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Dentists, Puns, and Money is a podcast focused on two things: The financial topics relevant to dentists leaving clinical practice and the stories and lessons of dentists who have already done so.
1. The stories of dentists who have transitioned from full-time clinical dentistry.
2. The financial topics that are relevant for dentists making that transition.
If you’re a dentist thinking about your exit from clinical, and you’d like to learn from the experiences of other dentists who have made that transition, be sure to subscribe to your favorite podcast app.
Host Shawn Terrell also dives deep into the many financial components of exiting dentistry, including tax reduction strategies and how to live off your assets.
And, we try to keep it light by mixing in a bad joke… or two.
Please note: Dentists, Puns, and Money was previously known as The Practice Growth Podcast until March 2022.
Shawn Terrell (00:01.398)
Welcome to Dentists, Puns, and Money. I am your host, Shawn Terrell. And today I'm going to talk about some of the money lessons that I learned after a near-death experience and suffering two strokes in 2023. Last episode, if you didn't catch it, was talking about some of the life lessons that I learned. So today's episode talking about some of the money lessons that I've learned as we drift back to a little bit more of the topics that are
a little bit more pertinent to the title of the podcast money. So a little story first. There is a bike ride in Iowa every July called RAGBRAI. People that are from Iowa will know all about it. But if you're not from Iowa, you might not have heard of it. But basically this bike ride starts on the western half of the state and goes all the way to the eastern half of the state.
takes a whole week, but basically you ride your bike across the entire state of Iowa, let's say 50 to 100 miles each day to get across the entire state in a week. So I did part of that bike ride in 2024. And it's interesting that when you're riding for hours out in the open countryside of the state of Iowa,
you would forget to look around and enjoy the view. But that almost happened to me. I had to be very conscious about stopping to enjoy the view because it's hot, you're tired. There's a lot of other bikes around you most of the time because there's tens of thousands of people that did this bike ride every year, amazingly. And even when there's no other bike riders around you and you're out in the middle of nowhere, so to speak,
You have to pay attention to the road in front of you to make sure that you don't hit a crack or a pothole or something that could wipe you out. So it's really hard to stop and enjoy the view. And I use this as an analogy because as it relates to your money and your life, everyday life can really make it hard sometimes and really crowd out some of the big most important things related to your money that are important to make sure you get done at some.
Shawn Terrell (02:27.206)
And...
If you're a dentist, you have to worry about your clinical practice and maybe you own your practice. So you're a business owner and manage employees as well. Maybe your spouse and a parent and those have different things on a day to day basis that you have to take care of or occupy your head space. So it can be really easy to have some big important things related to your money get crowded out. But for me, a near death experience solidified some of the things I've done in the past.
and also made me think about some other things that I'm going to do differently moving forward. So I thought I would share those. Money lesson number one from my near death experience, just get organized. It's not easy to do, but with my strokes, there was months where I couldn't see, I couldn't type, I couldn't write by hand.
And if I had not been pretty organized with my life and my money prior to that happening, it would have been extremely difficult to take care of all the personal bills and the medical bills and the insurance claims that needed to be taken care of in the aftermath of everything happening to me. The second piece of that is make sure you get your estate planning documents completed at some point, somehow, some way.
That's your will, trust if that's applicable to your situation, living wills, medical powers of attorney. I think that's most of it. I actually did an episode, a podcast episode about this a couple of years back. I think it's episode 52. That's a more detailed explanation of everything that needs to be covered with that. I have not listened to that episode recently, but I think it still stands up and still probably.
Shawn Terrell (04:27.484)
includes everything that you need to think about as it relates to your important legal documents if something happens to you. Because if something happens to you, there's not going to be time to get that stuff done. And even if you have a long drawn out illness or medical episode, that's not going to be something that you'd want to do or take care of or worry about during that stage.
of healing and recovery. important to get organized with your laptop. Just kind of like where you keep everything from a money perspective and then also get your estate planning documents done at some point. There's never a right time to do something like that or some things like that. But what I like to do is there are, if you look at your year,
busier seasons of life or busier periods throughout your year and slower periods through your year. Where I live in Iowa, I like to think about the colder winter months like we're in right now, November, December, January, February as really good times to work on some of those big picture projects when you don't want to be outside riding your bike, for example, or can't be because it's too cold. So those are good times during the year to worry about.
getting organized and getting your estate planning documents done if you're looking for a tip. Money lesson number two, as it relates to your documents, make them easy to find. And this is one place where I arguably failed. I did have all my estate planning documents completed prior to my near-death experience, but they were in my safety deposit box in the bank, which
my wife knew where they were, but if something had happened to her, if it had been an accident, no one else would have known where they were. On top of that, even with my wife being okay and knowing where everything was related to that, it wouldn't have been ideal for her to have to go to the bank and get the safety deposit box out in the midst of me being in the ICU.
Shawn Terrell (06:41.369)
having them handy somewhere in your house, probably a better idea than having them in your safety deposit box. And then along with that, in 2024, it's not just about the physical hard copy documents anymore, it's also about your digital assets as well and having access to all your electronic files. So if you have a laptop or a computer where you keep everything, make sure someone else that you trust knows how to get in there and where everything is.
It might be as simple as someone having access or knowing the password to your phone in the event that you're incapacitated or no longer here and someone needs to access a lot of that important information. Money lesson number three from a near-death experience. Get disability insurance or if you have disability insurance already, strongly consider keeping it.
So a little bit of backstory on me and my career, if you don't know this already, is that I sort of started out being a disability insurance, I don't know if I can call myself an expert, but liaison and helping a lot of dentists get disability insurance earlier or early in their careers or right out of dental school. And I've now transitioned to working with dentists later in their career. But in the process of
helping other dentists get disability insurance and vetting those contracts and that information for them. I also purchased some on myself, which was a really good decision because when you can't work or read or write or type for a long period of time, having disability insurance from a financial perspective certainly helps both pay the bills and just if you don't have to worry about money.
at a time like that, it's a really big blessing. a question that I get sometimes from dentists that are near the end of their careers is, should I keep my disability insurance? And I hesitate to make a blanket statement about that for everyone that might be listening, that's a dentist at the end of their career. But what I would say is if you are still financially dependent on the money coming in from practicing dentistry,
Shawn Terrell (09:03.254)
then you should probably think about or strongly think about keeping your disability insurance. If you are not financially dependent on practicing at all and you're doing it just for the meaning of doing it or you really enjoy practicing, then maybe that would be a situation where someone could think about getting rid of disability insurance. But it's important to get it if you haven't gotten it already and keep it if you've had it for a long time, potentially.
I don't want to make any absolute statements. So in closing, this episode sort of marks the end of me talking about the strokes that I suffered in 2023 and explaining what happened and sort of the life and the money lessons that I've learned from it. I'm sure I'll continue to reference what happened in future episodes.
And I've also thought about how I don't know if I can effectively relay what having a near-death experience feels like or how that would affect someone. I think it would kind of be like trying to explain if you are a parent like I am, what it's like to be a parent to all the other people or other people in your life that are not parents. Or if you have started a business or you own your own business,
your own dental practice, it's really hard sometimes to effectively relay or communicate what that's actually like to someone who has not done that or does not own a business or own their own practice. So I hope I've been able to communicate that a little bit, but I also recognize that maybe that's not the easiest thing to do. It's just something that you, if you've experienced that you get it. And sometimes if you've never experienced some of these big life things, and it's really hard to understand what it's like, but
Thank you for being here and hearing my story. I'm Shawn Terrell. I'm not sure what I'm going to talk about next on the podcast. I'm sure I'll think of something, but thank you for following along and yeah, we'll talk to you again very, soon.