Financial Frights and Delights: Treating Your Portfolio Right This Halloween

Announcer:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Millionaire Dentist Podcast, brought to you by Four Quadrants Advisory. On this podcast, we break down the world of dentistry finances and business practices to help you become the millionaire dentist you deserve to be. Please be advised we do speak with an honest tongue and may not be safe for work.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Hello and welcome to The Millionaire Dentist. I'm your host, Jarrod Bridgeman. Casey Hiers is out of town at the moment, so instead I brought in, I was going to say two special guests, but one's special and the other one's okay.

Will Chrisman:
Wow.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
But I've got two of our financial planners on staff here at Four Quadrants. One is Matt Bates, he's a CFP, and the other is William Chrisman. And William, Will? When I say William-

Will Chrisman:
You could go, Will.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
... wow, very regal here.

Will Chrisman:
When I hear William, I think of my mom yelling at me when I was growing up. So you go, Will.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
So Will, you're a CFP and a master of deduction.

Will Chrisman:
Master of financial planning.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Oh, I was close.

Will Chrisman:
But thank you.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yes, yes, yes. With it being Halloween coming up and it's the month of October, I wanted to come in and have a little fun, kind of a conversation. When I was a kid, even before then, this was urban legend talk from 60, 70 years ago. People are still afraid of this, but check your kids' Halloween candy; there might be a razor blade in it. And now it's like, oh, people might give your kids drugs, which those are expensive, I guess, and why would you give that away? So I wanted to bring you two on to talk about some tricks and treats for the financial planning world. What are some, start with some common, broad tricks that business owners and practice owners specifically sometimes fall for, or at least get a lot of things thrown at them? Will, do you want to go ahead and start off with this one, and Matt, you can just punch it up with your color commentary?

Will Chrisman:
One of the biggest things that we see in the investment world is the emotional biases that people have in the decision-making processes that tend to limit either return or clients really see a downside in risk before they start working with us or another financial planner. When we tend to look at the overall market, it tends to be ruled by two things, fear and greed, which is a sad thing because that leads to things like excessive trading, ignoring fees and costs, unbalanced portfolios, not using tax advantage strategies, and just a failure of due diligence when analyzing assets.

So it's important that the first trick people get caught up in is realizing you should have a strategy in place to protect yourself from the volatility of the market. We can see that today and quantum mechanic stocks have really just bowled up over really the past two days. Is that warranted? And then, we see fear-based investing even back into April when we had a lot of the tariffs take place. Nobody knew actually how that was going to impact the economy, but people definitely pulled out their money, and then we saw from the first day into the next couple of months, the market get a little bit more downtrodden.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
So having a strategy in place is obviously ideal. Isn't it an okay idea sometimes for people to have a little bit of fun money to play with in terms of investing in the random things? Is that an okay thing? If you're already comfortable, everything else is secure; somebody might want to throw some money on some Bitcoin or throw it on something else. Is that-

Will Chrisman:
That's definitely something that people are able to do, but it's important to know that every dollar should be a part of your overall strategy. So if Bitcoin or something a little bit more risky fits into that plan, then absolutely yes, you can diversify in some riskier assets, hoping for the upside. But if you put something in, let's say that's brand new to the market, you put $10,000 into it, you need to be comfortable losing 100% of your dollars that you're putting into whatever that aspect may be.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
You should probably talk to a planner such as yourself.

Will Chrisman:
Exactly.

Matt Bates:
So funny enough, if I may add.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Absolutely.

Matt Bates:
In the past, what I've liked to do is incorporate two kind of strategies that would actually allow the clients to have a little bit of fun here. One is actually the core and explore of that strategy. So at the end of the day, your core portfolio is going to be the one that's going to be meeting your overall financial goals, which is mainly probably retirement. Then your explorer will be a little bit of fun money, a little bit of, I guess, riskier dollars.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yeah. One you can play with a little bit.

Matt Bates:
Yeah, absolutely. And another way to think about it is work hard, play hard. So if you can have your core money working hard for you for your actual goals, then yeah, we can play hard a little bit over on the side.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
One of the things you and I had talked about before we started recording in terms of a trick that owners may fall into or face, would be unnecessary and expensive equipment purchases. Can you dive into... And I know some of our listeners are like, yep, that's me raising their hands right now. Also, please, if you're doing that, make sure to keep your hands at 10 and 2 if you're listening in your car. Keep an eye on. But Matt, can you talk about why that can be a trick?

Matt Bates:
No. We see a lot of our clients go to conferences or maybe have a close relationship with reps that they have, and with those conversations that happen in conferences, as well as with the reps, come with a little bit of sales pitch, and at the end of the day, these pieces of equipment are really great pieces of equipment. It's really more of like a timing thing because if you end up getting the equipment too soon, you might not have necessarily patient flow, and you might not end up actually utilizing the equipment.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
I mean, are you even trained on it? Can you actually make money on it? What if you're using it as a really cool coat rack? Does it have to be used specifically for its purpose?

Matt Bates:
Yeah.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
All right.

Matt Bates:
It might look nice, but we probably want to put to use.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Well, what's another Halloween trick we can pull on somebody?

Will Chrisman:
When I think of tricks, I really think of single-sector investing. Single-sector investing is something that I typically see a lot that is being thrown around on TikTok with the real estate bros, if you will. If you ever go on TikTok, watch a couple videos, I'm sure one of those guys will pop up. A lot of times, it can be real estate, it can be in any sector, technology, it can be in energy, whatever sector that somebody wants to push a product on an individual, just know not one single sector is ever going to be fully 100% protected.

We saw that in 2008 with a lot of the real estate development companies going under and a lot of people struggling to make monthly payments on big mortgage payments. Just for a more recent example of something that has happened, the energy sector from 2023 to now 2025, if you were solely invested in that, you weren't going to see a return that you would've if you just put your money into an S&P 500 in batch, because energy has really trailed behind that. And the tech industry, the dotcom bubble, we saw that in the early 2000s. We could potentially be in a quasi bubble right now, but it could keep increasing. That's why it's important to have diversity within your portfolio.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Should I just dump all my money into a really cool local brewery?

Will Chrisman:
Oh, God.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
If anyone's opening it up.

Will Chrisman:
Well, I'll have to try their beer first.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Do you have any advice on maybe some key things to look for to see if it's legit or worth your time?

Matt Bates:
Yeah, one of the main things are supporting financial statements. If there is an actual, say, pitch, if you get an email or representative reaching out to you or even are in a webinar and all of the information's being provided is conjecture and there doesn't seem to be anything that's really concrete, when they start talking about return on investment and then don't have any numbers to actually support that, it makes you really wonder what's going on here.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
One of the things, I get cold in emails and spam emails a lot, and one of the things I noticed that's a pretty big giveaway is I'll get emails from people with supposedly famous names, an email from Sydney Sweeney, an email from Catherine Zeta Jones. I'm like, I don't think she's emailing me about this CRM I've never heard of.

Will Chrisman:
Yeah, don't tell Michael Douglas.

Matt Bates:
Oh, no.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Speaking of that, going with the CRM thing, my field is videography and marketing, and having talked to outside the dental world, just local business owners, small business owners, how many times they get solicited some marketing package deal for an insane amount of money.

Matt Bates:
Yes, I see that quite a bit.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yeah. Can you expand upon that for me?

Matt Bates:
What I find is for some of our clients is the services sound really good like in a vacuum, but unfortunately they don't have anything to compare it to.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
True.

Matt Bates:
And they don't know what else is out there. So what we really appreciate is a lot of our clients send that information to us so we can actually vet them. So we're actually seeing that quite a bit if you're familiar with the Windows update, so we're actually seeing that quite a bit with some IT services soliciting there and you can do service upon service, I can list them all out. It's really very, very helpful when you have a frame of reference, and we've seen so many of them that we have that.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
If you're out there listening and you've not really used a marketing service before besides check the website, if they have case studies, that's an important one to check as well. It's the same thing you just said like having actual financials in hand. Case studies would be good, and seeing what other businesses they've worked with. Now that can be tough, but if there was someone that's focusing on local businesses, check to see if that local business is even still around. Did the marketing actually work?

Matt Bates:
Very true, very true.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Let's move on to treats. I'm a big fan of candy obviously if you've ever seen any pictures of me. Will, what are the treats of going back to your very first idea of having a plan in place?

Will Chrisman:
One of the first things that you can really build off of any financial plan as dollar cost averaging, and for those that are unaware of the term, it's just putting a set amount of dollars into the market into your investment portfolio every month. That's going to take a lot of the stress of trying to time the market because what happens is, as we all know, if we're putting money into a very accessible savings account, when you need a car or something and you don't want to have a big monthly payment on it, even though you can afford it, you're going to pull from that savings account. That's really geared more towards putting money when the market dips a little bit. So that's not a lot of fun to make that just to wait for a little bit of a dip.
The big thing is dollar cost averaging is going to allow your dollars to buy into the market at different times. Sure, sometimes you're going to buy into a high market, but you're also going to be buying those low times as well, and you don't have to think about it. It's an auto draft every single month going to your tax advantage account or going to your brokerage account that's a non-qualified account. So there's no one great thing that I can sell anybody, but dollar cost averaging is a good strategy to have within your plan.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Matt, off the top of your head, what's a good treat besides just the standard every paycheck I want to put X into my account?

Matt Bates:
Yeah, I mean really, it for me comes back to fully utilizing your 401k in your practice. What I see quite a bit is that somebody may not necessarily be saving as much as they could be, and then they introduce a traditional IRA or Roth IRA on the side, or it's like, all right, well the IRA limits, if you're over the age of 58,000 in a year, you're never going to come close to saving that amount compared to a 401k.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
So you could have just done from the start with a 401k.

Matt Bates:
Yeah, so I mean with a 401k, you're going to be maxing out at 31,000 if you're 50 and older. When you actually extrapolate that out over the years, the 401k is just going to be massive comparative. It depends on the practice, because some practices might not have the staff, so it really just depends.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Well, you're big into treats?

Will Chrisman:
Absolutely. Look at me.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Look at you. Do you have another hot treat for me?

Will Chrisman:
Yeah, I do have a hot treat for you, Jarrod. One of the more broad things that you can do that I would tell anybody off the street is to know your investment strategy. Here are a few things that you should know when you're investing, or if you are working with a financial professional, make sure you both are on the same page about. So some of those things are when are we going to rebalance the portfolio? What's my time horizon? What do I need to be invested in to reach my goals through my time horizon? How am I navigating my tax situation with investing and into retirement when you have utilized the 401k like Matt has said? And then finally, how much should I be investing a month given all of those other things to ensure that I can reach my goals comfortably?
And the greatest part for our clients here is they don't have to think about it and hopefully that everybody's working with a financial professional where all of the retirement goals and all the big things that loom over people's heads at night isn't there because it shouldn't be. We shouldn't have to worry so much about the future as the things we want to accomplish now and being with our families and being really involved in our jobs and our careers.

Matt Bates:
To piggyback a little bit off of Will said, having that strategy of what you're going to do within the first, say, five years of retirement, I feel like that's really, really important because when you're going into retirement and it's open-ended, we see a lot of people spend way more than they ever anticipated.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Oh, for sure, because you're bored. You have nothing else to do.

Matt Bates:
Every day Saturday. So I've seen my fair share of people just spend tens of thousands of dollars on grandkids, which I'm not one to just say, "Hey, don't treat your grandkids."

Will Chrisman:
Well, I know we're just getting, my parents are just getting into retirement and maybe my mom needs to listen to this podcast because last year she got the grandkids a little bit too much. It didn't fit all in my brother's house yet. Got it.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Guys, thank you so much for stopping in today and spending this time with me. Folks, if you are needing to talk to somebody or wanting to learn more about what it is that we do or some more helpful tips on things to improve your practice, we're going to be probably coming to a city near you. We're going to be in Savannah and Athens, Georgia coming up. We're going to be in Boca Raton in Naples, Florida, plus I think 50 more cities next year. So log on, check us out, give us some reviews, make sure to anything that I post on the social media, that'd be great. Guys, thanks again for stopping by and I can't wait to have you on again.

Matt Bates:
Thanks, Jarrod.

Will Chrisman:
Thanks so much, Jarrod.

Announcer:
That's all the time we have today. Thank you to our guests for their insight and for sharing some really great information. And thank you to you, the listener, for tuning in. The Millionaire Dentist Podcast is brought to you by Four Quadrants Advisory. To see if they might be a good fit for you and your practice, go on over to fourquadrantsadvisory.com and see why year after year they retain over 95% of their clients. Thank you again for joining us and we'll see you next time.