The Dental Amigos were excited to host Reese Harper, who is the founder of and CEO of DentistAdvisors.com, a registered investment advisory firm that focuses exclusively on dentists and specialists.  In this episode, Paul and Rob chat with Reese about the importance of occupational-specific consulting and the unique nature of dentists’ business and financial concerns.  Reese also talks about the need for dentists to be purposeful with their financial planning (a recurring and favorite Dental Amigo theme) and the need for a “financial treatment plan.”

Good stuff here from our Amigo Reese that will resonate with dentists at all stages of their careers. If you’re looking for Reese, you can find him at www.DenitstAdvisors.com and be sure to check out his very informative podcast when you’re there, the “Dentist Money Show!”

Transcript:

Intro: Welcome to the Dental Amigos podcast with Dr. Paul Goodman and attorney Rob Montgomery taking you behind the scenes of the dental business world. All the things you didn't learn in dental school, but wish you had. Rob Is not a dentist and Paul is not a lawyer, but since rob is a lawyer, we need to tell you that this podcast is for informational purposes only and shouldn't be considered legal advice. Listening to this podcast does not and will not create an attorney client relationship. As is always the case. You should formally consult with legal counsel before proceeding with any legal matter. Learn more about the Dental Amigos at www.thedentalamigos.com and now here are the Dental Amigos.

Rob: Hi everyone. I'm Rob Montgomery and I'm joined as always by the head Nacho himself, Dr. Paul Goodman. Paul, it's good to see you, man. It's been awhile.

Paul: I know. A lot of different things going on. It's an interesting time as a dentist. You know, half your staff wants off for the whole week, so it was not easy.

Rob: It's good fun, good stuff. Today we're joined by a special guest, Reese Harper. Reese Harper is the founder and CEO of dentistadvisors.com, which is a registered investment advisory firm that focuses exclusively on representing dentists and dental specialists, has proprietary planning methodology which is used by dentists across the country to track their progress towards financial independence. Reese is also the host of the Dentist Money Show podcast and he's a regular contributor to major dental publications and popular speaker at dental conventions, continuing ed seminars and dental districts all over the U.S. Three observations that I've made and listening to Reese and reading of some of the stuff and I like, and you know, he's committed to serving dentists', which is great and it's important for us and our listeners, and I like the fact that he emphasizes the importance of being purposeful, which people that listen to our show have heard that more than once. I also liked the fact that he really, the importance of not rolling out cookie cutter generic counseling, which is something in our world as, as lawyers. Uh, you know, templates and just stamping out the same old, same old. It's just not acceptable. So I respect and appreciate that about race. And now without further ado, here's Reese Harper and welcome Amigo. And thanks for being on the show.

Reese: Thanks Rob. It's a really great to be here and Paul, it's great to be here with you. Both of you guys have been important influences in my content and the dental community for a long time. I really think you guys are, I love your comment just made there, Rob, about the power of, of advice. I'm trying to write a book right now that I'll probably finish over the next 20 years and um, and one of the chapters is just be the life altering impact of advice for good or bad. You know, I really feel like good advice is, is, uh, there's a kind of a sacred responsibility that rests in the hands of an advice giver, especially when someone else trusts you to guide them down a path that's affecting their family, their kids, um, their health, their financial future. Like it's, I take it really seriously and, and I don't think that any one person should ever get the same piece of advice.

Rob: Yeah. Well that's, it's a lot of responsibility. It's interesting to hear you say that. I feel the same responsibility in advising my clients at the stakes are high and you know, people are coming to you as a trusted adviser and uh, you know, what your, how you guide them really has the potential to have this very significant impact in their life. Uh, well yeah,

Reese: I guess for me that's like the biggest motivator of why I picked this industry. I feel like the combination of making good financial decisions and the advice that comes with that, I feel like it's, it's a really critical, um, trajectory kind of springing point. Like every piece of advice really sets people on a path that either requires repair of it's long and costly and time consuming and cost people health and wellness and wealth and family and, or it's, or it's just accelerating that and it saves them time. It saves them effort, it saves them stress, anxiety, improves their health, improves their wellness, saves their family. I mean it's, uh, the, each piece of advice is important and we tried to take it seriously and I'm just glad that you recognize that and in your own practice and notice that about us.

Rob: So let me ask you this then. What, you know, how do you go about getting good advice? You know, how you know whether, and I think this goes beyond just dentist, you know, this is, you know, how does, you know Reese harp or financial rob, Montgomery lawyer, Paul Goodman, dentist consultant, and like factoring in other things. It's a serious job and like, you know this, so this is more holistic generally like, you know, when, when do you need a consultant and how do you go about, you know, hiring somebody and how do you know the right person? How do you go about getting good advice that can really empower your life and your career? Like you were just talking about?

Reese: Well, it was answer this in two parts. I think. Um, one let's answer it generally about general advice and then to own answered about financial advice. First. A general advice, I would say I'm a big believer in, um, the on occupation specific, uh, career advice when it comes to business. I don't believe in generic business consulting. I believe in occupation specific business consulting, occupation specific legal occupation, specific financial occupation specific accounting. I don't believe that. Um, although, although good advisers can exist that serve multiple occupations, I don't believe that they will. In today's world with the abundance of the Internet, the abundance of information, there's plenty of generic advice available. What you really need is Kerr is advice that's specific to your career and as a dentist specifically, um, there's a big difference between the types of advice that you would give a dentist, the types of advice you'd give it, any other service provider, any other business owner.

Reese: It's different than a doctor. Um, it's different than, it's much different than even service based companies. It's just dentists have their own set of environmental issues. They have their own education track, they have a generally, um, there, there are sets of personality profiles that exist within dentistry that are very different than then exist on ball streets. And, and I just think that knowing a knowing dentist and having spent and spending thousands of hours with them or any occupation that you're servicing, um, it really prepares you to be a good advice purveyor. And, and advice, as you know, I'm rob, uh, some of the best advice you're ever going to give someone falls outside of the scope of what you're charging for. Some of the best advice that you're going to give a dentist may not be related to the trip, the contract. Um, the language in documents, it might be a completely unrelated issue about something else that's related to his occupation and he didn't pay you for that, but he got value added advice that was that far exceeded the price that he paid you for the, the, the, the legal work and legal services you provided.

Reese: And the only way you're able to deliver that to someone in that, because you've spent more than, I would estimate somewhere in the 20,000 to 40,000 plus range. Right?

Rob: More than that. Yeah, great answer.

Reese: Interacting with dentists, you know, and it really shapes the - if you care about advice and respect the responsibility of what that is, I think it needs to be occupation specific and second thing, right?

Rob: I might have to put that on like that quote on our website right now because it is so important and we talk about that and you mean actual legal work that we do in our firm, it's not that it's complicated. Some things are more complicated than others, but that's not the secret sauce that we deliver is not just the, the mirror legal language, it's, it's knowing what to anticipate that. So as you say, occupational, you know, specific and sort of after seeing literally thousands of of deals come through and what works and what doesn't work, that's, that's where, that's where the advice comes from, is just being focused in that space and, and that, and then that's what you do. And I think you're going to lead into this now. And, and, and that's what you do for, for the financial services world.

Reese: Yeah. Well, and I think the last comment on this general advice would just be it. Malcolm Gladwell has a book where he just says, you don't really master a skill unless you've spent more than 10,000 hours really repeating that skill. And I just don't think you can be a good advisor to someone else. Um, and tell you spent a very, I mean, 10,000 hours is five years. I mean, I've trained financial planners in my, from for that long, um, at the, at the 20,000 hour mark. Um, which is closer to, you know, 10 years. I'm really, really, really proud of, uh, financial advisers, competency level and, but, but not really at the five year mark, if that makes sense. Like the five year mark. I'm, I'm happy for weather has, I'm grateful they've been with me that long. Right? But it is, it, I really think that 10,000 hours is like a starting point sort of becoming at a base level, very competent within your field. And I think, you know, it just takes a long time. So I don't want to discourage anyone, but as you've been a dentist and you looked at how competent you are at clinically at year five versus year 10, it's a big difference. It's a very big difference in year one, right? dentist get to go through dental school and if you do it, uh, like a GPR, then you know, like Paul's done and then you can build up some of that skill early on. Um, but it's different than being in practice. And so anyway,

Paul: Rob and I in this podcast, the Dental Amigos, what it stands for is you know about the business of dentistry, what they didn't teach you in dental school but should have. And I'm really passionate now with whether it's the dental nachos group or the seminars that we give is that every clinical decision you make is a business decision. Every business business decision you make as a clinical decision. And dentist want to separate these two, but it's just, it's just impossible. It's like, you know, usually you, you can't have good nachos without cheese. Uh, sorry for any lactose intolerant trees. You can have the fake cheese if you're lactose intolerance. But, uh, the, I'm trying to explain to dentist, it's about the, teach us a lot about clinical decision making for patients, but they don't teach us about dentists decision making for ourselves. And it's really become a, a real challenge slash problem for new dentists graduating because sometimes they don't even have the opportunity to be around, uh, media major older dentist and I, in my CE courses we have things I would say as you guys were talking about all this great content, we always have three rules that, you know, is to have fun, be willing to think in a different way and a commit to one positive change.

Paul: And I think they have the hardest time with being willing to think in a different way because, uh, it threatens the way they're thinking now. But I always try to explain to dentists like, you could be good. I mean, you were usually in line from a book maybe with this advice or change, whether it's placing implants, whether it's acquiring additional practice. You could be great. Uh, but dentists just since you'd, neither of you two have had the pleasure of going through dental school, they really bring your whole being down, your morale down where it's not just, Oh, this is wrong and you didn't do a good crown prep. It's almost like you're wrong as a person. And I actually just totally believed that this change is a dentist. Just brain and other thinking going through that process.

Reese: I agree. I think if we can go to the second topic that Paul, we were, I was kind of alluding to, it's just like what makes good financial advice or what, what's real? How do you know you're getting good financial advice, but what's, what's entailed and good advice and, and for, for specifically as it relates to investing and financial planning, building your net worth, um, you know, we talk about occupational specific, which I think is critical. It's mission critical. I mean, dentists are very dick if a super complex financial picture relative to most professionals, they're split between clinical and entrepreneurial. Um, there's a lot of entrepreneurial opportunity within dentistry that makes them kind of get pulled into that business side of their lives and the clinical sides, it's progressing as quick as ever now as well. And you have to keep up and really become a stay.

Reese: A very competent service provider in those aren't the same jobs. And it's difficult sometimes to navigate that. I could go on like the, the, I feel like they're in a financial perfect storm that's really challenging from a tax and debt perspective. They've got income that's really high and so that high income comes with its own challenges. It's very consistent, which gets them used to a certain lifestyle expense and also a little bit more overconfident than maybe, um, like if you take someone like me or someone like rob who we own a service business, um, maybe our cash flows aren't quite as consistent as dentists. Maybe we have a lot of volume in the first quarter of the second is a little slow or they're a contract that we're working on. Um, sometimes as business owners with a little bit more variable income, you care a little more cautious and you're planning a little, you look, your lifestyle expenses are a little bit more cautious because you're not sure when you're going to have that next big pop.

Reese: Um, most people don't have as, I mean that just had the highest income in the country, which is major issue, but it's also extremely consistent. Like I said, it's monthly. Basically the same. I mean in it and it that comes with its own set of challenges. Uh, I think it allows them to procrastinate a little bit more, allows me to be a little bit more overconfident than maybe the average person. Um, I also think that the lack of financial experience makes decision making very difficult. I mean, dentists are brilliant people, but their ability to make decisions is slow. That uh, financial topics because they don't have enough knowledge and they want to know the answers before they can make the decision. And

Paul: I have a comment that's very dense so, and they want to know the answer to make decision. What do you find is a good example of areas where dentists overspend, whether it's personally or professionally that you have to try to manage, help fix with your clients?

Reese: Well, for the most part, I think that they definitely have a larger housing expense than the average person. I believe. And I think that's not just anecdotal but measurable because they have the high consistent income. They're very confident in the real estate acquisition that they can do both in the personal because they can just qualify for much more debt and, and typically they end up with a larger percentage of their net worth in property than someone who had a less consistent, uh, income that was more of a quarterly bonus type of income. Um, and I think that's probably the main area that you end up coaching on. It's, you know, your, your real estate decision personally, it's the largest one you're going to make ultimately, that is going to affect your lifestyle trajectory in a major way because the money that you sink into that house is in most cases like gone forever.

Reese: Whether it's 2 million or 3 million or 500,000, you're in most cases, most people, once they pay that off, they don't want to leverage it again. And there's that new level of whatever that house costs. And, um, dentist, do, you know, on average only earn, they earn a lot of money throughout their career. But I mean some people are in 6 million, some people are in seven, some people are an eight. Some people are 9 million, some 10 some specialists might be much higher than that, especially if you have a lot of locations. The average dentist is going to have somewhere just south of $10 million of lifetime earnings. And if you know 20 or 30% of that is basically just tied up in a primary residence, that's very different than if 10% is.

Paul: It's a good point. I think, you know, one of the things Rob and I try to do and I'd say in my lectures are like Nacho tips is that, you know, like I as a transitions broker, you know, want to earn that eight seven, eight, nine, $10 million, you need the right practice to do it. And sometimes it's not, doesn't exist where you want to live. Exactly. So, you know, I encourage a young dentist not to purchase a house before their practice because it makes them unwilling to move or a better practice

Reese: if Martin and I just think that that money, I give him kind of case it goodbye and left your, you shouldn't, I mean it really is just net worth. It's just money. And a house instead of money in a bank account. But, but most people have an emotional attachment to a piece of, we all do. Like I do, like I've got a piece of property that I've raised my kids in. It's in the mountains where I want to live. It's by the ski resorts that I ski at a, it's by my mountain bike trails, but I like to go out, it's by the restaurants that I love. So I get my medium rare steak hey downs on a Saturday. Like I, it's my place. Like I want it and, and I've had to be very careful to limit the amount of my net worth that I can tie up in that property.

Reese: Three remodelling through expansion, through changes or landscaping through amenities because I kind of know that the emotion that I've invested into that property, it's important to me and it's probably not like money that I'll be able to get out later. And so I'm you, you have to be conscious of that. And, and I just meet a lot of dentists who are disproportionately invested in, in their properties, usually two or, or, or, you know, one large, one or two a good size ones. And sometimes that makes up too high of a percentage of their net worth. And then consequently we don't have enough productive investment assets to grow, um, throughout their lifetime. And so that was a good a side man about real estate. I kind of, I didn't want to hit this idea that we were talking about what is financial planning for a dentist?

Reese: Just real quick if we could. So like I think like let's take exams and x rays. Um, let's talk about the financial planning in terms of exams, x rays and a treatment calendar, like some kind of treatment calendar. If you're a dentist. I mean these exams are important, um, because it gives you a chance to interact with your patients, sort of understand where they're coming from and here is their interpretation of their needs. Right? Um, but the x rays are really important because it gives you an objective set of criteria to interpret what the patient is telling you. You know, and you don't often get the same feedback from x rays as you do from the exam, right? I mean, they're just, they're, they're different. Um, let's take, let's just say, when I say exam, we'll just talk about, let's talk about it in terms of just interacting with the patient, not getting in their mouth.

Reese: All right, so talking to the patients different than looking at their x rays, uh, and, and, and it's also different than a treatment plan. And I think all three of those things combined are really essential to having like good comprehensive oral health. And in, in financial planning, there's a really similar process that we've come up with that we think people should follow, but it doesn't get followed hardly ever. Um, an Alex, I'll just describe what I think the process should look like and then I'll, I want to talk about what it's really like for most dentists. So the process should be that you're having some kind of exam with a really smart, seasoned advice purveyor like we talked about, just like a dentist, a financial planner who's a specialist who's a fee only fiduciary, who knows what they're doing if they're having these interactions with them, but then they take x rays and they've got to collect objective data about you and compare it to other people that they have seen recently in your exact same situation.

Reese: Just like you're looking at someone's mouth and you look at someone else's mouth and it gives you a sense. If you see, you know how many exams you're doing in a day, you're going to be able to have some set of objectivity that lets you go. This is objective. We different than this. Financial planners don't have those kinds of tools in most cases. Um, those tools are another set of x rays for a financial planner is a really accurate personal financial statement. So, um, something that shows a, call it a hybrid, we call it a hybrid financial statement. So for Paul it would show. So and it would do the same thing for rob and as a lawyer, which you'll personal and practice assets in personal and practice debts all in one statement so that your total net worth all of your assets and all of your liabilities, including your practice value, um, your real estate in the condo that you operated out of. Um, the, the second location, the practice checking account, the personal checking account, your Iras, your 401k, it all shows up in one statement and then all the debts are right below it. And we see your total net worth.

Rob As a dad. You made me, this sounds like a lot of homework. How many clients come to you with all that? Even able to,

Reese: So zero people have that, right? I mean, unfortunately financial planning as an industry is like not, I mean it started in the late seventies, right? It's not a selling financial products started like in the 20s, I mean whole life insurance to the first product that America like to be told. And that's why it's still being sold today. But it's, you know, it's changed a lot. And then the financial planning has not been a standardized industry. And so when people come to the, they're lost most of the time with where their stuff's at. I mean it's, it's a hard, like I said earlier, it's really hard to keep track of all this.

Paul: I want to jump in, I want to Rob the general that he has, but real quick, where he's just so delicious. And so people come to the dentist when they have a tooth ache or they were raised to go to the dentist, you know? Oh, so, so that was in their culture. How, what are the, what is the thing that brings most of these dentists to you? Is it an a life event? Is it, oh, I just figured out I should talk to a financial planner, or is it,

Reese: it's some kind of pain, some kind of pain, right. Some kind of like pain in their life, which is not the reason to go to the dentist. Right, right. It's not the reason to go to the financial planning should be going because it's, you're trying to put this proactive treatment calendar in place.

Rob: Avoid the pain.

Paul: Yeah, right, exactly. It's a good line for days if you do not like seeing me, Mrs. Smith, get your teeth cleaned every six months because there's less of a chance to see me. So

Rob: they always do. You know, people come in like, well I can't believe this. This happened to me, but like, well, who represented you? Well, the broker kind of help me with this agreement. Like, well, I can't believe that this went south on you.

Paul: The fear of spending a little bit of money costs people so much money. It's mind boggling to me. Maybe just because I know I have only about four things I'm really good at. And eating Nachos is one of them. I don't know if that counts and I'm just so willing to seek advice from professionals and just say, how much does this call would be a personal trainer for fitness? It could be someone for a, a, a, a contract that like, you know, I have a Sottsass in my office and you know, Rob's team helps us with each contract each time. You know, I don't even say, Hey, I'll just use the old one cause I figure, you know, I'll spend this little bit of money to protect myself and learn. But for some reason I find dentist just skip that part. But then it gets to the a lot of bit of money at risk.

Reese: Yeah. Yeah. And I, I mean I don't want him to say that people should come with this. They shouldn't. No, no dental patient knows how to take an extra day. And when people come to us, they don't have like a clear picture of their financial situation. But if I can get a personal financial statement that's really accurate, we connect it to this dashboard and make sure that we can make it to where it's, it's real time and it stays updated all the time. So the practice value gets updated, the real estate gets updated, the debts amortize, and you want to know like, am I worth negative 500 am I worth 2 million? Am I worth a million? Am I worth 400,000? And you want to see how that progressed because the tree, the x rays that you're going to be taking every, uh, we take them every four months or every three months, every quarter.

Reese: So four times a year. And we just want to take that set of actors and go, you were over 300, now you're worth 500, now you're with 700 900 or hey, you're worth 700 and it's never changed for two years or your with 1.1, it's never changed. You have to have that objective set of x rays that you're taking in order to really know if, if the treatment that you're prescribing is, is making sense. And in our case, the way we do treatment and we think treatment should be done in financial planning is it should be. We break it up into 12 kind of subject categories and we rotate those. Um, uh, by month every year. So in January we always do the same thing. In February, we always get the same thing. In March, we always do the thing. So in January we're looking at people savings rates for the prior year.

Reese: February we're looking at their and liquidity. March, we're looking at their insurance policies. April taxes, may retirement plans. UH, June we're looking at investment returns. Uh, and the list goes on real estate in July and August her spending in September, we're looking at your retirement projection. In October it wasn't a practice profitability and November and then December we're doing a reevaluation of taxes. And so we, we um, we, that's our treatment calendar and we're doing their stuff. Like as if you were sitting in our dental chair and you, I mean we're, we're doing this but you don't have to be there. Like we have a, we're doing treatment planning on your stuff without you having to show up and take an x ray. And that's the beauty of it.

Speaker 4: Where I use, I use is about a thousand times a year to my patients. If you could drop your mouth off like your car, this would be better for both of us. And uh, you kind of can do that really. So Nice.

Reese: Janice. Janice are retiring on it. They have a very, very high income, but on average they're retiring like seven years later than the average American. And that the Ada data, you know, and my, my argument for why that's happening, part of it is some of them love their job and they just want to do it forever. But most people want work to be optional point, at least at the rate the average person does. And in my research, most dentists, they're not working later because they want to, they're working later because they haven't accumulated enough wealth to really support their lifestyles. And the reason that's happening is what you just said, like the financial planning is only happening when people show up to a physical appointment with their planner and talk. And that's just not going to cut it. In today's world. I mean there's, so if you've got to do debt taxes, personal spending, um, then you have to do savings and then retirement plan contributions, uh, life insurance, disability insurance, property and casualty, like legal estate planning, like your financial planner, like you can't meet with him and enough like there's just not enough time in a year.

Reese: And in our practice we spend about 45 hours of our time for every one hour of dentists interaction.

Paul: Yeah, that's good advice.

Reese: It's just like a, that's the way it should be done. But how it is done today is there's financial planners that don't take x rays. They have no treatment calendar. They don't even know your industry or occupation to begin with. So they can't really do an exam and then they just get paid to sell you stuff. I mean, they're selling you life insurance and that's their fee structure. I mean, it's crazy, but that's even happening out there. It'd be like a dentist working for a Dso where the patient never paid any money. The dentists just got paid from the suppliers and they got paid like a percentage on this. Amalgam pays you 50% of this and 30% of that. But if you do a composite filling, you know Henry Schein, we'll pay you 37% for this composite material. Like if a dentist, imagine a world of crazy DSO where the patient showed up, didn't really know what they were paying. They just had to like buy toothbrushes and you know, buy some things and somehow the dentists got paid but they weren't sure how. And the dentist was like trying to like prescribe treatment that paid him the most based on what the suppliers where, you know,

Reese: I mean, Geez, that's what's happening. It's crazy. Like it shouldn't be illegal, but it is. And then that's 90% of dentists are working with the commission based broker that doesn't know how to play in and has no proactive treatment, doesn't collect debt trades, wouldn't know how to do it in the first place. There's some good planners out there, but the good planners are the fee only fiduciary is that at least try to focus on an occupation and try to build some kind of treatment calendar, some kind of, um, set of consistent treatment.

Rob: And that's powerful stuff. And I think it kind of, to me, and what I'm hearing, and this has been our experience too, is, you know, a lot of this is probably rooted in just the desire to just find the cheapest option. You know, like, this guy only charges me a commission when I buy these securities, but this other person wants to charge me this money to actually do something. It's like, you know, and, and so when you hire the person who is either cheaper or is getting paid on what is a flawed business arrangement, you know, it's just inherently conflicted, you know, guests, why, you know, the result isn't good. You know? And I think so many people, your world and my world research are similar in that unlike dentists, like you can't say like, Hey, you know, I've got this cavity where I need a crown. I'm just going to, I've got to try to DIY the crown. Like, I mean, unless you're like stuck in the middle of the ocean and you have like some Tom Hanks dental emergency, right? You got to just start doing dentistry and yourself. Right? But otherwise like in, in our old people can say like, well yeah, I mean I, I speak English, I'm educated. I can read that contract and know what it says. Yeah. Maybe. Or I could figure out how to buy security.

Reese: Like Colin cowherd this morning was advertising on a Fox sports one for legal zoom and telling everyone how they just needed to like get, you know, they needed to be take control and go get their legal done from the right people. And it's like, but these are not attorneys and they don't give advice. And there's this big long disclaimer and I'm like, dude, it's like the most powerful media sources of the country or like convincing business owners to just circumvent like this whole advice industry. It's like spent their entire life perfecting the craft of advice. I mean, I just, I dunno, for me the more educated people get, uh, the more they ended up outsourcing. That's been my experience. The more they learn, the more they're educated, the more they learn, the more they'll go, gee, so I could pay raise like 495 bucks a month and he'll just like, do all this stuff and not sell me anything. I mean it's, but when you, when you see it on my website and you go to like, well I went to vanguard and it was free. I went to a recent site and I was like $500 a month. And you're just like, there's two financial planners in, one's like cops from another and how has possibly charging that much? He's crazy expensive

Paul: I know we're getting to know as quick as sort of raw appreciate from other the groups last night and they were asking, and this is just, and I'm just just to kind of bring this full circle, dentist really dislike it when patients ask how much their crown is and then they go to a cheaper dentist and say, oh it's cheaper there. The dentist and his or her mind thinks, you know, why are they picking the cheapest option yet? They turn around and do the same thing to themselves. Cause they were saying how much should bookkeeping costs per month? And I just commented that's not even the right question because you know, you've got to know what's the bookkeeper doing? One dentist said it should cost nothing. It only takes me three minutes a month to do my bookkeeping, which is just, I mean that's just not the truth. And it just, it was a bunch of dentists having a contest of how they could find the cheapest bookkeeper. And a, it's just, I don't know what happens to our industry, but I just wish there was a little more, I mean, what you're bringing to the table here is awesome. And Rob's helped me in terms of the value of like kind of bring it full circle, finding this type of device.

Rob: Well it's just a behavioral economics. What is the cost of cheap, you know, like it, it's just, and it manifests itself in so many ways in the world that the three of us deal and you know, and we see people who are paying for the cost of cheap, you know, and, and uh, the longterm effects of that and the impact is sometimes unforeseeable to that at the time because they're not experienced in what can go wrong if you do it this way. We all see the, the, the bad stuff and say, hey, stop before you go down that road, wait, wait that we can, we can help you. You know? But some people don't care. They're just going to run down that road.

Paul: You didn't know. You're going to tell you not, not, you know, totally serious. Even though I'm pretty lighthearted person to these dentists, that this decision could just ruin your entire life. It could ruin your financial future. It could ruin a relationship with your family, your spouse, and just at least check in and this is what I always say, there's no bad result. If you take something to an advisor and say, is this thing good? And the advisor says it's really good, I would do it. Then you're happy. Right? But then if they tell you this has five red flags, you prevented a huge mistake.

Reese: Yeah. I think just a circle full circle on this topic of advice. I just feel like if you're, if you're professional, it's financial. It's just been a financial advisor business model. I can't speak to every service provider, but if you're a financial advisor does not take a like comprehensive set of x rays of your situation, like proactively on a regular basis and he'll have no idea. Honestly how your net worth is changing and growing. Like, if that's not happening, that's a red flag. And if he doesn't have a treatment calendar that he's proactively executing without you having to show up, then they're just wasting your time. I mean, there's a thousand things the financial planner can do. If you just give them the authority to get it done. They can compare your, they can calculate your net worth and go to your property and casualty insurance agent and say, you know, we need to reduce his property and casualty from 700 to 600 on this equipment, or he needs 1,000,002 umbrella instead of $1 million umbrella or a 2 million instead of a million.

Reese: He can adjust your life insurance balances and reduce your costs. You can, you can call loans and shot banks and figuring out how your interest rates compared to other interest rates in the industry. He can look at your investment portfolio and make proactive decisions. I mean, we don't, we send personal video to each client every time we make a recommendation so they can watch it at their own tax. Uh, when we have a piece of advice to give, we just record it, show them a screen, show them the documentation and send it to them in an email or a text and they just watch it and Texas back and say, that sounds great. Thanks. And I mean, our clients are saving like thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of dollars a year in their time. On top of that, we're adding massive amount of value to their net worth and a good attorney can do that.

Reese: A good CPA can do that. Good financial planner can do that. And I just feel like the financial planning industry is just really needs to continue to step the game. It's going to die if you don't, because Wealthfront, betterment, vanguard, all this stuff online, it's a better product than what half of the advisors are offering out there. Some half the advisors are offering a marked up investment portfolio that someone could go online and get for cheaper and that's why dentists are doing it. So they're like, well, my guy's not doing anything. I might as well get it cheaper and, and so, but that's not the solution. Like the financial planning solution is not going to be DIY. You just need to find a service provider that can actually proactively executing in a treatment plan. I'll stop there, but I'm like on this rant about this lately because I just really feel, I feel like the, unless I'm a little bit more, um, vocal, it feels like no one listens to me. So hopefully no one takes offense at my, my, uh, being a little bit to proactive on a regular basis. But that's good race. It's, it's been great having you. Um, tell us, uh, tell our listeners, how can people find you and connect with you?

Reese: Um, well I would say probably two ways to get me. That's great. I like, um, I'm a big fan of the dental success network. Um, I'm the one of the admins on the wealth management chat room at the Dell success network and then you guys participate there. Um, I also like your Facebook group. Uh, the dental machos um, Facebook group. Um, I like to contribute online. So you can find me either one of those two venues is great. On the best way to get us, it's just go to our website@dentistsadvisors.com and subscribe to our podcast, the dentist money show every week. We have to fix that. If you are, you know, working with a current financial advisor, what you're going to learn from what we shared, just going to make that relationship better. If your DIY, you're just going to be a better DIY or, and if you're a person that wants services then on our website you can just click the book free appointment button and you can pick from a slot on our calendar and just chat with anyone. Um, so thanks for having me on guys. I really appreciate it.

Rob: Sounds good. Thanks so much. Great, great talk. We appreciate it. Thanks for listening to another great podcast with the Dental Amigos