This is The Perfect RIA, in case you didn’t know. Bringing you all the strategies to help your business grow. Are you happy? Are you satisfied? Are you hanging on the edge of your seat? Sit back and listen in while you feel the beat. Another myth bites the dust…

Micah Shilanski:  Well, welcome back to another amazing episode with the perfect RIA. I am your cohost Micah Shilanski and with me, as always is Matthew Jarvis. How’s it going, Matthew?

Matthew Jarvis:   You know, it’s going pretty good, Micah. I just bought myself a new motorcycle. So this may be the last podcast episode we record, if I don’t kill myself next week on the motorcycle. But life is good.

Micah Shilanski:  That’s good. Now did you sign that life insurance application I sent to you? I saw when you were going to do it. I think this is a totally insurable interest thing.

Matthew Jarvis:   I think so. You’re right. Podcast cohost on the reason for insurance, it should fly. No problem.

Micah Shilanski:  That’s right.

Matthew Jarvis:   And now we’ve got Backstage Pass up and running, and we’ve got profit flowing in. So there’s definitely an insurable interest there.

Micah Shilanski:  There you go. And I got my breaks guy coming to “Fix”, quote unquote, your bike and it’s next week so it’s totally fine. So everything’s good.

Matthew Jarvis:   I love it. Like they always say who needs enemies when you’ve got friends.

Micah Shilanski:  That’s right.

Matthew Jarvis:   Well, aside from poor decision making, buying motorcycles, we’ve got a pretty major topic to discuss today, and something that I think a lot of advisors overlook as an opportunity. They almost view it a lot of times, I think as a nuisance versus as a real opportunity to add value. And that is of course required minimum distributions.

Micah Shilanski:  This is something that is so important, right? And this is one of those little areas that you can be a head of and deliver massive value to your clients and they know that you’re always taking care of them, or you can be behind in it and they wonder why the heck you’re not doing your job. Those are the only two places that you get to be with this.

Micah Shilanski:  But it’s super easy to get ahead of this because there’s no surprise. We know when a client is going to be subject to an RMD. Yes, the Secure Act just change. So it’s going to be slightly different, but we still know what the rules are already. Clients don’t know right now, but we know what those rules are and how it’s going to work, and one of the things that’s really important in delivering massive value, and again I call it the dishwasher rule, but you got to communicate this stuff to your client. You knowing that they have an RMD, you knowing how much that RMD is isn’t worth anything until the client knows about it.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. And this is really important to staying ahead of it, almost to the point of answering questions before clients even know to ask them. When you think of other service providers you go to, that’s where you’re really impressed. You’re not impressed when you go to your dentist and the dentist says, “Hey Micah, you should probably floss more often”. That’s not really that impressive. Like, well geez, thanks for that. That key part wisdom.

Matthew Jarvis:   But when you go to every client when they’re 68 and you say, “Hey, in two years you’re going to be subject to this required distribution thing. I just want you to know that we’re ahead of it, and you’re probably asking yourself these couple of questions”. And you rattle off, well, how much am I required distribution B, when do I have to take it? Can I move it to a Roth account?

Matthew Jarvis:   The client says, “Oh, those were all my questions. I’m so glad that you already are aware of those”.

Micah Shilanski:  It’s perfect, right? Yeah. I love what you said right there. Knowing their answers before they know the questions. This is the key of an expert right here and this is the key of delivering massive value is being ahead of that.

Micah Shilanski:  The second thing I wanted to pull out with what you said right there, Jarvis is 68 right? You didn’t say 70 or April 1st the you’re following, you turn 70 and a half. Or now 72. You said 68 and this is a really important thing, and I know we do it in our office as well. You got to be ahead of this, not when they turn 70 or when they’re subject to the RMDs, but a couple of years in advance, you got to be articulating this, what does it mean to the client so they know that you’re taking care of it. So how do you articulate that to your clients? Then maybe let’s get into our processes and how do we administer RMDs?

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah, let’s do that. That’d be great. And of course, for the backstage pass members, we’ll have samples of everything we talk about today inside the backstage pass. But I would start by saying that in those client communications, we are communicating to every single client who is aged 68. Actually, in our office at 69, but Micah, after you mentioned in our pre-recording that you do at 68, I’m going to now do 68, maybe even 67 to beat you.

Matthew Jarvis:   I’ll email, your clients, “Listen, Micah’s probably not going to talk to you about this until next year”.

Micah Shilanski:  He hasn’t mentioned it yet, has he? He hasn’t even brought up these RMDs.

Matthew Jarvis:   But this applies to any clients that are on automatic RMDs. We send them a notice every year. “Hey, we’ve confirmed that your automatic RMD is set up correctly and it will distribute on whatever date it’s set for, and so you’ll get this amount”. For clients that are not subject to RMDs, maybe they don’t have an IRA account, we’ll say, “Hey, just a reminder, you are not subject to an RMD”. And so we’re communicating every year with every client, now aged 68 and older, previously 69 and older.

Micah Shilanski:  Yeah. So, that’s the key right there. Jarvis didn’t just say some clients or just the clients that it affects that’s out there, because every client has this question, therefore every client when they hit 68 is going to be talked about and that’s inside there.

Micah Shilanski:  Now we have a different process in our office from when you are pre RMD versus when you are RMD. Pre RMD, 68, 69. We’re talking to clients about it that yes, this is coming, but then we do that same thing, plus then once they’re 70, we’re taking RMDs. Now they’re in the distribution mode. Even though they’re on automatic distributions, we’re still going to confirm that the distributions are set up and they’ve been taken.

Micah Shilanski:  When we do our RMDs, I like to get them done at the beginning of the year. I don’t like to wait till the end of the year for whatever reason, so we get ours done pretty much in first quarter. They’re pretty much nailed out. In fact, one of our team members just the other day went through our RMD list and it took her about two or three hours, that was about it. And she went through every single client, she outlined all of the RMDs, she got it all filled out. And we’ll get a copy of our template of what she does. It’s now built into our CRM, but we still have our old template that’s there, that we’re going to make available for backstage pass, outlining how it affects every single client. So it doesn’t really take that much time to do, but I’m always shocked at how many advisors do not do this.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. Or rely on the custodian. They’ll say, well, the custodian will send them an RMD notice. And I tell clients even that, “Hey, you’ll get notices from the custodian. Those can largely be ignored because the custodian doesn’t see that you have multiple accounts”. And really, to be honest, the custodian is just sending those out as a CYA, it’s not a value add from them.

Matthew Jarvis:   But one thing I want to just remind the TPR nation about on this is people work with us, one of their main motivations in working with a financial advisor is delegation. They want someone else to take care of it. So while you and I are thinking about required distributions throughout the year, for them it may not even cross their mind ever. But when it does, they want to be like, “Oh, Micah’s got that taken care of”. Not, “Oh geez. I wonder if Micah’s got that taken care of. I haven’t heard anything from him. I don’t even remember the last time we took an RMD. Maybe we missed it. I don’t even remember ever taking it”. Because they’re busy with other life. But if they say, “Oh, that’s right, Micah sent me a notice three months ago. He sends me a notice every year. He’s got it taken care of”.

Micah Shilanski:  Yeah. And once the clients get to 72, 73, so they’re one or two years into the RMD automatic phase of this, it’s on autopilot. Just as you said, they know it’s taken care of in February of each year. They know leading up to it, “Oh yeah, we’re going to take care of this in February. They know in our meetings, it’s taken care of now. They still may ask if it was done, even though we’ve communicated with them.

Micah Shilanski:  So we have our meeting in March, we took care of their RMD in February. We get a meeting in March. We talk about it, yep, it’s done. We already sent them out a letter, plus we’re physically talking about it. In my October meeting, I’ll still have a handful of clients that say, “Micah, I know we talked about this, but did we take that RMD?”

Micah Shilanski:  And so it’s also important all throughout that year to know what the status of that RMD is for that client. Have they taken it and how much? Because when I get my second set of surge in October and those clients come in, they’re going to say, “Micah, did we satisfy it?”

Micah Shilanski:  “Well, yes”.

Micah Shilanski:  Then the second question is always, “How much was that RMD and where did it go?” Because they’re just on autopilot, they don’t remember this. And knowing the answer to those questions is so important because we know clients are going to ask them, and so we’ve got to have that information in advance. So this RMD thing is not just a one and done. You’ve got to be queuing it up, so that you’re successful all throughout the year with their questions.

Matthew Jarvis:   It really is. Now, we talked about this also in our webinar a few weeks ago on delivering massive value in client meetings. But something that I do in my office for every single client meeting, for any client’s aged 69 older, we have a printed RMD report for that client and I have it for every single meeting, even if it’s already been taken care of.

Matthew Jarvis:   It’s just in with my medium prep sheet because it comes up. Micah, like you said, clients will ask, “Hey, did we take care of that?” And I pull out this one page report that we have for backstage members and I turned it around and I say, “Oh look, here it is on April the 30th. We took your distribution of $10,000, it went to your bank account. We held out a $1,500 for taxes. The IRS wants their piece of it”.

Matthew Jarvis:   And they say, “Matthew, what did we do last year?”

Matthew Jarvis:   “Oh perfect. I knew you were going to ask that. Here’s last year’s and the years before as well, so that you can see that and it’s all on there”. Because Micah to your point, I had clients asking about it. I want to be ahead of their questions. When they say, “Micah, did we take care of that?”

Matthew Jarvis:   And you say, “You know what? We did and I’ve got this little report for you”. That’s amazing. Now if it doesn’t come up in that October meeting, I’ll just slide that report to the back of my stack and not look at it, but I’ve got it because I always want to be one step ahead.

Micah Shilanski:  You’re prepared. I love it. Now with this, there’s a couple of things that we need to be thinking about. One, we keep saying RMDs, blah, blah, blah because the TPR nation knows what we’re talking about. This is not the way we speak to clients about this, at any time. Now I will say RMD because that terminology is out there in the mainstream of which they are going to say, but I’m going to quickly follow it up by, “This is your required minimum distribution that the IRS says you have to take the money out of your retirement accounts, and I’ll explain the rule a little bit”. I always want to make sure clients are understanding what I’m saying.

Micah Shilanski:  So industry jargon, you want to limit it to not use it as much as possible. For the few times that you do need to use it, I think you need to throw in a full explanation of what that is to make sure you’re on the same page.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. The verbiage that you use explaining to that to clients. If you jump into some lengthy sections of the tax code, that’s not really going to help. The way I articulate it to clients and Micah, I’d be really curious to hear yours, I say, “Mr. and Mrs. Client, this account, your IRA account, this is money that you’ve never paid taxes on, and the IRS bill is due for some of this money, and so they’re requiring that you take out a small amount each year. They don’t really care what you do with the money. They just want their piece of the action. You can take out more than that, but you just can’t take out less or there’s a real big penalty there. Does that make sense to you?” And that’s what I say to them every time.

Micah Shilanski:  Yeah, basically. Do they ever follow up with, “Well, how much do I have to take out”, or, “How is that calculated?”

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah, and I like to put quips of humor in there. I say, “The IRS has determined your life expectancy at 27.4 years”.

Matthew Jarvis:   “How did they come up with 27.4?”

Matthew Jarvis:   “I have no idea. Mine is not to understand the tax code. It’s just to implement it”.

Micah Shilanski:  That’s right. We are how people. We understand how the tax code works. We are not the why people. “Why is it set up this way?” I have no idea.

Micah Shilanski:  So I tell my clients all the time, “You’re welcome to ask as many how questions as you want. You cannot ask why questions”. Why did the IRS do this? I have no idea. No one knows it. It doesn’t make any sense.

Matthew Jarvis:   A somewhat related joke that I use all the time. I always ask clients if they know why it’s called a Roth IRA. And I will confess, I was several years into my career before I knew the answer to this. And of course it is that Senator Roth in his infinite humility named this account after himself. So my joke is always with clients, “If you ever see a Jarvis IRA, all hope is lost”.

Micah Shilanski:  I was going to say, the infinite humility, come on, you know, you and I would do the same thing if we had it. You’re listening to the Perfect RIA podcast. Clearly humility runs deep within our veins.

Matthew Jarvis:   Another real value add, and I just really want to emphasize this. RMDs required distributions are just one of a dozen examples of where you can deliver massive value to clients. And we get hung up sometimes saying, “Well boy, how massive is it to just send out their RMD?” It’s still a massive value. But related to that, QCDs, Qualified Charitable Distribution, we have set up for any of our clients that are charitable at all. We got them a checkbook for their IRA account because we use Fidelity as our custodian. I think all the custodials would do this, and we put a big label on it, “For charitable use”, only with a couple of the key points for the rules. It has to be a pure charitable donation, not receiving anything in return, I.e. buying girl scout cookies doesn’t count. That’s what our label says. And so we talked to clients about that, “Hey, let’s use some of your required distribution. It’ll save you a couple of dollars in taxes if you give it to charity”.

Micah Shilanski:  Now when you’re doing those QCDs, and I love it. And again, I bring up QCDs even prior to 68, if I’m talking to longterm tax planning with clients. Because 68 is not the first time clients are going to hear about this. Clients hire us before they retire, and so, I’m getting clients in their 50s. So really, when we’re looking at it, we’re talking about RMD projections, we’re talking about tax planning, we’re talking about Roth conversion, all of those fun things. So this isn’t a mystery to them that’s going to be there.

Micah Shilanski:  And then as they’re getting closer to 68 we now start having that QCD Qualified Charitable Distribution. I’m not going to say the age I talk about it, I just so I can beat Jarvis. If I start saying the age, he’s just going to undercut me at the next pod.

Micah Shilanski:  No, it’s 68 when we talk about those. But they’ve heard these concepts before, and then we start laying in that charity aspect of it that’s there. But Jarvis, do you ask all of your clients if they should do, or if they want to do the QCD? How do you bring up to do a charitable contribution, without them feeling like an ass because, “No, I don’t want to give to charity”.

Matthew Jarvis:   I feel like my soapbox is piling up over here about the kinds of people who give to charity. It’s just stacking up. “No, we’re going to pass that”. But especially now that it doesn’t show up on most people’s tax return, unless they’re giving quite a lot to charity because they’re under the standard deduction, I just do it as kind of a preemptive thing. I say, “Hey, if you’re supporting any charitable organizations, it makes the most sense to use your IRA money. Essentially you’re using the IRS’s money to pay these charities”.

Matthew Jarvis:   But I do throw in there a caveat, Micah, just to be sensitive to that. I would say, “When we’re giving money to charity, first and foremost, it’s because we believe in the cause and we believe it’s the right thing to do. The second part of that is then how do we get the maximum tax benefit?” But we never put that cart in front of the horse. You give to charity because you think it’s the right thing to do. We maximize it with the IRS because we think that’s also the right thing to do.

Micah Shilanski:  Yeah. This is one of the reasons we grab several years of a client’s tax return. So it’s a quick thing that we can do. Just go back and look before we had the TCJA, Tax Cuts Job Act. Go look at the previous returns and did they make charitable contributions on there? Not 25 or $30, but did they make an actual charitable contribution? And if they did, then that just highlights you need to be having this conversation with those clients for sure.

Micah Shilanski:  And again, we tell all of our clients about QCDs to give them the opportunity if they want to do it or not.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. And we’ll discuss it with every client. I think maybe we have two or three clients where they just say, “You know what, I don’t give any money to charity”, and we just have a note to not ask them about it again. But other than that, if somebody doesn’t have a QCD checkbook and it’s tracked in our CRM, we ask and we try to figure out why not.

Micah Shilanski:  One of the things I was talking about on our pregame a little bit too with this Jarvis that we like to do with the QCDs that’s there. Any value add that we like to do, I like to try to keep track of it. Well, our big firm ride value adds, we track as well, so we can make sure that we’re taking care of everything for clients and everyone has got that value add. But there’s also the smaller ones like the QCDs. Like if we do a QCD for a client and they’re going to give 10, 20, $30,000 away for charity, well you just saved them a decent amount in taxes. Are you tracking that? That could be a good thing to throw in your CRM as well, because there’s no place this was going to show up in the future, because keep in mind that QCD doesn’t show up on their tax return.

Micah Shilanski:  So they’re going to forget about it in a year or two. The CPA’s going to miss it. All of those things. Again, dishwasher rule. If you’re doing something for them and they don’t know about it or they can forget about it, we’ve got to make sure we tell our clients. So if I had a client that had had a QCD in the previous year, then what I’m going to say to them is, “Mr. and Mrs. Client, it looks like last year we did that QCD for about $20,000, it saved you $6,000 in taxes. Is that something you would like to do again or is that just a onetime donation?” And I always give them the out of the one time donation if they don’t want to do it again. So that way we can talk about it with them and make sure it’s good.

Micah Shilanski:  But yeah, I would say bring it up and bring up the direct tax savings, because again, you did it, you got the work, so you might as well get the credit for this as well, because that is not the $20,000 contribution, it’s the $6,000 in tax savings that the clients are really going to fix on.

Matthew Jarvis:   Now Micah, in your example, you had $6,000 in tax savings. Would you also mention that if it was $100 in tax savings or $50? Do you have a bottom threshold for mentioning to clients how much you saved them in taxes?

Micah Shilanski:  No, I don’t think I do. I think I would talk about the tax savings, that’s inside of there. I can’t imagine I would round up from 50 cents to say it was a dollar. I don’t think I’ve ever had that opportunity. But I would always mention the tax savings that are going to be there because for one, who doesn’t love a tax saving? All of us want a tax saving. And I don’t care about your political affiliation, everybody wants a tax saving. So with that in place, I always want to highlight it to the clients.

Micah Shilanski:  And the flip side is also true. If they are making a decision which comes with a additional tax liability, I always want to make sure they’re talking about it. If they want to take an extra $10,000 distribution from their account, great, then that means we’re going to have to take $14,000 out of your IRA. So it’s going to work both ways with the taxes. I want to make sure they know what they’re paying and I want to make sure they know what they’re saving.

Matthew Jarvis:   I like that. We really need to do a future episode on taxes. We’ve done them before, but we need to do some more.

Matthew Jarvis:   One of my biggest clients, I got because I was able to show them how to save $100 a month on their Medicare premium. So they had just barely gone over the limit for just Medicare premiums, the means tested Medicare premiums, and I showed them a small change. QCD was part of that to get below the limit, saved him $100 a month in premiums on their $1.4 million of income and their $20 million in net worth, and they were ecstatic. Ecstatic.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. It was a huge difference for them. And I just highlight that because it makes a big difference, even the smallest dollar amounts.

Micah Shilanski:  Yeah and don’t put it in a rate of return, because that’s infinitesimal small, just to be really clear. This is definitely about that and if you attended our webinar that we had about client meetings in the report that I have, and I do a tax planning with clients, there is a checklist that’s right on that report and it shows pre and post tax planning, how it affects their Medicare premiums.

Micah Shilanski:  And this is a big highlight, Jarvis, quite frankly, I made it more prominent because of you in this story that you had about your client. We always talked about it but I didn’t bring it up as such a big thing. And now it’s a very big focus in our tax planning report, answering that question before they have it. Because when you answer that question, again, we’re a little off track on RMDs, but it kind of has the same effect. RMDs could kick you over that threshold. And I want clients to know about it in advance. I don’t want them to get a letter from the social security administration and say, “Hey, you’ve got to pay an extra hundred dollars in Medicare”. They’re going to be pissed. I want them to know about it in advance.

Micah Shilanski:  And also if we’re doing changes, like if a client’s moving into retirement a little bit late, and I know they’re going to get a letter. We’re always in advance with a Qualifying Life Event letter, QLE letter with the social security office, making sure that we’re filing this, we’re telling clients about in advanced, because when you tell them in advance, “Hey, you’re going to get this letter, they’re going to try to charge you more, but don’t worry, we’ll get out of it because of A, B, and C”, it’s a total win. Versus they get the letter, they get mad and they call you.

Micah Shilanski:  The outcome’s the same, you can still fix it. But the question is, what was that client relationship? You did in the latter one if they’re getting a letter from the IRS, if we’re getting a letter from social security because you did something that now they’re going to have to pay more taxes, you’re not getting the wind for it. You’re not being seen as an expert. It’s not massive value. You’ve got to be ahead of these things, just like RMDs. You’ve got to be ahead of RMDs with clients.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. We can’t emphasize that one enough. A couple related to that one, if they’re doing QCDs, I always warn them. I say, “Hey, we’ll send you a reminder in January, but there’s not any way for your accountant to know that you did a QCD, it does not show up anywhere. So we’ll send you a report, make sure it gets to your account or this will get messed up”. I also tell them that the IRS has no way of knowing that they’re doing a QCD, so it’s very likely that you’ll get a letter from the IRS that says, “Hey, fidelity told us that you took out 10,000 and you only reported eight. What’s the difference?” When you get that letter? Give us a call and we’ll take care of it.

Matthew Jarvis:   So Micah, to your point, I’ve got to stay ahead of those. And in January I’m going to remind them again, “Hey, remember we did this QCD. We’ve got to make sure your CPA gets the information on it”. They hire me. One of the reasons they hire me, like I said before, is delegation. I don’t want to make them remember things. I remember things. That’s why you pay me.

Micah Shilanski:  And that’s another thing too. If you’re not already doing it, one of the value adds that we throw out there is we have clients on the 8821s, the IRS release of information letter that allows us to get information from our clients. And basically what happens with this is we get the IRS’s tax letters a week before clients get them. So, this is just totally a great thing. So if anything gets missed, we get to see those IRS letters before the client gets them and we can be ahead of this with the client, which is just an absolutely amazing thing. So if we’re not doing that, that’s another thing that I would say.

Micah Shilanski:  I know it’s a sidetrack from RMDs, but you brought up the IRS letter and it’s been a huge benefit for us this last year, being ahead of these IRS letters versus being behind them.

Matthew Jarvis:   Now, a quick note on the 8821s. Getting that setup internally is a bit of a challenge, so I would attend Micah’s live event in November. This is a shameless plug, but Micah has got a system for that. This is not just to grab the form off the IRS website and mail it in. It does not work quite that easily. But once you have it set up to Micah’s point, it is a game changer.

Micah Shilanski:  Yeah, it was a pain in the rear. Thank you for highlighting that. Yep.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. It turns out delivering massive value takes a lot of work.

Micah Shilanski:  I was going to say, this is a great segue for action items that are there.

Matthew Jarvis:   It is.

Micah Shilanski:  And this is a big thing for people that are there, when they look at Jarvis’ practice or my practice, they’re like, “Oh well we do the same things”. Then you start looking at the nuts and bolts, but you don’t actually do it. This requires work. Yes, we talk about time out of the office. I’m broadcasting from Hawaii right now, because we’re on a vacation with family. But these are still things that you have to do that require a lot of work in order to have this freedom. So the question is are you going to do it or not?

Micah Shilanski:  Now, before we get into these action items, do keep in mind that in our backstage pass holders are going to get full access to the documents that we’re talking about today. So the examples that Jarvis and I gave, my blueprint process that’s going to be there for how you go through the RMDs, Jarvis’s RMD report, our PDF of our spreadsheets for how this thing is set up. All of that’s available in a backstage pass. So, if that’s something you’re interested in it, make sure you’re signed up to get that.

Matthew Jarvis:   And what’d you call those Micah, RMD rip off and deploy? Is that what-

Micah Shilanski:  Oh, that was my first action item. That’s right. My first action item. He’s cutting me off today. Does everybody see this. Just undercutting me at every saying.

Matthew Jarvis:   It’s because it’s raining and gray here in Seattle, and you’re in Hawaii. I’m so envious.

Micah Shilanski:  There we go. All right, so my first action item for everybody was either create via R&D. So if you don’t have it, make sure you’re creating or R&D your own process. Now, R&D, if you don’t know, stands for Rip Off and Deploy. So take the process that we have in backstage pass, swap out your logo on it, go for it, and use that process. You don’t have to recreate the wheel. This works. But implement or create a process if you don’t have one for these RMDs, for a massive value perspective, not just for doing them, but for doing them with massive value. So that’s action item number one.

Matthew Jarvis:   Yeah. Action item number two. I would, and this has been a theme really of today’s podcast, get in front of your clients. Communicate to them before they’re asking it. We’ll do a podcast on the Secure Act specifically, but you’ve got to a lot of clients that have questions about that, and you need to get ahead of it. Not some generic piece that you’ve printed off of Kitsis’ website, which by the way is really good technical information. But if you’re from produced some generic crap about the Secure Act, that’s junk. What you need to do to get in front of him is say, “Hey, Micah, in your situation, here’s what the Secure Act means to you, your family and your goals”. That’s getting in front of people.

Micah Shilanski:  Yeah, absolutely love it. All right. Your third action item that we’re going to have for you is QCDs in RMD letter. So if you don’t have one, you need to get one. You need to get this as well. Almost every single client you should be bringing up QCDs, even if you don’t think they’re charitable minded, you may or may not know, but also you don’t want someone else to bring it up to your client that you never talked to them, you never gave them this opportunity.

Micah Shilanski:  One of our biggest jobs is helping clients make informed decisions. We’re going to educate our clients, we’re going to give them a recommendation, but we’re going to inform them about their options, so they can make the decision that’s going to be there. And if you choose to withhold that information, you’re not informing your client. You’ve got to let everybody know about them.

Matthew Jarvis:   You really do. I think all of these things are interrelated, right? We’ve come off of 10 years of really great markets and we had two technical bear markets in there, but part of our job is keeping clients to the plan. And when the markets go up dramatically, you need to keep them to the plan and when it goes down dramatically, you need to keep them to the plan. And you say, well how does this tie into RMDs? It ties in because if Micah is communicating all these things to his clients, his clients can say, “Micah is on top of everything. In fact, he’s on top of things I don’t even know that he needs to be on top of. I’m sure he’s on top of…” Fill in whatever cat catastrophe is in the news. “I’m sure he’s on top of interest rates or inflation or the bear market or trade wars with China or blah, blah, blah. Micah is our guy. He’s on top of that”. And things like QCD reinforce that.

Micah Shilanski:  And speaking of on top of it, I only have a handful of clients that actually call me before they go to vote, to know what’s going on in the local elections and how to vote for things. It’s an interesting thing. So you just become this trusted advisor of a source of information on what’s going on. So there you go. That’s what you want to be.

Matthew Jarvis:   Very good. And last action on my hand. If you’re not part of the backstage pass already, you really ought to check it out. We’ll probably do another webinar. Our last one was a huge success. For those backstage pass members, be sure to log in and R&D all that information you paid for. It is yours to use.

Micah Shilanski:  All right, well this has been a blast as always. And until next time, happy planning.

Matthew Jarvis:   Happy planning.

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