Being smart with medicine doesn’t make you smart with money. There’s help in this guide for successful physicians who haven’t planned for their financial futures as wisely as they could have.

Financial advisers Burd and Hemphill follow up on Pay Yourself First (2013), in which they advised young doctors how to begin their careers on strong financial footing. Such advice came too late for those already established in their careers, not to mention their spending and investment habits. Case in point is the fictionalized couple who regard themselves as rich but in fact have less than they need to survive a year without their high doctors’ salaries. “Could we design a program as systematic and data-driven as that in our first book,” Hemphill asks, “to provide that peak-career physician couple with confidence they can change their financial outcomes?” It sounds like a First World problem, and it is—earning such a high income that the downsides of irresponsible spending and vanity investments can be invisible over the course of an entire career. Regardless, the financial advice here is sound, sensible and roundly applicable to individuals from a variety of professions and with a range of incomes. Maximize your pretax savings to your employee retirement plan, they advise. Dump the assets that cost more than they earn—the rental property for which you pay more on upkeep than you make in rent, the expensive car that depreciates in value every year and is far more than you need to get from Point A to Point B. Curb your consumption now to close the quality-of-life gap between your current lifestyle and your postretirement one. Less applicable to all readers, perhaps, is the talk of selling the boat, the vacation home and the speculative real estate, but it’s solid advice nevertheless—and the admonition may, in fact, keep some from heading down those slippery financial slopes to begin with. Burd and Hemphill are not only credentialed financial advisers, specializing in the medical field, but they are also solid writers, their soothing but rational voice both embodying and promoting clarity in the often perplexing world of personal finance.

Though not a replacement for one-on-one financial guidance, this slim and accessible volume is filled with good advice for professionals looking to get their finances back on track.

Burd and Hemphill’s debut financial guide aims to help start new physicians on the path to solid financial futures.

Doctors may make a great deal of money over their lifetimes, but that doesn’t mean that they always know how to manage it wisely. New doctors start at relatively low salaries—according to the authors, fellows may make as little as $12.50 an hour—but they can start making impressively high ones in the blink of an eye. Such a sudden, radical change in cash flow can easily throw a new doctor for a loop, particularly given society’s expectations of how doctors are supposed to live. Burd and Hemphill write that many young doctors plan to practice indefinitely and see no need to put money aside for retirement. But, they point out, the first few years of medical practice are crucial in determining a doctor’s financial future: A doctor who starts saving money immediately will end up with a far bigger return than one who waits even a decade to invest. One who starts by putting his or her cash toward an expensive lifestyle will find it extremely painful to cut back later and start saving, but one who continually tucks a percentage of earnings away from the beginning won’t have to change a thing. The authors define wealth as being able to maintain a lifestyle indefinitely without needing to work, and their book lays out a plan for accomplishing this end. Their program centers on the concept of “pay[ing] yourself first”—setting aside money from each paycheck and saving it before spending it on anything else. The authors clearly know their subject, and unlike many money management books, this one provides specific investment and money-management suggestions; the only sour note is the sales pitch at the end, when the authors advise new doctors to sign up as their clients.

A clearly written, common-sense guide to smart money management for medical professionals.