Read The Transcript Here:

Steven Jarvis, CPA (00:56)
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 I’m always excited to have guests on the episode. I’m even more excited to have guests that I’ve met in person. So joining me this week is Jennifer Climo, who has some deep tax experience, along with being a financial advisor, and was just at the summit 2025, enjoying that experience with us. So Jennifer, welcome to the show.

Jennifer Climo (01:23)
Thank very much, Steve, and excited to be here.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (01:25)
Yeah, I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for quite a while. You and I actually met for the first time a couple years ago at the AICPA Engage Conference. So I knew we were kindred spirits a long time ago. Then just, I mean, serving clients, building businesses, all that kind of stuff, life gets pretty busy. But we’re able to connect again at the summit here a couple of weeks ago and get this podcast scheduled. So I appreciate you being willing to set aside the time.

Jennifer Climo (01:46)
Absolutely.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (01:48)
Jennifer, as we dive into this, why don’t you just give a little bit of background as to what it is you do. Financial planning is this big, broad term. I throw out taxes already, but share some of your background and what your service model currently looks like.

Jennifer Climo (02:01)
So I was a CPA first, Steven. So I worked at a college for a small regional CPA firm. I knew I didn’t want to work for large corporations and audit cash for two months. So that’s what I did. while I was there, I worked a lot with nonprofit agencies and also car dealerships, oddly. And we were supposed to come back from our auditing and do tax returns. So would pick up an individual return and do it. And I liked it and was good at it. And so that was fun. Fast forward a bunch of years, I had quit my job and started my own CPA firm in 1999. And from there, I realized pretty quickly that my clients needed a place to invest their money to do retirement contributions. And I didn’t really know a lot about investments and the local brokers I was talking to. I don’t know what they were saying, but I was like, know, I think there’s a little different, some more, I want to do some more with this, go a little deeper. So I went back and got my master’s at Bentley College in financial planning, learned about the CFP, became a CFP right away, and then started Milestone Financial Planning and ran the two businesses side by side for a few years. And then after three or four years, the Milestone was obviously taking off, and it was far surpassing the tax business. But the tax business has always been part of Milestone. Now, Milestone, we’re a fee-only RIA out of New Hampshire. And we manage today, about 550 million in AUM. We have 13 employees because we’re growing. We’re always trying to staff ahead. But how we’re different is that we offer tax prep services to all of our clients and only our clients. We only prepare taxes for clients and especially trusts. We do individual and trust tax returns. We don’t do any corporate work. We outsource all of that and even super complex personal returns. We’ll outsource those as well to a local CPA that we work with. But even that’s not working so well lately as a lot of CPAs are, as you know, firing their clients and purging. And we’ve picked up a ton of tax work. do about, I would say about 184 returns, including trusts, only about 16 trusts. The rest are individual returns.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (04:02)
So Jennifer, we go back just a little bit, because I’m really interested in this. I mean, you giving that timeline, I mean, you were a really early adopter into what we’re seeing more and more now of CPAs realizing, hey, my clients need financial planning and investment management. And this is actually a great business opportunity, because compared to the more traditional CPA firm, financial planning is much higher margin. Just from a business owner’s standpoint, there’s a lot of appeal to financial planning, but did I understand that correctly, that when you first got into the financial planning side, you were essentially running two parallel businesses. Out of the gate, you didn’t say, hey, we’re gonna stop doing tax preparation for non-financial planning clients. Talk about that evolution a little bit.

Jennifer Climo (04:38)
Sure. So we did run both of them side by side. I did mostly financial planning, not financial planning, but tax consulting for some individual and small business clients. Worked with a lot of really small businesses, but they were super small businesses. And since we started Milestone, we had zero assets under management. So it’s grown from there. And those clients really didn’t have a lot of assets anyway. But back in those days, was the, we’ll take anybody if they’re breathing days because you need to pay the bills.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (05:04)
Yeah, we’ve all been there. Yeah.

Jennifer Climo (05:07)
Right. So, you know, but some of those clients are still clients today and have grown substantially as they grew their businesses. I was kind of young. I was in my thirties and so were they. And here we are today. But yes, I did always run them side by side, but the tax business is now a rounding error in terms of our revenue. But we do charge separately. It is a separate business, and we do charge separately and all we do today. It wasn’t we used to do everything, but when I merged in 2016, which is a whole nother story you can hear about on the Kitcespodcast. But when I merged in 2016 with Gene Fullerton, that’s when we got rid of all of our tax clients that were not clients of the firm. And we only offer it to clients of the firm now.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (05:42)
Well, so Jennifer, let’s kind of dive into that a little bit more because you mentioned that the tax fees are a rounding error, which I mean, that math checks out for me as far as if you’re managing 550 million of assets. So talk a little bit more about so why charge separately for it? Like, why are you even, I mean, why not just include in the financial planning fees?

Jennifer Climo (05:56)
because it is a separate service and some clients are much more complicated than others. I don’t know. I don’t have a great answer to that question other than I always have and probably always will. It is a different value and clients don’t see any value as you know in the tax prep. They’re like, I don’t understand why it costs $400 for my child’s return. I’m like, I don’t know what to tell you. are some of the more complicated returns they had three states.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (06:19)
Yeah. Yeah, that is a really interesting conversation. And Jennifer, obviously, you’re in a really great position to help clients understand that better. But for advisors listening who don’t have tax prep in-house or don’t have a really consistent relationship with where your clients are going for tax prep work, this is something you can do to help improve your client’s experience around taxes if you help set expectations of what good tax services should cost. Because most consumers anchor on H&R Block and TurboTax. They anchor on the local CPA who is 80 years old, works 80 hours a week, and charges $95 for a return. And they’re not getting good service in either of those cases. But when that’s your anchor point and you don’t understand how this industry has evolved or what goes into… I mean, if you pay $400 for a tax return, even for a simple child’s tax return, that’s still more on the transactional side of, I did the return for you. It’s a kid’s tax return. I’m probably not doing…a lot of ongoing planning. I probably don’t expect a bunch of questions to come up during the year. But if you get an IRS letter, if you have a life event that changes, if you want to be able to reach out to a CPA and get a meaningful answer, you need to pay for that service.

Jennifer Climo (07:24)
That’s 100 % true. Totally agree.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (07:27)
Yeah, Jennifer, as we work with financial advisors, we give them the option of whether they pay for our service directly for their clients or if the client pays. And it’s been interesting to see advisor thought process and approach on that. And I could be convinced either way, but there is part of me that I think slightly favors the client paying separately for tax prep themselves because it gives them more skin in the game, and it gives them more awareness that this is a separate valuable service and while it might not have the same implication for your life as other pillars of financial planning, if you don’t have good help on tax prep, if things aren’t getting reported to the IRS correctly, it just doesn’t count the same. We have to make sure that the taxes not only get planned appropriately, but executed and reported appropriately as well. It’s really, the full picture doesn’t count.

Jennifer Climo (08:13)
Yeah, I totally agree. probably, I mean, it’s funny on terms of fees, because some of the clients think that we charge so much and some of them sometimes we come up substantially less than the CPA firm they came from. So it really is all relative and did was that CPA firm larger? Was it value billing versus hourly billing? I mean, we’re not out because we do the asset management. So we’re not out to, you know, charge a huge amount for a return based on hours or anything. And we more I have a base fee. Then if they have all these complications like schedule C and E and extra states, then we charge extra for that. But if I was just the CPA firm, I’m sure we would adjust the billing. It would be even higher than it is.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (08:51)
Yeah, you would almost have to. We’re in a similar situation. Yeah, we’re certainly not trying to have discount fees. We’re not trying to compete on who has the highest fees, because we work alongside financial advisors. We do a lot of other things that, from a business standpoint, support what we’re doing. Yeah, taxes, for some reason, is this area where it seems like more often than not, consumers are out to get the best deal they can as opposed to the best value they can.

Jennifer Climo (09:14)
Agree.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (09:15)
So Jennifer, let’s talk a little bit more about what that, cause I get a lot of questions from advisors about the, know, kind of the idea of, Hey, I would love to, I would love to start integrating taxes in-house. And you have a definitely a unique background compared to a lot of financial advisors in that you were a CPA first, because one of the things I tell advisors when they try to explore that is like, Hey, what happens if the first CPA you hire goes on maternity leave or decides they don’t want to work for you anymore, get sick, whatever that is, like as the advisor, as the business owner, are you prepared to go ahead and do those 184 tax returns yourself. So, I mean, you have a CPA background, you have a lot more experience with this, but what’s your experience been like having to add team members tax specific?

Jennifer Climo (09:51)
Yeah, that’s interesting. So what we do is we cycle all of our planning associates through the tax practice if they’re interested. So we have a sort of unique model where we hire folks right out of college and train them to be CFPs over time. And so when they start out, teach them, you know, they get licensed and we do the trading and they’re doing all of the work to build the financial plans. And then during tax season, they can be a preparer and each one prepares maybe 30 to 40 tax returns during tax season. And, you know…They’re not super duper hard. I mean, we’re not doing super complex returns in general. they’re seeing that the nice thing about having a tax practice that’s part of your financial planning practice is you’re seeing the same thing over and over. You have the same kind of clients. In our case, we have two sets of clients. So we deal with retirees as everyone else does, and then also high-earning professionals. And so we’re seeing the same things. We’re seeing the same RSUs and stock options all the time with that group. And we’re seeing all of the Roth conversions and RMDs within social security with the other group. And because we custody with Fidelity, we’re getting all of the 1099s, and we can automate that. So we have a system where we can automate from WellScape. All the 1099s go boom right into our system. So we don’t have, and we say, Client, you don’t have to give us your Fidelity 1099. We have it. We’re not going to miss an account. We have them all. And it allows you to make it just systems and processes to make things smoother as part of the planning practice, we’ll have all of our clients sign 2848. So we have the power of attorney for all of those clients. Now, not all clients are tax clients, because some people love their CPA, and that’s fine, we’ll work with whoever. And if they’re not a tax client, we’re not gonna ask for that 2848 unless we’re close to the CPA. But if they’re self-prepared, we’re going to, because it just makes life easier. If there’s a tax notice, we get it several days before they do. There’s no more guessing. Did you make those estimated tax payments? Just look it up. I thought you’re missing a 1099 or something. Just look it up. It just makes life a lot easier.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (11:47)
Yeah, and for advisors listening, there’s so much you can do to systematize the tax impact you’re having, whether you have taxes in-house like Jennifer does or not. So Jennifer, you mentioned just automating the 1099s getting uploaded. So if you’re not doing the taxes in-house, great, there’s an extra step there. There’s a different system that needs to be in place. But you would be shocked at how grateful your clients will be if they don’t have to collect their own 1099s. That might sound simple and silly, but I see it all the time from clients who start working with us and their advisor gives us their 1099s directly and the client will gush for hours about how great their advisor is because now they don’t have to download and we as financial professionals we know it’s not that hard to hit download and upload but for clients it feels like this big hurdle.

Jennifer Climo (12:28)
Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing that we do that’s super helpful, I’ve gotten more comments on this than anything else we do, is that we remind them of their estimated tax liability every quarter. So it’s one of our value adds. We have a step in the process at the end of preparing a tax return. It’s exported into the tax planning software and a spreadsheet is updated with all four of their quarterly estimated taxes payments if there are any. Now we put as many as possible on autopay and then schedule the payment transfer to go out to fund that, but just an email to them saying, hey, just reminder, $7,000 is your estimated tax payment due next week, and we’ve transferred you this money, and it will be swept on such and such a date. And clients love that, and it’s so easy. It’s a small thing.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (13:12)
It really is. it’s, it’s, I don’t know, maybe I’m guilty of this at times, although I try pretty hard to stay on the simple side of taxes, but it can be so easy to get distracted by shiny objects. If you spend any time in the internet, you’re going to think that if you’re not saving your clients a million dollars in taxes every year, then you’re a terrible professional. And that’s just not the reality for most people. Most people just want taxes to be a little less painful. They want it to be a little more clear. They want fewer surprises. And Jennifer, what you’re talking about with systematizing things is really how we consistently do that. Now, this next question might feel obvious, but I think it’s worth reinforcing. If tax prep is a rounding error, why keep doing it?

Jennifer Climo (13:47)
Well, we are trying to grow and it’s actually a value add. It’s the entire reason people come to us for one stop shopping, honestly. As you point out that the conference, the conference did a great job of it. Tax planning is so, so important. If you can incorporate tax planning, you are different than every other advisor and you’re really making a difference to the clients because taxes is such a pain point for them. It’s the largest expense they’ll likely ever pay. And to get back to your other question, which I never really answered about succession, is when we build those young people through the process, we’ve had a couple people that want to be enrolled agents. And so we will pay, we give a certain amount to professionals every two years for their continuing education. So we will pay for them to become enrolled agents. And one of our young folks, Evan, who you met, is actually an enrolled agent, just became one. And we have another, an advisor actually working to become one. And so we strongly encourage that because that is a business risk. Obviously, if something happens to your one CPA, you have to be prepared and you can’t just go grab another CPA off the street.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (14:47)
Yeah. Well, Jennifer, I appreciate you bringing up enrolled agents. I think I’ve gotten slightly better over the years of referring to tax professionals more broadly. But for most consumers, CPA is synonymous with tax professional. And the enrolled agent designation is fantastic for people who want to focus just on taxes. I mean, you’re a CPA. I’m a CPA. But when people come to me and say, taxes is what I want to do, especially people who are already involved in financial planning, I don’t think I’ve ever recommended to somebody, Hey, you should go become a CPA. We talk real specifically about whether an enrolled agent makes sense. If they want to be preparing taxes, it absolutely does. But I appreciate you including that in the conversation because the enrolled agent is a fantastic designation for people who want to prepare taxes.

Jennifer Climo (15:26)
I agree, and as you know, not all CPAs know taxes. There’s some tax, some CPAs are on it or in industry, they don’t know anything about taxes. Just because you’re a CPA doesn’t mean you know taxes, but enrolled agent, you should know taxes.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (15:38)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Jennifer, switching gears just a little bit, I mean, you clearly have this extensive tax background. You’ve been, I mean, again, the timeline you talked about, you were probably one of the early adopters of integrating these things. You’ve got all this great experience. So why did you come to the summit a few weeks ago for this conference for financial advisors, where I proudly tell people you probably aren’t gonna learn any brand new proprietary secrets? I can’t imagine you walked away from there saying, Steven, I’ve never thought about the tax code that way. So why come to the summit? And then I’d love to hear some of your takeaways.

Jennifer Climo (16:10)
Well, the summit is something I always considered attending, but I’m like, I don’t know if it’s going to be worth it, whatever. But one of our young planning associates, Evan, who went with me, really wanted to go. And so I said, you know what? I’m going to go, too. I’ll go with you. So we went together. And I knew this going into it, that it was mostly a communications summit for us. I mean, there were some takeaways if you didn’t know tax. There’s definitely some strategies you could have picked up for tax planning and whatnot, but it was primarily how do you communicate value to the clients? And I thought the sessions were extremely valuable in that regard. And I had pages and pages of notes on things to implement. Things you know when you hear anyway, you listen to the podcasts all the time. And so you all know this stuff, but it’s just when you’re soaked in it, then it makes it easier to bring it to life.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (16:53)
There is something different. I’m glad you share that because there’s definitely something different about being in person for an extended period of time, where you’re not just hearing from people on stage. You’re able to talk to the people sitting next to you. You’re hearing. Sometimes it’s just small nuances. I know even when I’m speaking and I’m interacting with the audience, sometimes people will say somewhere, I almost want to stop my presentation and say, hold on, I need to take notes real quick. That was a really interesting way to say that. And so that’s one of my favorite things even being on stage is being able to call on people in the audience and instead of just saying, here’s what I think, it’s no, tell me about when you’ve actually had to deal with that. Tell me, tell me how you actually respond to a client when they bring you what you know is a terrible tax planning idea, but you don’t, you don’t want to make them feel bad. You don’t want to stop them from asking questions in the future and then be able to hear those, those answers because you’re absolutely right. I mean, we focus heavily on how do people take action? The, communication is a big piece of that systems and processes are a big piece of that. Accountability is a big piece of that. for, I mean, the people in the audience definitely span a wide range of their tax knowledge. So I definitely had people who left the conference saying, Steven and I learned so much on taxes, which I’m glad they were there. But we’re really intentional about, okay, no matter your tax experience, we wanna make sure that you can leave with action items that you can put in practice to enhance client experience.

Jennifer Climo (18:08)
Yeah, I totally agree. mean, one of the things that I loved, I just used it today, just today to talk to somebody is I’m a very blunt person. And sometimes the things that come out of my mouth really shouldn’t. So, but taking a step back and thinking how to rephrase things to in some fashion be clients like you, we work with clients like you in this situation or a busy client, typically in clients in your situation are too busy to think about where to put their cash or are too busy to think about some tax strategy and just instead of saying coming across by why didn’t you think about this you should have done this and you know there’s just better ways to phrase things and I mean of course you know that it’s common sense right you know that from before but having examples of how to phrase it was very helpful those are some good takeaways

Steven Jarvis, CPA (19:53)
Yeah, that’s another great example and one that I love hearing from other people as well. Those little nuances because as much as I love the podcast, it gives me a chance to talk to thousands of advisors on a weekly basis. There’s just something different about sitting there together in person, me on the Navi, these things together, sometimes sharing painful experiences. I think people in person are much more likely to maybe somewhat sheepishly say, hey, here’s what I got this wrong and what I learned from it. Hopefully somebody else can skip getting it wrong. Jennifer, just maybe a little bit more broadly, you mentioned coming home with pages of notes. What’s your approach to leaving a conference and then making sure you actually implement the value that you get, whether it’s the summit or anything else?

Jennifer Climo (19:30)
I came home and I sat down and went into my, we use advise on, we just moved to advise on for CRM. And I went and updated a bunch of workflows and checklists and downloaded the books I wanted to read from the conference that were mentioned, started reading them, started implementing. I’m one those odd people that’s very good about implementing right away and talking to my team about, we learned these three things. Let’s see how we can implement this into the practice.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (19:53)
Good for you, because so many people, it’s easy to be excited when you’re in person, and then by the time you get through your flight or multiple flights, by the time you get through the weekend, you’re back to serving clients, and those things kind of fade away. And so that’s definitely what I’ve seen have the biggest impact, is the people who will go immediately put it on their calendar, put it in their CRM, put it into their blueprints. Those are all great, great things. Appreciate you sharing that.

Jennifer Climo (20:13)
Yep, that’s definitely what we do.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (20:15)
Jennifer, as we’re recording this in the middle of October, as we approach year end, what is still on your to-do list for helping clients get ready for year end or for getting ready for this next filing season?

Jennifer Climo (20:26)
Well, as we’re going through our own search meetings, getting ready for year end, we are updating tax projections and making sure we’ve accounted for all the Roth conversions that we want to do for clients. And if we can make the Roth contributions in advance, we’re doing that as well. As part of our tax prep process, that’s one of our workflow steps is to see if we, for every single client, can they make a Roth? Can they make a deductible IRA? Can they do a backdoor Roth? So we pretty much never miss those. And that came out of…trial and error and making mistakes. Obviously, every time we make a mistake, that goes in the checklist. So, but yeah, there’s a lot of tax planning that goes on this time of year specific to the clients and what’s happening. But it’s pretty streamlined because we update the tax planning all year long. So it’s just very easy to drop in numbers. We’re not scrambling trying to prepare tax plans this time of year. Like I said before, when we finish a tax return, one of the steps is to export it to the tax planning software, which takes all of them in it. so then it’s just done for the advisors to update their tax plans all throughout the year.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (21:22)
Yeah, it definitely is easier to do tax planning when you have the tax returns as a starting point. That’s one of the reasons I’m so adamant that advisors get every tax return every single year. that is the foundation you need to use. Because even if life is going to dramatically change, even if someone’s going to retire this year and their income is going to go completely different than it was last year, I’m still a huge advocate for, okay, let’s start with the most recent tax return we have and build from there. That’s going to give us the clearest picture on what their tax situation is going to look like and then where those opportunities are that you’re talking about. Is this a year where it makes sense to do a Roth conversion? Can we go ahead and just contribute to Roth? I do appreciate that you mentioned Roth contributions because I do think that at times people skip ahead and just go right to, well, I hear about Roth conversions all the time, that’s the only thing I’m gonna think about. And it turns out there are lots of ways to Roth.

Jennifer Climo (22:07)
Absolutely. And not only that, but I wanted to also point out that it is the time of year always where we’re meeting with prospects. one of the, I, this was talked about a lot in the conference, but you always ask the prospect to send you their tax return as part of beforehand in advance of the meeting, because like you’ve said at the conference, you can, you can really get a whole story from the tax return. can tell what their investments are. You can tell if they’re investing their cash. Can tell what kind of houses they have? Do they have a second house? Do have lot of mortgages? There’s just a lot of really good chunky information on there.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (22:34)
Yeah, so much we can learn from a tax return. Jennifer, obviously your experience is gonna be a little bit different than most advisors who don’t have a tax background, but if you were talking to an advisor who said, there’s a lot of, it seems like there’s a lot of value in this tax prep thing, what’s one or two things you would strongly encourage they consider before they decide to add tax prep in-house?

Jennifer Climo (22:518)
Well, I would say that we have sometimes considered getting rid of the tax prep in-house. So you’ve got to consider the pros and the cons. It’s a lot of work, obviously, and it’s a lot of stress. And you really have to build your business so that you’re appropriately staffed, so that you’re not overworking anybody. I mean, I do feel bad for these people who are working 60 plus hours during tax season. We don’t. But it takes some pretty good planning to be able to make it so. And if you go into it not understanding what goes into it, you can pretty easily have your people being overworked, which won’t retain staff.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (23:25)
It really won’t. That’s one of the easiest ways to differentiate yourself as you’re recruiting is to really give people a different experience when it comes to the hours they work. We’re actually recording this episode on October 14th. And I mentioned to Jennifer before we started, I took that as a really positive sign that she voluntarily picked October 14th, the day before a deadline to record a podcast. Cause that tells me everything I need to know about how you structure your tax season that you aren’t scrambling at a deadline. So love to see that. That’s definitely worth it.

Jennifer Climo (23:52)
I also strongly suggest not filing extension. we have a rule, anything, if it’s because of us, it’s getting done. If the work was in, we get it out because I shift, we have to shift to financial planning and surge meetings. Once April 15th is gone, we’ll do cleanup for another couple of weeks and then off and away we go to financial planning. And so anyone who’s on extension isn’t gonna get their return done until late summer at the earliest. So therefore, we only put people on extension that, where we didn’t have the information where it was because of them and not us.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (24:19)
I’m 100 % in agreement with that. We do a larger volume of returns, so we have more that end up on extension, but we staff our team so that it’s never because of us. It’s because of late K1s or just we’ve got some procrastinators out there, but I love that approach. It seems like you see more and more CPAs and tax professionals in general just advocating for you should extend everyone. And Drew, I think that’s such a terrible mentality. We could do a whole separate podcast on that.

Jennifer Climo (24:43)
Yes, I’ve seen that!

Steven Jarvis, CPA (24:46)
So, Jennifer, if people are interested in learning more about what you are doing or following along with your journey, you mentioned that you’ve done a Kitces episode. Where else can people find you?

Jennifer Climo (26:34.078)
Milestonefinancialplanning.com is our website. also on LinkedIn under my name and I’m not really big into social media. So that’s pretty much it.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (25:01)
That’s probably a good call. So Jennifer, really appreciate you taking the time to come on the podcast today. For anyone listening, we have already opened registration for Summit 2026. We’ll be back in Phoenix, Arizona at the end of September 2026. You can go to retirementtaxservices.com and go ahead and get signed up. It’s going to be incredible. We’re going to take a real focus on financial planning with taxes at the center, bringing back a lot of great speakers and adding some new ones. So Jennifer, again, really appreciate your time today. It was great seeing you at the Summit. I’ll look forward to the next time we get to see each other in person.

Jennifer Climo (25:29)
Sounds great. Thank you, Steven.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (25:31)
To everyone listening, thank you for being here. And until next time, good luck out there. And remember to tip your server, not the IRS.