The Money Blawg is here to help legal professionals and other readers improve their personal finances and seek financial security.
Who Am I?
I’m the Money Blawgger, a lawyer in my 14th year of practice. I currently work in-house after having served my time in the salt mines of BigLaw.
The Problem with Lawyers and their Finances
So many smart people are bad with money, and lawyers are no exception. In some cases, being in the legal profession may actually amplify the problem.
Many legal professionals have little knowledge about personal finances, and that’s not a knock on them or the profession. We’re great at winning cases, closing deals and earning victories for our clients, but personal finances is a discipline outside of our professional expertise. If you’re like me, you had no formal personal finance education in law school, college or grade school. For many legal professionals, we end up muddling through our finances on our own or with bad financial advisors, and the end result is lots of us making poor, questionable or marginal financial decisions.
The good news is that legal professionals of all types can improve their finances and increase their financial education, but that starts with understanding and acknowledging that no one cares about, or will ever care about, your money more than you do. Not your financial advisor, not your friends, not cousin Larry. The world of finances can be very complex and confusing, and you need to be able to look after yourself.
We learn early in our training that lawyers must be zealous advocates who act in the best interests of our clients. When it comes to our own personal finances, legal professionals should be adopting the same standard – you owe a duty to yourself and your family to be a well-informed advocate to build, grow and protect your finances.
Now, it would be one thing if us lawyers were just left to our own devices to navigate our personal finances. The problem is that lawyers are a relatively affluent group, making us juicy targets for bad investments, bad investment advisors and oftentimes our own greed. This can be especially true for the well-educated, highly successful lawyers with a healthy sense of self-importance who conflate their ability to win legal victories with great skill in investing (this ego problem isn’t unique to lawyers by the way – doctors and engineers suffer from this too).
Unfortunately, the investment and financial planning world is a jungle, and you are fresh meat. Even your “guy”, the financial advisor, may not be looking out for your best interest and may in fact be looking to profit to your detriment. Say what you will about lawyers and ethics (insert your favorite lawyer joke here), but realize that most financial advisors are not and will not agree to be a fiduciary to you – you know, those same duties that you have sworn to uphold for your clients.
Why You Should Read the Money Blawg
I can’t and won’t promise to care about your money as much as you do, but I will be exploring topics in personal finance that I think will be of interest to fellow legal professionals and other interested readers, including:
- Salaries, Income and Compensation
- Trends in the legal industry that may impact our personal finances
- Saving, Spending and Conspicuous Consumption
- Investing
- Insurance
- Retirement Planning, Financial Independence and Early Retirement
- Estate Planning
I’m not a financial advisor, and most of what I have learned about personal finances has been self-taught. I’ve had the fortune (or misfortune?) of working, investing and learning about personal finances through the Internet Bubble, the Great Recession and the big run-up in the stock market for the past 10 years. I’ve had my own share of victories and mistakes and am excited to use my learnings and share them with others.
Whether you are a high, middle or low income earner, whether you are just beginning your career or closer to the end, whether you work in government, a firm, a company or in public interest, I hope the Money Blawg will be a useful personal finance tool for you.
My goals for the Money Blawg are:
- Educate fellow legal professionals so that they are in a better position to make good personal finance decisions.
- Learn and improve my own personal finances by interacting and sharing ideas with you the readers.
- Have fun. We already have plenty of stress in our professional lives.
- Be creative. While I may fancy myself as someone who comes up with creative business and legal solutions in my day-to-day professional work, I’m exited about using blogging as an outlet beyond the world of deals and cases.
- Be entrepreneurial. My professional career has been all about helping clients from new startups to the world’s largest companies. With the Money Blawg, I have an opportunity to experiment and run my own (very) small operation.
