13 Feb 2026 14 min read

Why you're always broke despite your doctor salary

I was earning over ₹1 lakh per month. On paper, I was successful. In reality, I was borrowing from my father to cover my credit card bill. That's when I realised: high income doesn't mean wealth. It just means a more expensive way to stay broke.

Photo by Mayur Freelancer on Pexels

I still remember the shame of that phone call.

"Papa, can I borrow ₹40,000? Just until month-end."

I was earning over ₹1 lakh per month — huge money in those days. I'd moved from Velachery to Srinagar Colony, a higher HNI locality in Chennai. I was a hospital consultant. On paper, I was successful. In reality, I was borrowing from my father to cover my credit card bill.

That's when I realised: high income doesn't mean wealth. It just means a more expensive way to stay broke.

But that realisation came too late. By then, I'd already made the mistakes that would cost me crores. I'd put one-third of my investment capital into a ULIP — an insurance-wrapped investment product that generated returns for the insurance company, not me. I'd bought penny stocks that looked like bargains but had no potential. I'd maxed out credit cards because "nothing felt like it was going out of my hand" until the bill arrived with crushing interest rates.

The worst part? I thought I was alone. I thought this was personal failure, not system design.

Then I started tracking the numbers. Not just mine — everyone's. Two surgeons from my batch. Same training. Same hospital system. Different outcomes.

Surgeon A: ₹8.2 crores earned over career. ₹24 lakhs saved.

Surgeon B: ₹4.8 crores earned over career. ₹2.1 crores saved.

Surgeon A earned nearly double the income. Surgeon B accumulated 87 times the wealth. The difference wasn't income. It was savings rate. It was financial literacy. It was understanding the gap between what you earn and what you keep.

You've felt this, haven't you? You've looked at your bank balance after a good month and wondered where it all went. You've upgraded your apartment, your car, your lifestyle — and somehow still feel financially stressed. You've made more money this year than last year, but your savings didn't increase proportionally. Or at all.

Here's the brutal truth: you're caught in the high-earner, zero-saver trap. And it's not an accident.

The Pattern Nobody Taught Us

Over 30 years ago, I was travelling by train. I used to buy computer magazines at railway stations — I was fascinated by what computers could do. Digit magazine cost ₹100, which was expensive in those days. Then I saw a different magazine: "Mutual Fund Insight." Half the price. ₹50.

I don't know why I bought it. Maybe the cover attracted me. Maybe I was trying to save money on magazines while bleeding wealth everywhere else.

That magazine changed my financial life.

It was run by Dhirendra Kumar at Value Research — a third-party evaluator with no skin in selling products. And in those pages, I learned something that medical school never taught me: the difference between insurance and investment.

Insurance: Money to cover risk. Returns only when the risk occurs — death, loss, accident. No returns otherwise.

Investment: Money to build assets that grow and beat inflation.

The ULIP I'd bought combined both. Worst of both worlds. The insurance company profited. I didn't.

Here's the question doctors used to ask when I explained term insurance: "How much return will I get?"

That question revealed everything. We didn't understand the fundamental difference. We thought every financial product was supposed to "give returns." We'd been trained to be clinically excellent and financially helpless.

And then I realised: that's by design.

During medical school, there's so much to learn, absolutely no time for anything else. That's how medical institutions bring up doctors. We start earning money but remain totally gullible in finances. The financial literacy gap is so massive that a radiologist from Mumbai created WealthCon — a financial course that admits only doctors.

Think about that. The gap is so huge, we need doctor-specific financial education. Because the general system already failed us.

I discovered this the hard way. When I checked online credit evaluation tools, I noticed something strange. The moment I selected "doctor" as my profession, the interest rate dropped. If I selected "lawyer" or "engineer," the rate was higher.

The financial industry categorises doctors as "low risk."

What does "low risk" mean?

On the surface: doctors don't cheat, return loans easily, do so reliably.

But here's what it actually means: low financial literacy. Gullible. Easy to exploit.

"Low risk" isn't a compliment. It's a classification. It means we're profitable customers. We earn well. We borrow reliably. We don't question terms. We accept advice from agents whose incentives don't align with ours.

We're the perfect profit centre.

When I made a list of everyone who gave me financial advice in my early years, I noticed a pattern.

My CA recommended property deals. He owned six properties himself.

My insurance agent sold me a ULIP with a 40% first-year commission.

My bank relationship manager pushed a home loan. He got a bonus for selling it.

My real estate agent positioned property as "safe investment." He earned commission on every deal.

My mutual fund distributor recommended high-commission funds, not best-performing ones.

Their incentive was the transaction. My benefit was secondary. Sometimes irrelevant.

Here's the real cost of commission-driven advice: one bad decision — say, ₹15 lakhs in a ULIP instead of an index fund — costs you ₹40+ lakhs over 20 years. Three per cent annual fees = ₹9 lakhs in direct costs. Underperformance compared to index (typically 2-3% per year) = another ₹20-30 lakhs in opportunity cost. Total wealth destruction from a single "safe" product: ₹30-40 lakhs.

Multiply that across a career. ULIPs. Penny stocks. Real estate concentration. Loans taken "for tax benefits" that generate cash flow problems without holistic financial view. Credit cards maxed out because spending on credit doesn't feel like spending until the bill arrives.

I lost one-third of my investment capital to a ULIP. Should have been split: term insurance (small amount) and mutual funds (the rest). The opportunity cost haunts me still.

I burned money on low-value stocks — Kingfisher and others — because my friend Dr. Arjun and I thought low price meant high future returns. It didn't. Low value plus no potential equals wealth destruction. We needed low value plus high potential, but that requires thorough company evaluation. We didn't do that. We just saw cheap stocks and bought them.

Dr. Krishna, a neurosurgeon resident, went even deeper into penny stocks. He lost heavily. So did we.

And then there was the credit card debt. I'd look at bills and think, "I'll pay part of it this month." The interest accumulated. I didn't realise how much until I sat down and read the numbers. The annual interest rate, divided into monthly rates, hid how crushing the cost was.

That's when I had to borrow from my dad. And my sister. To cover bills generated by lifestyle I couldn't actually afford.

The shame of those calls still sits in my chest.