This We Believe: 10 Financial Principles for Dentists – Episode 291

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On this episode of the Dentist Money™ Show, Ryan and Matt discuss core financial truths they feel can lead to less stress and a happier life. With money, things can constantly change. But there are some foundational principles that pass the test of time. Ryan and Matt point to nine financial fundamentals that guide their advice and one overarching principle that ties all of the others together.

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Podcast Transcript

Ryan Isaac:
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another illustrious episode of the old Dentist Money Show. And we’re really grateful that you’re here with us, really, seriously. Thanks for being here and listening to us today. Today on the show, Matt and I talk about some main core principles that we hold as financial advisors or dentists that we believe are a core thread in good financial plans and good financial outcomes and happy lives, mixed with money and finances and investing and insurance and loans and all those things.

Ryan Isaac:
So today we talk about those core principles and what we hope is that it gives you some insight on what kind of core issues or principles a good advisor should have when you’re working with them. A lot of things change in the financial and economic landscape. There’s always new strategies, always new things to do, but there are core foundations that will always make the difference. And that’s what we’re talking about today. If you have any questions that you’d like to chat with us about go to dentistadvisors.com, click the book free consultation link on the website and have a chat with us. Or post a question in the very friendly dentist advisors discussion group on Facebook. Post a question and we’ll post an answer, but thanks for being here everyone. 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, Ryan Isaac.

Ryan Isaac:
Welcome to the Dentist Money Show where we help dentists make smart financial decisions and avoid the bad ones along the way. I am a guy named Ryan Isaac, and I’m here with another guy, another fellow human, Matt, the Hollywood mountain Mulcock. What is up Matt? How are you feeling?

Matt Mulcock:
Yo Ryan. I’m good man.

Ryan Isaac:
How is your summer?

Matt Mulcock:
It’s a hot girl summer.

Ryan Isaac:
It’s hot girl summer.

Matt Mulcock:
It’s hot girl summer. It’s going well.

Ryan Isaac:
We were chatting about that and we don’t know what that phrase means.

Matt Mulcock:
Don’t know what it means, but it sounds fun.

Ryan Isaac:
It sounds fun. Sounds like a good summer and it probably is safe to leave in the podcast. So I hope everyone’s having a hot dentist summer.

Matt Mulcock:
That’s what I should say.

Ryan Isaac:
Having a hot dentist summer.

Matt Mulcock:
In all reality, let’s be real. I’m having a hot dad summer.

Ryan Isaac:
Hot dad summertime.

Matt Mulcock:
We were saying we’re going to get t-shirts that say hot dad summer.

Ryan Isaac:
We did.

Matt Mulcock:
I’ve got a six week old, I’ve got a two year old. It’s hot. It’s hot in Utah right now. Not compared to where you are, but it’s been hot, man. We’ve been hitting some triple digits.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. That is weird for June in Utah and man. Well, hot dad summer to all people out there. Hot mom summer. I mean, I just want to be inclusive. Hot human summer.

Matt Mulcock:
Yeah. Hot human summer.

Ryan Isaac:
We’re having a hot human summer. Well, thanks for being with us on another episode today. We have a lot to cover. It’s going to be kind of a fun episode. This’ll be like a philosophical, this is what we believe kind of episode. Wasn’t there an NPR show called This I Know or something? It sounds like something my dad used to listen to on NPR. This I Believe? I think there was an NPR show called This I Believe. Does this sound familiar?

Matt Mulcock:
Something like that. Yeah. You going to look it up?

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. This I Believe. Yeah. It was a show and it started in 1951 by Edward Murrow. Someone is listening to this and they’re like, you guys.

Matt Mulcock:
Idiots.

Ryan Isaac:
They asked Americans from all walks of life to write essays about their most fundamental and closely held beliefs. Oh cool. That’s a great parallel then. This I Believe NPR, Edward Murrow, 1951.

Matt Mulcock:
That wasn’t even playing. That was off the cuff right there.

Ryan Isaac:
Off the cuff, the memory creeped in a little, leaked into my brain. I used to listen to… My dad was the NPR guy. So that rings a bell. And then he would always also listen to Car Talk. Remember the Car Talk? The Click & Click brothers.

Matt Mulcock:
Oh yeah. That was on every Saturday.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Every Saturday we’d drive around and we listened to the Car Talk guys. I still don’t know anything about cars. So we’re going to do our own version of This I believe if that is familiar to you, if you know the concept.

Matt Mulcock:
Yeah, let’s do it.

Ryan Isaac:
Sometimes we refer to these things as the hills we will die on. So in financial planning, financial planning is an evolving field. There’s always something to learn. There’s always something new in the world economy. There’s always something new with money and investing and finance and insurance and loans. I mean, this stuff never stops changing. In the area of financial planning, investing, I mean, there’s a lot of tightly held beliefs, but we try to hold them loosely in a lot of ways to be able to learn and adapt, to change, and grow, and change our mind. I mean, the ability to change your mind is a great freedom. And we reserve that right.

Matt Mulcock:
Yes, always.

Ryan Isaac:
At all times to change our minds. But there are principles that despite current economic trends or cycles, despite fads, despite scary things, despite new technologies, new investment ideas, despite all these things, all these changes, there are principles that hold true pretty steadily and they don’t change too much. Our great grandparents could have succeeded on the same advice. They probably used this advice and that’s where we’re barely trying to hold onto it, but it lasts for generations.

Ryan Isaac:
That’s what we’re going to talk about today. And it’s kind of one of those episodes where it’s a little bit of get to know us and for this episode we pulled all of our financial advisors at Dentist Advisors to say, hey, give us a list of what are the hills you would die on? What are you willing to go to battle for? What fights are you willing to pick? Which things are you willing to let go? So well, let’s go back and forth here, Matt. We’ve got a good list here. We’ll dive in as deep as we-

Matt Mulcock:
A little tit for tat.

Ryan Isaac:
A little tit for tat, as they say. I don’t know who says that or where that came from, but that’s a phrase.

Matt Mulcock:
Who said it, whatever. Yeah, that’s a thing.

Ryan Isaac:
That’s a cliche. We’ll just go back and forth, dive in as deep as we feel like we need to on any of these subjects. And also we reserve the right to add to these or change them on a future episode.

Matt Mulcock:
Yeah. Inevitably, right before we start, inevitably, what will happen, guaranteed. I know for me, I don’t know about for you, but I’ll say it for me. We’ll finish this and a week later I’ll be sitting here thinking about it, stewing over it and I’ll be like, oh my gosh, why didn’t I say this one or this one?

Ryan Isaac:
Why didn’t we think of this? All the time. So here we go. Hills we will die on as financial advisors for dentists that we really strongly believe, this we believe, greatly affect your financial wellbeing, your financial future, your overall happiness, how it relates to work and career and money and net worth. So number one, and these are in no particular order. So it’d be hard to order these I think.

Matt Mulcock:
And I have no idea what you wrote and you don’t really know what I wrote. I mean, we did do a kind of a poll and talked freely as a group, but I don’t know what your list is.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. I’ve got my little pen here. I’m going to make a check mark if you say one of mine and I’ll jump in. I’ll go first. Number one. Actually, you probably have this quote, this comes an idea from Morgan Housel, the author. And the idea is that if… You wrote this, maybe you should say this. The idea is that if expectations grow faster than your income, then you’ll never be happy.

Matt Mulcock:
Oh, I’m X-ing one off my list. I’m X-ing one off my list.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, this is off your list.

Matt Mulcock:
That’s okay. Hit that again. It’s so important.

Ryan Isaac:
If expectations grow more than your income, then you’ll never be happy.

Matt Mulcock:
The one that I said that, again, is along these same lines is when it comes to money or wealth, the biggest challenge that we face is getting the goalpost to stop moving.

Ryan Isaac:
Yes.

Matt Mulcock:
And so again, this comes from Morgan Housel. He’s so much more brilliant than me, than I will ever be in how he phrases and how he articulates things. But that’s kind of what I was saying when it came to keeping your expectations in line with your income and again, getting the goalpost to stop moving. It’s something I see in my own life. It’s something that I see in the life of my clients, people around me that again, it’s the biggest challenge. It’s the never enough syndrome, right?

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Matt Mulcock:
What you were happy with a few years ago is no longer you’re happy with. And then you get into this rat race on this treadmill.

Ryan Isaac:
Or even months. I mean, we all know what that feels like to just anticipate the purchase of something or the acquisition of something and then getting it. And a lot of times the excitement of actually receiving the thing is less exciting than just thinking about receiving the thing. And then certainly sometimes only months later, it’s just another mundane piece of life that doesn’t even feel different anymore. It’s not even a differentiator anymore. And we’ve talked a lot about that on the show. I mean, it’s beyond the scope of our ability to help you change that in your brain. It’s a psychological thing. It’s a personality thing. It’s an environment thing. The people you surround yourself with and who you hang out with and the way you derive your own value and self-worth. I mean, it’s a tough thing to just say, here’s how to change it.

Ryan Isaac:
I will say that one thing that helps with this is… I’ll just go to number two. This was a thing on my list. It’s further down. Again, not in any order. But I’ll hit two of these things because I think this is how you deal with this thing where expectations as humans, our expectations just sometimes never stop growing. Things are just never good enough.

Matt Mulcock:
I’ll be happy when syndrome. Yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, I’ll be happy when. And so two of the things that were on my list today too, are that organization will be one of the most important things that you’ll ever do in your financial life. And it’s beyond the scope of today’s discussion, but when we say organization, we literally mean dozens if not, maybe hundreds of little things that happen every year or over the course of years in a dentist’s life in their finances that need to be constantly organized and updated. We mean the data, the data points, measuring data points. And actually, I’ll just stop there. And I’ll just say that the act of constantly measuring things can bring some context to that never-ending cycle of onto the next. I’ll be happy when. Because when you start measuring things, you become a little bit more aware of the finite limitation of your resources even if you make a ton of money. I mean, we watch people making seven figures still spend seven figures.

Matt Mulcock:
And by the way, people making seven figures that are struggling with similar things that people that are not making seven figures or that are dissatisfied because again, their goalposts have moved.

Ryan Isaac:
Different goalposts. So the act of being organized and having some kind of tracking in your financial life, which is the whole point of our entire business and accountability would be a different thing, but I feel like that’s a partial solution to that. A lot of it too is your brain and your mentality and your own emotional health.

Matt Mulcock:
I think that’s a great point. I think that is a good antidote to that issue of having the goalpost stop moving. Because I think one of the issues, we’ve talked about this before on other episodes, being this comparison mentality of just people, right? We’re pack animals. We want to compare to each other.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Matt Mulcock:
And today’s environment of social media obviously makes it worse. But what you’re describing is being organized and measuring these important factors, we’ve talked many, many times about. What I think it does is it gets you in this mode. You already said it. One of the things being, you’re looking at the right things and understanding the levers that you can pull and the finite things that you can actually control. Right?

Matt Mulcock:
The other thing I think it does is it starts to help you realize that yes, you should be comparing, right, but you start to understand the things you should be comparing, which is your past situation to your current situation and then moving forward. So you’re starting to compare yourself to just the progress that you’re making as opposed to other people. And I think it does get you more in the present moment versus saying I’ll be happy when. The only way you can start seeing the progress that you’ve made is by actually being organized and tracking that progress.

Ryan Isaac:
Yes. I like that you brought up the comparisons. I was just quickly trying to find, we did an episode on healthy ways to compare. I think I found it. It’s episode 284 of the Dentist Money Show. It’s called why your neighbors lifestyle is a bad benchmark, clever title.

Matt Mulcock:
Dude, you’re on fire with this search stuff.

Ryan Isaac:
I didn’t write that.

Matt Mulcock:
No, I’m just saying you’re on fire with this on a whim just searching. Normally people that are much more popular than we are, have shows that have producers that are on the spot doing stuff.

Ryan Isaac:
We don’t have that.

Matt Mulcock:
We don’t have that. We are DIY guys.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, so if you want to hear about the things you should be comparing that are healthy, episode 284, why your neighbors lifestyle is a bad benchmark. I’m glad you brought all those things up too. You started to say something that was on my list that I don’t know if I’m going to catch this one actually what you’re saying. But anyway, I liked the-

Matt Mulcock:
I thought you were going to say for a second, you started to say something insightful and then just totally-

Ryan Isaac:
No, there was another thing on the list that was a perfect segue, but we’ll get to that. Oh no, it was control. You talked about the things you can control. When you’re comparing the correct things you’re measuring and monitoring. That was another thing on my list of things we deeply believe that you can only focus on the things you can control, which is again, talking about cliches. But we find, this is my experience anyway, that oftentimes when it comes to money and finance and investing, we think there’s more things in our control than there really are. Or at least we behave that way. We behave as if we can control more things than we really can control. And there’s probably fewer things in our control than we realize.

Ryan Isaac:
So I would add that to the list of focusing on the things you can control, which again goes back to, that’s why I say when people ask us, what’s one of the biggest mistakes dentists make financially? It is hands down being unorganized because when you are a dentist and especially when you’re an owner of a practice, there are literally hundreds of little moving pieces in your financial life that if there’s no context or tracking or organization around those things, they just become guesses when you have to make decisions around them. And Reese Harper, Big Hoss, famously-

Matt Mulcock:
Shout out Big Hoss.

Ryan Isaac:
…Used to say all the time guesses make messes.

Matt Mulcock:
So true.

Ryan Isaac:
And I used to have that on a whiteboard in the office for so many years. No one erased it forever. It was kind of nice.

Matt Mulcock:
I don’t know why we haven’t made a t-shirt out of that.

Ryan Isaac:
Guesses make messes. It should for good financial planning. But when you have an organization, you are able to focus on the things you can’t control and it feels good to admit the stuff that’s out of your hands and then acknowledge the stuff that you can take control over and change and do something with. And so love that. What else is on your list?

Matt Mulcock:
Okay. So I said another one, this is shifting gears a little bit, but kind of the same theme of controlling what you can control. So I said, the number one killer of investor returns, notice I said, investor, not investment.

Ryan Isaac:
Okay.

Matt Mulcock:
The number one killer of investor returns is bad behavior and the bad behavior almost always stems from fear.

Ryan Isaac:
Okay. Behavior.

Matt Mulcock:
So again, controlling what you can control. And when I’m saying stem from fear, I’m saying either on the top end being fear of missing out, AKA greed, or on the bottom end, when things are going bad, just pure fear and people not wanting to invest.

Ryan Isaac:
Fear of getting hurt.

Matt Mulcock:
But number one issue with bad returns over someone’s lifetime comes back to your own decisions and just bad behavior.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. And this is measured in our industry. This would be a whole other episode, but in our industry, there’s a lot of pretty famous well-known studies and the results vary a little bit, but they’re very large companies and organizations that do these studies that show the behavioral difference between certain types of investors, people who have accountability have an advisor, have good advice versus people who do things on their own typically. And these are general crowds, right? But the factor between these people is behavior. It’s how they interact and behave with their investments. And I’ve seen the range as low as around 3%. I think that’s where Vanguard pegs it. Or maybe they’re closer to 2. Anyway that low in range. And I think I’ve seen it as high as five or 6%. And I can’t remember the organization that does it. There’s a lot of them that do this.

Ryan Isaac:
The point is that it’s a fairly widely studied thing in our industry. And it’s kind of a foregone conclusion at this point, that behavior drives so much of our investment outcomes. And I put on my list when it comes to behavior, I think maybe Will, one of our advisors said this, that behavior are so much more important than tactics or strategy, right? As humans, especially in the investment area of our lives, we’re so wired to just get hyped up on tactics and strategy.

Matt Mulcock:
It’s sexy, it’s fun.

Ryan Isaac:
It is man, and it’s always new, right? There’s always a new strategy. Multiple times a year, I swear there’s a new thing on Twitter that’s so big in the investment world and that you hear about it whispered conversations over in any restaurant and then it’s dead in two months.

Matt Mulcock:
Yeah. And it’s always accompanied by stories of someone making millions of dollars overnight from the said strategy and people automatically think, well, I can sit here and be disciplined and make good decisions over the next 20, 30 years. Or I can just go out and buy this or do that strategy and I can hit the lottery.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. So behavior over tactics, like what you said about behavior, I think that’s key. And that just means that it’s not so much about which investment you’re buying, but are you doing something that you can hold onto? Are you doing something sustainable? That’s kind of the question. I’m going to lead that into another thing that was on my list, which is that anything worthwhile in our lives, especially our financial lives, whether it’s developing a business or an investment portfolio or a portfolio of real estate, anything worthwhile is going to take probably long periods of time, not single digit years. Definitely not months. That’s a hill we will die on is that there’s no shortcut to this stuff. Everything meaningful takes a long period of time and have a different expectation is just a set up for disappointment.

Matt Mulcock:
Yeah. That’s spot on. And I was just sitting here thinking outside of luck, there’s always luck involved in life. Right? Life involves luck. But I’m just sitting there when you were talking about anything worthwhile is going to take time. Right? It’s going to take years and I’m sitting here thinking about overnight successes as we perceive them from the outside, usually are proceeded by decades of work.

Ryan Isaac:
Unseen grinding.

Matt Mulcock:
Time, effort, energy.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Matt Mulcock:
And then we on the outside, see the quote unquote overnight success.

Ryan Isaac:
Well you hear about someone starting a company and selling it two years later for a billion dollars. You’re like, what was that person doing for the last 10 years though before we heard about that?

Matt Mulcock:
Or 20, right?

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. More often than not, it’s a lot of grindy hard work and no money. That’s kind of how it goes. Okay. What’s on your list? Let’s hit one on your list.

Matt Mulcock:
So, well, I feel like I can’t. I have two more. How many do you have by the way?

Ryan Isaac:
I’ve got a few more, but it’s not fair because I wrote down everyone else’s. Of my own, I had half a dozen, but then I had more than that from everyone else. So let’s hit your last two and then we’ll just cruise through my list.

Matt Mulcock:
Well, no, no, we can keep going back. Either way.

Ryan Isaac:
Okay.

Matt Mulcock:
I would be remiss if I didn’t hit one of our go to’s, which is balance over burnout-

Ryan Isaac:
Yep, that was one on my list from you.

Matt Mulcock:
…Leads to a higher likelihood of happiness is my take and a hill I will die on.

Ryan Isaac:
Explain that. How do you see that play out in a dentist’s life?

Matt Mulcock:
Yeah. And again, I want to make sure that I’m saying this right when I say lead to a higher likelihood of success. Someone that focuses on balance in their life I think has a higher likelihood, or I believe has a higher likelihood of happiness, right?

Ryan Isaac:
For sure.

Matt Mulcock:
Over the course of their life. I’m not saying it is the only way, but I think it’s probably the highest likelihood. And so the context of this is I see the people that sacrifice kind of everything in their life to build, let’s say a business or whatever. In this case, we’re talking dentists obviously. So someone that’s solely focused on, again, the next goal in their business and they’re willing to work six days a week for their whole career. And then one day they look back and say, holy cow, what did I do that for? Right? To me, it’s finding that balance and kind of thinking about why you’re actually doing this is going to, again, lead to a higher likelihood of happiness than just focusing on the money or again, moving those goal posts.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. I mean, there are stories of entrepreneurs in general who go just super hard for the first 10 or 15 years. And then they legitimately are done at 45 and then they have a long life and tons of money after. But for every one person, this is a totally made up statistic, by the way, disclaimer.

Matt Mulcock:
Studies show.

Ryan Isaac:
For every one of those, there’s a lot more people who do that for 10, 12, 15 years, and then they’re not done yet. And then it’s just like, oh, what am I doing? We talked about this on a recent podcast, you look back and you’re just like, man, you just said my kids got old all of a sudden, and I had to miss some stuff, or my favorite hobbies have been neglected for years or there’s things I’ve been wanting to do in my life I just haven’t got to because I’m just waiting until work is done or something.

Matt Mulcock:
Yep.

Ryan Isaac:
And I mean, if I had to pick as a financial advisor, I’d rather see a dentist earn a little bit less money, but do it for a longer period of time. The profession of dentistry has such awesome longevity. You can earn a very high living on relatively low amounts of time input for quite a while in your life. I mean, it’s pretty rare. And from an investment standpoint, the longer you can put off pulling money out of your portfolios or having to spend the rent check from the building you own or whatever, the more your investments can perform, they have a longer time horizon.

Ryan Isaac:
And it just takes so much pressure off of those investments when you can maintain an income. So whatever balance means to you, it means so many different things. I mean, it’s again, cliches, right? Having balance, a balanced life, work-life balance.

Matt Mulcock:
Another cliche.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. I mean, what does that even mean? It’s different between every person but achieving that balance as much as you possibly can and always adjusting to it because life changes and work changes so that you feel that so that you have the longevity is just financially speaking longevity in dentistry is one of the greatest tools you have in your control. For sure.

Matt Mulcock:
Yeah. And we obviously have the luxury of being able to see pretty much every level of dentists, right? Or where they’re at. Every stage of dentists, I should say. So we see the young dentist that we hear this all the time. Right. Ryan, I know you do, I know I do. With these young dentists coming out of school that are like, kind of what you said, I’m going to grind. I’m going to do this for the next 10 years and I’m going to be done. I’m going to make X amount of dollars.

Matt Mulcock:
Those are always my favorite conversations to have with people. When they already have a dollar amount in mind, very specific. The highest I ever heard was I think a hundred million or something in that range. So anyway, I bring this up to say I hear those. And then we talk to people that are in their forties. They’re 45, right? Or maybe 50. And they will bring up the fact that I was that doctor back then. I did have that. And then their perspective completely shifts.

Ryan Isaac:
How it changes. Yeah.

Matt Mulcock:
Yeah. Like you said, from year to year, it’s going to be different.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, I mean, what you think you’re going to be as an owner and entrepreneur might be different next year. You might be like, I’ll never have multiple locations. I’ll never have a partner. Or I’m going to build a DSO. And then a year later life happens and things go on and then you’re like, that’s not worth it anymore. I don’t want that anymore. I want something new and different. And again, like we said, at the beginning, we all have the right to change our minds. It’s a beautiful freedom. So go ahead and change your minds. Do it with a plan, but change your mind if so be it.

Matt Mulcock:
And the hill I will die on is everyone is different and everyone finds happiness from different things and that’s okay.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. That’s totally true. Balance over burnout. You’ve said it a long time. I love that.

Matt Mulcock:
On the Dentist Money Show, we teach dentists how to make smart financial decisions.

Ryan Isaac:
You’re correct.

Matt Mulcock:
I mean, is that all it takes Ryan? To make smart financial decisions, listening to our show?

Ryan Isaac:
Matt, it’s a good first step. But to put your financial future on the fast track, the next smart decision is to go to dentistadvisors.com. What you do there is you click on the book free consultation button right in the middle of the home screen. And then you schedule a time to talk with one of our very friendly dental specific financial advisors today.

Ryan Isaac:
Let’s go to the last one on your list since you’re down to one. Let’s just do that.

Matt Mulcock:
Oh, the last one on my list-

Ryan Isaac:
It’s probably on my list too.

Matt Mulcock:
This is a hot one.

Ryan Isaac:
I like it hot. Coming in hot.

Matt Mulcock:
So my last one was, again, it’s just a one-liner, very hot. Most things in life we worry about don’t matter.

Ryan Isaac:
That wasn’t on my list. Solid. Explain.

Matt Mulcock:
So this comes from my guy, Greg McKeown, shout out. He wrote a book called Essentialism and he has another one out called Effortless. I have not read yet, but it’s on my list. But he basically talks about this. And if you have not read Essentialism, I highly recommend it, it is fantastic. But that’s basically the premise of the book is that most things we think about, most things we worry about don’t matter. And so I wrote next to it, health, relationships, and purpose. That’s really what it comes down to.

Ryan Isaac:
Those matter.

Matt Mulcock:
Those matter. Everything else pretty much is just details.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. And the things that we worry about that matter are numberless. There’s so many things we worry about. We put a name to it, but when you do look back, I’m an old man now, so I can look back at 41 and go, yeah. I mean, what were the three you listed there? Relationships, health.

Matt Mulcock:
I said health, relationships, and purpose.

Ryan Isaac:
And purpose. Yeah. You look back and those are the things you just don’t want to waste at all. And you do anything. The older you get, the more you’re willing to spend on those things, time and money, resources, whatever, to get those things. Purpose. Oh yeah. That’s so true. Man, you just get more and more willing to spend anything that it takes to get more purpose, healthy relationships and overall better health in general. Oh yeah. Will brought up one that I think is really important. And we’ve talked about this a lot. We’ve used the illustration of a teeter-totter early on in a young dentist’s life. All you have is time, right? You have no money and time is like a teeter-totter of time and money on one side and the other, and you’re loaded down with time, tons of time on your hands and you just need more money.

Ryan Isaac:
And we see this all the time. When you achieve the level of success that you’re looking for as a dentist, especially if you own a practice there’s so much going on, you achieve that money. But it is done at the expense of time. And we see this all the time where practice owners once kept everything on their plate. They do all the marketing, the training, the accounting, all the clinical duties, they do their own financial planning, whatever. And you achieve the success and then all of a sudden, there’s no time for that stuff.

Ryan Isaac:
In fact, there’s barely enough time to do, to perform a few core duties in the practice and then get on with your life, let alone all the other stuff you used to do. So that teeter-totter of time and money, it’s just something we see play out in people’s lives a lot. And this goes back into balance and it goes back into organization and tracking and accountability of having someone help you watch these things over the course of your career so that you don’t get stuck in one moment being like, oh man, I have no time to do anything anymore. And you can get things off your plate. Okay.

Matt Mulcock:
I think the hill to die on there, just to summarize that, I think the hill to die on there that Will had mentioned and I think we all agree a hundred percent is that time is just so much more valuable than money.

Ryan Isaac:
Yes. Yep. Time’s more valuable than money.

Matt Mulcock:
For every single person, it’s non-renewable. It’s a non-renewable resource.

Ryan Isaac:
Finite, dwindling resource.

Matt Mulcock:
You can always make more money. You can never make more time.

Ryan Isaac:
That’s the best way to put it. A couple more here. I feel like we’re heavy right now. I love this.

Matt Mulcock:
Yeah, we are. Got to lighten it up.

Ryan Isaac:
Speaking of financial planning, this is one that is definitely like a big principle of ours. Planning is a verb, it is not a noun. So when someone’s out there saying I need a financial plan, I need a plan. Realize that a real financial plan is a verb. Meaning it is something that changes and evolves over the course of your entire life. It’s not just your earning years, it’s not just your working years, but it is an evolving verb and action that requires a lot of input and feedback and communication. It is not a one-time event, it is not a noun. So planning’s a verb. It is not a noun. And that I like that one a lot because it comes up all the time. I just need a plan, I just need a plan. That thing’s going to change in three months. And we better be talking about it.

Ryan Isaac:
So that was one. I want to stress the point that there is no magic asset class. So this comes up a lot in discussions. It’s a fun thing to debate really. What’s the best thing to invest in? We get that question a lot. I want to make a lot of money, I want to be retired early. What’s the best thing I should invest in? There’s no best thing. There’s some better things. But there’s trade offs. So there is no magic asset class. What do I mean by that? Let’s just give it three main asset classes. You can have a private business. For most dentists, that’s the practice they own. You can have real estate and you can have public security, stocks, bonds, mutual funds. Of course there’s other smaller asset classes that are independent of those. But a lot of other things fold into those ones.

Matt Mulcock:
Did you say crypto?

Ryan Isaac:
I didn’t say crypto but we can-

Matt Mulcock:
Oh, okay. All right. No, that’s fine. It’s okay. It’s fine. No big deal.

Ryan Isaac:
But there is no magic asset class. So there is no, I want to get rich so I’m going to do real estate. I’m going to get rich so I’m going to use stocks. I’m going to get rich so I’m going to own a business. There’s just trade-offs and not everyone’s cut out to do all of them. So I want to stress that as a hill we would be willing to die on.

Matt Mulcock:
And sorry, I’m just pulling out bonus ones as you’re throwing this out. I think the whole point of this, right, is to pull them out as we’re going back and forth. What you’re saying right now is a hill that I die on all the time with clients. I tell them this all the time. And I think we always talk about this with either people that we’re just talking to on consult calls or getting clients, being that the most important part of any investment strategy is having one that you can stick with.

Ryan Isaac:
Stick to man.

Matt Mulcock:
And that’s really what you’re talking about is I don’t care about the asset class. We care about some certain principles of investing and the number one principle being, you’ve got to have a strategy you can stick with that’s repeatable.

Ryan Isaac:
Sustainability. Yeah. Anything worthwhile is going to take probably decades to build.

Matt Mulcock:
Yep.

Ryan Isaac:
So can you do it for decades? And if the answer is no, then it’s probably not the asset class for you. Don’t mess with it. I got one more and I kind of saved this for the last. We just did a podcast on this. Yeah. This was last week’s podcast. Although when this comes out, that probably won’t be a true statement anymore. But this is episode number 289, I actually did it with a guest co-host, Jake Elm, CFP adviser, Dentist adviser.

Matt Mulcock:
He crushed, dude. He crushed. He did such a good job.

Ryan Isaac:
We were live at the AGD conference in Austin in 2021, but it’s titled do I really need a financial advisor? But really the meat of that episode is the principle of accountability. I won’t give it away. In that episode, we talk about a study that was done that confirms my lived experience, working with people and being a person of accountability in many people’s lives. And I will just say that accountability, it’s kind of the main ingredient that ties so much of this stuff together. Trying to practice balance, trying to stick to a certain investment plan, trying to have a financial plan, trying to be organized, building the right business, holding the right expectations, focusing on the things you can control.

Ryan Isaac:
All the things we mentioned are kind of capped off by whether or not we have accountability to these things. And that can come in different forms. We talked about on that episode, number 289, check it out if you want to hear that. But that’s the one I kind of left here for maybe the end. I mean, I will just forever be a strong believer that human beings, one of our main weaknesses as a species is that we just don’t stick to things very well for very long. We’re so easily distracted.

Matt Mulcock:
So true.

Ryan Isaac:
Maybe that’s me just putting my personal beliefs on the world, but it’s also my experience.

Matt Mulcock:
You’re projecting right now.

Ryan Isaac:
I’m projecting a little bit, but as humans we have a tough time sticking to things for a long period of time and having an accountability partner. My lived experience and statistically this has been shown over and over again, that it makes the difference in accomplishing something that is really important to you or not at all. And those are things that we believe are super important. This we believe.

Matt Mulcock:
This we believe.

Ryan Isaac:
I think that’s how they used to close it.

Matt Mulcock:
This hill we shall die on.

Ryan Isaac:
This I believe. I think that’s how they used to close that show. But anyway, did we cover the good ones, Matt? Is there anything that you can think of? Anything else you want to add in there that we might’ve left out or need to add?

Matt Mulcock:
No, I mean you know there’s going to be. We’re going to walk away from this and be like, man.

Ryan Isaac:
One day from now we will-

Matt Mulcock:
Man, I should’ve said that one.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. A day from now we’ll think of better ways to say it. But anyway, thanks for joining us. I guess what we hope from this episode we get out of this is you get some insight into the mind of a financial advisor who is a fiduciary who only works with dentists and who is a comprehensive financial advisor like we are and kind of just peek into the way that we believe about things.

Ryan Isaac:
Now, the execution of a plan, right, the execution of building a business, of marketing, of an investment strategy, of holding insurance, paying off debt. Those are the things that change. Strategy and technique changes. But these are the principles that’ll be the common thread of success or falling short of achieving your goals. So hopefully we covered them all. I think we did.

Matt Mulcock:
Yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
If you have any questions for us, you can probably get your questions answered in a couple ways. Go to dentistadvisors.com and click on the book free consultation link and chat with one of our advisors directly. That’s a good way. That’ll be helpful.

Matt Mulcock:
That is a fantastic way.

Ryan Isaac:
We’re nice people and get one of us on the phone. You can also just go to our Facebook group, it’s called the Dentist Advisors discussion group on Facebook. Post a question. We’ll just post an answer back to you. Usually we’ll record a little video and answer your question directly. So that’s kind of fun. We like that. And it’s been awhile. No one’s posted a question for a few weeks.

Matt Mulcock:
I was just going to say, we haven’t done that for a bit.

Ryan Isaac:
Jeez guys. Is it summer? Is everyone on vacation? Everyone’s having a hot human summer right now. A hot dentist summer.

Matt Mulcock:
Everyone’s having a hot lady and a hot guy summer.

Ryan Isaac:
Hot guy summer.

Matt Mulcock:
Hot human summer.

Ryan Isaac:
We don’t use teenage slang very well on the Dentist Money Show as you can tell.

Matt Mulcock:
No, we really don’t.

Ryan Isaac:
Couple dads. But go there. Post a question. We love answering back on this question. So again, thanks for joining us. Thanks for being here on another episode and we’ll catch you next time. Thanks everybody.

 

CE, Investing, Spending