Taking Stock: A Hospice Doctor’s Advice on Financial Independence, Building Wealth, and Living a Regret-Free Life – Book Review.

“Daddy, what does it feel like to die?……..   My sweet child, I’m still trying to figure out what it feels like to live.”

Taking Stock: A Hospice Doctor’s Advice on Financial Independence, Building Wealth, and Living a Regret-Free Life, is a new book by Jordan Grumet, also known as “Doc G” in the personal finance community.  That touching passage of dialog above between Doc G and his daughter comes at the very end of the book and puts a tidy bow on the wisdom, advice, and vulnerability contained within. 

This is a different kind of personal finance book.  It’s not about money per se, but more about the things that money affects and that affect our money.

It’s about life and, more importantly, death.

 

Life = Messy

Regular readers of this blog know that I spend way more time writing about the psychology and behaviors behind money than the nuts and bolts of investing and personal finance.  

The trials and tribulations of your life, in all their glorious messiness, largely control the purse strings over your money.  Ignore them at your peril. 

When it comes to money, most folks prefer to push life’s messiness in a corner and focus on the numbers, as if the precise quantification of things will magically free the mind of it’s bother.  Good luck with that. 

In Taking Stock, Doc G has created a concise narrative of how to look at the role of money in our lives.  As a hospice doctor, he weaves stories of dying patients in with his own personal journey to address topics other financial books don’t tend to discuss.   

 

Three Themes

The book is divided into three main parts.  The first is titled “What Financial Independence Experts Get Wrong About Life – And Death”. 

In this section Doc details the story of his fathers death when he was only seven years old, and how it set the course of his life.  His honesty and vulnerability shine through and it provides a great grounding to understand the ideas in the rest of the book.  He then goes on to discuss various topics related to financial independence such as purpose, identity, and the art of subtraction.

The second section is called “Many Paths To Financial Independence” and Doc lays out what he calls the parable of three brothers.  Since I’m familiar with Doc’s blog and podcast and have seen speeches he has given I was very familiar with this section. 

Here Doc lays out three general paths to get to financial independence – front-loading the sacrifice, passive income and side hustles, and what the calls the passion play.  Anyone on a journey to FI will surely find themselves in one of these, or possibly all three at various points.

The third section is called “The One Thing The Dying Wish They Had More Of – Time”.  This section was the highlight of the book and hit home for me the most.  Perhaps that’s purely due to where I’m at in my journey, but I think it’s more because it covers what to me is the most important thing.  Time.  Yes, all this money and FI stuff is really about time.

 

Highlights

The book shines best when Doc details stories from his job as a hospice doctor.  I could never do that job in a million years, but I’m fascinated by those who do.   

Doc tells stories of real people in their final days that range from happy to tragic to peaceful, and are no-doubt repeated every day in America.  His storytelling is engaging and succinct and he has a flair for highlighting the deeper meaning in each narrative and how it relates to money, work, and time. 

He also has a wonderful way of stating the cold realities of the world in a simple and declarative way. 

• “There is no financial well-being without mental and physical well-being.”  Yep. 
• “Sometimes, in order to pursue things we really want, we have to suffer for a time.”  Double-yep. 

Many of these pronouncements seem obvious but I find it fascinating how modern pop-culture has often demonized the declaration of obvious truths like these.  As if hiding the unfortunate truth that life is hard will make it go away.  Doc tells it like it is. 

Other times he drops not-so-obvious lines that are clearly original thoughts and worthy of contemplation.

“Knowledge is the emergency fund in which you shield your happiness.”   That one was my favorite.

Another highlight of the book for me is the great laydown of end-of-life considerations that most of us will have to go through with our parents, and then inevitably with ourselves.  He covers wills, trusts, financial legacy documents, and interesting ways to approach these difficult topics with loved ones. 

I’m in the midst of this now with my Mother and I can attest it’s really hard.  Dealing with a depression-era parent who considers money the most taboo topic in existence is a daily challenge.  I definitely took some great advice from Doc’s writing.  

 

Transparency

Doc G is the first person I really connected with and made friends with in the personal finance/FIRE community.  I actually beat him to the blog name “Accidental FIRE” by a mere week or two in late 2017, and we formed a friendship from that coincidence. 

At my first FINCON in 2018 we hung out together practically the whole time.  We’ve often chatted over the years through Twitter or email.  He’s helped me numerous times with advice to care for my aging mother, and even offered to talk to her about her ailments.  He’s one of the most generous people I know and by far my best-bud in the FIRE space even though we don’t talk as much these days. 

I’m telling you this to be fully transparent.  I can’t help but feel a bit biased towards loving his book, it’s human nature.  I’m super-stoked that he’s packaged his experiences as a hospice doctor and now a leader in the personal finance community into a concise book, chock full of wisdom. 

That said, I tried to be as objective as possible in reviewing it.  I do wish there were more stories from the patients he cared for in their last days.  I find these vignettes the most powerful testaments of hope – gifts that others have given us through story so that we might avoid their mistakes, or replicate their successes.  Doc does a wonderful job of conveying them, I just wanted more of them. 

The only other critique is that at times the book seems to drift a bit back and forth between the mortality theme, nuts and bolts financial concepts, and other topics such as YOLO, opportunity costs, and Maslow’s pyramid.  Overall he weaves these concepts together well, but it sometimes seemed a little disjointed. 

To play devils advocate to my own critique, the fact that these seemingly discrete topics are indeed related is the point he’s trying to make in the first place.  Organizing the diverse ideas and concepts covered in this book is no doubt a tremendous challenge as many overlap or are interdependent of each other.  

 

Takeaway

This book stands out in the personal finance space by focusing on what really matters – life.  And yes, death.  After all none of us gets out of here alive. 

The topics covered in this book are applicable to everyone, and for those solely focused on the number-crunching of investments and tax strategies this book can perhaps serve as a wakeup call.  Your numbers and spreadsheets don’t mean a damn thing if you don’t step back and ask the deeper questions, and face the harsh reality that we’re all circling the drain.   

Taking Stock is a wonderful guidebook to address the deeper questions so you can live your best life, and die knowing you did. 

Taking Stock will be officially released on August 2nd.