Setu Mazumdar, MD

One key to successful investing is to realize that it's unlikely you'll obtain the average rate of return. When you invest with this thought in your mind, you'll have more realistic expectations of investment returns.

Gamblers can easily lose money by confusing actual outcomes with average outcomes. It's also a common mistake with investors and financial advisors. For example, short-term averages vary dramatically from long-term averages.

Although nearly 50% of physicians experience at least one symptom of burnout, they aren't given any good solutions to cope with burnout.

Having an unbundled structure for your group retirement plan gives greater transparency and also reduces conflicts of interest. A bundled structure could put your money and your retirement at stake.

Bundled retirement plans may be the most common and most convenient for small businesses, but medical practices can save money by unbundling, which means having multiple separate parties for each aspect of the plan.

If the responsibility of creating a successful group retirement plan has fallen to you, the first thing you need to determine is whether service providers (including financial advisors) are actually fiduciaries like they claim they are.

Physicians can find themselves the trustee for their group's retirement plan, and if they don't know what they're doing, they can be making a lot of mistakes.

I'm still paying off student loans. How can I save for retirement at the same time and make the most out of it?

While it's true that your savings rate impacts your portfolio more than investment returns, it depends on where you are in your career.

Many people focus on the wrong tactics to build wealth. The amount of your savings will have a greater impact than investment returns on your portfolio value.

There are a number of cost basis reporting methods and some will save you more money in taxes than others.

There were new tax rules this year to follow for taxable non-retirement accounts. Getting it right can save you thousands of dollars in taxes.

Setu talks about the challenges that physicians face in their financial lives, financial independence and more in this video interview.

A solo 401(k) might have more rules to follow, but for independent contractors, like physicians, this retirement plan might be best.

One of the benefits of being an independent contractor is the type of retirement plan you set up. While many physicians have SEP IRAs, you should strongly consider setting up a solo 401(k).

It's time to do some quality assurance on investment gurus and the financial media, so here are some more of the worst investment calls of last year.

It's time to do some quality assurance on investment gurus and the financial media, so here are some of the worst investment calls of last year.

The stock market does not know its previous history, and its past sequence of returns isn't going to shed any light on what it's going to do in the immediate future.

The behavior of gamblers can be sort of similar to how people invest and what financial advisers do in investment portfolios. You can learn a lot just from observing a game of roulette.

Historically, the market always recovers from a significant downturn, but your decision about how to react to a downturn depends most on your particular situation and your age.

Fleeing the market during the downturn can have some disastrous consequences for your portfolio.

Psychologically you're tempted to do something in investing - usually this means selling when the stock market goes down. But it's incredibly difficult to know when to get back in.

The market volatility is worrisome, no doubt. But through discipline, diversification and understanding of how markets work, the ride can be made bearable.

Lately your investment portfolio has probably felt like one long string of bad events that you couldn't control.

If you've been practicing medicine for more than 10 years and have accumulated some assets and are saving regularly, you should be far wealthier now than you were two years ago. And that's even accounting for the great recession of 2008.

Considering how negative the headlines have been over the last year, it's rather surprising to note that the markets actually thrived until now.

When you cut the clutter in your financial life you optimize your investments and will get better returns.

By simplifying your financial life, it will be easier to manage your various investments and accounts.

There are a number of factors to keep in mind when determining how your investments are doing, and one of the most important is to make sure you're comparing with the appropriate benchmarks.

I've got a theory about why financial advisors purposefully make investing far more complicated than it should be: Many want to confuse clients in order to justify their high fees -- either that, or they're just plain incompetent. Here are some things you need to understand and ask about your own investments, whether you do it yourself or hire an advisor.