April Fools: Don’t Get Tricked into These Financial Blunders – Episode 225

Don’t make these foolish mistakes in April—or at any other time.

For an April Fools Day episode of the Dentist Money™ Show, Reese and Ryan take a close look at financial mistakes that can make you feel like a money management moron. 

It’s been said, “Wise men learn by other men’s mistakes. Fools by their own.” On this show, Reese and Ryan share examples of money miscues you can avoid. Learn from the mistakes of others and then follow these tips so you can keep your net worth growing.

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Podcast Transcript

Ryan Isaac:
Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Dentist Money Show. Thanks for tuning in. We’re kind of in a little bit of a weird time right now. Currently it’s March 2020 and we’re going through all the unknowns and some of the worries and anxieties dealing with the coronavirus and all of the big decisions that people are making with their businesses and their lives and their employees right now. Our hearts to go out to everyone. We’re thinking about you, we’re pulling for you, and we’re trying to do everything we can to help as much as possible during this time.

Ryan Isaac:
On today’s show, Reese and I a few weeks ago recorded a couple old memories about April Fool’s Day from Reese’s childhood, and we talk about some of the common mistakes that most people in dentists tend to make with their finances that one might call foolish from time to time. Anyway, we hope you enjoy this episode. A lot of good, useful content in here. A few things around investments that Reese brings up in the voice of Yoda are actually pretty timely for right now. Thanks for tuning in. We hope everyone’s okay out there. If you have any questions you want to chat with this, go to dentistadvisors.com, click on the book free consultation button, and we’ll have a chat with you about your situation, or go to The Dentist Advisors Facebook group.

Ryan Isaac:
If you have any questions about what’s going on right now, go in there and post a question. We’ll do our best to get in there and answer it as soon as possible. That’s DentistAdvisors.com/group. Thanks again for tuning in everybody. We really appreciate it. Hope you’re okay. Stay safe. Enjoy the show.

Announcer:
Consult an advisor or conduct your own due diligence when making financial decisions. General principles discussed during this program do not constitute personal advice. This program is furnished by Dentist Advisors, a registered investment advisor. This is Dentist Money. Now, here’s your host, Reese Harper.

Reese Harper:
Welcome to The Dentist Money Show where we help dentists make smart financial decisions. I’m your host, Reese Harper, here with my trusty old co-host, Sir Ryan Isaac.

Ryan Isaac:
Yes. Wednesday, April 1st, April Fool’s Day. Welcome to the show. A couple fools here happy to chat with you again.

Reese Harper:
Couple of fools on April Fool’s doing their will.

Ryan Isaac:
Are you a prankster? You don’t strike me as a prankster.

Reese Harper:
My mom is and she’s probably listening. She listens to every episode.

Ryan Isaac:
Does she? Shout out.

Reese Harper:
Yeah. She’s like a religiously loyal supporter of the show. She gives me great insight.

Ryan Isaac:
We need to start a Patreon and have her send in money.

Reese Harper:
Now’s her favorite holiday.

Ryan Isaac:
Oh, it is?

Reese Harper:
Like literally.

Ryan Isaac:
Do you remember any that she’s ever done?

Reese Harper:
Oh yeah. Some of the craziest things that she convinced me of were like insane. It’s weird. She’ll appreciate this. The one I remember the most is when I was like 21 maybe or 22, she’s probably almost… I don’t know. At that point, how old was she? She’s probably in her late fifties, almost 60. She convinced me that she was pregnant.

Ryan Isaac:
No.

Reese Harper:
Yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
Were you just like, eh.

Reese Harper:
I’m like, “I don’t know to say right now.”

Ryan Isaac:
My kids are older than my brother or sister.

Reese Harper:
It’s such clockwork. I knew it was every year, literally every year.

Ryan Isaac:
On the day she convinced you of this?

Reese Harper:
Yeah. You know April Fool’s is coming and you’re like, no, I’m not going to believe you. No, I’m not going to believe you. No, I’m not, but it kind of lasts for a few weeks. Here’s the news and it’ll either be a little advanced or a little before. That’s like-

Ryan Isaac:
Dollar status.

Reese Harper:
After that, I never believed her about anything, but she did convince me of that for about two days.

Ryan Isaac:
That’s amazing. I always think of good ones. I never do them. The best thing I’ve ever done to my own kids was Easter felt on April Fool’s a couple of years ago. It was weird. I convinced my kids that there were… We told them that we put money in every egg and hid it in the backyard in those plastic eggs. But because there was money in all of them, we hid them really, really well. They go ahead and search the backyard forever. I just stood on the deck and video them and then let them know after like 15 minutes that there was no eggs, April Fool’s, and they were so upset. Humans are a little foolish sometimes. We humans.

Reese Harper:
You are.

Ryan Isaac:
I’m definitely foolish.

Reese Harper:
Speak for yourself.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, I am speaking for myself. We don’t have time to cover all that, but today we’re going to talk about… Really do kind of rapid fire back and forth here a list of kind of foolish financial mistakes that dentists make and people make. I think it’s just more general people make, but some of these are very specific and things that we’ve experienced personally, crimes against finance that we’ve committed. We need t-shirts that say crimes against finance, crimes against money or something. That we’ve committed that we’ve seen people kind of get into over the last 15 or so years. I have a list. I think you’ve got a list. I think the point of today would be to share the experience and kind of how it applies and then maybe what to do instead. That’d be a good format.

Reese Harper:
Great. We’re going to talk about the biggest… You go with your first one and I’ll go with one.

Ryan Isaac:
I got me a list here, man. Number one on my list, and this is something I’ve done personally and it seems to be like the universal financial mistake of everyone’s lives, you know where I’m going with this, is primary residence housing.

Reese Harper:
Ah yes.

Ryan Isaac:
That’s like the universal…

Reese Harper:
What a gem.

Ryan Isaac:
We’re going to break every financial rule that we’ve ever set for ourselves. We are going to dip in our emergency fund. We’re going to go into more debt that we wanted. We’re going to get a higher payment than we expected.

Reese Harper:
We’re going to put the pool before we can afford it.

Ryan Isaac:
Landscaping’s going in on a line of credit. We’ve all done this. One of the things that actually was probably my most stressful financial time in my whole life was buying my first home in 2005. In this exact scenario, still in college, mortgage lenders were like, “What income should we put on the thing?” I was two weeks into a commission only job. I got my first house.

Reese Harper:
Got my first paycheck, realized it’s time to put down roots.

Ryan Isaac:
It’s time to put down roots with my two year old and my new wife. I got myself a house in ’05 and at the peak. That’s my number one. You can share something about housing too because you have opinions on this, but maybe we could share like a couple of quick and dirty rules on how to avoid housing mistakes.

Reese Harper:
Don’t ever own a home.

Ryan Isaac:
Just rent forever.

Reese Harper:
Just kidding. No. But owning a house is the way that the local government and the state government decides that they can tax us in a more predictable way. They got all this land sitting out there. It’s not paying them anything. If they put houses on it, then we all start paying our taxes at a higher rate. Before that, they weren’t getting any money. There is a conflict of interest. Just so you know, the local state and city governments have for you to want to be a homeowner, somehow that trickles down, somehow that turns into like books and advice on like,, the longer you own a house the better off you are.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, interesting.

Reese Harper:
I really do think that the right way to approach housing is there is a point where owning a home is cheaper than renting a home, but it is after you have got your income to a pretty high place for at least the place it’s going to be. Like getting your income to the place where it’s like more at your normal… Where you’re not in growth mode, you’re not in early career stages. Because probably every client I have has tried to upgrade their house at least once. At least once in their life they’ve tried to upgrade once or twice. The more you upgrade homes, the more you turn over houses, the worse off you are long-term because you…

Ryan Isaac:
You think old furniture goes in new houses?

Reese Harper:
Whatever equity you have in a primary residence is money that doesn’t really come back to you. It just transfers from one house to the next. You just kind of end up saying goodbye to whatever amount of home equity or money you put into a house. Be cautious about that and enjoy it. It’s a blast. It’s what makes life fun. Don’t do it too early. That’s what we’re saying.

Ryan Isaac:
Do you have a percentage in mind? Like what percentage of housing cost would you want to keep a percentage of gross income? Banks will give you up to like what? 30 something percent.

Reese Harper:
I like the idea of trying to… Like in terms of your debt service, I’d like to be in the mid to high teens. That’d be great.

Ryan Isaac:
It feels really good. Yeah.

Reese Harper:
Most people won’t be able to do that if their income is maybe average and you live in San Francisco. It’s going to be really hard.

Ryan Isaac:
Geography plays a big role.

Reese Harper:
Keep your rent and your payment in the teens as a percentage of your gross.

Ryan Isaac:
You’ve talked before about planning for annual expenses from owning a home, and you’ve thrown out a few percentages of like the house’s value to just plan on for expenses, upgrades, maintenance, things like that.

Reese Harper:
Yeah. I think 2% minimum of your gross, but 3% probably isn’t unheard of, of the total appraised value that you’re just going to spend like on your house between furniture and property tax and repairs. Your minimum be 2%. You could be as high as three to three and a half percent of your appraised value of your home. Just trying to keep up with it. You got to add all that stuff in, man, from the shelves that you put in to the garage epoxy, to the landscape repairs, to the landscape computer, to the roof, to the replacing of an oven, to the carpet that floods to the drywall that gets punched in to the light bulbs, and fixtures that need to be replaced, to the furniture that’s no longer valid, to the countertop that chipped. I could go on. It’s just a lot to keep in mind.

Ryan Isaac:
Mid teens, mid to high teens. I would say, we all break this rule, but don’t dip into your emergency fund or your investments, your long-term investments, to buy the house. Save up separately outside of those. After doing this for so long, I can confidently say that the personal residence is the most financially emotional decision people ever make and all kinds of rules get broken. They just go out the window.

Reese Harper:
Hey, everybody. Here’s a few reasons why you should listen to our next webinar. First of all, the webinar format allows us to teach financial principles in a more interactive way. You get to see live graphics on your screen, sometimes I draw pretty pictures, and we have a live discussion that helps explain financial concepts in more detail. You can even send in questions live during the webinar and get an answer, and then we always do a Q and A after. Join us next time. Go to dentistadvisors.com/events and sign up for the next webinar.

Ryan Isaac:
You got one you want to throw out? I’ve got a list here.

Reese Harper:
I’m still guilty about the fact that I broke your first rule already like every year of my life.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, as have I.

Reese Harper:
Actually what’s probably happened is you have convinced me, because you talk to me about this a lot, I’ve probably done a lot less than I would have. Even though you still do too much, you do less. This is why we beat the drum.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Reese Harper:
Anyway.

Ryan Isaac:
You hear it enough. I mean, you’ll follow some… You’ll make a better decision by hearing that over and over.

Reese Harper:
I’m going to give you my… Well, one thing that I think is probably… If it’s April Fool’s, the thing that really turns you into a fool is when you think that by hiring someone in your practice that is a good deal from a little bit lower cost payroll perspective. You will be fooled into how much higher cost… It’ll be a much higher cost over time. If you try to cut corners on say the market rate for hygiene in your city is X and you found somebody that’s 20% less or 15% less, you’re just like, “I think this one employee can handle these three jobs. I’m just going to have higher profitability. I’m going to just like have much higher profitability, and I’m not going to invest in the right talent, the right people.” I am convinced that you’re worse off when you are cheap with payroll.

Reese Harper:
More importantly, if you’re hiring the absolute best person for the role, then sometimes you’ll just get lucky. Maybe that person’s really coming from a job where they were getting under compensated, even you giving them a raise will still not quite be at market for their capability.

Ryan Isaac:
Their value.

Reese Harper:
That’s different. I feel like there’s a lot of times where we are willing to build an organization around team members that are probably not quite experienced enough for the jobs that we’re asking them to do, especially when it comes to the front office and when it comes to the marketing department. I just think your team is worth its weight in gold and you really need to be careful to shortcut that. You think you’re getting ahead, but really when you do that, what’s going to end up happening is your productivity and your output and your efficiency and your total collections and your overall team culture, the pressure that you feel, the amount of extra hours you have to put in to cover for people’s lack of experience, that’s the real mistake.

Reese Harper:
I would say people make the mistake a lot of like just trying to cut corners on cost. I would say that same thing applies to service providers and professionals. I would extend that to the people that they hire as contractors and professionals.

Ryan Isaac:
Okay. I didn’t have those on my list. I’m writing those down because those are awesome. I’ll go to another one.

Reese Harper:
Thank you for making me feel validated here by writing it down.

Ryan Isaac:
I’m here to listen. I mean, this is basically just-

Reese Harper:
It’s great.

Ryan Isaac:
…a public counseling session.

Reese Harper:
Therapy for both of us.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, mutual therapy. I have on my list here, only focusing on debt reduction as like the sole purpose of cash flow. The mistake is that you just spend every penny on trying to get rid of debt as fast as you can in the early part of your career can get in a pinch mid-career where some of that money should have gone towards business growth and business investment, kind of the same things you’re saying here. Some of that money should have gone towards long-term savings for your future self. We have a ton of podcasts on this. If you go to dentistadvisors.com and just click in the education library on debt, we probably have hours on how to like arrive at a balance between debt and investing and business growth. But I would rank that as a pretty high…

Ryan Isaac:
What I’m trying to do in my list is I just try to think of conversations I’ve had with people, not throwing people under the bus, but just think of conversations where people were like self-diagnosing and looking back and kind of kicking themselves like, “Man, I wish I didn’t do that. I wish I would’ve just saved some money and had some liquidity and didn’t worry so much about this thing.” That’s one of my lists. Do you want to say anything about that at all?

Reese Harper:
That’s solid, man. No, I mean, I think you said it great. I think that’s great advice.

Ryan Isaac:
I’ve got another one here.

Reese Harper:
I got one here.

Ryan Isaac:
Oh yeah, go.

Reese Harper:
You got to give me a chance. You got to go one for one. I know you got more ideas than me, but it’s only fair. One of my favorite quotes of all time comes from one of the greatest actors of our generation. As you know-

Ryan Isaac:
Paul Walker?

Reese Harper:
…that’s Yoda.

Ryan Isaac:
Okay, Yoda.

Reese Harper:
He’s one of the greatest actors of our generation.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, he was.

Reese Harper:
Luke asks Yoda a really sincere question. He just says, “Is the dark side stronger?” Yoda wisely comes back and kind of thoughtfully he replies as follows, he says, “No, no, no. Quicker, easier, more seductive it is.

Ryan Isaac:
reproof.

Reese Harper:
He says it’s quicker, it’s easier, and it’s more seductive.

Ryan Isaac:
Yes.

Reese Harper:
That’s why the dark side is stronger. It’s not. That’s what it is. It’s not that it’s stronger. It’s that it is quicker, easier, and more seductive.

Ryan Isaac:
Yes.

Reese Harper:
What I find is that when people go to make investment decisions, sometimes they want things that are quicker and easier and much more seductive, but they’re not stronger. They’re not more stable.

Ryan Isaac:
Well, this is on my list. Expound on this because this is on my list. Part of my list was selling long-term investments during temporary market declines. We’re in-

Reese Harper:
You and me are speaking the same language.

Ryan Isaac:
…first week of March 2020. If you don’t remember this time, if you’re listening later, I mean, it’s 5% up, 5% down every single day for like 10 days now.

Reese Harper:
Yeah. I mean, I think what happens is when people want… They want something that feels… A good investment strategy, it builds slowly over time in a very stable way, and it also shapes your character. It shapes who you are as a person. The combination of who you become as an investor and your portfolio is where strength in investing comes from. Strength in investing is not something you can achieve through quick kind of seductive, easier methods. It is something that I feel like people want to do quite often is they will opt for a quicker, easier path that just seems like it’s going to be… I mean, more seductive is the only word that I’m thinking of right now because of Yoda, but I just feel like that applies to getting in and getting out.

Reese Harper:
Not having the pressure, not having this like tension of volatility. I mean, the market’s definitely freaking 900 points again today. It’s been a really volatile cycle. I think that the people that are really building investment character are the people that are continuing during this like really refining fire roughening. It’s kind of shaping people’s edges of their personalities around investing. If you can get through this and stay consistent with the strategy that you know is going to work, that’s where you end up being a much better investor, much stronger.

Ryan Isaac:
That’s the difference between Jedis and the dark side.

Reese Harper:
Ultimately.

Ryan Isaac:
That was a very deep dive. I hope that George Lucas…

Reese Harper:
I had to bring George Lucas into it a little bit.

Ryan Isaac:
He listens to the show quite often and I hope he takes that into account for the next episode. All right, I’ll hit you with one here. What about not investing in the business early in career? You’ve met people who… It’s usually people I want to say either personalities who aren’t interested in getting that big of a business just in life in general and therefore they kind of just do minimal growing the business, just wherever it takes them, or it’s people who are really maybe risk-averse or debt-averse, or it’s kind of the same principle. It’s kind of painful to hire the right people and train and build processes and systems and just little by little-

Reese Harper:
Yeah. I think people mistake business growth with like… Size isn’t necessarily the ambition that you have to have to want to invest in your practice. Your ambition for investing in your practice could be stability or life balance or fulfillment. There’s a lot of motivations for why you should invest in your practice early. I just feel like if you don’t invest in your practice, mostly the human capital in your practice, compensating the person fairly, like I said, that was one of my first ones, that is going to be your partner in running this thing. You have to view your team or at least multiple members of your team as partners in running this operation, even if you got a single location, like one location, and it’s just you and no associates.

Reese Harper:
Even if you are an associate, right? Even if you’re an associate, you have to think the same mentality, what infrastructure are you going to invest in to build your career? What education are you going to gain? Even if you don’t have control over the business, even if you’re just working there as an associate, you still have this long-term obligation to grow your competency level or the industry will outgrow you, the business will outgrow you. If you don’t grow yourself, what ends up happening is you become less and less valuable to the industry that you’re in. You become less and less valuable to the organization you’re a part of and that devalues your income, that devalues your currency, your earning potential, just because you haven’t kept up with your education.

Reese Harper:
I think that same thing applies to the business owner, not just in their own intellectual capital and clinical ability, but their ability to invest and grow team members and encourage team members to do that. That’s the true difference between a business that really can be… It can go through difficult market cycles and keep growing and then businesses that really just collapse when the market gets difficult because they just don’t have enough team, they don’t have enough infrastructure experience and education, so anyway.

Ryan Isaac:
That’s the thing that comes to mind for me and I’m glad you brought that up about it’s not about like the size of the business. Investing in a business doesn’t… That’s independent from how big it gets.

Reese Harper:
Yeah. The numbers are different. The numbers are different, right?

Ryan Isaac:
The scale is different.

Reese Harper:
Yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
But I have met single location, four chair doctors who mid-career kind of like, “I wish I just would have invested a little bit into more CE or better tech or better marketing because now I’m getting beaten by competition who is marketing better.” Even if it’s small, I totally agree with that, man.

Reese Harper:
That’s a hard thing to do. I was writing about this this morning in a blog post, being an entreprofessional, which is like this word that you and I have kind of given to small business owners that are really more craftsmen and tradesmen and skilled workers. They start with a job and that job ends up becoming a company and then they end up doing that thing and becoming default business owners. Dentists are not alone in that camp, but they are one of the most unique people in that camp. There really isn’t good infrastructure in the dental industry for you to just like plug into-

Ryan Isaac:
As a template.

Reese Harper:
…and like do it. It’s like, well there’s a lot. It’s just that the industry is quite diverse. If you’re going to own your own business, man, it’s challenging. We have empathy for people that are going through that, but there are plenty of resources and it really just is a conscious effort you got to make it. Instead of paying down your debt on your student loan that first five years aggressively, keep going. You already signed up for the debt to begin with. You’re not going to get out of it in five years. Just sustain your investment into the practice a little longer.

Ryan Isaac:
Okay. Do you have another one?

Reese Harper:
It’s my turn.

Ryan Isaac:
Go ahead. It’s your turn.

Reese Harper:
I would say one of the things I think people make a mistake of is they allow taxes to drive a lot of their strategic decisions. They’ll set up their entity structure in a particular way because of taxes that then causes them to have a little bit of accounting confusion and management reporting confusion, or they’ll put their money into a captive insurance company to really defer taxes, but not realize that they can’t afford to part ways with that much liquidity and still be able to go on a vacation. They got like $1 million of liquidity in a captive and they can’t even afford a trip to Disneyland, right? I feel like taxes wag the tail of the life dog sometimes.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, that’s almost the title of the episode we recorded… I don’t know when it was, but it’s episode 196 is the tax tail wagging your investment dog. You said life dog. I like life dog.

Reese Harper:
We both get one more. We both get one more.

Ryan Isaac:
Okay. I have two I really want to say.

Reese Harper:
Because Tad’s signaling. You go two. Hit your two.

Ryan Isaac:
I want two. I’ll go and then you go and then I’ll go and we’ll wrap it up. Anything else you want to say about taxes, by the way?

Reese Harper:
No. We got to be able to fit yours. We got to fit yours. The people want their tips. Give them their tips.

Ryan Isaac:
Well, what’s the way that [crosstalk 00:26:21] Yeah. Not let taxes drive every decision. Probably first go listen to episode 196.

Reese Harper:
I think the first thing to focus on is your net worth growth. Focus on growing your net worth and focus on improving your total liquidity position each year as your net worth grows. Don’t always obsess about whether it’s being taxed or not. Just focus on your net worth growth and how much of that is free from tax sometimes. I think that if you got $1 million inside of a captive, it’s not the same as $1 million inside of a brokerage account. They’re different. You should feel good about paying taxes and moving on because once you pay taxes and you move on, that money is like not going to be taxed again. There’s a big advantage to that. Having a pile of money that isn’t going to be taxed again is a good thing.

Reese Harper:
Tax avoidance and tax deferral in an extreme way just defers your tax until some unknown point in the future when you will pay tax, right? It can’t be avoided.

Ryan Isaac:
Cool. All right. I’ll go. This is nonfinancial though, but as I start rounding 40 years old and I hear this more and more, which is-

Reese Harper:
You’re rounding second base heading to third.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, exactly, which is people not taking care of their physical selves and it interferes with the natural longevity of the career of dentistry. I mean, dentistry is such a cool career because you can literally make six figures of income on very few days per week very late into life.

Reese Harper:
Yeah, that’s good insight.

Ryan Isaac:
We wanted to take a break for just a second to remind you how easy it is to book a free consultation with one of our dental specific advisors. What you do is go to dentistadvisors.com and you’ll see a big green button that says book free consultation.

Reese Harper:
Can’t miss it.

Ryan Isaac:
Click that button and book a time that works for you, or you can just call us at 833-DDS-PLAN. Let’s start a conversation about how we can help you with your finances.

Reese Harper:
I thought of you this morning when I was coming back from the gym because I was like… I mean, like that part of your life had a big impact on me. Seeing you prioritize that made me go like, “Dude, I got to prioritize that too.” Barbie like talking to me about it every day for the last decade. The day I started prioritizing that in my own life is the day my capacity as a person increased a lot. You’ve probably noticed that in my personality as I’ve been taking care of myself. I don’t know if you can notice. What would you say is different?

Ryan Isaac:
Well, I’ve been around you for 15-16 years and I think… When did you really like get serious about this? Two or three years ago?

Reese Harper:
Yeah, probably three years ago.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. I mean, for me I just saw you just look like you feel better. Just different energy, different capacity, like you said, for dealing with stress. I don’t know.

Reese Harper:
I’ve noticed that the most-

Ryan Isaac:
Really?

Reese Harper:
…for me, just the capacity to like-

Ryan Isaac:
To just deal with stress.

Reese Harper:
Yeah. I used to be able to go like six hours in the day, maybe seven hours or eight hours before I got my mind was completely black in a cloud of doom.

Ryan Isaac:
Of hatred and angst.

Reese Harper:
That’s where you kind of get like if… If I eat fairly well and if I exercise in the morning, I could go a lot more hours. Not that I always choose to, but I could. I could go a lot more hours with better energy, and I have more patience to deal with the challenges. I don’t give up. I don’t quit. I don’t get frustrated and change course. I feel like I can like persist through more difficult circumstances longer than I could when I was not taking care of myself.

Ryan Isaac:
I wonder if it’s coincidental too, but I would also attribute or I would also say a big change I noticed was just I feel like you got really good at communicating over the last few years, of like communicating huge issues in the business and teaching and correcting. I feel like you got really good at that. I don’t know if that’s coincidental. Maybe that’s just maturity in doing it long enough.

Reese Harper:
I don’t know. It’s probably the combination. It takes a lot of patients to be able to like have energy for those types of communication. They’re not fun. You know?

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, I know.

Reese Harper:
It’s not fun to like interact with a colleague or a team member and have it be difficult or contentious or hard.

Ryan Isaac:
But they’re required in a business. Hard conversations are absolutely required.

Reese Harper:
When you’re physically at least at your best, you’re able to have the energy, the patience to go through that. Man, I just feel like that’s critical.

Ryan Isaac:
From a financial planning standpoint, one of the best things a dentist can do for their own future net worth and financial future is just longevity in their career.

Reese Harper:
Totally.

Ryan Isaac:
Every year that you can just make another income is another year you don’t have to pull for your investments. You could let them grow.

Reese Harper:
You’ll enjoy your career a lot more too and walk away.

Ryan Isaac:
You’ll enjoy it.

Reese Harper:
We don’t work so we can retire. We work so that we can live. We work to live. We work to enjoy our work.

Ryan Isaac:
Evolve and progress and learn.

Reese Harper:
Work is not like a thing to just get through the drudgery.

Ryan Isaac:
Until it’s finally done.

Reese Harper:
I feel like if you’re not taking care of yourself, that couldn’t happen. Anyway, it’s funny, this morning when I was driving home, I was just thinking, I wish everyone could just like feel good about their capacity to handle tough things because I felt really capable to be able to… I handled a lot of really challenging things this morning, but I was only able to do it because of… I handled it in a way that I know helped the company materially get to a better place, but I couldn’t have done this five years ago.

Ryan Isaac:
If you’re like burnt out and under slept.

Reese Harper:
Sleep is critical, man. Sleep’s critical. Anyway, what’s your last one?

Ryan Isaac:
My last one is a common phrase we use and it’s a perfect closer here is… I think this might be the single biggest mistake dentists make generally, which is making we’ve called it random acts of finance. That’s just spending the course of a 25-30 year career with a high income and lots of cashflow making random financial decisions, putting chunks of money to random places based on whatever you feel at the moment. For some people, the worst thing is that just ends up being a little less efficient than if they were more organized. But for other people, that kind of randomness in financial decision making ends up in big mistakes that cost a lot of net worth in the future.

Ryan Isaac:
We talk about this a lot, but some really kind of frankly unsexy, boring principles of being organized and having someone hold you accountable to trending numbers and data when you make decisions, what do the numbers tell us when we make a decision. Being accountable to those things by another human is one of the most boring, but helpful things you could ever do to make better financial decisions and set up your financial future. That’s the one I would end with.

Reese Harper:
Yeah. Great advice, man. I appreciate the old reminder here on the day of days. It’s America’s holiday.

Ryan Isaac:
It’s America’s day, April Fool’s Day. If you have any questions about these things, they’re mistakes that you feel like you’re making and want to chat with one of our advisors, go to dentistadvisors.com. Schedule a consultation. We also have a very large and rapidly growing education library on the website. Any subject can think of, we’ve probably spent several hours on it in some form of content. Go to the website, hit the education library. Once a month we’re doing a webinar on each of the elements that we cover monthly for clients. Head to the webinar page and check those out, register. We’d love to see you. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for listening. We appreciate it. Until next time.

Reese Harper:
Carry on.

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