Keep it reasonably at arm’s length. If it’s a bad month, you don’t drop the rent that month. You want to keep it pretty consistent so that there is no blending of the two in case somebody wants to try to pierce that thing.

My point is that you can certainly have a market-based rent and make sure that it maintains your cashflow and all that in a pretty certain manner, especially if you have other tenants that are in and out of that space. If you have a business, you’re reading and you rent now, certainly consider with Tom is talking about, which is looking at, “Can I own this on this real estate and use that rent that you’re already paying to go out and do that?” It’s interesting because that sounds a lot like Rich Dad Poor Dad like Robert talks about. How did you meet Robert Kiyosaki and tell us a little bit about that story and some of the partnerships that you’ve had since then?

This was back in the day when I was reading everything I could get my hands on and that’s the story goes, my family was out of town and I was out running errands. My truck was dirty. I took it to the carwash. I dumped off my car, walked inside, went to the counter to pay my bill, and off to the left and in the back was this handwritten sign that said books for sale and a pile of these purple books. As I said, I was reading everything at the time, a lot of personal development and real estate and anything that had to do with money, mind, and things like that. It said, “Rich something.” I said, “What are you selling? Let me see that.” It said Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not. I thought that was a bit of a cocky statement. If anybody can put that on his book that has had something to say to me, I said, “Put it on my bill.”

I went home and did a bunch of other things. I tossed that book on my desk in my office. I finally was going to bed at about 11:30 that night and I walked past my office. I saw this book that I hadn’t even opened and I flipped the first page and then read a little bit. I enjoyed what I was reading. I read a few more. I leaned against the desk and read some more. I sat down to read maybe a chapter and to see what I was going to read one day, and about four hours later, I was finished with the book.

It caught my attention and caught my everything like that it has for 44 million people over the years. It was 3:30 in the morning. I couldn’t tell anybody anything. In the morning, I told a friend of mine, “I read the best business book I’ve ever read in my life.” He scoffed a little and said, “Sure you did.” He got the book and he called me back and said, “You were right.” I wanted to know who this guy was because I had never heard of this man. It wasn’t Mark Victor Hansen or Jim Collins. It was some unknown person. We wanted to call the publisher to find out. When we called the number, the person on the other end of the line was Robert Kiyosaki. It turned out that this was a self-published book. Everybody turned him down. It was designed primarily as a brochure to sell his game of CASHFLOW.

He only printed 1,000 copies. I called him up and said, “Do you got any books left?” He goes, “I sent two dozens to Austin. I got 976 books left because nobody is buying them.” I said, “We’ll take the rest.” We went out and visited with Robert. He taught us how to play CASHFLOW. My wife won with Robert standing over her, telling her what to do. Her prize was one of his CASHFLOW games. It’s still sitting in the cabinet back here. He handed me a bunch of books from his trunk. I said, “I don’t want to take all your books.” He said, “Don’t worry. Nobody is going to buy them anyway.” It’s a bit of an understatement.

We got to be pretty good friends. I ended up connecting a lot with him. I helped him edit part of the Cashflow Quadrant. I still have a galley proof upstairs. I brought him out to Austin to talk to some friends and a lot of investment stuff. We stayed friends for many years. By the way, mine was the first Rich Dad Poor Dad ever purchased.

I didn’t know that. That is awesome. That is a story right there.

That’s the beauty of the story because there were 24 books sitting there at the carwash. I went back and bought the rest of them, I handed them out to friends and I kept that original book. I gave it back to Robert several years ago. He’s got the first book ever and then he’s got my book hung up right next to it.

Robert gave me the copy that I have on my desk. We met at that Gene Guarino’s conference several years ago. That’s an amazing story, though.

We have been friends ever since. I talk to him so often, but he’s certainly done a lot for a lot of people. You can’t turn a corner without somebody saying that little purple book changed their lives. In fact, I’m doing a big project now with a person in the tech world. He said that book turned him around. It got him going. I hear those stories all the time.

I’ll never forget I was in Charlottesville, Virginia. It was the summer of 1999. I was in a Barnes & Noble and a gentleman walking the finance aisle. I was in the process of reading hundreds of finance books at the time and this guy holds up Rich Dad Poor Dad. He goes, “Are you looking for a book to read?” I said, “I’m always looking for a book to read.” He goes, “You need to read this.” I was like, “I don’t know this guy, but he stands there at the finance and money section too.” I’m like, “Okay.” I looked at him and I was like, “This is good.” I don’t think any of his other books were out at the time. I could be wrong. Maybe Cashflow Quadrant was. I read and bought every single book that he wrote after that.

I’ll never forget reading through all those, and as they’d come out and Tom came out with his and all these come out. It’s certainly helped shape many of my decisions and I’ll never forget thinking, “I need to be accredited.” That’s where I first came up with that concept. Tom, you had the fortune to read that book and do that. Your message has changed a lot since you’ve been in it. I’ve been in there. Why do you think that most of the doctors are in the top 1%? Especially if you’re a specialist or your surgeon, you’re most likely in the top 1%. You’re accredited. You have access to all this money and all these opportunities that are out there. Why don’t you think more doctors are financially independent?

It’s mindset and training. Those doctors that were teaching me way back when I was in training made a lot of money relative to inflation. They were doing well but still unhappy. If they got hit by a bus or broke a leg, they weren’t going to keep making that money. It’s mostly mindset. Great. All doctors are a great group of folks. They’re my folks. They’re husbands, mothers, daughters, and sons. They want to enjoy life. They do have a bit of a servant’s heart. You rarely find a doctor that got into medicine for the money and the money is certainly some surety of a nice lifestyle. Sometimes you can make quite a lot of money as a physician. To answer your question, as you go through, all you know is once you start working, I gather a paycheck, which is over 50% of physicians now. It’s not necessarily a good thing.

Do you mean those physicians are now employees?

Absolutely. They’re in E quadrant now. The rest of them are in the S quadrant if you know the Cashflow Quadrant. They’re looking for themselves but as you know, on that left side of that quadrant, if you don’t work, you don’t get paid. Certainly, we’re trained to do a service and do surgery, then you get paid. I realized that the more successful I got, the less time I was going to have. That was no fun and that’s what happened to me. It’s certainly not intellect because they’ve got it. It’s not that they can’t. They have not been exposed and don’t realize what is behind the curtain.

Maybe they don’t want to. Life is a bell curve. Some people don’t want to. Some people do and are searching down the others that maybe haven’t been exposed. That’s my take. I believe passive income through cashflowing assets is a way to create freedom, giving you the time to have the life you want. They want it. They maybe don’t know how to get yet.

Many years ago, compared to now, the debt was substantially higher when you came out of med school. The compensation, when adjusted for inflation, is lower. You’re probably more likely to be employed, which means you have somebody that has more control over your compensation. There is more government influence on the healthcare sector as the years go on. I look at the industry and you tell me the healthcare industry. It looks like costs are going up and compensation is going down. The doctors are right in the middle getting squeezed.

There’s got to be an inflection point at some point. The physicians are something like 2% to 4% of the cost of medicine and I do have a graph somewhere if you may have seen it in the book where inflation goes up by 22% and doctor income goes up by 2.5%, 20% difference over ten years. That’s a 20% loss of buying bulk. That is where things are going. Unfortunately, corporate medicine is not so great. I don’t think for all of us, even if you’re not in corporate medicine. If you’re running your own practice, you’re still not in control because the insurance company determines how much you’re going to get paid. It’s not the best to get paid more and the worst don’t get as much business. Everybody gets paid the same based on what the insurance company has said. There’s not a lot of control in medicine but don’t feel sorry for them. They still might have nice salaries. I don’t ever want anybody to feel sorry for a physician.

It is a challenging thing and that’s where I think where you come in, Tom. One of our investors has made some good choices over the past several years. He has some great income coming in. HCA comes into Asheville, buys the hospital, and puts a lot of pressure on his practice. He said to me, “I have this passive income coming in. I’m not worried because I know I can stay here. I want to live here and I want my family to finish out school here. Even if the money isn’t exactly what I want, I know I have a choice.” I know Tom, your personal story. I think this is an impressive achievement, but your passive income exceeded your earnings as a physician. Walk me through that. Did you give up medicine together? How are you still involved in practice? What did that do for you and your life?

It was liberating. That story that you told, that physician may not have reached the point where his passive income eclipses his medical income, but you can have partial freedom. You said the word, it gave him choices. Having some pressure taken off gives you the ability to have a choice. He can keep his kids in the school they like or stay in Asheville, where he likes to stay. That’s what it’s all about. Passive income gives you a choice.

As humans, we want to control our environment, meaning we want to have a choice about what we do, where we do it, and who we do it with. It’s important. In my world, I would buy an asset. It would create passive income and I would keep that in its own little bucket. It would grow, and over time, I’d buy multiples and they’d all grow together. Sometimes my money would make babies. There’d be enough money there, so I could go buy something else. It’s compounded on itself, and that’s important.

I truly remember, every quarter, I used a software program, just Quicken, something simple. I moved on with double-entry QuickBooks several years ago. I knew what I was paying each year for utilities, mortgage, clothing, groceries, or whatever. You didn’t have those categories. I realized over time that I had finally covered each of those categories and didn’t necessarily need my income. It was a great feeling. What did I do? I kept going. I kept doubling down, kept investing, and getting that money separate. I took a little more time off. I kept practicing for twelve years after I did not necessarily need the money.

One, I enjoyed orthopedics. Most doctors do enjoy what they do, but I enjoyed it because my passive income was growing as my practice was growing. I was blessed to have that situation because as things came up that were unpleasant, I was taking calls. Doctors have to stay up all night, take emergencies, not sleep, and things like that. I eliminated that in the 1900s. It was great. Nine years into my practice, I wasn’t taking the call anymore, maybe even earlier. I eliminated the call, I finally took a Friday afternoon off, and that was addicting because all of a sudden, I had a two-and-a-half-day weekend. It kept on like that.

That lasted probably in the last four years of my tenure as an orthopedic surgeon. My physician assistant made more money than I did. My 2019 W-2 was laughable, but that’s proof that I was enjoying what I was doing. I didn’t have anything pulling me away. I love my patients, my job and I had a great team. I have finally grown to the point where, rather than serving patients one at a time, I can serve people on a larger scale, one to many. I hung up the scalpel on April 30th of 2021.

I want you to share your next chapter with the audience, but I want to bookend that and read this quote by Robert Kiyosaki. I feel this because I’ve gone through the process. When you’re financially independent, you become better at who you are. If you’re a surgeon, salesperson, mother, teacher, whatever it might be, you become better at that. Robert says, “If every doctor followed Tom’s Rich Doctor Principles, millions of physicians and their patients would benefit because financially free doctors equate to better healthcare for everyone.” I love that quote. Tom, as you said, you’ve started to look for ways to give back and help more people. You have an awesome book, which I encourage you all to get. I have it myself. Share with the readers your next chapter and what you have in store for the future.

I was asking Robert one day what his next book was going to be because I put one out of that every year.

I can’t keep up now. I used to keep up. I feel like I’ve fallen a few behinds.

It’s tough. He’s got to get on an auto serve or something. He told me, “You should write a book.” I said, “Why should I?” He goes, “You got a story. You should write a book.” He suggested it and I said, “Okay.” I wrote a book. A lot of people would like to write one and don’t. I wrote it to write it. During the writing of that book, when I did my research, that I found out, I was a pretty happy doctor because I had a passive income. I found out how many unhappy physicians there were.

There were unhappy lawyers, accountants, and engineers too. Suitably, they’re people that feel like they’re trapped in the jobs. That’s where the mission was born. I’ve started a little website and have improved that, and it’s been organic growth. I try to help people do the same thing. That is where life is taking me. The book got published and I’ve been blessed to have quite a few people read it. Some people may ask for some help. That’s what gave me some purpose outside of medicine. It allowed me to step away from something I love to something I love more.

If you haven’t checked it out, RichDoctor.com is where you can find out all about what Tom has. He’s got a coaching program as well. If you’re a physician and you’re reading, I highly encourage you to reach out to Tom. He’s got tremendous knowledge through all of his experience. I’m going to ask you, Tom, if you can go back to your 25-year-old self and give yourself some advice, what would it be?

Probably focus. I’m not sure if my lack of focus allowed me to experience a lot more of life or slowed me down. Sometimes people will say, “What would you do differently in that?” I probably wouldn’t change anything because my past is what made me who I am. I’m happy with that, but probably I would focus a little bit more. I jumped around a lot. At 25 years old, I would get a great mentor right away. That’s one thing that took me some time to do. That shaved years, if not a decade, off of my learning process and my success path.

That’s one of my top tips as well. I look at your profession, Tom. I look at surgeons that go through the process and med school. They come out, they do a fellowship, and they work alongside experts to craft and hone their craft before they end up going with patients. For some reason, we used to have apprentices. I think that’s amazing advice no matter what you’re looking to do.

The apprenticeship model was not a salad. It’s how they’ve learned through the last hundreds of years. It’s so much nicer to learn from somebody else’s mistakes and from yours.

Tom, what’s the best way for people to get ahold of you again?

You can go to RichDoctor.com or you can send an email to Hello@RichDoctor.com, and I’ll get it.

Dr. Burns, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been a pleasure.

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I hope you found this episode valuable and I have one more thing to gift you. We have a page for my coaching clients, where you can get a free copy of my book as well as much more from previous guests on the show. Check out NextLevelIncome.com/Coaching to get a free copy of my book, audiobook, and much more. I’ll send you a copy of my book and cover all the shipping costs as a thank you for reading. Please like, share, and take 90 seconds to give us a rating on Apple Podcasts.

Important Links:

• Dr. Tom Burns

• Presario Ventures

• Rich Dad Poor Dad

• Why Doctors Don’t Get Rich

• QuickBooks

• CASHFLOW

• Cashflow Quadrant

• Hello@RichDoctor.com

• www.Richdoctor.com/Confidence

• NextLevelIncome.com/Coaching

• Apple Podcasts – Next Level Income

About Tom Burns