age 60, I'm not going to be in the best position physically. The odds are against me how many people do you know who are actually practicing as me as a physiotherapist over the age of 60? I could think of maybe one hand many people I could think over that age. you can't save yourself to wealth or retirement, especially not in today's environment, you have to

In this episode, we're diving into the powerful steps that you can take to achieve financial freedom as a massage therapist while overcoming the emotional toll of burnout and, of course, regaining balance in your practice. Welcome to The Conscious Practitioner, the podcast helping massage therapists and wellness practitioners align with their deeper purpose to build a thriving, sustainable practice, even if you feel stuck or burnt out. I'm your host, Dr. Jess, and each week we address your biggest practice challenges. Everything from struggling to manage unpredictable income to overcoming the emotional toll of burnout and regaining balance in your practice. Now together we uncover the inner blind spots and the outer struggles that when we master them transform you from a skilled practitioner to a truly impactful one. Today, I am chatting with Robin Valadares, a physiotherapist turned financial mentor who helps wellness practitioners create a financially stable life while maintaining their passion for helping others. In today's episode, you will learn the critical financial habits that separate thriving practitioners from those constantly struggling to make ends meet, how to create diversified income streams to reduce Financial stress and aligned to your personal goals and strategies to reconnect with your passion and energy while avoiding the path to burnout. Now, Robin brings a very unique perspective as both a wellness practitioner and a financial mentor. And he's here to guide us through the journey of mastering your finances while creating a practice that supports your wellbeing. So let's dive into this awesome conversation with Robin.

Well, Robin, thank you so much for taking the time. This is a conversation that I think, I think needs to happen way more often than it does. And a conversation that so many people are reluctant or scared to have because of whatever reason, but it's, it's money. So I first bumped into, when we were co facilitating at a really amazing workshop and retreat and your message, what you had to say, I found not only deeply resonated with me, but also with pretty much everybody else that was there. I absolutely loved the message. So I'm super excited to to talk to you about money, practical, and I guess the, the psychology behind it. So welcome.

Thank you Jess for hosting me on the opportunity. It's lovely to meet you a few weeks back at the retreat. I must say it was tough shoes to fill after you, after hearing you speak. So I'm glad the message resonated and thank you for the opportunity to speak to your audience.

Well Let's, let's kind of dive in, and maybe the first question is, what do you see as like the biggest bottlenecks when it comes to wellness practitioners?

Yeah, lovely question. And I think there's two components to it. One is wellness practitioners have done a fair bit of schooling traditionally, and they know their education or academia particularly well. And since understanding money isn't really taught in any sort of formal education, it's absent and sometimes feels overwhelming. So we. Push it off or hope it works out in the end. second component for wellness practitioners is that we typically get into the business because we want to impact change. We want to improve the lives of people we touch physically or verbally. So we put the needs of them ahead of our own and then money as a by product becomes a secondary or tertiary versus the primary priority in terms of can I satisfy my obligations first so I can impact change on my clientele later.

Right, right. Yeah, that's that's like an overarching issue. I think I like for so many different Aspects of running a successful business, right? I could certainly see how it reflects upon money But such a big issue is so many of us got into this because of the altruistic I just want to help people, you know Like I just I just want to help and that's like top of the list and then everything below that is like Basic business acumen and understanding money and finances so that that makes complete sense and in your experience working with other practitioners What what's like one of the more common conversations that you have when you first start working with people because people come to you and they're like a Robin listen my finances are Dumpster fire was one of the first sort of conversations you have with them to to start helping them think about it a little bit differently

So you got to draw that analogy with a dumpster fire. You want to put it out immediately and how you put it out is understanding where you're starting from. And for most people, they have no idea. They just know that, Hey, they feel like they're not getting ahead and they're living kind of paycheck to paycheck. They don't know where their money's going. So the first thing we address is, Let's find out where your money's going. Let's see what you're coming in with on a monthly or bi weekly basis in terms of your income being drawn in. Now let's see where it's flowing out. Are there certain expenses that are wants versus needs? Okay. Now you understand where the bottom line is. Is it a surplus? Is it neutral in terms of nothing, or is it a deficit? Then we can actually kind of optimize as to where the money's going in terms of investments or savings or certain goals.

All right. All right. All right. I like it. I guess. So it reminds me of the the money jar. I don't know if you remember that back as like early two thousands, maybe in the nineties, there was this whole idea that you'd have like your food money jar and you'd have your, I don't know, like rent money jar and whatever it might be. So the first thing you're doing is you're setting up jars. You're figuring out, Hey, here's what you're spending your money on. And Oh, looks like you're spending more money than you're making. Or like, Hey, it turns out if we're actually looking at it, you should theoretically have X dollars excess per month. And yet that's not really happening. Right.

Agreed. And then you tend to, as clinicians, we're like, okay. Oh, practitioners like earn more money. So that means more hours in the clinic, more clientele you're seeing more days working. And unfortunately, as you know, this full, well you've kind of laid down the road of burnout.

Right. Yeah. And I, I'm really glad that you, you brought us there because ultimately I see that as, as the biggest bottleneck to regardless of the modality, there's, there's like an emotional and physical cost to this job that Nobody really tells us about going in, right? So we go into it thinking like, Oh, this is going to be great. I'm going to be able to see eight, nine, 10 people to 20 people a day and make 80 per and you're doing the math in your head. You're like, I'm going to be rich, you know, but very quickly, the reality sinks in of like, I got like three people in me that I can see before. I don't have the, the emotional and physical capacity to actually Do the job. So so you're right, right? There's a limit to how many people we could see, and that tends to be the first go to see more people. So then how do you help people sort of renegotiate that in their head? What are other ways of thinking about it?

I think it brings me back to my, a question I received earlier on my practice from my preceptor Margaret. She said, Robin, how many people do you know who are actually practicing as me as a physiotherapist over the age of 60? I could think of maybe one hand through maybe two years of volunteering and you know. Practicums, many people I could think over that age.

Mm hmm.

of saying, okay, how do I have multiple revenue streams as a practitioner, whether it's not trading my time for money clinically as traditionally as we do it, whether it's when I learn about how money works in terms of investing in X, Y, and Z, rental properties, stocks, bonds, ETFs, GSEs, whatever it is, but knowing that my capacity or my ability to earn income traditionally is capped relative to my peers who are accountants, engineers, lawyers, investors. I understood how, or tried to understand how money works and put kind of to practice.

This is, this is so cool. So cool. Cause the conversations I tend to have is, is we go through step number one, which is, well, see more, more people per day, which we just discovered. There is a limit to that, whether it's the number of hours in the day or your physical capacity. So it's like, okay, let's rule that out. And then the next thing we could possibly think of is, well, just charge more for your services. But that, that has its own limit too, right? Like people are only willing to pay a certain amount for service. And like, there's a lot of thought that goes into it. But then the next thing that oftentimes comes up is I'll open my own practice and I'll hire a bunch of people to work for Me and then I could just do the managerial thing and then I got like 10 incomes coming and instead of just one So that's cool Because that's that's like the thing that most practitioners think of is the next step when I'm really appreciating about what you're saying It's like okay. No, let's just let's just think of it instead of thinking of it like a practitioner Let's think of it as far as You Somebody who understands basics of finance, right? So coming at it from a totally different angle in this case, talking about investments, love it. So it was

And you nailed it. It's the natural progression. We've found clinicians first, and we say, hey, we want to do something differently. I want to scale our time. We become business owners or clinic owners. And then we realize we're capped because, as you said, you can only charge so much. There's certain walls that you can't go physically past. You might have to open another clinic, but that's always dependent on your time or your input there. Whereas one. Aspect that most people don't consider is can I be an investor and a clinic owner or a clinician and the investments will satisfy my Obligations so I can choose what I want to do versus what I need to do and have that choice

probably 2021, 2021, I don't know, somewhere, somewhere in amidst the COVID era, I remember that for sure. And I remember thinking, this is my same thing. It's like, okay, like I'm working at a college. I got one income stream and I got my online business. That's another income stream. And then I got my clinic and this is another income stream, but something in me, which was not actually in me. It was. Mostly my stepdad. He was like, have you started investing yet? I'm like, no, I haven't. I figured, okay, I got all this time now. I'm going to, I'm going to learn about investing. And I got a, I got about like four months into it, negative like 5, 000. And I'm like, what have I Done. You know, like, so I hear you investing. It makes sense in so many different ways. Like it is like the thing we need to be doing, but good God, it can be complicated. So let's talk a bit about that. Do you have a way to sort of simplify this idea of investing for people who are like, I don't want, I'm barely making enough money to scrape by. And two, do I got to learn this entire thing? Right. So how do people navigate that?

It's complex. Sometimes it's designed designed by by reason where you tend to feel overwhelmed and then push off the aspect of not even doing it or pushing it off to individuals who may not have the same alignment or philosophy as you. I think the message is understanding that right now in our current economic 2, 3, 4%. You can't save your wealth or save your way to save yourself. To retirement because the lenders are going to give you 2 percent inflation is at 3 percent your real yield, your actual nominal versus your real, it's going to be negative 1%. So your purchasing power, we can all feel this, we know it's going to cost us more for the same amount of good going forward, we feel that squeeze, you can't save it there. So you have to understand investing or the power

Silence.

like owning an ETF or stock, but that's paying off certain high interest debt. Then I say, okay, now I have capital on my hand, what do I do with it? Can I do it myself or do I feel that I have the competency to do it myself? Or should

Silence.

somebody else, a professional, ask him, her, they the right questions so that I can trust my capital to them to make the allocated and educational decisions.

Right, right. And I'm curious, as you said that, I just want to put a mental pin here and hopefully I remember to circle back to these. But you said invest in yourself. I've got some thoughts and questions about that because it's such a brilliant concept. So I do want to loop back to that. So mental pin mate. But I also want to talk about this idea of, of, okay, so they made the idea, the decision like, okay, investing is a good idea. You can decide on whether it's best to work on paying down debt first versus paying down debt and investing versus just investing. Right? So there's these discussions which we can get into the nitty gritty of that. But one thing you mentioned, which I struggle with, is My idea of hiring an investor, you know, like somebody who's going to, to do this, I think you mentioned it earlier. Like they rarely have your best interest at heart. Like their job is to make money for the investment firm, not necessarily make money for you. And maybe in an idealistic world, that's actually the case. And you might get lucky one in a hundred where your investor is like, listen, I don't really care about the company. My goal is you. But I think the majority of the time when we hire out this, this idea of investing. There's a lot of risk at play there. So do you have any thoughts or ideas about how one manages that?

Lovely question because I feel through my experience, the financial world might be pit against the individual investor their alignment is not the same us as the individual investor and the retail investor. We have the power of interviewing multiple individuals at different firms, both private and public, and see who may have the same philosophy or vision as me. So when I ask questions, I have a whole bunch of questions like, Hey what is your investment philosophy? What do you typically invest in in terms of, is it stocks? High growth? Is it value? Is it ETFs? Is it bonds? Where do you see yourself in five and 10 years? What's your previous track record? And more importantly, what are you invested in? Can you show me what you have in your portfolio? So when you recommend this, I know you're doing the same thing that you're recommending to me. And what are the fees associated with it? But you as a retail investor, you have the power there so you can go to X firm, Y firm, Z firm, ask them all the same three questions, see what you feel has the most alignment and then make a decision. With that, you don't have to put all your hundred percent funds with that person. You can spread it out in multiple. You can say, okay, I'm going to have some professional do a portion of it. I'm going to do my own do yourself portion. And then I'll have a little more control over it. So there's multiple options you can do, but you, you generally have the power of making decisions. Do you have to address the right questions?

Love it. Love it. So the idea is you go into this investor and you ask the right questions. Let's, let's go through those top three questions. Again, the top three questions that you would ask an investor just to kind of, even if you know nothing about finance, get a rough idea of this as a person that you should trust your money with. What do you think?

Like what's in your kind of thing. What's in your portfolio. So I want to know if they're telling me to invest in X stock, that they own it themselves. Where do I see them or where do they see themselves in five, 10 years? For me, it might sound kind of hypocritical, but I don't want to see an individual who's maybe long in the tooth, giving me investing advice when he, she, they should be retired by now. I want individuals who are maybe in the same age bracket as me or the same goals, vision as me. So I know that they're, Hey, in five years, Robin, I'm going to be out of this game because I'm investing in X, Y, and Z. make sure I bring you along with the way. I want to see if there's actual downside to poor decisions. Some firms don't get paid the exact same based on your performance. So if I do poorly, they're going to get paid the same amount. That's kind of a mismatch of alignments. I want to make sure when I have success with my portfolio, they have success. So they're incentivized to be maybe a better allocators, a position size.

Beauty. Beauty. Okay. I love it. All right. We've got one pathway, right? Pathway number one is once we've decided investment's the key. Number one is maybe you just want to go talk to an investor. Let's explore this other pathway. Now let's, let's think about the person like myself. I'm, I'm a DIY kind of guy. Like I just love the process. Yep. I made a lot of mistakes early on in the investment process, but I love it. I didn't mind it too terribly much. Right. So let's talk about the person who wants to sort of learn a little bit of basics on themselves. Maybe they get like a wealth simple account or something like that. And they

I

on starting out their own investment journey without talking to somebody else, like the biggest mistakes that they could make. Yeah.

some of the online social blogs. you have individuals who are trying to get rich quick for my philosophy and then my belief is there's no get rich quick theme and if it is it's for the point zero zero one percent of the population so it's very rare. in long term growth and making smart decisions over a long period and long time horizon so. Not knowing what you're investing is probably one of the biggest mistakes people make, or the expectation that they're going to get rich quickly, so they dump all their money based on one, let's say, quote, Reddit post, and they get initial gains, but they hold on for too long, and the stock dumps, and then you're

Right.

carrying zero in your bank. So understanding what you're investing is crucial, and not trying to play the get rich quick, although how tempting it might be, doesn't lead to most favorable results.

Mm hmm. Okay. I like it. I like it. So then That, I think that's, that's good is my understanding of investment investing is there's no such thing as get rich quick. In fact, the saying is get rich slow. You know, like we, although it's tempting for myself and perhaps you too, to start talking about how compounding interest works. It's like, let's, let's just, let's just leave it as it works really, really well over the longterm. Right. So it all is all about longterm. So now. They figured the person's hearing and they're like, okay, I get it. You know, don't go through the get rich quick. Don't see a stock that's skyrocketing and think I'm going to hop on board. Where do they start? What's some good resources they can start to look into and research to, to begin to learn the basics of investing. So they could make the first basic investment and are like, we're going to go through books or whatever you think the best resources we could direct somebody in to make the basic decisions of personal investing.

Yeah, I think the three books I would recommend for hardcopy or audio books is a timeless one called Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. It's really targeting the mindset of why you should invest in yourself and invest in kind of assets. Next one for the Canadian audience would be Wealthy Barber by David Chilton, talks about kind of paying yourself first before you allocate any sort of funds to any sort of discretionary expenses. And a third one, a little more recent book, but it targets the psychology of money and aptly named Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel talks about The biggest leverage or lever point we have as retail investors, it's what between what's between our ears, It's not the

Okay. We hope you enjoyed the video. I'm going to put the link in the video description for you to watch it. Please check out my other videos and subscribe to my channel. Bye. Bye.

Astute investor, and you'll have the higher probability of making more data driven decisions versus more behavioral based decisions.

Yeah, yeah. All great suggestions. I mean, brilliant books. And I think what I, what I appreciate about all three of those is you didn't list black rock investment book number one on here's the, it's like, here are ways to start thinking differently. All three of those. It's, it's not necessarily about specific strategies, although there are specific strategies, particularly within rich dad, poor dad. Right. But it's more like, you know, Here's, here's how you could start to maybe try and spend a bit of time working through. Why is it that I seem to have a perpetual hole in my pocket? I mean, I know I, I grew up like upper poor, you know, lower, very lower middle class, like hover in that line between poverty and not. So there was a scarcity mindset a lot. So there's one, a scarcity mindset, but then there was also, why the heck are we there? You know, both of my parents worked and then once my parents divorced, like I had three Why? Because on top of the scarcity mindset, there was like a spend it, just spend it, just no money knowledge, right? So for myself, as I moved through my own understanding of money and tried to sort of like get, get out of my own student loan debt and do all, you know, be as successful as I can possibly be. There was a lot of time spent on figuring out Wait a second. It seems like every single time my bank account gets to like, I don't know, at this point in time, we'll go like, maybe it was 6, 000. Like every time I see that 6, 000 mark, for some reason, all of a sudden I got to buy something. Like I think it's time for a computer upgrade or whatever. Right. Not necessary, but for some reason it hit these financial thresholds. Something in me would click in and I'll drain the account, maybe not drain it. So I'm really a long story short. I don't mean to go too far, but what I'm saying is I'm super grateful that the books you suggested have to do with mindset psychology, what a person is doing in their inner world to understand the relationship with money. Cause at the end of the day, that's, that's where it all starts. Right.

If you don't know how you behave around certain decisions, you're going to be in a position to make poor decisions. Unfortunately, some of these decisions might be catastrophic.

Mm hmm.

time, on the other end of the spectrum, I think many people around the world in investing have this fear of failing. So we do not take any sort of action.

Mm hmm.

earlier, compounding works when you make these small, consistent things over a period of time. Fine, you have to get started despite how small the contribution is, but that will benefit you as you make these small mistakes that you don't repeat. You'll learn, you'll learn. Oftentimes people assume a cost at a loss of let's say 8, 000 is a complete loss, look at what you've learned as tuition in that decision or that mistake that you can repeat and maybe forex it in five years time. Now you have 32, 000 regardless of the 8, 000. So think about each mistake you make as a pretension. a position of an actual tuition in your learning and growing.

Yeah. Yeah. I really appreciate that. I really appreciate that. Cause that, that's, that could be the easiest way to get over the, the fear of losing, right? If, if you are starting to get investment, investing, figure out how much would I pay to learn how to make an extra 5, 000 this year, whatever that number is for you. Like, let's just say an extra five, an extra five grand a year. That's, that's not insignificant for some people, right? For most people I'd imagine. If you kind of do that and you're like, okay. Yeah. I'm willing to pay 400 for that and then put 400 into investing and see what happens. You just use that. As you said, you're just sort of tuition. I like that. So let's talk. I got to pause for a second, Robert. I'm sorry. My dog is downstairs howling. So I'm going to deal with him. I thought he was going to be good. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Yeah. Oh, man. Puppies, hey? A new behavior every day. It's like he's, he's never done this in his life. Today's the day where he's like, you know what? I'm gonna learn how to howl today. Ha, ha, ha. Alright, sorry about that interruption. Let's let's jump back into it. Alright, we're talking about investing. Investing in oneself, right? Like, yes, brilliant idea. And I think, maybe can we segue and dig into that? Cause that's that mental pin that I wanted to come back to. It's this idea, Of investing in myself and part of the reason I'm personally so passionate about it is there's a point in time when I was thinking about investing and I'm like, okay, at this point in time in my life. Where can I put my money that will have the biggest long term leverage and the decision I made was me more courses more education Learning how to make more money in the time. I was already spending and that paid off Huge you paid off huge so the investment of myself at that point in time was massive But I think there comes a point which there's diminishing returns behind that. I'm not too sure. So what's your opinion? Investing in oneself as a viable means of investing,

I absolutely love it. And it comes from a Warren Buffett who thinks the number one investment anybody can make is in themselves. And you've done that and I applaud you for it because it takes some conviction. It takes repetition. It takes some belief. So for me, I look for one big thing is what are some skill sets I can learn, whether it's clinically or tangentially, that no one can take from me and I can implore or use independent of my location and independent of my time. So whether it's understanding how real estate works, I can invest in a property, I can own this property, regardless of where I am in the world, it's paying me a certain amount of cash flow given month, it appreciates and I can borrow against. That's a skill set I had to learn. Or trading options on my phone. I can be in between clients and have a no show, I can trade an option to make up the revenue for the person that I may have lost out on a visit, or I can do it in X, Y, and Z territory. Or maybe I could learn about, hey, motivational interviewing, so when I engage with individuals, I can speak to them and meet them where they are. I've learned a skill set no one can take from me. So that's how I understand, or I picture investing in myself is what are these skill sets that I can develop by paying for someone else's a thousand hours of practice, which I know I can take forward towards five, 10, 15, 20 years. And no one can come calling. So I'm going to take the skill set away from you, Rob. It's

I think that's a lot of the time what we do with our education in the first place, right? As practitioners of all sorts, as we all made that decision at some point in time to invest a staggering amount of money in ourselves. And I think that's, that's really important. Thinking of myself to actually want to get into that conversation, because that is an interesting topic about is it, is that worth it right now? How much money people are spending on education compared to how much money they're going to earn? Because I know a fair few people who I went to school with 13 years ago. Who are still paying off their student loans, right? So you get this investment where theoretically you're thinking, I can make X number of dollars per hour, dot, dot. It's going to be a good investment. 15 years later, you're still paying off interest. So let's, let's talk about this idea of making an investment like student loans and how we negotiate and navigate that, isn't it?

a spicy conversation, Jess, because I'm torn and polarized on it because I think what society deems. Successful is maybe changing in our system in our in our culture right now me, at least as an immigrant here when I was young, my parents told me, Robin, you have three choices to become successful. Shall we say either lawyer, doctor or engineer and my brother to your senior to me pursued the engineering route. And I was an engineer. So I pursued becoming a doctor and in transition, thankfully, to become a physical therapist, but that's what's deemed of my culture and what society deems. If I told my parents, Hey, I'm going to open a business and I'm going to be a heat ventilation, a C a professional, they're going to look at me with three faces, but guess what? That individual didn't have to go through six years of schooling. That individual didn't have to incur the opportunity costs of putting themselves in maybe in their more formidable years through academics routes. I could have owned a business, maybe own real estate and successfully based on monetary. Principles, I'd be a lot further ahead financially, but hey, society maybe doesn't respect the HVAC individual as much as the position. And that's you to come to terms with that. I think there's a time and place for education. I think education drives certain skill sets better than others. I can learn investing on YouTube. I can earn investing in podcasts. I can learn in books or I can learn it in the halls of let's say Harvard. what, what's the opportunity cost of me going to Harvard versus me learning on YouTube? And that's a decision I think is changing fortunately, where people are more accepting of maybe blue collar type work instead of knowledge type work.

Yeah, yeah, I, I, I appreciate that tide change and I mean, I am, I am definitely in a perpetual student of the University of YouTube. Like I mean, I, I basically live on there by spare time, just learning my, my entire feed is how tos, right? So I love it. And it's so cool that we live in a time and an era where you can get a. legitimate education, like really legitimate education for 100 percent free. You just don't get that little piece of paper, that wall candy that says you've got the education. And I also want to note about your point about doing, doing trades. Like that's my background, right? I come from a trades family. Like our idea of success, a little bit different than yours is can, can you, you know, like have a bit extra money in the bank and buy your holiday trailer, you know? So it's, what's so interesting is, is. I moved from trades into the professional world and my stepdad different relationship with money. He was a plumber and he retired comfortably at the age of 60 like set up for the rest of his life because not not to do with what he did and make as a plumber. They can make good money. But again, It's thinking about money. So it comes back to that of like your education, in my opinion, do what you love, because we're in a day and age where the knowledge and information on how to make these financial decisions to be successful long term, it's not behind some sort of brick wall anymore. We all have access to it. So you don't have to become a doctor because you want to make the big bucks in order to retire early. You can do what you want. So long as you understand how to be smart with your money, right?

Agreed. And I've been fortunate to have a lot of friends who are like high powered physicians right now across the continent. And they're at my age, 36, 37, finally getting out of academia and actually earning potential income, but they've incurred a quarter to a million dollars in debt. It's the trade off there. With every hour and every dollar you have an opportunity cost, you can't get those back. You have to spend it wisely. And what brings you the most amount of joy, hope, fulfillment, or monetary return is up to you. I'm all in favor of pushing back traditional education certain roles, because you can learn it elsewhere, but not at the expense of your future self and making these poor decisions where you say, Oh, I regret taking classics in Greek like I did, because I'm not putting it to practice, but I spent two years learning it. So what's the cost of that?

Mm hmm. Yeah, I really appreciate that. And I mean not not disparaging education by any means. I mean, that's literally my business is education But I think I think we're at a beautiful time one more time and energy could be spent on how much we put into Education and on that note, let's let's talk about the the practitioner who's out of school. They're practicing. They're doing their thing Maybe they've even got a pretty successful practice, you know, they're they're They're putting a bit of money away and yet they still got their student loans. So let's now loop back to that conversation of they've got this, this debt that they need to pay off. That's incurring interest every single month versus opportunity to invest or somewhere along that spectrum. So specifically what I'm saying. Let's talk about the person who's got debt. What are some good financial decisions they can make in order to set themselves up better long term?

Awesome question, and it's understanding how the data is structured. You might have a 3 percent mortgage for 25 years, and that's at 3 percent and you're paying that. You might have a credit card that's at 20 percent and it's carrying a 10, 000 balance. You might have student loan in the middle at 7%. Okay, for me, how I address it, you can do three things to pay off your debt. One is something called the snowball method, and that's understanding, okay, I'm going to pay off the smallest amount of minimum payment first, And then as the snowball goes down the hill, it starts to build up steam and some traction. It grows larger and larger. So I'll pay the smallest off first and I'll pay the largest middle and the largest later on as I pay off the minimum payments. snowball. For the avalanche method is, okay, I'm going to target the debt with the highest interest rate first. And for most people, that's going to be credit card debt. Usually it's double figures, 15 to 21%. I'll pay that off first and then the second highest and then the third and so on and so forth. Okay. The third debt, depending if you have a line of credit, might be consolidating these two debts first, into one mount and paying off the lowest one there. For me personally, I'm going to pay up high interest debt, anything above 10 percent first. Then I'm going to take a look at, okay, mid interest debt, what is that? Is it a student loan that's forgivable? Maybe I don't pay it off. I have the ability to write it off my taxes? Maybe I don't pay it off. Is it a mortgage? Hmm, mortgage is 3%, but based on my investment knowledge, I know I can maybe invest and get 8%. Maybe I should take the money. I'm gonna pay off the mortgage and invest at the 8%, make that 5% spread. That's my decision. Or no, I don't, I'm not comfortable having that debt. It makes me maybe have poor sleep at night. I need that sleep at night factor back. I'm gonna pay off the debt and focus my allocation towards investing in the property by paying off that debt.

Okay, again, I just, I love it, man. I so appreciate how, no matter what you're talking about, you always bring in a little bit of like self awareness into the equation, like, ah, I can actually sleep at night. So thank you again for constantly bringing it back to that. And also for the technical example particularly when we talk about like, okay, I've got a mortgage at 3%, but I can make 8%. And if we slow that down a little bit for people listening, essentially what I believe Robin is saying is if you have investments, like you've got, for example, you've got 30, 000 left on your student loans, and you've got 30, 000 in investment. The question is, do I take that investment money and pay off my student loans? Well, if student loans are only 30, 000, I know this isn't how much student loans are out, but let's say they're at 3 percent and your investments making 8%, then you got to think it's actually making me money to keep my money in my investment. So you really got to look at the numbers and again, a financial analysis or expert or somebody like Robin who understands this stuff can certainly help you navigate these decisions a little bit more clearly. Am I, am I understanding that? Perspective correctly.

Absolutely, and thanks for slowing me down. Sometimes I get and I speed.

Great. Awesome. Awesome. Okay. So now let's, let's do one, one last example. We got person who's their student loans, 30, 000, whatever it might be. They got their student loans to pay off. They're pulling in some money with their, their their clinical work, whatever it might be. They've got their mental jars. They've done step number one, figuring out what's coming in, what's going out. Right. And then they figure, okay, well, I now know, because I've heard Rob and I've talked to him, I know that I have enough money every single month to pay off an extra 500 into my student loans, but that's it, like, that's all my extra money is going straight into my student loans. Now what would you say to somebody like that? Like, should they take all of their extra spending money and put it directly into student loans, or is there a more financially wise way of dealing with this extra income?

It's going to be a kind of blasé answer in terms of it depends for me, depending on your goals. If I want to retire in X amount of years or I want to open up another practice or buy a home or get a wedding ring or finance a business, I'm going to take that and say, okay, student loans can satisfy. I know I get a certain amount. It's not going to increase on me. I know it's there. I can pay it off. Is it better spent for X, Y, and Z in the coming future? So I'm big into goal planning in terms of, Hey, this is where I want to see 5, 10, 20, whatever it is and work my way back now. So I know that I have to allocate to this bucket or this bucket at this bucket and do it differently. You don't have to do all or none saying I got to pay student loans immediately. I can maybe put 250 instead of 500. Take the other 250, split it up three ways, 50, 50, 50, and do X, Y, and Z there. It really depends on goals. It's tough to give you a hard concrete example without knowing that they're the full situation.

Yeah, no, I appreciate that. I appreciate that. So it sounds like step one, figure out your goals, right? Like figure out what do you actually want to do financially and then split it up from there. Cool. Now, early on in our conversation, when we first started diving into, to types of investment, you kind of rapid fired a few different ideas, right? Do you do stocks and bonds? Do you do ETFs? Do you do real estate, right? So maybe just relax very briefly, considering on the person who says, okay, cool. I'm going to invest. They understand a little bit about investing in safe stocks, but let's talk about these options. We don't need to go into detail, but let's start with like pros and cons of doing something like real estate versus pros and cons of investing in stocks and bonds.

Right. It comes down to how much control you have over a certain asset. We'll call real estate an asset, we'll call equities or bonds, ETFs an asset. For real estate, most people understand how real estate works because we are brought up and live in some sort of housing. So, you know that, hey, property prices might appreciate or increase in value in a certain area. I know I have to pay a certain rent as being a renter or a landlord collecting a certain amount of rent. You can understand real estate. You have control. I can paint this wall if I need to. I can change the roof if I need to. I can update the living room if I need to. That's the control in real estate. The challenge in real estate is that, hey, you are very much susceptible to the market around you. In terms of let's say rates go up or down. Let's say they build up a nuclear power plant next door that might decrease or increase your value accordingly. Plus real estate's not very a liquid asset. It's eat liquid, meaning it takes time. You can't purchase a house today and move into it tomorrow. It's 30, 60, 90 days to kind of close that transaction. That's real estate. Whereas, Hey, I have less control in owning Apple stock, for example, but I know Apple particularly well. I use a lot of their products, but I can easily do that because it's low friction. I can purchase stock today. I could sell it tomorrow. It's very liquid relative to real estate. The challenge is I don't have much control. So you give up liquidity and control. It's the best thing I think most people do is understand what you're investing in. Take a look around you. Go down the street. Go down the shopping mall and see what stores you frequent. Is it Costco? Is it Walmart? Do I use Apple products? Do I buy a certain type of. Furniture from a certain store. Understand that and be pragmatic about, Hey, now let's say I go to Costco. Is Costco a good business? Let me go do some deep dive and see if they're making money or they're losing money or they're in debt. So understanding that, Hey, there's liquidity and then what you know, and there's illiquidity and then there's control and having a balance of those two, I think is a good way to approach it.

Yeah, thank you. Like, I remember when the stock market was doing its absolute chaos mid, mid COVID ish, it would be a 2022. I can't remember, but there was a point in time where everything was totally chaotic. And so my, my stepdad, his primary investments is in real estate. He's got a couple of rental properties, right? Like primarily that's, that's where he's made his extra money from. And then my father in law. His primary investment is stocks, bonds, ETFs, right? So he's very, very different mentality. I remember during, during when, when everything was crazy, Tim, my stepdad, he's like, that's it. I'm pulling everything out of the stock market. I'm out. I'm going all in on real estate. And then meanwhile, my father in law, he's having a different conversation. He's like, that's it. I'm absolutely done. Everything I've got in real estate, I'm pulling it out. I'm going all in. So it was so interesting how, you know, Both very successful in their own ways when it comes to investing, but fundamentally different perspectives. And you know what? Both ended up working! Very strange, right?

I didn't know that word.

Cool. So now I'm actually quite curious about you, if it's okay, like, like, You told me a little bit about the, the origin story of, you had one of your mentors, your professors, asking the question like, how many, how many practitioners do you see hanging around? You know, a little bit about your, your background coming from an immigrant family, having these pre planned trajectories, but kind of more fundamentally, I think it requires more than just that, I might be wrong, more than just that for somebody who's, got an education in physiotherapy and an active practice in physiotherapy to take a step back and sort of make such a profound pivot into a different direction of helping practitioners with finances, right? So what was it that really, really sparked that change in you?

Thank you for this because yeah, it's going to bring a whole bunch of emotion. And I think ultimately I wanted to live a life on my terms. I wanted the opportunity to have the choice to work because I love what I do, not the need to work. And being in a role, as you see individuals in my practice, as early as three years old to as elderly as 95, you tend to see how the body ages over time and what you can and cannot do as you get older. And I know. And I know that, hey, at age 60, I'm not going to be in the best position physically. The odds are against me or the probabilities are to live in my golden years. If I were to bring that forward, what age would I be comfortable with kind of letting go of traditional work and working when I want to versus when I need to? And for me, that's the age of 40. So I'm 37 right now. I know I have three years to kind of bring that forward. And for the last 10 years, I've been working towards this goal. Ultimately to have that freedom. So when I do have a family, my son, for example, let's call him Bobby Bobby's got a game soccer game at 2 PM on a Wednesday. Traditionally, most people are working at that time, but if I had that time freedom, I know I can spend that quality time with Bobby, take him to this game and be immersed with him. And that's the freedom I wish to have. But in order to do that, I have to understand how money works because otherwise I'd be stuck in a clinic trading my time for it on that Wednesday at 2 PM.

I just imagined a 20, 27 year old Robin sitting there having this, this thought and that's remarkable because I think this, this mental process happens oftentimes quite later in life, right? So what was happening at that age where you're, you're really looking at that and seeing all these different age of people, like, like what really like what was happening? Because that's again, quite unique at such a young age.

I'd like to give credit to who I was surrounded myself with. made the effort of connecting with individuals who are in real estate and trading options or investors by my nature. And their mentality is a little different than the average person. And one day I was on the golf course because I love to golf. And my companion I was golfing with, Josh, I met him for the first time, I'm like, Josh, what are you up to right now? It's a Tuesday afternoon. It's men's night. You're golfing. What kind of work are you in? He's like, Robin, I retired myself a few years ago and he was 30 at this time. And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, yeah, I didn't go to school. I kind of dropped out of my second year. Then I picked up a job at a local construction company. I started to build homes, understood what homes were appreciating for at that time, how they work. So I bought a couple of rental properties. Then I sold them, bought a couple more. Then I sold them, then I bought a few more. Now they're paying me to live. I was like, whoa. You can do that in your 30 years old. So that changed the way I thought of just meeting this individual on the golf course. And as I got around in his circles and by extension, other circles of investors, these are people in their twenties, thirties, thirty five forties doing what they want because they made these tough decisions now rather than pushing it off later. And now they're actually truly living life on their terms. So that taught me that it was possible, which is different than academic groups or in terms of therapy, because you're surrounded by people who are still working in their thirties and forties and fifties, you never get exposed to it. So you think only the wealthier, the rich can do it when this individual himself has done it and I can actually feel, touch him and see it. I'm like, okay, this is real life. I can do this. Let me invest in myself.

Amazing. Love it. It's so serendipitous moments, particularly when we're, when we're really paying attention, right? I love it. Love it. And now the, the business, which currently is financially fulfilled physio, right? That's currently, but I understand that not just for physios. The message isn't just for physios, it's for, for practitioners, but I love the name. It's so mmm. It just flows so beautiful financially fulfilled physio, right? What's what's your like from the mountaintops? Like you're going to stand there, you're going to be like, Hey, listen, practitioners, here's the message, you know, like the thing you want people to understand, the thing that really inspired you to do the thing that you're doing now.

I would say take action. Think about your future self right now, know that you can't, bad as it sounds, you can't save your wealth, save yourself to wealth or retirement, especially not in today's environment, you have to invest, so learn about it and entrust your capital either to yourself or to people like professionals wisely, but at least take action and do not push it off because you will regret it, if your decision is, hey, will I regret this in five years, make a decision now so you can minimize the regret later.

Beautiful. Love it. I would agree with that. I could, I could just imagine my, my younger self receiving that message. Well, quite frankly, my younger self would be like, what do you know? He was a bit of a, you know, a smart ass. So, but nevertheless, if he received that message and actually took it in, that would be life changing. And now as we, sorry, go ahead.

I was gonna say a tangible example is first rental property. I bought 10 years ago. My, my tenant was a professional tenant took me for three or four months without paying. I had to get the sheriff's him to evict this tenant. And there, the sheriff's knew who this person was. So this person's done it many times. I didn't know it. Cause I treated it as more of a, I was more of a bleeding heart than I treated it as a business. But that single mistake, that eight to 10, 000 lost into in my investment taught me so much that 10 years later, I have not made that same decision again, thankfully. And that's grown tremendously. But if I were to give up and say, forget this, I'm done with real estate, I would not be in the position I am right now. So it's understanding that, Hey, I'm going to make decisions. I'm going to make mistakes, but it's going to be that tuition we talked about earlier, and I'm going to grow from it.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. And that takes, that takes some grit, takes some wherewithal, certainly, right? It's the, the being able to fail and getting back up and doing it again. Right. Like that's, I think that's the ultimately the sign of, of entrepreneurship and being successful in business. It's you're going to fail. Way, way more often than you're going to succeed as a business owner, regardless of what type if you're really aiming for some sort of business success. So I appreciate that. It's the same sort of message with financial successes. Go ahead, take the risk within reason. If you fail, chalk it up to tuition and really learn the lesson because I'm sure there were a lot of meta lessons within that one. It wasn't just like, Oh, be careful of professional tenants. There was probably a lot of other lessons that all occurred within that same. Mistake with air quotes.

Yes, you're right. And yeah, I shouldn't diminish that there's plenty of learning opportunities in that decision.

Now, I mean, we've been we've been going now for about 45 minutes. So I'm curious. If was there any point in the conversation where you're like, I really want to sink my teeth into that or something you'd like to loop back around to or something that we haven't had a chance to talk about that. You're just burning to share the message of.

Hmm. I haven't covered a lot, Jess. I'm trying to think about something I keep reiterating with my clientele. I think the aspect of your ability to earn an income is traditionally finite. And something we alluded to earlier is that no one's going to tell you that you're going to work until 65, 70 don't even talk about it in school. I tutor in a certain program every year, and it's not really brought up. So your ability to understand, hey, at age 45, 55, my body might be breaking down traditionally as a therapist. My mind, my spirit might be breaking down traditionally as a therapist. What can I do to kind of extend my career? and

Mm hmm. Yeah. Mm

till we're 90, maybe 95. But you might be done work at 55, so you have 40 years of your potential obligation to yourself, but you have to save that or invest it now so you can pay off for your better years.

hmm.

with taking action immediately.

I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm firmly planted in midlife right now and it's a really interesting place to be because I'm finally starting to see that 60 isn't that old? You know, I'm seeing that now being like because of course in your twenties, you're like 61 foot in the grave, you know? But 60 is, is like crazy. If that's when you're planning on retiring, there is a lot of life left after 60. A lot of life left. It's something that I think we need to think about because as practitioners, like we said multiple times, there is a limit to how long we can practice this. I mean, there's some that are different than others, you know, like, like mental health practitioners, they, it's not very demanding physically, but it's certainly demanding emotionally. Nevertheless, there's a limit to it. So really, really remembering, like. There's, there's life that happens after this work, whether retirement is at 40, such as yourself, or 65, more traditional. Yeah, I really appreciate that.

Thanks, Jess.

Now, there is a question, a question that I ask virtually everyone, and I'd love to wrap this up with you. And that question is, in your experience and opinion, what do you think makes a practitioner successful?

Hmm. I like this one. There's a couple of ways I can take it. I think a successful practitioner enjoys what they do because they want to do it versus needing to do it. And that success is not monetary success, but more fulfillment. They have some sort of purpose. I think many of us get into the role because we want to do the right thing and improve people's lives. But sometimes over the course of our careers, it becomes more of a chore the original purpose of starting. The actual role and having success gives me the opportunity to do it because I want to do it versus when I need to do it. So I think that's maybe that's more purpose or fulfillment or meaning than it is success, but I'll equate the two there.

You know, Robin, I've asked that question to 75 some guests. I don't say this lightly, that might be my favourite answer.

Oh, thank you.

I mean, that's because I so agree with you, right? Like I hear you say that some part of me is like, yes, so many practitioners are still practicing because they have to. They're seeing patient 20 in the week. And that person is not getting the care that they deserve because the practitioner is doing it because they have to. Not because they want to. Right. So I think success measured by personal fulfillment and even clinical outcome Could relate back to are you doing this now because you want to and you love it? Are you doing it because you have to wow, that's it. I'm officially not going to ask that question anymore that that is sums it up Like i'm done. This is good But put

great

one in here

there.

That's great Awesome moment. I really appreciate that. Thank you so much for your time your wisdom your advice everything you had to say Really valuable stuff. This was a great conversation. Thank you.

Yeah, and thank you, Jess. You took the opportunity to connect with me and explore this topic, which is might be somewhat tangential to your general audience. I think it's very important to understand this type of education subject matter. So kudos to you to kind of branching out and kind of accepting me to speak to your audience. Thank you.

My pleasure