What Do Your Core Values Have to Do With Money? – Episode #375

Want financial peace of mind? First uncover what really matters to you when it comes to your money, then align those core values with your finances. On this episode of the Dentist Money™ Show, Ryan and Matt welcome back Reese Harper to talk about the philosophy behind the Elements app and how it can help people connect their financial decisions to their values and purpose.

 

 

 

---

Podcast Transcript

Ryan Isaac:
Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Dentist Money Show brought to you by Dentist Advisors, a no commission, fee only, comprehensive financial advisor just for dentists. Check us out at dentistadvisors.com. Today on the show, a very special treat, Matt and I welcome back, Big Hoss, Reese Harper, founder of Dentist Advisors and Elements. Getelements.com app. We, today on the show, we’re talking about the philosophy of the Elements and introducing it to the Dentist Advisors brand, we’ve been working for a long time, but the technology has finally been ready in the year 2023, and we’re rolling that out to hundreds of dentists all across the country in our private wealth advisor model and in our new dentist money membership model. So check all that out. If you have any questions, dentistadvisors.com. Also, we wrap up the discussion with one of my most favorite and interesting topics, lately in the whole realm of financial planning that is far outside of picking the right strategy or tax strategy, or mutual fund, or investment strategy, business strategy, whatever it is.

Ryan Isaac:
And that is the topic of identifying, acknowledging and aligning your most core personal values with the money and financial decisions that you’re making in your life, and how the alignment of those things creates a sense of peace and security and how the misalignment creates the opposite sense in life. And really fascinating topic, Reese has so much to say on this, so, we’re gonna just ask the questions, and step back and listen. We were all very well treated to a great discussion, thanks to Reese, thanks to Matt for spending time and thanks to all of you for tuning in, if you have any questions for us, go to dentistadvisors.com and ask us a money question, we’d love to help you out and point you to the right direction. Thanks for being here. Enjoy the show.

Jess Reynolds:
Hey there, it’s Jess with Dentist Advisors. Did you know we’ve recently launched a new service called the Dentist Money Membership, it’s an affordable way to support your personal financial strategy with cutting edge technology and guidance from dental-focused CFP advisors. The Dentist Money Membership includes the Elements financial monitoring app, an annual financial check-up, CE courses, an automated investment platform and more. To learn more about the Dentist Money Membership and to get started, go visit dentistadvisors.com/money.

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. I’m very excited to be here today, as I’m always. But today we’ve got Matt as always and the Big Hoss himself, Mr. Reese H. Harper Galore, the third, esquire.

Reese Harper:
It’s a good day, it’s a good day.

Ryan Isaac:
What is your… Middle initial, actually?

Reese Harper:
My middle initial is J.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, Reese J. Harper. H, just…

Reese Harper:
Hello and hello, friends.

Ryan Isaac:
There he is.

Reese Harper:
Clearly, I’m flexible, as the first thing that comes out of my mouth is a correction on my middle initial. [chuckle]

Ryan Isaac:
Sorry.

Matt Mulcock:
How dare you, Ryan?

Reese Harper:
Yeah, they didn’t say I was the easiest person to deal with, they just said, I have a lot of opinions.

Ryan Isaac:
I wanted you to do the intro. I wanted you to say, welcome to the Dentist Money Show, I’m your host, Reese Harper, here with my trusty old co-host.

Matt Mulcock:
Just a nice throwback. Trusty old, yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
Sir Ryan and Matt.

Reese Harper:
Yeah, it’s been… It’s great hanging out. For those of you who don’t even know who I am, I think I was on the first few hundred episodes before…

Ryan Isaac:
You were. You were.

Reese Harper:
I faded into the corners…

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. We are… Thank you for being here, Reese, we know you have a busy schedule and we did book this 30 days in advance to make it happen. And we are… We caught you during lunch. How about this Reese? For those who might not know, actually, I don’t know if everyone goes back to episode one, I kinda hope they don’t.

0:04:04.9 RH: They don’t, yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
Just for the sake of quality. Just for the quality. [laughter]

Matt Mulcock:
I have not heard episode one, I kinda want to go listen to it now.

Ryan Isaac:
I started once and I’m like, I can’t… I can’t listen to this.

Matt Mulcock:
I can’t do this.

Ryan Isaac:
Reese, who is Reese Harper? Who and what is Reese Harper? Tell the people.

Reese Harper:
Well, so my name’s Reese. Hello friends. I am a financial advisor that started my career working with dentists, and in that process, I learned about a problem I wanted to solve, with helping financial advisors work better with their clients. And so, Ryan and Matt were kind enough to let me keep working with some of my existing clients and go start another company called Elements, you can go to getelements.com and see that. And now I do a podcast over there, to financial advisors around the US and work on the other side of, maybe… Or another part of the financial advice business, which is just helping financial advisors get… To have deeper relationships with their clients and build technology that helps them do that. So, that’s what I do.

Ryan Isaac:
I was just gonna ask, when you meet a financial advisor and you’re explaining it, like, what’s the elevator pitch of what Elements is to a financial advisor?

Matt Mulcock:
Dude, you’re starting it off with a test here, Ryan.

Reese Harper:
I usually say…

Ryan Isaac:
Cascade.

Reese Harper:
I have a 10 step, 10 steps. But the one, I think it just encourages deeper conversations, I would say that. Like, it’s a way to have better conversations with your financial advisor about the things that really matter to you. And some of the existing software since it was built, a long time ago, was built for a world that has changed a lot, and so it was built for… The old way was kind of an Industrial Age, top down, everyone gets the same thing, world, where you’re building… You’re pumping out plans. Or actually, the industry was to sell plans for 10 grand for a plan, and then, you would never talk to the person again.

Ryan Isaac:
A book.

Reese Harper:
It was like a book in a binder and that world of kind of, presentation style world has changed a lot. Now, people are into real-time learning models, which are like, “Don’t pre-teach me, only teach me at the moment, I need to know it.” And everything we’re doing is kind of moving into this real-time learning world, and science is showing us it’s more effective. So if you wanna learn something about finances, you don’t really wanna learn it in advance, you only wanna learn the thing that applies right now, and then you’ll go to the next thing when you need it. So people are kind of hesitant to sort of… Advisors and clients just kinda wanna cut to the chase faster, answer their questions. They don’t wake up in the morning with… Clients don’t wake up in the morning thinking, “I have a financial planning problem I need to solve.” They wake up with a question on their mind just like a pain.

Ryan Isaac:
One thing.

Reese Harper:
One thing, and they want an answer to that fast. And so that’s kind of what Elements helps do. Deeper conversations, quicker is what we’re trying to do.

Ryan Isaac:
I was gonna say, being the advisor on that side, delivering Elements to clients as the three of us do, I resonate… That’s probably the elevator pitch I would use too, is, deeper conversations. More relevant, deeper conversations, more in the moment, more applicable, more meaningful. That’s probably the time when we as humans can even learn anyway, is when we want to, when it applies to something we’re dealing with, otherwise, it’s just like the rest of it goes over our head probably.

Reese Harper:
That’s great advice. Yeah.

Matt Mulcock:
One other thing I’d add to this. Reese, you made a good point about the other software, traditional planning software, you mentioned like, it’s meant to be sold as a plan. I’d also say, we’ve talked about this before, a lot of this older… Or, do the traditional planning software is, to sell a product, it’s designed to allow advisors to create a process around, “Oh, I know exactly how to use this to sell you something”, like, let’s say, an insurance product. I lived in that world for five years, right? The software I used was built around a sales process, using that software, so I think that’s another piece of this as well, like… Or you guys are going a little bit different than that.

Ryan Isaac:
That’s a good point.

Reese Harper:
Yeah. That’s a great insight. Yeah, before they sold plans, they sold products.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, well, I was just thinking, when you said a plan that used to get printed, they were often hundreds of pages and not… People didn’t know what they said. Really thick binders, and I think that was the point, is to seem it see… Make it seem so complex that they would have to just buy the products that were being offered to implement the plan. An that was the insurance…

Reese Harper:
Yeah, I actually had a conversation with a financial advisor this morning, and he… It’s a big firm, they probably manage four or five billion dollars and…

Ryan Isaac:
Jeez.

Reese Harper:
There’s… I don’t know if there’s a 100 people there.

Matt Mulcock:
We’re just nipping on their heels right now, nipping on their heels.

Reese Harper:
Yeah, and so it’s like… It’s a conglomerate of lots of different firms that have kind of merged over the last 15 years, and he was telling me like, “When do you… ” He’s like, “I don’t know how to go from here, with what you guys are doing to where I can get the plan printed.” And I said… He’s a really capable advisor, but a few years older than all of us here on the call, and coming from a generation where that was really common. Gotta print the plan, put it in the binder and deliver it. And, well I said, “Do your clients ask you for that or do you give it to them and assume that’s what they want?” And he just paused, this is like a couple of weeks ago, and I only had 30 minutes in for this call, ’cause a lot of people had met with him before and he had this one hang up and then we met, and I asked him this question and he sent me an email a couple of days later after we had met, and he said, “Man, that just stuck in my head so much.”

Reese Harper:
He’s like, I actually don’t really know, if all the things that I’m doing over here… ” He’s like, “We’re probably printing 50 of these a day, across hundreds of advisors or whatever.” He’s like, “I actually don’t know if anyone’s even ever asked us for one, but we’ve been giving them to them for almost 20 years.” And I just said, “Well… ” I said, “My… ”

Matt Mulcock:
Because the interest says you should.

Reese Harper:
My assumption is that, what they really want is they want… A client wants to know that you know them really, really well, beyond their numbers, beyond just their numbers. They want to get to know you at a deep level of values and purpose. That you know them at that level, and we can talk about that more later. And once you know them that well, they want you to answer questions that they have. And if you can do that more effectively, however, you can do that, the most effective way possible is what I’d say you should do. And so, I got an email from one of my VP of Sales, at Elements this morning. He’s like, “Man… ” I had just got off the call with him and they’re… He’s ready to go. Like, he’s just…

Reese Harper:
They’re like, “We’re gonna drop doing… We’re just done with all this plan delivery. We think we can use Elements to get there faster, have deeper conversations quicker and actually have a process that’s more aligned with the client.” And so, we’ll see. I mean, there’s no blue ocean here, there’s no perfect tool. It’s about the advisors. It’s not really about the technology. I mean, it really is about a human connection and how can you get the technology to kind of fade a little bit, just kind of, get into the background, so it’s not really noticeable anymore, because it’s working that well, it’s not like, a thing, it’s just kind of life and it goes away. That’s what my vision is, to where the advisors is all that’s left. The client and the advisor is kind of all that’s left, and this technology is being very quiet.

Matt Mulcock:
It’s kind of funny you say that Reese, because Ryan, we’ve talked about this a lot, and over the evolution of this, at DA, since I’ve been here for five years and like, that point right there is, I think it seems sort of obvious, but it took us a while to get to that, right? Like, meaning we used to more focus on almost using Elements as like, the thing that we were selling, and we… It took us a while for us to realize what you just said is exactly right. It’s like, it’s really about the advisor and the client and their relationship, and Elements is just an effective tool to be able to execute on… And bring up those conversations. But, it was an evolution, it took us a while to really have that click with us.

Ryan Isaac:
Yup.

Reese Harper:
Yeah, yeah, I think we had the same temptation that a lot of people do, which is, “I gotta sell my plan, I gotta sell my process, I’ve gotta sell my 12-step model, I gotta sell my calendar of things. I have to have a really big thing, to showcase or no one… What are they gonna say yes too?” It’s like, “Well, they’re saying, yes, to you, as a person, ’cause you know them, you’re gonna be able to answer their questions and guide them, and then you wanna let the whole process and technology be as simple as possible, so it doesn’t get in the way of that.” We want more conversations more often, we don’t want more data entry more often or more paperwork more often, or more plans more often. We want more conversations more often that are short, brief, easy, micro-interactions, and I don’t know, we’re… It’s taking me a long way to get that… Time to get that conviction too, but I’m pretty sure it’s the right… I mean, I know, it’s the right direction.

Ryan Isaac:
So 2023, the year we’re recording, this is the year that we… Dentist advisors are rolling out the Elements app to our hundreds and hundreds of dentist clients, all over the country. We’re so excited to be doing that. It’s a big undertaking, we’re learning a lot from the process.

Reese Harper:
Oh yeah!

Ryan Isaac:
Learning a lot about the tech, having a lot of feedback from people. It’s been wonderful. I’ll just say in the few weeks that I’ve been doing this, some of these very simple, quick interactions, some of the features of sending out… Like, there’s a feature on the advisor’s side to have a discussion, and input goals and next steps. And I’ve been loving this question of asking people like, “What do you wanna do this year? Money, not money, personal, business, whatever.” And putting those as goals, and then asking, “What do you wanna do in the next… Like, what’s important to get done in the next three months”, as next steps, hitting a button, sending out this, what you guys call a one-page plan, which is a new feature in Elements, that’s a snapshot of all the data and then some of these goals and values, and next steps in just one PDF, boom, to the email. It just felt like so much clarity and I’m so excited for it, but here’s my question is, can you talk about the lead up to this, you’ve been building elements now… Is it three years, multiple fundraising rounds, do you wanna talk about the latest one?

Ryan Isaac:
Why we felt like now was the time that, it’s time for Dentist Advisors’ clients to use the app? And kind of just, a little bit about the journey of what got Elements the actual technology company to this point.

Reese Harper:
Yeah, let me… Let’s clarify some of the questions, so I can make sure I answer them and not ramble too much, but of the context, the first one I’m hearing is, like, the staging of how we got here. I’ll be brief on that, ’cause I imagine that’s not super interesting to talk about my life to people, but the last couple of years, I would say… I’d say the first, four… Like, six to nine months of working on this, were more like project planning and research and trying to understand what the problem was, that I was feeling, but couldn’t quite put my feelers around and write out. And I’m still struggling with that. I can feel something, but a lot faster than I can say what it is that I need to do about it. [chuckle] So I knew that things were going slow, I knew that I wanted clients to understand their situation a little better, I wanted to reduce the cost of time and effort.

Reese Harper:
So the first year was basically doing research and building a really simple prototype to test, after we completed the research, ’cause I was still working as a financial advisor and pretty occupied by that. Because I went into fundraising, dude, we’re a rocket ship for sales, we’re crushing it, all of our numbers looked good. I went into that thinking, this was gonna be a walk in the park. Like, I thought…

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, easy.

Reese Harper:
Like August, I was like, “Dude, we got this. We’re crushing it.”

Ryan Isaac:
You would be telling people, “No.” Yeah.

Reese Harper:
Yeah, I was like, “We’re gonna have so… ”

Matt Mulcock:
Yeah, he’d be turning them down.

Reese Harper:
“We’re gonna be having so many people to pick from.” And the market started turning, inflation starts rising, like the stock market kept declining. I mean, it was like…

Matt Mulcock:
Cost of capital is going up.

Reese Harper:
A lot of liquidity in the market was getting held on to, waiting till Q1, Q2 of this year, just to make sure that they weren’t buying good companies like ours, like at the peak. They don’t wanna be buying companies like ours, when they have… The bottom is probably still a year out or six months out, ’cause they can keep waiting and put pressure on you and get really good bargains. Like, if someone could run out of money, not right now at the beginning of the decline, but if someone’s starting to run out of capital like at the Q1 or Q2 of next year where the market’s even tighter, then they might have a better buying opportunity, just to put more pressure on companies to drive their valuation down. So that was kind of the middle of what we were into. But anyway, I don’t think all of that, might not be that helpful for listeners…

Ryan Isaac:
It’s perfect, no.

Reese Harper:
But it’s fun to hear like the war stories, I think, when you’ve never raised money before.

Ryan Isaac:
It is.

Reese Harper:
And it’s nice when some founder’s willing to be transparent enough and not pretend like, it’s all easy. ‘Cause normally what you hear is just a bunch of yes, and success stories and people patting themselves in the back and telling you how amazing they are. If you can get someone to really…

Matt Mulcock:
Lots of survivorship bias, yeah, out there.

Reese Harper:
Lots of survivorship bias. And so, I think…

Ryan Isaac:
No, I think it’s really helpful.

Reese Harper:
Anyway.

Ryan Isaac:
That’s really good. I actually wanna switch gears to another big topic that you’ve been working on at Elements, but before I do that, really quick, I think it’s a good time to point out, as we start the year, our team at Dentist Advisors is… We do a lot of speaking and education as people know, a lot of stuff in person, over Zoom as well, and we’re making a big push to do a lot of education events at study clubs all over the country. And we’ve already got quite a few lined up for this year, it’s been pretty cool to reach out to clients and just say, “Hey, what are you a part of? What kind of groups you meet with?” And we now have… Now that we’re utilizing this Elements app within our client base, we can use it also in these educational formats, where audience members have their own version of the app on their phone and we’re kind of filling it out live or walking through it live. It’s been a really excellent educational tool, and we’re excited about that for clients, we’re also excited to use it to teach people in the industry, the broader industry.

Ryan Isaac:
So, this is kind of an invitation, as we’re on the subject to just… If you belong a study club or you help run one or have a friend or colleague that does, reach out to us and we’d love to come be a part of teaching these Elements principles at your study club. You can find actually more about this at dentistadvisors.com/workshop. So, Reece, one of the questions I wanted to ask you, maybe for the second half of this is about… I don’t know what you would call it, I would call it, values-based planning. I think it’s probably a fair statement to say that, in life, when we put our resources towards things that don’t align with our actual values, that’s where we get a lot of anxiety and stress and frustration and lack of motivation or whatever, but in financial planning, it’s especially true. If we’re putting money and resources towards goals or whatever that don’t align with our values, it causes people a lot of financial stress.

Ryan Isaac:
And that’s one of the biggest things we wanna alleviate with all this stuff, so can you maybe walk through what that means to do value… I don’t know what you call it, value-based financial planning, value-based financial decision-making, some of the value cards you guys have been using at Elements, and what your experience has been like, talking about… Making values a big part of the discussion before getting into logistics and strategy.

Reese Harper:
Yeah, it’s a great question, and I think you guys are gonna have a lot of fun this year doing seminars and study clubs on this topic, and all the difficulty of fundraising that I just shared, I mean it’s pretty amazing that over 500 advisors are using this app right now, that is allowing them to get to these values-driven conversations sooner and faster, just deeper, more impactful conversations, and I think you guys in the dental industry are just perfectly positioned to help bring a nice financial literacy training into study clubs that really helps put concepts into a dentist’s mind earlier in their career so that they’re not catching up on all this stuff when they have less time on their side.

Reese Harper:
A lot of the stuff, especially around values and purpose, like, it matters to have this philosophical foundation in place, or this bedrock in place, early in your career. The earlier you kind of get behind this framework, the better off you’ll be, so I’d encourage everybody to take advantage of Ryan and Matt and schedule something to get your group moving in a way that’s healthier for them. And I’ll probably start with just a story maybe of… I remember working with a dentist recently, who was actually in a really strong financial position, that ended up having an exit out of their practice, and was just… Had been sitting on quite a bit of money for almost 12 months.

Reese Harper:
And by all objective measures, I thought this person was like happy as a clam, just totally dialed. And I went and met with him, and I always bring… My values cards are something I keep in my backpack, and values cards, for those of you who are not familiar with them, they are just a card deck of dozens… I think there’s 72 or something values in this deck. And values might be something like, fun, it might be integrity, nature, wealth, different… These values are the things that sort of… We care about in our lives, and most people haven’t actually gone through an exercise, I’d recommend doing this with Ryan or Matt or, whoever you’re working with at DA, go through a values exercise with someone that…

Reese Harper:
We’ve got a website you can use too, to help you figure this out, but you’ll wanna narrow down your values to a small set that some people might call, core values, the specific number that you select is probably up to you. I would say no more than 10, ’cause it gets kind of diluted and you’d wanna rank your 10. I generally try to put them in a pyramid, so you have four at the bottom, then three, then two, then one at the top. But at least three, so at least three core values, of maybe as many as 10. You’ll have to decide how many, you just can’t live without. It’s a nice forcing function to sort of say, “Okay, you only have three, what are your three? What’s your top? What’s your number one?” I like building the pyramid because it sort of… It makes you pick a number one, it makes you add two more right below it, that gives you your top three, and then your next three round out, add up to be six, right. And then you’ve got your bottom in your pyramid that’s four.

Reese Harper:
It’s probably hard to envision this in your head, but I think we’ve posted right now, Ryan and Matt get in touch with them and you can get a copy of how to do this and they can even… They’ve got card decks too, but…

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, do you have the… Is the website live, that you’re working on, I know it’s been in beta testing.

Reese Harper:
Yeah. As of today, right now, it’s getelements.com/value-cards. That’s the one that we’re using right now.

Ryan Isaac:
Okay.

Reese Harper:
Maybe it’ll stay that URL forever, but if it doesn’t, I’m sure it’ll redirect.

Ryan Isaac:
Reach out, we’ll find it. Yeah.

Reese Harper:
What you’ll find is, I think that in order to make any financial decision, you need to start by really getting some conviction around what your values are, and they will change, but probably review them just once a year. You’ll notice like, maybe one… Your number 11th will come in and be in your top 10 and one of your top 10 will drop out. But it doesn’t usually shift a lot, I would just recommend doing this exercise once a year. Like for me, one of the things that’s starting to surface in my life is actually, fun and enjoyment. I didn’t have that, a couple of years ago, it was not in my top 10, didn’t even make it. And now, I’m starting to get to a place in my life where having fun is actually way more important to me than it used to be. I was very serious, very driven, very disciplined, but a lot of my friendships didn’t… I didn’t have time for a lot of my friends.

Reese Harper:
I was like building stuff and growing stuff, and I was really focused on that. And that wasn’t bad, like, I did some incredible things at that time. But I started noticing that friendship and fun started like… I was like, “Where is it? Is it gone? Did I not nurture it enough?” I don’t think there’s any… The wrong way to look at your values is like, “Oh, you had the wrong values.” It’s like, “No.” [chuckle]

Ryan Isaac:
Sure, yeah.

Reese Harper:
You have the values you value right now, and you’re just trying to be real about what they are. And then when you’re done with that values alignment, just do it once a year, but the first time you do this at… Once, you’re done with that exercise, I’d recommend documenting a purpose statement about, why money is important to you. Mine, I’ve documented it now twice, it’s gone through an evolution. Not super different though. When I first wrote it, my first purpose statement was, for myself, a lot… I’ll give you the words verbatim, so it’s not cryptic, but my purpose statement was, “The relentless pursuit of Ikigai”, which is a Japanese word. This is in parentheses right here. It’s a Japanese word that means purpose and meaning. So the relentless pursuit of Ikigai, for myself, my family, and my immediate sphere of influence, that was why money was important to me.

Reese Harper:
I thought money could help me, empower me, to help other people find meaning in their life and find value in their life, and that gave me a lot of purpose. So a lot of the decisions I was making, like, starting a new business or hiring people or expanding or trying to grow, it was really in service of my purpose, it helped me feel good to know I was actually helping other people find their strengths, lean into their areas of expertise, find fulfillment. And through entrepreneurship, I could do that more than I could through other… Let’s say, art projects. Like, I was a musician when I first started out in my career, and I think my real underlying purpose wasn’t being served as well, inside of music, because I wasn’t able to actually reach people in quite, as practical of a way as I can through the canvas of, let’s say business or entrepreneurship.

Reese Harper:
I don’t think my values or my purpose have changed that much. Today, I write my value statement slightly differently, but it basically means the same thing, so I change my words a little. But I think that that foundation… Like, if you make financial decisions without knowing those things, you’ll usually be on the wrong track for yourself. You’re going to be down a road that you… That is not aligned, if you don’t consider those, you’ll normally be misaligned. And what I mean by…

Ryan Isaac:
Can I jump in? Can I jump in? Oh yeah… Oh no, what you mean by that is…

Reese Harper:
What I mean by misaligned is, you’ll prioritize wealth maximization as the default. You will assume that, “I’m supposed to save money on taxes. I’ve gotta invest to get higher returns, I’ve got to add… I’ve gotta do more, I gotta have more, I gotta be more, I gotta do it faster.” Like, that’s the assumption, unless you’re aligned with your values and purpose, ’cause the default is just really powerful. There’s all of society, all of social media, all of dental industry comparisons, all of the heroes we worship in society. They have more than you, and they do it faster and they’ve got there quicker than you’re gonna get there. And so, if you’re making decisions based on the default, it’s probably gonna lead you to a place where you’re gonna be a little uncomfortable, unhappy… Not to say that growing your wealth isn’t important, like it… For some of you, it might actually be the most important thing.

Reese Harper:
Like you might find in your values exercise that wealth is your number one value, there’s nothing wrong with that. Wealth can be a very powerful value that isn’t negative, it’s a positive value, it’s just the default I think in financial planning, for what people assume we should be doing is making wealth our number one value at the expense of some of the others. And for a lot of people, that just turns out to not be true, it’s actually… It might not even be in their top 10.

Ryan Isaac:
Did we finish the story about the client you were working on that you assumed he had blissful happiness and you dug into values and then what?

Reese Harper:
Well, as we went through that… As I sat down with him, I brought my values cards and we went through the exercise, what was really apparent to me is, this person was financially independent. Like, there was no need to work anymore.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, as of that moment. Like, just hang it up. Yeah.

Reese Harper:
And they were not happy, like, not happy at all. Their values were closely tied with their previous identity as a business owner. Creativity was their second most important value, security was their… Like, a very high value, and he interpreted security as, “Being able to control my environment, my circumstances as it relates to creativity”, but he was in a buyout agreement that had him kind of handcuffed essentially for three years, through this DSO exit. And it was like just kind of a really uncomfortable situation, and we did this values exercise, we looked at everything. And this is someone that I… This is… I do a lot of work with people that aren’t my clients and I can’t commit to having clients, so I’ll just say transparently, I didn’t know this person beforehand, and I… They’re not my client now, I was just like, “I’ll help you out. And we’ll like, let’s go to lunch and chat.”

Reese Harper:
The conclusion of this meeting was, this person walked away realizing that they needed to go orient their life back to some of these core values, and that money really is not part of the equation. Like, they actually made a wealth maximization decision at the expense of some of their values, and now they’re having to go back to find the values even though they have all the money. And I could… Another opposite story that I think is interesting to tell is, I was in Guatemala last summer, and I met a guy named Raoul who by all objective standards, is what I would consider, financially secure. Not independent, they’re very different. Security is more of a financial health thing that I would describe. Like when you’re secure, you have a reasonable amount of savings, your cash flow is not going backwards.

Ryan Isaac:
You’ve got some income. Yeah.

Reese Harper:
You’re feeling secure, that’s very different than financial independence, which is like, “I don’t have to work anymore, ’cause I have all these assets that are either paying me passive income or I’ve got a liquid portfolio growing enough to… Where I don’t have to work anymore.” But what the biggest surprise to me is that this person, he was working in a non-profit in Guatemala, installing square foot gardens for people that had been eating corn as their primary source of food for the last 10 years. And Guatemala is a pretty chronically malnourished country, and a lot of the kids have both biologic… Like, mental and physical stunts to their growth, because they’re only eating corn, either corn syrup in the form of Coke or corn in terms of corn tortillas, just straight corn tortillas like every day.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, it sounds like my high school diet basically.

[laughter]

Reese Harper:
Yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Reese Harper:
Anyway, this guy had been serving for 10 years as the director of a non-profit, helping install gardens and helping people have vegetables in their lives and sort of eat healthier. He wasn’t in poverty, but he was a man of very meager means, but was super aligned with his values, and it became very clear to me that that was the case, and he was healthy with his finances. Like, he was secure, he… I don’t know the exact details of his financial picture, but he did share some with me, and I could tell, he was not even close to financial independence, but he was secure. He didn’t worry, his financial anxiety and fear was gone. And that’s when it just kind of hit me, between that conversation and this other conversation, where I saw that, someone with very little means was totally aligned and secure and peaceful, and someone with a lot of means was unhappy, it made me realize there was a place, there’s a space between, probably where a dentist is at, when they get out of dental school and they got a negative net worth of $500,000.

Reese Harper:
From that point to having lots and lots of money in the bank, you don’t have to get to financial independence to find financial freedom, to find peace, security, it’s way before financial independence. And the goal shouldn’t be financial independence, the goal should be just financial peace, financial security, financial freedom. And it’s this weird combination to me, of like, values and purpose alignment, like, deep values and purpose alignment that somehow feels like a tangible asset that like, if you were to take someone that didn’t have purpose and alignment and compared them to someone who did. You know, the person who’s got deep purpose and values alignment, doesn’t need as much in order to hit that place where they feel free, where they feel financial peace. It’s still…

Reese Harper:
You need more than broke with no liquidity and no money, like you can’t… It’s not a mindset thing where you’re just like, “I gotta think my way there.” It doesn’t work that way, it’s not that cavalier, so that’s what’s always bothered me about some of Dave Ramsay’s work and…

Ryan Isaac:
Sure.

Reese Harper:
And anyone who’s just throwing platitudes out there. It’s like there’s an exact science to achieving the feeling of where you’re feeling like you have enough. But it’s well before you thought. And that’s what’s cool about it, is you can live your whole life with that feeling of just like, “Man, money’s not that stressful anymore.” You could live your whole life that way, and you could achieve that in your early career and just enjoy your whole life, if you’re deeply aligned in both of the… The financial health side is super important, like increased liquidity, appropriate debt to income ratios, the appropriate savings rate. I could throw out tons of KPIs that you guys know about, that you’re looking for, trying to measure, ’cause if someone’s out of alignment with that financial health, no amount of values and purpose alignment or mindset is gonna bring them into balance.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, they have their place.

Reese Harper:
But vice-versa. And so, there’s this kind of equilibrium point that I’m calling it now, I don’t know what else to call it, this like equilibrium point where like, it… The fear of money just disappears in the middle of those two extremes, where you’re like, “Oh, I guess I’m not scared anymore.” And that is really the gift I think of good financial planning, working with a financial advisor is, getting to that place where you’re like, “You know what, money isn’t… Doesn’t scare me. It doesn’t make me scared, I’m not worried, I don’t wake up in the morning freaking out. I’m gonna be fine.” But you’re not financially independent, you’re not…

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, you’re not done, you can’t stop working today.

Reese Harper:
No, but there’s like… You’re done somehow, because you’re so aligned with your values and purpose, you’re so confident that you’re gonna be generating income through this work you love, and this financial strength that you have, that’s just constantly building and improving, that you’re just kind of relaxed. And I’m not saying financial independence isn’t an important goal for some people, but man, I don’t think your happiness goes up at all. Like, it… Your happiness climbs until you hit that freedom moment, but I just don’t know that that freedom moment can be defined by a number. Financial freedom is just not a number.

Matt Mulcock:
I think it’s interesting, Reece… I mean, that was amazing, by the way, and I have so many thoughts, we could go probably on this for four hours.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, it’s so awesome.

Matt Mulcock:
But it’s interesting you talk about the… What you’re talking about, just at the end here, and the, kind of the whole theme of that is like, again, in speaking of the traditional advisor approach was always retirement. Retirement, retirement. It was always about, “How do we get you to retirement?” Or it’s kind of shifting now to financial independence, we talk about work being optional here, but this is more… I think, what you’re hitting on, is truly like, the goal of this work that we do is what… Is this very thing. Is, how do we get you to align you getting financially secure, financially healthy, and you’re aligning your money and… The money you’re bringing in and the spending, aligning that with your values, you can get to this, like you said, this financial piece, so much sooner before this, “retirement”, or… But again, that traditional model gets the hooks in you and you’re thinking like…

Reese Harper:
It does.

Matt Mulcock:
It’s like, so easy to talk about, “Well, when are you gonna retire? Let’s talk about that.” It’s like, you’re 30 years old, let’s not think about that right now.

Reese Harper:
It a great, it’s a great point.

Matt Mulcock:
Let’s think about what you’re talking about right here, so I think that it’s a really good point you made.

Ryan Isaac:
Well, it gets you to start chasing things that you might not even wanna chase, and then not noticing things that you probably wish you were noticing along the way, and… Anyway, I don’t have anything to add to that. That was really…

Reese Harper:
What stuck out to you, man? I’m just curious of what about that felt like resonant to you.

Ryan Isaac:
The concept of financial peace or security, I like that term better, financial security being different than financial independence, and you can achieve financial security early in your career, long before you could hang it up and not have to work anymore. And I can speak from a lot of personal experience, and then in my own life and working with clients, just watching people… You go through points where you feel like you’re missing out on something, it might be time spent in another part of your life or hobbies or something that you’re not pursuing because you’re trying to maximize for wealth and knowing that there’s a balance that you can strike along the way, I think is just… It just feels so key to me in the concept of financial planning. Life and money can’t all be about, at 65, and then… And then it’s time to… It can’t be, it just, it can’t be, for so many reasons.

Reese Harper:
Ah, it’s so true, man. And I think that’s the thing you’re trying to get… I think the thing we’re trying to get to with this is, you really want the fear of money to disappear, you’re wanting the fear of money, of being destitute, of like, running out of money, fear of losing your house, not retiring, the fear of paying for kids college and not… Or the fear of maybe not being able to see places in the world that you wanna go to, maybe a fear of not being able to travel, a fear of not having the house you want, not having the car you want… Like, reasonable wants are a part of financial security. I mean, you can’t say, “Whoa, we just gotta all get comfortable with the needs that we got.” It’s like, “Well, some of us value fine dining.” That’s me, so, “I’m sorry, I’m gonna need to feel secure.” If you’re budgeting 50 bucks a meal for me and my wife to have throughout retirement, I’m gonna be like, “Oh, it’s just kind of like a little tight.”

Ryan Isaac:
It’s not gonna work.

Reese Harper:
So like, you can’t… And Ryan… Like, Ryan has different preferences than I have. And Matt has different preferences than I have… Like, reasonable wants are a part of this picture. This isn’t like… We’re not all gonna need the same thing, reasonable is different to each of us, in different areas. And so, I think once your values and purpose are really defined and you’ve got real good alignment there, you’ll find… You’ll get into this place where, a lot of good things start happening for you in your career, ’cause your energy is really good, you’re optimistic, you’re feeling great, and then somehow…

Ryan Isaac:
You’re mind is… Yeah.

Reese Harper:
Just like, good stuff just starts happening. And then this other side is like… Well, financial health is a real thing. Like, if you go and borrow money at 56% of your gross income, you’re just toast. It’s just, there’s not gonna be… Your mindset is gonna have… You’d have to be a real Jedi mindset, Zen guru, to get over a 58% debt to income ratio. Like, you can. Like, it’s possible, but to put a little bit of this mindset side is like, there is a world where… In a theoretical world, where the healthy finances probably wouldn’t actually affect you. We should be strong enough to be like, “Life is good, I’m fine right now, I’m just okay.” But we don’t live in that world, we live in a world, where we have to buy food and money is a thing, and currency is real, and we have houses and cars in life and vacations, and like, this is a pragmatic thing too, we’re gonna need to have healthy financial vital signs.

Reese Harper:
Financial health has to be a thing, but wealth maximization or an account the size of your account balances it’s not actually… Our financial health is not correlated as much to volume of money or amount of wealth, as it is to these other characteristics like, a savings rate, which is an indication of progress or liquidity score, which is an indication of downside protection. I think all of these, there’s a lot of scores inside of the Elements framework that are just intended to help people feel secure. And that’s where we’re trying to get to first. Just get to a place where you have financial security. Sometimes you have to get that through working with an advisor, because self-assessing this just isn’t enough. Like, it’s really hard to self-diagnose, whether you’re aligned with values and purpose, and whether your health is… Your finances are healthy.

Reese Harper:
It’s easy to invest money in an index fund, but it’s really hard to get alignment with your money and your values. It’s really hard on your own. I can’t even do it, and I’m a financial advisor. I really have to depend on people like Carl Richards, or Ryan Issac, or Matt Mulcock, like, I have to ask people like, is this… Or My wife, she now knows when I’m getting out of whack and my finances are sort of not… My money is not really aligned with my values. And it’s a real thing, it’s a real thing.

Ryan Isaac:
Love it. Geez, thank you so much, Reece, for spending the time and going through that, man.

Matt Mulcock:
Can we do a part two? This… I want to do a part two.

Ryan Isaac:
We could do a two part…

Reese Harper:
Yeah, we should get back together again. This is values and purpose one, folks. And…

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, values and purpose.

Reese Harper:
Thanks for letting me be a part of it.

Ryan Isaac:
No, thank you, man. Thanks for Matt, being here as always, everyone for tuning in. That probably generated a lot of cool questions in your mind, while you listened to this and go to dentistadvisors.com, and there’s a lot of resources on there to help you learn more about it, we’d love to chat with you too, if you have any money questions at all, we love answering money questions and pointing you in the right direction. So, thanks for being here. Thanks again, Reece and Matt.

Matt Mulcock:
Yeah, thanks Ryan, thanks, Reece.

Ryan Isaac:
And catch everyone on another episode of the Dentist Money Show, take care now, bye-bye. 

Behavioral Finance