Welcome to the Retirement Tax Services Podcast! Steven’s guest is Matthew Jarvis of The Perfect RIA and Jarvis Financial. Today’s topic is Qualified Charitable Distributions (QCDs).
There’s a lot to love about making charitable donations without getting taxed for them. However, there’s a lot of room for error when they’re reported. Steven and Matthew get real about acknowledging these mistakes. Moreover, they share tips on handling things professionally when it’s not your fault.
No one wants to look bad. It may be tempting to ignore a QCD-reporting mistake, but don’t: it’s your client’s money, let them decide if it’s worth fixing.
More importantly, dishonesty is a betrayal of your client’s trust. Delivering maximum value requires owning up. However, what do you do when you find someone else’s error?
An advisor at Matthew’s practice recently discovered a mistake: A client’s return didn’t accurately reflect $900 in QCD’s. Consequently, this came to roughly $200 in taxes. Although that amount might seem insignificant to some, it wasn’t to Matt.
It didn’t appear to be the advisor’s fault. Nevertheless, Matthew opted to take action because the dishwasher rule applies: You have to show clients that you are always looking to improve. In other words, even a $200 mistake swept under the rug is too much.
If you suspect a CPA has dropped the ball, how do you handle it? Both Steven—as a CPA—and Matthew advise against finger-pointing. Above all, keep it professional. Hostility only burns bridges.
Every mortal makes mistakes, anyway. Therefore, don’t fly off the handle. Matt observes that you might jump on someone… only to learn that you’ve “made a mistake about the mistake.”
Avoid starting an adversarial relationship with that center of influence (COI). For instance, telling a client, “Your CPA screwed this up,” will only backfire. If they happen to know the COI better than you, both could side against you.
Even if the client favors you, you’ll wind up making an enemy. The ROI isn’t worth it. Taking ownership and seeking solutions is far better. That’s most likely to generate value.
You’re probably in a great position to save the day: Advisors get to meet with clients throughout the year. On the other hand, the CPA may only see them annually. If you get proactive with that COI and establish a professional partnership, everybody wins.
However, if you don’t know the CPA, notify the client first. For example, an email can both convey the situation and reassure them. People fear trouble with the IRS. As a result, notify them that “This is an easy fix.”
Next, reach out and present the situation to the CPA—without laying any blame. Consider your words first. Don’t say “I think there’s been a mistake.”
Try phrasing it as a “can-you-help-me-understand”. This avoids putting them on the defensive.
Steven and Matthew have more on QCDs and quality control in this episode of the Retirement Tax Services Podcast. Do you have suggestions? Would you like to share a retirement tax planning experience on the podcast? Drop us a line at advisors@rts.tax.
Thank you for listening.
Steven Jarvis:
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 in this show I teach financial advisors how to deliver massive value to their clients through retirement tax planning. On today’s episode we’re going to talk about Qualified Charitable Distributions or QCDs and really we’re going to focus on what can go wrong with this process and what you should do when it inevitably does. And to really highlight how this might work in practice I’ve got Matt Jarvis here with me today as a guest, so Matt welcome!
Matthew Jarvis:
Steven it’s great to be back on the show.
SJ:
Yeah, it’s great to have you! so for those of you who didn’t listen to the other episode that was on, Matt is a CFP and owns an RIA in Washington state and is the co-founder of The Perfect RIA. So he spends a lot of time sharing stories of things that have gone well for him and maybe some things that haven’t gone so well and always learn from them so we appreciate you being here today.
MJ:
Yeah I’m glad to be here and I have to confess that I jinxed myself into this mistake that happened with a QCD. So a few weeks ago I posted on the FPA forum – which is a place I love to loiter – asking if anybody had seen mistakes with QCD and several people came out and said no there’s never mistakes with QCD, it always gets reported correctly. And I thought, huh, that’s kind of strange and so literally yesterday Steven, one of the advisors in my office came and he said, “Matthew we got this tax return from a client, we can, see we verify that last year they did $900 of QCD but it was not reported correctly on the tax return. What do we do? So I immediately thought, ‘Oh no, I jinxed myself here but let’s fix it.’
SJ:
Yeah you know people are grounded in reality when they can, honestly say, about anything that mistakes never happen. I mean, come on! I think they happen with everything. That’s part of being a professional, part of being a human really. The important thing is what are you going to do when they happen? So, really excited to get into the story but maybe let’s just start with: did I hear that right? You said $900 of QCDs? So we’re talking, maybe a couple hundred bucks in tax. So why is this the story we’re talking about?
MJ:
That’s a great question, that was actually with Alex in my office asked, and he said, ‘Matthew it’s $900, we did the math, it’s about $200 in tax savings in this client situation.’ Couple of reasons why we’re still going to take action on this. One, it’s the dishwasher rule, right? We want to show clients that we are examining their returns, that we are always looking for areas of improvement and that we own mistakes. If we’re going to sweep under the rug a $900 mistake or – $200 for the client – where does that stop? What if it’s $1000? What if it’s $10,000? So even if it was a single dollar off I’m still going to mention to the client, ‘hey it looks like this is off by a dollar, we don’t really need to do anything about this dollar but I want you to know that we are aware of it and here’s how we’re going to take care of it going forward.’
SJ:
Yeah, it’s certainly not for you to decide what is important to the client. That seems like a huge breach of trust really, and if it makes you feel any better the Department of Labour actually agrees with your one-dollar threshold. When it comes to 401(k) plans, that’s their threshold for doing audits and if it impacts an individual member or a participant in the 401(k), if it’s off by a dollar they will force people to fix it, to make it right for the participant. One dollar! so DOL completely agrees with you. I know that’s what you were looking for.
MJ:
Hahahaha! That’s great validation, thank you.
SJ:
it’s great that you’re taking that approach of: this is the clients money and it’s not up to me to decide if it’s important, it’s up to me to identify these things and take it to the client. So, tell us more about what happened here.
MJ:
Yeah so now we have an opportunity, right? The default is to think, ‘well the CPA screwed this up’ and we could certainly assign blame there. But nothing positive is going to come of that. So if I tell the client, ‘Mr. Client your CPA screwed this thing up, they have to fix it.’ Now I’ve got this big adversarial relationship. One, maybe the CPA is their close friend and they like them more than they like me! But either way if they call the CPA and say, ‘well Mr. CPA my advisor says you screwed this up, you’re needed to fix it.’ I have not made a friend here, I have at best made an enemy.
SJ:
Well, not only that but I mean how do you know the CPA screwed it up? Sure, it didn’t get reported to the IRS correctly, but, is that the CPA’s fault? I am not trying to just defend CPAs because I am one. But, let’s just start with ownership mentality. Get Jaco in here, of you know what? It’s really not even worth your time to think about whose fault is this. If you want to take extreme ownership, it’s how do I be responsible for fixing it? I love that that’s your approach.
MJ:
But I also want to hedge my bets because this QCD thing is fairly straightforward, right? The client had a $900 QCD, it does not report on the 1099 from Fidelity, so the CPA really had no way of knowing. But, maybe there’s something else going on. Again with the QCD world it’s pretty cut and dry, but I don’t ever want to accuse the CPA of making a mistake and then find out that I made a mistake about the mistake. What I always want to do is: ‘hey I was reviewing this and it didn’t totally makes sense to me, could you help me understand it a little bit more? I want to make sure that we’re not missing something. And Steven as I always do, I would be glad to pay for an hour of your time because I need to pick your brain I need to be educated by you. I want to go in with some humility, even if I think I know whatever the subject is inside and out. Why come in with my boxing gloves upright come in with kitty gloves, I want to build a relationship here.
SJ:
Yeah I really like that approach Matt and I was talking to a CPA friend of mine that spends all the time on taxes. Not about your QCD situation, but that topic in general and her comment to me to describe a similar situation was, okay, while the CPA really should be asking the questions and should identify these things but again what good does that do us to say okay whose fault is it and who should we blame? Because to be honest the CPA is in a completely different situation than the advisor. And really the advisor is so much better positioned to identify these things and make sure they happened correctly. Because you’re meeting with your clients throughout the year, you’re probably doing these things when there’s no time crunch when you don’t have 300 other clients demanding that you get something done in two weeks by the deadline. You’re in a much better position that if you partner with the CPA, if you’re proactive with them, that your client is the one who benefits. I’m not telling you that it’s your obligation to serve the CPA for some, just moral reason. It’s your client that’s going to win.
MJ:
Totally. Well, I think also like you mentioned at the beginning of this episode Steven, we all make mistakes and I want to extend professional courtesy to the CPA so that when, not if, when I make a mistake or my team makes a mistake hopefully that same level of professional courtesy will come back. But also in QCDs, it’s virtually impossible for the CPA to catch this. Right here, like you said they’re doing like 100s of returns, they get the 1099, they scan it in, or it gets automatically uploaded in the computer. Nowhere does it say that there’s a QCD. There is no letter, there is no mention of it, the only way they could possibly know is if the client remembers to tell them, ‘hey by the way I did this QCD thing.’ Which of course no client is going to remember.
SJ:
Yeah, even if we assume that you did a phenomenal job explaining to the client what a QCD is.
MJ:
And I did! Hahah!
SJ:
Between CFPs and CPAs and every other finance professional. We use so many acronyms and jargon that – which we shouldn’t be doing, but that’s a different episode – that if you’re talking to them about this in May, and in March they provide the information to their CPA, they don’t remember there was a QCD.
MJ:
No! Yeah.
SJ:
So, okay so let’s get back to the story, so where does it go from here?
MJ:
Correct, so it’s a new CPA for this client, so I don’t have a relationship yet with CPA. If I did I would reach directly out to the CPA or tax preparer and say, ‘Hey, I noticed this, again, would you help me understand it? and I think that not all the right information got passed on to you.’ So again I’m not blaming them, I’m not saying you made a mistake. I’m not even saying it looks like a mistake. I’m saying, ‘I don’t understand this I think that the issue is that myself and the client didn’t give the right information to you and therefore kind of garbage in garbage out, if you will.’ But like I said, I don’t know the CPA so I had to go directly to the client because if I reach out to the CPA that I don’t have a relationship with telling him that I think there was a mistake. It’s a weird situation. So, we’ve emailed the client: so we’ve reviewed your return as we promised we would, noticed what looks like a very common mistake, which is the QCD, the money you send to charity didn’t get reported correctly to the IRS. Great news, this is an easy fix. So that’s going to be my lead in, that this is an easy fix. Because people get nervous about the IRS, that oh no, I’m going to get audited and they’re going to seize my bank accounts and I’m going to lose my house. None of those things are going to happen.
SJ:
Yeah I really want to highlight the way you phrased that, because I think it’s really important: can you help me understand? That’s a line I’ve used for years in my career. I didn’t figure it out initially, but your wording is so important because you want people to work on your team and not feel defensive because if you start with ‘hey I think there’s a mistake’. Even if you don’t accuse them of making the mistake that’s how they’re going to take, if you lead with this got screwed up, they’re going to think, ‘oh well this Matt guy he’s coming at me’ I need to justify my actions to the client and he just my actions to myself. So can you help me understand?because it puts you both in a position where there could be a positive outcome and no one has accused anybody of anything.
MJ:
Totally and in this email which I’d be glad to share a copy with your listeners, we also highlighted the steps that we had taken to make sure it got reported correctly because I don’t want to… I want to be humble but I don’t want to come across as incompetent. So, great we could’ve done a better job or in the future we’ll do a better job communicating it, attached is the 1099 letter we sent you back in January that mentioned it. But that clearly – I’m going to take extreme ownership – clearly that wasn’t enough to make sure that the CPA got it, there will probably be a charge from the CPA to amend your return. Please have them bill our office, because we didn’t do a good job of communicating therefore it’s our responsibility to get it fixed.
SJ:
Yes so this is an email you’re sending to the client, right?
MJ:
Correct.
SJ:
So, for the listeners if you want to send an email to advisors@rts.tax, I’ll make sure that Matt gets me that email and then I can share that language with you because it seems like a simple thing but I know I’ve frozen up just sitting at my keyboard of, ‘okay how do I write this email?’ Especially when it’s on a sensitive topic and you need to sit there staring at the screen. So having something to reference can be great. So I really appreciate that offer Matt, again, advisors@rts.tax if you’d like to see a copy of that.
MJ:
Yeah not to divulge too far or rabbit hole too far into email etiquette, I also need to 100% assume that that email was going to get forwarded to the CPA, if fact, actually I hope that it gets forwarded. I might even put in there, ‘hey go ahead and forward this to your CPA, please make an introduction I’ll be glad to get this taken care of.’ So again the last thing I want to do is say that your CPA screwed up they made a mistake, dang it they need to fix this. None of those things I am not even going to mention that out loud, I’m going to approach it from the highest ground I can.
SJ:
Well, not only assuming that the CPA is going to see it whether you tell him to not but how much more value are you adding to your client? How much time are you saving them, if all they have to do is hit forward and they hit forward and say, ‘dear Mr. CPA can you see this email from my advisor, when can we talk about this?’ You just make their life easier too because nobody likes writing those emails
MJ:
When I get in touch with the CPA which is my next round of discussion. Like I said this just occurred in our office yesterday. I will of course offer again to pay for the amended tax-return. I will completely own that there’s just no way for him to know that this happened. But I will also Steven, still offer to pay for an hour of his time to get some ideas on how we can improve this QCD system, so that it doesn’t become a problem for him in the future, and again so I will pay for your time, I value you as a professional. I’m owning that I was the originator of this issue and let’s collaborate together, which again no other financial advisor is offering. No one else is offering to pay for their time, no one else is owning their mistake, no one else is saying, ‘hey, please help me help you so that we all win.’
SJ:
Yeah I really love that. Now let’s slow down to for just a second because you and I talk about this stuff all the time and I think you’re skipping over or not skipping over you’re going really quickly through a lot of really important things.
MJ:
Please.
SJ:
So, one, let’s reference every back to the other episode you and I did together. It was all about centres of influence, so if you want to hear more about that, offering to pay for their time and how to build those relationships, go back and find that episode it was great, really effective stuff in there. But you kind of casually mentioned that this was identified by Alex, an advisor in your office, reviewing the client’s tax return like you said you would. I think is how you phrased that.
MJ:
Yes.
SJ:
So go back and talk about that because correct me if wrong but, if you’re an advisor, you’re a CFP, not a tax preparer, not a CPA. So how was that a commitment that you’re making to your clients?
MJ:
Yeah so thanks Steven for drawing that out. Tax plan is a big differentiator, so I want to be clear between tax planning and tax advice. I don’t give tax advice I’m not licensed to give tax advice. We can do a lot of tax planning, somewhere listeners will say that’s semantics and that’s okay compliance is all about semantics. But when we’re talking to clients in retirement taxes will likely be be your biggest single expense, therefore we want to make sure that we don’t over pay the IRS. See I think you put it brilliantly, hey lets pay what we owe, let’s not leave them a tip, I love that saying, if you will. Part of that we’re telling our clients that every year we need to get a copy of your tax return either a PDF copy or through the 8821 system, directly from the IRS. But either way we need to see that so we know how much to withhold in taxes, what to do for Roth conversions, but also to watch for potential mistakes. Now I don’t want to promise I can catch every mistake because I can’t, but I say I want a 2nd set of eyes to catch potential mistakes especially if we’re doing QCDs, because I know it’s missed all the time.
SJ:
Yeah, that’s that’s great I love that and I think that is a really important distinction between tax planning and tax advice because I talk to advisors who in the same sentence will tell me I don’t do any tax any planning but I help clients with Roth conversions, and in my mind – maybe this is me as a CPA again too hung up on it – but I can’t think of an example of something you can do as an advisor that doesn’t have a tax implication. If we’re talking about money, if we talk about your income, your savings, your investments and the IRS is always going to take their piece. So we can either accept that and to your point you don’t have to give tax advice you can say, ‘hey, here are some things I notice, we should together – you and I, client – go talk to an expert to make sure we get this right. There’s lots of ways to do that where you are not the final say and so you’ve protected yourself, you’ve made sure more importantly so, you’ve made sure the clients going to get the right answer because that’s what it is all about. If your main concern when you show up to work every day is not getting in trouble, you’re doing this wrong. I don’t want anybody to get in trouble either but your focus should be value to the client.
MJ:
Like what you said about not being the final say on tax strategies. So, Bob Keebler, is a great CPA, has a lot of great training for advisors and CPAs; he always gives this idea, he says, ‘hey if your client is ever audited for a tax strategy you recommended, you want someone else to be sitting behind your bench.’ In other words, you want the CPA sitting next to you not at the other table coming after you. So, if I’m recommending a Roth conversion, a QCD, their tax withholding rates require distribution… everything is tied to taxes, I want to include the CPA because if things ever hit the fan I want the CPA sitting at my bench not the other bench.
SJ:
Oh, totally agree we want this to really be a team dynamic and if your focus is serving the client, it’s easy to get other professionals on board with taking a team approach with you.
MJ:
Now, I need to confess right, obviously the main goal is delivering massive value to clients in the area of tax planning for a discussion specifically but in general, but I also have a goal of growing a very successful practice. Doing tax planning puts me head and shoulders above almost every other advisor, in fact I had a client last year they said, ‘Matthew I’m comparing you and a mega firm that everyone would recognise.’ I said, ‘that’s great!’ And they said that mega firm said that I shouldn’t work with a small practitioner like you because you don’t have access to all these resources, these investment committees and so forth. I said, ‘yeah that’s that’s narrowly true, right but what did big firm say when they looked at your tax return?’ ‘Mathew they didn’t look at my tax return.’ ‘Really?’ But I knew this, but I said, ‘really really, so, how did they advise you how much to have withheld from your Social Security and taxes?’ ‘Mathew, they didn’t.’ ‘How did they advise you how much you should move from and IRA to a Roth so you don’t get killed in taxes in 10 years?’ ‘They didn’t mention that either.’ So tax planning gives me a huge leg up over firms that are shooting at way above my level. Right these guys have all the resources at the same time they’re missing this key area.
SJ:
Yeah totally totally agree with all of that, and a number of CPAs I talk to who almost never have positive experience with advisors. Sorry advisors but normally they’re seeing the stuff on the back end. So few of them proactively come to the CPAs and tax preparers and the way their eyes light up when I tell them that I work with some advisors and we’re trying to work together to go out tell other advisors this is how they should be doing it. Their eyes just light up and they’re like those are the advisors I want to work with. Yeah and it’s not surprising, it’s simple. It’s hard to consistently execute but it’s not complex.
MJ:
Yeah the other side of that Steven, those are the advisors they want to work with which means those are the advisors to him they’re going to send their clients not the advisor that comes in and we talked about this in the other episode and says, hey write down five names. That person they never want to talk to again. The advisor who is helping them out and back to this QCD thing, in a way I set the CPA up for failure on this, right? I did not make sure that the QCD was set up so now he is the one, if he had caught it or the client had caught it years later. To have to say, ‘well yeah I guess that the tax return was wrong.’ He can’t say your advisor set me up for failure or if I harvested a the capital gain and do a big Roth conversion and here she has to say well now you owe 20,000 in taxes. I’ve made them the bearer of bad news, I’ve set them up for failure, that’s the opposite of what I want to do.
SJ:
Yeah, so coming back to this specific story a little bit more. I probably know the answers from other conversations we’ve had, but talk a little bit about how Alex or what Alex was doing when this was identified because I know that you don’t just have him pick returns at random or pick clients at random to say hey here are some things to look for. How do you make sure this happens with every client and it is an effective use of time?
MJ:
Yeah, that’s a good question. This one specifically the client had just got a new tax preparer, CPA for this tax season and so they had specifically asked, hey can we send in our tax return and can you take an extra close look at it? And so for that one it was on the top of our list so that was an easy one to do. But otherwise once we get to about summer or as we’re getting ready for our fall surge meeting we’re reviewing every client’s tax return as part of our case prep for that meeting and we have sort of a checklist we go down for that. But one is of course anybody that’s doing QCDs, making sure that in fact that’s been reported correctly on the tax return because we know that that’s a pretty common thing. Otherwise we’re looking to see if anything stands out, are there any big numbers here we didn’t think were going to be there. we’re not necessarily not necessarily we’re just not at all matching 1099’s for example so I’m not saying he wanted Fidelity report is that the exact same number down to the penny, but if I look and I said I know he took an R&D last year and there’s zero on IRA distributions, something is going on here, I’m watching for big things like that.
SJ:
Gotcha, or things like hey we rolled over a 401(k) to an IRA, and why they have this huge qualified distribution.
MJ:
Yeah.
SJ:
Yeah, I think that was an example you had given me recently as well.
MJ:
I’m also watching to see what they owed in April and if they ended up owing money, then I’m going to have a discussion with them about that. Nobody likes owing money in April. So that’s when I’d approach them and say, ‘I see that last year you owe $5000 in April would you like us to take care of that? So that you don’t owe in April again’. I’m also watching if they’re making estimated payments and I want to look for ways and say, ‘hey, would you like us to just take care of that estimated payment for you?’ Which by the way is a whole episode we could do sometime Steven.
SJ:
Yeah, well you shouldn’t have to do that. So I think this is all really great stuff, this really I mean addresses the situation that’s inevitably going to come up. So I really appreciate you taking the time to do this with me today. Couple things I’ll throw out real-quick: we will do a separate episode that really gets more into why and when you should be doing QCDs, but if you’re interested in learning more, go ahead and send us an email at advisors@rts.tax and we’ll on the list for our upcoming newsletter which is going to be all about QCDs. So we’d love to get you on the list for that, and then you don’t really the goal of this podcast is not just to give out tax information because there’s plenty of tax information out there, right? You mentioned a couple of good sources already. So we really want to focus on what are actions that advisors can take based on this discussion that we’re having, and so Matt, I’ll let you go first and advisors who are listening to this episode, what should they do it when they hit stop?
MJ:
Yeah, number one is create a system for getting tax returns from every client every year, this does take work. You’re not going to just be able to one-time say, ‘hey, will everyone send me your tax returns?’ And magically get all of them. You’re going to have to educate clients on why it’s important, right? You can use this QCD example, you can say, ‘I work with advisors I talked with advisors who have seen mistakes on client tax returns. I can’t promise we’ll catch all of them but a second set of eyes never hurts.’ You want to give the client a why, when you’re asking for this very personal information, but that’s a must. You’ve got to get tax returns every client every prospect.
SJ:
Yeah that makes a tonne of sense to me, but let’s help out advisors who haven’t been doing this. How do you go to a client that you had for five years and tell him all these great reasons you should get their tax return and have them not think ‘well why weren’t you doing that the last five years?’
MJ:
That’s a great example Steven. We have a lot of head trash around that. So I like to approach it with – I’m always looking to increase the value I deliver to clients right? I always want to deliver more value to clients and this year my focus has been on getting additional training on tax planning and then I would go into don’t leave the IRS a tip etc, etc. We’re getting trained by some of the best CPAs in the country and as part of that I need to be looking at your tax return so we can see if there’s mistakes like QCD has been reported wrong or like 401(k) rollover is being done wrong. Things like that happen also let’s us watch for opportunities. I would by the way this year in 2021 I would say, ‘Mr/Mrs. client there are big tax law changes coming down the pipeline – which no one will disagree that that’s happening – and to get ahead of those we need to start looking at your tax returns so we can proactively take action as tax laws change. So, I would use… this is probably the perfect year ever, if you’ve never done tax returns before get them this year because you can use the tax law changes are such a motivator.
SJ:
Yeah that’s a perfect, perfect example. I loved your dialogue there to begin with, but you’re right anyone who hasn’t historically got tax returns from clients. You’re not going to find a better excuse or a better positive reason to get to clients and this isn’t a political discussion, right? You don’t need to get into what you think the final answer is going to be or whether you think it’s right or wrong. I think. we can all agree that changes are coming, so that’s great. The other action item I would call out for advisors is that – even though we didn’t get to the details today – again look for episode on that, you should be talking to your clients proactively about QCDs and really, the action item is any client who is 68 or older, you should be talking to about QCDs, right? Matt, something you and I have talked about a little; don’t wait until you’re 70 and-a-half, make sure that you’re proactively looking at this, so they know it’s coming. Let them know that this is something you’re thinking about and they can plan ahead for. That you’re not just springin’ it on them, on their 70 and-a-half ‘unbirthday’.
MJ:
And the way I like to position that Steven, as I say Mr/Mrs. client we are getting closer to the age where you will be forced by the IRS to take money out of your retirement accounts, your IRA accounts and pay taxes on that money. There is almost… there’s virtually just one way it’s really one way to get money out of your IRA, without pay taxes on it and that’s why giving those dollars to a charity, that you want to support. So, if there’s any charitable organisations you want to support, the boys and girls club, The Humane Society, whatever causes your passion about that, there’s a better way to do it then you simply write in a cheque. Now, I don’t want to get into all these nuanced details, I just want to say that there’s a better way and we know the way.
And the way I like to position that Steven, as I say Mr/Mrs. client we are getting closer to the age where you will be forced by the IRS to take money out of your retirement accounts, your IRA accounts and pay taxes on that money. There is almost… there's virtually just one way it's really one way to get money out of your IRA, without pay taxes on it and that's why giving those dollars to a charity, that you want to support. So, if there's any charitable organisations you want to support, the boys and girls club, The Humane Society, whatever causes your passion about that, there's a better way to do it then you simply write in a cheque. Now, I don’t want to get into all these nuanced details, I just want to say that there's a better way and we know the way.:
Yeah, really just priming the pump there that you, plant those seeds and make sure that things don’t come as a surprise or that they get… ‘cause the last thing you want is for it to get close to that time and for something to trigger it in the client’s mind before you’ve brought it up, right? You don’t want that doubt of, ‘has Matt really taken care of me?’
MJ:
Yeah, totally, dishwasher rule.
SJ:
Yea, dishwasher rule. Perfect, last action item I’ll throw out is to please go to whatever platform you get your podcasts on and leave us a five-star review, so we know that what we’re doing here is providing value to you and so our community can keep growing. Matt thanks for your time today, thank you everyone for listening really appreciate it. Until next time, good luck out there and remember to tip your server not the IRS!
