Art's Golden Rules of Financial Planning During a Pandemic

The Transcript

Art Wiederman, CPA: And hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Dental Finance and Management with Art Wiederman, CPA. I am your host. My name is Art Wiederman. I'm a dental specific CPA and I'm a dental director at the CPA firm of Eide Bailly, which is a firm that our CPA firm, which was HMWC merged with, my gosh, it's now been about eight months. Time flies when you're having fun.

We're already into another tax filing season. We'll chat a bit about that tonight. Not much, but tonight it's just you and I. And I love doing these things on my own. I've had a passion, folks, for broadcasting since I've been a little kid. I used to dream sportscaster. That was my dream in life. And I actually if I ever told you this is I actually let's see, it was about thirty two years ago because it was when my newborn son Nathan, who will be thirty two years old in about six weeks or seven weeks, he was in a stroller and I did fantasy sportscasters camp and it was really, really fun. I met Bob Costas, I met Roy Firestone, our keynote speaker at our graduation. It was a week that we got to play sportscaster was former President Ronald Reagan. This was in 1989. He had just left the well. He had left office a while back, but it was really fun.

So I've always loved broadcasting and I love the interviews that I do with my guests. But I also love just talking to you. And I you know, we have thousands of listeners that listen to this podcast every week. And I'm so thankful for that and thankful for the opportunity. And thank you. Thankful for all of the wonderful phone calls and emails I've gotten in my office here in Tustin, California, you know, saying that I think we're doing a good thing for the dental profession.

And I've devoted thirty six years of my life to the dental profession. The dentists that I've met, the thousands and thousands of dentists I've met over this period of time, just some of the most wonderful, kind, caring people. So we're going to do a show today, which is one of my favorites. We did something similar to this a couple of years ago, about a year and a half ago. But we're going to do this a little differently. Tonight is going to be Art's Golden Rules in a Pandemic.

So I've had these rules that I came up with years ago that I've been teaching dentists for many, many years. And we're going to go through them tonight, but we're going to put a little pandemic twist onto it and tell you what at least I think you should be doing now. Now, this could be a whole day that we could talk about, but we're going to do this at a very high level. And my objective tonight is, is what it is in most of the podcasts that I do is to get this to be a call of action to get you thinking about your financial plan.

Where are you going? What are you doing? It's more important tonight and we're recording this again we date stamp these things these days with everything that's going on. I'm recording this on Sunday evening, February the 28th, the last day of February. And this will go out live on the Internet Wednesday morning, March the 3rd. So you'll be able to hear it. And I hope it's a call to action for you.

So before we get to that little bit of information and some, I'll give you a brief update. There's not much to update on the ERTC and the PPP, but I'll just give you just some overviews on that. So let's start off with our wonderful partner, Decisions in Dentistry magazine. Lorraine Kent and her team are just absolutely remarkable, remarkable, remarkable people. And their magazine and their website is absolutely second to none. It's Decisions in Dentistry magazine. They have they have continuing education courses that come out. They have new courses every single month. And you can buy all one hundred forty of their courses at a very, very reasonable price for a year. I believe it's the way it works.

And I'm looking right now at my computer screen and here's an example of some of the courses they have, of course, that came out beginning of February called Infectious Disease Disclosures by Dental Providers. There's like five or six authors on that particular course, Diabetes Screening in Dental Practice. That one is Douglas Beal's. Yes, Ms. And Trevor Elsa, DMD, MS and Contraceptives Role in Periodontal Disease Risk, and again, there's six or seven authors and they're all wonderful, wonderful courses. And we've heard great things from the dentists who take these courses. So www.DecisionsinDentistry.com.

Also, if you are not working with a dental specific CPA, Eide Bailly, we work with about seven to eight hundred dentists and we have a great expertise in what we do and certainly contact us. If you're in other parts of the country, you can certainly look at our Academy of Dental CPAs, which is my mothership ADCPA.org. And right now with everything that's going on with the PPP program, round two is out. The ERTC, the HHS Provider Relief Funds. Again, I'm going to give you a quick update. Very high level, nothing that you may not know, but maybe you don't. Maybe this is going to be new information for you.

If you're not working with a dental CPA, you really need to be. And very important, and I'll probably mention this a couple of times during the conversation tonight, a week from Wednesday, March the 10th. I have been very fortunate and I'm honored that six dental societies in Southern California, where I'm located, have asked me to put together a Business of Dentistry yearlong series. And we are doing that. We've already done two of them. We did one with a wonderful management consultant, Kiera Dent, in January, and then we did one with my dear friend Kristie Boltz out of Columbus, Ohio, on marketing. And she just absolutely did a great job. And then with everything that's going on with the PPP and the Employee Retention Tax Credit, I decided to make the March one on that.

So if you want to register, basically you go to our website, which is www.EideBailly.com/dentalseries. You are also welcome to send me an email at awiederman@EideBailly.com and that's spelled Eide Bailly dot com. And you will find that you will get the registration from us and you get to listen at six to eight p.m. California time on Wednesday, March 10th. It will be live, but it will also live on Eide Bailly's YouTube page, which is where all of the prior webinars and also where my where my prior podcasts are.

Now I think we're pushing about one hundred and fifteen podcasts that I've done in the series. It's just been a labor of love. So they live there. So we have that going on. So let me give you some quick high level updates. Nothing great specifics. If you're going to apply for a second round PPP loan, you have until March 31st at the moment to do that. That is the deadline. If you have a greater than 50 percent reduction, if you had in any quarter for the most in 2020.

And when I say reduction, the law was retroactive back to March for all of you, considering that most of your dental offices were shut down from middle of March until sometime in May or June, that's probably the second quarter. So get a 50 percent or greater reduction in gross revenues, you are going to be eligible potentially to go back to 2020 and to not only get forgiveness of your PPP loan if you qualify, but also to claim the Employee Retention Tax Credit, which could be as much folks as five thousand dollars per employee in your firm for twenty in your practice for 2020.

Now we are at Eide Bailly on top of this, like they're on top of everything, as is the Academy of Dental CPAs. And we are in the process all of us put together this great program and spreadsheets where we're going to be able to help our doctors to get full PPP forgiveness. Hopefully if you met the rules and to get as much of an Employee Retention Tax Credit as you possibly can.

So what we're just telling people at a high level is that if you had a 50 percent reduction or if your state or locality, that would be a state, county or city, any legal jurisdiction. Basically said you have to shut down, and that's a whole nother conversation for a whole nother day. You could also be qualified for this credit if you think you're qualified for 2020 for the Employee Retention Tax Credit, you might consider not filing for PPP forgiveness quite yet until we wait until we hear what the Treasury is going to come out with. We are all desperately and I say desperately, that is not an exaggeration. We're waiting for them to come out with their guidance once they come out with their guidance.

Actually, what we will do is I will bring our two PPP ERTC folks onto this podcast. We will do a podcast specifically tailored to how we can help you get this this money from the government legally. Jim Donovan and Adam Sweet are our two firm experts in this. So we will have one or both of them on the podcast having this conversation, but not until we get a little more information from the government. The other thing that I will tell you is that you have we still to my knowledge, I have not seen the HHS Provider Relief Fund portal open up completely. They opened the portal in January. You can register put in all your information, but they have not opened the portal up yet for you to put in all of the information that you need.

And again, we have a product that just came out the other day that is going to be helping our doctors, you know, showing them what has to be gathered is a lot of information that you have to gather. And that's something, again, we'll come to you when that portal opens. Tyler Bernier, who is our firm expert in in that area, I'm going to have him on the podcast. And we're probably going to do a show on that because, again, this is a you know, the reporting of the HHS is pretty much your file, the report. And it's kind of like filing a tax return, folks. You hope you don't get audited. It's not like you're going to file this and then you're going to get a letter back and saying, well, yeah, you're OK. You're just filing information for the government, for the Department of Health and Human Services to have on their file. And, uh, you know, maybe someday they'll look at some of these. Maybe they won't. We don't know. But Tyler has been living this nightmare. He's out of Oklahoma City and he will come up. So those are my updates. There are other little updates which I'm not going to bore you with, but we're going to keep you on top of all this, you know, through this podcast.

So tonight's topic is Art's Golden Rules in a Pandemic, and I have lectured for many, many years to I mean, I don't even know how many lectures I've done over the years. I've done hundreds, maybe a thousand lectures, not really sure exactly how many. And I developed what I call Art's Golden Rules. There's about 10 to 15 of them. And we'll touch on a lot of them tonight. But like I say, what I want you to do is I want tonight to be a call to action. I want you to think about, you know, things your family and your future and your retirement and all this kind of stuff. So just as a general overview, as financial planning goes, there are really seven areas of financial planning. We may not hit all of them tonight, but the seven areas are generally cash flow management and budgeting, taxes, retirement, insurance, investments, college planning and estate planning.

And these are all areas that everybody should be looking at and working on. But you might have heard about a year ago, my goodness, it's going to be a year in two and a half weeks that this country basically shut down. It will be a year March 16th was about when this started and February 28th, it's been almost a year. And, you know, the last thing anybody's thinking about is, oh, my God, I've got to do a financial plan. Well, folks, I think it's really important. So I want to give you some tips.

First of all, as financial the you know, in a pandemic, what should you be thinking about? Number one? And this might be the most important thing that I tell you tonight. Don't panic, OK? Back in 2008, you might remember when we had the banking crisis. And I don't think people realize back in 2008 I was in practice in 2008, feels like I was in practice in 08, but I was in practice in 2008. And it it's just remarkable. I got phone calls in October of 2008 from clients who said to me, Art, should I pull my money out of the bank? I don't think the American public realizes how close we came.

To a Great Depression and a collapse of our economic system in the month of October of 2008, but that year most of the stock indexes were down 35 or 40 percent and everybody's 401k became one or one case.

Well, you know, it's interesting. That didn't happen. That did not happen in 2020. It started out that way. The markets absolutely tanked as soon as this became real. But they came roaring back because markets look prospectively. They look at what's going on. And it's going to happen in, you know, six to nine months is what they look at. And they said in six to nine months, we're going to have a vaccine, we're going to have a mitigation to this virus. And everybody saw what the markets did and they've come back. What are they going to do in 2021?

That is not what we're talking about tonight. We have smarter people than I who I will have on this program will give you their opinions. So, you know what you what you want to do is not panic. And the most important thing, guys, is you need to make a plan. If you haven't made a financial plan, it's time to make one sooner rather than later. So we talked about the fact that the markets were up. Dentists are in. You know, a lot of you folks are in really good financial shape right now because no one, you know, your investments did not go down 40 percent.

Number two, a lot of you did what we talked about. You got your PPP money. You got your round one. Many of you have already gotten around to you got HHS provider relief money. Some of you took EIDL loans of up to one hundred and fifty thousand. Some of you got more before they put the limit on it. So a lot of my clients did what I've been preaching since March, which is to build a war chest. So you have money and you have savings. And see, here's the other thing. Why we don't panic, folks, is because let's think about it.

You know, I have doctors and they spent 20, 30, 40, 50 thousand a year in travel and entertainment and going out to dinners and parties and this. Folks. There isn't a whole lot to do. I went on this weekend just to see what was going on in Orange County, California. You know, was there something interesting that we could go see? There were like five or six things and they were all virtual. They were, you know, the country starting to open up different parts of the country or more open than the others, but there was nothing to do, so a lot of people saved money. It's amazing. We didn't drive.

Now I have and I've told you guys this before, I have a car that is a 2007 s550 Mercedes. And I am not promoting the Mercedes brand. I think it's an excellent brand and there's lots of other excellent brands. But that's what I drive. It has two hundred and nine thousand miles on it. I've owned four cars since the age of 20 and I love my car, but my car doesn't get great gas mileage. It gets about 18 to 20 miles a gallon. Well, I'll tell you what, folks, you know, I used to fill up once a week. I go to the office. Now I fill up once a month, once every six weeks. And the amount of money that we've saved on gas and maintenance and repairs, that's in my bank account and all the trips that I was going to take in 2020. That money's in my bank account. I'm trying to plan some for 2021.

So you've got money and you've got the opportunity to do some planning. OK, you've spent money, less money on auto. You may have spent more money on your cable TV bill but probably not that much money. So what you want to do is you want to put a plan together. Now if you say, my goodness, I am overwhelmed. And folks, I realize you're overwhelmed. Dentists are trying to get the vaccine. Some of you have had the virus. Some of you have your team members, your family members, your friends, your patients have had this virus. And it's been a very, very difficult year.

So don't, you know, if you don't want to make a plan for the next 30 or 40 years, make one for six months. How much am I going to spend? How much am I going to save? Am I going to put away money in a retirement plan? What am I going to do? So, again, the idea is I don't want you to panic. There is no panic and there's opportunities here. There's opportunities to save money. There's opportunities to pay down debt. So we're talking about all this. So let's start off with my first main rule, and I'm going to I'm going to change it for now. You're going to think I'm crazy about the change in my rule.

My first rule is called my 65/25/10 rule. Many of you have heard me talk about that. And for 65/25/10 means this. If you earn, let's just pick a number, an easy number. Hopefully most of you, most all of you earn more than this. But let's say you earn one hundred thousand dollars a year, you should spend 65 percent of that on your personal living expenses and that your, you know, your house payment, your rent payment, your gas, your electric, your you know, your car, your food, all these things we say.

25 percent of that you're going to pay in taxes. Now how much is everybody going to pay in taxes. Well, somebody who lives in the state of Washington or the state of Nevada that does not have a state income tax is probably going to pay less in income tax than someone who lives in the state that I live in, which is California and California the maximum tax rate at the moment is 13.3 percent. 13.3 percent in California is if your income is over a million dollars every additional dollars, thirteen point three. So federal maximum rates, thirty seven states, thirteen point three. That's fifty point three plus some losing potentially of some itemized deductions, at least here in California, I mean, to fifty percent tax rate. And that's on every additional dollar. That's not on every dollar. On every additional dollar.

So we say that most of our doctors are paying the twenty five maybe to twenty eight percent rate of their total income. It just depends on how much you make and what your deductions are. If you give 10 percent of your income to charity, your taxes are going to be lower. If you don't give anything to charity, it's very personal thing. Your taxes will be higher. It's a mathematical fact. And then the other 10 percent because sixty five and twenty five add up to ninety and the other 10 percent we ask you to save.

I would like to push that a little further. I'd like to push that to maybe a 60/25/15 or so where you live on sixty percent of what you make, you pay about twenty five percent in taxes and you save fifteen percent focused on tonight's podcast. I would settle for eleven percent, twelve and a half percent to save. But fifteen percent is a great goal.

Now you're going to listen to this and just think I'm insane because you have student loans and you have a house payment and you have a car payment and you have credit card debt. Well, this is what we need to talk to you about. We need to sit down and figure out where all your money's going and where does it go and how do you spend it? I mean, you know, what do we do here?

So it's just a couple of simple things. Number one, look at your cable TV bill and your cell phone plan. I mean, folks, I will tell you that these cable TV companies and these cell phone companies, they spend millions of dollars a year, millions of dollars doing market research to find out how can they get you and I to add on additional services. How can we get you to buy that nine dollars and ninety nine cent channel? Because maybe there's one program you're going to want to watch and then once you buy it, you just keep paying for it every month. Companies make money. I mean, think about Amazon. Amazon Prime. Amazon Prime is brilliant. I mean, it's a membership. You pay it every you know, every year. You pay for it. Right?

Well, it's the same thing with, you know, companies make money off of people by oh, well, it's only nine dollars. They don't think about it and maybe you don't use it. It's like a gym membership. It's another gym memberships. So you look at these things and say, can I save some money here? Can I save some money on my cell phone bill? Can I save some money on my cable TV bill? Am I paying for a gym membership that I don't use and I don't need and I'm never going to use again even when the gyms open back up? Am I going to do that? The gyms are wonderful. I own a Peloton bike. I haven't been able to ride it in the last month. It's driving me crazy because one of my vertebrae decided to move and my chiropractor is telling me I'm probably a week or two away from that. But it's, you know, I have that and I can do pretty much anything I need to do that.

So in other words, I would like to challenge all of you to look at the money that you're spending and find a thousand dollars that you can part with. In other words, are there a thousand dollars of things that you pay for in your life that you and your spouse, significant other, or just by yourself, if you don't do not have a spouse or significant other that you can take a look at and you can say, I don't need this.

Now, part of this, I'm going to already give you as part of the bonus round here, I'm going to give you the fact that your car expenses are probably lower than what they were. Your gas bill is probably low here in California. You know, I love when they say the average price of gas is two dollars and sixty cents. Where? Where they just landed the Mars rover? No. In my neighborhood it's closer to almost four dollars a gallon, three fifty to four dollars a gallon, depending on where you go in Southern California. So, you know, if you're filling up once a week, I was filling up. It was eighty dollars a week. Eighty dollars. You know, if you have twenty gallons times four dollars a gallon. Eighty dollars a gallon. Eighty dollars for one fill up and take that times four, three hundred and twenty. Well, I'm only filling up maybe once every, serious, I'm working from home for the most part, once every six weeks.

Now. You guys have to go to work every day, but you may not be driving as much, so maybe your gas bill is cut down to one to two hundred dollars a month. I don't know. You'd have to see. So can I save that money? That's what I want to challenge you to do. Sit down and figure out. You're not going to cut your expenses by 50 percent. Anybody who says you have to cut your expenses by 30, 40, 50 percent is living in dreamland. Not going to happen. I'm going to challenge you a thousand dollars a month. Find a thousand dollars a month or close to it. And what can we do with that? Oh, my gosh. We can do so many things. We can start a college fund. We can put money into our retirement plan. We can pay down our credit card debt. These are the things you do under my golden rules that we have to find money.

It's a very simple formula, folks. It's the same as your dental practice. There's two ways to increase your bottom line in your dental practice. Way number one is increase revenues, way number two is cut your expenses. There is nothing else that is going to change the bottom line other than those two things. And you as an individual are also someone who has a business, except that your individual business, your income is not the amount of money you get from doing crowns and bridges and veneers and all the things that dentists do. It's what you take home and your expenses are what you spend personally.

So you can either increase your income from your business, which is another conversation for another day, or you can cut your expenses. You're not going to cut your expenses a lot. It's the same in a dental practice. When we tell people, you know, they say we need to make more money. It's not going to be on the expense side, folks. We cannot cut a dentist's overhead by 50 percent. We can't cut half your staff. We can't cut your lab bill down to where the lab is going to charge you ten dollars to mill a crown for you. We can't get a box of gloves for twenty five cents. It doesn't work that way.

So on your personal spending, you know, what can we do? We increase your income, work on your practice and you decrease your spending as much as is reasonable. So those are some of the things I want you to be thinking about is, you know, can I cut my bills? How can I do it? You know, shop for things online. Don't just see when you make two, three, four or five hundred thousand dollars a year, folks, you don't think about going to a restaurant and spending one hundred, you know, one hundred, one hundred fifty dollars on dinner.

And restaurants, by the way, have gotten more expensive. Why? Because they had to. I mean, to survive they had to raise the prices. They absolutely had to. So, you know, you can go out to dinner two people have a glass of wine or a cocktail, have a you know, a salad and entree and a dessert and you're at one hundred and fifty dollars when you're done with the tip. Easy. I've seen it. OK, so, you know, start looking at these things. It doesn't mean you can't enjoy a nice meal out, but, you know, some of these restaurants are very, very, very expensive. So maybe you do that once a month instead of twice a month, or you do twice a month instead of once a week. You know, if I can save three hundred dollars by not going out two times, again, it's personal choice. It's a math problem. Everything I talk about is a math problem.

Supermarket prices. There's another thing that I love talking about. So I'm not mentioning any names of any supermarkets. They're all wonderful and they have been amazing as far as keeping the food supply going during this horrible time. It was kind of dicey at the beginning, but they've got their act together. So there are the high end supermarkets that you can go to. And then there are the traditional staple supermarkets that you can go to. And I've been to both. And the price difference is pretty amazing as far as the difference. If you go buy a can of soup versus, you know, buying a can of soup at the staple supermarket versus the supermarket that is more of the high end supermarket.

But again, it's a personal choice. If you're saving 30 percent of your income and you're putting a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year away, go spend as much as you want on a can of soup. But I'm saying is, is these are things that you should be looking at is different ways that you can save money and you would be amazed by things that you don't that you spend money on, that you don't need.

So that's my 65/25/15 rule is what I'm looking at here is you know, set a goal for yourself. Everything is about goals. You want to lose weight. You set a goal. You want to stop smoking, you set a goal. You want to build a new house, you set a goal. You want to increase your net worth and you want to save money, set a goal. If that the goal is five hundred dollars a month. I don't care what it is, as long as you do something.

All right. Next of Art's Golden Rules. Pick a date to retire right here and right now. Now, many of our doctors have been practicing 30, 40 years, went through this pandemic and I've gotten the phone calls. Art I'm done. I am not going back to this. I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to figure out how to make PPE work and how to make social distancing work in my dental office. I'm done. I've got enough money. I want to retire. But for those of you that are just getting started and again, you know, if you're twenty eight years old and you just graduated from dental school, the last thing that you want to think about, that you're going to think about is going to be retirement. But I want you to pick a date today. Right now, I want you to pick a date. When do you want to have the financial ability to retire?

Maybe that's fifty five. Maybe that's sixty five. I don't know what the date is. It gives you something to look forward to. And again, a goal. You know, the goal is I want to save enough money so that I can retire when I'm sixty years old on twelve thousand dollars a month. We'll talk about that at length here in a minute. And also as far as retirement is disability and folks, the fact of the matter is, is that, you know, what you do is a physically demanding team sport, dentistry. It is. I mean, you all know it's back and neck and shoulders and ergonomics are so important. And I mean, the advances in ergonomic technology, the technology for, you know, chairs that the doctors are sitting in and the things that you guys have learned over the last thirty, thirty five years is remarkable.

But we see doctors giving us calls. Our clients. We work with probably close to three hundred dentists in our office in Tustin. And I will get the call. You know Art, I really got to start thinking about packing it in because my neck is hurting and my arms, I can practice. I can work, but it hurts and it's not fun and it's not going to get any better. So that's another reason to plan, because if you get to 60 years old and you don't have enough money to retire and physically you can't do this anymore, that's not a pretty situation.

OK, next Golden Rule, build an emergency savings fund, three to six months of personal living expenses. And I'm going to encourage you with this pandemic to shoot for twelve months. Why do we use that three to six months? There's a lot of financial planners use that. And the reason that we use that is because if you have proper disability insurance and you get disabled, disability insurance policies have this thing called an elimination period and an elimination period doesn't mean they eliminate your insurance. It means that for if it's a 90 day elimination period, that for 90 days you don't get a payment. Your payments start after the ninety first day of your monthly disability if you are disabled and can't be a dentist anymore.

Well, I need money for three to six months. If I have one hundred and eighty day elimination period, if I have one hundred and eighty days elimination period, I need six months of personal living expenses if I get disabled and I don't have any savings. Well, this is so, so important. There was actually a survey from Bankrate.com that basically said that more than 50 percent of all Americans do not have the financial ability to cover an unexpected expense of one thousand dollars.

Now, again, remember that dentists, you, the dentist, are in the top two percent of wage earners in the country. So hopefully most of you do. But I have clients that I can guarantee you that if I ask them, do you have enough money to cover an unexpected expense, they would have to put it on a credit card. That is frightening. So an emergency savings fund, three to six months of personal living expenses. And I'm going to encourage you to have a year's worth, OK?

Now, you're never going to take a six month vacation from your dental practice because then you're going to just have to shut it down. Not too many people do that. I've seen it happen a couple times, but it doesn't usually happen. However, you need enough money, OK, that if you get disabled or something happens. For example, a pandemic. Now, you know, many of my clients, we did get calls, Art, I can make payroll for another week and that's it. And many of them were saved by the Paycheck Protection Program funds that came in April and May. And that was a life saver for them. And then the EIDL loans and then the later in the year, the HHS Provider Relief Funds. And those of you who applied for round three, I mean, phase three of the Provider Relief. Some of you got six figures and you got that money. Some of you got the money in January of 2021.

So, again, you know, fortunately, the dentists came through this a lot better than some of the other professions, industries, if you will. I mean, you know, imagine, like I say, being a restaurant, being a nail salon, being a gym. I mean, it's just been impossible for them to do anything. So, again, that's what we're looking at is emergency savings.

OK, next, Golden Rule is a biggie. And this is plan your retirement base. How much income do you need? So tell you how we look at this thing, folks, OK, there are retirement savings calculators. And this is where working with a financial planning group, all the folks at the ADCPA, they do most of them do financial planning. We at Eide Bailly have a whole financial planning team. You heard them. They were on our podcast a couple of months ago talking about what they do and figuring out your total plan.

So that's why it's important that one of the things that you do is planning how much income do you need. Now, financial planners have said for many years that you need to be able to, you should be able to pull four to five percent of your nest egg out to live on. So let's play with some numbers here.

So let's say you save a million dollars and you're ready to retire. Now a million dollars sounds like a lot of money. Well, if you were going to pull four percent out, that's forty thousand a year. Five percent is fifty thousand a year. Because if that's your nest egg and that's what you're going to live on, that and Social Security, you need to have the ability to not have that money run out, because once you stop working, there it goes.

Remember, also, doctors, think about all the expenses that you pay through your dental practice that you're no longer going to pay once you sell your practice, because. I'm sorry, that's not correct, that you're not going to be paying through your dental practice because you will be selling your dental practice. Think about that. So travel, car, things like that, you know, other things that get paid through your dental practice that you're now going to have to assume on your own that you are no longer going to have a dental practice to pay for. So that's going to increase the amount that you need to spend, to save.

So let me give you an example here. Let's say you wanted to save three million dollars. All right? Now, three million dollars is a lot of money, no doubt. But again, using Art's rule of four to five percent, three, four, four percent of three million dollars is one hundred twenty thousand years, ten thousand a month. And remember that if you've saved it in a qualified retirement plan, you're going to have to pay taxes on it because that money has been was contributed and grew tax deferred for many, many years. Now, when you pull it out, the government wants their money and you have to pay tax. So if you got one hundred twenty or one hundred and fifty thousand, if you pulled out five percent a year, say, I got one hundred and twenty thousand and my tax was 25 percent, that's about 30,000. That gives you seventy five hundred dollars a month.

If your house is paid for, that's a lot easier. If you have a three thousand dollar per month house payment, that's going to make it a little harder. So just as an example, to save three million dollars, you would need to save eleven hundred and forty three dollars per month at seven percent interest or growth over 40 years. Now, that's about what does that come to? About thirteen thousand dollars a year. Now that's if you start early. The earlier you can start, the better. It's that simple, OK, which is going to be one of my other golden rules that we're going to talk about here.

So you want to, also another way to look at this is when you plan how much money you're going to need, plan on 70 to 90 percent of what your current income is right now, because you don't just snap your fingers, folks, and say, OK, on July 1, 2021, I'm going to retire. I'm earning three hundred thousand a year now and I'm going to live on one hundred and twenty. It doesn't work that way. I've been to this movie before many, many times. OK, so you want to make sure that you plan 70 to 90 percent. You're not going to live on one hundred percent of it. Maybe you have some other income. You're going to have Social Security, which is going to help you. But 70 to 90 percent of your current year's income is what you should plan on for most of you. But everybody is different. OK.

There are other things you think about as far as planning your retirement base, are you going to live in the same house? Are you going to downsize? We have people here in California who have houses that are worth two, three, four or five million dollars. That that's no exaggeration. And so, you know, are you going to live in that house, or are you going to downsize and take some of that equity off the table and live on it? Or are you going to stay in the current house?

Are you going to move from a high tax state like California, New York, Illinois, to a low or no tax state? There are nine states in this country that do not have a state income tax. I mentioned a couple of them. I'm not going to go through all of them. Washington state, Nevada does not have a state income tax. I believe Tennessee does not have a state income tax. So these are states that your incomes would go up because you don't have to pay a state income tax. California here, nine point three percent for most of us, could be as much as thirteen point three percent. Are you going to downsize or are you going to live cheaper?

Are your kids out of the house? That's another thing. Do you have children on the payroll? All right. I mean, I say payroll, meaning are you paying for them during this pandemic? Hard to find a job, right? 30 million people out of work. So a lot of kids moved back home. Are you still having to support your kids or are they self-sufficient and doing their own thing? OK, live in a cheaper state.

And Social Security. Again, we did a great show with my good friend Paul Woody from our Oklahoma ADCPA firm. And Paul is just Paul's just like one of the smartest guys I know. He's just a guy that if you have a question, you just want to listen to him give you the answer because it's comprehensive and thorough and all this stuff. Paul talked about Social Security and very simply for Social Security, if you know, if you're continuing to work, and you make more than I don't remember what the limit is. It's like thirty thousand dollars a year. You're going to have to pay your Social Security back if you're below full retirement age. And they increase the retirement age folks. They increase the retirement age several years ago.

So, for example, I am sixty one and a half. I always know when my half is because my half birthday is always on Valentine's Day. My birthday is August 14th. Valentine's Day is February 14th, and that is halfway through the year. So on Valentine's Day, I give my wife, wrote my wonderful wife of coming up on thirty six years, Lynn, who I've talked about. I adore her. She is the most wonderful person to put up with me all these years. She gets roses and she gets candy and I get like a half birthday present. So that's how that works.

So, you know, I am sixty one and a half. My retirement date is, my full retirement date, when I can draw full Social Security and it doesn't matter how much money I make, is sixty six years and nine months. So the you know, the younger you are it could go up. If for those of you that are older, your retirement date might be sixty five, but you need to check and see what that is. And again, for most of you, again, depending on how you did your Social Security and whether your spouse was getting that, I mean, we're seeing some doctors getting, I've got one doctor he gets almost seventy thousand a year, he and his wife. Seventy thousand a year in Social Security. But most of you going to end up with forty to fifty thousand.

Again, if I have two spouses, if it's just one, it might be thirty, thirty five thousand. But that is not chump change, folks. That's nice good money that you can use for your retirement and I would urge you to do so. So for your retirement base, again, how much do you need? You know, if the number if you're thinking how much money do I want to live on, what do I want to live on? I want to live on twelve thousand a month. That's one hundred fifty thousand. So a hundred fifty thousand, five percent of three million is about one hundred fifty thousand. So that's what you need to save.

If you're sixty seven years old and you save one hundred thousand dollars, well that may not be the that may not be realistic and you might have to work longer. But, you know, if you're younger, this is the message I'm going to pound into all of you. If you are thirty, thirty two, thirty four years old, start. And this is the next segway. This is a segway. We call this in broadcasting.

Get into the habit of saving money. Now, you're going to say Art, we just went through a pandemic and I've been having trouble and I have a kid who's out of work and I have a wife who got sick and, yeah, that's real life. Whatever it is, get in the habit of saving money, whether it's a hundred dollars a month or two thousand a month or five thousand a month, make it like a bill. Get in the habit of saving money. The only way that you're going to save money for retirement, for college, for whatever your financial goals are, is to is to start doing it and doing it on a monthly basis.

If you're a dental student. OK, I tell them to do this. If you're a dental student or you're a dental a recent graduate and you're looking, oh my God, my student loan payments are three thousand dollars a month and they're going to start in six months. Get yourself a jar. Put ten dollars a week in the jar. I don't care how much it is. Just put it in the jar, save it, get in the habit of saving it.

Next golden rule. OK, is. Oh, I want to go back to one more thing on the retirement. I just go through another thing that I read that was very interesting. I forgot to mention this. So this I found this from the big investment company Fidelity. They manage like, they have seven and a half trillion dollars that they manage. You know, we've been talking about all the government stimulus programs, the House of Representatives on I think it was Friday or Saturday past the President Biden's one point nine trillion dollar coronavirus stimulus bill. And, you know, one point nine doesn't sound a lot. But when you think of trillion, a trillion is a thousand billion folks.

OK, I don't know. I've met two billionaires in my life. I won't mention their names, but I've met two billionaires and they don't have a thousand billion. There are no trillionaires that I'm aware of and if there is let me know. So they have that amount of money. They came up with something interesting. They said here's some rules of thumb that they came up with. By the time you're 30 years old, you should have saved an amount equal to your annual salary. So doctors, if you're making theoretically, this is what they say. If you're thirty years old, you should and you're making, you know, one hundred thousand, one hundred twenty thousand a year as a dentist, you should have that amount saved. Is that realistic? I don't know. These are rules of thumb that we're talking about. By the time you're 40, you should have three times your salary saved. So if you're making you know, you're forty, you're making two hundred thousand dollars, you should have six hundred thousand dollars saved by that time.

By the time you're 50, you should have six times your annual salary. So maybe you're making three hundred thousand a year by the time you're fifty, six times three is one point eight million dollars. By the time you're sixty, you should have eight times. So let's say you're still making them three hundred thousand dollars, three times eighty two point four million. We're getting closer to my three dollars million number and they say by the time you're sixty seven years old you should have ten times your annual income.

So again, if you're making three hundred thousand, your goal, maybe ten times your income. So I've given you some ideas. 70 to 90 percent of your income, what you're making now is what you should plan for. Plan on having enough money so that you can pull four to five percent a year out to live on. And, you know, maybe we're looking at saving ten times my income. So if your income right now is three hundred thousand a year, your goal is three million, three million, three million times five percent, I can pull one hundred fifty thousand a year out. Now, that doesn't mean you're going to retire. You could still work and do other things. We talk about that, too.

So, you know, this is interesting that, another thing I found that according to the Economic Policy Institute, fifty six to sixty one year olds in this country have on the average one hundred sixty three thousand five hundred seventy seven dollars in retirement savings. That's frightening. Most of my dentists have much more than that, but some of them do fall into that area. So these are numbers that I want you to be thinking about.

Again, tonight is a call to action. I want you to take action. I want you to sit down with your spouse. I want you to sit down with your financial adviser, and I want you to start planning. How am I going to get there?

OK, let's hit a bunch of these because time flies when you're having fun, folks. Take maximum advantage of tax deferred retirement vehicles. You know, for 2020, many of you are going to still, a lot of our dental offices came back and were, I would say that the average dental office that we work with was probably down somewhere between five and 15 percent for the entire year of 2020. Now that's with all of you being pretty much shut down for eight to 12 weeks because we had all the pent up demand and, you know, people were expanding hours and expanding days of being open because everybody wanted to get in. And, you know, as we've said before, as you all know, having gone to dental school, dentistry, if it remains untreated, does not get better. It gets worse.

And that's what happened back in 2008, folks, when people stopped going to the dentist and dentists were down 10 to 20 percent in their practices. And the specialists were down more than that because everybody was getting killed on their investments and everything. Well, what happened after that? 2009, about 2010, 2011, 2012, dentistry roared back. I mean, it roared back because everybody who had put off getting their dental work done for a year or two years, three years, it had to get done because guess what? It hurt now. And we all know all of you who listen to my podcast, the thousands of you who listen, I know that dental problems only happen when it hurts, right? That was sarcasm. No, I know that that's not the case.

So the other great thing that you've got going on for you is the fact that 15 to 20 percent of the American public that was going to the dentist will not set foot out of their house or go to a supermarket. Well, that hopefully by the end of this year will change and we'll see some additional money. So you're going to have money and you have all this government money you've got. Take maximum advantage of tax deferred retirement vehicles. If you are over the age of 40 and you have the ability to save two hundred thousand dollars a year, you want to take a serious look at a cash balance, defined benefit pension plan.

Used to be that we couldn't do defined benefit pension plans for people that were under the age of 50. Now it's younger. I mean, we are seeing people put money away that are just amazing. I mean, I've seen all kinds of great things done with these plans. Most of you, we talk about the baby bear, the mama bear in the papa bear plan. You're just starting out. The baby bear plan is a simple IRA. And you and your spouse, if you're both on it, could put away thirty, thirty five thousand a year with very little in investment for your staff, for your dental team. You know, it's only three percent if they participate.

The mama bear plan is what most of you have, which is a qualified profit sharing plan with a 401k component that if you can fund up to around sixty thousand dollars a year, it's actually it was fifty eight thousand I believe it is. I don't have the number in front of me. Fifty eight thousand if you're under the age of 50 and then an additional 5000 catch up contribution for a, um, I'm sorry, catch up contribution. So you're looking at being able to fund around sixty thousand dollars a year for yourself. And if you put your spouse on the payroll and they do a 401k, you could be looking at, you know, eighty, eighty five thousand dollars a year for yourself and maybe 10 or 15 for your employees.

And then there's the defined benefit where you can put away a stupid amount of money. I mean, we had a doctor that we helped sell his practice and we planned this with two of them. They were both specialists. And we each had, we had them each put away. We started a defined benefit plan. We knew they were going to sell in about three years. And then three years we started the defined benefit. They were putting away about one hundred to one hundred fifty thousand a year. And then when we hit, we had the actuary and the third party administrator plan the formula out. And by the time we got to the year that they sold Bam! Bam.

I like that bam, bam, I'll say it again, bam, we were able to put away three hundred to three hundred and fifty thousand dollars for each of them in the year they retired. It was wonderful. Oh my God. It just worked like magic. And it's 100 percent legal. Take maximum advantage of your tax deferred retirement vehicles. Every year you lose is an opportunity. And the government folks, if depending on what state you live, if the state has a state tax, you could be saving anywhere between, you know, many of you in the dental world are in a 20, 22, 24 or 32 percent marginal tax bracket.

But if you're in the 37 percent marginal tax bracket and you're in a state bracket of maybe five to eight percent, the government's going to be paying 40, 45 percent of your retirement contribution because you're going to get a tax deduction for it.

All right. Next rule - own your home, free and clear by the time you retire. Make a plan. Make a plan. So here's how it works with a lot of my clients and a lot of the people that I work with is, you know, you go out and you buy your first home. Right? When does that happen? You know, you've got to save up 10 percent. Maybe mom and dad help you. You know, my mom, uh, gave me 5.000. I've told this story on the podcast before. My mom gave me 5,000 dollars as a gift.

I ended up repaying that gift as quickly as I could. And the other ten thousand dollars for the one hundred and fifty one thousand dollar home that we bought in Huntington Beach in 1986, I think it was, was when my wonderful wife Lynn went on The Price is Right and won ten thousand dollars on that game show. And that's what we used as a down payment for our first house. And I strongly recommend that if you can go on a game show and win money for a down payment, I absolutely encourage that. It was really fun that day, but it's not something I would count on.

So you buy your first house and then you practice, you know, maybe you're thirty, thirty two, thirty four and then your practice starts taking off and you start making some money and you say I can. And then then what happens. You have kids, you know, you have kids, they get expensive, they need room, they need to roam, they need to run, they need to destroy things. That's what children do.

OK, I mean, there should be, you know, there's life insurance or disability insurance. If someone could come up with children insurance, my God, you'd become wealthy. All right, so now you move to the bigger house. Maybe by the time you're thirty five or 40 years old, you know, your kids are seven, eight, 10, 12, 14, whatever they are. And you move to the bigger house and that's the house you're going to live in. Until you retire. And by the time you're ready to retire, when you get to 60, the kids are out of the house, hopefully off the payroll. Hopefully you get to see them. You get to torture their children the way that they tortured you. Oh, that's what I told my boys I said, when you have kids, oh, my God, I am going to spoil them. I am going to.

Oh, you have no idea what's in store for you. And they know it's coming. I am not a grandfather yet. I am hopeful someday it will happen. I love my two boys, Nathan and Forrest to death. They are the best and we'll see what happens. But anyway, they are gone. They're off on their own and doing their thing and so own your home free and clear by the time you retire. So plan. All right. You buy the house when you're 40, you get a 30 year mortgage, right. Pay it off in twenty years. So that when your retirement date of sixty, that same day that you start pulling money that four to five percent out of your retirement plan. You also pay off your mortgage.

OK, and right now, mortgage interest rates are as low as they are ever going to be. I'm hearing and the advertisements that they're in the twos, two percent, two and a half percent or three percent. That's what you want to do, is, you know, if you're getting that point, get that interest rate as low as you can and start adding additional principal. You know, what is it? Someone told me is that if you have a 30 year mortgage and I think it was one hundred thousand dollar mortgage and you add one hundred dollars to it, you can you can pay it off in 17 or 18 years. I mean, you can cut the number of years that your mortgage is going to be around and your monthly payment. And that's that much less money that you need in retirement. Own your home, free and clear by the time you're ready to retire.

So if you plan your retirement base and we also talked about pick a date to retire today, right here, right now, that date is 60. That's when I want you to have your house paid off. Never invest more money than you can afford to lose. Doctors. You are a prime candidate for people who are going to try and get you to invest money in things that are sure for sure. This is absolutely the best thing you can invest in. Everybody's doing it. It's wonderful. OK, so never invest more money than you can afford to lose. If you have three million dollars in your retirement fund and you're 50 years old and your practice is just doing great and you're saving one hundred thousand a year in retirement and your kid's college is funded and you want to take fifty thousand dollars and make a speculative investment in a company that you like, or something that you like. I don't have as much of a problem with you doing that.

Then I've heard stories about doctors taking 50 percent of the retirement income and putting it into speculative investments because they think, you know, this is how they don't want to work anymore. And this is, in a year, this is going to pay off big time and I'm going to be able to retire. Well, unfortunately, most of those movies do not end well.

OK, next rule - four to six percent may sound boring, but it works. The magic of compound interest, really, folks, these markets are volatile. I mean, you know, when you go back to you have to go back to before 2001, when sadly the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred. And in those terrorist attacks, that's when the markets started, when the uncertainty and the volatility and then you had 2008. Now you have a pandemic. So you know, what's going to happen this year? I don't know. The markets have started out a little bit lower in the first two months of the year than they were at the end, I believe. But you know what's going to happen?

Well, here's what's going to happen every day. There's going to be news, OK? Congress is likely, from what I hear from what they're saying, if they can get the Senate to come around, you're going to have two trillion dollars pumped into this economy. You have inflation happening. Look at the you know, as of right now, the Treasury yield is up to one point four percent. I was listening to one of the guys give a talk the other day in our Ellermeyer breakfast. You know, that's up. What happens when the interest rates go up, inflation goes up, interest rates go up. Stocks don't like that. They don't like when interest rates and inflation go up. So we'll see.

Markets go up, markets go down. You want to be investing for the long haul. There's going to be good. There's going to be bad. Historically in this country, over one hundred years, a combination of equities for the most part have returned seven to nine percent, compounded annually over the last hundred years. I mean, that is what everything that I've read and has said, you know, maybe someone will say, well, it's not a six point seven, eight percent. I mean, equities have done well, OK? Last year they did well. This year, I don't know what they're going to do.

It may be boring, but boring is going to get you to the finish line. How nice would it be to pick up the phone and call me, say Art, I did what you told me to do. I've saved four million dollars and I'm ready to go. Boy, I'd love to hear that.

Insure yourself for peace of mind, folks. Life insurance. I've said this on the program again. How much life insurance do you need? You need enough life insurance to do three things. You need enough life insurance to pay it. If you are the main breadwinner and your spouse is not working outside the home, you need enough money to pay off your mortgage. Pay off to put your kids through college, OK? When Forrest left Chapman University as a senior the last year, his mortgage, his mortgage. I'll be all right. His tuition was forty five thousand dollars a year. I think that's even higher now. Plus room and board, plus this, plus that, plus everything else. I mean, it's like 60 grand a year.

So need enough money to pay off the kid's college, pay off the mortgage and just have a pot of money for your non-working spouse that is going to allow him or her to raise the kids and live their life without having to go to work, if that's what's going on. That number is probably about three million dollars of life insurance. That's what you should be looking at. Most of you do not have an estate tax problem, because in order to have an estate tax problem, to need life insurance, you would need to have a net worth of over twenty two million dollars. And as much as I'd love to say, I don't think too many of our folks have that OK. So insure yourself for peace of mind.

Disability, long term disability insurance, how much do you need? It's a really, really hard question. As much as they will sell you, that's what you need. Most folks will be able to buy 50, 60 percent of their monthly income. Whatever your insurance agent says you can get, needs to be non cancelable, guaranteed renewable, own occupation, which means that if you know, it means that if you are unable to be a dentist, even though you could be a scientist or a professional lacrosse player, you still get your premium. If you have an any occupation policy, any occupation means that you have to not be able to work anywhere. And we don't like that.

Don't make your home into the money pit. You know, you buy a nice house and you fix it up the way you like it. But don't buy something that you're going to have to put thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars into those. Because folks, somebody's going to have a nicer house than you are, I promise you. I guarantee you that.

You know, my other rule. Some of these and we're about ready to wrap this up. Buy, don't lease a car. This is my rules. So I get to say what they are. I've owned four cars since the age of 20. If I have anything to say about it, I will keep this car until I die. May happen, may not happen. But if I can put 5,000 dollars a year into an automobile to maintain it, if that's what it takes, maybe, hopefully less. I don't have to have a monthly car payment of twelve hundred dollars a month, which is fourteen thousand a year. I can take that extra money and travel. I could take that extra money and save it in retirement.

So buy a really good car, keep it for all long time. Nobody cares what kind of a car you drive, folks, because somebody is going to have a nicer car. I was I was driving down the Pacific Coast Highway today with my wife and she said, oh, man, that's a really cool looking car. What is that? I said, that's a McLaren. That car costs like half a million dollars. I don't know what they cost. You know, someone's always going to have a nicer car than you are. And most cars look really nice if you wash them. Maybe someday I'll learn that. But anyway.

And then finally, the last golden rule for tonight is plan your estate to help the people you love. Please finish, if you don't have estate documents, you know, we can refer you, or one of your ADCPA members can refer you to an attorney who can help you do this. Lynn and I are literally finishing our estate documents, updating them because we have to update them every so often. Right now, there's a lot of hard decisions to make, you know, a lot of hard decisions to make. And we'll probably have somebody come back. We had a wonderful estate planning attorney Kelly Cruz came on a while ago to talk about the basics of estate planning. So you plan your estate to help the people you love.

So, folks, here's the deal. Very simple. Make a plan. Don't put your head in the sand, look at your investment statements, sit down with your investment adviser once a quarter, once every six months. Ask them why are we invested in this? Why are we doing that? Sit down with your CPA once or twice a year. That's what we do at Eide Bailly, that's what the ADCPA does. How can we save money?

You have no legal right. You have no legal obligation to pay one dime more than the amount of money that the tax code says you have to pay. And you're allowed to use all of the legal tax write offs and mechanisms to reduce your tax bill to as low as you can legally do it. That is the God's honest truth. Sit down and plan. Make sure you have enough insurance. Make sure you're planning for your kid's college education fund. Make a financial plan.

That is what I want to leave you with tonight, because, folks, you all work very, very hard. I mean, if you earn, let's say that you get out of dental school when you're twenty eight, you own your first practice. Maybe by the time you're thirty two, you're going to work for thirty to thirty five years. Let's say you work for thirty five years, you earn an average of three hundred thousand dollars a year in your practice, that's over ten million dollars that you're going to earn in your lifetime.

Now the government's going to get their share of it. You know, we're asking you to save. I don't know fifty thousand dollars a year, seventy five thousand dollars a year, so that when you get to that age of 60 and you wake up one morning and you say, you know, I've been doing this dental thing for thirty five years, I think I want to do something else. And I think I want to take more than two weeks off at one time that you can do it. Start early, start tomorrow. Call your financial planner. If you don't have a financial planner, call the CPA that you work with. If you're an Eide Bailly client listening to this, give me a call. We have a ridiculous, ridiculous financial planning group.

Ridiculous good is what I mean. They have, what they do is really great. And again, we all as CPAs, we're all vested in your interest in helping to get you to the finish line, which is where you want to be.

Uh, you know, and I'm going to leave you tonight with this. And I might have mentioned this also on the podcast once or twice before, but I was in, uh, New Hampshire a couple of years ago, probably three or four years ago. I had an afternoon. I was seeing some clients and I had an afternoon to walk around and I don't get that too often. I just walked, I walked around the town and I had my thoughts to myself, you know, it's kind of nice to do that every once in a while. And I walked by a little store and out of the store front, there was a little accordion stand out there and it had these letters on it. And the letters made up these words that said do things that make you happy. And I took a picture of that. And I look at that whenever I get down and we all get down every once in a while, and basically do what makes you happy.

And, you know, does money make everybody one hundred percent happy? No, but it allows you the ability to do things that do make you happy. And if you're in a rut and you don't see an end and you know, there's not a light at the end of the tunnel or there is a light and it's a train, sit down and make a plan.

So I want to remind you a couple of things, too, is, again, listen to on March 10th, we're going to do our series on the PPP and the interaction between the PPP and the Employee Retention Tax Credit. That's going to be very interesting. Continue to listen to this podcast every week.

We've got some great guests coming up. I've got a great interview coming up of how dentists can use LinkedIn to grow their practices. And we've got some great consultants that are going to be coming on to talk about different things. How to have a fee for service practice. And we're going to be talking about student loans.

We got all kinds of things coming up because I'm so excited to provide this information to you and to make, you know, to make it so that you have the resources and the tools to get to where you want to be. You all work so, so hard. And I am so impressed by the dental profession and the quality of people in it. So, again, so March 10th, we're going to talk about that.

And we've got our whole webinar series, which is www.EideBailly.com/dentalseries. You can go on to our events page at Eide Bailly. You can also go to our YouTube channel where all of our webinars on all kinds of great things live. And that's what www.EideBailly.com.

If you're looking for a dental specific CPA anywhere in the United States, the Academy of Dental CPAs www.ADCPA.org.

Well, folks, that's Art's Golden Rules in a Pandemic. And I hope that this information was helpful to you. I'm very proud of the work we've done on the podcast, part of the information we're putting out. And like I say, hopefully tonight has been a call to action for all of you to take some action. And I know it's tough and I know it takes work and takes effort. But I guarantee you, if you sit down and you do a financial plan and you go through some of these things we talked about tonight, when you get to the point when you're sixty, sixty five years old and you just really not loving getting up and going to work anymore, maybe.

Or you want to travel more, you want to do this or you want a new house, having a plan allows you to do that. And what do they say? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Well, that's what happens if you don't have a plan.

With that. Folks, I will bid you a good Sunday evening here from my World Broadcasting Studios in Southern California. God bless every one of you. And remember that my five words are failure is not an option. So that is it for this episode of the Art of Dental Finance and Management with Art Wiederman, CPA. And we'll see you next time. Bye bye.