Planning personal and practice finances isn't every doctor's strong suit, and financial planners who serve a lot of physicians notice particular mistakes that physicians tend make. Not only that, but the planners also have advice tailored specifically to their physician clients. Here are a few of those nuggets for planning the future of both personal and practice finances.

1 Forget the Joneses.
"The biggest thing that doctors do, especially here in Los Angeles, is that they don't live within their means," says Mitchell Kraus, a CFP and a financial consultant with Capital Intelligence Associates. "They don't live within a budget," he says. "A doctor in Los Angeles makes more money than most people in the whole wide world, but compared to a lot of people here--if they're trying to keep up with the Joneses," that can land them in trouble.

Kraus strongly suggests that his doctor clients create a budget and stick with it, especially those carrying student loan debt and those with a gift for spending. "If you're paying 18 percent on a credit card per year, a $1,000 purchase--if you don't pay it off immediately--can end up costing you $1,700, $1,800, $1,900 with interest."

2 Split Your Savings.
After you retire, make sure you've got both taxable money and tax-deferred money saved, with an ideal balance of about 50-50, says Paul Temby, a financial analyst at Dowling & Yahnke in San Diego. A rule of thumb is that a couple or individual should spend between 4 percent and 5 percent of their portfolio each year, but not more, he says. "If you're stuck with only IRA money at [age] 65, and you need to buy an extra car that costs $40,000, you need to take out $70,000 or $60,000, depending on your tax bracket."

3 Plan for the short and long term
In personal finance, "doctors often don't align their savings and investments towards their timeframes," says Kraus. "They put their short-term emergency funds in aggressive stocks or, on the opposite end, they have money they're saving for the long term that they're being too conservative with, and after taxes and inflation, they're technically losing money," he says.

Kraus' advice is probably familiar to every doctor investor, but it can't be stressed enough, he says. "The rule of thumb is that money you're going to need in the short term is savings, and money that you need in the long term should be invested," he explains.

4 Verify Your Business Plan's Soundness.
When doctors are considering the financial future of their practices, particularly solo and small-group physicians, a sound business plan is key, says Kraus. In the easy credit market accompanying the recent real-estate boom era, loan officers may not have scrutinized physician-practice business plans as carefully as they should have.

"If you're not willing to work as a business owner, go work at Kaiser, go work for one of the big health plans--don't worry about how the money is going to come in, and just do your job," Kraus counsels. For specialists, a good business plan means "knowing who your competition is nearby and who your referral sources might be nearby, and how much competition there is," he says. It's also important to know how you are going to draw in enough people to get a certain level of cash flow, he adds.

Sometimes this part is especially tricky. Kraus tells the story of a radiologist client who set up in an underserved area and made a great deal of money for the first few years. "Before he knew it, two or three other imaging clinics opened up in that area and all of a sudden his profits shrank because there was new competition," he says. With good planning, the client would have seen that the higher-than-average profits weren't guaranteed, and would have saved for leaner times and increased his marketing when they came, he adds.

5 Find an Expert You Trust.
In an item that applies to both personal and practice finances, Temby cites a common complaint among planners. "Doctors tend to be overconfident, and the overconfidence translates into them believing they understand more about investments than they truly do," he says.

Certainly the most common piece of advice stemming from that observation is that doctors should retain an expert in the arcane financial arts, but Temby adds an additional warning. "Doctors often make easy targets for bad practices," he says. "We've seen a number of doctors who've gotten involved in really poor investments because they were taken in by information that looked complicated, they thought they knew about it, and they effectively shot themselves in the foot," he says.

Often physicians will buy the "latest and greatest thing" or will invest heavily in certain industries, such as pharmaceuticals, where they have some expertise, Temby continues. "The problem is that they end up with a portfolio that is unbalanced and over-weighted in pharmaceuticals and medical device technology, biotech and that sort of thing," he says.

6 Consider a Defined-Benefit Pension.
"Often doctors are individual practitioners," says Temby. "We have a number of doctor customers that can have a defined-benefit pension plan with one employee in them, and that's themselves," he says.

"So, a really good deal for an older doctor who has themselves as their sole employee is that they can open their own defined-benefit pension plan and shelter upwards of about $160,000," he estimates. "If they're close to retirement, the defined-benefit plan is the type where, when they retire, they're going to get paid $70,000 a year or $50,000, and the plan uses an actuarial calculation to determine how much they have to save for the next ten years, so that they can meet their requirements to pay themselves when they retire."