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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 (00:01.487)
Welcome to Dentists, Puns, and Money. I am your host, Shawn Terrell. And I wasn't initially sure what to talk about in this episode after spending the last several episodes talking about the health challenges I had in 2023 and the two strokes that I suffered. But upon thinking about it a little bit and reflecting upon it, I think the most impactful thing to talk about moving forward, or at least today, is
sort of the reflections that I've had after a near-death experience. And I want to do that from two different perspectives. One from what I would call a life perspective and how I think about life now, maybe a little bit differently. And then the second perspective is what I've learned from a near-death experience related to or related kind of around the money perspective.
which I think is more in line with the original and I think moving forward objective of the podcast, which is around money and how dentists that are about to or getting out of clinical should think about the money aspect of that transition away from clinical. So today talking about life and what I've learned from that perspective. And then next time, next podcast episode, I'll talk about sort of the money elements of a near death experience.
I laugh to alleviate sort of the stress or the pressure of me talking about that. That's kind of my way that I deal with that. One housekeeping thing before I get started. I've noticed that the last several episodes, the audio has been a little bit spotty. So my short term solution to that is to wear these AirPods as I record, which will hopefully make the audio a little bit better. But if you're watching on YouTube, it sort of makes me look like a dead.
Delta Bravo as I record wearing AirPods. So apologies in advance for that, but hopefully the audio is better. So to transition, I have this joke about putting our six-year-old son to bed at night. And that joke is that he sort of turns into Socrates a lot of nights around bedtime, which is my way of saying he can get very philosophical as it's time to go to bed.
Shawn Terrell (02:23.589)
Part of that is most definitely the stall tactic of a six-year-old boy, but it's also kind of his brain winding down and getting ready for sleep. So I say that as I'm about to get a little bit philosophical and talking about what I've learned and I do so at the risk of sounding like I think my six-year-old sounds at bedtime some nights, which is like a philosopher or Socrates. So life lesson number one that I've learned
from this near-death experience is I think people spend too much of their lives focused on work and working. And I'm talking to myself as I say that as well, but hopefully by sharing this, this will help a few other people. It would be really easy and more clean if like before my strokes, if I was this total workaholic and then I realized that after this near-death experience, I had it all wrong.
That's not exactly accurate. I think COVID or the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 taught me that I needed to figure out how to work or be less focused on work and more focused on what I want out of life and how to like fit those two things together. But then the stroke definitely made that more or the strokes definitely made that more.
apparent more clear, however you want to say it. So I just think that it's this huge lie that we as Americans have to go, go, go and hustle, hustle, hustle and work 40 or 50 or 80 hours a week for 40 years to theoretically get to age 65 or whatever the retirement age is to then enjoy life and relax. just think that's
asinine if you stop and think about it. So the lesson that I have become more clear about and maybe this will help someone listening or watching is that if there's a way to enjoy more of life while you're in the middle of it, that would maybe be a good thing because we are not guaranteed this carrot at the end of the rainbow if you want to call it that or pot of gold at the end of the rainbow where
Shawn Terrell (04:48.851)
Forty years from now, we're going to have some glorious retirement where we can all of a sudden have the time, space and money to do everything that we want to do or enjoy doing. I think it's important to try to enjoy the things and the people and the experiences along the way as well. So that's life lesson number one. Life lesson number two, and this sort of relates to what I just talked about. But the second lesson that I've learned is that your health will definitely change at some point.
in the future and you will eventually or your life will eventually become well I guess it won't if you if it all ends suddenly like it almost did for me this isn't necessarily true but at some point in the future getting healthy again or staying alive will become your reality whether that's going to doctor's appointments having surgeries taking medication
And if you're not healthy, if you don't have your health, then that becomes your entire existence, trying to get your health back. And I lived that for several months and I absolutely hated it. So I think the gift that I've been given and that I hope that other people can learn from is that I have gotten a lot of my health back and am now able to do a lot of the things that I could do before physically.
And I just think it would be a tragedy for someone to be older than I am now, like 60, 70, 80, lose their health, realize that they're never going to get it back and realize that they sort of missed the window to do all the things that they really wanted to do or experience all the things that they really wanted to experience out of life. And because their health has changed irrevocably, that they can no longer do those things.
Life lesson number three. So you just can't account for everything in life as much as you want to. And as this relates to me. So before I went all the way out on my own business wise in 2020 2021, I sort of evaluated that decision by looking at it as well. If I crash and burn on being a business for myself or this niche of working with dentists just doesn't work out and I
Shawn Terrell (07:15.876)
Absolutely have to. I can always go dig ditches or do something else. And what I didn't account for was losing my eyesight and losing the ability, definitely temporarily, probably forever to lift, like physically lift heavy things. And I had sort of a backup plan for a lot of things, but not losing my eyesight and being unable to drive for a long period of time and not being able to
work or earn money using physical strength like I thought I might be able to do. So those are the things that I didn't account for and it taught me that in life you can try to sort of plug all these holes and make sure you have a backup plan to your backup plan but there's just gonna be some things that you didn't think about or you didn't see coming and not being able to see, not being able to physically lift heavy things.
not being able to use my hands as well as I used to be able to use them and definitely having an issue with my brain, the strokes, I didn't account for those things. So that's just life I guess and sometimes you just have to or I've learned that you have to at least let that go. Life lesson number four from my near-death experience. Pay attention to
who shows up for you during those really hard times when things happen. And that's sort of a two-part way to explain this. Number one, like a lot of people, friends and family physically showed up for me right away. We're at the hospital the same day and in the weeks and months that followed, we're physically there to help with everything that me and our family needed help with right away.
But the second part of that too that I realized is that I had a lot of friends, especially, maybe not a lot, but definitely some friends that I could tell were really uncomfortable talking about me almost dying. And I think that's natural. Like not everyone wants to think about that very hard, probably because you would think about yourself and how that relates to you because a lot of my friends are the same age as me, mid-40s.
Shawn Terrell (09:42.43)
And so I had to learn that just because people didn't really want to talk about or acknowledge very often what happened to me that that didn't mean or that doesn't mean that they don't care. It's just their way of dealing with it and handling with it. And if you look even closer, you can probably see other ways that they show up for you or sort of are there for you without talking about actually the giant elephant in the room. So.
Not everyone is going to want to handle that. to close, I watched this documentary recently. It's about a Canadian rock band called The Tragically Hip, which is arguably the most popular rock band ever in Canada. Apologies to Rush. but it's a really good documentary. you enjoy documentaries and you enjoy music, would highly recommend finding it on Prime Video.
But the subtitle of this documentary was No Dress Rehearsal, which is part of a song lyric of theirs. And the full lyric is, no dress rehearsal. This is our lives. And I think about that lyric a lot now. So I just thought I would share that in the event that it helps anyone else. Thanks for listening and watching Dentists, Puns and Money.
Thanks for following along. Again, I'm Shawn Terrell, although I turned into Marcus Aurelius a little bit today, but thanks for being here. And I hope to talk to you again very soon.