Steven (00:52)
Hello everyone and welcome to the next episode of the Retirement Tax Services podcast, financial professionals edition. I am your host, Steven Jarvis, CPA. And this week on the show, I think I get to do something for the first time in nearly 250 episodes, which is congratulate my guest on a recent engagement. Gideon Drucker from Drucker Wealth is joining me this week and literally as we’re recording this just barely got engaged. So Gideon, congratulations.

Gideon (01:16)
Thank you, thanks for having me. And yeah, I got engaged three days ago now and yeah, exciting time.

Steven (01:22)
That’s super exciting. And as any good tax nerd, of course you just did the math and said, you know what, I’m gonna be financially better off for getting married. That was the thought process, right? Strictly tax decision.

Gideon (01:30)
Yeah, is there another reason people get engaged? I thought it was really just focusing on the taxes, sitting down and figuring out what makes the most sense when you’re driving the tax bus.

Steven (01:38)
You know, even as we joke about that, I have started meeting more people who are getting literally getting married on paper. Like we’ll go down to the courthouse, get married and then still wait however long they need to plan a formal ceremony for the tax purposes. But joking aside, I am a huge proponent of we make good life decisions and then we figure out tax efficient ways to do them, which the little bit I know about your story and background, I’m quite certain, I’m very confident that this in fact was, hey, I’m making the right life decision here. And if there’s a tax benefit, so be it.

Gideon (02:07)
Yeah, and I would like to, you if I, would tell my girlfriend, first time I’ve now made that mistake. So I guess we have that live. My fiance, that that was a joke prior, but I listened to this podcast every week, but I don’t think she does. So I think I’m safe there and yeah, great life decision. And the taxes follow.

Steven (02:22)
That’s super exciting. I do think that is an important reminder for people though, especially as we work with clients who are going through big life changes or who are planning big life changes, that it can be easy to get distracted by the tax piece of it. Taxes are big part of all of our lives. And so it can be pretty attractive to say, well, what would make the most sense for tax purposes? And then try to force our life into it. And it just never pans out well if that’s the approach we take.

Gideon (02:45)
I mean, the best version of that is when somebody reaches out seeking a financial planner, right? We have what we call our 15 minute right fit calls. And I asked what’s going on, what led them to reach out. And the first thing, well, I’m opening up, I want to open up an LLC for tax purposes. Very first thing out of their mouth. Like, let’s talk about that a little bit more. LLC, protection strategy, not tax. And then I said, all right, maybe they just misspoke. It’s not about the LLC. They’re opening a business. What’s the business idea? How are you going to make money? Well, I’m not really sure. I haven’t really thought about, the business, just, I know I want to save money on taxes and the business will help me do so. And then, you you figure out where to go from there. How far back do you go? But yeah, that is definitely one of those life decisions. Do you want to run business? Do you have an idea? Can you make revenue? And then yes, there should probably be some tax benefits, but not the other way around. I know you’ve dealt with that even more than I have, I’m sure.

Steven (03:32)
Yes, that one does come up quite often and whether they’ll admit it or not, it’s because they heard it on a podcast, they heard it on social media, they heard it somewhere from their best friend who never pays any taxes, all that kind of nonsense. We did just dive right into this. I probably should take a second for our listeners and say, obviously you are a financial advisor. I’ll let you talk about your background with Drucker Wealth, but you and I have now partnered together for a few years. We’re one of our RTS Premier members. We have shared clients at this point. And the reason I point that out is because as you’re describing that conversation, that you go through with some of your clients. Being on the tax preparer side of this, I can always tell when I’m working with a client who has a proactive advisor and one who doesn’t. And for me, it’s kind of fun sometimes because I can think of clients we work with together who will come to me almost like a little bit sheepishly because whether they’ll flat out say it or not, they’re like, well, someone or my advisor already told me that maybe this isn’t the right way to think about this, but I want to hear from the CPA too. And so I love it when they’re already hearing that from someone else that no, I can’t just set up an LLC and deduct everything forever for any reason I want to.

Gideon (04:32)
I’m not going to buy a truck every year for my business that has nothing to do with transportation. Yeah, it’s reinforcing that consistently. It’s honestly a same type of dynamic when the market goes down and we’re constantly in their ear saying, hey, what’s our, what is the money for? When do you need the money? Does a short term correction, which historically is the only type of corrections there have been, will take in at a long enough timeline, but it’s, you know, I think it’s important to hear from me to hear from you. So even if they want to ask the question, they kind of know what we’re going to say and it reinforces the message and they want to hear that reinforcement. And that’s why they’re bringing it up to both of us consistently.

Steven (05:05)
That is a great reminder. They do need to hear that reinforcement. Whether it’s taxes its investments. Whatever it is our clients only deal with this stuff very sporadically. We deal with this hundreds of times thousands of times a year and so yeah, we need to reinforce that to them So Gideon, take a second here even though we just dove right into everything talk a little bit about about your firm your role in the firm and then really what I want to get into from there is, for a long time you’ve had this real emphasis. I would say more so than just about any other advisor I’ve met of, we’re going to really embrace this idea that we’re facilitating everything and we’re gonna make sure that we’ve got professionals around us that can deliver on all the different areas of financial planning we wanna address for our client.

Gideon (05:43))
Yeah, absolutely. So a little bit of background. So yeah, my firm Drucker Wealth, we’re now an independent RIA. We’re a fully virtual firm. So we have team members throughout the country, clients all around the country. And I’d say now we’re an RIA. We left our broker dealer almost 13 months ago. And I won’t get in too deep, but Drucker Wealth as a firm, have 800 clients. We oversee around a billion dollars of assets. We have two divisions that we work with, what we call a retirement and income division. That is the more traditional long-standing part of the firm that’s been around for decades. That works with clients in their 60s, 70s that are already retired, approaching retirement, but retirement planning is really the focus. And then when I came to Drucker Wealth seven years ago now, I created what we call our wealth builder division, which obviously you’re more familiar with. That’s more of our joint clients are in that division. And that is high income earning mid-career professional families. So most of these clients are thirties and forties. They make really good money. They, most of them have young kids and they’re really focused on full life financial planning.

(06:42)
That division at this point has, I want to say about 275 family households. It’s only five years old, but that’s really where most of our growth, our energy, our new hires are coming from. And just to tie it back, I guess, to the original question point about kind of building this one-stop shop, I would say like most of the things we’ve done on the wealth builder side, wasn’t the goal on day one of saying, hey, we want to bring in tax and estate planning and P&C insurance and cash flow and you know debt management and all this it was really letting the clients dictate what we needed to do next and Because we’re working with high income earning folks in their 40s mostly dual income. They have a lot going on there, you know living in high cost of area places like they just have way too much going on to want to interact with nine different professionals or you know if I said hey every client gets to have a monthly meeting with me, I don’t think many of them would take me up on that. Like they want a financial planning relationship that is proactive. When we have meetings, we get stuff done. You know, we’re sending meeting agendas months in advance. We do a surge meeting calendar for that reason. So I think we let our clients kind of show, Hey, where do we want to create the most value? What’s important to them? What’s not important to them? And that’s really been the been at the center. And you know, obviously we’ve been growing really rapidly over the last few years and that each time we bring on a new client that says the same thing of what they’re looking for. We say, all now we know what we need to build next, what we want to focus on. So yeah, I guess to say it really happened organically as we kind of built this mindset of we really want to be that one-stop shop for our clients.

Steven (08:12)
It’s really interesting. I appreciate you sharing that because I mean, when you look at advisor marketing, when you hear advisors talk about what they do, everyone likes this idea of sure, I’m gonna quarterback the relationship, whatever analogy you wanna use, but in practice, that looks different in a lot of different places. And what I’ve found in practice is that quite often that looks like, yeah, here’s somebody you can call all the best of luck. And really the approach that you’ve taken, which I’ve seen firsthand as we work together is no, no, no, these are, these are your clients. You take this very seriously that you’re, that you really are, you feel responsible for this relationship. And so I mean, as this has, has grown over the last few years, I guess maybe talk about maybe some of the painful learning early on, because you’re taking a big responsibility to commit to your clients of, Hey, we’re going to make sure this happens. But then you’re also coming to a third party and saying, work with our clients, that’s not always going to go perfectly right. So how do you balance that as the professional who took that responsibility on?

Gideon (09:00)
Yeah, absolutely. I definitely have been pain points, but I think as you were talking, the first thing that came to my mind is we, because we work with a very specific, I don’t want to say a niche because, know, it’s not exactly a niche. It’s a little bigger than that, but it’s clients at a particular stage of life at a certain income point, which tends to lead to a certain net worth. I think that’s allowed us to make this a lot easier than it otherwise would be. Right. Because we’re not working with a 72-year-old that’s worried about their RMDs and legacy planning for the grandkids. And then the next meeting, we’re working with a 23 year old with student loans in their first job. And how can you create that quarterback type, you know, that client experience where you’re quarterbacking and you know the partners to use when those two clients really have nothing in common with each other. They have totally different agendas and planning goals. Because all of our growth has been centralized in this thirties, forties, know, mid-career, certain income. I think that’s made it a lot easier to have these type of conversations because they fundamentally want the same things, right? They’re in the highest tax bracket, mostly W-2. A lot of our clients work in tech and have RSUs. That leads to, you know, specific tax priorities. It’s like, hey, there’s a lot of stuff we want to do we can get into, but number one is we want to make sure our RSUs aren’t creating a situation where we owe a lot in tax because the RSUs are withheld at a lower tax rate than expected. And I live in California or New York, so I have higher state taxes that the RSUs aren’t being withheld. So it allows us to be proactive because we’re having the same conversations. And I could do that same example on the estate planning side. And I think the other part, and I know you can vouch for this, is I’m a type A New Yorker. I’m pretty intense, and I’m pretty intense with our clients, and I’m pretty intense with our partner relationships, our technology platforms. And I think, when we were leaving our broker dealer and launching the RIA, we weren’t necessarily going fully independent the whole time, we thought we might join another RIA, join another BD. And the amount of these partners that said, wow, nobody’s ever asked this amount of questions. Like they were a little intimidated that I had a list of a hundred questions. And to me, I don’t know how anybody could leave a firm or open a (11:03)
Whether it’s an RTS, whether it’s a custodian like Altruist or wealth.com on the estate planning. By the way, I’m not a representative or paid, these are the partners we’ve worked with and they can vouch for how intense we get. So I think it starts on day one. I don’t know that I have a better answer than asking the right questions upfront, not being afraid to ask questions that might be uncomfortable to just lay your cards on the table because that’s the only way a partnership is going to work. And I would say,what we’re looking for in our partners, and I know RTS understands this better than anyone, is if we are the central relationship in our clients’ lives as a financial planner. And we want to work with partners that understand that, hey, tax is important, but as you always say, it doesn’t drive the bus. You want to make good life decisions, good financial decisions for your family, and then make sure you’re doing it in the most tax-efficient way possible. Same idea when we have our insurance partners.

(11:56)
No, we don’t want to work with, I don’t want to say the stereotypical, the insurance salesman that everything is seen through the insurance prism and be your own bank and infinite banking. And I don’t even want to go on that whole side pivot, but no, we want an insurance partner that understands that for a high income earning family in their 40s, you need a lot of inexpensive term insurance because your biggest vulnerability is what happens if God forbid you pass away tomorrow and you leave your spouse with three kids. Estate planning. We need our basic estate planning documents, right? We don’t need, for a lot of our clients, we don’t need 15 different documents and all these different fancy, we need to make sure you have documents in place, if God forbid something happens tomorrow. So long winded answer, but I think the shortest answer is our partners understand what’s most important and we wanna take care of the low hanging fruit and understand that their role is a part of the overall financial plan that we’re building together.

Steven (12:43))
There’s so much important wisdom in there, and I know for you it’s hard-earned that you

Gideon (12:47)
I guess that’s what happens when you speak for 10 minutes uninterrupted. I apologize, but hopefully that was a…

Steven (12:51)
No, you led with your type A New Yorker. Of course you like to talk. No one’s going to hold that against you. Well, maybe some people will, but I’m not going to. Some people will. That’s okay. Those aren’t the right people for you to have a partnership with. But I think there’s a lot of great wisdom in there. Whether you look at this with your partners, with employees, with clients, because what I’m hearing out of that is setting clear expectations, reinforcing those expectations and being willing to have hard conversations and those expectations aren’t being met.
Because you and have been partnering on this for a while now. And when we first started into this, what we’re trying to do at RTS, we feel is different than what a lot of CPA firms are doing, specifically with financial advisors. And there is a learning curve to that. And I’m sure there’s been a learning curve for you as you’ve gone down this journey as well. When you set out to do something different, you have an idea of what that looks like. And then you get into it and realize, I need to pivot. And so I know early on, you and I had a couple of those conversations of, hold on a second. Here’s what we thought was going to happen. This hasn’t quite turned out exactly how we thought, how do we get this back to where we want it to be? And those are the partners you really wanna work with, are the ones who will lean in and say, hey, we all started this committed to a certain outcome for our clients. And as long as you can find partners who are committed to that outcome, you can have those hard conversations and work through it as you go, and it’s everyone’s gonna elevate together. But you have to have those clear expectations and the willingness to have those sometimes uncomfortable conversations.

Gideon (14:06)
You have to be willing to adapt and know that, it’s not all going to be perfect on day one. And you guys and every partner that we’re happy to work with, when we bring things to the table and say, we thought this or hey, this isn’t quite, there’s, guess, two ways of handling that, of backing up and defensive or saying, hey, we get it. We understand what the ultimate outcome we’re driving towards. That is best for both of us and the client. And by being best for the client, it’s going to be best for both of us as well. And how do we make that happen? Those are the relationships that actually get stronger because things didn’t work exactly at the beginning, but you solve it and kind of grow from there. And then you know that everything is on the table to be spoken about, improved upon. And yeah, that’s worked really well for us in a lot of different areas.

Commercial (14:47)

Steven (16:25)
So Gideon, talk about how you think about partnering with a third party versus bringing someone onto your team because you have a lot of third party partners you work with. You mentioned wealth.com. They’re a sponsor of our summit. We’re big fans of what they do. But I also saw recently you announced that you brought someone onto your team who’s a state planning focus, which as I understand it, that doesn’t mean, hey, kick wealth.com goodbye. Like we’re not going to use them anymore. So how do you look at this balance of in-house resources versus third party resources?

Gideon (16:52)
Yeah, so yes, we are definitely, you we hired an estate attorney. yesterday was her first day. But we are not an attorney firm. We are not practicing law or any of that, obviously. We really, yeah, we’re looking at Carrie as a complement to the Wealth.com client experience. We realized, you know, to really maximize Wealth.com and, you know, their ability to generate these estate planning documents and really hold clients accountable, coach them through the process, general education, walk them through step by step.

(17:18)
It was important to have somebody in-house that could hold our clients hand and make sure that actually gets done. And we’re really excited by that. We’ve had somebody on the team that that wasn’t their full-time role of doing that. So it’s not like we’re going from, we just sent clients to Wealth and said, figure it out. I just, I quite frankly never thought that would work. I think Wealth.com would tell you that’s not the way it’s really intended to go. You want to hold clients hand, the technology makes it easier to bring people along. We wanna create maximum value for clients. So whatever way is going to allow us to do that, that’s the direction we’re going to go. And I know folks on the estate plan, just because that is something we recently brought in houses, her entire role is getting clients from A to Z. Is the get onto wealth.com, create the documents, help with the funding on the backend, and create a better client experience that integrates with everything else we’re doing in their financial planning review meeting. Same thing on the insurance side, right?

(18:09)
You know, we have somebody that helps with P&C insurance, life insurance, disability insurance, but as a part of Drucker Wealth, meaning they’re doing the analysis, but the recommendations come from us. Right? So I’ve personally just never understood, you know, the idea of, and not to get into the whole fee debate with financial planners of saying your fee only, and then passing the insurance to somebody else and then creating a separate client experience that doesn’t necessarily isn’t part of your firm. I’d rather say, Hey, no, we’re going to create what’s best for the client. But our team is going to run with the client experience. And Steven, even saying that isn’t putting you in a, because I know the LinkedIn financial advisor space is full of content in that regard. And then the last thing I’ll say on that, kind of bringing it back is I have a thousand ideas. I’m kind of the classic visionary, you know, right? In the EOS mindset, visionary and implementer where like, I want to do 15 things by next Friday.

(19:00)
And sometimes that can be a lot for my team. And I guess to the point of like, how do you figure out what to bring in house and what to outsource is what can we do in the next three months? Right. Versus what is more of a two year plan? What’s a five year plan? Because trying to do 10 things at once means you’re probably not going to do any of them that well. Whereas we thought, Hey, let’s tackle the estate planning first, because I think we can do that really well. We’re already using the technology and then in six months, let’s figure out what we can do next. So really having a roadmap, because I’ve tried it the other way when we’re trying to do 15 things and just, and I think you can relate when you’re in growth mode and things can start to break. Let’s take it one step at a time.

Steven (19:36)
Yeah, I like that framework of, what can we do in the next few months? What can we do in the next year, in the next couple of years? And we’re definitely seeing that more on the tax side where, when I first started into this several years ago now, I met a lot more advisors who were really committed to this idea that if I’m gonna do stuff on taxes, it’s gonna be fully in-house, like I’m gonna control it, like this whole thing. And I’m seeing more advisors think about how you’re talking about the estate planning side of, well what would it look like if we found a great third-party resource, but also had someone on our team who has enough background and expertise in that area that they can facilitate an incredible client experience. Because at the end of the day, that’s where we see the most value coming from is when the client outcome is what the top priority is. And there’s a lot of different ways we can get there, but we’ve always got to come back to what is that client experience that we’re creating.

Gideon (20:20)
Yeah, absolutely. And making sure that it’s all just, the same conversation. It’s the same, you know, you’re not getting, you know, we’re talking about lowering your lifetime tax bill, right? Talking about, you know, over your life and strategies looking more long-term. And then they get on with a CPA that’s just, how do we lower your taxes this year? They’re focused on that 12 month period. And there’s just that, it’s not about who’s right, but all right, well, those two things don’t really make sense. So, you know, part of when we’re working with you, we know we’re speaking the same language. We’re focused on financial planning and making sure we’re doing a tax efficiently and clients can tell, right? Even if it’s not so explicit, they can tell when their advisor and their CPA, their advisor and the estate attorney speaks, have a relationship, is talking about the client, right? Even when they’re not on the meeting, right? In a good way, not talking about that stuff, but like they’re integrated, they’ve had connections before versus when you’re just like passing it along and then you’re never talking about it again. I think clients are smart. They understand when that’s happening, when that’s not. And if they’re paying a financial planning fee, you know, an assets under that, whatever they’re paying, they want to make sure those things are connected.

Steven (21:18)
Yeah, absolutely. Gideon, you mentioned switching to being independent 13 months ago and when you did that, you also had a custodian change in there and I want to talk about what this last year has looked like for your clients from, obviously the tax piece is the piece that I can see most clearly. Geez, anytime you switch custodians, there’s going to be a lot of extra paperwork. We saw this a couple of years ago when Schwab bought TD and that was an involuntary one. But even for advisors not going through any sort of major overhaul, when you do a rollover, when you do any sort of back to a Roth contribution, a lot of your financial planning has implications at tax time. And I think your team did a really good job of setting expectations with clients as to what that was going to look like. But what was the formal plan behind that? How much did you sit down and map out, here’s how we’re gonna help clients through this versus reacting to it as it came along and questions came up.

Gideon (22:03)
Yeah, I mean, think the starting point is always just taking really good notes and being organized in real time as you’re doing things for clients rather than trying six months later to put together a list. Like, for example, everyone we do a backdoor Roth for, which is a lot of clients just because of the stage of life our clients are at, their income levels and all of that. Everybody that does a backdoor Roth, we keep track of that. And then we send the mass email to those clients. Hey, you need to let your CPA, if it’s not, you guys are another CPA that we partner with. You need to file Form 8606, you need to let the CPA know that you made non-deductible IRA contributions that we converted into a Roth and explain the logic of that because as we’ve talked about offline, some CPAs, well, you can’t do this, well, I didn’t know about that and it just, so we wanna be proactive. We let clients know, hey, you did this, here’s what you need to let your tax preparer know or you’re doing it yourself what you need to file. We’re always here to chat. So I mean, that’s just one example, but getting ahead of it, we do try to send a 1099 letter, right? Of, here are the tax documents you can expect. And we, for all of our clients, we upload all of their 1099s to their right capital, it’s our financial planning software, to their vault so they can get one folder and send it to their clients. We consider that a value add of just making their lives easier because they work with us.

(23:18)
On to the transition point. mean, yeah, thank God we’ll never have to go through that again, because this particular tax year, uh, we were at a HTK broker dealer that used, and we use Pershing, um, which NEDX 360, which that client portal, Tony, then I don’t think we have enough time to get into that, but NEDX 360 and Betterment we use on that side. And now we’re using, uh, mostly altruist for my wealth builder clients. So that’s three different custodians and we don’t have access, you know, meaning Drucker wealth to the broker dealer platforms because we’re not attached to them anymore. So again, it’s just about being proactive. would say months before the, months before tax season, we reached out to these clients and said, hey, we know this year is going to be a pain in the ass. We don’t have access to NetX 360 anymore. We also know it wasn’t that great. Know, we didn’t love going on there even when we did have access. You know, sometimes humor goes a long way. Here’s how you need to, you know. Here’s a reminder of how you should log in to those platforms to get your own tax documents. If you forgot your password, here’s what to do. We made a video about it. We did that months in advance and we said, hey, if you’re unsure, let’s set up some time with Tyler on our team who can walk you through it. But just this is the only year this is going to happen. Moving forward, it’s going to be super fun, as fun as generating tax documents can be. And it’s all gonna come from one platform and we’re actually gonna hand deliver it to you. But for this one year. Again, I get in that specifically with you just to say like being proactive, letting them know what they can expect, letting them know that this year is going to be really annoying and not trying to sugar coat it or make it sound better, but moving forward, it’s going to be a lot smoother and what we’re a few weeks away from it here, but it’s gone smoother than I could have thought because clients have had months and of course we know clients will do stuff at the last second, but they’ve had months of going into those old platforms and…yeah, we’re excited to be an independent firm and not have to go backwards next year moving forward.

Steven (25:03)
Well, and the other thing I’ll highlight because I have been talking to a lot of your clients here recently as we work together with them to get their taxes done. And one of the things I love about being able to talk to advisors and then talk to their clients is it takes all the BS away immediately because I’ve definitely talked to advisors who tell a really good story about how they think they communicate with their clients. And then I talk to their clients and their clients speak a completely different language. And it’s like, the advisor thought that was a nice thing to say, but they don’t say it endlessly to their clients.

(25:29)
Whereas there’s a handful of advisors and you’re certainly one of them. Where the way you just described that to me, not exactly because the clients won’t have to describe it once, but they’ve heard you say that so many times that a lot of the same words you just used, a lot of the same jokes you just made, I have heard from your clients because they’ve been hearing that from you consistently for months now. And that’s how you know your message is resonating. And for people listening to this podcast, a lot of these things, especially if it’s gonna be a little bit painful, a little bit uncomfortable, a little bit problematic. You have to say these things more than you think you have to say them. Like you’re gonna say it enough that you feel like you’ve said it too much and that’s when it’s gonna start resonating with clients. But then your clients do have a different experience because again, talking to some of these clients as we’re going through the tax filing season, I would say that there’s definitely a handful of them that didn’t take any action when you first started asking them to. They still waited till the last minute. Their experience was still better because even though they waited, they knew what to expect and they could still make those jokes back to me of, I know this is just the one year that we’re gonna do this, it’s gonna be a lot better going forward, I know Gideon told me three times already I to do this, okay, I’ll finish it out. And so the client experience is different as opposed to getting surprised at tax time that they’ve gotta go pull another document.

Gideon (26:37)
Yeah, absolutely. And part of why we want a relationship with you guys, with CPAs that understand how we work, I’ll give just one story just because it happened yesterday. This is actually a client that we had graduated. They weren’t a good fit from the start. Our clients love us, we love our clients, we’re brutally honest. And this client, there was always a little bit of, it didn’t really work. And we let them know that, hey, we don’t think this is the right fit. And so that happened at the end of last year.

(27:00)
And they reached out, you know, Friday night, which is just, I got engaged, as you mentioned, Saturday morning. So Friday night, I’m getting this from a graduated client saying, you know, you guys realize all these tax, you know, I have $15,000 of tax resulting from capital gains as my trusted CPA told me, I didn’t realize we sold anything, yada yada. And I’m looking at this thing, I know we didn’t do this. I know the account wasn’t even large enough, quite frankly, to generate if we sold everything. And long story short, it came from an account that we weren’t managing, we didn’t know about, it was from family. And I blame them a little bit, but the CPA just like didn’t give any, you know, when they were going through everything, didn’t say, hey, you should look at this particular investment from this family advisor. And that was part of why it didn’t work in the first place. You you’re, either have, you know, one advisor or you don’t really have an advisor if you have three.

(27:51)
But because the CPA kind of freaked them out a little bit and said, this is coming from Capital Games, you need to speak and didn’t give any context, direction, where did it come from? And it was just a good, another good reminder of when you have a good CPA relationship that we can talk and, you know, not accusatory and say, hey, what’s going on here? Is there something I missed? Is there something I need to know? And again, this is an example, had absolutely nothing to do with us. And it was very nice responding saying, yeah, you should probably speak to that other firm because, you know, we can’t comment.

(28:18)
But when you have a CPA, those conversations don’t happen even if there are cases where there are more capital gains than you expect, but you’re able to handle that together. And that’s just, that’s the most important thing come tax time, is no surprises.

Steven (28:29)
Well, I definitely appreciate that example because I tell advisors all the time that if they’re not proactively communicating with the CPA, they are going to get thrown under the bus. And I think advisors think that that’s a marketing ploy on my part. It’s not. Those are are real stories. They happen all the time because for the CPA who’s not focused on working with advisors, they’re just looking for the easy way out. They don’t want the client to be mad at them. So let’s let’s blame an investment guy. Who cares which investment guy? Let’s just blame somebody.

(28:51)
Gideon, before we wrap up here, I mean, clearly this is a topic that you put a lot of effort into, that you put a lot of energy into. Aside from the RTS podcast, which I appreciate that you listen to, what are other resources that you’re using to make sure you’re leveling up your game in this area?

Gideon (29:05)
Yeah, I mean, number one, uh, kitces.com. mean, if, uh, you know, whenever younger advisors reach out, I was asking, you, do you read kitces is like, is that? I’m like, you want to be in, you want to be a financial planner and you don’t know who Michael Kitces is. Like it blows my mind. So, you know, that is like a graduate degree in all things, financial planning, taxes, business development, running a business. So, um, probably your listeners don’t really need to hear me talk about that. Um, and honestly, I would say other financial planners, advisors on LinkedIn. Obviously, you know, your network is great, but just people really share what they’re doing and they’re, you know, they’re coaching, they’re providing client examples, client stories. So if I would recommend, if you see an advisor, they’re like, that was a good point. That was interesting. Follow them. You know, they’re probably going to post another good, you know, they’re going to post more content and more good examples, good stories. And, and I know we’ve done that at Drucker Wealth and we keep hiring new advisors and we have that culture of we’re always sharing posts from other advisors, good visuals that different advisors post. And I think that ups the ante, like in-house a little bit, right? Like, hey, like knowledge doesn’t stop. we have a certain amount of clients, so now we know what we need to know about taxes. No, we don’t know nearly enough. We need to keep finding more information. And if I’m doing that, everybody else on the team is going to do that. And it creates this, yeah, this environment of wanting to learn more, wanting to get better. And I think that’s an important thing, especially in taxes when things are changing every year.

Steven (30:19)
Absolutely. That’s such a great recommendation. It’s actually the entire reason that we do events is because anytime we can put advisors in a room together, sure, we put a lot of emphasis on putting on great content from the stage, but the amount of stuff that advisors learn from each other of here’s what I did in practice, here’s how I explained it, here’s how I visualized it. So whether that’s the summit at the end of September or we’re doing an M&A university here in June in Atlanta coming up, you can go to retirementtaxservices.com, see all the events that we have coming up because, I’m with you Gideon, getting on LinkedIn is a great start. The opportunities to meet people in person and learn what they’re doing will really help level up your practice. So Gideon, congratulations again on getting engaged. That’s super exciting. Really appreciate your time coming on the podcast this week.

Gideon (30:59)
Absolutely, this was fun. Thanks for having me.

Steven (31:00)
Yeah, and to everyone listening, until next time, good luck out there and remember to tip your server, not the IRS.