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Month: October 2019

YFP 124: The Behavioral Investor with Dr. Daniel Crosby

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The Behavioral Investor with Dr. Daniel Crosby

Dr. Daniel Crosby, New York Times best selling author, joins Tim Ulbrich to discuss his most recent work The Behavioral Investor. As both a psychologist and asset manager, Dr. Crosby provides a fascinating look into the sociological, neurological and psychological factors that influence our investment decisions and provides solutions for how to improve our behavior to be more likely to succeed with our long-term investing plan.

About Today’s Guest

Educated at Brigham Young and Emory Universities, Dr. Daniel Crosby is a psychologist and behavioral finance expert who helps organizations understand the intersection of mind and markets. Dr. Crosby co-authored a New York Times Best-Selling book titled Personal Benchmark: Integrating Behavioral Finance and Investment Management and is the author of The Laws of Wealth. His most recent work is The Behavioral Investor.

He also constructed the “Irrationality Index,” a sentiment measure that gauges greed and fear in the marketplace from month to month. His ideas have appeared in the Huffington Post and Risk Management Magazine, as well as his monthly columns for WealthManagement.com and Investment News. Daniel was named one of the “12 Thinkers to Watch” by Monster.com and a “Financial Blogger You Should Be Reading” by AARP. When he is not consulting around market psychology, Daniel enjoys independent films, fanatically following St. Louis Cardinals baseball, and spending time with his wife and two children.

Summary

Dr. Daniel Crosby was ready to fully walk in the footsteps of his father and become a financial advisor. During a two year mission trip with his church during college, Daniel became fascinated with human behavior and decided he wanted to study psychology. Toward the end of his doctorate program, he was burned out on clinical psychology work and didn’t know if he was able to do that work full-time. He got a job assessing bankers before they were hired and his passion for behavioral finance was born.

Daniel shares that his new book, The Behavioral Investor, is written more for professionals where The Laws of Wealth is intended more for a mass audience. At conference Daniel attended, he heard people repeatedly sharing ideas that weren’t founded in science. This drove him to research behavioral finance to determine what was true and what he believed.

In this episode, Daniel discusses several aspects of behavioral finance and the research behind them. For example, Daniel shares that research shows that intelligent people can’t avoid behavioral bias. He says that we’re just smart enough to present a credible case to ourselves and that there is a negative correlation between intellect and the ability to navigate financial decisions.

Dr. Crosby also discusses why he has a financial advisor manage his money. He says that even though he likely knows more about markets than his advisor, his biggest impediment to managing his own money is that he gets anxious and freaks out. Having an advisor puts someone else in control and pushes him out of the way.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Ulbrich: Hey, what’s up, everybody? Welcome to this week’s episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast. We have a special guest for you, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author, Dr. Daniel Crosby. He was educated at Brigham Young and Emory universities as a psychologist, behavioral finance expert, and asset manager, who applies his study of market psychology to everything from financial product design to security selection. He’s the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller, “Personal Benchmark: Integrating behavioral finance in investment management,” “The Laws of Wealth” — one of my personal favorites — and his most recent work, which we will discuss on today’s show, “The Behavioral Investor.” He is the Chief Behavior Officer and Brinker Capital. His ideas have appeared in the Huffington Post and Risk Management magazine as well as his monthly column for WealthManagement.com and Investment News. He was named one of the ‘12 Thinkers to Watch’ by Monster.com, ‘A Financial Blogger You Should Be Reading’ by AARP, and named the ‘Top 40 Under 40’ by Investment News. When he’s not consulting around market psychology, he enjoys independent films, fanatically following the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team, and spending time with his wife and three children. Daniel, welcome to the show.

Daniel Crosby: Thank you. Great to be here.

Tim Ulbrich: On the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast, we preach the importance of behavior when it comes to managing money, and your work in “The Behavioral Investor,” “The Laws of Wealth,” and your other work so eloquently includes rich research, stories, case studies and cultural references that we can all relate to that make a topic interesting and applicable that, let’s be honest, has a tendency to be quite dry. So before we get into the weeds and talk about behavioral investing, before we get into the nerdy financial conversation, I need to know, how did you find yourself at the crossroads of psychology and personal finance? How does one get interested and make a career of this?

Daniel Crosby: Well, it’s interesting because I entered college, my dad is still a financial advisor, and so I entered college with probably a limited range of options just sort of parroting what my dad had done. And I said, ‘Oh, well, I’m going to be a financial advisor like my dad,’ just saw that that was a good life and indeed it is good work and a good life. But then after my first year of college, I went on a two-year mission for my church and there, I got a chance to interact with people, I got to do a lot of service and things of that nature and just became fascinated by the human condition, the human struggle and sort of came back with this added emphasis on psychology. And I said, ‘Nope, this is what I want to do now. I want to study psychology.’ Well, I finished my bachelor’s, began my PhD three days after I finished my bachelor’s. So it was the ripe old age of 23 when I started my PhD. And towards the end of my PhD program, I was candidly just burning out on doing clinical work because my PhD is in clinical psychology. And so I said, ‘Look, I love psychology, I love thinking deeply about why people do the things that they do, but I don’t know that I’m cut out for 45 hours a week of hearing about people’s most tragic life events and their hardest days.’ And so long story short, found my way back to this original love of finance and got a job out of college assessing bankers pre-hire. So before a bank would hire an executive, they’d bring me in to give them an IQ test and a personality test. And there in the bank, I sort of discovered behavioral economics and behavioral finance in earnest.

Tim Ulbrich: So at the very beginning of the book, Daniel, you mention that the aim of writing this book is to be the most comprehensive guide to the psychology of asset management that’s ever been written. And I think you did a fantastic job of that, but as I read “The Laws of Wealth,” I really enjoyed that work. What inspired you to build upon that that you felt the need to come out with additional research and work that you have here in “The Behavioral Investor?”

Daniel Crosby: Well, you know, for me, it was really two things. “The Laws of Wealth is written more for a mass audience, a retail audience, mom and pop investors. “The Behavioral Investor” is probably better suited for professionals or people with a little bit of background. So there was a bit of an audience shift. But a secondary and perhaps tertiary consideration were I would find myself at conferences with other professionals, other people who were in this kind of world of emotion and finance, and I would hear them sharing ideas that I didn’t think were founded in science, that didn’t sound quite right to me. So there was one conference in particular where I was just sort of frustrated with what was being shared. And I felt like it wasn’t quite right but that I didn’t have the resources at my disposal to rebut what was being said. And so basically, a lot of it was just for me to figure out what I believed. You have a duty — if you’re going to make your living by going around and talking about these things to people, I feel like you have a duty and a responsibility to be better versed than anyone else in these sort of things, and so a lot of the reason why I write is simply to figure out what I believe myself and to teach myself what to think and what to share with others.

Tim Ulbrich: And I think so much of personal finance can quickly become opinion or OK, what did my friend do or what did somebody else or what are others doing? What’s out there in the news? And I think for pharmacists, we are trained, it’s drilled into us to think about evidence-based medicine, and I like so much of what you’ve done here in presenting the research and really putting I think a lot of rigor in depth behind some of the financial principles that will be sound in terms of helping one’s financial plan. So you break the book into four parts, and in part one, you investigate the sociological and neurological and physiological barriers to making sound investment decision-making. And early on in the book, you state, “Humans who are capable of much greater complexity of thought are accordingly capable of much greater self-deception and irrationality.” And you go on to say that there are social norms that define us and that “trusting in commonness and what makes one human but learning not to is what will make you a successful investor.” Tell us more by what you mean by this.

Daniel Crosby: Yeah, so starting with that first point, you know, when we become aware of our tendency to be biased or our tendency to make cognitive errors, a lot of folks and perhaps maybe smart folks like the ones that listen to this podcast go, ‘Oh, well, that pertains to other people but not me because I’m a pharmacist, I’m a doctor, and this is sort of a Joe Six-Pack problem, but it’s not my problem because I’m smarter, I’m better.’ But the research actually shows that there’s a negative correlation between intellect and your ability to successfully navigate some of these things because oftentimes, we’re just smart enough to fool ourselves. Like we’re just smart enough to present a credible case to ourselves that what we’re doing is not, in fact, wrongheaded or biased. And so there’s a couple of things at play: One is that smarts can actually be your own worst enemy in the way that I’ve just said. But in “The Laws of Wealth,” I cited research that shows that people lose 13% of their IQ, basically their cognitive processing power, when they’re in a period of financial stress. And so even for parts of navigating your financial life where smarts are of us, we have least access to them when we actually need them most. So it’s sort of a double-edged sword, but you can’t really think your way out of this one. And it’s a case of what got you there won’t get you to where you want to go. And a lot of people misapply their smarts in this area.

Tim Ulbrich: And I think that makes so much sense. I think any of us can think back to personal financial decisions we’ve made and I think especially as you reflect back — I mean, sometimes in the moment but I think more so reflecting back — where you look at a decision you made and it’s like, what was I thinking? You know, in that moment of time, what was going on? And I think it really speaks to the power of the emotions that can take over some rational thought and as we’ll talk about later in the show, the power of having a plan and putting that plan on automation to really help yourself get out of the way to ensure that your plan can see through to success. Daniel, one of the things I really took away from your book is that while it may seem counterintuitive, you mention that a large body of research suggests that investors profit most when they do the least, you know, really building on what we had just talked about here a couple moments ago. So my question here is, why do we have a tendency towards action? And why can this tendency hurt us when it comes to investing and saving for things like the future in terms of retirement?

Daniel Crosby: Well, one of the hallmarks, one of the key takeaways of “Behavioral Investor” is this idea that things that have served us well evolutionarily or things that have served us well in other parts of our lives serve us poorly when it comes to the investing domain, in particular. And so this action bias, as it’s called, is a great example of this. You know, in many parts of your life, quite intuitively more action does lead to greater results. You know, if you want to get more fit, then you should lift more weights. If you want to get smarter, you should read more books. Taking action does indeed bring about results. But in financial markets, the reverse tends to be true. Myers Statten looked at 19 different countries and found that in every single country that he studied, the more active people were in markets, the more they traded, effectively, the worse they did. And that was a monotonic stepwise relationship. For every extra action you took, you did slightly worse both net of and gross of fees, and so it’s a weird thing to think just about anywhere else, if you want more good stuff, you should do more. But in this world, doing less tends to get you more.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and I think we’ll talk more about automation as well, but I think this really gets to the point of when you can be aware of the potential negative effects of having an action bias or action type of mindset, I think there’s a tendency when it comes to our investments, our finances, to be wanting to check accounts. And certainly if those are reading the news or getting additional information, make quick decisions. And really, again, automation, take a step back, have a plan, have a coach, and really looking at putting that plan on automatic to get yourself out of the way. One of the things that I left with was in Chapter 2, which was titled “Investing on the Brain,” you summarize this study where the brain activity of individuals was measured, and they were making a series of choices that were either immediate or delayed monetary rewards. And I found this part really interesting and so applicable to how we handle our long-term investing strategy, this idea between rewards that are immediate or rewards that are delayed into the future. Can you talk more about what researchers found in this work and what the implications are when it comes to investing, especially investing for the long term?

Daniel Crosby: So what the study found was that when people were presented with a short-term reward, there was a flood of dopamine, which is sort of a neurological reward, if you will, but that no such dopamine rush was present when it was a longer term reward setup. So the key psychological concept here is salience, right? It’s how real, how vivid, how present to the mind, that reward seems. And so research has shown that when people are making long-term plans, what they have to do is make the long-term more salient. So to explain, like what’s happening to me right now is enormously salient because, you know, if I eat a donut or if I go on a walk or do any other pleasurable thing, I’m rewarded in real time. But something like saving for 80-year-old Daniel’s retirement is much more abstract, much more ethereal, much less salient. And so what we have to do is make the future seem more real. And so you see this in studies where people have actually aged their faces, there have been studies where people have shown you what you might look like when you’re 80 years old, and then ask you, do you want to save money now for retirement? And people save at a bigger rate when they imagine themselves vividly older than they are today. So with your planner, with your spouse, with whoever, we need to be having conversations about the future that make that future — if not just as real, much more real than it currently is because that’s going to entice us to do the sort of saving and preparing that we need to do.

Tim Ulbrich: And I think in your example in the book, I think long-term retirement savings, if we think about a traditional retirement model, you work for 40 years, you’re 70, 75, 80, whatever, you know, I think that one’s probably the most obvious in terms of OK, that’s so far off, and I have all these needs that are here today of which — and expenses that can happen, of course. But if I go to spend money today on a vacation or spend money on a home today or spend money on a car today, that’s an immediate reward. And that’s what you talked about in terms of the dopamine pathway being activated versus Tim or Daniel, 40 years from now, it’s a much harder goal to really see the urgency around. So I think that’s an obvious one. You know, one that I’ve personally experienced that maybe isn’t as obvious in a little bit shorter term is even something like savings for kids’ college. So I have four boys, my oldest is 8. And I can remember, I mean, it seems like just yesterday he was a newborn and we were talking about savings for college. And here we are at 8 and lots of needs have really been put ahead of saving for college for a variety of reasons. So while that isn’t necessarily a 40- or 50-year trajectory, it’s more of an 18-year trajectory, I still that gets to the point that you made well in the book of needs that you have today and really being able to work with a coach and a planner to help take those future needs and really making them as real as possible today to prioritize the savings for those. One of the concepts — and you link this well to the idea of keeping up with the Joneses — is you talk in this section of the book that we just referenced, “Investing on the Brain,” about anticipating a reward is deeply satisfying, whereas literally receiving the reward is far less gratifying. And I want to say that again because I think that’s a really interesting concept. “Anticipating a reward is deeply satisfying whereas literally receiving the reward is far less gratifying.” And again, you go on to make the connection here of how we easily can feel dissatisfied in the work and the money that we earn, how you kind of keep pushing that forward and that obviously leads to the concept of keeping up with the Joneses, feeling like you need more and more and more and it’s never enough. So my question here, Daniel, is is there a point where there is enough? How much is enough? And can money buy happiness? Is there a point where wealth can really produce happiness? That’s a question we all often hear and think about.

Daniel Crosby: Yeah, so I wanted to talk about why anticipation is more pleasant than the reward itself, and then I’ll move onto the happiness question. So there’s something in psychology called “focalism,” which is when we imagine a future event, we imagine sort of one dimension of it. We focus on one particular thing. And so if you’re imagining a trip to Hawaii, you focus on laying on the beach with a pina colada in your hand and not getting up at 4 o’clock to make your flight and getting stuck in traffic and everything that it takes to get there because even for something immensely pleasurable, there’s still some element of hassle and negativity associated with it. And we tend not to focus on that. So that is part of why preparing for an event, a vacation, a gift, whatever, is more pleasurable than the event itself. You know, I think about we bought our dream home a couple of years ago. And you know, looking on Zillow and dreaming about all the things we would do there and everything was a lot of fun, but cleaning all of the toilets in a big house is a lot less fun. And so this focalism leads us to sort of one-dimensional appraisals of things, and that is the way that it is. In terms of the literature on money and happiness, it’s really quite fascinating. So in a phrase, money is better at buying the absence of misery than it is at buying happiness. So money can make you not sad. Like people with adequate resources are happier or less sad than people with inadequate resources, and that increases exponentially up to about $75,000 or $80,000, up to about sort of a middle-class income. But after that, it plateaus very quickly because what money is good at doing is having you not worry about living in a safe neighborhood, not worrying about keeping shoes on your kids’ feet, not worrying about keeping food on the table. But once you’ve sort of provided for that lowest rung of Maslow’s Pyramid there, it gets much trickier after that. And after that point, money can buy happiness if you spend it on certain things. And so the things that money can buy happiness is if you spend it on time with others, like a vacation or time with others, if you give it away, so if you’re charitable, and if you buy yourself out of things that you hate doing. So like getting a maid or getting someone to cut your yard or whatever you hate doing, if you can buy your way out of that. And that’s about it. So it provides sort of a worry-free baseline. And then after that, you have to get kind of particular about how you spend it because if you’re not spending it on time with people you love and if you’re not spending it on making your life a little easier, it just doesn’t do much, candidly.

Tim Ulbrich: That’s so rich. And I love how in the book, you talk about the concept, along with keeping up with the Joneses and eventually getting to this basic level of happiness which money can buy of being able to cover needs. You talk about the concept of living on the hedonic treadmill. And I think we can all relate to that where we buy something, and the anticipation of it was much greater than the reality of that or that feeling, that dopamine rush over time subsides. But when we think about investing in things like giving to others and being philanthropic or investing in convenience is what I just heard you say there, investing in time and experiences, I mean, those are the things that really produce that true joy and happiness. And I think that’s such rich information that we all can think about and reflect upon with our own financial plans. Beyond the minimum, beyond taking care of our needs, are we spending our money and investing our money in the things that matter most? Which the literature supports really does buy happiness and hopefully doing what we can to minimize buying things that we know will not produce that same level of happiness. So shifting focus here for a minute, I want to talk about loss aversion because I think that is real for so many listening to this podcast, especially myself, and thinking of those that were significantly impacted, either directly or indirectly, by the 2008 recession. Can you talk further about the concept of loss aversion and how this may have an impact on one’s long-term savings plan?

Daniel Crosby: Yeah, so loss aversion is the observation in the psychological literature that people are about 2.5 times as upset about a loss as they are excited about a comparably sized gain. So if you go to Vegas, and you lose $100, you’re upset. If you gain $100 bucks, you’re like, yeah, whatever, it doesn’t change my life. So this is sort of this asymmetrical relationship we have between how we perceive loss and gain. So of course, this leads people to do a number of things in markets, notably, to take too little risk. Now this can be exacerbated, depending on sort of where in your life you encountered the markets. So for me, I just turned 40 last week, and so I got out of school in 2008, I finished my PhD in 2008. And so the first thing I did is I got out of school, I got a job, started saving, started investing, and immediately ran into the buzzsaw of 2008 and early 2009. And so there’s something in psychology called this primacy and recency effect. So we have increased memory, right, we hang onto things that happen early in a sequence or late in a sequence. And so for people like me whose initial foray into investing was getting their money chewed up and spat out, it can be a very discouraging thing.

Tim Ulbrich: And I think, Daniel, so I’m on the exact opposite. I also finished my pharmacy degree in 2008, but I was doing residency in 2009, so when I just started investing, I’ve only been on the other side of this 10-year run in the positive. So I have yet to experience that loss. I really bought at probably about the lowest point, and so I think that leads me to be somewhat of overconfident in what the markets will do. And I think you do a good job in the book of when you’re thinking about risk, truly assessing risk not based on one experience or one moment in time but really looking at the historical risk. And I think on the other side of that when I think of my experience is that I shouldn’t necessarily look at this 10-year period, as I may have a tendency to do, and expect that that run is going to continue going forward. And so I think there’s — I could see this on both sides of it as well. And I hope our listeners will pick up a copy of the book because in “The Behavioral Investor,” you do a great job — and we’re only talking about a few of them here, obviously loss aversion being one — but you do a great job of distilling what you say is more than 117 different types of behavioral biases into four types of behavioral risk: ego, conservatism, attention, and emotion. And you walk through each one of those in detail, you give strategies to overcome, and so I hope our readers will get the book to look at more of those in detail. So I want to shift to the topic of automation. And I think — and you mention in the book — you could have really titled the book and distilled it down to three words: automation, automation, automation. And I find the irony in your book of there’s so much complex research and so much rich data and ultimately, it gets to this concept of less is more, automation, and have a coach. And so talk to us about the power of automation and how that helps combat some of these biases. And I’d also be interested in, you know, how have you successfully navigated automation, even in your own financial plan?

Daniel Crosby: Yeah, it’s a fascinating thing because people make the mistake of thinking that a complex, dynamic system like the stock market has to be met or solved with equal complexity. And you remember from your stats class that to avoid overfitting, when something is complex and dynamic and always in flux, really the way to not overfit by solving that problem is to approach it quite simply and with just a couple of rules. And you know, you’ve touched on a couple of mine, which are automate and work with a coach. And so automation is great because it actually takes a human tendency to be prone to the status quo, to be sort of lazy, and it locks it in for our benefit. So you know, being lazy can lead you to never start saving and investing, and that’s certainly problematic. But if you begin a robust program of investing and saving, and then you lock that in and you automate it, that same laziness can work to your benefit. So that’s sort of the magic of automation is it just locks in this human tendency to be conservative and be status quo-prone and uses it, flips it on its head and uses it for our benefit. The second piece I’ve written about quite a bit is that I work with a coach, like I pay a financial advisor. And I mean, at the risk of being arrogant here, I probably know more about financial markets than my financial advisor. And so why do I pay someone to manage my money, to hang onto my money when I perhaps know more than they do on paper? Well, the reason goes back to our conversation about education and IQ and these sorts of things. The biggest impediment to me reaching my financial goals is not inadequate knowledge of markets. The biggest impediment is me freaking out.

Tim Ulbrich: Yes.

Daniel Crosby: And so I understand that I’m no different than the next person. Like I can’t write enough books to make myself rational or calm or cool-headed. And I know myself. And I’m, in fact, quite not level-headed. I’m quite anxious, and I’m quite skittish. And markets — and look, let’s call it what it is, just in life general, nobody goes into psychology because they’re well-adjusted, right?

Tim Ulbrich: Right, right.

Daniel Crosby: So I know this about myself, and I build a wall to keep me out of my own way.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and I think the self-awareness — I share that with you as well — I think the self-awareness of that and then taking the initiative to say, OK, I need that coach, I need that accountability, because I think as your book highlights so well, we’re just hardwired toward getting in our own way when it comes to being successful with investments. And so I think if we can acknowledge that, be aware of that, call it what it is, I think that really gives us the humility to say, OK, we probably need somebody in our corner to help us out with this plan. I would also point our listeners to, in addition to Daniel’s book, we talked about automation in detail on Episode 057 of the podcast if you want to check that out. And a book I’ve talked about before on this show is “I Will Teach You to Be Rich” by Rahmit Sedi. I think he does a really, really nice job of talking about the power of automation and giving some examples of what that could look like. And in his plan, he talks a lot about that upfront time investment to develop the plan or work with a coach to do that. But then after that, you’re really saving yourself time and I would argue saving yourself a lot of anxiety and stress when you know that you’re going to be really just overseeing the plan as it’s hopefully functioning and running itself and not having to really wonder, am I achieving this? Am I not achieving this? What’s going on with certain parts of the plan? I want to end by talking about passive investing versus active investing, two terms that many of our listeners are probably familiar with. But then a third approach that you talk about, which is a new approach called rule-based behavioral investing and why that may be even a better approach than passive investing, which I think many of our listeners would probably be in favor of. So can you briefly define passive and active for those that are not familiar with those terms when it comes to investing? And then outline what’s different about rule-based behavioral investing?
Daniel Crosby: Yeah, so passive investing in its purest form is saying, I don’t know what the market’s going to do in the future. So I’m going to own the entire market, effectively, to use the S&P 500 as a proxy for the entire market. Instead of trying to pick the winners and losers from these 500 largest companies in the U.S. economy, I’m just going to own them all and own them in the sizes that they are. So the bigger the company, the bigger a piece of my portfolio it will be. And I’m not going to try and pick winners and losers. Active investing would be trying to pick winners and losers from among those 500, again, just using this as a simplified proxy, we’re going to try and pick the top 50 stocks from among these 500, hold those 50 with the aim of beating that benchmark, as it were. And so like many things I think in our day and age, the conversation around active and passive I think has sort of devolved into hysterics and people just shouting at each other from the other side, the other bank of the river. And so I wanted to look at this and say, ‘You know, what works about passive investing? And what works with active investing? And let’s just do that. Like let’s just do what works.’ So when I looked at what works, it must be said that the reason there are so many passive enthusiasts is that it’s just worked very well and it’s very cheap, on average. So if you look at 10-year periods over the last 10 years, it’s something like 85% of passive vehicles have beaten their active brethren and at a fraction of the cost, so that’s very compelling stuff. But passive investing still falls prey to a couple of mistakes. You know one of them that is somewhat controversial is market cap waiting, which basically says the larger a company is, the larger the size of my portfolio it will constitute in a true passive portfolio. Well, there’s research to suggest that larger stocks underperform smaller stocks. So you might want to do something as simple as equal weight or broaden your universe. There’s also interesting research that I think not many people are aware of. If you look at something like the S&P 500, this is the Standard & Poor’s 500. You know, the Standard & Poor’s is a rating agency. This isn’t mined from the earth, right? Like this doesn’t occur in nature. There’s a secret committee of people who chooses who will go into and out of the S&P 500. And at times, they have made poor decisions, just like we all do. They’ve made decisions to include, to break their own rules around profitability to include AOL right before the tech bubble burst. So they can break their own rules, they can make poor, wrong-headed, discretionary choices that can lead to some underperformance. So my thought was take the best parts of passive investing. It’s well diversified, it’s cheap, and do those things. Never overpay. Diversify to the hilt. Those are great things to learn. But you can also take rules from active investing or the best types of active investing, which is don’t use your discretion. Don’t leave it up to some external force to choose what’s going to go into your portfolio. You rule based on choosing affordably priced, high quality shares, weight them in a way that’s consistent with strong performance historically. So you know, before I get an angry army of passive investing enthusiasts after me, there’s so much recommended. For the average person, for the person who just doesn’t want to think about this stuff, passive investing makes all the sense in the world. But if you’re interested in these things and you want to take it just a step further, I think there are ways that you can improve on market cap-weighted passive investing that are very sensible and very affordable.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and you do a great job of this. Chapter 12 is called “Investing a Third Way,” and I found this very refreshing, to be honest. And confession time to my audience and community, I mean, I was one of those people, I am one of those people I feel like that is kind of on the side of passive investing, shouting across the riverbank to the people on the active side. And I think this was just a good reminder of, you know, as you mentioned, many things in life, it’s not one of two options, but there’s multiple options. And really taking a look to see what’s the best from both of these? And is there a third way and a third approach. And you do a great job in outlining this in a table in terms of what really are the advantages of what you’re referring to here as this rule-based behavioral investing. It’s got low fees, it’s diversified, it has the potential to outperform, obviously potential a key word there, low turnover, and manages bias. And in the book, you were very clear and your quote was, “To be as direct as possible, passive investing should be the de facto choice of those uninterested in the art and science of investment managing. By buying a diversified basket of index funds that covers a variety of asset classes, know nothing investors who often know a great deal are likely to beat more than 90% of active managers and have time to focus on pursuits more meaningful than compounding wealth.” And so I think that’s also a great reminder of again, there’s not one or two options. There’s a multitude of options. And this also depends on how involved and how interested you want to be in learning more about the process. So Daniel, thank you so much for taking time, for coming on the show, for, again, the work that you’ve done here in “The Behavioral Investor,” “The Laws of Wealth,” and the other work that you’ve put out there as well. So in addition to listening to your podcast called “Standard Deviations” and getting ahold of the book, “The Behavioral Investor,” which is available pretty much anywhere, where can our listeners go to learn more about the work that you are doing?
Daniel Crosby: I’m very active on Twitter @danielcrosby and also post a lot of my research on LinkedIn, so just Daniel Crosby, PhD. So thank you so much for having me.

Tim Ulbrich: Awesome. Thank you so much, Daniel.

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YFP 123: Leveraging Your Expertise to Start a Side Hustle

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Leveraging Your Expertise to Start a Side Hustle

Dustin & Melody Hartzler talk about their healthcare side hustles, how these ventures have accelerated their financial goals, how they balance and prioritize their time, and how they work together as a couple when it comes to business and managing their personal finances.

About Today’s Guests

Dustin Hartzler is a Happiness Engineer at Automattic by day, where he helps business owners work all of the kinks out of their WooCommerce stores. If working with WordPress all day wasn’t enough, he spends time each week recording his WordPress podcast called Your Website Engineer (http://YourWebsiteEngineer.com). He enjoys helping people understand and use WordPress to its fullest capacity and spends time tinkering with code. When he’s not in front of the computer (which is rare), he enjoys spending time CrossFitting, reading and traveling. He lives in Dayton, OH with his wife, 5.5 year old daughter, and 2.5 year old son.

Dr. Melody L. Hartzler, PharmD, BCACP, BC-ADM, is a family medicine clinical pharmacist and Associate professor of pharmacy practice. Dr. Hartzler is a graduate from Ohio Northern Raabe College of Pharmacy. She completed her PGY-1 Pharmacy Practice Residency with emphasis in Ambulatory Care at the Chalmers P. Wylie VA Ambulatory Care Center in Columbus, OH. Following residency, she joined faculty at Cedarville University School of Pharmacy and developed a collaborative practice in a family medicine residency program. She now serves part-time for Cedarville University School of Pharmacy and part-time as a clinical pharmacist at Western Medicine Family Physicians. Her primary practice interests are diabetes, IBS/IBD, and functional medicine. In her current clinical practice, she works collaboratively with her physicians through a consult agreements. She is board certified in both ambulatory care pharmacy as well as diabetes management. She is a nationally recognized speaker, who has presented 6 times at the ASHP Midyear Clinical Meeting, as well as numerous state and local programs. She is an active member of American Society of Health System-Pharmacists as well as state and local organizations. She is also is a current board member for the Ohio Pharmacist Association. Dr. Hartzler’s passion for functional medicine lead her to start her company PharmToTable, LLC; she blogs at PharmToTable.Life. Her newest adventure is FunctionalMedicineCE.Com, she is making quality continuing education for Functional Medicine convenient and affordable.

Summary

Dustin and Melody Hartzler share their career journeys and how they are leveraging their expertise to start a side hustle. They have created multiple side hustles built on needs they are seeing while also fulfilling creative outlets they crave. Melody works 3 days a week at Western Medicine Family Physicians and teaches at Cedarville part-time. At her office job, she focuses on diabetes medication, transitions of care, medical reconciliation and does functional medicine consultations. Dustin is an electrical engineer turned Happiness Engineer at Automattic where he supports customers set up their WooCommerce stores and websites.Together they have created two side hustles: Functional Medicine Continuing Education and Pharm to Table. This episode focuses on Functional Medicine Continuing Education.

Dustin and Melody share their roles in their businesses. Dustin is able to have a creative outlet by building websites for their businesses and Melody often brings new ideas to the table based on the needs she sees in the pharmacy and functional medicine fields. They often have business conversations while driving.

Melody dives into functional medicine, a break down of what it is, her personal story leading her to learn more about functional medicine and how she incorporates it into her office practice as well as in their side hustles.

They speak more about their business model and the costs behind getting websites like they have up and running. The couple also share their advice for getting started in a side hustle and the podcasts and books they help to inspire their journey.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Ulbrich: Hey, what’s up, everybody? Welcome to this week’s episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast. I’m excited to welcome onto the show Dustin and Melody Hartzler, proud fellow alums of mine of Ohio Northern University to talk about their unique career journeys with multiple side hustles, which most recently culminated in the launch of FunctionalMedicineCE.com and a virtual symposium that they are launching on Nov. 9, 2019. This episode is an extension of the work, the excellent work, that Tim Church has been doing as a part of our YFP side hustle series where we talk about ways you can create additional streams of income to reach your financial goals faster and highlight pharmacists who are making this happen. Now, before we get started with today’s episode, I want to mention an awesome giveaway that we have going on this month in combination, in partnership with Brandon Dyson and the team over at TLDR Pharmacy. And this is the ultimate residency prep giveaway, and you can learn more and enroll in that giveaway to get yourself eligible over at YourFinancialPharmacist.com/giveaway. Again, that’s YourFinancialPharmacist.com/giveaway. In this giveaway, the ultimate residency prep giveaway for five winners, we have a variety of resources, everything from interview prep, letter of intent prep, a pharmacy residency bootcamp from the Pharmacy Advisory Group, lots and lots of resources, including the forecast application fee that, of course, costs just over $100. So again, you can learn more at YourFinancialPharmacist.com/giveaway. So Dustin and Melody, welcome to the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast.

Melody Hartzler: Thank you.

Dustin Hartzler: Hello, hello.

Tim Ulbrich: Well this has been a long time in the making, so excited to have you guys on the show. And we’re going to talk everything from business and side hustles to how do you guys effectively work together, what’s the purpose, what’s the goal, why are you doing these side hustles, so I’m excited to be able to have our community, our listeners, get exposure not only to the businesses that you’re working on but also a little bit of the behind-the-scenes of how the two of you operate and the success that you’ve had. So why don’t we start with each of you — Melody, I’ll start with you. And then Dustin, I’ll ask the same thing. Melody, can you start and tell us a little bit about your day job, what you’re doing every day as a clinical pharmacist? And then from there, we’ll jump later in the show about some of the side hustles.

Melody Hartzler: Sure. So three days a week, I work at Western Medicine Family Physicians, which is a private practice family physician office in the Dayton, Ohio, area. And then I also teach at Cedarville part-time, so I get the opportunity to still teach what I love, which is endocrinology and diabetes-focused. And also I am in charge of our residency teaching certificate program at Cedarville. So during the week at the office, I do a lot of diabetes management, also transitions of care, helping med reconciliation for post-hospital discharge patients. And then I do a lot of functional medicine consults too, which I think we’re going to get into later.

Tim Ulbrich: We are. And that was — part of wanting you to share that is I think often the value in a side hustle — most side hustles that often turn into successful businesses I think is where there is synergy between someone’s area of expertise in their day job and what they’re able to do. So split position, teaching as well as practice in functional medicine. Dustin, why don’t you give us a little bit of background on the work that you’re currently doing at Automatic as well as the previous work that you had in starting and owning your own business?

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, absolutely. So I do work at Automatic now. I am on a support team, so I help people set up websites. And you might see where this is going here in a little bit, but I had a business when we moved to Dayton in 2010, I set up my own company because I wasn’t going to do my electrical engineering job, drive to a factory two hours away, and it just didn’t make sense. So I’m like, let’s see if I can start something here. And I started, and I had a business building websites for people. And so I have a lot of experience, 10 years almost, in just building websites and helping people get their websites set up. So that’s my primary focus, and that’s my primary day-to-day.

Tim Ulbrich: So you’re title, Dustin, if I pulled this correctly from your LinkedIn profile, is a “happiness engineer.” What is that? I mean, what does the day-to-day of that look like?

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, so that’s just a name for our customer support team. And so our goal is to make everybody happy, I guess if you will. It’s mainly — it’s kind of a unique position in the fact that we’re not like a normal call center that says like, “Oh, you can only give them refunds if this, or you can only do this.” Like there’s so much flexibility in our jobs, like you know, if somebody has paid for a plugin or paid for something and it just doesn’t work, we can go outside their window to refund them or we give them extra time or give them free plugins. Like I’ve given customers who’ve spent thousands of dollars with us, just oh, this wasn’t working when you try to check out, it’s on me. Like it’s one of the cool things that we can do for our loyal customers and just try to make everybody, that experience when you’re building a website is so frustrating. And so our goal is to help people get what they need and to also just do it without having to ask for extra permission. Like, “Oh, can we give someone this $100 thing worth of value?” Just go ahead and do it, and everybody moves on with their lives.

Tim Ulbrich: So one of the things I don’t think I’ve ever asked you this and I don’t want to gloss over, Dustin, but you mentioned obviously you’re trained as an electrical engineer and you abandoned — for lack of a better word — abandoned that work, started your own company. You mentioned the long commute, but what other reasons, what other factors played into that decision in terms of leaving a career in a field that you had spent a lot of time obviously in training and becoming an expertise and deciding you want to go this route into web development?

Dustin Hartzler: I think the two things that stand out to me is one, I don’t like meetings. I worked at Whirlpool, and I would literally have like seven hours of meetings in an eight-hour day, plus have to do all my other work.

Melody Hartzler: He wouldn’t do well in academia either.

Tim Ulbrich: No, no, he would not.

Dustin Hartzler: And then I think the other thing was just the inspiration I was getting from listening to so many other business podcasts and people creating their own thing and doing their own thing, and the income level was — you were never capped. Whatever you could create, that’s how much money you could make. So I think those were kind of the two reasons besides the long commute. And honestly, I liked the commute more than the work because I got to listen to podcasts the whole way to and from work.

Tim Ulbrich: I love that. I mean, so the aversion of meetings and the advantage of not having a cap on your income certainly can be reasons to be able to start your own business. So I agree, though, Melody, academia would not be the environment for Dustin. You’ve got to love the meetings that are about the meetings. Those are my favorite types of meetings. So let’s jump in. And Melody, if you could start, and Dustin, feel free to chime in, you know, I’m always curious, obviously here we are on a personal finance podcast, but I think so much of people’s success in business or here in side hustles or side hustles that turn into businesses over time is really dependent on people having a solid financial base and foundation from which they can build. So tell us a little bit about your personal finance story and journey as an individual, as a couple, and how that has put you in a position to be strategic and on the offense when it comes to these business opportunities.

Melody Hartzler: Sure. So I probably didn’t have the best understanding of finances when we got married and even going into school. I had a lot of private loans that had a variable interest rate. So by the time 2008 came around, before the stock market crashed, some of those were at about 16% interest.

Tim Ulbrich: Wow.

Melody Hartzler: Yes. So we left, I graduated in 2009, and I had about $120,000 in debt plus an additional $12,000 that I ended up paying back to Walgreens about three years later. Maybe a little longer. And so from that point, we knew we had to pay it back, and we wanted to pay it back quickly. We really wanted to pay it back before we had kids. Dustin had a lot less, which he can talk about. But so I — even during residency, I wanted to pursue residency and I knew that I liked talking with people and I loved the idea of community pharmacy, but I knew that the way that it was going wasn’t going to work for me and my goals. And so I did my residency in an outpatient facility at the Columbus VA. And I didn’t have weekend responsibilities there, so on the weekends, just like every other resident in town, I was working on the weekends. So I worked at Walgreens every other weekend throughout my whole residency. So pretty much had four days off a month because I was working the other weekends. And you know, that helped us a lot because we were able to significantly increase even just that first year. If you think about four days a month of a retail pharmacist’s salary plus the residency salary, it almost was about the same.

Tim Ulbrich: Absolutely.

Melody Hartzler: You know, when you got down to it. So that was a blessing to still be able to have that residency experience and then be able to get paid a separate position to help us dig out of that a little bit and then ended up having one of our cars died that year, and so we ended up having to use a lot of that to purchase a reliable car to get to those jobs. So and then Dustin, I can let him talk a little bit about his strategy when we were paying off loans. He was even paying them off when we were in Ada still at Ohio Northern, so my last two years of school, I worked as a head resident — actually three years, the last three years I was at ONU, I was the head resident. And so my room was free and we had the stipend plus we got a meal ticket. So here we got married and we’re living in an apartment on campus and going to the cafeteria as a married couple because that’s what made the most sense. I mean, we didn’t have our awakening on the whole health and nutrition thing at that point, so we were still OK with eating the food there. And so that was a big savings, we didn’t have a rent to pay for our first early years of marriage because of that. And so Dustin really was able to start driving down some of those high interest loans.

Tim Ulbrich: So Dustin, give us the strategy a little bit — and obviously chime in with your own financial position as well in terms of student loan debt. But those together when I hear 16% interest loans, were those just things you aggressively paid off? Did you guys refinance those? But in addition to that, what was the motivation for you that even while Melody was still in school that you obviously had very significant intentions of trying to aggressively pay those off. Tell us a little bit about that backstory.

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, so when I started — so I graduated. I’m two years older than Melody school-wise. And so I graduated two years earlier. And I had a full-time job, you know, a full salary engineer position, and I drove to and from work. And this was like right at the dawn of podcasts, believe it or not. And the iPod, video iPod is the first iPod with the thick wheel, and I felt like I could invest $300 in this Apple device so that I could play it through my car deck tape player.

Tim Ulbrich: Yes.

Dustin Hartzler: To and from work. Like I was commuting an hour to and from Whirlpool. And I was like, well, I just want to learn about money. Like nobody ever teaches you about money. And so I got hooked on the Dave Ramsey Show, and all of a sudden things that he was saying was making sense. And we didn’t full out Dave Ramsey — like we took vacations while we were still in debt. Like we lived life, but we still were pretty aggressive with our student loans. But what happened was I ended up with like $20,000 in student loans. I throw that number out there like, oh, just $20,000. That’s still a lot. It’s not Monopoly money, like we paid it all back. But so I ended up — he was talking about creating a budget, and this was all before Dave Ramsey has his budgeting tools and stuff online. So I had an Excel spreadsheet, and I figured out — and I don’t know if this is true or not — but as an engineer, you’re always trying to figure out how you can save the most amount of money in interest. And so like we figured that it made more sense for Melody to take out new loans for the last couple years while we paid off her current loans. And so we had about three things we had to pay for: We paid for gas for my car to and from work. We paid for renter’s insurance. And I think we paid for like some groceries for breakfast and lunches for me. That was pretty much all of our bills. And so it was like every week, I figured out that if I wanted to spend $2,000 per month towards the loans, then I could spend $500 per week. And then that last week, whatever we had left in the month, we got that, that’s what got sent over to Sallie Mae at the time. And so that was kind of the strategy and the thought process. And was it the coolest life to live? No, not really. But looking back, our first two years of marriage, we lived on campus. And I mean, I got to do all the intramural sports and all that kind of stuff, and there were still a lot of friends that I had because I had just graduated. And so it was kind of cool, like it was a good jumpstart with such a weight around our ankles, if you will, with all of the loans that we had.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, I mean, there’s nothing like a good date night at the Macintosh cafeteria, right? At Ohio Northern University. I mean, what I love about that though is I love the intentionality, I love that Melody, you kind of admitted that you didn’t necessarily come in with the same appreciation for that and obviously had more debt, although that’s still well below the national average of what we’re seeing now even though it was a higher interest rate. But still were really, really aggressive. And I want to follow up on that and hear from the two of you. We talk a lot on this show about the importance of having a financial why. What is your motivator for why you even care about this topic of money to begin with? And we’ve preached over and over and over again that that’s going to be different for everyone. But if you can articulate that, especially as a couple if you can articulate that, I think it makes so many other parts of the financial plan easier to work through, such as the month-to-month budget and being on the same page and all the things that cause so much heartache and a lot of difficulty for people. So for the two of you, what’s the vision? What’s the dream? What’s the why when it comes to money in terms of why you wanted to be intentional in paying down the debt? And what’s the future hold in terms of why this topic of money matters?

Dustin Hartzler: I think the first thing that really comes to mind is like, I didn’t like paying people to use their money. I don’t know, like I had never had any credit, I had never — before, it was always like, “Oh, interest. That’s what the bank pays me.” And then when we see how much the interest is making, or how much we’re spending in interest, it just like takes your breath away almost. It’s like, wow, on our mortgage or whatever, that’s a lot of money just to spend to have used somebody else’s money. And so I think that’s kind of the driving force behind it, and then kind of looking out — and I do this a lot too with trying to figure out what happens the day comes and we don’t have our mortgage anymore, like look at all of the possibilities there. Like, oh, if we didn’t have a mortgage, we could easily cash flow college for our children. Or oh, if we didn’t have a mortgage, look how much money we would have to do these other things. So I think some of the why is just giving us the flexibility to do what we want. You think about it, and I told this to Melody, I don’t know, a few weeks ago or months ago, we were driving somewhere and I was like, “I am so glad that we do not have any student loans anymore.” With all of the things that we’re doing, the pieces of the puzzle, like you start tacking on $500, $1,000 here or there doing other things, we would rather spend instead of $1,000 to Sallie Mae to pay for education, like we would rather spend $1,000 to have our kids be more bilingual and go to a Spanish immersion preschool, which they do, and a kindergarten. So those are some of the kind of the things that I can think of right off the top of my head when it comes to financial motivators for us.

Melody Hartzler: The other thing too is that we’re Christians and we’re also passionate about giving and serving, and so we feel called to give back. It’s not really our money to begin with. And so how can we be a better steward of that? And so paying it down quicker as far as the debt that we had and even with our mortgage now is important to us so that we can be better stewards of the finances that we’re given and the opportunities that we have. We do give at least 10% of our incomes to our church and to various ministries in our community, even through the things I’m doing on the side hustles, the blogs and things like that. I also make it a priority to tithe those and things like that as well. So that’s important to us. Travel is also important to us. So I love, I’ve been to 49 out of 50 states. And so I grew up — and a lot of times, my parents didn’t have any super fancy we did, timeshare travel and different things like that where we’d cook most of our meals throughout the week, but hey, we were at the beach. And we did a lot of trips where we’d drive to the Grand Canyon or drive to Yellowstone and stopped at a lot of places along the way. And so I sort of got the travel bug and then like Dustin said, even when we were paying off debt, we were still traveling. So we went to Hawaii. My parents had gifted us two timeshare weeks out there that we were able to line up sort of back-to-back. But you know, when we were out there, we definitely used a Red Lobster gift card in Honolulu. And we totally ate peanut butter sandwiches at the feet of waterfalls. And so it was OK. We saw the beautiful creation that we were there to see. And obviously if we went back now, it would be a little bit different. But we laughed at that, and again, before our healthy food awaken, but we still have great memories of that. And even when we went to Europe before we got pregnant with our daughter, we went with another couple, we split Airbnb’s, so we weren’t out there spending — when I look at the Travel & Leisure magazine, I just sort of read it like, oh, this is beautiful. I’m never going to stay at these places. It has cool places to go, but never am I going to go on this place that costs $3,000 for the whole week just for one person. But yeah, so we really do want our kids to be exposed to travel, and that’s also important. And we like to — even each year, we like to go someplace by ourselves to sort of just disconnect from the day-to-day and I guess you could say the rat race sometimes. And then we like to take our family on a trip as well. So we just got back, actually, from St. John. But even within that, we went on Marriott points, and we got a good deal on flights. So it wasn’t like we’re just still — we’re still trying to be budget-friendly because we still are in debt with our mortgage and trying to be good stewards of our money.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and I think you guys have been great examples that you can enjoy something that both of you are very passionate about in terms of traveling and exposing your kids to that but also do it in a way that fits in your financial plan and is reasonable to do in terms of how much money you have. And what you all are going to remember, obviously, is the experience. Right? I mean, not necessarily using a Red Lobster card, although that’s a great story. I mean, the meals and the food and all that are good, but obviously the experience and the time you have with one another and with your family is going to be what you’re going to remember in the long run. So let’s talk business because I wanted to lay that foundation because as I mentioned on this show and I say often, being able to aggressively pursue business opportunities, whether it’s a side hustle, whether it’s investing in another business, whether it’s buying real estate, whatever it be, doing so when you have clarity on the things that we just talked about I think allows someone to be able to pursue that opportunity with confidence and to do it in a way that’s not going to add on stress. And I think that’s so important that we all know the stress that can come from our own financial situation. And when you think about things like debt and not having emergency savings and obviously you put kids into the picture and expenses go up and home prices, all those things, and if you want to then pursue business opportunities but you already have those stressors, obviously this could be one extra layer of stress rather than hopefully something that can produce additional income and also allow you to pursue something that you’re passionate about. So what I would like to do is talk through two businesses I know that you’ve worked on, and we’ll talk about the one a little bit more in detail that you’re getting ready to launch, the virtual symposium, the functional medicine CE, but I also want to talk about your other venture in farm-to-table. But before we jump into those two, help me understand — obviously, we’re going to talk about two pharmacy-specific oriented businesses, but Dustin, obviously you’re not a pharmacist. We’ve learned you’re an electrical engineer, you’ve got a web design background, so what is the role that each of you play when it comes to the business ventures that you’re working on?

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, so the thing about working at Automatic, it’s an awesome company. It’s the — WordPress.com is the company behind that, and there’s a specific little thing in my contract with them that I have a — it’s a conflict of interest for me to build websites for other people and charge money for it. I can out of the goodness of my heart for as many people as I’d like, but the time doesn’t really — I don’t really have the time to build websites for the goodness of my heart for many people. And so I think one of the really interesting things with that conflict of interest, you know, I was always trying to think like, OK, what can I do as my side hustle? Or what can I do that I’m really passionate about? But everything I’m passionate about is WordPress and websites, developing code and stuff like that. And so that’s one of the things that really, it was kind of once I started at Automatic back in 2013, it was like for a few months and a few years, it was like, well, I don’t have to do anything else. I’ve got this good-paying job, let’s not worry about it. But then that itch continues to be there. And then Melody comes up with these ideas, it’s like hmm. So I can build something for free, and I get revenue from it, essentially. So like I was talking to some people at we have an all-company meetup. It’s once per year; it was back in September. And I was telling people like, oh yeah, I built this. I was using WooCommerce and my wife is making all this money with this website. And they’re like, well don’t you mean you? And I was like, no. My wife is making all this money. So I think that’s a really good blend of what we can do as a couple because I can’t create that kind of thing on my own, mainly just because of the conflict of interest. Like had I — if I leave Automatic, I can go and do whatever I want. But I really like my job, and so this just gives me the opportunity, it scratches the itch of I get to build things but then I’m also getting the benefit of building this by as much as Melody can fill.

Tim Ulbrich: Hey Melody, I know how big of an asset that is, you know. For us, we have the magic bullet of Tim Church. You have the magic bullet of Dustin Hartzler that can do all of that. But the web design piece, the opt-ins, the lead magnets, the format, that can often consume people when they’re trying to just get their idea off the ground. So what an incredible resource. So building on that, it sounds like based on what Dustin said, you’re often coming with the vision, the idea, and then are you batting that back-and-forth with Dustin? Is he helping on the execution? Help me understand how you’re fleshing out a business idea that you come up with.

Melody Hartzler: Yeah, so normally, honestly, it’s a lot of conversations in the car when we’re driving places because if the kids are watching something on the iPad and you can’t do anything else when you’re driving, that’s when we have a lot of our business discussions. But I think a lot of times, it’s like, hey, this is what the need is that I’m seeing. And then like we’re just sort of going back-and-forth about how we can meet that need but also turn it into that side hustle and generate revenue from it.

Tim Ulbrich: Yes.

Melody Hartzler: And so for example, with the functional medicine CE, I all the time was seeing people saying, “Hey, I want to learn more about functional medicine. Where can I go?” And there’s a lot of great organizations teaching about functional medicine. The challenge is not a lot of them are providing pharmacist CEs. So if people are looking to meet their Continuing Education requirements with this education, that wasn’t happening in a lot of those situations. And also, the conferences are sort of expensive. And so when you’re looking at Institute of Functional Medicine, which is a great organization, and I’m hopefully going to be — I want to go to their conference next year at some point. It’s a great organization, but there’s no pharmacist CE currently, and there’s also — it’s a couple thousand dollars, if not more because you’re talking plane travel and really nice hotel stay for five days. And that all adds up really quickly. And so you know, a lot of people are too like I’m not sure if I’m ready for that. What can I learn to before I get to the point where I want to spend a couple grand on this. And so a lot of the other functional medicine programs out there, there’s Functional Medicine University, which is a great site that’s a couple grand to do their certificate program, which is actually one of the lower cost ones for getting a whole certificate. But anyways, so if you’re talking like IFM, you’re talking maybe $20,000 by the time you’re done with all the things you need to do to get that certificate. So I thought, you know, there’s got to be a better way to do this. So with my background in education, I’ve developed a lot of Continuing Education as well over the years as a faculty member. And I thought, you know, we can teach people, and we don’t have to have them go anywhere. You know? We’ve got webinar, you can Zoom software, and the ability to work with — I work with CEI, which is a great CE company. And so the ladies there that I’ve worked with have been fabulous. And so I’d already been working with them a little bit, writing for them. And so I thought, you know what? I can do this but host it on my own site and then I can still pay them to certify the CE and get this sort of going. And so I started talking about this with Orthomolecular, there’s a pharmacist that works for Orthomolecular, which was like, hey, that’s a great idea. We could sponsor it. And I was like, awesome. And so you know, the more I talked about it, the more people started to say, OK, yeah, we can do this. And so I had a lot of support. The speakers that are speaking this time around are all awesome and have been sharing a lot about the conference, and so Lauren Castle (?) is the founder of FMPhA. It’s funny because I was on maternity leave with my son, I think, and I saw the flyer for OPA that year. And it was this Introduction to Functional Medicine. And I was like, who in the world is giving that talk? Here I am holding this baby. So I looked at it, and I looked her up and I called her and we started connecting, and so that’s been awhile now. It actually might have been when I was on maternity leave with Kinley now that I think about it, about five years ago. But then now she lives like 10 minutes down the street from me. So —

Tim Ulbrich: Small world.

Melody Hartzler: It is a small world. But it’s been fun to help encourage her and what she’s doing in the functional medicine world and also have her support for what I’m doing as well.

Tim Ulbrich: So we’ll link to this in the show notes as well, FunctionalMedicineCE.com. The first virtual symposium is starting on Nov. 9. So for those of you that are interested in the topic, obviously check it out. Also I would encourage for those of you have an educational idea that you’re batting around and wanting to get a feel for what a virtual symposium is, I would check that out as well. You guys did a great job with the website setup, Dustin. Nice work. And I think it looks really clean, you’ve got great speakers on there, and I think it’s a great model that others can look at and build off from as well. So let me — couple more questions. I want to dig into this business model a little bit further, but for those of our listeners that maybe aren’t as familiar with functional medicine, give us the down-low on what is functional medicine? And why is it a topic that you care so much about? And why as a pharmacist do you think you have a lot to offer in that space?

Melody Hartzler: Sure, that could be a whole hour conversation, so I’ll try to not do that. But so essentially, functional medicine is really looking at the root cause of disease. And so we do that really well when we talk about infectious disease, you know, we have a treatment, it gets rid of it, we’re gone. But as far as the chronic disease model in this country, when we think about chronic disease, we really don’t have a lot of cures for most of our chronic diseases. It’s just something we manage with symptom management, and I do that every day in my practice too. I manage diabetes with medications, but I also try to incorporate some of these functional medicine principles as well. But essentially, it’s acknowledging that patients are individuals too I think is a big component of it. So just because something works in the population health, it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily going to work for this person sitting in front of you. And so trusting that what the patient is saying about their symptoms and using information that’s evidence-based is part of it, so it’s not like we’re just throwing these supplements that don’t have any science. It’s so much biochemistry, I wish I would have really paid a lot more attention in biochemistry. I give these reports, I do this one report from Genova Diagnostics called The NutriEval, and you literally get the kreb cycle printed out with all the different components of it of the patient’s actual body, and then it tells you what nutrients you need to make that cycle more efficient. And I was like, man I should have — and it seems like such a long time ago too. So it’s good — that’s why education, Continuing Education, is so important to try to keep brushing up on those skills. But I think the best example that I like to give is functional medicine approaches IBS. Irritable Bowel Syndrome is not just constipation or diarrhea. Like there’s something causing it. But the drugs that we have both of those conditions, whether it’s IBSD or IBSC, are just symptom-managing drugs.

Tim Ulbrich: Right.

Melody Hartzler: They’re not actually correcting any of the issue. And so typically, IBSD is often caused by a dysbiosis or an imbalance in the microbiome, which is why we do now have a prescription agent that is an antibiotic. But there’s also challenges with that because it’s only 60-70% effective after one course. And so there’s other things that we have to think about. And then as far as constipation, we don’t really have anything that addresses a lot of the root cause. And so when we are looking at someone with IBS, we’re thinking about is there a potential pathogen that’s causing this? Is it a parasite? Is it a microbiome imbalance? Or is it inflammation? So even some of our IBS patients, their fecal count protectants (?) is really high, so there’s a lot of inflammation going on there even though you wouldn’t classify it necessarily diagnostically as IBD. And so looking at some of those things, is food intolerance related? And so we organize sort of our thoughts based on the patient. There’s this whole timeline piece of functional medicine. So they look back questions that we’re asking patients on our intake survey: Were they breast fed? Were they born prematurely? What kind of stressors did they have early in life? Was it parents went through a divorce and then all of a sudden these abdominal symptoms started to appear? And so there’s different points in your life that this cycle piece and the stressors also sort of turn over the epigenetics. So epigenetics is, you know, you have this genetic code at the beginning, but then the influences in your life turn on and turn off different things. And so everyone is unique in that aspect because we’ve all had different influences in our lives, whether that’s chemical or external stressors from family circumstances and things like that. So my stressor that led us to functional medicine was actually the birth of our daughter. So it was quite the experience, and we sort of planned for this natural birthing experience, and our doula was in jail, so that’s a podcast for another day.

Tim Ulbrich: Oh gees.

Melody Hartzler: So from that, it turned into a pretty stressful induction, long labor and the first five weeks of her life, she was super colicky and tongue-tied, and it took us awhile to realize that. And so all of that stress I think just sort of set my bad diet, probably poor microbiome balance, sort of over the top. And then, you know, about a year later, I started to have this abdominal pain that wasn’t going away. And everybody was like, oh, you’re fine. Yeah, basic interventions type things. Even then GI specialist was like, no, there’s no reason to scope you, you’re completely fine. I was like, well I literally have this pain every single day in the same exact spot. And so I finally found some functional medicine practitioners and turned out it was probably dysbiosis, probably CBO — I never actually did the breath test, which I don’t always do for our patients either — but did some of the comprehensive stool testing and took some antimicrobials. I even tried the laxin (?). It was a long journey, so it was about at that year point from her life for about a year and a half that we were still sort of going through the journey. I even went to the Cleveland Clinic Functional Medicine Institute. And I felt a lot better at that point, but I had finally made it on the waitlist, and so I was like, you know what? I’m going to go and learn from them. So let’s see what they have to tell me because at this point, I knew functional medicine was something that I wanted to incorporate, but I wasn’t sure exactly how to do that because I was working at the time in a federally qualified healthcare center, which was a little bit challenging because, you know, the cost of a lot of these interventions right now is really only available to people in the middle class and above. So I think some of the things other people are doing in this community to try to make these resources more available to the masses is awesome. So but at this point, it was challenging for us to do a lot of that testing. But there’s still a lot of basic things we can do, not only in community pharmacy but also in settings like that, you know, as far as testing vitamins and using probiotics and doing nutrient supplementations to help to heal the gut. And so even in that practice, looking back, there’s probably a lot more that I could be doing at the time, but I didn’t have enough experience to know what that was. And so — but anyways, so at about that time, it was right before, actually, we got pregnant with our son that we decided that I needed to go part-time with my faculty position. And that was coming from a lot of the stress with not only not knowing what was going on in my body and trying to — I was like, if I’m going to have another child, like I really need some extra time during the week. And I also in my head also had a lot of these ideas sort of out there, that I would like to do the blogs and stuff like that. And so made that decision and then started my part-time position with Cedarville and also at that time then, transferred offices to work in a different family medicine office, which that was really I think one of the pivotal points for my career because the family medicine physician that I work for is wonderful. And he is very open to a lot of these things, and so when myself and actually my best friend is one of my colleagues there who’s a nurse practitioner, and we sort of went to him together because he needed a new nurse practitioner. But we had also heard that he needed someone to manage his diabetes. And so I was like, well she may not want to manage diabetes, but I can do that. And she didn’t want to do something else, so we sat with together and sort of said, this is what we can do, that we both have this interest in functional medicine. And then fast forward to today, we have a functional medicine service that patients see her, sometimes they see me as part of that. And so we’re starting to be known in the Dayton area for our functional medicine service, so it’s pretty exciting. And so I really feel like had we not made that decision to go part-time, like that really wouldn’t have been where we would be landing right now. And so yeah. So it’s exciting and I really think the passion for sharing about functional medicine is because of that experience that I had as a patient, and I think that’s a lot of pharmacists that are involved in functional medicine had some kind of personal experience, whether it was them or it was their spouse going through something or their child. And even with our daughter, I’ve learned a lot about pediatric approaches to functional medicine through some of her journeys with allergies and asthma and things like that. And so a lot of my initial blog post that I have on farm-to-table are based on a lot of those topics that I was sort of walking through and researching anyways for our own personal health.

Tim Ulbrich: And what I love about this is one, just great example of — I think great businesses are made out of identifying a problem that needs to be solved that people actually care about, and you’ve checked that. Obviously, there’s lots of concerns people have out there about their own personal health and diet and exercise or not getting successful treatment plans with traditional medicine. It also has a combination of certainly your expertise, so an area of practice and an area that you’ve experienced firsthand, an area that brings your educational background as you’re looking at building CE and online courses and things like that. And then obviously, it has a personal component as well. So I think as people are out there hearing this, I think it’s just a great example of as you’re thinking about a business, you’re thinking about a side hustle, is there something out there — you mentioned you and Dustin talking in the car where you often say, OK, well, there’s a need here or there’s a problem that’s here, something that needs to be solved. That’s where it starts, and then it’s trying to figure out what is the solution? And is it a solution that you can bring value to based on your previous experience and personally? Or based on your experiences and expertise in what you do every day. So before I ask you a question about the business model of this, Dustin, as I look at the website, which again, is incredible, as I look at the website if I’m somebody listening to this podcast and thinking, oh, I have this idea and I need to build this site whether it’s a site for a CE program or whether it’s just a site for what they’re trying to do, I look at this and say No. 1, I could never do this. I don’t have time or this is way too expensive. So give us a ballpark. Like what would be involved here if somebody were building a site in terms of time and roughly expense to get something like this off the ground?

Dustin Hartzler: Sure. And this was one thing that — I mean, you mentioned it earlier. Like Melody’s able to do these things because she doesn’t have a lot of upfront tech costs because like that’s my thing. But honestly, I bought a — I didn’t do all the design, I didn’t have time for that either. But I bought a $20 theme online and I did some customizations and I did some things with it, and you need a website and you can get hosting for $5-10 per month or $50 a year or so. You can even go to WordPress.com. We’ll do a little promo there. But they have the ability for $100 a year or $300 per year, you can get live chat support and do all kinds of things online. And you can have somebody physically help you if you run into things like that. So I would say all in all, with my development time if you were to pay somebody to do it, I probably have 20 hours in the site and just because it was a lot of tinkering, and there’s probably 20 more hours of things that I want to do because I know — I want to be able to do this multiple times. Like that’s kind of our goal. We want to have this virtual symposium and then another one and another one. And a lot of the stuff that’s in there is kind of hard-coated. It’s like built right into the theme. And so if Melody needs to make a change, I have to do it. And I don’t want that, I want her to be able to do all the changes because I want to make it easier for me in the future. And so I don’t know, I would say you — if you would invest like $500, you could get a pretty decent website up and running to test a business idea or test a model out or something like that. You could go a lot less than that if you are a little bit techy and you’d rather do a little sweat equity if that’s something interesting to you. You know, a minimum if you bought a theme and you have some hosting, you could get by with about $100 investment. And so I think anywhere between the $100-500 could get you a pretty decent website up and running to start testing that idea out.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and I think that’s great. That’s what I want our audience to hear is that we’re not in an age where you have to be paying $10,000 or $20,000 to get your site off the ground, right? When you look at themes and you look at some of the things that are out there in terms of plug-and-play and what you can do with e-commerce, whether it’s them digging a little bit deep to read and learn on their own or ultimately hiring that out, it shouldn’t be an expense that is unbearable, even if they don’t have a Dustin Hartzler on their team. It should still be an opportunity they could pursue. So Melody, let me ask you a question or two in terms of the business model of this. And I want our audience to hear kind of your thought and vision of where this is starting and where this could go in the future. So I’m on the website right now, FunctionalMedicineCE.com. I see you have a symposium on Nov. 9, and I see you have a silver package, which essentially is the live option that people can tune in for seven hours of CE, it’s live only, $129 all the way up to a platinum pass, which gives them both the live as well as the video recording and then a post-conference networking. So what, as you were putting this together, what is the business model? What’s the goal in terms of running this? And I know there’s other virtual symposiums that have been out there that offer a free option and then they offer a buy-up option and then they’re promoting additional products and services. So as you started this way, why did you start this way? And where do you see this going in the future?

Melody Hartzler: So we started this way because looking at what other people were paying for functional medicine education, this is still much less than that. Even the weekend, I went on a Saturday-only symposium, that was Pharmacy CE in Indianapolis in September, which was great. But it was like the conference fee was $499 for the day. And then there was a discount code that got it to $299, but then we stayed at the Marriott downtown and the gas to drive there and a lot of people flew there, and so it added up to probably $1,000 pretty quickly for a lot of people. So we knew that — and there was I think 115 pharmacists that were there that day, and so I knew that if people are willing to fly across the country for this one day event, I feel like there’s enough people out there that would pay a fraction of that to be able to learn this information from people that are experts in the field. And so that was sort of the thought process by not having a free option upfront, and also I think the cost of the CE was part of that too and having to pay for accrediting the CE, AACP-accredited. And so we didn’t want to lose money on our first adventure in this, and so that’s part of the reason. We do offer discount codes, and we actually did make a YFP code as well. So if anyone’s listening to this and wants to sign up, YFP will get you 10% off. And so our future plan is to move forward with more of these virtual symposiums. And so our goal is to have three or four a year but then also eventually have a membership to the site where you would get all of those included in your membership throughout the year. So we’re looking at doing our second one probably late February, maybe early March, focusing on pain and inflammation. And we’re also going to try to have a session on CBD since that’s something that’s very popular right now and a lot of pharmacists have questions about because their patients are asking questions. And I think that’s the other thing about functional medicine that’s so important is whether or not you’re interested for yourself, a lot of your patients are interested and they’re asking you questions about way more herbal supplements and different products than they probably ever have. And so really being able to have the tools to answer some of those questions I think for a lot of people is important. I just kept hearing over and over, like hey, where do I get good information about this? And so I really just felt like we needed to try to provide that.

Tim Ulbrich: So when you think of threats to this, I think of the concept of how do you bulletproof your business, right? So you mentioned membership, which I’m guessing is maybe one answer to this, but what thoughts do you have in terms of the next person who comes on and says, “Well, I’m going to offer a free symposium, and I’m going to offer it for $79.” Like what’s the differential advantage that you see here? Because I think that’s an important aspect people need to think about when they’re working on a business idea is of course there will be competition, but what differential advantage do you have to this business model that you think will allow you to be successful in the long run?

Melody Hartzler: Well, that’s a good question. I think overall, the having a team of people of that have expertise in this subject, I mean, there’s a lot of people growing and learning more about functional medicine, so I anticipate that there’s going to be other opportunities. And I think the membership piece, we might morph into having a certificate program as well because I know a lot of pharmacists are looking for a lower cost certificate training program compared to some of the other options that are out there. I think developing a community is also important in trying to keep people engaged in your business versus looking at other places, and so I’m hoping that after this conference, we’re going to develop even just a Facebook group to start out with for people that all attended and just sort of stay connected and offering discounts for the next conferences for those that attended. And so I think trying to get the community built around it, I mean, you guys are a great example of that with the community that you’ve built around YFP. And so I think that’s really important to being able to continue to drive what you’re trying to do.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, I really like that aspect. And I think the book that comes to mind if people want to learn more on that, one of the books that will never leave me that I always think back to is called “Tribes” by Seth Godin. He talks about exactly that concept of how do you build a community? Another article out there is around the concept of superfans and 1,000 superfans. But building a community that are passionate about this topic, which I’m guessing people are that are engaged here, either because of personal experience or because of the outcomes they see with patients that they’ve worked with and how do you create that platform and community that they can engage with each other all the time, throughout the entire year as well as these events that may happen throughout the year. So let’s jump into some fun questions to wrap up here. And we didn’t get to talk to as much but I want to reference our listeners to you also have another site you’ve worked on, which is Farm to Table, FarmtoTable.life, where they can learn more about the blog and the work that you’re doing over there. But I want to talk about some more of the fun, lighthearted questions on the business. And Dustin, I want to start with you because obviously, you’ve gone through this process of owning your own business. You started your own media company, and I’m sure there’s many people that are listening to this podcast that have some type of business aspiration, whether it’s big, small, medium, anywhere in between, they’ve identified maybe a problem that they see as unsolved, the process that could be done better or differently, or maybe there’s others that are just out there feeling stuck and they don’t even have an idea formulated but know they want to do something different. So from your experience of both starting a business and now working with Melody on this, what advice would you have to them in terms of next step that they may be able to take?

Dustin Hartzler: Yeah, I think it all really depends in your life is like, it depends on how much time you have. Like if you’re young, you’re right out of school, like you have so much time available to you that it’s kind of silly that you say you don’t have enough time. But I think really, the big thing is just spending some time thinking about it and just starting. Ask some people. Like when Melody figured out this thing was — she’s seen all these people commenting on Facebook and relationships and connections she has, like she saw the need there. If you find a need — you know, I found a need. I wanted it to help people have less horrible websites online, and that was a passion of mine to do that. But then also, I wanted to learn more about tech. And so the two things really came together for me, which was super nice. And so the advice is just start. I mean, it’s so hard to just start anything. But if you have a passion, you have an idea, like come up with a little thing that you can do. And I think the other thing that’s a big that was always a big thing for me was like, let’s just work on it for five minutes. Like five minutes goes by really, really fast when you’re working on something. And then all of a sudden it’s 10 minutes, and then it’s an hour. And then it’s like, wow, I spent a lot of time on this today, and I’ve made progress. I’m moving forward in the right direction.

Tim Ulbrich: And Melody, let me follow up with a different question. But you know, often people are interested in side hustles, of course, in part because they’re passionate about the idea and helping others but also the idea that there’s additional income that can be used for other financial goals and things that they’re working on. So for the two of you and your family, what are you hoping to do with the additional income that you’re earning through the business side hustle?

Melody Hartzler: Well, should I say the truth? Dustin wants a new pair of running shoes.

Tim Ulbrich: Yes.

Melody Hartzler: We definitely want to invest back into the business as part of that. So anything from this first conference, honestly, we probably won’t do much with personally but invest into this concept and continue to grow it. We may set aside some for our emergency fund or car funds because our one car has got 245,000 miles on it and something is loud in the back that needs fixing bad. So there’s that. But you know, that’s part of the financial goals. And we’ve always driven used cars and we would still buy a used car with the next step, but that’s part of how we are able to afford travel and things like that. But I think also, we want to give. We’re going to be giving back to the people that are sharing about this conference too. And so all of our speakers that are promoting the conference have a specific code and even your code and whoever’s, we’re going to be giving a percentage back to those people because again, we want to create that community and everybody is a part of that for promoting this. And it’s not just our work that’s helping to spread the word.

Tim Ulbrich: And I want our community to hear from the two of you. I sense — and Dustin, you alluded to certain podcasts that you turned your car drives and your commute essentially into an additional education or two that you received along the way — I think it’s so important for our audience to hear, what are you reading? What have you read? What are you pulling inspiration from? So Dustin, let me start with you. Is there a book or a podcast or a resource that you would reference people to that was really helpful in your own journey?

Dustin Hartzler: I have so many of these. Like I could go on for hours. I’m looking at my podcast archive here, and I’ve got hundreds that I’m subscribed to and just listen to ones that are encouraging to me. The ones that — I’m still a Dave Ramsey subscriber. Like he just gives me inspiration like hey, look what you can do when you have your financial life in order. It’s all about you don’t make money to — how does he say it? He says something along the lines of like, you really want to — look how generous you can be when you have more money and you have your life in order. So that’s one of the things that I like. So the Dave Ramsey Show is one. I listen to a bunch of podcasts that are tech-related to give me inspiration of how I can become a better developer and how I can — some of the tech tools that I can do.

Tim Ulbrich: Sure.

Dustin Hartzler: And then I’m also reading a book that was a recommendation from a podcast. But it’s called “PsychoCybernetics,” and it’s a book written by a guy, his name is Maxwell Maltz. And he’s an MD, and it was written a long time ago, before digital technology. And so it’s kind of a cool thing, it’s talking about your brain and how you can — some experiments of like thinking through the visual success. Like they did experiments with people shooting free throws. The first group — you shoot 20 free throws every day for a week and see the results at the end of the week. And you have one group that shoots 20 in the first day, and then shoots 20 on the last day and see how they have improved. And then the third group was like, they shot 20 on the first day and then they did nothing but imagine shooting 20 free throws every day. And then their percentage improved by 50-some percent, even though they never actually made a shot. So it’s kind of an interesting book. I’m still at the very beginning of it, but it gives me some inspiration of like, hey, here’s some things that it’s not all about your life and your circumstances, like how you think about things. And I think that’s really interesting.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, mindset and visualization. Those are great takeaways from that resource. Melody, how about you?
Melody Hartzler: So most of the podcasts that I listen to are functional medicine content podcasts. And so I really love Kara Fitzgerald’s New Frontiers in Functional Medicine. It is a good one that — she’s an MD, but she interviews people all over the country that are researchers, that are MDs, that are PhDs, that are clinicians, like doing the work of functional medicine, and goes through great protocols and just getting people’s opinions about different things and how they would treat things. Some of the people she interviews are even, you know, the lady I was listening to yesterday on my drive to Columbus for the OPA meeting was a nurse practitioner in New York that was treating a lot of weird patients and just gleaning insights from that. So I like those. I also love from a faith standpoint, “Dayton Women in the Word.” It is a local organization here. The podcast obviously airs wherever there is Internet, but it’s been a good, you know, like hey, I need to listen to something that’s about — get me away from all the business ideas because I’d drive to work and just think about all this stuff and what I need to do. But it helps keep me grounded in what my true purpose is. So obviously our church and things like that have podcasts. But sometimes I even forget to turn on the podcast when I get in the car because I — sometimes, I’ll use that time to pray and sort of reset my thought processes for the day and just pray over the people that I’m going to interact with.

Tim Ulbrich: Which is always important before you get home, especially with young children and kind of entering that space. So thank you so much, both of you, for taking the time to share your journey. And I think it’s going to be an inspiration to many. And again, I would reference our listeners to FunctionalMedicineCE.com, virtual symposium beginning Nov. 9, as well as the work they’ve done over at FarmtoTable.life. So appreciate the time that you’ve taken. And as always, I would ask our listeners if you like what you heard on this week’s episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast, please do us a favor and leave a rating and review in iTunes, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your shows each and every week. And as a last reminder, make sure to head on over to YourFinancialPharmacist.com/giveaway. For those that are pursuing residency training and are going through that application process, we have the ultimate residency prep giveaway going on for the next couple weeks where we’re giving away over $349 value in resources to five different winners: information on residency interviews, how to effectively write letters of intent, we have a boot camp course, and a great resource from TLDR Pharmacy as well. So again, YourFinancialPharmacist.com/giveaway. And until next week, we appreciate you joining us.

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YFP 122: What Will Be the Future of Pharmacy Practice?

Posted on by yfpadmin


What Will Be the Future of Pharmacy Practice?

Dr. Todd Sorensen, President of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) and Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives & Innovation at the University of Minnesota joins Tim Ulbrich on this episode. They talk through the workforce challenges facing the profession of pharmacy, rising indebtedness, the change.org petition, and Todd’s vision for the future of pharmacy practice including dramatically expanding the number of pharmacists working alongside primary care providers.

About Today’s Guest

Dr. Sorensen is Professor and Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives and Innovation at the College of Pharmacy, University of Minnesota. He also serves as the Executive Director of the Alliance for Integrated Medication Management, a non-profit organization that engages health care institutions in practice transformation activities that support improved medication use. He is currently serving as President of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy.

Dr. Sorensen’s work concentrates on identifying strategies that facilitate clinical practice development and developing change management and leadership skills in student pharmacists, pharmacy residents and practitioners. His research and service activities have focused on working with health care organizations to implement strategies that improve health outcomes associated with chronic illness, specifically identifying leadership strategies that allow organizations to integrate and sustain medication management services delivered by pharmacists within interprofessional teams. This work has been greatly influenced by ten years of experience participating in and leading national quality improvement collaboratives for health systems seeking to optimize medication use in outpatient settings.

Summary

Dr. Todd Sorensen joins Tim Ulbrich for a conversation covering many topics such as workforce challenges facing the profession of pharmacy, rising indebtedness, the change.org petition, and Todd’s vision for the future of the practice of pharmacy including dramatically expanding the number of pharmacists working alongside primary care providers.

Todd is the President-elect of AACP and also Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives & Innovation at the University of Minnesota. Todd explains that he believes there are two broad reasons why the pharmacy job market is changing and why the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 0% job growth in the profession over the next ten years. One of those reasons is that there is a lack of perceived value in the medication distribution process. The other is that the professions has seen this coming for 20+ years according to a workforce projection report from 1999. In that report were new roles for pharmacists, however those roles haven’t grown as projected.

Todd discusses his Presidential address at the 2019 AACP Annual Meeting which was titled Leading in Dickensian Times.” He began the speech with the notable quote, “it was the worst of times, it was the best of times” referencing different viewpoints of pharmacists today. There is a group that sees the current state of pharmacy as the worst of times and are legitimate in feeling that way as they are experiencing job loss, wage cuts, and a saturated job market. However, others see it as the best of times because there is a lot of opportunity available.

Even though Todd falls in the second category, he says it’s imperative to acknowledge the pressures and difficulties pharmacists are facing today. Todd shares AACP’s plan to address those issues. He also sees a large opportunity for collaboration between physicians and pharmacists and envisions every physician office having a pharmacist working in it. To attain this goal, first we have to have the mindset that it is possible and shift to a model of value based healthcare. He points out that no one is as highly trained and skilled as pharmacists are in managing complex medication problems.

Lastly, Todd addresses the #ChangePharmacy petition on change.org that requests organizations such as AACP halt accepting new accreditation applications until standards are installed, among a number of other requests. Todd explains that the reality is that they are unable to do this. As we’re in a free market society, restricting or halting such openings could be viewed as restriction of free trade. Instead, Todd says that we should shift our focus to create new opportunities for pharmacists that were predicted 20 years ago. This alone, according to Todd, should shift dynamics and balance the supply and demand of pharmacists.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Ulbrich: Hey, what’s up, everybody? Welcome to this week’s episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast. I have joining me today Dr. Todd Sorensen, president of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, also known as AACP, and Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives and Innovation at the University of Minnesota. In addition to hearing about Todd’s background and career story, we’re going to focus our time together on the current workforce challenges facing our profession, including a flat job market over the next 10 years as projected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the student loan debt that continues to be on the rise, and his vision for the future of the profession of pharmacy. Dr. Sorensen, welcome to the show.

Todd Sorensen: Great, thanks. Glad to be here.

Tim Ulbrich: Well first of all, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule. I know you have essentially two full-time jobs this year, both as president of AACP and associate dean at the University of Minnesota. And before we dive into the discussion around the workforce challenges that we’re facing as a profession and your vision for the future of pharmacy practice, if you could give our listeners just a brief background on your career journey and how you got to this point in time leading as the president of AACP.

Todd Sorensen: Sure. So I was a graduate of the University of Minnesota as a pharmacist in 1994. I entered practice, actually moved to Canada and was on faculty at Dalhousie University and practiced at the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Center, where I was a critical care pharmacy specialist for three years while my wife and I were in Canada. It was a great experience, learned a lot there, got to experience a lot of Canadian pharmacy, which was a great experience to then bring back home, understanding similarities and differences between the two countries. Came back to Minnesota, worked for a period of time in managed care, really brief stint there, about 15 months. And then joined the faculty here at the University of Minnesota in 1998. My time here I have had kind of two distinct teaching experiences. I taught skills in our curriculum for a long period of time, physical assessment skills, was one of the instructors in our skills lab for almost 10 years. And then shifted my teaching activities almost entirely over to teaching leadership development. And my research work has really focused over the entire span of time at the University of Minnesota of how we advance the role of pharmacists in clinical areas, primarily in ambulatory care, both in community pharmacy as well as in primary care clinic settings. I would say the one thing that has really carried through my entire career starting as a student is I’ve really always been fascinated with about how leaders facilitate change in organizations and in their environments. I really got that bug in me when I was a student and saw some of the things that were happening back in the early ‘90s. And that’s what ultimately led me to focus on teaching leadership in our curriculum. I have done that in one way or another now almost, well, over 20 years I’ve been teaching leadership in one way or another. And that’s gotten me very involved in national organizations as well, which in the case of AACP, I’ve been very involved in a lot of different ways, worked my way through the different ranks and ultimately had the opportunity to run for president and get to serve in that role.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and I’ve had the pleasure of attending several of your leadership sessions you presented on a national level. I’ve attended with some of my mentees, we’ve done some workshops and other things, and so I appreciate the work that you’ve done on that and the influence you’ve had on hundreds, probably thousands, of pharmacy leaders out there, students, residents, and other practitioners. And we’re going to come back, I appreciate your comment about your interest in change management and that aspect of leadership as well as your background and interest in primary care as I think that’s going to come together nicely as we talk about your vision for the future. So I don’t want to assume that everybody listening knows and understands AACP. So can you give us just a high-level overview of what is AACP?

Todd Sorensen: Sure. AACP is a national organization that represents faculty and schools of pharmacy. So we have two groups of members: We have institutional members, so all of the 144 schools of pharmacy across the country are members as institutions of AACP, and then the faculty at those schools, anyone who holds faculty appointment can choose to join AACP. We have approximately 5,000 members, faculty across the country, and again, those 144 schools.

Tim Ulbrich: So as our listeners know, and many pharmacists are unfortunately experiencing firsthand, the profession is pharmacy is changing. Many brick-and-mortar pharmacies are closing, we’ve seen a lot of news in the last year of full-time hours that are being reduced, in some places, jobs that are being cut, and I think for many, the job market is becoming more saturated than they probably have seen throughout their working career with the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently projecting a 0% job growth for pharmacists in the next 10 years between 2018-2028. Obviously, a topic that’s near and dear to my heart. To top it all off, we now see pharmacy graduates that are carrying student loan debt in excess of $170,000 on average. So from your perspective, Todd, both as the president of AACP as well as somebody who’s just had a lot of experience in the profession of pharmacy, why are we seeing such dramatic changes over the last few years? And what’s happened across I guess the last five to 10 to 15 years that’s led to these changes?

Todd Sorensen: Well, it’s a question that’s probably on the mind of just about everybody in pharmacy right now. It’s an important question, and from AACP’s standpoint and from our school’s standpoint, of course, this is a very important topic to us in terms of our alumni, all the practice sites that we work with in providing education and really just being part of the overall profession of pharmacy. And what happens out in practice, of course, does have influence and affects what happens in education as well and vice versa. What has happened? What has led to this? Well, it really is a complicated, multifaceted issue. And I don’t know that we can pinpoint any one thing. I do think there’s two broad issues that come into play. First, there is a lack of perceived value in the medication distribution process by people outside of pharmacy. Most payers and consumers, they do see medications and the process of acquiring them really as a transactional process.

Tim Ulbrich: Yes.

Todd Sorensen: And therefore, there’s little belief that any payment beyond cost of a medication should be required. And until we are able to demonstrate the value beyond that and a perception among payers and consumers, that is the reality that we live in. And that is been getting to be a tighter and tighter and tighter margin as that perception continues to drive those traditional payment systems over the last several years. And second, I’d say that we’ve really, we’ve seen this coming for over 20 years. If you go back to 1999, there was a workforce projection report authored by David Knapp (?), and eerily, some of his projections have born out to be quite accurate, particularly around some of the reductions in the number of pharmacists in the drug distribution process. What didn’t happen that were part of his projections was there was projections around new roles for pharmacists and how do we create those opportunities? And we have not seen the growth in some of the areas that were projected at that time. So I would say that there’s a number of things that happened over the last 20 years that maybe were a bit of a distraction from causing the profession to really look at what we need to do to create those new opportunities and bring value into the healthcare system in a new way. And now, we’re at that point in time where we really have to focus on that because we can’t ignore it any longer. There’s a lot of other factors that come into play that we probably don’t have time to get into. I would like to highlight for the listeners, if they are interested in really kind of getting into this in a deeper way, Dr. Lucinda Maine, the executive director/CEO of AACP, authored and published this summer a commentary titled, “It Really Isn’t That Simple” in the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education. That is an open access journal, so anybody can access it. And she really gets into a lot more of the statistics and the numbers and the trends and the factors along the way from 1999 to 2019. And I think it’s really a good read that explains how complicated this issue really is.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, you beat me to it, Todd. I just had that pulled up; I was going to reference that piece to our listeners. We’ll link to that in our show notes as well. But I think the multifactorial, the reasons and discussion is really important, and I would encourage our listeners, I think this is a topic that often carries a lot of emotional aspects to it. It can feel charged based on how this is impacting your personal situation, whether that be somebody who’s impacted by job loss or just feeling the pressure of student loan debt or other things and really looking at all of the different variables and looking all the way back to some of the projections that were made in terms of the shortage and why we saw some of the expansion and, as you mentioned, some of the lack of evolution of where we thought the roles of the pharmacist was going to go beyond the dispensing aspects. And we’re going to come back to that as we talk about your vision in the future. So in your title of the piece that you facilitated in your presidential address at the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy annual meeting this past summer in July, the title of that, which is published in AGAPE, which we will link to in the show notes, is “Leading In Dickensian Times.” And so what do you mean by that? What did you mean by this as you were choosing the topic and using that as the keynote for your presidential address?

Todd Sorensen: Yes, the reference is, of course, to Charles Dickens and “The Tale of Two Cities,” and I started out that speech with the familiar phrase that many people are familiar with: “It was the worst of times, it was the best of times. And I really feel like that is the mindset that we many have in pharmacy today. There is a group who sees this as the worst of times and probably in their personal experiences, that is a very legitimate perception to have. There is also a group who sees this as potentially the best of times, that the opportunity for pharmacists is as great as it’s ever been. I fall into that category. And so I started out the speech kind of using that traditional — paraphrasing the first paragraph of “A Tale of Two Cities” to kind of highlight this dynamic between things are as bad as they can be versus there are opportunities, and we can choose to look at where our opportunities are in a new way. I mean, I can honestly say that in the 25+ years I have been a pharmacist, the recognition of the good that can come from medication use and the harm and the cost associated with medication use is as great as it’s ever been. They may not — the people who are recognizing that now at an acute level outside of pharmacy may or may not see pharmacists as part of the solution. But that awareness is there like it’s never been before. And they’re looking for solutions, and so that creates an opportunity for pharmacy to be part of that solution in a way that I don’t think in the past 20 years have really existed in the same way that that acute understanding of where medication use is in our society and the good and bad that it can produce is a great opportunity for us to shift what we bring to the healthcare system.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and I think what you just said there is so profound that the awareness piece is there. It’s finally there to the level that I think we had hoped it would be. And now the question is, are pharmacists going to be the center of that solution? And how do we as a profession begin to think about our role in that and making sure we’re advocating for our role. And that may mean shifting the role that we know or have been comfortable in for some time. So I think as there is a need for a problem to be solved, now the question is, are we willing to really pivot to make sure we’re a part of that solution? So Todd, in your address, you acknowledged that there’s some tough challenges pharmacists are facing in the current reality of our profession. So you said, “Pipeline of candidates seeking to enroll in professional programs continues to be far below optimal numbers. The employment prospects for our newest graduates are not consistent with the story we want to tell prospective students. Our alumni frequently express frustration about the nature of the work they’re expected to perform and the difficult environment in which the deliver it. The traditional model of compensation through distribution of medications is as difficult as it ever has been. So my question is, what is your vision? What is AACP’s strategic plan to remedy the challenges current and future pharmacists are facing here?

Todd Sorensen: To address that, I’d first say in presenting that information and saying that I fall into the category of people that see this could be the best of times instead of the worst of times, it is important to acknowledge that there are pressures. And so the last thing I wanted to do through this speech and through conversations like this is to send the message that I don’t recognize these issues but that they are real. They are. Now, in terms of AACP’s strategic plan, we really have three priorities related to this that we’re very focused on. First is increasing the pipeline of candidates. So regardless of where we are with number of schools, and we have been seeing a decline in the number of applicants interested in pharmacy.

Tim Ulbrich: That’s right.

Todd Sorensen: And that’s an unfortunate situation for the profession as a whole. There’s a lot of factors, again, this is also multifactorial, but for a number of reasons, individuals who are thinking about what their career choice is going to be might be looking at other options, not even in healthcare. We’re competing with lots of things in technology and other areas that are where high school seniors and into the undergraduate years of college are really wanting to focus their attention. So we have to demonstrate that pharmacy is a vibrant profession and a great career choice. And it is. So that has included a number of things that AACP has done with schools to really get the word out to candidates about pharmacy as a career.

Tim Ulbrich: Right.

Todd Sorensen: The second priority is then the consumer understanding of the role of pharmacists. And there’s a lot of misperceptions about the role of a pharmacist. And that affects, then, the pipeline as well because parents are often guiding their children in their career choices. And so a year ago this month, actually, we launched the Pharmacists for Healthier Lives campaign, which is largely a social media-based campaign targeting consumers to understand the diversity of the roles that pharmacists play in healthcare, the impact that pharmacists play in healthcare and really trying to help consumers understand how to work with a pharmacist and to proactively understand the role that they have that really, their healthcare team is not complete if they don’t have a pharmacist actively as a part of it. And then the third strategic priority for AACP is really focusing on innovation and education and in practice. That’s really where our work is focusing on this year is what is going to be the role, what should be the role of schools of pharmacy to help transform the way that we prepare practitioners for practice in the future and help stimulate the innovative practices that are going to bring value into healthcare in the future.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and I’m hopeful going forward what obviously the focus of our podcast is personal finance, and so of course I have a bias here, but I’m hoping that we can see beyond just the somewhat of a grassroots movement, which is great, where we’re seeing many colleges more vested in this topic than ever before. I’m hopeful we can see some more movement on the national level, whether that be with AACP, other national pharmacy organizations. I think there’s some good models out there in medicine and vetment to really make this a priority. And I firmly believe — and we can talk about lots of reasons of why students are coming out with over $170,000 of debt, much of that is related to rises we’ve seen in tuition, much of that is self-inflicted with cost of living expenses, a whole host of reasons. However, we know that the financial literacy and education piece is so important, and we also know that if we can help decrease the burden of this financial indebtedness, I think we’re going to see more pharmacy graduates that are willing to take the risk that we need them to be taking when we need to have complex problems that need to be solved and we need solutions to solve those. So I’m hopeful that we can continue to further this conversation on a national level, and I think we’re seeing traction on that. And I’m excited to see where that goes in the future. Now, in your speech, you reference one of my favorite books, which is Gary Keller’s “The One Thing,” which I would highly recommend to all of our listeners and we’ll link to in the show notes. And that book, “The One Thing: The surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results,” he links success to narrowing your focus on really a single question. That single question is, what’s the one thing I can do or we can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary? So how have you used this book, this concept, this method, to think of solutions to the current state of pharmacy?

Todd Sorensen: Well, you know, I’d mentioned before that the issues that we’re facing right now and the reasons why we’re facing them are multifaceted. So if you look at all those different issues and facets, it can become overwhelming. And so the premise is the book, as you described, is to really — and I know that it can sound simpler than it is, but in a very complicated world, you have to be able to distill things down to their essence, to some degree so that you can know where to go to create change. And it’s really — I think the book talks about this — it’s really ingraining in yourself a way of thinking and asking that question over and over again. What’s something that you can focus on today? What’s the one thing I need to do today to make everything easier or unnecessary? Or at the level we’re talking about, what’s the one thing that we can do to make everything else easier or necessary. So spent a lot of time with that question and really trying to not take the easy way out and just say, well, there is no one thing in this case. It’s too complicated. And from my experience, from my observations, what I landed on was the one thing that we can do to make everything else easier or unnecessary is forging collaborative, authentic relationships with physicians, that that could have more impact and more power than just about anything else that we would do that might focus on directly attacking some of these different factors that we’re focusing on, whether that be debt in itself, the job market in itself, so forth. Partnerships with physicians help us solve healthcare-related problems and create advocates for pharmacists in a way that would be stronger than we could ever be on our own. So I think it would make everything else easier or unnecessary.

Tim Ulbrich: And as I mentioned to you before we hit record, Todd, when I read this article and I listened to your speech just a few days after the annual meeting in July, you know, I think a lot of people are going to hear this and quickly start listing the objections. Well, we can’t do this because of this, this, or this. Or we can’t do this. Or what about this? Or what about this? And I think certainly of course there’s room for all that discussion, we should have that discussion, we should bat up these ideas back and forth. But the one thing I really, really appreciate is I feel like we have been lacking bold vision in terms of what are some potential solutions going forward? And so I commend you for putting a bold vision out there that leans on your experiences, and I think leans on a lot of opportunities and successes you’ve seen pharmacy have over the last five years. And so some more questions I have about this because I did my residency training 11 years ago in a physician office when at the time, you know, patient-centered medical homes were really just coming to be. So I certainly can appreciate the value of this living it firsthand and seeing many other primary care, ambulatory care pharmacists, when you see them in that practice and you see the impact they have on the patients, on the relationships you’re able to build with those other providers and the impact they can have on quality metrics, it pretty much becomes very obvious of wow, this is incredible if we could replicate this vision all across the country. But obviously, the questions are coming in terms of well, how do we scale it and how do we fund it and how do we replicate this with different state practice acts and all these other things? So couple questions for you on this vision physicians and pharmacists collaboration. What are the one or two areas that you think we need to start as you think about the potential objections or barriers that are in the way? How do we begin to forge forward when it comes to this idea of really replicating this model of pharmacists in a physician path? What are the one or two things of where we begin to do this?

Todd Sorensen: Well, I think we start with a mindset that it’s possible. And it is possible, I’ve seen it in my own state play out over and over and over again. And one of the reasons why it’s possible is the shift to value-based healthcare. If we continue to be focused on fee for service payment structures, it becomes very difficult to see how this maybe will play out in the way that we hoped it might. But when you focus on the fact that healthcare is moving more and more into paying for value, and I believe fully that pharmacists can bring value into healthcare, then there is a place for that. And so much of that value is being measured and determined upstream in that primary care area so that we can prevent the costs that occur downstream in terms of hospitalization, complications secondary to chronic illnesses, and so forth. So moving upstream to that place is where we need to be. And the healthcare system is becoming more focused on primary care than it has been in many, many, many years. So how do we align with that? The other reason I believe that it can happen, I referenced this story in the speech. I was at a conference where I saw a physician colleague who I knew by name, they were somebody that I work with that have a couple of pharmacists actually working in their clinic, and I didn’t know her personally, and I went up to introduce myself. And so I said, “Hi, my name is Todd Sorensen, I’m at the University of Minnesota.” Her immediate response without a beat of pause was, “So nice to meet you. I will never work in another clinic again that doesn’t have a pharmacist.”

Tim Ulbrich: Yep.

Todd Sorensen: And you know, that’s the vision that we need to have, that we can say the physicians don’t want to collaborate with pharmacists because there’s history, there’s been experiences that have suggested that. But the physicians that are coming through in the early parts of their career now and the pressures that they’re facing create a whole dynamic that didn’t exist 10 or 20 years ago in creating those teams. So it can happen. And so that’s where I would start, and then we could get into technicalities, different things that need to happen. But we don’t need to start with worrying about practice acts, we don’t need to start with worrying about — we have to build the relationships first. And the relationships will then create the advocacy that will make all the other things fall into place, which is, again, “The One Thing” principle. One other thing I’ll add is that we’ve done this before. The ‘70s and ‘80s schools of pharmacy were often the catalyst for creating change in acute care practice. I’m not sure if we have, as schools, maintained that same mindset that the leaders of those schools in the ‘70s and ‘80s had. And so part of this is calling for our schools, again, to see their role as catalysts in building these partnerships and creating these opportunities. We’ve done it before, we can do it again.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and I think we’re in somewhat of a perfect storm environment, you know, building off of what you said. When you think of the challenges physicians are being faced with, the multiple pressures they’re being faced with, in combination with the value-based healthcare model that we’re shifting towards, I think pharmacists fit very nicely into that. And in my opinion, I think we often get caught up in the weeds of the conversations of what about practice acts? What about this? What about this? And I think starting with the relationships, starting with the vision. And I think in any time where there’s a complex problem like this where you start hearing a lot of objections that are being presented, I think that is so ripe for entrepreneurship and innovation. And so I personally think we’re going to look back and this 10-year period, whatever number of years you want to call on pharmacy and say, “Wow, a lot of cool things came out of this because these people decided to take risks towards this bigger vision and what could be achieved.” So one of the objections, Todd — and we could talk about many of these. I just want to talk about a couple here. But one of them I commonly hear and think about myself is, well, what about nurse practitioners? What about PAs? And how do pharmacists differentiate? What’s our differential advantage in terms of competing with those providers, especially when you think about factors like ability to prescribe, ability to get paid and reimbursed for those services that they’re providing inside of the clinic. So as you’ve thought about this on a bigger vision type of level, I’m sure that issue has come to mind for you and obviously from your experiences as well. So what are your thoughts on that?

Todd Sorensen: I have thought about it, and it’s a really important question. It gets back to the issue of bringing value into healthcare. We are in an environment where the practitioner or the individual that can produce an outcome at the lowest price is the one that’s going to get the business. And in many cases, pharmacists are the second most expensive person on a healthcare team. So we really have to think about what is it that we do uniquely, that nobody else can do as well as us, to be able to justify that price point and be able to demonstrate value. And there’s a couple of things that I think of. First of all, no one is trained. And nobody is as skilled as pharmacists in managing really complex medication-related problems. So that’s where we have to focus our team. For us to spend time on the majority of our time on things that are not very complicated, that our single disease-focused, others can do that. You mentioned nurse practitioners and physicians assistants. Honestly, RNs, at even a lower price point can manage essential hypertension on protocol. So we really have to be looking at where our unique knowledge and skills are different and can be leveraged in a way that exceeds that of others. The other thing that I would highlight is this was a small study, but it has gotten a lot of attention because it’s kind of put a new lens on, again pharmacist and physician teams. And one of the things that physicians are really dealing with — and of course, pharmacists are as well, which is issues of burnout and lack of joy in practice.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah.

Todd Sorensen: We interviewed a series of primary care providers who had formal relationships with pharmacists and asked them whether or not that relationship affected their sense of burnout or joy in practice. And basically unanimously — of course that group, this was through interviews that we did this with — they said absolutely. And then we asked them why. And one of the things that came out of that that I in hindsight maybe could understand, but I hadn’t thought about it at the time, was that they said that the way I work with a pharmacist and this type of relationship is different than I work with any other practitioner. It’s different than how I work with a nurse practitioner. All these clinics had nurse practitioners in them. And the reason why was that the nurse practitioner has their own panel, and the physician has their own panel. They don’t really collaborate on individual patients. They collaborate at a population level, not necessarily an individual patient. Whereas they said with pharmacists, these really complicated, complex medication-heavy burden patients, they wear me out. They create mental burden, and often I just don’t know where to go with them. And it’s really part of what’s contributing to my lack of joy in my practice. But when I work with a pharmacist collaborative on that, it lifts much of that burden. So the way I work with a pharmacist on this select group of patients is different than the way I work with any other practitioner. And that’s starting to get to that uniqueness and to that value because we’re finding something that nobody else is doing or can do as well as a pharmacist can, and it’s bringing value. In that case, the value is in the sense of joy in practice with physicians, which will play out as an influential element in decision-making.

Tim Ulbrich: Absolutely.

Todd Sorensen: It also leads to then costs, better care, it really can lead to the quadrupling.

Tim Ulbrich: That’s an interesting angle. I’ve never heard that talked about. I’ve heard obviously the impact on value-based contracts and being able to improve quality metrics. I’ve heard about and seen studies related to freeing up physician time so they can see more patients, which certainly works in a fee-for-service model, but I think run flat longer term. That’s a really interesting angle in terms of the provider satisfaction. And it makes sense. I mean, I think back to my time in a primary care office, very much the 80-20 rule where you’d have 20% of the patients, maybe 10% of the patients, that took up 80-90% of the time in terms of the questions they have, the complexity of their care and the frequency of their visits, and so I think the pharmacist certainly could play an important role in that process. Todd, one of the things I also think a lot about is just from the academic perspective obviously living in this realm, and I think back to one of my favorite books called, “The End of Jobs” by Taylor Pearson is that I think as I hear you talking, as I listen to your vision, I read more about your vision, I think we have to find a way to better facilitate students and pharmacy graduates and practitioners being comfortable in the uncomfortable. So when I hear your vision, you know, I think pharmacists often want the A-Z checklist of OK, what do I need to do to execute this to be successful to earn a paycheck? And I think the answer is, it’s not there yet. And I think that those that are going to be successful, both practitioners now and students that will be out there in the future, in my opinion, is you have this broad framework, you have this broad vision, but now the creativity lies in the multiple pathways of solutions that can be had. So I would encourage our listeners for those that are out there, whether they’re working full-time, part-time, thinking ahead to the future, begin to think about what are the business solutions that may exist in this framework that you’re hearing Todd talk about? So Todd, I want to address — and you acknowledged this, and I appreciated it — that many pharmacists are frustrated right now with the state of the profession. And many of them are being deeply affected by the current reality. And so those that are out there listening or working today, maybe some of them got laid off, hours got cut, and they’re hearing about this longer term vision to expand pharmacists role in a primary care, they may feel like this message doesn’t do much to address the current challenges. And I’m not necessarily suggesting AACP has this responsibility alone, I think there’s a shared responsibility across all organizations and also shared responsibility by the individual as well as the associations, but any thoughts on short-term solutions or short-term strategies in addition to this longer term vision?

Todd Sorensen: Yes. You know, I would start off by saying that I think that part of the reason that we are — if you go back again and think about the 1999 and some of the projections that were in that NAP report and the factors that maybe did not allow those things to come to fruition on the growth side of the projections, I think it’s in part because it is much easier to focus on short-term initiatives in the short-term. It is much harder, even with the best of intentions, it is harder to get organizations let alone a whole profession, to really look at the long term.

Tim Ulbrich: Yes.

Todd Sorensen: The phrase, “the tyranny of the urgent” comes to mind. And many of the things that we have done over the last 20 years I think are with a short-term focus in terms of trying to pursue this payment opportunity here or even though they might not be the right thing or solving the problem in the long term. Let me give you one quick example.

Tim Ulbrich: Sure.

Todd Sorensen: I’m a particular fan of pharmacists trying to achieve revenue through annual wellness visits in primary care settings. We can’t demonstrate a clear value in net value proposition in that role because again, a nurse practitioner or even a nurse can do that. So by adjusting your service line to try to take advantage of that payment opportunity is very much a short-term focus that is not building the capacity and the direction for the future where you can actually demonstrate value. So I understand the dynamics. It’s easier, we have these short-term pressures that we have to address, so it is a balancing game that we have to consider. And it takes more discipline, and it takes more risk to be able to focus on the long term. And as you’re speaking to the audience and encouraging the idea of these opportunities in entrepreneurship, that’s the same thing. There’s the short-term of the job that’s in front of me right now. There’s a long-term of how I can be a solution and be creative and entrepreneurial to create an opportunity for the long term.

Tim Ulbrich: I think that’s such a great example, the annual wellness visits. I mean, I think it’s no different than how I treat my business and how other business owners look at things in terms of if you’re going to develop a product or a service, you want to think about, again, what’s your differential advantage? And even if this has short-term revenue gain, could this be replaced quickly by something else? I think that’s a good example where can we show a value proposition that is different than what others are doing? And I think based on the criteria for what’s involved in an annual wellness visit, I would agree with you, no. The other example that comes to mind, which isn’t going to be popular, is that even though we have a short-term urgency to focus fixing reimbursement rates on dispensing of products through fair reimbursement through some of the PBM things that are going on, all of that important efforts that we need to continue and we should be doing. It still, again, is a shorter term horizon as we think about 10, 15, 20 years, is the value of the pharmacist still tied to that product? And I think personally, the answer is no. And so I think that, again, we need to be thinking about the longer term and certainly addressing some of those issues. Todd, I want to end by talking about the change.org petition. I think we have to talk about it. For those that are not familiar, the change.org petition #ChangePharmacy, it’s been signed by almost 23,000 people now as of October 1. It probably is beyond that. And it urges the leaders of ACPE, AACP and APhA — not sure why only those three, but nonetheless, to halt and/or postpone accreditation of new pharmacy schools until 2030. So again, I have been a big advocate that we need to be having a constructive, informed conversation that addresses the challenges we’re facing today but also talks about the future and the vision that we need to aspire towards. So what insights can you provide, Todd, either from your personal perspective or AACP’s perspective, to those that signed the petition in terms of the authority for these organizations to “halt and/or postpone accreditation?” And really, what do you think the type of impact that that would have in terms of a solution and the impact on the profession?

Todd Sorensen: Yeah, it’s probably — it’s not really appropriate to hypothesize what that could look like because the reality is that it can’t. And ACPE has commented on this a number of times that we do operate in a free market society, and to do anything on their part to overtly restrict accreditation of schools could be viewed as restriction of free trade. And so that’s just a reality that we have to address that the market is part of what we believe drives supply and demand in our economy. Now, in terms of the number of schools, I mean, right now, that, again, is the short-term focus is that the reason why we are in the situation we are is because we have too many schools. Well, what if we would have created the new opportunities that were projected 20 years ago? Let’s say that even just 50% of primary care practices had some sort of formal relationship with pharmacists right now. That doesn’t even mean embedding them as an employed member of the team, but relationships between the community pharmacist and the primary care setting. That alone probably would shift our dynamics to the point where we would say we might be in balance with our supply or maybe even undersupplied at that time. So we don’t want to run the risk of taking, again, the very acute issue and blaming one thing as the reason for why we are in that situation. And instead, we need to look to the future and say, what does society need? What is the value that pharmacists can bring? And we don’t really know the number of pharmacists that are necessary. I would project that if we could accomplish the aim that I would like to see us pursue that we would not then say we have too many schools. We potentially are not fulfilling the needs of society with the number of pharmacists that we need. So it all is in your perception of how you look at things. Is it the worst of times? Or is the best of times?

Tim Ulbrich: Todd, I thank you so much, again, for taking the time that you did to come onto the show. Thank you for your leadership in AACP and all the work that you’ve done for the profession.

Todd Sorensen: Thanks, Tim. I enjoyed it. Great to have the opportunity to share some of these thoughts with your listeners.

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YFP 121: Creating Another Stream of Income as an Airbnb Host

Posted on by yfpadmin


Creating Another Stream of Income as an Airbnb Host

Tim Church interviews Dr. Hillary Blackburn about how she’s monetizing her personal residence as an Airbnb host. Hillary has been able to earn thousands of dollars each year making this side hustle another consistent income stream for her and her husband.

Summary

Dr. Hillary Blackburn and her husband, Chad, have been monetizing their personal residence as hosts on Airbnb for the last five years. They use this additional income, which has totaled to over $40,000, as their travel fund. Hillary talks through what it’s like to be a host through Airbnb.

Hillary explains that Airbnb is like Uber for vacation rentals and says that it’s a great option for travelers, especially in areas where hotel prices are really high. Hillary and Chad rent their home in Nashville 14 times a year. Typically when the home is rented, they stay with family that happens to be in town or use that time to travel themselves.

Hillary explains that sometimes it’s difficult for her to share her personal space, but her husband doesn’t mind if people are there. Each year they re-evaluate whether they’d like to host their home on Airbnb and he reminds her that they can use the income for their travel fund so they don’t have to take any money out of other savings for their trips. Chad takes care of managing their profile, reservations and communicating with guests. Hillary says that this side hustle is easier on her than picking up shifts at a pharmacy.

Their home is a four bedroom, two bathroom house located in a really convenient area of the city and is generally rented out for about $600 a night. In the rental price, they’ve built in a cleaning fee and have their home cleaned by a maid once a month. The couple has friends that have bought second and third houses to host on Airbnb. Hillary explains that if you purchased a condo in Nashville and paid $2,000 in mortgage each month, you’d essentially be able to make that payment by renting it out for two weekends.

Hillary and Chad have had relatively good experiences renting their home on Airbnb. Although it’s sometimes difficult for her to allow strangers into her home, she takes precautions like locking her closet, locking the basement, and making sure certain valuables, including pictures, are secured. Her advice on becoming a host is to first use Airbnb as a guest and then simply go to the website to set up a host account.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Church: Hillary, thank you so much for coming back on the show.

Hillary Blackburn: Yeah. Thanks, Tim. It is great to be here.

Tim Church: Yeah, I think you’re one of the few guests who has made a repeat experience, so always happy to see that.

Hillary Blackburn: Well, glad to share some more updates and some other ways that I’ve been making a little extra income and hopefully will be a good thing to share with your listeners.

Tim Church: Awesome. Excited to hear about it. But before we kind of go there, knowing that you live in Nashville, this question has just been burning that I have to ask you. OK? You have to sing karaoke. What song are you picking?

Hillary Blackburn: Oh gosh. You know, I am not always a karaoke person. I’ll tell you what my husband always sings. It’s Big and Rich, “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy.”

Tim Church: Ooh, that’s a classic hit.

Hillary Blackburn: Yeah. So I think he probably enjoys doing it more than me. I just like to be the backup dancers and things.

Tim Church: OK.

Hillary Blackburn: But yes, lots of good music here in Nashville. Definitely come visit and we can check out some of the spots on Broadway.

Tim Church: Love to. Love it there. So it’s been about five months since the last time you were on the show. And before we talk about kind of a different way that we didn’t talk about before on how you’re earning some extra income, can you give us a little bit of an update about what’s happening with your career and your businesses?

Hillary Blackburn: Yeah. So since May, I started an MBA course and have been doing that. That has been taking up a lot of my time. But it’s something that I had always wanted to do and really wasn’t going to commit to it if, you know, it was too expensive. Again, financial, that was a big barrier. So we have some really amazing programs here in Nashville. Vanderbilt has a very nationally recognized, Vanderbilt Owen School of Business, Belmont has a great MBA program. But I really didn’t want to commit to a $50,000-60,000 another degree already having a pharmacy degree. So found one that is online, so that’s scalable and very affordable and something that my employer was able to help finance as well. So just all wins on that front. And this one is self-paced and competency-based, so I hope to have it finished within six months. So having that existing experience in business over the past 10 years has been a lot to draw from but definitely learning in the key areas that I want to learn in. So that’s been a lot of what’s been keeping me busy. But as far as some of the other business things that I’ve been working on, of course still doing the Talk to Your Pharmacist podcast, and I do make some revenue from that. We’ve got two great sponsors, RxDestroyer, which is a drug disposal system, and Theraworks Relief, which is a topical pain foam, pain reliever. And then of course, I have just launched a new podcast called “The Natural Products Resource Center” focused on helping to educate our pharmacists and others about separating fact from fiction around natural products, particularly medical cannabis since that is certainly taking the medical community by surprise. And you know, I’ve got also a pharmacy residency boot camp online for those who are gearing up for residency. So that’s just a couple of recordings, sessions that I did last year and wanted to make those available for people at their own convenience, so it’s all online so kind of like the MBA, being able to take those chunks of learnings whenever it’s convenient for you and just kind of I was able to basically download all of these tips and things that I’ve crowdsourced from other residency directors and organizations that are actually doing the residency process. So they’re doing the recruiting and hiring, so what they’re looking for. And then just tips for navigating Midyear. So I have been staying busy, Tim.

Tim Church: I would say so. It sounds like it. I mean, I’m just blown away. I feel like you just keep mentioning new things that I don’t even know about by the time that we got on this recording. So that’s really exciting. So it sounds like the MBA is taking up quite a bit of time. How many classes are you taking at one time?

Hillary Blackburn: Yeah, so I take — the way this program, it’s Western Governors University, which is a nonprofit university started by 19 governors to really make higher ed really affordable. They set it up as six-month terms, so you can take as many classes as you want in one term. So if as soon as I pass one, then I’m going onto the next. So I’ve already hit leadership and communications and marketing, ethical leadership, accounting — accounting and financial management were definitely the areas that I’ve had to dig in and really study. But right now, my husband and I don’t have children, and so we can really — if we’re not traveling or doing something fun, which we love to do, we’re pretty buckled down on the weekends and can knock out 20-30 hours in a weekend of committing to studying.

Tim Church: So when a lot of people are binge-watching “Downton Abbey,” “Poldark,” other shows, you’re basically hustling, grinding it out, trying to not only further your education but also your businesses as well.

Hillary Blackburn: Right. Don’t ask me if you want to know the latest TV show. Although I did watch all of the “Outlander” series that are out. So I’m a big fan of “Outlander.”

Tim Church: OK, OK. Well, you mentioned to me after a call that we had a number of months back that hey, by the way, I also have another side hustle. And that’s kind of why we set this podcast up because I think it’s really a cool and somewhat I’d say — I don’t know if I want to say easy, but not as time-consuming as other things and other side hustles that are out there. But that is becoming an Airbnb host.

Hillary Blackburn: Yeah.

Tim Church: Talk about what Airbnb is for those of the people out there that don’t know what it is, even though it’s been around for a number of years, and how do you become a host?

Hillary Blackburn: Yes. So Airbnb, for those that are not familiar, it is basically like Uber for vacation rentals. So people are probably most familiar with VRBO or others. Well, Airbnb has basically helped any homeowner or apartment owner or whatnot, depending on, of course, whether your city and state allow it and whether you have to have any type of licenses and things. And if anyone has those types of questions, my husband navigated all of that. He had to go down and you’ve got to get your permit and there’s a fee for that. And then you have to take out taxes and all of those regulatory things. But Airbnb is such a great option not only for travelers — the very first experience I had with Airbnb was as a traveler. So we were going to Houston for a wedding and hotels were all really expensive. We wanted to be a little bit more affordable and booked a studio through Airbnb. And the great thing about Airbnb is that just like Uber or Lyft, there are ratings and reviews. So not only do you rate and review the accommodation, but you as a guest are being rated and reviewed. So it’s because of that review type of setup that, you know, that kind of I guess dissuades any of the fears that someone stranger is going to come into my house and mess it up because you do have that opportunity to review them. And so if you have a bad guest, you’re going to rate them bad, and they won’t ever be able to use the service again. And Airbnb does allow for you can put in for cleaning fees, you can set that into your price. You can also — they have a very hefty insurance package. And then if you notice anything that potentially does break or something, you can always charge the guest. So they have all of those things, insurances in place. But since we have been doing it with our own home for the past 5+ years, we really haven’t had any major issues. We are sensitive. We don’t let all the bachelorette parties come because we are in a residential area. And you know, we live here. It’s not a second property that we just have furnished. We actually live in the home and rent it out up to 14 times per year because after 14 times per year, then you have to start doing like the federal taxes. And for us, you know, usually it works out that if someone’s wanting to come stay, we are traveling anyway or we have family in town and we just can go and stay with them.

Tim Church: So Hillary, I want to back up just for one minute because I bet there are people listening right now and saying, ‘Hillary, are you kidding me that you are letting complete strangers stay in your own home?’

Hillary Blackburn: Yes. I am a little crazy, yes. So Tim, as I mentioned, I do have this love-hate relationship with Airbnb. So as a guest, I have loved being able to use it. Now, don’t get me wrong. If I’m traveling for work and then I’m probably going to use a hotel because work is paying for it. And I still try to be very frugal, of course, but there’s something about a hotel that you kind of know what you’re going to get. But there’s definitely some gems, some like really awesome houses. Or for instance, if you’re traveling to a city and you’ve got a big group, you could all rent out a big house and then you’re all together instead of being in a couple, you know, lots of different hotel rooms. So alright, getting back to letting people stay in our home, so my husband started doing it at our house before we got married. So he was an early adopter and had roommates, and it was a great way for them to rent out their fourth room for all these people that like to visit Nashville. And I actually did it a couple of times before we got married because I had a two-bedroom condo that the roommate, my roommate had moved out, and so I was letting people come in to that second room. I had my door locked but all of the general areas were fine. So once we got married, I’m like, OK, we’re not going to do Airbnb anymore. But it’s funny because if you start to think of your house as an asset that is just sitting here and not making any money, then that’s kind of the incentive that my husband uses. And then the way he gets me to do it is that that is our travel fund. So if anybody knows anything about me, they know that I love to travel, we love to travel together. We’ve been on some amazing trips. And a lot of the way that we’ve been able to do those is from this extra income. So we’re not using — we’re dual income, no kids, so we’re just trying to socket away for retirement, live off of one income. So we’re living off of mine. And so instead of having to steal from our retirement and our savings to do all of the amazing travel that we do, you know, we’ve got a trip to San Francisco coming up this week and then we’re going down to Mexico City in November with a group and hopefully we’re going to use our Southwest companion pass to go to Hawaii over Christmas. So those are just some of the things — but those are some of the big trips that we’ve kind of done all year. So we’re kind of all queueing those up for Q4 it seems.

Tim Church: So he knew exactly how to persuade you into this, right?

Hillary Blackburn: Yeah, you need to know your spouse. Exactly. So a lot of my friends, a lot, a lot of my friends would say, ‘Absolutely no way am I going to let somebody come into my house and stay here.’ And there are definitely times when I have had tears and we’ve had some — Chad and I have had some really difficult conversations. And it’s like every year, I’m like, never again. And then I’m like, oooh, but we want to go on this amazing trip. So it’s kind of like when I see the trip in mind, I’m like, OK, OK, we can do it.

Tim Church: And is that because just the thought of more strangers coming into the house? Or have you had some somewhat bad experiences that make you hesitant to continue on?

Hillary Blackburn: Well, I don’t know if this is just being a female, but you know, he operates very differently than I do. And he doesn’t mind if people are here at all. For me, I’m like, oh, this is my personal space. You know, this is our home, like I have all of my personal pictures, all of the furniture that we’ve gotten and different things. Like all my clothes, I do lock my closet, so that is something that I do. But you know, there’s certainly areas like my bathroom, I’m like, well, I definitely have toiletries out for guests, but people are nosy, so people could be like — but yeah. It’s just something that you kind of just have to get over. I was just listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “Talking to Strangers,” and yeah. It’s like instead of just thinking that everybody is out for the bad, you’ve kind of got to think about air on the side of truth. And so I think just knowing that people want to be respectful, they’re coming to stay in your house, they know it’s a house. We do have house rules. There is a ratings system. We really haven’t had any — I think one time before we got married, we had some partiers. And the police were called once or twice during the whole weekend by our neighbors. So that was not ideal. And we’ve had maybe one other issue where we’ve had like a wine glass break, but they were cheap wine glasses. You know? And so I really haven’t had anything where like I’ve had a stain on a sofa or anything like that. But heck, if that happened, then you just charge them. And then you get a whole brand new sofa.

Tim Church: Right, there you go.

Hillary Blackburn: So part of me is like, well, before I really do a whole lot of any kind of redecorating, now’s the time. Once we have kids and everything, then that gets a little bit harder to do. So right now, we’re just really trying to utilize all of our resources and be good stewards of what we have.

Tim Church: Well I think the other thing too is that as a host, not everybody knows this, but you get up to a $1 million worth of property damage protection in case you need it.

Hillary Blackburn: Yes.

Tim Church: And so that is one of the things that I think can make it a little bit easier to let people be in your primary residence or whether you have another property, knowing that you do have some protections in place.

Hillary Blackburn: Yeah, exactly. And then on the flip side, if you are traveling, like to Nashville, for instance, the hotel prices are outrageous. There’s not enough hotels for all of the people who are wanting to visit. And you know, you can really get some great deals on Airbnb and make your vacation really affordable.

Tim Church: Definitely. I was going to get into that a little bit, but I think that’s one of the biggest reasons why it’s becoming so popular with the millennial generation. And I was looking at some statistics and that 30% of millennials, they’ve had a very positive opinion of the service. And about a quarter of them have stayed at least once in an Airbnb. And definitely I think it’s disrupting the hotel market to some degree because not only is it more economical in many cases, but I think also to especially some of the more exotic places or just different is that people get a really unique experience.

Hillary Blackburn: Exactly.

Tim Church: So let’s talk a little bit about the economics. You mentioned that your cap per year is 14 different reservations through the year. Is that correct?

Hillary Blackburn: Actually 14 nights. So I’m really not doing it that much.

Tim Church: 14 nights. OK.

Hillary Blackburn: Yeah. I mean, we have some friends here that have bought second and third properties. So a lot of people want to buy a second home and make money from that, put it on the rental market. You can honestly make more money on the Airbnb market than on the regular rental market. So say, you know, a Nashville rate for maybe a condo, two-bedroom condo, $2,000. Well, you could make that in two weekends if you were doing Airbnb. So you know, you don’t have that guarantee that it will be booked up all the time, but if you start getting a lot of great reviews, then you become a Superhost and then you get rated higher, and so people are going to find you. So that gets a little bit into the marketing of your Airbnb I guess. But we could talk more about that.

Tim Church: So are you pretty consistently booked for those nights?

Hillary Blackburn: Well, so we — since we only have like 14 nights, we leave open our calendar a little bit during spring and fall. We found that those are two of the biggest times of year. So fall being that we’re a mile away from Vanderbilt, lots of people come in wanting to stay during the fall. And then spring in Nashville is very fun. So that was just seven weekends or if we have a three-night stay or two three-night stays, then that’s five weekends. So yeah, we don’t have just 14 days out of the year. We’ll close off for the rest of the year. We have one more Airbnb at the end of the year — I mean, sorry — at the end of the month, and then we won’t do it again until 2020 if we do, which I feel like I’m getting more and more comfortable. Another thing, too — so we have Ring, which is basically I guess a webcam for your front door or something. I feel like I should be getting some royalties for all of these products that I’m promoting.

Tim Church: Yeah, exactly.

Hillary Blackburn: So Ring, we had that installed maybe about a year or so ago. And you can see when packages are dropped from Amazon, you know, a lot of time people have challenges with people stealing packages. We didn’t have that issue, but just for more security purposes, I obviously like privacy and security. And those are two values that I hold dearly. And so it’s just nice to be able to see like when there’s movement at your front door, you have a package, who’s at your door while you’re away. Maybe you’re traveling and on vacation, you want to see what’s going on at your house. Ring is great for that. But what I’ve found is that I have to turn off Ring when Airbnb guests come because for me, it’s like out of sight, out of mind. I don’t want to know who’s staying there, when they come and go, any of that. I let my husband handle all of that because otherwise, it just works me up into a tizzy. So he does all of the management for our Airbnb. He’s talking with the guest, he shows up and does a walk-through with them. Basically, I think once they know that you live there and it’s your home, then they’re going to treat it more respectfully. So he manages all of that. So that’s what we’ve found works for us.

Tim Church: So what does a typical night, what does it cost to stay in the Blackburn residence bnb? Actually, I was going to ask before you answer that, do you have a nickname for your Airbnb property?

Hillary Blackburn: Anchor Down.

Tim Church: Alright.

Hillary Blackburn: So since it’s close to Vanderbilt, it’s called Anchor Down because that’s kind of their motto or whatever because they’re the Commodores.

Tim Church: OK.

Hillary Blackburn: So yeah. So also, Airbnb has an algorithm available. So they know when there are hot markets. So you know, maybe the Labor Day weekend, Vanderbilt-Georgia game, or other weekends, like the Draft. We were out of our house for the draft weekend too. Lots of people come in. So when those weekends hit, then the price goes up. So a typical price per night is usually around $600. And we have a four-bedroom, two-bath house. It is really conveniently located, you know, close to downtown, within the 440 Loop, it’s a beautiful Craftsman-style home. So it’s amazing. We were able, fortunate to have bought this in the downturn. So my husband bought it 10 years ago, so in 2009, and so of course, the property value has just increased over the past 10 years with Nashville being such a hot market. So hopefully when we’re ready to sell, we’ll be able to do well. But yeah, so usually, it could be anywhere around $600 a night. So once they take out taxes and things, like this past weekend, we made $1,200, yeah, just under $1,200. So not too —

Tim Church: So that was the profit to you?

Hillary Blackburn: Yeah, profit.

Tim Church: Wow.

Hillary Blackburn: So it’s way easier than me going and picking up a shift at a retail store, which I still work PRN but have not been doing that as much because I have all of these other things keeping me busy. But yeah, so for changing out the linen, I change out the linens, I change out the towels, I do lock my closet, he locks our basement. We pull out a few really personal pictures, make sure that our refrigerator is cleaned out. I don’t remove all the condiments and everything. I used to be way more intense about what I would clean out and what I wouldn’t. But honestly, sometimes people end up leaving us food. They’re like, ‘Oh, we have all this extra alcohol left and we’re flying out.’ We’re like, ‘Great.’ So yeah. I mean, it’s been something that we’ve been doing for almost five years. And you know, we’ve been able to really make some awesome memories traveling and not have to steal from our other funds.

Tim Church: Yeah, so it definitely sounds like yes, there are definitely some concerns and maybe some inconvenience around being a host and doing that.

Hillary Blackburn: Totally.

Tim Church: But the opportunities that being a host gives you and affords you really outweighs all of those other things and concerns. Would that be fair to say?

Hillary Blackburn: Yeah, I would say that. And eventually, are we always going to do Airbnb? Probably not. But for right now and the home that we’re in and the time in life that we’re in, it is a great way to make some extra income.

Tim Church: And so what would be a typical yearly earning that would actually be profit for being a host for your property?

Hillary Blackburn: Yeah. So I guess anywhere like $8,400?

Tim Church: OK, OK. That’s a nice side hustle. And you said this — what year is this?

Hillary Blackburn: We’ve been married four and a half years. And he’s been doing it for six. And he actually did more than 14. They changed a lot of the rules. So I would say even conservatively with the 14 days, we’ve made $42,000 in five years.

Tim Church: So you really are making sure that your house is an asset.

Hillary Blackburn: We are, yes. And we get it cleaned. We have a maid that comes every month.

Tim Church: Yeah, that’s what I was going to ask you is so you’re changing out some of the linens, but are you paying someone to come in and clean between every time there’s a guest?

Hillary Blackburn: Yes, but I already have a housekeeper come once a month just to help me keep everything clean.

Tim Church: So you mentioned kind of the average cost per night for your Airbnb. Does the Airbnb platform automatically adjust during those points where they think you can charge more?

Hillary Blackburn: It does.

Tim Church: Or is that something that happens automatically?

Hillary Blackburn: Yes.

Tim Church: OK.

Hillary Blackburn: Yes. So it’s just supply and demand.

Tim Church: So you don’t have to necessarily guess what the best price is going to be or trying to always go higher than what the standard or recommended amount would be.

Hillary Blackburn: Right. And they allow you to set your own price and, you know, you can also block your calendar for certain dates when you don’t want people to stay. You get to talk to the people or you hear they’re for a bachelorette party, and they’re like, ‘No, we’re here for a family reunion.’ We’re like, ‘Great. We love family reunions because the moms and the grandmoms always end up cleaning before they leave.’ So yeah. For the most part, it’s been really pretty great.

Tim Church: What tips would you have for people who are interested and maybe want to get started? And what should they avoid when they first become a host?

Hillary Blackburn: You know, I would just check out the Airbnb — you know, I would be a guest first, actually. I would totally start with being a guest. Check it out as a guest the next time you’re traveling, see how it works. It’s very easy. They even have an app, so you’re like literally texting and communicating with your host. So you get that experience, and then you basically just get on the Airbnb website. They have a different profile for you if you’re a host.

Tim Church: So one last question, Hillary. What do you do or what have you done to make the guest experience memorable? Is there anything special?

Hillary Blackburn: You know, one of the things that we do is you know, we have a guide, we put bottled waters by everyone’s bed, just making sure the house is clean and orderly, and then just being a really responsive host. So I think that we do all of that and have always had really great reviews.

Tim Church: And has that got you to that superhost status that you were talking about a little bit earlier?

Hillary Blackburn: You know, we did have superhose status but only doing it for 14 times out of the year, it’s kind of hard to maintain that.

Tim Church: Well Hillary, thank you so much for coming back on and sharing a really cool side hustle. I think it’s a great way to earn extra income, whether you’re using your own residence or whether you have an additional space or property because as you mentioned, it doesn’t take as much time as going out and working an 8-10 hour shift to pull that in. Now, obviously, it’s going to depend on where you live and kind of what the rates are. And if you’re interested in learning what your space or property would rent for, you can check out our Airbnb earnings estimator, and that’s at YourFinancialPharmacist.com/airbnb. So Hillary, thank you so much for coming back on the show. What is the best way for someone to reach out and contact you?

Hillary Blackburn: Yeah, so I am on all of the different platforms. So Instagram, @talktoyourpharmacist and Facebook @TalkToYourPharmacist, I have a page as well. Also pretty active on LinkedIn. You can search for me at Hillary Blackburn and then on Twitter @hilblackburn. Oh, and of course my website, www.pharmacyadvisory.com.

Tim Church: Well thank you so much, Hillary, and looking forward to all the work and what you have ahead.

Hillary Blackburn: Awesome. Thanks so much for having me back as a guest.

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YFP 120: 5 Ways to Finish 2019 Strong

Posted on by yfpadmin


5 Ways to Finish 2019 Strong

Tim Ulbrich talks through 5 ways to finish 2019 strong. These 5 strategies will help you enter the New Year with a sense of momentum and accomplishment, setting yourself up for an awesome 2020.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Ulbrich: Hey, what’s up, everybody? Welcome to this week’s episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast. I’m excited that you are joining me as we talk about five strategies that you can employ in 2019 to finish the year strong. So last week, we heard from one of our Certified Financial Planners, Christina Slavonik, where we did our first episode of a new segment that we will be rolling out going forward called, “Ask a YFP CFP.” Of course, CFP standing for Certified Financial Planner. We had some great questions that we answered from you, the YFP community, and we’d like to tackle more of your questions in the future. So if you have a question that you would like to have featured on the show and answered by one of our fee-only Certified Financial Planners, please do us a favor and shoot us an email at [email protected]. Again, that’s [email protected].

OK, so today’s episode, five strategies, five things that you can employ in 2019 to finish out this last quarter of the year strong. The theme across all five of these strategies is intentionality. The theme is slowing down for a moment and getting out of the month-to-month rush to ask yourself, what am I trying to achieve? Or maybe to remind yourself what am I trying to achieve? To ask yourself, what progress have I made thus far? And to ask yourself, what are some strategies that I can do for this last quarter, this remaining three months of 2019 to finish the year strong and to start 2020 with a bang? You know, I’m a big believer in momentum and running into the new year with some wins. And I think this is a much different situation than just waiting for 2020 to roll around, waiting for the new year to roll around so that you can hit the reset button and get a fresh start on your financial plan on the financial year. Now, don’t get me wrong. I think hitting the reset button every once in awhile can certainly be refreshing, and it does serve a purpose. But choosing to be intentional, choosing to be intentional in this final three months, in this final quarter of the year, and digging in, that’s a growth mindset. And that is putting yourself in a position of playing offense rather than playing defense.

So let’s jump in: Five strategies that you can employ to finish 2019 strong. Now, what would an episode of the YFP podcast, what would it be without us talking student loans? So No. 1 here is reevaluating your student loan repayment option. Or maybe for recent graduates, maybe it’s just evaluating your student loan repayment option for the first time. You know, when I started Your Financial Pharmacist back in 2015, I noticed there were only a handful of pharmacists that were spending the time, the time that is necessary to navigate all of the student loan repayment options that are out there and to determine the one best option for their own personal situation. This takes work. This takes effort. This takes digging into the unknown. This takes really understanding all of the variety of the repayment options and the confusion that could come along with that. And after I graduated from pharmacy school in 2008, I defaulted into the standard 10-year repayment plan because I didn’t know what else was out there. And at the time, that was the easiest path forward, right? It’s the standard, it’s the default repayment plan. The problem was is that I could have saved significant amounts of money by either pursuing Public Service Loan Forgiveness, PSLF, as I did work for a qualifying employer, or refinancing my loans to a lower interest rate because many of my loans at the time were at a fixed 6.8% interest rate, and I certainly could have done better than that if I weren’t pursuing PSLF, which I was not. So don’t get me wrong, while I’m grateful that I eventually got them paid off, I’m grateful that Jess and I were able to work through this journey, I think we learned lots through this journey, but not knowing all of the options that were available to me and just defaulting into the standard 10-year repayment plan certainly cost me big. Thankfully, there is now a lot more resources out there in terms of helping borrowers navigate the maze of student loan repayment. And in the pharmacy space — of course, disclaimer, I’m biased here — there is no better student loan repayment piece for pharmacy professionals than the one put together by our very own Tim Church. And that is the ultimate guide to repayment of student loans. You can get that post and all of the details and all the information for free at YourFinancialPharmacist.com/ultimate. Again, YourFinancialPharmacist.com/ultimate. We’ll link to that in the show notes.

Now, for students that are listening, the question hopefully you’re asking yourself is, you know, you’re note reevaluating repayment options, you haven’t yet evaluated them, and maybe you haven’t even thought about this yet for the first time. After all, this seems like it’s off into the distance as something you need to be thinking about into the future. And so my encouragement for the students listening is to begin to learn about these options that are available. Certainly you’re going to graduate, you’re going to have the grace period, you’re going to have some time, but that’s going to come quick. You’re going to have lots of competing priorities, you’re going to be studying for the NAPLEX, you’re going to be studying for the MPJE, you’re going to be starting a new job or residency or training program, and it may seem like that’s something to worry about in the future. But I think now is really the time to start listening to episodes like this or reading blogs or other resources that are out there to understand these terms, understand what an unsubsidized versus a subsidized loan is, understand what different types of loans are in terms of consolidation and refinancing and loan forgiveness and having the vocabulary, having an awareness that when you need to choose that option, you’re in a position that hopefully does not feel as overwhelming.

I would also encourage the students listening that I think you’ve heard me talk about before on this show, I think it’s easy as a student, myself included when I was a student, to fall into the trap of worrying about this in the future, to fall into the trap of it just feels like Monopoly money, it doesn’t feel real. So I would encourage you to inventory your loans, to log on, to look at your balances, to look at the interest rates, to see how that interest is accruing, to ask yourself, what are some things that I can do, especially on my unsubsidized loans, to lower the interest that is ultimately going to be accruing while you’re in school for your unsubsidized loans and, of course, capitalizing and growing beyond that?

And then students, the other thing I would encourage you is to begin to develop a relationship with the financial aid officer at your institution. Again, really building that relationship. Now having these conversations early as possible to begin to understand the terms, understand the options that when you need to make that decision, you’re ready to be in that position of action.

Now, for recent graduates, here I’m talking to the class of 2019, this could be those that are pursuing residency or those that are out in practice already, you know very well that you are in the grace period. You have the grace period, you’re living it right now. And here we are, that grace period is going to come to an end very soon. So now is the time if you have not already done so to evaluate and compare your options. I think for myself as was true for many others probably listening to this, it’s a rude awakening when you get that statement out of the blue to say, by the way, in the standard 10-year repayment option, you need to pay about $1,800 a month for 10 years to get these loans paid off. And so now is the time, before you get that notice, to evaluate, compare your options, understand income-driven repayment, understand some of the nuances between those plans, understand loan forgiveness, understand what are your options in the refinance marketplace so that when you go into active repayment, again, you’re in a position to make an educated decision.

Now, just a separate word for residents, you know, I think the common thing among residents is an automatic decision to defer. And my question for you to consider is is deferment the best option? Have you really thought about that? Have you really determined what’s going to happen to the interest on your loans while you’re in residency? What’s your makeup of subsidized versus unsubsidized loan? And I know, it’s a busy time. It’s a busy time. You finished your orientation, you’re active in your research experiences. Many of you are probably also teaching, balancing patient care and staffing responsibilities. I understand that you’re busy. But now is the time to really dig in and understand these options. And for those that are in active repayment, my question to you is maybe you’ve never sat down and intentionally evaluated all the options that are available to you. Or maybe you at one point refinanced, but you haven’t reevaluated rates. Or for those of you that are pursuing loan forgiveness, maybe you haven’t yet submitted your employer certification form. So my challenge for those that are in active repayment is have you confirmed, have you spent time to determine that the repayment strategy that you’re in right now is really the best option for you?

And I think as we are certainly here in October 2019, we’ve seen interest rates come down, we’ll talk about that here in a moment with refinance, when it comes to student loans, that means we often see the interest rates on a refinance become a greater differentiation or separation from the interest rates that you’re going to get offered through your federal loans. Now, we’ve said many, many times before, refinance is not for everyone. There’s certain considerations and benefits that you have in the federal system that you may not have in the private system, although that gap has closed. And certainly if you’re pursuing Public Service Loan Forgiveness, absolutely you do not want to pursue a refinance. But for those that have decided that is the best option for them, I think now is a good time to check rates. Certainly if you’re just getting initial quotes, it’s a soft pull on your credit, and that’s not going to have an impact until you actually go through the full application. You can learn more at YourFinancialPharmacist.com/refinance to learn more about the refinance process, who we think it’s for, who we think it is not for, and ultimately to check and compare rates. Again, YourFinancialPharmacist.com/refinance. So that’s No. 1 is reevaluating or evaluating your student loan repayment options.

No. 2, it’s hard to think about the holidays here in October, but if we’re going to finish 2019 strong, we need to set a budget, have a plan, and save for the holidays. And that’s No. 2. Now, we talked about this in detail all the way back in Episode 023. That was a long time ago, and I don’t know about you, but I know that I could use a reminder, and I’m guessing that’s the same for you, that we could all use a reminder about by the way, we’ve got to be thinking about the holidays and the impact that has on your financial plan. So of course, ideally, we’re saving throughout the year, that’s the thing we should be doing. But if you, like me, find yourself looking up at the calendar as we roll into October saying, ‘Is it really time for the holidays again?’ then we need to develop a plan as soon as possible to avoid the stress and the debt that often comes along with the holiday season and impacts how we start the new year. After all, the data shows that on average, on average, those who take on debt accrue approximately $1,000 of new debt from the holidays alone. So if we’re going to be in an offensive position going into the new year, we cannot let the holidays derail our financial plan. So the question here is, how can you have a painless financial holiday season?

So I think first thing that you can do is list all of your holiday expenses. Now, I’m talking all of your holiday expenses. And I know, here we are, it’s October. It’s not even Halloween yet, and we’re talking about later in the year holiday expenses. But this is important, right? Because it sounds easy. But from my experience, I’m sure from your experience, a lot of frustration comes from understanding what really are the true expenses when you reflect back on it. And I think we often underestimate these true expenses. So you know as well as I know it’s not just the gifts for family and friends, although that’s where we typically stop and end with the budget for the holidays. It’s the gifts we often buy for coworkers, it’s the gifts for those that are hosting parties we attend, it’s the gifts and the things associated with various work outings. It’s the expenses associated with hosting family and friends. Of course, it’s the travel, it’s the house decorations, it’s the cards and the postage, and the list goes on and on and on. So I think where we start is listing each item, holding true to that, and hopefully eventually coming up with a budget for each line item to come up with in sum, what do we need to be planning for the holiday season?

Second, for each of those categories, once you get everything down on paper, you know, begin to think about and identify are there some ways that since here we are planning well in advance, are there some ways because of your preparation and because of your diligence that you can be more intentional and save money during the holidays? For example, perhaps an electronic letter with a photo compared to printing cards or shopping in advance to be more intentional and to give yourself time to price shop around and compare. Or maybe it’s taking up those gift cards that have been unused or cashing in on travel or credit card points to help fund gifts or putting a cap on gift amounts with family or friends. And again, the list goes on and on. But the point is if we can plan here in October as we talk about finishing 2019 strong and we don’t wait until the last minute, we can be much more intentional and I think reap the benefits of that going into next year.

Now we have a guide we developed all the way back in Episode 023 if you want more information to help you think about this further and even start to work through the budgeting process of this. Head on over to YourFinancialPharmacist/holidays to get started. Again, YourFinancialPharmacist.com/holidays. So that’s No. 2: Set a budget, be intentional, save for the holidays. s

No. 3, evaluate a mortgage refinance. So for those of you that currently own a home, you know, here we are at the time of this recording, early October 2019, and we have seen a significant reduction in mortgage interest rates compared to this time last year. And I think there’s even talks of further reduction in Quarter 4 of 2019. So as an example, this time last year, my wife Jess and I moved down to Columbus from northeast Ohio, and interest rates on a 30-year fixed loan 12 months ago were north of 4.5%. So 12 months ago, we saw interest rates on 30-year fixed loans be above 4.5%. We actually closed on a loan at 4.625%. Now, today, we are seeing rates, a year later — depending on credit scores, of course if you buy points in the process and other factors — we’re seeing 30-year rates that are below 4%, high 3’s, and we’re seeing 15-year rates that are in the low 3’s. And I’ve even seen some offers in the high 2’s, especially if you’re buying points in the process. Now, it may not seem significant, but when you talk about a percentage, percentage and a half, even three-quarters of a percentage, depending on your mortgage, depending on where you’re at in the repayment process, this can be significant, especially over a 15- or 30-year term. So what I encourage you to do is take a moment to stop, look at the interest rate, look at the current market of rates — you can look at that without having to impact your credit score — and calculate a break-even on what this would mean if you would refinance your home. How much would you save relative to how much you would cost, how much you would spend in the closing process? So pretty simple, you can run a calculator. We’ve got some great resources on our site. If you go to YourFinancialPharmacist.com/calculators, we’ve got lots of resources that can help you here. But essentially, you do a simple calculation to say OK, if this is my current balance on my loan, here’s my current interest rate, here’s the rate I’m assuming in a refinance, how much would I save per month? And obviously, you have to make this as close to an apples-to-apples comparison as possible because if you currently have 26 years left on your mortgage and you’re going to refi to a 30-year, obviously you need to account for that time difference. There’s certainly calculators that can help you do that. So once you calculate the savings over the life of the loan, then you want to ask yourself, well, how much are you going to pay in closing costs, in fees? And this would include things like bank fees, title costs, third-party costs, appraisals or attorney fees, escrow charges and so forth. What’s your total cost to close? And based on your monthly savings, when will you get to a break-even? And typically, what you see like in the situation where Jess and I are in right now, if we had a 30-year mortgage that we just closed on a year ago of 4.625% and we can get a 30-year in the low 4’s or the high 3’s, then certainly we’re going to see a significant return on investment in a fairly short period of time. So that’s No. 3 is evaluating a mortgage refinance if you haven’t looked at that in awhile.

Now, No. 4 is one that’s near and dear to my heart, and it’s something I’m becoming more and more passionate about as I really understand the power and value in continuing to have a mindset of professional development and learning and learning and learning. No. 4 is making a commitment to read at least one book per month. Some of you may already be doing that, some of you that may seem a stretch. It’s just a place, a recommendation of where to start. Now, where does this come from? My wife and I are recently watching the Bill Gates documentary on Netflix, which is fantastic, by the way. It’s called “Inside Bill’s Brain,” and one of the things you’ll notice in that documentary is he just carries around this sack of books. He’s constantly reading and reading a wide variety of things. And his passion to learn, his desire to learn is so evident as a part of the fabric of who he is as a leader. And we’ll link to in the show notes, he actually has a summer books 2019 reading list, a suggestion of books if you’re looking to get started. But he’s reported to read approximately 50 books per year, and he’s quoted as saying, “You don’t really start getting old until you stop learning.” And when you look at some of the most successful people that are out there — and here I’m defining success by a combination of both net worth as well as the impact they have had and the work that they’re doing. This could be business related or philanthropic related, which certainly Bill Gates would fall into both of those. And what you see among these people is a common thread of a quest for knowledge, a deep desire to learn more and the humility to accept that what they know is only a fraction of what there is to learn, no matter where they are in their career. And so this just got me thinking, why is this so for such famous, successful people like Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Warren Buffett, all of whom are worth billions of dollars, extremely busy, have lots of competing priorities? How in the world do they have time to read, time to learn more? And why is that such a significant priority for them? In many of these leaders what you see, as I’ve already alluded to, is that despite being extremely busy, they set aside at least an hour a day, five hours a week, over their entire career, or at least most of their career, for activities that could be classified as deliberate practice or learning. And this has been written about, it is known as the “Five-Hour Rule,” this five hours a week, and there’s a 2016 article that was written by serial entrepreneur and bestselling author Michael Simmons, and he quotes these individuals as exhibiting these behaviors and habits: Warren Buffett, for example, which is referenced in the Bill Gates documentary as well, spends 5-6 hours per day reading five newspapers and 500 pages of corporate reports. Not sure how he stays awake for that, but he does. Bill Gates reads 50 books per year, I already mentioned that. Mark Zuckerberg reads at least one book every two weeks. Elon Musk grew up reading two books a day, according to his brother. Mark Cuban reads more than three hours every day. Arthur Blank, co-founder of Home Depot, reads two hours a day. Dan Gilbert, self-made billionaire, owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, reads 1-2 hours a day.

So my encouragement to you is to start making a habit of reading and learning more, whether that is the old-school book-in-hand method, maybe it’s a Kindle, an audiobook, podcast. Make this commitment to learn more of a priority. Set a goal for the number of books — I gave you an example as we started here point No. 4, one book per month — but set a number of books that you want to read for the remainder of 2019 and do the same for 2020. So we’ll link in the show notes to Bill Gates’ Summer of 2019 reading list if you’re looking for a place to get started. And I hope that you will share with the YFP community and our Facebook group what you’re reading and what you’re learning. And of course, if you’re looking for a good financial book to get started, I have to mention “Seven Figure Pharmacist,” I have a bias for that. Also I will throw out there, “I Will Teach You to Be Rich” by Ramit Sethi, “Rich Dad Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki, “Friend of a Friend” by David Burkus, which we recently interviewed on the podcast, and one if you want to get ready for an interview you’re going to be doing in the future is “The Behavioral Investor” by Daniel Crosby. It talks a lot about the behavioral aspects of finance and has built a career with his PhD studying this information about how behavior impacts our financial plan. So there’s some ideas to get started. So that’s No. 4. No. 4 is making a commitment to read and doing so with reading at least one book per month.

No. 5 is start visualizing what success will look like for you in 2020. You know, several years ago, I read a book called “The Miracle Morning,” and one of the activities they talk about in “The Miracle Morning” by Hal Elrod, it’s a great book, great process, is this concept of visualization. Pat Flynn talks about this a lot as well in his book, “Will It Fly?” And they talk about this process of not only setting goals but visualizing those goals becoming a reality and then revisiting those goals each and every day or maybe it’s once a week or maybe it’s several times a month. And when you do that, an amazing thing happens between you start with the goal that maybe feels like a hope or a dream or a wish, and then you articulate it, and then you become more specific, and then you put a number to it, and then you start to repeat that and see it and think about what would this feel like? What would this look like if this were to become a reality? And you begin to convince yourself through visualization that it will become a reality.

So I want you to answer this question as you think about visualizing success for 2020. And that question is, at the end of 2020, finish this statement: I will feel like I am winning financially if… So write it down. Look at it. What is happening for you at the end of 2020 that you will feel like you are winning financially if these things happen? The more specific you can get here, the better. Maybe it’s a certain amount that you want to have paid off of debt, credit card debt, student loan debt. Maybe it’s a certain amount that you want saved for a rainy day. Maybe it’s a certain amount for investing or for paying on a mortgage or for starting to get invested in real estate. And I would encourage you in addition to just writing these down, maybe some things that come to mind that you’re already thinking about, set one big, audacious, stretch goal for 2020. One thing that may seem like, you know what, it’s a hope or it’s a dream, it’s out of sight, it’s out of touch, but this is something I’m going to put down on paper, and I’m going to begin to think about that if I get these other things achieved, I’m going to be in a position to work towards this bigger goal.

So for Jess and I in 2019, this was real estate. We said, you know what, we want to invest in our first real estate property. We want to do that in 2019. Now, at the time, we had a big $0 invested to do that, but we knew it was a goal. We were able to articulate why that was a goal for our family. We created a sinking fund in Ally that had a big $0 for a long time, but it was a constant visual reminder of why we needed to achieve the other things within our financial plan that were ultimately going to allow us to unlock this part of it. We’re going to talk more about what that process was for us and our first property and hopefully soon our second property in the next couple weeks.

So I want to finish here with a quote from Seth Godin that I think really gets to this concept of visualizing for the future, really gets to this concept of setting big goals and often that our limitations are internal, our limitations are the variable that we can’t see a big enough picture to be able to realize what we’re actually capable of. And this is really this concept of a growth mindset. Seth Godin says, “Not the limit of our skills, not the limit of our knowledge, not the limit of our physical capacity. It’s almost always the limits of our internal narrative, our guts, our willingness to be kind, to believe, to care enough to lead. We can’t do anything about the limitations of physics, and we can never do enough to change the limitations of our culture.” But Seth says, “But we can begin today on changing the internal limits we place on ourselves. Yes, it’s your turn.” I love that from Seth Godin.

So there you have it. Five ways to finish 2019 strong. I hope you can take away one of these five, maybe all of these five, and as always, I’d love to hear what your thoughts are and would love to have you share your progress with the Your Financial Pharmacist community over at the Your Financial Pharmacist Facebook group.

Before we wrap up today’s episode of the Your Financial Pharmacist podcast, I want to again thank today’s sponsor, the American Pharmacists Association. Founded in 1852, APhA is the largest association of pharmacists in the U.S. with more than 62,000 practicing pharmacists, pharmaceutical scientists, student pharmacists, and pharmacy technicians as members. Join APhA now to gain premier access to YFP-facilitated webinars, financial articles, live events, resources, and consultations. Your membership will also allow you to receive exclusive discounts on YFP products and services. You can join APhA at a 20% discount by visiting pharmacists.com/join and using the coupon code A19YFP. For more information about the financial resources we offer in partnership with APhA, visit pharmacists.com/YFP.

And one last thing if you could do us a favor, if you like what you heard on this week’s episode, please leave us a rating or review in Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts each and every week. Also, make sure to head on over to YourFinancialPharmacist.com, where you’ll find a wide array of resources designed specifically for you, the pharmacy professional, to help you on the path towards achieving financial freedom. Have a great rest of your week.

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