Dental Specialist Pays Off Student Loans - MtoM Podcast #181

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

Here's Milestones to millionaire podcast number 181. Dental specialist pays off student Loans. This podcast is sponsored by bob baiani@drdisabilityquotes.com he's an independent provider of disability insurance planning solutions to the medical community in every state and a longtime White Coat Investor sponsor, specializes in working with residents and fellows early in their careers to set up sound financial and insurance strategies. If you need to review your disability insurance coverage or to get this critical insurance in place, contact Bob whitecoatinvestor.com Dr. Disabilityquotes. You can also email infodrdisabilityquotes.com or call 973-771-9100. All right, there's only a few days left to nominate the White Coat Investor Podcast for a podcast award. We're trying to win the People's Choice Award for best business and or the best educational podcast of the year. We need your help. We need you to help us reach more doctors and spread financial literacy. Really, I don't care if we win this award, but I do know that winning this award is going to help more people hear about the White Coat Investor and thus help them. And so this is a great and totally free way to give back and support WCI. All you need to do is is go to whitecoatinvestor.com vote and that link will take you right to where you go to nominate the White Coat Investor Podcast. And I think if we get nominated, that same link will be used to vote for the podcast in the competition. But the more nominations we get, the more people we can help. So please do that if you can. If you can. Remember, when you get done listening to this podcast, next time you're online or on your phone or whatever, whitecoininvestor.com vote. Just give us a quick vote. Help us win that award. All right, stick around. After our interview today, we have got a great discussion we're going to have. We're going to talk about the truth about investing. In fact, we're going to go over a number of the truths. And some might think these are basic, but I bet at least one of them won't be basic to you. So stick around afterward. Meanwhile, enjoy this interview with somebody that did just about everything right. It's nice when people hear you know how to do this early on in their career and just nail it. And this doc really has. So let's get him on the line. Our Guest today on the Milestones to Millionaire podcast is Tim. Tim, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. Happy to be here.

Now, Tim, we've met before. You've got one of our WC icon shirts on. Which WC icons have you been to?

It's the 2022 and the 2023. So those are the two I've been to.

Okay. The ones in Phoenix.

Yeah.

Very cool. Well, tell us where you're at in life. What do you do for a living? How far are you out of your training, what part of the country you're in?

So I'm a dental specialist, and I have been out of training for two years now, and I am in Texas.

In Texas. Okay, very cool. Well, let's talk about what we're celebrating today. You've got multiple milestones here. Tell us about them.

Yeah, so last year I paid off my student loans. That was the first big milestone that we're celebrating. And then another milestone I put in when I applied is just talking about a cash balance plan that I maximize my cash balance plan for the year.

And I understand you also paid off a car in there somewhere.

I also did pay off a car. That is true.

Tell us about the car. What car is it?

It's a Toyota Corolla Cross. So it's kind of a. It looks like a RAV4, but it's just a little bit smaller. So I regret buying it, but it's okay.

You regret the car? You regret the way you bought it?

A little bit of both. I wish we would have bought a bigger car, and then I wish I wouldn't have had to finance so much of it. But it was one of the.

How much did you end up financing?

So I financed the entirety of it. So it ended up costing. After all the fees and everything, it was about $35,000.

Okay, and if you'd paid cash, how much of that do you think you'd save?

Oh, I think my interest rate was at 5. Well, I first financed with a Toyota dealership and ended up refinancing with just a private credit union. So that dropped my interest down to, I think, five and a half.

Okay, but you paid on that for a year or so or how long?

I. Yeah, I think I got the auto loan in January and I ended up paying it off in December. So it was my Christmas gift to myself, actually, as I paid off my car.

Very cool. All right, well, let's talk about the student loans. That sounds like that was a bigger deal. If you're a dental specialist, I imagine you had significant student Loans. How much did you owe when you got done?

Yeah, so when I left residency, I owed $489,562.98, but who's counting? Yeah, right.

So, I mean, how'd you pay for dental school? It was all you. You borrowed it all or what?

Yeah, I just borrowed everything.

You borrowed everything. Okay. Nothing from your family, nothing from a spouse? You didn't have any cash saved up? You're not a trust fund baby? Nothing?

No, I did have, I did have a traditional IRA from when I worked, from when I was a dental assistant before. And I probably shouldn't have done this, but I just applied it towards my, towards my dental school fees and everything for the first year. It was only a couple thousand dollars though, so it wasn't much.

Wow. Well, what did you think while you're taking out all those loans? You're, you know, second year, third year dental student and you're like, eh, I'll take another a hundred thousand, please.

Why not? Tack it on. No. So I remember my very first day of dental school, just looking at like, my loan, just the start of my loan balance and thinking, this is a lot of money. Do I really, really, really want to do this? So I remember having a little bit of hesitancy and just thinking I could still, you know, I could still run, I could still get out of this without too much, too many problems. But. So the first week I went back and forth a little bit, like, do I really want to do this? But then I end up staying, obviously, so.

And you could. Then you committed and then I committed, yeah. Was it worth it? Do you like what you're doing now?

I absolutely love what I do. So I'm sorry. So happy. But in the moment I was, Yeah, I think my brother, my brother said he should have made like, tallies of all the times I called him, like worrying about something my first year of school, but. But in the end I'm super happy and I'm. Yeah, I'm really grateful to be where I'm at today. So.

Did you ever consider any of the forgiveness programs, IDR forgiveness or PSLF or anything else?

Yeah, I did actually apply for two years for the kind of like the rural physician type of, type of scholarships where you go to like an Indian reservation or just somewhere that's just more remote, more rural to have them pay for a portion of. I, I applied during, I applied before I began and I didn't get the scholarship and then I applied for like, I think a few years after and then my Third and fourth year. I just said they're obviously not going to give it to me. So I'm just, I just stopped applying.

Did you say you're two years out of training?

I'm two years out of training.

Half a million dollars in two years?

Yeah.

Okay, tell us about that.

It was kind of painful, but it was worth it.

So you literally, you just sent in 10, $12,000 a month?

More than that? Yeah, no, significantly more than that. So I had to send in. Well, I. So what happened is I graduated at the end of June and then from.

June I'd be twice that. So you're sending 20 or $30,000?

Yeah, yeah.

I can't do math in my head today.

It's okay. So I, I graduated end of June, and then I started from July until December. I just tried to get everything under control because I started a business essentially. So I, I didn't, I didn't sign with anyone. I wasn't an associate with anyone. And so I started my own business. And so to December I tried to just. I also, I also took out $30,000 from my in laws and then I financed the car and then I maxed out a credit card to $10,000. So my first six months I really just focused on paying off my in laws, paying off my credit card, paying off the car. And then from January till October of the next year is when I did my student, Student loans.

So you opened a practice?

Yeah, I, I work mobile, so I actually visit different dentists as a specialist and they just hire me, they just contract with me for a day. And so I don't actually have a physical location. I wasn't ready. Yeah, I wasn't ready to sign another big, like, bill of, you know, get more loans out. So I just, I just, I decided to go mobile.

So you carry a little bag into their clinic and otherwise use all their stuff, correct?

Yeah, so I just go in with all the equipment I need for the day and then I just do it every day. So I just come home, I unpack, unpack my car, and then I repack my car the following day.

So give us a sense what, what your income has been like the last couple of years doing this.

Yeah. So for the last couple years.

For.

The half year, for when I graduated residency, I, my income was 225,000. And then for the year before when I was in residency, it was 90,000. I was moonlighting when I was in residency as well. My first year of residency, my wife worked actually for the first six months until we had our first son and then I was moonlighting and so, yeah, so it was 90,000. And then for the half year I graduated, it ended up being 225. And then last year was 740.

You know, when I look at the average incomes for dental specialists, they are not 740. They're like three hundreds, four hundreds maybe. Why is this not a more common path for dental specialists to do this? I mean, it dramatically reduces your risk to not take out these, you know, practice loans and all that. And you still made good money. Do you even know anybody else doing this? I've never even heard of this.

Yeah, I do know. I do know quite a few other people doing this and it's not, it's not common, definitely not common. But it's. I think it's worth it. It does take a lot of work to.

Clearly it's worth it. It's brilliant, right? It's brilliant.

Well, I mean, 740 before taxes and before paying all my supply costs and everything. So I ended up, I probably ended up taking around 500, 550 home maybe.

So still, still considering there was not a practice startup cost for the most part, you know, some equipment obviously you gotta have. Oh, that's pretty cool, man. That's awesome. Okay, so you decided you've become financially literate clearly at some point in this process and you got what, a Solo 401k and now a personal cash balance plan or what?

Yeah, so I have a solo 401k for myself and my wife and then a cash balance plan for just myself. Currently we've considered adding my wife, but we're still debating that.

Okay, is she working in the practice somehow?

She is, yeah. So she does all my scheduling. She. I actually have one employee and so that travels with me. And so my wife will do. Do the payroll for her, my wife will do the schedule for me and yeah, just quite a few of the kind of behind the scenes helping with billing of certain things. So my wife does a lot of the behind the scenes, but the employee.

Doesn'T qualify to contribute to the 401k.

Yet currently not because of her age. So I decided, yeah, so I decided in that regard that I was just going to give her more money and then when she becomes 20, when she turns 21, then we'll roll her into the 401 and into the cash balance plan. So that's coming up next year.

Yeah, yeah. Just make sure you don't break those rules. The penalties can be nasty.

So, yeah, I'm already working with one of your recommended people for the cash balance plan. And so.

So they're keeping you on track. Yeah, I was just worried you were doing all personal stuff and then starting to have employees, which would get you in trouble. So the cash balance plan, you're still young. What. How much of a contribution are you able to make to it?

So for. For la, it kind of depends on how much you pay yourself because I have an S corp and so you have to pay yourself a certain amount. The cash balance plans, depending depends on how much you're paying yourself as W2 income. And so last year, because we were so focused on student loans, I was able to do $80,000 in the cash balance plan. Had I paid myself more, I could have contributed more. But that was.

That seems like a big contribution for somebody as young as you. So. Yeah, I think I'm glad you got somebody helping you make those calculations and keeping you compliant in that respect.

Yeah, I think that if I paid myself the maximum that they recommend, which it would end up being around $100,000 for my age. So if I pay myself a little bit more or if I paid myself more, then I could have got up to about $100,000.

Well, very cool. So which of these are you most proud of yourself for?

Oh, definitely the student loans. No question.

Yeah, that's a pretty serious accomplishment. I mean, what percentage of your income is going to the student loans?

Probably 50% or more. Yeah, gross.

50% of gross, yeah. Yeah. So you're living on 10 to 20% of your income after paying taxes, probably.

Correct. Yeah. I think our, I think our monthly budget, I mean, it's kind of climbed. It's just, I mean, it's just natural for the, you know, the creep to happen as you, as you increase your lifestyle a little bit. But we've tried to minimize it. And so our monthly budget currently is around 6, 7,000, 8,000. It's going to climb up to 10, 11 starting in about a week because we're buying a house. So we're buying a house in the next few days.

I like the way you timed that. Got rid of the student loans, now buy the house. I like that. Yeah, well, but you just had a 20 or 30 thousand dollars a month raise.

Yeah.

Where's that going to go?

Probably to the house.

Oh, you're going to pay off the mortgage?

Well, once again we're working with the cash balance plan. So I have to pay myself and save enough to maximize out the cash balance plan in the 401k and then I Think everything above and beyond that I'm going to put towards the mortgage. I've considered doing some real estate investing, but I'm still just. I'm still just, I don't know, thinking about it. I'm not. I'm not quite ready. So.

Yeah, wouldn't surprise me if you got into that soon. It's very cool, man. You've really not only built a great income. Right. Congratulations on that. But you have demonstrated control over it, Right. You've taken that income and you've forced it to do the things you want it to do. And I'm really impressed with that. I think you did a really nice job doing that.

Thank you.

Yeah, be proud of yourself for that.

It's represented a lot. I mean, it's been a lot of work. Obviously, I work six days a week. My wife has asked me to cut that down. You know, during the middle of it, we rewarded ourselves with a piano and we've tried to reward ourselves along the way. And she eventually asked me to just stop working so much, which I've happily said yes to. But. But yeah, last year represented a lot of, you know, a lot of six days a week. Long days, long hours, but worth it.

So can you go back and tell us about the conversation the two of you had about this plan? I mean, you guys are clearly working a plan, right? I mean, you're, you're on the same page with this. Tell them about that conversation when you put this plan in place and negotiated what you were going to do with, with all this new income.

Yeah, so we did start a, we did start or write a financial plan before we graduated. We did the fiery financial advisor course. I should say I did the Fiery financial advisor course. And then I tried to summarize it and we, my wife and I would watch short clips of different, different sections that we wanted to talk about. But we did get a written financial plan before, before I graduated, which helped us kind of springboard into, into this. Initially, our plan was for three to five years to pay off student loans. But I just, every time I would get additional income and I had said we were going to put it towards something else like investing or house. I just couldn't. I just couldn't swallow the fact that I was going to keep paying, you know, 7% on my. Or eventually because my student loans were deferred, they were in the 0% interest rates. But I knew that eventually that would come back to 7%. And so I just couldn't, I just couldn't swallow that pill. I just Couldn't handle that. And so I decided to keep paying towards student loans as opposed to kind of splitting the money. We just decided to be hyper focused on one thing before instead of split in so many different ways.

Yeah, well, it's clearly worked, right? That focus has worked and now you've got the freedom to do all kinds of cool things with that income and also showing yourselves that you can control your spending and not have a lifestyle explosion. So tons of good stuff you've done here. Sometimes we have people on here that have had an interesting journey and made a few mistakes on the way. I'm not hearing anything you guys did wrong. Did you do anything wrong? Are there any financial mistakes in your life at all?

I just wish we wouldn't have bought that car and would have bought a different car, but otherwise I think we've done pretty good, you know, and I have to thank you and your team for a lot of it because I was in my second year of residency when I came across you. One of my attendings actually recommended the WCI podcast, and so I started listening, and I was just about to pull the trigger on a $500,000 house. So I was about to be in debt a million dollars. And I listened. I scrolled through and I listened to one of your episodes about residents and buying houses. And I made it about halfway through the episode, and I turned it off because I was frustrated, because I didn't want to be told no. I just didn't want to be told no at the time. I wanted to do what I wanted to do. And then about a month later, I was at the gym again and I listened to the episode all the way through. And from that point, I've just been a big follower.

That's awesome. You know, the. The worst part about it, of course, looking back, right, Real estate went crazy in 21, 22, et cetera. And who knows, you might have been okay buying it, but certainly, you know, on average, that's usually not a great move, but, well, that's pretty awesome. Congratulations to you.

Thank you.

You really have done a great job. And thank you so much for coming on here and showing people that the program works. If you just follow the program, it works and you get exactly where you want to be. So. So thank you so much.

Of course. Thank you so much.

All right. Hope you enjoyed that. Pretty awesome. Not only the business model, awesome, what they've done with their income and just knocking, you know, knocking it out of the park when it comes to reaching financial goals, you know, those guys are going to do so well with their finances, learning this stuff early, and obviously being really disciplined as well. So that's pretty awesome. All right. I told you at the beginning we're going to talk about investing, so let's do that. I just want to give you a few principles to think about when it comes to investing. The first one is don't buy investments that you don't understand. Right? I run into people all the time. They're like, I didn't know this investment could do that, or I didn't know there was a surrender fee, or I didn't really understand how that worked, or I didn't understand the tax consequences of that investment. I run people all the time. Don't buy stuff you don't understand. And while that often is something like whole life insurance, not always. There's lots of investments out there that are fine investments, but you need to understand how they work, what the risk of the investment is, what likely returns are, how it's taxed, who's getting a cut of fees, and all that sort of stuff you need to understand. The next principle is to limit speculation with your investments. Now, what's a speculative investment or speculative instrument? It's something that doesn't generate any rents or, or interest or dividends or earnings. We're talking about stuff like precious metals, gold, platinum, silver. We're talking about a lot of crypto assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum. We're talking about empty land, we're talking about Beanie Babies, we're talking about commodities. If you want to speculate in these sorts of investments, you need to limit how much your portfolio goes into them. And the usual rule of thumb I throw out is 5%. You want to put 5% bitcoin, fine. You want to put 5% in gold, fine. No big deal, right? But if you're putting 50% of your portfolio into these sorts of investments, that's a mistake. Don't be doing that, all right? Limit the speculation with your investments. All right? You've heard that more risk equals more reward or more return. But what you may not understand is that higher investment risk is a necessary but not sufficient condition for higher returns. Just taking on more risk doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get higher returns. For example, some risks are not compensated. The classic uncompensated risk is buying individual stocks, right? You're trying to pick the next Nvidia. But the truth is you can diversify away that risk. And if you can diversify a risk away, why should you be paid for it? You don't get paid for it. It's uncompensated risk. Doesn't mean it can't pay off. You shouldn't expect it to pay off, at least on average. Speaking of diversification, that's the next principle, right? Diversify your portfolio, okay? Seems super obvious, but people don't do it. I hear about people complaining that they lost, you know, $100,000 in a hard money loan, right? You don't have to put $100,000 into a single hard money loan. You could have put that in a fund that had 80 loans, right? These things do go into foreclosure. Some 2 or 3% of them or so go into foreclosure, right? Usually don't lose all your principal, and that happens. But you know, diversify. Use a fund, you know, own enough of them that if one of them tanks completely, you don't get hurt. You know, it's same thing with stocks. You know, diversify them. You can buy them all for three basis points by using a Vanguard ETF, right? You can have 4,000 US stocks. Buy them all in 30 seconds. Diversify, diversify, diversify. Not only within an asset class, but between asset classes, right? The classic ones, stocks, bonds, real estate. Right. If you want to add some other stuff in, that's okay too, but diversify, okay? Here's another important principle. Invest when you get the money. Timing the market is really hard. It's probably impossible in the long term, but if you're like most docs, you're going to have something to invest every month for the next 10, 20, 30 years. So when you get paid, invest. And what will happen over time with this periodic investing you're doing? A lot of people like to call it dollar cost averaging, but it's actually technically something else. But this periodic investing is that sometimes you're going to get a really good price on the investments you're buying. Sometimes you'll get an okay price, and sometimes you'll pay a little too much. But on average, you're going to end up getting a more favorable price. And the truth is that time in the market matters a lot more than timing the market. Having bought stocks at any point in 2004 is a better deal than timing it exactly in 2019, right? That time in the market matters. Gives your time much, gives your money much more time to compound. Likewise, if you can invest beginning of the year instead of the end, do that. Delay purchases if you can, so you can invest first. All right? Some people have a hard time putting things on autopilot right? If you can't resist timing the market, at least try to do the opposite of what the crowd's doing, right? Buying something after it just went up 1,800% in the last year is probably not a great strategy to invest, right? We're talking about meme stocks and, you know, bitcoin after it goes up 4x, that sort of a thing, right? The time to buy this stuff is when nobody's interested in it, right? It doesn't feel right. But the end, it's at least more likely to be right. But at the same time, you got to be careful with what they call catching a falling knife, right? Just because something went down in price doesn't mean it's going to go back up. Sometimes it's just on its way to zero. And just because it went from $80 a share to $20 a share doesn't mean you should buy it because the next stop might be $2 a share or $0 a share. So be careful catching falling knives. Another important principle is that past performance does not guarantee future performance. They're required to put that in a mutual fund prospectus. There's a reason for that is because it's true. Unfortunately, the natural thing to do is look back at the last year, three years, five years, 10 years, whatever, and just pick out whatever did the best. That's not a great way to invest because there tends to be a cyclical nature. What did better last year doesn't necessarily do better this year. And in fact, when something's relatively underperformed is probably becoming a more and more attractive investment over time, right? Like when interest rates go up, the price of bonds falls, but bonds as an investment become more attractive. They're now paying higher yields. And so just because bonds had a lousy 2022, you don't want to be pulling your money out of bonds in 2024. Because they had a lousy year a couple of years ago, they're now much better investment than they were in 2021 when you are more than willing to buy them. Don't chase performance. Okay, here's another principle. If you're not using an index fund, you'd better have a darn good reason. The data is very clear, especially after tax and in the long term, that indexes funds outperform active managers, whether those are active managers of mutual funds or people just picking stocks on their own. So if there's no index fund in the asset class you want to invest in, okay, well, maybe that's reasonable. Or your 401k doesn't offer index funds. Okay, maybe that's reasonable. But otherwise, you know, there really isn't a great reason to not use an index fund. Another important principle is stop playing when you've won the game. Investing is a single player game. The goal is to reach your goals. You win if you reach your goals. It doesn't matter if you beat the S&P 500, it doesn't matter if you beat your brother in law. Nothing matters. You don't have to beat the market. All you need to do is reach your goals. So as you get close to your goals, maybe you can dial the risk back a little bit. And you don't need to go to 100% cash or anything. But don't take risk. You don't need to take to make money. You don't need to impress people you don't care about. All right, here's another principle. Be careful adding new asset classes to your portfolio. When do we get all inspired to add a new asset class? Whether it's real estate or whether it's Bitcoin or whatever it might be, small value stocks, emerging market stocks, who knows? When do we do that? Well, we're humans. We do it after they've done really well. And so what often happens is as soon as you add a new asset class to your portfolio, it does poorly for the next few years. This happened to me in 2007. I decided we were going to add real estate to our portfolio in 2007, right? You can imagine how great that timing was. So we added the Vanguard REIT index fund. Subsequently, in 2007 and 2008, it fell. That initial investment fell 78% in value. 78%. 4/5 of every dollar we put in there disappeared, right? Happens all the time when you're adding new asset classes to your portfolio. Now, we stuck with it. We still have real estate in our portfolio and 20 years later, we've done just fine. Right? Not only that money that lost 78% come back, but lots of other money that we added over time has done just fine in that portfolio, in that asset class. But be careful when you're adding new stuff. Make sure you're not performance chasing. Another principle, rebalance your portfolio every now and then. Right? The data is not entirely clear of how often you should rebalance, but it suggests that you don't need to do it any more often than once a year. But you should do it every now and then, right? Rebalance back to your original percentages so the risk you're taking on stays about the same. Okay. Another principle is there are many roads to establishing a successful investment portfolio. There are many roads to Dublin, right? You don't have to have a perfect portfolio. It doesn't have to be the same as anybody else's. You just need good enough and you need to stick with it in the long run. Okay, here's another one. There's an old joke about the economist that's walking with his students who points out there's a $20 bill on the ground. The economist doesn't believe it, says it can't be there. That wouldn't be efficient. Well, every now and then There is a $20 bill lying on the ground. Go ahead and pick that up. All right. It's not going to be there for long, but there will be a few times in your investing life and maybe a little more frequently in your business life while you run into a sort of situation where there's just a free lunch sitting there. Go ahead and take advantage of that. I mean, do your due diligence, but don't wait too long. Sometimes there is some free money out there. Maybe it's a property being sold by busy air who doesn't know or care what it's worth. Maybe somebody wants your house or your boat more than you do. Who knows? But just like there's really bad deals out there, sometimes there's really good ones too. Another important principle is to stay the course both in bull markets and bear markets. I find that beginner investors really struggle in the bear markets, but intermediate investors often struggle in a bull market. They say, how much longer can this last? I better sell now. And they missed the last six months or a year or two years of a bull market. A successful investor stays the course both in bull and bear markets. Okay, don't mix. Investing insurance usually end up with inferior insurance and an inferior investment. Lots of weird, complicated annuities and cash value life insurance. The agent's going to tell you it's not an investment, but invest in it. You know, believe him when he tells you it's not an investment. It isn't. Another principle, use retirement investment accounts and your money will grow faster because it's not getting taxed as it grows, whether it's a Roth account, whether it's a tax deferred account, use them preferentially over a taxable account. You also get a couple other benefits. It's easier estate planning. You can just name a beneficiary, it stays out of probate and it can be stretched for 10 years by your heirs. Also, you get significant asset protection in every state from at least some types of retirement accounts. And if you get in a terrible situation and end up declaring bankruptcy, it's nice to be able to keep some of your assets. Don't let the tax tail wag the investment dog. A lot of people make this mistake. They start worrying about taxes and they try to figure out how to pay less in taxes and they end up giving more than they're gaining by doing so. So consider the investment first, then look at the tax consequences. Remember that it isn't just your returns that compound. Compound interest also works on your costs and the costs matter. So pay attention to your fees, pay attention to what you're paying for advice, and remember those compound over time as well. Simplicity is valuable. It's been called the majesty of simplicity. You don't need complicated portfolios. Some of the most sophisticated investors I know have used a one fund portfolio. It might be a life strategy fund or a Target retirement fund or another balanced fund. You don't need 28 different mutual funds, 34 individual stocks, and 800 individual municipal bonds in your portfolio. It can be much more simple than that and be still very sophisticated and very successful. And finally, I want you to remember that the investor matters more than the investment. Your own investing behavior is a big determinant of your investing returns. If you want to see the enemy of your investments, look in the mirror. Stick with your plan. Get a written plan, stick with it. And don't take too much out in retirement each year. Avoid performance chasing, avoid greed, avoid fear. All that is going to matter a whole lot more than a few basis points in extra fees. All right, I hope that's helpful to kind of go over some of the basic principles you need to understand to be a successful investor. This podcast was sponsored by Bob Baiani@drdisabilityquotes.com One listener sent us this review. Bob has been absolutely terrific to work with. He's always quickly and clearly communicated with me by both email and or telephone, with responses to my inquiries usually coming the same day. I have somewhat of a unique situation and Bob has been able to help explain the implications and underwriting process in a clear and professional manner. Contact bob@www.whitecoatinvestor.com. Dr. Disabilityquotes today. You can also email infodrdisabilityquotes.com or you can just pick up the phone 973-77-1-9100 get that disability insurance in place today. All right, that's the end of our podcast. Keep your head up, shoulders back. You've got this. See you next time.

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