The 15 Times Math: What Every Busy Dentist Needs to Calculate Tonight

A young hedge fund manager is having dinner with an old friend. The friend asks how he's doing, and he answers the way most high achievers answer: busy. Really busy. Building something. Making good money. Winning by every measure that has ever been put in front of him.

Then the friend asks a different question.

"How often do you see your parents?"

Twice a year, he says. They're across the country — he's in California, they're in New York. He flies out, they spend time together. Twice a year.

His parents were in their mid-sixties. The average person lives into their late seventies, early eighties. He did the math in his head.

Fifteen times. He would see the people he loved most in the world approximately fifteen more times before they were gone.

"This was the math that broke me," wrote Sahil Bloom, the author of The 5 Types of Wealth. "It was the math that changed my life."

It changed Wes Read's life too. And if you're a dental practice owner who hasn't run the same calculation, it may change yours.

The Front Row Funeral Seats

Before doing the math, do this first.

Imagine sitting across the table from the person who matters most to you. A parent. A sibling. A childhood friend. Whoever would sit in your front row if something happened — the people whose loss would level you.

Picture one of them, clearly, across the table.

Now answer honestly: how many times a year do you actually see that person?

Not text. Not occasional calls. Actually in the same room, present, unhurried.

"Run that math," says Wes Read, host of the Dental Boardroom podcast and founder of Practice CFO. "The average person is living into their late seventies, right around 80. How many times a year are you seeing this person? Multiply that number by how many years they have left — or you have left — and quantify it. Ask yourself: does that feel like enough? Does it feel finite and limited?"

Most people, when they run this number, feel something shift.

Not because the number is always alarming — sometimes people are pleasantly surprised. But because most of us have never made the relationship explicit. We've never reduced "I'll see them around the holidays" into an actual count of remaining visits.

Once you make it a number, it stops being abstract. And things that aren't abstract are much harder to deprioritize.

What Happens When a Financial Advisor Runs This Math

Wes Read has spent nearly 20 years as both a CPA and a Certified Financial Planner, working with dental practice owners across the country. He has helped hundreds of dentists optimize their cash flow, plan their taxes, structure their retirement accounts, and build financial ecosystems around their practices.

He read The 5 Types of Wealth last year. The math in the opening pages changed something for him personally.

"I thought about my dad, who is now 79 or 80 years old," says Wes. "I am 47. My dad lives in Arizona. I live in Southern California, in San Diego. I see my dad every Thanksgiving, and then generally one or two other times during the year."

He ran the numbers. His father is at actuarial life expectancy. They see each other two or three times a year. The math produces a number that is not large.

Wes didn't write about it or reflect on it. He acted.

"I immediately took action. I reached out to my dad and I said, 'Dad, it's time to do a road trip.'" They planned a two-week trip together — Washington DC, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, historical sites that both of them love. They leave this Sunday.

"I haven't done this ever," says Wes. "When I was 15, my dad and I did a five-day backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevadas — about 80 miles, incredibly rigorous — and it shaped so much of that relationship and how I viewed myself going into my teenage years. It's been a long time since I've had that amount of time with somebody I care about so deeply."

The math didn't produce a plan. It produced a phone call. The phone call produced a trip. The trip will produce memories that neither of them will forget.

That is the point of the math.

Why Dentists Are Particularly at Risk

The dental practice is a voracious consumer of time and attention.

There's a reason the word "busy" shows up so often in conversations with dental practice owners. Not as a complaint — as an identity. Busy means productive. Busy means the practice is growing. Busy means you're doing the work. There's a deep professional culture in dentistry, as there is in most high-earning professions, that treats busyness as a signal of success.

But busyness has a cost that almost never appears on a financial statement.

"As a high earner, you tend to be at times very time poor," says Wes. "And part of this is because we're optimizing the wrong variables."

The practice demands presence. Patients need to be seen. The team needs leadership. The systems need attention. The marketing needs oversight. The finances need management. And most dental practice owners are, to varying degrees, still the bottleneck for all of it — the person everything routes through, the one who can't step away completely without feeling the tug of responsibility.

The result is a life that produces financial wealth at the expense of time wealth. And financial wealth without time wealth is not what most dentists imagined when they were grinding through dental school.

Sahil Bloom left the hedge fund world — one of the most financially rewarding career paths available to a Stanford graduate — not because he failed, but because he did the math and realized he was winning the wrong game.

The practice-owning dentist is playing a version of the same game. High income, high production, high stress, high busyness. Winning by the metrics that have always been in front of them. And sometimes arriving at a milestone — a revenue goal, a paid-off student loan, a second location — only to look up and realize the people they care most about got a version of them that was always partially elsewhere.

The Cost of Twice a Year

Here's the thing about seeing someone twice a year: it feels like something. It feels like maintenance of the relationship. It feels like you're still showing up.

But twice a year for someone in their late sixties or seventies is roughly 20 to 25 remaining visits, assuming average life expectancy. Spread across the years that remain, that's not a relationship being nurtured — it's a relationship being preserved at minimum viable contact.

And this isn't a guilt argument. It's a math argument.

When you buy a piece of equipment, you calculate the ROI. When you allocate capital, you model the return. When you hire a team member, you assess what their presence generates.

The same analytical instinct that makes you good at running a practice is exactly what's needed here — applied to your life instead of your business.

"What gets measured gets managed," says Wes. "A lot of what we need to do is measure the things in our life that so often get crowded out because we're just focusing on that one key area of success: financial wealth."

What if you measured relationship time the way you measure collections? What if you forecasted visits with the people who matter most the way you forecast cash flow? What if the number of times you see your parents this year was as intentional as your production target?

The math is not meant to produce sadness. It's meant to produce decisions.

The Deliberate Decision

In The 5 Types of Wealth, Sahil Bloom and his wife packed up and moved across the country to be closer to family. He left the hedge fund world. He started building a life around the people, not the money.

He framed it not as a retreat from ambition, but as a redirection of it.

"The opposite of a successful life is not a failed life," writes Bloom. "The opposite of a successful life is a default life."

A default life is one that gets built by inertia — by the accumulation of days where the practice came first, where the call got pushed to later, where the vacation got shortened, where the holiday visit ended a day early because Monday was busy.

A designed life is one that gets built deliberately. Where the math gets run. Where the visits get scheduled. Where two weeks in DC with your father becomes something that actually happens, not something that stays on a list of things you mean to do.

Wes poses the question directly: "What's your version of Sahil's cross-country move? What's the deliberate decision you've been putting off because the default is just easier?"

Running the Math Right Now

You don't need to read the book to do this exercise tonight.

Pick one person — just one — who would sit in the front row at your funeral. Someone you love deeply and see less than you wish you did.

Write down how many times per year you realistically see them.

Write down an honest estimate of how many years they — or you — have left in good health. Not maximum possible lifespan. A realistic window for the kind of visits that matter.

Multiply.

Look at that number.

Now ask: is that the number I would choose if I were designing this intentionally? Or is that the number I arrived at by default?

If it's not the number you'd choose — make a call. Not a note in your planner. A call. Right now, or at a defined time this week. Schedule the visit the way you'd schedule a new patient appointment: with a date, a time, and a commitment.

The math isn't meant to be a source of regret. It's meant to be a source of motion.

Run it before the number gets any smaller.

Listen to Episode 157 of The Dental Boardroom Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/157-30-dinners-left-why-money-isnt-wealth/id1518344747?i=1000766303144