Should You Pursue Financial Independence or Financial Freedom? – Episode #607

On this episode of the Dentist Money Show, Matt and Jordan discuss the key differences between financial independence and financial freedom, emphasizing the importance of purpose-driven financial goals and proactive planning. They share insights on gaining control over your finances, aligning habits with your personal values, and finding clarity in your financial journey. Tune in for a fresh perspective on achieving true financial freedom.

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Podcast Transcript

Intro: Hey, everybody, welcome back to another episode of the dentist money show brought to you by dentist advisors. We have a great show for you today. Jordan Haines, our old new addition to the team. Jordan Haines joins me. And we use an analogy of Peter Atiyah, this idea of lifespan versus health span and how that applies to money and the difference between financial independence And financial freedom it’s really a follow up episode, almost from the last conversation Ryan and I had about retirement and the definition of retirement, what it means. We go deep. We share experiences from our own lives, share experiences from clients around this idea that this really has to be more than just financial independence and a number on a spreadsheet. As always, we hope you get something out of this. We hope you enjoy the show.

Matt Mulcock: Welcome Jordan.

Jordan Haines: What’s up, Matt? just us.

Matt Mulcock: This is fun. we’ve done a couple shows together. not one on one did we haven’t done one on one have we, we did a panel with Ryan, you did two cents with me and Robbie. We, again, as I said on those shows, if you’ve heard the less, the, the lovely sultry voice of Jordan Haines, you’re better off for it. And, I’ll give you the quick summary. We did this already, but for those of you listening and hearing Jordan for the first time. Jordan is an old OG, I’ll call him, of Dentist Advisors, ran off with Reese for a while to do Elements. And then with a ton of prompting from me and pestering, we’ll call it, I was able to get Jordan to come back. I’m taking all the credit for that, by the way, just so you know,

Jordan Haines: It’s all you. Yeah, you just, yeah, you, you followed up constantly all the time sitting there nagging. No, you were actually really chill about it. We would just have conversations and every conversation you said, Hey, do you want to come back and hang out with us?

Matt Mulcock: Every time we chatted, Hey, by the way, you want to come back? Yeah, exactly. Here you are.

Jordan Haines: Yeah. I will say, let me tell you this. So with Reese last couple of years we have been talking to a lot of financial advisors, pretty darn good financial advisors. I might add, like these are, if those of you who haven’t spent any amount of time looking for a financial advisor, you know that they’re all over the place. And you and Ryan have talked a lot about like hiring a financial advisor. I think you did a episode recently in like December about this. So it’s hard to find a good financial advisor. So I’ve been spending the last couple of years, I’ve worked with thousands of advisors, a lot of really, really good ones. And I’ll tell you what, Dentist advisors, and I’m not just saying this, yes, I’m a little biased, but like you guys have built, we’ve built a really awesome firm, like just the way that we talk about this stuff and how we approach money and things like that. I’m toot my own horn. I know this isn’t a great way to come in

Matt Mulcock: Shoot away.

Jordan Haines: And like selfish plug, but that’s why I’m back. I think Dentist Advisors is a really, good team and we like talking about money in the right way with people. And there we go.

Matt Mulcock: I love that. And then actually, I mean, I totally agree. I am very biased, fully admit I’ve been here for seven years. There’s a reason I came over and I stay and I love this place, but, To that point, I think the foundation of, of why we’re saying that is, and you said the conversations we’re having today, this is like, I’ll say for me, what I love most about my job, it’s two things. My one on one interactions with my clients that I’m so grateful to have. And then also the ability to do this, to have these types of conversations. So, I’m glad it’s come through for you over the years. And you’ve seen that with your experience and I’m, and it seems to come through for dentists that We’re just here to educate no matter what, whether you hire us, you don’t. We just want to, we want to hopefully add value to the, to the industry. So that’s, I’m glad that you said that. this topic we’re going to talk about today is something we’ve talked about from different angles and I’m super passionate about it. This idea of defining what, Financial freedom is versus financial independence. And I wanted to, I’ve thought about this so much. Literally this has been like in the back of my mind for several months. I’d say since like last summer, when I read the book outlive by Peter Attia, have you read this book, Jordan?

Jordan Haines: Yeah, it’s been a while, but it is a good book.

Matt Mulcock: So good. It was, it got really popular for a while. I think it probably still is. I know he’s done like the podcast circuit and. And things, but there’s a concept in there that he kind of bases his entire book around, which is this idea of lifespan versus health span and there being a difference. And we talk, you know, he, so his whole thing is like traditional medicine talks a lot about. Longevity, lifespan, just simply, you know, mortality rates, right? Mortality rates is like a lot of like traditional medical, jargon or, or kind of, approach. It’s just mortality. Well, he says it great. Lifespan. Okay, cool. but if I lived to 95, but my life is horrible for the last five 10 years, does it really matter? And so he compares that lifespan to this idea of health span and the way he defines it as really just years of healthy, active living. And so I’m going to stop there for a second, Jordan, and just get and get your thoughts on kind of the setup there of Peter Atiyah and this idea of these two concepts.

Jordan Haines: Have you seen this guy? Sorry, this is related, but have you seen this guy? He’s he, I feel like his name is Brian something, but his whole thing is just like live for as long as possible.

Matt Mulcock: Yes. He’s the one that’s like experimenting on himself

Jordan Haines: Yeah, yeah. Like experience and he’d like post all of his experiments and stuff. it’s incredible to me. You see, like you hear what his age is and you see what it looks like. And you’re like, Oh my gosh, didn’t know that. it’s really fascinating to me. I don’t want to spend my life. Trying to live as long as I can, right? Like I would rather live my life doing the things I want to. So when I hear you say that I, I’ve talked to people who are getting ready for retirement. My own parents. I’ve talked to plenty of clients who, sometimes we get caught in our head of just like either like in the world of physical health, just living forever. Right. Like I want to live forever. Go talk to a 98 year old

Matt Mulcock: Yep, yep,

Jordan Haines: And ask them if they want to live forever. And I guarantee you, they’re not going to want to but we’re in that later stage where, maybe we need to think less about just like optimizing forever and more about just like living the life that we want to live. Right. I don’t know if that’s kind of where you’re getting at with this, but that’s kind of what I think about

Matt Mulcock: It’s funny you said that you talked to a 98 year old. Um, my grandma love her. Love you, Anne. so she is 87. she’s amazing. She’s just the typical both equal parts, sweet. And the other part, just so mean depending on the situation. But every time I talked to her, I talked to her probably a couple of times a And every time I talked to her, She tells me, especially lately that she’s just done. Like I’m just ready to be done.

Jordan Haines: I just love it.

Matt Mulcock: This last Christmas, we, we had a great Christmas. She came and I talked to her after like the next day or two days later. And she goes, Oh, well, Matt, um, I don’t think I’m going to be around next year. I I’m ready to be done with this life and ready to go. So to your point, like we think we know what we want. That’s a whole other discussion. We think we know what we want now, looking forward. When in reality, we have no idea what our perspective will be, but I think most people in that situation are like, yeah, no, I’ve lived a good life. Like I’m done. I’m not trying to live forever.

Jordan Haines: Yeah. now that you’re sharing your grandma, I got to share my grandma’s story. My grandma’s 98. Which is why I say that word 98, we were just down and visiting her, and she’s been like, I was, I’ve, she’s been done for 10 years. Like, she’s just like her husband passed away 45 years ago. She never remarried. She’s like totally with it. She’s just kind of like, I’m tired. we walked it into her house. This was like three or four years ago. and she just had like stacks of monster energy drinks. And we’re like, grandma, what are, what are these all about? And she’s like, listen, I’m tired. And I’m also done. If I’m going to be alive, I’m going to be awake. And so she’s just like pounding energy drinks and she’s still here with us. so she’s just like, her favorite drink is a monster energy. She’s pounding it. She’s equal parts cranky and equal parts sweet, just like your grandma. But she’s just so done. It’s,

Matt Mulcock: You know what?

Jordan Haines: Imagine an 88 year old, just pounding monsters.

Matt Mulcock: You know, what’s funny is I can just imagine like a local newspaper picking that up and being like, the key to longevity is pounding in at five energy drinks a day. Look at this woman. Like the false equivalency of that is a whole other discussion.

Jordan Haines: Well, have you seen the interview that she’s like 100 years old or 105 and she’s like drinking like full sugar Dr Pepper and they’re like, she’s like, my doctor told me not to drink this, but he’s dead and I’m still alive. So tell me that. Anyways, it’s so funny. We’re not recommending that everyone here pound monster energy drinks. This is not a health show, right?

Matt Mulcock: Definitely not. We are not. We barely know anything about money, let alone. No, I’m just kidding. Um, okay. So, here’s kind of the analogy that I, I want to use. And ever since I read that book, this is again, been rattling around in my mind of this idea of healthspan versus lifespan. And this, I love what he says of like years of healthy, active living versus just mortality, but it’s not. And the, this importance of like quality over quantity type of thing. And you said it right is like, maybe we stopped trying to optimize for everything and just kind of like live our life and be present and enjoy it. there’s lessons just in and of itself there. The thing I’ve, I was thinking about, and I’m again, passionate about this kind of idea of being really. Focused on definitions of, of words when it comes to retirement and money and wealth, specifically around this idea of financial independence versus financial freedom, those things get thrown around a lot synonymously. And yes, I’m here to admit that I’m, I’m especially on the financial freedom side, like I’m making up my own definition, which we’ll share here or I think Dentist advisor as a whole has a different definition, but I couldn’t help, but think about financial independence, equaling lifespan and financial freedom, equaling healthspan. Like that’s how I look at this and we’ll define these more, but, I want to get your Jordan, what, what are you thinking? What are your thoughts when you, when you hear that, like that analogy, if anything,

Jordan Haines: I am. I think listeners of the show will know that like we’re very conscious, like we consciously don’t say like retirement all that much. Yeah. Right? Like I’ve listened to the show forever and I know that like that’s just a word that I don’t use as much and I know that that’s like very common. Like, okay, well, what is retirement? Retirement is like, I don’t have to work anymore, right? Like, okay, well, the other definitions I put on there is like financial independence. I think what you’re describing to me is just like financially, I don’t have to work anymore if I don’t want to Um, I often will use like work as optional at that point. And that often is like the thing that so many people are working towards. Like that is my goal become financially independent. whereas I’m, I’m really interested on like how you would define financial freedom, almost. Well, actually I want to leave that open because I think when I hear you say financial independence, I’m thinking purely like functional, right? It’s just, do I have to work or do I not like, could we just replace financial free independence with like income independence? I think it’s a very descriptive word. in that sense.

Matt Mulcock: Yeah. I actually love that because I think if you do it that way and make it even more specific, I think it forces you to, and this is a whole other show, but I, cause I’ve thought about this a lot in my life too, of we talk so much in our industry around financial independence, or in this case, I love this idea of getting more granular and saying, no, no, no, no. Independence from income or in the need of income, like for my, like, like my efforts, direct efforts, that also opens up the conversation, which again, we won’t spend too much time on today, maybe another show around like what other areas. Are you failing to, invest in to gain independence from or just by focusing on income independence. So just an example, like your attention, like what about attention independence? Like there’s other aspects of, I think that that could come into this, but I love this, what you’re saying, Jordan, of, it being specifically income independence from like your, your actual like active income. Input of effort, generating money for you

Jordan Haines: Hearing you say that, hearing you say that, I wonder if this feels like a very, like we’re being very curious here, which is fun. I’m, I’m enjoying this exploration. What I’m thinking, coming to mind is like, when I’m financially independent or income independent, it’s almost like I don’t have to worry about it anymore. And then hearing you talk about like, Family or other areas. Like, is there a point at which I don’t have to worry about this anymore? And is that the objective, right? Like where I’m not overly concerned with that so that I can focus on the thing I actually want to worry about, right? If you go look at, like, I sent you a podcast recommendation over the weekend, where they just talk about all these autobiographies and biographies and people who have built things, businesses and movements and things like that in the past.

And one of the common themes that I’m really interested in is like, a lot of these people work until they’re dead and it’s not because they hate it and it’s not because they can’t afford to be done with it. Like most of them were like financially independent at 30, like really young, but they found the thing that brought them satisfaction and joy out of their life. Yeah, and purpose and and they removed every other distraction. And in some case, the distraction was finances, right? Like until I’m financially independent, I’m not going to be able to fully focus on this thing. And once they became that way, they could. And I think that that’s a healthy way to view financial independence if that’s the focus. But I think sometimes, It’s like all we can think about, right? Like I will be happy when I’m financially independent. Well, what else do you have to fall back on? What are you going to do after you become financially independent? It’s the same with like, I was talking to a dentist a couple of weeks ago where he had focused for so long on graduating dentist school and then getting his production up and then buying a practice. Well, now he has a practice. Now what? Right. Like what’s my life look like right now? And I wonder if that’s the thing that we need to think about. It’s like, what is the thing that brings us true joy and happiness? And can we focus on that thing?

Matt Mulcock: I. Love this so much that you went down this road. and again, there’s a whole other discussion here and this is what we do on this show, right? We kind of go down these different paths. Hopefully they’re helpful. but I love this concept of spending more time on the independence part, because, if you really think about it. In most cases, financial independence or income independence is just a something like just a proxy of what they think they should want or say, and it’s not that important to them, or it’s not as important to them as other things. I’ll give you an example. Any dentist out there listening right now, and they’re like, I want to be income independent or financially independent.

That’s my only goal. I’d say, cool. Why don’t you sell your house you’re in right now? Go live in a condo for. You know, a fraction of the price or go live in a trailer, go live in a way less expensive place, sell all your goods, sell all of your stuff. And your only vacation you take is maybe a camping weekend and you, you live on beans and rice. Like I’m being extreme, but the reason I’m being extreme and Jordan, I want to see if this point lands with you and tell me if I’m crazy. If you really think about it, financial independence is not your number one priority from that angle, because if it was, you would go do it. And most dentists out there right now that are listening to the show, our average client could be independent right now. They would just have to cut their spending down by about, you know, a A large amount and they could if they wanted to.

Jordan Haines: Mm hmm. Mm

Matt Mulcock: So it’s your, it’s more lifestyle. It’s more. I love what you said. It’s like, it’s more. I don’t want to worry. I don’t want this to be a major stress for me.

Jordan Haines: Hmm.

Matt Mulcock: It’s shifting your perspective, which I think leads into this idea of financial freedom. And there’s a huge difference here. I’m going to stop there for a second. And Jordan, just tell me on that thread I just pulled on, if that makes sense or what your thoughts are.

Jordan Haines: Yeah. Totally makes sense. I have a personal experience that I want to share, but, first let me respond to kind of what you’re saying. I think you’re right. I think most people like, for example, me, like I’m still pretty young, right? I like, if you looked at me, you’d be like, oh, this guy’s a gazillionaire and can retire tomorrow. No, absolutely not. If I decided to cut my spending in a by, by a quarter and sell a couple of my property, and, yes, I could totally retire. I could be done working forever, but that’s not what’s important to me. I think money And you’ve, I, you said this in a conversation with me recently, and I’ve thought this for a long time, and it’s great to be reminded of this. Money is a tool and it’s a means. To some end, it’s not an end in and of itself. And there are so many times you, you get this all the time. I know you have, because I’ve heard this quite a bit the last few weeks talking to dentists that are just raising their hand and saying, Hey, talk to me, um, where they’ll come and they’ll say like, I need the investment that gets me the highest return.

I need like more money. Like I’m going to invest for more money. And then I often will like push a little bit and say, What are you actually investing for? What’s that more money for? Tell me more, right? I think we all have, like, what’s the reason we’re doing this, right? Like, why am I making more money? Why am I building wealth? Why is my net worth growing? Why do I need more liquidity? Because that’s going to be the thing that prompts us to figure out, like, what’s actually important to me. And then that flips the script a little bit, because like you’re saying, I don’t think most people just want to have, not be able to work. Right. I think they want something else. So like my, why is I want to be an integral part of my local community. Like that’s really important to me. And so if I can do things to get me there so that like, I can go on walks and say hi to my friends and the people in my community, and that’s the life I want to live, that’s fantastic. But that doesn’t mean like I need to stop working tomorrow and be completely financially independent. And I don’t need the income that I have because I do need that income to do something. So anyways, all that to say, I’m rambling at this point. Income or money is a means to an end. What is the end? And I think that’s where you’re getting at with this.

Matt Mulcock: A hundred percent. And this is why I love this, this analogy here, again, coming back to this idea of Peter Atiyah. well, let’s do this really quick. let’s define what we mean. So financial independence or income independence is a basic calculation. It’s, it’s equivalent to mortality. How long do you live? It’s pretty basic. Financial independence is defined as literally does the money I’ve piled up. can I now live off of that without having to work? Right. Don’t have, I built up enough assets kicking off enough income for me. And, or I can start to like sell off and, you know, and use the money. We have a calculation for this called total term, your retirement readiness or work optional number. And it’s just your net worth divided by your annual spending. That’s it. It’s, it’s, it’s super easy. It’s

Jordan Haines: Yeah. Everyone right now, you can listen to this. Just write it all down on a paper. What do you own? What are the debts that you have in the balances you have minus out how much or divide that by how much you think you spend in a year. There you go. There’s your

Matt Mulcock: And that’s a basic number, right? and so again, financial dependence is the equivalent of lifespan. it’s just how long do you live? What’s your independence? Financial freedom’s a little bit. Different, right? And it’s what we’re kind of talking about. Here’s my definition. Generally speaking, financial freedom, the difference there is the quality of your life and the control you have over your money. Do you have control over your money or does money, does your money control you? do you have purpose in your money? Do you understand like to what you were saying earlier? Do you have your why? Do you know why you’re even doing that? Like those all go into that financial freedom. But if I had to boil it down to one thing, it’s you have control. And ownership over your money and not the other way around. that’s freedom to me. You can be financially free far before you’re financially independent and you can be financially independent and absolutely miserable and not even close to financially free. I’ve seen this. I’ve seen this many, many times of people being completely independent for years, years and years and years, and they’re nowhere even close to free. Because their money owns them. What are your thoughts, Jordan?

Jordan Haines: I’m going to share my thought with the story. so we have three kids. We have, we had our third on leap day last year. It was kind of fun. those of you who have had a third kid know that like, It comes with like way more stress than normal, but then also. Like we had to get a bigger car and around the same time, we had to do some updates on our home, like it’s a 10 year home. There’s a couple of things that went out. so basically we just like at the beginning of last year, we had a lot of expenses, just line up one after the other. And then we had the baby and the baby was more expensive. Like it’s been four years since we had another kid and inflation, it was just like way more expensive. We had moved States than it was. And so the liquidity that, that I had access to went away overnight. Right. Like we had, we still had some level of liquidity, but it caused me a lot of stress and what I found and was really interesting because I wasn’t worried about it. Right. Like we were saving money. We’re doing okay. Like we have a plan in place. I felt like we had good habits and behaviors and it was interesting about this was about june last year. So it’s been three or four months. And I was just like cranky and nervous. And like every time I thought about money, it would like make me upset. And, I was talking to a financial advisor friend of mine and I was just like venting, right?

Like here’s the situation. He said, didn’t you have like a kid? You bought a car, you did all this stuff. Like. How’s your like cash looking? How’s your liquidity? And I told him, what my liquid situation was like. And I was looking at decisions that I had been making up to that point. And I was being very reactive, like very reactive to things. And I felt like my money was driving me. I had no control over my situation because my liquid situation was down more than I was comfortable with. And it took a second with this conversation to realize I have to get to a point where I can be more proactive. Where I’m in control and I’m not being reactive because living a life of reactivity can be so stressful. So I think, um, in response to what you were saying, having control, I think another way of thinking about it is it’s the ability to be proactive to make a plan and execute that plan rather than like constantly responding to things coming your way, right? When I, you know, that couple months later, it was like every new expense was stressful. I was always reacting and sometimes I was reacting emotionally to things I shouldn’t have been. so I think that’s when, when I think about financial freedom, I like that idea of control of being proactive and not having to be reactive to things.

Matt Mulcock: Yeah. I love that definition to Jordan in such a good example. The way I, what I wrote in our outline here, what I’ve thought a lot about is like, part of this is what you’re describing is, do you have a system running, do you have a system running that allows you to be proactive? That allows you to be present, right? What I was thinking of too, when you were given that example is, How many dentists that I know, whether they be clients or I meet at events or whatever, wherever we’re doing stuff all over the country, how many that are already financially independent, right? On paper calculations done. They’re like, yeah, I don’t have to work that are still being reactive in a different way. Being reactive of like, man, I just saw this like YouTube video or Instagram about X, Y, or Z trading strategy that does it, you know, this percentage or whatever, and it’s like, What, again, I just think of that and like, man, why are you not just like off enjoying your life? Like it’s what you were saying earlier.

Why, why do you care? you’re done. You’ve won the game. You’ve won the financial independence game, but you are nowhere close to winning the financial freedom game. Not really, maybe a game you can win, but like. You, you need to shift your mindset a little bit at that point. And S and again, as long as you have a system running, you understand this idea that money is simply a tool to, and it absolutely can increase the wellbeing of your life. If spent intentionally and based around your values, like that’s the work you got to be doing now. It’s not. Like the spreadsheet stuff, you’re done. Now you got to get into like the heart and soul of it of like, what is this even for not to get all philosophical, but kinda like there’s a lot of work to be done on that side.

Jordan Haines: Well, there’s, it’s interesting you and I were talking about this today. Um, something’s been on my mind a lot lately and I’ll just share this here and know that I’m not this, this isn’t, the 10 commandments isn’t like a gift from heaven. That is

Matt Mulcock: Please bring it. Yeah.

Jordan Haines: Life. Yeah, there we go. this is something that we’re exploring right now. I think most dentists, listening to this can resonate with this to some point. I think there are stages that we all go through as a dentist and it starts with being a student. Right. And I think those of you here who have been through dental school know what that was like, right? What was the objective? You knew what you were doing. The objective was take out some student loans, finish school, so I can get a job, right? Like, it’s pretty straightforward. We all know what to do. Well, then you graduate dental school, and I think most dentists know what to do then, right? Okay, get my production up, maximize my income there, learn the clinical skills that I need to succeed, and figure out what I want out of my dental career. Is that I want to just be an associate forever? For is it that I want to own a practice? Is it that I want to go into partnership? Whatever that is, right? It’s almost like that first stage. I called this the producer stage, right? It’s the whole point is preparation. Like I’m getting ready for like when I figured out what I want to do with my life and so many people that we talked to have finished that stage and they’re kind of like, I don’t know what to do next. And like, what is the next thing that I’m supposed to do? I did all the things that I, like I had a system. The system was get production up, maximize my income, learn the ropes, do the things that I need to. And now I’m there. Now what? And so a lot of the people we talked to are kind of in that like weird limbo stage where they’re trying to figure out what the next stage is, which I called the builder, which is like, you’re growing, you’re leaning in hard to the thing that you’re really good at. These are a lot of the people that we work with.

And frankly, a lot of people listening to this are like, you’re in the middle of it. You’re growing your business. You’re growing your practice. You’re growing your income. You’re growing your family. All of these things are growing. Growing is like where you’re at. So you’re thinking about savings and you’re thinking about all these things. But this is where like people start to lose themselves a little bit where they kind of forget. Like what is the point of this? And they enter into that final stage that you had, um, Sent to me, I hadn’t really thought about this and we called it the exit. I call it the wind down. it’s the stage at what it’s like we’ve grown and we’re kind of at that next stage and we don’t really know what the next stage is. What’s this wind down stage? Like, what’s this? Like, I’m getting to the point where I’ve like done everything financially. I’m like, now what? And then we get to the, like, we’ll just call it retirement stage. We’re done working. We’ve washed our hands of this. We’re going to live our life to the end. and a lot of people there, it’s not just in dentistry, have no idea what to do. The reason I share this is what you’re saying about systems. I think really matters because we create in our mind, like these systems and we know what these systems are, and then something happens or we’ve graduated those systems we’ve grown out of them. And we, we don’t have any new systems. We don’t know what the next objective is and the next goal. And what am I working towards? And unless we have like sat down and really defined what’s important to us or what we want out of our life, it’s really hard to make a new system. I mean, this is where I think you and I as advisors spend a lot of our time. It’s just like, what do you want? Right. It’s not always about the return.

It’s not always about maximizing and optimizing our finances. It’s not about the retirement and the financial independence. It’s about all this other stuff. What is that? And sitting down and like getting really clear on what that thing is makes those like weird blended stages, like where you’re graduating to the next stage of your life makes it so much easier.

Matt Mulcock: Yeah, I think it’s so good, Jordan. I’m so glad you went through that. Cause I think that does resonate with a lot of dentists out there. And so we’ve done this right. Where, you know, people come to us, we speak places and we do a lot of like the technical stuff of like, when can I retire and we have Robbie on the show all the time around investing. And there’s a lot of technical stuff when it comes to, or the quantitative stuff, when it comes to money and finances and investing, right. So when we bring up stuff around, like, you really need to understand your why and the purpose behind this, some, there are times whether they do it. Out in open or they’re doing it internally. I admit it’s not lost on us that there might be some eye rolling, right? There might be some like there there might there might be this idea of like, okay, bro Just like tell me when I can retire? We like I am fully in on this of like you have to have this you have to understand your purpose that leads to to you starting to prioritize which then is what you build your plan around and if you don’t If you don’t have those, I guess they just will happen to start with P. Like if you don’t have those three P’s, that all starts with purpose, which is that why, and by the way, this goes for business as well. So Gina Wickman wrote traction. We follow this process. We’ve talked about this on the past shows like shout out elevation, Jared and Dan. And their group, they, they do this as well but the very first thing, you know, Wickman, does with his system, EOS is, basically encourages and says, you have to do this first is as a business owner, as a practice owner, answer the question, why are we in business? And that’s not something as simple as like, you just, here it is to make money.

Like you have to get to the heart of it. Why are we in business? So I think that applies and you’ll be shocked at the transformation you’ll make as a team, as a business owner, as a dentist, when you’ve answered that With some like actual good faith effort on the business side. And you create like this North star for your business. And it’s the same thing for your personal life. If you answer that question, like, why is money important to me? What tool is it serving in my life? You’ve got to find that purpose. And it almost feels like things just kind of fall in place. And that alone. If you put it actual effort into it and you start living along, like you start aligning your capital with your money, with those values. Yeah. Again, you may not be any closer to financial independence that day, but you will feel so much more free with your money, the difference between again, this lifespan and health span.

Jordan Haines: I love that. I was, uh, I work at home. I have this little office, in the corner of our house and my son is six. He’s turning seven soon. And it was one of his days off from school and I hadn’t taken it off and I had to go do some things. So I was walking and I said, Hey, I’ll see you in a couple hours. I’m going to go to work. I can go talk to people, do the thing that I do for work. And he said, dad, why do you have to work all the time? And I was like, um, so that I can like pay for this house. And honestly, like I came and I sat down and I’m like, why do I work? Like what? It was like one of those you guys know you when you get to that moment, you’re just like thinking about the universe. That was one of those universe thinking moments where I was just thinking, why do I work? Why do I do this thing? And I, I talked to my wife that evening and we actually had like a really good conversation. Why? Why are we making money? Why are we saving this money? Like every decision that we’ve decided to make every habit that we have financially, yeah.

Why do we do this thing? And it was really enlightening. A lot of these things were just kind of unspoken.

Matt Mulcock: Oh yeah.

Jordan Haines: We were both somewhat on the same page. Sometimes we weren’t on the same page and it helped a lot for us to get on the same page and think through what is the whole point of this moneymaking thing? Why am I in business? So I like that framing from the business perspective. What is, what is the point of this business? What are we trying to do? And then, After that, what am I trying to do? Why am I in business? Why am I making this money? Why am I doing these things? Anytime you want to make an investment, this is the one thing that like, every time you and I talk to someone, anytime someone, uh, calls us and says, what’s the next hot stock? And I say, why do you want to know? Like, why does that matter to you? If you’re constantly asking you that, that, that question, I think you’ll get really clear on what it is you’re trying to accomplish with your money, with your financial habits, your financial behaviors, then financial independence is going to be a wonderful thing. Because you know why you did that. I don’t think the one thing that was coming to mind too, as we’ve been talking about this, we’re not against financial independence. I mean, that’s partly what we’re in business. Like we want to help people get there, but why do you want financial independence? I think that’s what financial freedom is. It’s, it’s financial independence paired with understanding why you want that.

Matt Mulcock: Well, I love that you just said that, Jordan. It’s not about just, so we’re not against people living long lives. We want you to live a long life, but I guess the whole point is we’re saying, as Peter Atiyah says in his book so well and built this whole book, it wrote his whole book about is it’s not just about living long. There is another part of that. It’s the quality of your life in the years that you have. And it’s the same thing with money. We are not against financial penance. Our whole business is built around helping people get to a place that work is optional. But I think what is lost on a lot of people and Jordan, you just shared a personal example. I have one very similar that literally made me cry early this week with my daughter. Same exact question. but there’s gotta be more than just independence of income. There has to be. Otherwise, if your goal is just a number, If it’s just a number, I just need 5, 000, 000, I just need 10, 000, 000, I just need 30, 000 in passive income, and I’m good. If your goal is just a number, the result is emptiness. That is a, like, I think, that is a general rule of life. If your only goal is a number, I, I think you will be left feeling empty with the result. I really do believe that, and I’ve seen that so many times.

Jordan Haines: Yeah. You talk a lot about, system driven goals versus outcome driven goals. Um, I think that’s really what’s at play here, right? Like if we think about physical health, longevity is just lived a year, like extend death as far as possible. Like that’s an outcome. Make that as far away as I can, whereas health is right now, what are the habits and the behaviors that I have right now? I mean, I think that’s really what it’s broken down to. there are so many people out there that think about that future retirement or that future financial independence or that future. I sold my business or that future I got. A million dollars, whatever that is, and it’s really hard to feel like you are successful right now when success is determined on some future outcome. And the nice thing about this reframing is if I understand why I make money, if I understand why money is important to me, I can be successful right now. You might find that like the thing that you want out of life, the reason you make the money that you do, or the reason you want to become financial independence, you might find that that thing is here. You’re already, you got it. And now it’s just a matter of maintaining that and systematizing it and you’ve got it. And it’s just, it makes for such a better life. It makes for such a happier life. It takes the pressure off that future outcome. It doesn’t mean that you’re not going to get that future outcome or that that future outcome is not important. That’s not defining what success, like what success means to you right now. Because right now is what matters, not in 30 years.

Matt Mulcock: So good. And we’re, we’re alluding to a couple of different things that are popping in my mind of like, I just literally steal ideas from people that are way smarter than me, but kind of a combination of ideas between Simon Sinek book called infinite games, incredible. And then of course, James clear atomic habits. He’s like unknowingly, one of my main mentors doesn’t even, I don’t even know him, tried to get him for the summit a little bit above our price, a little bit of our pay grade. but just to summarize what you just said, Jordan, I’ve talked about this with so many people, and I try to apply this in my life so much is when you have these outcome based goals, what you’re saying is, tell me if I’m wrong here, but what you’re saying is, if my only focus is an outcome based goal, that’s like my definition of success. What you are saying is not only you’re saying like, I’m not successful until I get there. What you’re saying is I am unsatisfied. I am filled with angst and I’m a failure until I achieve this thing, this outcome, what James Clear says is you can be satisfied. If you focus more on a system based identity based goal, you can be satisfied anytime your system is running. And that corresponds to this idea from Simon Sinek of playing the infinite game. For example, no one’s going to say, I won the game of like, I won the game of parenting. You don’t win the game of parenting. You don’t win the game of, of leadership. Like these are, these are infinite games that you’re playing. These are identity based games. These are the games that you want to be focused on and playing as far as like, again, having that purpose and saying, I don’t need to base my identity or my success, failure rate on. Did I achieve this outcome that I made up anyway, I just made it up. So I love this idea of just saying, have a system, have control over your money, have a purpose behind it, and just watch what happens. I think it’ll change everything for you.

Jordan Haines: I love it. I would only add that my favorite way, my favorite part of playing Monopoly, It’s not winning. It’s making the deals and playing the game like that is my favorite part. And that’s something I’ve had to teach my son how to do who just wants to win all the time. It’s like, did you have fun for the gazillion hours we were playing this game? Yeah. And you lost. So what? You had fun playing it. And I think when we reformat our, our thinking to there’s a future, there’s an outcome, there’s a win that I have in the future. We can win right now. We can just enjoy playing the game and we could know what our why is while we’re playing the game. That’s going to totally change it for

Matt Mulcock: That’s

Jordan Haines: Totally going to change it.

Matt Mulcock: That’s it. Because let’s be, let’s be honest for just a second here. If we haven’t already, we’re talking to a bunch of type A high achieving dentists, right? let’s be real there. Dentists, the people we’re

Jordan Haines: Guys want to win.

Matt Mulcock: You want to win and you’re the smartest. Some of the smartest people in the, in the, in the world, right? Like we’re acknowledging that, um, you’re high achieving in order to be where you are, you’ve had to follow these extrinsic patterns of success, grades, ranking in school. If you’ve gone on to do specialty, you, you know, getting into school alone, you have to basically have these, these measurements of success that are kind of like exterior, right? So, and then when you get into practice, all the comparison stuff, like we under, we get it, we work with dentists, that’s all we do. So, we understand we’re talking to a bunch of type A people. so that’s not lost on us, but it’s what you just said, Jordan of like, you can still have goals. Don’t get a lot. Don’t get it twisted. We’re not saying don’t have goals, absolutely have goals. Just don’t overrate goals and don’t underrate the cost of goals. If you don’t have a purpose behind them. I think the cost of goals without a purpose is it leads to the syndrome and a disease I’ll call it of I’ll be happy when. That is, I think, something you should try to avoid at all costs. So it’s, it’s what you said, have the goal, but you got to have a purpose behind it and a system built around it. And again, you can be happy playing the game. And then if you, if you achieve this win, awesome, you did it. It’s not this like, Oh, I’m a failure now if I don’t get it.

Jordan Haines: Yeah,

Matt Mulcock: I love that.

Jordan Haines: Yeah, full circle. I want to bring it back to what, what, how you kind of led this in this idea of financial independence versus financial freedom. And I think that we can be financially independent and not financially free. I think that’s kind of how it comes down to it and

Matt Mulcock: It’s seen it so many times.

Jordan Haines: Yeah. Financial freedom can only happen. If you understand what you’re solving for with this money game that you’re playing right now. So if I were to have like any takeaway from our conversation, it would be sit down and ask yourself the question. Anytime you have a financial habit or you’re doing something or you have a goal in place, So ask yourself the question, what am I solving for with this? What am I solving for with this? What do I want this to do for me? And I think that gets you to start thinking through, like, what is your purpose with this? And if you understand that purpose, everything is just makes a lot more sense. It doesn’t make it easy, but it makes it a whole lot more sensical. And yeah. It’s easier to stick to things when you do it that way.

Matt Mulcock: Yeah, totally, totally agree. yeah, to your point of the independence versus freedom. I’m super passionate about this for the work that we do, but also just personal experience, like watching my parents, you know, my dad in particular right now, he’s well beyond financial dependence and has been for a long time. I think many of you out there know, I’ve mentioned it here or there. You know, lost my mom to cancer a few years ago and just absolutely brutal. But, the reason I bring it up is to say like, my dad is financially independent. He never took the time. And obviously there’s that factor as well. There’s a whole other lessons of there of like, you know, you never know from a health perspective, what can, what can change and all of a sudden your priorities change. But in particular with my dad, I have this conversation with him all the time around, like, he is the definition of independent and not free. My dad stresses about like his, utility bill. He’s owned by his money and he’s well beyond financially free. Cause again, he has, he lacks that purpose. He doesn’t even know why he’s like, he told me one of the hardest thing he’s ever done is finding out how to fill his day. He didn’t make investments into hobbies. He’s never invested in like what his purpose is. so this is this, I guess I say that to say like why I’m super passionate about this topic. It’s like super critical. Not only that, but also just the clients we meet with every day about this exact topic. So I loved your summary, Jordan. any other takeaways you’d have around this with like, just anything around how to achieve financial freedom or things dentists should be thinking about anything else that comes to mind.

Jordan Haines: I just think these transition points are really valuable. They’re a good opportunity for those of you listening to stop and think, what am I solving for? Right? So those stages I described earlier, if you’re at the point where you feel like you’ve done what you needed to, right? Like you graduated dental school or you got your production up or you bought the practice that you always wanted and you’re there. Well now what? Right. Or you grew your practice to a point where you’re. Six successful and you’re making good income and you’ve taken the trips that you want to take and you have the house that you wanted and now you’re sitting here feeling empty and you don’t know what, what’s next. I think you just ask yourself the question, what am I solving for? What was I solving for? Why did I do this to begin with? And I think that that’s a really helpful exercise for people to go through.

Matt Mulcock: Love it. Love it. this is amazing. Jordan. Love these conversations. I think this will most likely come out kind of a back to back of another show that Ryan and I just did about retirement, this exact topic in a different kind of a different angle. So we’re going to be beating us over people’s heads. Hopefully it’s helpful. as always want to remind people, If you like this type of topic, right? If you’re hearing this and you’re like, man, this is insightful or just gives me a different perspective. Hey, we hope that’s the case. And we, we, we love that. But, I want to invite you to the Dentist Money Summit in Park City, Utah in June, June 20th and 21st. A lot of it’s gonna be based around this type of stuff, intermixed with other stuff, right? We, we got feedback from our last one last year around getting more into like investing in particular, right? We have a whole keynote speaker around investing, but our theme is planned for the present. it was incredible. Jordan, I know you weren’t there last time, but stoked to have you out there for this year, June 20th and 21st whole news, latest speakers. We’d love to have you out, check it out. Dentist money. Summit. com, Jordan, thank you so much for being here, everyone. Thanks for listening till next time. Have a great day.

Bye bye.

Keywords: financial freedom, financial independence, health span, life span, purpose, proactive financial management, emotional well-being, financial habits, system-driven goals

Behavioral Finance, Finance 101, Retirement Plans, Tracking Progress