By his early fifties he had done well — a busy practice, and four properties to show for it: the clinic premises, the family home, a flat he rented out, and a plot bought years ago ‘for the future.’ He felt wealthy, and in a sense he was. But when a costly equipment upgrade and his daughter’s overseas course fell due in the same year, he was strangely short of cash — asset-rich and liquidity-poor, with almost everything he owned locked in bricks he couldn’t sell a corner of. His wealth was real. He simply couldn’t reach it.

This is the quiet pattern in many a doctor’s balance sheet. Property feels like the natural home for hard-earned money — solid, visible, understood — and so it accumulates, until it crowds out everything else.

Real estate feels like the safest place for a doctor’s wealth. Concentrated and illiquid, it is often the riskiest.

Why property crowds the rest out

Several forces push the same way: property is tangible in a way markets are not, it is easy to justify (‘it will always be worth something’), and a clinic or nursing home blurs the line between profession and investment. The result is a net worth heavily concentrated in one asset class, in one or two cities, that cannot be sold in parts, that yields modest rent, and that leaves frighteningly little liquid when life actually needs cash — an emergency, an opportunity, a child’s education, a slower year of practice.

Balance the bricks with something you can sell

The fix is not to disown property — it has a place — but to stop it being the only place. As income comes in, deliberately direct a meaningful share into liquid, diversified financial assets rather than the next plot, until your wealth has a healthier balance between what you can touch and what you can actually spend. Keep a real emergency buffer. Treat the clinic as your practice, not your portfolio. The aim is a life where a sudden need never forces a distress sale of a property you love.

Be proud of what you’ve built in brick and mortar. Just make sure some of your wealth can be reached without a buyer, a broker and six months. Hold property by choice, not by default — and always keep part of your wealth liquid. In twenty years, the doctors who weathered shocks calmly were rarely the ones with the most property. They were the ones who weren’t entirely in it.