Financial Planning for Practice Owners

We are never paid commission for selling financial products. This means your advisor is free to explore the entire marketplace and focus on exactly what you need. We'll build on what you have, using some of your existing solutions and then recommending improvements. You’ll have confidence knowing that our compensation only comes from you, our client.

Our compensation structure also allows us to provide advice you wouldn’t typically receive from other financial advisors. Whether you want to purchase a piece of real estate, restructure your estate plan, save for kids’ college, or analyze an associate agreement, your advisor is here to help you get organized, analyze options, and implement the right solutions.

Using a limited power of attorney, we will establish lines of communication with each of your professional contacts to request data and documents on a regular basis. In essence, we’ll be the quarterback of your service provider team and make sure your financial playbook includes the most up-to-date information from all the right sources. This allows us to complete much of our analysis behind the scenes without disrupting your busy schedule.

In our experience, most financial advisors try to take generic solutions intended for the broad population and make them work for dentists. We see this happen with retirement plan design, lending, insurance, investments, budgeting, and other critical financial planning decisions. Whether you're an associate, a practice owner, or a large enterprise, we've built a planning process that is customized to the challenges and goals you have for your career.

Our advisors have access to financial statistics for hundreds of dentists, and they often know what course of action has been most successful for someone in your situation. Instead of paying a generalist advisor to learn the nuances of your profession, you’ll benefit from the experience we’ve gained over the years as dental-specific advisors.

Understanding the growth and trajectory of your practice is critical for an investment advisor. Sometimes it makes sense to invest in equipment, expansion, or an associate. Other times it makes sense to save for retirement or pay down debt. Making investments in the right place at the right time requires visibility into all the moving parts of your personal and practice finances.

Because all of our advisors are dental-specific, we can leverage our collective experience to make more insightful recommendations. Our advisors meet often to discuss cases, changes, and new trends. As dentistry evolves, so do our advisors and their intellectual capital.

Debt is a major source of financial stress for a dentist. Between student loans, practice loans, and mortgages, the pile of debt can seem insurmountable. But debt doesn’t have to be a bad four letter word. We will show you how debt factors into your overall financial strategy and help you find the right balance between paying it down and saving for the future.

Upfront, and as part of our ongoing planning services, we will analyze your loans and provide recommendations to secure the best financing options, preserve enough cash, and build your net worth. Our network of lenders who specialize in dentistry often gives us access to creative and responsible solutions to grow your net worth as quickly as possible. As your net worth increases, and you build personal liquidity, you can also begin to borrow against your own liquid assets, often at very competitive rates which may allow your net worth to compound even faster.

View more content related to debt management

Within your initial financial plan, you’ll see a thorough analysis of your existing insurance policies and our recommendations for improvement. We’ll take a look at your life insurance, personal and practice disability, business overhead disability, buy-sell, key person, personal liability, and business liability. Each of these policies will be reviewed on an annual schedule so we can make adjustments as your spending and net worth change.

A retirement plan is one of the most proactive ways to reduce and defer taxes, and to attract the best employees. This could mean a SIMPLE IRA, Safe Harbor 401(k), profit sharing plan, cash balance plans or other pension plan designs. It's important to get advice from someone who is not incentivized to sell you a retirement plan. In many cases, the timing and type of plan you establish will either accelerate your growth or hold you back. We will provide an independent voice of reason to help you understand all the options available in the marketplace—not just the ones available through a single provider.

As technology and service models change, the best-of-class retirement plans also change. We can work with your existing provider to enhance the investment selection and design of your existing plan, or we can recommend a more optimal solution with a new servicing partner that might be a better fit for your situation. The optimal design is often different for each practice. Every year, we'll collect a new practice staff census and analyze your retirement plan to see if we can increase your tax deductions. This is particularly important as your collections and personal income reach new levels and higher tax brackets.

Estate planning is the management of your affairs upon your death. As the party who has access to a comprehensive picture of your financial details, we are in a unique position to help your attorney develop and update your estate plan as changes to your financial life require it. When you have children, obtain new real estate assets, apply for additional loans, or reach new levels of liquidity and net worth, you’ll need to make adjustments to your existing estate plan. This might be as simple as a will or trust, but may be as complex as an asset protection trust, or even a Charitable trust. In most cases, you'll need to establish a basic estate plan early in your career, and then enhance that plan as your wealth increases—which is always a combination of good insurance planning and timely additions of new trusts and business entities to your financial profile.

Due to the state-specific nature of many legal issues, it's important to hire a trustworthy general counsel attorney who is familiar with your state laws, but it's also important to have an estate planning specialist who is familiar with this area of law. We'll help work with your existing attorney, or help you decide on a new team that will best meet your needs. We will make sure that the ownership and titling on all of your investment accounts and insurance policies are in line with your existing estate plan. As your assets continue to grow, we will also recommend at specific times for you to have asset protection conversations with your attorney that may not have been relevant when your income and net worth were at lower levels.

Beyond the normal deduction you receive from donations, sometimes you can receive additional tax benefits when you give to a great cause. As opposed to simply writing a check to your church or favorite charity, we can do an audit of your investment accounts to find specific lots of securities that have the most significant capital gains. Then we can donate those shares to charities who accept in-kind contributions, and eliminate the capital gain taxes owed on those highly appreciated mutual funds, stocks, bonds, or ETF's. If you are saving money on a regular basis, we can often make these donations with minimum impact to your portfolio diversification. As with all tax matters, it's important for us to collaborate with your CPA to have a discussion if we are contemplating a large donation and explore any unknown variables specific to each tax year.