For the First Time in Three Years The Number One Article is About Money
For three years, the most-read article on this blog was a list of dermatology fellowship and training programs for nurse practitioners. Fellowships take time to find, can be challenging to evaluate, and every nurse practitioner trying to specialize eventually goes looking for that list. Last month, it lost the top spot. No new content went up until this past week. The blog just kept doing what it always does, and for the first time since I started writing, the number one article was not about dermatology at all. It was about money.
You're Ready to Talk About the Money
The piece that took over is called Why Nurse Practitioners Making $300K+ Don't Know How to Deploy Capital. Read it here. That is three years of reading habits getting overturned in a single month, by an article that has been sitting there quietly since it was published. This didn't happen because I ran a campaign about financial literacy. It happened because the audience went looking for it, on their own, with no prompting from me. Nurse practitioners are earning more than ever, some well past $300,000 a year, and they are landing on an article that basically says: you have the income, and you still don't know what to do with it.
We spend years mastering diagnosis, treatment, and patient outcomes. Almost none of that training touches what happens to the money once it hits your account. So the same clinician who can manage a complex case with total confidence is searching for how to deploy capital at $300,000 a year, because the structure for that never existed until she had to go build it herself, one search at a time.
Financial literacy is a clinical competency. It belongs in the same category as your prescribing knowledge and your patient assessment skills, because it determines whether the income you have worked so hard to earn actually builds a life, or just passes through your hands. Nurses are investors. We are investable. Most of us have just never been shown what to do about it.
Immediate Action
If you are reading this and you relate, start by asking yourself one question. What are you earning right now, and what percentage of it is sitting in an account doing nothing. That single number will tell you more about your financial health than any budgeting app. This is the same thesis behind a new white paper I just published, Financial Literacy as a Clinical Competency, which builds out a full framework for what this looks like in practice. You can download it for free from the Mahogany Dermatology Nursing Bookstore.
About the Author
Dr. Kimberly Madison, DNP, AGPCNP-BC, WCC is a Board-Certified, Doctorally-prepared Nurse Practitioner, educator, researcher, and author dedicated to advancing dermatology nursing education with an emphasis on skin of color, business acumen, and digital literacy. She is the founder of Mahogany Dermatology Nursing | Education | Research™ and the Alliance of Cosmetic Nurse Practitioners™, the first dermatology nursing organization in the country built at the intersection of clinical excellence, skin of color care, and financial literacy for nurses. Through peer-reviewed research, published books, and a growing community of nurse entrepreneurs, Dr. Madison is building the infrastructure that makes this profession sustainable for the people who choose it.
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
