Read The Transcript Below:

Steven (00:51):

Hello everyone and welcome to the next episode of the Retirement Tax Services podcast Financial Professionals edition. I’m your host Steven Jarvis, CPA, and rolling into the new year. We’ve already got an episode where I am not bringing on a CPA or a CFP or any kind of tax expert per se by license, and I don’t mean that as a negative at all. My guest, Andre Nader, is someone who has spent all of their time focused on the FAANG community, on the fire community and has a lot of great content around tax planning specific to equity compensation. So I’m really excited to dive into this conversation today. So Andre, welcome to the show.

Andre (01:28):

Thank you Steven. Really excited to chat with you today.

Steven (01:30):

Yeah, so before we get too far into some of the technical details, I just love people to have context for why we’re having the conversation. So give a little bit of your background.

Andre (01:39):

Yeah, so I’ve been in tech for around 15 years and 10 of those years I was over at Meta or Facebook at the time and within one of the darlings of the FAANG acronym And within tech we get sucked in acronyms all the time, so feel free to stop me if I’m using a one that doesn’t make any sense. But anyway, this entire time what I realized while I was working within tech is, I dunno, particularly within Facebook, the last couple of years the income started to get much higher than I ever imagined and I was constantly surrounded by my coworkers who all of us within similar high income just earning high income more than we thought, significant amount coming it from RSUs but they didn’t necessarily know what to do with it and there was a lot of memes around how to handle it.

(02:21):

And me personally, I’ve always been someone who’s been very liking to be deep in the weeds. I’m a data analyst by trade very much into how do I understand what the numbers are saying and interpret what the best way to grow things are. So I approached my own personal finances with that same lens of how do I make this grow, how do I figure out what the best optimizations are? So just as a side person passion project, it was always just very deep into personal finances, very deep into fire. But all by just, again, on the personal side just figuring out how to do things myself and then over time sharing what I was learning with my peers who were all going through the exact same thing. I think that was one of the big benefits is just learning and then sharing. That was also a big way for me to make sure I really understood something like the best way to really be able to have things sink in is can you teach it to someone else?

(03:14):

And that’s been one of the things that I’ve been valuing. And then I was laid off from meta in April, 2023 and I realized afterwards that I think I hit my enough number. I no longer need to go back to work thanks to 15 years of tech salaries. My wife’s also in tech, I don’t say retired, I say semi-retired. My wife is still working, she’s over at Uber still making those San Francisco tech salaries and still doing perfectly fine. But we were at the place where I no longer needed to go back to work. So I thought through what are the things that I am passionate about that I’m enjoying spending my own time without having to think about the monetary side. And I started writing more and more on LinkedIn just around my own path of being able to get to this enough number and just the entire journey that kind of got me there. And that’s kind of been where we’re at right now is just being able to spend time writing about things that I’m passionate about and filling my days with things that give me purpose without having to overemphasize the monetary side.

Steven (04:08):

That’s fascinating. Andre, I appreciate you sharing all that background. And if you don’t already follow Andre on LinkedIn, please do. He has great content there and that’s actually how you and I originally got connected and one of the things that drew me to your content is you mentioned fire in there and that you’re, it’s probably because I come from a stereotypical CPA background where your starting salary, we probably shouldn’t complain, I mean for the general population, accountants do just fine, but compared to tech workers, CPAs, really they make a lot more money later in their career. So fire is not a conversation in the CPA community. You don’t make ’em a lot of money right out of the gate. In fact, it’s something that’s looked down on mostly out of jealousy. But I had had some maybe less than positive experiences around people who promoted fire.

(04:50):

Just my initial impressions. And one of the things that I love about your content is it’s not solely focused on here’s how you retire tomorrow or as soon as possible. You really break down these different topics and say, Hey, here’s some things you need to understand and I really like that you highlight that being able to teach someone else really just reinforces that you understand it for yourself and that really where you’re coming from as you share this content is your own lived experience. This isn’t theory of, hey, it might be nice if when you got that RSU vest on some random date that maybe you did X, Y and Z with it. I mean you’re like, Hey, this is what I do, this I see other people do. I think recently you were just sharing vesting schedules because these big publicly traded companies, they have to share all this information.

(05:32):

Before we any further into the conversation, I do want to just highlight for the audience that a lot of the things we’re going to be talking about, even some of the things we’ve already shared, this isn’t just applicable to FAANG employees to people in these tech companies. I work with clients across a lot of different industries where things like RSUs, especially more so than ISOs or incentive stock options have become more the norm. And you run into people who you described it as unexpectedly making more than you expected or in different ways than you expected. Whether that’s someone who’s a tech employee in the medical field, even working for any kind of publicly traded company or even private company that has stock-based compensation. We we see a lot of these issues where people just aren’t sure what to do.

Andre (06:12):

But definitely one of the reasons I was writing is because you were saying the salaries within tech, they’re extremely high, how high they are, and there’s a lot of shame that sometimes goes with these high salaries. So one of the things that I was doing when I was trying to do my own research on the side initially was go to Reddit, go to LinkedIn, go on various forums and you’d be asking these questions and be like, oh, my income is, I dunno more than $200,000 per year and this is the questions that I have. And then people would say, oh, you’re earning $200,000, you should be teaching us what to do. And it was this big thing where just because you earn a lot of money doesn’t mean you know what to do with it and was just surrounded by peers that were in that exact situation, particularly when again, I was in a data function, which within tech, the engineers and the product managers are typically even the higher paid workers where a new grad software engineer can be pulling in like $200,000 if you include RSUs in their first year, like liquid all in.

(07:09):

So there’s no expectation for them to understand any of this. It’s the first time they’re earning money at all and then now they’re coming in from RSU side. So it’s just super interesting and it’s helpful for me too. It’s like I approach things from a very specific lens with the, I’m writing a lot for that high earner within tech that’s getting paid in public RSUs because that’s me, that’s who I am. It’s very easy for me to write about what I’ve physically been doing and also just as, again, I am a marketer analyst by trade, it’s very much around writing what I’m doing and what I’m personally going through and how my thought process is in trying to figure these things out. But really my philosophy is very much on keeping it nail the basics. Don’t make it over complicated except that when you’re within these tech companies, you won the income game, you don’t need to be taking these outsized risks everywhere else. And then again, a lot of it is too is spend some of the money to make it sustainable because these jobs pay a lot, but they are a grind and they can be long hours and can be hard. So if you’re not spending the money to make it sustainable, then you’re going to burn out and it’s not going to be worth it.

Steven (08:15):

I love that you’re touching on that because I tell people all the time that we’ve got to make good life decisions and then figure out the most tax efficient way to go about them naturally speaking to that, whether it’s your savings rate or your tax plan or whatever else it is, you just hate life to get there. It’s not going to be worth it. Andre, when I end up working with people who have a lot of RSUs or again, I like how you described unexpectedly coming into a certain amount of income or how they get that income, I’m usually already a little ways into their journey to be honest. I have yet to work with the client who comes to me through a financial advisor before they’ve started that job where they’re going to get RSUs and they say, Hey, my job offer includes RSUs.

(08:51):

Help me understand what these are. And so usually we’re trying to play a little bit of catch up of, Hey, you’ve been getting these for a couple of years, you get killed every year at tax time and you have no idea why you’ve got this huge concentration, you don’t know what to do with it. So I’m usually kind of midstream before I even get connected with them. So what are some of the things just right out of the gate for someone who’s brand new to this equity world that you are trying to help them understand? How do you teach the basics to people?

Andre (09:15):

Some of these lessons I think will be applicable to your audience really well because there are periods over the year where people care about this stuff and I’m sure you guys see, okay, now going into Q1, I’m sure you guys are extremely aware that all of a sudden people care about their taxes and then after April, once they pay that tax bill, all of a sudden they care. But within tech, depending on the company, they also care. Every time there’s a new vest, it’s another decision that they need to make. So taking a step back, at the most basic level, most tech workers have no idea how much they get paid. And it’s not because for lack of trying, it’s just because over, as you get more and more senior, significant amount of your total compensation is from RSU. So restricted stock units that are vesting on a either monthly or quarterly basis in most cases within big tech, I think they’ve transitioned more and more to more frequent vests as opposed to when I first started, maybe there was annual vesting cycles or big one year cliffs, but then more frequently, particularly within faang, you’re immediately vesting on a quarterly basis.

(10:11):

So with the stock prices, how they’ve been fluctuating over the last look at the last five years, even just this past week, Uber stock has been up 10% and then Meta has been doing who knows what over the past year it’s like up a hundred percent all of these crazy fluctuation. So let’s say that you’ve been at a company for a few years, every single year you might be getting more stock. It’s really impossible for you to know off the top of your head, how much am I actually going to make? Because so much of your compensation is based off that equity and that equity is constantly fluctuating significantly on a month to month basis. So a lot of the work that I’ve done initially is just answering the basics of this is how you can learn how much you get paid. And it’s like creating Google Sheets that have ways for you to input like here copy and paste exactly like this out of Schwab, out of wherever your equity is out of shareworks paste in all of your upcoming vests and I did all the hard work for you with these formulas and it will tell you, Hey, this is how much you’re going to likely make over the next year based off of the current stock price and locking in over the year.

(11:12):

All the ones that have already vested that amount is kind of locked in. So you can’t really change that obviously, but just having those basic understanding of this is how much you make and it sounds like crazy. How do these people not know how much they make? But again, it’s complicated. It’s not easy to know. The reason I made all of these tools is because I personally didn’t know, and I’m a numbers person, I didn’t know how much I was earning or how much I was going to make for the year. And that’s a foundational thing of how much total compensation are you getting over the next year or even this year as a basic starting point, even before talking about taxes, even before talking about all this stuff, it’s like what’s your income? ,

(11:57):

And a lot of the work that I’m doing is just around like, Hey, income is, income is income and needing to treat all of these income sources like any other income has been kind of the way that I’ve approached things and kind of the way that I’ve been encouraging more and more people to think about it because at the end of the day, from the IRS perspective, those RSUs their taxes income right when they vest. And most people, they learn one specific thing and then it gets stuck in their head. So for example, they learn that, hey, long-term capital gains taxes are applied after you’ve held a stock for one year. So all of a sudden in their heads they’re like, oh, I need to hold my vest for one year because there’s a better tax treatment and I’ll have to pay short-term capital gains if I sell it before then.

(12:40):

And the reality is at vest, their tax is income regardless of whether you sell or not. And I can say this every single month and there’ll be more people that learn this every single time. So that’s a lot of the things just saying the same thing, the basics over and over and over because there’s constantly people that are not, again, they’ve never earned RSUs or maybe they’re finally paying attention to them and being able to nail those basics of just like, this is how much you make, this is how you should think about it, it’s income. Treat it like income. If you wouldn’t be using your bonus money to buy your company stock, why are you doing the same thing with an RSU vest? I mean, just pushing really hard on saying the same thing over and over just to kind of slowly bring more and more people around to at least thinking about it like that.

(13:22):

Plenty of people. I think the other challenging thing is doing nothing has been very rewarding over the last 10 years. If you’ve been in tech and doing nothing, being ignoring all of your RSUs and pretending they don’t exist and all of a sudden those numbers have gotten really large, you’ve been rewarded for ignoring it and not paying attention to it, which is really unfortunate for a lot of what I’m writing about. And I saw this particularly within covid when everything crashed really hard, all of a sudden everyone cared about diversification when things were crashing down. So my big thing now is while things are at all time highs, Trisha trying to push people more just to be aware of it and thinking about diversification now as opposed to waiting until shit hits the fan and then all of a sudden caring about diversification when things are crashing down. So again, nailing the basics, understanding the compensation, and then understanding just the basic tax treatments of the income.

Commercial (14:13):

Hey advisors, it’s time to simplify your tax planning for 2025. Get your free RTS tax reference guide today. Created by our expert tax team and shaped by feedback from professionals like you. This guide is packed with up-to-date federal and state tax data. You can trust that state by state summary. It’s a game changer from client meetings to quick access at your desk. It’s the perfect resource to have on hand. Don’t miss out. Download your guide today@retirementtaxservices.com/taxguide. Happy tax planning.

Steven (14:48):

Yeah, I love the emphasis on the basics there and that with your background totally makes sense that you’re focused on these FAANG employees, but it’s so universally applicable for advisors listening to this podcast almost guaranteed that if you haven’t sat down with your clients and explained to ’em how their income works, no one has their tax repair, certainly has, and they probably haven’t taken the time to do it. Andre has on his own to say, here’s how my income works. Because even for people who don’t get bonuses or stock-based compensation, I shouldn’t be surprised anymore, but I’m still constantly surprised at how many people just don’t even understand what their salary is versus what goes into their bank account versus what their taxable income is. And so taking the time to walk someone through, and it’s even more important if they have equity compensation to say, Hey, here’s the important steps that are going to happen along the way.

(15:30):

Because even for the people who do care a little bit more about the numbers and are trying to figure this out on their own, at most they look at this once a year when they file their tax return, when they get their W2, maybe if they’ve got more regular vestings, something’s coming across their desk, this isn’t necessarily a direct knock on any of these employers, but I’ve yet to see the employer that is consistently enough trying to teach people how these things work that it ever sticks. A lot of ’em aren’t really doing anything besides giving you a bunch of disclosures they’re required to and saying, Hey, best of luck. The ones that take a little bit more effort than that, they still aren’t doing it regularly enough to make sure these things stick, which is why there’s so many people who are coming to you and following your content and looking for financial advisors or CPAs who specialize in working with people in that situation because it does have some pretty huge ramifications.

(16:19):

And we see a lot of mistakes get made on tax returns in these areas. And really we see a lot of people that will go from having this fantastic year where they made all this money, more money than they thought was possible, and they see all the taxes come out of their paycheck and then they get to their tax return and they say, how can I possibly still owe $50,000 in taxes? How can I possibly still owe a hundred thousand dollars in taxes? And especially for first year clients, for us that have stock-based compensation, that’s one of the first conversations we have to have. In fact, especially when I’m introing people late in Q4 or right now here in January, that’s one of the first things I tell ’em is, Hey, since we’re new to working together, probably a good chance you still get killed on taxes this year at tax time.

(17:01):

We’re going to work together going forward, you know this. But back to that, consistently reinforcing things to people, employers are only required to withhold 22% on the stock-based comp until it gets over a million dollars in a single year. And that’s just not cutting it. I’ve yet to meet the person who’s getting an RSU and is only getting taxed at 22%. It just doesn’t cut it. And so people get into this cycle of just getting killed every year at tax time. And then you mentioned some of the crazy stuff that’s been going on in tech recently. There’s a couple of clients I work with that work for Nvidia that for their 2023 tax return, because normally what will happen with RSUs is they vest, the company will sell and withhold some portion of those to cover some taxes, and then sometimes their tax reporting isn’t great.

(17:47):

So this is something to be on the lookout for. If you’re an advisor working with someone with RSUs, we got to make sure that the basis is reported correctly because if withholdings happen on the day of the vest, there should be no capital gain, maybe a dollar or two of a gain or loss if it doesn’t happen within 24 hours, whatever it might look like. But then ran into these Nvidia employees that the stock price was moving so dramatically that literally they had their vest there withholding and three weeks later they were working with someone to try to diversify. And they’re already getting just smashed on capital gains in general because the stock price moves so much in three weeks. And so taking the time as you start a relationship with someone with equity comp to say, Hey, here’s kind of the range of possibilities, those things we can see because most of us get the most panicked when something happens we didn’t think was possible.

Andre (18:34):

Everyone within tech remembers that first $50,000 tax bill. And again, I have screenshots of my TurboTax be like, I must have messed something up. This can’t be right. But again, the reality is within growth, again, within meta, I was on the growth team, so it was very much around what are the frameworks that we have around growth? One of the most powerful things ever is default. So whatever the default action is, most people are going to take that. So you were saying that supplemental withholding is 22% by default. Fortunately, more and more companies are allowing you to make those changes, but originally there was no way for you to edit that 22% even if you knew that you owed it. So all these people weren’t doing any changes. And then from one year to the next, all of a sudden they’re getting paid more in RSUs and those RSUs are making up 50% of their income and they’re only getting withheld at 22%.

(19:22):

And they’re in places like California earning in high tax brackets federally, and they’re just getting crushed. So California’s not an issue. California doesn’t have supplemental rates, but so they’re maybe getting a couple thousand back from California, but then owing $50,000 federally, and everyone remembers that piece, so they don’t understand why. And that’s one of the things I think for your audience is sometimes people are fine paying taxes over the year, but when they have to physically bring out their checkbook at the end of the year, that’s when they start looking for How do I find ways to reduce this? How can I play these different games to make the taxes go away? And that’s the most basic one around the supplemental income, just getting nailed with that. And a lot of it is unexpected. So my big thing is it sucks owing $50,000, but it’s not the end of the world, particularly if you have the money.

(20:08):

A lot of times there’s maybe another vest or a bonus that’s happening around that same time, but I don’t care how much you make, having $50,000 is a surprise expense sucks. That is rough in that no one enjoys that. Even if you’re making a million dollars, it’s not super fun having to randomly have an extra $50,000 expense. So my big thing is I’ve been pushing a lot in December now January too, is like, please estimate your taxes. Just get an understanding of it so you can have some of that liquidity ready to go and not be surprised. Because the biggest thing that most people that hurts most people is the surprise payment. The payment sucks, but it’s not a big deal. But the surprise payment when it’s really no fun.

Steven (20:42):

So Andre, let’s dive into that a little bit because you’re working with tens of thousands of people that follow your content. So I work directly with a lot of advisors, definitely a lot of taxpayers as well. What ultimately is a throwaway line. What gets thrown around a lot is we’ll just go ask your tax preparer, which we know does, especially this time of year, you’re probably not going to get great responses. So how are you helping somebody who’s not savvy on this stuff, who sees the importance, clearly they’re following your content, they know they should be learning something. How do you help that unsophisticated person on taxes estimate their tax liability?

Andre (21:11):

Yeah, no, absolutely. So I’ve created very simple tools around basic calculators. I’ve used a program called Coda, and on my website, Faang Fire, there’ll be a tab on the top that says tools and it has links to all of these. They’re all completely free, where it’s just very basic estimates of like, Hey, oh, interesting. Physically pull up your last paycheck. Or since we passed last year, like, Hey, pull up the very last paycheck of the year. And because I had been at meta, I have those pay stubs. My wife’s at Uber, I have those pay stubs. I’ll be like, physically, look, this is what your paycheck actually looks like. This is the box for what your overall income is. Put this in this specific field.

(21:46):

Oh, this is how much your federal withholdings are so far year to date, put that here. And just physically walking them through exactly what to do and what to enter with specific examples of actually handheld holding them so they can just copy it. It’s like I don’t need to think about, oh, I have to figure out what my year to date withholdings are. I’m like, I dunno what that means. What are all these things? There’s five different taxes that are withheld. Does that get included? Or how do I think about that? So being able to physically with a red, taking a screenshot with a red circle around it, copy this number, enter it here within this piece, just a very basic thing of, hey, this is not going to be exactly how much you owe. There’s a million factors that go into it. This is just federal.

(22:21):

It assumes you just take the standard deduction and it doesn’t assume anything else. It’s just kind of very basic of this is how much you’ve paid so far based on the most basic taxes, this is how much you should have paid. And here’s the difference. And this, just to give you a rough back of the napkin estimate is super helpful. Just people get a little bit more confident in understanding where some of this comes from. Why am I owing this money? And understanding why they’re owing it is a big thing. And then you hit the other one of that’s the defaults and that’s the correct amount that they owe. But then there’s all these things of the mistakes that happen. And I think about them as the, I have a list of the holy trinity of tax mistakes that FAANG employees run into or tech workers run into.

(23:03):

And you hit on one where it’s like you can do everything, but then you import that 10 99 automatically and all of a sudden all of your cost basis is zero for when you, let’s say you sell on invest, but the cost basis a zero. And they’re not doing anything wrong, they’re just doing it themselves. They’re just automatically importing it. And sometimes maybe they’re using tax preparer and they hand it off and then they just assume that it’s all right and then things just get imported and they miss a zero cost basis will result in every single amount of that as a short-term capital gain and you’ll owe significant amounts. So that’s one of the most basic ones to catch of like, Hey, is cost basis zero? Then you should catch this. And some of that is me. I’m writing specific examples of like, Hey, look specifically on your tax return after you’ve done it maybe, and look at this specific field or look at maybe this schedule and are there any zeros for cost basis because that’s probably wrong.

(23:56):

I don’t know why. And now we’re going into we’re in 2025, how the Schwabs of the world don’t have checks for it’s zero. It’s obviously very rarely going to be zero. Why can’t you please catch this when this happens? So that’s the most basic, most egregious one. But then you run into people with the SPPs where that’s another super common one. That’s the second of the trinity of the SPP cost basis. Adjustments aren’t being made. So depending on what the discount was, how long it was held, all of those factors, it just gets blindly imported incorrectly, assuming it was just a normal stock sale. And that’s another one. It’s easy mistake to make if you’re just kind of blindly importing it. Sometimes the do it yourselfers are very deep into the weeds, but it’s easy to make a mistake when you’re just importing it and trusting the software.

(24:40):

I think there’s a lot of, particularly within tech workers, a lot of trust in software to not make a mistake and it’s basic math, how can they do this wrong? But if you have bad data going in, it’s just going to be bad data coming out. And that’s exactly what happens is kind of that big one. So it’s like $0 cost basis, just messed up cost basis adjustments on the SVP. And then the third one is for the more sophisticated people, they’re doing backdoor roths and they just trip up on the entry and accidentally don’t enter everything correctly. I write about that because I’ve physically done it twice and the second time, the minute I hit submit, I remember that I know I didn’t follow within TurboTax, I didn’t go through this exact specific sequence that nails it exactly. And now all of a sudden I’m paying taxes on that $7,000 backdoor Roth that I did.

(25:25):

But it’s super, super common and people don’t have any realize that’s like, those are my trinity. It’s like messing up your backdoor Roth, getting your RSU cost basis, these things as zero and then just messed up cost basis on the SPP. That’s the ones that I’ve seen the most when I’m talking to people. And it’s also the easy ones where I’m like, Hey, this is how you check if that happened, and if it did, you could fix this. You have some time. Go talk to your tax preparer, have them make these corrections. Or if you haven’t talked with a professional before, you can go to them and they’ll be able to fix this for you. They’ll know exactly what to do. Or if you’ve over withheld on something or over contributed to something, giving them the language of like, Hey, this is go to your tax repair and say this specific line, and they’ll immediately know what’s happening.

(26:05):

A lot of it’s going to be like maybe they’ve contributed to the Roth and they now earn too much money and this is what they need to do to undo it. Or they’ve worked two jobs and now they over contributed to the 4OK. And sometimes a lot of what I write is just giving them the language. It’s all jargon at the end of the day. It’s accepting that so much of finance is jargon, but it matters. And the specifics of what words you use will mean different things. If someone walks to you and says, conversion, rollover contribution, all these things mean something very specific to you and very specific to the IRS, but to them it’s like these all words, they all mean the same thing. I’m just going to use them interchangeably. And that’s been a lot of the value where I’m writing is trying to translate in between this is the common language of what’s happening.

(26:44):

So I’ll use things like the mega backdoor Roth. If I’m talking to a tech worker, I’m like, this is what the mega backdoor Roth is. And then I’m like, okay, but if you’re talking to your tax professional, translate this as if you’re making an after tax contribution to your 401k with an in-plan conversion to a Roth 401k. So it’s just like that translation. Here’s the jargon and then what it means to them. And then this is the common language, and then this is where things get kind of messy in the middle. And just being able to translate that, and again, doesn’t need to be complicated. But again, with all this stuff, again, you add backdoor into things and people just start getting very confused and thinking they’re playing very complicated games. And when you break it down, particularly with things like after-tax is something that’s been extremely popular lately, so I’m assuming your audience knows.

(27:27):

So it’s all around more and more, particularly within faang, every single FAANG company. So FAANG being Facebook, apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google. By the way, all of them have the after-tax 401k. So which means for 2025, I think you can contribute $70,000 total across employee contributions, employer match plus this after-tax portion. And people don’t realize that that exists and they think it’s complicated, but in reality it’s all around like, Hey, I take a screenshot of my contribution screen in Fidelity and it’s a percent field. All you need to do is change this percent field. Then there’s some nuance around like, Hey, is there an extra dropdown around in plan conversion? Yes or no? And if not, then oh, physically call Fidelity and use this specific language and tell them like, Hey, I made an after tax contribution to my 401k, I would like to do an in plan conversion.

(28:13):

And then it’s about like, because I’ve physically done this myself, I also know that. And you can ask them to do this forever for you in the future without having to call them every single time. This is where I also value the LinkedIn financial planner community and the tax professional communities. I physically wrote all this out and I share exactly what I write on LinkedIn. And again, a CFP I was following told me like, Hey, you’re saying that you have to call every quarter, every single time that you’re contributing to do this in plan conversion. Actually, did you know last time I was on the phone with my client and we were talking to Fidelity, they were able to change something on the backend and you never have to call them again. And that was again, a huge ROI for me. A lot of times I’m sharing these things and the feedback that I get from the LinkedIn comments is super valuable half the time. It’s very critical. Obviously anytime you put something on the internet, there’s always the audience that wants to tell you why it’s wrong. I try really hard to be accurate with what I’m saying. I’ll say most cases I am right. But there’s things I don’t know. There’s like, I didn’t know that you could automate this process, and that’s super valuable to have and that’s one of the big things. Again, it’s super valuable

Steven (29:16):

So much you can learn through that lived experience. And Andre, I can nerd out about this stuff for hours, but as we wrap up here, I want to highlight a couple of things of what you were just talking about that was just a little mini masterclass session on how’s an advisor. You can provide tremendous value to your clients by doing things that do not in any way venture into giving tax advice. Because I think too many people stop really short and they say, oh, RSUs came up. Go talk to your tax preparer. No, no, no. Take the steps that Andre is describing here. Get their pay stub, go through it with them. Look at what’s specific to them. Give them, I like how you talked about a couple of times giving them the language to use when they go to their tax repairer. It may sound like the same thing on paper of saying, Hey, go talk to your tax repairer or saying, here’s what you’re going to say to your tax repair.

(29:58):

But that creates a completely different outcome for the client you’re working with. It’s just an absolute game changer for how people navigate this, how well they learn it, of cutting through that jargon. There’s so many great things that advisors who will take this seriously can be doing for their clients. And at the end of the day, once you get, especially once you get comfortable with it for the types of companies your clients typically work for, it’s really not that much more work on your part. You’ve got to take the time to learn it upfront and then you just have to be diligent and consistent and intentional enough to walk your clients through it from there. I mean, you’re almost on autopilot just having those consistent conversations, like you said, to make sure that we’re reinforcing this until it gets consistently executed. So Andre, I really appreciate your time, your willingness to come on and share this. Obviously everybody can go follow you on LinkedIn, anywhere else that people can find you or should be following along.

Andre (30:48):

And I have a free newsletter on faangfire.com and I publish a very casual twice a month-ish. And that’s kind of where I put my long form content in. I know that tech workers are notoriously hard to work with. I know for your audience too, the very hypercritical skeptical of everything audience. And I think that look at some of the content that I write because I’ve managed to kind of go and be successful within this audience, mostly through, I have the advantage of having the lived experience where I’m writing like that, but it’s around just building trust through education. And I’m seeing more and more firms, advisors and CPAs writing this very specific content that people have around the problems that they’re facing. And as you’re seeing these problems that your clients are facing, think about it and know that if this one client’s facing it, likely, there’s a lot more.

(31:37):

How can I put out content out there that’s very specific to this very specific use case? And maybe it’s like, oh, an Uber employee who has their SPP that has this very specific discount. And if you’re able to demonstrate that you’re able to solve that specific problem, then it breaks the barriers down immediately. And even the very skeptical software engineer who thinks they know everything will be like, alright, this guy’s on top of it and has done this before and they’re valuing your expertise and valuing the ability for you to add value right away. And that’s the big thing, proving that you can add value in getting through that notorious skepticism that all tech employees have. And particularly if you’re dealing with engineers, I see the memes on Reddit where they’re like, oh, that sounds like you’re working with an engineer. This audience does want help.

(32:20):

And this audience does want to be able to have trusted experts that they can lean on. And a lot of it is in terms of just like, I want to buy my own time back. I know I don’t know this stuff like the back of my hand. I want to reach out to experts, but I want to make sure that this expert knows what they’re talking about. And being able to figure out how can I demonstrate that I know that I can add value this specific person because I’ve done it before, I do it through content. How you do it can be in different ways, but I think there’s a lot to learn from how I’ve managed to write and make content that kind of resonates with this. Again, highly critical, highly skeptical audience.

Steven (32:53):

Andre, I appreciate you being so willing to openly share that. And the one other thing I’ll pull out of what you said that we’ll end on, you talked about learning an additional nuance just from the financial advisor that was following along with you. There’s so much power in learning from other people doing this. And with no small degree of bias, I’ll hold out the RTS summit every year as really one of the best opportunities to get in person with financial advisors who are doing these types of things, who are willing to share, who are in a growth mindset, a learning mindset. So go out to retirement tax services.com, check out the summit. It’s this September and October 30th through the third in Phoenix, your retirement tax services.com. We’d love to see you there in person. Andre, thanks again so much for being here and to everyone listening, until next time, good luck out there. And remember to tip your server, not the IRS.