MtoM #239: A Professor and a Dentist Become Multimillionaires and Finance 101: Financial Waterfalls

Summary

White Coat Investor Podcast
MtoM #239: A Professor and a Dentist Become Multimillionaires & Finance 101: Financial Waterfalls
Host: Dr. Jim Dahle
Guest: Matt, Chemistry Professor
Release Date: September 8, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this episode of the White Coat Investor: Milestones to Millionaire Podcast, Dr. Jim Dahle interviews Matt, a chemistry professor, about how he and his wife, a dentist and practice owner, became multimillionaires only a decade after finishing school. They discuss the journey from significant student debt to financial independence, key strategies (like regular finance meetings and automating savings), how they juggled family life with wealth building, and Matt shares actionable advice for others.
After the interview, Dr. Dahle delivers a detailed segment on the concept of financial "waterfalls" – a strategy for prioritizing and allocating income efficiently as wealth grows.

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Key Interview Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introducing Matt & His Family's Journey

• Background & Profession

  • Matt is a chemistry professor at a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, 10 years post-grad. His wife is a dentist, also about 10 years out of school, who recently bought her own practice.
  • [02:09] Matt: "I am in Pennsylvania. I'm 10 years out of graduate school, and I am a professor teaching chemistry at a small liberal arts college."

• Achieving the Milestone

  • Their recent milestone: $1 million in invested assets. Their total net worth is about $2 million.
  • [02:54] Matt: "My wife and I have a million dollars invested."
  • [05:20] Matt: "About two million dollars."

• Tracking Progress

  • Regularly tracks net worth together with wife during "monthly date nights" dedicated to finances.
  • [03:13] Matt: "We track monthly, so my wife and I have, like, monthly date nights where we go over finances and sort of our goals."

2. Income, Debt, & Wealth Growth

• Income Evolution

  • Combined household income currently about $400k (primarily via wife's dental practice, plus Matt’s salary).
  • Average income over 10 years: $250k–$300k.
  • [03:55] Matt: "Right now we make about 400 combined... she owns her own practice... that has drastically increased our wealth in the past couple years."
  • [05:07] Matt: "Probably around $250,000, $300,000, $250,000 or so."

• Starting with Debt

  • Right out of school, net worth was negative $250k due to student loans.
  • [04:02] Matt: "Ever was right out of school? It was negative 250."

• Strategic Debt Repayment

  • Prioritized paying off their home mortgage (fully paid by 2018) before student loans. Student loans lingered due to pandemic forbearance; paid off recently.
  • [06:18] Matt: "We paid that off in 2018."
  • [04:23] Matt: "...we just paid off her student loans earlier this year."
  • Rationale: Mortgage was in both names and seen as more urgent for family security.
  • [06:28] Matt: "It was mostly a priority because that was in both of our names and the student loans was all in my wife's. So we prioritized paying that off rather than the student loans, mostly as a hedge against something happening to her."

• Assets & Portfolio

  • Invested assets: $1M
  • House: Paid off, worth ~$400k
  • Dental practice equity: ~$500k
  • Practice building: ~$400k
  • Rental property: ~$200k

3. Balancing Family and Financial Growth

• Navigating Early Parenthood & Career Stress

  • Juggled finances and three young children (all under five at one point) during early years with modest income.
  • [07:18] Matt: "It was a challenge at first... she only made $50,000 at that point. And that's when we had our third kid... It was stressful, but we started having our monthly date nights..."

• Importance of Communication

  • Monthly financial meetings as a couple were pivotal, especially when deciding how to allocate a growing surplus.
  • [10:11] Matt: "I would say first, having these monthly meetings has been really helpful, discussing how we want to allocate that next dollar..."

4. Investment Strategy & Philosophy

• Highly Automated, Index-focused Portfolio

  • Both max out workplace retirement accounts; wife also uses practice profit sharing ($65k/yr); both do backdoor Roth IRAs; contribute monthly to brokerage account.
  • [08:02] Matt: "So we both max out our retirement plans... she does profit sharing... backdoor Roths... brokerage account..."

• Index Fund Focus

  • Nearly all investments are in index funds.
  • [08:28] Matt: "Yeah, pretty much all index funds."

• Automating Savings

  • Make giving money to investments non-negotiable by setting up automatic withdrawals.
  • [10:11] Matt: "...we've always automated our savings, so it's always coming out of the paycheck before we see it."

5. Decision-Making, Disagreements & Advice

• Resolving Financial Disagreements

  • Main debates were about surplus allocation (debt vs. investing vs. other goals). They found success by focusing on one major goal at a time.
  • [08:43] Matt: "...for a while, we were... splitting a little bit... At some point, we decided we just need to pick one goal and focus on it..."

• Actionable Advice for Others

  • Hold monthly check-ins, automate savings, pick clear priorities, and embrace living frugally in early years with more lifestyle upgrades later.
  • [10:32] Jim Dahle: "And that way, you know, you're going to have some savings and you just gotta be frugal on the backside, I suppose."
  • [11:03] Matt: "That is right." (on not living like a resident forever)

• Splurges and Lifestyle Inflation

  • Splurges focused on family travel once finances allowed.
  • [10:43] Matt: "We started traveling a lot more, so we took a Mediterranean cruise last year. We went to France earlier this year..."

6. Looking Ahead

• Next Steps

  • Plan to pay off the remaining rental property mortgage, then potentially buy more rentals (goal: at least three rentals, one per child).
  • [11:30] Matt: "Well, we're going to pay off our rental within the next year and then probably try and look to invest in more real estate."

• Concerns for Future Generations

  • Noted rapidly rising home prices may make ownership harder for their kids.
  • [11:52] Jim Dahle: "...you look around and you wonder how your kids are ever going to be able to afford to buy a house in your area?"
  • [11:58] Matt: "Yeah, I mean, our house has doubled in value in the past 10 years."

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "We track monthly, so my wife and I have, like, monthly date nights where we go over finances and sort of our goals."
  — Matt [03:13]

• "It was mostly a priority because that was in both of our names and the student loans was all in my wife's [name]. So we prioritized paying that off rather than the student loans, mostly as a hedge against something happening to her."
  — Matt [06:28]

• "Our retirement funds, our brokerage account, that's all coming out before it hits our bank account. And so that we're always trying to pay ourselves first."
  — Matt [10:11]

• "Investing is way sexier than debt, for sure."
  — Jim Dahle [09:46]

• "You come out of school, you come out of training, whatever. You got 12 good uses for money and only enough money for four of them."
  — Jim Dahle [09:19]

• "You decided you were gonna take control of things. You became financially literate. You carved out some significant chunk of your income and used it to build wealth... you become a millionaire, you become a multimillionaire, you become financially independent."
  — Jim Dahle [12:34]

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Post-Interview Segment: Financial Waterfalls Explained

[Begins at ~13:30]

What is a Financial Waterfall?

Dr. Dahle explains the “waterfall” as a system for prioritizing where to direct your next dollar, pouring your money into one "pool" (financial goal or account) until full, with overflow moving to the next pool, and so on.

A Sample Waterfall Order

1. Employer retirement plan match
   "[The match is] free money... your first priority. Because not getting it is leaving part of your salary on the table." [14:28]
2. High-Interest Debt Repayment
   Credit cards, loans with >6–8% interest prioritized for early payoff. "If you can get a guaranteed return from paying down an 8% debt, that's pretty attractive." [15:15]
3. Health Savings Account (HSA)
   "It's triple tax free... a really, really tax advantaged account." [16:00]
4. Retirement Account Contributions
   Max out 401(k), 403(b), Solo 401(k), depending on employment.
5. Backdoor Roth IRA
   For both yourself and spouse, if eligible.
6. Taxable Brokerage Accounts
   No upper limit, fill as much as you want with index funds, etc.
7. Alternative investments, additional debt paydown, or other personal goals
   Choose based on values and preferences.

• Personalization:
  Dr. Dahle notes that each waterfall is personal—some may prioritize paying off all debt before investing outside tax-advantaged accounts, others may blend the order differently based on their goals and risk appetite.
  "[The] concept is helpful for those of you that are early in career and you've got these dozen things that are good to do with your money... you got to list them out in the order in which you care about them most and start addressing them..."

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Key Timestamps

• 02:09 — Matt describes his profession and background
• 02:54 — The milestone: $1M in invested assets
• 03:13 — The role of monthly money date nights
• 04:02 — Starting net worth: negative $250k
• 06:18 — House paid off in 2018; rationale for mortgage prioritization
• 07:18 — Balancing kids, family, and money early in career
• 08:02 — Investment strategies (401(k), profit sharing, Roth, brokerage)
• 08:43 — Working through financial disagreements
• 10:11 — Secrets to success: automate, communicate, prioritize
• 10:43 — Biggest splurges: family travel
• 11:30 — Next goals: more real estate, generational planning
• 13:30 — Dr. Dahle explains the financial waterfall

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Tone & Takeaways

The tone is conversational, supportive, and practical, with real-life anecdotes and down-to-earth financial guidance. Matt and his wife’s story shows how diligent planning, automatic saving, and teamwork create real long-term wealth, even outside the typical “doctor” path. Dr. Dahle’s waterfall framework is designed to provide clarity and scaffolding for listeners facing competing financial priorities.

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For Listeners Who Haven't Tuned In

This episode is a blueprint for high-income professionals (not just doctors!) who want to achieve financial freedom while raising a family. It’s packed with practical strategies—regular planning, automating savings, and intentional goal-setting—and features an energetic discussion on ordering your financial priorities to make consistent progress. The “waterfall” segment is especially useful for anyone wondering where to direct savings or whom to pay off next.

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Advertisements, extended intros/outros, and non-content segments have been excluded from this summary.

Transcript

[Podcast Announcer]

This is the White Coat Investor Podcast, Milestones to Millionaire Celebrating stories of success along the journey to financial freedom.

[Jim Dahle]

This is Milestones to millionaire podcast number 239. A professor and a dentist become multimillionaires. This podcast is sponsored by Bob Baiani at Protuity. He's an independent provider of disability insurance planning solutions to the medical community in every state, and a longtime White Coat Investor sponsor. Specializes in working with residents and fellows early in their careers to set up sound financial and insurance strategies. If you need to review your disability insurance coverage or to get this critical insurance in place, contact [e-mail] Protuity P R O T U I T Y Or you can email infoorotuity.com or you can just pick up your phone and call 973-677-19100. Disability insurance if you don't have it and you are depending on your income, you need it. Get it in place today. All right? Don't forget, if you have interest in real estate investment, particularly if you are interested in investing passively in real estate, check out our Opportunities list. This is a list where we introduce you to companies, mostly fund providers, private fund providers that offer real estate investments. And this might be on the debt side, it might be on the equity side, whatever. There's a bunch of different options there. We have a turnkey provider on there, lots of different ways you can invest in real estate. You can find all [e-mail] reopportunities but this is the Milestones to Millionaire podcast. This podcast is driven by you and we'd like to feature you and your successes on this podcast. We can use them to inspire others to do the same. But stick around after this interview We've got a great interview today, but stick around afterward. We're going to talk for a few minutes about the concept of waterfalls. Our guest today on the Milestones to Millionaire podcast is Matt. Matt, welcome to the podcast.

[Matt]

Thanks for having me.

[Jim Dahle]

Tell us what you do for a living, what part of the country you're in, and how far you are away from your schooling.

[Matt]

I am in Pennsylvania. I'm 10 years out of graduate school, and I am a professor teaching chemistry at a small liberal arts college.

[Jim Dahle]

Very cool. I don't know that we've had a professor on here before, and this is episode 239, so it's pretty great to have you. As a lot of people know, there's a lot of doctors that listen to this podcast, but it's Far from everybody. It's only about 75% of our audience is doctors. That leaves 25%. That is something else. And you are part of that something else. So welcome to. And this message is for everybody else out there that is not a physician. You're welcome on this podcast, too. Right. So just by way of introduction there. All right. Tell us what milestone you've accomplished that we're celebrating with you today.

[Matt]

My wife and I have a million dollars invested.

[Jim Dahle]

Wow. I mean, that's even better than to be in a millionaire, right? That's a million in investable assets. And when did you realize this?

[Matt]

About two months ago.

[Jim Dahle]

Very cool. Is this something you track regularly or you just happened to add it up and realized you were there?

[Matt]

We track monthly, so my wife and I have, like, monthly date nights where we go over finances and sort of our goals.

[Jim Dahle]

Sounds like a wonderful date.

[Matt]

It took a little while to get her into it, but now that we're millionaires, it's much easier to talk about.

[Jim Dahle]

Yeah, there's a lot of good stuff to talk about. Very cool. Okay, well, let's get into the deets a little bit here. Tell us a little bit about your household income over the last 10 years.

[Matt]

Sure. So my wife actually is a dentist, so we're part of the white coat investors, I guess, in that sense. But she's also about 10 years out of school, and right now we make about 400 combined. But she owns her own practice, and so that has drastically increased our wealth in the past couple years, I'm sure.

[Jim Dahle]

But I'll bet it also increased your debt dramatically, didn't it?

[Matt]

That it did, too.

[Jim Dahle]

What was the lowest your net worth.

[Matt]

Ever was right out of school? It was negative 250.

[Jim Dahle]

And then did she take out a practice loan right out of school, or was that years later?

[Matt]

No, she was an associate until three years ago. So she was an associate for the first seven years.

[Jim Dahle]

Okay. And how far did she get into her student loans as an associate?

[Matt]

She paid off her. Well, actually, we just paid off her student loans earlier this year. They were on pause during the pandemic, so we didn't pay any off, and we actually saved up to buy the practice at that point when we weren't paying on the student loans.

[Jim Dahle]

Okay, tell us about your career pathway.

[Matt]

So I did a postdoc after I got my PhD and then immediately went into the job market and got my job. This is my 11th year teaching.

[Jim Dahle]

Same place.

[Matt]

Yep.

[Jim Dahle]

And what do chemistry professors make these days?

[Matt]

I make about 70,000.

[Jim Dahle]

Okay, so certainly not the same as what a doc who owns her own practice is making.

[Matt]

That is very true, yes.

[Jim Dahle]

Okay, and you said, what do you think you averaged over those 10 years as far as income?

[Matt]

Probably around $250,000, $300,000, $250,000 or so.

[Jim Dahle]

Okay, well, tell us about your. Have you added up your net worth as well? I mean, we know you have a million dollars in liquid assets, but what's your net worth total, do you think?

[Matt]

About two million dollars.

[Jim Dahle]

About two million. Tell it. Tell us what that's composed of.

[Matt]

Yeah, so we have the million dollars invested. We have a fully paid off house with about 400,000. And then we have her practice, which her equity is probably a little over half a million. And then we own the building that she practices in. That's worth about 400,000. And then we have a rental property worth about 200.

[Jim Dahle]

Okay, this is a little bit of an interesting lineup for your debts. Right? You said the house is paid for, that you're living in?

[Matt]

Yep.

[Jim Dahle]

But there's debt on the practice?

[Matt]

Yes.

[Jim Dahle]

Is there debt on the building the practice is in as well?

[Matt]

Yes.

[Jim Dahle]

And what about the rental property?

[Matt]

That. There's a little bit left, but we're hoping to pay that off next year.

[Jim Dahle]

You seem fairly anti debt.

[Matt]

Yes.

[Jim Dahle]

I mean, 10 years out of school and your home's already paid for. When did you pay for that?

[Matt]

We paid that off in 2018.

[Jim Dahle]

Long time ago.

[Matt]

Yeah.

[Jim Dahle]

Tell us about that. Why was that such a priority for you and how did you pay that off so quickly?

[Matt]

It was mostly a priority because that was in both of our names and the student loans was all in my wife's. So we prioritized paying that off rather than the student loans, mostly as a hedge against something happening to her.

[Jim Dahle]

You figured no one was going to come and foreclose on her brain, but at least you'd have a roof over your head if something happened.

[Matt]

Exactly. Yeah. And at that point we had three kids, and so it was sort of stabilizing the home life versus anything else because as she's sort of the big breadwinner in our household, if something did happen to her, our income would go down pretty drastically. Yeah.

[Jim Dahle]

How many kids now?

[Matt]

Still three. We stopped after the third one.

[Jim Dahle]

Okay, so how did you balance being financially successful with raising three kids?

[Matt]

It was a challenge at first when she did a residency for a year, a general practice residency, and she only made $50,000 at that point. And that's when we had our third kid. So at that point we were Making a little over 100,000. We had three kids, all under the age of five, and it was stressful, but we started having our monthly date nights to just talk about if we have any extra cash coming in, what are we going to do with it. And once we paid off the house, then things really started to really balloon for us.

[Jim Dahle]

Wow. Yeah. I mean, as income goes up, as debt goes away, of course the money has to go somewhere. And it sounds like for you, it went into investments. So tell me about how you guys invest.

[Matt]

So we both max out our retirement plans, and then we both have 401ks. And then through her office, she does profit sharing, which allows her to stock away about 65,000 a year. And then we both do backdoor Roths, and then we have a brokerage account that we stick some money in every month as well.

[Jim Dahle]

So a little bit of this, a little bit of that. But it sounds like mostly publicly traded securities, mutual funds. Is that what you're invested in?

[Matt]

Yeah, pretty much all index funds.

[Jim Dahle]

Okay, very cool. All right, well, tell us about, you know, the biggest money disagreement you had. You said that it took a little while to get used to having monthly money meetings. What. What was the biggest disagreement you ever had?

[Matt]

I think when we started to have a surplus, it was, what do we do with it? And for a while, we were, you know, splitting a little bit on to paying down the house versus paying off student loans versus investing. And at some point, we decided we just need to pick one goal and focus on it. And so that became the house until we paid that off. And then it became, okay, let's buy a rental property. And so we bought our first rental not long after we paid off the house. So it was really just figuring out how we wanted to allocate the next dollar. And then once we sort of came up with a plan, then it's gone pretty smoothly since then.

[Jim Dahle]

Yeah, it's one of the hard things. You come out of school, you come out of training, whatever. You got 12 good uses for money and only enough money for four of them.

[Matt]

Yeah, exactly.

[Jim Dahle]

Choose which ones to do. The fun part, though, is now, if you look back on those 12 things you had to do with money, you've only got two or three of them left. So the decision is dramatically easier a decade later, isn't it?

[Matt]

Yeah. And it's much more fun to talk about these things than it was those things. Yeah.

[Jim Dahle]

Investing is way sexier than debt, for sure.

[Matt]

Yeah.

[Jim Dahle]

Ah, very cool. So, I mean, what's your secret? Success. There's Somebody out there like you, right. Ten years ago, you know, married to a dentist, married to a physician, whatever, you know, trying to combine your finances, start working together toward financial goals. And they're going, man, I'd like to be, you know, a multimillionaire in 10 years. What advice would you give to them? How'd you do this?

[Matt]

I would say first, having these monthly meetings has been really helpful, discussing how we want to allocate that next dollar. And then we've always automated our savings, so it's always coming out of the paycheck before we see it. So our retirement funds, our brokerage account, that's all coming out before it hits our bank account. And so that we're always trying to pay ourselves first.

[Jim Dahle]

Very cool. And that way, you know, you're going to have some savings and you just gotta be frugal on the backside, I suppose.

[Matt]

Yeah.

[Jim Dahle]

What's been your biggest splurge in the last couple of years?

[Matt]

We started traveling a lot more, so we took a Mediterranean cruise last year. We went to France earlier this year. We've been to Mexico and Canada in the last couple years with our girls. So really travel.

[Jim Dahle]

Very cool. So you're not supposed to live like a resident for half your career, is that right?

[Matt]

That is right.

[Jim Dahle]

Thanks for that. You know, every now and then, people here live like a resident and they assume I want them to do that until they're financially independent. But really it's just the idea of front loading some of your financial tasks, like you guys did. And then the truth is, when the kids are young anyway, they're not going to remember those trips. So, you know, might as well, once they get to be a little bit older, to take those opportunities. Very cool. What's next for you guys?

[Matt]

Well, we're going to pay off our rental within the next year and then probably try and look to invest in more real estate.

[Jim Dahle]

Very cool. So you got a goal to be a landlord of a little real estate empire. How many doors do you anticipate you're going to. You're going to build into this empire?

[Matt]

I mean, we'd like to have three. That way we could have one for each of our kids, but we'll see if we go beyond that.

[Jim Dahle]

Very cool. Is your area getting like mine, where you look around and you wonder how your kids are ever going to be able to afford to buy a house in your area?

[Matt]

Yeah, I mean, our house has doubled in value in the past 10 years.

[Jim Dahle]

Yeah, I know how that feels, for sure. Well, very cool. Congratulations, Matt. You have Done awesome. You and your spouse have done awesome. And your kids, you guys have all. You know, it's a team effort. You put it all together. You've managed money well, you've increased your income, you've taken care of your debt. You should be very proud of yourselves. I know others will find this very inspirational to see that, hey, they're no different than we were. And if they can do it, we can do it. So thanks so much for being willing to come on the Milestones Millionaire podcast.

[Matt]

Been my pleasure. Thanks for having me. All right.

[Jim Dahle]

Another great interview. The thing I love about these interviews is, is in some ways, they're all the same, right? Because the pathway to success, for the most part, looks the same for everybody. You decided you were gonna take control of things. You became financially literate. You carved out some significant chunk of your income and used it to build wealth. Now it's a different order. What people do, sometimes people pay down one debt before another, or they invest more instead of paying down debt, or they pay down debt more instead of investing whatever. But you give it a few years of deliberately working to build wealth, and you get there. You become a millionaire, you become a multimillionaire, you become financially independent. And before long, money is no longer a significant factor in how you live your life. It's way beyond not worrying about money. It's just not a factor anymore. And it's a beautiful place to be. And it's a place where I think you can not only be the most present partner and parent, you can be the best doc you can be because you're no longer focused on what a procedure or a clinical day is going to pay you. You're focused on the person sitting in that seat or lying in that bed that needs your care. I just think you become a better doctor when you're not as worried about money. So that's a pretty wonderful thing. Now, I told you we were going to talk a little bit about the concept of waterfalls. And when we talk about waterfalls in the personal finance and investing space, we're talking about this concept that you only have a certain amount of money. So what you do is you pour it like water into the top waterfall, and that pool is full, it spills over into the next pool and into the next pool. Once that pool's full and into the next pool, and you might get down five, six, seven pools, whatever. And then you run out of money. And what that waterfall represents is the best uses for your money. And that might be paying on a debt. It might be maxing out some type of a retirement account. For example, a waterfall that we've put together to help people decide what to do next. Because it's hard in the beginning, right? This is all kind of new to you. And you got 12 great uses for money. And you're like, how do I prioritize these? But here's one way you can prioritize these. And we call it the waterfall of tax efficient investing. And that first pool is your employer provided retirement plan match. The match is free money. If you just save something for retirement, you get paid more by your employer. Maybe it's 50% of the first 6% of your salary that you put into that account. That's your first priority. Because not getting it is leaving part of your salary on the table. So you put enough money, enough water into that pool so you get the full match from the employer, then it spills over into the next pool. And the next pool is really should be high interest rate debt right now. What's high? Well, probably more than 6%, maybe more than 8%. Certainly any sort of credit card debt at 15 or 30% is in that category. Right. This is a high priority. Your guaranteed investments out there are paying you something like 4, 4.5% these days. Right? So if you can get a guaranteed return from paying down an 8% debt, that's pretty attractive. Yeah, you might do a little better than that. If you have a particularly good real estate investment or maybe stocks have a good year, maybe you can borrow at 8% and come out ahead investing. But for the most part, when you get into those higher interest rate debts, it's a pretty good option. So we have that as our second pool. The third pool I would put a health savings account. It's one of the major priorities for us every year because it's triple tax free. You get a tax break. When the money goes in, it grows tax free. When it comes out and is spent on healthcare, it comes out tax free. It's triple tax free. It's a really, really tax advantaged account. And so that one really comes next. Okay. And then next in the waterfall, once you've filled that out, right, you got your match, you paid off all your high interest rate debt. You now maxed out your HSA for the year. That's probably where your retirement account comes. And maybe It's a Solo 401 if you're self employed, maybe it's a 403 if you're at a academic center, whatever. But you max that out next it might be $23,500 this year. Still got more money you can put away toward building wealth. Well, that's where we start looking at a backdoor Roth, both for yourself and for your spouse. If you're under 50, that's $7,000 this year for each of you. Still got more, but you can always invest more in taxable, right? And that pool actually never ends, right, because you could put $10 million a year into a taxable brokerage account if you wanted to. But sometimes people put a limit on that and they say, I want to invest this much into index funds in a taxable account, and then we're going to stop doing this and I'm going to go buy a rental property, some sort of alternative investment, or I want to put $10,000 into Bitcoin if I can, or whatever, right? You get to design this waterfall yourself. And at this point you can pick anything you want. Other people, they're very debt averse and they're going to put even low interest rate debt into the waterfall at about that point. I know we didn't really have much of a taxable brokerage account until we'd paid off our mortgage. You know, it was important to us to pay off a mortgage. And so before we had much of a taxable brokerage account, we actually dedicated money toward paying off the mortgage. And then of course that allows you down the road to invest even more into a taxable brokerage account. But that's the concept of a waterfall, right? You're moving from one pool to another. You are, you know, taking, engaging with your financial priorities in the order in which you have prioritized them, right? Your money is going toward what you value the most. And I think that intentionality is really valuable. And the concept is helpful for those of you that are early in career and you've got these dozen things that are good to do with your money. Maybe it's beefing up your emergency fund and paying off this debt and that debt and this debt and you got all these new retirement accounts you want to take advantage of. And maybe you want to be a landlord and so you want to do some of that and you want to take your kids to Europe or whatever. You got all these priorities. Well, you got to list them out in the order in which you care about them most and start addressing them, start working down them. And you will find, like Matt found, as you go through that first decade or so of your career and your financial life, that some of those start going away, right? You pay off the debts or you no longer have whatever that priority was and pretty soon instead of working with a dozen of them, you're only working with three of them and your life actually becomes a lot more simple. This episode was sponsored by Bob Baiani at Protuity. One listener sent us this review. Bob had been absolutely terrific to work with. He's always quickly and clearly communicated with me by both email and or telephone, with responses to my inquiries usually coming the same day. I have somewhat of a unique situation and Bob has been able to help explain the implications and underwriting process in a clear and professional manner. You can contact [e-mail] Protuity. You can email infoorotuity.com or you can call 973-771-9100 to get disability insurance in place today. If you'd like to be on this podcast, you can apply whitecoatinvestor.com Milestones is where you do that until our next episode, which will drop this Thursday. An episode of the regular White Coat Investor podcast. Keep your head up and shoulders back. We'll see you next time.

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The hosts of the White Coat Investor are not licensed accountants, attorneys or financial advisors. This podcast is for your entertainment and information only. It should not be considered professional or personalized financial advice. You should consult the appropriate professional for specific advice relating to your situation.