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 to kick off the new year to welcome in 2025, my guest this week is Kevin Thompson, who I actually, this last yea,r got to meet in person, which is always fun since we do so many things online. But Kevin, welcome to the show.

Kevin (01:11):

Man. I am happy to be here to meet you and your brother in person. I know I was looking up at you guys, and I was like, wow, you guys are really tall, man. So it was great to meet you guys in person and exactly, I mean, hey, and look at those medals behind you. I am… The more I know about you guys, the more enamored I come with you guys. It’s like, this is amazing. This guy’s running half marathons swimming across the English Channel. What’s going on here? So this is great.

Steven (01:35):

Wow. I certainly appreciate the kind words in the early stages. You’re learning all the positive things. We’ll keep the skeletons until later. But Kevin, just for the audience, give a little bit of background on what it is you do.

Kevin (01:47):

Well, we’re RIA here in Fort Worth, Texas. We comprehensive financial planning. Now we’re doing tax services. Now, I’m not saying we’re doing your taxes, but we’re talking about taxes and we’re going to get in that here in a second. But investment management, estate planning, just true financial planning. When I say true financial planning, I’m not saying sales my friend, I’m talking about true financial planning where we’re not going to come in here and get you a life insurance policy and tell you you’re all fine and dandy. We’re really doing some real, real work here and that’s why I’m an RIA and that’s why I love what I do.

Steven (02:18):

Kevin, talk about what your typical client profile looks like. I know that gets a lot of emphasis in our industry anymore of who is it I serve? Because to your point, if we want to do really quality financial planning, we can’t have a hundred clients that look a hundred different ways.

Kevin (02:32):

True. That’s true. And in the beginning when you’re starting to build a firm, everybody’s different. You’ll take everybody. But at the end of the day, business owners and professionals, that’s who I mainly work with and retirees. Now, when I say retirees, everybody wants to retiree or less retiree, but people that are looking for distribution planning, tax planning, tax focus, Roth conversions, things like that, people that have a million dollars or more in assets, you could do really good stuff them because there’s IRMAA tax that they’re going to deal with. There’s all these different tax things that people don’t necessarily look at, but I typically work with individuals that either they’re retired or they’re professionals.

Steven (03:09):

Geez, right out of the gate there. And we’ll come back to the tax services you offer as financial advisors, as CPAs. It can get really easy to forget that all of our clients don’t understand things at the same level we do. Because the thing I remind people, the way I think about this is I look at a thousand tax returns a year. My clients look at one tax return a year maybe. And so when we talk about things like when you said IRMAA is what made me think of it, because this just came up with a new client to us and then an advisor that’s relatively new to our program on this call with them, and they’re clearly misunderstanding how IRMAA works, which is totally natural if this is your first time encountering IRMA this one time large event in 2023, and so they were concerned that their IRMAA in 2024 was going to go up and they were concerned that it was always going to be higher. And so we had to talk about, and we took just a couple of minutes, but you could see the relief on their face to understand how it works that oh, it’s a two year lag and it gets looked at every two years. And so if 2024, or sorry, 2023 was uniquely high for them, great news, it’s going to go up in 2025 and then it’s going to go back down when their income goes back down.

Kevin (04:12):

Absolutely. And this is one thing that people don’t necessarily take to heart. I know we’re getting into the tax nitty gritty, but when you’re about to retire, when you’re about to retire, your income’s high and everything’s fine and Danny and you retire on the next date. Boom.

Steven (04:27):

Yeah.

Kevin (04:27):

Always tell people, and I don’t know, is it SS44? SS44? I don’t know the term, the form, but there’s a form there you have to fill out where it’s an event that happened and therefore they can go back and say, okay, you retired, so we’re going to take that into account so we don’t get hit with these IRMAA charges. So it’s important to understand these things because I think I recently came across a client and I said, Hey, by the way, I mean it’s a new client of mine. I said, Hey, you’re paying these IRMAA charges and you retired last year. Let’s focus on this and let’s get this into the system because this needs to be addressed.

Steven (05:00):

Yeah, SS44, I think, if I’m remembering right off the top of my head, actually, I just filled this out literally two weeks ago for a client, and this is one of those areas where it’s a great example of how we don’t have to get caught up on the complex, weird, unique tax planning strategies to add value because this is a great example. By default, the IRS is going to wait two years, and so if we help a client fill out this Medicare waiver the year they retire, it’s potentially going to save them thousands, multiple thousands of dollars in Irma charges over those two years. And so these are those ways that we sand off the rough edges of someone’s retirement tax bill, but we have to know what we’re looking for. So Kevin, talk a little bit more. You said you don’t prepare taxes for clients. So when you say tax services, what does that mean to you?

Kevin (05:46):

Now we get into the ambiguity because they always say, and I just took the EA, we’re going to get into that here in a second, but the EA says that CFPs cannot discuss taxes.

(05:59):

You cannot, they shouldn’t be doing that stuff.

Steven (06:01):

You can’t give tax advice. That doesn’t mean we can’t talk about taxes.

Kevin (06:05):

Well, but then that’s, when the ambiguity comes in. What’s tax advice versus what’s tax planning?

Steven (06:09):

Yeah.

Kevin (06:09):

Mean, we talk about what’s an IRA, if I talk about, okay, we’re going to do a Roth conversion, is that tax planning or is that tax advice if I tell you to put 6,000 or 7,000 into your traditional IRA? Is that tax planning or is that tax advice? So it’s a lot of ambiguity there. So that’s the reason why I went wholeheartedly into the EA because I just wanted to remove all the ambiguity. I said, I want to talk taxes, and if I don’t want to get caught up into the minutia of things, let’s have the designation in place to where I can have these conversations and go a little bit further. Whether if I do want to do a servicing of a couple of easy tax returns, I can do that for clients as well. But that’s the main reason why I honestly got the EA because I was just tired of people saying, well, tax planning is this. Let’s bottom line this. It’s all tax advice. I don’t give a damn what you say. It’s all tax advice, and you know that to be true. Right?

Steven (06:57):

Interesting. Okay, so that was one of the questions I wanted to ask was what motivated the EA? And so there it is, and that’s definitely a really clear way to take the ambiguity out of it because in my experience, actually, I wrote a pretty in-depth article with the Kitces team on this of trying to differentiate tax advice versus tax planning because I think, and you’re illustrating this for so many advisors are told, Hey, you can’t touch this. You can’t talk about it. So I love that you took responsibility for it. And you said, okay, I’m not going to take that to mean that I have to ignore taxes. I’m just do what I have to be able to talk about it all the time. Because I think unfortunately, a lot of advisors take that to just say, well, I’m never going to talk taxes, but here’s the reality, Kevin, and this is why you went and got your EA. There’s really, there’s two types of advisors. There’s advisors who are proactively addressing taxes, and there’s advisors who are lying to themselves because every money decision has a tax impact. So if you are doing anything with a client’s money, you are having a tax impact. It’s just that some advisors, they’re having those tax impacts and not being proactive.

Kevin (07:58):

And you and I both know, I mean maybe it’s just me, but how can I call myself a planner and holistic? I know that we have to use the word holistic, but the idea is if I can’t understand a tax return, and again, I don’t understand it to your level, by the way, just FY, I don’t, you’ve seen thousands more than I have, but if I can’t necessarily readily just get a person’s tax return and kind of decipher what’s going on and then try to make a recommendation, then I’m talking about rollovers. I’m talking about all these different things inside of a person’s tax life, how could I make that recommendation without even knowing what the tax x-ray looks like? And we have so many advisors out there that are willing to put products and services into people’s lives without just overlooking just the x-ray and I don’t understand it, man. And that’s where the sales comes in. And again, people got to make money, I get it, but at the end of the day, just do proper planning. That’s just my 2 cents.

Steven (08:54):

Wow. Yeah, I mean we can all get on board with that. Proper planning is what it’s all about. I definitely know a lot of advisors who are looking into the EA. I think for people who want to, like you said, you can take all the ambiguity out of it and just give tax advice if you want to prepare tax returns, I think it’s absolutely worth it to get ea. I do think there’s a lot of room to be able to do tax planning where we don’t get ourselves into legal trouble, but we have to be intentional about it. It can’t just happen by accident. Recently, I’ve had some conversations with actually E&O insurance providers for financial advisors, and it’s really interesting talking to them because they get to see, because there’s this kind of scary idea. If I talk taxes, I could get sued. And as it turns out from the E&O side of it, they’re seeing way more claims because advisors inadvertently gave tax advice because they thought they were skirting the edges. They see those instances way more than they see someone who’s proactively and intentionally saying, Hey, I think you should convert to Roth. Those aren’t the people getting sued. It’s the people who are just trying to ignore it and getting burned by it anyways.

Kevin (09:57):

Thousand percent, thousand percent. And like I said before with my EA, and I know you’re going to ask me this question, so the ea, I took the EA because I wanted to remove all of that, and I realized when I took the EA that, and I don’t know what kind of language you can use on the show, so I’ll keep it clean, right? No, but I took the EA and I realized, hey, I don’t know as much as I thought I did, because here’s the deal. We all know retirement planning. Oh, we know everything about rollovers, qualified accounts, all of that stuff. I’ve been doing it for a decade. I know this stuff. So I go into the ggl system, shout out to Deborah on ggl. She got me my EA exam, so I just want to give her a little pub there. So I go into the system and I go to the section that says retirement plan.

(10:43):

I’m like, oh, this is easy. I should skip this section, right? I should skip this section. I go in, I take the pre-exam because they give you a little pre-exam before you go through all the study course 40. I’m like, what just happened? I thought I’d knew this stuff. No, you don’t. I don’t care. You don’t know it. It’s deep, man. So that’s why I took it because I’ve learned so much. I mean, it wasn’t a very difficult program, but it’s a necessary program because what it offers and the information that you receive and the CEs that you have to do, it keeps you informed in the tax code that is ever ever changing.

Steven (11:21):

Oh, yeah, a hundred percent. Because the tax code’s written in pencil for sure. But a lot of what you’re describing is why we created retirement tax services. It’s why we do the podcast. It’s why we do the annual summit because there’s this middle ground where I’ll give a lot of advisors the benefit of the doubt that they have some general understanding of taxes, but it’s those things that happen on the edges, and those edges come up way more often than you think because it’s easy to get on social media and say, ah, here’s what a typical Roth conversion should look like. And we all know that’s nonsense because there’s no such thing as a typical Roth conversion. It has to be specific to the client. We’ve got some options here. You can take the route that you did go get your EA feel a hundred percent confident that I can give tax advice and keep moving.

(12:00):

Or we get involved in communities where we can ask questions, whether that’s retirement tax services or something else that’s out there, but we’ve got to have access to resources to other advisors who are doing this stuff as we host our conference, as we do other events, that’s where I see a lot of the value coming from is an advisor being able to ask another advisor peer to say, Hey, when you came across the last time, you had a client who made a Roth contribution and then had a bonus they weren’t expecting and you had to go and help ’em do an excess contribution removal. What were the actual steps in that? How did you calculate the gains? And being able to actually ask somebody those questions. That’s where we take it from textbook to reality,

Kevin (12:35):

And that’s why I love you and what you guys provide, because I’m going to tell you this right now. You’re the only person I allow in my inbox. I’m telling you right now. Wow. You’re the only person I’m telling you. Like I said, I’ll X out everybody else. I’ll like, ah, that’s junk. But then your stuff comes in. I read it, man. I appreciate what you do, man. Thank you.

Steven (12:55):

For sure. I’m a numbers nerd to begin with. I can see the numbers of who opens the emails, who gets the emails, and it’s great to see that thousands and thousands of advisors are hearing the message we’re sending out. But really I love being able to hear directly from people like you, Kevin, who this is having an impact on. So thank you.

Kevin (13:10):

Absolutely, man. So what’s another funny thing about this whole EA experience? I’m going to tell you this real quick while I’m taking the study course. They always say, you’re only allowed to say you are enrolled to practice before the IRS. So when someone asks you, Hey, what is the ea? I’m enrolled to practice before the IRS, but I get a letter today from the enrolled agency, congratulations, you’ve met the requirements to become an enrolled agent. By obtaining this elite status, you’ll play a critical role in providing services to the American taxpayer. I’m like, hold on, hold on. You told me I’m just an enrolled to

(13:48):

Practice for the IRS, but now I’m an elite status.

Steven (13:51):

Yeah. I’m like, come on, look at that.

Kevin (13:53):

Even the IRS has to market. Hey,

Steven (13:55):

Come on, you the IRS, that’s what that extra $80 billion is going towards is marketing. There you go. I thank you for your elite status.

Kevin (14:03):

Oh, but that’s crazy. You tell me one thing, why can’t I say why? Hey, I’m an elite individual with the IRS, but you just told me I was right, but apparently I can’t say that.

Steven (14:12):

I expect to see that on your LinkedIn profile. But Kevin, this does illustrate a really important point, and I think why there’s so much opportunity for advisors to be involved in the tax conversation is because there is such a range of what people are hearing and what people are expecting. I think that kind of language is a lot of times why consumers are misinformed, that if they have an enrolled agent or a CPA, they’re working with on tax preparation, that they must be covered on all things tax. And that’s just not the case because although there are a lot of advisors like you who are getting their EA on top of what they’re doing, the stereotypical enrolled agent, the stereotypical CPA is still there looking in the rear view mirror. They’re getting last year’s tax return done, and they’re moving on with life. And so for advisors out there, that’s why there’s this opportunity is because most taxpayers, unless they have an advisor like Kevin who’s proactively doing this stuff, they’re not getting forward looking input and recommendations when it comes to the tax topic. And there are opportunities here. No, most of my clients are never going to move to Puerto Rico and only pay 4% tax. In fact, a lot of my clients pay an insane amount of taxes each year, but we’re able to help them make sure that they’re only paying what they absolutely have to, and then we’re standing off their rough edges. We’re not having them leave the IRS a tip, and that’s where the opportunities are for most taxpayers.

Commercial (15:33):

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Kevin (16:07):

And you and I, we both see this, man. There’s a lot of business owners who are, they’re just doing their business and next thing you know it’s tax time and now I have 24 to 48,000, I got to pay. I’m like, hold on, hold on. You didn’t pay your quarter lease. What’s going on here? So when I get some of these business owners, I’m like, oh my gosh, who are you working with? I’m working with a bookkeeper. Like what?

(16:30):

I mean, you make too much money to be working with someone. And I take designations to heart because I know I don’t necessarily believe that too many designations are a good thing, but at the end of the day, there’s certain designations in our industry, and I’ll tell you right now, it’s the C-F-A, C-F-P and the CPA designations are the most recognizable in our industry. We can call it what it is, but at the end of the day, it’s important to be working with a tax professional that has these types of designations, that understands the tax code that’s doing the CE every single year that knows what’s going on, the changes. And from a business owner perspective, if you’re not working with a cpa, I don’t know what you’re doing. I mean, I truly don’t know what you’re doing now, but I meet a lot of ’em that are working with just bookkeepers and things like that. And by the way, that’s something that the IRS needs to take hold of because there’s a lot of untrained individuals that can just be a tax person. Oh, it’s

Steven (17:18):

Shocking.

Kevin (17:18):

It’s shocking, right? It’s shocking that they can do tax returns, but they don’t have to have any real knowledge around the tax code. They’re just putting forward tax returns. I don’t understand how that’s even possible.

Steven (17:28):

And a lot of people aren’t really aware of this. It is a shockingly low bar to become a tax professional, not to become a CPA or to become an ea. Those are much stricter licensing requirements. But to be a tax professional, and I’ll use very sarcastic air quotes,

(17:42):

Super low bar just about anybody can do it. Kevin, you’ve got a background in professional sports. I definitely see it in that arena a lot. I also see it a lot in what I’ll call accidental entrepreneurs. This is online content creators. I talked to an advisor a year or two ago who specializes in working with professional video gamers, but people who maybe didn’t come from a lot of wealth and then suddenly have a lot of it, all of a sudden they’d rather use their friend next door who’s told them they’re a tax professional, but not realizing that becoming a tax professional is not a huge hurdle, and then they’re just not getting quality advice and input. And you mentioned bookkeeping, that’s one of those areas that for new business owners, it feels like something they can DIY on day one before they’ve started generating revenue and they’re not generating very much revenue. Like, ah, I’ve got a spreadsheet, I’ve got access to QuickBooks. I’ll just handle this. And that’s something that people quickly outgrow but don’t realize quickly enough that they have outgrown.

Kevin (18:34):

Yeah, my CPA shout out, she’s wonderful. Christie Cortez down in Austin, she does my bookkeeping as well, and I’ve realized quickly she saved my butt during the audit. Literally, she had everything already spread out. She had my balance sheets, my profit and loss statements, all that stuff. All I had to do was just go in and download it and it was there and I was like, oh my God, that just saved me hours of just work. So just as a business owner, get your house in order to make sure that all of that stuff, the backend stuff doesn’t bite you in the butt in the future because taxes, not having proper books and records can kill you.

Steven (19:10):

Oh, absolutely. And since you mentioned that for any advisors listening who are looking for help on bookkeeping, send me an email, steven@retirementtaxservices.com. I’ll get you connected with our friends over at BELAY. They do a great job in the bookkeeping world and in addition to helping with virtual assistance. So Kevin, as you look at how your practice, how your client service has progressed over time, specifically in this tax arena, what are other things that stand out to you that you are focused on now that you maybe weren’t five years ago in providing this comprehensive service to your clients

Kevin (19:39):

Outside of tax planning? Is that what you’re saying? Outside of tax planning, we’re doing some estate stuff now that’s been a little bit harder to kind of integrate into the system because it’s just getting people to move, getting people to go from A to B, that’s the most difficult thing that it takes to get people through the process. But estate planning, tax services, of course, asset management, I mean, it’s just really being in depth in regard to their entire financial life. I mean, breaking everything down from A to Z man, it’s just, it’s important when you’re talking about planning and trying to get people to on the right steps really to do a diagnostic. And people want to say, oh, just give me your income and your expenses and I can put this e-money together for you. We can just put these fake numbers together.

(20:26):

It’s going to be linear and you’re going to have $14 billion when you retire. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come across a client who had a JP Morgan advisor say that JP Morgan advisor, and the next thing you know, they gave me their information and I’m like, man, that’s a crazy report there. That’s a crazy report. That’s the linear, you’re going to have $14 million. One of my clients, one of my new clients came to me and said, Kevin, you just cost us 7 million in retirement. I said, no. I said, I’m going to tell you this. This is realistic. Whatever they were doing for you ain’t happening. I’m telling you that right now. So it’s important to understand the technology and the tools that you have and provide that service to your clients. That’s my goal, and that’s just where I stand on, man. I don’t like linear math and the beautiful pictures that people give. It’s just false narrative in my opinion.

Steven (21:12):

Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of great software out there for certain aspects of helping serve a client. And I work with a lot of advisors and I work with a lot of advisors, clients, and so I hear firsthand from clients what makes their advisors stand out to them.

(21:25):

And it’s never the client coming to me and telling me about the pretty picture that the advisor said. They’re not even coming and talking about, oh, well, my client made me X amount in returns in the market. Investments in asset management is important, but the things that stand out are those customized, those really specific. It’s when the advisor understood them and their life and their situation and were able to help in ways that the clients didn’t even expect. It’s the client whose advisor helped them make sure they weren’t getting, having anyone pulled over on ’em when they were selling real estate or works with clients whose advisors helped them when they go to buy a car. It’s different things that again, don’t come into the traditional narrative and not that that’s what those advisors are building their whole business model around, but to your point, there are advisors who are committed to helping their clients be successful with money, whatever that might look like.

Kevin (22:15):

And the reality is it’s not as much as the numbers as it is the relationship,

Steven (22:21):

And

Kevin (22:21):

It’s the small things that keep people wanting to talk to you. You don’t want to call your client and have them like, ah, dang it, okay, what’s going on? Is the market going crazy? No. You want to call your client and be like, Hey, how’s it going? Yeah, you want to have great conversations with ’em. And by the way, when I call my clients, it’s rarely about anything financial. It’s just like, Hey, just checking in. What’s going down? Hey, you went to the football game last week and how was that? That matters more than any annual review that you could ever put in front of somebody and saying, oh, I made you 18% this year, 10%. What matters more is you checking in on them to making sure they’re okay, whether it’s monthly, quarterly or whatever. That’s more important than anything else.

Steven (23:02):

Yeah. The example that always comes to mind when things like this come up is tax loss harvesting because advisors who, that’s the first thing on their website under tax services, or that’s what they lead with in their content is, Hey, we do great tax loss harvesting. Hey, timeout, that Vanguard automates that, right? Tax loss. Some of these big companies that, sorry to break it to you, they’ve got more money than you do. And so if we’re talking about things that can be automated, they’re going to run circles around you every time you can’t catch up, but what you can do really well, and I meet people at those big firms who sometimes are the exception and are doing those things well too. But what you can do really well, to your point, Kevin, is the relationship side. It’s actually understanding that specific client, and yes, you are going to provide those services. I don’t want anybody to take it the wrong way, but you still need to handle the numbers. That’s why they came to you. But that’s not what’s going to set you apart. That’s not what’s going to keep them coming back to you. That’s certainly not what’s going to get them to refer their friends to you. There has to be that individualized piece of it.

Kevin (24:01):

So one of my buddies, he’s in Lubbock and he’s enamored with direct indexing, and I’m like, stop. I was like, I don’t want to hear this stuff. I mean, it’s just another shiny object in this grand scheme of whether it was tax loss, harvesting, direct indexing. I’m like, I don’t want to hear any of that stuff. I said, okay, tax loss harvesting perfect. What are you going to tax loss harvest this year or last year? The market’s up 25%. What are you going to do? It’s rebalancing. What are you going to do? What are you going to rebalance? You can rebalance back to a target asset allocation, but at the end of the day, that’s not why people are coming to you. They’re coming to you for the relationship and having these conversations like we’re having right now.

Steven (24:41):

Yeah, absolutely. As we kick off the year, there’s definitely the time of year that you want to be thinking about what your process around some of these topics are, because these things don’t happen by accident, especially as we talk about tax planning and being able to weigh in and provide valuable insight around taxes. That means you have to understand what’s going on in your client’s tax life. That means you need relationships with their CPAs. It means you need to be requesting copies of their tax returns, and you need to do these things systematically, not haphazardly. And so if you’ve never requested a client tax return before, now’s the time to be figuring out what’s that request look like? How am I going to send it out? How’s my client going to send those returns back to me? Because again, and Kevin, I’m sure you would agree with this, even when we talk about those individualized and relationship level type things, they aren’t just going to happen by accident. You have to have an intentional approach to this.

Kevin (25:29):

I’m going to say this, if you haven’t requested a tax return, you haven’t done any planning, just I don’t know what you’ve been doing, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. The first thing I do is request a tax return because I want run it through the system to see exactly what I’m dealing with, and then we can kind of start building things after that. I just don’t understand. It’s like giving somebody a prescription for something. You don’t know what the elements are. It’s like, get out of here, man. I don’t have time for that.

Steven (25:51):

Well, I’m glad I’m not the only one saying that. Now, usually, part of the way I phrase that as well is tax planning doesn’t count until it’s reported to the IRS correctly. And so you can get your client 99% of the way there, but if it doesn’t get reported on the tax return correctly, none of the rest of it counted. And unfortunately, I’ve seen, especially when we have new clients come on board, we review recent tax returns. We see this all the time where we see stock sales with zero basis reported because they didn’t understand that it was an RSU that got taxed through their W2. We see backdoor Roth contributions that don’t get reported correctly. We see Roth conversions that don’t get reported correctly. We see QCDs that get double counted. I mean, we see all these things and sometimes it’s with advisors who are almost doing a fantastic job. They’re doing most of it the right way. They’re missing that last step. That is a crucial step and blows up the rest of the process.

Kevin (26:39):

I had a client recently just a new client and we’re doing planning for them, and their advisor at e and j Edward Jones was doing Roth contributions directly into his account, and they make a combined like $350,000

(26:56):

For the last two years. And I’m like, oh, thank you. Gosh. I said, okay, we’re going to write this letter to your financial advisor. They’re going to fix it there. I’m not going to fix it. They’re going to fix it over there and let them handle that. And then once they get all that fixed, then we’re going to move it over. But right now, let them fix that problem because that’s a two year headache man. And I don’t know if there’s going to be any disclosures made or whatnot, but that’s the kind of stuff that doesn’t make sense to me. That’s day one financial planning in my opinion.

Steven (27:26):

And those are things that are getting identified because you’re looking at the tax return. I’d be willing to bet that your client didn’t come to you and say, Hey, my current advisor is screwing up my Roth conversions or my Roth contributions. They need you to help me with this. No, no, no. They probably had some kind of feeling that maybe there was a higher level of service they could get, but it’s you getting the tax returns and identifying them that for them, that results in action.

Kevin (27:46):

A thousand percent. And that’s exactly what happened. Ran their tax return, said all the numbers, like, Hey, this doesn’t make any sense. You’re doing what? And then boom, yeah, hopefully get that fixed, man. But that’s the benefit of having a person that’s in the tax arena working with you as a financial advisor. And again, I know there’s a lot of ambiguity between who can say what, but if you’re worried about that ambiguity, go get that EA and call it a day or get a CPA and call it a day. That’s just my opinion.

Steven (28:14):

Yeah. Well, Kevin, I really appreciate you sharing your insight and perspective on this. I mean, what a great way to kick off the year with the podcast of reminding everyone that you’ve got to be getting tax returns every single year for every client. That’s one of the best steps that financial advisors can take to really commit to being involved in taxes and do it in a quality way. So Kevin, really appreciate your time. Where can people learn more about what you’re doing? If they’re interested in what you’ve got going on,

Kevin (28:36):

You go to the website 9icapiatlgroup.com. You can go to the YouTube Channel nine group or nine eighties podcast on YouTube. And of course you have all of our stations on iTunes, SoundCloud, all the other things on nine eighties podcast. But we’re doing a lot of things here. We got a lot of webinars coming up. And by the way, if you have a webinar, I would love to join, not join you as a panelist or anything like that, but join your webinar to check you out some of your tax things as well. And yeah, we’re doing a lot of things. We’ve got a lot of things coming up. We’re looking to hit 2025 hard, and thank you for the opportunity to speak today. And by the way, if you see someone swimming in some random lake somewhere, it’s probably this guy.

Steven (29:15):

Probably this guy.

(29:16):

Quite possibly. I’d love to get out and race. Well, since you mentioned webinars, Kevin, we’ll just finish with that. For 2025, we are moving to doing CE webinars for advisors. These will be CE events that will actually give you actionable and valuable content. So keep an eye out. The first one will be in late February. We’d love to have you and everyone else there. I’m excited what we can do to keep impacting the industry.

Kevin (29:37):

Appreciate you, man. Thank you so much.

Steven (29:38):

Absolutely. And for everyone listening, until next time, good luck out there. And remember to tip your server, not the IRS.