Read The Transcript Below:

Steven (00:49):

Hello everyone, and welcome to the next episode of the Retirement Tax Services Podcast. I’m your host, Stephen Jarvis CPA. And with me today I have the author of Delivering Massive Value, Matthew Jarvis, welcome.

Matthew (01:02):

Steven, it’s nice to finally meet you.

Steven (01:04):

To finally meet me. Yes, yes. It’s so great. So it’s actually a lot of fun to be able to do this in person. We’re here in Vegas together. Yeah, we’ve had a lot of fun this week. Really productive week. I was at the AICPA conference learning about all things tax related. More from a technical standpoint. And then we spend time today touring the venue that the RTS summit’s gonna be at. Which we’ll talk about that a little bit more in a minute, but really why we wanted to record on a podcast is because you recently released the bonus edition of your book Delivering Massive Value.

Matthew (01:34):

That’s correct. So I published the original edition a year or two ago as a best seller. And then it quickly ran out of print, which I’ll have to confess my head address. That surprised me. And so before we ordered a new edition, we updated all of the value ads, we updated the one page financial plans, the tax planning section, updated a lot of things. So excited to talk about the book and see how it delivers value to advisors.

Steven (01:54):

So for our audience who is familiar with the book, you might think that chapter 21 would be my favorite. And the bonus edition, my picture is in there, which is kind of fun. Chapter 21 is all about tax planning, but really what I want to talk about is chapter 18, which is the one page financial plan. And the reason I want to talk about this is because with taxes, with a lot of things, with taxes in particular, tax goes 80,000 pages long or whatever the number is, it’s really easy to feel like the complicated things are where the value is. And so on your one page financial plan, there’s a tax section. This is something you really focus on, but it’s really just a couple of bullet points. These are short sentences. These aren’t these huge crazy ideas. So talk about how there’s value in that.

Matthew (02:34):

Yeah, that’s a great question, Steven. And I know as an advisor myself, obviously with a great practice, I am drawn to the complicated strategies. Right? I really wanna find complicated things. I’m always looking for the 11th page of the RTS newsletter, hoping to find some tax strategy I wasn’t aware of. But those only matter when all of these, what I’ll call simple strategies or basic strategies, are taken care of. So when you look at the samples in my book of real one page financial plans that I use with real prospects who became real clients, they’re very straightforward. They’re very simple. They’re things like letting the client know how much they paid in taxes last year. Now, you might think, why would I need to do that? Well, really no client knows how much they paid in taxes. They might know what they owed or got refunded in April, but they really don’t know what they paid overall. And we’re highlighting basic, but overlooked strategies. Things like backdoor Roth contributions, managing RMDs, strategic Roth conversions, and retirement. So I don’t need to get out to this crazy strategy, and we’ll get there someday. Right? I don’t need to put down every tax strategy. I know what I need to put down is the next two or three tax strategies they need to implement in their situation.

Steven (03:36):

So, Matt, help me with this though, because if all you’re doing on your one page financial plan is getting into the tax section and writing Roth conversions and you paid X amount of taxes last year, I mean, they can look at their tax return, they can Google their Roth conversions are common tax strategy. What have you done for them?

Matthew (03:51):

Well, so if they haven’t done them, so I’m not gonna put, so if they’re consistently doing Backdoor Roth as an example, just to pick one. So if they’re consistently doing Backdoor Roth, then I’m not going to write consider Backdoor Roth. Now, I may look and say, Hey, we need to review that strategy, because odds are, they probably have some basis, they’re not tracking correctly, or their 8606 has been reported wrong. But I’m gonna look for actionable steps that they can go on. I mean, in fact, when I look at if you go to the book page 213, you can look at a real one page financial plan. And it says, an example is evaluate restructuring retirement plans for maximum potential tax savings. Evaluate a set versus a solo 401k versus a divine benefit plan. What does that necessarily mean? It means that the client needs to look at what their retirement plan options. This was a small business client, no one’s ever done that with them. I’m the first person that’s done this with them. So we can say, Hey, that’s a simple strategy. And it may be, but no one else has done that. And so for this prospect who became a client, that was a big draw. They said, Hey, I’ve talked to five other advisors. I’ve talked to four different CPAs. No one helped me decide which retirement plan was best for my situation. That’s massive value.

Steven (04:53):

A couple of things that stand out to me there. One, what’s implied in what you’re describing is that you got their tax return and you went through their specific situation, of course, which is critical, of course, that this isn’t so what this is not, it’s not a laundry list of possible tax strategies that where you say, Hey, here’s three pages of things we might do. You’ve taken the time to get their tax return and say, these are things that are relevant that we need to work on together. You’re not promising any particular outcome but these are specific to you. These are things we need to work on together. But it’s also on the other end of the spectrum where you say, Hey, I’m the only person who can set up these 12 layers of trust in three different states that are going to make it so you never pay taxes again, we’re not trying to get cute with the IRS. We’re not trying to get so convoluted that there’s really nothing to do there.

Matthew (05:35):

And there certainly is for some ultra high net worth clients, there are advanced tax strategies that make sense. After all these other ones, I once worked with a client they had a net worth of $70 million. Seven zero million. And we worked with them for a period of time before they, what they needed was beyond what we could provide, but they hadn’t done those basic things yet. And so, despite having a net worth of $70 million, there was basic things that hadn’t been done. So we worked with them for several years, got all these basic things, and then once, in that case, that’s a quite complicated case. We handed it off to another firm. But again, if they’re not doing the basics, an example of that, you can look again in this sample, evaluate the pros and cons of establishing a donor advised fund for charitable giving.

(06:16):

So I had looked at a client’s tax return. I had seen that they were doing charitable giving enough to itemize. They had mentioned that it was important to them, and I saw that they weren’t doing any appreciated securities. Again, for most of your listeners, that’s not an advanced strategy, but it’s one that’s being consistently overlooked. So again, for me to be able to show and say, Hey, there’s things I noticed that you haven’t noticed now, something that sometimes more sophisticated prospects will push back on and advisors will push back on. They’ll say, well, this is a short list. Like you could probably take care of this in three months to which I respond. I say, Hey, this was the low hanging fruit. This is what we saw on our first pass. Once we get through with these, then we’ll start with round two. By the way, Mr. And Mrs. Prospect, if at any time you feel that you’ve exhausted the value, that we provide great time for us to part ways as friends.

Steven (07:03):

I really like the how intentional the communication clearly is around that. You say it so fluidly, so casually because you’ve practiced this so many times. But there’s a process to all of these things of, okay, what you’re looking for when you get the tax return, that it’s not arbitrary. You’re not picking it up and, you know, flipping randomly to different pages hoping to find something. It’s okay, here are the things because you’ve defined who you work with. You work with similar people over and over again. You can quickly see, okay, here’s what’s relevant to this client. You talked a little bit about pushback. You might get there. I’d be curious. If there’s any other times that from a prospect or a client, they look at this short list and say, well, are there things that are coming to you expecting that you’re not including when you have such a short list?

Matthew (07:48):

Well, I’ve yet to run into many prospects that have done any kind of proactive tax planning. Cause really just no one’s doing it. Now, again, your listeners, right? They’re saying there’s, you’re obviously tax savvy advisors, right? You are the anomaly. There are not many. Like when, if I see a Fidelity ad or a Vanguard ad or whomever, right at the bottom, it says, Hey, we do not provide any tax advice. In fact, one of my strategies when a prospect comes in and says, Hey, I’m Matthew, I’m comparing between you and Vanguard. And Vanguard, by the way, is a great firm, and we use their investments in our portfolio, but they say, I’m comparing between you and Vanguard. And by the way, Vanguard’s a lot less expensive. I say, I wouldn’t even know. What did Vanguard say when they looked at your tax return?

(08:29):

Matthew, they didn’t look at my tax return. What did Vanguard recommend when it came to Roth conversions? They didn’t recommend Roth conversions. What did Vanguard recommend when it came to donor advised funds? I’d never even heard that term. And again, I’m not trying to single out Vanguard. I’m just using an example that came to me recently with a client. I’m providing a service that no one else is providing, but if I go too complex with it, I’ll lose them. They’ll say, oh, taxes were a mystery. Which is why they hadn’t implemented. And if I get deep into this thing and I have a 27 year tax projection, I’m trying to explain how Irma’s gonna work in 17 years, I’ll lose ’em.

Steven (09:00):

There’s some really good points in there about how you communicate that level of complexity. Like Matt, speak to how you help set expectations with clients. Because as I’m looking at this, the tax section of this one page financial plan in your book, none of these are indicating how much you’re gonna help them save or what the impact’s gonna be. And so you, it seems like you could run the risk of on the prospect looking at this, oh, I see these five bullet points. Matt’s gonna save me a million dollars in taxes. We get a year or two from now, and this, Matt, why haven’t you saved me a million dollars in taxes yet?

Matthew (09:30):

Yeah, I’m hesitant to put numbers on for a couple of reasons. One, whenever you’re doing hypothetical, somebody else could do a better hypothetical, right? Like, if we’re cherry picking investment returns, you show me your investment returns, I can cherry pick something that’s done better and then you can cherry pick something. There’s also some compliance issues, right? I don’t want to say, Hey, listen, we’re going to give you a million dollars in tax savings. That’s gonna be a problem. I may illustrate, and I certainly would. If we’re talking about a backdoor Roth, I’ll say, Hey, we’re gonna do, if you were 55, we’re gonna do 7,500 married couple $15,000 each. That may not sound like a lot, but we do that for 10 years. That’s $150,000 plus growth. Now it’s $300,000. Now you have a pool of money. But I would always do it on a very illustrative level. I’m not gonna say, Hey, do you think the assumed rate return is 9.3%? I’m gonna use really simple numbers on that.

Steven (10:19):

You’re not baking the inflation rate.

Matthew (10:21):

I’m not. Now, if somebody wants to drill in on that a little bit more, I’ll say great news. That’s something we do for people who decide to become a client. Right. We can go in deep at that. Steven, I wanna highlight something. I wanna give credit where credit is due and also give a little bit of shout out to the RTS summit. Most of the items that you’ll find on my one page financial plan, some of them I thought up myself, and I’ll just be really honest, a lot of them I learned from other advisors, not from experts. I have no love for experts. I learned them from other advisors. When I go to conferences, like when I go to the RTS summit this fall, I’m gonna be talking to advisors. Hey, when you look at a tax return, what are the first three things you look at when you ask a client for their tax return?

(10:55):

How are you asking for that? When you set up a donor advised fund for a client? How do you set that up? I’ll give you a quick example. No one taught me this one, but this one has worked really well for a lot of advisor practices when setting up a donor advised fund. Our good friend Micah Schilansky, excuse me, not donor advised fund when using QCD. Distributions from a charity, he will set up a designated account for that QCD money. So we know that any money that comes out of that is a QCD funds. Brilliant. Easy to track, easy to report. I will set up on the existing IRE account, a checkbook specific for QCD. We’ll put a label on it, Hey, QCD to charity only, so that we can track those. Those are things that we learn from each other. And that’s where a format like the RTS summit is a place not just to go to learn great technical knowledge, which you obviously will, but it’s a place to ask other tax focused advisors- How are you articulating this?

Steven (11:45):

And we certainly went out of our way to make sure that the people we’re bringing on stage, whether that’s the keynotes or the panels, that these are people who are doing this in practice and can speak to, here’s something I did last month, last week, not here’s what worked 10 years ago. I like that you bring up the example that of, with Micah, because we work with quite a few of his clients. And from the tax professional side I mean, you have a whole chapter about working with centers of influence that’s working with tax professionals. Those are the kind of things that are really the game changer on working with tax professionals. Because that’s what really sets you apart. It’s not where you invited them to lunch or how you played golf with them. Or the latest market update you sent them.

(12:21):

The things that you do that at the end of the day really make your clients’ life better, but as a side benefit, it makes the tax repairs life better. QCDs are such a great example. You mentioned backdoor Roth. That’s another example where the 1099 is almost worthless.And is gonna set the tax preparer and the client up for failure over and over again. And it’s that simple thing that can make all the difference that sitting down in a room with another advisor. And I love that you’re illustrating those questions that people should come prepared to a conference with what’s those three things you look at. How are you making QDCs easier for your clients? They’re just total game changers on how you provide value through tax planning. That’s not just the tax savings. We love the tax savings. So many other ways to deliver value around taxes.

Matthew (13:02):

Yeah. And I certainly wanna quantify that for a client. The dishwasher rule. I wanna make them aware of what we’re doing. Steve, you mentioned earlier in this episode that we’re not going to hand a client or prospect a list of 300 possible tax strategies. Right? Which is an error, I think in some of the tax software that’s out there. But it is nice internally to have a list of the three or five or 10 most common strategies you use for your niche or your niche. That way you can look back through that list. You can have those 10 and say, as I’m reviewing Bob and Sue, all of our fictitious clients are Bob and Sue. As I’m looking at Bob and Sue, does this strategy apply? Yes or no? No. Okay. How about that next one? In fact, in my book on page 208, I put in the questions that I ask myself when I’m creating the one page financial plan, right?

(13:45):

So under taxes, I have my questions, how can the client or prospect pay less in taxes? Should they be doing Roth conversions? What about capital gains or enhanced charitable giving, any asset location optimization? So these are questions I’m asking myself as I’m reviewing through their situation. What advice can we offer or recommendations can we implement to reduce their income tax bill? So it puts me in this curious mindset as I’m reviewing through things of, all right, here’s a couple of questions I need to ask myself. And 98 clients out of a hundred, one of these is gonna be applicable to them.

Commercial (14:18):

Prospects walk through your door for investment advice, but they become clients because of the tax advice you provide them. If you are a financial advisor who struggles with implementing key concepts of tax planning for your financial advisory clients, then on September 27th through the 29th, you will wanna be at the live in-person event hosted by Retirement Tax Services in Las Vegas, Nevada. Register now at retirementtaxservices.com.

Steven (14:45):

Yeah, that’s a really great framework and I like that you’re bringing up how the process actually works. Cuz this isn’t arbitrary, this isn’t random. And also a lot of the thought process that went into how we’ve put the summit together. One of the keynotes that we’re really excited about, Cheryl Rawling from Morningstar in her presentation she’s gonna talk about just that idea of, it’s not about having that laundry list. You need to have those tax strategies. You understand, but it’s about learning about the client, understanding what’s gonna be applicable for them, helping them problem solve. And then on the other side of things Micah Schilansky’s gonna come and speak specifically about how to develop processes and how to delegate pieces of those processes. Because I know that’s one of the questions they get from advisors as they listen to these different things we talk about.

(15:26):

Geez, that sounds like a lot of work. And they’re thinking, well, what I hear from Matt Jarvis is that he takes all this time off and spends hardly any time in the office. Sure, sure. So how does he still get all these things done in an effective and valuable way? And there’s definitely levels to that. But some of it is the processes that’s being able to delegate. It’s understanding which pieces do get delegated and which don’t. And those are things that we’re all gonna cover in depth at the summit to make sure you’re not gonna leave with a PhD in the tax code tell you that right now. If that’s what you’re coming for, you’re at the wrong conference.

Matthew (15:54):

Wouldn’t do any good anyway.

Steven (15:55):

No, it wouldn’t. You are gonna leave with the information, the skills, the tools, some resources on how do you get this done in practice.

Matthew (16:03):

In fact, one thing that to think about when doing in practice a mistake a lot of advisors make, so they have the victory of getting tax returns from clients. So let’s shift from prospects to clients. So they’re getting consistent at getting tax returns from clients and there’s information on the book. And then of course RTS has a lot of information on how to do that. And then what happens is they look at them one at a time. So they pull up that PDF and then they pull up the CRM record, and then they pull up their last dictation and by the time it’s all said and done, they’re taking 20 or 30 minutes just to get basic information. So what my team does, when we get towards tax planning season, usually fall surge October timeframe, I have them pull up every single client tax return and either, depending on your setup, put all the data into the CRM we can do a class on this or whatever key data points from the tax return. They put it in the CRM. We’re simply in a spreadsheet so that when I’m ready to look at taxes, I can look at all 150 client households and see their taxable income, their adjusted gross income, their deductions, whatever I need to look at. So I can start looking for things like Roth conversions, or if you’re of clients in the state of Washington, are they gonna be subject to the capital gains tax or the new long-term care tax. So I can look through those more quickly versus pulling up returns one at a time.

Steven (17:11):

Yeah. That’s great. Great insight on how that works. Matt, I’ll give you an example of this first, but I want you to think about things that you’ve learned along the way that maybe were a little bit painful for you, cuz it’s really easy as we get together on a podcast or reading on social media, everyone talks about just their successes and look at how great I am, and I’ve always done it perfectly. So I’d love for you to think about, okay, what were some of the painful things that you learned so people can skip past those. An example that comes to mind for me, and this again might seem really simple, is just letting clients know that it is possible that they could get a letter from the IRS, especially as we start talking about some of these different strategies that the 1099s will always get reported correctly, or they don’t ever get reported correctly.

(17:49):

That, hey, it’s possible you could get a letter from the IRS and here’s what those types of things might say. And of course you can reach out to us, we’re gonna help you every step of the way. But for advisors, for tax professionals in particular, we see these kinds of things over and over again. So it becomes second nature to us. And so when I see a letter from the IRS, it doesn’t scare me. It doesn’t make me nervous. No, we take an approach if we’re gonna do these things the right way, and we’re gonna sort out the details if we need to. So I don’t get nervous, but when a client sees an IRS letter for the first time and their only thought about the IRS reaching out to them is, I must be getting audited. I must be going to jail.

(18:22):

This is gonna go on my permanent record, or no one’s ever gonna talk to me again. That’s where their mindset goes. And so I’ve started very intentionally, especially as certain things come up, QCDs, backdoor Roth contributions, whatever it might be of just, you know, slipping that in there that hey, it’s possible the IRS is gonna send you a letter. If that happens, you’re gonna send it to us. We’re gonna help you every step of the way. We’ve got you from start to finish. So no need to panic. They might still panic a little bit, but they know what they’re gonna do next.

Matthew (18:48):

One of the ways I’ve learned to handle that is when I’m talking to prospects or clients, anytime I’m talking about strategies I say or taxes, I say one of the benefits of working with a firm like ours, working with our firm is that we’re here to assist you in your tax planning. Whether that’s proactive planning, like doing a Roth conversion or it’s reactive plannings. For example, you receive a letter from the IRS asking for additional clarification. Now, my attorneys want me to remind you that I am not your CPA and I’m not your tax preparer. Right? So we’re gonna provide tax guidance, we’re not gonna represent you in front of the IRS. But again, one of the benefits of working with our firm is that if you have any tax questions of any nature, reach out to us. And if we don’t have the answer, great news, we have a network of tax professionals, they can get that answer for us.

Steven (19:31):

That wording right there at the end I think is so important for people to really focus in on because that it’s accurate, it’s helpful to the client, but I think it helps advisors get past the head trash of, can I be involved in this? Because what I heard from you at the end there, and I love that language is not, Hey, I have all the answers. It’s, I’m committed to helping you find the answer, and as long as that’s your approach as an advisor I tell the advisor, Hey, you need to dive into this stuff. You can’t wait until you’re an expert, whatever that means, because it’s never gonna happen. Or you’re gonna get so distracted on getting into the weeds, you’re not gonna be delivering value to clients. So using that language and having that commitment, cuz the commitment is important behind it of, hey, whether we have the answer or not, we’re gonna make sure that this gets taken care of.

Matthew (20:13):

Yeah, a mistake, yes. About mistakes. A mistake I made for a lot of years in my career was confusing complexity with value, specifically with tax planning. And so I had early in my career studied tax planning. I had taken tax courses, I had reviewed a lot of tax returns and those types of things, but I could only respond to the client with complexity and it was of no value. And it wasn’t until I had met Tom Gau rest in peace that he explained to me that we’re really just trying to get the client to take the next step. So, as I mentioned earlier on this episode, if they’re not doing backdoor Roth contributions, that is our next step. If they’re aware that last year they paid $43,212 income taxes, and that’s what we would call being very patriotic, that’s our next step. And so Tom passed away a few years ago, shortly before he passed away, he and I recorded several videos that are available. You can go to the theperfectria.com and look for the Tom Gau bonuses. That’s our gift back to the industry in memory of Tom. But he was a tax genius. But really where his genius was in taxes was how to articulate that to clients in a very succinct manner.

Steven (21:18):

Yeah. And that definitely takes a level of genius to be able to do that because taxes are complicated, they’re confusing, there’s a lot of misinformation. In fact, we constantly are answering questions for clients that really, again, for a professional might seem like they’re on the simple side, but that’s what’s hanging them up. You know, if that’s what’s preventing them from taking that next step, if they’re so concerned about whether they are itemizing or taking the standard of deduction and they don’t understand that 90% of people take the standard of deduction at this point, then they’re never gonna follow through on your strategy on doing Roth conversions if they’re still hung up on some of those things. And so being able to cut through the noise and get to here’s what’s important and give us space for their questions, but not give dissertations.

Matthew (22:01):

Another mistake that I made, I talk about this in chapter 21, working with centers of influence was assuming, and this was an insane assumption, assuming that the tax repair would instantly recognize my tax strategy and applauded my brilliance what tended to happen is they’re doing their job, which is tax returns, not tax planning. They would totally ignore my strategy. They would report it incorrectly, partly because they didn’t know. And then they would throw me under the bus when the client had to pay taxes on their Roth conversion. Now, we could do multiple episodes. I know you’ve done several newsletters on this, but assuming that the tax repair is on your save wavelength is, that’s an impossible assumption, right? So that’s where things like the 1099 letter comes up, that’s where things like working with the center of influence, that’s where withholding taxes or having taxes set aside for Roth conversions, all of those things come up.

Steven (22:52):

So many important nuances there. And as we’ve kind of covered a lot of different things, which is why I love that you were committed enough to take the time to write this book. To put it, to give people a framework. That’s why we put the time and energy into things like launching the summit this year. Because while there’s a lot of great tax information out there, I mean, when you Google tax Finance, it’s like 300 million results. Like, there’s plenty of data out there. It’s how do you find it in a cohesive way so that as advisors listening to this start to get the reps in or looking to go to the next level, they have something to reference. And it’s not just this kind of, let’s pick a paper out of a hat and decide randomly on what we’re gonna work on next.

Matthew (23:32):

I do want to throw one caveat, right? So we’ve been talking about the one page financial plan and how the strategies are rather simple. And the way it articulated in appliance is rather simple. This doesn’t mean that these are easy to implement strategies, right? So everybody quote unquote, knows about the backdoor Roth, but most of the ones I see have been done incorrectly. Right? Kareem and the coffee issues, the timing was wrong, the reporting was wrong, the dollar amount was wrong. The client didn’t understand the aggregation rules, the advisor didn’t understand the aggregation rules. So it’s easy to be dismissive of these and say, Hey, everybody knows how to do it back to Roth. Well, everyone’s heard of it. Almost no one’s doing it. And of the people who are doing it, most of them are doing it incorrectly. And so you do need a resource in your corner. I used to pour over the tax manual itself, the IRS publications Natalie Cho’s Life and Death Planning of Retirement Benefits, which is a thick, difficult read. And then RTS came along. Now obviously I’m biased, Steven cuz you and I go way back. But you’ve gotta have a resource either your own in-depth knowledge or someone that you can turn to and say, Hey, am I doing this thing right?

Steven (24:38):

Yeah, absolutely. And that really feeds a lot of what we focus on at RTS to pull together some of those resources and give people a single place to be able to go and figure out how to execute those things.

Matthew (24:52):

I do have to confess on the note of RTS, that my tax knowledge, I guess this is a recorded thing, so maybe I shouldn’t confess this, but my tax knowledge has somewhat gone down since RTS started because there’s so many more resources available through RTS, like the desktop tax guide that I always have on my desk. Somebody had asked me the question the other day about how do I, they had, they had missed their RMD, how do we correct that? You know what great news, there was an RTS newsletter. I’m gonna pull that up. I know that you’ve got an RTS newsletter coming out on how the home office deduction works. That’s one more thing. Now I don’t have to commit to memory. I can just pull that up. What that allows me to do though is have more time to be aware of these strategies and to work with clients. And I don’t have to spend all that time to commit the technical stuff to knowledge.

Steven (25:35):

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for any of us to be able to spend as much time as possible on our highest and best use, we have to have resources to help with the rest because we can’t just be dismissive of it. One way that this has been explained to me recently that’s really resonated is this idea of small hinges swinging big doors. And as we talk about these tax concepts, these simple quote unquote tax concepts, that’s really what it comes down to is that we’re focusing on these small things we can consistently do over time to swing this big door of tax savings, tax flexibility, and ultimately helping clients be able to better accomplish their goals.

Matthew (26:07):

I love that. Yeah, it does. It’s a small thing. It’s not that elaborate strategy of the intentionally defective Alaska Trust based in Nevada, Harvard in Puerto Rico, right? It’s again, it’s back to Roth. It’s if they’re a small business owner, which retirement plan are they using? Are they using the Augusta rule? Are they hiring their kids on the business? Are they planning ahead on cash flow and doing strategic Roth conversions? That’s probably strategic. Roth conversions is probably one of the most overlooked strategies everybody quote unquote knows about Roth conversions. Almost no one is doing bracket management on Roth conversions. And so I can sit down with a prospect, I can sit down with a client and I can say, Mr. And Mrs. Client, someday you are going to need a lump sum of money. Hopefully it’s for something fun like buying an RV and traveling around the country.

(26:52):

Maybe it’s for something not fun like long-term care, heaven forbid. Either way, if you were to take a big chunk of money out of your IRA account all at once, you would get killed in taxes. That’s my technical term- Killed in taxes to prevent that from happening. We’re going to eat the proverbial elephant one by a time and take a small amount out of your Roth, out of your IRA each year and convert it into a Roth. How much the most of the IRS will let us take without getting into a new tax bracket. Mr. And Mrs. Client, is that okay with you? And they say, well, how much is that going to be? I said, great news. I will calculate that. Or if you’re not comfortable with that, you can reach out to your tax team RTS, we will calculate that for you. That’s a discussion I have year after year cause it’s value that I can bring to the table every single year.

Steven (27:35):

Nah, that’s great. We can obviously keep going on this for hours. We love nerding out on this stuff, but we wanna make sure that it’s really clear how people can take action based on the conversation we’re having. That’s where value comes from. And the first action I’m gonna highlight is go get the bonus edition of delivering Massive Value. So help my audience where, how do they go about getting this?

Matthew (27:55):

We committed to giving away a thousand copies of delivering massive value to the industry. You just have to cover the cost of shipping. And there’s still a, if I looked out my closet, my kids did delivery, I think there’s still a hundred copies of those left. And so if you want to get that copy, you can go to the perfectria.com and there’s a button get Matt’s book. And you can get a copy of that. While you’re on the website, as I mentioned earlier, theperfectria.com, get a copy of Tom Gau’s masterclass. It was his last and only known recorded teaching. Absolute genius. And I’m gonna throw out one more, Steven, just a shameless plug for you get signed up for the RTS Summit. I’m ecstatic for it. I can’t wait community for me that’s in my backyard here in Las Vegas, but to be able to spend two and a half days with advisors who are committed to tax planning, not just nerding out on some obscure section of the tax code, real tax planning, right. When Cheryl steps up and says, Hey, I’ve been a financial advisor for two decades and a CPA and I wrote my own software on how to manage taxes on investments. Cannot wait for that. When Michael Henley steps up and talks about how he does multiple six figure Roth conversions cannot wait for that. When Micah comes up and I try to stump him with tax questions, cannot wait for that. So I can’t recommend highly enough attending the RTS Summit.

Steven (29:09):

That’s a great summary of some of the speakers and there’s a few more that are just super excited. You’re gonna be there. Retirementtaxservices.com is where you can go to get registered. It’s gonna be a great event. Like we mentioned at the top of the episode, we were actually touring the event space today. They’ve got a great setup for us. We’re gonna have space not just to have these great presentations, but to facilitate that interaction between the advisors who are there. Cuz I even though we’re putting this on, I’m gonna be one of the keynotes. I know that there’s gonna be so much learning that goes on that I have nothing to do with other than getting those people in a room together. So, super excited.

Matthew (29:40):

One last thing and again, I know this is recorded, but I’m gonna pretend like this is just a secret between us, you and I and the listener and your car. We will be doing some cigars after hours. And so if you are a cigar connoisseur or a cigar amateur or you can just tolerate the smell send us a message, message me through LinkedIn, Matthew drivers and let me know that you’re gonna join me for cigar night and I’ll make sure we have plenty of cigars for everybody.

Steven (30:02):

Oh, that’s awesome. That’s really exciting. I’m more on the, I can tolerate it, but I know there’s plenty of connoisseurs that will be there. Matt, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate you taking some time as we’re hanging out together to record and share this knowledge with everybody.

Matthew (30:14):

Yeah, it’s really my pleasure and again, for all of my fellow advisors, right? I’m an advisor just like you and I’ve been intimidated by tax planning at times and I thought that I needed really complex stuff. But it’s really just go and find other successful advisors. Read my book, head 10 to the summit, but find successful advisors and just ask them, what’s the top tax strategy you’re communicating with clients? Or what, how are you articulating taxes to clients? And then borrow that verbiage, adaptive it for you and your niche, but just borrow that verbiage. You don’t have to invent this stuff and you don’t have to read the tax code end to end.

Steven (30:46):

Love it. For everybody listening, thanks for being here. Good luck out there. And until next time, remember to tip your server, not the IRS.