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Month: February 2019

YFP 089: From Unemployed to Successful Pharmapreneur

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From Unemployed to Successful Pharmacy Entrepreneur

On this episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist Podcast, Tim Ulbrich, co-founder of Your Financial Pharmacist, interviews Dr. Blair Thielemier, a successful pharmacy entrepreneur. She is the founder of BT Pharmacy Consulting, creator of the Pharmapreneur Academy and the Elevate Pharmacy Summit and author of the Amazon bestselling book How to Build a Pharmacy Consulting Business. Tim and Blair talk through pharmacy entrepreneur opportunities she has discovered through her journey from losing her job as a clinical hospital pharmacist to building a successful online business that provides pharmacists with efficient systems to managing a sustainable model for clinical services to improving patient outcomes and achieving the highest standards in the practice of pharmacy. They discuss what makes her tick as an entrepreneur, what changes she is seeing in the profession of pharmacy and how having your personal financial house in order is integral to having a successful business.

About Today’s Guest

After graduating with her Doctor of Pharmacy from the University of Arkansas for the Medical Sciences in 2011, Blair unexpectedly lost her full-time income as a clinical hospital pharmacist in 2014. She was asked to serve as an independent Medication Therapy Management Consultant Pharmacist, a niche position that was entirely new to her at the time but would be instrumental to her future success and entrepreneurial journey. For the past three years, Blair has been focusing on elevating the profession of pharmacy through advanced clinical services. In 2015, she founded a pharmacy consulting business BT Pharmacy Consulting, LLC and currently trains and coaches other pharmacists looking to start their own consulting businesses through an online e-course and membership site at the PharmapreneurAcademy.com . In April 2017, she launched the first online pharmacy conference in the industry. In 2018, based on the success of the first summit, she hosted a five day encore event in partnership with the National Community Pharmacists Association’s Innovation Center. The Elevate Pharmacy Virtual Summit featured pharmacists of various backgrounds practicing pharmacy at the peak of the profession. She is also the author of the Amazon bestselling book How to Build a Pharmacy Consulting Business.

Summary

Blair shares her story of losing her full-time clinical hospital pharmacist job to building successful online businesses. In 2014, while pregnant with her first child, Blair lost her job. Not knowing where to turn, she first took a hard look at her family’s finances to determine how much they truly needed to live and where they could cut their budget. From there, Blair contacted local independent pharmacies in her community to see if they needed her to fill in any shifts. She was given an opportunity to take over cases in a clinical program which she first declined. Blair felt like she wasn’t an expert enough in MTM to take on these cases. She thought she needed further board certifications or a master’s degree to be successful in this line of work. After accepting the position the second time, Blair discovered that MTM consulting was her passion and knew she needed to begin a business in northeast Arkansas and southeast Missouri.

Blair decided she would initially take on 3 or 4 coaching clients. She found challenges with each client as they were building their own businesses and was able to work through them. These experiences ultimately led her to develop her Pharmapreneur Academy course.

In working with clients to help them grow their businesses, Blair sees that pharmacists need to see their own value before they can pitch themselves confidently, that pricing your services appropriately is incredibly important so customers can see the value they are receiving, and that skills and trainings should be added as they are needed instead of adding them in case they are needed. Blair also shares about the need to bring more services elements versus products to clients.

Blair discusses other opportunities and platforms that are becoming available for pharmacists to work in, like genetic testing, the extremes of beginning the journey as an entrepreneur, the biggest mistakes she sees pharmapreneurs make, and much more.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Ulbrich: Hey, what’s up, everybody? Welcome to Episode 093 of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast. This episode has been a long time in the works where I have an opportunity and privilege to interview Dr. Blair Thielemier. So quick bio on Blair: After graduating with a doctor of pharmacy from the University of Arkansas for the Medical Sciences in 2011, Blair unexpectedly lost her full-time income as a clinical hospital pharmacist in 2014. She was asked to serve as an independent medication therapy management consultant pharmacist, a niche position that was entirely new to her at the time but that would be instrumental to her future success and entrepreneurial journey. The past three years, Blair has been focusing on elevating the profession of pharmacy through advanced clinical services. In 2015, she founded a pharmacy consulting business, BT Pharmacy Consulting, and currently trains and coaches other pharmacists looking to start their own consulting businesses through an online e-course and membership site at pharmapreneuracademy.com. In April 2017, she launched the first online pharmacy conference in the industry. And in 2018, based on success of the first online summit, she hosted a follow-up event, a five-day encore event in partnership with the National Community Pharmacists Association Innovation Center. The Elevate Pharmacy virtual summit featured pharmacists of various backgrounds practicing pharmacy at the peak of the profession. And she’s also — in case that wasn’t enough — the author of the Amazon best-selling book, “How to Build a Pharmacy Consulting Business.” Blair, welcome to the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast.

Blair Thielemier: Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

Tim Ulbrich: This has been a long time in the making, so I’m excited to get you on the show. And I was planning, I went way back to 2016, shortly after I started Your Financial Pharmacist. And you may remember, you wrote an article for us on the blog, “Four Ways for Pharmapreneurs to Improve Their Financial Equation.” And we’ll link on that, but our discussion is really going to build on that. And I’ve been following along your journey and genuinely have great respect for the work that you’re doing that’s having a positive impact on the profession and, I believe, allowing pharmacists to pursue the dreams that they have to be the best clinician and the best businessperson that they can be. So thank you for your contributions, and thank you for role modeling that, even for my own business. I appreciate it.

Blair Thielemier: Thank you. I think it’s important, that’s something we don’t get a lot of in school, right, is how to promote our businesses, how to promote ourselves and market our services in the right way. So I thought it was something very important to help other pharmacists with.

Tim Ulbrich: All the fun stuff, right, that we don’t get in school.

Blair Thielemier: Exactly. I love it.

Tim Ulbrich: So as I was preparing for this episode, I was going back through the website, I was recalling my own experiences just following you and your business growth, and I thought, what a journey that you have been on. And so I want to start by taking our listeners back to 2014, just a few years after you graduated from UAMS, you’ve got your PharmD, you’ve been out for a few years, you’re working as a clinical hospital pharmacist. And you lose your job. What are you thinking at that point in time? What are the thoughts that are going through your mind?

Blair Thielemier: One of the main ones is “I am 6 months pregnant, I have a baby on the way, how am I going to pay for this?” I was planning on an 8-12-week maternity leave. Now, is that going to be completely out the window? Pretty much, how am I going to replace this income? But you know, before I could even start looking at that, Tim, I had no idea how much income I needed to replace. And I think that is an important part to start with in my story is literally, the first thing that I did after I lost my job was I went and signed up for Mint.com and Personal Capital, all these different sites and started trying to figure out, OK, if I’m going to make the bare minimum to get by, what does that bare minimum look like for me? And really, drilling down on our expenses, exactly how much we needed to bring in each month to keep our lifestyle pretty much the same.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and we’re going to dive into that here in a little bit because I think as you and I have talked about before, getting your personal financial house in order is so critical to being able to approach business with confidence, to being able to take the risks that you need to take. And I think building a healthy business is a lot of that depends on your own personal finance. So here we are, you’re at 2014, you all of a sudden lose that full-time income. Do you think, as you reflect back on your journey today — and we’ll talk about the work that you’re doing here in a little bit — but do you think you ever get to the point of developing the businesses you started, taking the risks you started if that wouldn’t have happened back in 2014?

Blair Thielemier: Absolutely not. No. I think I was interested in entrepreneurship, but I really thought it was going to be something outside of pharmacy. I don’t think that I realized this opportunity existed until it happened. So when I lost my job as a clinical hospital pharmacist, I was pregnant, so I was just picking up shifts here and there at local independent pharmacies. So I was hustling on my student loans before we decided to have a baby, trying to get all those paid off. So people kind of knew me in the area as someone they could call with extra shifts. So I had gotten my name out there as a relief pharmacist for independent community pharmacies. And pretty much I just started calling them up and saying, “Hey, you know, I’ve got a lot of days open here if you need any vacation time.” And that’s how it grew. So I started doing that, picking up relief shifts, and to their credit, these pharmacy owners, they wanted to help me. I mean, they just welcomed me with open arms and really made up the difference in those shifts. So in working back in community pharmacy, they were like, “Hey, you’ve got this clinical background. We’ve got these clinical programs that we have to do now called CMRs, and we’d really like for you to start doing them for us, start taking over our MTM program and figuring out how to see these patients.” And I’d never done it before, so the first time they asked me, I said no because that’s scary, right?

Tim Ulbrich: Sure.

Blair Thielemier: You’re billing Medicare for a service that isn’t a product. And so luckily, I had kind of a mentor of mine, someone I had worked with in the past who she was doing some independent consulting doing MTM. And she helped walk me through my first few cases. So as I started doing more and more cases for these pharmacies, I fell in love with it. And I thought, this is what I need to do. I need to grow my MTM consulting business in northeast Arkansas and southeast Missouri because I’m licensed in Arkansas and Missouri. And so that was my focus. After the baby came and she was doing wonderful, so really in 2015, I’m thinking, OK, I’m growing this business. How am I going to do it? I know. I’m going to put up a website because if you put up a website, people are just instantly searching for you.

refinance student loans

Tim Ulbrich: Or make a business card, right?

Blair Thielemier: Or make a business card and just hand that out to everyone you see, and then your business will be successful, right?

Tim Ulbrich: Right, right. Yeah.

Blair Thielemier: Well, the problem with having a website is if you don’t have a plan to attract traffic to your website, it’s pretty much like that business card that’s probably in your glove box in your car, and no one’s seen it. So what I did, I was sharing information about MTM on my website and on my blog, which was BT Pharmacy Consulting. And if you had seen it back then, it was really, it was focused on people hiring me. So I was sharing this —

Tim Ulbrich: I remember that. I remember that.

Blair Thielemier: Yeah. So I mean, it came about very organically because I was trying to build my business here locally, and as I was doing that, I was writing these blogs and sharing them on LinkedIn, and then other pharmacists started contacting me like “What are you doing? What is MTM consulting? How can I do this? I’d love to get out from behind the bench, even if it’s just a few days a week.” And so I decided at the end of 2015 I would take on three one-on-one coaching clients, other pharmacists, just to see if I could help them. And very quickly, we identified several challenges to building their businesses, and we were able to work through those. And that experience with those three one-on-one coaching clients is what I decided to turn into the e-course at the Pharmapreneur Academy.

Tim Ulbrich: So much to unpack there. And I appreciate you sharing that. And you know what jumps out to me as I think about a lot of pharmacists out there today that I’ve heard from that are frustrated with either, you know, hours getting cut or frustrated finding a position, and you know, thinking back to your journey in 2014, you find yourself in that position, and at that point in time, you have a mindset decision to make, right? Is this going to be a woe is me? Or is this going to be an opportunity to build relationships, leverage the relationships you had, take some initiative, which you did, see a problem that needed to be solved and work through that? And obviously, as you know in building a business, you take one step, that leads to another step, that leads to another step. But often, we get hung up in kind of the overall vision, which can be very overwhelming. One thing I want to ask you about, though, that stuck out to me there is that you said no at first. So when you talk about those other pharmacies that you were working with, you said no at first. And you alluded to the Medicare reimbursement and maybe not fully understanding or appreciating that at the time. But were there other reasons you said no at that point in time? I mean, were there things that you felt like confidence-wise or self-limiting beliefs or things that you didn’t feel like you had the tools to begin with the business? I mean, I know you worked through that, but what were the reasons that you said no to begin with?

Blair Thielemier: Oh, absolutely. And this is what I also found my first coaching clients struggling with too. So one of the big ones was not feeling like I was the best person to do this job. So I felt like I wasn’t expert enough in MTM. I felt like I needed a Master’s in MTM or a board certification in ambulatory care or just whatever I could think of, I’m thinking that’s my comfort zone. I mean, I know that I can get through school, I can pass these courses, and I can rack up this education. And I do, I’m big on personality tests and stuff. So I’m an INTJ, and the trap that I myself get stuck in a lot is the neverending pursuit of more knowledge. Like I need to know everything about a subject before I can move forward with it. And really, what the mentor, Ashley, was able to help me with in walking me through those first few cases is just seeing how I already had the tools and the skills that I needed. And you know, and then when I went and started looking at, OK, now I want to build this business, I think I need to go back to school and get an MBA because you can’t own a business if you’re not an MBA, right? And so it was just — it’s been a constant struggle for me to, you know, to view myself as expert enough to be able to offer these services. And so it’s something I see other pharmacists struggling with. You know, all the time, they ask me, “Should I go and take this course? Should I go and take this certification?” or whatever. And I’m like, “Well, what are you doing? What does your client say you need? What setting are you working in?” So really, now, I like to say, I add skills and trainings as I need them not in case I need them. And that’s been a huge learning curve for me.

Tim Ulbrich: I think you are so spot-on there. I think for many pharmacists, myself included, we tend to be learners by nature. Right? And that’s who we are, and I think there’s a tendency to feel like we need to acquire all this knowledge, and I think if we’re honest with ourselves, many times, that’s an avoidance of wanting to really step into something that we can think we could do, whether it’s business or take on some risk or whatever, and it’s an easy out to begin to continue to pursue. And I would point our listeners to — I’m sure you’ve listened to the “How I Built This” podcast on NPR. And many of those successful entrepreneurs and business stories, many of them don’t have formal education. I would say a vast majority of them do not. What they saw was a problem that needed a solution, and they took a risk to do that. They were confident in their ability, but they weren’t perfect in their ability. They made mistakes, they had self-limiting beliefs like we all do, but they took that step. And I think that’s an important piece for many of our listeners to think of as they’re considering their own journey. So one thing I want to ask you, Blair, is that I think there’s many I’m sure that are listening to this podcast that have some business aspirations to take a unique talent that they have to tap into some unsolved problem or maybe a process that could be done better or differently, or maybe there’s others listening that are feeling stuck in their job but don’t yet have an idea formulated for what their business may be, whether that’s a side hustle or a formal business. And I think when hearing and seeing your story in hindsight and as I introduce you and hearing about all the success you’ve had with the academy, your consulting work, the book, the summit, on and on, that can feel overwhelming to people that are just beginning. What advice would you have to somebody who’s just starting or beginning on that path to overcome that anxiety and overcome that comparison with others and to just take that first step in getting started.

Blair Thielemier: Well, first of all, I’m a huge proponent of a side hustle or building some kind of business as an additional income stream. I think we’re living in the gig economy, and I see pharmacy consulting as a way to leverage the skills and stuff you already have because a lot of people come to me and I get emails all the time. It’s like, “I was afraid I was going to have to leave pharmacy because it’s just not for me. But that was before I knew that consulting was an option.” So whether it’s consulting, whether it’s real estate, whether it’s creating your own podcast about personal finance, whatever it is, whatever your passion is, I think it’s about looking at the value that you can provide the person in front of you. So you know, one thing I like to say is you first have to be sold yourself on your value in order to pitch your services confidently.

Tim Ulbrich: Amen.

Blair Thielemier: So unless you’re running a charity, you do have to charge money for your services, and I think selling yourself is an art. So talking about, oh, I’ve got this, this, this and this, like certification or letters behind my name, well, nobody cares about that. But they care how you can help them achieve whatever goals or results they’re trying to get to. So when you’re talking about say you’re pitching a physician’s office, you’re going into a physician’s office saying, “I’d really like to come in and see some of your patients. There’s this thing called pharmacy consulting that they’re embedding clinical pharmacists into primary care settings all across the country. Doctors are loving it, it’s helping with burnout. The financial guys in the office are loving it because I’m going to be helping with quality metrics and meeting your MACRA and MIPS quality measures, helping you get better reimbursement, no late penalties and all this,” but you’re not saying, “I can do this, this, this and this. I learned how to do motivational intervene, I learned how to — I’m a certified diabetes educator, blah blah blah.” You’re not talking about what you can do. You’re talking about what they need.

Tim Ulbrich: Absolutely.

Blair Thielemier: So when you’re thinking about promoting your services, whatever it may be, think about what the result the other person wants to get. So I say if you’re going into that physician’s office, you don’t have a relationship with them, go in with a list of questions because you can’t offer them a solution until you know what their problem is. And I think that’s pretty similar to and can be applicable to most businesses is your marketing message needs to be tailored directly to the needs of the person that you’re hoping to serve.

Tim Ulbrich: Absolutely. And I think, you know, I’m thinking of as you were talking there, you know, Pat Flynn and his podcast, “Smart Passive Income,” and his focus is on providing value, right? You have to know what you’re bringing to the table. You have to know what the problems are before you start to present solutions. And just to build off of what you said, Blair, around pharmacists charging, I think one of the things that I often see is pharmacists tend to undercharge for their services because they don’t yet fully believe in the value of what they bring to the table. And second to that, they don’t fully account for all the expenses that are involved with providing something. They stop often at their salary and say, this is what I make per hour, and this is the value I bring. I think that gets to some of the business aspects of the plan. I’m sure you see that way more than I do with your clients.

Blair Thielemier: Yeah, absolutely, because you do need to take into account, well, I’m going to have to be paying for some other stuff that are benefits given in my job like liability insurance and maybe even health insurance if you’re looking at doing this full-time. So there is a difference in what you’re going to charge as a consultant just to cover those basic expenses. But I also believe in — especially for cash-based services — you’re also pricing yourself and your services based on the results that you’re getting for the person. So you know, for example, when I started looking at what do I charge pharmacists for the academy? It’s what could building a business do for your life in terms of financial freedom, in terms of financial flexibility? And then I want to price it appropriately so that the customer also sees the value because if I was giving this stuff away, then people would not be as invested in, OK, you know what, I’m going to do this. I’m going to take this advice and move it forward. And that’s the same for our patients. If I’m doing a genetic consult for somebody, you know, I charge my full rate because I want them to take it seriously, to be fully invest in the results and what I’m telling them, and then also to commit to making the changes that I suggest in my recommendations.

Tim Ulbrich: So Blair, shifting focus here a little bit, we have — as you very well know — a healthcare system that is moving towards value-based care and payment models. But largely, what I’m seeing outpatient pharmacy — not everywhere, but is really stuck still based on a payment-for-product model. We seem to be caught in this chicken and the egg situation where we want to evolve the role of the pharmacist and be doing non-dispensing care activities and leveraging their expertise, but we seem to be in this vacuum where the payment mechanism don’t support these efforts for a variety of reasons. Simultaneously, we’ve got a growing number of graduates, pharmacies that are cutting their hours, we’ve got automation and technology and Artificial Intelligence and states that are expanding the roles of technicians and other healthcare providers that, to be frank, have prescribing rights but are available at a cheaper cost than a pharmacist. What do you as a thought leader in this space, what do you make all of this? And where do you see you role in addressing some of these problems?

Blair Thielemier: So the new models of care, that’s exactly the reason why I created the Elevate Summit because I wanted to share stories and the experiences of pharmacists who were doing something differently and succeeding in adding a more service-based product into their toolkit, so to speak. So you know, traditionally, pharmacy has always been a product-based business. And I think as we’re seeing reimbursements decline, we need to bring in those service elements because they can be profitable, you can charge cash for a lot of these things, and there are people all across the country that are doing them very, very successfully. So what I wanted to do with the Elevate Summit was to highlight some of these models, you know, one this year I’m in the process of recording interviews for the 2019 summit. This year, I’m interviewing a pharmacist with an all-cash business model — a pharmacy owner with an all-cash business model. I’m interviewing one who brings in an embedded nurse practitioner to do MedSpa stuff. So they’re doing like chemical peels and Botox in the pharmacy. And others, they’re doing diabetes education, they’re doing travel vaccines, they’re doing consultations on health and wellness. There’s so many different things that we can provide. And then to answer your point about there are other people out there that can provide similar services that may be cheaper than a pharmacist. So I hear this all the time. Why would a physician hire a pharmacist when they can just hire another nurse practitioner or physician’s assistant and the billing is so much easier? I mean, that’s a fantastic point. So you know what? I asked one of our physicians that’s joining us on this year’s Elevate Summit that exact same question. And what he said was, “They’re trained in the same way that I’m trained. A pharmacist is trained in a completely different way than the way I was trained.” So what he saw the value of the pharmacist is as bringing in that different perspective in looking at it at a completely different angle whereas the nurse practitioner or the PA, who were trained in the same way, are looking at it kind of from the same lens as the physician. So I think we need to own our expertise in the area of medication management and optimizing therapy. And I also think there’s a lot of opportunities — you know, everybody’s into genetic testing now. It’s like for Christmas, everybody gets like one of the —

Tim Ulbrich: It’s the cool thing to do.

Blair Thielemier: It’s the cool thing to do. One of my friends told me that her aunt and uncle went to a party — they’re from New York — and they went to a party, and the party favor like an Ancestry DNA kit.

Tim Ulbrich: Oh my gosh.

Blair Thielemier: So they all did their DNA swabs and then they had another party later to come back and everybody looked at their results, and it was all fun and games. And I’m like, OK, but did you know that you can actually use that information to make medical decisions about your health? I mean, you can use that information more than just like, oh, that’s cool, I’m 20% Irish or whatever. You can really dig in a lot deeper, and so that’s one platform that I want to promote more this year personally is getting out there and talking about the value that pharmacists can add in helping decipher some of these genetic test results. So I started — after my son was born, I’ll share this quick story. So my son was born in December of 2017, and when he was born, the neonatologist had him under the light and they were looking at him and she was holding him on his belly and kind of looking at the base of his spine, and he has a very, very deep sacral dimple. And my daughter had one too but not near as deep as what his was. And the neonatologist said, if I can’t see the bottom of this, we’re going to need to do an ultrasound to make sure that it’s not open. And so you know, I told her, I said, “My daughter had the exact same thing. She’s fine. There was no neural tube defect or anything like that.” And his was closed too, thank goodness. It was just much, much deeper than hers. So then I’m thinking, I took folic acid my entire pregnancy. What’s the deal? I had actually taken it from the time Aven (?) was born until the time Hoyt (?) was born, so I knew that it wasn’t because I wasn’t taking folic acid. But when I went and did my — it was one of the direct-to-consumer DNA kits, it came back that I had a high risk of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, which actually exists on both sides of my family. My maternal grandmother has Parkinson’s, and my paternal grandmother died eventually of Alzheimer’s. And so in kind of digging a little bit deeper, I started looking at I’ve got this mutation in MTHFR that prevents me from being able to metabolize folic acid into the fat form, and so pretty much the folic acid I was taking wasn’t doing anything for me. But it was also, I went and got a blood test because I’m a guinea pig. And I like to — before I started taking methylated folic acid or anything like that, I wanted to know, what were my levels? What was my homocysteine level? And being able to start tracking that. So I went through with a fine-tooth comb, looked at all of my genetic markers, took them to my doctor. I was like, here’s the test I want. You can imagine. He was a very good sport about it, he was like, OK, I’ll try to figure out what these are and how we’re going to code these for your insurance. And so we did that, and you know, it came back that I’m a homozygous variant for the MTHFR mutation, and you know, I think now how close was my son or my daughter to having a neural tube defect because even as a pharmacist, I didn’t know that this existed.

Tim Ulbrich: And that’s why that party needed a pharmacist there to help them interpret their results. Right? And take some action.

Blair Thielemier: Exactly.

Tim Ulbrich: No, I think that’s a huge opportunity, and I’ve been following the work that you’ve been doing there, which is exciting. So for a minute, I want to talk about the value of having a sound personal financial situation to be in a position to start and grow a business. And I know this is a topic that you talk about with your community members and those in the academy and those that you’re coaching with the belief that really, a financially healthy business is built off the foundation of a financially healthy individual. So what does this mean for you and as you’re working with clients? You know, obviously, I’m sure for everybody, getting rid of all of their debt and everything is not necessarily realistic. What do you use in terms of the advice of getting yourself in a sound financial position that will allow you to take the risks and go confidently into the business aspirations that somebody has?

Blair Thielemier: Well, one question I get all the time is, how quickly will I be able to replace my salary? And so that question is a little bit difficult to answer because it’s kind of like, well, how much do you need? Not how much are you making right now.

Tim Ulbrich: Exactly.

Blair Thielemier: Not how much are spending that maybe isn’t on the necessities. But how much do you absolutely need? And that’s why I said when I lost my job, kind of the first thing that I went to was starting to track our budget because, Tim, this is embarrassing to admit. I didn’t know how much I made each month.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah. Hey, I was there.

Blair Thielemier: I had no idea.

Tim Ulbrich: Yep.

Blair Thielemier: I knew what each paycheck said, but I had never really sat down and been like, OK, this is how much income I’m averaging each month. And I definitely didn’t know how much I was spending each month. If I didn’t even know how much — I knew a roundabout, but I didn’t know exactly how much I was bringing in each month. And I definitely didn’t know how much I was spending each month. So whenever I was able to take a hard look at those numbers and figure out, you know what, I don’t need to go shopping on Saturday afternoon because it’s raining and there’s nothing else to do and that kind of stuff that I was able that year that Aven was born, I lost my job, to take a $40,000 pay cut and be fine. We were able to now live well below what we were actually spending once we sat down and took a look at it.

Tim Ulbrich: And I think that is great advice. And we’ve talked so much on the podcast about budgeting to be able to determine what are those essential expenses, what to cut if you need to cut, and I think that’s huge for those thinking about some business ventures. They’ll say, OK, what do I actually need to live off of rather than what am I currently making or what am I currently spending each and every month. A couple things I would just add to that is that I think there’s two extremes on this that I’ve seen with the business, you know, some that say, I’m just ready to jump in, and I’m not worried about these aspects of my personal financial situation. And then the other end that says, I want to have everything lined up. I want to be completely debt-free, have a fully funded emergency fund, be on my path towards retirement, all these things taken care of before I jump into business. And you know, I believe that there’s probably somewhere in the middle that is reasonable for everyone. So maybe you look at, OK, I’ve got a plan for debt repayment, I’ve got a solid budgeting process in place. I’ve got an emergency fund. I’ve got the basics around insurance coverage while I’m working towards these other things, but I at least feel like I have a solid foundation so that I can jump into this business with confidence. And I think that allows people to approach their business in a more confident way and take the risks that they need to be taking. Blair, what are maybe the one or two biggest mistakes that you see new pharmacy entrepreneurs making? I mean, what are kind of the common traps that either fell into, probably I fall into, that you often see people that you coach going into? You maybe alluded to one with the idea of the website and feeling the need to start there. But what are some of the other common things that you see?

Blair Thielemier: So I think, you know, you mentioned not having — like some people have to have all of the information before they move forward. And definitely that was something that I probably should have been a little bit more diligent about when starting a business. I knew that I needed to register my business, I needed to have an LLC and all that. But I had no idea how to deal with taxes or any of that kind of financial stuff. So I am a big fan of investing in people that can coach you and help you through the processes like this.

Tim Ulbrich: Agreed.

Blair Thielemier: I ended up — so after my first year in business, I wasn’t doing quarterly estimated taxes or anything like that. I ended up owing about $17,000 in taxes. And it was something that I wasn’t prepared for because I really had no idea how to calculate that. So whenever I say I made just about every mistake in the book, I mean, it’s true. But we were able to come through that and, you know, now I know and hopefully I can help you guys avoid some of these pickles like that. But that would be definitely a big one, which is investing in hiring either a coach or some kind of professional to help you through that. I think once you have a business, you’re past the TurboTax, Do-It-Yourself thing, for me anyway because I will say whenever something is not my strength. And taxes and all of that is definitely not my strength. So I think it’s part of that is, you know, investing in your business. I think you can start a business relatively cheaply, but I don’t think your goal should be to spend nothing. So a lot of times, we’ll spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on our pharmacy degrees and then after that, it’s like I’m not going to pay $50 to do that CE. You know? And it’s like, I think professional development is a huge part of being successful, and this is also going to be a topic you’re going to hear me talk a lot more about this year is professional, personal, career development and what does that look like in order to do it in a way that, like I said, you’re not adding skills in case you need them, you’re adding them when you need them.

Tim Ulbrich: Absolutely.

Blair Thielemier: So as an entrepreneur, I value my time more than it costs to hire someone who is a professional in that space that can just come in and download into my brain, here’s everything you need to know. And if they can do it for me, even better.

Tim Ulbrich: Absolutely. And I think you’ve got to value your time and put a dollar amount to that. And that’s something that I am guessing like you and many other entrepreneurs struggled with at first, but I’m coming to appreciate more and more each and every year the value of depending on people that know exactly what they’re doing, they’re an expert in the space, and they can help accelerate business growth because it’s an ROI on your investment. So let’s talk about legacy for a minute. You know, I look at your vision statement, Blair, on your website, is powerful. It says, “In the next five years, helping hundreds of pharmacy businesses add millions of dollars in revenue and to serve them as an advocate for clinical pharmacy services.” And I think that it’s fair to say that the work that you’re doing today is going to be left behind for others to build upon and for your kids to admire and say, “Yes. That was my mom that did that.” So my question for you is, what do you want your legacy to be?

Blair Thielemier: Oh, I love that. Great question. So you know, it’s definitely — it is about my kids seeing me doing something that I’m passionate about, that I love, that I truly believe, this is my purpose is to bring together all this stuff that I’m interested in, present it to pharmacists as here is a viable financial model for really loving your career again. And you know, we’re being faced with a lot of challenges. You mentioned them earlier, just job market saturation and then AI coming in and maybe we won’t need to be doing the dispensing anymore. So then what are we going to do if not dispensing? We need to create these opportunities for ourselves, and a lot of people say, oh, we need provider status to do that. Well, you know, physicians have provider status, and they’re not getting reimbursed the way that they want to, so I’m pretty sure we’re not going to be reimbursed the way we want to, even if we did get provider status. So I think the opportunity there is to come up with unique things that maybe even exist in the market but that aren’t being done the way you would do them as a pharmacist like the genetic testing, like the health and wellness consulting where you’re counseling people on, oh, if they’re going to use CBD oil, make sure it’s not interacting with some of these other medicines or if they’re going to use this or that supplement or herbal medicine. And it’s a huge opportunity for pharmacists to get into the preventative medicine space, and so my legacy, I really, I want to bring about these ideas for new opportunities. But I think more importantly, I want to give you the skills that no matter what you’re doing, no matter what you’re selling, what business you’re in, you can feel confident in going out and marketing your services and selling them in a way that feels authentic. You know, that’s something I hear a lot of pharmacists say, “Well, I don’t want to feel like a salesperson. I don’t want to feel like sleazy, trying to push my product on people.” And that’s kind of why I said, well, first, before you sell your product to anybody else, you have to believe in it yourself.

Tim Ulbrich: Absolutely.

Blair Thielemier: You have to have bought into it 100%. And I think that this thing that I have can solve your problem and then you present it like that. You know, here’s your problem, here’s what you’ve told me you need, here’s the solution that I’ve come up with that I think will help you achieve what you just told me your issue was. And then when you introduce your price point, it’s kind of like, well, you know — it should be a stretch, your price point should be a stretch for whatever so that they can see the value in it, but it should also be something that they’re like, yes, absolutely. I get what you’re saying. That makes sense. So giving pharmacists that business acumen, I guess, is really my ultimate goal so that whatever it is they’re selling, they can do that confidently and then they can grow their business confidently.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and I think there’s that compound effect where as you’re training and teaching other pharmacists, they’re going out there and impacting patient care lives in a way, in a far greater number and a way than you could ever do yourself. And I love watching that and how you’re inspiring others. And I would also add, I think part of legacy for me — and I think you share this from what I’ve been observing your journey — is the legacy of our children. And I sense a passion for you in teaching your children about entrepreneurship and business and probably at a young age, just the role modeling, but I think that’s something that I’m passionate about, my wife and I share that. And I’m hopeful that that’s something that we can collectively do and thinking about how do we teach and train the next generation, you know, the skills that maybe we didn’t get ourselves or didn’t feel like we received through our formal education. So a couple last questions here that I want to make sure we give our audience insight into. Starting a business — and I alluded to this earlier that we often see the glamour, we see the glory — but you and I both know that it is absolutely exhilarating, but it’s also hard and it’s a grind at the same time. And there are moments that you can feel overwhelmed, there’s moments that you can feel unfocused, there’s moments that you feel like are stressful. And you go through those times of excitement and obviously, you remember exactly why you’re doing what you’re doing. What do you do — what is your process to kind of bring yourself back to that reason of why you’re doing what you’re doing when you’re feeling overwhelmed or unfocused or you’ve lost that focus temporarily. What do you do to re-engage? How do you keep yourself motivated along the way?

Blair Thielemier: So I was thinking about this the other night. So I try to do a meditation almost every night, just to kind of clear my head and think about exactly what you just said, why it is I’m doing what I’m doing. And I’m a very self-motivated person, but I think it’s because I have sat down and I have put together these goals. Like you mentioned, you know, the vision statement on the website. I put that on there to remind myself and to remind others what is my ultimate goal. So do you have your goals written down? Do you know what you’re working towards? A lot of times — so I work with a lot of independent community pharmacies as well as independent consultants who want to go in physicians’ offices. But they will not have kind of a guiding goal. So take health and wellness, for instance, if your big goal is to become a health and wellness destination, you know, maybe some of these other programs, it’s OK to say, “No, I don’t think that’s right for my audience at this time.” And that’s how I do a lot in the academy now is looking at so is this right for my audience? Is this program going to help them move forward with their goals? And then ultimately, advance the profession of pharmacy and help them add millions of dollars of revenue to their businesses? So I think it really is about going back to those goals and staying focused. So in the beginning, it was hard. I mean, but I loved it. I would get up early Sunday mornings and stay up late at night after my daughter went to bed. And I truly enjoyed what I was doing and working on my business. Whatever you choose, make sure whatever business you choose to go into that you’re cool with talking about it all the time because I really feel like I could talk about MTM and entrepreneurship all the time and never run out of words and run out stuff to talk about. And that’s the fire and the passion that you need to be able to bring to your business in order to have the endurance because I mean, it is a long game. That’s why I tell people, don’t build a website unless you have a long-term plan to bring traffic to it. Or don’t start a podcast unless you have a long-term plan to continuously upload episodes.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and that passion comes through in what you do. And I think it’s contagious and really allows the success that you’ve had and the academy members and drawing people to you. So before we talk about the academy and the virtual summit here to wrap up, how about a book and/or a podcast recommendation for our audience? Something that’s inspiring you, that you’re pulling from, that’s motivating you, that you think would be valuable to our community.

Blair Thielemier: Oh, so next up on my read list — I haven’t read it yet — is “Mindset” by Carol Dweck.

Tim Ulbrich: Heard of that.

Blair Thielemier: Yeah. So I’ve listened to her on a couple podcasts, and I really like what she’s doing. So mindset is a huge, huge issue for people. So one of the things that held me back in the beginning was I was afraid to one, to market myself as an expert, so to speak, in the field. And then two was I was worried what other people would think of me. I would put out a video, and instantly be like, should I take that down? You know? Because I was worried, what will my colleagues think? What will my husband’s friends think? What will all these people think? And you know, and occasionally, people would say to me, “Oh, I watched your video, but I didn’t understand what you were talking about.” And so, I would just kind of, “Oh yeah, you know, well it’s because it’s for pharmacists. You’re not my target audience,” obviously, but I think having the mindset of like I’m going to do this for me, whether or not anyone else is listening, that was really kind of the what I needed to hear in the very beginning, and I heard that from my business coaches and my mentors of saying, “You know what, just keep doing what you’re doing. You’re going in the right direction.” Even when other people were saying, “I don’t think pharmacists would pay for that. I don’t think they’re going to join your course. I don’t think they’re going to pay a monthly fee for business coaching from you.” And I still hear it. I still hear people say, “Oh, I think your course should be lower so students can join,” or “I think your course should be higher.”

Tim Ulbrich: They would be saying the same thing if it were a third of the price, right?

Blair Thielemier: Exactly. So it’s a lot of like just listening to yourself, and if you’re comfortable with it, I think just pick a direction, pick a number, and go with it. You can always change and reiterate later. But I think that was a big part. So the “Mindset” book by Carol Dweck I think if anyone wants to chat with me about it, I’m going to have lots of time for reading here coming up as we’re headed to South Africa, so it’s going to be a very long plane ride. So I’m getting my Audible and my podcasts cued up.

Tim Ulbrich: I look forward to reading it. Mindset is my personal mission for 2019 for all of the reasons that you mentioned. And I think similar to you, as I look back to my business journey and even just personal life, you know, whether it’s places stumbled, mistakes that I’ve made, if I wouldn’t have confidently taken the step to put myself out there, I would have never made those mistakes, which every one of those has been a learning opportunity, which has resulted in something else being better that I can bring better value to our community. So I think having the mindset around how you may go into certain situations, mistakes that you’ve made and looking at those as opportunities to continue to grow your business. So let’s finish up here, the Elevate Virtual Summit coming up May 8-12, 2019. Our listeners, I hope you’ll be there, great content planned, as Blair mentioned. You can get your free ticket by registering at ElevatePharmacySummit.com, and we’ll make sure to link to that in the show notes. And Blair, just for a minute, the Pharmapreneur Academy, I referenced that in our introduction, our listeners can go to YourFinancialPharmacist.com/academy, and they can use the coupon code YFP50 to get $50 off their first month. But tell us a little bit more about what our audience can expect if they were to engage a little bit more in that academy.

Blair Thielemier: So the academy, as I mentioned, is the e-course I built based on our one-on-one coaching program. So I created the MTM consulting program as the base of the academy. Since then, I have continued to build on new trainings and new modules. We go from very beginner stuff like should I get an LLC? Where do I find liability insurance? You know, how do I cold-call my potential clients? OK, they said yes. Now they want me to implement annual wellness visits in a primary care clinic. What do I do next? Or OK, now I want to do cash-based genomic consulting. What should I do with that? So the e-course, it builds on itself, and it goes from the beginner stages up through much more advanced content. So it’s a self-paced e-course. You can log in, get instant access. If you use the coupon code YFP50, you’re going to get $50 off the first month. And so you can cancel that anytime. It is a recurring membership, but we don’t hold anyone hostage. So you come in, go through the e-course, use the forums. The forums is where, you know, a lot of our members say is their favorite part of the academy because they ask questions, they get feedback not only from me but from the other pharmacists in there, so we’ve got about 150 pharmacists that are in the academy. You know, it’s not like a forum if you’re part of one of your national organization’s forums that you ask a question in the forums, it may or may not get answered. Or you may not get the answer you were actually looking for. These forums are monitored every single day by me and my team, and you are guaranteed to get an answer from one of us. So that’s where we kind of do our daily group business coaching. And then we also have a monthly member call the last Tuesday of every month, it’s a live Zoom call, like a video conference call that everyone who’s a current academy member can jump on, sometimes we bring guest experts like you, Tim, in to talk about –

Tim Ulbrich: Looking forward to it.

Blair Thielemier: Yeah, to talk about like financial, getting your financial foundation under you or in January, we brought in a sales coach, the sales maven Nikki Rausch, so whatever it may be, we kind of sometimes bring in guest experts, sometimes, we just do a Q&A, sometimes, I’ll do a special training. It really depends on feedback from the academy members. And that’s something that I’m big on. I probably ask for feedback maybe too much, but I really want to continue to build and grow the academy, and I do that by listening to what our members are telling me that they need.

Tim Ulbrich: Awesome. So again, that’s YourFinancialPharmacist.com/academy. YFP community members can get $50 off their first month by using the code YFP50. Blair, this has been fantastic. I’ve enjoyed this, looking forward to collaborating in the future. And thank you so much for your time and coming on the show.

Blair Thielemier: Thank you for having me.

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YFP 088: Introducing YFP Planning!

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Introducing YFP Planning!

On this episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist Podcast, YFP Co-founders Tim Ulbrich and Tim Baker announce some exciting news as it relates to the launch of YFP Planning, talk through the benefits of financial planning for pharmacists and reminisce on the origins of Your Financial Pharmacist.

Summary

On this episode, Tim and Tim dive right into an exciting announcement regarding the launch of YFP Planning. YFP Planning provides comprehensive fee only financial planning services now as part of Your Financial Pharmacist. Formerly Script Financial, YFP Planning covers anything that has to do with your financial situation including cash flow, budgeting, insurance, retirement, tax preparation, and estate planning.

Tim Baker, CFP and head of YFP Planning, shares that financial success and wealth were based off of an old equation that is now a myth. The old method of thinking focused on being income statement affluent where a high income is made, however you have no savings to show for it. Conversely, balance sheet affluence is where money flows in and actually sticks so you can save for a purpose.

Comprehensive financial planning forces you to look at your current financial state and make moves to better it. This can be especially helpful for pharmacists who typically have higher incomes and a lot of student loan and credit card debt. YFP Planning doesn’t just provide you with information on how to pay off your loans, save money, or create a budget, but instead also offers accountability and coaching. Having someone offering an objective approach to your financial situation helps you to see the whole picture and pushes you to take the steps you need to reach your goals.

The YFP Planning process starts of with a free discovery meeting where the YFP Planning team learns more about you. If you decide to move ahead with YFP Planning, the first meeting focuses on getting organized. Then, another meeting is scheduled to discuss your goals and dig deeper into some questions you may have not asked yourself about your financial situation or goals.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Ulbrich: Hey, what’s up, everybody? Welcome to Episode 088 of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast. Excited to be here with Tim Baker after we’ve had a series of side hustles represented by the one and only Tim Church. He’s doing a great job with that series, the side hustle series, so if you haven’t listened to those, check those out. Tim Baker, welcome back to the show. It’s been awhile since we recorded. I think — what? The New Year Game Plan back in Episode 081.

Tim Baker: I know. It’s actually crazy, like I think — not to be a broken record, but it’s actually nice to be like a listener and to hear all of these inspiring people come on and just the work that you’re doing and Church is doing on the podcast, like it’s really cool to see. Yeah, things have been good, been super, super busy, lots of things going on. But yeah, excited to be back on the podcast today.

Tim Ulbrich: I’m with you on that one. I kind of like the surprise of like an episode going online and get to see it as a listener and hearing the past couple weeks and being inspired by some of the pharmacists out there doing some awesome side hustle stuff. So we’ve got more of that coming also in the new year. So lots going on in your world and the tax prep, right? So we just did a webinar recently. And tell us more about what’s going on in that arena.

Tim Baker: Yeah, so one of the things that I really was thinking about in terms of like Script Financial and really providing great service to our clients is what are some things that really, we have to work through and really deal with every year? And it’s really tax. So before, you know, obviously, I’m a CFP, and a major component of that is tax, but I really wanted to learn more and look at ways to almost start a tax business as part of this Script Financial. And when the things with the Tims all kind of took off, I kind of set that aside. But I was lucky enough to have Paul Eichenberg, who’s a member of my team, who has experience with tax, become part of the team and really offer that as a service to our clients. So last night, we did our first webinar, our first YFP webinar. And it was great. We had great attendance and just kind of a learning experience for us on the webinar side. But yeah, we’re super excited to roll that out for clients. So when clients work with me, comprehensive is just kind of included in their fees, so every year, we’re doing a little bit of tax prep, which is kind of what we’re going through right now, this time of year. And really, kind of the planning that I’m a big believer in that, hey, halfway through the year, let’s take a look and do a projection and make sure that we’re not paying Uncle Sam too much or getting a refund back or whatever that looks like. So yeah, big changes, but very exciting. And just excited to roll that out.

Tim Ulbrich: Awesome. Yeah, you guys have been doing great work there. Shoutout to Paul, I think he’s doing an awesome job leading that. And for those that are listening that aren’t yet clients, if you want to learn more about that service, YourFinancialPharmacist.com/tax. And as Tim mentioned, that’s both inclusive of the filing part but also the strategy part of looking ahead to say, what can we be doing to maximize the tax situation heading into 2019? So Tim, we’ve got some exciting news to share on today’s episode alongside a discussion we’re going to have on the decision to hire a financial planner. One of the most common questions that we get — and we’re also going to be reminiscing along the way about our journey as we both individually reflect back on all of the things that have happened really leading up to this moment. And I think it’s — to be frank, I’ve been kind of giddy about this because, you know, when you and I met just a few years ago, I feel like really, the culmination of that vision is coming together. And it’s been a really, really fun ride. So before we start getting too sentimental, Tim Baker, let’s cut to the chase. Give us the good news. What’s the announcement?

Tim Baker: Yeah. So the big change is that Script Financial, which I just talked about, which I launched way back when in 2016 is now YFP Planning. So this has kind of been kind of in the works, so Script Financial is now part of the Your Financial Pharmacist brand. It’s just super exciting. I know Tim, like when I think back when we met, you know, via Twitter way back when, I never imagined that it would kind of lead our paths to this, but it just made sense in terms of kind of our beliefs and I think what we’re really trying to do in terms of empowering pharmacists and pharmacy students to really take control of their finances. So whether it is the blog or the podcast or a course or doing your taxes or comprehensive financial planning, which is kind of my bread and butter, you know, we felt like basically having that under one brand and one mantle made the most sense, so I’m giddy as well. I’m super excited about I think where we can really take this and I think with good feedback from our listenership and readers and all that basically YFP subscribers to kind of listen to what is needed and adapt. And I think one of the things that really was a catalyst for me to leave kind of the traditional financial planning firm was, you know, there wasn’t really a lot of planning out there for young professionals or individuals that were dealing with student debt or just cash flow and budgeting. So I think in that same breath, we always want to make sure that we’re adapting to the needs of the community and what’s out there and what pharmacists are dealing with. So I’m just super excited to really get going on this and kind of do this relaunch of the brand.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, I’m with you on that. And one of the most common questions we get is, hey, do you guys offer comprehensive financial planning? And for our listeners, here’s the answer. Yes, yes we do. So YFPPlanning.com is the launch of the site. So if you’ve been hearing us talk about Script Financial, Tim’s brand and company, we all are now one entity. So YourFinancialPharmacist.com, you can get there as well or directly at YFPPlanning.com. And I think this really, for me, as I mentioned before, is a culmination of the vision that we had when we sat down at Bob Edmund’s on I-71 in Mansfield, Ohio, and I was actually there with Jess and the boys recently, and I was kind of — I mean, she probably was looking at me like, why are you staring off into the distance?

Tim Baker: Get a little teary-eyed.

Tim Ulbrich: Got a little teary-eyed, I was looking at the booth where we sat and had my boys there, and it was just kind of a cool moment. But just sharing that vision of like, you know, we are so passionate about helping pharmacists in this area, and I think our vision at the time was, hey, everything A to Z. Everything from debt to budgeting to investing to estate planning in all forms and fashions, we want to be involved with pharmacy and helping people along that journey toward financial freedom, which for everyone means something different. And we had this vision that whether you want to come to YourFinancialPharmacist.com and check out our free resources and calculators, which we have a ton out there, or you feel like financial planning’s a great fit for you, we’ve got that all now in one place. So let me ask you the obvious question because I think it’s worth digging in a little bit deeper is, what does comprehensive financial planning mean? Because I think we throw that out there, and the industry, as we’ve talked about before in Episodes 015, 016 and 017, you know, is very different in terms of what you’ll get for that service. So for you and for us, what does that term mean?

Tim Baker: Yeah, I think I look at it as if it has a dollar sign, we’ll work through it. To me, if I’m hiring a professional to help me with my finances, I want someone — I want there to be someone in my corner that has my back, that has my best interests in mind, which unfortunately, the way the industry is set up, that’s not always the case. So I think we’re touching on all of the things that are related to the financial plan, more specifically, things like debt management and kind of your fundamentals and cash flow and insurance and retirement and estate. But there are going to be things that are beyond that, those life events that come up, and I think it’s just really important to have someone that understands what your goals are and kind of understands really the technical piece of the financial plan and point you in the right direction. You know, so much of kind of the old equation or the old guard of financial planning was to push product. Hey, you’re a pharmacist or a doctor, here’s a life insurance policy that, you know, is probably going to pay me a lot of commission or a disability policy or an investment. And I’ll talk to you once a year. That’s not necessarily, you know, the model that we employ. So I think that the idea that a lot of things in life, even in the financial services, is becoming more and more of a commodity. So you know, really what we’re focused on is kind of bringing that life plan that fits the view of what your view of a wealthy life is and have the finances really support that. Typically, most people don’t — they don’t accumulate wealth for the sake of accumulating wealth. It’s for, you know, the fact that they want to retire at age 50 or they want to have this vacation home in the woods somewhere. So that’s really the idea is to connect the dots with, OK, what is a wealthy life? And then how do we get there? And that’s, to me, that’s what fires me up.

Tim Ulbrich: Awesome. Love it. You know, Tim, one of the things that stands out to me is over the Facebook YFP Book Club right now, we’re working through the book, “The Next Millionaire Next Door,” by — we’ve talked about it on this podcast — Dr. Tom Stanley, Dr. Sarah Fallaw, which reminds me of our journey and our beliefs to buck the status quo and complacency that’s out there when it comes to achieving financial freedom and building wealth. And the one takeaway that I remember from this book and the first one that was published back in the ‘90s is that this old equation of high income=success is a myth. It’s a false reality. But so many pharmacists, myself included at one point, really subscribe to this false reality. So tell us more about this old equation and how you see pharmacists kind of falling into this trap.

Tim Baker: Yeah, it’s kind of what they talk about when we talk about income statement affluent versus balance sheet affluent. So essentially, income statement affluent — and I see this a lot where, you know, you have a household that makes $200,000, $300,000, $400,000 or whatever that looks like and have nothing to show for it: have no savings, have credit card debt, and essentially, the money, the household’s like a siv, the money comes right in and goes right out. Balance sheet affluent — and I’ve seen this even with residents who make $40,000 or $50,000 or incomes of less than $100,000 — balance sheet affluent are those people that when the money flows in, it actually sticks. And you’re saving for the purpose of retirement or a kid’s education or whatever it is. So the reality is that you’re spending, you know, for a lot of people, a lot of people will say, “Hey, I wish I could make a little bit more. I wish I could get a 10% raise, and then all of my concerns could be put at ease.” But the reality is and the psychology shows us that most people, their spending rises with really their income. So you know, if I double your salary tomorrow, a lot of people will double their spending. So the old equation is, you know, basically is when you follow traditional advice, you should really enjoy your income and really live for today, and we see that in society as being — we very much live on credit and we spend, spend, spend, you know, car payments, a big mortgage, that type of thing where what we really want to do — and it often leads to things that give us stress, so I’m thinking back to Jessica Louie about clutter and things like that. A lot of it is very near-term, like satisfaction of like, oh, this is awesome. But then we just surround ourselves — and I’ve been this way in my life in the past where I’m like, I just have all this stuff that I really don’t like or want that just causes more stress. So I think, you know, the idea is we want to make sure that we are being intentional. We talk about being intentional with our spending. And develop a savings plan that allows you to allocate dollars for the things that mean the most, whether that is a vacation to the Pacific Northwest, whether that is a vacation home in the woods or a trip to Paris, France. Those are really the things that I think are what I talk about life plan that are more important.

Tim Ulbrich: Amen. Preach it, Tim Baker.

Tim Baker: Yeah.

Tim Ulbrich: Preach. You know, it’s interesting because we just finished up “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” in the book club, and now we’re reading “The Next Millionaire Next Door,” and that wasn’t intentional, but two very — I don’t know if different is the right word — but just very philosophically — you know, “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” to me is all about growing the asset line and thinking about real estate and those types of things.

Tim Baker: Yeah.

Tim Ulbrich: And I think that “The Millionaire Next Door” focuses much more on frugality and cutting expenses, both of which are very important. And Jess and I were having a conversation the other night is you put the two of those concepts together, and boom. It’s like, game on, right?

refinance student loans

Tim Baker: Yep.

Tim Ulbrich: And I was even thinking back to this old equation, thinking back to 2009, you know, Jess and I had over $200,000 of student loan debt, we had a house with almost no equity, we soon had a growing family to support with the loss of one of our incomes because she was going to be staying home. And we realized that despite all of the amazing opportunities that have been afforded to us, there’s really little discussed truth among practitioners, ourselves included, in this field about how to manage this. And I think many pharmacists listening find themselves in exactly the same boat. And so as you meet with pharmacists or residents or fellows or students, what are some of the most common frustrations and things that you’re hearing from them?
Tim Baker: Yeah, it’s a great question. And typically, when I meet with a prospective client, I’ll lay out essentially three things. And I’ll say, “Hey, Tim,” — you know, typically, when a pharmacist such as yourself comes to speak with me about their finances, they share one of a few things. It could be “I’m overwhelmed with student debt,” or even credit card debt, I’m seeing that more and more, this credit card debt. “I am confused how to properly budget, save and invest in my future.” And that’s kind of a broad, that’s a broader one. But it typically hits for most people. And the last one is, you know, “I’m frustrated by the fact that I make a good income, but I’m not progressing financially.” And kind of this idea of living paycheck-to-paycheck and maybe not enjoying kind of their work because they could be stuck in that work because they need that income, that type of thing. So there’s a lot — and typically, when I kind of go through those pain points, a lot of pharmacists look at me and then they say, “You just described me. Like you’re three-for-three.” So I think it hits on a point a lot of kind of what we’re talking about with empowering pharmacists to really get going on this because you can meander in life and wake up when you’re 45, 55, and really have nothing to show for it. It’s really that easy to do. So I think like part of what we do at YFP Planning now is really, we kind of force you to look at it. We meet quite often, so we almost like force you to really look at that, look at the kind of your current state and make moves to better it. And really examine — we often don’t do enough self-reflection, not just about finances but about life in general. You know, so when I say, “Hey, Tim, what does success look like in five years?” what I often see is, “Wow, that’s a really good question. I never really thought about that.” And then the other things I see, particularly between spouses is kind of like that rubberneck, like I can’t believe that these are the things that you want in five years or that type of thing. And again, it’s hard for us to imagine our five-year-older self, and essentially what I do with clients that if you’re 30 right now, you’re 35, I’m like, imagine when you’re 35 or 40, and put yourself in that place. So I think like the pain points are definitely real, and it’s easy to put your head in the sand and kind of not look at it and just live with it, but I think the sooner that we can kind of get a plan in place, the better. And hopefully, we can do that for you.

Tim Ulbrich: And I think just to build on that, Tim, one of the things I see, I’m sure you see it more often that people often come up to me after a talk or ask a question, and they’ll describe that “I really want to pay off my $200,000 student loans,” or “I really want to save $4 million for retirement.” But when I ask that next-level question of why or what’s motivating you or what’s going to keep you going, there really isn’t much thought there, right? And I think that goes to the point of visualization and thinking about not only your why but where you see yourself in five or 10 or 15 years. And what would be the negative impact if you didn’t do this? Or what are you hoping to achieve by doing this? And I think that gets to the point of accountability and coaching. And one of the things that excites me as we think about YFP Planning is that for the past few years on YFP at YourFinancialPharmacist.com, we’ve been providing a ton of information — and a shoutout here to Tim Church, who has done an unbelievable job.

Tim Baker: Yes.

Tim Ulbrich: The guides, the checklists, the calculators, the blogs, the podcasts. But what I’m getting to here is it’s not just about information. I’ve seen this firsthand with Jess and I working with you that I read on this topic all the time, but at the end of the day, if I don’t have an accountability partner or a coach, things may not get done. And you know, there’s a quote out there. It says, “If information was the answer, then we’d all be millionaires with perfect abs,” right? So you know, talk to me about accountability and coaching. And I think often, there’s this misperception that hey, my financial planner’s going to help me get x return on my investments when really, maybe the accountability and the coaching is the more important piece.

Tim Baker: Yeah, I think like when I look at it, you know, I kind of go through like when I more or less explain to a client what we do, a lot of it is kind of touching on the different parts of the financial plan, but I almost say like at the end of it, like crumble all that up and throw it away because really, I think the value that we provide is kind of the ongoing coaching and accountability. The technical side of it is important, but you think about even like in pharmacy, like it’s important that you know your stuff, but a lot of it is adherence, right? You want to make sure that your patients are taking their medication and all that kind of stuff. So like it’s the same thing as like I could give — what I tell clients often is just because life is so busy, I could give you the most well thought out, awesome financial plan. Most people will read it, say, “Hey, that’s nice.” And they’ll throw it on the shelf, and nothing ever gets done. So I think what we try to do is provide some, you know, where we have a client portal and we try to put those tasks back into the client portal, that pings them and reminds them. And really, again, the fact that we meet frequently, we’re trying to always push the ball forward and cross those things off the list, whether it’s getting your will done or insurance in place or setting up this Ally account for the purposes of Paris, France, which I want them to label it as “Paris, France,” even if it sits empty for two years. I don’t care. I want that there, ready to receive money when that happens. So I think that — I think that the accountability is important. But I also put a heavy premium on the objectivity. So you know, if we take you and Jess as an example, you guys view money differently. So sometimes, it’s good to have someone that has an objective opinion that says, “Hey, these are what my thoughts are, and this is my advice.” So I think if you couple the objectivity and kind of the objective approach to the financial plan with the kind of the ongoing coaching and accountability, it’s a deadly combination. And that’s what I think that often falls short with a lot of other advisors, so sometimes I’ll ask a prospective client, “Hey, who ultimately is going to make the decision? Is it you? Is it you and your spouse? Is it you and a Yoda in your life? What does that look like?” And a lot of times, you know, people will say, “Well, I really respect my dad’s opinion.” They have an advisor, and that’s an objection I kind of have to overcome because most of the time, dad’s advisor is not going to understand or really value what we do because dad’s advisor will typically — you’ll pay based on the assets that are invested and then maybe — and if they don’t have minimums like $250,000 or $100,000 minimums, and they will work with a younger professional, then they talk to you once or twice a year. That’s not our model. We’re very different. So it’s not an apples-to-apples approach. So again, I think the coaching and the accountability part is such a big part of that that I think it’s a differentiating factor between us and other financial planners.

Tim Ulbrich: So Tim, hopefully this is a feel-good for you, but as you were talking right then, I just started making a list of all of the things that Jess and I accomplished in the last three months that I’m confident we either would not have done or would not have done as quickly without your accountability and coaching. So I’m sure I’m missing some, but we’re back on track with our zero-based budget, using YNAB, we got the estate planning documents wrapped up, emergency fund is back to full fund after we moved recently, we worked through plussing up our disability and life insurance policies, umbrella insurance policies, we worked through lowering fees on investments, asset allocation of accounts, and setting up our savings sheet with our sinking funds. And even to your point earlier, some of those have a $0 but are a reminder of the goals that we have, right? So we have some real estate goals at $0 right now. That’s not the point. The point is it’s a reminder of the goal that we’re trying to get to and because of that, even at $0, it’s something that Jess and I are talking about. So that’s the power of accountability right there. Would I have done those things did I have the knowledge to do them? Yes. Would I have executed? Maybe yes, maybe no. And that matters.

Tim Baker: Well, it makes my heart happy. And you guys are great clients, so I think that, yeah, I think that it’s good feedback. Now, the 403b that we have in transit, that’s a work in progress. I’ll talk to you about that today. But you know, there’s always things that, you know — and again, it’s kind of like an ebb and flow. So it’s never going to be clean-cut in terms of like, hey, we knocked this out. Things are going to change in life. And imagine like in your life alone, what has changed over this past year, and you’ve accomplished all that, and you’ve been really intentional about that. And I think almost working together has kind of forced us into that. And I think that’s great. And yeah, I think that it’s hard to — so a lot of — it’s hard to quantify that, though. Like how do you quantify? Because at the end of the day, pharmacists are scientists. They’re very analytical, so they want to say, OK, if I’m paying this amount of fee, am I going to get this return? And I put that back on how do you value x or how do you value y? But I understand, like you have to get value from that. But yeah, it’s great feedback. And I think the things that really fire me up are those types of, that type of feedback but also seeing a client — and I have a few clients in mind that come to me with $40,000 in credit card debt, and they pay it off like aggressively, very quickly, so we can move onto the next thing. And we can see the movement in their overall net worth, so where before they were -$200,000, maybe they’re now they’re only -$140,000, which sounds like people laugh at that, but those are real dollars that we’re making moves towards. So I love those cases, and it inspires me to kind of keep going and really be the advisor, be the planner there that is there to back them up and really encourage them and really give them tough love when they need it as well.

Tim Ulbrich: Alright, so Tim, we’ve talked before on this podcast many times about the value of fee-only financial planning. Episodes 015-017, which I referenced earlier, and lots of variability that’s out there in the financial planning industry. So just real brief, fee-only, what is it? And why does it matter?

Tim Baker: Yeah, so I guess in my profession — and I guess I struggle to call it a profession for a lot of reasons, but really, the way that advisors are really identified, so if we have any John Oliver fans out there who does Last Week Tonight, he does a segment on financial advisors and kind of what they are and how they work, and I always reference that because I think it’s actually pretty funny and pretty accurate. You know, essentially, a financial advisor or financial planner, that name really doesn’t mean anything. Unlike a PharmD, an MD, a JD that actually carries weight to it, the CFP has, that’s kind of like an accreditation that you want, a Certified Financial Planner, but essentially, financial advisors, financial planners, are typically categorized in three buckets. You have a commission agent, which in the very extreme example, think of like Wolf of Wall Street. “Hey, Tim, I’m walking in the parking lot, I had this great idea on a stock that I want to sell you or this life insurance plan or this disability policy.” It’s very transactional, and it’s the sale of product. So I’m trying to get my commission and then go. The fee-based world, which this is where I started in the industry before I launched Script Financial was fee-based. Fee-based is basically where you have advice and the sale of product, basically they’re merged together. And anytime that happens, you have a conflict of interest. So in my last firm, I would say, “Hey, client, I could sell you this mutual fund that pays me a 1% commission and a 1% trail or this one that pays me a 5% commission. Or if we talked about term and whole-life, this particular term policy pays me a commission of x and whole-life pays me a lot more,” so anytime that you have — and we see this, Tim, we see this with physicians. So physicians are not supposed to get kickbacks on the medication they’re prescribing because, you know, there’s a conflict there. So it’s the same in our industry, except right now, most of the advisors out there operate in that fee-based world. What fee-only does, and it’s a very, very small subset of financial advisors out there. I’ve heard estimates it’s less than 5%. What fee-only is is basically you separate the advice, the dispensing of advice, from the product. So my compensation comes directly from the client, there’s no kickback or referrals. It’s not through a mutual fund or insurance company. It comes directly from the clients. So I don’t really — I’m not influenced to put a client in Product X or Y. I want to basically — I’m giving them the advice, they’re paying me for the advice, and I’ll put them in products that I think are in their best interest. So the big thing with fee-only is that it follows that fiduciary standard of care, which means that I’m legally bound to act in my client’s best interest versus a suitability care, which the majority of advisors out there where they can actually put their own interests ahead of their clients’. Which is crazy to me that that is actually a thing.

Tim Ulbrich: And I think just to drive that home one step further, if we think about the traditional financial advising model, typically, there’s a compensation based on Assets Under Management, so how much you’ve invested with them or commission from product scales, which often are hidden from view or hourly fees. So in other words, that advisor is incentivized to focus on investing over other options. And sometimes, this means that your goals as the client and their goals as the advisor are not fully aligned. And that is so important for pharmacists to hear that message because as we launch YFP Planning, we talk about fee-only financial planning services, which is what you’ve been doing with Script Financial, that it really bucks that model entirely. And that’s really important for those of you that are looking comprehensively, that I need help with student loans, I need help with credit card debt, I need help with my budget, I need help with home buying, I need help with estate planning and all these other things with investments being one piece of that. But we’re not going to only focus on investments, ignoring the rest of the financial plan. And so I think that holistic model and that pricing incentivizes that comprehensive nature is incredibly important for our clients to be considering, whether it’s us or somebody else, to make sure that they’re looking at a model that’s fee-only, that there’s a right educational credential and that pricing is done so in a way that really incentivizes that advisor to work with you on a comprehensive nature.

Tim Baker: Yeah, and one of the things that frustrates me a bit is, you know, when I’m talking to a prospective client and they’re like, “Well, maybe I’ll go with my parents’ advisor that doesn’t charge them anything,” which is utterly false. It’s so, like, nothing comes free. So you know, typically, what happens there is that they don’t know what they’re being charged, which is a problem. Transparency is a problem in our industry. So that’s a problem. But I think also is the — I think when you work with a professional, there’s almost like a sense that they know what they’re talking about. And I would say by and large, most advisors have no idea what to do with student loans or how to help clients with a budget because it’s just not something, you know, most advisors want minimums of $250,000 in investable assets, so there’s almost this assumption of wealth. So it’s like, “Hey, kid straight out of pharmacy school, good on you. But you don’t need financial planning help,” which is utterly false. It’s just that their model is set in a way that they’re incentivized to go after those that have investable assets. And then really with the student loan piece in particular, I’ve had clients that say, “Hey, I’ve been working with this other advisor, and their advice on the student loans was like, oh, they’ll just take care of themselves. They’ll just amortize over time,” which is like ugh, I just want to scream to the heavens and say, “No, that is terrible advice.” But then they’re also in a whole-life policy or whatever. So it’s just crazy talk.

Tim Ulbrich: Follow the dollar. Follow the dollar.

Tim Baker: Yeah, exactly.

Tim Ulbrich: So talk us through the process at YFP Planning. Where do people begin? And then once they go through that process of trying to figure out is it a good fit for them or not? What does that look like from there?

Tim Baker: Yeah, so it’s a great question, Tim. So I think the best, you know, if you’re listening to this podcast and you’re like, man, I think this works for me, probably the best thing would be to go YFPPlanning.com, and you can actually schedule like a free discovery meeting with myself. And really, this allows me to kind of learn a little bit about you and potentially your spouse, what are the big issues that we’re dealing with and kind of talk through the process and what we do and kind of get a sense of each other to see if we would be a good fit. So you know, if we decide that, we kind of go through a step to kind of get you onboarded. So it could be really the first meeting that we have is get organized. So in the get organized meeting, we essentially look at your client portal. So once you become a client, you get a welcome email that says, “Hey, start linking all of your things to the client portal: your checking, your savings, your student loans, all that.” And what I’m doing is I’m building the first lens in which I’m going to look through to give you advice. So I’m looking at a snapshot of your income and your net worth, and then we also do kind of a 90-day retroactive budget exercise just to see how money is flowing through the household. So that’s really the first meeting. And then from there, we essentially schedule the second meeting, which is the second lens in which I’m looking through is it’s all about the goals and kind of hearkens back to the three questions that we went through with you and Jess. And really, it’s where I learn the most about my clients and really how the client views what a wealthy life is. So we’re going to ask you thought-provoking questions that you probably have not asked yourself. But the idea is to really, based on those two meetings, build a plan in a way that I am helping you grow and protect income and grow and protect your net worth while keeping your goals in mind. To me, that’s the name of the game.

Tim Ulbrich: So Tim, I’m guessing some are thinking, can I just do all of this myself? So what is your answer to that? Because I know for you, fit is very important in terms of the right fit for you, the right fit for the client. So what is your response to that?

Tim Baker: Yeah, I think, you know, I think the answer is that you can. You absolutely can. And there are a lot of people that kind of more of a DIY approach. And Tim, I would probably put you as a more DIY, especially before we first met, but I think once you start working with someone and you can kind of see the power of kind of the ongoing coaching and accountability, it almost kicks that into second gear. So I think you can. I think my view on that is, you know, I’m a financial planner, and I need a financial planner because, again, I need someone to objectively look at Shea and I’s situation and say, hey, we come from very different places in terms of money. These are our goals, how do we get there? So I get it. Pharmacists are very smart. They’re very analytical. But you know, even if you’re going to play a sport, you’re going to workout, typically, you have a trainer or you have a coach that kind of looks at your situation and looks at it from that third-party viewpoint and say, “Hey, brass tax, these are things that I think you’re doing well at. These are things that I think we need to improve upon.” So I think that you can. I would argue that what we do across the board with tax — so the slide that I put up last night was the average pharmacist will make $9 million, and $6 million will flow through your accounts. What’s at stake is really the $3 million that typically is eaten up by tax. How do we be as efficient with that as possible? You know, I’m analyzing an individual’s 401k now, and their expense ratios are like 2.67%, which is crazy. Like it’s crazy. So with a little bit of adjustment, we can really lower that substantially. And over the course of their lifetime, we’ll save probably hundreds of thousands of dollars, not an exaggeration.

Tim Ulbrich: Maybe more.

Tim Baker: Maybe more. And again, that’s not a guarantee or anything, so nothing like that. But like, it’s those types of things that either you — the audience, you guys are trained as pharmacists, you’re not really trained to look at some of these things that I do every day with clients. So it’s just that other, maybe more technical piece of it to really look at. And again, I think kind of the high-touch that we are with offering the tax and the cash flow and budgeting piece is I think a really differentiator between us and maybe the other guy.

Tim Ulbrich: So to our listeners, regardless of whether you choose to explore YFP Planning, I want to offer up a challenge to you that is two questions. No. 1, what are you going to do in the next 30 days to change your financial situation? And No. 2, what’s the first step that you’re going to take towards your wealthy life? Because everyone we’ve talked to, myself included, constantly says, “I wish I would have started earlier,” right? And when I go talk with students and residents and I talk with faculty and pharmacists and preceptors, the one thing they say is, “I wish I would have started earlier,” or “I wish I would have learned this information sooner.” So Tim, let’s wrap up here. Just give us a little bit of background on the YFP Planning team — I know it’s a team that’s growing — and what our listeners can expect as they engage with us as a group.

Tim Baker: Yeah, so I’m super fortunate enough to have a good team that surrounds me. Like I mentioned, Paul who was on our webinar last night, he is essentially my go-to. He’s basically Director of Operations and Tax. So he handles all of the tax returns internally. Frankie, who’s my assistant, she does all the behind-the-scenes work that sets me up for meetings and follow-up and all the things that are crucial to kind of push the financial plan forward and helps me with that. And Tom, who’s my assistant advisor. And all Tom does is work on cash flow and budget. He’s a super nerd, he likes that stuff.

Tim Ulbrich: Super nerd.

Tim Baker: Super nerd, yeah. So I’m so happy to have them as part of my team. And of course, you guys in terms of helping the firm grow and Caitlyn, who does an excellent job with the podcast, all integral parts of the team. But I think like as we — and Tim, I was thinking about this, like you know, the other day, I’m like maybe we should have like a career section on our website. Because I think that we are growing, and I would love to be able to have maybe jobs out there that maybe would be interesting to the YFP community. But I’m excited. We’re looking at bringing on a paraplanner in the coming weeks and just to add additional backup. And I think as we grow, one of the things that we’re really — and we talk about this a lot, kind of the three Tims — is making sure that our brand is — we want to make sure that what we represent and what we believe in is kind of is shown amongst all of our team members. So I’m just excited about, you know, really the rebrand and I think where we’re going to take this going into 2019 and beyond.

Tim Ulbrich: Absolutely. And to the point you made about the careers piece, we’ve got some exciting announcements coming out, looking for some writers that are passionate about this topic.

Tim Baker: Yes.

Tim Ulbrich: We welcome and value other perspectives. And then also, we’ve been floating around the idea of a student internship. So if there’s any students out there listening that are nerds on this topic, we’d love to hear from you. [email protected]. And we’re hoping to make that a reality here in 2019. So to the YFP community, as always, we appreciate you joining us each and every week. And we’re excited to be on this journey alongside of you. And if you’re not yet a part of the community over at the Your Financial Pharmacist Facebook group, check it out. That group every day inspires me as they’re challenging, helping one another, motivating one another, sharing success stories, looking for encouragement. So again, that’s the Your Financial Pharmacist Facebook group. Tim, it’s been a lot of fun, as always, with this episode and the journey, and looking forward to an awesome 2019.

Tim Baker: Same here.

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YFP 087: Student Loan Updates with Travis Hornsby

Posted on by yfpadmin

Student Loan Updates with Travis Hornsby

On this episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast, Tim Ulbrich interviews Travis Hornsby, Founder of Student Loan Planner and Chief Student Loan Planner. Travis shares student loan updates and talks about his journey starting the Student Loan Planner, the most common mistakes he sees pharmacists making with their student loans, the pros and cons of student loan refinancing, what legislative changes he anticipates will happen and the one step you can take today if you are feeling overwhelmed with where to go next with your student loans.

About Today’s Guest

Travis started Student Loan Planner in October 2016 after helping his wife and her friends figure out their six figure student loans. He used to be a bond trader, so he took his Excel heavy skill set and built models for how to save money paying back student debt. When he and his wife tackled her debt from med school, there were not a lot of resources out there for professionals like her. Most of the sites that did exist just wanted us to refinance so they could earn a commission.

Summary

Travis Hornsby, founder of Student Loan Planner, talks all things student loans with Tim Ulbrich. The Student Loan Planner has saved 1,500 clients a projected $80 million over the lifetime of their loans.

Before launching the Student Loan Planner, Travis worked as a bond trader for one of the world’s largest companies. However, he wasn’t excited about getting up for work in the morning. He sought early retirement, traveled the world, and met his now wife who had a lot of medical school debt. Travis used his experience with Excel to model paying off her student loans and did the same process later for a lot of their friends. This experience paired with his realization of how little or bad advice is given for paying off student loans led him to create his Student Loan Planner business.

Travis provides insight and updates for different loan repayment options and reminds those with pharmacy school student loan debt that they have a lot of options.

First, Travis discusses the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program (PSLF). He shares that a lot of people are getting the story wrong about the history and working of PSLF and thinks that in the future, borrowers taking this path will be grandfathered in to complete the program, even if the program has changed or doesn’t exist anymore.

Travis also discusses the return of investment of the pharmacy degree and that it’s important to take your focus off of debt and think about your broad financial goals, as this can aid in determining which repayment plan to chose. He also speaks about the refinancing market and how to know if that’s the option that will work best for your situation depending on your debt-to-income ratio. Travis talks about the benefits of the “refinancing ladder” and that you are able to refinance your loans multiple times.

He also gives advice to those that may be feeling overwhelmed by their debt. Travis shares that it’s important to determine what your goal is, whether it’s to get your student loan balance to zero or for your loans to be forgiven. This will help you determine which path to take and allow you to plan out how to repay your loans.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Ulbrich: Travis, welcome to the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast!

Travis Hornby: Great to be here, thanks for having me, Tim.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, I’m excited to have you on and talk all things student loans and excited to be able to pick your brain as somebody I view to be a leading expert in this space and hear more about the work you’ve done at Student Loan Planner and also talk about this topic, this behemoth that is student loans, the impact on pharmacy graduates, what you’re seeing with your clients and the future of student loans. Specifically, we’ll talk a little bit about loan forgiveness, refinancing and other things that I know our listeners are in tune with or want to learn more about. And Travis, I have to say, I was reflecting as I was going back, preparing for this episode. I think it was just over two years ago I heard about your journey, we had a phone call, got a chance to talk a little bit about the vision of what we each were working on. And it’s been incredible to watch what you have been doing over at Student Loan Planner, so congratulations on the work that you’ve done.

Travis Hornby: Thanks, and you know, great work as well, educating pharmacists and making them more financially literate. It’s badly, badly needed. So really grateful for Your Financial Pharmacist being out there. We’ve got very similar positive missions to try to help people as a community, so it’s exciting to talk.

Tim Ulbrich: Absolutely. And before I ask you to talk a little bit more about your journey of starting Student Loan Planner, I want to make our audience familiar with the work that you’re doing if they’re already not, so StudentLoanPlanner.com, and you have saved over 1,500 clients a projected $80 million over the lifetime of their loans. And we’ll talk a little bit about how you have done that. And the website, again, StudentLoanPlanner.com, is an incredible resource: up-to-date information, you’ve got the blog, you’ve now got the podcast we’ll talk about here in a little bit, calculators, quizzes. Your calculators are phenomenal. Is that you building those? I mean, that’s amazing if you’ve been building those calculators.

Travis Hornby: Yeah, you know, I did build it. That’s my background, I was a bond trader for one of the world’s largest investment companies, and you know, the career path is keep your head down, make a lot of good trades, you’ll work your way up to being a portfolio manager, and that’s a wonderful career path. It’s a very numerative career path, but it just wasn’t for me. It wasn’t what got me up in the morning, really passionate and excited to go to work. And I’m a big believer that no matter whether that’s in your field that you initially chose or whatever it is, you should try to seek it out. And so for me, that kind of led me to trying to do early retirement. So I actually quit my job at 25 and traveled the world for a little bit and then ended up dating this woman who had a lot of student loan debt, my now wife. And she had a lot of debt from medical school, and so I was thinking, well, you know, I’ve got all these Excel skills fresh out of being a bond trader. I should use these to model it for her. And I did. And then she told me to tell all her friends about it because they were in the same boat. And then we had friends when we were up in Philadelphia that were in a bunch of different graduate programs, and I found that the math was applicable to their situations as well. And then I thought, wow, this is a lot more fun than making rich people richer. Not that that’s a terrible thing because a lot of big investors are mom-and-pop type people, and that’s a noble goal, but it just wasn’t something that made me super excited to help people that already had figured out their financial issues.

Tim Ulbrich: So Travis, what were you seeing at the time in terms of — you mentioned your situation with your wife and the journey that you guys had paying that off, and you’ve kind of brought your experiences together as a bond trader. You had this desire of kind of doing something you are passionate about. What did you see in your own journey as it related to paying off student loan debt and achieving that vision of becoming debt-free? And why were you then passionate about spreading that onto others?

Travis Hornby: Sure. So a lot of your pharmacists that are listening to this that work at not-for-profit or government employers will really feel the pain here, will really feel our pain. So my wife worked at a not-for-profit employer when she was in residency and in fellowship. So she had a bunch of credit towards loan forgiveness. And then at about year 7 or 8, you know, in terms of the numbers of years toward the 10 that she needed to get public service loan forgiveness, she submitted all the paperwork after I made her realize that hey, this is a thing, you should really apply for this, you should be eligible for this and then we should be able to just cap your payments out on the IBR plan for the last two or three years of it when you’re attending, and we should be able to get $100,000 wiped away. And so I submitted all the forms, and then Fed Loan came back to us and said, “You don’t have any credit on half of your loans. And on the other half of your loans, you only have three years of credit.”

Tim Ulbrich: Classic, right?

Travis Hornby: Yeah. I was just blown away by this. I said, how is this possible that you’ve made all these payments based on your income for seven years and you have almost no credit for a lot of your loans and barely any on the other half? So I thought that was just absurd, and so I ran the numbers again to see, well, pretend that she gets the full three years of credit on everything, what does that mean for the rest of the PSLF path? Should we count on this or not? And her debt was small enough, you know, thankfully, that we just decided that the projected savings, there might be like $20,000 or $30,000 left over at the end of the 10 years, so we’re just going to refinance it and pay it off really quickly. So that’s what we did. So we paid off her $124,000 of med school debt, which is, you know, very low compared to a lot of people that I talk to. And we’re very blessed that it wasn’t very high, but at the same time, it’s really crazy because it should be the injustice of this whole system going through this personally because her parents were first-generation Americans coming over here from Hong Kong and then Canada. And they really sacrificed and put tons of their savings into her med school to try to help her come out with less debt. And if she’d only had better guidance, she not only could have had her parents keep a lot of that money, but she could have paid even less of it back if she had had that information early on in the process. So I thought that was just so outrageous that one, the cost was already so high for medical school. But second, that she got such bad advice from that same medical school that caused her to be kind of taken advantage of by the loan services, just the fact that cost us five, even six, figures. I just thought that was terrible, and I didn’t want that to happen to anybody else.

Tim Ulbrich: I love that you took your personal pain and obviously, you know, nobody wants to go through that, but taking that personal pain and turning it into good and teaching others. And I think as I follow your blog, I weekly kind of follow, I think you’re an incredible teacher of taking what is a unbelievably complicated subject — probably one we both agree is unnecessarily complicated — and really breaking it down in a way that people can understand and really take a step back to say, what is the best student loan repayment option for my personal situation? And I know coming out of school, similar type of a journey, as I look back, I could have went Public Service Loan Forgiveness, I could have refinanced, didn’t know what either of those were, didn’t have the education, didn’t have the tools. I couldn’t tell you what was subsidized, unsubsidized. I couldn’t tell you IBR and PAYE and REPAYE. I didn’t have any idea any of that knowledge. And I think that’s a consistent theme we see with lots of pharmacists, I’m sure you see with your clients, and being able to break that down and as you work with people one-on-one to say, hey, based on your situation, this is really what we think is the best path forward I think is incredible. So that’s been fun to watch your journey and see that grow along the way. So let’s talk while we’re in the moment of loan forgiveness, let’s talk about that for a minute because I think there’s so much swirling right now about Public Service Loan Forgiveness. We’ve talked about it on this podcast on multiple occasions. In Episode 018, we talked about maximizing the benefits of PSLF. Episode 078, we just recently talked about whether or not pursuing loan forgiveness is a waste. And so much news swirling around about, you know, at 99.x% of applicants being rejected and you know, is this something as a new pharmacist graduate that might actually be viable for me or not? So give us the lowdown on what’s going on with loan forgiveness. Is there any new news out there? What should recent graduates be considering as they potentially pursue this path?

Travis Hornby: Yeah, that’s a great question. So the listeners that are planning on loan forgiveness or afraid that they might not get it, they first need to realize historically what happened with this proram. So this program was around since 2007 on the books but functionally, it really didn’t exist until like 2009. And in earnest, it didn’t exist until 2010. And the reason is because you had FFEL loans before 2010 that were basically loans issued under an old loan program. So before 2010, when the government took over all student loan lending and created everyone had to use the direct loan program past that point. Prior to that point, you had this FFEL loans, which are basically bank loans that are backed by the government. And those loans, because you can think of the banks being the ones that actually hold the debt, obviously they wouldn’t want those loans forgiven, right? And so the government essentially gave them basically allowed the banks to not have to deal with the PSLF thing for those loans. And so when 2010 rolled around, then everybody started getting direct loans by default without having to do anything special. And everybody had access to things called Income-Based Repayment that people could sign up for without having to be a PhD-level expert in Department of Education bureaucracy. So a lot of people look at these statistics, and they get really depressed. But the problem with that is that you have to look at what happened 10 years ago to understand why so few people are getting approved today. And that’s a very hard thing to do and explain in a quick 800-word article on CNBC or something like that. So that’s the problem is a lot of people are getting the story wrong because yeah, like it was almost impossible to have loans that qualified in 2008 and 2009. That’s why you’re only seeing people that basically went to like one-year Master’s degrees that documented everything perfectly, they got super, super lucky being the ones that are getting approved right now. And so for that reason, I don’t personally believe that we’re going to see any large-scale forgiveness for PharmDs until about 2023. I think that’s when we’re going to see the first cohort that had been on an income-driven program for, you know, 10 years consistently and actually has a full slate of PharmD debt that they’re going to get forgiven. So a lot of the people out there that are pharmacists, you know, don’t expect any shocking news until then.

Tim Ulbrich: And you actually recently talked with — or I can’t remember, you might have blogged about it — a real, live person who actually had loan forgiveness, right? I mean, they do actually exist.

Travis Hornby: They do. Yeah, it was great. She sent me an email — that’s one of the best parts of having a student loan blog and just being super focused on that alone is, you know, I got this long email from this person who was like, this is my story. Feel free to use it. And I was like, absolutely. I’ll take you up on that. So I wrote a blog post about it, and she only had $19,000 from a very short, abbreviated degree program in like 2008 that just happened to be from one of the right schools. Because they had direct loans prior to 2010, but it was very limited. And so this person just happened to have the right kind of debt, she had signed up for the wrong kind of program, but she followed the TEPSLF rules, the Temporary Expanded PSLF rules, precisely. And she ended up getting loan forgiveness, and it was amazing. She even got refunds for all of the payments that she made that she shouldn’t actually have to make based off of her payment count. So that’s really amazing. Like anybody that’s worried about not getting PSLF needs to probably read that article because it shows you that not only are they going to cover it and give it to you, they’re also going to give a literal refund for all of that money that you pay that you shouldn’t have had to pay. So that’s the most amazing program that you can really think of in terms of if you can actually get it.

Tim Ulbrich: So one of the questions I probably get most often, Travis, is what is the future of this? And what certainty, if any, what’s the political climate? And obviously, none of us have a crystal ball, but as you’re in this each and every day in the weeds, I mean, do you foresee major legislative changes coming in the future? And if so, should there be any security that people feel in terms of being grandfathered in in terms of when those rules may be changed?

Travis Hornby: Yeah, so the thing that people need to realize is the way that the U.S. government works is the grandfather people in, and they make changes on a long-term basis. So a perfect example for this is social security. Social security, whenever they need to fix the program, they don’t cut benefits for people that are currently retired because they don’t want to make people super angry at them in the short term. So politicians is the “them” that I’m talking about. So what they do is instead, they just gradually raise the retirement age over time. So if you talk to people that are looking at social security, their retirement age goes up by like I think it’s 2 months every year or so for the next x amount of years until it hits 67. So something similar like that’s going to happen, I think, with PSLF. I think that it’s very, very expensive, this program. People have no idea how expensive it’s going to be from the taxpayers’ perspective. So I do expect it to get phased out eventually. I think that you’re going to a future Congress realize that it’s way, way more expensive than they thought probably in the early 2020s, and then I think that they’re going to probably curtail it or eliminate it, but they’re going to eliminate it for future borrowers, and they’re going to eliminate it for people who start graduate school after a certain point. So it’s going to be real interesting to see what grad programs do. I would imagine they’ll probably try to enroll a lot of people early. You know, so they can get access to this. But yeah, I do think it’s going to end at some point in the next, say, 5-10 years. But I think it’s going to end for people who have never taken out yet. So I think that the PSLF promises that are being made now will be continued to be paid out well into the early 2030s.

Tim Ulbrich: Awesome. I’m going to switch gears for a minute here and talk about the ROI of the pharmacy degree. You’ve blogged on this topic, and we’ve talked about it here. We’re in a landscape that is shifting. We’re hopeful, I think, as those that love the profession we’re going to see this shift back, but obviously supply-and-demand, and actually just yesterday, I got an email from somebody in the YFP community talking about they’re a fourth-year graduate, getting ready to go out into the market, they’re worried about the market being saturated, salaries are decreasing, and they’re basically looking at between salary reductions and a reduction in the number of hours, planning on a base salary somewhere around $85,000. And the question being, what can I, what should I be doing to plan financially for that? And I think historically, the message that I felt and many others have felt that don’t worry about the student loans, you’re going to have a great income. Well, that story is changing. So as you’re working with clients, Travis, specifically your pharmacy clients, are you seeing this trend? Are you seeing the shift? And what are some of the things that you’re trying to help them think about in terms of intentionality of student loan repayment? Maybe being strategic about finding an employer that qualifies for loan forgiveness, refinancing, how does this shifting ROI of the degree in the job market impact their plan to pay back student loans?

Travis Hornby: Sure. So the average pharmacist client that we’ve had has had about $214,000 of student loan debt. So that’s obviously a multiple of what the first-year starting salary is. If you were going to talk about the average income being $85,000, then in terms of the average that we’ve seen, that would a debt-to-income ratio of about 2.5, 2.5 times income. So generally, what we tell people is if you have a debt-to-income ratio that’s above 1.5-to-1, and this is at a family level, then that means that you probably need to go for loan forgiveness, you know, in some fashion. Basically, what you need to realize is that if you try to refinance this thing, it’s kind of like walking in front of a train. If you’re making $85,000 a year, you have $200,000 in debt, you’ll have to pay $2,000 a month for 10 years. So that’s about a third of your take-home pay going to debt. That’s really not that sustainable.

Tim Ulbrich: For 10 years.

Travis Hornby: For 10 years. That’s really not a sustainable or a smart decision. And that’s not anything, that’s not a mean statement, that’s just reality of math. And you could pay the debt back, but if you do, then you’re not going to be accomplishing things like saving for retirement, saving for your kids’ college, you know, buying a house, like doing all these other financial goals that are really important. So one thing that I like to tell somebody is take your focus off of the debt from a really zoned-in level and start thinking more about, you know, what are your broad financial goals? And how does that fit into your debt repayment? So for example, if somebody has $120,000 in pharmacy school debt and they are one of those lucky folks who does get a full-time job at a CVS in maybe a rural location making $120,000-130,000 a year, yeah, sure. Refinancing can make a lot of sense. And paying it back in five years and doing a refi ladder where you start with a 10-year, refi to a 5-year later, you know, and getting rid of it as fast as you can, that’s a great decision. But when you’ve got an $85k type of income, I’m assuming that this person’s not working at a community hospital or an eligible not-for-profit. So that’s one of the biggest misconceptions that I’ve run into with pharmacists is they’re not aware of the other loan forgiveness. So the IDR loan forgiveness. And that’s going to be more and more important for pharmacists. You know, one thing that I think is fascinating is $85,000 is still an amazing salary. That’s still really good compared to your typical person that’s going to go work for a corporation and make $50,000-60,000 a year. And if you’re working 32 hours a week for that income, that’s exceptional. And the reality is I think we’re going to continue to see, you know, this decline in salaries because of the acceptance rate of pharmacy schools is so high overall. And so I think for a person who’s in pharmacy school now, you think about this from a positive perspective is the worst case scenario, your debt is a tax. It’s a percentage of your income. And so if you lose 10% of your income to student loans, and that’s your cost — I know you have to put a couple hundred dollars away for a tax bomb one day — then that $85,000 income can actually be pretty attractive. And to take it a step further, you know, how many people out there can go earn a $50,000-60,000 a year job or salary, rather, working 20-25 hours a week? Not a lot of people.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, I think that’s great insight. And we’ve talked before on the show, and I want to emphasize it again because I don’t think we talk enough about what we call non-PSLF forgiveness, or the other PSLF forgiveness. And I think you’re spot-on with this debt-to-income ratio, if that continues to trend in the direction we’re seeing it trend, that option is going to become all the more important as when you evaluate. And I also would add to that, Travis, and we’ll talk here fo a minute about refi, but as interest rates are climbing, obviously, that changes the math a little bit on the refi. And I like the example that you used of pharmacists coming out, maybe they have a lower debt load than the average, so maybe $110,000-120,000. Maybe they’re making $120,000-130,000, they’ve got one of those full-time jobs that’s paying a decent salary, well then obviously, paying them off or refinancing looks very different than somebody maybe who has $250,000 of debt and they’ve got an $85,000 income. And to Tim Baker’s credit, one of the things he talks a lot about, and I appreciate his external view into the pharmacy world is that we typically don’t think about career advice in the sense of seeking something like a qualifying employer for loan forgiveness, right? We often are thinking about it specifically on the type of pharmacy practice that you’re interested in, salaries have been relatively equal since I graduated in 2008. You aren’t seeing huge discrepancies from one area to another. But we are starting to see that trend happen. And I think now, a very important consideration is if you’re somebody that has an extremely debt-to-income ratio, then really that choice of employer and potentially being able to pursue Public Service Loan Forgiveness is going to be a viable option. So Travis, as a follow-up to that, what are the trends you’re seeing in the refi market? It feels to me that six or 12 months ago, even maybe a year or two years ago, the math on that was very lucrative because of where interest rates are. And I feel like that’s tapered off a little bit as interest rates have come up. What have you seen in terms of the clients that you’re working with?

Travis Hornby: Yeah, I mean, a few months ago, that was definitely the case. It’s gotten a little bit better because the 10-year Treasury yield has declined a little bit again with a little bit of uncertainty in the economy and the government shutdown, China’s economy being a little bit slower growth than expected, so I think that the refi opportunity will exist for at least probably the next few years. I’m not sure if it’s going to go completely away. I don’t think it will because, you know, a reminder for folks that when you borrow in school, it is tied to what the government’s borrowing cost is. So you know, eventually, if interest rates keep rising, you will also feel it in your student loans that you’re taking out while you’re in school. You know? So last year, Grad Plus was 7%. This year, it’s 7.6%.

Tim Ulbrich: Ugh.

Travis Hornby: Yeah, so even though you might not be able to refi to like a 4% or 4.5%, you know, if you can still refi to like 5-5.5%, and you’re having to borrow at 7.5% or 8% or 8.5%, like that’s still savings, you know? But yeah, the refi market, I think the one thing that I’d like people to know more of — and we have a similar philosophy too on how we hook people up with the refi deals because you guys obviously have a lot of great bonuses on your site — and the thing to do is to refinance multiple times. So I did a survey of our readers, had almost 1,000 responses, and only half of them knew that you could even refinance more than one time.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, we see that a lot too.

Travis Hornby: Yeah. So for example, like you can refinance for — say you’re one of those people making $130k and you have $120k in student loan debt, well, you don’t want to do a five-year because that payment’s going to be over $2,000 a month, and what if you lose your job? What if you want to move? What if you want to work part-time or something like that happens? So that’s a very common feeling. And so rather than jump right into a five-year, what you can do is you can do a 10- or a 15-year where the payment’s around $1,000-1,300 a month, something like that, and you can pay extra. So you can pay maybe $2,000-3,000 a month to really knock the debt down. And then once you knock the debt down a bunch, then you can refinance it again and maybe cut your 4.5% or 5% rate down to maybe a 3.5% or 4% rate with about the same monthly payment by refinancing to a shorter term. So that’s called a refi ladder, and a lot of people don’t understand that. And that’s something that could save people money. I will say this, though, the refi thing, I don’t want people to get super focused on the refi thing because that will save you several thousand dollars, it really can in terms of interest costs. And if you pay down your debt faster than you would otherwise, it could save you tens of thousands. But loan forgiveness can save you hundreds of thousands in certain situations. So that’s why, you know, you’ve got to be real careful also about not making extra payments. One problem that I see people make or one mistake that I see people make — I’ll give you an example. I had a buddy who was a community pharmacist at a hospital system, and he was paying on the standard 10-year plan. So he was paying on $200k of debt about $2,000 a month, you know, instead, he could have been on the Revised Pay As You Earn plan, and he could have been paying about like $690 a month. So you know, saving almost a little over $1,300 a month, and he was eligible for Public Service Loan Forgiveness.

Tim Ulbrich: And maxing out a retirement account and all of that jazz, right?

Travis Hornby: Yeah. And then he could reduce his student loan payment even more. So and that’s the PSLF example. You know, the flip side to that is a pharmacist who wants to have a family, work 20 hours a week, wants to have more time for hobbies or whatever that reason would be. And then that person can pay, you know, say $400 a month working part-time. And then you just have to make sure you’re prepared for that tax bomb when it hits in 20-25 years.

Tim Ulbrich: So I hope the students that are listening, hopefully one of the take-home messages you’re getting as you’re hearing Travis drop lots of wisdom here is knowledge around this topic is obviously going to be able to influence a decision that could save tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. So using this time, you know, before you graduate, before you go through the grace period, to really identify for your personal situation, taking a step back, looking at all of your financial goals, looking at the type of job you’re going to pursue, residency, no residency, all these variable, debt-to-income ratio, and coming up with the best student loan repayment option is huge. Refi ladder, Travis, I like that. I know the concept, we talk about it. We talk about that idea, but I think you should brand that. So I haven’t heard that term used before.

Travis Hornby: Yeah, I should trademark it, right?

Tim Ulbrich: Absolutely.

Travis Hornby: I got a lot of zingers here, you know? I mean, yeah. There’s all kinds of weird things that I’ve learned doing this that you wouldn’t think about unless you’ve really had a lot of cases. So I’ve done over 1,000 plans personally. I think that’s more than anybody else in the country. I’m not positive, but I think that is. And you know, advised more than 330 million myself.

Tim Ulbrich: That’s incredible.

Travis Hornby: Yeah, so that’s pretty bad because that tells you how much debt it out there, you know?

Tim Ulbrich: Well, you’ve got $1.what? $1.4 trillion more to go? Something like that?

Travis Hornby: Yeah, exactly. So I mean, so one example is something called the breadwinner loophole, that’s another one of my weird terms I’ve come up with. So for example, a pharmacist in California might be making $90,000 a year, maybe she has a stay-at-home spouse, and that spouse makes nothing. And she’s eligible for Pay As You Earn. Well, in community property states, you can file separately for taxes and equally distribute income. So you can equally distribute income based on community property rules in these certain states. There’s like nine of them. And then you can basically have instead of an income of say $90,000, her income would be $45,000. And because you equalize the incomes, you also eliminated most of the tax penalty from filing separately as a married couple. So that’s an example of just some random thing that, you know, we realized probably a year into doing this that people could do since the payments are based on your adjusted gross income. And you know, we’ve not received any guidance on this yet, but it certainly seems like this is a legitimate way to approach repayment in these nine specific community property states. So that’s another one of these random things that you wouldn’t really think about unless you do this all day, every day. So that’s one thing that I like about our focus is we really do focus just on people that have $50,000-$1 million of student loan debt. Really, our primary client is in the $200-500k range. But you know, it lends itself for having a deep specialty level of expertise on something that’s very complicated. You don’t have to worry about getting the broad financial plan together, the insurance or things like that. That’s somebody else’s job.

Tim Ulbrich: Tim Baker, that’s your job. Yeah.

Travis Hornby: Exactly, yeah.

Tim Ulbrich: What are, Travis, some of the most common mistakes that you’re seeing pharmacy graduates make as it comes to their student loans? I mean, I’m sure there’s a ton of them. After you do enough of these, you start to see some I’m guessing repetitive things that are happening over and over again that our listeners can be aware of.

Travis Hornby: Well, for your pre-pharmacy listeners, there’s a whole bunch of schools that have opened up to basically take your money. And that’s why they exist. I mean, that’s just my personal opinion. But you know, you have like high-quality schools, you know? Like UNC or like Ohio State, that’s where you’re at, right, Tim?

Tim Ulbrich: Go Bucks. Yes.

Travis Hornby: Yeah, so maybe University of Florida. I mean there’s pharmacy schools that have been around for a long time that are high quality that even if you have a crash in the profession are not going to be going anywhere. But there’s a whole bunch of new schools that I won’t mention any by name because you know, I don’t love getting served lawsuits, but you know, basically there’s schools that were initiated that are private schools that were founded in the past, you know, 5-10 years I would say are automatically suspect. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad school, but you want to be very careful. And from a student’s perspective, if you’re going to go to these places, you just have to realize that things could potentially not end well if you go to one of these programs that has a high acceptance rate. So I would actually ask the school to give you their acceptance rate data. I would ask them to tell you what their average salaries are for graduates in writing. And I would actually do some due diligence and actually ask them in a very assertive manner for these statistics that you deserve to have prior to making this decision. Now, if you already have the debt, then I think that your perspective has to be a positive one. There are, like I said — you don’t even have to actually be a pharmacist, which is kind of crazy. These income-driven repayment plans apply whether or not you’re unemployed or making a bazillion dollars as a CEO. So it doesn’t matter that you become a pharmacist, even if you graduate pharmacy school. So from a mental health perspective, don’t feel trapped, even if you have $200,000, $300,000, $400,000 of pharmacy school debt. Do not feel trapped. You have so many more options than you think you do. And if you want to go make 50% more than the median household income in America, you can do that, even in a big city and live a pretty decent life. You’ll have to live on a budget, you’ll have to be a little careful with your expenses. It’s not as good as it used to be, but you’ll certainly make a good living. And so I would just say in terms of student loan mistakes, I mean, it’s a little broad, but I guess I just want people to know that the biggest mistakes you can have is not having a plan and sticking your head in the sand.

Tim Ulbrich: Amen. And if I could echo that, that’s the one thing we’ve seen, Travis, is the wandering through graduation into new practitioner life of not having an intentional plan. We’ve already highlighted and we don’t need to beat it further that that can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that example you gave of I think you said it was a community pharmacist friend of yours that went through a 10-year standard repayment, paid the maximum payment for 10 years, that was my situation. You know? And I think that as I look back on that journey, a little bit of knowledge would have saved me a ton of money along the way. And I want to also add, you know, your advice for the pre-pharmacy student I think is incredible because the reality is not all schools are created equal. And a lot of this data you can go out and look up in terms of what’s the board pass rate? What’s job placement like? What is the application acceptance rate into the College of Pharmacy? What’s the residency placement rate? And obviously, you know, there’s ranking that are out there, but they don’t represent many of the factors that are going to be most important to you as a graduate of a pharmacy school. So great stuff there. Travis, my last question for you is that my guess — just knowing our audience — is that we have lots of our community listening that’s feeling stuck with their student loans, feeling paralyzed, maybe feeling overwhelmed, don’t know where to start. What’s one piece of advice that you’d give to them that they can begin to get over that hump of feeling stuck or overwhelmed?

Travis Hornby: One piece of advice would be look at what your payment is. If you think that your payment is too high, take a look at Pay As You Earn or Revised Pay As You Earn and try to figure out whether or not your end goal is to go for full repayment and get to $0 in terms of the debt you owe, or if it’s to go for forgiveness. That would be the first big decision somebody has to make. So if you could at least figure out whether or not you need to go for forgiveness or repayment, that will help a lot because a lot of people, you can tell that in their actions, they don’t really know. They’ll throw an extra $200 at their highest interest rate loan when they have it, they’ll make a $5,000 one-time, lump sum payment to the smallest loan to get rid of it so they feel better psychologically, and that’s very, very indicative of just having no plan and no strategic direction at all with your loan repayment. So I would say that’s one piece of advice. One thing that I’d say is I forgot to say this when you asked student loan repayment mistakes. There’s a lot of residents out there who probably listen to your podcast.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah.

Travis Hornby: The residents need to be on one of these income-driven programs while they’re still in residency.

Tim Ulbrich: And not deferring.

Travis Hornby: Yeah. A lot of people don’t realize that, but if your goal is to eventually pay your debt back, Revised Pay As You Earn can get you thousands of dollars in interest subsidies from the first month that you start paying on it. So if you’d like to have $5,000-10,000 less in debt by the end of your PGY1, PGY2 years, then get onto the Revised Pay As You Earn if your plan is to eventually pay the thing off. If your plan is not to eventually pay it off, you’re kind of unsure, then you might look at Pay As You Earn as well to try to build up credit for forgiveness. But that’s one mistake that I see people make all the time that I think people will continue to make because, you know, the residency programs are not as organized with as much detailed information for loan management as I think a lot of the human medicine physician type residency programs are because they’re a lot older and more resources are behind them. So that’s one thing that I’d say for your residents listening, but yeah. The big kind of direction, you know, you have to figure out if you’re going for full repayment or forgiveness. And that’s the big fork in the road, and that determines a whole bunch of the recommendations that we like to give. So like one thing we do is we figure that out for people or which path we think they should go down.

refinance student loans

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, great advice for residents. And I probably see — the most common situation I see is deferment during residency, which for those that are thinking loan forgiveness, obviously deferment does not equal a qualifying payment, number one. But two, as look at the income-based repayment plans, then you know obviously depending on how that’s calculated, you know, there’s this automatic assumption that I can’t afford any payment. Well, do the math. Sit down and figure that out. And obviously, you’re going to begin to make that progress toward whether you’re going to pay them off and refinance them or whether you’re going to eventually pursue loan forgiveness. So Travis, obviously StudentLoanPlanner.com, our listeners can learn more about the work that you’re doing and the service you provide. Also, it’s my understanding you recently launched a podcast, the Student Loan Planner podcast. I’m assuming that’s available on iTunes, anywhere that you can find podcasts: Stitcher, Google Play, Spotify, etc. Beyond StudentLoanPlanner.com and the podcast, what’s the best place that our listeners can go to learn more about you and the work that you’re doing?

Travis Hornby: I would reach out to us, [email protected], and myself or somebody from our team will reach out and tell you what we think you’re dealing with and whether or not we think that you’d be a good fit for our services or not. And then if you want to just read more about pharmacists in particular, if you go to our blog, StudentLoanPlanner.com/blog, on the right hand side if you’re on a desktop, you’ll see our categories that we’ve written articles on, so there’ll be a pharmacist category that you can click and read everything we’ve ever written about pharmacy school and pharmacists. And it’s quite a lot at this point, so take a look at that if you’re looking for some free resources.
Tim Ulbrich: Great stuff. Travis, on behalf of the YFP community and the YFP team, thank you so much for taking the time to come on today’s show and looking forward to more collaborations in the future and having you back on to provide some more education to our audience.

Travis Hornby: Thanks for having me on, Tim.

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YFP 086: How to Spark Joy as an Entrepreneur

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How to Spark Joy as an Entrepreneur

On this episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast, Tim Church, YFP team member, interviews Dr. Jessica Louie about how to spark joy as an entrepreneur. Jessica is a Board-Certified Critical Care Pharmacist and Assistant Professor of Pharmacy Practice. She is also a multi-passionate entrepreneur with 3 small businesses. Jessica is the CEO of Clarify Simplify Align, High Performance Life Coach, Professional Organizer and Certified KonMari Consultant.

About Today’s Guest

Dr. Jessica Louie is CEO of Clarify Simplify Align, High Performance Life Coach, Professional Organizer and Certified KonMari Consultant who helps busy professionals gain clarity of their purpose, simplify and declutter their home and minds, and align their work into their lives with simple processes to avoid overwhelm, lead with confidence and curate lives they LOVE.

Jessica holds a Doctor of Pharmacy degree from University of Southern California (USC), Advanced Practice Pharmacist license (APh) and is board-certified in critical care (BCCCP). She uses her healthcare background to coach clients through emotional and difficult decisions. Jessica resides in Pasadena/Los Angeles, California and serves her clients in-person locally, travels to Salt Lake City, Utah and Brookfield, Wisconsin and provides virtual coaching sessions.

Summary

On this episode, Tim interviews Dr. Jessica Louie about her entrepreneurial journey in the creation of three businesses that have really taken off. In the beginning of the episode, Jessica shares more about her background and the inspiration she had to start side businesses on top of her busy full-time pharmacy career. Jessica is an Assistant Professor of Pharmacy Practice at West Coast University School of Pharmacy and is a critical care pharmacist working in an intensive care unit at a hospital. She divides her time between both settings and truly loves the patient interaction she has. At the end of her residency, Jessica was burned out. After some life changing events, she realized that she wanted to live with more intention and focus on spending time with people she loved. She was also ready to take on new challenges. This began a transformative journey in finding her why and beginning several businesses.

Petit Style Script, Jessica’s first business, is a fashion and lifestyle blog that helps women make intentional clothing choices by investing in quality pieces and by creating a capsule wardrobe. She dove deep into website design, social media management and marketing which helped to keep her costs lower. Her revenue is earned by affiliate commissions and through sponsored content instead of through a signature product.

In her newest business, Clarify Simplify Align, Jessica helps other busy professionals gain clarity of their purpose, simplify and declutter their home and minds, and align work into their lives. She takes clients through a transformative process that includes a free consultation, a simplifying process in decluttering your home in an intentional way, and using your new mindset and habits to apply to other areas of your. Jessica is a certified KonMari consultant which is the popular method founded by Marie Kondo, however, she believes that this whole process is more than the KonMari method. She provides emotional and physical support while also offering accountability to her clients. She shares that there are many benefits to decluttering and organizing your environment like gaining free time, reducing anxiety, taking control of your health and finances and gaining confidence in decision making. She works with clients locally in Southern California but is also able to host virtual online sessions.

Clarify Simplify Align was created in July 2018. Jessica currently earns 5 figures and has a goal of moving into the 6 figure range in the next 12 months. Her side hustle income is being allocated toward savings, investments, and travel. Jessica has been able to balance the work with her businesses and her full-time pharmacy career. She spends about 25 to 35 hours a week on her businesses, depending on the number of clients she has. Her biggest advice to pharmacists that are wanting to step into an entrepreneurial journey is to gain clarity and follow your passion.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Church: What’s up, everybody? And welcome to Episode 086. Wow, that is just crazy to say that number as we move closer to 100 episodes. Now, I can hardly take any of that credit, given the other Tims have done most of the shows. So kudos to them. And also I want to have a big shout out to Caitlyn on our team, who does our editing and does an excellent job. If you basically consumed any news or social media in the past couple months, then you know about the show Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. And the show is just everywhere, and it’s an incredibly popular series on Netflix right now. But just in case you’re in the dark, this show is all about world-renowned tidying expert, Marie Kondo, helping clients clear out their clutter in their home and choose joy. So what the heck does that have to do with today’s episode? Well, our guest today is not only an accomplished pharmacist, but she’s one of the few that holds the KonMari consultant certification, which basically allows her to perform in-home and virtual consults, similar to what you see Marie Kondo do on the show. So I’m really excited for her to talk more about this and her other business ventures. So let’s go ahead and jump into the interview. Jessica, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show and for being part of this side hustle edition.

Jessica Louie: Thank you for having me, Tim.

Tim Church: When I sent out the first email alerting the community that we would be talking more about side hustles on the podcast, you were the first one to respond, and I could tell that this was something you were excited about and wanted to share what you’ve been doing outside of your full-time job. So before we kind of jump into your businesses and your pharmacist’s career, I want to know what gets you so fired up about this topic of side hustles and entrepreneurship.

Jessica Louie: Well, thank you. It was really a life transformation in terms of starting my small businesses 2.5 years ago. And it’s definitely been a great learning experience for myself that I really would love to share with other pharmacists and healthcare professionals and students.

Tim Church: That’s great. And kind of going back into before you started any of these businesses, where did that inspiration come from where you just decided, hey, I’m going to do something outside of my typical pharmacist job or my duties there?

Jessica Louie: Well, as I was finishing my residency back in 2015 and transitioning into my role as an assistant professor in pharmacy practice, I was really undergoing a burnout type of episode in healthcare at that moment. And like other busy professionals, I was kind of spinning around this quarter-life crisis, accumulating things in terms of I had been on a long journey of nine years of training for my bachelor degree, doctorate, residency, PGY1, PGY2, board certification, and you know, I wasn’t really enjoying the journey. I was just trying to get to the finish line. And then I realized, you know, how life can be really short when my aunt died suddenly at age 51. So now I really like to live with intention and be present by the people I’m surrounded with and the things I’m surrounded with that spark joy. So I really want to share my story to see if it will help inspire someone else to really transform their own life and really be happy with their day-to-day life.

Tim Church: Wow, thank you for sharing that, Jessica. I love what you said there about being intentional and kind of getting the fire started to pursue some of those passions and ideas that you had. And I believe that’s so true. And I think that that’s one of the most common characteristics of people that have an entrepreneurial spirit is just being intentional about what they’re trying to do. And a lot of times, we live a life that’s reactive instead of proactive. So that’s really great. So can you talk a little bit about your current role as a pharmacist? You mentioned that you had a long journey and did residency training in order to get there. But talk a little bit about the role that you’re in now and what you’re doing.

Jessica Louie: Yes. So right now, I am an assistant professor of pharmacy practice at West Coast University School of Pharmacy in Los Angeles. And I am a critical care pharmacist, so I work in the intensive care unit of a local hospital. And you know, my current role is really divided between the university and my practice site. So this is my fourth year teaching at the School of Pharmacy, and I am really passionate about teaching critical care topics related to respiratory and cardiology. And most recently, I am developing elective courses to focus on well being, resiliency and burnout prevention in our graduate students. So that’s a passion of mine in the pharmacy world.

Tim Church: So how do you split that up between your teaching responsibilities and your role in the critical care unit?

Jessica Louie: Currently, I spend a little bit more time at the university. About 60-70% of my time is at the university during the semesters. We have 12-week semesters, and we have long winter and summer breaks. And then I’m at the hospital setting two days a week, usually. And it’s a great balance in terms of being there to educate the students and also being there to stay up-to-date on the healthcare institution.

Tim Church: Great. And can you go into a little bit more detail about what is your day like typically at the hospital?

Jessica Louie: Typically, at the hospital, it’s a local community hospital. And it’s a Level 2 Trauma Center, so we’ll usually start where you’re going in and working out patients, getting ready for interprofessional rounding in the intensive care unit or with the other medical teams. They do have medical students and medical residents at the institution. And then going on rounds and completing some of the in-person work with the patients with their medication reconciliation, their pain management and preventative health screenings and putting some progress notes, both for the other healthcare professionals and for pass-off to the other pharmacist. And during that process, if there’s students on rotations, walking them through that process in the morning and then also meeting with them in the afternoon for educational discussions on different topics and different patients. And then also assisting other pharmacists in the setting to see what they need help with.

Tim Church: So it sounds like you’re in a very clinical role that’s very much participating in direct patient care and working with other healthcare professionals. Would that be true?

Jessica Louie: Yes, and really trying to see where we can expand service lines because in California, there’s, you know, a need for some expansion of service lines in the hospital setting. So working on that right now. We just had a new law passed in California requiring pharmacists to perform the medication reconciliation in the hospital setting. And I know some hospitals are struggling with that new implementation of that law. So seeing it work and help with resources and things like that.

Tim Church: And what would you say are your favorite aspects about your job? You know, I think there’s a lot of negativity in our profession, and I think it depends on the setting that you’re in and the responsibilities that you’re doing, but what do you most enjoy about what you’re doing as a pharmacist?

Jessica Louie: I definitely enjoy the patient interaction and helping them through the process. I know critical care in the intensive care unit can be an emotional and difficult situation for these patients and their families. And that’s one of the reasons why I am part of a new initiative with the Society of Critical Care Medicine to target post-ICU syndrome. So similar to PTSD, our ICU patients and how they transition and how their quality of life changes, so that brings me a lot of joy in terms of trying to give back to these critically ill patients and their families and making sure that they do have the support system, even when they’re outside of the ICU setting and in transitions of care.

Tim Church: Wow. I think that sounds like a really great program. And I, working in ambulatory care, I didn’t know that that was even a thing or something that patients were dealing with. So I think that’s really a great initiative to kind of get that going and identifying that patient need and looking for ways to integrate into that program. So I think that’s really cool.

Jessica Louie: Thank you.

Tim Church: So you talked about that you’re on this long journey, it’s taking you nine years with all of your residency training. Do you feel like it was worth it?

Jessica Louie: I definitely feel that it was worth it. I think that’s it’s important to take a step back, though, and remember that it’s not about getting to the destination. It’s about enjoying the journey and the experiences. And I think that there were times during that nine-year process where that was definitely forgotten. And if you’re familiar with the growth and fixed mindset type of philosophies, it was definitely in this fixed mindset instead of a growth mindset in terms of, you know, doing this for myself and for my patients. And you know, just getting back to why did I really go through this process? And what impact do I want to have on patients and the healthcare community and other people? So it definitely was worth it, and I wouldn’t change it looking back.

Tim Church: That’s so good. And I think you made some really strong points there. And I think that a lot of pharmacists who are on a long journey to get to their career and where they’re trying to is sometimes you can forget a lot of those things that are important along the way. So you talked about at some point, you got inspired and you wanted to start pursuing some things beyond pharmacy and really focus on some other passions. So what were some of your main motivations besides, you know, feeling like life is so short and that you really have to be intentional about going after things that you want to do. What were some of your other main motivators?

Jessica Louie: At that point in my life, you know, I really had achieved the things that I had set out to achieve. And it was time to take on new challenges. I like new challenges and lifelong learning, so I had, you know, a strong passion for helping other women feel confident in how they dressed and their wardrobe choices. And you know, I started that as basically my first hobby that I turned into my first small business called Petite Style Script. And you know, because I like to challenge myself, I wanted to learn how to website design, how to run social media and marketing, so I ran all of that as a solopreneur over the last 2.5 years. And I gained a lot of skill sets that I was able to apply to my other two businesses.

Tim Church: That is so cool. So you really bootstrapped a lot of this getting in off the ground in terms of I’m going to learn how to do all of the back-end work, I’m going to learn website design. I’m going to do it all. I think that’s really cool. And sometimes, I think especially if you don’t know where to start or maybe you’re limited with funds and don’t want to hire people, that that’s a great way to get going. So talk a little bit more about Petite Style Script and kind of what that business is all about. And what are some of the services and offerings that are through that business?

Jessica Louie: So I focused on Petite Style Script at first. You know, my aunt had passed away earlier that year and she was really a big fan of shoes and handbags and women’s fashion. So I wanted to help other women, especially petite-sized women feel confident and empowered by their outfit and wardrobe choices. So it is a fashion and lifestyle blog, and although it has a lot of petite information, it also caters to other women. And I’ve turned it into really being intentional with your outfit choices by creating capsule wardrobes. So that’s one of my signature products and services. And then just highlighting really classic style where you’re investing in quality over quantity of pieces. So I talk about things that I own and things that I recommend and sizing and fit and then how to style things together to really have a classic wardrobe that will last for years to come. So there’s a lot of just how-to’s and resources on the website that are free for people to read or join the email list to get weekly style advice.

Tim Church: And so what you’re selling is actually the advice of style but not actual wardrobe or physical products, is that right?

refinance student loans

Jessica Louie: That’s correct. So I don’t physically make any of the products. I will earn income through affiliate commissions or sponsored content with companies that I really love. So I have a few companies that I’ve used, even from when I was young that I’ve been able to partner with and really showcase why those companies are great for the environment and really quality products to offer to my readers.

Tim Church: Can you go into a little bit more detail about affiliate marketing with this business and how you’re earning income? Because I think a lot of times, you know, the word “affiliate marketing” sometimes can have a negative connotation. But I actually think it can be a great way to point people to the right products and services and actually can provide a lot of value.

Jessica Louie: Yes. So affiliate marketing or affiliate commission is really popular in the fashion blogging world. I learned that early on, both from your website and from your social media. So basically, I am creating content and articles online. And I am talking about different products, I’m recommending how to style them together, talking about my sizing that I have purchased. And then I’ll link to my outfit or to other items that are similar to my outfit if those items are no longer in season or available online. And then if readers would like to purchase the same item that I’m wearing or a similar item that I’m wearing, they’re able to click on the link and I earn a small affiliate commission when they purchase the item through the website. So I work pretty closely with the Like to Know It and RewardStyle affiliate company and a few other companies to really showcase this is what I personally own and recommend and I’ve tried it out. And I’m not necessarily getting paid to try it out, that would be sponsored content, which is different than affiliate income. I have personally purchased the clothing I’m wearing, and then I’m going to link to it to earn a small commission from you reading the how to articles.

Tim Church: So I think that’s a great point that you put on there in that you’re not just promoting and pumping products and different attire that anybody could use or just something that you find that could earn income. These are actually things that you’re recommending to people either because you’ve tried it out or feel very confident about the product that they’re offering.

Jessica Louie: Yes. And I mean, personally, in my opinion, when I go and buy a product, you know, I like to read a review or see how it fits on someone, especially when it’s more difficult to find petite-friendly clothing. So it’s nice to be able to read someone else’s article and honest review besides just seeing a picture of it on Instagram or on Facebook. So that’s what I’m trying to provide in longer, 1,000- to 2,000-word blog posts, articles, on the website.

Tim Church: And so would you say for that business, is affiliate marketing, is that the main generator of revenue?

Jessica Louie: Yes. That is the main generator of revenue.

Tim Church: OK. And then you said there’s also some sponsored content. So can you talk a little bit about that?

Jessica Louie: Yes. So sponsored content is when a company will pay for certain content to be promoted, either on social media, especially Instagram, or on the blog website. And you know, those are contracts that we’ll make with certain companies that I really feel passionate about promoting. So it’s usually companies that I’ve worn or used for years. So those are companies like Figs scrubs healthcare professionals and Aveda hair care products and skin care products and different things like that. And they will be — if it is a sponsored post, it’s clearly marked, either in the social media caption or in the blog article as well to show that it was paid content, but it also, you know, I personally have used it and stand behind the company or the product.

Tim Church: That’s great. And I think it’s a cool way to earn revenue because you’re helping people get to products and services that they need and that they want. And you’re providing input from it.

Jessica Louie: The sponsored content also pays for the production costs of running the website and social media. So there’s a lot of effort put into having people find your content, so a lot of SEO optimization, so if you search for a product on Google, you know, it’s coming up on Google, Pinterest and YouTube so you can find the photos, the videos and the written words. So that’s really where the sponsored content is helping offset production costs.

Tim Church: Yeah, and that’s what I was going to ask you. Where do you find the majority of your customers — is that organic traffic through Google? Or is it through social media?

Jessica Louie: It definitely is through search engines. So Google is definitely the top one and then technically, Pinterest is a search engine and not a social media platform, so Pinterest is my second most common referral source. And then my third most common is YouTube. YouTube is also a search engine and is owned by Google. So those are my primary three. So I definitely put a lot of effort into the backend so people can find the content. And then social media is nice, but it’s really not — I feel like it’s more for exposure and for people to digest some content. But then they need to also take action to get to the website or to get to more information so that, you know, it’s great for exposure and creating a community with some of the readers and some of the other bloggers and business owners, but it’s a smaller proponent of a referral source.

Tim Church: I think this business is so cool because it’s just way outside the realm of pharmacy. And you know, I think that’s a lot the stories that I’ve heard with pharmacists and what they’re doing on the side that yes, there are some things that definitely have a pharmacy twist or relationship, but this one is sort of a little bit outside of that realm. And I think that’s really cool. So before we move on to your next business, so I have a question. Is there any intention for one for men that you’re going to create so that if I need some fashion tips that I can go to?

Jessica Louie: So currently, no, not another fashion-focused blog or website. But with my newest business, I do help people simplify their homes and wardrobes. So I don’t discriminate against men or women for clients for those coaching sessions. So I can do that more one-on-one or group coaching but not necessarily full, written articles geared towards men.

Tim Church: OK. So your newest business — and you told me before we jumped on for the recording that this one has really been a result of some of the other things that you’ve done. And I think this one is also really cool because, again, it’s outside of the pharmacy realm but something that you’re passionate about. So talk a little bit about that one.

Jessica Louie: Yes. So basically, this is my third business. The one in the middle is actually my pharmacy-focused business. But I wouldn’t have been able to get to this point in opening Clarify and Simplify online without my experiences with the other two businesses and learning about virtual content and other marketing things. But this business is, you know, to help other busy professionals gain clarity to their purpose, simplify and declutter their home and minds and align their work into their lives. So work into your life, not the other way around. So we can really avoid some of the overwhelm and burnout that people are feeling and lead with more confidence so that you really build and curate a life that you love. So it’s really talking about being more intentional and taking away some of the burnout that a lot of people, I think, are experiencing with the work environments we’re exposed to.

Tim Church: So this is kind of has multifaceted business in terms of what you’re trying to do to help people. So can you walk through the process if somebody says, “Jessica, I want you to help me be less stressed out. And I want you to help me do that and walk through this process, especially with decluttering things.” Can you just walk me through what that consult — what would this look like?

Jessica Louie: So a potential client would schedule a free consultation call, so we really get into what are they looking for, what are their goals, and you know, what kind of budget they have in terms of I’ll offer either one-on-one in-person coaching or one-on-one virtual coaching or virtual coaching because they’re not local to my area or I don’t travel to their area. So I’m based in Los Angeles. And we’ll go through that process and really overall, it’s really about clarifying your why. I was trained with Simon Sinek earlier in 2018, so I use a lot of his philosophies and putting that into actual practice. And then the simplifying part is really up to the client in terms of do they want to go through the simplifying process in their home? And if they do, I am a certified KonMari consultant, so we are using the KonMari method developed by Marie Kondo. It’s a Japanese method to really dig into decluttering the home in an intentional way so that you’ll never do it again in your life. And you’ll really change your habits and your mindsets around your home environment. And then we’ll be able to use those habits and mindsets to then apply to other areas of your life. So that’s where aligning your work into your life comes into play in terms of really addressing a lot of well-being and burnout prevention and then we’re able to address the habits and mindsets related to community, the people you surround yourself with and your finances and your healthcare. So that’s, you know, the full transformative process, and then if someone is specifically looking more to just do the simplifying the home and professional organizing, you know, we can do that. But I would encourage them to go through the whole process. And I provide either workbooks for them to do it on their own time versus me one-on-one coaching them.

Tim Church: So just to clarify, for the majority of the people that you’re assisting in coaching, you’re either going to their house or giving them a virtual consultation, and you’re literally helping them declutter their home. Is that right?

Jessica Louie: Yes, that’s correct. So a lot of it is in-person, in their home. And you know, it’s a different way of approaching professional organizing and decluttering because it’s really going to be a lifestyle change and really intentional. So then if people live outside of my service areas such as Los Angeles, Salt Lake City or Milwaukee, Wisconsin, then I’m doing more online, virtual coaching through that process. And I really focus on the home first because I think that once you address what’s closest to you, which is your home, then you’re more easily able to address other aspects of your life.

Tim Church: And how did you develop an interest in doing that?

Jessica Louie: That’s a good question. So I read Marie Kondo’s books back in 2015, and I applied the method to my own home. So she has some very popular books called, “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up” and “Spark Joy.” And you know, she goes through a category-by-category type process of organizing your home instead of a room-by-room or a little-by-little type of process. And then I was able to help my friends and family go through the process as well, and I learned about her official certification system and was officially certified this year. And there’s only about a handful of certified consultants in different areas through the United States. So about 100-120 certified consultants in the U.S. at the moment. So I really love the process, but I also think that it’s more than just the KonMari method, and that’s why I like to bring in Simon Sinek’s philosophy and then work-life alignment in my philosophy as well.

Tim Church: So what do you have to do to become certified?

Jessica Louie: So the certification process for the KonMari method, you know, starts with yourself. So you’re going through the process yourself, you’re making sure that you have completed the entire process. The process, you know, is very individualized, but it usually takes one month to six months for people to complete the five categories in their own home. And then you’re going to a training program, you’re working with individual clients as practice clients, basically, taking an examination and then getting officially certified.

Tim Church: So they don’t just hand them out to everybody, it sounds like.

Jessica Louie: No, not just anyone.

Tim Church: So I have to ask this question because I’m just thinking in the back on my head that I’ve seen many episodes of Hoarders, and you know, everyone has their own way and own system of organizing. And sometimes, there is no system. But have you had any cases, basically, where you’re like, wow, like you were just overwhelmed at what you had to do to help them in their situation?
Jessica Louie: So I haven’t experienced with my clients particularly with being diagnosed hoarders, per say, but I know everyone’s home environments are different, so that’s why it’s really important that they really trust me to invite me into their home. And you know, I think that my healthcare background really helps in coaching these clients. It is an emotional and difficult process of addressing each item in your home and each item that you own, especially when we go through the last category of sentimental items and photos and things like that. So I think that, you know, with my healthcare background, I am able to help them process, especially with my work with intensive care unit patients and their trauma that they’ve gone through. So it definitely is very personal to the client, and that’s why I really enjoy working one-on-one, in-person, if possible.

Tim Church: And what do you typically charge for someone to do one of these consultations? And is that a one-time consult? Or is that an ongoing process?

Jessica Louie: So the first consultation is free. So that’s a 15-30 minute call, maybe a video chat, depending on the person. And then it really is based on their own budget in terms of — you are going to invest in this once in your lifetime, in my opinion. I actually would prefer you never rehire me for the KonMari method portion of our coaching, at least, because no one rebounds after going to the KonMari method. You organize your home once and for all, and then you keep the habits and the mindsets have changed so that you don’t reaccumulate the clutter. So it really depends on the home size and how many people are in the home. So we work one-on-one, so if it’s a family, I work one-on-one with each person in the family or teach the parents to help the children. But I do work with children as young as 4 years old. And most sessions are about $500 per session and then usually, people invest in the packages to really commit themselves to transforming their life. So throughout the process, usually I’m able to help them then, you know, recoup a lot of that money they invested in the package with me because they’re able to resell items that no longer spark joy, and I’m able to help them work through the consignment, resale, donation, environmentally sustainable process of discarding the items. And then it takes usually one month, three months or six months for people to get through the process. And depending on the budget, then they’re able to also do work on their own, so doing a little bit of homework in between our session together. So let’s say we finish most of someone’s clothing category, but we haven’t finished their shoes. Then they’re able to go through their shoes in their own time, and then the next session, we get together and tackle books and papers. Those are the next two categories. So then for papers, you know, I really encourage a lot of digitizing of papers. So then they’re able to digitize things on their own time, not necessarily with me there. It kind of depends on the client, then, of how much time we’re one-on-one spending together. But usually, the entire process takes anywhere between 20-50 hours.

Tim Church: Wow. And what kind of feedback do you get from people after they complete the session and kind of go through the program?

Jessica Louie: Usually, people are so surprised in terms of how much we get done during the sessions and how much of a transformation it is because they maybe either worked with other professional organizers before or tried to purge and do spring cleaning every year before, and nothing ever stuck because, you know, their closets just reaccumulated things or their attics or garages. Here in Los Angeles, there’s very few people that actually park their cars in the garage. And I grew up in the Midwest, and you know, I always thought, you know, it’s unfortunate that you’re not actually using your garage space so that you’re protecting your cars and other items. And so basically, the transformation that they feel is pretty significant because a lot of these times, the clients have tried going through the process themselves. You know, purging, decluttering, going through the KonMari method after reading the books. But they don’t have an accountability partner. They don’t have emotional and physical support. So as their coach, you know, I’m facilitating that process to make sure they’re keeping accountable to working through all the categories and setting an end date to when we’re going to finish this because this is not a lifelong process. This is, you know, there’s an end goal in mind and a vision in mind so they can get to that step. So a lot of times, when people DIY this, you know, it might take them one, two or three years to finish the process. And we definitely decrease the time commitment that is required.

Tim Church: And you mentioned that, you know, obviously decluttering, getting organized, is a big part of the process. But it’s not the only thing that you’re doing and what you’re trying to help people accomplish.

Jessica Louie: Right. I think that it’s a big component of everything. But if someone really is not committed to the process or not ready for that process, that’s OK. We don’t want to ever force anyone to go through the process. So a lot of times, when I’m working with couples, one person is more committed than the other. And you know, the other person will just see the transformation in the client and maybe be willing to start their own transformation a few months later or a few years later. It’s really up to them. But I think it’s so important to be able to go through the other steps, like clarifying your why and aligning your work into your life, if you’re not ready to do the simplifying in your home environment.

Tim Church: I know that I feel amazing when my space is decluttered, clean, whether I’m at work or I’m at home, and my wife probably to the next level. Like she uses it as almost like a therapy session when she’s cleaning and doing things. So what would you say to somebody that says, they ask you, “Well Jessica, what kind of benefits and what’s going to happen in my life if I get my house in order? What can I expect? Or why should I do this other than just to get organized?”

Jessica Louie: So I mean, there’s been a lot of research in terms of how your space affects your well-being and how many people have anxiety related to their clutter, right? Because basically, anything that you’re seeing, anything that you’re consuming, you know, via social media or other environments is something that you have to process. And I call it “closing the files” in terms of you have to be able to close the files in some of those things. But basically, people are really gaining more time to focus on what matters most to them because technically, everything that you own needs to be taken care of. So that means either physically taken care of or cleaning things. So usually, you get more time to really focus and have more intention in your daily activities. You also free up your mind to live more in the moment and be present. And I really think it creates more calmness and peaceful environments. And it really changes your mindset about things versus experiences. So creating experiences and memories together instead of buying a lot of things and gifts and physical items, you know? Because when we’re older and we’re on our deathbed, no one ever says, “Oh, I wish I owned more things.” They always say, “I wish I had spent more time with this person,” or “I wish I would have done this.” And they have some regrets. So really focusing on let’s not have those regrets later in life. Let’s do those things now and live life to the fullest. And then one of the big things I really focus on is increasing confidence in your decision-making skills because throughout the process, you know, you don’t really necessarily — when you start, you don’t really necessarily know what really speaks to your heart, what sparks joy, but as you go through the process, you really build your confidence of I know I want to keep this, I know that I love this item. And then you’re able to apply that habit and that mindset to having confidence in your day-to-day life, interacting with people, taking control of your healthcare, taking control of your finances. So those are some of the things that help people during this transformative process.

Tim Church: Wow. I’m just so fascinated by this. And I love it. And I’m sitting here on the other end, and I think it’s funny that as you’re talking about this transformation and the decluttering, like I’m already feeling like relaxed, like as you’re talking and going through it. So I can only imagine that if you’re someone that is doing the full process, getting the full makeover, what the benefits come about from that. So I just think that is so cool. Now, can you talk a little bit about the income that you’re earning from this business and from your other businesses? And you know, without even getting into specifics, just generally speaking, you know, what kind of income are you bringing in from that?

Jessica Louie: So this business is a little bit newer. This was created in July of 2018, so right now, you know, I’m earning five figures. And the goal in the next 12 months is to be earning in the six-figure range and growing the business both locally in my local area, southern California, and also online with some virtual sessions to really reach — I think that the online environment is great because it really reaches beyond your local network or the classroom and things like that. So those are my goals moving forward.

Tim Church: And how do you allocate the additional money that you’re bringing in from the businesses? Where is it going?

Jessica Louie: So it really is going basically to savings. So I paid off all of my student debt a little bit less than three years out of school, so I paid that off back in early 2016, and I was able to make some investments so my family was closer and living closer to me. And now, it’s really just saving for the future and for possible investment in the future in terms of more traveling — I didn’t really travel very much during my training process. So there’s been a lot more travel recently and more plans to go to Tokyo, where the KonMari method was founded, and other travel experiences. So really creating more memories and time together with people that I really love.

Tim Church: That is so cool. I really like that. I mean, congratulations, by the way, on paying off your student loans. I think that is awesome as well. And actually, just a side note on that, do you think that not having student loans, which a lot of people are struggling with even for 10-15 years post-graduation and even longer, that not having that on your plate has allowed you to take more risks as an entrepreneur but just to explore more and be willing to invest more in these businesses?

Jessica Louie: I think it definitely has helped in terms of I had a little bit over $50,000 in loans to pay off. And I was very intentional with that during residency and then right outside of residency. And I was also very fortunate with not accumulating $100,000 or $200,000 or $300,000 worth of loans. I think that the environment now with student loans has changed a lot in terms of it’s really easy to get the money, but it’s really difficult to know how much the interest is compounding and all that stuff.

Tim Church: Right.

Jessica Louie: So overall, it’s definitely helped me invest more into my businesses because I have those funds, I don’t go into debt at all with investing in my business. And I’ve been able to invest in business coaches to help me along the way as well. So it definitely helps in terms of you need to make the investment so it’s not just a hobby. It is a small business, and you’re really leading it as a small business then.

Tim Church: Now, I think a lot of people are listening to all of these businesses and things that you’re doing while you’re a professor and working as a critical care pharmacist. How the heck do you manage all of this?

Jessica Louie: Honestly, Tim, it was difficult in the beginning. But I was also — also think about, I was a year out of residency. And during residency, I was at a great program, but I was also spending 80-100 hours a week in the hospital. And that was because I was really involved in research processes and other things. So I was spending extra time that wasn’t required of me to be there. So I was already in the mindset of, you know, I don’t have to work 40-hour weeks. I can work 80-hour weeks and things like that. So that really helped me in the beginning of my first business to, you know, really dive deep into the learning process of the technology and the back-end things. So you know, I didn’t think I was working that much, you know, because that was kind of normal. And I was almost bored if I wasn’t doing something that was challenging me, right? And then I also have a partner who’s also in medical training and working quite often and paying down his medical student loans. So I think that if you have a partner that also stays busy and, you know, is working to achieve their visions, it really helps for your support system to know that you’re both working towards your end goals and your visions and growing your careers. But overall, since that time, I’ve definitely been a lot more intentional about how I run my businesses and have been able to automate things and just also learn what’s important. So for example, recently in 2018, I built up a pretty strong Instagram and social media following, but it wasn’t really a passion of mine anymore. And it wasn’t attracting my ideal clients, so I stopped posting on Instagram. And has that affected my business? You know, no. Like it’s nice to connect with people on social media, but sometimes, you have to take breaks and put boundaries about your time commitment to things that aren’t actually bringing in return on investment.

Tim Church: And how many hours now are you typically spending on your businesses?

Jessica Louie: I would say, you know, 25-35 hours a week. It really depends on how many clients are scheduled during that week because I’m seeing clients in-person locally, either at night, in the evenings after work, or on weekends. And so it depends on how many of those clients are scheduled and then I’m doing some of the technology in terms of posting. I like to batch things out. I highly recommend, if you do have an online business that you batch things out. So in 2018, I’ve been doing a little bit more videos. So I recorded all my videos for fall in two days in August. So I think that if you’re really intentional about how you, when you’re working on your business versus working in your business, how much time you commit to each of those and your strategy behind that.

Tim Church: So it sounds like it’s much more manageable now in terms of balancing your job as a pharmacist and what you’re trying to accomplish in your businesses.

Jessica Louie: Definitely. I think that at the beginning — and I think this happens with a lot of entrepreneurs, you know, you want to do all the things and you want to grow your Instagram, grow your LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, everything all at once. And then you kind of learn that, you know, that kind of sets you up for some burnout and exhaustion. And now I’ve learned, you know, that really focusing on what matters most, what will have some return and what also is enjoyable. So and then when you’re at a point when you can outsource things and automate things, I would recommend that so that you’re using your skill sets to their fullest potential when you get to that stage.

Tim Church: Jessica, you have shared some awesome points about entrepreneurship and what you’re doing in your business. What advice in general would you give to other pharmacists and even students out there who have an interest in becoming an entrepreneur? Maybe instead of or even in addition to their role as a pharmacist.

Jessica Louie: I would definitely recommend following a passion, you know, gaining clarity of what you really want, setting your ideal lifestyle of how you want to live your life day-to-day and then going after your dreams because I know a lot of people who will wait to say, “Oh, I’ll do that in x number of years,” but why don’t you just do it today in terms of setting up that dream and going for it? And you know, it might be overwhelming at first, but every baby step will lead to big transformations. And when you’re documenting the journey that you’ve been on, you’ll see how far you’ve come.

Tim Church: That is so good. And what books, any books you would recommend on entrepreneurship or running a business in general? I know one that you already mentioned, and it’s one of my favorites, which is “Start With Why” by Simon Sinek. Any other gems that you have found to be extremely helpful or inspiring?
Jessica Louie: I also really like Brendon Burchard’s “High Performance Habits.”

Tim Church: I’m listening to that right now, actually, in the car.

Jessica Louie: Very nice. And then of course, Marie Kondo’s books if you’re interested in the KonMari method. And if you’re interested in simplifying, Courtney Carver’s “Soulful Simplicity.” It actually has really nice, tangible advice. And “The Growth Mindset” books, I think it’s Angela Duckworth, I think those are some of my go-tos right now. And then I usually provide a list of resources as well when I work with clients if they want to look at more books outside of those.

Tim Church: That is awesome. Thank you so much, Jessica, for coming on the show, for sharing your insights about business but also some of your passions and what you’re doing. And I think it’s just incredible. And I think a lot of people are going to find value not only from what you’re doing but just the experiences that you’ve been through. So if somebody wants to reach out to you, either just to learn more about entrepreneurship or your journey or even to become a KonMari coach or consultant or do what you’re doing, what’s the best way to contact you?

Jessica Louie: The best way is to go to my website, ClarifySimplifyAlign.com, and reach out via there, the contact form, schedule a call or email, which is [email protected].

Tim Church: Great. Thank you again so much. And I look forward to reconnecting a few months down the road to hear what you’re doing and how you’re growing and expanding your business.

Jessica Louie: Thank you, Tim, for your time.

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