Read The Transcript Below:

We’re not overpaying. No, we’re not overpaying. We’re not overpaying anymore. The tax code’s complicated, boring, and overrated. You don’t want that, you want a pro. One thing that you should know: this is a radio show. It’s not tax advice, don’t take it that way.

Steven Jarvis:     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 in this show, I teach financial advisors how to deliver massive value through tax planning.

Once again, on the show with me, I have a great guest, a financial advisor who serves physicians; Chad Chubb, a CFP who is a tax planner in his own right. I don’t know that that’s listed on his business card because well, no one has those anymore.

But when I met Chad and we started working together, I was instantly impressed with the level of dedication he has to tax planning with clients. So, Chad, so excited to have you on the show. Welcome.

Chad Chubb:      Thanks Steven. So, I was thinking through this and all the times I listen to your podcast and I get to hear that awesome intro; it is going to be so special (maybe like a bucket list thing), to finally hear my voice after that awesome intro music.

So, it is an honor my friend, this should be a lot of fun, looking forward to it.

Steven Jarvis:     Well, hey, I’m glad to make your bucket list. That’s awesome. Yeah, we have a lot of fun with the song. It’s ruined the song forever for me. I can’t hear it on the radio without going into tax mode. But thankfully, that’s why we’re here for today to talk taxes.

So, Chad, talk a little bit about kind of your just background as a financial advisor and then we’ll dive into the tax side of it.

Chad Chubb:      Yeah. So, my firm is … we were in Philadelphia for a long time. We just moved down to Tampa. The uniqueness about our firm is we do have a very specific niche. We work with Gen X, Gen Y physicians. I usually describe this as physicians under the age of 50, is the bulk of our clients.

So, we really focus on that niche. We really enjoy working with that group. And with that, obviously tax plan is embedded in there.

And then another unique part of our firm is that we use all flat fees. So, for any new clients that come on for us, we use subscription models, probably labeled as today. But really using a flat fee model to work with our clients.

And I think just speaking to at least other advisors, just thinking our clients are younger, so they don’t have a million-dollar net worth. So, we built that subscription model in there to really cater to our clients. We’re very specific on everything we do for our niche.

So, that’s WealthKeel in a nutshell. We have two other employees as well. And we got a good thing going inside of our niche here. And we’ll try to keep the tax planning going, which I know obviously, will be a hot topic of what we get into today.

Steven Jarvis:     Yeah. There’s a few things just in your introduction that I’m really excited to have you on, because it’s a bit different than a lot of the themes we normally talk about, a lot of the advisors that have been on the show, because there’s just kind of (with all due respect to advisors serving pre-retirees and retirees, some of those kind of more stereotypical, here’s what I do as a financial advisor) great tax planning in there. But some of those topics tend to dominate the headlines of what you can do for tax planning.

In fact, I’ll get a lot of advisors who say, “Well, my clients just have W-2 income, there’s no tax planning for me to do.” And kind of some of these really these myths of, “Well, until my clients are 50 plus, what am I really going to do with them anyways?”

But, to your point, your clients are younger. You’re not charging an AUM fee. You have this setup that’s incredibly intentional delivering a lot of value, but not maybe fitting in with the normal headlines that you see.

Chad Chubb:      And that’s all done by design. When I started doing this, our niche kind of evolved over time, but I knew that I wanted to focus more on my generation to be able to relate on more life events; income growing, family growing, moving, buying our first home, starting a family.

All these moving parts outside of just financial planning, because early on, when you do a flat fee, you do … and to this day, you kind of have that concern of like “What do you do for someone?” Like they’re not retired. What are you going to do?

And I know Michael Kitces says that all the time, like in a joking context for all those subscription advisors who like XYPN like, “What do you do?” And I think it really kind of evolved on what values and what services we’re going to provide to our clients to actually really earn that fee.

Because I don’t think there’s any perfect fee model out there, but the one nice thing about AUM is it’s — I don’t want to say it’s hidden. That’s not the proper word, but it’s embedded in there.

With ours, it’s billed directly from their bank account, every single month, like they see us. So, it’s one of those where you’re always just trying to say, “How do we provide value? How do we stay in front of the client?”

So, kind of all these different pieces really led to how we built our model and continue to fine tune it. It’s got a long way to go still, but all these little different moving pieces have led WealthKeel to what it is today.

Steven Jarvis:     Yeah, that’s exciting. I always love hearing that not only is an advisors service model an evolution from where it started, but that continues to be.

The people I have the most respect for (you are certainly on that list) are people who are committed to continuing to learning and growing.

If I meet somebody who says, “I have got it all figured out, I can do this the exact same way for the next 10 years, and I’ll be fine.” I think, well, your clients are going to miss out.

So, Chad, take us kind of back in the way back machine a little bit; was tax planning always a piece of what you were doing or was it kind of an evolution as you looked to yourself and said, “Well, hey, if I’m going to charge them every month, I got to be doing something.” And that got added in. When did that come into the picture?

Chad Chubb:      Tax planning really fired up when we started to fine tune our niche. Earlier on, like when I first started, it was more of a traditional planning firm where we were working with a lot of pre-retirees and even there, we would still ask for tax returns.

I don’t know how many of my clients will listen to this podcast, but it was kind of just for the show. It did have important things. Like we would look at income, we’d look at some things, but we weren’t really doing any planning. We weren’t doing like simple things, like making sure their social’s right, making sure the list of their dependence’s right. Like little things we do now, we didn’t do back then.

So, it’s always been something of interest to me. I don’t know if this all started just from being a CFP and you kind of hear tax planning and you learn tax planning.

So, it’s always been there. It didn’t really fire up until we started working with physicians, which would’ve been really back in like 2017/2016 is when it really started to fire up.

And really, I never thought in a million years, I would say student loans have become one of the more complicated parts of our client’s financial plans, but student loans have become one of the more complicated parts.

And with that, we had to know taxes. Their student loan payment was built off of their AGI. Well, what’s affecting their AGI? Well, we need to know more than just your AGI number to actually be a good financial planner for you.

So, it’s crazy. But really working with physicians made me realize that we need to put much more emphasis on this tax return, as opposed to just, “Hey, send it over. We’ll store it on the vault. If we ever need it, great, but we’ll probably never going to use it.”

So, it was really the physicians and student loans that sparked it. And then obviously, we know all the value that can come after that, but that was the initial, “We need to do this. We need to make this a part of our practice going forward.”

Steven Jarvis:     Well, I certainly appreciate your transparency of hey, this kind of started as, let me check the box on a hey, I asked for it. We all have to kind of learn and progress. And I feel like it’s a disservice when people aren’t willing to acknowledge where they kind of had those growing pains.

So, I really appreciate your transparency on that. That’s something I preach constantly of advisors need to be getting tax returns for every client every single year as kind of a bare minimum.

And then you started listing there some of the things that you can start doing from there, even if you just start with the basics. For advisors listening, who maybe you’re where Chad was six or seven years ago, and you get some of the tax returns, you’re not entirely sure what to do with them; you need to find a checklist for reviewing it. You need to use something like Holistiplan, find tools that you can use that you don’t have to just overnight become a tax expert.

This is going to develop and progress over time. And having a niche is really going to help that process because on the clients that we work together on, I can see it in the things that you do. You have a really deep knowledge on those areas of tax that are always coming up for your clients.

Chad Chubb:      Yeah. It’s the backdoor Roth IRA. That is one that again, I never thought I could tell you like specific forms, but the form 8606 is literally embedded in my brain forever now.

Simple things like solo 401(k) contributions, the amount of accountants that we have worked with where they would send us over the max number, but they never knew that their client was still maxing out an employee plan as well through their say academic medicine. But then they have all this 1099 income, and they would send us these huge numbers, like, “Hey, they can put in 60,000.” I’m like, “Whoa, we missed one here.”

You see it so many times that then you can actually be proactive for it. Steven, you’ve helped clean up one of the larger issues we’ve seen where we had a client doing solo 401(k) contributions, it was all being overdone. There wasn’t enough 1099 income to support that. And we had to go clean up two or three years of those.

So, just knowing that you’re working with high income professionals, we can fine tune what we’re looking for from a tax side of it. Again, backdoor Roth and solo 401(k)s are probably the easiest just because we see them so much. But we could go down a lot of rabbit holes with that as well.

Steven Jarvis:     Yeah. There’s so many different directions we can go with that. One of the things that has stood out to me as I have started collaborating more directly with advisors working together with taxpayers is; the value that comes from even just starting with really basic things like some basic client education around taxes.

So, our clients come to us as finance professionals, whether you’re a tax preparer or financial planner, because they want your expertise. They want you to take care of some of this for them.

But there’s a level of education that still needs to happen. And I love seeing advisors who are committed to that, where this isn’t just, “Hey, Bob and Sue, we’ll take care of this. We’ll let you know when it’s done.”

I love that you’re always including your clients in your communications to kind of let them know what’s going on, reminding them why you’re doing these things, because it really helps to make sure that we’re going to have long-term success.

A really simple example that comes to mind is a client I worked with this year, who as we were going over their tax return together, they said, “You know what, I’m thinking about not making my 401(k) contribution the next couple of years, because we’d love to use that cash for some other things.” And this was the really important part, “And we don’t really think it’s making much of a difference on our taxes.”

And so, I said, “Okay, great. Let’s take a look at this together.” And the physician had a very high tax bracket. And when we looked at it and said, “Oh, actually that contribution saved you $4,000 in taxes this year,” their eyes kind of lit. And they said, “Oh, okay. I remember that we had talked about that with my financial advisor at one point. I’m so glad you brought that up.”

And so, in part, for me, it reinforces the value of collaborating on these types of things. But there’s a whole spectrum of how we add value. That’s certainly on the basic end, on the more complex end; you’re talking about backdoor Roth contributions, making sure we get all of these kind of Is dotted and Ts crossed to get real tax savings in there.

There’s both quantitative and qualitative value that comes from doing tax planning.

Chad Chubb:      Yeah, that’s one too. I think I literally just heard your brother say this on the Kitces Office Hours, but the dishwasher rule. Like actually telling clients like, “Hey, we analyze this for you.” Like, “Hey, we analyze this Roth conversion. Maybe you want to do it, maybe you don’t, but we did analyze it. Here are the numbers for you.”

And even taking like, “Hey, it saves you $4,000 this year. I know you make 4,000 per year, so probably that’s not that much, but then do that over 10 years. And then 20 years.”

And that’s one thing that we’ve started a lot more is actually one, give them the number like, “Hey, I know we tell you to do 20,500, but you’re not putting that into tax terms. So, let us put into tax terms for you.”

And then also spread that out over 10, 20 … we have physicians that probably have 30 more years of active work, like, “Hey, here’s what that does.” And then you also do your 457(b) like okay, don’t forget that.

The other shocker is we started putting our financial plans, we’ll list from their last tax return. We just pull this data from Holistiplan, but we’ll list their total tax. And the amount of clients are like, “I paid over six figures in federal taxes?” I’m like, “Yeah, that’s just your federal tax bill. We didn’t actually plug in state for that number. That’s just what you paid on …”

And just something so simple. But no one knows like, “Oh, I paid a hundred thousand in taxes last year.” So, just to bring that to their attention, they could have been working with their accountant for 20 years, but the accountant would’ve never brought that up to them because it just, “Hey, we’re just getting it done.”

But we could put it into planning terms now and say, “Here’s what it is now. Here’s what we’re trying to keep it at. Here’s what we think it’ll be in the future; obviously all cloudy, very, very cloudy, first of all, but we’re going to work on what we do today and then kind of work backwards from there.”

Steven Jarvis:     Yeah. Unfortunately, a lot of tax preparers are very focused on that refund or payment number. That total tax rarely gets highlighted.

Just last week as this episode is airing, we did a power session all about unlocking the full potential of Holistiplan. And we partnered with Holistiplan to do that because you highlighted as one great example there of using that as kind of a summary of here are the important numbers from your tax return.

But thankfully, for advisors who are interested in tax planning, but not entirely sure where to start, there are more and more tools and resources out there to help kind of hit the easy button and get you to the point where you’re delivering real value to clients very quickly. This doesn’t have to be a 10 or 15 or 20-year progression of let me slowly learn the entire tax code.

Chad Chubb:      Yeah. And I think whether it’s your podcast, whether it’s Holistiplan, it’s not even that there’s more information out there. There’s more digestible information. And I think like we think of taxes, we think of tax codes. I’m never touching that thing. Even when I do touch it, by the time I finish it, it’s going to be completely new by the time I get to the end of the book.

So, I think, I don’t know if it’s just the way that we can now get access to information, whether it’s through podcast or YouTube, but I think it’s much more digestible now.

But also, I think because investment management continues to become more commoditized. It’s hard to say like, “Hey, you pay me X dollars per year because I have this magical sauce.” The magical sauce is really hard to sell now these days.

So, now being a more holistic advisor, true tax planning, student loan planning, cash flow planning, whatever the case may be. I think that’s also a reason why we’re starting to see tax planning become a better conversation, but also, one that we can articulate better to our clients as well.

So, they’re not overwhelmed by this. And we can just give them numbers as opposed to like, “Well, section 4.178462 in the tax code …”

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Steven Jarvis:     Yeah, and for advisors listening, I bring on guests every week who are talking about how they incorporate tax planning into their practice, but it is still such a small fraction of the industry, of the financial planning industry that is doing proactive tax planning. And it’s probably even a smaller fraction of the tax profession that’s doing forward looking tax planning.

The tax preparation profession is very focused on checking the compliance box. And a lot of advisors are still either unwilling or feel like they’re unable to really commit to tax planning. I don’t think that’s really the case, and I’m trying to be a part of kind of expanding that thought process.

But Chad, as you think back over the last several years, as you’ve more fully embraced tax planning as a way to add value to clients, what’s kind of evolved or changed over those years. I’m sure you’re not doing exactly the same way today that you were six or seven years ago, so how has that grown?

Chad Chubb:      Yeah, the biggest thing is actually taking the tax return and reviewing that data. Little things, we have found children that were missed as dependents, we have seen socials that were incorrect, which doesn’t sound like something too crazy, but when you have physicians on visa and they can’t prove tax returns were submitted, it creates a really big issue.

So, one little digit could affect someone from becoming a U.S. citizen, little things like that, that you almost just take for granted that they’re correct. The amount of errors we found at just the very top of the 1040, to this day, is still like amazing to me.

Like you would think that’s the easy part, no numbers, yet. Maybe the social number and their address, but besides that, like there’s no numbers yet, something crazy.

So, that’s been a part where we actually are reviewing it. Now, we’re actually plugging the data into Holistiplan. So, for us, it’s just a much more comprehensive review.

And then we use E-Money for our financial planning software, but we still have some spreadsheets, especially for the student loans stuff. We’ve done student loans long enough that we kind of build our own systems in there.

So, even just taking the AGI, plugging that improperly, seeing like, hey, what if you have this 457(b) that you’re not utilizing, but you’re going for public service loan forgiveness.

So, we can crank away another 20,500, but you’re also going to now lower your AGI, which then lowers what you’re actually paying to your student loans and same thing, marriage comes in there; “Oh, we had our first kid.”

So, for us, I wouldn’t say much has changed only because we always asked for a tax return. I think that was just more or less checking the box from like the CFP, like that’s what good planners do. But now, we’re actually taking that information, analyzing it, coming back with action items to our clients.

And also, just keeping year after year after year because we have a good mix. We still do have some baby boomer clients where we do Roth conversions every single year.  So, we have a mix of backdoor Roth IRAs, Roth conversions, making sure we don’t mess with IRMAA anywhere with our older clients.

So, just really paying attention to all these moving parts. I would just say we’re much more detailed now when we discuss tax plan, I think that’s the biggest change for us.

Steven Jarvis:     Yeah, that’s really awesome. I hadn’t even thought about the non-tax implications of your tax return, especially for those people on visa. So, that’s a really interesting example.

But that’s not the only example of where that’s going to happen. There are lots of different ways the government uses a tax return in different ways. And so, that accuracy there, I definitely am very much on the bandwagon of, as you start reviewing a tax return, you have to start at the top. You have to start with that basic information.

Even if it’s somebody who’s been filing a tax return for years. Just because it’s been through a piece of software, doesn’t make it perfect. Just because it was filed last year or the last 10 years with the wrong social security number doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep checking for that. Because it can go years at a time without these things being noticed if someone isn’t paying attention.

So, such a huge value-add for your clients that you’re taking the time to do that.

Chad Chubb:      Yeah. And to your point of your tax planning can evolve. To review the top part of a 1040, you don’t need to know anything about the tax plan. You need to be able to confirm the CRM matches the social, all their kids are listed, the address is correct. And maybe that’s all the further you want to go with it.

But that’s still a good value add, because even if there isn’t anything ever wrong or you find a dependent is missing or the social is wrong, which I would label is a bigger one, those are still really important factors.

And just simple things, just listing like, “Hey, here’s your total tax. Here’s your total income. Like congratulations, you pass the six-figure club, you pass the seven-figure club.”

Like you can keep it simple and show your clients that you are still reviewing their tax return, and you’re looking for value. Even if you’re not seeing if they messed up the 8606, you don’t have to get that detailed. You can kind of take that at your own pace.

And I would assume you get some good feedback, you’re probably going to continue to peel back the onion on wow, they were really excited when we found out they missed a dependent, what else can we learn?

So, I think it’s just more or less taking at your pace. But even if it’s super simple, just the top of the 1040, you’re still doing something, probably the bulk of advisors still aren’t doing today.

Steven Jarvis:     I love that you highlighted in there pointing out to the client, kind of those milestones of “Hey, you hit the six figures club,” or whatever it might be.

That’s not something I talk about as often on the podcast, but it’s something I do with my clients as well, that when we’re reviewing their tax return, I always start by, “Hey, congratulations on that level of income, that takes a lot of hard work. That’s really impressive.”

And nobody takes the time to tell them that. Money’s kind of this funny conversation for most people. It’s probably not something they’re sitting around telling their friends and family about anyways.

And so, they don’t really have opportunities for someone to pat them on the back and say, “Man, you work really hard.” And so, I’ll sit down with taxpayers who are making impressive amounts of money and they still just light up a little bit to have someone tell them, “Hey, you did a really good job.”

So, I love that you’re starting with the basics there. And then it’s just up from there. For advisors who aren’t sure where to start, start that simple, start with verifying that basic information.

And if you’re not sure how to explain that to a client, here you go. If you haven’t request the tax returns before, you can start with,” Hey, I was listening to a podcast the other day of a financial advisor who’s just doing a ton around tax planning. And I heard all these stories about things that can go wrong. Not that it’s likely that it went wrong on yours, but this is something that we’re going to do for all of our clients.”

And if nothing went wrong, you just come back to them with the dishwasher rule. You mentioned it; “Hey, great news, we went through, you’re all good. We’re going to look at it again next year.” You can start simple and still get a lot of value out of it.

Chad Chubb:      And today with technology like Holistiplan, you can literally just upload their tax return and have a cheat sheet that is so easy, I mean, we will actually crop the box out and put that in the financial plan.

And just the simple little box at the top listing their effective tax rate or marginal tax rate or total tax, you wouldn’t have to know anything about the tax code, but your client would still find probably so much value in that little box because no one’s ever walked through that with them.

And that’s again, just the beauty of technology, but also more digestible tax topics that we can actually understand and present to our clients. But yeah, those little victories too, are huge. About a hundred households of ours will do backdoor Roth IRA every year.

And every year they do it, we still send them a huge congrats, 6,000, but you’re still doing it. You’re doing it every single year. You’re max on your 401(k), 457(b).

And even we will list like, “Hey, you’re saving a hundred grand per year. You probably get lost because it’s all automated. You’re saving a hundred grand per year. Like did you ever think you’d be doing that?”

And I just think, like you said, Steven, who else is really cheering them on in these moments? Like they’re not at the neighborhood barbecue like, “Saved a hundred grand, what’s up everybody?”

Like it’s one of those things where you can only really celebrate those victories with a very, very small cohort. So, I think it’s fun to be the quarterback of that cheering for sure.

Steven Jarvis:     Yeah, that’s definitely a lot on the qualitative side. And then the excitement level, I would say, at least in my experience, is definitely a little bit higher when you get to see those tax savings.

There’s just something so emotional for people about taxes. When you can clearly show, “Hey, we took these actions together and as a result, you saved $3,000 in taxes. You save $500 in taxes.” Sometimes these aren’t even big numbers and clients are ecstatic about it.

Chad Chubb:      Yeah, I always use the example, you could show a client their performance report where they made a hundred grand last year, or you could tell them they missed the $300 charitable contribution but you got them to add it before they filed. They’ll celebrate that $300 deduction that got added more than they will hundred grand from their portfolio.

Taxes are just a different monster, like taking it from me, “We’re okay paying uncle Sam, our fair share. We just don’t want to leave him a tip.” So, when you get those little wins, 50 bucks a hundred bucks, it’s very comical to see like how excited clients get when you could show much larger numbers from like their investment portfolio.

But knowing they didn’t overpay uncle Sam just, it feels darn good. I couldn’t agree more. Just always such a great reaction from your clients when you do find those moments.

Steven Jarvis:     Yeah, it’s so fun to see those moments of impact. A little bit selfishly, the only thing I don’t always totally love is that (a little bit self-imposed here) as I’m collaborating with great financial advisors, Chad, like you, for whatever reason, the financial advisors, the one who gets for all the credit for all of these things.

And so, sometimes, our have financial advisors who will be a little bit hesitant to want to collaborate directly with the CPA. Maybe they have bad experiences, whatever it might be, I totally get it.

But whether you’re going to collaborate with RTS or someone else, there is so much value to the client. And dirty little secret, you’re going to get all the credit if you’re the one that makes the introduction. And so, we can talk about this from the standpoint of what your client get out of it, what you get out of it.

But at the end of the day, in my heart of hearts, I really believe that if the planning you’re doing isn’t reported to the IRS correctly, you haven’t followed through all the way on what you’re responsible to the client for.

So, we’re going to run out of time before we can get really too deep into it. But I know that you’ve seen a difference in that collaboration as you take that all the way through to the end.

I just want to throw that reminder out there again, whatever tax preparer you’re working with, make sure that as you’re doing all these great things we’re talking about, you’re also seeing that through to the end of communicating that to the client themselves, so they prepare their own taxes to their tax preparer to make sure these things get captured and they really get the full benefit out of doing all this great tax planning.

Chad Chubb:      Yeah, and to give a few real-life examples quick, just working with Steven and the RTS team, this was our first year working together and Steven’s too modest here. So, I’ll give some real-life examples.

I can tell you now our clients had such a wow factor when we got the email from the RTS team with me and our clients on it and just say, “Hey, take a look at this review. Just let know if we’re missing anything.” And little things did pop up. Like we missed a back door Roth IRA because the client didn’t upload the documents.

Alright. I notice it, Steven’s team fixes it right away. 529 plan contributions, they’re missed all the time because people are waiting around for a tax document. There is no tax document saying that you actually put money into the 529 plan.

So, your accountant’s never going to know that, but such a simple process, but it just showed the collaboration and teamwork between your advisor firm and a team like RTS and Steven.

And it was just such a neat process, to walk through that. And now, we’re in these midyear reviews and going through W-4 updates. The amount of clients that underpay on their taxes, and they have no idea what to do, or they try to go to their tax preparer, and they’re like, “Ah, you’re fine. Don’t worry about it. We’ll look at it next year.” It’s like, you just kind of keep picking it down the road.

The first one we did with Steven, his email was so detailed that I kind of just sat there and I was like, “Wow, like, this is what we always wanted.”

And the first time I met Steven was at FinCon in Austin. When he explained what he was building, I was like, “This is literally what I wanted.” I wanted to always have this for our firm where we could collaborate and work together.

So, again, whether that’s Steven or you have a good tax preparer where you do that, I can give a shout out to Steven because we do work directly with him. But the feedback we got from our clients, but also, just the wow factor from the advisor side, very rarely do you hear this, but we’re already looking forward to the 2022 tax season. I never thought I’d say that, but that’s where I am right now with Steven and RTS.

Steven Jarvis:     Wow, Chad, I feel like somehow, I almost bribed you to say that. I don’t know if there’s a higher compliment than I’m looking forward to a tax season together.

For our advisors listening, especially for our existing RTS members; we definitely have a lot of resources out on the website to help you build these relationships with other CPAs as well.

As much as I would love to work with every advisor in the country, it’s going to take us a while to scale that way. We do have an opportunity right now, if you’re listening to this podcast, as it comes out, to get signed up as an RTS member.

So, please go out to the website, leverage those resources. We’re here to help as many advisors and as many taxpayers as we can both directly through what we do. And then by showing what’s possible as these collaborations really take shape.

So, Chad, I certainly appreciate the kind words. It’s been exciting for us as well to really see that impact on the end taxpayer.

Chad Chubb:      Of course. And yeah, that was from the heart, truly, it’s been a lot of wow factors and one the client feedback, but two, for an advisor that always wanted almost like the in-house accountant.

This is everything I’ve really dreamed of just really having this type of collaboration and it’s been awesome. And like I said, you probably don’t hear it too often, but already looking forward to the upcoming tax season to go through this again.

Steven Jarvis:     Very kind of you, Chad. Before my head gets too big, we better pivot and talk about action items or I’ll just sit here and bask in this. We always want to make sure that we’re taking great information and turning into action. So, it has real value.

So, Chad as you think about kind of the evolution of tax planning in your practice, this conversation we’re having today, what are action items that you would recommend that advisors take to make sure they’re delivering value to their clients?

Chad Chubb:      Yeah, as an avid podcast listener of yours, Steven, I knew this was coming and I thought I could think of something crazy, but it still came back to where does this all stem from?

And it comes from actually getting a tax return. I think the value that that can add whether it is something as simple as reviewing the 1040, or you’re getting to the weeds and looking for over contributions as the solo (k)s, or messed up backdoor Roth IRAs, it’s such a simple thing to do that gives you so many more routes for value.

And I wish I could have thought of something more creative than that, but it really does come back to that because without that, you’re lost. Not only do we love the tax return, we love to review pay stubs too. Just kind of seeing where the money comes in, where it goes and just following everything.

So, I know you’ve heard this answer on about a hundred episodes before this, but starting with that tax return and utilizing maybe a simple review at the top of the 1040, maybe you add in some technology like the Holistiplan, and you’re kind of putting in there and then getting the data fed to you, and then you kind of decide what you want to present, but you can’t do any of that without the tax return.

Steven Jarvis:     Chad, every now and then I’ll have someone ask me, “Hey, are you going to move on to something besides, hey, get every tax return?” And I say, “Once everybody does it, I’ll move on from it.” But this is such a progression. And so, I’ll just build right off of that.

So, if you’re not getting tax returns, absolutely, Chad’s a hundred percent right. That is where you have to start. You have to be getting tax returns for every client, every prospect, every single time.

If you’re already getting tax returns, make sure you’re getting a hundred percent of your client’s tax returns and that you’re doing something with it. Chad was nice enough to admit that early on, it was a, “Hey, I check the box and now, he’s moved on from that.” You need to do the same thing. This is, “Okay, great. Now, we have the tax returns now, what are we going to do with it?”

And if you’re already doing something with it, great, what am I going to do different for this tax season? Taxes change every year. Great thing about having tax planning, you know, there’s always going to be more value you can add.

So, have an intentional conversation with yourself, with your team. What are we going to add this year, when it comes to tax planning to really elevate what our clients are getting?

The last action item I’m going to throw out, Chad, this has been so great, I really appreciate you coming on here. If you’ve made it this far through the podcast, clearly, you’re getting something out of this. We do really appreciate the feedback and the reviews. It helps the podcast grow. It helps us get to more advisors.

So, take a minute, leave us a five-star review, leave a comment on the value you’re getting from this podcast so this can keep growing so I can keep having great guests like Chad come on the show. We really appreciate everyone that’s listening.

And again, Chad, so excited to have you on the show. Thank you for taking the time to do this. And I’m really excited to see you here in a couple weeks at this year’s FinCon.

Chad Chubb:      I know we’ve come a long way since that first FinCon in Austin. So, I appreciate Steven. I love the podcast. So, truly my honor to be on here. Like I said, just really excited to hear my voice after that intro for this pod.

Steven Jarvis:     Perfect. So, glad I could help you with that life goal.

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

We’re not overpaying. No, we’re not overpaying. We’re not overpaying anymore. The tax code’s complicated, boring, and overrated. You don’t want that, you want a pro. One thing that you should know: this is a radio show. It’s not tax advice, don’t take it that way.