There is an old saying, heard most often in legal circles, that a person who represents himself has a fool for a client. Medicine has a similar instinct: doctors are generally discouraged from treating themselves or their own families. Neither rule exists because the professional lacks ability. Both exist because being close to a problem distorts how clearly you see it.
A good part of our working week is spent with people who live by this rule at work. Specialists, advocates, engineers, chartered accountants, people who would never let a colleague operate on themselves or argue their own matter. Many of them have never thought to apply the same rule to their own money.
That is not a criticism. It is one of the most consistent patterns we see, and it is worth understanding, because the habits that make someone excellent at their profession are often the very habits that leave their own finances to chance.
The habits that make a good professional
Professional training rewards a particular way of working. You are expected to master a body of knowledge, to be right, to be self reliant, and to carry responsibility for the outcome. Over years, that becomes identity as much as skill.
So when the question turns to retirement, investment or cover, the natural response is to handle it the same way. Read up on it in the evenings. Ask a colleague who seems to have it sorted. Trust that someone who can interpret a scan, a contract or a set of financial statements can surely work out a portfolio.
Often they can, in the technical sense. The difficulty is rarely intelligence. It is distance. It is very hard to be objective about your own lifestyle, your own fears and your own blind spots, and harder still to find the uninterrupted time that a proper plan asks for when your diary already belongs to other people.
The difficulty is rarely intelligence. It is distance.
There is also a subtler trap. Expertise in one field breeds a reasonable confidence, and confidence does not always notice where its field ends. The surgeon who would never improvise outside her specialty may be quite comfortable improvising with her retirement savings.
Time is the scarcer resource
Most professionals start earning in earnest well after their peers. A decade or more of study, internships, articles, training contracts or registrar years is common, and many begin their careers carrying study debt. By the time the income arrives, the years in which compounding does its quietest and most valuable work have already passed.
Then the curve turns steep. Income can rise quickly over a few years, and it is entirely natural for life to rise with it: a larger home, school fees, a practice to buy into, the car that finally matches the effort that went into earning it. None of this is extravagant. It is simply what happens when people who have deferred for a long time are no longer asked to.
The consequence is that a high income can mask a modest savings rate for many years. The numbers look healthy month to month, while the long view is quietly falling behind where it needs to be.
A high income is not the same as a high savings rate.
There is one further point worth naming. For most professionals, the single most valuable asset they own is not their portfolio or their property. It is their ability to keep doing their work. We wrote about that at length in The Asset That Walks Into the Room, so we will not repeat it here, but any plan that does not protect that asset is incomplete.
Waiting for things to settle
Ask a busy professional when they intend to sort out their planning properly and the answer is usually some version of “once things settle”. Once the registrar years are over. Once the practice is bought. Once the children are in school. Once this particular year is behind us.
Things do not settle. They change shape. And while the formal plan waits, decisions are made anyway, one at a time and each for good reason. A policy taken out through a colleague’s recommendation. A retirement annuity contribution made in a February rush for the tax certificate. A share portfolio assembled from conversations at dinner. A unit trust opened years ago and never revisited.
Each of these may be perfectly sensible on its own. Together they are not a plan. They are a collection, and collections tend to overlap in some places and leave gaps in others, usually in the places that matter most when something goes wrong.
Products are the last step, not the first
The financial industry is very good at offering answers before anyone has asked the question. It is easy to end up discussing which fund, which policy or which platform before anyone has established what the money is actually for.
A plan works the other way round. It starts with what your life costs today and what you would like it to cost later. It asks when work should become optional rather than necessary, what happens to your family if your income stops, and how the practice or the business fits into the picture. Only once those answers are clear does it make sense to talk about products, and by then the choice is usually far simpler than it looked.
The right products, bought in the wrong order or for the wrong reasons, still add up to the wrong plan.
When a label helps, and when it is just a label
Walk through any medical conference or professional association event and you will find no shortage of financial solutions described as built for professionals. It is worth taking these seriously, and equally worth asking what the label actually means.
Sometimes it means something real. Insurers price risk partly by occupation and by the claims experience of people in that occupation, so some professions do qualify for better terms. For someone whose income depends on a specific skill, the way disability is defined, whether you are covered for your own occupation or for any occupation you could reasonably do, matters a great deal more than it might for others. Some providers are organised around particular professions, sometimes with membership structures that share profits with their members. And anyone who owns a practice has needs a salaried employee does not: buy and sell arrangements between partners, key person cover, cover for the overheads that keep running when the owner cannot work.
Sometimes, though, the label is simply packaging. A familiar product with a professional name on the brochure. Premiums that start attractively low and rise steeply later. A bundle that suits the average member of a profession rather than the person actually reading the brochure.
The useful test is a simple one. What specific problem does this label solve for me? If the answer is clear, the solution may well be the right one. If the answer is mostly about who else has bought it, it deserves a closer look. A product built for professionals is built for the typical professional, and nobody is quite the typical professional.
This is not only about professionals
Nothing in this piece is unique to doctors, lawyers or engineers. The same patterns show up in business owners who are brilliant at running a company and have never had time to look at their own affairs, in senior managers who oversee large budgets at work, and in people who simply prefer to handle things themselves.
The professions just make the pattern easier to see, because the training is so long and the expectation of self reliance so strong. The principles that follow apply to anyone. What differs from one person to the next is the detail, which is exactly why the detail deserves attention.
What this asks of you
- Take the second opinion seriously. You would insist on one for a patient, a client or a structure you were signing off. Extend the same courtesy to yourself, not because you could not work it out, but because you are too close to see it clearly.
- Write down what your life actually costs. Not what you earn, what you spend, today and in the life you want later. It is the single most useful number in any plan and the one most people have never calculated.
- Ask what a product solves before you ask what it costs. Whether it carries a professional label or not, a solution is only as good as the problem it was chosen to fix.
The old saying about the lawyer and his client is usually told as a joke. It is really a quiet piece of wisdom about the limits of being close to something.
In our experience, the professionals who handle their money best are rarely the ones who know the most about it. They are the ones who applied to themselves the rule they apply to everyone else: that being close to a problem is precisely the reason not to be the only one looking at it.
This article is general information and not financial advice. It does not take your personal circumstances into account. It refers to types of cover and provider in general terms only and does not recommend any product or provider. Tax and legislative positions are stated as at October 2026 and may change.
