#323 How I Run My Quarterly Financial Review ft. Peter Kim, MD
In this episode, Dr. Peter Kim breaks down the exact quarterly review process he uses to catch financial blind spots before they turn into a bad year. If you’ve ever felt vaguely behind without knowing why, or noticed that anxious feeling about money without any real numbers to back it up, this episode gets into why that happens and how to fix it.
He walks through the four areas he checks every quarter, the journaling method he swears by, and why subtracting from your life often matters more than adding to it. Tune in!
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Episode Highlights
Now, let’s look at what we discussed in this episode:
- Why Start Doing Quarterly Reviews
- Why Quarterly Beats Yearly or Monthly
- What Clarity Actually Does
- The Four Areas to Review
- How the Review Actually Works
Here’s a breakdown of how this episode unfolds.
Episode Breakdown
Why Start Doing Quarterly Reviews
Peter opens with a story about a physician who called him a few years back. On paper, the guy was doing fine. Good income, investments moving the right direction, nothing on fire. But he told Peter he felt behind and couldn’t say why.
Peter asked him one question: when did you last actually sit down and look at your full financial picture? Not a quick glance at account balances, but a real look. The physician had to think about it, and the answer was January. It was October when they talked. Nine months had gone by with him just guessing at how things were going.
That gap between how someone feels about their finances and what’s actually true is the whole reason Peter does these reviews. He points out that clarity doesn’t just lead to better decisions, it also gets rid of the background noise that builds up when you’re not paying attention.
Why Quarterly Beats Yearly or Monthly
Peter walks through why he settled on a quarterly cadence instead of doing this once a year or once a month. His logic is pretty simple. If you only check in annually, you could go a full year making mistakes before you notice something’s wrong. Quarterly limits the damage to a bad quarter or two before you catch it and adjust.
He doesn’t dismiss monthly reviews, he just thinks they’re overkill for most physicians. Between clinical hours, family, and everything else competing for attention, monthly reviews eat up more time than they’re worth. On top of that, month to month numbers can swing enough that you end up reacting to noise instead of an actual trend.
He compares it to how doctors already think about patient care. Nobody waits until a patient is in crisis to check labs. You monitor things over time and look for patterns early. Peter treats his own financial life the same way, using quarterly check-ins as his version of routine labs.
What Clarity Actually Does
Before getting into the mechanics of his review, Peter spends time on something he thinks gets overlooked entirely, which is what clarity does for you psychologically. He’s noticed a pattern in himself and in the physicians he coaches. When people feel financially anxious, their first move is usually to pull back or cut something, even when that anxiety has nothing to do with their actual numbers.
Most of the time, he says, that scared feeling comes from uncertainty, not reality. You check your bank account, the number looks lower than expected, and your brain starts running worst case scenarios without any real evidence behind them. Peter admits he’s been there too. The fix isn’t cutting back impulsively, it’s sitting down and actually looking at the full picture: income, passive income, net worth trend, where the money is going.
Once physicians do that, he says the anxiety tends to drop fast, because the reality is almost always less scary than whatever their head had been telling them. And it’s not just about money either. Clarity makes the bigger decisions easier too, things like whether to cut clinical hours or take on a new investment. Those choices feel impossible in a fog, but a lot more doable once you know where you actually stand.
The Four Areas to Review
Peter lays out the four things he actually looks at every quarter. First is financial health, which means income trends, how much of that income is passive versus active, and whether that percentage is moving up or down. He also checks net worth direction and hunts for leaks like forgotten subscriptions, fees, or investments he’s been meaning to deal with. He says this is usually where people get their biggest wake up call, not because anything is falling apart, but because they’ve simply never looked at it all together before.
Second is time and energy. Peter pulls up his actual calendar from the past 90 days, not what he planned, but what really happened. Then he asks himself one question: does this match the life he said he wanted, or does it look like the life he’s defaulting into. Third is relationships, meaning family, close friends, and key professional connections. He’s blunt about how good physicians are at rationalizing neglect, telling themselves they’ll reconnect next quarter, which somehow never actually arrives.
Fourth is projects and trajectory, basically what moved forward, what stalled, and what he’s avoiding. That last part is the one he says he sits with the longest, because whatever he’s avoiding is usually the most important thing on the list. He’s honest that he tends to knock out easy tasks first and leaves the important stuff for last, which is exactly why this question matters.
How the Review Actually Works
Peter breaks down his actual process. He blocks off a couple hours of what he calls thinking time, done completely alone with no calls or distractions. Before he looks at a single number, he journals by hand and answers three questions: how does he actually feel about where things stand, what’s working that he hasn’t given himself credit for, and what assumptions or blind spots might he be avoiding.
Only after that does he pull the actual data. He does this manually on purpose, even though automated tools exist, because manually going through the numbers forces him to actually look instead of skimming past them. What he finds interesting is that his gut feeling from journaling and the actual data don’t always match, and he treats that gap as useful information either way. It tells him whether the numbers are better than he assumed, or whether there’s something the numbers aren’t capturing.
He keeps everything on a one page template, same four areas, same questions, one spreadsheet with four tabs. After a year that’s four data points, after two years it’s eight, and patterns start showing up that you’d never catch doing this once a year. Every review ends with two or three specific adjustments, split between things to do more of and things to stop doing entirely. He circles back to the physician from the opening story, who eventually told Peter he finally felt like he was steering his life instead of just surviving it, not because his numbers changed overnight, but because he finally knew what was actually true.
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