RTS #073 Help! Where’s the tax “easy” button?

I’ll just cut right to it: there is no easy button.

There are absolutely ways to make tax planning and being involved in your clients’ tax lives easier, but it still takes work. The “easier” button is having checklists and reference guides that ensure tax planning gets done consistently and effectively (bonus points: they also help with delegation and getting the team involved). Those can be checklists and reference guides you develop yourself, or you get from someone else, but the best advisors I know have resources to take their client experiences and outcomes to the next level.

If you go the DIY route on tools like this, make them as specific to the clients you serve as possible. This looks like getting tax returns for your clients and focusing on the topics, forms, and line items that come up most often. Take notes of the most common tax questions you get from clients or the most frequent areas of frustration for them come tax time. Do those two things, and you’ve created a short list of what you need to prioritize for creating or finding resources, AND you’ve also got the topics for your content creation for months to come.

Whether you are creating your own tax resources, are a member of RTS already, or are getting resources from another great source, the next step should always be testing those resources out on your own return and having your team members do the same. Remember that practice always comes before performance. Don’t take a reference guide into a client meeting if you’ve never walked through it in a practice setting. And if you really want to be top level, that practice session will be recorded so you can watch it back and look for areas of improvement.

Being involved in tax planning takes work, but if that work is intentional, it is 100% worth it (and we define “worth it” as creating positive outcomes for your clients!). There are two months until the end of 2024, and then the calendar turns over, and we have a few months of straddling two tax years. As one gets closed out, the other gets kicked off. Now is a great time to be revisiting and improving your internal resources, dusting off the resources you have access to but have set down, or exploring new opportunities to learn and expand your tool kit.

One opportunity to do just that is next Wednesday, October 30th, at 9 am PST, when I will be joined by Micah Shilanski, CFP®, for a free webinar covering practical considerations on getting Roth conversions done before the end of the year. Yes, the title is a mouthful, but with the right roadmap, the execution gets easier.

Happy Tax Planning!