Read the Transcript Below:

Amber Kuhn  

TPR nation! Are you looking to learn more about Matthew Jarvis’s guardrail strategy and how to communicate to clients? Visit theperfectria.com/guardrails to get exclusive access to Matt’s video example on presenting guardrails to clients, you’ll learn how to address those critical questions about how much income can be safely taken to retirement and what adjustments need to be made when the markets perform poorly. Visit theperfectria.com/guardrails to get your access today. 

Matthew Jarvis  

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Perfect RIA podcast. I’m your co host, Matthew Jarvis, with me today special guest Steven Jarvis, who is, in fact, my brother, but also a CPA. That’s the reason I think, Stephen, you’re my only brother who’s been on the podcast. So I want to make sure it’s clear that you’re not here because you’re my brother. But more on the CPA side.

Steven Jarvis  

Yeah, there’s three other brothers that have never been on the podcast. So I do that is what like helps me sleep at night. I am just somehow in this unique space more qualified than my other brothers, who have no interest in financial things at all. 

Matthew Jarvis  

There we go. There we go. Well, family dynamics on the podcast a lot of times, course, with your great work at retirement tax services and the retirement Tax Services summit, the desktop guide and the 8606 masterclass, all those great things. But today we want to talk about common mistakes, detrimental mistakes, potentially catastrophic mistakes that are made with IRA accounts. So not necessarily theoretical ones. We’ll touch on those, but ones that you and I have run into that it’s very easy for advisors, when advisor clients to fall into the trap of these mistakes. So Steven with that, let’s, let’s jump right in. 

Steven Jarvis  

Yeah, I think this is an area where advisors might think, Oh, geez. Well, I’ve never screwed that up. I never would screw that up. How could somebody screw it up that bad? But I mean, this is a whole spectrum of things. I mean, within the last year, advisor come to me because a client that I was not helping them with had just come to them because their last advisor had basically done the paperwork wrong on a rollover, and inadvertently, the check got cash before it made it to the next account, and this huge taxable event got created. And so, I mean, we have the one side of things where you need to make sure you’re doing the basic stuff correctly, and you don’t take for granted that it’s going to happen automatically. And then there’s the other end of things where about once a year or so, I’ll have a client that comes to me and says, Hey, I just heard about this really cool thing where I can buy foreign rental properties in my IRA and then still use the rental property myself and not pay taxes like this sounds like the best thing ever. So we have this whole spectrum of possibilities, and we got to make sure we’re paying attention. 

Matthew Jarvis  

Yeah, there’s a there’s a lot there. So let’s, let’s start through with some of those examples specifically. So your rollovers are a real common area of mistakes. Now, if you’re doing just a straight trustee to trustee transfer, so let’s use like the example, ever the client has a fidelity 401K account, and you’re helping to move it into a fidelity IRA account, and it all happens electronically with a quick phone call or form two fidelity, well, it’s pretty straightforward, pretty that’s going to get screwed up. The 1099, could still be issued incorrectly, but it’s in the reliabilities. But that’s a pretty straightforward one, a different one, though, on the opposite extreme, would be like a client has an old 401K, that’s a small dollar amount. They ignore it. The custodian pushes out a check so they get a check in the mail made payable to them. Well, now we have a scenario. This one’s really easy to mess up, right? Lots of reasons it’s easy to mess up one. Of course, they might just cash the check and throw in the bank. Well, that’s unfortunate, because now it’s a taxable event, and potentially, if they’re under 15 and a half the tax, the 20% it was withheld is now subject to the penalty, as is the money that they put in the bank. So those can get messy pretty quick. I’m sure see what you’ve run into those as well. 

Steven Jarvis  

Yeah, what makes it even messier at times is if the custodian assumed it was a rollover, was told it was a rollover, but sends that check. They might not have withheld taxes at all. The client cashes it, and then has this tax bill due, has penalties. It can get really murky really quickly. And the 1099 R is a form I rail on all the time, because it’s not super helpful at what it actually reports. And we’ve done other podcasts talking about things like qcds, where there just isn’t great reporting. But even what I just came across that I’m still actively working through with a client, they got an examination letter from the IRS for 2021 because the IRS picked it up to take a look at and is alleging that they owe taxes, penalties, amongst other things. It affected their child tax credit, all this stuff. Because even I’ve gone back and looked at the tax return, it’s one I filed. Went back and looked at the tax return, the 8606 was reported correctly for a backdoor Roth contribution, yeah, some of the IRS still flagged it and said, Hey, this should have been taxable, and so help the client fight it. I’m very, very confident we’ll get it sorted out. But this is why we want our documentation to be rock solid, even even in that simple example with the fidelity, fidelity transfer, we still want documentation of what happened in the unlikely event the IRS comes to ask questions, because unlikely is different than impossible.

Matthew Jarvis  

That’s a great point, right? The IRS is not going to accept unlikely as a defense, right? They’re going to say, Show us documentation, or we’re going to assume the worst, right? They’re always going to assume the most expensive option. Same with with basis, whether we’re talking about Ira basis or stock basis. Hey, listen, if you can’t prove it, we’re going to assume the worst case. So on the check and the rollovers again, if a client is ever getting a check made payable to them. You’ve got to be really careful. And if you’re doing any kind of that activity, or when K rollovers, irate rollers, any kind of scenario where they could possibly get a check, I just want to seed that in there. I want to say, Hey, Mr Mrs Klein, two things we need to remember. One, sometimes these companies forget that this is your money, not their money, and so they might make it difficult. The second is, sometimes they’re not good at following instructions, and so they might mail you a check instead of sending it directly, like we’ve asked. If you get a check from this company or from any company you don’t recognize, please give us a call right away, because there’s some important things that we need to do on that so that that’s a common area of issues.

Steven Jarvis  

There’s so many tax areas, Matt, where that point you just made is so important that we seed those expectations of what could happen. And sometimes, you know, as I’m talking to clients, we’ll even do with a little bit of a laugh, and for 98% of the clients, that will never be relevant, but it changes the outcome entirely. Of letting clients know, hey, it’s possible you can get a letter from the IRS, and if you do, we’re going to be there to help you with it. It’s possible that they’re going to send you a check and not follow the instructions that we give them, but just letting people know. I mean, that’s like the human condition, right? Yeah, the things that negatively impact us the most, from an emotional standpoint, are the things we didn’t think were possible. 

Matthew Jarvis  

Yeah. And this is one of the few places where I’ll risk predicting the future, right? So I’ll never predict, hey, where do I think interest rates are going to go, or elections, or tax laws or anything else, but if I see that, you know, hey, these guys might forget that it’s your money their clients always. Oh, you know what? Matthew told me that these guys were gonna forget, right? Or Matthew told me they might ask for an extra form, right? So I’m always gonna be receiving your point. Hey, Steven told me that the IRS might have a question about that, but he was gonna help me with this, right? So our mind will go back to that, versus a state of frustration or or even sheer panic. Steve, I guess, related that, since we’re on the topic of those Ira rollovers, how about mistakes with the 60 day rule? I think this is a common issue that I see where people kind of say, like, Hey, I’m going to use this 60 day rule as a 60 day loan. Lot of kind of misunderstandings there. 

Steven Jarvis  

Yeah, there definitely are some misunderstandings there. And as much as I love podcasts, obviously I host one as well. It can be hard for us sometimes, because we were talking quickly, we only got so much time trying to get through things. And I mean, all of these conversations really should come with a reminder of like you need to do your research and apply these to specific situations. Because I remember not too long ago, talking with our good friend Micah shilanski about using the 60 day rollover near the end of the year when we’re not exactly sure where income might fall out for things like premium tax credits and doing Roth conversions, and this can be a great way to create ourselves an extra window of time, but we’ve got to make sure that we have all of our ducks in our row if we’re going to go beyond the basics of tax planning or any kind of planning, gotta be really clear on when does that 60 day window expire. Are we remembering that there’s the 60 days and then we can only do this once within 12 month period. And whose Ira was it? Because IRAs are individual accounts, and so if we’ve got a married couple, there’s there’s some conditions in there, we got to really make sure we’re paying attention to we can create irreversible situations for our clients.

Matthew Jarvis  

Steve, this reminds me of a specific client that I had. This was a few years ago, and they’ve actually since, since passed away. And so what we’ll call them Gary and Patty here. And so Gary retired from his employer, had worked there for many years, had a 401k and had about $400,000 in it. And so this particular employer was one that issues checks. So some employers won’t do a electronic transfer. They issued a check, but the check was made payable to the custodian, and so we deposit it with the new custodian within the 60 days. So that doesn’t matter the 60 days of its payable the custodian. You don’t know a big deal. The following years, I always do. I ask for the client’s tax return, and I get the client’s tax return, and it shows $400,000 of ordinary income of Ira distributions, taxable Ira distributions, I said, I called Gary. I said, Gary, I saw that they had to show this $400,000 distribution on your taxes that you filed three months ago and that you owed like $150,000 on that. He says, oh, yeah, Matthew, that was terrible. We actually had to go get a home equity loan to pay that tax bill. And I said, Carrie, how come you didn’t call me? He says, Why would I call you? That’s just what happens when you retire. I asked my tax repair. They said, that’s what happens you retired. So I paid the money well, Steven, what had happened is the custodian had incorrectly marked it as a taxable distribution, so they put it in the wrong box, and the tax repair didn’t think of it, and so the client didn’t know any they just paid the bill. And so I looked at that. We saw it. We were able to get an amended, amend the tax return. We got the $150,000 back. We also saved ourselves an issue down the road, because that money, if it was deemed as a taxable distribution, it could go back into an IRA there was, like, all these cascaded issues, but it was a reminder. And I always remember the example of Gary and Patty that anytime we’re doing money movement, it’s not done until we verify that it’s correct on the tax return. This, I think, speaks Steven to your point on backdoor Roth contributions or rollovers or contributions until it’s report on the tax return, it’s not done.

Steven Jarvis  

Stories are great for reinforcing these things. Remember what happened? Because another example that’s the opposite extreme comes to mind a client recently this came up called Scott, and Scott has a pension as a former clergy member, and there’s some tax rules that are a little bit different with clergy, but their pensions are still taxable. We accepted very rare cases, yeah, but the 1099 that he received showed all of his pension as non taxable. The custodian for the administrator had not reported any of it as taxable, and so we intentionally filed a tax return that conflicted with the 1099 Sure, which? I bring this up for a couple of reasons? Well, one, to show that the opposite can be true as well. We like the errors don’t just happen in one direction. And also, just to remind people that the tax reporting forms, unfortunately, and I love an attorney to contradict me so we can hold some people accountable. But this is not some kind of contractual agreement between the IRS. It’s more of like a best effort, because I’ve never heard of a situation where the custodian was held responsible for incorrect reporting on a 1099, it’s it’s always the taxpayer who gets stuck with sorting this. Your example is a private example. The IRS is never going to sort that out, because they were told, hey, it’s taxable. The custodian, they marked it as such and moved on like nobody’s going back to that. If you had caught it, something that slightly different probably would have happened with Scott in this case, because at some point the IRS probably would have flagged that the year before he had taxable income, and then, if we were would have reported it in line with the 1099, and reported no taxable income, the IRS, at some point might have flagged that, but it’s not going back to the custodians, going back to the taxpayer. So as an advisor, as someone who cares about tax planning, you have to be getting these tax returns every year to make sure that the tax reporting happens correctly.

Matthew Jarvis  

Yeah, I guess. Let’s keep pulling on that thread. I’m reminded of another stress that we just story day for us we need like a campfire here. A client will call him Adam. He got a new tax repair at some point, and I was review, I was asked for last couple of years tax returns. In fact, actually see another thing was this actually came from we were doing a form 8021 so we were pulling the IRS transcripts, and we were looking at tax returns for the last several years. And I noticed that four years prior, they had been reporting basis on their IRA, and then no basis the next year. But no conversion, no, no, 8606 and what had happened is they had changed tax repairs, and the basis had gotten lost. So the basis has gotten lost, so we were able to find that basis tracking back down. But that’s a great example specific to IRAs, if they’re carrying forward basis on form, 8606 and again, you’ve done an entire masterclass on this. You’ve got to make sure year after year that gets tracked. Because I would say nine times out of 10 that’s anecdotal. Often the basis gets lost. Somebody just either gives up tracking it or forgets why it’s there, and it just doesn’t keep getting tracked on that nobody said double taxed. 

Steven Jarvis  

Yeah, as much as we love software and AI and all these different tools that help us, technology isn’t to the point to replace an advisor yet, as you well know, but there are certain life events that we should all have checklists around that we double check a few things. Retirements, certainly one of those rollovers, moving money between accounts. But you mentioned there, if someone is switching tax preparers, you should have a list as an advisor of, Hey, did the basis get carried over? Were there losses that need to get carried over? Was depreciation information carried over? They have rental properties or businesses. There’s these life events that as things are getting switched between professionals, between software platforms, things can get missed, and the software is never going to tell you, hey, that basic did you go back and look the last three years that there is basis. So there’s a huge opportunity for advisors who are being proactive and intentional about this to really change outcomes for clients.

Matthew Jarvis  

Yeah, there really is, Steven. Let’s shift gears a little bit. You alluded this at the beginning of the episode, which is situations where clients come in and they’ve heard about $5 billion Roth IRA accounts, or they’ve heard about buying property outside of the country and leasing it back to themselves, or whatever the case may be. Let’s chat a little bit about as advisors, when people come in with kind of hairball tax ideas. How do we how do we give space for that, such as, the client doesn’t feel like we’re insulting them, or that we’re ill informed, but at the same time, like, help the client see, like, Hey, this is this not a good plan? 

Steven Jarvis  

Yeah, that’s always an interesting question to have to navigate. So my perspective be a little bit different, because I’m not an advisor and a more site advisor, and so sometimes this makes it a little bit easier for me. And I have very constructive and collaborative relationships with advisors. So I’m never, I’m never throwing them under the bus, but I can use the advisor as a little bit of a buffer to say, hey, you know what? That’s a really great question. And then I remind clients all the time that taxes are never the primary, or almost never the primary, reason we do something their passenger on the busses. You like to say, Yeah, and so that I can feed the conversation back through the advisor. So we’re making sure we’re taking a holistic look at it. But Matt, for me, where it often starts is, I always want to come back to the basics to say, You know what? There’s a whole range of tax planning that we can do, and some of that, some of that flashy stuff is, is a lot of fun to talk about. Sounds exciting, but we’ve got to make sure we’ve covered the basic stuff first. And for a lot of clients, that’s as far as you had taken there. Oh, that’s right, we need. Let’s come back to these other things that we can just we can skip over really issuing an opinion on whether that’s a good idea or not. So that’s where I typically start. Yeah, I think that is a great spot.

Matthew Jarvis  

I’ve definitely run into this a lot of times with clients. And there’s a couple of tools I go back to again and again one and you kind of stole my thunder on that, which is great. It’s a good expression, right? I was like, Hey, listen, Mr Mrs client taxes are a passenger on the bus. They’re not the driver of the bus. And so corollary to that is we’re never going to do anything for taxes that we wouldn’t otherwise do. Yep, right. So giving money to charity is a great example of that. Like and I tell clients all the time, hey, you should only give money to charity because you feel like it’s an organization that’s going to make the world a better place, that we potentially get a tax benefit that is icing on the cake at best. This, by the way, we’re gonna sidebar here for a second. This is where, like, Charbel, remainder, trust and whatnot. These are great tools, but often they’re sold. It’s like there’s this amazing tax break. No, no. First things first, if this is a smart move financially, let’s go down that second would be if there’s a tax benefit attached to it. So So helping clients get awareness of that. I also step into your point of collaborating with advisors. If the client is really set on something that sounds like a bizarre tax idea, this is where I go to my Center’s influence. I say, you know, Mr business client, I’m not super familiar with this strategy, kind of for that is a it’s because it looks a little shady to me. But tell you what, let me reach out to the CPA that I relationship with. Let me get some more details. Why don’t you get some more details as well? And let’s circle back around next Thursday. 

Steven Jarvis  

Another approach that I’ll take, and I think I’ve heard you, you say similar things, just when people want to buy a rental property in Hawaii, kind of a thing, yeah, one of the things that can help, especially when I can tell that this is a new idea for the client they just came across that it’s not something they want to do for 20 years. Their their brother’s uncle just told them about this thing they could do, and they’re so excited about it, what I’ll do is somewhat intentionally repeat what I’m hearing back to them, but in a way that highlights the parts that don’t pass the sniff test. An advisor actually just recently reached out to me about this potential investment opportunity where you put in $50,000 and you immediately get a $250,000 charitable defection. The look on your face is appropriate. And so if a client comes to me with this that you know, they’re going to initially Give me what the sales pitch was, then I’m going to repeat back to them and say, hey, just so I understand this, right? Like I want to make sure I understand the logic here. Of it sounds like you’re telling me that you get to invest $50,000 and get a $250,000 terrible deduction. I’m gonna have to look into that, because that doesn’t sound like the kind of thing the IRS would be would do for us, because that sounds a little bit too nice. And so I’m intentionally highlighting kind of some of what sounds ridiculous to me, and then I’ll take it a step further and start asking the client to go back to whoever’s pitching the idea. I say, you know, why don’t you go tell that you work with a CPA who would love to see the documentation behind this, just so I can look at the numbers, because that’s sometimes where it starts to come undone when these things are really in those gray areas, or in just areas that we shouldn’t be in at all. When they hear the CPA wants to look at it, that they suddenly disappear or don’t want to talk about it anymore, which is another it’s a win for the client too. Of Well, great. Now I don’t even have to go down and, like, give this hard no and a sales pitch, like, they just ghosted me because they didn’t want to give the information to my CPA. 

Matthew Jarvis  

Steve, I’m glad you had mentioned that’s a brilliant approach that I like using in all sorts of angles. So we’re talking specifically about taxes, but it works if they’re getting pitched some kind of bizarre investment or some kind of deal that’s guaranteed to make money and they can never lose and I would just say, Listen, sometimes we hear things differently than they were said. Just ask them to send it to you the bullet points in an email, that would be great. Why do I want it an email like you’re you got the same, you know, stupid grade that I’ve got on. Why do I want an email? Well, now I have it in writing, which means that maybe there is something that I missed, like maybe they are, yeah, they do have something I’ve not seen before that would be great. Or now I have a written thing that I can forward on to whatever regulatory body I need to go to. So they said, Hey, this thing is guaranteed to give you Forex to return to the IRS. Cool, that email is getting forwarded to the IRS. Now they have a complaint line for that, right? Or the state insurance commissioner, whoever the case may be, also saves me from telling the client like, hey, this guy’s a crook. Yeah, I’m saying, Hey, listen, so that we all are clear. Could you just get those bullet points? That would be perfect, and it solves so many problems. 

Steven Jarvis  

There’s always new things to learn. The tax code is always changing. People are getting creative with the tax code. Backdoor Roth contributions were created on accidents, and I’m a huge proponent of them, yeah, and so I genuinely do want to learn. And so when a client comes to me, I don’t want to be like Man, that guy sounds like an idiot. You need to run away because I want to learn, either for one of two reasons, either to be able to see, hey, this is shady. We shouldn’t be involved, but now I can see how it’s being pitched, or this is something new, and I want to know that when, when this makes sense, to make my clients aware of it.

Matthew Jarvis  

Yeah, for sure, pulling us back to the IRA specifically, a big area of mistakes and a big, just kind of warning flag for us as an advisor, is anything that involves what’s known as self dealing on an IRA account, right? So like, hey, I want to sell my company to my Roth IRA, so that it grows tax free. Or I want to sell a rental property to my IRA, or I want to buy a rental property in my IRA and then contribute manual labor to manage it. Or I want to then use it as a rental myself for my own use. Anything that involves you as one of the people in the transaction is likely going to be prohibited, not necessarily 100% like there may be some exceptions, but as a rule of thumb, if you are one of the parties in the transaction, it ain’t gonna work so, uh, important one there, yeah, IRAs are meant to be completely separate from you as an individual. The other one that can get tricky in there, when we go outside of more traditional investments, is physical possession of the investments. This comes up with gold interest. Want to buy gold inside of their IRA, and then I’d have to go back and find the specific it’s great story.

Steven Jarvis  

I’ll have to go back to clients getting sold on this idea of I’ve got to own gold inside of my IRA, which someone else can have the investment conversation as to what you want to do with gold anyways. But just from a tax standpoint, the you as the individual can’t have physical possession of the investments of the IRA. So if you buy this gold or silver or whatever precious metal it is, and then it gets shipped to you, this is a huge problem. And you might think that sounds ridiculous, that happens. 

Matthew Jarvis  

Oh yeah, it for sure happened. So again, not something to go on willy nilly. Again, something you’d want to have like, Hey, can we get an email detailing that I always like to Stephen, especially on the gold one, I always I’d like to say, because I’m a little snarkier than most. Hey, could you ask that for just a copy of their IRA statement that shows them owning this gold or this real estate or whatever? Why do I want to because they don’t own any right, nobody. They’re not eating their own cooking. But it’s just, again, it gives the client this great ammunition that you’re not going to argue with. Right? If they go back and they say, Hey, my advisor says this is a bad idea. The guy is going to say, well, your advisor is an idiot, and here’s why, and they’re part of the conspiracy. But if they come back and say, hey, my advisor asked you, kind of just put those bullet points in an email, and if you could send me a copy of an investment statement, I could show up. That would be great. Suddenly all their ammunition goes away and they tend to disappear, thus saving the client the fraud or whatever the case makes. It’s a great non computational way to to sort that out. Steven any other big ones that come up with, with IRAs that you can think of, of course, we could go into required minimum distributions, which is a whole can of worms. It gets messed up quite often, especially for inherited or spousal rulers, things like that. Beneficiaries are obviously there are can of worms as well, not as much a tax issue, but a lot of Ira problems come from beneficiaries issues.

Steven Jarvis  

We can do whole episodes that we have on the retirement Tax Services podcast on inherited IRAs. The thing I’ll say, though, because I think it fits into this conversation, and maybe we haven’t specifically hit on in these words yet, is whatever area of tax planning we’re talking about, we have to have an intentional plan. That’s how we get ahead on tax planning is intentional and proactive. Because you mentioned inherited IRAs, which the IRS recently punted again on enforcing RMBs on inherited IRAs. And I see a lot of people react to that, thinking, hooray. I don’t have to worry about this for another year, and maybe that’s a good thing, but if we let taxes happen by default, most likely we’re gonna get killed on taxes, because by default, if we don’t do anything else. We’re going to take the entire inherited IRA in year 10, and we’re going to get killed all at once. And so people look at this, do I take an RMD or not as the litmus test of what I should be doing? But that’s really just one piece of the puzzle that we obviously want to meet the RMD if we have that requirement, if the IRS ever gets around to enforcing it for inherited IRAs, geez, literally back at the napkin. Write down the next 10 years and make sure you understand for your client. Are there any big life events? Are we going to retire? Do we have severance coming to us? We have RMDs on our own accounts, kicking in Social Security? What are these different things so that we know, hey, here’s a couple years where I want to take more of this inherited IRA. Or there could be situations where somebody’s going to retire nine years from now. Maybe we do wait 10 years to take it all, but we want to make it situationally specific. We want to have an intentional plan.

Matthew Jarvis  

I love it. I love it. Well, Steve, in this podcast like yours, the retirement Tax Services podcast, is all about taking action. So let’s take a minute to cover a couple of action items. I know the first one well, I’ll give a shameless plug here. The first one that comes to my mind is, of course, the retirement Tax Services Summit, which is September 25 and 27th that’s correct, in beautiful Phoenix, yeah, and Phoenix. So that’d be a great gathering. I’ll be there. You’ll be there. You know, dozens, hundreds, whatever, of advisors sharing how they practice taxes in real life. So there’s a lot of places you can go and listen to someone read you the tax code. And I suppose that’s interesting. What I always want to know is, how are you doing this with clients? How are you articulating this when you’re running into a client who says, hey, I want to buy gold in my IRA and keep it at the vault in my basement, how are you having that discussion? So, yeah, that’s action item number one. Go to retirementtaxservices.com and get signed up for the Fall Tax Summit. 

Steven Jarvis  

Yeah, and that, I’ll just comment on that real quickly, because last year was so well that we were able to expand it this year. We’re going to have a few more sessions. We’ve got some great breakout sessions that are going to happen this year. Obviously, the tax plan is going to be a big focus of it, but we’ve got people coming to talk about how to do systems and processes to make this a reality in your practice. We’re going to talk about delegation. We’re going to talk about the behavioral side of all of this. So this is really going to be an incredible event for giving you things you can immediately go home and implement. I love it. Actually.

Matthew Jarvis  

Item number two, whether you use our scripts or someone else’s, you need to have really clear, concise ways of articulating complex strategies, right? So, for example, Hey, your rollover is not complete until it’s been reported to the IRS correctly. Or, hey, sometimes these companies forget whose money this is, or, Hey, that sounds like a great idea. Why don’t you come and send me an email with the bullet points, just so I can take a look make sure I’m understanding what it is they’re talking about, right? So for whatever you’re running into in your practice, it needs to be that concise. It cannot be some convoluted well, on a Thursday, maybe it’s this. So whatever that is, find it and get as rehearsed with that as you are with your own name, right? That same level of confidence. And once I say, What’s your name, I don’t say, Well, you know, kind of depends who Jarvis. You know, Friends call me Jarvis. Here it is. So that’s a key action item. 

Steven Jarvis  

I’ll do a shameless plug that I think goes along with those. If we have actually two different master classes on the retirement taxer.com website, one specifically around form 8606 and back to Roth contributions, and one on reviewing tax returns for broadly. And why this fits in is because Matt you, you rattled out those scripts very casually and fluidly, because you’ve set them so many times you have to practice this stuff. And both of those master classes include scripts. It includes discussion around how you say this to a client. And I’ll be totally honest, even though I’m a huge fan of those masterclasses, that’s not enough either. That’s gonna give me a great resource. So you have to practice. And so you have to, whether it’s getting on camera or standing in front of a mirror, whatever it is, you gotta practice and rehearse these things. So when it’s time to perform, practice is over, it is perfect. 

Matthew Jarvis  

Well, Stephen, hey, thank you so much for joining us and for all our listeners until next time, happy planning. Hey, before you leave a quick word from our sponsors. Hey everybody, I want you to take a quick look around your office, and on your desk there should be the Retirement Tax Services Desktop Tax Guide. And if it’s not there, or if it’s not current, meaning you didn’t download it in the last month, go to retirementaxtservices.com and download the desktop tax guide. This is a must have resource for every financial advisor committed to tax planning.