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STAY ON TOP  OF YOUR TAXES

What You'll Learn In Today's Episode
  • Who is Nitrogen Wealth?
  • Why taxes are such a powerful force in serving clients.
  • Opportunities to learn more IN PERSON both through Nitrogen Wealth and Retirement Tax Services.

Summary:

On this episode Steven is joined by the CEO of the company formerly known as Riskalyze. Having recently rebranded to Nitrogen Wealth, Aaron joins Steven to discuss the evolution of their platform and how taxes are now incorporated into how they help Advisors attract, serve and retain clients. Steven and Aaron discuss the potential traps of unexpected tax bills from an investment portfolio and how the Nitrogen platform can help Advisors better understand the tax drag of specific investments and portfolios.

Ideas Worth Sharing:

All this stuff is very complex and it's very important. It's complex to figure out how to navigate the tax system and manage your tax exposure. Well, it's complex to figure out how to reduce risk in a safe way that will still get… Share on X If all we're thinking is I'm gonna buy a fund and someday sell it, and that's when I'll have a tax impact, the expectations and the experience can be way off. - Steven Jarvis Share on X  Growth is a double sided coin and it can help you bring new clients support, but it can also help you keep the ones that you have. And that's really important. - Aaron Klein Share on X

About Retirement Tax Services:

Steven and his guests share more tax-planning insights in today’s Retirement Tax Services Podcast. Feedback, unusual tax-planning stories, and suggestions for future guests can be sent to advisors@rts.tax.

Are you interested in content that provides you with action steps that you can take to deliver massive tax value to your clients? Then you are going to love our powerful training sessions online. Click on the link below to get started on your journey:

Retirementtaxservices.com/welcome

Thank you for listening.

Read The Transcript Below:

Steven (00:49):

Hello everyone, and welcome to the next episode of the Retirement Tax Services podcast. I am your host, Stephen Jarvis, CPA, and I am so excited to have a very special guest with me on the show today. When we originally booked the episode, I thought, great, we’re gonna talk about taxes. But recently they’ve had another big announcement that I will let Aaron Klein, who is the CEO and co-founder of what was Riskalyze, talk about this big announcement.

Aaron (01:15):

For sure. Thanks for having me on. Just a real honor to be invited and excited to do it. And yes, we just rebranded the company after 4,452 days of operating as Riskalyze. We rebranded the company to Nitrogen. And, you know, it’s really interesting, just to give you a little bit of the backstory behind that brand is such a powerful thing, and it’s a bit of a double-edged sword because yeah if you don’t do a good job, you can redefine your brand to mean anything you want it to mean. If you do a really, really good job of branding, then unfortunately it’s a double-edged sword. You’re kind of stuck in the box that you’ve put yourself into. And so what’s super interesting is, you know, when we started building our software, the first thing we built was the risk number and kind of like, how do you use the risk number to kind of document how much risk tolerance somebody wants and really align with that, with the risk in their portfolio.

(02:09):

That’s really what we built, like step one. And we named the company Riskalyze after that capability. And you know, then we spent the next decade building out all these different capabilities across the platform, building out proposals and building out stress testing and building out, you know, risk capacity measurement with retirement maps, building out some tax analysis capabilities. I know we’re gonna talk about today. Building out, you know, all these different things that are really designed to help drive a firm’s growth in different ways to turn, you know, leads into meetings and meetings into valued clients and clients into referral champions for the firm. And so like that’s kind of been our theme and our focus for the last decade. But I can’t tell you how many firms we would go into and, you know, we’re getting rolled out in a lot of larger firms and we’d talked to some of them and they would go, well, I mean, it’s so great to talk to you.

(03:02):

Like you’ve got a great reputation, you know, a number of our advisors really like you, but we don’t really need a new risk tolerance documentation solution here at our firm. Right? Yeah. And, it just led us to recognize that we were kind of trapped in a box of our own making with the brand. So we decided to take the bold stuff we announced last fall that we were going to rebrand the company. And, you know, we will always be the makers of Riskalyze. Like we’re, that, that’s part of our history, part of our legacy, and we’re proud of it. And yet, you know, we look to the future and we say the Nitrogen growth platform is really about driving that set of workflows to help financial advisors get people from lead to meeting and meeting to client to client to referral champion.

(03:45):

And that involves risk and that involves portfolio analytics. That involves, you know, our check-ins engagement with clients, that involves tax analysis, that involves proposals, that involves stress testing. Like all those different pieces comprise this growth platform that can really drive a wealth management firm’s growth. And, you know, yeah, it needs to be integrated with the asset platform and the CRM and your marketing on the other side. But like, this is a hole in the wealth tech stack that we sprang up to field, you know, a decade ago. And it was kind of time for us to stop hiding the growth platform in plain sight.

Steven (04:19):

Yeah, that’s a really fascinating journey. My listeners all know that my background’s not as a financial advisor. I’m still not a financial advisor. I just spent all my time working with them. And when I had, a little over two years ago, ahead, an advisor reach out to me after they had seen me speak at another event. And I always try to focus on the compliment in this, but I get this a lot of, Hey, that was a great presentation for a CPA, or, that’s the most engaging presentation I’ve ever heard from a CPA .  That’s just kinda the nature of the game for me. But this advisor..

Aaron (04:49):

It could be worse. They could be staying for a lawyer for something like that.

Steven (04:53):

Right? For an actuary.

Aaron (04:54):

It could be worse, it could be a lot of worse. A lot worse.

Steven (04:57):

Fair enough. But this advisor had reached out and said, Hey, loved your presentation. It would be great to see you at the Fearless Investing Summit that Riskalyze puts on. And Riskalyze was new to me at that time. And so I said, okay, great. Tell me about Riskalyze. They said, oh, well they do this risk score. And in my head I’m like, well then what am I gonna talk about? But I had such a great experience when I came and did my breakout section all on taxes because I could immediately tell that there was so much more to what you were doing than just, Hey, this is a risk score. And your audience, your members, the people who are there, they wanted so much more. They want this platform that you’re talking about of, there’s so many things they need to do for my clients. It can’t just be one thing.

Aaron (05:37):

Right. Yeah, no, that’s absolutely right. And I think that, you know, the truth is, it’s all about how you engage with clients engage with both prospects and existing clients, again, to take them down that journey of leading them to ultimately become referral champions for the firm. And, what I love, you know, tax is such a fantastic example you know, when you save a client a dollar in taxes, I feel like you know, I think it was Josh Brown who said you know, that’s like worth $10 of additional return in the portfolio. You know, it’s kind of like, I don’t even know exactly why that is, but it’s a deep psychological thing of like, you know, the dollar in taxes is like lost money as opposed to the $10 of additional return you might get is like, found money, you know?

(06:25):

And I just think that it’s so powerful to think about that. So, that’s one of the reasons why we felt like, you know, tax is a really interesting component and an important component of a growth platform because there’s nothing that drives you know getting clients excited about coming to board with you as a financial advisor or getting clients, you know so passionate about what you’ve done for them as a financial advisor. There’s few things more powerful than understanding the kind of tax alpha that you’re generating for them as a financial advisor.

Steven (06:57):

Yeah, I’ve definitely seen that play out time and time again. As I do the tax side and I collaborate with advisors on the investing, the financial planning side, it just blows my mind every time when I’ll be on a call with the advisor and the client is just being, just effusive with their praise to me of some small thing we did on taxes. We saved ’em $300 and underpayment penalties they’ve been paying and they just skip over all of the great work the advisor’s doing. Cause the tax piece is so emotional, which that speaks.. Definitely speaks to one of the questions they had of, you know, why go down that route? Because taxes are, they can be a huge headache. There’s a lot of complexities involved. It’s always changing. So Aaron, talk a little bit about what, I mean taxes a really broad topic. So when you say that Nitrogen Wealth helps with taxes, I mean, what specifically, what areas is an advisor gonna see benefits from being on the platform?

Aaron (07:50):

Yeah, for sure. So let’s be clear. Like, I don’t see us necessarily building like end-to-end tax analysis or something like that. There are some great products out there that do that. You know, I think about our friends over at Holistiplan, for example. I know we’re doing a webinar together with, you know, in a few weeks I think with you and Holistic Plan and us. I think that’s coming up on June 13th. So that’s a great opportunity for listeners to jump in and join that. And you can find that, by the way, at nitrogenwealth.com. Just click on events there in the footer and you can register for that event, you know, with Holistiplan with Steven. So, you know, all that to say we’re not building an end-to-end holistic tax analysis. We focused in on something very specific and it was this concept of tax drag.

(08:33):

Cause what a lot of people, I can honestly say like until like, I don’t know, it might have been three or four years ago, I was actually not aware of tax drag on a portfolio. I don’t think I really understood that. I always thought that if you owned a fund that you know, you are only gonna see a tax impact to your own personal taxes when you sold the fund. Like I just had that in my head that like, that’s how that worked. And, you know, turns out that is not true. There are profound differences. And by the way, this is something I don’t think is very well known, not only by investors, but it’s also just not well measured by the industry. Some financial advisors are really smart and pay a lot of attention to this. It’s hard to get data about it.

(09:12):

It’s hard to measure, it’s hard to look at. But there are profound differences in return because tax drag is kryptonite for the returns of a portfolio. It you know, if you have, if you take the same fund that is basically following the same objective, but one of those you know strategists is running things in a very tax efficient way. They’re distributing a very low level of capital gains. They’re doing a lot less of that kinda selling of taxable stuff with gains that get distributed to the end owners of the fund. And the other one is generating a lot of capital gains back out to the client. It is a profound difference in ultimate return and it doesn’t get measured, right. Because both of those funds are really just being stacked up next to each other on like a Yahoo Finance chart.

(10:01):

Right. And it does not bring into effect the fact that some of your capital got returned and then you had to pay taxes on it, and so you couldn’t reinvest as much back in. Okay. And it’s just, it’s kryptonite to returns and it’s largely unmeasured in our industry. So that is the feature. We built this feature called tax drag that allows you to look at these funds and go, well, based on how the manager has managed the fund in the past and the distributions they’ve done in the past, here’s the percentage of drag that you can kind of extract from the security or this portfolio based on if that fund manager continues to follow their same pattern in the future.

Steven (10:37):

Yeah, that’s really interesting. It brings to mind quite a few conversations. I’ve had way too many conversations I’ve had, especially over the last couple of years in situations where, and I think what you’re describing would help with the transparency on this. You end up in situations where someone you have taxpayer working with a financial advisor, we go through a year, like I don’t know, let’s just pick one like, I don’t know, 2020 or 2021, you know, so some of these years where the market in that year maybe wasn’t stellar, let’s just use that really generally. And so you have a taxpayer who gets the end of the year and thinks, wow, I got killed in the market. There’s no possible way my investments are gonna create taxes for me. And then, I mean, back to your point about the, you know, the quote of the $10 return versus the $1 in taxes that emotion is multiplied the other way as well is when I unexpected, yes.

(11:22):

Have to pay some taxes. Oh man. The people are livid. And so what would happen, what would happen is that this fund for that year kicks out a giant capital gain when the market’s down and the taxpayer about loses their mind because they say, how can this happen? The market’s down 20%, why am I getting taxed? And they’re missing the fact that there’s positions in there that have been held for years and over all of those years, there was a gain in there. But to your point, there can be these taxable events along the way. And if all we’re thinking is I’m gonna buy a fund and someday sell it, and that’s when I’ll have a tax impact, the expectations and the experience can be way off.

Aaron (12:01):

Absolutely. And it is profound to me that it’s really about management style and that we’re not measuring this as an industry. What do I mean by management style? I mean, there are choices that that fund manager is typically making that determine whether or not they’re going to create the taxable event. Or not. And there are a lot of managers who will take what they’re doing to the taxes of the end owner of the fund into account when they’re making these kind of tactical decisions about what positions to close, what positions to keep. And then there are others who just don’t think about it that way. They just don’t pay any attention to it. And frankly, you can see it in the numbers because you’ll have, you know, you can take two funds that have roughly the same objective and you can stack them up next to each other and they’ve got roughly the same return in history.

(12:48):

Okay. But one of them has like, you know, you’re gonna see like a 1.2% drag on your returns over the long run, if you put the impact of taxes into the math Okay. And the other one, it’s like 0.4%. Well that is profoundly different. And it’s like paying fees. Yeah. It’s like paying like fees in excess of that, you know, to a more expensive financial advisor and getting a worse track record like that is not where clients want to be. That’s even true. Without it being unexpected. Yeah. Like even if you can expect it, you’re harming your long-term returns because the power of compounding does not get to happen. If you take that capital gain off the table and have to pay half of it to the government.

Steven (13:31):

That’s really interesting comparison to fees because, oh, I mean, since I’ve been involved in the industry, I mean, you definitely see this emphasis on transparency around fees. Yeah. Which, that’s more of a question of just transparency of where do you find the fees, but I think part of your point is that up until a platform, like what you’ve got on Nitrogen has been built. It’s not even just a matter of did I go and look for the fees? It’s where, or did I go and look for the tax track? It’s just wasn’t even there, it wasn’t there to be to be reported. 

Aaron (13:58):

Correct. I’m not aware of it being, you know, like a real metric that gets reported anywhere. It’s kinda like you had to kind of dig in and like, and like figure out, and by the way, part of the challenge is I think a lot of people have looked at this and said, well, I mean, we can’t do a forward looking analysis on this because we don’t know what’s gonna happen for that fund manager. So it’s really only a backward looking analysis. And we decided to look at it and say, well, wait a minute, our long-term belief has been, it is absolutely true that past performance does not predict future returns. Okay. But it’s also equally true that the only data we have to go off of to try to analyze the future is what has happened in the past. Okay. Otherwise, we’re just guessing that’s just predictive guesswork.

(14:37):

And predictive guesswork has been proven over and over again not to work. So we’re actually better off taking, like we’ve gotta understand we gotta be real with ourselves. We can’t just take the past data and say this is what’s gonna happen in the future, but it’s the best predictor that we have. It’s the best way that we can start to think about and make good decisions for the future is by looking at what’s happened in the past. And I think that is equally true with tax track. I think when you look at how a particular, if you’re in a fund and you’ve got a fund manager who cares about tax, drag on a portfolio and tries to minimize capital gains getting distributed to their fund owners then you’re likely to see that behavior continue and have a relatively low level of tax drag on that fund.

(15:20):

Conversely, if you have a manager who doesn’t really like, bring that into account with their management decisions, I would argue you’re pretty likely to have the same exact experience next year. So we decided to look at that and go, let’s take trailing 12 months data on the tax drag that that fund created and let’s model it like it could happen in the future. And all we’re saying is, this has been the tax drag on your portfolio in the past, and now you gotta ask yourself, do I own the right fund? Because this is reasonable to believe that this might be the case in the future. So what I love about it is that we have built this visual in the context of the fees. So what we’re doing is we’re stacking it up in like a bar chart that stacks up the advisory fee and the internal expense ratio of the of the portfolio, right?

(16:07):

The average total expense ratio and expenses of the portfolio and then the tax drag on the portfolio. So what I love about that is that when you do a comparison, an advisor who is tax smart, okay, and you get to work with a lot of tax smart advisors, an advisor who is tax smart is actually going to have a new competitive weapon to be able to put the, you know, the current portfolio with an advisor who might not be tax smart up there and go like, look, maybe my advisory fee might be 10 basis points higher than the other advisor’s advisory fee, but I’m earning that higher advisory fee because, because look, my tax drag is 50 basis points lower than the tax drag of your current portfolio because I’m actually picking the funds in your portfolio based on picking managers that have a track record of being smart about how they do taxes.

Commercial (16:58):

How many client referrals have you got? Because your tax planning advice is so good that your existing clients just can’t stop talking about it to their friends. If you are like most financial advisors who know that they need to improve the tax planning advice that they give clients, but struggle with knowing how to implement that and what actions to take, then you need to join us September 27th through the 29th in Las Vegas, Nevada. Go to retirementtaxservices.com and register for the event where leading financial advisors will be presenting materials alongside Lead CPA Steven Jarvis on how they implement tax planning advice in their practice. You’ll leave this conference with actionable advice that you can take and make a change in the way that you structure financial planning advice when it comes to taxes. Join us in Las Vegas, Nevada, September 27th through the 29th by registering at retirementtaxservices.com.

Steven (18:00):

Hey Aaron, that leads into one of the questions I wanted to ask about, just kind of talking to mechanically, how does this work? Not as how does the software do all the analysis of the background, but an advisor has access to this tool? I mean, what does this look like in their practice? So they’re going in and they’re putting in what’s in the portfolio or things that they’re interested in. I mean, what’s the time commitment look like? Is it something they’re delegating to the team? How is this benefiting the advisor’s experience?

Aaron (18:27):

Great question. I should note that like, we’re in the middle of rolling out the tax drag feature across all the different aspects of the platform. So we’re not quite at the end of that journey, but we’re nowhere close to the beginning either. It’s, so right now inside the platform you can pull up individual security, see the tax drag of that security, you can also pull up the stats analysis of a complete portfolio in detail and kind of see that. And the next phase is rolling it out kind of in the context of the portfolio and the proposal that you’re building and rolling out new reports that all include this on the printed reports. So the printed reports is gonna be a really great milestone for this. And we’re super excited about it. What the workflow will look like is this, a very common workflow in our platform is for advisors to say, okay, I’ve got this, this meeting that I have with a prospective client and I’m gonna build out a proposal for them.

(19:15):

And, you know, the first thing I wanna understand with the proposal is what is your risk number, Steven? Okay. And you go through the process, you go, well, I wanna be a 42. You’re like, great, now I’m gonna plug in Steven’s current portfolio and I might find that he’s invested like a 75 Okay. And whatever financial advisory is with, or he is a do-it-yourself investor or whatever it is, like his portfolio is not really an alignment with his risk number. But once in a while we will find that your current portfolio is actually invested fairly close to the risk number you wanna be. So maybe you wanna be a 42 and it’s already a 45. Okay. Well, the next aspect that I might be looking for, if I was, you know, a nitrogen user two years ago, is I might be looking at what we call the GPA of the portfolio.

(20:00):

Okay. The GPA is basically a metric that’s easy to understand. It’s like, how should I think about the risk reward efficiency of this portfolio? Am I getting the kind of like the best historical returns in exchange for the risk 45 that I’m taking? Okay. And you know, we say the Riskalyze GPA of 3.5 or higher is good. We will actually be kind of upgrading that metric. And what I found is there’s a little bit of disagreement about that. Okay. GPA was a fun analogy. We’re gonna stick with GPA, but we’re gonna shift the score as we upgrade it to Nitrogen GPA later this year and we’re gonna shift it to 4.0 or higher being a good score because everybody’s got a different opinion about this. And so, you know, some people thought 3.5 or higher was a good GPA.

(20:45):

Other people are like, are you kidding? Stanford has 5.0 GPAs now. Like, nope, you gotta be a four or higher. So we’re gonna switch Nitrogen in the future to be a 4.0 or higher score. It’s gonna look different and be on a slightly different scale, but for now we’re still using Riskalyze GPA 3.5 or higher is good. Okay? So we might look at your current portfolio and your current portfolio might be a 3.5. You know, the portfolio that you’re proposing to the client might be like a 3.7. Okay? So it’s like, it’s better, but it’s only marginally better. So what I think is really cool around tax drag is now I’ve got a third competitive weapon, okay? The risk number might be the same. By the way, about 88% of the time we find that people have more risk in their portfolio than they wanna realize.

(21:31):

So you’ve got a great competitive weapon there about 88% of the time. Yeah. Secondly, GPA is often like not being focused on like risk reward efficiencies not being focused on. So usually you’ve got a really great competitive weapon there. But if those two are relatively close now we look at tax drag and, and let’s say in this hypothetical example, I look at tax drag and you know, my risk number is close, my GPA is close, but now I’ve got a 50 basis point advantage on tax drag. Okay? That’s right out there on the, on the proposal, it’s very easy to use because I’m plugging in the current portfolio you have, and I see that it has a tax drag of 1.3%. Okay? I pull up my existing model, I know that it has a tax drag of more like 0.7%. Okay? I’m gonna propose that we move the client to this other portfolio that is much more efficient from a tax perspective, okay? And I’m gonna be able to propose this and show the client how I’m more mindful about taxes as an advisor. It’s gonna be really easy to visualize and I’m gonna be able to see that I’m actually saving money, not necessarily from the advisory fee, not necessarily from, you know, maybe even the expense ratios in the portfolio, but just from being mindful about good tax management of the portfolio, I’m gonna be able to see and visualize it.

Steven (22:46):

No, I clearly am not unbiased in this. I spend all my time on taxes. But as you go through those, and I’m thinking about a prospect’s experience, you know, a risk score might be a new concept to them. Sure. They’ve probably never thought about, Hey, do I have this score? Or you know, how should I be thinking about risk? To your point, everybody’s gonna think a little bit about GPA and applying a GPA to an investment. Again, new concept, but taxes is something that everyone’s familiar with and knows there’s pain associated with it, even if they don’t, even if tax drag is new to them, even if how we’re specifically applying it, the concept of taxes and hey, if we work together, I can help lower the impact of taxes that is going to resonate. And I see that time and time again that taxes resonate more than so many other areas of financial planning because of the pain and emotional I feel with it. 

Aaron (23:32):

I mean it’s a really good example of why I would argue, I mean, look, we live in a fast in fascinating times, right? Like we’re watching the rise of AI, we’re watching, you know all of this, the rate of change in technology is like very fast. And yet I still believe at the end of the day that there is a long and an exciting future ahead for financial advisors. Because here’s the deal, all this stuff is very complex and it’s very important. It’s complex to figure out how to navigate the tax system and manage your tax exposure. Well, it’s complex to figure out how to reduce risk in a safe way that will still get you, you know, the kind of financial outcome that you’re looking for. It’s complex to figure out, how to be efficient with risk and reward.

(24:20):

And here’s the thing, it’s not just complex to do those things. It’s also super important to people. And, you know, let’s not even like yes, it’s important to people that they not lose all their money. That’s very important. But like you, like you said a couple of times already on this podcast, it’s very emotional to people to ensure that they’re not losing money unnecessarily to taxes. Everybody I’ve ever talked to is like, listen, I’m willing to pay my fair share, but like, I don’t really want to be in a position where I’m being dumb. Okay, the tax system and the tax rates are based on people not being dumb. And I don’t want to be one of those dumb people who pays more in taxes than they should. And I think that’s a very fair point of view and I think that, you know, financial advisors have an incredible opportunity to deliver more value by being able to frame their value through that context.

Steven (25:09):

Yeah, it’s a really great point, Aaron. I really appreciate you being willing to come on and share so much of what you’re doing at Nitrogen. Congratulations again on the rebrand. I know that’s a lot of work that goes into that. It’s very exciting. We always like to make sure that we’re turning the information in this podcast into value, which in our minds is by turning into action. And so what I would love for you to do is to really, it’s two questions. Cause I know I have a lot of listeners, a lot of advices I work with who are already on your platform. So I’d love for you to offer a recommendation of an action item for people who are already using the platform to elevate their experience. And for people who aren’t on the platform, what’s that action item they can do to learn more about why this might be efficient?

Aaron (25:44):

Sure. Absolutely. Well, for the folks who are already on Nitrogen, I would think just quickly about two things. I mean, one is you’re sitting here listening to an incredible podcast about how to leverage taxes to drive value in your practice. So obviously you’re at the very least intrigued about this idea. And I would argue this is a rich vein of value for you to provide to your clients. And so like go dig in and check out the tax track metrics inside of the Nitrogen platform. You know, that was a free upgrade that we delivered to everybody. So if you have Nitrogen, you have tax drag. And I would encourage you to go dig into that and take a look at that. And again, we’re rolling it out into more parts of the platform, the portfolio screen, the printed reports, all those different things.

(26:24):

So, but you can check it out today inside of, you know, pulling up an individual security or pulling up stats on a portfolio. Secondly the big, you know, here’s the big thing that I will encourage everybody to do because this has been transformative for so many practices. Go check out the check-ins feature inside of nitrogen check-ins is just a very quick two question survey that you send to your clients on a monthly or quarterly basis that says how you feeling about the markets, how you feeling about your financial future? And you know, that two tap survey, like positive or negative about the markets, confident or anxious about your financial future really quickly helps you sift out your clients to the ones who are happy and okay. And like, they’re gonna be fine until their next client review and the ones who are feeling nervous and anxious and need your help.

(27:08):

And it really is gonna help you sift out the 10 or 15% of clients who need to talk about something. Maybe it’s a tax issue, maybe it’s a risk issue, maybe it’s a, I’ve just been watching too much CNBC and I need my psychology repair. Could be any of those things. Check-Ins is a super powerful tool to help advisors keep their finger on the pulse speed of client psychology and turn those clients into referral champions for their firm. So, that’s my recommendation. And those are two things that like every Nitrogen user on any plan have access to and they can do right now without costing themselves another pennies. So I’d just encourage you to go do that if you haven’t checked it out. Oh man, we’d love to chat with you about that. You know, we’re at nitrogenwealth.com and would love to chat with any financial advisor who wants to just unlock how they drive growth in their firm because, you know, really, and growth is kind of like a two-sided coin because it’s not only bringing new clients into the firm, it’s also driving great retention for firms.

(28:07):

We have way too firms that are, that are only retaining 87 to 90% of their, of their asset base every year. And that means that like, that’s not a firm that’s nearly as valuable as the firms that like really drive great retention and get up there into the high nineties. And we’ve seen the ability of the Nitrogen platform to help firms get there. So growth is a double sided coin and it can help you bring new clients support, but it can also help you keep the ones that you have. And that’s really important.

Steven (28:31):

Yeah, I’m all about that because for me, one of those things that goes right there hand in hand with that retention is the value delivering to your clients hundred percent. Which takes an intentional approach. I like that you talk about those check-ins, whether it’s taxes or any other element of a financial plan there’s gotta be an intentionality behind how you set this up, how you follow up, how you ensure that value continues to be delivered. 

Aaron (28:53):

Yeah, for sure.

Steven (28:54):

The other thing I’ll throw out, I think we were chatting about it before we hit record, but you guys put on a great event every year. It’s in Miami in October this year. That’s the month after the RTS Tax Planning Summit that we’re doing in September in Las Vegas. So there’s definitely great events out there for listeners for like, I love listening to the podcast, but it would be great to talk to some of these people in person. Yes, you’ve got great opportunities coming up. So go out to retirementtaxservices.com for our summit in September and then of course you can find information on nitrogenwealth.com on the Fearless Investing Summit.

Aaron (29:24):

For sure. Thanks so much.

Steven (29:26):

Yeah, Aaron, it was great having you here. For everyone listening, thanks for tuning in this week and until next time, good luck out there. And remember to tip your server, not the IRS!

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The information on this site is for education only and should not be considered tax advice. Retirement Tax Services is not affiliated with Shilanski & Associates, Jarvis Financial Services or any other financial services firms.

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