Episode 39: Financial Planning to Combat Burnout with Sarah Catherine Gutierrez, CFP, CRPS

In this eye-opening episode, financial planner and author, Sarah Catherine Gutierrez, CFP®, CRPS®, unpacks the hidden role that money stress plays in burnout. Drawing from her work with over 1,000 physicians and 25,000 financial wellness participants, she explains how financial independence can shift the way we work, live, and ultimately reclaim our time.

What You’ll Learn:

• Golden Handcuffs and Burnout - How living paycheck to paycheck and being trapped in cycles of spending deepen the exhaustion many professionals feel.
• Planning for Relief - Why creating a financial plan can bring immediate mental relief, even before your money situation changes.
• Freedom in Action - Real-life stories of financial independence, from physicians reducing their schedules to families restructuring their lives for greater freedom.

Why It Matters:
 Burnout is more than exhaustion, it’s the feeling of being trapped. A solid financial plan can unlock options, shift perspectives, and turn work into a choice instead of a burden. At its core, financial independence buys back the most precious resource we have: our time.

About Our Guest:
Sarah Catherine Gutierrez, CFP®, CRPS® is the CEO of Aptus Financial, an advice-only financial advisory firm. She holds an MPP from Harvard University and has provided financial planning for over 1,000 physicians. Her firm manages retirement plans, student loan programs, and financial wellness initiatives serving over 25,000 participants. She is also the author of But First, Save10: The One Simple Money Move That Will Change Your Life.

Website: aptusfinancial.com
Substack: @payyourselffirst

Transcript

  📍 Are you a busy parent? Do you feel like you're being pulled in multiple directions all at once? Are you exhausted and overwhelmed? Meet my mom. Her name is Santi Tanikella. She's a pediatrician, expert in mind body medicine, and a life coach. She can help you break free from guilt and overwhelm, so that you can enjoy the life that you've worked so hard to create.

She can also teach you how to support your family in a more holistic way.



  📍 Welcome back to the I Am Well MD podcast.

Today we have Sarah Catherine Gutierrez on the podcast with us. She's the CEO of APTUS Financial, an advice only financial advisory firm. She holds an MPP from Harvard University and the Certified Financial Planner designation. Her firm has provided financial planning to over a thousand physicians and runs retirement plans, student loan programs, and financial wellness programs with more than 25,000 participants. She's the author of

"But First, Save 10: The One Simple Money Move that will Change your Life." SC, welcome to the podcast 

Santi. Thank you. It's wonderful to see you.

You as well. It's been a while. So, SC and I met at the White Coat Investor Conference actually a couple years now in a row, and she has always been this amazing wealth of information and inspirational to me. I'm super excited to have her on the podcast today, because I think you all will find her equally inspirational.

So, where would you like to begin, SC there's just so much to talk about. I have your book, literally right here. Right here in front of me. Well, 

thank you very much. It's wonderful seeing you holding the book and it's an interesting book because it's not really as relevant for physicians because it's about paying yourself first 10%.

And many physicians, in order to retire, actually have to have quite a bit higher savings rate because they make more money, uh, social security will have less of an impact and, you know, you get a later start. The basic premise, though, is the same. And I love talking about just basically paying yourself first.

Right. Whatever dollars you make, you put that money away. And what I think is really interesting to, you know, lend its discussion around wellness, is what kind of impact can good finances and paying yourself first have on wellness, or its opposite, is what we see with a lot of physicians is burnout.

Which is I think one of the biggest topics right now in the physician community. 

Absolutely. And I have to say, it's not just the physician community, right? Like it's everywhere. Everywhere. You know, I know a lot of physicians listen to this podcast, but I have a lot of other professionals who listen too, and

I am finding more and more as I continue in the work of both the wellness field as well as pediatrics. Parental burnout is huge. Workplace burnout is huge. The strain of being in the sandwich generation, that's something that can't be neglected either. We find ourselves in these various tough spots in life.

One thing that you have taught me is, when we are cognizant of what's happening in our financial lives that can be really helpful with ameliorating some of that burnout. Can you talk a little bit more about that? 

Absolutely. And, you know, it's so funny , you're talking about starting with the brain and that's where we kinda have to start, right?

Because I can tell you all day long that if you pay yourself first and you are on top of your finances, you have an emergency fund. You set yourself up to be able to be "work optional" at a reasonable age? Yeah. I can tell you all those tactics and people can say, "yeah, great, but that's for other people, not for me.

I'm trapped in my circumstances." I know what it's like to be trapped in circumstances. You know, actually I started making money at 12 babysitting, and it is really funny to look back and I was able to make money so well, I'm such an entrepreneur, but literally I spent everything I had.

You know, it's like, it's some big coincidence. Every dollar I ever had that I made or borrowed in student loans, um, was exactly the amount that I needed to spend. You had said my bio that I went to the Harvard Kennedy SChool. You would think that they know the brain better than anyone and

you know, the financial aid office offered me $5,000 for the semester. And I said, "well, how do I know this is gonna be what I need?" This is just for the spending money that I needed, 'cause tuition was covered. And they said, "oh, well, you know, just spend what you need and then return whatever you don't use."

How much do you think I ever returned in four semesters? 

Yeah, probably zero. 

Zero. $5,000 goes fast. It does well. Now, this is a long time ago. $5,000 was a lot of money at the time, but it could have been 20,000. It doesn't matter. I mean, if you wanna talk about embarrassing, I actually

couldn't believe how much money that was, and in my first two weeks arriving on campus, I literally invited my entire class to a happy hour. Oh my goodness. Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep. Now I won't even take myself to lunch, so, so it is funny. So anyway, here's the deal. We feel trapped, right? We feel, you know, whatever it is that we're making, whether it was my first job making $23,000 a year, or these physicians we work with who are paycheck to paycheck on a million dollars a year, we will always think it's just because I don't make quite enough money.

So this is where we have to say, "whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Is that really the case?" And instead of looking at our bank accounts, instead of looking at our paychecks and how much money we make, we have to start with the brain and we have to understand what is actually happening in the brain. So obviously we have this limbic system and of course I always feel so sheepish explaining this.

There are physicians around, but, but hopefully people are nodding in agreement. But you know, we have this limbic system, right? It's that caveman brain that says there is food on the ground, must gather and eat now. So we still have that firing and it is a survival impulse and we need to understand just what role it's playing, right?

So it doesn't matter what it is, it could be a $200 skincare product, right? I remember taking one I just bought 'cause I turned 40 and started panicking about wrinkles, right? Mm-hmm. And so I take it to my dermatologist and I'm, you know, saying is, "is this the kind of thing I need to start spending money on?"

She goes, "no. How about the research and the Science behind this $8 bottle of Vanna Cream that you need that will do the exact same thing?" Right? So it's really fascinating that, uh, that limbic system that starts firing. And then what happens is it conspires with our prefrontal cortex. So what I tell people is that in the absence of a plan,

your prefrontal cortex will be roped in by your limbic system, and it will create a story that you will believe. It will tell you there all the 20,000 reasons you need to buy a yacht. If you start making $3 million a year, it doesn't matter what it is, it's gonna make a story.

And these physicians, and then, you know, you said in my bio we have 25,000 I call median income, kind of normal income people is the majority of people that that I actually encounter and my team encounters. You know, it doesn't matter what the income level is or what the item is, the stories that we tell ourselves why we have to have something are so compelling to ourselves.

Even if an outsider says, "that makes no sense." Like my dermatologist saying "that $200 serum makes no sense." Right. It's the storyline. And so when we can really understand those impulses in the brain, then we have to say, "okay, okay, I see it." How do we stop these spending patterns that have been created, these thought lines that I've created, that convinced me to spend all of my money, and then to be able to get a plan in place to be able to defend my money from my brain.

That is it. 

I love it. Defending my money from my brain. Yeah. And you know, it's, you have the people where it's this, it's, you have the money, so you spend it and then you're like, "where did it go?" And then you have the hoarders who are like, "oh, it's never gonna be enough. It's never gonna be enough. We're always gonna be destitute."

Right. Like, and it's, it's really interesting to see the dichotomy between the two because in, in that respect, it's the same process. It's the limbic system saying, oh, we have everything we can spend it. Versus, "oh, we have something. Better keep it for a rainy day and another rainy day. And another rainy day.

Oh my gosh. The situation's really dire, but we're gonna save that money. We're gonna save it for another rainy day." You know, same thing. Oh, 

that's, yeah, same thing. So that's right. So I guess it's the basal ganglia specifically that's, you know, that's conspiring with the, you know, dopamine and let's all spend, but there's a different area that's.

That's responsible for Scarcity mindset, but still back in that limbic system. Right, and that's exactly right. Equally damaging. So I know people say, "no, no, no. Isn't it better to end up with more money? Isn't that a better mindset if you had to choose the two?" I don't know, because I've seen relationships destroyed by Scarcity mindset.

I mean, imagine the fear and anxiety you are walking around with by having that Scarcity mindset run amok. So yeah, it's just as damaging and I really believe we have to find that middle ground between those two mindsets. 

I agree. And, I've seen that in action. I know, my dad used to have this huge Scarcity mindset when it came to money.

For a long time I genuinely thought we were poor. And when I was 13 we moved and we moved to a bigger house and I was like, "how can we afford this?" And maybe we weren't like super high income earners. We were probably middle class, maybe we were upper middle class.

I have no idea because my dad always painted this picture of us being destitute. And so there's this huge, you know, mismatch in my life where I was like, okay, well. Maybe we're destitute, but we live in a decently nice house. And, somehow dad paid for college for both my older brother and my older sister.

And that was the plan for me as well. Long story short, we did encounter some financial difficulties. It ended up being a very good thing that my dad was as careful as he was with money. But in the end I still very much was in the dark. And I think being able to have these sorts of open conversations can unlock lots of doors so that we are not either in Scarcity mindset or in this mindset where we feel like we have to spend our money.

So I totally agree. Yes. So tying this into burnout, where does financial wellness and burnout interface?

Yes. And so let me give a, a quick anecdote. So imagine there's a 63-year-old nurse in front of me and she is saying.

"I can't work another day. I can't do it. I just, I'm tired. I can't do these meetings anymore. I can't do these long days. Uh, can you tell me if I can retire or not?" So she's just, she doesn't even know how much money she has. And so, I look at it and realize that she's got enough, not only to retire right then, but to increase her lifestyle.

She has more than enough money. 

Wow, 

Santi. Does she retire? Did she? Did she? I told her she could. Did she stop right then 

if she remember? She couldn't 

work another day. Yeah, not another day. And I told her, you can stop working right now. You can leave.

I could just imagine that woman signing her resignation letter, two week notice. Here we go, packing up the bags and saying, see ya homies. Right. See ya wouldn't wanna be ya! 

That's right. But she didn't. She didn't. Didn't. And here's the difference. It is a very different thing when you're working and you know you have the choice to go to work or not.

Absolutely. So it's really interesting to me because when I talk to young physicians, who are in training and I say, how many of you want to retire one day by the time you're 65? I get looks of real confusion. I get mediocre hand raises. I mean, really, it's just not even a thought.

But when I, oh, interesting. Mm-hmm. But when I say, "how many of you want to be forced to work past the age of 65?" Not a single hand goes up. How many of you want the ability, the choice to be able to stop working before the age of 65? All the hands go up. Burnout is that feeling of no choices. That's what it is, I don't have a choice.

So, uh, my husband and I had kind of a mini burnout moment. I mean, burned out before the kids are starting School this week, burned out before we're even starting. That is not a good sign, right? So our kids are ending that hectic, we're Uber driver parents, you know, that's what we're becoming, right? As our kids are hitting into upper elementary, middle school timeframe.

For us eating dinner every night is a real priority. Like sit down as a family, have a meal, it's our time to connect. And we're realizing that it's gonna be virtually impossible to both cook and do that , you know, and get the kids to bed on time. And so we walked through our choices.

Which included: do we hire someone to come in and cook for us, right? Do we hire a meal service? We went through five different choices available to us so that we could face that particular burnout head on. Now, if we're living paycheck to paycheck, is that a conversation we can have? No. Yeah, it's about creating choices.

That's what financial planning does, is you create space in your budget where if you need to flex at certain times, if you can pull back at certain times, you can. A lot of people think financial planning is just about saving enough so you can one day stop working. We have physicians who have 25 and 30% savings rates, and what that does is when they're in a time where they need to take a sabbatical or go to 80%.

Or do something that they need to do for their kids or for themselves, they have the choice to do it. Now, do I know when I am 30 years old and I'm starting my career, if I need to go to 80% in 15 or 20 years when my kid is in high school because I feel compelled to do it? No, I don't know that.

Now, do I wanna rule it out? Do I wanna say yes? My plan is to live on every last dollar I have so that I have no options when my kids are in high School, or no options when I am facing employment that is too much, no options. When I want to stop taking so much call and I feel powerless with my institution, do I want to create an environment where I have zero choices in my day to day?

No, no one wants that. This is about creating choices, not just for the future you that one day wants to stop working. This is the intermediate you as well. 

I love that we're bringing this even into the equation. This is conscious financial planning for now and for the future. And so this applies to even the youngest of us, right?

Who maybe haven't even thought about like, oh. One day I might have kids that are in high School, you know? But I think about this even for the new moms who are struggling with the time commitment it takes to raise a newborn, a baby, a toddler. And the fact that you can't stand at the stove

for 40 minutes. It's just not possible some days. How do we guide those parents that are really early on in their career and also having a very busy family life? 

Sandy, that is so right. Okay. So I think we are crazy as a society, especially with high earners.

With what we tell people to spend money on, okay? Especially with babies and toddlers. So I had a baby and we wheeled that baby out in a crib out of our one bedroom, into a kitchen every single night to sleep. Now, if you go ask Marco, my oldest, how sad he felt that he did not have a nursery. He will look back at you

very curious. Now, it is so normal to spend 50,000, 70,000, a hundred thousand on a nursery, right? That's very normal. I mean, think about the hundreds on the fancy recliners and the gear, and all the stuff that we buy. But what is the one thing that is actually finite? That if you have the choice that you might want, and that is your time, right?

That is what you can't get. That's what you can't go buy at the target shelf. So such a good point. Buy the services. By the person that can bring you the food, the healthy food that's important to you, right? If that's a priority. So my sister right now has a baby.

They have found someone that can cook and deliver meals and even negotiated to stop using plastic to put it into reusable glass containers and brings it every day, you know, that is way more important for them than the fanciest of gear, right? So you just have to figure out what is the best and highest use of these dollars during every phase of raising kids.

And just remember, society is gonna fill your feed with the stuff, right? Because that they need to make money on you, and they know that you're sleep deprived and you're tired and you're gonna put that thing in your cart and you're gonna buy it. But if you really step back and say, what do I actually need right now as a new mom?

I need help. I need a housekeeper. I need someone to just come and tidy up, right? If you've got the funds and the finances, that's where I want you thinking is about that. Now, if you don't have the funds and the finances, do you wanna go broke and in credit card debt on those things, right?

You don't need any of them. I mean, we didn't have a lot of money at that time. I was building a business. We were living on my husband's pay as an engineer and we were in this one bedroom apartment, and we just bought all white onesies, right? Just those just, you know, you can make these decisions and it's not about other people, it's about you.

And you know, I can't imagine the stress of having a baby and going into financial debt, consumer debt at the same time. 

I fully agree. There's something to be said about going baby shower crazy, right? Like, what am I gonna put on my registry? And when not all the items on the registry have been purchased, you feel the need to complete the registry by buying everything else? Yes, you do. And the reality, the reality, I was like you, I bought a bunch of white onesies. I got the Star Wars type, the crossover type because, newborns are really wiggly and wobbly and I just wanted, they are something that I could lay my son into and then quickly get his arms trying to get those onesies over his head.

I was like, forget it. You know, it's too much work. Like, I, I wanna enjoy motherhood, not like, struggle to put clothing on my child. But I realized, yeah, like a lot of those fancy clothes, oh gosh, within a month he had outgrown them. I would feel so sad inside, like, "okay, now, now who's gonna wear this?"

So you don't underestimate the value of hand me downs, the value of just getting like the most basic things. Even like the crib, like I got a crib from my sister and I just purchased a new crib mattress. You know how many times my son slept in that crib? How many? Twice. Twice. And it was the days that I tried to crib train him and he wailed and wailed and wailed, and I realized

I have a child with separation anxiety. This is never gonna happen. He hated his crib and guess what? Baby number two came and I decided to buy her a new crib. She hardly ever slept it. She preferred the pack and play. Come on. Like what a waste of money. So, you know, like before we make these big purchases, we really have to think about whether or not it's worth it or whether or not it's okay to have our babies sleep in a pack and play that has a level of versatility to it, right?

We can transport it from a room. It doesn't take up much space. It could go into the kitchen, you know? Um, the crib might actually be overrated. All you want is a safe space for your baby. 

Yes. And how you define that might be different than what the consumer culture is defining that for you. And that's where you have to always do sanity checks on is what they're saying about this reasonable.

I mean, you can spend a lot on car seats, for instance, right? And. Your brain, man, that, that basal ganglia, I mean, it, it starts going, right, when you're thinking about this. This is the safety of my child. What is the safety of my child worth? Now, you know, there's a lot of ways for your child to sit very safely in a car seat, right?

It doesn't have to be the thousands of dollars, you know? So, Santi, what I really love about a financial plan is that you're not faced with moral decisions on spending. So, for instance, our kids use the used uniform closet at our School, and I've never ever bought one uniform piece new, and that's just what we do.

Our kids don't know any difference, but this is not a matter of am I the kind of person who buys a new uniform or am I the kind of person who buys used as if it's some kind of moral thing? Mm-hmm. Instead, what I have is I have a financial plan, and my financial plan says that

this is how much our house costs, this is how much it costs to repair it. And I set money aside for that. Here's how much our cars cost, is what we can afford and this is the money to repair and then replace them. This is how much we spend on vacations, which is a lot. And we set that money aside and put it away.

Of course, you know, we know how much we need for retirement. That was gone even before we even started all of this, right? Started setting aside money. So that by the time you whittle it down. I don't have a clothing budget. I don't have a $5,000 kid clothing budget. Our kids get one new pair of shoes.

We do that. If they wanna buy other shoes, they have an allowance and they could go buy them with their green light accounts, which I really love. Now, could we spend more? Santi, could I spend more money and go buy them brand new School uniforms? Could I? Absolutely. I'm sure you could, if you really wanted to.

I could. At what cost? Is that $5,000 from my vacation fund? Do I wanna take it outta there? Do I wanna retire a little bit later than I plan? What's what at what cost? So when you can do a financial plan and you allocate the money to the things you really care about, maybe you really care. I know there are people who actually care deeply about their kids' appearance and about their own appearance.

I think it's a good use of funds. That is something you do. Like, it's enjoyable for them, right? And by all means worth, maybe not spending as much on a vacation, right? Maybe driving older cars. It's just working with whatever the means are. By the time you've taken out all the money of the things you really care about and need, and then you start allocating it and then you have to say, is it really important to

have this really fancy nursery or is it really important to do these things and then you start doing that shuffle. Right. Okay, well, yeah, maybe I do have the money left over and I could spend $5,000 on my kids. That $5,000 would also pay for a meal service. Right. Great point. Yeah. You're constantly iterating on your money and you've gotta find your own sweet spot.

If you've got $20,000 or $10,000 or $5,000 that every single month is hitting your bank account and you have no plan for it, every dollar will get spent, I can assure you, because that basal ganglia knows what it's doing. It knows how to adapt to whatever that money is.

And then you might be left at the end of the day saying, "where did my money go?" And that is what we see is, I don't even know where it went. It just gets whittled away. Now, might get whittled away things you care about. Great might actually be whittled away by things you don't care about because you just clicked on the TikTok shop or you know, whatever Amazon boxes or whatever it is that, you know, spending to other people's values and what they care about.

And so what you are wanting to do is stop the out of control feeling and be able to assign that money to the ways that are gonna make you actually happier. A lot of people say money can't bring happiness, let me tell you, it absolutely can. Having peace of mind, being able to create more time for yourself and your family, this is the kind of thing that money can be spent on.

Fully agree. And I love that you're talking about it in this way. We have to have a tiered approach to what our values are, right? Being able to understand our values, understand where we wanna spend our money, the things that are worth it to us versus less worthy, right?

If we know those in advance, then we can allocate the money in the appropriate buckets. Interesting that my husband and I were having this conversation last night and I was never somebody who cared for brand name anything. I remember when I was getting ready for college one summer, so I worked at The Limited, right, a clothing store.

Oh, oh yeah. That's a big deal. Retail. But they forced you to buy their clothes so that technically you could market them. Well, I'll be the first to say that I'm curvier than other women. And so I didn't always look very good in their clothing. Actually it worked out in my favor because then I didn't go out and buy all their clothing.

But here's what I had to do was I said to them, look, I can't, I don't fit into your clothing properly. Like I've got hips. And um, and they said, well, you can wear what you want, but you can't wear anything that has brands on them. Well, back in the day, gosh, I was in my early twenties, maybe late teens. I had all these LEI jeans that were very nice and accommodating.

And so I took a Stitcher and I took off the LEI brand on the back and that's what I wore to work. And I wore a couple of their tops and I rotated, right. Because I think there had to be a little give and take. So that was my happy compromise. But I had other coworkers who would literally blow their whole paycheck on the clothing that they were selling.

Of course they got more shifts and then they spent more. You see where I'm going with this? How interesting. Yes. 

They can never get ahead. 

You can't get ahead. And my priority was, I need money for college. This is where, you know, things kind of fell apart for us was during the recessions in the early two thousands, I had lost money for college.

And so I knew I was gonna have to take out loans for college and I was like, I'm gonna take out the bare minimum, but I'm gonna work throughout college and throughout the summers. And, you know, there were times where I held two jobs at a time to be able to offset

my college expenses. And so I just would look at my coworkers and be like, why are you bothering to work? Like, what's the point if that money can't be spent in a way that's valuable? And then I realized, I was like, and that is the difference right there. I need and want this money for School and for her

she needed and wanted this money for clothing. And there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with that. I had to stand back and be like, okay, I realize where I'm getting a little judgy about it, and perhaps it's because I need to allocate. There was a need, there were these financial handcuffs there that kind of forced the direction that I needed my money to go in.



Absolutely. And so think about it this way. So Santi, you've got this coworker who maybe you had an open conversation with and they said, I am literally here to work four hour, five hour, six hour shifts,

and my only goal is to spend all of the money that I'm making on clothing. I highly doubt that that would be the conversation. I don't think anyone works like that to literally spend all their money, but we do it anyway, right? I did it. I worked a ton and I spent all of my money. So here's the thing.

Think about the end result of this. I'm sitting across from women or men who are in their sixties and they have nothing saved. So think about what that might feel like for a second. So you've worked for 40 years or 45 years, and it literally means that every single dollar you ever made, you spent.

Do you think that is the intention? Because let me tell you, when those people are in front of me, do you know what they're saying to me is, "beg people to save, beg them to save something so that they are not in the position that I am in. I need you to tell young people starting their careers, whatever you think you need, you do not need it.

You can pay yourself first. You can set aside a little bit when you leave your job. Please don't cash out your retirement. I did that. I thought I needed it, but gosh, do I really need it right now. Please tell people." So I have these people begging me. And then I have young people who think that there's no money. Right? Now,

I will say a lot of people, you know that read my book, they're starting their first jobs. We have big campaigns in college to save 10. They're coming out saving 10%. It's amazing. But there's still people who say there's no money there. I still have men and women who you know, will I do retirement plans

who will be leaving my plan and 'cause they got terminated or they had to leave for personal reasons and they cash out. And there's nothing I can say, you know, I'm trying to say, look, I've talked to people who have done this exact thing. I promise you do not wanna cash out and start over at age 45 or at age 50.

And there's just not a lot you can say. But I'm here to tell you what you're describing, that in the Limited store, that is a microcosm of what we are seeing in real life. That there is just this idea that it'll all sort itself out later, and it just doesn't.

Every paycheck. Some money has to go into your future self. 

Agree. So I wanna circle back to one thing that you said in the beginning of the podcast, this concept of "paying yourself first." And for a while people would throw this phrase around and I didn't quite understand what it meant.

And then I came to realize the more I thought about it and the more I understood from context clues, right? Um, I realized our current selves are paying our future selves. So Right. By having retirement funds, or IRAs, or whatever buckets your financial advisor recommends, you know, listen to your financial advisor, get a financial advisor!

You know, the advice that you get is golden! I didn't realize how important it was to have someone like that on my side. Like we go to a doctor, we've been going to doctors since we were little, little, little. So there is some value placed on that.

There are some things that doctors can do that perhaps, someone who isn't trained, may not be able to do, right? You have a laceration. You go into the ER, they know how to stitch you up without getting you infected. Great skill, amazing skill. But in that same way, financial advisors can do the same thing, right?

Like this is a person who is an expert. They have dedicated their life and career to teaching people how to save money so that they can live well at any point in their lives. But particularly during the time that is the most vulnerable, right? Which is retirement age and afterwards. Because I'm in the medical field, I'm so privy to this piece, which is:

Life is a miracle. We don't know when things are gonna happen and how that might hurt us financially. And so being able to think in advance to protect ourselves, to create some buffer around those periods of time where we're vulnerable, that- that is a great use of your money.

That is so beautiful. Thank you. We talked about young moms or young parents who are just bringing their first child into the household, right, it's a very precious time. It's a transitional time. It's a high stress time.

It's a time that can be very financially difficult as well, right? So even being able to prepare two or three years in advance for something like that can be pivotal.     📍 

  📍  Life can feel like a constant balancing act, work deadlines, family responsibilities, and everything in between.

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 So SC, what are some examples of what financial independence can look like, other than just your typical retirement?

Yeah, so financial independence can is, it's something that can look very different, and you may not even know what it is that you want when you're creating your financial plan for you to have financial independence. So essentially what what you're doing is you're creating a series of choices for your future self.

So for instance, at its most basic, when we are saving for retirement, in those retirement accounts that you talked about, what we're saying is, "Hey, I am setting you up for financial independence when you are 65 years old." So when you are 65 or 60 or 55, essentially what we're gonna be able to do is pay ourselves a salary to not work.

I'm gonna pay you for the right to stop working when you're ready. So again, some people set themselves up for financial independence when they're 55. Some set themselves up for financial independence at 60, 65, and there's different math for it. So yes, the, the idea here is that you can have a long-term retirement plan, which is your financial independence.

But what a financial plan is also doing is allowing you choices along the way. And what we find is that everyone has a very unpredictable life. As you said, life is a miracle. There is no better way to describe it. I am so thankful every time I wake up in the morning and my brain is intact, my body is intact, and you can do anything when that happens.

I think my gratitude comes from being a financial planner and seeing good friends get diagnosed with a brain tumor or breast cancer or car accidents that are not your fault, but wreck your finances. It is so wild to me that these catastrophic things, they're so unfair.

When they're not your fault and you have to pay for them, and it's just, it is what it is. I just had a wellness participant- an uninsured driver drove through her home. 

What, 

oh my gosh, through her home, almost killed her. But guess who's paying the price for this? Her homeowner's insurance rates tripled.

Because of this uninsured driver, right? These are the unfair things, right? And you can't predict them. Job loss, right? We've seen, surgeons who go into RVUs and the RVUs go down and they don't make as much money, right? So you, these are the things you just don't know that are going to happen.

So a good financial plan is basically giving you the space to be able to make less money and it's not catastrophic. It's the ability to go to part-time if you have a cancer diagnosis and you're on chemo and you can't work the way you wanna work, right? So these are the things that, you know, good disability insurance, being smart about your money, having a good emergency fund, they can help you with those things when life feels a little less like a miracle, right?

But the other side of it, which is life is going great, I just want more time. I wanna buy my time back right now. This financial independence is about not having to take the kind of call that I was willing to take when I was in my thirties. Now I'm in my forties and I don't wanna take that anymore, and everyone's pressuring me to do this in this job.

Well, it's the ability to walk away, right? If this job is coming with so much call because you're not hiring another physician that'll help take the call. Well, so yeah, I'm gonna go somewhere else, right? That's the kind of choice you have.

There are so many physicians, so many people out there that don't have those choices because they're living paycheck to paycheck. Now I will tell you this is the most serious: If you wanna point to the biggest offender to financial independence that I see continuously, it is housing.

That is our biggest offender. And I can tell you right now that our physicians who run, you know, we've had over a thousand physicians come through. We've been looking at some trends, and our physicians typically save around 25% of their income. If you look at their housing costs, in general, they're less than 14% of their monthly pay.

Hmm. 

Most people, when they're going and looking at houses out of residency and they're touring around with the real estate agent, they got their new job. They know what they're gonna make. They're calculating what the bank is telling them they can afford, which is 28% of their income. Wow. Okay. It squeezes out.

All of their ability to save enough, to put money aside for home repairs on that real expensive house. It is the biggest offender. But this is why you have to do a financial plan. If you want financial independence, you ca you will not do it naturally unless you're the miserly type and the scarcity mindset.

I promise you, it's really hard to stumble into financial independence. You have to have a plan. So, we love to do financial plans when people are broke, when people are in training and they don't have a penny to their name, and they're not making the big bucks yet. Sure, they've got the student loan debt.

That is the time to do the plan. If you wait and you say, oh, financial planning is for after I have money. Well, okay, you've already bought your house, you've already bought your cars. You've already sent your kids to private school. Imagine, imagine if five years out of training, you say, "Hey, I think now's a good time to do a financial plan."

Are you gonna sell your house? Are you gonna pull your kids outta private school? Are you going to go from driving a Porsche Cayenne to a Toyota Sienna. Are you? A 15-year-old Toyota Sienna? No you won't. No, 

you won't. Listen, I'm gonna laugh because I have a Toyota Sienna. 

Yes, you do. Yes, you do. Okay, now we're gonna have to send pics of us with our Toyota Sienna.

what year is yours. 

Oh gosh. I think it's a 2016. 

You're so fancy. Mine's 2015. 

Oh, goodness. Yeah. So actually I love my toyota Sienna. I remember going in and I was like, I want a minivan. And my husband was like, you've got to be kidding me. And I was like, no. And here was my thought process:

I knew we could technically afford a quote unquote nicer car, but really what I wanted was. I want a car where if my kids throw up, I won't cry about it. I want a car where if there are pieces of cereal stuck in the car seats that I won't cry about it. I want a car where if my kids go out and play soccer and they bring their dirty cleats into the car, that I won't cry about it.

If my car gets dented, don't wanna cry about it. Right. And here was the other pieces. I was anticipating a growing family. Right. I need places for car seats. I need places for grandparents. I need places for luggage for when we go on trips. And you know what? It has done all of those things for me. It has. It has done all of those things for me.

So I am forever grateful for my cars, which are nothing special, quote unquote, by the standards of other people, but they are so special to me. They have driven my family everywhere. They are safe cars. Fixing them up it's not a wallet breaker, right? Like, I love my cars. I don't need to have the Porsche, I don't need to have the Mercedes.

I just need something functional and safe. Period. And, and this goes back to that whole brand thing. Like I've never been attached to brands. I'm attached to what other joy it brings me. Is it the right fit for this time in my life? You know, is it going to serve its full purpose? And if those two boxes are checked off, I'm good.

So simple. That's it. Okay, so here's the funny thing about that, right? So someone's listening, going, but I do love cars. I do like fancy cars. I want a fancier house. I want a nice remodel and you're saying, you know, you might be like me. So I have, really inexpensive furniture. I one of those luggable rugs I want, I have the same thought process as you, is right now in this phase in life.

I don't wanna cry when my kids do things. Right? I don't wanna be policing them one day. They're gonna have to learn to be responsible, but if a watermelon rolls into the back of my Sienna and we go through a hot summer and don't realize it's there and it rots and there is a rotten watermelon smell in my car forever

you know, that no amount of baking soda can cure I don't wanna cry about it, right? At least it's in the Sienna and not in the Porsche Cayenne, and that is my thought process, but okay, Santi do I want a Porsche Cayenne one day? 

Wait a second. Yeah, I do. SC, I have to ask, has this whole rotten watermelon thing actually yeah, it 

actually happened.

It actually, literally, there is a rotten watermelon fragrance that will, for that. Just, it's actually kind of, I've grown to love it. I mean, I get it professionally cleaned. That's my thing is I do get it professionally cleaned twice a year. It costs several hundred dollars, worth every penny,

right, just to get the stinky soccer sock smell outta there. But yeah, so there's, it lingers, you know, sometimes the professional car wash, get it out, but it'll come back, you know, especially in the hot summers. It'll come back and remind me of what happened. But yes, I don't wanna cry. I don't wanna cry if they, took permanent marker to my couch like my daughter did.

Forever, the artist. I didn't cry when that happened. Right? We still have to teach them to take care of our things, but it's not a catastrophe. But here's the deal. One day I want that stuff. One day. So I think sometimes people listen to these podcasts and they think, I'm not gonna sign up for that. I don't wanna sign up for a lifetime where I never buy nice things.

Mm-hmm. 

Mm-hmm. 

This is why I'm telling people this is not a moral decision. Like your decision to buy a Sienna versus a Porsche cayenne is not a moral decision. It's a decision that if your financial plan says that's what you can afford, so that you can hit all your financial goals, then that's what you buy.

But one day your financial plan might say, "Hey buddy, you have more than you need going to these retirement accounts. Let's ease up on lifestyle." And I'll tell you right now, that is actually where I am right now in our phase in life. So, you know, those early years of saving, 'cause I'm 40, going into my 45th year, we saved aggressively.

We've had the benefit of compound interest. So you know it, we turned things around. I stopped living paycheck to paycheck, became a saver. Then I liked being a saver, saved more and more and more. And we had at one point a 40% savings rate, 40% of growth. That's amazing. 

That's amazing. We 

decided we wanna be able to be work optional in our late forties.

Well, now we're realizing well shoot, we kinda like what we do. We can buy the services that we need to buy our time so we're not chasing our tails. Right? We can work the way we want. We can get support the way we need. I even hire someone to come in and I'm not a very organized person, but I like tidiness.

So I have someone that comes in   few hours a week and just helps me to stay organized, right? I mean, we can do these things, because we set ourselves up. So one day I will have nice cars. One day we will have a remodeled home. It's just not right now. So I hope anyone listening to this, you're realizing that, this is just living the life that your financial plan says that you can live.

It is not some kind of moral decision making. 

Absolutely. Yeah. And to boot. I kind of mentioned this earlier in the podcast, right? Like that feeling of judginess when someone else's values are not necessarily aligned with my own. Like, there was a younger version of myself who had feelings about that sort of stuff, and now there's like this beautiful sense of neutrality, which is:

Money is a tool for our success. It's a tool for us to be able to rely upon when we need it most. And how we use those tools is how we use those tools, you know? You have to just make sure that it's aligned with what your needs are in that time and what your needs might be for the future. SC, this is just an amazing conversation.

I had to actually wipe away tears, I said, "I don't wanna cry about," but then, this conversation about your watermelon, like just, it made me cry anyway. But kind of as we round up our conversation, this podcast was designed to help us heal ourselves, to heal our children, and to heal our children's children.

Do you have any last words of advice for our listeners? 

I just, that is such a beautiful way to kind of wrap up. We have to heal our money wounds. So , there is this financial plan and there's the money buckets and the things that you're putting into them, but I do encourage people to look at the money tropes that you have.

Did you grow up in a scarcity home? Did you grow up in a home where money was chaotic? Are you going the opposite and going to the opposite extreme? And what kinds of lessons then are you passing down? I think that it is less important about what I'm doing in my own finances and the way I live my life.

I think it's less important than what I'm handing down to my kids, and so I am very, very conscientious of the way I talk about money with my own kids. And I encourage people to do the same. So when we pull into, yes, I send my kids to a private school, but when we pull in and the kids see the Rivian and the Porsche Cayennes and they make those comments,

"mom, can we drive that?" I say, "it's not part of our plan. We have a plan for our money, and that doesn't fit into the plan." I don't say, "no, we're too poor for that." Right? Or, "no, we will never buy anything like that." I use this language of, "it's not in our budget. It's not in our plan. We have a plan for you to go to college.

We have a plan for us to retire. And so we put money towards that plan." I think there are really healthy ways to distance ourselves from the emotion of money and go to what you're saying. Money is a tool. Money is a tool for the wonderful Sienna that I'm using to drop you off at school today.

Right. It's a great tool for me to also put aside the kind of money I think I need to put aside so that you can go to college one day, which I think is way more important right now than driving a nicer car. I actually do think that it's landing. I mean, I hear them repeat things back to people.

They have their own budgets. They have to buy their own car. So, uh, they've been saving for cars. We use greenlight accounts, we use allowances. I match their savings dollar for dollar. If they don't have enough money to buy a car, they will not get a car. It's my first money lesson for them. I let my kids fail.

I let them succeed, whatever we need to do so that they can have a healthy relationship with money. Because at the end of the day, that's what's important is for us to use money as the tool to serve us, rather than us using ourselves as a tool in service of money. 

I love it. This has been such a valuable conversation.

SC, thank you so much. How can our listeners find you? 

Great, Santi. Thank you so much. So I encourage you to come check out our website, it's aptusfinancial.com, and you can see our approach to financial planning. I have given talks on how to seek out financial planners. And if you're seeking guidance for what you need for financial planning, you might be a DIYer and you wanna do it all yourself.

There are great resources for that. We do not manage assets, so a lot of financial planners do that. If you are looking for that service, we can also point you in the right direction for that. But we provide a basic financial planning service. That is it. we Run the financial plan. We want people as early as possible in life so that they can

truly set themselves up to succeed. So you can come visit our website, learn more about us and yes, if you've got young people in your life, they're getting out of college we've had a lot of great feedback on, "But First, Save 10," the book, and you can get that on Amazon.

Advertising the book right here! 

Santi, 

thank you. Yes. Thank you again SC for being on the podcast. It really was such a pleasure. It was an honor to be on it. Thank you so much.

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