(Ep. 185) Five Tools You Need to Create a Winning Financial Plan

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Student Loan Planner Podcast. This is Travis and we have some big tools for you today. I am really excited to share that we decided to put together the ultimate guide to making your own financial plan. It's gonna be called Dreams Not Debt. So this is a course that we are launching right now at studentloanplanner.com slash plan. If you've always wanted to get a financial plan but you felt like the price was out of reach or you felt like financial planning just doesn't take into account the fact that you may have had student loans or have student loans, this is the course for you. As a podcast listener, we're giving 70% off and we're closing that course discount this Thursday. So about 48 hours after you listen to this probably. So if you do not wanna miss out on a transformational financial plan for your life, check out studentloanplanner.com slash plan. Again, 70% off until this Thursday. This is the other half of what I've always wanted to teach our audience. So we've made the investing course. We've had four figures of students, thousands of people go through that course and people have invested millions of dollars and become more confident investors with that course and gotten closer to financial freedom. That's awesome. But the problem is I don't want you just to be rich. I want you to be rich and happy. And if you just invest, then you will eventually be rich. But without a plan for your why, without asking hard questions about what motivates you, you will never hit that destination of your dream life efficiently. You might be so wealthy that eventually you realize you can live it, but I would rather you start living your dream life as soon as possible. I would rather you not wait until you're financially independent to make some big life changes that are gonna increase your happiness. So again, studentloanplanner.com slash plan. We're gonna talk about the contents of that course in today's podcast episode, give you a preview of what you would learn and you're gonna learn a bunch about financial planning, I think, if you listen to this. So one of the things that I wanted to do for our audience is get more equipped to help you with financial planning. We don't wanna be your specific financial planner because I think there's a lot of good financial planners out there. And if you want to hire one, I would look for someone who's fee only, who's a CFP and who specializes in something that you need. Maybe that's your particular profession, people in your stage of life, people that are going through different specific kinds of challenges that you might be going through. So that's what I would do if you wanted to hire somebody who's gonna be your one-on-one financial planner. We're not gonna do that, but what I thought we could show you how to do is make your own financial plan. And even if you do hire a financial planner at some point, just knowing about what a good financial planner should do for you and knowing about what goes into a financial plan is going to make sure you get really good value from that relationship. So I think most people can make their own financial plan. Most people are capable of making their own financial plan. And so if you just take a very short amount of time checking out this course, you're gonna be so well-equipped to hit that dream life a lot sooner. So I want to give you a little bit of a story about my own personal life, about why I believe in financial planning so much. So when I was in corporate America, I was not super happy in life. I had graduated from college, did well, and thought originally I was gonna go be an economics professor, and that didn't work out. And so then I went to work for a big company, and then I thought, okay, my life's goal is to be an executive of this company and maybe run this big company one day. That's what I thought I wanted. And then I found out that being in a big corporation, it just wasn't the lifestyle that I was looking for, for various reasons. Big corporations tend to be a lot slower, a lot more bureaucratic, have a lot more processes and procedures. You typically can't get change happening as fast. And I'm somebody that is, you know, I'm an entrepreneur. I like to disrupt things. I like to come up with new ways of doing things, and I like to implement them quickly. So it was just like a personality mismatch. And the thing is, is I had been working hard to save and invest and grow my wealth, but I didn't really have a plan as to why. So the really big game changer for me was when I realized that because of my frugality, because of the things that I was doing, I actually could put all those things together with a specific plan in place to live my best life sooner. So what I did is with about a year's notice in my own brain, I mean, I didn't tell my employer for about a couple months before I did this. So I put together the pieces of the puzzle that allowed me to retire at 25. And why did I want to do this? Well, I decided I wanted to travel the world. I felt like life was too short not to live my best life sooner. And I'm really glad that I did that. I actually ended up meeting my wife. I ended up getting to see 40 countries across the world. I ended up pursuing things that I was more interested in than just corporate America. And I ended up coming up with the idea that resulted in Student Loan Planner that actually ended up making me a lot more money than what I would have made in corporate America. So I really believe that you should bet on yourself. And I think that your goals are gonna be different from mine. You might enjoy your job. You might love your profession. You might want to get promoted to the top of that profession. You might want to work, but work less. Maybe you want to live in a million dollar house. Maybe you want to renovate your house until you have the most gorgeous kitchen in the world where MasterChef could film it at your home. There's all kinds of different goals out there. Maybe you want to have kids. Maybe you don't have kids. Maybe you want to travel the world. Maybe you want to work remote. Maybe you want to start your own business or buy a business. Regardless of what your dream is, I want you to achieve it. And that's how we get there, is through financial planning. So we're gonna talk about five key ideas in today's podcast that we go over in the course, the Dreams Not Debt Financial Planning course from Student Loan Planner. So the different tips we're gonna go into in a little more detail here in a second. Cash flow, taxes, insurance and asset protection, life milestone planning, and goals-based investing. And then you put all that together into your own financial plan and then execute. So let's talk about each one of these five categories. I'm gonna go into some details so you get the idea of why this financial planning stuff, it can be squishy at times, but it's also quite technical too. You know, there's a gazillion different tools in the financial industry that you can use. And financial planning is saying, which of these tools do I need to do the job and how do I put them all together and choose which ones to use based off of my limited time and my goals and then put them all together to make it happen. So cash flow, let's talk about cash flow. Cash flow is a fancy word for, you know, what are you spending and why? Where's the money going? And so for thinking about cash flow, the first thing I would do to start off is just make a net worth statement. So you put all your assets on one column and all your liabilities in the other column and you figure out what is your net worth right now. Now, that is a little deceiving because your student debt's probably not a debt, it's probably an income tax, unless it's private student debt, in which case it is a debt. And so you should include any private student loan debt on your net worth statement. You should also include federal student loans you plan to pay off on your net worth statement. So if you have your assets listed and your debt listed, what you want to think about in these columns is which of the assets could be converted into cash. Which of your assets are liquid, which ones of them are not liquid. So for example, you know, a house you just bought that went up 5% value, that's, you know, it's part of your assets, but it's an illiquid asset because you're not gonna be able to get, you know, a mortgage refinance with such a small amount of increase, probably. You might be able to do a home equity loan depending on if you put 20% down, but, you know, it's not super likely. Whereas, you know, an asset that's invested in a brokerage account is very liquid. You could sell it and pay any capital gains tax and then have access to that money. And that's important to know because what your current net worth statement is, that gives you an idea of how much of a cushion you have to take whatever next step you want to take. You know, if you have a net worth statement that has almost no assets and, you know, your cash flow is modestly positive, then that's not gonna get you where you want to be fast enough, right? Alternatively, you might have a lot of net worth on your balance sheet. You might actually have a lot of equity in your home that's untapped. Different things that you might be able to do, restructuring that, home equity loans. Maybe you could, you know, use some of that equity to renovate your kitchen instead of wait to save for it. There's all kinds of things that you could do based off of what that net worth statement shows. So that's kind of the first step, is figure out where you're at. Next step is to figure out where your cash is going. That's the cash flow statement. So statement of cash flows is something corporations do, right? But for your personal cash flow statement, you want to figure out what's coming in, what's going out. Most people don't track their spending. And what we find at Student Loan Planner is that's a big missed opportunity. And you don't have to do something super fancy. You don't need to keep an Excel sheet. There's a lot of people out there that if I told you you need to track your spending in an Excel sheet, your eyes would gloss over. And luckily, that doesn't need to happen. Luckily instead, what you can simply do is use one of several different budgeting methods to come up with a model of what you're spending. So first, I would pick an app that will connect with your bank accounts that will pull in all of your transactions automatically. So I would either use ment.com or YNAB, YNAB.com or personalcapital.com. Those are just a few of the different methods. And you can do a traditional budget where you say this is all my categories I want to spend money on. This is the amount of money I'm allocating to each category. And then I'm going to match up my spending to that category. And then I'll know how much or little I have left over at the end of the month in each of these different categories. And if I have a surplus, then I can put it towards some of my other goals. So that's more of like a YNAB, YNAB.com, unitybudget.com. That's their method. Now, myself and Rob, our senior consultant, have actually different methods for measuring cash flow. So for me, I prefer the top five method where you look at your top five categories of spending and you make any necessary changes to increase cash flow to those five categories. Sometimes that means increasing cash flow spend on those five categories because that's kind of showing what you value the most in your life. So for example, you might find travel as one of your top five. Maybe you want to spend more in that area. And if you need to make cuts because you want to get out of student debt faster or you want to save for down payment on a home faster, whatever it is, then I suggest looking at those top five categories and trying to figure out if there's creative ways that you can cut back in those categories first. Because honestly, the lattes are not going to make any difference, really, in you getting to your goals faster. Now, our senior consultant, Rob, actually has a side business called Family Budget Expert. And he suggests the keep, cut back, eliminate method. So this method is when you look through all of your spending, categorize it based off of most money spent, least money spent, and what you do is you look at whether you should keep it, cut it back, or eliminate it. So a lot of times certain things will be really important to you, so those are non-negotiable must keeps. Certain things are nice to have, but maybe you could do without. So an example might be dining out. Maybe dining out's fun for you, but maybe you feel like you got to eat too much already. And so maybe you cut back on dining out. And then maybe there are things that you don't use, like subscriptions or particular, sort of particular items that you spend money on that you weren't even that aware that you were spending that much money on them, and maybe you eliminate those completely. So for example, maybe you have a habit of buying something expensive on Amazon and you realize you don't even use those things when you buy them. That would be an example of something you could eliminate. That brings a level of discipline to your spending overall, and it helps keep you accountable for what you're spending your money on, even down to smaller transactions. So with cash flow, you pick one of those methods of tracking your spending. You make a statement of net worth, statement of cash flow, know where you're at, and that tells you kind of how much ammunition you've got to get to that next step. So let's look at taxes now. Taxes are a major, major deal because most people pay too much. So with taxes, the key is knowing enough to be dangerous and then deciding whether or not you should be doing your own taxes or hiring somebody to do them for you. If you are a business owner or you make money from 1099 income, you will almost surely pay for your tax person from having them do your taxes instead of you doing them. Honestly, once you get above just a simple W-2 and filing your home interest documents and everything, you can do it on TurboTax for sure if you're a W-2, but then once you get more complicated, I just think you're risking making some mistakes that don't actually help you any and actually cost you money instead of save you money. Now, one of the reasons why is there's just a bunch of loopholes that most people are not aware of. So one example is FSAs, flexible spending accounts. You know, there's medical accounts and then there's dependent care accounts. A lot of people don't realize that and they don't take advantage of it and then they spend after-tax dollars on daycare instead of pre-tax dollars on daycare. Some other examples, health savings accounts. A lot of people will sign up for a more expensive plan not realizing that you pay more money in premiums than even if you went out with the max out-of-pocket out of your high-deductible health plan. A lot of times these Cadillac health plans are sort of priced even more expensive than if somebody uses a high-deductible health plan and contributes the max to HSA. Other reasons are, you know, 403Bs, 401Ks. A lot of times people don't realize that you can double dip and do a 457 if you have access to that on top of your 403B or 401K. Now, it would be a 403B if you have access to a 457 because those are only offered through non-profits. Sometimes people get confused about 401As, too. 401As are mandatory contributions that your employer withholds for you and might contribute to and people also mess up the Roth IRA all the time. A lot of times people don't realize they need to do a backdoor Roth IRA. It's probably one of the top frustrations that people have with us sometimes if they file taxes separate and they've already contributed to a Roth IRA. We might want them to file separate for student loans, but because of doing the Roth IRA already, it kind of disallows that contribution and they have to recharacterize their contribution, which is really a big pain in the butt. So just a PSA, by the way, if you file taxes separately, two of the big things that can get messed up are your Roth IRA where you have to actually make sure you do a backdoor Roth if you do filing separately and also your dependent care FSA. You get a $2,500 deduction instead of 5,000 if you file separate, so that can cost you some money in taxes there. So that's just W-2. I haven't even gotten into 1099 folks or business owners that are doing an S-corp or a C-corp. S-corp folks, you can set up wages for yourself and legally dodge a lot of the self-employment and Social Security Medicare taxes out there. People don't realize this. If you're making 100K as a business owner and you pay yourself 50K in wages working with an accountant to justify that, then instead of paying 15% on 100,000 for Social Security Medicare, you can pay 15% on 50,000. If you make below, I believe it's 340,000 as a couple, you can use the QBI deduction, qualified business income, if you're a business owner, and write off 20% of your business income and not pay taxes on that. If you have a very stable private practice that's gonna be making a lot of income for a long time, you can work with a CPA and a benefits administrator to set up a defined benefit plan and put away as much as 200,000 a year pre-tax for your retirement and not have to have that included in your AGI. You can, in some cases, buy your building almost for free. What I mean by that is if you buy a million-dollar building with 4% interest for the 30-year term, then the interest deduction you'll get probably is about 40,000, and then the depreciation of your building will probably be about 24,000 because you'd take one divided by 39, and then that's about 65,000 of tax-free write-offs that you would get from owning a building, and the first-year mortgage is like 50,000 or so. So you're buying a building tax-free in terms of your cash flow, not tax-free technically, but in effect, you're buying it virtually tax-free. So you're growing a huge value of assets, and then when you retire, if you want to, you could take the value of your building and maybe look into doing a 1031 exchange and buying a different property that would be another investment property that could rent out for a substantial amount of money, and you could, instead of focusing on just avoiding lease charges to your dental practice, you could sell that and buy something that would provide you rental income of a more substantial nature that's passive income through a property manager that you could use to support your retirement. And then finally, if you're really killing it and making a ton of money, you can convert into a C corporation and pay 21% taxes because of tax reform, and then take advantage of qualified small business stock and hold your C corp for five years and get as much as $10 million tax-free when you sell your business if you follow certain rules. So what's the point of being rich from planning so carefully with taxes? I mean, taxes is the number one outflow when you're high income. And if you're not high income now, maybe you will be at some point in the future. And even if you're moderate income, you're still much higher income than the typical American. So that means that you have a lot more options to save money on taxes than the typical American does. And if you're not taking advantage of them, you're just paying extra money to the government for no reason. And sure, you wanna pay your fair share of taxes, like that's an honorable thing to do, but you're not gonna get a gold star for paying more than you actually owe. And even if you want to have higher tax rates to fund better social services, that's something that, in my opinion, is independent of the taxes that you pay. If you look at really any politician, even ones that are very much advocating for higher tax rates as a society so we can provide more public goods, their CPAs have a fiduciary relationship with them for their taxes and try to make them pay as little as legally allowed, right? So I think that's a very reasonable path to take regardless of your views on tax rates. And insurance and asset protection is next. So this is number three. It's amazing to me how little people think about insurance. So what I mean by that is there's vanilla stuff, there's situational insurance that you might wanna buy, and there's just stuff that's really complicated that everybody buys but nobody really knows what's going on with it. And then also there's asset protection that is relevant as well. So let's break down a couple of these different items. So for vanilla stuff, auto insurance, homeowner's insurance, renter's insurance, it's amazing how people will leave out the most important part of your policy and not realize it. So example with auto insurance, you need to buy underinsured and uninsured motorist insurance. You need to have a max liability policy paired with a umbrella liability policy so that if you are, heaven forbid, in an accident with your friend from medical school and that person becomes disabled and is no longer able to earn their $2 million of future lifetime earnings and they are, they didn't purchase their disability insurance policy, they might really like you, but they still might wanna sue because they need to get financial assets to support their living needs. It's just reality, right? And so if you have an umbrella liability policy paired with a max auto liability policy, then you'll be covered for that. And you won't have to worry about that. With homeowner's insurance, it's amazing to me how few people realize whether or not their policy is covering replacement value or actual cash value. Actual cash value is the depreciated value of your home and replacement value is what it would cost to build the similar home that you've got brand new, which is a big difference. And so when we were buying homeowners, I noticed that the policy that was offered to us or recommended to us by our mortgage company was only to build like a 500K home and we were paying more than that for our home. So if something happened, a fire burned down our house, we might not even get enough money to pay off our mortgage or barely enough to pay off our mortgage. And then we would have sort of been stuck with higher interest rates with no ability to put, to have more money to build a new home. So that's something really important to look at as well as the riders that are on your homeowner's policy. Are you covered for flood? Are you covered for windstorm? Are you covered for earthquake? You need to think about those things when you are getting that kind of insurance so you don't have to think about it anymore after you get it in place. Renter's insurance is something that we've had in the past. It's amazing how few people pay attention to what the insured location is. We moved around a couple times, forgot to update our renter's insurance, forgot to cancel our old renter's insurance. Luckily, we were able to get a refund. And we called and told them, hey, we just forgot to cancel it. And they gave us a full refund because we weren't living in that location. So, but a lot of things to know about vanilla insurance. Now situational insurance is something that some people need, but not everybody needs. So you need to figure out, do you need this? And why do you need this? And how do you buy it for high quality coverage for the lowest price? So term life is one example. If you have people, depending on your income, you need term life. And how much do you need? Well, work is gonna cover you probably for two times your salary at best. Even more employers will just give you 50,000. And that's because the IRS lets you deduct premiums on a 50K policy if you do a group life insurance policy for everyone. And so that's nothing. That's enough to handle your end of life expenses pretty much and maybe pay off some credit cards and that's it. That would be a disaster. You do not want to put your loved ones in a situation where they would need to do a GoFundMe if something tragic happened to you. That's not responsible, right? Now obviously, if somebody's low income, tragedies happen, I'm not at all criticizing people who do GoFundMes because sometimes it's just unbelievable the tragedies that you see there. But if you're a professional that doesn't have any kind of expectation of anything bad happening, you need to go ahead and get term life. It's a responsible thing to do, if you have kids especially. How much do you need? We tell people 10 times their income. It's pretty cheap. So if you are a doctor making 200K, you need a two million dollar policy, probably a 20 year term. And it's pretty straightforward. You can go to studentloanplanner.com slash life and get life insurance quotes. So it's pretty straightforward to get a really good term life policy in place. Mine's 80 dollars a month for a three million dollar term and I recommend everybody get that if you have kids. Disability insurance. This is something you're going to buy if you're high income. Really, that's really the only people that buy it, to be honest. Because other people will just look at the cost and say I can't really justify paying for this. Because disability insurance is a couple hundred to a few hundred a month. And it pays you if you can no longer do your occupation. That's called own occupation disability insurance. And this is something that virtually all physicians will buy. Most dentists will buy this. Other professions, CRNAs, optometrists, sometimes psychologists, nurse practitioners, those folks will buy it too in a lot of cases. But after that, it kind of falls off. Where maybe if you're an ultra high income veterinarian or ultra high income lawyer, you might buy it. But otherwise, people seem to like to take their chances. And when you're buying this, your school or your employer or your residency or fellowship program might actually offer a better discount than what an independent agent could get you. And that's kind of unfortunate because what happens is a lot of the disability insurance agents might talk to 200 prospects in a year. They need to put food on the table. They're going to want to make a sale even if they know that your residency program might be able to get you a slightly better pricing. They're going to want to close the sale, right? And so you might also get hit up by people who are captive agents where they can only sell from one company. And in a lot of cases, the policy that they have is inferior and if they don't sell you their company's policy, they don't eat. So disability insurance is complex. That's one of the reasons I decided we would start our own agency to help people at least get quotes where I would know that people will get sent to their residency program to apply if there's a better discount that we know of that we can offer. So that's kind of our idea, is sort of offering this as a service for SLP insurance. I don't care if you go to somebody else, it's fine. I just want you to get a good coverage policy in place that's true on occupation, has all the riders you need, and I want you to evaluate your options and just get it in place and then not have to worry about it anymore. Other things you need, health insurance. Now the crazy thing about health insurance is the Affordable Care Act made health insurance more accessible and also way more complicated. So with the ACA, you might get policies through work and there's different kinds of plans. There's EPOs, POSs, PPOs, high deductible health plans, HMOs. We go into all the different kinds of health insurance in our course and we talk about also the ACA plans of what to do if you're not covered or you don't have coverage options through your employer. You can do a couple different options. You can go to a broker and look for policy through their marketplace. You can look at the Affordable Care Act options and then you can look at, sometimes you might look at health share ministries. So when I was not married and didn't have health insurance, I went through a health share ministry when I didn't have a super high income. I had a high enough income that I didn't qualify for subsidies through the exchange, but not so high that I felt comfortable just paying for a very, very expensive ACA plan. So if you weigh different options available through health insurance, it gives you more power. A lot of times when people wanna quit their job, the big fear is how do I pay for health insurance? If you know the hacks available like keeping your AGI between 150% and 200% of the poverty line, you can sign up for a silver plan, pay basically zero a month for your premium, and then you can get cost sharing assistance where your deductible can be as little as a couple hundred dollars and doctor visits are five to $10. I did this in between my job as a bond trader and starting student loan planner because I knew about these hacks because I was super into personal finance and read every personal finance blog I could get my hands on. So I wanted to share with you those tips so that you could not have health insurance be an obstacle to your dreams. Now the final part of that section would be asset protection. So this is like LLCs, corporations, talking about trusts, creditors, retirement assets, et cetera. So for asset protection, sometimes it's as simple as paying attention to do you own investments, physical investments, or business investments where somebody would get mad and sue you. So what is an example? You own a rental property and somebody slips and falls and heaven forbid breaks their back. And you paid somebody to de-ice the sidewalks but they didn't happen to come that day because they just didn't tell you and didn't show up. So then you're liable even though you try to do the right thing and somebody's gonna sue you because they have a lot of bills because they're missing work and they hurt their back and hopefully they're not, you know, something even more serious like being paralyzed but they're still gonna have tens of thousands of medical bills and rehab and they're gonna have to come after somebody for that. And so there's a couple situations here. If you have something titled correctly, you might have your rental property owned by an LLC. And the rental income for that property doesn't hit your personal bank account, it hits the LLC's bank account, which means that if the person comes after you, the most they could come after you for is the assets in the LLC, which is like the cash and maybe the equity of the home that you have. Now on top of that, you can make sure your insurance is titled correctly so that you've got protection for the value of the assets in your LLC's as well. And then you can have even a holding company on top of that where you have each of your different assets and different LLC's and have the holding company own those LLC's. So this is really more intended for people that want to have a seven figure net worth and don't mind the extra complexity for the extra protection. And retirement accounts, luckily, are very straightforward because those are ultra protected from creditors compared to most things. So, and there's other aspects like a certain amount of home equity that's basically exempted from creditors. In North Carolina, I believe it's 35,000 as an individual and 70,000 as a couple that creditors can't come after in your home equity. So for people that have sort of simple finances, you want to put a lot of money in retirement and paying down your home mortgage. For people who have more complicated finances, there's a lot of options available like getting certain kinds of insurance, professional liability, E&O, and then making sure things are properly titled, owned by LLC's and corporations to prevent somebody from coming after you personally. Next category is life milestone planning. A lot of people have gone through a lot of different life events in history and luckily there is a lot of wisdom in place financially of what you need to do to get ready to do these various things. So a couple of those obvious things that happen are house, car, kids, marriage, business, retirement, college, and hitting financial independence. Now, if you're buying a house, you need to decide what kind of mortgage to use. You want to think about what down payment you're going to need. You need to realize what options you have available really early so you know that you don't have to put down 20%. You have some other options available to you. For buying a car, a lot of times I would tell people five years ago, buy a three year old used car for cash if you can afford it because that's where the relative value is. Now, in my opinion, the relative value is in new cars that you order online and wait for three months to arrive. So things are fast moving, fast changing in these different categories, but if you have a little bit of understanding of why you might do that instead of sign up for a car lease, you'll save a lot of money. Having kids. You do not have to have the same health plan every year. A lot of times people will do a high deductible plan for certain years and then when they know they're going to try to get pregnant or they are pregnant, they'll switch to a Cadillac health insurance plan for that one year and then plan to switch back once they are not planning on having a kid. There's other hacks available as well like the dependent care credit. Marriage. If you've gotten married, you probably know quite a bit about this already, but if you have not, think about things like what venue you choose. Will they allow you to bring in your own alcohol? Will they allow you to bring in your own entertainment and will they charge you a per plate fee or is there a way to get your own resources that you are providing? It's amazing how much cheaper your booze is when you go to Trader Joe's and pay $600 for your favorite wine bottles like we did versus having a private group come in and charge you $10,000 for it. So different kinds of very basic hacks like being smart about your venue selection and your ceremony with the pandemic kind of marriages that got put off. Now people are celebrating those. Knowing some of that can help save you a lot of money. Businesses. What kind of business financing is available? What's your goal? What are you trying to do? Are you trying to do acquisition or startup? There's a lot of tricks available so that you can make that decision the right way. Retirement planning. That's one part of financial planning, but everybody thinks it's the only part. So retirement can also mean how much do you prioritize putting money into retirement assets versus assets like a brokerage account that you can access sooner because of goals that you have that you wanna accomplish quicker. And college savings. What kind of colleges are your kids gonna go to and how much do you wanna contribute for that? Will that affect their financial aid? These are real questions to discuss and think about. Financial independence is when you don't have to work anymore unless you want to. When you hit that point, how are you gonna find meaning in your life? How are you going to be self-actualized? That number one need in the hierarchy of needs, right? Financial independence is not gonna make you happy. It's just gonna give you the opportunity to be happy. So that's something to think about as well. Now the fifth category is goals-based investing. So if you are saving for a housing down payment and you are gambling your money on GameStop stock for that housing down payment, you're not aligning your investments with your plan and your goals. You're sort of taking huge risks and you don't really need to be doing that. So if you are wanting to retire but you have plenty of assets to do so with and you really would love to work fewer hours and maybe focus on some other things in your life, then focusing on loading up money into retirement savings might not be the ideal plan if you plan to take a long leave of absence from your job. Maybe you wanna have a better balance of cash savings to kind of soften that slowdown of income along with saving an adequate amount for retirement. And of course, if you're trying to buy a house, then you need that down payment money to be in an appropriately secure investment that gives you some rate of return while you're waiting to get to that amount of down payment you want, but that also doesn't generate a bunch of extra taxes. So maybe you would be looking at something like a tax-exempt short-term bond fund for that. So goals-based investing is a little bit more specific and financial planning focused than just investing in general because investing in general shows you how to choose the cheapest funds and what kind of stock bonds mix to have and why and what accounts to use. But goals-based investing says, well, on top of that, layer on the fact that this money is for different pots of things you wanna achieve and make sure that your different pots of money are working towards the different goals you wanna achieve and the amount of time that you wanna achieve them in. Finally, you take all these things that you learn, you put it all together. So the only way to say no to something is to have a bigger yes. Anything is possible in your life, almost anything, but not everything. So you have to choose what's most important to you. And then you use all of these tools of financial planning to achieve that. So let's say that you wanted to work three days a week. What you would do is figure out what your cash flow statement is and figure out how much flexibility you would have based off of your budgeting flexibilities to cut back. How much available cash could you cut back on? And then you would look at taxes and figure out what your marginal tax rate is and figure out how much less money you're making by working three days a week instead of five in terms of your take-home pay because your take-home pay is not gonna be nearly as different as your pre-tax pay because of marginal tax rates being the highest for that final dollar that you earn. So you would then look at your insurance and asset protection. You might have to drop down to part-time. So then what insurance options are available so that your family is still protected? Do you lose full-time health benefits? If so, what are your options to replace those benefits? Maybe there's some reasonable choices. For milestone planning, are you still on track for retirement if you cut back to three days a week? Are you still on track for financial independence? Will you still be able to save for your kids' college and your own retirement? Will you still be able to afford the house renovation that you wanna do? And then goals-based investing, while you are thinking about these various life milestones you're trying to hit with this three days a week goal, is that setting you back anywhere for any kind of key goals you're trying to hit in your life? Maybe you realize that it's setting you back a little bit, but it's an appropriate amount of time to be set back on. So maybe instead of retiring at 60, you're retiring at 65, but you're working three days a week instead of five. That's maybe a trade-off that you would accept. So that's what I mean by putting everything together and deciding what do you do and how do you do it. Maybe you wanna buy a business. Maybe you're not sure about when to do that. So you figure out what your cash flow statement is. Maybe you are more inclined to do an acquisition instead of a startup because you find that your budget has a lot less flexibility than you thought it had because you have kids and a spouse and you need to do something that's more of a sure thing. Maybe you look at that cash flow statement and realize you have more flexibility than you ever dreamed which makes you a lot better off candidate for a startup where there's higher upside and your risk is mitigated because your cash flow statement is so positive. You think about your taxes as a business owner and how much money you're gonna save. You plan long-term and avoiding taxes on sales if you ever sell your practice by being smart about 1031 exchanges. You think about the insurance that you might wanna get in place before you switch over to owning your own practice. So maybe you wanna get that disability insurance ahead of time with your W-2 income. Maybe you need to talk to an attorney and a CPA to help you set up the right LLC and set up the right structure for that so that you pay less in taxes. And becoming a business owner, maybe that has some unique options for how you might tile your car. Maybe you can deduct some car expenses. Maybe becoming a business owner ties into your plan to get married because you wanna get that up and running before you have that ceremony so you can feel secure financially that you're contributing in your marriage. Maybe you are going to hit financial independence faster because of being a business owner. And then with this extra cash, what do you invest it in and why? What are your goals as a practice owner? Is it to make a ton of money? Is it to build an empire? Is it to have this huge impact on the world? Is it to do novel procedures that keep you interested? If so, maybe you buy a cutting-edge machine that might not be the number one thing you would do from a financial perspective, but maybe it's a really fun thing to do. So regardless of what your ideal life is, you utilize these five tools, right? Goals-based investing, life milestone planning, insurance and asset protection, taxes and cashflow planning and budgeting. You put that all together and you can do almost anything. The way that I was able to do what I did is I made sure I had the right amount of cash in my account, that I had a net worth that was, some of it was liquid if I needed to cash out more. I had appropriate investments based off of my goals not having to go back to work for at least 10 years when I retired at 25. I had a careful method in place of tracking my spending so that I knew if I was kind of going too high above my targets. I had insurance planning in place so that if I had a catastrophic health incident, it wouldn't wipe out all my savings and force me back to work. And I had plans for my life that were totally upended because I met my wife and we got married and I started a business because I wasn't wanting to go back to corporate America and I wanted to use my talents in a way that would help others. So whatever your goals are, this financial planning knowledge will transform your life. It absolutely will. And the crazy thing is I looked at this course, I think we have at least four dozen different tips that could save you $10,000 or more built into this. You know, simple things like realizing that your mortgage interest might be tax deductible where your student loan interest is not, taking out a bigger mortgage, maybe with a 0% down mortgage, to get tax deductible mortgage interest so that you can take that money instead and pay down less tax-efficient student loan interest faster. Things like depreciating your building and realizing you can buy your building with tax-free money, so why wouldn't you do that to grow your wealth? Situations like maximizing your pre-tax income by putting away money into the smartest accounts and tax-optimizing all of your deductions from your paycheck. Things like planning ahead for your retirement so that you more tax-efficiently withdraw assets to generate less of a tax bill at the key time when you might wanna be maximizing your silver plan subsidies in the Affordable Care Act Insurance Exchange. So there's all kinds of stuff to learn in financial planning, and I really hope you sign up for Dreams Not Debt financial planning course because it's gonna get you to that dream life faster, really in as little as a year, or maybe you can realize that you can do it immediately. Maybe you realize that dream of starting your practice or three days a week working or having the family or taking the dream vacation for three months to hike some mountain trail. Maybe you can do those things right now, and maybe the thing that was holding you back is limiting beliefs and then knowing that there's all these financial planning tools, right? I'll read a couple of them, 401k, 403b, 457, DB plan, profit sharing, SEP IRA, solo 401k, simple IRA, HSA, S Corp, C Corp, Schedule K, QBI, QSBS, 1031 exchanges, depreciation, all these different tools. What does that mean? Just a bunch of tools scattered in the shed that you don't know what to do because you're not a general contractor, but you still have all these resources available to you, and if you only use the right tools with the right combination, you can finish that goal, you can build that project, but you need to know how to put it together. And you can hire somebody for several thousand dollars a year that will do it with you one-on-one. That's not gonna be us because I want to get you this knowledge cheaper and quicker so that you will either make your own financial plan and implement it and update that plan yourself with this knowledge, or you will hire somebody eventually that will do it for you, but you'll be aware of what they're supposed to do for you instead of having to guess. So studentloanplanner.com slash plan, that link is gonna be good for basically until this Thursday, couple days only. You're getting 70% off, and there's a money-back guarantee that if you don't love this course, or if you don't find one of those 40-something different tips that's gonna save you $10,000 if you disagree and didn't find anything to save you money, which I really doubt, then you can send us an email, help at studentloanplanner.com, and say, hey, I didn't find value in this course, or I knew all this already, or I just feel like I want a refund for, I don't know, whatever reason. You don't have to have a reason, just no reason at all. And just ask for a refund, and we'll give that refund to you. Because I know you, this is really gonna change your life. That's why we're so happy to give these refunds because it happens for less than 5% of people. And this is knowledge, again, that's gonna be life-changing. It's gonna let you live your dream, and that's why I'm just passionate about this because I really hope you know this information already, and I probably would bet that 70 or 80% of our audience doesn't know it yet. And probably 90, 95% of our audience doesn't know at least one of the key tips that we've got in there. So, studentloanplanner.com slash plan, check it out, 70% off, dreams, not debt. That's what I want you to focus on, your dreams and not your student loans, which never, ever, ever need to hold you back. Live your dream life. Life is short. This pandemic has shown us that. And I hope that you achieve what you want to in life, and hopefully can help you get there. Studentloanplanner.com slash plan. Hope you have a great week.