The Chiro Money Show

Chris and Scott each brought one trick and one treat for Halloween. Chris's trick: pay yourself first, automatically. Scott's: private equity as a Kinder Surprise. You pay more for less chocolate, can't see what's inside, and can't easily get out. The treats: couples on the same page, the RESP and the TFSA. Then two horror stories. The $80 billion and $30 billion are in Canadian private real estat...

If you didn't come home tomorrow, who would be short, and by how much? That's the whole question behind life insurance, and it's where Chris and Scott start. They size the cover for a made-up family, then explain why term insurance suits a need that ends and what permanent insurance is actually for. They also look at the life insurance a bank offers with your mortgage, line of credit or credit car...

Money is just a backyard ultra unless you draw the line. Last weekend Chris ran a race with no finish line, where you keep running loops until you decide you've had enough. Most practice owners are running one too, as 100 visits a week becomes 150, then 250. Chris and Scott talk about why the goalpost keeps moving, a client who asked whether they could scale back and still reach their goals, what...

Your grandkids will never ask what your net worth was. So why do we have every client update theirs each fall? Chris and Scott explain what a net worth snapshot is for, why October and November beat December for a money review, and how to explain what changed over the year instead of just reading the number. Then they look ahead: what three quarters of real numbers from your practice and your hous...

Welcome back for part 2 of the mini Q&A interviews we did down at Future Proof in Huntington Beach a few weeks ago! Enjoy! CHAPTERS 00:00 Part two from a money festival 01:55 Julia Chung — nobody admires grandpa's tax return 08:59 Markus Muhs — the cash piling up in your corporation 15:00 Cam Smith — the markets are voodoo 24:24 Connor Hewson — there is no secret sauce 27:48 Mark Gochnour — is...

Are you going to be okay? That's the question underneath almost every money conversation, so we took the mic to Future Proof in California and put it to five people who do this for a living. Five planners and advisors from both sides of the border, at what's billed as the world's largest wealth festival, Future Proof — four days outdoors on the beach. Why saving turns out to be easier than spendin...

There are two ways to get this wrong. Sit still, or floor it at something random — a random act of finance. They look like opposites, and they're the same problem: no plan underneath means nothing to say no to. Scott's client had a great practice, a good advisor, and a high six-figure cash pile in his corporation nobody had ever decided to do anything with. Chris runs the math on what that costs o...

To join TIGER 21 you need twenty million dollars in investable net worth. Not your house. Not your business. Twenty million, liquid. Dr. Laurence Tham chairs two of those groups — one in Portugal, one global. Twelve to fifteen members meet every month, and at each meeting one member opens their entire portfolio to the room: net worth, allocation, everything they're in and everything they're gettin...

Ninety-four point seven percent of Dr. Laurence Tham's new patients came from referrals. He ran no new patient marketing to get there. Laurence graduated from CMCC in 2002 and has never practiced a day in Canada. One week after his board exams he flew to Australia with his new wife, five thousand dollars, and three months of locum work. Twenty years later he had built one of the largest chiropract...

You can absolutely build a low-cost, globally diversified portfolio on your own — that part of investing has been solved, and we're not arguing against it. But investing is only one of the six areas of financial planning, and for an incorporated chiropractor the other five are where the real money gets made or lost. In this episode, Scott and Chris break down the difference between DIY investing a...

Money can only ever do two things: be spent now or be spent later. In this episode, Chris and Scott unpack what that simple truth means for chiropractors at every stage of their career, from the debt-heavy student years through practice growth, peak earnings, and eventually a practice sale. They share real client stories, including couples who are objectively crushing it but still feel like they s...

Most practice owners believe the path to more income is more volume — more new patients, more visits, more everything. Dr. Jamie Richards built a practice doing over $1 million a year while being in the office every other Wednesday, and he says that belief is exactly what's keeping doctors stuck. In this conversation, Jamie breaks down his Retention Based Practice™ model: why a 100-visit-per-week...

A lot of chiropractors assume that incorporating unlocks a new world of tax efficiency — that anything remotely business-related can now be run through the corporation. This episode breaks down what a legitimate write-off actually is, using the CRA’s two real tests: was the expense necessary to earn income, and is the amount reasonable? We walk through the biggest gray areas — vehicles, home offic...

Most Canadians can't tell you what they pay their financial advisor or what they actually get for it. In this episode, Chris and Scott break down the three most common ways advisors get paid in Canada, from bank-embedded MERs to advice-only fees to a fully separated fee-only model, and why so few people can answer a simple question: how much am I paying, and what am I getting for it? They also dig...

In this episode of The Chiro Money Show, Chris and Scott dig into a question that flips conventional financial thinking on its head: could giving actually be the best investment you make? Inspired by Dr. Daniel Crosby's book The Soul of Wealth , they explore the research behind "felt wealth" — the surprising finding that generosity makes people feel wealthier at every income level, no matter the d...

Most chiropractors are scared to spend money on marketing — and the reason usually comes down to a bad experience, not bad math. In this episode, we're joined by Dylan Marchese and Trevor Johnson of The Chiro Consultant to break down why so many clinics get burned by agencies, and what separates the practices that see 3–10x returns from the ones that quietly bleed money every month. They walk thro...

Market crashes aren't a matter of if — they're a matter of when. In this episode, Chris and Scott break down why bear markets happen on average every six to seven years, why trying to time your way around them almost always backfires, and what missing just the 10 best days in the market can do to 20 years of returns. They cover the two levers you can actually control — portfolio design and investo...

Scott hits a milestone this week — ten years as a Certified Financial Planner — and he and Chris use it as a chance to reflect on how financial planning has really changed over the past decade. They dig into why products were never the plan, how the industry shifted from advisors-as-gatekeepers to a world of direct access and AI tools, and why cash flow management remains the single most important...

What happens when you commit to financial planning the same way you'd commit to a personal trainer or regular chiropractic care? In this episode, Scott and Chris break down the compounding effect of ongoing financial advice — why the real value shows up over years, not in a single annual check-in. They walk through the research on advised vs. non-advised households (including some eye-opening stat...

If you're an incorporated chiropractor, you've probably heard the pitch from your accountant: pay yourself dividends instead of salary and save roughly $9,000 a year by skipping CPP. But is that actually true? In this episode, Chris and Scott sit down with Aravind Sithamparapillai of Ironwood Wealth Management — a CFP who ranked first nationally on his exam and has done deeper work on Canada Pensi...

This episode looks at whether buying into a hyped-up IPO is actually a smart move, using the SpaceX public offering as the case study. We break down how a company can carry a trillion-dollar-plus valuation while never having turned a profit, and what that gap between price and reality really tells you. Then we get into the historical data on IPOs, which paints a very different picture than the day...

In the final episode of our three-part investing series, we get into a third way to build a portfolio, one that sits between traditional active management and pure passive indexing. We unpack the research behind tilting toward value, profitability, and company size, why those factors have historically delivered higher expected returns over the long run, and how Dimensional Fund Advisors turns that...

Most Canadians have been told the same thing: ditch active management, buy a passive index fund, and you're done. But "passive" investing is nowhere near as hands-off as it sounds. In this episode, Chris and Scott break down what passive investing actually is, why there are 13 million indexes to choose from, and the surprising number of active decisions you're making the moment you pick a fund. Th...

Most Canadians have no idea how their money is actually invested — and the stats show that 77% of investor dollars are sitting in actively managed funds at the big banks. In this first episode of a three-part investing mini-series, Scott and Chris break down what active management actually is, why it's still so common in Canada, and what the data says about whether all those highly paid fund manag...

Most financial plans end up as a 60-page leather-bound binder collecting dust on a shelf. In this episode, Scott and Chris make the case that everything you actually need can fit on a single page — and walk through exactly what belongs on it. Inspired by Carl Richards' The One-Page Financial Plan , they cover why money matters to you, how to think about goals (or "guesses"), where you stand today,...