In this episode of Anesthesia Success, I am joined by finance oriented anesthesiologist, Dr. Aaron Lewis. We discuss “The Critical Financial Variable” of wealth accumulation which they describe as “the amount of money that you can save”, also known as saving rate. Dr. Lewis will bring some tips that you can implement in order to have a better grasp on your personal journey in wealth accumulation.
Want to win free a copy of Inevitable Wealth by Nick Murray or The One Page Financial Plan by Carl Richards? Leave a review on iTunes, screenshot it, and send it to justin@anesthesiasuccess.com for your chance to win!
Hello and welcome to episode 42 of the anesthesia success podcast. I’m really excited to be coming to this week with my friend, anesthesiologist and fellow financial Wiz, the money nerd himself, Dr. Aaron Lewis. Aaron, great to have you this week. It’s great to be back. Destin. Thank you. This week
Justin (00:39):
We’re going to talk about what I would describe as like the foundation of wealth building because as busy professionals, whether you’re a physician or anything else, you really only have the mental, emotional capacity to direct your efforts and your time and attention towards, I would argue one or two or maybe three major initiatives as it relates to your finances. More than that and things just get scattered and your efforts get diffused and you’re not able to make the targeted progress that you want. So an important question to ask at the outset of, you know, becoming a higher nurse. So this is very relevant for residents and fellows out there who are planning on becoming attendings and a few months or even attendings who want to really ratchet up their attention to the things that matter as it relates to building wealth. This is, this is my thesis and what Aaron and I are going to unpack here is that the amount that you save, also known as your savings rate, the amount of money that whenever you get paid you’re able to keep rather than spend.
Justin (01:44):
That is the critical financial variable and the one that more than anything else is going to be determinant of your financial success. So Aaron, I’m really excited to hear your thoughts on this cause I know you know you’ve walked through this yourself and this is something my wife and I think about. I’m curious as you think about your savings rate, as you think about the fundamental critical variable of building wealth, what comes to mind for you?
Dr. Aaron Lewis (02:10):
What comes to mind? First and foremost is discipline, which is not something that comes naturally to everybody. It’s a skill that has to be practiced. Of course, I practice it with my wife all the time. It’s not something that just happens without significant effort. Yeah, I agree with you that of course your, your savings rate especially early on is the most significant factor to building longterm wealth. And that speaks to the value of putting in some extra time and effort on the ground floor to get a financial plan. So this is when you are coming out of residency or fellowship, you should consider an embrace putting in some front end time and effort and concentration into getting a plan. Once you have a good plan and you can follow it with discipline, the effort goes down. An automated financial plan is the easiest one and I would argue most successful.
Justin (03:14):
Yeah. Yeah. I actually was recently, and this sort of, I was thinking about this idea and doing this podcast because I was recently, I was down at wake forest at their med school doing a little presentation for the med students. They’re talking about how to pick a financial planner, how to discern who is, who is somebody who am I can and should trust potentially. And one of the questions I got from one of these ms force was, you know, how do I know that the investment returns that a financial advisor is going to give me are better than the investment returns that I could get myself? And so I was, you know, sort of filtAarong this question that I heard through the things that I knew about the relevance of the question that this person was asking. And so I said, you know, before I even answer that like Canada advisor get better investment returns, let’s reframe the question.
Justin (03:59):
Let’s understand, you know, you’re an ms four, you’re going to have three to five years of residency and other one to three years of fellowship and then you’re going to become an attending and then you’re going to earn for another, you know, 10 plus years before investment returns become more relevant to you than how much you’re saving then your savings rate. So really what you’re asking me is a question that the answer isn’t even relevant for another 20 years, arguably, and right. You know, as I was considAarong this, it, it made me realize that I think this is a message that we need to share. Anyone can do, this can take this very important step today, but this is undoubtedly the beginning of the wealth building journey.
Dr. Aaron Lewis (04:45):
No question. What you said is absolutely true, and I would say it a different way. I would say it like this. It is, it’s not even the proper question to ask. Can I, can a financial advisor get me better returns? The value of a financial advisor is to keep you from making big, dumb mistakes in a time of panic. The advisor’s job is not to go get you greater returns. The advisor’s job is to help you with the financial plan and help you stick to it in times where you might be panicking and want to sell, cause a coronavirus. Yup. Make mistakes. I want Bitcoin. Your financial advisor’s job is to say, Aaron, we have a plan. Remember the plan we made? We’re sticking to it no matter what. And so they hold you to your decisions and what what you know is best for you in times of panic. This is the value of a financial advisor not to get you greater returns.
Justin (05:53):
Yup, I would agree. And ultimately, you know, the hope is that it yields greater wealth than it is my firm belief that it does over time. Obviously I’m super biased in that, but I 100% agree. You know, to go back to what you said earlier, Aaron, about the idea of discipline being an important part of the wealth building process. I think this is where an advisor can significantly assist, is to just be a cheerleader, be a coach, be an accountability partner. Be somebody who says, our target savings rate for this calendar year is 35% in order to do that, we’ve got to max out these three accounts. We’ve got to put an extra 12 K a month into this account and I’m going to check in every couple of months and make sure it’s happening. And if not, we’re going to have a conversation to see
Dr. Aaron Lewis (06:33):
Where are we too ambitious in our goals. Are there changes we can make and what it allows an investor or a physician or a wealth bill, any aspiring wealth builder to do is to remain focused on those one or two critical variables that are going to, as I said before, be ultimately determinative in building that velocity towards the kind of net worth building that you’re going to want to achieve. And of course there’s, there’s one more important factor. What a financial advisor will allow you to do is to take all of the hours and brain power and effort you would apply to doing it yourself. It allows you to offload that onto them and gives you more free time to do whatever it is you’d like to do with your family. Go bowling, go traveling, reading on the weekend, go camping, [inaudible], whatever that is. And so you have to be able to assign a value to that also is the free time that you are purchasing by using an advisor.
Justin (07:29):
That’s right. And so it’s, you know, similar to the way that it’s helpful to have a personal trainer when you go to the drip, the gym, but you don’t actually need one. All you need is like an eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper with like here’s the workout. If you can do the workout three times a week, you’re going to get buff, right? That’s what I want to try to create here in the next 30 minutes or so is I’m going to give you the sheet of paper to say if you follow these several steps, this is going to help build that velocity towards increasing net worth. And it’s going to be a very simple understandable, repeatable, executable system that you can put in place in your own life. I’m going to talk about how this works for me and my wife and Aaron’s going to share his own system for tracking net worth and tracking cash flows.
Justin (08:10):
So that we can hopefully help any of you listeners out there who are interested in doing this, get the playbook and if you want to run the playbook, and obviously for the context for this discussion, I’m always looking at this. I so I closely follow the environment for anesthesia practice and anesthesia and pain are obviously a little bit distinct and in the market forces and how they’re impacted. But in anesthesiology I’m always seeing these headlines of like payer contracts being slashed and a lot of volatility as it relates to employment. And I know this is something that Aaron has seen and I always, I’m, I’m seeing headlines like one a week for physician groups impacting large geographical areas. And so one of the reasons that I think this concept is so important, building net worth as quickly as possible by honing in on savings rate is because if you can do this at the outset, you can provide a nice layer of insulation between yourself as an anesthesiologist or you know, pain management slash anesthesia physician and, and all of the market forces happening out there that you have no control over.
Justin (09:16):
You can control your savings rate, you can control how quickly you build wealth. You can’t control whether or not your group is going to lose a contract at their hospital or whether or not one of the big insurers is going to refuse to sign a fair contract with them. And that can cause a lot of stress. So if you can take the potential stressors of all of those things we can’t control and eliminate or mitigate their impact on your life by having a system to build wealth so that you’re insulated, this is just gonna make your quality of life that much better.
Dr. Aaron Lewis (09:46):
Absolutely. There’s a fringe benefit also that we should talk about to sort of going through creating a, a discipline plan for saving. And that of course also is comprehensive when it includes your lifestyle, how much your mortgages, your vehicles and stuff like that. So when you execute a repeatable plan of financial discipline in your life, and the worst were to happen, let’s say you took a 50% pay cut or 40% pay cut, whatever, something that would arguably or not arguably be terrible, you have already established that you can be a disciplined saver. And so you can reduce your saving even spending everything to accommodate this now unforeseen circumstances. And you’ll be better equipped to do that than somebody who’s freewheeling it spending, let’s say more than they should. And then they get a 30% cut in their income. That’s, that’s a real disaster for them. Whereas the person who is used of creating a plan, executing a plan will be in much better shape to tolerate the ups and downs of the market.
Justin (11:00):
Absolutely. And so if we, if we talk about, I want to talk first about the timeline of how this can unfold. Somebody who’s paying attention to savings rate in a way that they will want to move the needle. And then we’re going to talk about the actual mechanics of how does this work. So from a timeline standpoint, this is why when that [inaudible] asked me that question, I thought this is not the right question. If you’re saving the same amount of money every year, and this works with any amount, say it’s $10,000 a year, if you’re saving $10,000 a year, it’s you’re going to need to save that amount for 13 years before you get to the point that the growth from those investments outpaces the benefit of adding that $10,000. And what I mean by that is this, every, say you start and you put $10,000 in an investment account and it makes 7% so at the end of the year it’s $10,700 then you put another 10,000 and then it’s 21,400 and you can see how there’s this very small incremental gains from the investments.
Justin (12:03):
So it’s, you know, 700 a year and then that grows a little bit as your balance grows. But the 10,000 that you’re putting in every year, that’s the thing that moves the needle and it’s a big chunk on top. So it’s doubling, it’s increasing by 100% and then by 50% the full balance. And so that big number, that big contribution is so critical to be doing. Rather than saying, Oh, I hope my investments, you know, get 12% instead of 9% you know, on a balance of $10,000 that doesn’t matter. This doesn’t start to matter until you have a big six figure number or a seven figure number. So at the outset, if you want to increase your pace to building that net worth, this is the number you need to focus on is how do I get that 10,000 a year to be the biggest number possible and then how do I do everything I possibly can to maintain that contribution or grow it as the years pass?
Dr. Aaron Lewis (12:53):
Yeah. One of the, one of the huge mistakes I made when I finish my residency and that was of course a stage when I was still developing financial literacy was I felt tremendous pressure to go out and seek market beating returns. Okay. Like you said, I didn’t know what you’re, what you’re telling your listeners now. I didn’t know that the key was just a high savings rate. Again, I believe first for some erroneous reason that I had to seek out higher returns that led me to stock pick do stuff that does not work. It didn’t work for me. It’s not going to work for anybody. And so you’re, you’re, you’re doing a service to your listeners by verse in that bubble. Had I heard this message it’d be much further ahead.
Justin (13:42):
Yeah. But as the Chinese proverb says, the best day to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best day is today. So I’m hoping everybody out there listening can start to take advantage of this knowledge. Yeah. Aaron, I want to talk a little bit about how do we, how do we start this process? If somebody says, okay, I’m convinced I need to have a high savings rate, you know, maybe I’m an attending or maybe I’m transitioning into attending hood and I want to make sure that I capture as much money as possible and that I have this, you know, you said disciplined, automated, like on the really boots on the ground. How does this work for you and your wife as you implement something like this?
Dr. Aaron Lewis (14:18):
So if I were to go back to first year attending hood, knowing what I know now, and it’s the same thing, what I would recommend to anyone really trying to embrace this for me, step one is to look under every rock to find out what are your pre-taxed buckets? What are they, where are they, what do they add up to? And for me, whatever they are, you fill ’em up for me. That’s, that’s important. Step one, fill him up. So what’s a pretax Redux bucket? I used synonymously with our retirement plan. What that means, well, most commonly retirement plan that allows you to divert some of your income and not pay tax on it. So for example, a 401k plan, if you earn $400,000 a year and you maximize your limit this year of 19,000, okay, you’re only gonna pay tax on, you’re going to pay tax on 400,000 less 19,000.
Dr. Aaron Lewis (15:24):
Okay.
Dr. Aaron Lewis (15:24):
Meanwhile, the money you’ve put into your foreignK will grow over time tax-free. So these are pre tax buckets. They’re very valuable and you ought to maximize them, in my opinion. That’s a good step one. That’s a good place to start.
Justin (15:38):
Yup. Absolutely. And so after you, you know, you look at your 401k, if you’re an academics you might have a four, three B or a four 57. There’s some other opportunities there. Say, you know, we’re looking across the landscape and we maxed all these out. What, what then
Dr. Aaron Lewis (15:54):
For me, now it gets individual and at this point now we, you’re asking I ask my clients to do self-reflection. Look at what do I need, what do I want? How do I want to live? How do I want, what do I, what am I willing to give up to build wealth early? And this is where a financial plan comes into place, which will allow that person essentially now to give Mark a certain amount of money that they divert to potentially after tax investments. So brokerage account that you will have paid tax on that money and it will grow and you would pay tax on capital gains on it. This is sorta going to be the difference maker above and beyond your buckets that you, the individual will have to decide what’s best for you.
Justin (16:35):
Yeah, I 100% agree and understanding the values and the priorities is so critical. This is something where a financial planner can add a lot and bring a lot to the table, especially in the context of a family, in a household, in a marital relationship to help partners hash out what is our plan, how are we going to approach this as a team and I like to approach it with my clients from sort of the opposite or at least I’ll describe it from the opposite end, which is instead of talking about the savings, let’s talk about the money that comes into your checking account and this is literally what my wife and I do, so we get paid, money’s in our checking account and what I like to do and I help my clients do this and encourage them to have this very simple system that brings transparency to their cash flows and say, okay, we’ve got a checking and a savings account.
Justin (17:22):
They’re both titled jointly because I want both spouses when this is agreeable to them to have transparency to all the dollars that are sitting in cash. And so we’re going to establish a baseline amount for each account. So we have one checking account, one savings account, the checking account. Our baseline amount is going to be $10,000 just because that’s how much we need to pay the bills and to not bounce checks and for us to be able to sleep well at night knowing that we’re not gonna. If if our car broke down, we could pay that in cash and then the savings account is designed to hold everything else that is needed for our cash emergency fund. So you know, say I wanted $50,000 total cash in the bank that I could access within a day. 10,000 of that is in my checking account that I just described.
Justin (18:14):
That’s our paying bills account. 40,000 of it. Summing to 50 is in a high yield savings account. That’s going to earn a little bit more interest. This is like an ally bank, American express. You can just Google high yield savings account and then the rest of that 40,000 is going to sit in that high yield savings account. Now the reason I really like this setup is because of the immediate transparency it brings to somebody’s cashflow. So I know that you know for my wife and I, if we start the month with $10,000 in the bank, we finish the month with you know, $15,000 after we pay our bills. And like all these things happened, money comes in, money goes out, end of the month, 15 grand. I know in this month I had positive net cash flow of $5,000 and so the question then becomes what happens with that 5,000 and then we have to filter through all the values and priorities that you just mentioned Darren.
Justin (19:07):
But as far as like how do I make this work? How do I capture money and how do I know how much money I have to capture? And then how do I put in a system where I can make a conscious decision about that money. This is the way that my wife and I do this and it actually really helps us because we can look at the end of the month and say, Oh, you know, this month was 9,000 we had left, we must have maybe we traveled, maybe we, you know, there’s big onetime expenses that pop up and we can know, okay we need to replenish that before we then take that extra money, that extra net cashflow and deploy it in a certain direction. That’s great. You’re your client, you use that with all your clients. I use a modified version of this depending on client preferences with just about everyone.
Justin (19:52):
Now some clients have a bunch of accounts and they want to maintain some individual accounts and if there’s an outside LLC or other self employment income, sometimes there’s structural constraints. But if somebody said, Justin, I give you carte blanche, build us a system that is easy to understand, that is transparent and that it’s going to maximize our ability to see the free cashflow, grab the free cashflow. I think this is really tough to beat. Yeah, sure, sure. I have never thought of my own finances that way to be honest. I may have had a much fewer arguments with my wife if I had done it that way maybe. But it sounds like, I mean you still been very intentional in enrolling the rock up the Hill. And so yeah, another thing to think about that I didn’t really, so we’re talking about buckets, there’s different ways to think about buckets.
Justin (20:44):
I like to describe this as a bucket strategy. So I described to my clients there’s three buckets and if we’re thinking about building wealth, this is the way that we do it. Number one bucket is the checking account. That’s the $10,000 balance bucket number two is the high yield savings account that I’m going to use for the emergency fund and say I’m saving for a down payment on a house or a car or any other short to intermediate term need. So buckets one and two total will equal my emergency fund plus any other money I need in the foreseeable future. Bucket number three. Bucket number three is the bucket that we want to stuff as much money into to grow for the long term as possible. So Aaron, this is what you just described, the 401k, the four three before 57 Roth IRAs, taxable investment accounts, any other, you know, you could even say like rental real estate or any other investment opportunities you want to pursue. Bucket number three is where real wealth building happens and this is also where risk happens. So talk a little bit for you Aaron, about how do you think about that bucket number three as it relates to taking risk and as it relates to volatility and money goes up, money goes down. Is that something you lose sleep over? Why or why not?
Dr. Aaron Lewis (21:59):
Thank you for asking me. I’m glad to use the V word volatility. So I, it may be beyond the scope of this conversation, but, but it is important to know for people who are going to start to consider this stuff, read about it, that risk and volatility are not the same. There’s this phenomenal book I have opened to a page that I’m gonna read a little bit from. It’s called simple wealth, inevitable wealth by Nick Murray. A. I view it as required reading for people who are considAarong this bucket number three that we’re talking about, which is a bucket of investments for the longterm, which of course we’ll be exposed to risk and volatility. Again, they’re not the same. And I’d like to read a passage out of it that I think is worth all of your listeners rewinding. When this is done and reflecting on it.
Dr. Aaron Lewis (22:47):
It is, it is very valuable and in my opinion, it’s one of the keys to success. Here we go. Investors who feel that their financial fate is a hostage to the vagaries of global economics or impersonal and often volatile market forces often see themselves as ponds and even victims and victims don’t win. But investors who correctly realized that their own behavior is the decisive variable in their longterm results. Thiel because in fact, they are very much in control of their own destinies. That bears memorizing. In my opinion, when we apply that concept of bucket number three, what we come out with is a thoughtful plan for dollar cost averaging, which is another term that describes automated purchases or investments that go into bucket number three and psychologically you have to withdraw
Speaker 5 (23:46):
The
Dr. Aaron Lewis (23:47):
New cycle. You have to withdraw from real forces that move markets up or down and you have to follow this plan in a disciplined fashion. Over the longterm, you will build wealth. There’s never been a 20 year period where the S and P 500 has returned in a negative fashion. So with some self reflection on this kind of stuff, understanding the numbers and applying it to bucket number three, this is how I handle risk,
Speaker 5 (24:17):
The
Dr. Aaron Lewis (24:18):
Pressure and worry I might feel from risk and what I recommend to my clients, how to think of it.
Speaker 5 (24:24):
[Inaudible]
Justin (24:24):
Absolutely, and I think it’s important to note bucket number three. This is the bucket where we’re going to take that risk because bucket number three, the investments bucket is the part that is the longterm wealth building portion of your assets. So if you need money in a year to maybe buy a car or to buy a house, we shouldn’t be subjecting it to the volatility of the stock market. Right? we should keep that in bucket one or two either in your checking account or savings account. But if you take control, I love the, you know, subject to the, you know, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that the Nick Murray quote they’re talking about. I think this is super applicable in the anesthesiology space. If you view yourself as a victim and you don’t take, you don’t have an internal locus of control to say like, if I take control of my own situation, if I build this buffer between myself and the healthcare, institutional volatility, to which I may be subjective, I don’t take control, then you are going to be upon, you are going to be a victim.
Justin (25:25):
You are going to be someone who life happens to instead of you leaning forward and saying, I’m BI, you know, saving a huge chunk of my income, 25, 35, 45% of the amount of money that I make. I’m going to be prepared, I’m going to be taking control. I’m going to be thinking responsibility really, because it is a scary world out there. Things do happen. Coronavirus who knows what’s going to happen with this. It’s still way too early to tell and there’s a million other things. You know, I was looking at this chart on Facebook, so like I survived, you know, and then there’s this dot, dot, dot, and it’s like Ebola in 2014 and the federal government shutdown in 2012 and it just lists all of these huge, you know, potentially capitalism ending crises and you know, we’ve made it through thus far. And if it’s your opinion that capitalism is going to persist, stock markets are going to continue to return to investors in some lumpy fashion the way they have in the past, then the best way to capitalize on that is to maximize your savings rate, to have this bucket setup and after you get bucket one and two, fill to as much as you need to sleep well at night stuff.
Justin (26:37):
Everything else in the bucket number three and build wealth in the fashion that you suggest or,
Dr. Aaron Lewis (26:43):
Yeah, it’s, it’s
Justin (26:44):
Certainly countAarontuitive, but the disciplined, well thought out, planned dollar cost averaging investor relishes the opportunity to execute their discipline monthly plan during market draw downs. Again, I feel pressure, I worry it’s normal to worry. But the key is you can’t act on it. And the numerical truth again is that as a discipline, longterm dollar cost averaging investor, you need market draw downs to continue your strategy through the bottom of it. It’s, it’s really important to always remind yourself of that I have to do it to myself. I mean, there’s no one, no one’s immune to worry. I have to check my plan and, and remind myself of, of the truths of longterm investing just like anybody on bad days. Yeah. But it’s the key. Absolutely. Yup. Yup. Totally agree. And it’s because of it’s because there’s risk that you can make money if there was no risk, there’s no risk in your checking account. How much money do you make in your checking account? Right. It’s probably negative after bank fees depending on, you know, where you bank, but it’s, it’s investing in businesses and companies and industries and economies where there is risk, there is fluctuation. And because of that, that’s where you can make money in the long [inaudible].
Dr. Aaron Lewis (28:08):
Yeah. Another, another another perennial concept from this book, Justin is essentially that the greatest risk to longterm wealth for an investor is not owning stocks. Again, that bears explanation and it’s, we can’t go into it here. It’s, it’s in the book. You can discover it elsewhere, but, but that’s the truth. The greatest risk you have in longterm wealth building is not owning them.
Justin (28:33):
Yeah. And so what this means for any listeners out there who are under the age of, I would say like 43, if you finish residency and or fellowship and you’re 30, 32 years old and you’re just coming out and you’re, you have this [inaudible] question, which is, where can I find an advisor who’s going to get better returns? Let’s take that question and turn it on its head and acknowledge the fact that for the next 13 years, if you saved $100,000 a year for the next 13 years, it would take until the end of that 13 year period for the investment growth that happens in one calendar year to be more than the annual contribution of that $100,000. Meaning the biggest thing between you and that million dollar portfolio isn’t investment returns. It’s you stuffing $100,000 every year into those pretax accounts, into investment accounts. Ended up all the other, you know, different types of investments out there like today, start stuffing huge amounts of money and that is going to be the biggest driver for you.
Dr. Aaron Lewis (29:30):
Yeah. Your many of your listeners may have heard the anecdote when you, one of the most valuable things you can do is live like a resident for the first five years or something like that. And this sort of speaks to that is when you start out, it really is all about your saving. It is not about chasing returns or which investments you pick. It is about saving in a disciplined fashion. And that’s where this, yeah, that’s where some of these anecdotes come from. Like live like a resident for five years, which by the way I think is a great idea.
Justin (30:01):
Yup. And so for any of our listeners out there, I also really love this. There’s two books that I give to clients and friends to say like, here’s what I recommend. Here’s how I recommend you see the world as it relates to building wealth. I want to give two of each copy to the first four people who want to go to iTunes and leave a review of this show. So go to iTunes, find the anesthesia success, leave us an honest review, screenshot that review email to me@justinatanesthesiasuccess.com and I would love to send you a copy of either simple wealth, inevitable wealth by Nick Murray or the one page financial plan by Carl Richards. Both of those are really phenomenal content that really mirror a lot of my own financial philosophies and I, I can really recommend. So leave us a review. We’d love that and love to get these resources into your hands.
Justin (30:47):
So you can also go to anesthesia, success.com/ 42 and I’ll link to all the, you know, resources we’ve mentioned as well as this really great. I’m a financial advisor, a friend of mine, Joe [inaudible] refers to this as literally his favorite blog post on the internet. And it shows this where the tipping point is as far as how long do you need to save money before your investment returns begin to contribute more than your savings. And again, that’s between year 12 and year 13 this is the kind of knowledge that if you get it into your head, you know sooner rather than later, it just, it transforms everything and it gets you to freedom much more quickly. It provides that thick layer of insulation between you and the big scary world out there and all the unpredictabilities of your employment. And it allows you to hopefully take that internal locus of control to say, today, right now I can start to make financial progress.
Dr. Aaron Lewis (31:40):
Yeah. And this, this new should come as a huge weight off the shoulders of some of your listeners who are unsure how to do it. I mean, if someone would have told me this, and again, I, I was under the pressure, I felt under the pressure of having to stock pick. I mean, it was a disaster. Very stressful. You take besides the fact it can actually be done and what we’re telling you is just save. I mean, yeah, save. Just save.
Justin (32:04):
Yeah. And this is the sort of the unsexy secret of financial planning is that the most valuable thing that a financial planner could do for you and here’s one through 10 of an engagement is literally get you to save as much money as possible. Now, there’s a lot of other things obviously, that they, a lot of value that’s provided in different areas, but if they did nothing but take you from $75,000 of savings to $100,000 of savings per year, that would have, I mean, a really an incalculable impact longterm as far as just pay when you’re buying a boat. And no Aaron, no,
Dr. Aaron Lewis (32:40):
Aaron, you’re not getting a boat
Justin (32:43):
Or just holds up the mirror and says, listen, you can either buy a boat this year and take that a hundred K you were saving and drop it down to 50 if that’s what you want. Or we can keep doing the a hundred and maybe you can join a boat club for $400 a month and there’s a happy medium here.
Dr. Aaron Lewis (32:59):
All right.
Justin (33:00):
So in closing, Dr. Lewis, are there any other stories you want to relate or any other bits of advice that you think are relevant to this discussion for our listeners?
Dr. Aaron Lewis (33:10):
You know, I could, I could really spend a whole hour sharing the mistakes I’ve made along the way and yeah, what I’ve learned and how I’ve kind of grown as an investor that that would take a whole hour. I think it, it always bears repeating that for your listeners who are, who are
Dr. Aaron Lewis (33:27):
Looking at whatever their position is, a younger with less experience and listening to two people that they view as sort of professionals and maybe thinking they haven’t made mistakes or Oh, I’ll never do that. Or I never know that that’s, that’s really a falsehood. The, the secrets are not secrets. The, the strategy is simple. It’s not easy. It’s simple. The little bit of reading or you know, just stuff at like this and this podcast. You can do it. You can build wealth. It’s, it’s basically a short, this is the amazing news. It’s almost a sure, if you can follow a disciplined strategy of saving, you will for sure build wealth. And so, and, and also you’re also allowed to make some mistakes and all along the way, that’s to be expected. I think that’s a good one. There’s, there’s reminding not to be too stressed out over this. You don’t have to be perfect.
Justin (34:17):
Totally. And it’s all part of the journey. And the mistakes you make are the ones that give you the most, you know, deeply rooted, passionate about the way that you want to live your life in many cases. Right? And so you don’t, you can’t protect yourself from every mistake and you want to just take every day as it comes and experience, learn, grow, keep it moving.
Dr. Aaron Lewis (34:39):
That’s right. That’s right.
Justin (34:41):
Cool. Well don’t forget to leave a review. Check us out in iTunes and let me know what you think. Send us an email to see what you thought of the show. I want to send you one of these two copies of this book. Also go to anesthesia, success.com/ 42 in addition to some other resources. I also want to post there just a little diagram of some of the things that I share with my clients as far as monitoring, cashflow, being able to have transparency to how much do I have every month leftover that doesn’t require budgeting. It only requires that you log in and look at something and you can quickly discern where am I at and it can hopefully distress you. And help free you to build wealth more quickly than you ever thought possible. Aaron, thank you very much for your time today. Really enjoyed having you on this episode of the podcast.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS