Read The Transcript Below:

Steven (00:51):

Hello everyone and welcome,ome to the next episode of the Retirement Tax Services Podcast, Financial Professionals edition. I’m your host, Steven Jarvis, CPA, and really excited this week to share some insights and recap of the RTS Tax Planning Summit that we had just a couple of weeks ago in Phoenix, Arizona. For any of you listening who were there, thank you so much again for being there. It really was a phenomenal event and while we put a lot of time and energy into making sure we have great people on stage and incredible partners to help make that event as great as it was, the attendees are a big part of that. So thank you for being there. If you missed out this year or if you were there this year and had a great experience, go ahead and mark your calendar for next fall. We are going to come back for the third installment of the RTS Tax Planning Summit.

(01:35):

It will be October st through 3rd, 2025, and it’ll be back in Phoenix, Arizona. So stay tuned to the podcast for more details on that as registration becomes available. But go ahead and mark your calendar. We are committed to those dates and we’re committed to making the third installment even bigger and better. If you were there this year and you have been to the first one as well, you’ll see that it doubled this year, which was super exciting for us to have even more advisors there in the room focused on leveling up on tax planning. We are going to expand it again this next year and make sure that we continue to level up what we bring to that event and we’re excited to have all of you there with us. Now, whether you listen to the podcast or come to the events or follow us in other ways, hopefully you see our commitment to continually leveling up and the event that we do is no different.

(02:27):

And as we go through the event, we’re asking for feedback, we’re getting feedback, and thankfully that is all phenomenal. We’ve been given a lot of great praise for what we’ve been able to do, but again, we’re always committed to leveling up and I’m not big on waiting around for things. And so there were a couple of things that came through in the feedback of people who were excited to be there but had ideas for how we keep improving and I didn’t want to wait until next year, so we’re going to take care of some of those in the short term as well. So one of the pieces of feedback that we got was attendees would love to see more hands-on practical application of the things that we discussed. One of the areas this came up was specifically around Roth conversions. We did a session about practical applications of tax planning, and we really dove deep on some areas of how we actually get Roth conversions done.

(03:19):

Not just the theory of it, not just where’s the tax code, but hey, start to finish. How many steps really are included in that process? How are we articulating to a client the value of Roth conversion? What about when they have buyer’s remorse eight months later? How are we reinforcing that value, particularly if their CPA has told ’em what a terrible idea it was to pay taxes early. So we got into some of those conversations. There was a lot of great sharing from the audience of things that they’re seeing in practice with real clients, and it was a great experience, but in that format, we weren’t able to cover everything that I might have liked to, and there was just short of 200 advisors in the room. That’s far from the whole industry.

Commercial (04:01) 

Pardon the interruption. But as excited as we get to bring you the podcast, we get even more excited about our live events, our virtual online power sessions that have now been intended by thousands of advisors who are looking for a chance to engage directly with me, Steven Jarvis head, CPA, here at Retirement Tax Services, alongside incredible advisors who are doing these things in practice. Go out to retirementtaxservices.com/powersession to get signed up for the next event so that you can take your tax planning and your tax value you deliver to clients to the next level. We’ll see you there. Retirementtaxservices.com/powersession.

(04:44):

So on October 30th here, in just a week and a half, I’m going to be joined by my good friend Micah Sh.ilanski We’re going to be doing a free webinar for advisors, all about actually getting Roth conversions done because the great news is 2024 is not over yet, and we aren’t so far into the year that we can’t get good tax planning done if we have a process that we can follow. So Micah and I will certainly talk about some of the obstacles that come up with deciding how much to convert or when to convert. Some of the challenges that we hear regularly are, what do I do with IRMAA?

(05:18):

What do I do if the CPA is not on board? We’ll talk about some of those challenges and how to overcome them, but more importantly, we’re going to go through how do we not just get this done from a standpoint of how do we get a client on board with the value proposition, but how do we get our team involved? How do we make sure that there’s a plan for getting the taxes paid? How do we make sure that all of the steps are documented so that when we get to reporting time, that client has the information they need, that they have the information to pass along easily to their CPA so it gets on the tax return correctly? And then when we finish this all out and we request that tax return, that of course I tell you all the time you need to get every year for every client that you are able to correctly identify where that should have been reported and make sure that it was in fact reported to the IRS correctly because tax planning only counts if it’s reported correctly.

(06:10):

So October 30th at 9:00 AM Pacific, Micah and I are going to jump on this webinar. You can go to retirementtaxservices.com to register. You can find me on LinkedIn and shoot me a message to get registered. We are really excited to be able to do this because we find so much value and so much great feedback when we do these live sessions on what people are able to accomplish. So come to that session ready with your questions of things that get in the way of actually getting Roth conversions done. Micah and I will both give examples of clients we’ve individually worked on, clients we’ve worked on together on successes, on challenges that we’ve run into and things we’ve had to learn along the way, sometimes slightly painfully, but all of the end goal of creating great outcomes for clients because at the end of the day, that’s what this is all about.

(06:57):

That’s why I do this podcast. That’s why I do so many of the things I do is because when we consistently do the simple things over time, we can help clients sand off the rough edges of their retirement tax bill. Taxes are going to be one of the single largest expenses they have during their lifetime and certainly throughout retirement. And so even if it feels like a small thing one year to the next, those will pay big returns over time. But we have to have a system for getting them done. So you may already be in the midst of your fall client meetings or if you’re getting ready for them, this is going to be a great opportunity to again, learn from other people who are actively doing these things to come and ask your questions to get resources around how do I make sure that I not only get this done, but that I can incorporate my team along the way?

(07:45):

And we’ll also share examples again, of real life situations that these things have come up and how they’ve been addressed. I’ll make sure that I’m sharing a copy of the form 8606 and how that gets reported on the tax return because there are levels to how Roth conversions, just like any planning activity get done, we’ll start with kind of the 101 of here’s the most basic and how we just get the money converted and the taxes paid, and then we’ll get a little bit more advanced. Like I said, talk about some of those obstacles that we run into. Give some examples of when these things get a little more complicated. What do we do with the premium tax credits for clients who are getting health insurance from the marketplace? What do we do with IRMAA? How do we think about quantifying the impact of IRMAA because I’ve talked about on the podcast before, but I am not a fan of just blanket across the board, Hey, well, if IRMAA is involved, we just can’t do a Roth conversion, I think we need to take the time to understand what that really means.

(08:47):

The other thing that Micah and I are going to talk about that we get a lot of great feedback on anytime it comes up is specifically how we articulate this value proposition to clients and how we make this as simple of a conversation as possible. I’m not going to give away all the things that we’re going to talk about on the webinar, but for me, and I know Micah’s a big fan of this as well, we want to start with the simplest explanation that gets the client on board with the activity that we’re trying to get done. And this isn’t about not sharing great information. We want clients to understand what it is we’re trying to accomplish. That helps with the buy-in, but there’s no need for hour long presentations and 50 pages of charts and graphs if we have a clear value proposition and if we understand why it’s a value to the clients that we serve.

(09:32):

Because while we talk about Roth often on this podcast, we’re doing a whole webinar. We do sessions on it at the tax summit. That doesn’t make it the answer for everyone in every situation. We need to make sure we understand when it applies, how it applies. I definitely very adamantly we’ll say that it should at least be considered for every client every year, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to get executed every year. We’ve got to make sure that these things are specific to client situations and part of that long-term plan because if we take the IRS one year at a time, we lose by default, the tax code is not set up to help us pay only what we absolutely have to. And at the end of the day, that’s the goal is to pay the taxes we owe and not leave the IRS a tip.

(10:17):

So once again, mark your calendar next year, October 1st through third is the RTS Summit 2025. The third installment is going to be great, but more immediately, go out to retirementtaxservices.com, get signed up for the webinar that Micah and I are doing just a week away to make sure that we all have the tools we need to help clients get Roth conversions done before the end of 2024 and create great outcomes at tax time. Thanks for being here, and until next time, good luck out there. And remember to tip your server, not the IRS.