By Dr. Jim Dahle, WCI Founder
We’ve got some exciting news. The White Coat Investor just got a fresh new look and a completely redesigned website.
The website is easier to navigate, so you can quickly find the resources, content, and trusted experts you want. It has fewer ads (as you have requested for years), and it’s better organized—so that you can find what you need as quickly and easily as possible.
Personally, I am most excited about the increased functionality and speed. Doctors like “high-yield” stuff, especially emergency doctors like me. Not only will the site rapidly help you to learn what you need to learn to take control of your financial life, but it will also better connect you with the resources you need to do so. And it’s obviously a lot nicer to look at.
The redesign has become “the baby” of most of our staff and has required thousands of hours of work, and we are excited about how it will serve you better. It may take a little getting used to things, but we promise it will be worth it. Of course, if something is clearly a step down from the prior version, let us know and we’ll see what we can do about it. But after literally months of testing, we don’t think any of the changes are a step backward. Slightly different yes (and nobody likes change), but better once you get used to it.
The History of The White Coat Investor Website
Fifteen years ago, I started a blog to share what I was learning about personal finance and investing. What began as a small passion project has grown into a trusted resource for doctors and other high-income professionals who want to take control of their financial lives. Back in May 2011, when I moved all the stuff I had been typing into internet forums for years onto The White Coat Investor website, it looked like this:
It was very basic and very . . . well . . . brown. Brown on blue. And it stayed like that for something like five years. Since it didn’t make money for years, I was the tech guy (along with everything else) for a long time. And that was the best I could do. By 2016, WCI was making enough that we could contract out a little help on the tech side, and we did our first website redesign—including the creation of the WCI Forum, our first of now four online communities. The site then looked like this:
Look familiar? Yeah, now you know one reason why we embarked on a massive redesign project two years ago. Eighteen people are working here now (half of them full-time) instead of three part-timers, and it was time to bring the website out of the 2010s and into the 2020s.
After burning out on WCI in 2019, when only five of us were working part-time on it, we went on a full-time employee hiring binge starting in 2020. Our second hire? A Chief Technology Officer (CTO). I probably don’t have to tell you what his first comments were about what we had been doing tech-wise for the prior nine years while I was the CTO. Now, our tech team has grown to three. Plus, we have someone whose only job is designing and making everything we do as attractive and functional as possible.
But they were far from the only ones involved in this project. The project became larger and larger until it eventually sucked in just about everybody working here, just about full-time for much of the last year. Thank you to the entire WCI team for their dedication to this project in addition to their regular job. You should be very proud of your work. I know that I am.
Look how pretty this is!
Click from page to page, and you’ll notice a beautiful, consistent look. However, the appearance is only the beginning. The website is faster, the menus are more functional, and the site is far better at connecting you with the resources you need without annoying you and freeing up our staff to spend their time on activities that really matter to you.
What We’re Doing Here
Thank you for being part of The White Coat Investor community. Thank you for reading blog posts, listening to podcasts, watching videos, engaging in online communities, handing out books, using our recommended resources, and especially for making money conversations less taboo in medicine.
We know that when doctors are financially secure, they are better partners, parents, and physicians. The earlier people start learning about money, the bigger impact it can have on their lives. Thank you for being part of this journey with us.
I started The White Coat Investor blog in 2011 after becoming financially literate. I realized that I had been taken advantage of by recruiters, lenders, insurance agents, real estate agents, and financial advisors—and I was far from alone. I realized if doctors didn’t learn this stuff, this was going to keep happening year after year after year. While I had been trying to educate them on forums, it became clear to me that doctors were hungry for this information, and nobody was teaching it to them in any consistent, organized, unbiased way.
As a business, WCI was for-profit from the beginning, but there wasn’t much profit being made. That first year, I had a little over $900 in revenue, and I wrote it all off. My goal was to make $1,000 a month within two years. It was close, but I did it. Barely.
Needless to say, it probably would have been much smarter for me to have spent all that time working a few extra shifts rather than typing thousands and thousands of words into the internet on a quixotic mission driven by a missionary zeal to give other docs a fair shake on Wall Street. But I could see the income slowly increasing, and more importantly, I could see the difference the message was making in the lives of dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of doctors and other high-income professionals. Literally millions of people were coming by the website every year. I felt a sense of purpose, and it quickly became clear that what we, as a community, were doing mattered.
It was doctors against Wall Street, and the WCI community was leading the charge!
In 2014, we published our first book, The White Coat Investor: A Doctor’s Guide to Personal Finance and Investing. That led to more growth and more opportunities to help. We have since published three more books, Financial Boot Camp, Guide for Students, and Guide to Asset Protection—and we’re working on a Guide for Residents that will debut in 2026.
Over time, I thankfully learned that not every financial professional was out to take advantage of doctors. Most people end up needing to borrow money, refinance loans, buy insurance policies, and have contracts reviewed at some point in their careers. I also estimate that something like 80% of doctors need, want, and should use a financial advisor and/or an investment manager. There are good people out there, which added another layer to WCI’s mission: connecting doctors to good financial professionals that they could trust.
A year after the first website redesign in 2017, we launched The White Coat Investor Podcast to spread financial literacy, interview guests, and answer questions while you commute, exercise, and walk the dog. We built on the growth of the podcast by adding the Milestones to Millionaire Podcast in 2021, which celebrates financial accomplishments, no matter how small, with guests and uses them to inspire others to reach their own milestones.
In 2018, we launched our first in-person conference, The Physician Wellness and Financial Literacy Conference, aka WCICON. While guaranteeing 1,400 room nights and hundreds of thousands of dollars in food purchases to a resort still feels like the biggest financial risk we take, it’s become one of our favorite weeks of the entire year. It’s not just because we get to go somewhere sunny at the end of winter and get together as a community. Most of us don’t have people in our everyday lives we can talk to openly about money, but those people surround you at WCICON. This event brings together a group of people who understand your world; who are eager to learn; who are willing to share their stories, support each other, and have tons of fun while doing it. We’re doing it again March 25-28, in Las Vegas.
2018 was a busy year as we also launched our flagship online course, Fire Your Financial Advisor. This course was to support people who are interested in being a DIY investor, but it also helps teach you how to find and vet financial professionals if you decide that you want to delegate some of your financial chores. In 2024, Fire Your Financial Advisor became available in Student and Resident versions in addition to our best-selling Wellness option, which includes all of the original course plus wellness content to make it CME eligible.
For years, we had people ask us for a course on real estate, so in 2022, we launched the No Hype Real Estate Investing Course.
Starting White Coat Planning
Now, after 15 years of talking about how the financial planning industry could serve people better and after seven years of teaching you how to manage your own finances through our course, we have realized that many WCIers needed something more. We’re excited to be building what we think is the ideal financial advisory firm that will serve all types of investors. We look forward to offering good advice at a fair price and serving high-income professionals with integrity, expertise, and care.
It’s a risk to try something different, but the chance to build something better for a community we care so deeply about—and maybe even change the industry in the process—is worth it.
While we’re not yet accepting clients, if you’d like to be kept up to date on our progress, you can sign up for a no-commitment interest list here. And if you know any planners who would like to focus on providing good financial advice instead of prospecting or selling products, send them a link to the full job listing here.
New Look but the Same Commitment to Serving You
While The White Coat Investor has grown, our mission has not changed.
We are here for you. We are here to give you accurate (and if you’re really lucky, slightly entertaining) content to help you along the journey to financial success, to celebrate your success, and to inspire the next generation, too. You’ve got this!
We hope this improved website makes it easier to find the educational resources and trusted experts.
Despite months of pre-launch testing, there are sure to be some things that didn’t transfer over as well as we hoped or don’t look or function as intended. If you find those things, please let us know by commenting below or emailing us at [email protected].
We’re really excited about this next evolution of The White Coat Investor and continuing to serve you. Thanks for being a white coat investor.
Any questions about the new site redesign? Comment below!
