I finished school years ago. With my colleagues who did dual degree omfs programs and also paid for expensive medical schools they also had high debt. Eventually everyone pays it off and it’s uncomfortable at first.
Thanks for the comment. Wish you all the best.
This is why most of my friends here in CA don’t hire hygienists. They do all the cleanings themselves and get to keep the $100-120k to themselves.
The dentists can do the same….work 5-6 days a wk and make $250-350k.
The millennials have almost no chance of being able to afford a house. A small 1100-1200 square foot starter home here in CA is around $1 million. For one to buy a house, his household income needs to be at least $400k and he needs to save at least $200k (which may take 3-4 years to achieve with such income) for a down payment. There is no job out there that pays a new grad (engineer, dentist, doctor etc) such high salary. I feel bad for the younger generation. The only way the millennials can get a house is to inherit one…...and they will get it because the parents can’t live forever.
Yup. Agreed.
New grads (myself included) need to stay out of HCOL, saturated places like California. There are plenty of places in the country that are much more affordable to live (albeit maybe less desirable), where you can get a home for a lot less than a million. It may not be a mansion, but there are still some good sized homes at a lower price point in many places, although prices everywhere continue to rise.
To be honest, I don't know the net worth of anyone. Does anyone actually know the net worth of anyone else?
4 years earlier?
Some DHs get a bachelor's degree in DH as well.
I always struggled to understand this. Sure, if you don’t have enough patients in your practice to support a hygienist, it’s better to do all of the hygiene yourself. In this case you should do better marketing and increase the number of active patients you have to the point where you can support a hygienist.
This is indeed the case at most of the dental practices here in CA. Even with medicaid patients, dentists still don’t have a jam-packed schedule every day. In addition to working at their own offices, some dentists have to work part time 1-2 days a week at the corp to keep themselves busy. My sister has never hired a hygienist. And that’s how she’s able to buy her own office building + several rental properties.
Yes, if your office is beyond its maximum capacity…solidly booked 5-6 days/wk…..there are too many patients for you to handle by yourself…. you don’t even have time to go to the bathroom, then having a hygienist should help. This would be a good situation to have. Every dentist’s dream is to have a super busy practice like this. If I were a general dentist who has such successful practice, I wouldn’t mind paying the hygienist $110-120k so I could produce 10x more by doing all the high productive procedures.
There’s definitely multiple ways to skin a cat. Dentists can be successful having different practice models and that’s part of what makes dentistry so cool.
Yeah, it’s nice to be an owner because you can do whatever you want.
The OP said "her 2 hygienists aren’t remotely producing 2X as much as what they are being paid.” It’s still a nice passive income for her. But since the OP was not fully booked and had some free time, instead of sitting around doing nothing, she considered doing some of the cleanings herself and saved $100K (or whatever the amount she had to pay a hygienist) for having to hire just 1 hygienist instead of 2. A lot of times, you just need to hire a much lower wage assistant to clean operatory for you after you do your own cleanings.... why waste $$$ to hire an expensive hygienist to clean the operatory for you?
This would be ideal. But in the real world, you don’t have an unlimited supply of patients even when you're in a much less saturated area. You don’t have a waitlist of patients ready to fill the cancelled slot any time you want. It also depends on the job of the front desk person to fill the appointment book. There will be some patients who call and cancel at the very last minute. Sure, you can charge the no show fee....and still keep the patients happy....good luck with this!
Offering the hygienist higher pay (either higher daily minimum or higher % of collections) means you’ll have higher overhead…..and your own pay will be less. From my experience, nobody cares about your practice the way that you do. Even when I offer my manager a bonus for every new case that I start, my managers still wants to go home on time and tries to reschedule the start patient on another day.
Many hygienists don't care about working hard to keep their jobs. If you don’t pay them enough, they’ll leave you for a better job somewhere else. A lot of dentists spoil their hygienists with very high salary and they are afraid to make their hygienists to do too much work……and therefore, many hygienists now want at least $50-60 an hour and only want to see 1 patient per hour. There is a hygienist shortage problem in some states…. but not in CA because most dentists in CA don’t need hygienists.
