Read The Transcript Below:

 

Steven (00:52):

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 I am truly honored this week to have as a guest, none other than Benjamin Brandt. Ben, welcome to the show.

Ben (01:05):

Oh, so happy to be here second time, long time. Third time. First time. Long time something. Long time.

Steven (01:11):

Yeah. You’ve definitely been a guest before. Obviously we do a lot of other things together. I always love chance to talk about financial planning and tax planning, but what prompted this particular episode is some of the work that you’re doing and that you’ve been doing for a long time around prospecting and content creation around marketing, including taxes. I mean, really, even though you’re not a CPA, you’re not an EA. You don’t hold yourself out as the be all end all tax expert. You do keep this front and center in everything that you present to prospective clients, and then you keep it really in the mix for your ongoing clients as well. So I’d love to talk about a little bit that origin story of why you were such an early adopter into lean into taxes as a conversation, and then let’s go through some of the different ways you incorporate this.

Ben (01:55):

Yeah, so taxes are such a big part of retirement planning. I mean, it’s probably the single biggest bill that our clients are going to pay. A lot of times people have the misconception that I’ve got two or 3 million bucks in my IRA, that must be what’s going to bear out how much I pay in income taxes. It’s really more cashflow. The cashflow that comes out of all of those accounts and your social security is what’s going to dictate your taxes over time. If you take 30 years of cashflow and you assign a 10 or 20% effective tax rate on it, for most of our clients, it’s going to be like high six figures, low seven figures in taxes. So once I started kind of connecting those dots and saying, gosh, financial advisors have extremely sticky clients, but that pales in comparison to how sticky tax clients are for CPAs. If there could be a way to combine those two things and show people how much money they’re actually going to be paying taxes, I mean, we’ve got super happy clients forever if we can figure that out.

Steven (02:44):

I like how you’re talking through how you’re starting to quantify for clients and prospective clients what that tax bill really looks like. Because I see a lot of advisors make the mistake of jumping right to the end without helping the clients understand the journey, and they’ll run somebody’s situation through one of these different planning softwares that will show you, Hey, if you do X amount of Roth conversions, you’ll save $2 million over your lifetime in taxes. And they’ll present this to a client who only has $2 million in a 401k or an IRA and this is just never going to line up for the client. How could I possibly save $2 million in taxes on a $2 million balance? They might think to themselves, I’m not a math expert, but that math ain’t math in. And so the context you’re giving is so impactful.

Ben (03:26):

Yeah, it’s so common even just to pace inflation. If you live for 30 years, there’s a really strong look at that. You’ll double or triple your income, nothing fancy, just pacing inflation, $10,000 a month becomes $300,000 a year at age 100. I’m hoping that you’re still spending that money on vacations and travel and things like that. You might be spending it on healthcare, but just to pace inflation, we’re probably going to triple our income if we live long enough. And so anytime you triple your income, it’s reasonable to expect you’re going to pay more in taxes, I think.

Steven (03:56):

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, as you and I talk about this and for advisors listening, that all might sound really simple or obvious, and I think for a lot of advisors it’s not particularly obvious. It’s definitely not obvious to your clients. And so if you’re listening to this podcast, listen to the way Ben explains these things. This has been crafted and refined over years. I mean, Ben, I’ll let you speak to just how long you’ve been talking about taxes, but this is a constant iteration process because just even in the three or four years I’ve known you, I’ve seen how your processes continue to evolve because you’re always getting that feedback and learning. So Ben, how long have you been including taxes in your client discussions?

Ben (04:30):

Oh gosh. Well, our podcast is 10 years old in 2025. I don’t know if we talked as much about taxes then as we do now, but I would say I started getting coaching from people in our ecosystem in 2018 or 2019. So I probably been doubling down and tripling down probably since then, so maybe five years.

Steven (04:49):

Yeah, that definitely puts you on the front edge of advisors focusing on this stuff. It is getting a lot more headlines now, but as I have one-on-one conversations with advisors, it’s still the exception that advisors at large are doing great work around taxes. So Ben, we’ve talked about your podcast. I know that you do a survey every year for your podcast listeners, a variety of questions that come back, but it seems like both in the questions they ask and in the survey responses, taxes from their, this isn’t just you imagining and hoping that clients care about taxes, that’s the feedback you get as well, isn’t it?

Ben (05:23):

Yeah, I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but it was like 80, 90%, something like that. We asked a question, if your financial advisor could do your taxes, is that something that you would want? And of course going into the survey, we thought, yes, that seems pretty likely that that’s something that clients want. But just to see the numbers, 6,000, we sent out to 6,000 people on our email list. I think a few hundred took the quiz. I’d have to look back at the numbers, but it was pretty the dominant yes, that people would want that. Now we didn’t say, is your advisor paying for it or are you paying for it? We didn’t get into those details, but it is just a little bit strange that we take our to the bus stop when it comes to taxes, but we let someone else drive them to their destination. It’s like looking forward and recognizing that clients are going to pay a huge amount of taxes and we take them just right to the edge and don’t actually file the documents for them. It seems like the juice is worth the squeeze to figure out how we can file these clients’ taxes for them, and then we’ve just got a direct line to a more satisfied client I think.

Steven (06:19):

Yeah, I would absolutely agree with that, Ben. So it’s been five or six years that you’ve been incorporating taxes in some way or another. How has that evolved in that time? I mean, what did it look like originally as far as what you were communicating or what you were trying to focus on versus what you do for clients and prospects now?

Ben (06:35):

Well, when I first started my career, we weren’t even allowed to look at tax returns, really. We’re financial professionals, but we work for a big company that has to legislate down to the lowest comm denominator of the biggest idiot among 2,500 advisors. And so they basically said, I think I maybe fitted the description of that lowest comm denominator, so maybe they were extra careful with me, but they basically said, you can’t give tax advice.

(06:57):

And then I would maybe skirt the issue a little bit. I would take tax returns and I would try to look at them, and honestly, I would muddle my way through. But early on in my career, I barely had any idea what I was looking at. And then I’d play around on TurboTax and then eventually I became a CFP. And so just little by little giving more and more advice, and then some of these tax tools came out like Holistic plan where you can really get, you don’t even really need to know how to read a tax return to use holistic plan. So I was like, well, that was another a 10x. And then finally we started working with retirement tax services where someone will actually do the return with you and for you. And at that point, I don’t think there’s any going back with clients once they have one less relationship to manage and they’re getting even more value as a result, that’s a pretty big game changer.

Steven (07:43):

Yeah, absolutely. Before we hit record on this podcast, I was on a call with a client and their advisor, and it was really interesting because the client, very high earning executive at a well-known publicly traded company. Sometimes when people come into a new relationship, I want everything of course. I mean come and take on my garbage for me. But as we talked through it and I just kind of simply said, Hey, here are the things that we focus on, really what this client came back to was, oh wait, you’re willing to talk to me more than once a year. You’ll take a look at my pay stub near the end of the year and make sure I’m not going to get hit with underpayment penalties. If I get a letter from the IRS, you’re going to talk to me about it. And so it was really, at the end of the day, it was the simple things, and I highlight that not to really reinforce your point, Ben, about to get started on this. You don’t have to start as an expert. You don’t have to know every nuance of the tax code, and eventually you maybe still have to learn those. You just have to partner with someone who can. The bar is so low on the service that people currently get around taxes that you can 10x, 100x better than what they’re getting if you’ll just lean in and take responsibility.

Ben (08:48):

I would give it a place to live on the calendar. If you’re brand new with taxes, you could either pick the spring or the fall. When we first started doing this, before we did returns in May, we would look at, so we’re meeting with clients in the spring after they did their taxes. So we’re looking at in May, we’re looking at the prior year’s income and saying, okay, here’s what your income was. Here’s what your taxes were, effective tax rate, IRMAA, we would kind of give them a play by play of what happened over time. Then that morphed into rewind six months. Now we’re meeting in October, November to dummy up what we think that year’s return will look like in advance and saying, okay, we’re $5,000 short on our withholding, so now we’ve got to do a special distribution for withholding, or we’re getting more advanced with some clients.

(09:31):

We’re not doing any withholding throughout the year because now money markets are paying some returns so we can earn the clients and sometimes a few thousand or several thousand dollars in a money market account in interest by just having an extra meeting at the end of the year and saying, okay, let’s settle up before the calendar flips over. So if you’re brand new to taxes, I would probably pick the springtime and say, once your return is done, here’s what happened and here’s how we can use that information to make this year different. So just giving it a place, even if you’re just reviewing these numbers, there are so many clients that don’t know how much they paid in taxes. If they have their withholding dialed in properly, they might not know that they paid $35,000 in taxes last year. And so for them to hear that number that, oh, well, this might be meaningful enough to dedicate a meeting to say, okay, how can I change that number or reduce that number or defer more taxes or realize more income or whatever the appropriate solution is depending on their goals, but give it a place to live on the calendar.

(10:23):

I think that’s a good starting spot. After a couple rounds of that, after a couple different Mays, clients were looking forward to that appointment and saying, Hey, in March I’ve got this question and know we’re going to meet in May to look over my returns. Let’s do that. Or now that we’re meeting with clients at the end of the year, we’ll get emails like a week or two ahead of time saying, Hey, I haven’t seen the email yet. I’m excited to start talking about year end taxes. When does the window open to schedule appointments, things like that. So once you kind of train a client that these numbers are really valuable and sometimes they’re really big numbers, clients are really kind of thirsty for this information, whether I had a podcast or YouTube channel or book or anything like that. Just regular clients are interested in this information from their advisors, so we just have to teach them that it’s an issue and then here’s some ways that we can help you make this better.

Steven (11:07):

Ben, I a hundred percent agree with that. There’s a lot of great perspective in there. I do want to zoom in on one of the things that you said in there just because I’ve been getting a lot of questions about it. As we get close to the end of the year, you talked about having clients hold off on paying taxes throughout the year and then meeting with them near the end of the year to true things up. So talk a little bit more about what it is you’re referring to there and what that looks like logistically in practice.

Ben (11:30):

Yeah, so the IRS wants their money when you have the income, right? So you take on distribution in January, really the government wants that tax revenue in January. Withholdings is kind of the exception to that. Withholdings are sort of viewed preferentially as equally distributed throughout the year. So really our distribution in January, we don’t really have to settle it up until December. Now if we’re paying quarterly estimates, it’s a little bit different if we’re, there’s a couple nuances there, but essentially if we pay our taxes through withholding, then we can settle it all up at the end of the year. And we sort of fell into this backwards one, interest rates were zero for a long time, so the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze to have this extra step that could potentially get messed up and could potentially have the client pay penalties and interest and things like that. So this wasn’t something we did until more recently because interest rates are actually meaningful. We went from 0.06 to six or something like that, so

(12:22):

this Is meaningful, but we had a client that bought a house and they needed like 600,000 early in the year, and we thought, gosh, if we could keep the 200 grand or whatever the tax bill was going to be, if we could just keep that in her account for eight months at a 5% money, market rate cash, it’s like whatever the math was, six grand or seven grand or whatever it was, I was like, could we sell the client on? There is an extra step we need to take at the end of the year, but if we could leave this in a money market, this could be meaningful and the client was all for it. So depending on the client’s income and how much complexity they want, this has rolled out to many more clients over the years. But…

Steven (12:54):

So Ben, in that situation, was it just that you held off and knew that we were going to make another distribution, increase your income even more, or did you take the extra step and this might have been what you were referring to as things can go wrong? Did you take the extra step and roll that back in using the 60 day rollover?

Ben (13:09):

We did that for the first time this year. In that case, we didn’t, in that case, we didn’t do the roll it back, we just left it in the IRA in cash to earn interest.

Steven (13:17):

Oh, okay. So otherwise what she needed $600,000 in cash, you might’ve had to say, okay, if we needed withhold it back in January, we’ve actually got to distribute 800 and have 200 go to the IRS. Instead. You took just the 600, she bought the house, and then at the end of the year you took the other 200 had it 99% or a hundred percent withheld for taxes, which yeah, love that. And to your point, it it’s situational. It’s not going to be every single time, but with interest rates higher, yeah, she earned a bunch more money. Fantastic.

Commercial (13:48):

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Ben (14:09):

So logistically how that works is every single client from basically Halloween until November, give or take a few days, we meet with every client and then our lead advisor over Zoom, we’ll sort of dummy up their return. At this point, we’ve got at least two or three years, if not five or six years worth of returns for everybody in holistic plan. And so we just say, here’s what 2023 looked like every line item, how does 2024 look different? And of course we’ve got all their distributions and all their capital gains and things like that. On our end, we just go through line by line and say, here’s what we think it’s going to be. You’re $37,000 away from the next IRMAA bracket or you’re 50,000 away from the next marginal bracket. How does that make you feel? A little trick that we do just to help make the client’s retirement even better is if they think they should do a Roth conversion and their guardrails are such that they’re underspending their portfolio, which is most of our clients are super savers.

(14:58):

We had twist their arm to spend the money and we had a case where we should do a 60,000 Roth conversion. The client says, yep, let’s do it. And we said, we’ll actually get the same place from a tax perspective if you just spend this money and go do that trip that you’ve been talking about doing, how would that make you feel? And they’re like, oh, interesting. Because from a tax perspective, whether you put in your Roth or whether you spend it, we get the same place we’re solving for smaller RMDs down the road. We’re solving for more flexibility when we switch from married filing jointly only to single. So spending the money gets us the same place, and it’s probably more in line with their stated goals, maybe not their immediate goal that they had in their head to do this Roth conversion, but every so often it works and the clients spend the money and that’s, we like to say, Roth conversions are cool, but converting that money into memories is actually significantly cooler.

Steven (15:39):

Ben, that’s such a cool insight because we can get really hung up on this idea of Roth conversions, which ironically, a lot of the advisors who get really focused on Roth conversions are the same people who bang the drum against insurance and other products. We can all fall in that same trap of here’s this thing I do and that’s the thing I do. So let’s get everyone to do Roth conversions. I’m definitely one blowing the horn on, Hey, we should be looking at this every year. But really what you’re doing, Ben, is you’re just skipping a step. Because when I talk to a client about Roth conversions, I’m trying to help them save taxes through actual tax savings or tax flexibility, and that’s the way I talk to ’em about it is so that they have more power to accomplish the goals that are most important to them, like taking a trip. So I love that approach of why not get ’em on board with the idea and then say, Hey, what if we just went ahead and accomplished that goal now? Well, what a cool way to help clients really accomplish what’s important to ’em.

Ben (16:30):

Well, you’ve attended the Genius Network annual meeting with Joe Polish in the past and he says, sell people what they want, give them what they need. That’s kind of what that is, is like, Hey, come for the tax savings. We’re going to help you send the rough edges off seven figure tax bill. But in reality, what we’re doing a lot of the time we’re doing that too, but in reality, a lot of the time we’re also helping them achieve their goals because Super Savers, the same skillset that got them to save up three or 4 million bucks is not the same skillset they need to spend it. That’s where they need that coaching and that accountability to say, Hey, we’re not getting any younger here. You took out X amount of dollars last year, but the market was good, so we have even more than we started with, we should be about spending this money. That’s why he saved it up in the first place.

Steven (17:05):

Well, Ben, that’s such a great reminder because on a 30 minute podcast, we do stay pretty focused on the tax side of things quite often, but I constantly tell people we’ve got to make good life decisions and then figure out the most tax efficient way to go about them. We shouldn’t be doing things just for the sake of taxes. And this is a great example of how you navigate that for clients in a way that helps them go so far beyond just, Hey, I stuck it to the IRS just a little bit.

Ben (17:29):

Well, that feels good too, but ultimately spending the money is what we want the clients to do. We want ’em to, I don’t know how good that is from a business model perspective to encourage our clients to drain their assets, but within the confines of the financial plan, making sure our guardrails are in place and things like that. But no, we tell this to prospects all the time. We say about 90% our clients, which we think you’ll fit into, we’ve got to twist their arm to spend more money. About 10% of our clients, we got to tell them to pump the brakes, so we don’t want to run out. So we just know our demographics. Most of our clients are engineers are super savers with the podcast and clients. We’re having hundreds of these conversations a year. So I mean, we know who we’re working with because of our podcast. They’re not going to reach out to us unless they don’t sort of see the world the same way we do. So we’re a lot of preaching to the choir, but we do a lot of arm twisting to get people to spend more money.

Steven (18:14):

I’m getting off on a little bit of a tangent here. That is one of my favorite things about creating content is it gives people an opportunity to learn what you’re all about. And so I mean, I’ll make the joke to new clients, new advisors, Hey, I’m not sure Guy for accounts in the Cayman Islands, I’m all about paying what you owe and not leaving a tip. But for the most part, people are just nodding along and smiling as I say that because heard me say it before, they know what I’m all about. They don’t come to me because they want to move to Puerto Rico. They come to me because they want to stand off those rough edges. And then on the topic of content creation, I do selfishly just want to hear a little bit about the process of what led you to and then got you through publishing your first book that’s available for pre-order on Amazon, and it comes out I think at the beginning of the year.

Ben (18:58):

That’s right. Yeah, it’s available. I think we just did a Black Friday Kindle deal for 99 cents. We were briefly the number nine book in all of retirement planning, which I screenshotted that thought that was pretty cool. Shockingly when you give away something for almost free people buy it, which I was surprised. But yeah, so I always said I would never write a book. I said I would always just be a podcaster, but when you start to learn about some of the demographics of who buys books and who’s shopping on Amazon, 20 million people, something like that in my age, demo, listen to podcasts a week, a significant number of those people are willing to buy a book on Audible or on Amazon. So I’m trying to use other platforms. Jeff Bezos is pretty good about getting his ideas and his products out in front of people. So I want to piggyback on his monstrous platform to just grow the platform.

(19:44):

I mean, I’m never going to make my money back probably on what I’ve invested in the book with. Hiring a team for 17 months is not expensive, is not inexpensive, it is expensive, but just to get my message out to more people because that’s going to grow the podcast, grow the newsletter. I’m going to launch in my YouTube channel in January, and so all goes to building up the platform, and if you give it all away for free long enough, a certain percentage of people can raise their hands and say, I’d like some help. And that’s how the business grows.

Steven (20:07):

Ben, did you say what the book is called?

Ben (20:09):

The book is called Retirement Starts Today. It’s a non-financial guide to an even better retirement. So we want people to identify with their future selves. It’s a future self retirement book. We want them to live a no regret to retirement. So how you do that is you identify with your future self and say, what would he or she tell me to do? And then you work backwards.

Steven (20:25):

So Ben, let’s go backwards a little bit here because I get a lot of questions from advisors obviously on taxes, but specifically on how to incorporate taxes in content they create and in their marketing. And I know you’ve talked about this before, but it’s certainly not in a while on this podcast. I think a lot of advisors will get hung up on the method that they use and trying to pick what is the perfect way to get my message out there. When you originally went down this podcast route, what was that original decision making more importantly for advisors thinking about creating content now, whether on taxes or other topics, how would you help them evaluate what direction to go?

Ben (20:58):

Like what was my podcast origin story?

Steven (21:00):

Yeah, I guess basically, well, why podcasts and not YouTube or blogs or seminars. I mean, there’s so many different marketing channels and ways to create content. How does somebody navigate? Here’s the one I should start with.

Ben (21:10):

Well, I started with a blog and then I realized I’m barely semi-literate on a good day. I’m not a writer, I’m a talker. And then my grandma always used to tell me I’ve got a face for radio. So that ruled out YouTube right away. Even though I am launching YouTube in 2025, we’re going to get some TikTok filters, so I’m going to look like I’m a 26-year-old by in the years fellow, but I was subscribed to 29 podcasts back in 2015 whenever I launched the show. And so I thought, well, that’s where I need to be. There was five retirement podcasters at the time, so I thought, well, I’m pretty late to the game. This is probably never going to go anywhere, but we kind of just muddled our way through and we’ll record our 400th episode here pretty soon. So pretty well four, I think we’re at 3 million downloads or something, some crazy number.

(21:52):

But the reason we started the podcast is because I used to go, this is very old school, but I used to go to the energy generation conference. So North Dakota is a big energy state. Most people think of oil. It’s also coal. Coal is really more of the center of the state where I’m at. And they built all these power plants and they did generational hiring in the eighties, so 30 years after, the eighties was right when I was brand new to the career. So all these guys were retiring, and so we wanted to meet these guys. And so we’d go to this energy generation conference and I would rent this money machine, this money tornado machine. It was the tie into finances, and I tried to get people talking about retirement. These are like 58 year olds, and we did this for several years, and then everybody was, average age was 60, and then it was like 38 overnight because of generational hires for power plants. And so I thought, gosh, these retirees are getting fewer and fewer, and every retiree advisor in town knows these are the good clients, so it’s going to be more advisors pursuing a smaller number of clients. I live in North Dakota, total populations like less than a million. So I said, I got to get my message out there in some way. And so that’s sort of a few different avenues of how the podcast got started.

Steven (22:53):

That’s really interesting. What I’m taking out of that is there’s some really intentional thought to this because you can find examples of success on all sorts of platforms. There are still people growing incredibly successful practices, cold calling. That is not what I want. I have cold called before, not what I’m signing up for again.

Ben (23:09):

Done it, don’t love it. I’ve done door knocking. Don’t love it. I’ve done just about everything. I’ve done seminars, I’ve done webinars, I’ve taught college classes. Some things you’re fortunate that you’re terrible at it right away. So the universe tells you to stop doing it. Other things are moderate. I taught college classes years after I was doing the podcast just because one hadn’t fully caught on and one was still good enough to do another one. You get one or two interested people that’s good enough to do another one at some point. Those numbers don’t, once you’ve got a few hundred clients, which I don’t, but once you have a few hundred clients, the incremental one or two just not worth it anymore, you want to focus on the podcast where you can talk to 10,000 people at a time or whatever your numbers are.

Steven (23:43):

Yeah, that’s really interesting. Like I said, you can find successful examples of just about any platform. I think social media might be one of the more dangerous ones because the vanity stats give you the false impression of success.

Ben (23:53):

That is a tricky one. That’s a tricky one. You get 36 likes on a really snarky Twitter post and you feel like you did something, but if the phone doesn’t ring, what good did you do?

Steven (24:01):

Yeah, Ben, I can nerd out about this stuff all day. Let’s circle back here for a second and make sure that we have clear takeaways from this conversation. I think one theme, whether we talk about the way you work with prospects or you work with clients, the way this has evolved over time, a theme that stands out to me is consistency and getting the reps in that you talked about initially having to muddle your way through tax returns. And now, I mean I’ve talked through tax situations with you. You’re naturally self-deprecating, but you’ve learned a lot over the years. You do a fantastic job helping your clients navigate that because you consistently put the reps in. And so as this podcast airs in December, as we head into another tax filing season, this is the time that as an advisor, you need to be either starting a process for getting tax returns and reviewing them, whatever tools you’re going to use, whatever that system looks like, ideally copy someone who’s doing well with this, or if you’ve already been doing this for years, like Ben, it’s time to revisit and look at how do I improve that?

(24:57):

Ben, I know that that’s something that you do regularly is okay, what’s the next iteration? Is that delegating into someone else on my team? Is that getting them the training? Is that looking at some new aspects for my clients? But that consistency in getting those reps in I think over time is what’s going to make the single biggest difference.

Ben (25:12):

I think that’s the future. We actually just had somebody on our team, one of our advisors pass their EA exam, the third exam this morning. So we’re extremely excited. We’re investing in this, and I think right now it’s a nice to have, but in 10 years I think it’s going to be a half to have, I think every young advisor, 35 and under Young advisor, you’ve got to have a means to talk meaningfully about estate planning, which I did not have. That was an accountability thing for one of our mastermind groups. So we went out and got wealth.com and hired a lead advisor that has had hundreds and hundreds of reps with estate planning. So you need to be able to give meaningful guidance on estate planning and potentially even software to help clients self prepare documents. So 15 years ago, you need to hire a person specifically.

(25:52):

Now with technology, we can get there a different way, and you need to be able to give meaningful tax advice and or bring the client across the finish line with a prepared and filed return. So if you are focused on value expansion, then fee compression will never be part of the conversation between you and your clients. I think we’re at a fork in the road and we’re going to have Robinhood and a lot of these companies providing nearly free advice. It’s Dallas CFP, it’s like 500 clients per CFP, but it’s almost free. Vander has been doing this for a long time, or we’re going to have more premium priced offerings where we can go extremely deep on coaching and cashflow and estate planning and taxes and real comprehensive advice. If you don’t want to worry about fee compression, I would focus for the next 10 years on value expansion and just invest in your business as much as you possibly can. Still run a profitable practice, of course, because the market will go down eventually. It doesn’t like that lately. So you want to stay in business, so run a profitable practice, but invest heavily in your business. And if RTS isn’t on your radar, it definitely should be. That’s a great way to invest in your business.

Steven (26:53):

Well, Ben, I appreciate that and I’ll jump on that shameless plug you’re giving me there and say that yeah, if you’re looking for resources of how to accelerate that, and there’s lots of great ways to go about it, but we’ve put together some really great resources at retirement tax services, including around reviewing tax returns. You can send an email to advisors@rts.tax or jump on my LinkedIn profile. I have a link there for resources around reviewing tax returns. We’d love hearing from advisors, the checklist we use for reviewing tax returns that has been downloaded close to a thousand times now. It’s really impactful. Actually, one of my favorite stories, Ben was a taxpayer who downloaded it and found themselves about $10,000 in tax savings.

Ben (27:28):

Do you have a minimum number of returns that you want to do if you have an advisor relationship?

Steven (27:32):

Oh, that’s a great question, Ben. Yeah, for a select, we’re at about three or so dozen advisors that we do tax returns for in addition to the resources we provide around education, we’re seeing 15 to 20 is where we start really developing that rhythm and cadence where we’re working with multiple clients together. And so we develop a much better relationship. We have advisors that we work that I think our biggest advisor has probably 80 returns with us, but one or two off. It feels like an exception and not the norm. And so it’s just not that same experience. So we really love getting into that 15 to 20 range of advisors. So we get that good workflow going.

Ben (28:09):

I know when we first started, we sort of pitched it to clients as a beta test, so we reached out to I think 10 clients or 12 clients and said, we’re thinking about starting this new thing. I think a lot of these people were self preparers, so we weren’t breaking that CPA relationship that they already had. So we said, we’re thinking about rolling this out. Would you like to sort of beta test it with us? We’re going to cover the cost of it. And we sort of beta tested the program and now we rolled out to every client about half our clients take us up on it. So I was just thinking about if somebody wanted to explore it, could they pull their clients and say, if there’s 12 people that might be interested in this, just to roll it out as a beta test. That’s what worked for us. Of course, RTS was brand new at the time, so I dunno what you’re looking for, but that’s what got us excited about it.

Steven (28:49):

And we definitely still love working with you and your clients. So I appreciate the kind words there. And again, if you’re interested in learning more about how we work with advisors or getting into the program that Ben’s a part of, send a message to advisors@rts.tax. Jen on our team will get you all the information you need. Ben, thanks so much for being here. I love talking to you as always. It’s great to see you.

Ben (29:08):

Always a pleasure.

Steven (29:09):

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