Wealth Building Strategies: A Practitioner’s Guide To A Comfortable Retirement

Many dental practitioners will practice long after the perceived retirement age of 60-65 years of age. Most of these clinicians keep practicing because they love treating patients and some will keep practicing because they have no choice. The “no choice” group can be particularly unfortunate: they are supporting children, grandchildren, an ex-wife or wives, loved ones with illness, or terrible investments.

As dentists, all of us would like our investments to guarantee a long, worry-free retirement. Financial security is very important to clinicians who have worked all their adult life in order to achieve a modicum of financial freedom in retirement. Most of us do not work for a large corporation (e.g. GM) that might (or might not) have a wonderful pension plan set aside for their employees.

The purpose of this summary is to present some suggestions that could appeal to clinicians for various types of investments that help to accumulate a monthly cash flow. A large monthly income from investments will give clinicians of all ages much better choices in retirement. In fact, every clinician in private practice should be marketing every day for an eventual sale or transition of the practice. This “estate planning” should be an ongoing effort. The immediate goal of this paper is to demonstrate how the clinician can build up an investment portfolio to throw off a monthly income so large, that many more choices are open: whether it is choosing the hours that we work, the types of patients we choose to see, or travel and vacation options.