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Y’all planning for this?

Welcome back TPR Nation. This is Jamie Shilanski in an episode of Worlds to Conquer and I’m going to share with you the inside my office Shilanski and Associates is going to be gearing up to tackle as we move into summer. So for those of you that know Shilanski and Associates is our RIA up  in Anchorage, Alaska, it was started by my mom and dad, Floyd and Rosa Shilanski. About four years ago, my brother, my baby brother, Micah Shilanski and I had been at the helm for the last dozen years or so. And we have just instrumentally gotten better and better and better, but make no mistake about it. That is because we are standing on the shoulders of giants. We are refining processes, we are delivering massive value, and we are impacting 1000s upon 1000s of heartbeats. That’s how we refer to our clients. We don’t necessarily refer to them as clients internally, we always call the heartbeats. Why does it matter? The heartbeat is impacting the heartbeat. How many heartbeats can we tell, why? Because I never ever, ever want to reduce our financial advisory practice to account numbers and account sizes and value of AUM. This is about making massive multi generational impact on individuals because we have the greatest profession in the world. We get to deliver so much value and help people be an incredible sounding board during every single one of their massive milestones throughout their lifetime. And if we do our job right, that is the marriage that is the birth of children. That is the career changes that is a loss of parents putting parents in retirement centers and welcoming grandchildren. We get to experience so many generations of impact by providing people with incredible financial advice from a trusted source that they get to use as a sounding board. We don’t get to slack off or we get outside of Surge. So what is surge? Surge is a specific time block period in which we do nothing as financial advisors but we back to back with clients to deliver massive value. It is strategic, it is focused and during the springtime, it is our biggest surge out of the year. Now why is it our biggest surge is it because we have more time to meet with clients? Nope. We keep it kept at those six weeks that we talked about. That’s all of March and half of April. Why do I get a half of April? Because I tie it to the tax deadline. Are we meeting with more clients during spring surge? No, we’re not. We’re meeting with the same amount of clients during that spring surge. But it is our biggest surge because of the majority of the information that we’re gathering from our clients during that time blocked period. In the month of March. Clients are geared up to hunt and pack their financial information. This is a an extraordinary time. We start reminding clients in January of all the information that they’re going to be receiving in the next couple of months. And then asking them to provide our office with copies whether or not they think it applies to something that’s going on with them. If they see it. If it involves money, why don’t they go ahead and provide us a copy of it. This is the time of year where clients have to remember their login your username and passcode to get 1099 information to get things set up. And so when they’re remembering that we’re saying hey, by the way, why don’t you go ahead and throw that into box.com. That’s our secured client portal where we can share information. But one of the hard rules in our office is we don’t send anything out unsecured we really don’t even try to send out blank documents to clients design. Why? Because if I email you a billing document, when you send that document out, what course of action you’re going to take? You’re gonna email right back to me, unsecure! So we really try to push everything we possibly can into box.com because of their encryption protocols. And then when a client gets back to us through box.com so we really try to in fact during one of our SEC examinations, they asked what was the biggest threat to client security of their information? And my brother answered: Clients. Clients are the biggest thread to Client Security and Information. I cannot tell you how many clients are like hey, can I just check text over my passport? Nope, sorry. Don’t text with the client. What can I just email to you then? No, no, you can’t. So we really have to advocate to keep our client information safe by taking these protocols and not deviating from them unless unless we absolutly have to and there are rare occasions because there are probably three clients in our entire practice that just because of their age and their technology differences. They don’t understand how to use the portal. But most of the time I mean for all the rest of the 500 clients or 497 clients. They get it they know how to use it. Everything is online. Everything pushed us online during the pandemic. And so this is a wonderful time for people to be logging in grabbing their tax information and providing you a secured copy of that. So I love to see everything that they would give to their CPA. Oh, here’s a fun thing that I’m going to share with you if you have an enterprise office. I just learned that from talking and networking with other financial advisors that in their enterprise office, the second year associates for financial planners so the first year they get their CFP the second year they have to go become enrolled agents and the way that that enterprise office operates is that all the all the financial advisors that go into their third year so the first year CFP, second year getting enrolled agent, third year they started doing the tax returns of all the clients. I thought that was brilliant in respect for this particular practice. I don’t know if it’s something I would adopt for us, but I thought it was brilliant because what better way to get completely acclimated into a client’s finances than rolling up your sleeves, taking your rings off washing your hands and getting all inside of that dough. I mean, you’re just leaving and massaging and letting it rest and coming back to it. I mean, you’re really working that information over in order to get everything out of it. So I thought that was a great idea. I’m actually going to have our new hire, our paraplanner he’s going to start his Enrolled Agent for a different purpose. I don’t think that we’re going to bring taxes back in house. My brother when he first start off the career started off a side hustle of Shilanski tax services because it was just natural. In fact out there right now I’m probably speaking to many CFPs that also are CPAs or maybe you guys do taxes inside your financial planning firm. If that’s the case hit us up on social media or at theperfectria.com. Let us know if you’re managing both of those. If you do taxes inside your financial advisory firm, or do you outsource that out to the center of influence? What does that look like? We did Shilanski tax planning it became so incredibly laborious that my brother couldn’t actually bring on financial planning clients because he had so many tax clients that he was meeting with that we just ended up with a bandwidth problem. So we kind of closed that down went dormant for a few years we worked with centers of influence, but in 2021 we had a lot of CPAs retire in this country. We had a lot of tax professionals say it’s been real. It’s been fun. It was not always real fun, peace out Cub Scout and took off. They rolled up their practices and told their clients go find somebody else. But the problem was is that as we knocked on doors most people weren’t taking average clients. They were looking for the boss the back office support solutions they wanted to do the large corporations in which they picked up the accounting recurring revenue every single month as well. And so we found a real hard time placing people with CPAs that would do the average person’s tax return. So we partnered up with retirement tax services and had them start preparing returns for individuals in our practice that we’re having those type of challenges. We’re premiere members over there. So Stephen Jarvis is their head CPA. They’ve got a wonderful team. They also have an entire network of other financial advisors. That they get to you get a pin questions, they do quarterly updates, they give us a 37 points  check list which is fenomenal way.

It’s good for somebody like me that gets to you know, like, go down a checklist to item number seven, and I’m like, Yeah, we’re done. We’re done. We’re gonna move forward, but it really forces me to look at that tax return. Go for the 37 point checklist and make sure it’s good to go for the client. And I love it! Because of that 37 point test, if you haven’t purchased it, jump order retirmenttaxservices.com downloaded it. I think they sell it, it’s super marginal. I mean, it can’t cost more than 50 bucks to sit there and go through every single tax return. Either if you’re as a financial advisor, or if you’re an operations person, relationship management. And you catch things you wouldn’t otherwise, to draw our attention to and they’re small.

They’re small things that actually have big impact. One of them that they ask is has there been an address change? Seems stupid like a stupid question, to update your address with the IRS? Well, if you moved addresses, maybe you move states and maybe you moved to a state that’s going to have an income tax problem. And so it was really great exercise for all of us to go through in our office. I don’t think I’ll bring taxes back in house but I will give some of our paraplanners and our advisors that training Gleim offers it g l e i m my we looked at their syllabus, and this is just really good foundational training for financial advisors. As financial advisors, we’ve always operated in kind of a murky area between law and taxes. And there is a bigger question about what is legal advice versus what is financial planning advice, and what is tax advice versus tax planning advice. So we’d like to make sure our clients know we’re not attorneys. We’re not CPAs but we’re going to work hand in hand with them. And we’re going to bounce ideas off of another reason I really like working with retirement Tax Services is it gives me a sounding board before I go to the client, and I say hey, listen, I got this client. This is what we’re thinking. We want to do a whole bunch of qualified charitable distributions out of the IRAs when they hit age 70. What’s our process? How do we move forward? And they’re like, actually, you know what, under the Cares Act, you could do XY and Z right? And so it’s just good things good, real good sounding board to bounce ideas off before you go present to a client and figure out you can or cannot do something. So I like working with them for that reason alone. I don’t think we’ll bring taxes back in house but we always do tax planning for our clients. So one of the things that we are trying to be instrumental with our financial advisors about is doing a five to 10 year tax plan. What does the horizon look like? Now? This is a conversation I have with many CPAs because you know us as financial advisors, we’re all about the forecasting. We’re all about the what ifs the predictions. What’s possible. Hey, what do we do this and this scenario, that’s not where CPAs live and operate, they live and operate with what is law? What is fact today, and it’s not even just a current year. What was it last year because I’m doing all of this looking backwards. You want a fun exercise, it’s really kind of sad is looking at engagement letter of a CPA firm and look at everything that they tell you to do and go back. Or what they tell you what they charge for right, we’re gonna do tax planning, tax advise. We’re gonna look at minimizing your tax liability. You know, all of these things, and they go to your clients as they do they do XY and Z. Oh, no, they just prepare me return and tell me what I owe. All right. So we like to take it a step further in our office and working hand in hand with those CPAs to bounce ideas off, strategies. How can we do everything for tip the IRS, they’re earning far enough of our hard earned dollars? We don’t need to leave a tip on the table for the extra work that they’re doing. So when another financial advisors go to that Enrolled Agent, I’m going to give them a good foundation of taxes because they see a lot of tax returns. So when we partner with any CPA firm, we always ask our clients to give us a copy of the tax return. Now I’m always looking for an opportunity where I can make it as stupid, simple and easy for the client as possible. So when they are in our office, if they are working with a CPA firm, that’s not retirement tax services, because we have a blanket one for them because they work with a lot of our clients. But I go out and I say Hey, could I have you sign this letter of authorization? I’d really wanna make sure that I provided your CPA with as many of the 1099s that you are coming out of Schwab, that’s where we custodian add or I would like to see a copy of your return before it gets filed. I’d be happy to review a draft a second set of eyes never hurts. And they say oh my gosh, that would be fabulous. So now I have the client sign an LOA. Now we have our mission to go to the CPAs office and I can get the information instead of asking the client for it. Why because clients are not always responsible for getting us the information. Now, their responsibility. They’re not responsible to follow up with the task of how many people that they’ve shared this information with. And so if I can make it easy for the client by having them to sign a letter of authorization, I’m going to do that. And then I’m going to task my relationship manager. Remember my relationship manager manages the relationship with the client. They don’t provide financial advice, but they do things like schedule or follow up with third parties. So I’m going to ask my Relationship Manager I’m going to say hey, Mr. Mrs. Client, have a signed letter of authorization with XYZ CPA firm, please go get the Working Papers, please go get the draft tax return. And then our relationship managers can send that over they can work behind the scenes they can get all of their region, so I make it less of a nuisance for clients anytime I can save a client one or two steps, I’m going to take that action. I’m going to do it on their behalf because one I’m a control freak. I am a control freak. I want to make sure this stuff is getting done. I want to completely checked off my to do list and then to I want to provide massive value to the client and when they come to us it is to simplify their life not add a level of complexity to it. And so I want to take anything that I can make it simple for the client. I’m going to take on the burden I’m going to take on that action and doing alright, so we’ve gone on to the CPA firm or maybe the client is responsible for getting us the tax return however that happens. We’re getting the return and once we’ve got the return and it needs to be the executed not just a draft, it’s okay to have a draft but I want to upload a new version on top of that with the executed version. I want to make sure I’m going to do things like fall with the client Mr. Mrs. Client, it looks like you had a tax liability of $20,000. I’m just calling today to confirm that that was paid that you submitted that payment to the IRS. Oh, I gave the CPA check. Fabulous. Thank you so much for letting me know. Or actually you know what I meant to jump online and do that. Oh my gosh, I’m gonna have a penalty Hold on. Great. Can we schedule appointment with our service team, and if they have any difficulties, they can certainly walk you through how to take those steps online, whatever gets it done for the client, whatever like level of concierge service that we can help the client with. We’re going to do that. Alright, so now we’ve got a copy of the tax return. Now we’ve made sure that they have made their payment. Now for any client that owes taxes. Most of the time. Whatever software the CPA firm is using maybe proconnect, it doesn’t matter. It’s going to kick out an estimated tax worksheet and it’s going to give you those little vouchers and say Mr. Mrs. Client, you didn’t have enough money withheld throughout the year for your taxes. Therefore next year, we recommend that you make these estimated payments and it’s gonna be the single sheet of paper but with just 1/3 of it telling them what they think their estimated tax payments are going to be. Here’s a low hanging value add that you can do and it costs very little time inside of your customer relationship management software CRM. Micah and I my baby brother, we created infinity. That’s our CRM, that’s our brain trust that we use for our financial planning practice. So inside of our CRM, we capture all of this information for the client. So if the client has an estimated tax payments that they need to make next year, we’re flagging that for the summer appointment and during that summer appointment, the financial advisor might say Hey, Mr. Mrs. Client, you know what, I think it makes a ton of sense to update your Social Security taxes that are withheld. And then the client says I didn’t think that taxes came out on Social Security. Well, great. Let’s talk a little bit more about that. And then that gives us a segue to make those sorts of incremental adjustments or if we have a client that just needs to make estimated taxes, we can send them out to expired Mr. Mrs. Client. As a courtesy reminder, I’m sure your CPA firm has already mentioned this to you, but you have an estimated tax payment of $10,000. If I can provide any assistance or you need a free of any additional cash for that, please let our office know, low hanging fruit. Why is that low hanging fruit? Because the CPA firm already did the calculations very spat out what they think the estimated taxes should be. Now whether or not it’s accurate because maybe the clients income and inflows as much of ours do but that’s up to you and your client relationship. Most of the time, they’re going to be relatively close and if they’re not relatively close, what a great opportunity to say Mr. Mrs. Client, I know based on last year, the CPA firm that you’re working with recommended that you meet estimated tax payments of $10,000 every single quarter what they may not have been privy to is we’ve 100% converted your IRAs into Roths, therefore we won’t have that additional income. I’d like to take this opportunity to let you know I think you can say that $10,000 every quarter this year and not apply it to the potential tax liability.

BOOM! Massive massive win for you as a financial advisor, but you’ve got to be able to go back and look at those returns. Look at the advice the CPA is giving. Have a conversation with the CPA. I never go well your CPA doesn’t know what they’re talking about because they didn’t know XY and Z. Instead I called Mr. Mrs. CPA Miss CPA. I see that you’ve recommended Bob and Sue to get $10,000 estimated payment. I wanted to let you know we’ve 100% converted all their IRAs to the Roth this our last tax year. They’re not going to have those additional income burdens those additional tax burdens. What do you think about adjusting this down? And then you have a dialogue and conversation? I never say your idiot CPA did XY and Z. I want to make sure I’m having a respectful dialogue. Because the CPA is a historian. They’re looking at all of the information that the client has provided them for months or year past past past tense and so they don’t get to do a lot of the forward planning. They don’t get a lot of forward seeing. And that’s where the difference between tax advice and tax planning comes in. Having that dialogue having that respectful conversation, and then taking every opportunity you have as a financial adviser to provide a little bit more value. And it’s low hanging fruit stuff like that. I told you the two things that are really really super low and tangible and that you are able to do one letter of authorization make it stupid, simple. Two, do you got the estimated taxes. Does it make sense during your surge summer schedule to talk to clients about either increasing their withholdings or setting up an action sequence inside of your CRM for your relationship manager to remind your clients that they need to make an estimated tax payment? Where can you take those wins? That’s what we’re looking for. All right, the third super low hanging fruit that to this day, I am beguiled at how impactful it is. It is so impactful of a value add that if a client doesn’t get it, I get an email saying hey, we were traveling, and I didn’t get this, can you make sure you put it in my box.com account? It was really really helpful for me. And when Micah first presented it to me because he presented he was like, Hey, why don’t we do X, Y and Z? And I was like, Oh, that seems silly. That’s when they get an onboarding or or tax organizer from their CPA. Why would we do this? I have never heard a client tell me how much they love the tax organizer from this year. That’s not true. I have one client ever tell me how much they love that binder and tax organizer. But I hear about this value add every single year especially if a client doesn’t get it and that is the 1099 value add. So what we did was we created a list of which custodians which companies the client should receive a 1099 from Allianz Prudential Schwab fidelity, whatever this is, we capture that information inside of our CRM. We use Mail merging to create a value add and we say and we created a checklist, Mr. And Mrs. Client as you prepare for this year’s tax season, we wanted to take this time to provide you with a courtesy list of what we think you’re going to receive 1099s on. It’s going to be xy and z companies custodians, please make sure you watch out for those. And by the way, Mr. Mrs. Client, if you don’t receive those ones, and their custodian or Charles Schwab or one of the companies are affiliated with, please contact us. Our team will make sure we put a copy in your box.com account. This was tremendous. This was gangbusters. Why? Because our responsibility was to take complex topics and make them super simple for clients. And this allowed us to do that they love this checklist. And so at the end of every January this goes out it’s one of the first things that they receive. Clients take pictures of it on the refrigerator, they magnet it up there and they start check marking the box of when they start receiving these 1099s and if they’re missing one, it brings it to the top of mind attention. So when we talk about value add, so a value add is a client deliverable that takes a complex topic and boils it down to as simple as possible in a one page if we can, if we can’t make it more than one page. It’s certainly not more than two. We don’t in our office present 80 to 100 page print out to client builders or financial plan. Why? Because we care about progress not prettiness. What does that mean? Whenever I’ve seen a client carry around 100 page booklet of financial plans, their execution on any of those is marginal at best. And also money’s fluid. Those plans are static. You print them down, it’s done. And same is true with our value ads. We print them down that’s a static piece. Money’s in motion. Money’s constantly in motion. So on our value adds, we try to keep them on one page. We deliver a value at every single quarter to a client. Our value adds repeat every couple of years. Why? Because they matter every couple of years. The 1099 is a regular one. We tried to we tried to say hey, maybe we’ll do something different. But we just had an overwhelming response from our clients that they loved it. So why are we going to change something that the clients absolutely love? Why would we take something that is working really successfully and then say oh, let’s not do that anymore? That was too successful. So we’re conscientious of doing that. Alright, so now we’ve grabbed these tax information. And now we know a couple of different things. And next value add that you can do we don’t do this with our clients. We have this conversation in our meeting. So this becomes part of our homework sheet. So as I mentioned inside of Infinity, our CRM, we capture a lot of client data, our brain trust, and then we created something my especially our mom and dad created this years and years ago, and this was called a homework sheet and the homework sheet used to be literally a carbon sheet of paper. So it was a piece of paper that had a carbon copy. Out the talking points in the conversation, they would list what the financial advisor was going to do and they would list the client homework on there. And then they would rip off the carbon sheet but one copy went what the client wants to do with us. Today we have upgraded that and the whole sheet prints out vitals for us. And so just like if you were going into a doctor’s office and they have like your vitals reported on the chart, that’s exact same thing. We call it a homework sheet because it is a homework that we need to do as financial advisors or the clients to the one my mom and dad started. We still have a section for financial advisors and we have a section for the client of who’s going to do what because as financial advisors are some things we can do but there’s some things the client just has to do. Get us your pay stub get us your employer booklet change your allocations on a third party managed platform. You know get us your wills and trusts there are things the client has to go and do but I want to follow up on so we keep that homework in place and then our relationship managers will follow up in two weeks. I am a huge advocate of setting client deadlines why Parkinson’s Law. The work takes up the amount of time that you allow for it. So I will say to a client, I will say hey, listen, we just finished all your estate planning. One of the greatest mistakes that I see clients make is they pay 10s of 1000s of dollars for this wonderful estate plan comes this beautiful leather binder and then they forget to update the beneficiary designations. I’m going to make sure your custodian accounts are updated with all the investment new ones that we have here. But Mr. Mrs. Client, can you go to your bank? Can you go to your title agency, can you go to your employer? Can you get these beneficiaries updated? Yeah, we’ll totally do that. We’re not going to forget great. I’d like to set a deadline around this just so that I don’t become increasingly annoying. And you already know Mr. Mrs. Client, I am a huge control freak. I need to see verification that these things are done. Not because I don’t trust you. I don’t trust the person processing this paperwork on the other end. I want to see that this has been updated and the clients would want to get a laugh out of that. And I said Mr. Mrs. client can we agreed to have this completed in the next 30 days? Great. I’m gonna have my relationship manager call you on the 31st day if we don’t have everything or we’re gonna remind you,

is that okay with you? Yes. And guess what? I was always going to do that. But now I have their acquiesce now I have their buy in now. I have their agreement that they’re on board with this plan. And I will have the relationship managers call two or three times until this gets done. Why? Because it’s important to get done if you’ve ever sat across from a widow or widower that didn’t have their beneficiaries updated and now you gotta go through the whole probate process. Oh, you only make that mistake one time. And so I become incredibly annoying. I’ve seen this done as much as I possibly can, and an advocation for our clients. And I’ve never had anyone say hey, I really don’t like that. They’re like, no, this is fantastic. This is what I need. Please stay on top of me. I know I’m not doing my end of this and I need to get this done. So that’s one of the reasons that we do that. We take on our homework sheet as part of those vitals, we also write down their taxable income. So we’ll have their AGI we’ll have their taxable income. We’ll have their estimated taxes last year we’ll have their marginal and their effective tax rate. And this is really nice for us as financial advisors because then when we’re there, we’re doing the planning, we can say well actually hold on last year, I see that you’re in the 28% tax bracket. What if we did and we’ll grab the guide that retirement Tax Services gives us we’ll look at the tax chart and we’ll say hey, what if we converted, you know, 75,000 out of your IRA to a Roth so we’ll continue tax planning as part of our dialogue. We don’t do or have conversions. We really, really, really, really tried to dissuade clients from doing Roth conversions until October of every year October we get really, really busy doing Roth conversions, because oftentimes clients don’t know what their income is going to be. And if we wait until that 10th month, we got a pretty good idea. So we’ve got a really good understanding of where they’re going to end up income tax wise, and we also know what their tax brackets are going to be at that time. So that makes it a really powerful opportunity. But it is amazing. The credibility you will get when you look down at your form. And now that homework sheet is now on digitize, we put it on our Remarkables we take our notes, clients do not get a copy of it. Now if there’s something we change is just internal for us. But that’s also our pulse point when we do our dictation. So when we finish up our meeting and we’ll go out we’ll do our dictation. I’ll pull up the homework sheet and we’ll make sure that we talk about each one of those pulse points on that and that’s been really great for individuals like me that you have a really powerful conversation. And maybe you know, with all the financial advisors, you’re going through 45 minutes of stuff and then one little note can trigger Oh yeah, talk about X, Y and Z in the future. So it’s been really great. And it’s wonderful to look down and say well, actually so last year I see that you’re at a 22% tax bracket, and 20% whatever that is, and then the client is like, oh gosh, I love that you keep track of these things because they’re not. They’re not their whole world our whole world is  their finances. Their whole world is not. Their whole world is their job and their retirement, and their family and their health and all of these other things that they have. They trusted us to take care of this aspect of it. So really powerful. So once you have all that information, it’s great to capture it and put it inside of your CRM and then outline over the summer. What are your value ads going to be for either this year or next year? Doing all that forward? Planning because you just got all of this information from the clients. If you’re sitting here listening to the things, saying Jamie that’s all great, but I’m a one man shop. I don’t know how I’m gonna accomplish all of this, or I have an assistant but I think this might exceed their skill level. I don’t feel real comfortable getting your tax return. Email us at lifestyle@theperfectria.com. There are several paraplanner in firms out there that offer this sort of back office support solution. I’d be happy to make an introduction. We’ve used some in the past. We stopped using them just because we had enough personnel on board that our personnel was taking over this, but I’d be happy to begin introduction to a company that could assist you in this capacity. And at least get this information in there and done. This doesn’t have to be a full time you gotta have people for projects there CFPs out there for hire all day long. And you could say hey, I’m gonna hire you. I want you to work on inputting all the tax information, we created a module inside of our CRM, go through every single tax return through the month of May and June. Add this information in – garbage in garbage out. You got to spot check and even if they don’t go credentials are spot check their information make sure everything is good so that when you extract that information to run your value add you have garbage pretty down on the paper and not and report that to the client. There’s nothing more embarrassing. I hate not having the right information on a client deliverable and it could be something stupid. And a lot of times it’s we sold that vacation property last year but it’s still showing up on the net worth report. Can’t stand when that happens. TPR Nation! This is Jamie Shilanski in an episode of Worlds of Conquer. Tons of action items for you right now to take forward momentum action on. So use the end of this tax season to start planning for your value adds, start doing the work to set you up for success with the clients later. But most importantly, go find people who share your values and change the world.