Dentists Who Invest Podcast
Official Podcast of the Dentists Who Invest platform. Talking all things investing, money and finance with a dental spin. Have you ever wondered how you can grow your wealth and protect your hard earned money as a Dentist? We've got you covered. Featuring famous guests such as Andrew Craig, Edward Zuckerberg and Benyamin Ahmed we delve deep into EVERY aspect of finance to educate and empower ALL Dentists.
Dentists Who Invest Podcast
How To Shave Years Off Your Retirement with Anick Sharma
If you’d like to discuss your finances with a professional, you can connect with Anick here: https://www.viderefinancial.com/contact
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You can download your FREE report on how you can avoid financial mistakes as a dentist using the link just here >>> dentistswhoinvest.com/podcastreport
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What if you're already financially free and don't know it? This eye-opening conversation with Certified Financial Planner Anik Sharma reveals how dentists and business owners frequently work years longer than necessary, sacrificing precious time with family and pursuing passions.
Sharma introduces us to a revolutionary way of thinking about retirement—not as an age milestone, but as "the point at which you stop sacrificing the present for a future promise of being happy." Through compelling real-life examples, he shares how proper financial planning helped clients discover they could have retired five years earlier, leading to emotional revelations and immediate life changes.
At the heart of effective retirement planning lies a comprehensive cash flow strategy. Using the vivid "bucket analogy," Sharma breaks down how money flows through our lives and how we can gain clarity about our true financial position. Rather than fixating on arbitrary numbers like "a million-pound pension," he encourages listeners to focus on what that money actually enables in their lives.
The discussion challenges the conventional retirement mindset, highlighting how dental practice owners often become trapped in the "one more year" syndrome—continuously postponing happiness while building wealth they may never fully enjoy. Sharma emphasizes that "real wealth is about time, memories, relationships, and experiences," not just accumulated assets.
For practice owners, there's a crucial distinction between building business value and creating personal financial independence. Many dentists focus exclusively on the future practice exit while neglecting to systematically extract wealth along the way—a strategy that ensures financial freedom regardless of business performance.
Ready to discover if you're already financially free? This episode might save you years of unnecessary work and sacrifice. Listen now and start reimagining what retirement means for your unique life and aspirations.
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Disclaimer: All content on this channel is for education purposes only and does not constitute an investment recommendation or individual financial advice. For that, you should speak to a regulated, independent professional. The value of investments and the income from them can go down as well as up, so you may get back less than you invest. The views expressed on this channel may no longer be current. The information provided is not a personal recommendation for any particular investment. Tax treatment depends on individual circumstances and all tax rules may change in the future. If you are unsure about the suitability of an investment, you should speak to a regulated, independent professional. Investment figures quoted refer to simulated past performance and that past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results/performance.
Another episode of Dentists Who Invest Podcast. Guys what we're going to talk about today, Going to get into the nitty gritty of how someone can shave years off their retirement. Big clue it starts with figuring out what your retirement looks like in the first place and your objective. But it's not just that. Obviously, if it's that simple, well there wouldn't be some content we could make out of it. More will be revealed very shortly, but just before we do that, we have Mr Anick Sharma sat in front of a certified financial advisor.
Dr James:No certified financial planner. If I nailed it, the second one.
Anick:That's right. Certified financial planner.
Dr James:Boom zing. Awesome Anick. How are you today?
Anick:Good thanks, James. How are you?
Dr James:I'm amazing looking forward to listening to everything that you have to say today, Anick. So you know what would be lovely if we had like a little bit of a high-level bio about yourself. I feel like that would be a really nice intro for the listeners.
Anick:Sure, I had a background in academia, published white paper looking at some hemodynamics of the brain. Had a last-minute 180 turn, decided to go into financial services, joined the firm in Harrogate was a bit of a hybrid between a financial planner and a back-office paraplanner. Went through my exams in quite a fast rate five years down the line client facing, cfp, certified Financial Planner, fellow, all those sort of things. But for me the real fun, the juicy bit, is sitting in front of a client and helping them to plan their retirement and how that might be trying to solve the problem each person has.
Dr James:Amazing, okay, well, let's jump straight in. How can anybody shave years off their retirement? How can that be done? And you know what's interesting about asking you this. You sat on the other side of the chair. You've had this conversation a million, billion, trillion times, whereas for lots of people it's once in a lifetime, so you have context on this absolutely, and I understand.
Anick:As individuals, we all think our time is different, but it's not. Time and time again, everyone just wants to see the retirement goal person rush straight to it. I'm a financial planner and the clue is in my name. I plan it out. So, rather than just rush to, it helps to break it down and think about where we want to get to point B from where we are today. Point A I like to get out a lot running and hiking and stuff. I'd never go for a run or a hike without an endpoint or a route to know where I'm going to go to, because if I just decide I want to go out and get lost, that journey becomes really messy and hard to follow. The what is having a clear strategy, so a financial plan aided by a cash flow. Typically, the how is a little bit more difficult. It comes with complexities and the tax issues that come around and some of the efficiencies we can make, but at a high level, it's about having a clear plan, clear strategy to get to that point.
Dr James:Awesome, and I've got another analogy on that front which I really like. Imagine the ship. It sails out into the ocean but it hasn't actually brought it to itself what it's goal or it's destination is. How can that ship ever calibrate it's sails? How does that ship know if it's making progress or not making progress? Right, it literally makes no sense. So I really like that analogy. Okay, cool. So let's relate that to what you see during these conversations that you've had with clients in the past. How does that actually look like in reality for these people?
Anick:or saying I need to start on my pension, or I've got all this cash within my business, what do I do with it? Great question, absolutely great. And don't get me wrong, I'm a massive nerd at heart and I would happily go down to granular detail and get into a deep dive of investing and business tax. Absolutely love it.
Anick:What people don't do often enough is just take a step back, give yourself that context. What does good look like? What does that ideal retirement look like? And such a deep dive can be hard for some people because they come to me having a conception that they want to drill down to some numbers, but they don't necessarily understand what the numbers are for. For example, the client might think about I need income protection. They won't necessarily think about what number they might need when we capitalise it across their lifetime. They think about the human side of it, ie spouse or kids may be without that income and need to provide for them when they're gone by.
Anick:Taking that step back and having the context of our life and our circumstances means we can have a detailed roadmap to get to point B. Now what that looks like in principle is making a financial plan and cash flow together with you. It's very much about having that balance between today's enjoyment and saving for tomorrow, which the cash flow really does. And one question might be what actually is a cash flow? In a nutshell, it's a very fancy spreadsheet. So a cash flow is only as good as its inputs and you can model out balance sheet income expenditure across a lifetime. Once we have confidence of the inputs, we can be somewhat confident of the outputs. There are a whole load of underlying assumptions to go in there and I can probably do another podcast on investment assumptions alone, but without boring you?
Dr James:No, I think that I almost said the opposite there. I was going to say the opposite.
Anick:I'm like hell, yeah, let's do that, but anyway, not to Taylor get me back on and we can have a very deep dive into assumptions.
Anick:I'd love that I'd love that I'm gonna take you up on that anyway, sorry, I didn't mean to barge in once we're happy with the inputs we can really start to kick the tires on the output and have confidence in it and then we can start to stress test it so we can build in things such as retirement within this cash flow plan and within that we can really start to pull the levers. I really enjoyed this. I call it art of the possible. So you might say I don't know, I'm having holidays at £10,000 a year until retirement age 50 years. Then what happens if we crank holidays to 50 grand a year? We can see the outputs. The chart will go red or blue to say whether it's viable or not, and you see from those outputs whether it's possible. Once you get that grasp, you can be so flexible and model, live with a client or build out scenarios then and there to see what really makes a difference.
Anick:In my experience and my clients will know this from my time with them I really like a bucket analogy to explain cash flow planning. So imagine you have a bucket, just one you might use to wash your car. It's quite warm at the moment so you might be doing that a bit more often Now. Within the bucket you have income streams such as you might be taking some sort of drawings from business, a small bit of salary and dividends. Over time this liquid bucket builds up. By liquid I mean things you can eat, drink or spend, things that are accessible. Now, not all things you own are in the bucket. Some things are illiquid, so sit outside of that. By that I mean your house you can't easily sell it to realize money or your business. Your business sits outside the bucket, but for most people there'll be some sort of business event in however many years, and we'll have that inflow of capital into the bucket. So this bucket's a constant inflow from the top. Now underneath it's a bit of a rubbish bucket. There are some holes in it to represent some taps.
Anick:Now imagine your bucket's going from left to right. Those taps change as you progress through life. So as you're younger you might be going on a holiday and spending a bit too much money on alcohol, whereas once you start to get older and kids might come into the equation, the holiday and expenditure profile looks a bit different. You might be getting some longer haul trips Then, as we start to step down and go across the bucket until our 70s, long haul travel is probably not on the agenda, probably more of a short haul travel, and then we're possibly thinking about gifting some of that money we don't always need until we get to the very last tap, which unfortunately, is a bit of a morbid topic but death, some sort of later life planning, because care fees aren't cheap.
Anick:So within that analogy, we really have three main levers have more coming into the bucket, less coming out or what's inside the bucket in terms of our assets, we sweat it, ie we look at the risk levels to make our money work harder for itself. So in a very little snapshot, that is how the cash flow works. But investments and wrappers and pensions and ISAs and GIAs and this investment and that investment, they are all literally just tools to execute a financial plan. Personally generally and the financial plan in view is, we're quite agnostic over what tools you use. You can't use a sledgehammer to crack a walnut. It's all about using the right tool for the job, and the job is always to have a great financial plan and execute it in the most tax efficient way possible.
Dr James:From my conversations with other financiers in the past, they have consistently observed that dentists tend to inverted commas have too much money when they retire. And what is too much money? Can you ever have too much money? I hear some people playing in their head when I say those words. What I mean by that in this specific instance is they've over saved, as in they have more wealth than is necessary to actually achieve their goals yeah.
Anick:so see that all the time in my experience, typically working with business owners and senior executives, they come to me with relatively large amounts of money on their balance sheet and they always have the mindset one more year, one more year, a few more years down the line and it means they miss out on the family stuff and the children's birthdays. Life is for living and real wealth is about time, memories, relationships and experiences. We all die. It's a fact of life, and it doesn't really matter how much money you have if you haven't lived the life you want or have carried out what really interests you. And I genuinely get so passionate about financial planning because it can facilitate the life you want, but not enough people know about it, which means I have one example that springs to mind.
Anick:Client worked really, really hard all their life, massive sacrifices, because they thought they were doing the best thing for them and their family had a massive 30 oddodd million pound exit Within a few months. They got diagnosed with cancer and died shortly after. Horrendous story. Life is so short and if we're not making the most out of what we really want to do or what means the most to us, it will just go by in a heartbeat and without having that plan to help get us there, or without the context to realize. You know what I actually am financially secure and now's the time to go out and live life.
Dr James:it's so easy to be caught in the hamster wheel of life but this is the thing, though, because I can totally foresee how, in the lifespan of an entrepreneur, they get so caught up in the doing like what has actually brought them success initially going from one to ten, the, the activities that got you from one to ten in terms of success are not going to necessarily be the things that get you from 10 to 100. In fact, often there's a shift and you can stay stuck at level 10 and here's the thing you might be happy. There it comes back to happiness. But if the reason that you went from one to ten was to achieve some next level goal, something after that, then really it might just be worth re-evaluating.
Dr James:Let me just make that really clear what that is. So, like I said, the entrepreneurs they work really hard, generally speaking, to get from one to ten. Right, but 10 to 100 is more about strategy, delegation, all these things having some sort of plan. So that is a big how can we say hurdle or a big barrier that people don't always overcome, and I feel like these sorts of conversations can help pull that to the surface and get people thinking themselves hmm, actually, upon evaluation, am I already financially free without realizing it?
Anick:and it can be really scary and hard, especially when your mindset has been work, work, work, build out this massive business that has been successful and all of a sudden someone's saying right, stop. I see it time and time again that these very successful people with all this money, day one of retirement, they're turning around and say now what? What do I do with all this time? And In terms of retirement, when I approach it with my clients, it's not about having a hard stop, work, work, work, bang stop, because that's enough to send anyone insane. I think retirement has to be a graduated process and that looks different for different people.
Anick:Financial planning is not one size fits all approach. Someone could be the same age, have the same income, business, work the same amount. Their financial planning is completely different because as humans we're all very different. But one person that could be a step down to four days a week, realizing you know what. I don't have to work that extra day or I can get away working a day a week as a graduated step down out of the practice. There's someone else it could, potentially I'm going to take up that hobby in that day a week. I'm no longer in the practice. It's just having that conversation to what money means to someone and why, which. It's difficult because, we've money stigmatized.
Anick:Let's be honest. We shouldn't talk about, apparently, how it makes us feel, but we absolutely should do. Let's talk about money more often how it makes us feel, but we absolutely should do. Let's talk about money more often, how it makes us feel and what our experiences are. That then helps these informed conversations about what do I do with my view of money and how can I apply that to my own financial situation. That helps get the best outcomes for individuals across the board, without a doubt.
Dr James:Do you know what? You know what really breaks my heart, my heart, right? It's like we go through life and we're conditioned to have this carrot in front of us which is retirement. And it's so easy to be like I'll be happy when I'm retired, I'll be overjoyed, I'll be over the moon. But how many 60 65 year olds do you see running around like, yeah, oh, my god, this is absolutely unbelievable, right?
Dr James:Actually there's a tendency psychologically by human beings to futurize our success.
Dr James:That is a complete, complete and utter psychological bias, right, and that actually never leaves you, but you almost have to untrain yourself to think like that. Now, the problem with the conditional model, the traditional concept of retirement, is it plays into that little delusion that we have and it means that we continue, continue and continue and continue thinking that until we actually get there and then we realize things are just the same as before, are you with me, right? Whereas actually, if we can just pull it into the present is way more powerful. And, by the way, I'm not the best at that. Full disclosure, absolute, complete and utter disclaimer in there, but at least I'm conscious of it, at least I'm aware of it. Rather than that, rather than falling into the psychological pitfall that I am going to be overjoyed and happy whenever I hit a certain age, at a certain amount of time, and hopefully, hopefully, I can hit that stage way sooner, because I again I think we need to shake up the whole concept that you have to wait until 60, 65 to be retired.
Anick:I've got a little bit more to add to that, annick, that you might really like, actually, but before I do any thoughts on what I've just said, completely brie if you tie your happiness to a certain age or certain milestone you're just going to get to and be really disappointed and not fulfilled with life and the problem is it's too late at that stage.
Dr James:You, you can't actually turn back. Are you with me? Because it's already happened, the time has already happened, that's the issue. But anyway, you were saying Absolutely.
Anick:If I bring it to an investing perspective, time's the most important thing for compounding Exactly the same principle here you want to have time on your side as much as possible.
Dr James:Good things happen in time hell, yeah.
Dr James:So I once heard retirement defined as the point at which you stop sacrificing. Very so, this is this description I'm about to give you. Every word is this isn't mine, by the way, I read this in a book, but I memorized it because I was like this is cool and every word is deliberately there and it's deliberately explained like this. Okay, so I'll start again. The point in life at which you stop sacrificing the present for a future promise of being happy. It's good, I like that. Right, you're sacrificing the present to a greater or lesser degree, but there's some level of compromise there. You're sacrificing the here and now for the promise, because that's all. It is right, it's literally just a promise, and promises are made with the best intentions, as we all know, but do they 100% happen? Not always. The future promise of being happy okay, that's from a book and it's over here on the bookshelf. Uh, I can't quite see it, but anyway, it's over there somewhere.
Dr James:So, by that definition, if we use that definition, there's three ways to be retired inverted commas. You can make so much money in the here and now, like you literally just win the lottery or you sell your mega business and you have billions. Yeah, that you never have to think about ever again, right? You don't even have to invest it. You've got that level of wealth. Inflation is never going to catch you, okay? So you basically have so much money in the here and now that your time is completely your own. Do whatever the hell you like. Right now, that would be well and good. That happens to like 0.0001 percent of the population, right? So whilst that may happen and you weigh in the way you, you may win the euro millions probably not, right? So we can't put our eggs in that basket.
Dr James:Second way is to become a hermit. So you move up to the mountains, your outgoing is good enough and you're completely self-sufficient. Again, that's not a lifestyle everybody would choose. We all partake in the system because we like our creature comforts. This is why we have our house, this is why we have heating and electricity, which actually forces us to kind of partake in the whole capitalism game. Basically, if you think about it, because we want these goods and services that are available. So that's the second way. Again, a lot of people like the good stuff in life, and I actually believe in that too. We shouldn't be. We shouldn't be completely exuberant, but at the same time, it's not about austerity. So the second way, as I say, is to reduce your outgoings to nothing.
Dr James:The third way is just to figure out what your ideal life looks like. Have it in the here and now and then. What that means is that actually you're not sacrificing anything in the present for the future promise of being happy, and that ideal life is something that might be available. Because how many like my parents in particular? Right, they went back to work three days a week when they were retired, right? So was that their whole ideal life all along, and they were kind of putting off the point at which they give themselves permission to be happy until the age of 60, 65. And maybe if they just did the three days a week thing from the start that that was actually what they wanted and the income would have, they would have saved enough eventually to be able to be, on paper, financially free as well.
Anick:It's a really interesting concept, george Kinder he talks about. George Kinder looks at the human side of money a lot and the Kinder way of life planning. It goes that one step further than financial planning, but planning your life around what you want. One of the questions is if money was no object and you're going to die, and if you're going to die tomorrow, what would you really miss out on? And it never really comes down to having the latest iphone or the biggest tv, because all these things, to your point about capitalism, yeah, it's really nice to have, but so that really leads to a meaningful and purposeful life which are having a.
Anick:That sense of fulfillment is really what we're all after now. There's definitely a balance of today's enjoyment versus saving for tomorrow. We don't want to be living in the mountains and spending nothing because we're going to be miserable. And then we start to idealize at age 65, when we have all this money, we can retire, we're going to be happy. It doesn't work like that. You could die the first day into your retirement, then what You've completely sacrificed for however many years, and you get to one day and that's it.
Anick:What was it all for? There definitely needs to be some sort of balance. Um, if you go too extreme, you're not necessarily going to be happy, and I've seen multi-millionaires dealing with them on a financial basis okay, I've got all this money what anyone else would think how could you ever be unhappy? But unhappiness still exists, despite what your balance sheet number might be, and I think we need to start looking at what really drives us to be happy and focusing on that in our run-up to retirement, because if we just idealize retirement at the end point, we're not going to be that happy. When we get there, it's all about. It's that cliche, isn't it? It's about the process, not the end point. You have to enjoy the process, otherwise when you get to the end point, it's a bit like now what?
Dr James:idealized is a good word, thank you, really good word. I like that in this, in this context. 100, because the reason why that word works so well is ideals rarely exist at all, but we all subconsciously idealize retirement.
Anick:Yeah, we do, we really do, and it's so easy to do, especially when we're thinking about how great it'll be when we're sat on a beach for the rest of our lives.
Anick:And yeah, of course, it's gonna be fantastic doing whatever it is you might want to do in retirement.
Anick:But if you live in the future or thinking ahead to the future, you're going to completely miss the present, and so much good stuff happens there. I also appreciate everything we've spoken about as being quite high-level context and, taking the human side, it is very important as well to drill down into granular detail and look at the mathematical argument for whatever decision you might do and just bring it back full circle. This is where cash flow can really help do that and kick the tires off the numbers and to drill down into it. That's a very overlooked part and what blows my mind is there are some I say financial advisors, not financial planners out there who don't do any sort of cash flow planning exercise. It's really hard to give any sort of context to any decision in life without a financial plan of what you're working towards. Why would you ever want to invest any sort of money or grow any sort of money without the context of what you're working towards. It's a bit of a finger in the air at times well, this is it.
Dr James:Unless you crystallize that people you know we're just pulling these numbers out of the air and we're like, hey, I'd like a million a year, right, but uh, yeah, that'd be nice for most people.
Anick:But interesting, you say that I real life example. How? How did a client come and number one the first meeting. I want a million-pound pension. Great, wouldn't we all? But why? Why do you want a million-pound pension? Upon digging deeper, they thought having a million pounds would then be able to facilitate 20 grand a year on holidays, being able to take the kids and grandkids away. That's the good stuff. That's the real juicy, hearty stuff. Million pound pension? Yeah, okay, money's a tool to facilitate the holiday and lifestyle you want. But taking that step back to think, what do I really want? No one really cares about whether it's a pension or what investment is. It's what you can do with it. That's the main thing. Money enables the life we want.
Dr James:Boom. And you know what I'm interested to know. You know, whenever you drill down into his or hers, was it him?
Anick:Him, him.
Dr James:Whenever you drill down into his goals, was that million pound pension actually necessary, even though that's what he was fixated upon? No, it wasn't.
Anick:Which meant he had in his head. He said, as well, he wish he came to us years earlier because he kept putting off, which I understand. These are very busy people business owners and executives. Time is a very poor resource of them. But if he came a few years earlier, he could have done this exercise then and wouldn't have to build up as big of an amount and wouldn't have had to work for as long as he did so. And time, time is time is so scarce. So why waste time being on the wheel when we can go out and do the things we want, the things that we really enjoy?
Dr James:there's, there's, there's a time for the doing, energy, but the doing is ineffective without a strategy, because it doesn't actually make sense what, where are we going and what are we trying to do? And the problem is that it's so what is the word that I'm looking for? Like self-fulfilling in the near term, to just keep being busy because you keep getting that instant feedback, which is good for the dopamine in our brains, but it's not actually, it's not actually long term, the most effective way to get to where you want to go. But anyway, I'm just curious as well as that.
Dr James:So, in your experience, what I love to do whenever we get guests in the dempsey invest podcast is talk about real life things that they've observed, that you really can't find this information any other place apart from the reservoir of knowledge that's in somebody's brain and experiences, because they've sat on the other side of the chair. Yeah, you can read about it in books and YouTube and stuff like that, but it's not quite the same, you know. So I'm just curious has there ever been can you give us like an anecdotal case study obviously anonymized and what have you of an instance where an individual came to you and they actually realized they were already retired I mean that person that we talked about just then. They are of that ilk, for sure, but any more powerful ones where they had that conversation and then instantly afterwards they were like oh my god, I'm actually just going to pack it all in straight away. This is amazing. Something along those lines like there was.
Anick:It had huge and meaningful immediate impact for their life so a cash flow and a cash flow tool is so powerful to illustrate that um, one particular situation immediately springs to mind. This woman, really, really lovely person, um senior executive working really hard for years. Her daughter is everything and her plan had always been to just travel the world with her daughter, um, give her a childhood she never had herself, um, and just to make sure they had those memories for life. And the same things always happen came to me over saving massively, which is great. I'm not shooing saving away.
Anick:Saving is a fantastic habit and the more we can save the better. But without context of where we're going to go, it leads to a situation where she was in front of me and we demonstrated you could have retired about five years earlier. Just having someone break down in tears for five, just the sadness that five years had gone, but the delight that I can actually do this. A week later she put in the notice and started getting photos through all the time from the various places around the world she was going, which is fantastic.
Anick:I absolutely love that and and just being there to help guide someone through that journey is really amazing and I genuinely love it. I love what I do. I don't see it as a job, it's not. It's a career. My fiance's uh family I bumped into them recently and, um, my fiance's mom made a comment saying you still one of those funny people who loves what you do, and genuinely I do, it's not work. When you sat in front of people trying to well, helping them achieve lives they want, it's a pretty special place to be.
Dr James:Good stuff, mate. Well, long may that continue. I mean, when stuff as powerful as that happens, it's pretty real. Let's just say that, okay, cool. So we've covered a lot of cash flow planning today and we've covered a lot of how that can be meaningful and impactful in people's lives. If you were to give us just a high-level outline of how that process looks, what is that? So they come to you, you talk, figure out the goals and then, presumably, it goes from there. How does it look?
Anick:Yeah, so kind of walk through the door day one. Um, if we realize we're a good fit, we start going down the journey. Um, interestingly, most people turn their head and say what? The first meeting? It's best not to talk about money and talk about the debt. Is it all? Because we all get to that, you, the person you're.
Anick:It's far more important to get your background, your context, see what your drivers are and see what you want to work towards. Once we have those detailed conversations and those meaningful interactions, we can then start to build out a financial plan, a cash flow model, and with that we're going to have covered expenditure what, what ideal, what the perfect life will be. And we can build that into the model, quantify it down and from there we work backwards, building a load of income assumptions. So your income might be something at the moment. Over the next few years it could increase or decrease, depending on whether you want to step down until we hit that retirement point. And then we can build in all sorts of other assumptions for business exits or house downsizes or increase the holidays.
Anick:But it's that ongoing iteration of having meaningful conversations with you, the clients, and just iterating on that financial cashflow, tweaking assumptions, playing with the expenditure and having that collective buy-in. It works best when I plan with you, not plan for you. It's not my life, it's not my financial plan. So having you buy into that and having that collective feedback it's great for everyone all around. But things change the second you walk out the door. That financial plan is redundant. The financial plan is live as of that moment. So it really works best with that continuous interaction. Typically at an annual review we will look at the cash flow again, have a deep dive into it, kick the tires to make sure everything is as it is. If it's not on track for the perfect life, then no problem, we can look at making some changes if needed or if some sort of life circumstance is happening in the interim. Quite often we have ad hoc meetings just to run through the cash flow, see if things are on track still or how things are looking.
Dr James:Sweet man, thanks so much. Well, I mean, it all comes back to how can we stop sacrificing our present happiness for that future of promise of being happy as well? That is the premise, and you might, people might even be there without realizing it, and you know it's another thing that I want to throw out there to to give even more balance to what we're saying here today. It's possible but not flipping easy, but it is possible to create a business which runs itself in such a hands-off way and gives you balance, that it gives you amazing cash flow and it also is a lovely big asset that's growing and appreciating with time. That is another viable means to retirement and obviously we would definitely advocate the financial planning side of things as a component of that.
Dr James:But actually it's possible to reach it purely with the business alone, which a lot of people don't realize, which is really cool. It's not frigging easy and that requires a lot of sacrifice. But those are really the two methods that I know of Design a business that allows you to live the lifestyle you want here and now. Or if you already have a business and you quite like doing a little bit of dentistry, maybe you don't want to take yourself out of your business to that level, or you've got a lot of cash building up, uh well, it's useful to harness that as well, which is more the cash flow planning side of things absolutely, and there are various levers we can pull to make things super efficient and extract that business risk from the business because of the business all over.
Dr James:What a bloody beautiful way of putting it right there, because I see that all the time where you have these principles and their life's mission is to friggin, build up their practice, and then they get this big juicy exit and cash flow dies because their business is gone. You get this big juicy exit and cash flow dies, right, because the business is gone. And even sometimes I've even had people message me before and they're like James, the thing that nobody tells you about the exit from your business is that you don't have cash flow anymore. That I've had like three or four people come and say that to me and yeah, I mean yeah, I guess this is the penny never drops until it actually happens. But you're right, the stuff that you're talking about today is the other side of the coin. How can we deleverage from the business? How can we pay ourselves and make sure that our money grows in value? That's the investing component.
Anick:Yeah, yeah, and it's really difficult because unless you've been through that journey, or been through it with someone, how are you meant to know, how are you going to feel on things that you don't already know? There's no manual off the book how to retire 101 or everything to expect, and which is why it can be really helpful to get context with someone who knows what, who knows what they're on about, what's been through and it's useful to harness those tax levers, those tax wrappers, rather on the journey you get more out of them.
Dr James:Smash the ISA every year Not just the ISA obviously Depends on someone's situation. Get that 20K out of the ISA every year, tax-free Way more efficient and it's also compounding rather than trying to invest it all at once, right.
Anick:Absolutely and with compounding everyone's favorite quote, but Einstein apparently once said compounding is the eighth one in the world. The earlier you start the better. You're absolutely right. We want to be as tax-sufficient as possible. Looking at ISAs or making pension contributions, they are a great way where it's appropriate and suitable for an individual, but removing value from the business, the personal assets and the earlier we do that, the quicker we can start compounding, which can then just blow up over.
