Why All Nurses Should Be Millionaires.
If there is a career that I believe deserves to be millionaires, based on the work they do every day, I would definitively say nurses. Yes, I am biased of course. I worked as a float nurse for a major hospital in Delaware and saw the good, bad and ugly of nursing and healthcare. The amazing thing about nurses are that they are genuinely kind people, not getting into the career to make millions of dollars. Blood, sweat, vomit, illness, urine, feces, chemicals, needles, CPR, and being yelled at could all be found within an eight-hour shift. Some wouldn’t trade it for the world, and others are slowly moving on to different areas of nursing.
Funny enough, I remember not only patients stating, “You do not get paid enough for this” but also family members stating, “You do not get paid enough for this”. If members from the general public were to shadow an ER, ICU, or Med-Surg/Tele nurse for 12 hours, they would feel the same way. It should be mandatory for some executives of hospitals and C-Suite to do so, to help with perspective.
Making between $30-$60 an hour for 20-30+ years could absolutely make you a millionaire if saved and invested properly. Is $30-$60 an hour worth the price of admission for a nurse that is four-year bachelor educated, NCLEX certified, skilled and talented at life sustaining measures, assessment skills, multitasking, deescalating, and working long hour days? I do not think so.
Well, what is the solution, Shane? How do we fix this? Why state the obvious?
Nurses deserve a better financial opportunity. There could be endless solutions; create a standardized high minimum wage for nurses that better aligns with their abilities, hospitals have a zero-profit run rate, so profits are better distributed among nurses and frontline workers vs. the C-Suite, add more financial education to nursing programs.
BUT the first step to finding a solution is to start talking about it.
In this blog I am going to discuss many different topics about nursing, finances, life and my journey from nursing to a financial advisor, to then becoming a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER®, and Co-Owner of RIA.
Be well,
