact, as I started sharing more of my own story and my family’s story and started getting asked more questions about it, I figured out that I just like sharing our story even if there’s only one or two people listening.

We actually realized a while ago that we were doing things differently from a lot of our peers – and not just with money. We often get asked how we are able to travel and chase adventures like we do, how we decided to grow our family through adoption, how we can take so much time off from work, how we can pay our loans off so fast, and how we’re doing it all with our kids in tow.

I decided it was time to write about how we do what we do, and why. To write about the decisions we’ve made that are a little different from the mainstream. To share real stories and real numbers from our lives. And that’s why these posts have rippled out from being just about money into things like travel hacking and foster parenting and a bunch of other awesome topics that make it quite fun for me to write.

So while there are some articles here that will certainly be the most relevant to orthodontists in the Millennial-ish age groups who are interested in money topics, I hope you’ll be able to find some content here you can enjoy regardless of your age or profession or financial situation.

What’s Next?

I’ve still got a lot to learn about work, money, and life in general.

We’re raising the kids. We’re building a house. We’re still traveling all over the place. We’re still getting rid of our debts. We’re trying to hit financial independence. We’re trying to prove that it’s possible to not have a ton of stuff and still have a ton of fun. We’re trying to stay fit and healthy.

I’ll share a lot about what we’re doing here. Hopefully you’ll be able to get something out of hearing about our wins, our screw-ups, or both.

Thanks for reading!