True financial planning goes far beyond investment selection or market predictions. In fact, investment returns are largely outside your control. What is within your control are your habits, behaviors, and the decisions you make over time—and how those decisions align with your goals.
For veterinary business owners, planning becomes even more critical. Owning a practice creates concentrated risk, unique cash flow dynamics, and a need to synchronize personal and business decisions. When those pieces aren’t aligned, even good decisions can lead to outcomes you didn’t intend.
Real financial planning allows you to evaluate different paths, understand the consequences of each, and choose the direction that best fits the life you want—not just the numbers on paper.
Transcript:
Hey, Smarter Vets®, CJ Burnett here. Just got done with a long conference season. There was a question came up multiple times that I heard from people and they weren’t, this question might sound like a bad question, like they’re being, they were just being inquisitive. They just wanted to know, they weren’t trying to sound antagonistic.
And that question was, why do I even need financial planning? And what’s funny about the question is, I think it’s a perfectly legitimate question to ask.
Why do you need financial planning? Especially if you’re a business owner. Like you have so much of your plan built around your business. Financial planning is really kind of thought pigeonholed into investment only, right? I go to the person whenever I have money to invest that’s not in the business, right? It’s in my personal name because I’ve saved it outside the business.
We’re trying really hard to redefine financial planning for y’all, but let’s just back up one second to think about the question that I think we need to be asking.
It’s not why do I need financial planning, it’s why do I want financial planning?
Because here’s the thing, you don’t have to plan anything. You can go about life and let life happen to you. Now most successful people don’t just let life happen to them, they usually happen to life, right? They kind of make things happen in their life, but let’s just say you’re not that person. You’d rather just kind of go throughout life and let things happen and put out the fires that need to be put out and that’s perfectly fine. You’re perfectly okay doing that.
But most of the time when you do that, you will end up accidentally somewhere. And it’s a matter of where do you want to end up and do you want to end up somewhere by accident or on purpose. Now if you end up somewhere by accident, most of the time, letting things happen to you and then letting the plan unfold as it goes, you might find that there are things that are unexpected that happen to you that completely devastate your plan. You might find that your expectations just aren’t met.
Maybe in retirement income planning, you might find yourself never being able to retire just because there wasn’t enough thought or enough planning put into the many years while you were working and then you finally get to that spot where you’re ready to sell and the sell of the business is not going to be enough for you to actually step out of the business and have a livable income beyond that because maybe you’re living your life on say $300,000 a year and then after you sell your business you’re going to have to live on maybe $100,000.
And so that dramatic decrease in your income causes you to have to rethink selling the business because your lifestyle is just going to suffer on the other side of the transaction. And so you never sell. You basically hold on to it.
You’re in your 70s, your 80s, and you just never are able to get to a spot where your income is able to be fully replaced by your personal assets. And so we want to just rethink financial planning. Think financial planning more in a broad sense. It’s not just about investments. That’s like 5 % of what financial planning really is. Financial planning is focusing on the habits and the behaviors that are going to get you to where you want to go on purpose and focusing on the things that you can control, not on the things that you can’t. So let’s not ask the question, do I need financial planning? Because the answer is no, you don’t. You actually can go your entire life and just let things happen to you.
The question is, do you want financial planning? And even more so, take it a step further: Do you want the type of financial planning that’s just going to focus on investments, or do you want the financial planning that’s going to focus on the whole, not only your household, but your business as well.
And then be able to coordinate and marry all of the goals that you have for your personal life and all of the goals that you have for your business life so that they all overlap and complement.
And then you have an integrated financial plan that is able to boost everything up and really end up somewhere on purpose. Most of the time, I would say, clients find themselves in spots that they never even thought were possible just because they put a little bit more extra thought into what they were doing and they had guides along the way.
My name is CJ Burnett. See you next time.
This material is intended for general public use. By providing this content, Park Avenue Securities LLC and your financial representative are not undertaking to provide investment advice or make a recommendation for a specific individual or situation, or to otherwise act in a fiduciary capacity. Guardian, its subsidiaries, agents, and employees do not provide tax, legal, or accounting advice. Consult your tax, legal, or accounting professional regarding your individual situation. Tom is a Registered Representative and Financial Advisor of Park Avenue Securities LLC (PAS). Securities products and advisory services offered through PAS, member FINRA, SIPC. Financial Representative of The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America® (Guardian), New York, NY. PAS is a wholly owned subsidiary of Guardian. Florida Veterinary Advisors and The Next Step Planning Group are not an affiliate or subsidiary of PAS or Guardian. California Insurance License #0K80141. AR Insurance License #15823672. Florida Veterinary Advisors is not registered in any state or with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as a Registered Investment Advisor. The individuals associated with Florida Veterinary Advisors do not maintain specialized licenses or qualifications for the financial services provided to veterinary professionals. 7989827.1 Exp 5/27