Whether you’ve just graduated dental school or have recently retired, financial planning is a must! Of course, your needs will vary at different phases during your career, but as experienced financial planners for dentists, we can provide you with the guidance and support you need every step.
You’re a new dental professional with a bright future ahead of you.
If you’ve just graduated, you may feel overwhelmed about getting started with financial planning.
We can get you on track for success by ensuring you’ve got financial clarity around:
• Debt management — including paying down your loans
• Cash flow management
• Making sure you have the proper insurance in place, including health and disability
• Saving for your first home
• Starting to put a little bit away inside an RRSP
• Planning for the future purchase of a dental practice
Now that you’ve established your dental practice,
you need to consider the use of a corporation for legal and tax protection.
With a corporation comes different tax strategies to minimize taxes, including income splitting, paying out dividends vs salary, and managing cash flow for the future.
Your financial plan will address:
• Cash flow management — including debt and financing
• Integrated tax planning strategies that include your personal and business finances
• Creditor proofing of assets
• Investing in your children’s RESP, your RRSP, and TFSA
• Planning for future purchases — including a bigger home, dental practice, and investment property
• Insurance review — including health, disability, critical illness, and life coverage
• Estate planning — including your Will
You’re well established in your practice at this stage of your career.
You may have a group of dentists working together and sharing resources to help each other succeed.
If you’re at this stage, you should be focused on managing the finances of your practice and family.
This includes:
• How money is being spent, saved, and used to pay down debt
• Managing increasing expenses for children’s education, taxes, and costs related to your practice
• Reviewing your investments to optimize tax efficiency and minimize fees
• Reviewing your insurance coverage — including disability, critical illness, and life insurance — to make sure it continues to meet your needs as they change over time
• Updating your estate plan
Now that you’re retired,
your financial planning needs to focus on ensuring a steady cash flow and determining what legacy you want to leave.
Your other financial priorities will include:
• Retirement cash flow
• Tax minimization
• Estate planning
• Healthcare for old age and out-of-country travel
You’ve worked hard and are now ready to sell your practice.
This brings a new set of financial challenges, including building an exit strategy from your practice and changing your focus from growth to income generation.
As you’ve grown older, your priorities have shifted, and your financial plan should reflect this.
It’s important to consider:
• Integrated tax planning that considers your practice and personal finances — including accessing the lifetime capital gains exemption
• Retirement income planning
• Financial assistance for adult children — if necessary, and determining the duration of contribution
• Reviewing the need for permanent insurance for estate planning needs
Dentistry is one of the few professions where you're paying off two large debts at once. First, the dental school debt — often $200,000 to $400,000 by graduation. Then, if you buy into or purchase a practice, financing that can easily add another $1,000,000 on top of it. Between the two, it's not unusual for a young dentist to be carrying $5,000 to $7,000 a month in combined debt payments before ever paying themselves a salary.
On top of that, you're not just a clinician — you're also running a small business, with staff, equipment, overhead, and everything else that comes with ownership. A generic financial plan built for a salaried employee doesn't account for any of that: not the compounding debt, not the incorporation decision, not the fact that your income depends entirely on your own two hands.
So the real question isn't whether your finances need a dedicated strategy — carrying that much debt while running a practice, they almost certainly do. The question is whether you want to keep piecing it together yourself, or work with someone who already understands the numbers behind a dental practice.
Owning or working toward owning a practice creates a specific set of financial pressure points most generalist advisors rarely see up close. Here's what tends to matter most, at every stage of a dentist's career:
Canadian dental graduates often carry $200,000 to $400,000 in education debt — among the highest of any profession. Structuring repayment properly, without stalling your other goals, takes a deliberate strategy.
Buying into or purchasing a practice can add roughly $1,000,000 or more in financing on top of existing education debt. Modeling that combined cash flow honestly, before you sign, is one of the most important financial decisions you'll make.
Combined corporate tax rates for a professional corporation typically sit far below combined personal tax rates once income climbs — often in the range of 12% versus 50%+. Deciding whether, and when, to incorporate has a real impact on what you keep.
Your income depends on your hands, your vision, and your ability to perform precise clinical work — an injury or health issue can end your earning power overnight. Properly structured disability insurance is the foundation everything else in your plan is built on.
A new graduate carrying student debt, a dentist financing a practice purchase, a mid-career practice owner managing staff and overhead, and a dentist planning their eventual sale all need very different things from a financial plan. That's exactly why we built ours around the career stages above — so the plan keeps working for you as your practice, your income, and your priorities change.
When you work with us, here's what that looks like in practice:
You've built — or are building — a practice most people only dream of owning.
Give your finances the same level of expertise you give your patients. Book a free, no-obligation conversation and find out exactly where you stand.
Book Your Free 20-Minute MeetingSee how this plays out in practice
Read an illustrative case study on an associate dentist buying the practice they work at.
Read the Scenario →This page provides general educational information for dentists and is not personalized financial, tax, or legal advice. Individual circumstances vary — book a meeting to discuss your specific situation.
