Want to Get Stronger Financially? Use These Benchmarks. – Episode 242

Benchmarks are a positive way to get you financially motivated and keep you going.

On this episode of the Dentist Money™ Show, Reese and Ryan take a close look at how comparing your financial performance to a standard can help you gain greater financial strength. In fact, our Elements® program was built on performance comparisons. That said, benchmarks can be misused and counterproductive when viewed out of context.

Learn how to closely measure your financial progress in specific areas to develop better habits, and how to make benchmarks more valuable by including someone else to hold you accountable to them.

 

SHOW NOTES:

www.dentistadvisors.com/benchmark

 

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Podcast Transcript

Ryan Isaac:
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Dentist Money Show. Have you ever wondered how you compare in certain categories to your peers? Do you save enough money? Are your investment returns as good? Do you spend too much? Today on the show we talk about the illustrious Benchmark and the pros and cons of comparing ourselves to other human beings. Also in the show, towards the end of the episode, I will be giving out a link for a free Elements Benchmark Survey you can do on our website. Stick around for the show, listen for that link. Thanks for tuning in. We appreciate all the love and support. Enjoy the show.

Announcer:
Consultant 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:
And we’re back.

Reese Harper:
We’re back with another one. And I’m going to blindside you with this one. You don’t even know what’s coming today. You don’t even know what’s going to happening.

Ryan Isaac:
I always prepare. I’m always prepared for every podcast. But yeah, sometimes the topics do catch me off guard.

Reese Harper:
I like the surprise, I like to surprise you.

Ryan Isaac:
The audience has requested that. They don’t like stale responses.

Reese Harper:
Yeah. The candor.

Ryan Isaac:
We’re going to be talking about the subject of benchmarking today and how often we as humans and then specifically, for our listeners and our clients, people, dentists want to know: “How do I compare in this area to my peers?” You know, it’s like a really important thing to want to know.

Ryan Isaac:
So first though, let’s just talk about this kind of like human need to compare. I think this, I mean, this isn’t a study, okay. This is just my brain saying this, but I think probably more than any other time in history, we, we’re probably a more comparing species than we’ve ever been. We just have the tools to compare so easily now.

Ryan Isaac:
So let’s start with the good side of comparing. I know we’ve never used a fitness analogy on the show before, but we’re going to start one today. I’m going to bring in a fitness analogy on the show today. I know I’ve never talked about CrossFit either. So this is the first in the 240 whatever episodes that we’ve done.

Ryan Isaac:
So I’m in CrossFit. When I go, I think about this all the time when I do workouts on my own, versus when I go to a gym. When I show up to a gym and I see a name and a time on a board, like there was a certain amount of work that had to be done for the workout that day and these people did it in these time ranges. And when I go to that board and I see the people that are close to me, maybe I’m a little bit better, maybe they are better than me, I see the people that are close to me and I see their times, it makes me do more work better and faster. I’m more motivated to do better if I’m working out next to somebody and they’re going just a little bit faster. I’m willing to feel a little bit more pain to go a little bit faster and work a little bit harder. Maybe running next to somebody, that kind of stuff.

Ryan Isaac:
So the positive side of benchmarking and comparing, I’ve noticed in my life, I’m sure everyone’s got some examples like that where there’s been a positive push. There’s someone kind of close to you. It’s disheartening when someone’s way out in front of you. You can’t ever catch the person in some part of life. But when they’re kind of close to you and it’s a little bit motivating. So there is a positive side to this. And I was just kind of curious, what positive sides of benchmarking or comparing, not even benching, just comparing, have you noticed in your life?

Reese Harper:
Well, I think when people, I remember when I was at Northwestern Mutual, when I started my career, I saw that they would, every week they would post the number of phone calls or outbound sales activity that every financial advisor would do each week. And how many appointments they had, all their statistics, okay. How many clients they got. They would just post that. And when I first saw it, I was like, just felt dirty. It’s like, “You guys are manipulating me. You’re making me feel bad.” And over time, I kind of didn’t really feel like it was so bad anymore. I just kind of started paying attention to it. And I saw how it affected what I thought was possible for myself. Like-

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, exactly.

Reese Harper:
The stock market is the ultimate example of that. If you think about the public stock market, you have thousands of companies that have visibility into the details of each other’s financial statements. The profitability, the sales targets, the growth rates. The industries are broken down in segmented. Information technology compared to manufacturing, compared to industrials, compared to healthcare, the hospitals compare themselves.

Ryan Isaac:
Right.

Reese Harper:
And it, it creates the highest returning investment in history is because of the disclosures of performance statistics to your peer group. And everyone’s going, “Well, if Kaiser can do that, why can’t we do that in our hospital network?” Or, if, and I just think it’s like, you can’t ignore that. And when you isolate people from numbers, when you isolate them from performance, when you isolate them from that kind of information, I think everyone’s performance is worse off. That’s why, I think I feel so strongly about the way we do financial planning, because I think it helps both our advisors and our clients maybe have a better reference point for what’s possible.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. I think you just highlighted the exact reasons why, or the benefits of comparing ourselves. Like seeing what’s possible and then realize that you can push a little harder, you can go a little faster, you can do a little bit more, you can be a little bit more uncomfortable for longer to achieve something because you saw someone pull it off. And I think that’s part, that’s a perfect segue.

Ryan Isaac:
The whole point of today is, we get that question a lot. I mean, it’s something dentists want to know all the time. We built an entire system of financial planning kind of around the idea of benchmarks, not just against other people, but against yourself and your past self is a benchmark, which we’ll get into. So the whole idea for today is, how to use benchmarks in a positive way to make you motivated, to keep you going because there is another, there is a downside to this whole comparison thing that we’ve become as humans too.

Ryan Isaac:
With the era of social media to-

Reese Harper:
I was just going to say, “Yeah, man.”

Ryan Isaac:
We probably never been more depressed comparing ourselves to other people. There was this article in Psychology Today that was kind of just giving tips for how to do comparisons better. How to make sure that we do them the right way. They said, recognize that a lot of times when we compare, we’re often using unrealistic targets. Oftentimes we take the things we’re worst at and compare them to the things people are best at.

Reese Harper:
Yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
And be like, “Oh, look how bad I am.” In this article they said, “Try to keep in mind when you’re making a comparison, what the purpose is. What are you trying to achieve and get out of this anyway, to make the Benchmark helpful?” So let’s get into that too.

Ryan Isaac:
So we’ll take a quick break really quick. And then when we come back, I want to spend some time first talking about the types of benchmarks that Dentist Advisors does for dentists. Kind of like categories and the pros and cons. And then I want to talk about benchmarking against your past self as a concept too. So we’ll hit that when we come back.

Reese Harper:
Ryan and I are pretty easy to talk with. And so are our other advisors. Let’s just find a time that works for you so we can start a conversation about how to take control of your financial future. Give us a ring at (833) DDS-plan to set up a free consultation, or just go to the website at dentistadvisers.com and click, book free consultation.

Ryan Isaac:
So let’s talk first about, let’s get into a little bit and share some of how we have built a system of Benchmarking and comparison. It is of course, something that people want to know all the time. Dentists want to know how they compare to other people and how they’re doing in different categories. And we’ll talk about the limitations of benchmarks. I mean, we have discussions internally all the time every month when we send reports out. And we have a new benchmark that gets updated. We discuss, “Man, here’s the limitations of this number.” I mean, one number of a benchmark does not tell a whole story. But let’s walk through some categories for us. That’s what I wanted to do is maybe let everyone know, what are the categories of benchmarks we do of the different, there’s age and all that kind of stuff.

Reese Harper:
Well, in our practice today, we benchmark very specific key indicators of financial health. Those key indicators are savings, spending, debt, taxes, liquidity, retirement accounts, real estate, practice value, your overall retirement readiness, and then insurance policies investments, and we’re starting to bench, we also benchmark profitability. And then we’re starting to Benchmark a couple of other things as well, and creating a couple of new categories in our system that we’re pretty excited about.

Reese Harper:
But when we look at these different categories, for example, you have to decide, with savings. Am I going to compare people by age?

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Reese Harper:
Am I going to compare people by the size of their practice? Am I going to compare people based on their income level? Or maybe how much money they’ve made in their life, what their income is. And you got to be pretty thoughtful about how would I grade, how, if someone calls me and says, “Am I doing okay?” I don’t want to make them feel bad if they really are doing good. And if they’re really doing good, I want to keep encouraging them. But if they’re struggling or maybe, maybe they’re spending too much, or maybe they have a habit of building up liquidity, but then it just gets used in the practice all the time for large expenses. Or maybe their practice equity just isn’t increasing, they’re constantly struggling with a similar practice value and they’re not building up a net worth outside of their practice.

Reese Harper:
There’s all these things that are deeper signs of financial, we’ll call it unwellness. People that are struggling with their money. It could be any of these categories that I’ve mentioned earlier. And so we either take income, age, net worth, we’re working right now to try to take, what we call, lifetime earnings, which is how much money people have made since they started working until now, and kind of seeing how they’ve done with what they’ve had. If you’ve made $500,000 since you started working, what’s your net worth? Or if you’ve made a million/five, since you started working, what’s your net worth?

Reese Harper:
It’s an interesting statistic that we’re looking at right now on our new app that we’re working on. We actually divide someone’s net worth into their lifetime earnings to kind of see what that ratio looks like. Is it 20%, is it 10%, 15%, is it 150% of their lifetime earnings? You can imagine if someone makes $100,000, let’s say I’m living in Tibet and I’m a monk and I sell pineapples to the people that pass by my-

Ryan Isaac:
That’s the national food.

Reese Harper:
… temple.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Reese Harper:
Okay? And then I have sold during my lifetime, I have made $100,000, but I also came up with this app idea while I was in the mountains and it was a pizza delivery system that everyone in North America is going to use to deliver pizzas. Because I figured this out. When I was reading a book about web design while I was selling pineapples in Tibet.

Ryan Isaac:
Common story. This is pretty common rags to riches. Yeah.

Reese Harper:
Pretty common story. So I’ve made $100,000, but my net worth might be 10 million because I’ve came up with this great idea. So I have a hundred times my net worth compared to what I’ve earned. That’s really unusual, but a lot of people do more with what they have, right, than other people. Some people might just open a second location. Or some people might add an associate. Or some people might just save more or spend less and be a little bit more frugal and make more of their net worth than what they have earned. And that’s kind of, these are some of the things that we’re looking at.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. That’d be a really interesting way. Let’s talk pros and cons for a second. Like I was saying before, every month, so in case anyone isn’t familiar with what I’m saying, you can go to dentistadvisers.com. In fact, just push pause, go to dentistadvisors.com on your phone and go to the elements part of the website. And you can see, you can see what we’re talking about. This system of financial planning called the elements. It’s kind of broken down by category. And every month, every month has its own theme, its own financial category that we’re focusing on to analyze and Benchmark.

Ryan Isaac:
So when we send these reports out every single month, let’s give an example. Let’s say last month was real estate month. It’s a month where we take time to value everyone’s real estate holdings, consider what percentage of their net worth is made up of just real estate and how that’ll affect their current decisions and their future retirement options. And we sent out some of that data. So a benchmark might say, for your category, the average person has 15% of their net worth in real estate or 30% of their net worth in real estate. Whatever it happens to be.

Reese Harper:
One of the things that could be helpful is letting you see how much people are paying down their properties. How much equity people have in real estate as a normal kind of practice. Let’s you know, maybe if you’re carrying enough debt or too much debt or too little debt on your property compared to other people in your situation. That can be pretty helpful to you and your advisor, because you’re going to be able to kind of see if you’re outlier. I think anytime you’re an outlier, it doesn’t mean you’re necessarily wrong.

Ryan Isaac:
Exactly.

Reese Harper:
It just means that there’s something about the choices that you’re making that are distinct. And that may be because you’re crazy or it might be because you’re just doing it the right way. Because a lot of times, the right way is not the average or the consensus. But you want to know where you’re an outlier. Are you an outlier with your practice profitability? Are you an outlier with your real estate? Are you an outlier with your savings or your spending?

Reese Harper:
Your financial advisor’s job is to find where your extreme tendencies are at, just to make sure that you’re not going to blow yourself up at some point with something that you can’t see, like a blind spot that you can’t see.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. I think that’s really great, man. As far, I think about some of the Benchmarks that cause some of the most chatter. For example, tax rates a big one. When we send out our report that shows what percentage of your total gross income went to tax, all of your taxes, which is different than what showing on your personal tax return and we show a Benchmark. Average person, your categories paid 27% of their gross income. That one’s like, it’s always a big up.

Ryan Isaac:
And here’s what happens and we’ve heard this story a lot. Someone will say, “Well my friend makes the same amount of money as me and she doesn’t pay any taxes. She didn’t pay any taxes. We made the same amount of money last year. She paid nothing.” And there’s so many things under the surface of why, if that’s even true, first of all.

Ryan Isaac:
Which I guess this is the public service announcement to take a break and say, be careful of buying into too much of what other people, you hear in passing from friends or colleagues, “Yeah. This was my return on this investment.” Or, “This is how much I paid on taxes.” Chances are, they might not be calculating it accurately themselves before they relay the information that you’re comparing yourself against and then feeling bad about. So that’s just my PSA for that.

Reese Harper:
People tend to exaggerate the positive and they tend to exaggerate the negative. So people tend to describe their lives worse than they are or better than they are, depending on how they feel about the thing they’re describing. So people tend to beat themselves up about their body image, way worse than it really is. And they’ll tend to exaggerate their investment returns much more than they, than they really have gone up if they’re positive.

Reese Harper:
Similarly, on the investment return side, sometimes if people have had a bad investment, they will exaggerate the outcome of that. Sometimes even more than it was as well. I’ve had people say, “Last year it was so bad. My accounts were just down so much.” I’d be like, “Well, how far down were they?” “I don’t know. I think I lost five grand or something.” I’m like, “Well, how big were your accounts?” “Oh, I have $250,000.” I’m like, “So 2%?” Or like, “We talking…”

Ryan Isaac:
What’s the actual [crosstalk 00:18:12]?

Reese Harper:
So what was bad, what was bad? And so I think that’s a really good point. Don’t over index on vague descriptions.

Reese Harper:
This morning I was having a conversation with our financial planning process surprisingly to our dental audience. They may not know this, but our business was featured recently in a national financial advisor podcast. I was interviewed and my interview questions, I was asked to describe what we’re doing with financial planning that makes our business so unique. Because a lot of financial advisors are interested in this elements thing that we’ve created.

Reese Harper:
And Ryan and I, initially the, I think the reason we created it is we were trying to kind of standardize some of the patient experience we’ll call it, right. We just didn’t want to have Ryan’s client experience and my client experience to be totally different. And we didn’t want the next advisor that we hired to have a totally different experience either. We were trying to standardize this experience. And in order for us to do that, we had to have some really concrete key indicators that we were, focused on and processes that we were following. So this elements planning process was, is what kind of evolved from that?

Reese Harper:
Anyway, I was on this radio program, got interviewed and I had quite a few people after that schedule appointments with me or reach out to me and get on my calendar and ask me a lot of questions. And one of the main things that people were, are really hungry for, even in the financial advisor community is, how do I grade performance in a standardized way across my clients so that I can actually give advice that’s more helpful, more behavioral oriented instead of just managing people’s investments? And how do I know when something’s bad or good? How do I know when something is just okay, right.

Reese Harper:
If financial advisors, they spend a lot of time helping you save money, but they don’t quantify a lot of the time, whether what you’re saving is the appropriate amount of money for your income level. Is that good or bad what you’re doing? Or is it just fine and you’re doing great?

Reese Harper:
Anyway, it was surprising to me to see how many financial advisors are really, they’re really struggling with the same question. What do I do? I literally had one text about three days ago. There was like, “Is it okay if I just download everything off your website and just use it because I need help with this. Like really I need help to do this. Can I call, can I use your system?” And so anyway, we’re working on trying to help other financial advisors have a solution right now, but it isn’t a, this isn’t something that’s clients struggle with just purely, this is something financial planners struggle with. So if you’re feeling like, “Man, I don’t really have, I don’t really do this kind of stuff.” It’s like, it’s not really common. And it’s because financial planning really hasn’t evolved very much as an industry.

Reese Harper:
Right now it’s, one advisor I talked to that was, that called me, he put it, he said, “I like your process because it helps me shift more towards science and away from art.” And I thought that was interesting. Because it’s not like he was saying he doesn’t want financial planning to have some art in it, like the art is the kind of human connection side. He’s like a little less art, little more science.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Reese Harper:
A little less Rembrandt, right. And maybe-

Ryan Isaac:
A little more, Sir Isaac Newton.

Reese Harper:
Yeah. A little, a little more-

Ryan Isaac:
DaVinci.

Reese Harper:
Yeah. DaVinci. A little more concreteness here.

Ryan Isaac:
How about that.

Reese Harper:
And it’s like, yeah, we shouldn’t be saying things like, “Let’s save up for a rainy day.” We should be saying a rainy day is… this. And “save up” means… this. Are you below or above that Benchmark or at it? And then we should be not okay with being below a minimum level of what we define as rainy day. And then we should manage to that benchmark as opposed to just being like, “Yeah, I don’t know. We told them, we said, save up for rainy day.”

Ryan Isaac:
Rainy.

Reese Harper:
Like we said-

Ryan Isaac:
It’s raining.

Reese Harper:
… it’s raining,” right. Did you know? It’s like, “Okay it’s rainy day.” COVID is rainy day more like great recession.

Ryan Isaac:
Right.

Reese Harper:
Is rainy day more like great depression? What kind of definition are you? And then, so little more science, little less art. I think that’s kind of the beauty.

Ryan Isaac:
That’s cool.

Reese Harper:
I really love that. Okay. I think that was a good recap of how we think about Benchmarks and comparing dentists to other dentists. Let’s take a break really quick and we’ll come back and we’ll finish up a thought with comparing a Benchmark of your own personal Benchmark, your current self versus your past self. So we’ll hit that when we come back.

Ryan Isaac:
Hey Matt, what do you like to drink or snack on when we do our webinars every month?

Matt Mulcock:
Yeah. That’s a good question. I’m usually hitting a Red Bull. But it’s hard because it’s an evening webinar.

Ryan Isaac:
These evening webinars taking place 6:30 p.m. mountain standard time.

Matt Mulcock:
Mountain time.

Ryan Isaac:
Once a month.

Matt Mulcock:
Where do you find it?

Ryan Isaac:
Well, if you’d like to find the webinar or you’d like to register for it, you go to dentistadvisers.com/webinar, or just go to the website and click on webinars under the education tab.

Matt Mulcock:
It’s a good time.

Ryan Isaac:
It’s a great time. What kind of things do we cover in our webinar, Matt?

Matt Mulcock:
So each month we’re going to hit an element, right? So it’s going to be some component of your financial life. We’re going to dive a little bit deeper than we would on the Dentist Money show, right? We get to draw pictures. There’s live polls. You can ask questions.

Ryan Isaac:
It’s great time.

Matt Mulcock:
Yeah. It’s a good time.

Ryan Isaac:
Well, we’d love to see you in attendance at one of our fantastic webinars. Just go to denistadvisers.com. Sign up today for the next one. Thank you very much.

Ryan Isaac:
So let’s talk about the, let’s talk about one more type of benchmark that, I don’t know. I was going to say it gets overlooked. I’m not sure if that’s true or not. I’m not sure, but I just don’t know if it gets enough attention and that’s the benchmark of your current self versus your past self.

Ryan Isaac:
So for example, someone might say, “I saved a lot of money this year.” And the natural tendency is to want to know, how does that compare to other dentists? And we just got done talking about how that might compare across age ranges, or income, or specialties, or lifetime earnings. But the other way to think about this is if you saved a lot of money this year, how did that compare to last year? And how did that compare to five years ago? And then there’s almost like this derivative of that, that’s also, how does that compare not only to last year, but compared to last year’s income? And last year’s spending? There’s multiple levels. It’s not just, what did I save? It’s what did I save compared to X? And where was it compared to X a year ago?

Ryan Isaac:
So let’s just talk about that for a second. What are the advantages and what have you seen in practice? We’ve implemented. This is a big part of the way we do financial planning. But what have you seen in this personal Benchmark?

Reese Harper:
Well, I think it like really anchors, your own personal Benchmark is kind of the one that you can’t really run away from. You can discount other people’s, you can say, “Well I’m in a bad market.” Or “I got started late.” Or “I used to be a painter and now I’m a dentist and so I get a pass because I’d started my career way later than other people.” But when it comes to your own behavior and over time that’s something you just can’t hide from, something that’s just staring at you in the face. And I did this yesterday with a very successful client when we were walking through his savings deposits over the last nine years. And he saw his savings rate and I was showing them how much money he had put away. And I showed him the last two years. And I said, “The last two years you have pulled out more money out of your accounts than you’ve saved by far. Like-

Ryan Isaac:
Ah, interesting.

Reese Harper:
… almost 30% more than you’ve saved. And you think that you haven’t, you think you’re saving the same, but whatever has happened in the last two years, you’ve had these three withdrawals that you took out. This one was a large lump sum. Then nine months later there was another large lump sum and then another large lump sum six months later.” So I showed him these withdrawals and he’s just like, “Man, I forgot that I even did that. I forgot that I even pulled money out of my accounts. I remember now what that was for. That was for this and this was for this.” And they were all consumption items, right. They were all big major purchases that he’d made. And I think-

Ryan Isaac:
[crosstalk 00:27:23] to not even remember that either. Just kind of discount it.

Reese Harper:
Yeah. And it was just like, it was interesting because when I showed him that data, we walked through it, he reduced the amount that he wanted to take out. The whole point that I, he had called to want to do a withdrawal for a consumption item. This person’s late in their career and they’ve done a really good job accumulating, but they wanted to take some more money out. And I just wanted to show them how much they’d been taken out for the last two years and how different that was from the last nine. And if they kept going on the pace they’re at right now, they’d literally bleed themselves dry and wouldn’t have near the security in retirement.

Reese Harper:
And it was hugely motivating because they just turned back around and said, “Okay, I don’t need that much out then. I’m only going to take this much.” And they reduced their withdrawal.

Ryan Isaac:
I was going to ask you if they change behavior. Interesting.

Reese Harper:
They didn’t withdraw, they withdrew, I don’t know, 50% of the amount that they were going to. And I think it’s powerful, you know.

Ryan Isaac:
Well man, think of-

Reese Harper:
Looking at your own behavior in the past, really does question, help you question your, what you’re doing.

Ryan Isaac:
Wow, man, totally. And think about like the power of the accountability that that just had. If that situation is multiplied a bunch of times over that person’s life and career, which it totally does happen like that, where an accountability partner, another human who has the data to look back over your own history and just call out the math, bring in the science, less art, less emotion that person will end up in a drastically different situation than they would have on their own. Clearly on their own, they’ve done a good job being a dentist and making money and putting money away but-

Reese Harper:
I don’t think they would have saved hardly any money though either. I think saving money was part of this accountability. It’s been hard. Some people really struggle to, even though they earn a lot, they are successful in their career, they know how to earn money, they just don’t accumulate it very well. They don’t, they’re not good at saying no and they’re not good at knowing when enough is enough or when they can’t afford stuff.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Reese Harper:
That is just as simple as that.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, it’s a big deal. So to recap some of this stuff then, when someone’s asking, what’s a, what is a benchmark? What’s the utility of one? There’s the obvious one, which is, “How do I compare to other people?” Subcategories of that are, “ow do I compare to other people in age, or income ranges, or specialty, or opportunity? There’s the category of, “How do I compare to my past self? “How does this year savings compare to last year’s?” And then there’s the sub category of benchmarks on benchmarks.

Reese Harper:
Yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
It’s like, savings versus spending, savings versus collection, savings versus production, savings versus investment growth, or savings versus net worth sides. There’s a lot of different ways. And I think the point is Benchmarks can be extremely helpful. Like we talked about in the beginning, they can be motivating, they can push us harder, make us go faster and make better decisions. But they’re usually best used in situations where another human being has like a really clear view of all of the data so it’s presented in a mathematical scientific way and they probably don’t do much good unless there’s accountability with it too.

Ryan Isaac:
Because that client yesterday, maybe they had a, maybe they could have had a spreadsheet that showed them that information that got emailed to them from their investment provider. Here’s your savings and here’s your withdrawals. But if there’s not another human calling that to attention, it probably doesn’t affect behavior. So…

Reese Harper:
Yeah. I think that’s a great insight.

Ryan Isaac:
They go hand in hand. Okay. So I mentioned in the intro that we had a link for everybody to, we have, it’s kind of like a mini elements Benchmark survey. If you go to dentist advisors.com/benchmark you’ll land on a page, and it will kind of give you an example of three benchmarks that are maybe some of the most important indicators of someone’s financial health and where they’re headed. It’s a savings rate, a spending rate and a total term, which is their it’s your net worth and how long you could live on your net worth. Three very, very important benchmarks.

Ryan Isaac:
If you hit this link, dentistadvisors.com/benchmark, you’ll go to this page and we’ll give you some things to fill out and some data enter. And we will return to you a Benchmark survey and give you not only your own scores in three of these really important elements, but we’ll give you some benchmarks against some of your peers in those same categories. So dentistadvisors.com/benchmark. It’s free, just go there, put in some data and we’ll kick back a report and probably give you some cool insight on that.

Ryan Isaac:
So Reese, thanks for taking time today. And I’m going through all this on the personal benchmarks and the FOMO that we feel and the comparison we feel. It’s tough being a human in 2020 sometimes maybe.

Reese Harper:
Yeah, man. Totally. Yeah. Thanks to everybody for tuning in. It’s a pleasure to always be here.

Ryan Isaac:
All right. And if you have any questions, you can also go to dentistadvisers.com, click on book free consultation, book a call with one of our advisors. Or go to our Facebook group if you want to post a question and get some answers from the group. That’s dentistadvisers.com/group. Thanks again for joining us. We appreciate the support all the time, and we’ll catch you next time.

Reese Harper:
Carry on.

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