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With no hidden fees and a 100% purchase guarantee, you can feel confident when you book your premium LA tickets with Sweet Hop. Visit suitehop.com today. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

Financial freedom often involves figuring out how to integrate the finances and the family life. And today I've invited Dr. Marilyn Broderon. She is the founder of the Infant Dental Center and she is going to share with us a little bit about her journey to that business. Welcome, Marilyn, to Radical Personal Finance.

Hey, Joshua. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. So you reached out to me after a show that I did, a Q&A show, in which a listener called in and said that she was conflicted over whether or not she should continue her professional education at the master's level, or whether she should put that on hold in order to be able to spend more time with her child.

And you had some great commentary on that and had, you know, you've worked through that same challenge of decision yourself. So I wanted to invite you on to share your story. So share with us a little bit about your story, especially as it relates to finances and your family.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, when you were doing that Q&A, I was riding in the, I was driving in my car and I was literally screaming out loud at the girl. Like, I was so, I was so, I felt so passionate about this. So, yeah, to answer your question about, you know, finances and family, I don't feel like those need to be mutually exclusive entities.

Like, you need to, you can only choose one or the other, or you have to sacrifice a lot of family time to have decent finances. Like, that doesn't need to be the case. So, yeah. What did I say that got you so upset? It wasn't anything that you said.

It was just her way of thinking. And I totally see where she's coming from, where she was thinking, you know, it has to be a one or the other. The Q&A was about a girl who's living in Hawaii and she didn't know, and she couldn't finish her master's program.

And I was thinking in my head, you have a small child and you live in Hawaii. Like, go just live in Hawaii and be with your child and enjoy that time. And it's okay to push pause on things and then start back up again. So, I actually thought you gave really, really excellent, excellent insights.

So, tell us your story. Have you always felt that family and finances didn't have to be in conflict? You know, I think I always wanted to feel that way, but I wasn't quite sure how to make that work. I was always a very precocious child. I told people when I was 10 that I wanted to be a neurosurgeon.

And then I had a mid or quarter life crisis when I was 13 and realized that to become a neurosurgeon, you don't have to have so many years of schooling afterwards. And I come from a large family. I'm the oldest of five kids. And I loved living it. I loved being a part of my large family.

And I didn't know how I would be able to make that work, how I would be able to be, how I would be able to have a mom and have this really rewarding family life and also be able to pursue professional things that I was interested in. So, that was always something I was thinking about.

How do I make that balance work? And one of the things that I did was I graduated from high school when I was 17. And I got, as soon as I got accepted into college, I promptly got the course catalog and I mapped out my whole college career because I wanted to be able to graduate in three years.

So, within the parameters and with good course selection, I was able to do that. So, I graduated from college when I was 20 and I had also gotten accepted into dental school right upon graduation. So, from all my calculations, I was going to be 24 when I graduated from dental school.

And I did. So, yeah, my approach was I want to get finished with my schooling as soon as possible so that then I can figure out this work-life balance. - What did you do after school? - I did a residency program for, you know, unfortunately, I was actually only able to do it for nine months because nine months into my residency program, I got disabled.

So, it was interesting. We were in a conference and someone was doing a lecture when all of a sudden I felt like I was going to pass out. And I wasn't pregnant. I was, you know, there was no reason for that to happen. It just kind of came on all of a sudden.

And it actually turned out to be a quite serious medical condition that it wasn't going to affect my lifespan or anything. It was just extremely, extremely debilitating. So, at 25 years old, I found myself disabled and unable to work. And I was actually out on disability for about three, four years.

You know, so it was interesting. I was surrounded in this very like hyper competitive environment. I was actually a resident at Johns Hopkins Hospital, which, you know, an incredible institution and lots of really incredible smart people. And I was in this environment and then all of a sudden everything stopped.

- Right. - And it was a very introspective and almost like a very spiritual time for me because I had to really identify what made me, what made me me, what was actually important. Because this identity of being a hospital-based practicing dentist, that wasn't something that I was anymore.

My body physically couldn't do it. - Wow. So, after a few years, you recovered. And is that when you started your specialist practice? - Yeah, yeah, it was. So, we figured out all the health stuff and I had a child. And in that timeframe, actually becoming a mom, I learned about my niche that I practice in.

So, I do a laser procedure on babies for having difficulty feeding. And it was funny, actually. So, it's interesting that becoming a mom actually was very helpful for me professionally because I was able to understand from the patient side, from the mom's side, of being able to feed a baby who's having difficulties, what that feels like.

And my lactation consultant actually suggested that I start a practice like this. But at the time she suggested it, we were about to make a move across the country. I had a three-month-old. My husband was about to start residency. I'm like, I'm in no position to even think about this.

That's a cute idea. But no, I still need some time to figure out my place right now. But when my son was about a year and a half old, that's when I started to really think about that. I was to the point where I felt like I hit my stride as a new mother.

And in our family life with my husband in residency, I was starting to get a little bored and wanted to be able to use my time and my skills. So I started thinking about what I could do. And that comment from my lactation consultant kept coming back to me.

So when your son was a year and a half old, then you began your specialist practice. And your area of practice is you perform a laser surgery. It's called phrenectomy, is that right? Uh-huh, yep. So this for children, infants who are tongue-tied, then you perform this laser surgery that frees their tongues, which allows them to feed successfully and allows them to latch properly to their mother's breasts.

So without this surgery, the mother would most likely be unable to breastfeed their child. Is that an accurate summary? Yeah, yeah. And sometimes the severity depends. Some babies are able to get by breastfeeding. In my estimation, the biggest benefit of this is that it makes the breastfeeding experience so much smoother.

Which is a big deal. As a father, I will affirm that that is an incredibly important, if you can make breastfeeding not a big deal, that is a hugely valuable service that you provide. Oh my gosh, it's the best. I get emails from families who are saying, "Oh, I have a completely new baby.

We're really being able to enjoy our newborn." And as someone who really values family time, this newborn period can be so fleeting. So if there's something to be done to make it more, where you can really savor those moments with your baby, it's the best. Standard advice that I give, and since a massive percentage of my audience is male, I'll give it here.

A standard of advice that I give to prospective parents, people who are expecting their first child, as I say, there's so much emphasis placed on having a healthy, successful birthing experience. A lot of people have gone and educated themselves extensively about all their different options, especially among many new mothers who have studied a lot of the different details.

They know exactly what they want. And so when my wife and I had our first baby, we felt very well prepared for the birthing experience. But nobody told me that the birth wasn't all there was. And all of a sudden, facing those first few days with all the challenges of breastfeeding, it blindsided me.

And we felt woefully unprepared for that. And so that's become my standard piece of advice, is to say that, yes, do your homework on the birthing experience, but you should also make sure that you prepare, at least mentally prepare, that it's not necessarily all roses and butterflies from there on out.

>> Oh, absolutely. You know, one of the pieces of advice I give to my postpartum moms is, you know, breastfeeding is a very natural thing, but it is not something that is naturally ingrained in us. It's still a learned skill. It's something that the baby and the mom needs to learn how to do.

So and it's okay if they're struggling. >> No question. >> That's part of the process. >> Yeah. >> It can be. >> Yeah, absolutely. So in your commentary, connecting back, lest this become the lactation consultancy show, which is not the, although I am educated on the subject due to my desire to be a good father, it's not a specialty that I desire to teach others about.

>> >> So back to how this relates to finances. As I understand it, this business provides for you an ability to earn a healthy income while also giving you a significant amount of flexibility and timing flexibility because it's your own practice, because it's somewhat versatile. And this allows you to be extremely involved in the care for your son rather than needing to hire all those services out.

Is that accurate? >> Yep. >> So tell us more. >> Absolutely. Yeah, there's so many great things with having my own business. So I actually worked with a business counselor when I initially had this idea. I was actually in Milan. I'm a travel hacker and we had a bunch of credit card and airline miles.

And we were staying in this really nice hotel in Milan and like, wow, your life doesn't have to be, there don't have to be as many barriers as you think there are in your life. Like if I could stay here, maybe I could do something else crazy. Maybe I could start my own business.

So I worked with a business counselor to flesh out all of the details. I kind of had a model of about how much money I thought I could make, how expensive all of my different supplies would be. And as I worked with the business counselor, it was starting to look like I would be working maybe three to five hours a week, clinical time.

And when I sat down with her and we made all of these spreadsheets and came up with the different insurances, I would need the equipment, the upkeep, all employees, all of the different things I would need. I remember there was this moment I looked up at her and I asked her, I'm like, is this even allowed?

Is this okay? Is this really okay for me to do this? And she said, Marilyn, yeah, of course you can do this. This is your life. If you want to, if your priority at this time is you want to be able to have more time with your child and you don't want to work full time, that's okay.

The numbers are working out. So that's what I did. - Well, it shows the benefit of having a high hourly wage. Always recognizing that there are only three things that you can coordinate that are going to control the outcome of your income, the number of hours that you work, the amount of work that you output per hour, and the value in the marketplace of the output of your work.

And so you've invested up front a tremendous number of hours of study, preparation, and professional training in order to be able to command a very high hourly wage, which opens up tremendous possibilities for you. And that's absolutely fantastic. - Yeah, you know, there was a lot of market research that I did.

I was on some Facebook groups where other women had gone to different professionals all across the US. And so I had an idea of what the fee was, you know, across different states. And when I started putting all of the pieces together of how much it would cost for me to get all my equipment, all the supplies that were needed, I realized, like, I would be making a decent profit, especially in a setting where I did not have huge overhead from a dental office, you know.

In my practice, I do not have dental plumbing. I do not have an x-ray unit. I don't have dental chairs. I don't have a lot of things that really can cut into the profit margin in a regular office setting. I was really able to pare down to exactly what I needed to be able to provide a good service to the families that I see.

- Do you have staff? - I do, I do. Yeah, so because this is such a part-time, this is such part-time work that I do, like for instance, this week, I'm in my office six hours seeing babies this week. And I always need to have an assistant with me as I do the procedure to help stabilize the baby's head and swaddle them and whatnot.

And I actually use college students. So I have two pre-dental students who are my assistants. It's really wonderful for them because the schedule, it's not a high amount of time that they need to commit. And it's also a really good learning experience for them, especially as they're going to try for dental school.

- So let me clarify. So you do need dental assistance during the surgery. But beyond that, one of the potential benefits I could see of your business is that because your marketing is exclusive on one specific niche, you're not going to be fielding generalized telephone calls, which means it opens up that either you could probably answer your phone yourself or just simply have a very, a contracted answering service.

And you don't need to handle office staff for customer inquiries and things like that. Is that accurate? - Yeah, yeah. So I do have one, I have a virtual assistant who does do some of that admin work and she will answer phone calls for me, especially if I'm on vacation or if I'm away for a while.

I am actually the one who answers all, most, the majority of the phone calls I answer myself. 'Cause like you said, all of the inquiries are from new mothers who have questions about their baby being tongue-tied. I don't, and it was an interesting switch in the beginning, I was so nervous about building up my patient base that anytime the phone rang, I had to drop everything I was doing and answer the phone.

Now I'm to the point where I'll answer, I'll return phone calls once a day. So I'll block off maybe a half an hour, an hour every day. And I call and talk to the families directly, which I've actually found has been really great, a really great practice builder for me.

Most times when you call to schedule an appointment, you're talking to a receptionist who probably is familiar with the procedure maybe, but they probably don't work around it. Whereas when I call these moms back, a lot of times I can answer a lot of really detailed questions for them.

I can put their mind at ease. And I also have a really low no-show rate as well. That can be a big problem in medical offices, people just not showing up to their appointments. But because people are talking to me, the doctor directly, they know that if they don't come, they know who it is that they're putting out in that setting.

So… That's fantastic. Yeah, it works really well. Now you built this business starting in a new city where you and your husband had just moved to. How did you market and start to establish yourself in the new location? Yeah, so I… That's a good question. I knew of breastfeeding support groups and I was actually breastfeeding my own child at the time.

So I went to one of them. I also knew different midwives and lactation consultants. I reached out to them, just introduced myself. Because my husband's also a physician, I know other physicians in the area. So I know some pediatricians. And once they found out about my services, this isn't something that a lot of pediatricians are super familiar with.

So if they had a baby where they had a question about it, they would send the babies to me for evaluations and treatment if needed. A lot of it ended up being through Facebook mom support groups. You have to go where your clients are. So a lot of moms get respite from going on Facebook and kind of talking to each other about their day or what's going on.

Adult communication. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And in those groups, sometimes people would tag me or they're like, "Oh, you should go to her. She's really great." And then the more I started seeing mothers, the more word of mouth got out with what a valuable service this can be. And in fact, it's funny, I was telling you about that national Facebook group.

They have a preferred providers list. And I ended up getting on that list. And from that, so I live in Corpus Christi, Texas. It's about three hours south of Houston. And from that, I've had families travel from as far away as New Mexico, Louisiana. Routinely, I'll have people come travel to see me from within a three-hour radius of where I am.

So people know about me. Well, so I'm going to draw a couple of business lessons for the broader audience, things that I observe in your story. First and foremost, I don't think that this topic is or should be restricted in the context of stay-at-home mothering or specifically in terms of moms versus dads.

I think it's rather obvious that babies have a much bigger need for mom during the early years, but that doesn't mean that dad doesn't need to be involved. And this has been my vision all the way through. In order to be able to produce the type of family that my wife and I dream of, it requires a lot more active approach.

And all of us make this choice every single day. All of us make the choice to be engaged in the jobs and the businesses and the careers that we are involved in. And in terms of is there a choice that has to be made, mutually exclusive choice between finances and family, on the one hand, no, there doesn't have to be a mutually exclusive choice.

They're not necessarily opposed to one another. But on the other hand, yes, there are ways of earning money that are going to conflict with working as a family. There's no chance in the world you're going to get me to sign up to be a politician at this stage of my family's life.

There's no chance that you're going to get me to sign up as the CEO of a publicly traded corporation. I mean, you cannot function in those environments on any kind of reasonable work schedule, and you are at the mercy of your boards of directors or other people. And so if you desire to have flexibility and freedom, you're going to have to make different choices.

Doesn't mean you got to be broke, but it does mean you have to make different choices. And one of the tremendous benefits that we face, as we record this in 2017, is it's never been easier to set up a specialized cottage industry, so to speak. And cottage industry doesn't mean you have to make soap in your kitchen and sell it for a dollar a bar.

I mean, that's great. People do well with making soap, but you can make soap or you can slice babies' tongues as they should be sliced with a laser and make a little bit more than a dollar per ton. So that's the benefit that we face. And from a business perspective, by choosing a very focused, very tight specialty, you can turn the marketing machine to work for you.

If you were just a general dentist, if you were one of many, then the only basis of your referability is the fact that, yes, you're a nice dentist and you are effective at what you're doing and your pricing. And so you're in a world of commodities where you have commodity-based pricing and it's very, very challenging to differentiate yourself.

But by choosing a very small specialty, something that has personal importance to you, something in which you're going to be very effectively connecting with your patients, that opens up the ability to be referable. And you don't have a ton of competition. And when somebody needs your services, if we had a baby that had tongue problems and we needed it to go, we would drive to Orlando, we'd drive to Tampa in an instant to get it done because you know you want to work with a specialist.

And that can be applied in all of our businesses. That can be applied in financial planning. That can be applied in investments. That can be applied in real estate. That can be applied in engineering. And with the simple ability to hang out your shingle through the use of a web page and to market your services through a national and international Facebook group, it opens up the possibility for so many of us to follow your path, Marilyn, and enjoy some of the same benefits.

- Yeah, you know, I was actually just having a conversation with a girlfriend of mine. So complicating our family life is my husband is a ER physician. He just finished his residency. So his schedule's all over the place. If I was working in a dental office and regular, you know, I've seen patients from eight to five every day, you know, sometimes he's off on a random Wednesday or Thursday.

I would miss those days off. So having something that's a little more flexible is extremely important to us. So anyway, one of my other friends who's married to a colleague of my husband's, she was a lawyer, and she worked for the DA, and she had these horrible daytime working hours.

When her husband was working night shifts, forget about it. Like, they didn't see each other at all. And she ended up quitting her job because it was just way too hard on her marriage. So I was talking with her, and you know, she was talking about wanting to start up her own law firm.

She was interested in the building that I had gotten my office in. She was looking into all of these things. And one of the suggestions I made was, you know, why don't you, you could specialize your law practice to looking over physician employment contracts. And that's all you do.

And that's something where you don't even need an office. They can email you the contract. You can review it at your leisure. If your husband is off in the morning, you guys could go to the beach or go do something together and then review the employment contract in the afternoon when he's sleeping.

You know, like you have the flexibility to be able to do that. So I'm happy to report that she's starting to look into that business model for herself, you know, and especially how you're talking about with these cottage industries. What sets you apart? Why should someone go to you?

For me, they should go to me because I've traveled to other dentist offices. I've learned specifically how to do this. I'm very comfortable treating babies with a laser. That's not something I learned how to do in dental school. That was something that I went out and got on my own.

So I am very different from any other dentist in my area because of that. And with my friend wanting to do physician employment contracts, that's something that she can learn about. She can gain the expertise to do that. She can look at some of our friends and look at their contracts and see what amendments they were making.

There are ways that you can gain a skill where you can become an expert in that area. Absolutely. And you can become an expert in a relatively short period of time with study and focused study. Most areas of expertise, some areas, for example, law, will build on a general understanding, a generalized legal knowledge.

But most areas of expertise, a few hundred hours of focused study, of diligent investigation, and you can become an expert. And that becomes a huge time-saving device. I want to point out a couple of the benefits also for your friend to spark our audience's thinking. By having a small specialized practice like that, and she's in an ideal situation where she's not required to make a huge amount of money immediately.

This is one of the biggest challenges that professionals often face, is if you are required to support a high-expense family life immediately, or if you're required to support a high-expense personal life based upon your past expenses, i.e., I have $200,000 of student loans that are not in deferral. This can be a real challenge to start a business because you need to make a lot of money quickly.

And generally, specialty businesses are going to be slower in the beginning. You could go and make more money working as a dentist just if you just go right into the mainstream approach than if you start with having a series of small referrals because referrals take time. But on the backside, you can cut so much in expenses.

You can cut out the need to maintain an office. And in most metropolitan areas like mine or probably like Corpus Christi, just to have a relatively small reasonable office, if you share the space with a bunch of other people, you're at $1,000 a month. If you have any kind of private space where your clients are coming in, you're at $1,500 a month by the time you go all in and include all the extra expenses.

You can probably cut out any need for staff requirements. A simple answering service or virtual assistant to help with scheduling, you can replace a lot of those functions. That eliminates the need for employees. Employees are expensive. That eliminates the need for a lot of insurance and things like that.

And you can cut a few thousand dollars off of most businesses by turning them into cottage industries or "lifestyle businesses" instead of trying to be big and huge. Well, count the hours. Let's say that you're billing at $200, $200, $300 an hour. Let's just use $200. If you can cut $3,000 a month out of your expenses at $200 an hour, that's 15 hours less of work.

That's just pure expenses right off the top. And so that's a huge benefit for professionals who've developed a skill and a knowledge and an expertise in an area. Yeah. I'd say overhead is really, really important to look at. So my husband and I, we think of my overhead in terms of baby units.

So how many babies do I need to treat in order to meet my rent? In order to meet all of my licensing fees, my payroll? And I was very mustache-y about how I ended up setting up my practice. Is this a truly necessary expense? Is there another way we can go around this?

Could I have a smaller office? All of these things. And that really benefited me, especially while I was starting out. So I can share my baby unit. I'm actually at about five to six baby units a month to break even. So anything over that, I'm making profit. That's great.

That's awesome. Now, one of the things that you had written in your communication to me after that episode, which was 417, in which you responded, you wrote to me that you have a number of benefits because you do work and you do earn income. That gives you – and yes, it's very, very flexible.

You get a lot of the benefits of being a stay-at-home mom, but you get other benefits as well. What are some of those benefits that you get from maintaining your medical practice? Yeah, so sure. So one of them is health insurance. When my husband became a grown-up doctor – he's not in residency anymore – he lost his insurance.

He became an independent contractor. We had to get insurance ourselves. And through the Obamacare marketplace, the insurance in Texas was horrible. You could only get HMOs. Especially considering my health problems, if I need to go to the doctor, I wanted to be able to have strong coverage. And because I had a business and I have W-2 employees, I was actually able to qualify for a group insurance through a PPO because of the structure of my business.

And then I'm also able to pay the insurance premiums through the income that I earn from my business as well. So that's a really great thing for a family. I'm also able to contribute to retirement plans. So now that my husband has started earning real doctor money, we've bumped up in our tax bracket.

So the name of the game right now for us in our situation is we want to put as much money into tax-deferred accounts as possible. And because he's able to put money into a SEP IRA, I've been putting money into a SEP IRA, but now I'm starting an individual 401(k) so I can contribute an additional $18,000 every year on top.

So anyway, it just overall is a really great situation for a family with tax deferrals. I can also write off my cell phone, our internet service, a lot of other things, our business expenses that I can write off. And especially being in a higher tax bracket, that's a pretty huge savings because our after-tax money is like 30%.

You have to take off like 30% of whatever we have to get to our after-tax dollars. So anything we can be writing off free tax is saving us money. That's fantastic. How about the flip side? Have you had any regrets along this journey? Is there anything that because of your decision to pursue building this practice and not to stay exclusively as a stay-at-home mom, have you had any regrets or disadvantages from this path?

In the motherhood aspect, not so much. Occasionally I have some mom guilt because I have to do admin activities and my son was watching Rescue Box a little longer than I would have liked. But on the motherhood front, really not so much because it is a fairly limited time that we need somebody to be watching our kids or we need someone to be here.

Professionally, I do deal with a little bit of regret. What I was trained to do in dental school, I don't do any of that. I haven't done a root canal in six years. I haven't done a denture filling. I don't do any of that anymore. I haven't picked up a drill in years.

And so for some, it can seem like this was a waste of education because I spent four years and then an additional year in my residency program developing expertise in that. But I don't see it that way. I see that it's almost like that time was necessary to get my professional credentialing so that I'm a licensed dentist.

But that's almost like that time is a sunk cost. I do have no desire to do those procedures anymore, so I don't. I think our society is going to try to put mom guilt on you no matter what you do. Yeah, right. There's always that. You can never be good enough to match up with all the moms on Pinterest.

Right, right. And that's okay. One of the benefits, just a couple things that occurred to me that I was kind of expecting you to say, one of the benefits I would imagine is that by maintaining your professional work, it does give you more opportunity to continue adult conversations. I think that's a huge benefit.

Oh, very much so. One of the biggest costs for full-time mothers is often that their adult interaction can become so diminished, and that's a huge, huge cost. And now my wife and I have to work constantly at it to make sure that there's lots of adult interaction for her.

And so I've got to imagine that's a big benefit for you. Yeah, there is something nice to being ... Women, we're multidimensional. We have that motherhood hat that we put on, but then it's also nice to be able to have this professional hat that I put on. I can speak very intelligently about the different peer-reviewed journals on ankyloglossia and tongue-tie.

I can talk about laser physics to concerned parents. I've been invited to speak at the local children's hospital at different events, talking about breastfeeding. And it's nice to be able to use my brain in a different way. Absolutely. Is there anything I've missed? Anything you'd like to share with my audience?

You've got the soapbox. Anything you'd like to share as we wrap up? Oh, goodness. I should have thought about ... I should have just thought about my soapbox more. Well, I will say when starting a practice or a firm or a business of this sort, there's always the element of having no idea if it will actually work or not.

And having that fear is completely normal. You have to build up the courage and decide, "You know what? I'm going to expend X amount of dollars." And for me, I actually had a time limit. I had a year. I was going to really dedicate a year of my extra brainpower to building this practice.

And if it didn't work ... And after a year, I would reevaluate. If it didn't work, I could walk away and I wouldn't feel bad about it. I knew I had given it a good try. So it's okay to feel scared or nervous about doing this. And that's part of the joy.

Now I'm two and a half years into this and my practice definitely works. And it's a really beautiful situation for our family. I think almost all of us who've started a business spend some amount of our ... There's a quote. I can't come up with it. Along the lines of, "50% of your time is spent in a euphoric state, just so excited about how rich you're going to be and how great your life is going to be, just absolute euphoria.

The other 50% has spent in absolute terror." And they cycle back and forth pretty consistently. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I definitely went through all of those changes. Oh, and one other thing I thought of. So I'm still in close contact with a lot of my classmates from dental school.

And a lot of them are in the throes of having their own general dentistry practice or their specialty practices. And they have a career. They have everything set up. And I don't. My life doesn't look that way. It's okay for your life to look different than your peers do.

Sometimes I feel like your career is this sacred priority that you have to do what's good for your career. You have to make this move because it's good for your career. Do this thing because it's good for your career. Sometimes it's okay to do things that's good for you as a person, that's good for you as a mom, good for you as a wife, good for you as a human being who likes to go to the beach.

It's okay to give yourself permission to make decisions in that capacity. I've got to imagine your husband's a big encouragement to you there. I know my wife is for me because I've made many decisions. And I've often felt the same thing as I've left the career path, the normal career path of working as a financial advisor and gone in other directions.

I know that I've faced so many decisions where I've said, "Wait a second. This is going to cause me to be looked down upon. This is going to cause me not to be the big hot shot that I could have been. I know I'm walking away from this notoriety and this public acclaim.

And I know I'm walking away from this particular career benefit." And I so value she's so good at saying, "Just hold on a second. Why are you doing what you're doing and are you focusing on your design or are you trying to live somebody else's dream?" Right, right. Yeah, as an anecdote, my husband went to University of Maryland for medical school.

And there's a thing in March called Match Day where everyone in front of their whole medical school reads where they're going for residency. And so I was there at Match Day and there were a lot of very like sexy sounding places that people were going like Yale and Harvard and UPenn and all of these like really incredible residency programs.

And you're picked based off of your ranking that the program ranks you and also that the student ranks the program and then there's a computerized match. And my husband got up there and he read Corpus Christi, Christus Spahn Medical Center and all these people in Baltimore, they're like, "Oh, I wonder if that's a low priority." He got matched really low down on his rank list or something.

But Corpus Christi was actually our number one choice. And it was our number one choice because it's by the beach. He ended up getting the residency program, how they structure it was very family friendly. They get excellent training. They do a ton of procedures. It was an all around really great program.

The only quote unquote negative about it was that nobody had really heard of it. And it was out in the middle of nowhere. And as we were making our rank list, I remember looking at him and we were talking about it. I'm like, "We don't owe anyone anything as far as on our resume, we need to look a certain way." It doesn't matter.

If this fits with our family, that's what we need to do. And as your virtual financial advisor, it warms my heart. Texas, growing economy, not a dying economy like many other places, no state income taxes, low cost of living. It's a great place. I know, I know. We love growing income taxes.

Well, Marilyn, thank you for coming on the show. I appreciate your sharing your story and I hope that it serves as inspiration to so many other people listening that you can sit down and you can take an inventory of your skills and your abilities and you can design an opportunity that'll help you to fit your life goals while also meeting your financial goals such that your highest priorities, whatever they be, can be fulfilled and finances and family both included in that.

So thank you for coming on today. Yeah, yeah. Thank you for having me, Joshua. Yeah, I hope this helps spur some thinking in someone else who's listening. And I forgot your website is infantdentalcenter.com. So if anybody in the Texas or surrounding region and has a child with tongue tie or what's the other name of the other condition?

Tongue tie or what? Ankle colosseum is the medical term for it. That would be hilarious if somebody came to my practice because they listen to me a lot of the time. You never know. There's probably lots of crunchy. My wife and I are pretty crunchy these days. There's probably lots of crunchy listeners who are looking for services like yours.

I love it. I love it. Thanks, Marilyn. Call me. I'd be happy to talk to you about your breastfeeding challenges. This show is part of the Radical Life Media network of podcasts and resources. Find out more at RadicalLifeMedia.com. Don't just dream about paradise. Live it with Fiji Airways. Escape the ordinary with Fiji Airways Global Beat the Rush Sale.

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