Transcript
Steven Jarvis (0:00)
Foreign.
Dave (0:08)
What is up?
Ann (0:09)
And welcome back, everyone, to another episode of the Practical Planner podcast. You got me and Ann and Dave, the whole team here, but we also have Steven Jarvis here. I'm sure everybody, if you are just. I think if you're listening to this podcast, you have to know who Steven Jarvis is. He's a, you know, great content creator, great in the tax base, works with financial advisors, kind of helping their clients get taxes done, do tax planning, etc. So, Stephen, thanks for joining us today, even though you're at a conference.
Steven Jarvis (0:37)
Yeah, super excited to be here. If I only recorded podcasts when I was at home, I wouldn't get nearly as many of them done. So, yeah, that doesn't matter. I'm in Columbus today as we record this, getting ready for an FPA symposium. So, always excited to be able to get in front of advisors, talk about how they can help their clients.
Ann (0:52)
Love it, love it. And I'm really excited for today's topic because I don't know if we could have a better team to talk about what we're going to talk about. So I think in the financial planning world, um, especially if you come from broker dealer world, wirehouse world, like, you are extremely scared of two things. One of them is the word tax and talking about tax. The other one is talking about things that have to do with legal, right? And that's estate planning in the world that we're in. And, you know, I think a lot of my job when I talk to other advisors is like, helping them realize that when you're at a really big firm, they don't want to risk anything for you. Right? You're a big firm, you're one advisor. They honestly could care less whether you're there 10 years from, from now. They just want to make sure you don't ruin their firm. Right? And so when they think about tax and legal, they know that there's, you know, advisors can go to way wrong areas, lead their clients into a bad spot, and that can lead to issues of their firm. And so instead of like this being the line in the middle that you can't cross, they're like, let's take 100 steps away from there. So you're not even close to having any issues. And so I think that, you know, when we, a lot of probably the people listening here are more independent, more RIA world. And I think when as advisors get there, there's a lot of learning about what can we do, what can't we do? How do we best help clients? And so you Know, when you think about, you know, an advisor's role and what to do and how. How do they talk tax and legal without crossing that line?
Steven Jarvis (2:22)
Yeah, it's a really good question and one I get all the time. I'm sure you guys get to navigate it quite often as well. And so the first thing I like to on this topic is just a reminder to every financial advisor out there, you already do tax planning. It's just that some of you are intentional about it and the rest of you are a compliance risk. And that might sound kind of backwards because you probably think of Thomas to your point, especially depending on your background, you're probably thinking, oh, I'm a compliance risk. If I really aggressively talk about taxes all the time, if I'm helping my. My clients move to Puerto Rico, which, that's a whole different thing. And maybe you are a compliance risk, but for most, for most advisors, they just, they forget that every money movement has a tax impact. And so we have to keep that front and center, especially as the CPA world continues to get more and more compressed for resources. A lot more pressure on preparers and things like that. Not excusing some, maybe some of the lack of capacity or help that goes on and just acknowledging a reality that more and more clients are going to be turning, and rightfully so, they're going to be turning to the people who help them with the rest of their money decisions to say, hey, wait, all those decisions you helped me with had an impact on my tax return. I expect that you're going to help me make sure it got reported to the IRS correctly.
