Navigating Post-Election Uncertainty for Dentists

Hi, welcome to another episode of Financially Free Dentists. I'm your host, Conor Mallman. And I'm your other host, Jake Courtney. And I'm just a guy in the street, Travis Hornsby. What a, what a special guest today. I know we're, we're so lucky. I'm, I'm so excited about this episode. We have Travis joining us, um, and man, we're going to cover a whole bunch. Uh, I guess before we even jump into things, uh, I want to, I want to say we're recording this Thursday, November 7th. So Travis, I'm surprised you're even standing right now. Um, yeah, that's, it's kind of like an internal joke in the team that like somebody helped Travis because I didn't get a lot of sleep the past couple of days. Uh, election night only slept like a couple hours, two, three hours, just cause there's like so many articles on our website that people just don't think about that got to get updated. And cause I knew people were going to search for certain things, right? Like, you know, Trump repealing, save Trump repealing PSLF. And the funny thing is like, I've already written a lot of these articles back in 2017, like, so it's like a lot of these articles already existed, but like had to be readapted to like the current context. So it was just like, you know, Oh gosh, got to go fast. So I, uh, yeah, I pounded all those out. And, uh, you know, there was a couple like house GOP student loan proposals that were kind of irrelevant at the time, but now I probably are relevant because of probably unified control of Congress with the white house. So I was trying to update that as well. So, you know, a lot of fun, but you know, a lot of time to sleep. So it's pretty good. It just proves the point that business ownership is a full-time job, more 80, a hundred hours a week sometimes. So, well, yeah, before we scare people away, though, I do think that being a dental practice owner is definitely different from being a publisher of a online niche website, because whenever news comes out, you know, if you don't put it out there, a competitor, well, it's different in the dental world. Right. I mean, yeah, you still have issues to worry about when the patients are all gone and the lights are off, like you still have to worry about your taxes and your, you know, licenses and business property tax, whatever your thing is. Right. But the good news is, is if I wanted to hire out what I did at 4 AM in the morning, I could have, I just loved it too much. So I like refused to let anybody else touch it. So I could have been like, Hey, here's a pile of cash work all night. Fix these things, but that's not cool. That's not fun. This is a really dumb analogy, but like Teddy Roosevelt, Jr. I feel like that was like the son or grandson. I think if Teddy Roosevelt, he's like the only general that like stormed the beach on Normandy on D-Day, I don't think I'd be that brave, but like, I kind of get where he's coming from. Right. Like the guy's like, you know what? I want to fight too. Throw me in coach. So I don't know. That's, that's kind of how it felt after the election. Just trying to help borrowers. I love you. Right. Or I love that, you know, I love that you were on the beaches and we were sleeping. Yeah, it's all good. It's all good. HR violation, Connor, but this is supposed to be a fun podcast for dentists, so we're going to keep it, keep it chill on that note of, uh, having a lot going on, burning the candle at both ends. I want to hear from you guys. We were talking about self-care recently, myself and a couple other folks. And, uh, I want to know what you guys do for your relaxed time. And like, how do you, how do you separate your work day or how do you take a break? Is there a self-care go-to that you have? I'll let Travis start this off. Cause I think I know what, what his is. Cause I see the videos all the time of him hiking. Well, I don't know. I play some video games. Y'all are gonna be shocked by this, but I like ones where you'll take over the world, right? Like civilization, build your own country or empire. And then when you get invaded, uh, and everything falls apart, you know, just kidding restart. So that's relaxing for me. I like to do canoeing, like dancing, hanging out with my kids. Those are kind of the top ones. You know, dancing. Can I ask, is that like ballroom dancing? So secret about me, I'm actually a pretty decent swing dancer. I grew up doing it every Friday. So if somebody puts on Zoot Suit Riot, watch out. Very cool. Mine is not near as entertaining, but we moved to Tennessee. The big reason why is because of the lakes and the hiking and everything that is comes along with being near the Appalachian mountains, Appalachian, like throwing an apple at you, that that's really my self care. And like right now in November, it's like 80. I mean, you're close to me over here in Tennessee, Travis. So you understand what it's like, you know, high as 80 degrees today and fall and it's, you know, not humid. It's awesome time right now. So I, like, I just went on a walk between my first meeting and this meeting. I mentioned this before in our first episode, you know, I, I am very much a workoutaholic, so that's my way of kind of burning off some steam and kind of removing myself from any stressful environments. Jake, you look like a bear trapper, but a polished bear trapper. You know what I mean? Like a hundred years ago, change your hairdo, change the professional clothes and stuff. And you can, I could see you out there with Leo DiCaprio in that bear battle movie or whatever that was. Yeah. Like hiding in a deer sense that you love the mountains, right? Like sleeping in a deer carcass or, or is that too much? I like to do the hiking. I love getting outdoors, but I'm the one that's kitted out in a fluffy jacket and like, I'm not getting cold. I'm not freezing. I'm in Chicago. We're right next to the river, my detox. And like, I try to create separation between work and non-work life. Right. And it's hard when you're at home. So it sounds like you do something similar, Jake, but I try to walk the dog on the river. My black lab Lucy was sleeping behind me right now. It's very therapeutic just to just get five, 10 minutes, make a commute, right? It's an artificial commute, but create some separation. Travis, I wanted to touch on this a little bit with all of us together, why we're doing this podcast. How have dentists been typically helped with financial planning and student loan guidance? And how has student loan planner and what we're doing different? The way I think about it is I feel like we're the student loan ringer, like a Bill Simmons podcast, right? So he's got the ringer show. That's the big show. But the reality is, is there's subsets within the ringer of stuff that like really needs to be talked about. That's not really relevant for like the general audience. And so dentistry is very special and unique. You know, dentistry is the probably second largest group of occupations and occupational like numbers that we serve only behind physicians and just barely behind physicians. And dentists have very unique challenges, very unique opportunities compared to other professions that we serve. So our dentists out there a lot more likely to have the upside potential of entrepreneurship, a lot more likely to be a lot more capable of crafting their hours. Uh, you know, so you think about a dentist, like if a dentist wants that, like flexibility and how much or little they work, that's a lot easier to do in a lot of cases than it is in medicine or vet med when you're dealing with like these very large bureaucratic employers where you've got to work only for a few different ones. So dental school is obviously not going to help with these topics. They're not going to talk about it. I promise you that the DSOs are not going to like what we talk about in this podcast. They would much rather you accept $10 for a filling and be happy about it. When you lose a hundred dollars in the procedure, that's another reason is to try to help equip people with just tools to have happiness in the profession that private equity doesn't want you to know about the unique challenges of dentists and our, and dental specialists too. I want to make sure that people understand this is also for prosthodontists, endodontists, orthodontists, oral surgeons, periodontists, right? This is pediatric dentists. This is not just the general dentist show. It's really the DDS slash DMD show, because this is something for anybody that's got a DDS or DMD, whether you stopped or pursued a specialty. It's really all encompassing. We're trying to talk to the entire community of people that would show up on a dental town. And so that's the goal of this podcast is to create that safe spot to talk about things that need to be talked about that we see constantly in the thousands of dentists that we help and dental specialists, and just to kind of keep it real, just talk about some things that I think people would be able to benefit from and learn more and enjoy life more if they knew. I think that lines up perfectly with student loan planner in general. I think we pride ourselves in our straightforward advice. We don't try to sugarcoat it or anything. And I think people appreciate that. They're tired of hearing just vague, general advice. We do this with our clients, right? We're very straightforward. And we try to think about the big picture. And two, this is going to be more of a wealth growth show. This is primarily going to be talking about strategies for minimizing taxes, growing wealth, financial independence, living your best life, right? This is not going to be too much on student loans. We're not going to be talking too much about that. We'll be talking some, but not that much because the whole idea is somebody might listen to the once a week student loan planner show and they might listen to this show as well. And then eventually when they have no student loans, they might stop listening to the student loan planner podcast because you know what, I would stop. And so then the idea would be that you could have one show that you can connect with that gives you that different angle out there where it's about financial freedom and fun as a dentist and not about just some of the different things out there that people try to suggest. Like you have to be worth, you know, $50 million to be happy with 10 practices, right? So, I mean, you could be, you could be able to, we could probably talk about that at some point, but you know, that's the idea behind it all. I agree. And you know, a lot of dentists get the guidance of, Hey, you know, your life starts when you pay off your loans. And so our goal with this is life starts now, right? You can start building wealth. Now there's a whole bunch of strategies you can use and we all know, and hopefully our listeners know as well that you don't have to pay off your student loans. Item number one, a lot of stuffy financial planning shows are going to say, that's your first step. Get rid of all your debt. Then you can start saving and investing. That's just not true. And also all, I like what you said there, Travis, I almost feel like our show should be like what dental school didn't teach you. And it should have. What other profession is it so common for you to have to know, have to wear all these like business hats. You may own a practice. You may be the head marketer. You may be the accountant and the bookkeeper and you know, head of HR. Oh my gosh. Like where were those classes? And you have to learn a whole science profession, medical profession. I mean, that's, that's incredible. So we want to take away some of that stress. So on that note, taking away stress, you know, election was a couple of days ago. Travis has three and a half hours of collective sleep over the past 48 hours. What do our listeners need to know or need to be thinking about? Over the next six, 12 months for their student loans. I think the big thing to know is if you have your first loan after July, 2014 that you've ever taken out. So you're pretty much in the same shoes pre-election as you are post-election. So people that have that first loan they ever took out after July, 2014, that means you're eligible for the new IBR plan and all the usual math of like, should you go for forgiveness or not applies if you have your first loan taken out before July, 2014. So for example, you guys are going to a dental conference here, Yankee Dental in a little bit. And you'll listening to Flo Rida. I think he's going to be there. That's right. So if you know who Flo Rida is, if you ever went to a Flo Rida concert, if you watched step up to the streets too, or whatever, I think it was him and T-Pain in that one. Right? So the joke there is like, you know, you have your first loan before July, 2014, right? You're kind of like a millennial or elder millennial. Then the loan rules might be getting less generous with the Trump administration. So we have to really monitor it closely, see if people are still good forgiveness candidates after as they were before. And I think that there could be a lot opportunity for people to decide some different things than they might normally decide, right? And with their loans. So I'll just say, if you have double your income in debt, still great forgiveness case, even if things get less generous, no matter what they do with the Trump administration and student loans. And then if you've got anything below two times your income in debt, then the answer is, it depends. It's, it's just going to depend on how all these rules shake out. We'll have more on that obviously over at the SLP podcast and as well as the email list. I think most people, you know, if you're wanting to go for forgiveness and you're on pay do nothing for now, if you're going for forgiveness, but you're on the same plan forbearance, switch to the IBR plan. And if you are planning to pay your loans off and you're on the same plan forbearance, just get that 0% interest subsidy until they end it presumably shortly after Trump takes office. And I think it's important to reflect on the fact that the COVID forbearance period was 42 months of no payments. And then we, Oh, I know, trust me. We had like seven months. I'm just kidding. I know the listeners were like, heck yeah. How about some more? Definitely had it nice for the majority of borrowers out there. So, well, I mean like, there's a lot of weird stuff that could impact dentists just to be clear. Like I've worked on a model today on the house GOPs plan for income driven repayment, right? This is something that who knows if it ever goes through, but if it did, this thing is even more jacked than the save plan. I was running some effective interest rate scenarios and models and stuff. Your typical dentist would get like a 2% interest rate for the first like five years out of dental school. If this plan went into place, if you're a low income borrower with this plan, you'd be screwed. But higher income borrowers would just be like balling out with this plan. It's kind of interesting. So, so the thing is, there's a lot of unpredictability going on that could impact how all this shakes out, right? And dentists are in this unique position of, yeah, sure. You're very educated and you have a lot of student debt. So you might think, Oh, I'm going to be in big trouble with all these loan rules are going to get rolled back. But in some ways, when you think about the student loan, interest pause, the person who put that in place was Trump. That really benefited dentists did not benefit baristas hardly at all. Right? So if you think about like some of the things that are coming down the pipeline, dentists could be the beneficiaries of tons of it. And frankly, that's another reason for this podcast, guys. We want to be able to just talk about real talk that the average person on the street be like, man, screw Dennis. They're rich. I hate it when they bill me all this money. You know, you know, I don't care what their problems are. Like, we don't want those people here. We want to just talk to you and just have the real talk about like, Hey, how do we help your family as much as we can? We didn't make the rules. We just have to help take advantage of them. That's a great point. It's important to keep in mind that forgiveness is sticking around. Forgiveness isn't going anywhere, whether it's one way or another. And that could be if you're working towards PSLF, you know, an FQHC, or if you're at the VA or a state facility, there's been proposals in the past, right? I think I'm right in saying that to get rid of PSLF, but I don't think there's a whole lot of momentum behind it. Right? So I would feel comfortable in planning for that. But for a lot of dentists, this could be kind of a great period, right? You may find that you need to pay your loans off, which by the way, really good problem to have, right? That basically means that you're making more than your loan balance. Big high five to you. If you do need to pay it off, then you've got free money until, you know, if you're on the save plan while they decide what to do. I always joke about like, there's so much speculation in student loans. What if the Trump administration wins? What if the Kamala Harris administration wins? And now we have some clarity on who won, right? There's still a ton more uncertainty that you just mentioned there, Travis. So thinking about that, what's some things that especially impact maybe some high income individuals like dentists, because we all know dentists are in the typically the top 5% of income earners out there. What are some things that are likely to happen with the Trump administration being now reelected, I guess, with a little bit of a gap there too, uh, that dentists should care about from their personal finance side of things? Well, yeah. I mean like, so remember I deal with the world the way that it is, not the way that it should be. And so we're obviously having unified Republican control with a Republican White House. You're going to see for sure an extension of the tax cuts and jobs act in some capacity now. And that's probably going to last quite a while. It'll probably be in another seven year extension roughly, or even eight year extension. And so what does that mean? Guys, you got to buy a boat. Oh my gosh. You need to go buy that like off-roader you've always wanted to get. You need to go buy the Birken bag. You need to book the luxury vacation to the mall dives with your girlfriends from dental school. I mean, it is time. It is time. There's money flowing like crazy. Our grandkids are in deep trouble. They're really going to hate us. I mean, they're going to spit on our graves probably, but we will have lower taxes and much higher deficits. I'm kidding somewhat, but like the reality here is the QBI deduction, the tax cuts and jobs act that benefited higher income earners a lot more than lower income earners. All that stuff's going to get extended in some capacity. And there's a lot of uncertainty as to how they'll extend it. And even wage earners could actually get some benefits as well. One of the examples of that is remember that president Trump promised no tax on overtime. Well, what if there's some random like overtime rule that goes into place that somehow benefits wage earning dentists kind of unlikely there. I think he'd probably would have to structure it for budgetary reasons with like income cap on it, but possible. But I think for sure the major benefits are going to be practice owners, major, major benefits for practice owners. I think we're going to see another extension of all those accelerated depreciation schedules. So if you want to go buy the cyber truck and claim that, you know, your dental practice needed it, that's literally probably a possibility without the, you know, especially given Elon bought the election, right. I'm just like kind of uncensored right now. So hopefully that's okay with our listeners. But now he gets a seat at the table. Yeah. I mean, so, you know, will there be, I mean, maybe they'll even pay you to get a cyber truck. Maybe you get a hundred thousand dollars in a free cyber truck instead of having to pay for one with the way that they're going to change this tax code. Other things to know is there will probably be some impacts on like salt deductions, state and local taxes. We might see that deduction get uncapped again. But I'm expecting some very generous rules, right? The old saying elections have consequences. I mean, this was a major win for the Republican party in these elections, and they will absolutely use their power because they don't need Democrats in the Senate to do any kind of tax cut extension simply because they have two moderates in the Senate Murkowski and Alaska and Collins from Maine. And they have 52 seats, at least at the time we recorded this, which means that they can just do a tie breaking vote with JD Vance and they can push through any tax code change they want. But the only catch is it can only last for a certain number of years. So the last tax cuts and jobs act 2017 expired 2025. That's what I'm kind of thinking we might see. So they might pass it in 2025. It might expire eight years after that. So maybe like 2032 something along those lines. And so then the only way that would get repealed or modified is if you had unified democratic control, say in like 2028 in 2028, you know, how likely is that to happen? Well, the last time Democrats had unified democratic control, they tried to make this tax code changes and they didn't succeed, right? They tried to change it and it did not work. They were not able to get built back better past. They were not able to change the tax code and get agreement on that because of some resistance from moderate members in the democratic Senate. I also think that people are kind of concerned about higher borrowing costs. That's something to kind of talk about and think about a little bit. So people are saying that the Trump tariffs could be inflationary. I do think that it depends on like, and if you're in the dental profession, I don't think that's going to impact people too much because I have a lot of the dental stuff is kind of more, I think, I mean, I would assume it's a little bit more us based and us kind of manufactured is my guess. Actually I shouldn't say that because I'm not an expert in dental manufacturing for devices. So I could be surprised there, but I think that dentistry is probably a little lower impact on the tariff side of things. But for the interest rates, essentially what Trump's proposing is very expensive and he's not promising to pay for a lot of it with tax increases. So bond markets know that the U S is going to be borrowing an absolute massive amount and interest rates are going up as a result of that because the bond buyers know around the world, Hey, the U S is about to issue a whole bunch of paper and we got to charge more for that knowledge of what's coming. So those are a lot of the things to kind of think about, right? I mean, if I was going to be in the market for a home in the next year, I might kind of think about taking some action on that. If I was going to be in the market for acquiring a practice or expanding a practice, I probably would speed up those plans a little bit just because the uncertainty about borrowing costs going up. So there's basically two sides of the coin here. You save a lot on taxes, which is great. But on the other side, if you're looking to take out more debt, you might have a higher interest rate for longer and that would be more costly. So obviously we're big fans of running the numbers in your situation, but thinking about most of the practice owners out there, knowing the amount of profit that a dental practice can make this tax cuts extending can be a tens of thousands of dollars saving most of the time for a dental practice. It's been around for at least a few years. I always like your 10,000 foot view, Travis on politics and the policy changes. That's always so helpful. If I'm thinking about this as, you know, an associate who's thinking about buying a practice in the next year or two, and they see the election results and not quite sure if they should be confident or not confident as a prospective business owner, it sounds like they should feel pretty good. Well, you know, what usually happens after an election is if you're a Democrat and the Republican wins, you feel negative about economic sentiment. And if you're a Republican and the Democrat wins, then you also feel negative about economic sentiment. And both of those feelings are probably not connected or accurate in terms of just the way the economy works, right? Economy. Most people would say kind of like a random walk, some control over things, but you know, usually they say that the president doesn't actually have all that much power about how the economy goes. It just goes. And I think there is some truth in that. And I think that there are some big overall dynamics to pay attention to, like the borrowing costs, the tax code, because those are things that will happen for sure. And those are just decisions that you can just figure out what to do based off of your, your situation and stuff. So I think the much bigger question is just like, is it the right time to be an owner? I sing the praises of ownership. I know you guys, I think had a pod episode on, uh, when not to be a practice owner or something like that. I don't know. I might have to fire you too. You know, I don't like that. I don't know. I didn't listen to it yet, but, uh, I'm just kidding. Cause I love practice ownership. By the way, if I fired these two, I'd be screwed. So I can't do that. So like the goal there is just get the people in the right spot, right? That's the goal is if you shouldn't be an owner, there's some great reasons not to be. If you should be an owner, you should be confident about it and go for it. And this is kind of the point of the pot, right? Like this is why we're doing this together is to just really empower people. Like we want people balling out on the dental practice owned boat somehow that their CPA blessed that they could write off. They drove there with their awesome car that they're leasing to the practice that the CPA blesses and then they've paid off their practice loan and they've got all this cash coming in. They don't know what to do with, or they're working three days a week in a 10 99 or w two job, tons of time, freedom, hanging out with family, living a great life, no stress because they aren't a practice owner. Don't want to be. So that's what we're just trying to do. Right guys. It's just kind of find that sweet spot for everybody listening. That's right. I think that's very, very important for our listeners is that first define what you want out of it. You obviously went to school for quite some time. It's an investment in your time and effort of getting to this point. That doesn't necessarily mean that you need to make 500 K of as a, an associate work in five days a week. Right? So it doesn't need to be like that. So first define what that life looks like. And then you can basically maneuver your financial and career commitments around that, whether it's owning a practice or taking on a three day a week to 99 rule. So we luckily at SLP wealth, I mean, we see all types of varieties. That's what I absolutely love about working with dentists is there's so many different, obviously types of people out there, but also types of dentists out there in terms of what they do. So I love the variety of folks that we work with. Absolutely. There's a couple of folks I'm working with right now on bringing schedules down because they'd rather go do yoga or go explore the great outdoors instead of like battle with Delta on reimbursement. So let me tell you one hack that I had conversation with the dentist once that I loved the guy had like four or five DSOs. One of the DSOs accounted for like 40% of his volume revenue wise. He wanted to like just work less. And so I was like, have you ever looked at the margins of what these DSOs pay you for different procedures? Have you ever looked at what you're actually earning like net of the costs? Cause it's like if you could have one DSO have 40% of your revenues, but if the volume of procedures you're doing because of that payment is so high and the margins are low, you might actually be able to fire that DSO and go cash only for the subset of the patients that you're seeing that you take that insurance for and then not bash your head against the wall. And so that was basically the suggestion is, is, you know, I won't say the name of this particular DSO. I think everybody knows who it is. But the point there is like this person was working for such low wages, those extra two days a week. I mean they were essentially not making hardly at all that much at all compared to the other ones that they were accepting that had better reimbursement rates. So that, I mean, that is how doctors fight back. That is the answer for like declining reimbursement rates in the profession is if you're in a very high competition area and you know, like you might have to just suck it up because there's not really much of an option if you need to make a certain amount of money because there's so much competition, right? But if your financial needs are lower or you're in a less competitive area and you have this desire to work less, like a whole lot of the time, you can just look through the list of your vendors, right? And say, who's the one I hate the most? Who's the, who's the insurance company? I just absolutely despise with every fiber of my being. Do I have to work with them? You know? Yeah. You'd have some upset patients and stuff like that, but you're not obligated to do work for free. And I think a lot of times people feel like, Oh, I'm a bad person if I don't accept all the insurances. No, you're not. You're a good person that is looking out for their own mental health and their own family's priorities, right? Ultimately, at the end of the day you work because you enjoy it or you get purpose or, or you get paid and you're choosing to spend time with work instead of other things you could be doing. Right. And I think that people really have to think really hard about that trade off and decide, okay, if I'm making a 10% margin on some DSO and I can figure out a way to kick them out of my life, that's smart. That's really smart. So that's just some of the things I've learned over the years talking to thousands of dentists. That's a lot of times people do not look, they don't know their numbers. They don't look at their numbers. They don't know their profit margins by insurance company. You know, like you could make the same amount of money drilling a cavity with one spot as you might make drilling three with another. And people a lot of times don't think about that. I really like what you said about, does it make you a bad person to optimize for dollars per hour worked or for quality of life? No, right. You're taking care of you and you're going to serve a lot more people if, if you're doing okay. If you're taking care of yourself first, if you don't take care of yourself and you burn out 10 years of the profession, then you've not done anybody any favors. So I totally agree. Prioritize quality of life dollars per hour worked. Yeah. Well, I think that's a perfect place to end it. I so appreciate you joining us, Travis. I feel a lot less stressed. Hopefully our listeners do too, that the world of student loans is not ending post election. Um, maybe a couple of things are changing, but still enough to plan around. There may be some positive things coming for practice owners. And you know, there's a lot of complicated emotions right now, but hopefully this serves to ease some concerns maybe for our listeners. Well, and, and I just want to say to the listener, like better than this podcast longterm, man. Like if you go back and listen to my first podcast I ever did, oh my gosh, man, I was just, I didn't know what I was saying. I was just kind of, you know, I, it was terribly produced and everything. Right. And these guys are already doing a way better than I was doing for my first few shows, you know? So stick with this thing longterm and you're going to learn some wild stuff on this pod. I'm sure that we're going to try to keep it fun, try to keep it interesting. I can't wait to see what happens with this podcast longterm. I mean, just having a place where a dentist can just have their stories heard, man, it's going to be fun. Do we have like an email yet for the show or like a link to people who can leave questions or reach out to you guys? Are we doing that yet? If not, we will. So that's a great idea, Travis. I'm glad you brought that up. Well, you know what? That's great. Well, how about just, if you want to send any feedback, just email me, right? Travis slpwealth.com. You can hit me up directly for now. And just to thank you for listening to the show. Like I said, we're, this show is going to be so fun longterm. So you can't wait. Can't wait. Yeah. Like you said, and I'll just echo it. Our goal is to reduce stress, ease anxiety and think differently about the finances of being a dentist or dental specialist. And that's, that's our main goal. And hopefully with your feedback, we can see if we're doing a good job. Yep. Well, thanks everybody. I appreciate you joining us. We'll be back in a couple of weeks here with another episode. Take care.