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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 (00:02.274)
Welcome to Dentists, Puns, and Money. I am your host, Shawn Terrell. This podcast is brought to you by Dentist Exit Planning. Dentist Exit Planning helps dentists within five years of leaving clinical build their financial treatment plan for life after dentistry. So I know this dental practice owner who had a rough month a while back. One week.
or one day during one week, his computer system went down and that threw everything into a loop. Hard to see patient charts, hard to access the online scheduling system without being able to get on the computer to get online and see that stuff. while everything was still being, while patients were still able to be treated, the kind of fallout from that was just
how much stuff had to be entered after the fact, taken down manually at the time and then re-entered later. And that led to a lot of lost productivity for that week. And then the following week, things got even worse when three members on his staff were out with sickness, some version of the flu. And that led to a number of patient reschedules.
And hopefully those patients will still be able to be treated down the road, but there's sort of a lagging effect of that and the loss productivity that comes with that and getting those patients rescheduled and back on the calendar. And just what he thought, things couldn't get any worse the week after that. So this is three weeks in a row, a big snowstorm hit. It hit one afternoon. So a lot of patients canceled or rescheduled that afternoon.
and then sort of continued into the following days. So it was basically a day and a half of pretty low volume of patients seen. And as you know, if you own a dental practice, you still have to pay your staff while you're there. So that's sort of a bad day, a bad stretch, a bad week. And sometimes I have noticed in life, maybe you have too, that when bad things, relatively speaking, happen, they tend to happen in a row. When it rains, it pours.
Shawn Terrell (02:22.854)
And so that was just a really bad month for a practice owner. But as a dental practice owner, I think you have to eventually build the ability to expect the unexpected as cliche as that sounds. Expecting the unexpected can make getting through some of these bumps in the road a little bit more tolerable. a little bit more easy. And I think that's relative relevant to
thinking about your life, your financial life especially, after you leave clinical someday. Because there are some things that we know and some things that we don't know about what the next 20 or 30 years after you leave clinical dentistry are gonna look like.
For example, if you have money invested, broadly speaking, in the stock market, you have money in investable assets, we know that over long periods of time, generally speaking, over decades, that has been a good rate of return. We also know that in short periods of time, like years or a couple years together, there have been, historically speaking, some pretty sharp downturns where
Our account balances have been down 20 or 30 % or more from where they were the previous five years, for example. The lost decade comes to mind as it's called. We also know that historically speaking right now, taxes are pretty low from where they have been over the course of the last hundred years or so, especially with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which
as I record this is set to sunset or expire at the end of 2025. So I think it's reasonable to expect at some point in the future taxes maybe aren't gonna be as favorable as they have been for the last several years. And then another unknown as it relates to your life after clinical, if we're talking about a 20 or a 30 year period of retirement post dentistry is that there are just bound to be unexpected
Shawn Terrell (04:35.651)
expenses that pop up. Maybe you have to help out one of your kids or another family member. Maybe there's a medical event that occurs to you or someone close to you, your spouse, for example. Or maybe it's something positive, maybe a real estate property that you sort of had in the back of your mind pops up in its favorable terms and you need to your hands on a large chunk of money. So being able to
Expect the unexpected as it relates to your financial life after clinical is a really important thing. to being able to yin when you yang because or being able to yin when things are yaning because if you have several million dollars in investable accounts and you're using those accounts that are tied up broadly speaking in the stock market to generate
income or money or cash flow to live off of in retirement and all of a sudden that drops 20 % over a short period of time. As an example, I keep qualifying everything just to make sure that I'm okay, compliantly. But the point being, you're going to have to have some options for getting your hands on some money to live on while the market is not doing so good because
Historically, we know it's recovered, but it doesn't happen overnight. So it's good to have the ability to pivot when things aren't going well. And this has been something that's taken a lot of practice for me, but I have learned that If we can sort of look at all the things we know are going to get sideways at some point, but we can't predict the timing of when things are going to get sideways, then
we can sort of plan for those things and know that, okay, whenever this happens, this is what we're gonna do. So planning for how we're gonna feel and what actions we're gonna take when these inevitable things that have happened historically happen over a 20 or 30 year period in retirement. I think that goes a long way for.
Shawn Terrell (06:55.692)
enjoying the ride and being able to smooth out some of the bumps in the road, if you want to call it that. Speaking of being prepared. And I think being a dental practice owner probably helps people go a long way and sort of having that mindset of not knowing when things are going to go the wrong way, but just knowing how you're going to react when things go the wrong way. Because as I mentioned with those examples off the top,
Owning a dental practice is sort of... Owning a dental practice is dealing with unforeseen issues that can pop up in the short term and how you handle those will go a long way into how you get through life and enjoy life after clinical. Speaking of planning, it's getting to be tax filing time. And if you're someone who likes to get organized and get everything together ahead of planning your taxes,
I have something that might help you out. It's a tax filing checklist. Just sort of all the documents that you need to gather and all the things that you need to be aware of as you get ready to meet with your accountant or your CPA and file your 2024 taxes. So if you are interested in a tax filing checklist, I have a free copy that you can download and have emailed to you. If you are listening to this podcast on a podcast app,
go into the show notes and click on "Resources From Episode." That'll take you to another website where you will be able to download a document at the top. It's called the "Tax Filing Checklist." Put in your name and your email and click send to me and you will receive that tax filing checklist at the email you provide. If you happen to be watching this on YouTube,
Thank you for watching and if you wanna subscribe to our YouTube channel, that would be awesome too. But the way to get the "Tax Filing Checklist" from YouTube is to go to the main Dentist Exit Planning profile page on our YouTube page and there should be a link in that profile. Click on the main link and then again look for the "Tax Filing Checklist" when you are redirected to a page. Put in your name and your email and click okay.
Shawn Terrell (09:21.897)
and it will email you that checklist for your taxes. A couple reminders before I go, as I mentioned off the top, Dentist Exit Planning helps dentists who are leaving clinical within the next five years build a financial treatment plan for their 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. I'm Shawn Terrell. Thanks for listening and watching Dentists, Puns and Money and we will see you on the next episode.