A brief educational intervention in personal finance for medical residents

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Although medical educational debt continues to escalate, residents receive little guidance in financial planning. AIM: To educate interns about long-term investment strategies. SETTING: University-based medicine internship program. PROGRAM DESCRIPTION: 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 nonattendees. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN 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. © 2007 Society of General Internal Medicine.