Can Chiropractors DIY Their Financial Plan?

Let's start with the part people expect us to argue with, because we don't.

You can absolutely manage your own investments. A low-cost, globally diversified, index-based portfolio is a sensible way to invest. It's close to what we use with our own clients. The tools are better than they've ever been. A single all-in-one fund now does what used to take four or five separate holdings and a spreadsheet.

Investing, as a problem, has largely been solved.

The DIY movement also earned its place. For decades a lot of Canadians paid high fees for actively managed funds that trailed their benchmarks, often without knowing what they were paying. Plenty of people looked at that and reasonably concluded they could do better on their own. Many of them did.

So this isn't a case against DIY investing. It's a case that DIY investing and DIY financial planning are two different things. For an incorporated chiropractor, the gap between them is where most of the money is made or lost.

Investing is one-sixth of the plan

FP Canada breaks financial planning into six areas: financial management (your cash flow), investment planning, insurance and risk, retirement planning, tax planning and estate planning.

Investing is one of the six. If you've nailed your portfolio, you've done one-sixth of the job well.

For someone with one employer and a T4, the other five are fairly simple. For a practice owner with a professional corporation, they aren't. You're deciding how to pay yourself, how much to leave in the corporation and what to do with it, how that interacts with CPP and RRSP room, what insurance the corporation should own, and how all of it lands at retirement or a practice sale. Each of those is its own decision, and they affect one another.

Dan Bortolotti, the Canadian Couch Potato, arguably wrote the playbook for DIY investing in this country. He has been clear that the hard part isn't picking the investments. It's building the plan and then implementing it.

Where the value actually is

Chris put it about as directly as it can be put. The value of good advice is not in the portfolio. Almost everyone's portfolio should look roughly the same. The investment side of the value is keeping someone invested in that portfolio when it drops sharply and every instinct says to sell.

The rest of the value is in the other five areas, and a single decision there can matter a lot. Chris described a common case: a practice owner who has paid themselves only dividends for a decade. They've made no CPP contributions, built no RRSP room, and have everything sitting in the corporation. Rework that compensation strategy and, over a twenty-year horizon, the difference to their net worth can be substantial. That's one decision, made once and revisited as things change.

That's what the fee-comparison charts leave out. They project an advisor's fee forward thirty years at a smooth average return and show you what you'd have saved. Real life doesn't compound smoothly. Markets fall, businesses change, families change and tax rules change. Advice earns its cost in how well you get through those points.

Scott shared a line he'd come across from another advisor that sums it up. Financial outcomes depend less on any single decision than on the quality, sequencing and coordination of decisions over time.

What about an advice-only planner?

If you want to keep managing your own investments but know you need a plan, an advice-only planner is a real option, and a good one. You pay a transparent fee for a full plan. The planner has no incentive to take over your portfolio, which removes one of the bigger conflicts in this industry.

The trade-off is that many advice-only planners work on a one-time basis. You get a snapshot: recommendations based on your life as it is today. A year later your practice has grown, you've had a child or bought a building, and the snapshot is out of date. You can buy another one. What you usually don't get is someone walking through implementation with you and adjusting as you go.

And AI?

Scott tested one of the new AI financial planning tools, the kind where you enter your balance sheet and goals and get back a plan. The result was underwhelming. It produced projections, but nothing suggested it understood who he was or what he actually wanted.

Two bigger problems stand out, at least for now.

First, AI tends to agree with you. Frame the question a certain way and you'll get the answer you were hoping for. If you aren't a professional, you also won't catch it when the plan is wrong about salary versus dividends, CPP or the corporate layer.

Second, even a perfect plan has to be implemented. Anyone who has done this with clients knows implementation is where the friction lives. There are forms, accounts, sequencing, follow-ups, and the decision you keep putting off. A document doesn't do that work for you.

AI is making our work better, and it's changing quickly. What we'd say today may not hold a year from now. But a better tool isn't the same thing as someone in your corner.

Who genuinely can go it alone

There is a profile where DIY planning works:

• One source of income, all T4, no corporation
• No complicated dependants or special circumstances
• A long time horizon
• A real interest in personal finance: you read the books, you do the research
• Enough self-knowledge to trust yourself not to sell in a panic

If that's you, keep going. Just watch for the point where it stops being you. That's usually incorporating, a spouse and kids, a practice, or a situation where the decisions start depending on each other. That's the moment to bring in advice. It doesn't have to mean handing over your portfolio.

For most chiropractors listening, the corporation is where that point arrives.

The one thing: Buying the index fund was never the hard part. Building the plan around it and sticking to it is.

Listen to episode 047 of The Chiro Money Show →

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