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 with me once again on the show, quite possibly the most frequent guest. I’m not entirely sure why that would be, but none other than Matthew Jarvis. Matt, welcome.

Matt (01:08):

Steven. Thanks for having me on the show. For recently joined listeners, we are of course brothers and so been that way for a long time, but it’s also fun to do a lot of work with advisors where the intersection of practice management and tax planning connect all the tax knowledge in the world is something I learned early in my career from Tom Gau of all people, all the tax knowledge in the world, all the tax designations in the world do not matter for diddley if you can’t communicate it with clients in a way that they understand it and take action.

Steven (01:34):

Matt, I think what’s even worse than that is all of the tax pontificating, the tax prognosticating, the tax. I’m going to shake my crystal ball as hard as I can and hope I know the outcome and especially as we record this after a recent election. I’m not sure if you’ve heard about that or not. I’m already starting to get tons of questions from people on, well, what do we do now because everything’s going to change, so I’ll let you go first. What is your approach when politics come up with clients in general and then specifically around taxes and elections?

Matt (02:02):

Yeah, yeah, so in my office, I have my own political beliefs in my personal life, but professionally I want to be totally politically agnostic and there’s a lot of reasons for that. Even if I think that this client and I are on the exact same page, I think we voted for the same people and we support the same cause. I still don’t want to go down that path in the office one because that’s often a negative path and I don’t want negative emotions associated with the work that we do. The other is it has no bearing on the work that we’re doing. If I go to meet with my doctor, I don’t want to spend the day talking about motorcycles. I want to spend the time talking about how do I improve my health? Same in my financial planning practice. I want to spend the time focused on the things that we can control and not bemoaning or pontificating on things for which we have no control.

Steven (02:45):

Yeah, that’s a really great reminder and yes, who gets elected can have an influence on what the eventual tax policies are, but the approach I take is that we need to make the best plan we can based on the information we have today and the laws as they’re currently in place. And I know we share a similar approach on this, that tax planning is really about making plans for the long term. If we take the IRS one year at a time, we’re going to lose regardless of what the tax rules are. And so sure, we can pass an election and say, all right, full stop. I’m not going to do tax planning until everything’s crystal clear. Well, good luck with that because the tax code’s written in pencil that day’s never really going to come. And so I think for me, at least, it really comes down to what are the core principles or the foundations that our tax plans based on, and then yes, we’re going to have to make adjustments to those along the way if and when things change. But I’m not going to sit and wait and I’m not going to constantly dramatically change my tax plan every time there’s a new headline. I see.

Matt (03:41):

Yeah, I wouldn’t go this deep with a client per se, but as an advisor, we also need to think about what are we really expecting is going to happen. So let’s say that you’re expecting that tax rates are going to go down. Cool. Let’s just take a minute and pencil this thing out. Let’s say you were going to do a $10,000 Roth conversion this year before the year ended, and now you’re saying, well, I think rates are going to go down. Let’s not do the conversion. Well, how much money do we really think is at stake? Let’s say the client’s at a 22% bracket and you think it’s going to go down to 20%, so a two point difference, $10,000 conversion, what’s that $200 difference? I’m not going to delay a Roth conversion for 200 bucks because this is a multi-decade, possibly multi-generational strategy. I’m not going to get that hang up. Now, if I had a client that was getting ready to sell a business and they had the ability to sell it in one year versus the next, I might think about it a little bit, but then again, I’ve seen way more deals blow up because somebody started dragging their feet than over the tax consequences of it.

Steven (04:36):

Matt and I know that over the last several months, you and I both have been having more and more conversations with advisors about their own practices and potential sales and things like that, and one of my big takeaways from that that reinforces things I’ve known for a long time is that if we’re going to do tax planning on a business sale, that doesn’t happen the day you go to sell the business. That is a conversation early. So that’s a conversation that if someday you hope to sell your practice, whether that’s a year from now or 30 years from now, you need to be thinking about those things and get those things cleaned up and have a plan well in advance. So even in your business sale example, if you haven’t thought about tax planning before the middle of November and you’re trying to sell the business right now, there’s probably not as much you can do on the tax planning side.

Matt (05:15):

I think one of the most important things we can do as advisors as it relates to taxes, politics, and just in general is one of our core jobs is to be able to articulate complicated things in a very succinct manner. And so if we were already planning, let’s say getting ready to meet with a client, we had already talked about doing Roth conversions and they say, Hey, Matthew, I know we were going to do this $40,000 Roth conversion, but I think rates are going to go down next year. I think we could wait until next year to do that conversion. What do you think? This is where I do not want to launch into some Monte Carlo illustration about the time value of money over the next couple of decades. This is where I’m going to say, Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, each year we agreed to move some money from your IRA bucket into your Roth bucket. My recommendation is we still go ahead and move that money, and if rates go down next year, which they could, then we’ll do a bigger conversion next year. And if rates go back up, whether they go up next year or four years from now or eight years from now, or 400 years from now, well four hundred’s too much, but in your lifetime, we’re going to be glad we’ve done a Roth conversion.

Steven (06:11):

Yeah, I like that you’re bringing it back to their specific situation because on a podcast, on a webinar, on social media in particular, it’s really easy to be trying to go with rules of some or be super succinct and skip over, Hey, this has got to be client specific. I get really frustrated with advisors, tax professionals who want to want, like you said, do out the Monte Carlo simulation, get the charts and graphs out and figure out the mathematically optimal outcome. This comes up a lot just this last week, an advisor reach out to me say, Hey, here’s this situation for a client. They’re only going to be able to Roth conversion if they pay the taxes out of the conversion, if they take it out of the IRA and their kind of default approach was, Hey, does that make it a bad idea? And so you can see they’re approaching it from the negative,

(06:51):

And then I go back and to, okay, what are we trying to accomplish here? Because this isn’t just a whack-a-mole guessing game of when is the tax rate going to go up or down? We’re also creating flexibility. We’re doing this over the long term. There’s several things going on there. My response back to them was, Hey, if our only option for doing the Roth conversion is paying for the taxes out of the IRA, heck yeah, let’s do it because we’re still filling up that tax free bucket. Yes, if they have other funds, you can get more into the Roth bucket by using outside funds, but that’s not going to stop me from doing it if the Roth conversion makes sense for that client.

Matt (07:24):

And I think similar to investment planning, tax planning is not heavily influenced by whoever or whatever party is in control, right? Because we’re talking about a long-term approach and the fundamentals are the same. The fundamentals of investing and the fundamentals of tax planning are the same regardless of who’s in office or which political party is in power. And Steven, here’s a great example of that, right? And this is one I use all the time with clients. Whenever we’re talking about tax buckets, especially Roth conversions, I say, Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, someday you are going to need to take out a big lump sum of money. Let’s call it a hundred thousand dollars. Hopefully it’s for something fun like you decided to buy an RV and travel around the country. Maybe it’s for something not fun like medical expenses or you have to remodel your house, you can stay living in there, whatever the reason. If we pull out a hundred thousand dollars in one time, and side note here, it doesn’t matter who’s president or who’s in charge of Congress, if we pull out a hundred thousand dollars at one time, it’s going to kill us in taxes. But if we can do 10 or $20,000 a year, we can fill that tax free bucket without getting killed in taxes and put you in a better spot. And that’s true no matter who’s in office.

Steven (08:26):

But Matt, you had that conversation after you’ve shown him a 40 page analysis of what the perfect Roth conversion amount is, right?

Matt (08:32):

No. In fact, I was just talking to an advisor today and the client, he’s working with a client, they’ve got about a million dollars of IRA money, they’ve never done Roth before, and he says, Hey, they’ve got about $120,000 left in their marginal tax rate. So he is doing good planning here. And he says, how much should we convert? And I talked to him. I say, listen, this is as much a math question as it is a behavior question. The math question says 120,000. In fact, the math question could actually say a lot more than that. The behavior thing is what can the client stomach for that tax bill regardless of where it comes? So for him, this is something I use with clients all the time. These people are going to have required distributions in several years. We did the math that required distribution would probably be north of $36,000.

(09:12):

Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, in a few years, the IRS is going to force you to take out about 36,000 a year so they can start charging you taxes. My recommendation is we get ahead of that, that we take control of the situation, and let’s start converting 20 to 30,000 each year so that we don’t get forced to take out so much down the road and great news, we’ll have this bucket of tax-free money. Is that okay with you? Now, again, the math would’ve said convert way more. I get that, but the real world is I want them to convert something versus get totally lost in some big number they’ll never do.

Steven (09:41):

Yeah, so many great examples of how that works in the real world. I was working with one of our RTS Premiere members recently, real sharp advisor who takes a tax focus, and he came to me with this situation to say, Hey, got these couples, mid-career professionals that are basically going through a career change, an intentional career change where they have a year where their income is almost non-existent compared to other years.

(10:01):

But the career change happened a couple months into the year, and so they had already been withholding at a very high level, expecting larger income for the year. And so for this couple and the trajectory they’re on for their career, this is going to be a very unique year. This is going to be one of the only years of their entire career where they have such low income where they can actually be converting in the 12% bracket. And so there’s the one side of the advisor that to your point is, oh, what’s the maximum? Let’s here, let’s do this thing. But the behavior side is so important, and he had the conversation with the client to feel out that, hey, they don’t really want to come out of pocket for a Roth conversion, but even though they know they could get a refund if they didn’t do a Roth conversion, they’re totally comfortable with just leaving that money with the IRS. And so we went through and said how much of a Roth conversion they can do to just offset that refund, and so now they’re going to fill up their Roth bucket. No, it’s not the mathematically optimal number, but they’re filling up that bucket in a fantastic rate. Yeah.

Matt (10:56):

Yeah. It’s also important I think, as an advisor, when politics comes up, similar to addressing any objection, you need to have a couple of tools in your bag to address that, right? One of my favorites is always, whatever the rant is, I always say, you know what? I totally agree with you, and next time President Biden calls me, I’ll be sure to let him know. Now, by the way, let know, I’m going to tell him a few other things. That’s not my other thing I’m going to tell him, but I got a few things. I’ll add that to the list, and I say that with a big stupid smile because it’s a joke, right? If we want to be a little more serious, I’ll mention Steven Covey’s two circles. I’ll say, Hey, I’ll draw this out. Mr. And Mrs. Client, you may be familiar with, Steven Covey died many years ago, but he was a very famous speaker and he said, Hey, there’s this circle of things in our life that we’re concerned about.

(11:40):

We’re concerned about the weather. We’re concerned if our kids are going to graduate from college. We’re concerned about the markets, and then there’s this much smaller circle of things we can control. How much am I going to do for Roth conversion? How am I going to invest my money? The more time I spend focused that circle, the better I’m going to do. Now, again, Steve, that explanation takes a little bit longer, so I’m not going to use that one unless it’s really necessary. I’m going to stick with the really light ones. Hey, when President Trump calls me and asks me to be the head of the IRS, I’ll let ’em know we need to change this tax form. Until then, we’re just going to kind of have to deal with it.

Steven (12:08):

Yeah, I’m a big fan of that approach as well. I usually just refer to Congress as opposed to whichever president, because I don’t have to remember who’s in office. But yeah, having some quick line like that helps with what 90 plus percent of the situations. Sometimes you have to go a little bit further, but even when we have to go a little bit further, Matt, what I’ve noticed on how those conversations go, it really reinforces how good of a job we’ve done up to that point in providing some kind of foundational tax education, which we’ve worked together on all sorts of resources for advisors to make sure that they’re technically helpful, but also real world applicable. And I know that specifically for November, for our RTS members, you’ve been helping me work on this guide for, I’m talking about tax buckets, and the reason I bring this up is that anytime a more challenging question comes up, if I can tie it back to something we’ve discussed previously to say, Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, remember when we talked about, and we tie it back to that other thing, then we get re-centered on what actually matters. If I have to launch into an explanation they’ve never heard before, I failed a little bit on providing that foundation for them.

Commercial (13:14):

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Matt (13:35):

If you can’t fit it onto one page, you’re probably not doing it right. You need to put some more effort into that. We’ll talk specifically about that own earn o piece that’s in this month’s newsletter, but Steven, this month I worked with two different higher net worth clients, one with about $70 million and one with about $15 million. And for both of them, they have elaborate trusts and they have slats, and they have defective grantor trusts, and they have stock that we’ve got discounted valuations. They’re minority owners. There’s all these pieces going on, but what they really wanted at the end of the day is a single piece of paper that I did in PowerPoint, so the boxes would line up and it was these different boxes and it had the name on ’em and it had what was in them. And that’s what the client, these are sophisticated clients, they didn’t just come across this money by accident and they said, Hey, can I get that one pager again because I got to go meet with the attorney and I can’t ever figure out what PC’s talking about.

(14:26):

So getting it down to one piece. Now, specific to the November newsletter for the RTS members, this worksheet is designed more for the mass affluent and it’s helping clients understand these different tax buckets, which loosely speaking, and Steven, you can comment on this a second. Loosely speaking, we’re doing four buckets. We’re doing ordinary income and Mr. And Mrs. Client, these are things like the interest on your bank account. This would be paychecks, social security, things like that. The next bucket would be your capital gains bucket, right? These are assets that you’ve owned for more than a year. The third bucket will be tax deferred. This is money you have not yet paid taxes on, but when you take the money out, you’ll owe taxes on it. The fourth bucket tax free. Now, some of our listeners, including myself, are like, wait a second, what about a brokerage account with muni bonds in it?

(15:11):

Which bucket is that? Cool? Draw it out as you need to draw it out. So if you have a client with substantial muni bond holding it, I’ll just draw that over here. I’ll say, Hey, we have this joint account, and it’s mostly in this capital gains bucket, but part of it’s down here. The thing is, I need to get them a framework that I can identify with. If they have 200 pages of fidelity state work statements, they can identify with nothing. If I have a one pager and I’m drawing on it and I’m putting these dollar amounts in, suddenly we all have a shared language that we can work off of.

Steven (15:35):

It also gives us a great shared language for when we go to the tax return at the end of the year and go through what happened for the year. Becuase for those of us who review hundreds if not thousands of tax returns, it can feel like second nature to go through and Oh, here’s the things that go into each of these bucket or each of these line items on the tax return. But to have that extra step in there for a client of, oh, hey, line one on here. Remember, this is our ordinary income bucket we talked about. That’s the one that’s going to get the highest tax rate the IRS can possibly assess for us. And then we can go on down through. And then when we have conversations about Roth conversions or whatever it might be, now instead of getting into intricate math, that feels daunting to the most sophisticated engineer. We’re just talking about, Hey, getting money from one bucket into the next in a strategic and intentional way that helps minimize our taxes over our lifetime, not just all at once.

Matt (16:26):

Yeah. Other examples of using that framework would be, obviously the markets are up dramatically this year. If you’ve done any kind of rebalancing at all in a non-qualified account, the client’s going to have a ton of capital gains that they didn’t see. They didn’t take money out of that account. And what’s their tax repair? If you’re not working with Steven and his team, what’s their tax program going to say like, Mr. Client, you owe an extra 40 grand this year because of your advisor. Well, it’s not because of your advisor. The markets went up like crazy. We had to rebalance to stay in the models. But if I’ve gone through this framework, Steve and I can say, Hey, listen, Mr. And Mrs. Client taxes are a passenger on the bus. They don’t drive the bus. The driver of the bus is your financial goals and your financial goals dictate that we have a very well diversified safe portfolio, and in order to do that, sometimes we have to pay the passenger called the IRS, but great news, it’s going to be capital gains. Remember the capital gains bucket taxed at a lower rate. So while it’s bad, it’s not as bad as it needs to be. Again, I’m drawing back to this framework of things that we can control.

Steven (17:23):

Sometimes I like to get really specific because I get the questions from advisors on how this works in practice. I think you even talked about on our podcast, you certainly talk about on The Perfect RIA podcast, but

(17:33):

You’re talking about taxes from the very first prospect meeting with potential clients. How often are you reinforcing these foundational concepts? Is this only every few years when taxes come up? Is this every single meeting? When are you actually putting taxes back in front of a client?

Matt (17:46):

Yeah, I’m talking taxes at least in every meeting. And I tell clients this, especially prospective clients, especially if I’m going up against Vanguard or Fidelity Retail or whomever. I’ll say, Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Prospect, what did fill in the blank firm? What did they say when they looked at your tax return? Well, Matthew, they didn’t look at my tax return. In fact, we were curious why you wanted to see my tax return. And I say, really? So just so you know, taxes in retirement are going to be your single biggest expense. In fact, Mr. And Mrs. Prospect, you showed me that you’ve managed to save $2 million in your retirement account. Congratulations, by the way. That’s phenomenal accomplishment. $2 million, somewhere between zero and 1 million of this $2 million is going to go to the IRS. Now, part of my job is to get as far down that scale as we legally and ethically can, but this could easily be more than half goes to the IRS, right? So I’m bringing awareness to this every time. The other thing, I’m always bringing awareness to, of course, this cashflow guardrails buckets or the war chest cashflow. I’m always going back to those, but we’re always going to talk about taxes because no one else is talking about it, not even their tax repair with very few exceptions.

Steven (18:54):

Yeah, it’s a good point on the tax repair because it can be easy for advisors to assume, oh, my client works in the CPA, I don’t need to focus as much on taxes. You might need to focus on it more because not only do they not have someone who’s proactively thinking about it, they have someone who’s going to regularly throw you under the bus if things don’t go their way because the tax preparer, this isn’t just an indictment against all tax preparers. They’re being asked by the client, by your shared client to give them a giant refund right now. And so anything that doesn’t help with that giant refund right now, it’s almost not really in their job description. It’s not what their client’s asking them to do. So they’re not incentivized to do that. They’re probably doing a volume of returns that doesn’t make sense, but that’s what the industry does right now. And so if you want your client to have any shot at all of not getting killed in taxes over their lifetime, back to your circles, that’s within your circle of control. You can’t just assume that somebody else in their life is going to worry about that.

Matt (19:46):

And again, I’m always on the practice management side. Some of this speaks to just being willing to do the hard work as an advisor. It’s really hard to get clients to do their estate planning. It’s hard to get clients to update their beneficiaries. It’s hard to get clients to pay taxes now that they absolutely don’t have to pay taxes on so that they’re in a better position down the road. Much easier would be, Hey, let’s buy more of the FANG stocks. They’re up so much this year. Wouldn’t that be great? Let’s put it all in equities. Let’s go buy all Bitcoin. Like whatever’s hot and fun, let’s go do all of that. Or conversely, when the market’s going down, Hey, let’s move all the cash and let’s go all the hedges. That’s fun to do. But the work that makes a difference in the world is the stuff that clients need to do but don’t want to do. Gains harvesting. Everybody likes to talk about loss harvesting. Loss harvesting. We can have whole debate on this thing. It’s generally just a giant waste of time. And there’s a stack of SEC lawsuits surrounding it. Gains harvesting however is a massively powerful tool. But you’ve got to go to a client like a Roth conversion and say, Hey, I think we need to pay some taxes now today so we don’t get hit harder down the road. That’s not an easy discussion.

Steven (20:49):

No, Matt, it’s such a great reminder. And we have the same problem on the tax planning side, right? I mean, the internet headlines, the social media clickbait stuff, I mean, the exciting things, the sexy things, they’re moving to Puerto Rico and buying discounted assets that you can donate at 10 x what you paid for them. They’re these different things that sound more exciting, that for the numbers people out there, like advisors, it’s easy to get pulled down that rabbit hole. Let me do this one really cool thing. So no, if you want to really help your clients, you are going to put the time into practicing how you talk about things like tax buckets or however you want to explain that foundation. It doesn’t have to be buckets, but whatever you do, you’ve got to be practicing this on your own situation with your team members. This might even be recording yourself and listening back of how do I adjust my wording so that it resonates and I’m helping my clients understand this complex topic and take action on it because they don’t take action. All that learning didn’t really do you any good, but it’s the people who are willing to get those reps in who have the biggest impact on their clients.

Matt (21:46):

Oh, for sure. It is, for sure. It is. As you were mentioning in social media, it reminded me of the opposite end of the spectrum, which is clients that come in wanting to do hyperaggressive, aka legal things that they’ve heard. In fact, I was recently at a conference, Kajabi conference, a software company, and admittedly, I’d fallen asleep in the back of the room. It was break, and I didn’t really care. And this guy wakes me up, I’m sleeping in my chair. He wakes me up and he’s like, how would you like to pay zero in taxes? And I said, boss, I’m going to stop you right there. I make too much money to pay zero in taxes. And he starts rattling off all of these exotic taxes strategies, which I had heard of all of them before, and they were grossly overstated. And where I was able to get ’em to finally stop, and this is something I hand to clients as well, is I said, Hey, you know what?

(22:27):

We’ll call him Bob. Bob, you know what? It’d be great. Would you send me a redacted tax return where you implemented one of those strategies? And I’d be glad to have my CPA take a closer look at it. Now, of course, what did Bob respond? Oh, I can’t really do that. Confidentiality. No, no. Take the name off. Take the social security. You cut off the top of the page. I don’t care. So I went over so I can see how this thing actually works. In fact, Steve, our good friend, Micah Shilanski, this is a hard just way out in the woods here. He was getting proposition by this very aggressive tax strategy, and the guy was selling it really well. The guy was a CPA. He was selling this tax strategy super well. And so Micah and I were talking about this. We’re like, dude, what do you think about this tax strategy?

(23:04):

And we both said, Hey, it doesn’t pass the sniff test. It can’t be this good. So what we decided to do, and to Micah’s credit is what he did. He called an IRS defense attorney. So the kind of attorney, if you’re getting sued by the IRS that represents you, he calls his attorney and says, Hey, listen, I’m going to do this strategy. How do you think it will go? And the guy says, I might be able to get a year knocked off your prison sentence. Micah says, what do you mean? The guy says, if you do this, you are going to go to jail. I can probably help you shorten the jail time. Don’t do it. And this is kind of a fun one to laugh about, but it’s a good tool to keep in our pocket if a client says, Hey, listen, my cousin Eddie said I could move my asses to Puerto Rico. Cool. Do you think your cousin Eddie could send us a copy of a redacted tax return so that we could see it? And then if you’re really serious about this, love to chat with an attorney that would have to defend us if the IRS came and asked this, right? Versus trying to argue like, Hey, let me pull out the tax code section, blah, blah, blah. I want to stay super high level as long as I can.

Steven (24:02):

Yeah, absolutely. And geez, even as we’re having this conversation, it’s so easy to get going down these rabbit holes because they’re fun to talk about. They’re interesting, they’re exciting. But at the end of the day, what we help most of our clients do, geez, 95 plus percent of my time, 98% of my time is on the boring things that work or talking clients off the ledge. Two years ago, I had a client who was just about to pull the trigger on buying a rental property in Bolivia inside of their IRA,

(24:30):

And it was a company that specialized in this. And so they had the whole pony show figured out to convince him why this was such a great idea and how to avoid all these IRS gotcha things. And at the end of the day, for me, that became like a, Hey, I’m not going to sign that tax return. If you’re comfortable doing that, you’re welcome to go find a CPA. Who’s going to do it anyways. But it is really easy to get going down those rabbit holes, which Matt, is the reason that you and I spend so much time creating resources for advisors to make it simpler, to stay locked in on these topics that will help the vast majority of clients almost every year.

Matt (25:06):

Yeah. Another one, I always keep up my sleeve where my office is. There’s an attorney in the region that does really aggressive Medicaid trust planning, which that’s its own area, but at least in the state of Washington and in most states, the laws are very aggressive on Medicaid planning. And so this attorney thinks he can get around all this through all these exotic trusts. And so clients hear about this and they want to do this. And I tried to argue with him and reason with him, but it was my credibility against his. And so what I finally came down to, Steve and I, as I said, Hey, listen, see if you can find another accountant or attorney not affiliated with this guy who also thinks it’s a good idea because I’ll let you know. I’ve talked to most of them and I can’t find a single one who thinks this is a good idea.

(25:48):

Now, it’s not my credibility. I’m not arguing against this guy. I’m just saying, listen, I can’t find anybody else who says this is a good idea, and that’s a big warning sign for me. It’s a big warning sign for me. Same with some exotic tax strategy or whatever. Like, Hey, let’s just find somebody not affiliated with this guy who thinks it’s a good idea. And that’s usually the end of the discussion because a client realizes, oh, wait a second, nobody else is going to agree with this thing, and I don’t really want to take the time to find it. And now that you mentioned it, it does sound kind of fishy.

Steven (26:15):

Yeah, it really comes back to that straight face test. And having recently sat through an IRS audit, I can tell you that it totally changes the approach to that conversation when you know going in, Hey, we did everything by the books and we’ve got the documentation to support it. This IRS audit might be a little annoying, but I’m really not worried about it. That’s a totally different game than I trusted that one guy off of tv, and he seemed like he knew his stuff, but now he won’t answer my calls, and I got to sit through this by myself. Yeah, that’s not position you want to be in.

Matt (26:43):

Well, I know we’re kind of going all over the place here, but there was a case that went through the tax court a few years ago where a client was doing his tax return with the CPA signing the tax return, and then it never got submitted for like 10 years. The CPA just was never hitting the submit button. And so he went to tax court because there was all sorts of issues with not having filed his tax return, and the tax court was willing to waive the criminal penalties, but nothing else. They said, Hey, it’s still your obligation. So even though he signed it and he had the email saying, Hey, go ahead and submit it, he said, it’s still your obligation, it’s your tax return. So yeah, if Bozo the clown says, Hey, you can do this thing, it’s not bozo the clown that’s going to jail, or at least if he is, he won’t be going alone. You’ll be there with him.

Steven (27:26):

Yeah. Well, Matt, as you’re so fond of saying, I mean, information only counts for value if we turn it into action. I do want to just share for a minute with the audience about how you can help sort through some of the nonsense you see and get to things that work with clients. That’s why we spend so much time at Retirement Tax Services providing resources to our members through our monthly newsletters that always come with a reference guide or a handout that you can use with clients through the webinars that we do, the office hours that I have, through so many things that really at the end of the day, again, this isn’t, here’s how you move to Puerto Rico. This is, here’s how you consistently get clients to understand complex topics and to take the actions that are going to make a difference on lowering their tax bill over time. So get on retirement tax services.com, send us a message at advisors@rts.tax. We’d love to get you more information on becoming part of the RTS community and getting access to incredible resources like this. So now, any other parting thoughts on this wonderful topic of taxes or politics?

Matt (28:26):

It’s a shameless plug, but the worksheets are phenomenal. Steven, you’re obviously designing them with advisors that are using them with their clients. Having a piece that I can use with clients again and again makes a huge difference. It keeps me on track. It keeps the attention where it needs to be. It keeps us from pontificating about politics or the markets or anything else.

Steven (28:42):

Yeah. Well, I appreciate that. And Matt, of course, as always, I appreciate you taking the time to join the podcast, share your wisdom and expertise, and to everyone listening. Until next time, good luck out there. And remember to tip your server, not the IRS.