Paging Financial Freedom

Getting Your Spouse On Board for Financial Freedom

• Daniel Shin, MD and Lila Kaplan, CFP • Episode 3

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In this episode of Paging Financial Freedom, Dr. Daniel Shin, a surgeon and real estate investor, and Lila Kaplan, a former Wall Street professional and certified financial planner, discuss how to get your spouse on board with the journey to financial freedom. Together, they share personal stories, challenges they've faced, and practical strategies to help couples align on their vision for the future, especially when one partner is a doctor.

The conversation dives into the struggles many couples face when introducing the concept of financial freedom to their spouse, especially when the idea feels like a complete shift in lifestyle. Dr. Shin and Lila explain how their own journeys unfolded—Dr. Shin reflects on the early days of discussing financial independence with his wife, while Lila shares how she worked to bring her husband on board with her goal of retiring him in five years.

They emphasize the importance of aligning on a shared vision of the future before diving into the numbers, and the role that real estate investing plays in creating more choices for medical professionals. With a combination of empathy and actionable advice, they help listeners understand how to make financial freedom a joint mission.

Key Takeaways:

00:01 – Introduction to the mission of the podcast and how Dr. Daniel Shin and Lila Kaplan are helping doctors and spouses achieve financial freedom.
03:35 – The disconnect couples often experience when one spouse is ahead on the financial freedom journey and how to align on a shared vision.
06:42 – Why creating a shared vision is key before diving into financial details, and how to bring your spouse on board.
14:08 – The power of real estate in creating financial freedom and giving doctors more choice in their careers.
22:36 – The Five Whys technique to understand deeper motivations for financial freedom and work backwards to set achievable goals.
25:02 – Final thoughts on the importance of patience, communication, and a shared vision for achieving financial freedom together.

Links Mentioned in the Episode:

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00:01: Welcome to Paging Financial Freedom, a podcast about doctors and spouses and the journey to financial freedom through real estate and tax savings. I'm Dr. Daniel Shin, a surgeon and real estate investor. might know me on social media as the Doreenian Doctor or the founder of Sirius Real Estate. And I'm Lila Kaplan, former Wall Street professional, certified financial planner, and the person on a mission to retire my orthopedic surgeon husband in the next five years. I specialize in apartment investing. 

00:29: helping doctors and their families build true financial freedom beyond their W-2 incomes. If you're interested in achieving tax-efficient financial freedom through real estate, you're in the right place. Let's get started. 

00:44: Hey, Lila, how's it going today? Hi, Daniel. All good here. How are you? I'm excellent. All right. I'm excited to jump into it. We had decided that we were going to talk about something that I think is really an interesting topic. It's about how to get your spouse on board with financial freedom. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely a very relevant topic, especially for our podcast, being that I am a spouse of a medical professional and you're a doctor who 

01:13: needs to get your spouse on board as well. Yeah, I think it's often the case that in a couple, someone, either the spouse or the physician, is ahead of the other person in terms of that journey to financial freedom, because it always starts with this sort of like mindset shift in the beginning, where you're kind of going from this acceptance of the same old nine to five, you know, for the rest of the life until retirement, and you're moving away from that towards this other sort of paradigm. 

01:42: Absolutely. mean, from my perspective, you know, it always feels like I'm asking my spouse to change his life without warning. I'm bringing a lot of information and sometimes he's just not willing or have the time to listen to me. Do you get the same sense? Yeah. mean, I think it's, especially when 

02:08: When both spouses are, are busy, you know, either with work or with the kids, think oftentimes this, the other partner coming and saying, I want us to completely redefine our idea of our future. can seem threatening. It can seem just, um, at a left field. And I think that's, that's the way that it was for me when I think back to, you know, the first. 

02:34: Really the first couple of years that I started talking to my spouse about financial freedom and working towards it in an active way. To begin though, do you mind if we just spend a few minutes talking about the concept of financial freedom? Like what does financial freedom even mean to you? Yeah, I mean, honestly, financial freedom means that my husband is not working so many hours anymore. That he has his freedom, his choices to do medicine if he wants to. 

03:03: but also have the choices to spend more time with his family. Yeah, I think it's a similar thing for me too. I mean, it's, it's really about sort of financial security and having that sense that you can work because you want to not because you have to, you know, pay the bills. think financial freedom certainly to me means that no matter what I'm doing in my day to day, I know that my family's lifestyle and certainly the bills are going to be taken care of. 

03:30: and that you just have control over your day to day. Yeah. And honestly, financial freedom. And I talked about this all the time that I want to retire my husband in the next five years, but retirement doesn't actually means that he's going to stop practicing medicine completely. uh Like I said, it's really the freedom of choosing whether he wants to practice or not right now. You know, his job is super demanding. 

03:58: I'm not sure how much passion he loves, you know, he has for his, you know, specialty, but I want to bring that back. want him to be more passionate about his job. Um, and that's how choices can do for you, right? To, bring that passion back into your life. Yeah. And I think that I've seen that in my own career. So just kind of fast forwarding today, I practice medicine. 

04:25: Uh, about a quarter of the time, one week a month as a locum tenants. And. You know, honestly, I like it much more in this, in this way, in this part-time manner than I did when I was doing 50 hours a week and clinic call in the operating room and, you know, I spent another 10 hours commuting on top of that. So I think it's easier to like it when it's this kind of more confined part of your life and you can experience it and enjoy it for what it is. But also. 

04:54: not feel that it's kind of taking over every single aspect of your day to day. So uh I like that balance, honestly. Yeah. And honestly, for me, I feel like medicine can become his hobby, right? You know, hobby that you love to do on a day to day or weekly basis. And that's what really financial freedom means to me and for my husband. But 05:18 Where do you think the disconnect usually happens when you're speaking to your spouse about financial freedom? Yeah, I can bring you back to it. for us, it was, you know, I started on this journey towards financial freedom independently. I was the one who was stuck in the commute in Southern California for at least two hours a day. And I was spending that time dreaming about a future where I didn't have to sit in the car for that amount of time. 

05:45: And, you know, could choose to do it or not. And I was thinking to myself, how do I get there? And, you know, that's really what brought me to real estate investing in particular. But it was a solitary journey at first, because I knew that I wanted to get there, but I didn't really bring my, my wife into it until really a couple of years later in the pandemic, when we had time to really sit in the car for these long car rides, these car ride naps with our kids. 

06:13: Uh, we were just driving up and down the Pacific coast highway in Southern California. There was no traffic and we just had this really this time just to connect and talk about the future. And I use that time to basically present to her this vision of the future where we were both location independent, where we had really much more choice over how we spent our day to day. We didn't have concerns and really worries about. 

06:42: paying bills and things like that. so in the beginning, when I was talking to her about this, she, she, think she almost saw it as a criticism of our present day life. And really it seems to be coming out of nowhere because I didn't involve her from the beginning. By the time I presented her with this almost fully packaged idea of the future that I had, it was almost like, who are you? What have you done with my husband? You know, why are you changing this assumption that I had? 

07:11: about our lives together. think that's where we felt a disconnect. Yeah, absolutely. So she wasn't very accepting in the beginning. Yeah, it literally, I think, took dozens and dozens of hours of conversations and really years before she was fully on board with the idea. What do you think it is with you and your husband? Oh, you know, honestly, my husband is, he is okay with 

07:38: anything that I do in my life because I always have a lot of business ideas. I would like for him to be a little bit more involved in terms of what I'm doing, in terms of trying to retire him. He is just not willing to take the time because he's busy. I completely understand. He has an entire career. He's saving people's lives. 

08:06: So I'm, what I have done recently is propose just a couple of podcasts for him to listen to or read a couple of books, like what I have here, why doctors don't get rich by Dr. Tom Burns. And he's starting to open up and understand exactly what I'm trying to do. It just takes a lot of education. 

08:32: And it takes a lot of shifting of the mindset for doctors. And I think that's the biggest challenge when you're working with a doctor or you're married to a doctor. Their perspective is very parochial. And so it's a little harder and challenging to change the way of their thoughts of how they think about life, career. And honestly, I feel like most doctors never think about retirement. 

09:02: We've known many doctors who are still working in their seventies, eighties, and they'd rather die on an OR table than spending time with their family. And that's just not the lifestyle that I want for me and my family here. So. Yeah. I, I've definitely heard that from, especially from the older physician population and 

09:26: I, the thing is, I firmly believe that the paradigm of medicine has changed in the U S and it's not compatible with that vision anymore. So, you know, and this is controversial, but like when doctors who are now in their seventies and eighties were training and when they were practicing, it was almost like the golden age of medicine where, you know, there was a significantly different level, I think of respect for the physician role in society. And it was much more. 

09:56: of an autonomous practice, you know, more physicians were in private practice. were, they were running their own businesses. They were able to define their relationships with their patients in a much more sort of one-on-one fashion. And now we've just got so many barriers in that relationship where there's insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and private equity, you know, more and more often now. And they're just putting up these barriers where it's, it's honestly a different way of practicing medicine now that it used to be. And I think that. 

10:24: the more recent crop of physicians coming through are feeling that change and it's, you know, in a negative way. Yeah. And honestly, with communication, social media, news, um everything is just readily available. Information is readily available to us. And we are starting to see a lot of physicians in social media and on TV talking about life outside of medicine. 

10:49: And so I want my husband to have that. I want him to have the curiosity of exploring other avenues besides working, you know, 80 to a hundred hours a week. But, you know, we're still taking steps day by day to get us there, shifting his mindset and also me trying to look for opportunities where I can help us to get to financial freedom. Yeah. 

11:18: suggested a really great sort of gateway. know, I think podcasts are certainly a really nice way of reaching a lot of people in a. And usually when someone's listening to a podcast, they're in a receptive state and it's almost by definition, they're sort of in a receptive state where they're willing to absorb that message. And that's, think a lot of the reasons why we decided to start this podcast. Um, so we can reach audiences, you know, where they're at. 

11:45: If they're in their cars or at the gym or doing laundry or something like that, it's, just a very nice way of talking to people. When I was trying to bring this message of financial freedom to my spouse though, you know, she wasn't, you know, it was kind of different because I knew that she wasn't going to just sit and listen to podcasts because she didn't have the time or the, the real interest. She didn't have a two hour commute that I did every day, you know, so there really wasn't, I knew that was. 

12:14: was not going to be the medium to reach her. So just thinking back to when I was talking to her about this, I really came about it from the perspective of shared vision. So we just talked for a while about visions for the future, not only in the next five years, but 10 years and even 20 years. And we sort of worked back because when I, when I talked about it with her, it was clear that we did have a lot of things in common in terms of, you know, 

12:42: what we imagined, you we didn't imagine working 50 hours a week and not seeing each other and not seeing the kids, not traveling. So we started of shared common ground on a number of things. And then I kind of started to paint a more rich vision of how we could achieve that and sort of worked back from there. So how is she involved with your business now? You know, now not as much as she used to be, believe it or not. So 

13:09: Uh, we were in Southern California at the time for about 12 years straight. And that's where I did residency. And that's where, you know, I started my life as an attending surgeon as well. And it was quickly, you know, in that time, when I started on this journey of financial freedom, where I was much more involved actively in investing and specifically buying real estate. And initially it was just by myself, as I said, and then after a couple of years, I sort of had proof of concept and. 

13:39: You know, I don't know if everyone is receptive to this, but I basically put it on a spreadsheet and I said, look, this, is an example of the first few deals. And this is how it's gone. This is the benefit that I think it's going to bring to us in terms of appreciation and tax efficiency and cashflow. And honestly, that really resonated with her because she has an MBA ah in addition to a PhD and I think can see things from a business standpoint. So. 

14:08: After I actually formalized it on a spreadsheet, believe it or not, she was like, okay, I kind of see what's going on. And she kind of got more on board. talked about real estate purchases together. We talked through renovation plans. She did our books for a while, but ever since moving to Memphis a few years ago, she's been 100 % dedicated to her role at the local museum where she, honestly does not have time to do the uh active investing in the way that she was helping before. 

14:38: But that's okay because now I have time for it because I've carved out the majority of my life to work on it. That's amazing. And do you guys talk about your goals on an annual basis? I try to do it with my husband. I try to sit him down, um, at least at the end of, you know, prior year or beginning of the year to talk about our goals, our personal goals, and also our financial goals as well. 

15:03: Just so that we're both aligned on our vision. And if we're going to have a five year plan, we need to make sure that we're actually achieving, you know, our annual uh milestones. So what do you guys do? Yeah. I think we do it fairly regularly actually. So we, even though we're both pretty busy, we try to do, uh, if we're both in the same city at the same time, you know, which isn't always the case, cause I travel for as a locum tenants. 

15:33: We try to do a date night on Saturday night and we get a babysitter and we go out and have dinner. And a lot of times we're just sort of, yeah. And yeah, it's good for your relationship, but a lot of the times we're just kind of decompressing and reconnecting. But you know, if it's been a while since we've gone through sort of updates on finances and sort of recent things, we'll take some time. Sometimes I bring my laptop, honestly, and it's really dorky, but we'll be sipping some wine and going through. 

16:00: you know, cashflow projections and things like that. You know, and that's the time that we, we do stuff like that. Uh, and I think it happens at least once a quarter or something like that. What, so what about you? Are you guys connecting over date night or is it, you know, before bed or when do you guys actually talk about it? My husband definitely doesn't geek out on spreadsheets. Actually it bores him. And so I have to speak to him in his, you know, 

16:29: in the mindset that he has. And so we do talk about it. We do go on dates at least once or twice a year. You know, we have three little kids, five and under, so we're still in the thick of it. But we love to travel. We love to eat. We love to explore the world. And that's kind of our financial freedom for us is allowing us to be able to travel around the world with our kids and have them experience the world. And so we do talk about it. 

16:59: I think I need to, I personally probably need to step a little bit in terms of, you know, showing him and teaching him the numbers. He's not a finance guy, but I can geek out on data. So sometimes I go a little too deep and it really, you know, then he starts to pull back. But I mean, it's honestly trying to speak his language, you know, as we we've been married for eight years, no, nine years now. 

17:28: almost 10 years next year. um And so every day I still learn a little bit about him that I haven't known before. And so that's just part of life, part of relationship. And we love to work together to figure out what to do in the next stage of our lives with our family, our kids. So we're just taking small steps to get to where we need to get to. 

17:53: I mean, that's really, um, that's really great because I think you're right that every couple is different. Everyone's going to come to the discussion with their own history and baggage and you really have to meet your spouse where they're at. But it sounds like where you guys are connecting is especially this vision of a future that allows travel and time with kids and, and, and flexibility. Um, so it seems like you are meeting, you know, on the common ground and sort of working back from there as well. 

18:23: Yeah. And this is why I love real estate investing because I can be anywhere around the world and still be able to do deals. As you know, most of my investment deals are not local to Colorado where I live, but actually in other states. And so, you know, is the ease of building a real estate business. Actually, it's not easy to build a real estate business, but just the ease of managing. 

18:52: Some of the operations relationships can be done remotely by way of phone calls, social media. I mean, we got so much technology at our hands right now that we can utilize to do anything that we put our mind into. Yeah, I think that is also one of the things that I really liked about real estate as well. At least in theory, as you say, so much of it can be done remotely. And it's not that you're swinging a hammer across a state, but 

19:21: You're using teams and processes uh and you're, leveraging the expertise of others to enact your vision for the real estate investment project. And it's, it's very different, I think for most physicians where you're literally sitting with the patient, you're one-on-one, either you're talking to them, prescribing the medications, you know, uh, or operating on them. And it's, it's a very different sort of interaction, the business of real estate. 

19:50: versus a business of medicine. So it is a little bit of a different sort of way of approaching business, I think. So Danielle, what do you think you can do better to get your wife more involved, more, you know, accepting on this journey with you? Yeah, I think we've done a lot of the hard work, which was the many hours of just creating a shared vision for our future. think that really laid a really good groundwork, but 

20:18: I think now there's a new challenge where, you know, she is so busy working really hard to help improve the museum here in Memphis. And, and, you know, they're, they're building this $200 million new museum uh in downtown Memphis. And it's this all encompassing super big job and she's doing an awesome job. But I think that she is so involved in that, that sometimes we actually, yeah, as I said, we struggle to reconnect on this journey that we're 

20:46: on together towards financial freedom. I think I just, I have to make a better effort at routinely kind of touching base about it and making sure that we're still on track. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's all about communication, right? Yeah. So what about for you and your, your, your husband, where do you think that you can improve that sort of a connection about the future as well? 

21:10: Honestly, for me is just being a little bit more organized. Um, I am the type of girl that, you know, kind of jump into different things all the time. Um, I might not communicate with them all the time. Um, sometimes, you know, I'm, I might be buying a building or a house and I'll just call him, say, Hey honey, we just bought another property. Uh, I just want to let you know. Um, but I think I need to just kind of organize our. 

21:39: plan a little better, like you said, kind of look into the future and work backwards and really trying to hone in on our financial goals and the number and the budget that we want to achieve on an annual basis. I definitely dream very big, but I also need to focus on the smaller stuff as well. And then just getting him a little bit more involved. I like for him to understand 

22:08: the business as well, because I feel like if he can understand the type of investments that, that I like us to be part of, then I can explain this to any other doctors who also want to take on the challenge of getting into the real estate investment world. see. Okay. So it sounds like there's a couple of things to work on, and this is probably applicable to anyone listening to. So. 

22:36: It sounds like we've identified that the shared vision of the future is really important, but there are some practicalities to think about in terms of the numbers. So figuring out the cost of the lifestyle that you like to enjoy, you know, be it travel or schooling or restaurants or clothing, automobiles, just figuring out sort of a shared vision of where you want to be. And then you extrapolate from that how much it costs. 

23:04: And then you can take from that what level of financial freedom and assets and cashflow you need to basically achieve to pay for all that. there's, there's some practicalities to it, right? Yeah. I think it's really digging into the finer details, right? You know, a lot of people like to say, I want to be financial free. Okay. Why? What does that look like? And I think I read a book where they said, ask five whys and you'll find exactly what you're looking for. 

23:35: You know, do that with your spouse, sit down, figure out exactly what both your visions are and just keep asking why until you know exactly what point you need to achieve and get to. I think I know what you mean. So it's trying to unpeel the layers of people's motivation. So it's like, maybe we could do a quick example. it's like, um, Lila, why do you want financial freedom? I want my husband to work less. Why do want your husband to work less? 

24:04: I want him to be able to spend more time with our family. Why do want him to spend more time with your family? So that my children can remember their dad spending time with them versus working all the time. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. If we go a couple layers deeper, usually it connects back to some, you know, deficits in childhood or all this stuff. Someone's going to end up crying. So we wouldn't have to go that far. 

24:32: But yeah, I think that's a really powerful exercise. All right, so getting on the same, so, you if I could summarize it from my standpoint, getting on the same page with your spouse in terms of shared vision for the future, that's what I see as like a fundamental unlock to financial freedom. Yeah, and if you have a skeptical spouse, just be open-minded, ask questions, and you might be surprised how aligned you guys are. 

25:02: you know, already are. So, but thank you so much for listening to us. I hope this really helped you and your spouse, if you have one or your future spouse, or it could be a relative that you are, that you truly care about. So, Daniel, any last thoughts? No, I think this is really great. I think it's going to be helpful for people to think about how to talk about to their spouses. 

25:26: about financial freedom and get on that journey. And just remember it's, it's, it is a journey. You're not going to nail it the first time. And even if you get resistance at first, don't give up. So yeah, I really enjoyed talking about this and can't wait until the next one. everyone. Okay. Bye everyone. Next time. Bye. Thanks for tuning into Paging Financial Freedom, where we help doctors and spouses like you take control of your finances, invest smarter, and build a light by design. 

25:55: If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave us a 5-star review, and share this with someone who needs to hear it. And remember, financial freedom isn't just a dream, it's a decision, so let's get there together.