Listen in as VIN Foundation Executive Director Jordan Benshea has a conversation with Drip.vet Co-Founders Dr. Lance Roasa and Dr. Drew Olsen about their scientifically proven passion project, and why veterinarians are the canary in the coal mine. Driven by their motivation to help colleagues get a sense of empowerment through habits and improve mental health, these two veterinary powerhouses are a wealth of knowledge. Covering topics ranging from the importance of a budget to their secret talents, this episode has a good shot at being one of your favorites.
GUEST BIOS:
Lance Roasa, DVM, MS, JD
Dr. Lance Roasa is a 2008 graduate of Texas A&M where he was the first student to undertake a 4th year business-track, spending the majority of his clinical training in veterinary business and industry. In 2016 He completed a law degree from the University of Nebraska and his training was centered on the law of small business, taxation, and the law of veterinary medicine.
Drew Olson, DVM
A 2012 Iowa State Veterinary College graduate, Dr. Drew Olson has practiced in small and large animal clinics and has considerable experience in the veterinary compounding medicine industry. An Omaha native, he is regarded as one of the nation’s leading veterinarians in compounding specialized veterinary medications. Be sure and ask Dr. Olson about his experience with retired circus elephants or his participation as a veterinary student in Frontier Vets, a documentary filmed in the remote region of Kruger Park in South Africa. Drew resides in Omaha with his wife, Karin, and their daughter Olive. They enjoy spending time with friends, family, and their rescue dog, Faith.
LINKS AND INFORMATION:
- Drip.vet: https://drip.vet/
- FREE Personal Financial Course: https://drip.vet/vin/
- VIN Foundation Vets4Vets®: https://vinfoundation.org/v4v
- VIN Foundation Student Debt Center: https://vinfoundation.org/studentdebtcenter
You may learn more about the VIN Foundation, on the website, or join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.
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TRANSCRIPT
Intro
Lance Roasa, DVM, MS, JD: Veterinarians are literally the canary in the coal mine. This lack of personal financial literacy basically permeates all of society. It’s not just an American thing. It’s an entire worldwide problem.
Jordan Benshea: That is Dr. Lance Roasa, joined by Dr. Drew Olson, and this is the VIN Foundation’s Veterinarian Pulse podcast. I’m Jordan Benshea, the Executive Director of the VIN Foundation. Join me and our cohost and VIN Foundation Board member, Dr. Matt Holland, as we talk with veterinary colleagues about critical topics and share stories. Stories that connect us as humans, as animals, as a veterinary community. This podcast is made possible by individuals like you who donate to the VIN Foundation. Thank you. Please check the Episode Notes for Bios, links, and information mentioned.
Meet Lance Roasa, DVM, MS, JD and Drew Olson, DVM
Jordan Benshea: Welcome, Lance and Drew. Thanks for joining us today.
Lance Roasa, DVM, MS, JD: Great to be here, Jordan.
Drew Olson, DVM: Thanks, Jordan. Really excited to chat.
Jordan Benshea: Yeah, I’m excited to get into this with you guys. We’ve been working behind the scenes and collaborating for a while, and it just seemed like a good idea for a podcast episode and share the goodness with others. So, we don’t keep it all to ourselves.
Lance Roasa, DVM, MS, JD: Exactly. This is going to be a lot of fun.
Journey into Veterinary Medicine
Jordan Benshea: Alright, so let’s dive right in and give me a little bit of history on each of you and how you got into vet med and your story.
Lance Roasa, DVM, MS, JD: Well, thanks. I’ll go ahead and jump in there first. I’m a 2008 graduate, Texas A&M, but my story really in veterinary medicine started a long time before that, and it didn’t really necessarily take the route that most people go into veterinary medicine. Interestingly, one of the biggest reasons I wanted to go into veterinary medicine is I wanted to be a small business owner. I thought that the business side was absolutely fascinating, and all the other stuff with veterinary medicine and surgery and all that stuff kind of came secondary to that. That, quite honestly, has dictated my career now that I think back on it. I didn’t really think about that a lot when I was in veterinary school and even out in practice quite a bit. I did always want to be a veterinarian, just not for the some of the same reasons that other people want to be veterinarians.
Jordan Benshea: Yes, you don’t really hear that too often that people get into veterinary medicine to be a small business owner.
Lance Roasa, DVM, MS, JD: Maybe that was a little bit of a flawed assumption, Jordan, maybe I didn’t do my homework ahead of time.
Jordan Benshea: How about you, Drew?
Drew Olson, DVM: Well, that’s a good question, and kind of to mirror off Dr. Roasa. Small business has always been a passion of mine. My first real job was actually my first veterinary job. I’ve always done my own small businesses on the side. I’ve always loved animals, working with animals, communicating with people, so I naturally gravitated to medicine in general. After a trip with a cardiologist in Switzerland, a human cardiologist, I came back and decided veterinarian medicine would be where I would like to go. As an aside actually, the reason I ended up going to veterinary school is because I got accepted. My big passion was in renewable energy, and if I didn’t get accepted, I was going to go work in a startup in Minnesota. Instead, I went to Ames, Iowa. So, go Cyclones.
Founding of drip.vet
Jordan Benshea: You guys founded drip.vet. Tell me a little bit more. When did you found it? Why did you found it? How did that get started? How did you guys find each other? Let us in on a little bit of your story.
Lance Roasa, DVM, MS, JD: Sure, we can go back to 2014, 15, 16, somewhere in there. Drew and I didn’t know each other well, we were actually working on some boards in some committees for the Nebraska Veterinary Medical Association around some legislative stuff that had to do with compounding. So, nothing to do with what’s really drip.vet or personal financial success. However, we did go to the Fix the Debt summit, which was held at Michigan State University, and at that Fix the Debt summit people came in from all over the country. The main thing was this topic of how do we work with the outstanding debt-to-income ratio that’s within veterinary medicine. Now, at the time, I was teaching in a bunch of veterinary schools, probably 14 to 15 veterinary schools, and I taught courses around law, business, ethics, and things like that.
Addressing Financial Literacy in Veterinary Medicine
Lance Roasa, DVM, MS, JD: Keep in mind the key word there was business, and so as the three or 400 people that were in this room started looking around [these were faculty members and people that ran veterinary organizations and associations and things like that], they said, “Who is able to teach personal finance?” One of the key components out of that Fix the Debt summit was we need to teach more personal finance. Veterinary students, veterinarians, early career veterinarians, they looked around the room and said, “Who’s capable of teaching this?”, and I kind of got nominated. Now, at the time, I wanted to make a big distinction that teaching business and the business of running a veterinary practice is totally different than personal financial success, but it’s easy for people to conflate those two things and I want to draw that distinction. Personal Finance is all about your personal finances, whereas business is about running a practice, about owning a practice, two different things, some overlap, but very different topics. So, coming out of that, Drew and I teamed up and we said, “Hey, we’re probably some of the only people that can teach this.” One of the reasons or the reason that we founded drip.vet was to combat the suicide epidemic in veterinary medicine, but more than the suicide epidemic. We were seeing and dealing, and these were friends of ours that were dealing with anxiety, with depression, with burnout, with compassion fatigue. We saw our own classmates leaving the profession and going and getting jobs elsewhere. We knew that there was a core fundamental problem in veterinary medicine. We created this hypothesis that basically said that one of those core fundamental problems is the fact that veterinarians and veterinary students don’t know much about their personal finances and that lack of personal financial training goes on to run into issues with finance, with stress, with anxiety, and that starts us down the road to all the bad stuff that I mentioned earlier.
Drew Olson, DVM: And, Lance, you did a good job there. From my standpoint, I love this analogy that Lance makes a lot, I personally was the canary in the coal mine, and had a passion for, maybe we could even joke tweeting out, or raising awareness nationally. Before owning veterinary hospitals with Lance, my profession was primarily on national education with veterinarians and technicians on compounding medications, which actually then ended up blending into our opioid education as well, as you know, things seem to come together. I was really in a spot, kind of that typical person, that persona that was running into financial difficulties, that was running into emotional difficulties, anxiety, depression, even facing challenges with suicide. So, at that point, Lance and I were connected and becoming good friends, and I thought if Lance could help create the message, design the message, that I would be able to help get the message out to essentially the nation. That’s where the roots of drip.vet were formed.
The Impact of Financial Stress on Mental Health
Jordan Benshea: It is interesting how we see finance is such at the root of so many things. I mean, a lot of people personally and professionally, it’s something that they struggle with. It’s always fascinating to me how people justify finances in different ways, right. It’s really tied to how they spend it, and I think what they value, and what they find worthy. Definitely with the VIN Foundation Student Debt Center and all of our student debt initiatives, we see so many veterinary students who get into veterinary school, and their sole goal is really to just get in and then they get in and they’re not even thinking about what’s going to happen when they get out. They just want to go anywhere they get accepted. A lot of times that means that they end up choosing extremely expensive schools, and then they end up with this huge student debt balance. Have you guys found that as well?
Lance Roasa, DVM, MS, JD: Absolutely. Not only do we find that, but just like the VIN Foundation, we work with these individuals on a daily basis. It’s not just this concept that there’s this debt-to-income ratio that’s problematic. We look at and the organizations are looking at large scale numbers, and I say, “No, these are people that are attached to these numbers, these are people that actually have this debt that actually have this income that have to wake up and deal with this every single day”. So, to answer your question very directly, yes. It’s very concerning and it’s very scary, and it’s also very saddening, when you’re actually talking to someone that’s facing these issues.
Drew Olson, DVM: I am not a big numbers person. It’s been more of passion and purpose, and things like profits and money follow that for me. Connecting stories and people and removing the statistics has been really important for us.
Jordan Benshea: Absolutely and I think that that’s when you’re able to see on a more human level. You’re able to connect with, as Lance said, there are people behind these numbers and that’s an extremely important factor and the most important thing to think about. The choice that they make at which veterinary school they will go to will impact them for decades to come, and those they love and the people in their life. So, it’s an extremely important decision!
Lance Roasa, DVM, MS, JD: Incredibly important.
The Personal Financial Success Course
Jordan Benshea: Yeah, and the VIN Foundation is super excited because we’ve collaborated with you and with VIN on this course that you guys are offering for veterinary students for free. I wanted to give you guys an opportunity to introduce that course, share with us about it, and why you started it.
Lance Roasa, DVM, MS, JD: Yeah, absolutely. So yes, pleased to announce that the VIN Foundation, VIN, and drip.vet have collaborated on personal financial success for some time now, but even it goes way further than that. So, the VIN Foundation has been putting forth the absolute best resources when it comes to student debt topics, when it comes to wellness topics, when it comes to helping veterinarians. We, over at drip.vet, we’ve been relying on those resources quite a bit. So, we link out, as part of our course, as part of Personal Financial Success, we’ll send people to VIN Foundation all the time. So, it just made really good sense for us to team up on the actual course itself. To answer your question directly on why did we start Personal Financial Success and why do we have this as a separate course, well, as part of my teaching responsibilities I went to start looking around for is there a course? Is there something an off the shelf solution that we can go pull from another profession? Can we go look at dentist, pharmacist, engineers, lawyers, or teachers, or somebody else that’s a profession that’s struggling with the debt-to-income ratio and struggling with personal financial literacy? The short answer is no, there is no off the shelf solution. Drew kind of mentioned it earlier, but what we’re seeing is veterinarians are literally the canary in the coal mine. This lack of personal financial literacy basically permeates all of society. It’s not just an American thing. It’s an entire worldwide problem. Personal financial literacy really should be taught at the junior high and high school level, but here we are in professional school and for early career doctors, teaching personal financial literacy. The reason that we have to teach that in veterinary medicine is veterinarians have some of the most obscene and high debt-to-income ratios. We have more people that are struggling with high amounts of debt, low incomes, and not a lot of financial skills to be able to balance those things out. So, we literally had to go create the will, Jordan, we had to go create this course from scratch if we wanted to get across to veterinarians, but we had to do it with some really, really important limitations. Number one, we couldn’t add any more stuff to the veterinary students’ day. They’re already extremely busy in class, we couldn’t just say, “hey, peel out 20 hours a semester or peel out a weekend.” That would just add more stress to their environment. The second thing that we quickly learned when we started doing the research and trying to understand how to teach financial topics is that a classroom setting does not work. I want to repeat that. There have been huge studies, meta-analysis that looked at hundreds of papers of people that actually teach personal financial topics for a living, this is their job, and they research, and they write papers on this. They come out and they say that if you just go talk to a group of students for an hour or 2 hours, 20 hours, 6 hours, whatever that is, when it comes time to actually using that information in real life, there’s this thing called information decay, the students don’t actually use it in real life. So more importantly for me was this factor of information decay, and it can actually go negative, meaning that by standing in the classroom and teaching to a group of students, you can actually do more harm than good. What it told us is the traditional way to teach standing in the classroom, or delivering live presentations, not only doesn’t work, it can actually do more harm than good. Then secondly, there’s just no time in the veterinary school curriculum to get this across. We had to find a way to deliver these materials in a way that was easy, and also encouraged retention.
The Drip Teaching Methodology
Lance Roasa, DVM, MS, JD: So, we found this thing called drip teaching methodology, and that’s where drip.vet gets its name from. Actually, drip.vet gets its name from a focus group, a bunch of veterinary students came together and said, “Hey, this is the coolest and most fun name that you can come up with.” It’s based on drip teaching methodology. We deliver, in Personal Financial Success, small tidbits of information drips, if you will, over large periods of time. Over time, those drips of information [six to eight minutes at a time] add up to a lot of material. We’re getting that material across, but more importantly, we’re encouraging retention. Keep in mind here, Jordan, that our goal at the end of Personal Financial Success is not to have someone take a test. We can teach people how to take a test and how to pass a test on personal financial literacy. That’s not what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to change behaviors in the real world, we’re trying to change people’s habits, which is a lot harder and a much more loftier goal, but that is ultimately what’s needed if we’re going to change people’s lives.
Drew Olson, DVM: And just to go off data, drip is the opposite of the firehose. Whenever I close my eyes and think of drinking out of a firehose, which pretty much all the professors in my first year of veterinary school were going to say the next four years of my life is going to be like it, the primary feeling I have is pain. That does not sound like fun to drink out of a firehose, or very effective. Lance and I did a lot of research, Lance did a lot of research, and we also had a PhD that has wrote books on pedagogy that was part of it. Lance, I do want to ask you one question as being a person that was going and still does teach at a lot of veterinary schools, in a arguably firehose fashion, what were your feelings as we were finding all of this research out?
Lance Roasa, DVM, MS, JD: Well, it was extremely disappointing to know that me getting on airplanes, flying across the country, staying away from my family, sleeping in hotel rooms, and delivering this firehose of information was doing more harm than good. I mean, it was quite depressing for me to know that that was what my life was right now, and I was actually doing the exact thing that I didn’t want to do, which is harm veterinary students.
Drew Olson, DVM: And Jordan, we spent quite a bit of time on the research, how to develop it and then what sort of platform does that look like? I don’t even want to think about the amount of money and time that we’ve spent experimenting on things in the trashcan, basically, that were scrapped. But we did find that providing an environment so that people can access via mobile very, very quickly, emails eventually down the road, and things like push notifications, that you can essentially slowly gain your knowledge on the subway or riding, maybe not riding a bike is a bad example, but maybe while you’re taking a break between riding a bike, maybe a break between your surfing appointments, Jordan, but that creating something that’s really easy to access, and that’s fun, and interactive. That’s where linking over to the boards with Dr. Tony Bartels has really been helpful in getting that initial information out, getting the conversation started, and then continuing the conversation with VIN and VIN Foundation.
Jordan Benshea: And what I’m hearing is you guys have put a lot of time and effort in meeting people where they are, because it’s really challenging in general for people to grasp subjects that can sometimes be taboo or something they don’t want to talk about. The last thing you want to do is have a high barrier of entry. Right? I mean, that’s not going to be successful for anybody. So, it seems to me that drip.vet really does a good job of creating a low barrier to entry with these small, micro learning bits of information that, as you said, Drew, mobile, email, online, it seems like that offers a much more improved educational opportunity for information to be absorbed. Is that what you guys have found as well?
Drew Olson, DVM: Exactly. We are now maybe considered in the last leg of COVID. Everyone’s getting vaccinated, and things are starting to look better, but before COVID we were continuously preaching and sometimes pounding sand was the feelings around online education and around virtual environments. Now, after a lot of people have been forced into that, it’s kind of the mainstay thought process of how we work from home, how we study from home. Those points three, four years ago were crazy to think that a veterinary student would actually go online to receive their education.
Jordan Benshea: And do you see it, have you seen the link? You mentioned this earlier, but I’m hoping that you can speak to it a little bit further, about the connection between personal finances and personal mental health.
Lance Roasa, DVM, MS, JD: Yes. This was our personal hypothesis that debt and problems with personal finance were leading to these issues that we’re seeing downstream, anxiety and depression. We all know what the cortisol pathway will do, and we all know that once you get into this circle, that it can lead to severe depression, and even suicidal thoughts and behaviors. However, we didn’t have that link in veterinary medicine at that point in time 2015, 2016 when we started this. We started looking at what does the societal papers do? What happens when we look at Americans at large? Do Americans in a precarious financial situation have a higher incidence of stress and anxiety and even suicide? To answer that question, yes, they do. People that are undergoing personal financial struggles are orders of magnitude more likely to die by suicide. I want to point something out here, Jordan, that this is not just about suicide prevention. I want to call special highlight to Vets4Vets. That is a huge resource. I love the work that you guys are doing over there at VIN Foundation, please make sure that the link to that is in the notes for this podcast. Backing up, this is more than just about suicide, the people that have high amounts of debt have all sorts of ancillary effects on their personal side, not just on their financial side. They do things like delay relationships, they don’t get married or don’t enter in relationships, or they enter relationships later in life. Secondly, they delay having a family and having children. They put those things off until they can “get their career under control.” People move all over the country to get to the job that pays the most. This means that they miss out on family time, they miss out on birthday parties, and nieces and nephews’ graduations, and things like that because they’re living hundreds of miles away from home. There are all these little bitty things that we change in our life, because we’re dealing with debt, and because we’re dealing with a lack of financial aptitude. In our research, we found all these things. It’s like, wow, we didn’t really think about all of the stuff that this debt-to-income ratio and a lack of financial literacy has to do with veterinary medicine. It just so happens at that point in time there wasn’t a lot of research on that in veterinary medicine. Now fast forward to 2021, we are starting to see some studies and some surveys that link these things directly. Veterinarians are now pointing to and saying, because of my lack of personal financial literacy, or because of my debt, or because of my uncertainty around my income, it is leading to depression, anxiety, delaying important things in life, and even suicide.
Drew Olson, DVM: Jordan, that’s a really good point and I want to bring up too that there’s, in my mind, two groups, one group that needs it now and more of a preventative medicine group. I think all the veterinarians and technicians listening can agree that preventative medicine is the way to go. Do your annual exams that sort of thing to make sure that your pets are healthy. What the Personal Financial Success course is trying to build habits. Lance, I think after this, I’d like you to talk a little bit about the habit formation, because you hadn’t mentioned that yet. Getting the habits so that we don’t end up in these scenarios where we’re going to Vets4Vets or on other platforms where we’re basically at the end of our rope. If we’re in that group that is at the end of the rope, I’m pretty sure all veterinarians have been asked by people, “Would you be a vet again? Would you go down that road again?”, and maybe think before answering that, why don’t you find out for yourself and look at taking a course to get yourself educated. Ideally that we would move this course into early on, like Lance had talked about, in grade school and high school, pre-veterinary school. To get further down the road, because even right now if we have each course is individually designed for each year of veterinary student, they’re all in different needs and timing. Lance, another thing you could probably talk about is in time, education, that this is a large course, broken up. Either this course you need it right now, or you needed it a while ago. I wanted to create those two groups, but we all can either, if we need it right now, do that, but then also refer people to taking the course that may be earlier on in their careers, or even in pre-veterinary.
Jordan Benshea: I want to jump in here for a minute and say, I think we should probably let people and the listeners know, this course is free. All of VIN Foundation resources are free. You just have to be a pre-veterinary student, a veterinary student, or a veterinarian. That’s it. This course is also free. I wanted to make sure that we mentioned that, and you guys can speak to that.
Lance Roasa, DVM, MS, JD: Yeah, thanks for that, Jordan. I’ll actually take it a step further than that. Not only is it free and completely free and always will be free, it’s also completely devoid of any outside financial interests. So, there’s not an app, there’s not in app purchases available, we haven’t taken any money out from any sort of financial institution or any anybody like that, that’s trying to sell you something. There are no conflicts of interest involved in Personal Financial Success. It is purely and just like VIN Foundation resources, it’s purely just the best stuff, the stuff that you need to know. There’s not any underhanded, underlying, or hidden agendas in it.
Drew Olson, DVM: Exactly, and we’re not going anywhere, either. This is really Dr. Roasa and I’s passion project to continue to give back. We will be here and continue to be improving those free resources too.
Jordan Benshea: Hearing what both you guys said, it reminds me of this idea that when you hear people towards the end of their life and people ask them, what would you do differently, you never hear somebody say, I wish I worked more, right? You always hear people say, I wish I spent more time with my loved ones. I wish I had spent time with the people that I care about or done things that I loved. Being able to do that begins with the decision based on where you spend your money, even money that’s not technically yours yet, and when you borrow it. With that knowledge, starting for pre-veterinary students, and which school they choose, all of these steps at every single defining moment in their career, they have this opportunity. I think that this education is so vital, because it helps them along the way to really understand and learn, look, you’ve got the opportunity to make it easier on yourself. Right? You don’t have to make this as hard. Life is hard and life is challenging in general, with all those different aspects that you’re talking about. The VIN Foundation Vets4Vets program found that, we created something called the Thrive in Five toolkit, which is to help veterinarian students their first five years out of veterinary school, because what we found is that if they were struggling in their first five years out of veterinary school, that they were struggling throughout their career. If they were doing well in their first five years out, they were doing well throughout their career. We put together a toolkit of all these different resources, all free again, part of it’s the Student Debt Center, Vets4Vets, New Graduate Survival Manual, just things that kind of help them right when they get out of veterinary school. I think that it’s so important to have those resources combined with drip.vet’s resources in this course, and ways to really set them up for success, just as any veterinarian would tell you to set up your puppy for success. This is a key part of that, is setting these veterinarians up for success in their life financially and mentally.
Lance Roasa, DVM, MS, JD: Unfortunately, there’s no magic bullet here. There’s no one easy solution. It’s a bunch of little bitty solutions and that makes things complicated, and that thing makes things complex for people. The bottom line here is you can do this. This is a very empowering situation. There’s nothing that’s overly complex, you don’t need an MBA or a CPA or something like that to tackle this stuff. It’s all little bitty things, tiny, tiny little steps that you can take in your life every single day.
Drew Olson, DVM: The key is to just get started and where you focus your attention typically brings success. A lot of this course has to do with that. Also, the feeling that especially a first-year veterinary student feels that they have to have it all figured out, everything needs to be figured out, what they’re going to do for an internship or residency, how they’re going to negotiate their first job, how they’re going to do their repayments, you don’t need to know that stuff right now. What we do with this course is help generate confidence that if you just stay on track, you just take the drips as they come through, they’ll start to slowly build and build, you’ll maintain your focus, you’ll create these habits that eventually, by the time you’re done, you’re good. One of the big benefits is that you can be confident and rest easy that you are doing what you need to do right now. A lot of times, it’s, hey, relax, you know, chill out. You don’t need to know it all right now. Just get started.
Jordan Benshea: Yeah, just get started. I really have to give people tangible things, tangible ways to help. Clearly the drip.vet course is that. It’s very tangible. It’s a very tangible approach with action items to do.
Practical Financial Tips for Veterinarians
Jordan Benshea: Along those lines, could you guys give our listeners three goals maybe for veterinary students, or even veterinarians who are struggling with their personal finances? If they could do three things right now in the next short period of time, they could take some sort of action to feel like they were moving in the right direction, what would those be?
Lance Roasa, DVM, MS, JD: Yes, absolutely. So, three very tangible goals. Number one is get a sense of empowerment. You can do this. This is not overly complicated. You don’t need to wait till you can take an accounting course at night or get an MBA or something like that. This is stuff that every single person can do, and more importantly, it’s their responsibility that they should do. It’s their personal financial success, not someone else’s, not something that you can hire out, etc. The second thing that you can work on is habits. If you are deciding, hey, I’m going to lose weight, and I’m going to work out, it’s all about getting yourself in the habit of doing those things. There’s never going to be a perfect day to do this. The perfect day is always tomorrow, if you’re a procrastinator, like me. The idea is you have to integrate these things into your habits, so that’s one of the biggest points that we make in Personal Financial Success is how do we do the mental hacks. How do we do the life hacks to integrate these things into our habits? There’s lots of little bitty stuff that we can do. In fact, just like Drew talked about, we had a PhD researcher come in and teach us habit formation, and how to how to hack the system and to get those habits built into the system. And the third thing, Jordan, this is a little bit more tangible, and it’s a little less exciting, more boring, is it’s all about budgeting. One of the biggest things, the difference between people that we see are highly successful from a financial standpoint and also from a happiness standpoint, have good mindfulness and a good contentment within veterinary medicine is the fact that they use a personal budget, versus people that are struggling, that can’t pay their bills, the people that just don’t understand where their money’s going, it comes down to that budget. So, one of the biggest habits that we can get across to you is to get on that budget. That’s one of the hallmarks of Personal Financial Success is making sure that we’re checking in with people on a monthly, weekly basis, making sure that we’re giving folks all of the tools that they need on how to budget. We’re bouncing ideas back and forth off of people about technology tools, and how to budget better. I know that it seems simple. I know that it doesn’t seem very exciting but being successful on the personal financial success side is all about developing and sticking to a budget.
Drew Olson, DVM: I completely agree with those goals, too.
Jordan Benshea: Do you guys have a template for a budget that you share?
Lance Roasa, DVM, MS, JD: We have multiple templates for budgets that we share. So, either that’s like me, so I’m on Excel, I’m the old Microsoft Excel, Google Spreadsheet budgeter. We have templates on that format, but we also have templates that people can use inside of Mint, and in any other budgeting app. We have 1000s of veterinary students and veterinarians that are in Personal Financial Success, so we get a lot of great ideas that other people are doing and the way that they’re budgeting. This is a community that we’re trying to learn from each other, so there’s plenty of budget examples out there. We do not want people to sit down and have to recreate the wheel. Use the resources that are in front of you. That’s the core concept of VIN Foundation and the core concept of drip.vet.
Jordan Benshea: I love that! I think that’s great. I think for a lot of people, just the idea of sitting down to start a budget can seem overwhelming. Where do I even begin? How do I name those columns? Where should each thing go? It’s great that you guys have templates that will work even within Mint, etc., because it makes it a lot easier for people to get started, lower barrier of entry.
Lance Roasa, DVM, MS, JD: Well, here’s an example of that, Jordan. Let’s say we have this task, and we’re going to create this budget from scratch, basically. Well, that budget process, developing that budget for the first time actually takes us about three weeks in Personal Financial Success. Step one is understanding where your money is coming from. Step two is going out and pulling that money together and understanding how much we’re talking about. Step two takes place over multiple drips, over multiple days. So, it’s not that you’re sitting down and pouring away at the computer or the spreadsheets for hours upon hours. It’s, hey, I’m going to do this 10 minutes a day, over time you get it done. You take all the steps to get it done. However, it’s not so time consuming and tedious and painful for your brain to get it done. The point being is, hey, this wasn’t so bad, this was easy, I can do this, again. It’s not like you know, a two-hour workout where you’re like, I’ll never do that again. So, the whole point is making this easy and fun, so people continue to do it,
Drew Olson, DVM: I can tell you a little personal story here in two scenarios. One scenario would be, you’re in veterinary school and maybe you have a significant other [that is you guys are living together] and maybe that person isn’t as aware or has much care for budgeting as you do. It doesn’t really matter what tool you’re using; it really comes down to the communication. In that spot, being aware of the ramifications of your budget versus their budget does make a difference. We have interviews in our course that, unfortunately, [and I’m sure the listeners probably have a couple Degrees of Separation of this similar story] is that relationships do end, and if you’re not following your personal budget, and someone else is using your budget, you’re going to end up with the short straw there. The other scenario is maybe you’re in a long-term relationship, it’s solidified, and that person might not be really into technology. Mint and there’s a lot of really cool templates out there, I’m obviously a big technology person, but if your significant other isn’t, a pen and paper is a great place to start. It’s the communication, it’s building an openness around those subjects, the financial components. A lot of times, if you’re in financial hardship, you’re having troubles, it’s really hard to talk about, especially when you’re comparing yourself to the Joneses or in that rat race of life. No matter what it is, I think communication and whatever means to creating that communication is really important.
Jordan Benshea: That’s a good point, Drew, looking out for yourself. Especially if you’re in a relationship, making sure that you’re in there with eyes wide open. I think that was a good suggestion. Thanks for adding that.
Drew Olson, DVM: We pull the Band-Aid off in this course. People put their heart and soul and share their experiences to help people not feel alone, but also help them not make the same mistakes.
Jordan Benshea: Yeah, it’s all about how we can help each other and leapfrog mistakes that others have made, right. We can only do that through shared experiences, which I think the Personal Financial Course does a great job of doing.
Closing Thoughts and Personal Insights
Jordan Benshea: You guys have shared a lot with us, and I really appreciate it. Just a couple more questions here. One is, what is something that you’re excited about in the veterinary profession? I mean, we’ve talked about really heavy topics today. Probably two of the heaviest topics in the veterinary profession. What’s something that you guys are excited about?
Lance Roasa, DVM, MS, JD: I tell you every time that I get to teach students, every time that I get to interact with students, it really makes me excited. It really invigorates me, and the reason for that is I see incredible ideas, incredible talents in the pool of veterinarians that are coming up that are joining our profession. What excites me is the ingenuity, the entrepreneurship, and then the overall excitement about the profession. That energy is contagious, and that’s why I love working with future colleagues.
Drew Olson, DVM: I’m really excited to be a part of, essentially our collective knowledge starting to be plugged in more and more together. If we look just from 10 years ago to now, the ability for us to have a voice and be able to have our voice be heard quickly across the globe is really exciting. I see some massive changes coming down the road quicker than a lot of people expect.
Jordan Benshea: That’s great. Those are both positive things, and I think it’s always good to end on a positive note. I’m going to throw a question your way. We didn’t really prep for this, so hopefully, it doesn’t totally throw you and if it does, we can make other arrangements. I like to ask people on this podcast do you have a secret talent or if it’s not a secret talent, maybe something that you enjoy doing, that others might not know about?
Lance Roasa, DVM, MS, JD: That is a tough one, Jordan, I’ll give you that for sure. I guess I think mine goes back to my time as a Texan. I grew up in Texas, and I’ll tell you, Jordan, I can’t wait to make it for you sometimes, but I make awesome guacamole sauce. I do have to say so myself?
Jordan Benshea: Wow. Speaking as somebody that lives in Southern California, that’s a challenge. I don’t know.
Lance Roasa, DVM, MS, JD: It’s my secret talent.
Jordan Benshea: And here I thought you were going to say that you’re a pilot. Maybe, too many people know about it.
Lance Roasa, DVM, MS, JD: Maybe that one’s not a secret anymore.
Jordan Benshea: How about you, Drew?
Drew Olson, DVM: Basically, if I’m starting to get stressed out or anxiety or anything like that my solution is swimming. So, a lot of my close friends will send me to the swimming pool. “Drew, you need to go swim and then get back to us.” That’s my secret sauce to getting through challenges and getting through life.
Jordan Benshea: That’s a great one. Working out and exerting energy like that can be a great equalizer for us and helps us gain perspective in the midst of things. That definitely is for me, as well. I joke that everybody wants me to work out. They might not necessarily know it, but trust me, they do.
Lance Roasa, DVM, MS, JD: Yeah, that’s your safe word. Go work out.
Jordan Benshea: Well, thank you guys so much for joining us. Really appreciate it. I know that we’ll be doing this again. Thank you both so much for your dedication and for putting this effort into this passion project. It’s making really a big difference in a lot of lives and improving the profession. We are honored to be collaborating with you guys and we look forward to more great things ahead. So, thank you.
Lance Roasa, DVM, MS, JD: Thank you, Jordan. Great to be here and we are very happy to be collaborating with VIN and VIN Foundation.
Drew Olson, DVM: Thank you, Jordan.
Outro
Jordan Benshea: Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Veterinary Pulse. Please check the Episode Notes for additional information referenced in the podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast, please follow, subscribe, and share a review. We welcome feedback and hope you will tune in again. You can find out more about the VIN Foundation through our website, VINFoundation.org and our social media channels. Thank you for being here. Be well.
