Your Practice Is Worth Something: Craig Goldslager on Financial Planning for SLPs

Craig Goldslager didn't know what an SLP was before he married one. His wife Lauren was still in grad school when they met, and she promptly introduced him to the profession by laminating a visual schedule and taping it next to their ceiling fan switch. He kept falling asleep on the couch with the fan running. She solved it the SLP way.

That introduction turned into something bigger. Craig is a financial planner who built his entire firm, Utterly Financial, around helping speech-language pathologists make smarter money decisions. He's also the host of the SLP Money Podcast, where he breaks down retirement planning, practice valuation, insurance, and exit strategies for clinicians who never got a single business class in grad school.

On this episode of Clinic Chats, Craig sits down with Kadie to talk about why SLPs need financial education, how to think about the value of your private practice, and the real consequences of not reading the fine print on your insurance.

The $600,000 Referral Nobody Meant to Give Away

Craig tells a story that stopped Kadie mid-sentence. A clinician he met at a conference for private practitioners was 46 years old, running a successful practice in L.A. County. Her husband got a new job in San Francisco. They had to move.

She didn't know she could sell her practice. So she referred out every single client to other clinicians in the area. Free of charge. Because she cared about her families and wanted them taken care of.

Craig ran the numbers using valuation software. That practice was worth approximately $600,000.

"That's become my mission now," Craig says, "to share with every private practice clinician that your business is worth something." Research backs him up: 60% of business owners believe the sale of their business will generate 60 to 100% of their retirement income. But you can't monetize something you don't know has value.

Why Nobody Teaches SLPs About Money

Craig points to a stat that makes him cringe: for every $25 the financial services industry spends on consumer marketing, only $1 goes to financial education. The gap is by design. And it hits speech therapists especially hard because grad school doesn't include business or personal finance coursework. You earn your C's, you learn to treat, and you're on your own for the rest of it.

That's what pushed Craig to start speaking at universities, then at national conferences, then to launch the podcast. He kept hearing the same questions from his wife's peers. How do I pick health insurance? What's a 401k versus a 403b? Should I be an independent contractor or a W-2 employee? What even is a group benefit?

"A lot of people think about products first," Craig explains. "They save into a 401k because that's what their employer offers. But they need to think about strategies first. What's the goal? Then pick the product that serves the goal."

Begin With the End in Mind

Craig borrows from Stephen Covey's first habit: begin with the end in mind. Whether you plan to run your practice for 10 years or 30, you need an exit strategy. Not because you're leaving tomorrow, but because the decisions you make today, how you structure your finances, what insurance you carry, how you save, all of it compounds toward that exit.

His firm, Utterly Financial, built their onboarding process to mirror how SLPs work with new clients. There's a free consultation. Then a financial assessment, just like a clinical evaluation. They look at your financial history, identify strengths, flag threats, and present opportunities. Some people take the action list and run with it on their own. Others stay on as ongoing clients.

The approach scales. Craig works with solo practitioners who just need a few answers, all the way up to multidisciplinary clinics with dozens of employees and multiple locations. "We don't think it's one size fits all," he says. "There's private practice owners of all sizes, from solopreneurs up to partnerships and hundreds of employees."

The 26-Year-Old Who Picked the Wrong Insurance

Craig closes with a story that drives his work. His wife's coworker, a 26-year-old SLP, signed up for her group benefits the way most people do. She checked a few boxes, picked the cheapest health insurance option, and moved on.

Then she was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer. Her chemo treatments weren't covered.

"She's 26. You're invincible. Nothing bad can happen to 26-year-olds," Craig says. She's okay now, physically. But the financial fallout of one unchecked box was devastating.

Craig uses the analogy of flood insurance in South Florida, where he lives. You can't call your agent the day a Category 5 hurricane enters the cone and ask to add coverage. The same logic applies to health insurance, disability insurance, and every other policy clinicians sign without reading the fine print.

"Most people won't necessarily come out and say, 'Will you review our insurance policies?'" Craig explains. "But we'll probe. We'll ask what you've signed up for, what you have. Will you send us copies so we can review?"

Find Your Niche, Then Go Deep

Craig draws a direct line between clinical specialization and financial success. The most successful clinicians he meets are the ones who've found their niche, whether it's dysphagia, AAC, or pediatric feeding. They go narrow and deep, and when someone needs that specialty, they're the obvious choice.

He did the same thing. He started as a generalist financial planner working across industries. Then he met Lauren, started helping her peers, spoke at a university, then a national conference. The speech therapy niche found him organically. "I was working with people across all different occupations," he says. "And then this just sort of happened."

His advice for clinicians still figuring out their path: it might take years. That's fine. But the practitioners who find their thing and own it are the ones who build something lasting.

Your practice is worth more than you think, and the financial decisions you make today shape your options tomorrow. ClinicNote is a HIPAA-compliant EMR built for private practices and university clinics, handling documentation, scheduling, and billing in one place so you can focus on growing a business that's actually worth something when it's time to step away. See how ClinicNote works.

Transcript

Kadie: You are listening to Clinic Chats, the speech therapist's private practice podcast. A podcast full of personal journeys where we not only talk about success stories, but also real life struggles of small business startups. Clinic Chats is sponsored by ClinicNote, a HIPAA compliant, cloud-based EMR platform used specifically by private practice owners and university clinics. I'm your host, Kadie Jackstat, and thank you for joining me today.

Kadie: Today I'd like to welcome Craig Goldslager to our show. We have quite a unique episode coming today. Hi Craig, how are you?

Craig: Hi Kadie, I'm great. Thanks so much for having me.

Kadie: So today Craig and I are going to dive deep into his specific business and specialty in the podcast and finance world for SLPs. Craig, I know you wanted to first give a little bit of info.

Craig: Yes. Just before we begin, I just wanted to make one statement saying that everything I share with Kadie today is for general and educational informational purposes only. I do not rely on anything that I say for making decisions specific to your situation. Again, it's just for general informational purposes only and should not be construed as tax, legal, and or investment advice. So with that out of the way, let's get to it.

Kadie: Let's get to it. Thank you for that disclaimer. So Craig is actually the host and founder of the SLP Money Podcast. Craig, I cannot wait to hear about your specific business and how you got started in SLP niche and finances for them.

Craig: Sure. So SLP Money is a podcast that I host and it was a derivation from the financial planning firm that I created called Utterly Financial and our mission is to help SLPs achieve the retirement that they desire. So we receive a lot of common questions, concerns from both clients as well as SLPs as I meet them around the country. I used to travel a lot more, but in the coronavirus world, now we meet through webinars or Zoom meetings, but a lot of common questions and concerns.

Craig: And so one of the reasons why we started the podcast is because as someone who works in the financial services industry, I know that there is a lack of financial education provided to a lot of professions, SLPs specifically. And so we wanted to help change that and that's one of the foundational principles actually of our planning firm that one of our pillars is to provide education, financial education to SLPs and private practice owners to allow them to make better, more informed financial decisions.

Kadie: Yes. Well, I'm excited to really dive into this because before beginning with ClinicNote, I was an SLP. I started in schools coming out of grad school hearing, you're going to make $80,000 and I'm just being totally transparent. I would say half that would have gotten me pretty darn lucky coming out of school. So I can't wait to hear a little bit more about what you offer SLPs who then take those financial constraints into their own business, which adds even more pressure. So why SLP? You have to have a connection to an SLP.

Craig: I do. I am married to one. Hi, Lauren, if you're listening. Sometimes she listens to these, sometimes she doesn't. But I am married to one and prior to meeting my wife, I did not even know what an SLP was.

Craig: And I often share a story that I was thrown into being a spouse of an SLP very quickly. My wife used me as a guinea pig, if you will, while she was still in grad school actually. I have the problem of frequently falling asleep on our couch in the living room, leaving the ceiling fan on all the time.

Kadie: Okay.

Craig: So Lauren says to me, if you continue to do this, I'm going to make you a visual schedule so you learn the habit and no longer do this. And I'm like, okay, whatever a visual schedule is. And so I kept leaving the fan on. So she came home one day with a laminated visual schedule, placed it right next to the fan switch and said to me, look, every time you get up from the couch, you take the fan from the on button, switch it to the off button and turn the switch off.

Craig: So I got thrown into the fire of visual schedules pretty quickly. And I actually don't use visual schedules in my business, but I know SLPs are big fans of checklists, flow charts. And so that's a really important thing that we do with our practice is give out checklists, flow charts, and just try and make the complex financial world a little bit simpler.

Kadie: Yes. So your experience from school was largely in finance and then did you just merge those, your and your wife's knowledge base, and become a specialty finance company for SLPs?

Craig: Somewhat. If you liken it to a traditional SLP, a lot of SLPs will be generalists, right? Maybe they work in the schools or they work in a hospital setting, but they're not really sure if they want to have a niche in a specific disorder that they treat. So I was the same way. I worked with people across all different occupations.

Craig: And over time, once I met my wife and then I started helping some of her peers out as they were making decisions about, well, should I go work for a certain type of employer? And then they needed help navigating the complex world of group benefits, picking out different types of insurances, saving for retirement into different types of accounts. And I kept getting common questions after questions after questions.

Craig: And so I started speaking at a few local universities where we live, just financial planning 101, if you will, for speech pathologists. And then I actually had the opportunity to speak at a national conference for private practitioners. And that's where this whole idea went to another level because I met so many wonderful clinicians at this conference that I spoke at.

Craig: And a lot of times people ask, what's your why? Why did you get into business and what's it for? So if I can share a quick story. At this conference, I gave a presentation called "Leaving Your Private Practice Is Inevitable," meaning every business owner, myself included, will have to leave their business at some point. Either voluntarily or involuntarily.

Craig: So I gave the presentation about that topic. And then afterwards, I got a wonderful reception from the audience. And one clinician came up to me after the conference and said, Craig, can we chat for a few minutes? I said, of course.

Craig: And so she pulls me aside. This was a few years ago. But at the time, she was 46 and she lived in Southern California, L.A. County, and told me that prior to my speech, she didn't even know that she could sell or monetize her business. She didn't know that was a possibility.

Craig: So what she did was, we all know SLPs are very good hearted, well-natured, really caring, want all of their clients to be super successful, usually put themselves last. And so what happened with this clinician was, she lived in L.A. County, her husband received a new job in San Francisco, so they had to move. And since she didn't know that she could sell her business, she told me that she referred out all of her clients to other clinicians in the area because she cared so much about her clients.

Kadie: Yeah, that's what I did. I was small. But here, here, take 20 new clients. Congrats.

Craig: Exactly. You've got your caseload to be taken care of. You've made connections with these clients. And so again, she didn't know that she could monetize and actually get value from selling her practice. So she had asked, we have software that we can use to value the price of a private practice, determine the valuation. And she asked if she could send me some financials just so she could have an idea of what she referred out. So we used her information and she ended up referring out a private practice that was valued at approximately $600,000.

Kadie: Oh, jeez.

Craig: Right. So that's become my mission now, to share with every private practice clinician that your business is worth something, might be worth less than that, might be worth more than that. But the fact that you are building a business, there's a lot of research that's been done, some surveys, and it turns out that 60% of business owners believe that the sale of their business will actually generate 60 to 100% of their retirement income.

Craig: So this clinician was no different. She just didn't even know that she could monetize her business. And so the core foundation of our company is to make sure that, back to the education, that sometimes people get so bogged down by details and minutia, I think it's important to take a step back and realize that as private practice owners, your business is worth something and you need to come up with some type of strategy or exit plan in order to monetize the company.

Kadie: So is that your primary focus, would you say, monetizing for the end, whenever that may be, or are there other aspects as well?

Craig: Yeah, there's a lot of other aspects. So I like to read a lot of books. One of my favorites is The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. Have you read that one?

Kadie: I have not. I'll take that recommendation.

Craig: Yeah. So it's really good. And the first habit, the most important one, is to begin with the end in mind. So a lot of clinicians want to be private practice owners for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, however long they want to stay in business, but you have to have that end goal in mind. Just to know that that's a possibility, but that's many years, if not decades down the road. So there's many steps to take from the beginning to the end, but it's important to have that visualization and know what your overall goal is at the end.

Kadie: Absolutely. Yeah. And I'm so happy that you are here to explain some of that because there's some shame, I think, that I feel as an SLP that I'm sure others might too, that of course we are so passionate about treating patients and being that hand for a family. But yet at the end of the day, I would say for the majority of us, finances are still important. I've had the pleasure of speaking to some people who are like, oh, I just start my business and it's okay if I take it slow and it might not be this big financial burden, which is great. But also I think for the large majority of us, we have to admit that yes, we love our families and we love the clients, but money does matter.

Craig: Absolutely. And just another thing that I've realized is one of the reasons why I started speaking at local universities was I know that very few clinicians take business classes, take personal finance classes. It's just not part of the curriculum when you earn your C's. And another stat for you, being in financial services, this was one that makes me cringe, is that for every $25 spent by the financial services industry on consumer marketing, only $1 is spent on financial education.

Kadie: Wow.

Craig: Right. So if you've wondered, well, how come I see all these commercials on TV or all these advertisements in magazines, but nobody's teaching me anything or teaching me classes about it, well, that's just proof in the pudding. It's kind of by design that way.

Kadie: So when an SLP finds you, or I guess, how do they find you as far as for a finance consultant?

Craig: Great question. So we have our website, utterlyfinancial.com, but we are heavily involved with a lot of industry associations. I think our number one way to communicate with SLPs around the country is through some of our public speaking efforts. So for instance, unfortunately, ASHA 2020 has been canceled, but we were going to give three presentations at that conference this year. Last year, we were in Orlando at ASHA 2019.

Craig: We were actually scheduled also to speak at a few statewide ASHA associations. And so we really try and get our message out through public speaking, as well as through the podcast that you mentioned and just industry associations. Like I mentioned earlier, one for private practitioners. The conference that I spoke at is one called APSPA, which is for the private practitioners in speech pathology. And it's just an industry association for a private practice owner who wants to grow their business, continue with success and growing the business into what they want.

Craig: So we look for opportunities to get in front of people and then they can read more about the specifics on our website.

Kadie: So we talked about exit planning, which is just one component. But at the same point, we also try and educate the younger clinicians, those who are just entering CFY or maybe recently completed CFY by partnering with institutions around the country and just educating on some of those one-on-one questions.

Craig: Like I said, back when I started this project with my wife, answering questions about group benefits and how to differentiate the offers between one clinic versus a hospital setting versus a private practice.

Kadie: Absolutely. And how long has Utterly Financial been in business?

Craig: Yeah, so Utterly Financial started about two years ago now, back towards the end of 2018. But I've been in the industry for much longer than that. But like I said, it's amazing the power of working with a niche.

Craig: And as I meet more practitioners, some of the most successful practitioners I know are ones who focus on a specific disorder, right? Because you name the disorder, whether it's dysphagia, using AAC devices, you can go so narrow and so specific that when people have that need, you're going to be the one that they come to.

Craig: So I have to make the analogy to any other profession. Let's pick doctors. If I have heart palpitations and I need to go see a cardiologist, I don't really care where that cardiologist lives. I'm going to go find the best one because I want the best care for me. Especially with today's world and people becoming much more acclimated to working through teleconferencing. If prior to that world, if that cardiologist lived in New York, I'd hop on a plane and go to New York or California because you want to meet with people who are experts in their specific field.

Craig: And I think a lot of clinicians, especially when they're starting out or starting a private practice, may not know what that niche is. And it's important to figure out what you like doing and who you like serving and what setting you like serving. But those clinicians who I find to be most successful find that path and maybe it takes years or even decades to figure out what that is.

Craig: But the same thing happened for me. I was working in financial services, working with people across all different occupations, all different industries. And then this just sort of organically happened by asking to speak at a local university and then speaking at conferences. And people had follow up questions and we set up some time and here we are.

Kadie: That's awesome. And does your wife have a private practice or did the knowledge of an SLP just kind of lead you here even without a private practice business?

Craig: A little of both. One of the interesting things about personal finance is navigating the world of benefits. My wife started out as a W-2 employee. Then she went to be an independent contractor, a 1099. Then she had a private practice for a little bit. But then in between pregnancies, we have two children, we wanted her to go back on group benefits so she could receive some benefits while she was pregnant.

Craig: There's a lot of factors and a lot of decision making that goes in. It's not really set it and forget it type of strategies. I think benefits should be reviewed annually. I think all financial decisions need to be reviewed frequently because things change. Tax laws change. Investment options change. And when you factor that into a marriage or a family with children, those financial decisions become increasingly complex because there's so many other participants to include in the decisions.

Kadie: That's right. Yep. Well, thank you for making me feel less guilty about job hopping in the same exact manner.

Craig: But that's exactly it. And that's what makes it so unique in that there's no right answer. There's no path. A lot of times people think that either saving for retirement or some financial goal is all a linear growth, right, it's just that straight arrow just pointing to the top right of a graph, straight line. But we know it never looks like that. There's a lot of waves. There's a lot of bumps. There's ups, there's downs.

Craig: And I used to have to spend a lot more time with that concept. But now I just have to say coronavirus and everyone understands that all these different threats and different things can happen in life. And there's no way to avoid certain threats from happening. But SLPs can certainly mitigate the consequences of threats by being prepared.

Kadie: Exactly. So the steps would be someone comes to you, they're seeking advice for their retirement or whatever financial planning, and then you personally make a plan. Are there other people with you?

Craig: Yeah. So we have a few members on our team. I serve as the lead advisor as well. So we have everyone come through our company through our plan of care process. So we start out, we built the process just like SLPs meet new clients. We offer everyone a free consultation to come and just learn more about us. And we learn more about you, whether you're an employee of someone else or you own your own practice. And we just really determine to see if it's a good fit.

Craig: Sometimes, even though we work with SLPs, maybe people have an advisor already or they have a team in place and they just have a few questions that they want answered. So we're happy to do that.

Craig: But what we do in our next step of our process is we give everyone a financial assessment, just like when a new client walks into a clinic, you need to perform an assessment to evaluate the disorders or see where opportunities exist or what kind of treatments should be provided. So we do the same thing. We go a little bit deeper. We learn about your financial history, some decisions that you've made in the past, questions or concerns that you have.

Craig: And then what we do is we take the assessment away. And my back office team will review the assessment. And then we'd get together for a second meeting to perform an evaluation and share strengths that we see, opportunities that exist, or perhaps even threats to you or your family or your business.

Craig: And at that point, we'd ask if you'd like to continue the relationship and enter into a planning agreement. And sometimes people say no, thank you for the help and thank you for the action list. We'll go ahead and implement it ourselves. But then we also go through the route of providing additional assistance and onboarding you as a client if you want to continue the partnership and the relationship.

Kadie: And I'm just envisioning the several different sizes of practices. So are there different options for a practice or different pricing as well for a super large practice versus like a sole proprietor who just needs a little help getting started in that retirement plan?

Craig: Yeah, so we think that every practice has similar challenges, but at the same time, they're all different, which is kind of like what you're saying. And so we do offer three different ways to work with our team. For some people, it's like what you said, maybe they're just starting out and they have a few questions and they just want to have access to a resource where they can get more information. So we're happy to do that.

Craig: Sometimes we have several clients that are multidisciplinary clinics with multiple locations and dozens of contractors and dozens of employees. So there's a lot more depth to those conversations. That's a separate entity, but that's what we help determine. And it really depends on how much the client is looking for out of the relationship also.

Craig: If they're just looking for a few check-ins or they just want some guidance, or maybe they want to implement some type of insurance or start saving into a retirement plan or some other savings vehicle, we're happy to set that up. There's a lot of different routes. And that's what we learn in our plan of care process, because we don't think it is one size fits all. As you mentioned, there's SLP private practices of all sizes, whether it's a solopreneur and it's just one caseload and one person managing her practice, up to partnerships and hundreds of employees. So there's a full scope of practices.

Kadie: Right, and I think for me personally, I'm just at the point where, of course I've always known how important saving was and retirement was, but before you start a family and have kids, like you said, it's just like this cliche thing that you hear you're supposed to do, but now it's real. And so I do want to encourage everyone, have a plan. And of course, once again, I sound cliche, but I think it is important and it becomes more evident as you kind of get to that point.

Craig: Oh, absolutely. I also think, just to liken it to speech pathology, most people don't wake up one day and notice an issue. A lot of times when you're dealing with things that are intangible, you don't just wake up one day. There's some event that caused them to seek help from an SLP or seek help from a financial planner.

Craig: It's not really something that's usually at the top of people's minds. And so that's why we try and do a lot of proactive outreach, whether it's through some of these educational events that we host or information sessions, because there's a lot of trigger events in life. Whether it's a childbirth or a death in the family or a wedding, there's all these different milestones and life events that is usually the trigger event for people wanting to take action.

Craig: But as I mentioned earlier, sometimes things you can't plan for. And so you have to take the necessary steps prior to a life event happening. Where if it's a negative consequence on the family, I always joke that the only time anybody ever wants to talk about insurance is usually after an event happens and they're either no longer insurable or they can't get the insurance that they want.

Kadie: Yep.

Craig: Right, because I live in South Florida, like hurricane hot zone. And so one of the things that people always deal with down here is flood insurance. So I always make the analogy for that because I can't call my homeowner's insurance agent the day that we get thrown into the hurricane cone, right? Category five hurricane storm coming right at my house, which for the last three years, we've been in the cone for a category five storm. I can't pick up the phone and call her and say, I just want to add that flood insurance now because I see that we're in the zone.

Kadie: Exactly, she'll do what you just did to me. She'll laugh me off the phone.

Craig: Yeah. So you never know when things will happen. And that's what I mentioned earlier is that all these different threats and things can happen to us during the course of life. So it's always important to know what you have and make sure that you're adequately eliminating those consequences of the threats that exist.

Kadie: Right, and so through the business growing, you have since started the SLP Money podcast. Tell me a little bit about the SLP Money podcast.

Craig: Sure, so some of these things that we're talking about today, Kadie, are just things that we go into much more depth about and much more detail because every financial planning topic can deserve its own 30 minutes to 60 minutes conversation. So we're going pretty deep into some of these topics that we're talking about.

Craig: I mentioned earlier about the clinician who didn't even know she could sell her business. So my first episode was actually just me giving the presentation, "Leaving Your Private Practice Is Inevitable." So if a private practice owner is listening to this podcast, you can listen to that instead of having to travel and go to an industry conference. You can listen to the same presentation that I gave.

Craig: So we go deep on that. I mentioned that another clinician didn't know how to value her private practice. So I brought on a guest valuation expert and we talked about how private practice owners can value their businesses. And then we talked about for younger clinicians, just getting started on the right foot and different types of savings accounts or ways to save.

Craig: And I think what happens with a lot of people in financial services, and we address this on the show, is people think about products first, whether it's saving into a 401k or a 403b for retirement. And I think a lot of people have that backwards. They need to think about the strategies that they want to implement first. So that's the planning that we do. You have the goal of saving for retirement, but most people only save into a product like a 401k because that's what their employer offers them or that's what they know.

Craig: But there's a lot of other products. There's a lot of other ways to save maybe for retirement or other financial goals like a house, vacation house, children's education. So there's different products to help implement the strategy or whatever goal you're trying to accomplish. So we break all that down a little bit further.

Kadie: Perfect. And I know that you also had the ClinicNote CEO, Lana Fox, on the podcast. So hopefully that will be out as a resource soon as well regarding using ClinicNote as an additional financial investment for private practice owners.

Craig: Yeah, I'm so happy. And we had such a great conversation. As important as it is for every SLP or private practitioner to use an EMR, it's really important to learn. So Lana and I ended up talking a lot more about being an entrepreneur and the things that it takes to be a successful business owner.

Craig: If you work in a small private practice or a small group, you're almost an entrepreneur yourself because you're going to have to wear many hats, you're going to have to do a lot of different responsibilities maybe in addition to clinic work. So we talk about a lot of strategies and that's some of the other conversations that we've had with guests as well.

Craig: Just the benefits of joining industry associations, joining other communities. There's so many resources online for SLPs to join whether it's online communities or social media groups. Just chatting with like-minded individuals where they've gone through it before and they can save you hours upon hours of Google searching or going down rabbit holes that you're trying to solve these problems yourself. I'm sure you've done that.

Kadie: I've done that. Yeah, that's the reason why I'm here today doing the Clinic Chats podcast. I spent so many hours on Google until I finally found colleagues who I could work together with and it's so helpful. So hopefully we can do that for others as well.

Craig: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's part of it. The SLP community is incredible and that's another reason why I've dedicated my career to working with SLPs. It's such a welcoming community and as long as you provide value, every SLP I've ever met has really consumed everything that I've provided with such tremendous resolve and gratitude and it just makes me inspired to help more and more.

Craig: Through the podcast, we have some long form blog articles that we've written on our website. So perhaps you like reading as opposed to listening. We have all this information over at our learning center on utterlyfinancial.com. But in 2020, I believe that all the information is out there. You can go down rabbit holes, you can go down Google searches, you can try and locate all this information yourself.

Craig: We've produced content. I know there's many other SLPs who provide similar information, whether it's specific to services you might provide or treatment techniques up to student loan repayment strategies. You can really find the answer to a lot of questions that you have. It's just so many resources available.

Kadie: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much. This has been so enlightening and I'm excited to get to share this episode and the resources that you've shared. Are there any other send-off resources or comments that you'd like to add?

Craig: I would just say, if people would like more information about our team, you can head over to utterlyfinancial.com. Again, there's the learning center where you can see some of these long form blog articles. We have every episode from our podcast up there as well. If you like podcasts, you can download our podcast, SLP Money.

Craig: And again, if you're interested, browse through our website. We break our firm into six different services that we offer for clinicians because we really find that there's six key areas of financial wellness that every SLP should have. Three if you work for an employer, but there's six if you're a private practice owner.

Craig: Some will not be applicable if you're not a business owner, but common ones that we think everyone has to deal with include optimizing insurance, like the flood insurance example that I talked about earlier. We don't sell flood insurance, but we'll always look at auto insurance, homeowners insurance, because a lot of times clinicians will not read the fine print of some of these contracts.

Craig: Especially if you're an employee for someone, you check some boxes, you just ask your fellow clinician what she chose on her benefits. So we think insurance is important, building your nest egg, just different investment strategies, how to save, different types of accounts, saving for retirement. And so all these things are really important.

Craig: And can I share one more story before we go?

Kadie: Please do.

Craig: So this was another reason why I decided to focus on SLPs. I mentioned my wife earlier. She worked primarily in the schools. She likes working with peds. And at one of her first schools, she worked with another SLP who, just like most SLPs, signed up for her group benefits, checked some boxes, picked a health insurance plan, disability plan, other insurances, started saving money to the 401k, et cetera. And you just check the box. You don't really realize what you're picking.

Craig: And so what happened was she started not to feel well one day. And long story short, as a 26-year-old, she ended up being diagnosed with stage three breast cancer. And would you believe it, that the health insurance choice that she picked, her chemo treatments were not covered by the insurance.

Craig: So she, like most people, chose a very inexpensive option. The premium out of pocket was very low, but she didn't realize what the consequences of picking such an inexpensive health insurance choice was because she's 26. And who would have thought? You're 26. You're invincible. Nothing bad can happen to 26-year-olds.

Craig: And so fortunately, she's okay. She's well now. But I always use that as a story because physically she's fine, but it can be emotionally devastating and crippling to a family because of one unforeseen event.

Craig: So knowing every time you sign up for an insurance contract for anything, auto insurance, homeowners, anytime you sign a contract, most people don't read the one to 200 page prospectus or contract that comes with that insurance policy. So you really need to know the fine print. You need to know what you're signing when you sign up for these things.

Craig: So again, that's some services that we can provide. And that's all part of our plan of care process that we offer to take everyone through because most people won't necessarily come out and say, will you review our insurance policies, but we'll probe and we'll ask some questions about what have you signed up for? What do you have? Will you be willing to send us some copies so we can review it to really analyze and see what you have?

Kadie: Oh my gosh. Yes. That would be so helpful.

Craig: Yeah. And just making sure, because I can't tell you how many times I've heard stories. And like I said, it's a free process. If people want to reach out, we're happy to help where we can, if you just have a few questions. And if not, we know that everyone has to make these decisions at some point. So that's why we put up the free resources where people who are do-it-yourselfers and they want to implement their own solutions, then we just hope that they make educated decisions when they make them.

Kadie: Awesome. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate you bringing these resources over to the Clinic Chats podcast and thanks for spending some of your day here chatting.

Craig: Oh, it was my pleasure. And thank you so much for having me.

Kadie: Thank you for joining me and listening to Clinic Chats, the speech therapist's private practice podcast. If you have a moment, please leave a five-star review for Clinic Chats to help other SLPs find our podcast. If you'd like to share your own personal journey through private practice, please email me at kadie at clinicnote.com. That's K-A-I-D-E at clinicnote.com.