← The Lifestyle Practice Podcast For Dentists
The Lifestyle Practice Podcast For Dentists
312. 7 Lessons That Could Change How You Think About Money
00:07:51
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Hey there. Welcome to the Lifestyle Practice, the podcast where dentistry meets real life. We talk about growing and scaling your dental practice, avoiding everyday mistakes, fixing common challenges, and building success without burning out. If you want to grow in dentistry while protecting your lifestyle, you're in the right place. Grow smarter, practice better, live more.
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I used to think that my job as a parent was to help my kids avoid all the mistakes that I had. I thought that if I taught them enough, maybe they could avoid the struggles that I had. But eventually I realized something. Most people don't learn very deeply through advice. They learn through experience. Ownership teaches differently than advice does. So I want to basically tell you seven things that I'm teaching my kids about money that I think all of us as dentists need to. Point number one is that learning comes through experience, not through advice. I used to think that my joke job as a father was to teach my kids about all of the mistakes that I had made. If I can just teach them enough, then they can learn all of these mistakes. They can avoid all of these pitfalls. I've learned that is just not the case. You cannot learn any significant lesson in life without it being very hard and challenging. It changed my perspective and role from how can I support and love my kids and create opportunities for them to learn, for them to fail to struggle while the stakes are low? Almost always what I hear is when people reflect on what they learn from their parents, it's almost always what their parent did when they were growing up. Not what they said, but what they did. Point number two is that money is a tool. It is not the purpose of life. I'm not sold on, you know, teaching my kids to view life in the same way that I do. Money is a means to an end. It is one of the tools that we can use in life to design our experience. Someone that is making a million plus dollars per year can be just as successful or no more successful necessarily than someone that's making 50,000 a year. That's living simply and is fulfilled. Intentionality matters more than the actual status. I don't want my kids blindly chasing wealth. Money does not necessarily equate to standard of living above a certain point. Point number three, that there are multiple paths that can lead to financial freedom. The amount that you make does not equ to financial freedom. I'm not anti college, but I'm not necessarily like pro as far as a default path either. I recently wanted to find someone to detail one of my cars and so I was looking online and I ended up seeing some Ads for a company. I looked them up. They had really good reviews. The fee was pretty affordable and reasonable. I reached out and set up an appointment. They came to my house. He looked like high school or college kid. And so I ended up talking to him after and just kind of saying, like, man, is this your business? Or, you know, you just work for someone else? It was all him. He's like, I do my own marketing. Like, I really enjoy what I'm doing. He asked me for advice. We talked a little bit about, like, hey, here's what I would recommend you do. Part of what we talked about was he's really proud of the fact that he was booked out for, like, a month. I told him, I was like, that's not necessarily a good thing. You could play this a little bit smarter. And which is really interesting because I have the same conversation with dentists. There's a lot of dentists that are, like, really proud of being booked out X amount of time. I was like, well, if you raise your fees and now you're booked out two weeks instead of four weeks or even one week, you know, you keep raising your fees, you're going to be working the exact same amount of hours, but your income is going to be significantly higher. So that was kind of fun to talk about. And then he asked me, kind of towards the end of when we were talking, he was like, what do you think? You, obviously college was big for you in helping you earn more income. He's like, what would you say in my situation? How strongly would you recommend going to college? He's like, my family's, like, really kind of pushing me to go to college, and I'm not totally sold on it. So my response was, it's not black or white if school. And, like, some of these careers that you need school for are very enticing to you, and that sounds like fun, and you want to go that route. And I said, yeah, definitely do it. But also, you're very driven. You've already figured out a way to have a decent income with zero school. So I told him. I was like, in your situation, I would not recommend that you go to college. I would recommend that you continue to maximize this business as much as you can and learn a lot of business experience, start reading business books, listening to podcasts, work on leadership, Try and scale as much as you can. Which point number four is to invest early. Seven years ago, I set up a program for my kids. Any money that you put in this index fund, I will match it. And when you are 18 that money is yours. But if they take it out before the age of 18, they only get half of that. I want them learn about compounding the power of investing early. I want them to learn patience. I want them to see that the market can go up and down. One of the best things is just long term thinking and delayed gratification. Point number five, compound interest. Interest. I pulled up investment calculator, casted my screen onto our TV and showed them some different numbers. And I said, here's what your index funds like. If you have this amount when you're 18 years old, here's what that could be after 30 years for some of them to look at it and be like, oh my gosh, my money could end up being a hundred thousand dollars. Point number six is that there is a balance of saving and investing and living. If you completely save everything and invest everything and you're scrimping, not really enjoying life, that's not very fun. On the other end the spectrum, if you're just spending everything living paycheck to paycheck, that can be very stressful at times. Financial freedom requires balance. Money should improve your life. It should not become an obsession. Seventh point is that intentionality plus ownership equals freedom. For about five years now, I have been reading books in the morning before school. I have philosophy, I have one religious business, and then I have two mindset books each day. Whoever's turn it is, they get to pick a book, give like a 5 to 10 minute lesson on principle or a thought that's in the book. The ideas that you hear repeatedly eventually shape the lens for how you see life. I'm less interested in controlling what my kids think and I'm more interested in helping them learn how to think. The exact same principle applies to compounds as well. If I can help teach them some of these things when they're like really young, then as a teenager maybe it's a little bit more impactful, maybe not. And that's okay too. They're going to learn what they learn. And so I just want to give them opportunities. I don't want my kids to inherit dependence. I want them to inherit perspective. I want them to inherit the ability to think for themselves, to experience things in their own life, to fall down and to learn how to pick themselves back up. And how do they keep going when things get tough? How can they look at things and situations in the beginning with the idea of flexibility? Intentionality? Starting out with some intentionality can really benefit you. And so it's good for them to experience both what does it look like when they're intentional about something, what does that lead to versus when they're not intentional and they're just kind of going along with things? I think, again, an idea that financial freedom is not tied to a specific number. It is the ability to intentionally build a life that fits who you are. The goal is intentional living. I want capable adults as children, not dependent adults. And it starts at a very young age.