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Published in: Journal of General Internal Medicine 3/2007

01-03-2007 | Original Article

A Brief Educational Intervention in Personal Finance for Medical Residents

Authors: Gurpreet Dhaliwal, MD, Calvin L. Chou, MD, PhD

Published in: Journal of General Internal Medicine | Issue 3/2007

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Introduction

Although medical educational debt continues to escalate, residents receive little guidance in financial planning.

Aim

To educate interns about long-term investment strategies.

Setting

University-based medicine internship program.

Program Description

An unselected cohort of interns (n = 52; 84% of all interns) underwent a 90-minute interactive seminar on personal finance, focusing on retirement savings. Participants completed a preseminar investor literacy test to assess baseline financial knowledge. Afterward, interns rated the seminar and expressed their intention to make changes to their long-term retirement accounts. After 37 interns had attended the seminar, a survey was administered to all interns to compare actual changes to these accounts between seminar attendees and nonattendees.

Measurements and Main Results

Interns’ average score on the investor literacy test was 40%, equal to the general population. Interns strongly agreed that the seminar was valuable (average 5.0 on 5-point Likert scale). Of the 46 respondents to the account allocation survey, interns who had already attended the seminar (n = 25) were more likely than interns who had not yet attended (n = 21) to have switched their investments from low to high-yield accounts at the university hospital (64 vs 19%, P = 0.003) and to enroll in the county hospital retirement plan (64 vs 33%, P = 0.07).

Conclusions

One 90-minute seminar on personal finances leads to significant changes in allocation of tax-deferred retirement savings. We calculate that these changes can lead to substantial long-term financial benefits and suggest that programs consider automatically enrolling trainees into higher yield retirement plans.
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Metadata
Title
A Brief Educational Intervention in Personal Finance for Medical Residents
Authors
Gurpreet Dhaliwal, MD
Calvin L. Chou, MD, PhD
Publication date
01-03-2007
Publisher
Springer-Verlag
Published in
Journal of General Internal Medicine / Issue 3/2007
Print ISSN: 0884-8734
Electronic ISSN: 1525-1497
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-006-0078-z

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