Doing Nothing and Random Acts of Finance

Here's a fitting confession for a fiftieth episode. We recorded forty-nine of them before we bought proper podcast microphones.

It wasn't a hard decision. It was never urgent, and there was always something more pressing. Not deciding was easy.

That's the whole episode in miniature. Most expensive money decisions aren't bad decisions. They come from not deciding.

Limbo land

Scott has a name for it: limbo land. It's where capable, successful people end up with their finances stuck. Nothing is on fire, so nothing moves.

The client we talked about on the show is the textbook case. He had a high-revenue practice and was paying himself well. He had an advisor he'd been with for years, and he had money invested. If we'd never met him, he'd still have been on a decent path. That's exactly why this is easy to miss. Limbo land doesn't look like a problem from the outside.

Underneath, though, there were three things.

A large cash balance had built up in his corporation, and nobody had ever actually decided to leave it there. It had simply collected, year after year.

There were deals he'd said yes to in the moment, a private investment and a property a friend brought him, that he now wished he'd thought through.

And every spring there was a tax bill that felt too big and that he could never quite explain. Much of it traced back to those deals. Pulling a large dividend out of the corporation on short notice has a tax cost, and nobody had planned for it.

Two ditches, one road

That client shows both ways to get this wrong. You can sit still, or you can lurch at something random. Scott calls the second one random acts of finance. It's the move that feels like progress because at least something happened.

They look like opposites. They're the same problem. Both happen when there's no plan underneath.

This is what we most want listeners to take from the episode. A plan isn't mainly a list of things to do. It's what lets you say no. When the deal of the month comes along and everyone you know seems to be in it, the question becomes: does this fit what we're actually trying to do? If it doesn't, you let it go. That's a decision too, and a good one. The difference is that you're measuring it against something.

It isn't a knowledge problem

The chiropractors we work with are not financially illiterate. That's rarely the issue. The issue is too much information and too few decisions.

AI makes this sharper. As Chris put it, you can get AI to give you almost any answer you want. Frame the question your way and keep asking until you hear what you were hoping for. That isn't a flaw in the tool. It's human nature, and the tool just makes it faster. Even when you do land on a sensible answer, a clip in your feed a couple of hours later can reopen the whole thing. One client recently sent us a strategy from Instagram that isn't even possible in Canada.

When everything is up for debate, doing nothing feels like the responsible choice.

The cost you can't see

This is the trap. A bad decision has a date and a number attached. Not deciding has neither. There's no statement showing what the money would have done if it had been working. Year one of waiting costs almost nothing you can feel, which is exactly how year one becomes year five.

On the show we worked through the difference between cash sitting in a corporate account for five years and the same cash invested, and what skipping a single early year of contributions looks like fifteen years later. We'll leave the specific numbers in the episode, where they come with the context they need. The shape is what matters here. Compounding is back-loaded, so the cost of waiting stays invisible until it's large.

"But cash gives me options"

It does, and we'd never argue otherwise. Flexibility and options are the two things we most want for our clients, and cash buys both.

The answer isn't no cash. It's knowing how much is enough, so the rest can go to work. The structure Chris described is simple:

• Know your practice's real monthly operating expenses, and hold several months of them in the operating account.
• Keep a separate reserve for genuine emergencies.
• Set aside several months of your own pay.
• Keep a personal emergency fund as well.

In our client's case we left all of that in place and didn't touch it. There was still a substantial amount above it doing nothing. Once the buffers are properly funded, investing the surplus stops feeling brave. It's just the next step. If revenue dips, the bills and payroll are still covered.

Even the planner needs a planner

Chris admitted the best example of all on the show. He sold a house this year, and the proceeds sat in his account. He thought about what to do with them for weeks before the sale closed and for weeks after. He has the textbooks, the training and access to the same tools everyone else has.

What finally moved him was sitting down with Scott and talking it through. He acted that same week.

We all have blind spots, and we're all emotionally attached to our own money. Doing this for a living doesn't exempt you.

Where to start

Don't try to fix everything at once.

Get organized. Put your net worth, practice cash flow and personal cash flow in one place where you can actually see them.

Write down what you've been putting off. You probably thought of one or two while reading this.

Pick one and take a step. Just one.

Use your team. That might be your planner, your bookkeeper, your CPA or a mentor. Chris needed Scott for this. That isn't a weakness in the system. That's how the system is supposed to work.

The one thing: A plan's real job isn't giving you things to do. It's giving you something to say no to.

Listen to episode 050 of The Chiro Money Show →

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