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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 (00:02.518)
Welcome to Dentists, Puns and Money. I am your host, Shawn Terrell. This podcast is brought to you by Dentist Exit Planning. At Dentist Exit Planning, we help dentists leaving clinical in the next five years build their financial treatment plan for life after dentistry. So I returned home recently after being out of town for a few days. And as I was pulling into my driveway, I noticed it right away.
My lawn was on the verge of being out of control. The grass was tall, the dandelions were taller, and there was no doubt I really needed to mow right away. But then I remembered something. I really don't care about my lawn. Let me back up. I was returning from being gone at a Cub Scout camp out with my oldest son.
And in the few days before we left, I really did plan to mow, but it kept raining right around the time that I planned to do it. And mowing wet grass, if you've ever done it, it's not a fun experience. So the job did not get done before we went camping for the weekend. And we got home from camping around lunchtime on a beautiful Sunday, not a cloud in the sky, perfect time to mow. But the camping gear needed to be dried out and organized and put away.
and I hadn't seen my other son in a few days and he really wanted to go on a bike ride and my wife really needed a break from my other son after being home with him for a few days. So I had a choice to make. could wedge the yard work into a lovely spring Sunday or I could push it off one more day and not mow until Monday, which it was supposed to be nice. So that would worked out fine. I could practically hear my neighbors.
and their thought bubbles thinking about whether or not they should try to get me written up with the HOA. But I resisted because unlike most of my neighbors, I really don't care about my lawn. And I'm probably giving the impression that my lawn is the worst on the block. I don't think it is. It's just that I concluded a while back that you really have to decide in life what you're really gonna care about.
Shawn Terrell (02:17.959)
And in part because of the near-death experience that I had a few years ago, and I've talked about that, I decided that I won't spend a beautiful weekend doing yard work anymore instead of going to a park or on a bike ride with my family because you really can't care about everything all the time. And it occurred to me while I was reaffirming my decision to not mow on a gorgeous Sunday,
that there is a similarity between this situation and dentists who are leaving clinical practice for life after dentistry. You, Dr. Dentist, as you think about life after clinical and your retirement to whatever comes next, have to decide how much you care about money. And to clarify, almost everyone cares about money and making sure they have enough to live.
What I mean is, you care enough about money to be proactive about how you're gonna handle it when you retire from dentistry? Because to be fair, it might work out fine if you don't care that much and take more of a reactive approach with your money and how you're gonna spend it in your life after clinical. So here's a few examples of being proactive with your money in retirement.
Number one would be building an income plan for retirement with your assets when and how to start drawing Social Security How much to take out of your investment accounts and when? Having a strategy for required minimum distributions if you have deferred a lot of income during your working years your practice years Thinking about how you're gonna handle market downturns, which are probably inevitable over a long Retirement like decades mark is probably gonna go down
from time to time. Number two would be being proactive about tax optimization. So I have talked about this a number of times, but it bears repeating here. I don't think there are these huge, large moves that you can make to really lower your lifetime tax bill. I think it's more about many micro engagements or micro actions.
Shawn Terrell (04:35.627)
with your taxes over long periods of time that sort of add up and compound into a decent amount of tax savings over your lifetime or what's left of your life when you are in retirement over your lifetime.
And so that might include Roth IRA conversions or converting some money that you have in a tax deferred or a pre-tax account, paying tax on it now and moving it into a Roth IRA. And then another micro engagement on a yearly basis that might reduce or lower your lifetime tax bill would be something called tax lost harvesting with taxable investment accounts. So there's a couple of examples of that. And then number three,
The number three example of sort of being proactive with your money or deciding to care about your money ahead of retirement would be sort of being intentional about anything that you might want to leave behind for other people or other things or institutions that you care about like charities. One approach would be just to kind of live your life in retirement and spend what you spend and whatever is left over goes to your spouse or your relatives or other charities.
But if you really want to get into it a little bit more and that's a very important thing to you you really care about that then there is probably a more intentional more proactive more efficient way to leave money behind to Whoever or whatever you care about after you are no longer here so
One thing I want to make sure I'm clear about is that if you have a pretty big disparity between how much you have to spend in retirement and what your cost of living actually is, you might not need to care that much about your money. It might work out just fine. In other words, if you were a really good saver during your high earning practice years and you stuffed a lot of away,
Shawn Terrell (06:34.89)
and you don't plan to drive a Lamborghini and you don't plan to eat caviar for breakfast every day in retirement, then there might not be anything to sweat. Spending lots of time and energy planning might be a waste of time and you might be better off focusing on and caring about other things. So you could definitely think about your money in your post-clinical life a lot like the way I currently think about my yard. That it's sort of important.
It's got to be addressed, but you don't have to really wring your hands over when and how that gets done. Now, I do want to mention that some would probably say I should outsource my yard work, my lawn work, and I probably should, maybe I should. But I also don't need my lawn mowed every five days and I don't need it nitrogened up every month. And in my experience, that's what lawn companies want to do. So I will stick with the DIY approach.
for now and not going too crazy on it. How about you? How much do you care about your money? So how about you? How much do you care about your money? If you don't care too much, like I said, it might work out just fine. If you do care and you want help with it, shoot me an email at shawn@ dentistexit.com Couple reminders before I go and wrap up.
Dentist Exit Planning again helps dentists leaving clinical within the next five years build their financial treatment plan for life after dentistry. And also a reminder that Dentist Exit Planning is a registered investment advisor. The information presented here should not be interpreted as investment, legal, tax, financial planning, or wealth management advice. It's for educational purposes only and past performance is not indicative of future results.
That's all I have for now. I am Shawn Terrell. Thanks for following along and we will talk to you again very soon.