REAL DENTISTS. REAL STORIES.

Hear How Other Practitioners Created Freedom in Their Personal and Professional Lives

Free For Life™ is not the end. If anything, it is an inflection point to go even further.

Meet Dr. Ben and Sondra Jensen

After about 15 years of practicing, I realized I wasn't completely happy with just being a dentist. I had reached a point where I wasn't intellectually stimulated, and I was searching for something more. On top of that we found ourselves frustrated that we couldn't see a clear path to retirement, despite paying off our debts.

I started listening to David's podcast and educating myself about real estate and the other ways to create my own freedom, but nothing resonated with me the way David's podcast did. I had a phone call with Freedom Founders and decided to attend an event. Sondra was skeptical, but willing to attend the event on the condition that we would not sign up for any membership or commit to anything. But once we got there, it was a different story. We had found a group of people that we really fit in with. We absorbed all the information on Thursday and Friday of the event and by Saturday, Sondra and I both agreed we found our community and decided to commit for 1 year.

Prior to Freedom Founders we attended other conferences, but what made us get on board was the fact that we would manage our wealth ourselves. We weren't handing it off to someone else to decide what to do with it.

I've recently taken an extra day off at work and I'm having more more fun than ever practicing, while having record breaking months at the practice. My oldest son wants to be a pilot and now I'm following in his footsteps getting my private pilot's license now. Being Free for Life™ means spending more time with our family, and taking more time for ourselves to travel and learn new hobbies.

It's like a weight lifted off your shoulder when you have your path laid out in front of you and you know everything's going to be okay.

Meet Drs. Scott and Kelli Fischer

Our family culture is very tight-knit. We've worked together as co-dentists in the same practice for 32 years, and we sat next to each other in dental school, so that was another four years. We're as tight as can be.

We were amassing some money, but as Warren Buffett said, “If you're not making money while you're sleeping, you're in trouble.” And when you think about trying to leave dentistry, get out of the practice, do the math, no matter how much you got, it's not going to last very long. It's changed our mindset completely to figure out what passive income was, and how to do it.

We have one son, Jake, who is 23. He has made an investment already with one of the Trusted Advisors. He's getting that mindset, and that is very rewarding to see him taking charge. I would give anything at 23 years old to be able to have that knowledge.

It's like a weight lifted off your shoulders when you have your path laid out in front of you, and you know everything's going to be okay. That's what freedom means to me.

We have our asset base. Not only is it not shrinking, it's actually still growing. We're Free for Life™, we have all the money that we need. We live on less than the cash flow that's being generated by those investments and living our best life.

Meet Dr. Dennis and Monzell Perry

I was an oral and maxillofacial surgeon by trade. My practice was hospital-based, which is pretty rare in the oral surgery world. I worked in the hospital, so there's constantly something to do between hospital patients and the ER. I was on call 24-7 and at work six days a week. It was grueling and it wasn't getting any easier with age. I started to feel burnt out. I didn't want to keep doing this for the rest of my life, but I didn't know how else to make money.

I heard Dr. David Phelps speak a number of times on some live calls, webinars, and Monzell and I talked about joining but were hesitant. We had a really bad experience elsewhere. We invested a tremendous amount of money, and virtually lost all of it. We attended the Freedom Founders Virtual event in 2020 and agreed if we don't like it, we'll just turn the computer off and walk away. It's no big deal. But by the end of the first day, it was a done deal. We knew this is where we needed to be.

Now we have our asset base. Not only is it not shrinking, it's actually still growing. We are Free for Life™! We have all the money that we need. We live on less than the cash flow that's being generated by those investments and living our best life. The pivot has been 100% traditional to largely alternative investments.

Freedom Founders has changed what we thought was possible. My time with my kids is more valuable. My time with my wife is more valuable. These memories, I'm going to have them forever.

Meet Dr. Brian and Alina Crawford

It was maybe six or seven years ago, where I felt like I was gonna have a nervous breakdown, just trying to go between the offices. You're at that point where you're kind of still doing everything because you're growing. I really just felt the anxiety and the pressure. And that's when it hit me: that I can't keep this up. I can't keep doing this.

I was sacrificing all of my time and joy, just to make money. While I was in dental school, I remember one of my instructors said, “You know, you're never gonna be wealthy being a dentist.” And I was like, “Okay? What do you mean?” And he's like, “It's not the money that you make in dentistry. It's what you do with that money and how you invest it.”

What was funny, is at the time, he was kind of encouraging us to just put all our money in the stock market. I must have just been really horrible at it because I felt like by the end of that five or six years of doing that, I'd had basically what I had put into it. So I realized there had to be something better.

One day, just flipping through a magazine, I saw a Freedom Founder's ad. I talked to Alina, and I said, “You know, if I'm ever gonna really feel comfortable jumping into real estate, we need to learn about it.” That gave me a path. There was a blueprint.

When I found out financially, we could be okay. And I could slow down and not always be busy, and the offices will keep running if I take time off. There was a big difference. I was able to take off an entire week to spend it on a trip with my daughter, and I've never gotten to do that.

Freedom Founders has changed what we thought was possible. My time with my kids is more valuable. My time with my wife is more valuable. These memories, I'm going to have them forever. Free For Life™ means flexibility, it means getting to to do things that I want to do.

Enjoy time now. Enjoy happiness now. True wealth is having that choice to do what you wanna do on your own terms, and Freedom Founders has given us that clarity at an earlier stage in life.

Meet Dr. Jeffrey and Celia Chen

My grandfather was a dentist. My father was a dentist. It's probably in the genes. Naturally, I wanted to be a dentist. If I could just stick with root canals all day, I'd be very happy. But being a small business owner, you're wearing a lot of hats. So over time, it can kind of wear on you. And three and a half years ago, that's when I felt that I was just living the conventional wisdom of trading your working hours for some future date of happiness.
I just wanted something different.

I happened to be on David's podcast and what he spoke about, it strongly impacted me. Of course, like all spouses, I think Celia was skeptical at first, but once we met the community and seeing such a collective group of people with a common belief, the same goals, it really made our decision to join easy.

Family is really important to us. As the kids get older, they're on their path and their journey, and it's a little harder to always get together. We travel a lot to Asia to be with our parents.

I want to spend more time with my parents, and take care of them even though they're so far away.

Since being in Freedom Founders, I've taken more time off work. I did try to attend all the kids' activities [before], but I wasn't mentally present. I was physically there. But in the back of my mind, I was always worrying about, “How can I make this practice run better? How can I grow this practice more?”

If I were to tell my younger self, I think it's important to have a very, very good work life balance. Enjoy time now. Enjoy happiness now. True wealth is having that choice to do what you wanna do on your own terms, and Freedom Founders has given us that clarity at an earlier stage in life. And I think that's one of the legacies that we want to leave behind.

Freedom for us means knowing that we have the option to pivot to do something different if we want to, because we aren't dependent on solely practicing dentistry to make a living.

Meet Drs. Brent and Ally Rickheim

We were both in the Air Force, and we were stationed in Italy. Our first date was a bird festival and a motorcycle ride, and the rest is history. We moved to the States and that's where we had our son. Renting an RV, we headed out to places that we heard might be good places to live. To wrap our trip up, we stopped in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. There was a practice that wasn't even listed yet, but the guy was super kind and he was a prior Air Force veteran as well, and he was ready to make a transition out of private practice. It couldn't have been a better blessing for our transition into civilian life. We'd never thought about running a practice, so it was kind of like a leap of faith.

What drew us into Freedom Founders was way back in the Air Force when I learned about Doctor Phelps and the Freedom Founders community. I loved the message. I followed it for years knowing that this has to be the way eventually.

We had an accountant CPA who said, “You guys are making it, you're on cruise control on the open highway. All you have to do is keep doing that for twenty more years.” We looked at each other after we got off the phone, and we were like, “Cruise control? This is not cruise control. We wake up and fight every single day to keep this car on the road.” We had no exit strategy other than just working away for twenty more years and hoping that we had enough at the end of that to do what we want in retirement.

Freedom for us means knowing that we have the option to pivot to do something different if we want to, because we aren't dependent on solely practicing dentistry to make a living.

It becomes more about the journey and giving part of yourself to others, because we have a tendency to get wrapped up in the destination and not enjoy things along the way.

One of the best parts of the entire Freedom Founders community, is that learning better ways of doing life and passing those pearls on to our kids, so that we can set them up even better than ourselves.

Invest wisely for your future, not the current moment, but for the future, the long term. Most importantly, you only have one life. Enjoy the ride.

Dr. Cindy Rider and Scott Densmore

We met way back in 1983. We dated probably almost halfway through dental school. Became best friends. We had a twenty year gap of really no communication. I reached a point in my life, I needed my best friend, so I reached out to Scott and made a riddle only he would know. And that's how it started back up twenty years later.

All of our kids blended so well. There's six kids between us with seventeen years difference. Our family is called “The Gang,” We've been married now going on seven years.

I had braces and was kind of an ugly duckling back in junior high. I got the braces off, and I wanted to be an orthodontist. I went to dental school, loved it, but found I wanted to be an oral surgeon. I was an associate at two other practices, and I discovered how to run a business and how not to run a business. I came home and started my own company, and I've been in the same spot for about 27 years.

Scott and I would have these discussions. What are we gonna do when we stop working? I saw a Facebook feed from Freedom Founders and it was a survey about retirement. “Do you have enough to retire on?” I had a couple of calls, and David offered for us to come to a Freedom Founders meeting and see what it was about. It literally took one day of hearing different people, seeing different people, listening to different people to decide. And by day two, at lunch. The journey began.

The future for us is being able to enjoy our life journey together, but we also want to enjoy our adult children as they start their own families and discover who they are as people. What's important for us to pass on to our children is the value of money. For your family, for yourself, for your lifestyle, for your children. Also to invest wisely for your future, not the current moment, but for the future, the long term. Most importantly, you only have one life. Enjoy the ride.

Meet Dr. Kevin and Kelli Collins

When COVID struck, my dentistry was shut down and we didn't know what was going to happen. We started thinking, “What's our game plan?”

I reached out and Freedom Founders had a workshop in the SPEAR Study Group in AZ, so I went. At lunch, I looked to my left and there was a guy next to me and I recognized him from one of the videos. I asked, “Are you familiar with Freedom Founders?” And he pulled out of his briefcase a newsletter from Freedom Founders and goes, “I'm one of the original members. And I can go ahead and tell you right now, this is the real deal.”

Kelli was very skeptical. But Freedom Founders has been a great asset for us. I think just the thought that, if I wanted to wake up tomorrow morning and do something different, do nothing at all, that I could do it. And I can go down and it's four other avenues of my life and not be worried about it.

My father, he was a great provider, but he worked really hard, and when he finally retired about a year later he passed. And all the things that he mentioned he wanted to do – he's gonna start playing golf, he's gonna start doing this. He never had the opportunity to do it. So, I think in this group, it gives you the opportunity to carve your own path and not feel like you have to go to the very end, till you're just completely burned out and not be able to enjoy your future.

I was really good at saving money. The cash flow passive income portion of it, I was not very good at understanding what that looked like. It's kind of opened up my eyes on just a whole different world I didn't know existed. I didn't see the bigger picture. It's been a great experience and it's given me clarity on the pathway moving forward.

That's where Freedom Founders has come in. It has gotten us to a point where we don't feel like we have to do this forever.

Drs. Brad and Jennifer Mokris

I was in residency. She was in dental school. We dated for about seven and a half months, got engaged, and we got married a week after graduation. Moved up to South Carolina where we started a family and a practice. We have four children, Avery, Reese, Austin, and Graham. We live a life of organized chaos.

We got a call from her dad saying that her previous orthodontist was looking to sell her practice. It was the same orthodontist that Jen grew up with who treated her when she was in high school. So we just took a leap of faith and did a lot of praying and crying.
And I think a week later we sold the house.
Jen and the kids moved down to Florida without me because I had to keep transitioning my old practice out. It's been really fulfilling for her to have a career that she can be so proud of. But at the same time, the struggle for her is that it does take a lot of time from our kids.
I think that's where Freedom Founders has come in. It has gotten us to a point where we don't feel like we have to do this forever.

Before I even met David, I had been listening to his podcast and was referred to him by a colleague of mine. And I think 2018 or '19, I brought my brother to a Freedom Founders event and just had this great experience of learning and seeing this eye opening world of the mindset that a lot of new members had. I came home and I was like, “Jen, we gotta do this.” And we were just blown away.

It was great for us as a couple because it was the first time we finally got on the same page with our finances. I think success for us was not being forced to go into work every day. Our lives were slowly getting busier and busier outside of our practice, but our practice was still busy. It's still growing and growing. So when we saw this inevitable tunnel of not being able to control our lives, we had to figure out how to separate ourselves from the practice, but also still manage the practice and still build our wealth from that. And Freedom Founders enlightened us.

We've just in the past year been able to start joining different committees, different organizations in our church. Because we can scale back at work, it just allows us a little bit more time to do those things.

We're trying to develop this culture in the family of respect, accountability, and then also building a relationship with your financial world that is necessary to evolve in this world that we live in.

There's five freedoms. And financial freedom is only one of we have a lot of work to do on our other freedoms, and that's what kind of gives us the stepping stone by achieving this financial freedom. So we got a lot of work to do. Our relationships, our families, our faith, we have so many goals and achievements that we still have yet to accomplish. So this is just one stepping stone, but it's an awesome stepping stone. It feels good.

It felt like I had finally found what I was looking for. I love the community… Freedom Founders made me ask myself the question of “What is freedom?”

Meet Dr. Jose and Tanya Garcia

We're a very close knit family. We spend a lot of time together, and we are all about experiences and about trying new things.

Our sisters went to college together. When I first heard about Tanya, I immediately knew she was gonna be a part of my life. I've always been impressed with how she is able to not be influenced. She does what she thinks is right and doesn't deviate from that.

I come from a family of physicians and dentists, so I grew up seeing how wonderful a profession it is. I knew at a pretty early age that I wanted to do it. I had the opportunity to partner with a wonderful doctor, and we did well initially, and then we had the recession in '08, and we struggled massively. I lost a lot of my team members.

First time I heard about Freedom Founders, I was talking to a friend after we were playing tennis. It was literally a five minute conversation, and then I just forgot about it. And then a year or two later, talking to someone else about his investments and he told me about Freedom Founders. From there, I dug into it and it just completely resonated. It felt like I had finally found what I was looking for. I love the community, and I already had a lot of friends in the community and seeing them be successful only motivated me to do the same.

Joining Freedom Founders made me ask myself the question of “What is freedom?” My son is playing on the high school team, and they just asked me to become an assistant coach. I never would have been able to do that had I not known where I stood. And now, that quality time is way more important than any production numbers that I need to achieve.

Tanya has convinced me to join the Peace Corps. There's so many things that we can do when we retire. For me, developing some kind of structure for our kids to learn how to be self sufficient and invest. If you amass a big number and you give it to your kids, what good does that do if they don't know how to sustain it and grow it? Parents don't speak to their kids about finances, how to manage their money. We didn't grow up with that, and I'm really excited to see what our children will do with that information and knowledge early on.
Being Free For Life gives us more flexibility and more security to to decide when we make some big decisions. It's having the freedom of choice.

I was surrounded by like minded people that make a difference in this world, that are passionate about their profession. Our freshman FIT group, we're like a family. You can't buy that. It's an unbelievable group.

Dr. Daniel and Mary Jo Sage

I was going out with some friends, meeting a girl that I just started to date. We're hanging out in a nightclub, and a buddy of mine saw Mary Jo sitting at the bar, and he had said to me, “Why don't you go introduce me to her? So I walked up to the bar, and I said, “This is my friend, Larry.” But next thing you know, Mary Jo and I just started talking, and talking. And I left my friend and the girl thirty feet away. I didn't wanna leave this conversation. I mean, you see her smile. Mary Jo's smile can light up a room.

When I was in my undergrad, I did some volunteer work at a hospital, and I saw the physical therapy department, and I'm like, “Wow, I could do that.” So I waited till I graduated, took my prerequisites, and graduated in ninety six. I worked in skilled nursing, and I did a lot with brain injury, and I loved it. I'm a big believer that the body gets better if you can reach people emotionally, mentally, spiritually. It's the best profession.

And then I just decided two years working in skilled nursing to get my own practice. So I went in on my own small little place. We outgrew that quickly. We just started scaling the business, and over the years, we took it to three clinics. And then I sold in 2019 to a publicly traded company, and I retired this past February.

The first thing that interested me about Freedom Founders was aligning my wife and I on a common path. The other thing was I had sold my company already, so I had a nest egg of money that I watched in the stock market go up and down, up and down, and I had to live on that. It was very unsettling to watch things constantly moving all over the place, so I was interested in finding out more about it. This was an opportunity for us to be aligned and to work together towards, “How do we take our nest egg of money, and how do we do something with it that's gonna make sense?”
Hearing people's experiences in the group really helped to calm any fears Mary Jo had. They take it step by step. They teach you. You learn. From my perspective, I was surrounded by like minded people that make a difference in this world, that are passionate about their profession. Our freshman FIT group, we're like a family. You can't buy that. It's an unbelievable group.
We realized if we want to create something for the future for our family, we have to make some decisions on what's important to us by getting rid of things that we didn't need to have. I don't think would have come to our awareness unless we stepped out of the environment that we were in, and joined a group like Freedom Founders where you can put things in perspective.
This saved our financial future. Success for me looks like finding a purpose in life. And what I mean by purpose is it's something that when you get up every day, you get excited about and you enjoy doing, not necessarily purely for money, and you can make a difference in the lives of yourself and those around you, and you can have freedom to create that and expand that purpose, that to me is success.

Freedom is to truly be present with each other without distraction.

Dr. Peter Yonan and Erin Reilly

Peter and I met each other at a TEDx event at the community college. But we got to know each other much better after that, both sitting on the board of directors for the Boys and Girls Club. It was a long time ago. We'll call it a long courtship, if you will.

We have the best years now. Less work, more play, more travel, more time for family, more time for relationship, more time for community, more time for learning than we've ever had before. We have a lot of things in common. We both have Hawaii roots.

Hawaii is an important part of our life. As a couple, as a family, and individually, we still have family there that we do go and visit often. We have taken multiple trips there and share that time, whether it's jumping off a cliff or going surfing, fishing, the food, all of it. Those pieces are important to all four of us.

It was a slow courtship for a reason, as maybe many dentists, I'm sure people in other professions have come to understand this, where you dedicate too much time to your profession and not spending as much time with family and taking that opportunity to spend more time with my kids and spend more time with Erin and dedicate myself to more that side of life than necessarily professional side of things. I think that was one of the main attractors to me of Freedom Founders.

I do remember the first conversations about Freedom Founders. I enjoy coming to the meetings to learn more about what Freedom Founders was, about who was involved, and what their experiences were. I think my favorite parts of those meetings have been one on one conversations, hearing what people have done, how long they've been in it, what's worked for them, what hasn't. And Peter can have a conversation, and I can have a different conversation, whatever it is. I think that that was beneficial. Since Peter has taken the lead on Freedom Founders, I can see his language change.

Previously, when I owned the practice, it was much more difficult to take time off. One of the things is having a calendar, being able to plan ahead and reserve that important time for ourselves and for our family. You know, I think that's kind of been one of the more empowering things. And you get more time for you too.

My other wife's name is Phil. He's my he's my lifting buddy. It's given me time to get to the gym. You know, it's good to have those other relationships and friends outside of our family that I'm able to dedicate time to as well. Freedom is to truly be present with each other without distraction. And guilt.

I think long term, the next, is on a little island in the Pacific. We don't know which rock it will be yet, but Hawaii to spend more time there again. We both love it and miss it, but we've still got some years ahead of us of school for the kiddos. I think Peter looks forward to doing more dentistry for less fortunate and getting to share the knowledge that he has with others. There's so much there, and when you see and hear him do it, he has so much to give. And I think that there's something there we haven't totally realized yet.

One of the things that I thought was neat about Freedom Founders. It is about the legacy and the next generation.

Drs. Ed and Lisa Wentz

Lisa and I met in school. She was in dental school, and I had just started the orthodontic program, decided to get married, and moved to Lubbock. Neither one of us had been here. Before, didn't even know where it was on the map. We've had our practices together. She's a periodontist. I'm a orthodontist.

It's been just another addition to our lives to be able to share dentistry together and just makes it more fulfilling.

He is a visionary and a leader, and he thinks and dreams big, and I don't. Sky's the limit, so we really complement each other on that. He calls me his dream killer. I kinda say I'm the voice of reason, but without his vision, his orthodontic practice, he dreamt big and did big and was able to take a lot of good people along the way and pour into them and keep his family culture, not just with our family, but with his work family.

I do say dream killer sometimes just to tease Lisa, but at the same time, I'm very thankful for Beck. If she ever says, Hey, that's a good idea. And it's like a match in gas.

It saved us a lot of bad decisions on my part because, you know, a dream without somebody to really put it into action is really just a bunch of hot air, two half woods to do what?

Yeah.

Like a whole bunch of hot air, two half wits to do what?

Yep. Make a whole wit.

So that's what we do.

My dad had a brain stem stroke at sixty five. He was arranged in the army, never drank, never smoked. And at sixty five, he was a quadriplegic mute. When my dad was here, he couldn't talk, but we had a little baseball bat, and he had a light on it, and he could spell.

And so we're sitting there watching a war movie one day, and I said, Dad, you are a leader in the army. What does it mean to be a good leader? And Dad, real quick, didn't have to think about it. He spelled it out, take care of your troops.

And I thought, you know what? That's the best definition I've ever heard. And I feel good about taking care of the troops, and the troops would be my team, associates, my family, and the patients.

We're in transition with Ed's practice. You still got another couple years.

Just celebrated her retirement earlier this year.

Where Where we are now, we're kinda looking back going, gosh, it was so good. Why are we quitting? You know? But in the same instance, there's a necessary ending to everything, and it's just been a blessing.

I've asked this question since I was in my thirties. What are you gonna do when you retire? I've read so many things on retirement, hoping to find out what's after this.

Before I joined, I read about every single book David put out. His book, What's Your Next, was really intriguing to me. I could see and sense David's integrity in what he was doing. In my business, I've always joined study groups or had consultants come in, and I always gained a lot more than I spent. And I've been thankful for the way things have worked out with Freedom Founders as well.

With what has recently happened with Ed's Health, it's been an eye opener because you think you're invincible. I mean, you think you've got all these years, and you just don't know. But we've had a lot of together time the last couple weeks, and it's given us some time to think and talk. I am just thankful for the day.

I can wake up in the morning now that I'm not practicing. I don't have the stress of carrying my phone for post ops and things like that. That has been a big stress relief for me. But But if I get a text in the morning, my daughter needs me to watch Blakely while I take the other one to the doctor, whatever, I've never been able to do that.

My next is more day to day.

A lot of times when you are a future focused person, you're looking three, five, ten years out, and that's one of the things where Lisa's kinda grounded me a little bit more. She lives in the present, and so I'm aiming to do that a little bit more.

Ed's always said, a legacy is what you leave in somebody, not what you leave to them. Throughout this whole process, we've, as a family, created an environment at a ranch that he has where we have a gathering place.

The name of the ranch is the six. We just wanted to put God first and then teaching those lessons to your children and your grandchildren.

It's neat to see how some of the things that we poured into them, how they're already incorporating and taking them on with their families to love and take care of other people.

And that was one of the things that I thought was neat about Freedom Founders. It is about the legacy and the next generation and not to be a cul de sac just to the kids, but to look beyond the kids, to the grandkids and their kids. And I think the six kinda summarized a lot of the things that you guys were doing at Freedom Founders.

My mom passed away before she started having grandkids. So I'm living my dream with all my grandbabies and being able to walk alongside our kids raising their kids. So the mentorship and being able to do that together with them has been very fulfilling for us.

Had I not done the Freedom Founders, I would say life would be a lot more chaotic and a lot more stressful. It's a very real community, one that I feel blessed to be a part of.

Dr. Brad and Sherri Dixon

Sherri and I met at Oxford College, and the only required class is a drown proofing class. And part of the drown proofing class is that you had to be tied up with your arms and feet and survive in the pool.

He kept bumping into me in the pool, and I just thought he was being a jerk.

But it turned out he didn't have his glasses and he couldn't see. That's how we met. We got married the summer after his first year and lived in a little house in Augusta while he finished dental school. One of the things that we've always remembered about the last little bit of dental school was that he passed the boards, graduated from dental school. I was pregnant, had the baby, bought a house, moved to Gainesville in seven days. Then he's in the process of building an office building. So it was sort of a whirlwind.

She had worked in a dental office. She had been an assistant, and then she got her hygiene degree.

Worked as a hygienist, worked as an assistant, worked at the front desk, assistant, front desk, done a little bit of everything.

You know, when we started out, she's the one with the dental experience, so she's the one to thank for where we are.. Our grandkids are probably the biggest things in our life right now. I love taking the kids to the farm, going fishing, or having them feed the cows or ride on the tractor.

You know, that was something that I remember from my dad and that's something that I wanna pass on to them.

Brad and I were raised by very conservative parents. Conservative in values as well as conservative with money. They were super frugal for a long, long time, and then they had some money to spend. What came out of that for us was that we had an appreciation for how hard money was to come by, and we lived very frugally when our children were coming along. And I think that has impressed both of them. Neither of our children have a lot of school debt, and they don't have credit card debt. So that is huge this day and age, I think.

I had some health issues and ended up needing to sell the practice before I was really ready to. But at the time, it turned out to be a blessing because after COVID, we had staffing issues and everything seemed to be more difficult. And with the health issues, it just was time. And my accountant told me that we could not afford a divorce. So, yeah, it's cheaper to sell the practice.

When I sold the practice, I've been working with Scott Manning for several years, and Scott sent a letter of introduction to me and the Freedom Founders Group. It just seemed like this was a good fit. Had I not done the Freedom Founders, I would say life would be a lot more chaotic and a lot more stressful. It's a very real community, one that I feel blessed to be a part of.

Hearing that there were other alternative ways to be more in control was a good thing for me because I knew he was gonna put me on a budget if we didn't have that security.

If she misses a day or two and the Amazon guy doesn't deliver something, he he still comes by to check on her and make sure everything's okay.

I think one of the biggest things that I'm excited about and Brad also is that we have really tried to take hold of our health, get more active, eat better, so that we will be able to have a longer future and do the things that we wanna do. Some of the values that we would like to see our children share are caring about your fellow man, helping where you can.

I think ultimately success is trying to make a difference for people.

One of the things that's been most inspiring lately is seeing how our community has reacted to the hurricane and the devastation that happened in our state and states around us. And to see community coming together to help make a difference in somebody's life like that.

Freedom has been choices and choices that we have available to travel or do something with the grandkids has opened up a world of possibilities for the future.

I just feel much more confident that no matter what happens, we're going to be in a much better place than we would have been before.

Dr. Tina and Marshall Herington Free For Life

So we met in the flying club at Georgia Tech. The whole story was that I was his instructor.

I was working as a flight instructor while I was in dental school.

My first instructor got a corporate job, and so I needed a new instructor. And you were in between classes and was able to pick me up and finish off the flight training.

We've been married for almost thirteen years. Flying is something that to do it safely, you have to treat it like a profession. It's not a hobby.

We have a bit of a saying that we are weird, but we are weird in the same way. So we get each other. We have some very strange conversations about very detailed things that no one else would necessarily understand, but we understand.

She's very driven, very focused.

I can be very focused to a fault sometimes so that I don't always see what's going on around me.

And so if he helps me see the big picture Trying to get you to take your foot off the gas sometimes. I need help with that.

I think what brought me to Freedom Founders was COVID because when the practice was shut down, it made me realize that I had all my eggs in one basket in one practice, in one building in Suwanee, Georgia. And if anything happened to the practice or the building burned down, yes, the insurance would pay to replace the building, but nothing would ever replace the value of the practice. And I realized at that point that I needed to do something different. So I feel much better now that we are more diversified and we have investments in many different things, but I just feel much more confident that no matter what happens, we're going to be in a much better place than we would have been before.

The biggest freedom that it has given us is time and not feeling like the day is quite as compressed. Freedom Founders has unpacked the ends of that so that there's more headroom to be with our kids doing the hobbies that we had to put aside for so long because there simply wasn't time in the day to do it. It's been wonderful.

I think one thing we walked away from our blueprint day with was a commitment to fly more and to fly together more.

And we have done that in the last year since our Blueprint Day. We have flown more hours and more hours together than we have in the last ten years.

Our next is probably right now, and we're in the middle of it while all the boys are growing up and going through school.

We have the opportunity right now to really be with them and help shape them a little bit more intimately.

I hope to pass along the things that we have learned in Freedom Founders to the boys. I want them to learn the things that we now know at an age much younger than when we learn them.

Developing a legacy beyond just the family is still something that we're working on, both within the context of our church, community involvement. There's multiple aviation organizations that we're involved in.

I think for younger dentists, the focus is on buy a practice, start a practice, and grow it, and and that's important.

I wish I had started thinking earlier about how I was going to get out of that. I was just so busy building it and building it and making it bigger and bigger. I had no idea how I was ever going to extract myself from it. So don't wait too long to think about your exit and your next. Doesn't mean you have to do it right away. It's just important to have a plan.

We were just amazed at the quality and caliber of the other members, and they all seemed so dialed in as far as what their plan was and their goals.

Dr. Chris and Natalee Mueller

We met during the fall semester of my freshman year in dental school. I knew she was a good person, but I had no idea what an amazing mother and wife and the kind of home she would make for our children. Those were all just surprises that I got down the road.

Family is one of the top things that we value. We have five children.

Natalie wanted to stop at having four kids and took me a few extra years to convince her to try for one more. She made a deal of it. We tried this. She gets a new car and a kitchen remodel.

The one thing to describe Chris, and everybody knows this, is that he is fun. I think I was looking for somebody that could bring more fun into my life and more adventure.

We've done a couple week long rafting trips on the Colorado. We did a ten day backpacking trip through the Alps.

He's been the best dad. He just plays with the kids, and he keeps us so active.

I bought my first practice eight months out of dental school. And I had the good fortune at the time knowing a dentist who had worked with a practice management company that I ended up signing on, and I'm actually still with them today. One of their key things was take off eight weeks a year. So I've done that since the beginning, and now we're up to much more than that. Those memories from taking that time off when the kids were little, you know, those are invaluable and so much better than having spent that time doing fillings on somebody.

When Chris bought his practice, we had two little babies and she didn't want anything to do with it. But his consultant told me, no. You're gonna do this. You can keep the books. And so I started doing that. You know, I work from home. I've actually really enjoyed it. You know, since I'm detail and number oriented and Chris, not so much that way, we complement each other. It makes me feel like I'm part of the practice. The practice is our practice.

I saw a Facebook ad, I think, for Freedom Founders, and I'm in, like, the last third of my career. Retirement's coming, and I felt good about where we're at, but I just didn't know how does this play out for me. Talked to Natalie about it, and we signed up. Talking people there, we were just amazed at the quality and caliber of the other members, and they all seemed so dialed in as far as what their plan was and their goals and their investments.

What I like about Freedom Founders is how Natalie has taken the brains and run with it and become the one that's driving the Mueller bus as far as the finances go. I just provide the income now to invest at this point. So That's an important part. That's the one thing I appreciate about Freedom Founders is the empowerment it's given to my wife.

The core value we try to bring across to our kids is faith in God and his role in your life and having each of our children know that they are a child of God.

Just having a spirit of gratitude, you know, that we've been pretty blessed and have all these things not because of us, but because God has blessed us in this way. And because of that, we feel like we have a responsibility to do something good with it to make other people's lives better. You might like to do a mission for our church too in the future, you know, find ways to give back to our community. It's just not having those constraints that would stop us from doing those things that we feel like we have a purpose and bring us joy in our life.

For me, I can see the Olympic mountains in Washington from my office. And on a sunny day where I'm tied to the chair, midweek, that's the time you wanna be up there. There's nobody up there. Trails are empty, and I'm stuck in this office. For me, freedom is being able to go wander.

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What if You Could Achieve Financial Freedom in 3-5 Years or Less? You Might Be Closer Than You Think...

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Most Dentists Don’t Have a "Plan B"... Do You?

The Cruelest Fate is to Possess Wealth Without Freedom.

It’s a fate that can be costly…

As my friend Dr. Mike Abernathy says: “Being a solo practitioner dentist past age 50 is a 99% fatal condition.”

The industry is changing (corporate dentistry, managed insurance, etc)
Your retirement “runway” is shortening
Your health is in the balance (decades of leaning over the chair takes its toll)

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