A brief educational intervention in personal finance for medical residents.
BACKGROUND
Although medical educational debt continues to escalate, residents receive little guidance in financial planning.


OBJECTIVE
To educate interns about long-term investment strategies.


METHODS
University-based medicine internship program.


METHODS
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 non-attendees.


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.
Dhaliwal
Gurpreet
G
Department of Medicine, San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center, San Francisco, CA 94131, USA. gurpreet.dhaliwal@va.gov
Chou
Calvin L
CL
D003479:Curriculum; D004503:Education, Medical, Graduate / Q000191:economics* / Q000379:methods; D006801:Humans; D007396:Internship and Residency / Q000191:economics*