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 here is your regular reminder that the plural of Jarvis is in fact, Jarvi and not Jarvises because joining me today is none other than Matthew Jarvis. Matt, welcome to the show. 

 

Matt (01:09):

 

Yeah, it is interesting in my memory that the plural form of Jarvis had been fought over for generations in our family. It was not until my wife Jackie, at the time was my girlfriend, said, no. The plural form is clearly Jarvi, which was met with great resistance at first in the family and then widely embraced. So yes, welcome to everyone listening to the Jarvi Brothers!

 

Steven (01:28):

 

The Jarvi Brothers. Here we go. So of course we want to talk about all things taxes because that’s what we’re here for. In particular, I wanted to take some time to share with the audience about our first annual RTS tax planning summit that happened back in September because we’ve gotten phenomenal feedback from everyone who attended a lot of interest in next year’s event. That’ll be in September of 2024, but wanted to share some of our takeaways, highlights, things that we learned and why we’re so excited to come back and do it again.

 

Matt (01:58):

 

Yeah, yeah, it was a lot of fun and a real thank you to all the advisors. There were hundreds of advisors there in person and attending virtually, and I’ve obviously been to a lot of tax conferences. Steven, I know that you have as well, and as you talk about all the time in this podcast we talk about on The Perfect IRA podcast, knowledge of the tax code is not enough. That’s interesting. There are plenty of advisors that have a deep tax knowledge. It’s the ability to implement it with clients. And the best way to learn that is to ask other advisors, Hey, how are you actually doing Backdoor Roths? How are you actually doing Roth conversions? How are you handling RMDs? How are you deciding on an LLC versus an S corp? Right? All topics that came up. How do you know if you’re crossing the line between comprehensive financial advising and some sort of prohibited tax advice? So it was so great to have a group like that to chat with. 

 

Steven (02:38):

 

Yeah, because when we decided to do this, it wasn’t like we looked around the industry and said, Hey, there’s no tax conferences. We need to start. The first one really our observation was, Hey, we go to all these tax conferences. They’re super deep in technical knowledge and basically have zero in the way of what do I do when I get home tomorrow to my office. How do I serve my clients? So at least for me, a fun little kind of confirmation that we struck the right balance is that this was intended for advisors, but we had a CPA who attended. He had reached out to me ahead of time and said, Hey, will this be valuable for CPAs? And I said, well, to be totally honest, I’m not sure because we’re going to be really focused on how you can consistently implement what’s going to feel like relatively simple things to a CPA.

 

(03:18):

 

And I was talking to him after the event and he was thrilled he came, but he is like, yeah, I mean from a technical standpoint, there wasn’t anything new. And I said, perfect, because that’s not what we were going for. And talking to advisors, there were still a lot of people who learned new things, even from a technical standpoint. But most people’s takeaway was, oh, now I know how to go back and serve more of my clients. Now I know how to better identify where these opportunities are and then how to delegate to my team, how to structure it to my calendar, and how to make sure these things really happen.

 

Matt (03:47):

 

And I think over my career, a lot of times when we talk to what we used to be called the advanced markets team or these technical experts, they almost felt an obligation to find super obscure tax code things. But there wasn’t ever a way you’re like, Hey, you need to set up intentionally defective offshore grantor trust for your clients. Okay, cool. Who do I actually do that for? What do they look like? And then how do I explain it to ’em in a way that they’ll take action? Boy, geez, I don’t know. So I only want to know about tax strategies that I can sit down and implement with our clients. And one of the speakers who actually ended up being in the bonus session, right, Michael Henley, he couldn’t able to attend live, but you guys did the post-webinar on that. He talks about doing six-figure Roth conversions.

 

(04:27):

 

I’ve only done six-figure Roth conversions a couple of times in my career. He’s doing them for most of his clients every year. Geez, how do you have that discussion? How do you tell a client, Hey, we’re going to convert $200,000? You’re in a top tax bracket, you’re going to owe $60,000 in taxes. How do you have that conversation? And he was brilliant at walking through, and I don’t want to steal his thunder, but he said, Hey, listen, Mr. Mrs. Client for his clients, you are always going to be in a top tax bracket. Very low probability that top tax bracket ever goes down. Let’s pay that tax now, especially because as clients are often subject to the estate tax, let’s lower the estate tax valuation of your estate. And just a brilliant way to articulate that. 

 

Steven (05:02):

 

You mentioned having a great audience of advisors there. We certainly appreciate the community around this, and that certainly makes the event better. We’re very intentional about who we put on stage, who we put in the audience, who we put as our sponsors because we want this really community feeling. And Michael Henley, unfortunately, wasn’t able to come as planned, and we were able to pull out of our audience, and Michael Cummings came up on stage on almost no notice. He was recently on the podcast as well and shared his experience with buying a tax practice because that’s a question we get all the time. And so that was one of my takeaways from the conference as a whole. And it was obviously very intentional, but love to see it come to fruition that we wanted people to be able to talk about the things they had really done and share their experiences where things had gone wrong, how they had learned from things, how they’d improved on things, and really create this atmosphere where people are willing to say, Hey, I’ve messed this up before, and here’s how, cause we learned so much from that.

 

Matt (05:54):

 

Yeah, I’m glad you would bring that up where we make mistakes. And Mike and Diana were really great. They’re very transparent on, here’s what’s great about owning a tax practice, and here’s really hard everything. It’s not as sexy as it sounds, but whenever I go to conferences, I always have a couple of questions I have in my mind that I’m going to ask every advisor that I meet, how are you handling required distributions? Or what do you do for clients that don’t have a family member to name in their estate documents? But also this one’s a little hard to do. I also like to ask about common mistakes. We don’t like to talk about our mistakes, but it helps me avoid those myself. Hey, what are mistakes you’ve made when doing Roth conversions? Well, mistake I made is we withheld the taxes and we weren’t supposed to, and there’s not any way to get that back.

 

(06:33):

 

Once taxes are withheld, you can’t get those back until you go and file. Right? And a lot of that conversation, Steven, and correct me if your experience was different, didn’t come from the stage, it came from the discussions in the hallway. I know we’re doing cornhole tournaments outside, we were smoking cigars. For those of us that are in that kind of vice, that’s where we can kind of fess up and be like, all, listen, I know I’m not on stage and this isn’t being recorded. Here’s where we’ve screwed this up in my office and I’m damn sure it’s never going to happen again. And make sure you don’t make that mistake as well.

 

Steven (06:57):

 

Yeah, that was really important to me as we were planning the conference. And again, I think that went really well. And a lot of that came from advisors like you, Micah, other people that we know who from their years of attending experience attending conferences, they would say, Hey, a lot of these conferences, sometimes the only value I got out of it was the hallway conversations. So we tried to make sure that we were putting a lot of people in the room who would have those conversations. I know I got to have a lot of those great conversations, and I heard from everyone else that, yeah, there were some fantastic takeaways. And I just really appreciate the advisors. I think those who are doing the best job are the ones who are most willing to admit, here’s an area I need help on. Here’s an area I’m not sure what to do.

 

(07:34):

 

There was an advisor that came who just a week or two before the conference had reached out to me and said, Hey, we’ve got this issue that just came up in our office. It feels like we messed the whole thing up, but here’s what it’s related to. Can you help me? And I said, actually, there’s going to be an advisor at the conference who does this kind of stuff all the time. I’ll make sure I introduce you. And I was able to make that introduction on night one. That alone made the whole conference worth it for her.

 

Matt (07:55):

 

Yeah, I’m glad you had point that out, Steven. So I had gone through a spell where I had stopped going to conferences because I didn’t enjoy going to the sessions. I thought, well, whatever they’re going to talk about, I can just read. I can go to the Kitces site and I could read a white paper on that. Why would I sit through the conference? And of course, a lot of conferences, it’s just the wholesalers, and I’m thinking, if I want to talk to the product vendors, they’ll just come to my office and they’ll buy me lunch. But what I realized, as you just pointed out, it’s the conversations that happen in the hallways, the introductions. And so often I go to a conference, I won’t attend a single session the entire conference, and I’ll just work the hallways the whole time and I’ll just look for anybody and everyone I can meet and I can learn from. Of course, I’m pulling up your ADV as I’m talking to you to make sure that we’re looking at similar things. But I think RTS did a great job of really facilitating those of saying, Hey, we realize this is a critical component of conferences for some of us, the most valuable component. Let’s make sure to make that as easy as possible.

 

Steven (08:45):

 

For the people in the audience who follow me on LinkedIn, which if you don’t, please do, but follow me and not Matt, I’m trying to pass his follower account. I tag myself as the least boring CPA, and I really lean into that. And so we were able to have some fun on stage. I mean, one of my favorite parts of the conference, it was me and Micah up there talking about reviewing tax returns as he’s walking around holding the value sledgehammer that although it was kind of a joke at first, one of our team members actually made it specifically for the event. It’s really turned into this great analogy for, Hey, are we really delivering value or are we just beating people over the head with volume? Because in every session, and I really appreciate our speakers who are outside of our core network, who came and took our advice seriously to make sure they were focused on action, that this isn’t, we’re not asking you to come and give a dissertation. We don’t need you to prove how smart you are. We need you to give people things they can go home and do. And I think start to finish, we really were able to follow through on that.

 

Matt (09:41):

 

Yeah, I think so Steven, I have to confess, one of my favorite parts of the conference, I really want to push this out here. I want to see this at more conferences was obviously me. No. My favorite part was that the MC throughout the day through two days was a professional standup comedian. Our good friend Corey McKay, who’s a great standup comedian on his own. We brought him in once again to MC the event, why would you bring a comedian? Obviously, he has no technical knowledge. He even joked about, he’s not even sure if he’s filed his taxes, whatever that is, but these could be really serious topics and they can get kind of monotonous and kind of boring. They can kind of drag on. And so it’s fun to have that to break it up. He would tell some jokes in between the sessions, which was great.

 

(10:20):

 

But whenever I see a standup comic, and I always am beating on this drum, these people are masters of communication. Most advisors are terrible communicators. We go into a meeting we drone on, we start talking about the tax code, whatever the case may be, comedians, they’re rehearsing every word, every pause, every syllable. The emphasis of those syllables are emphasis for some of us. And so it’s a good reminder of what does a master of communication look like, right? And Steven, you and I have both done Corey’s classes. Standup comedy class really is a must-attend skillset. Not that you’re going to be up with your client meetings or on stage making slapstick jokes, but to know how to communicate that level of effectiveness was a great reminder to see in person. 

 

Steven (11:00):

 

Communication is such a key piece of this. And again, a focus on all the things that we do. I tell people all the time, I’m never going to read the tax code to you. There’s so many things I don’t have committed to memory. My technical tax skills are probably better than most, but still really what it comes down to, and again, all that counts is the action that gets taken. So whether that’s our audience leaving the conference and taking action, they get home. But more importantly, it’s them being able to communicate this to their clients in a way that’s going to help their clients take action. And so you giving the most technical and legalese explanation of a tax strategy, that’s not value. That’s something that can be Googled. What can’t be Googled is that really effective communication that applying it to their specific situation. And so whether you’re listening to the podcast, you came to the summit, you read our articles, that’s one of those things that we’re constantly trying to drive home of how do you more effectively communicate this? And I measure effective communication by who takes action.

 

Matt (11:54):

 

A hundred percent. It was interesting, one of the presentations from our good friend Micah Shilanski was on LLCs versus s-Corp. Right? Because there seems to be this wisdom of the masses, for lack of a better term, that an s-corp is always superior to an LLC. I think the first conference you and I ever went to together, we were at the conference and there was a social hour ahead of time and an advisor there, he says, Hey, listen, what is, you remember this? Yeah, I know you remember this. He says, Hey guys. And the whole group of people, these are all financial advisors, CFPs, the works, right? What’s the taxation of S-Corp distributions? And I said, all things being even ordinary income. And he says, wrong. They’re taxed as capital gains.

 

Steven (12:32):

 

Well, Matt, let me stop here because this is the importance of communication. What he said was, what’s the tax rate on S corp dividends? And that was the immediate red flag to me was, oh, that’s right. You are not even thinking about this. Right? And that’s why in his head, he’s like, oh, I’m getting preferential rates on this because he thought they were dividends and they are not.

 

Matt (12:51):

 

Yeah, note, I’m glad you pointed that, right? These are small distinctions. Also the danger of just repeating something that you’ve heard or read or thought you’ve heard, right? So here he is. He’s going around, I would imagine telling clients, he was telling all these advisors that if you switch to an s-corp, take $1 in salary, which is a mistake, but people do this and then the dividends, which is no such thing, are taxed as capital gains. He was making so little money that would be free. And so people can go wildly wrong with this stuff. But anyway, so Micah gave this great presentation on LLCs versus S-Corp reminding people that you do still have to take reasonable compensation, which is not well-defined from an S-corp. And if your income is above the Medicare Social Security tax threshold, the FICA tax threshold, you’re probably not picking up a whole lot in benefits. And you’re getting, especially if you have partners, you’re getting some trade-offs. So I’m not doing that presentation justice, but it was a great, what was it, nine or 10 points of different real-world scenarios. If you’re going to buy a car, if you’re going to do a home office deduction, if you have a partner, does an S-corp in fact stack up better than an LLC? And to Micah’s point, often it does not. It is by no means a silver bullet.

 

Steven (13:54):

 

And that’s a great reminder again, whether you attended the conference or not. One of the things I’m constantly saying to people is we need to make good life decisions and then figure out the most tax-efficient way to do it. And legal structure is a perfect example of this. A couple of weeks after that, I was at FinCon talking to actually an RTS Premiere member who is kind of going through this thought process for himself right now of, Hey, should I move to an S corp? And it’s okay, let’s talk about the non-tax things first, including, Hey, how do you see your practice continuing to grow? Because he’s got some junior advisors that he’s thinking about, what does equity look like someday? Am I going to have partners someday? It’s like, okay, yeah. The dynamic completely changes on whether S Corp makes sense just before we even get to the tax side of it, if there are these other considerations. So we got to make good life decisions and then figure out the most tax-efficient way to do ’em.

 

Matt (14:40):

 

Yeah. And tying this back to the conference, this is where it was great to say, alright, what do you do in your practice? What business structure are you using? What business structure are you recommending to your small business clients? It’s so important to say, what are you literally doing? Right? I remember Steven and I were at a conference one time, presenter, a very well-known presenter. He was giving a presentation about a single premium immediate annuities, which can be a real viable tool. There’s a place for them. So he’s going through these illustrations and I’m looking at the numbers and I’m saying, now the numbers don’t add up. I’ve never seen SPIA rates this good, right? This was a couple of years ago when rates were terrible. And so he’s going through this. So I finally raise my hand and I say, Hey, we’ll call him Bob. I got to ride him out on this podcast. Bob, what company did you get those quotes from for these illustrations? And he says, well, I didn’t. I just did the math on what they should be.

 

(15:31):

Well, Bob, I got to let you know right now, I’ve done the quotes on this. And they come in at about half of the numbers that you are proposing, which means your strategy doesn’t work at all. Second question, Bob, which you didn’t want a second question. Second question. How do you articulate to a client that they’re going to take a lump sum of principle, let’s call a half million dollars, and they’re going to give up that principle in exchange for a monthly payment? How do you convince them to give up that money? I don’t know. I’ve never proposed this to a client. Strike two. So you have a scenario that doesn’t work in real life, and you’ve never actually done it with a client. That’s not helpful for me. But when a Mike Cummins gets up there and he says, here’s what actually happens when I’m running a tax practice.

 

(16:06):

When Michael Henley gets up there and says, here’s how I talk to a client about Roth conversions. When Micah gets up there and says, Hey, this is how I help a client decide between an LLC and an S corp. That stuff is all pure gold for me because I know, and my head trash is there too. I know that this is real-world stuff. And I tell myself, Hey if Mike can do it, if Michael can do it, if Steven can do it, if Micah can do it, I can also do this. I’m just going to repeat what they do and it’ll work the same way or pretty close.

 

Steven (16:29):

 

Well, and to a point you made earlier, one of the things that stood out to me from Micah’s presentation is that he was willing to get up there. He was talking about having your kids on payroll, and he talked through how powerful it can be, and then he was willing to, on stage, confess, Hey, I knew this was a great thing a year or two ago or whenever it was. And then I kept telling myself I was going to take care of it later, never got the paperwork done and missed out on that opportunity for that tax year. And so as soon as he realized that, and then he was able to outline, okay, the next day, here’s what I went and did to put this in place because only the action counts. And for some of these tax strategies, especially when we talk about ’em on a podcast or even on stage, we go really quickly and sometimes leave out some of the nuanced detail that is critical to making the strategy work. And so again, that’s why it’s so important to learn from people who are doing this because when you have those hallway conversations, they can tell you, oh, no, no, no. Here’s how I documented what my kids were doing in the time they spent on it and how I paid them, and all those things that if you don’t do, you are going to get destroyed if the IRS ever comes and asks questions.

 

Matt (17:25):

 

Yeah. There’s a lot of nuances there, right? Steven, something else that comes to mind when you’re going to a conference, regardless of what conference you’re going to, typically, there are too many attendees to start doing a lot of research ahead of time on attendees, and they don’t always release attendee list in advance. The speakers are always listed in advance. I love to take a minute to do research on the speakers ahead of time, figure out who they are, because oftentimes when they come off stage and the event goes on to the next thing, they kind of just wander around. They’re not going to fly out until later the day or the next day, and they’re usually really excited. They’re there on stage. They’re not getting paid at all or hardly anything. They’re there because they’re passionate about sharing the message. And so when I find them and I say, Hey, Bob, I really love your presentation.

 

(18:07):

 

Can I buy a cup of coffee or a beer? We can talk about this a little bit more. I can get hours of their time that would otherwise be impossible to get in any other setting. In fact, I was at a Dave Ramsey conference one time. I got to have cigars with Dave Ramsey himself and his leadership team. I spent two hours talking to Dave Ramsey’s, Chief technology officer. The guy was brilliant. Why? Because I sought him out and I said, Hey, you’re already here. I brought cigars. I did some research. I know you guys are into cigars. Let’s sit down and smoke a cigar. And I was able to get this. I could never get two hours with this guy in any other study. There’s just not a chance where I could in that study, and I did. So if you’re going to a conference, do some legwork, who are the speakers?

 

(18:42):

 

Learn about them and then find them and ask them real questions. Don’t waste their time. Here’s something else I’ve seen at conferences, Steven. I was given a keynote address in London at a conference, and the guy who gave the keynote before me, he says, Hey, listen, we’re going to do 10 minutes of Q&A at the end of my session, but I’d just like to remind you that I’ve been doing this for 30 years and you heard a 50 minute presentation, so if there’s a dispute, I’m right and you’re wrong. Don’t argue with me. And he laughed and he made a joke around about it. It was a good point that he brought up.

 

Steven (19:08):

 

Since you mentioned Dave Ramsey and some of the things that have been going on around him recently, I’ll tell you that one of the things I also like about conferences, especially getting to meet people who we might kind of put on a pedestal or we only see us to some kind of celebrity figure. For me, it really helps with, Hey, these are still real people. They worked really hard to get where they are. They’ve learned from a lot of trial and error, and I can do the same thing for me. It kind of removes some of the mystique around it so that I feel like I can go accomplish those things. Because as much fun as it is to eat popcorn and sit back and watch people dissect, whatever, the most recent thing David Ramsey said that they don’t think he should say, okay, perfection isn’t the expectation. And I actually get concerned by people who hold themselves out as perfect. I want to know that you learned this through painful experience so that it came from a really valuable place. And it also reminds me that, Hey, I’ve got to put the work in. Even if you give me every secret that you can share, you’re still only helping me accelerate the process. I have to go do the hard work myself still.

 

Matt (20:05):

 

Yeah. Another example that comes to mind, it’s been almost 10 years, maybe 12 years. So since I very first went to Tom Gau’s Coaching Program, which Tom Gau since passed away, Rest in Peace. But one of the biggest takeaways I got from that program was I talked to as many other advisors as I could, specifically, the ones that were making two or three times as much money as I was, not 10 times, not 20 times. And I would talk to them and I would try to figure out what it was they were doing or what they knew that was different than I did. And what I discovered, and this goes to your point, Steven, it wasn’t as different as I thought I had in my mind at the time. Maybe I was doing two or $300,000 gross. I’m talking to guys doing a million, and I’m thinking they’ve got to be 20 times as good as I’m, I bet they’re better looking.

 

(20:42):

 

I bet they’re smarter. I bet they went to fancy colleges. I bet this whole thing, Nope, nope. They’re normal guys and they’re just doing more reps than everybody else, and there’s just some small tweaks that they’re doing. And so I found those, and I just did exactly what they were doing with the confidence of saying like, Hey, I saw Bob is doing a million and I’m doing 200. Bob’s not any smarter than I am. He’s just better at communicating to clients. Let me do exactly what Bob’s doing. Let me do exactly what Tom Gau does, and I will at least get some portion of that result. And there’s just no other setting to do that than certain conferences.

 

Steven (21:11):

 

Well, we spent two full days together going through all this stuff. I mean, we’re having a hard time even recapping this in a short podcast episode, which is why one of the reasons we’re so excited to be doing this again next year. It’s going to be September 25th through 27th. So stay tuned for opportunities to get registered for that. Definitely block it on your calendar. And as we talk so excitedly about this, I’ll even admit that it was a phenomenal success, but there was room for improvement. We got a lot of fantastic feedback. It was overwhelmingly positive. But Matt, as we look ahead to the conference next year, obviously going to invite you back to get up on stage again. What are you excited about for things that are going to be there again and things that we’re going to improve?

 

Matt (21:46):

 

Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m glad the feedback didn’t include, don’t invite Matt back, or it did. Yeah, really excited for next year. Of course, we’re going to partner it as we did this year with The Perfect RIA Precon. Of course, if you’re not familiar with The Perfect RIA, check us out The Perfect RIA podcast. Be sure to give it five stars and subscribe. So we’re going to do that practice management. We’re always looking and saying, Hey, how do we double our effectiveness? How do we double our profitability? How do we double our value to clients? Double our time off, right? That’s really the focus on those two days leading in. I know Steven, there was several advisors that asked for more frequent breaks. Lemme just call this one out, right? I don’t know. I guess people need that. You’re a big boy or a big girl. If you need to go up and use the potty, just get up and use the potty. I don’t know. I didn’t go to a lot of traditional schools. I unschooled a lot of my life, so maybe that’s why I’m kind of jaded to that. But yeah. Anyway, I guess I’m going to throw in a few more breaks for the wimps in the group. I dunno.

 

Steven (22:40):

 

Yeah, definitely things at both ends of the spectrum, right? Little logistics things, but adding a full day of TPR I’m super excited about because we did some mini sessions. It was great having you and Micah there. Those were fun to go through some of that stuff, and people loved it. Obviously, they came to a tax conference, but these are still financial advisors. They want to know how to improve every aspect of their practice. So we’re going to do a full day of that. We are also expanding the agenda so that there’s going to be, this last year we did only main stage and we said, Hey, this is what you’re coming to see. We’re going to expand it a little bit so we can cover a few more topics. We’re going to have some breakouts. The great thing is that we have an incredible video production team that comes, and so even if you don’t, can’t attend two sessions at the same time, everyone will have access to both of ’em.

 

(23:18):

 

So we’re excited that we can bring even more content. We already have some great partners coming on board as sponsors so that we can make sure that it’s a phenomenal event and that we’re being really intentional. The people we’re putting in the room, we’re excited to have in the room with you so that this isn’t, Hey, here’s our row of booths that you’re going to try to avoid. This is, hey, things. We’ve got people on stage who have tried these things, who are using these things in their practice, who can tell you this is why you should or shouldn’t go talk to one of these vendors. So I’m really excited about how this is already coming together.

 

Matt (23:51):

 

For sure. And of course, Steven, I know that speaking of conferences, you were speaking at the FPA NorCal conference in May, and so I would definitely, all these things we were just talking about events. If you’re going to be FPA NorCal, right, find Steven asking these questions, by the way, I’d also say if there are any speakers you want to make sure come to the tax summit, this would be a good time to point ’em out to Steven and say, listen, can you get so-and-so to come, and we will pull our strings to get there. But yeah, I mean, again, be to FPA NorCal. See Steven there. Maybe I’ll be there. We’ll see. It’ll be a surprise if I’m there. 

 

Steven (24:18):

 

Definitely stay tuned for updates on my speaking. I’ll be doing a lot of speaking across the industry this next year. I’m really excited about the invites and opportunities that I’m getting, and yeah, I appreciate that shout out, Matt, for a call to action of, Hey, if you’ve got people you’d love to see on stage, we’d love to hear about that. We’re early enough that we can still keep building out that agenda. So yeah, it’s going to be phenomenal. I’m very much looking forward to it. 

 

Matt (24:40):

 

Perfect. Well, Steven, one last thing before we jump. For those of you that are longtime listeners of Steven and his webinars and his podcast, you will notice in the background that he has his Spartan Metal collection, and I noticed your newest edition. How I noticed a new edition out of the hundreds that are there was the Toughest Mudder. Steven and I, mostly Steven actually completed the toughest motor race a few weeks ago. I got to be Steven’s pit crew. And so he ran what did be 54 miles? 56 miles.

 

Steven (25:09):

 

56, yeah. I only got credit for 50, but yeah, 56.

 

Matt (25:12):

 

Through the dark, through the mud, through the water. I was Steven’s pit crew, which meant that every hour to two hours an alarm would go off, and I would wake up out of my lawn chair and I’d walk over and give Steven another granola bar and tell him to get running some more. But a lot of fun to do those kinds of things together. In fact, we were talking about maybe even finding a Spartan race that we could invite the whole community to. So stay tuned for that. 

 

Steven (25:32):

 

Stay tuned for that. We need to get some more of the details, but I got to spend a day with the CEO of Spartan, and there’s a good chance I’m going to end up with a whole stack of passes. So we’re going to pick out a race and invite people to it just to have some fun, because as much as I love spending time talking about taxes, we’re all still real people. And we’ve got to balance these other areas of our life. And that’s one that I’ve found a lot of value in being physically active. So we kind of plan it throughout the episode, but of course, we’re always about making sure information has value, which means taking action. So make sure you’re blocking your calendar from September 25th through 27th, next fall, September 2024. That is depending on when you’re listening to this. The other thing, whether it’s our conference, another conference, will mastermind groups, whatever it is, really strongly encourage you to make sure you have an intentional place where you’re looking to collaborate with other advisors, because that’s where you’re going to learn these details. That as much as I appreciate the audience that I have, and I do firmly believe in the value I’m providing, there’s things that I’ll just never be able to tell you because I’m not an advisor. And you need to have a community you can get those from.

 

Matt (26:33):

 

I love it. Of course. Final action item, go over and check out The Perfect RIA podcast. We have a lot of fun over there as well. And Steven, thank you so much for having me on the show. It’s always great. I love, oh, a second, one last action item. This one’s key. If you do not have a printed copy of the RTS Tax Desktop Guide on your desktop, I’ve got mine. It’s underneath my coffee cup right now. Print it now. If you haven’t downloaded it recently downloaded recently. It’s constantly being updated. I take this into every meeting. I have it next to my desk everywhere I go. Absolute must have resource, the RTS Desktop Tax Guide. 

 

Steven (27:02):

 

Yep. We just released the first edition for 2024, and I say the First edition because they released the information really slowly. So all the federal stuff is updated. The state stuff will come later. Retirementtaxservices.com, it’s right on the main page. You can download that guide, get it printed, get it laminated. It is a great one to have. So Matt, thanks so much for coming on the show. It’s spending some time with me. I mean, the 24 hours we spent together on the Tough mutter clearly wasn’t enough. We just got to keep doing this, so thanks for being here.

 

Matt (27:25):

 

Oh, my pleasure, man. My pleasure. Well, thanks everybody. Steven, thank you for having me.

 

Steven (27:29):

 

Thanks for being here and listening. Until next time, good luck out there. And remember to tip your server, not the IRS!