The Mark Perlberg CPA Podcast
The Mark Perlberg CPA Podcast
EP 67 - How to Find the Right Tax Strategist without Overpaying
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Can the right tax strategist transform your financial future? Join us as we uncover the essential steps to finding a competent tax planner who can navigate the complexities of your finances—from real estate to investments and estate planning—without costing you a fortune. We’ll guide you through the critical process of due diligence and explain why recommendations from peers with similar financial situations can be invaluable. Discover how to evaluate potential tax planners based on their communication skills, proactive approach, and track record with clients resembling your profile.
For elite entrepreneurs, the choice between a compliance-focused firm and a strategy-focused one could make a significant impact on your bottom line. While the latter may come with higher fees, the sophisticated, value-added strategies they offer can translate into substantial tax savings. We'll provide practical advice to avoid overpaying for professional services while securing top-quality tax planning. Tune in for actionable insights on vetting the right tax strategist to maximize your tax savings and streamline your financial health. For more in-depth guidance, visit www.prosperlcpacom.
Let's discuss how to find a tax strategist without overpaying. There's a lot of resources and articles and influencers talking about how they can do tax planning for you and for a lot of folks who are realizing they finally have reached a point where they're tired of overpaying and taxes, might feel a little overwhelmed by all these different options and struggle to make a decision here. So we're going to discuss how you should be looking at this and making the best decision for yourself. First, let's talk about where to find them. If you're going to find someone through, maybe, a cold resource, like they show up in an Instagram feed or YouTube, or maybe they're on a Google ad and you don't really know much about them, that's fine. But you really want to do your due diligence. Don't just stop at the first person you see who says they do tax planning. This is going to be a really, really intimate relationship, because tax planning involves not just looking at that one real estate property you have or that one business. It's looking at everything and your family dynamic, your retirement accounts, your investments, your future, your estate planning. So you really want to put a lot of thought into this and not just find the first tax planner in your neighborhood On that point, and not just find the first tax planner in your neighborhood. On that point, it doesn't really matter if they're local. There might be some nuances with the states you're in, but most competent CPAs are going to serve clients across the country and they're designed to do that.
Speaker 1:Another thing you want to think about here. Another thing you want to think about here don't just use the family friend or the accountant around the block. Don't just find the easiest resource or the first person that comes into your network that offers tax planning. Really take some time to find that right person. Even if it's a family friend or it's someone who you know, like and trust, that doesn't mean that it's the best relationship for tax planning. Again, this is such an extremely important concept of finding that right relationship, and the right person for your friend may not be the right person for you. Sometimes there's a personality element, there's a process element, it's a specialization element. So here's some other things to think about as far as finding that. How can we find that right person for you and where do we search?
Speaker 1:One idea I like here is for you to look within other people. Now, this may sound like a really obvious solution here. But why not look into other friends of yours and colleagues who already have accounts doing to them what you want them to do to you? So if you are a real estate investor, why not reach out into your community of real estate investors and talk to someone in your situation to make sure that they know someone or at least see if they know someone who can diagnose their situation and do an effective tax plan and make sure that their situation is going to be relevant to yours? So if this person is just renting out a single family rental to their grandma and makes $100,000 a year, but you make $2 million a year and are buying multi-million dollar investments, you may find that their success with that friend of yours or colleague is not going to transfer over into working with you because you are going to have more sophisticated tax issues and you're going to have a higher need for advisory sophisticated tax issues and you're going to have a higher need for advisory. So here's some things that you can ask your tax accountant or prospective tax accountant to make sure that this is the right fit.
Speaker 1:Think about the challenges you've had here, and I often find those the most common challenges are communication and also that they're being proactive, and you also want to see the how they've served other clients in similar circumstances. So really try to dive into the details. How do you communicate? Because a lot of clients or a lot of CPAs are behind on their client communication. So how do you ensure that the client's inquiries and requests are being met in a timely fashion? What's your process here to make sure this is done? Do they just say, oh yeah, I just read my email all the time, or do they have a systematic approach? Do they have a team that's collaborating on the client communication? If you have an elite firm, they're going to have a very clear and precise answer of how they've built a system and protocols in place to ensure effective client communication Also effective client communication. Also, how do you ensure success? What are their protocols for quality assurance and making sure that the client's needs are being addressed and the proper staff are being assigned to it? Really try to get details here, because if you're working with someone who is maybe less adequate or competent, they're going to give you a lot of fluff. Get specific answers of how they do this and you'll see from someone who's really elite that they will give you a detailed answer of how they built these refined processes to assess the needs and what they've done with their clients, and they can give you clear examples of how they are going to be able to address your need and prevent any issues from arriving.
Speaker 1:Another thing I think you should all ask is ask these advisors to explain other clients in your circumstances. So let's say you're an eight-figure earner, you're a seven-figure earner. Let's say you're exiting out of your business as a multi-million dollar exit, you're a high-income earner or maybe you're just getting started. Ask them, tell me about some examples of other clients like me that you've served, and try to learn about the successes they've had and how they've had strong relationships with those clients. Another thing I want you to think about here now. Here's something to avoid here. So you want to avoid this question.
Speaker 1:When trying to find the right accountant, Do not start with price, because if the first thing you ask is, hey, what's your price? What's your price, what's your price? A seasoned, elite advisor at account first off is not going to be able to give you the price right away without understanding your situation, and usually that initial call is for that. Also, if this is someone who is in demand and this is an elite advisor they may not want to work with you because they don't like serving clients that are cheap and that are price sensitive. So if the first thing you come at is wanting to know the price, what you're going to trigger in that firm is okay, we got all these people that want to work with us and this one person right here. It's just all they want to do is cut costs. Are we really going to invest our time into someone who may be not interested in investing into our services? And every time they add a new rental property and a new business, are we going to have to worry about raising their price and making this a profitable engagement? Are they also cutting costs in other areas? Are they using discounted and incompetent bookkeepers and they don't have enough staff to run an effective system, so now we can't serve them. So when you leave with price and all in you, if you come, if you, if you project that all your decision-making is going to be on price, you're really going to turn away a lot of those elite advisors.
Speaker 1:When you start off with price as an inquiry also, you're going to have a right away within five minutes is usually missing a lot of additional analysis and assessment that goes into preparing for this engagement. They need to scope this out. They need to understand how complex is your situation. They need to have the staff in place and understand the scope of work and make sure that they can have the right arrangement. So, when you're onboarded, adequate staff and the fees are going to compensate for adequate staff to assess your needs.
Speaker 1:Now let's talk about estimating what you should be saving on your taxes here. So we're talking about how do we make sure we're not overpaying in taxes, right? So when you're going to go into these engagements here and if you're working with someone who's highly qualified, you're often going to find and this is your first time working with a tax strategist the fees might be double, triple, quadruple what you're used to paying your tax account. So get ready. You might see a little sticker shock, and that's okay, because usually the tax savings can more than justify this. So you want to have some level of confidence that this extra investment is going to create legitimate tax savings. So see if they can communicate in some fashion. What's the tax savings going to be here. If someone just says okay, you make a lot of money, I'll charge you 25 grand and you have no idea at all what's going to happen. You might be a little concerned, and that's understandable.
Speaker 1:So what can we do here to gain confidence that the advisor is, when you've signed with them, going to be able to provide enough value so you're comfortable with this new fee structure? So what we do is we often do a six figure savings guarantee, so we guarantee that we'll save them at least six figures in taxes or we'll refund them their money. Oftentimes we'll do a 3x or a 5x guarantee, depending on their situation. And if you really want to do this right an elite advisor they're not going to always know right away what the initial savings is or what the future savings is, until they've had a deep dive into your situation and fully explored what works best for you and asked lots of detailed questions here, which is part of the engagement. But at the very least, they can look at your situation at a high level here and provide some level of confidence in their ability to create a solution for you that will hopefully save you millions of dollars in taxes that will grow and compound year after year after year.
Speaker 1:Now, when you do this as well, again dive into the processes and systems. Make sure there's some sort of established way on how they're going to dive into your situation and save on their taxes. Here. And as you're researching these people even if they have a great sales pitch and you feel wonderful about them see what you can find online about these people, Because some of these salesmen, or great salesmen, have to be good salesmen, especially if the product's not great. Look into the Google reviews. See if you can find any third-hand experience here, or would you say second-hand experience, Third-party experience. So and I would be a little bit weary of these testimonials because that could be you know their best friends from college talking about how great they are. So really dive deep and see what you can find from unbiased sources and I love to look at Google reviews as one of those things and if you can find videos and content of them articulately explaining what they do, that's also going to help you out, because then you can see that the leader of this firm really knows what they're talking about. What can you find that really gives you that confidence, outside of what you're seeing in the sales pitch? Do your research. It's worth it.
Speaker 1:For these types of relationships, the impact could be the impact of making the right versus wrong decision could be hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, and when we do this right.
Speaker 1:So again, when I talk about finding the right tax strategist without overpaying, we do not want to overpay in professional fees.
Speaker 1:We really want to make sure that we're getting our money's worth. However, if you're going from a compliance-focused firm to a strategy-focused firm that's going to be diving deeper into your situation and doing more sophisticated, more value-added strategies, you're definitely going to pay more. In almost I would say, about 99.9% of the time you're going to pay more. But if you can do all these steps and really gain confidence in their abilities and ask the right questions, find them through the right resources and gain a reasonable level of comfort that you're going to create tax savings. Not only are you going to avoid overpaying in professional services, you're also going to avoid overpaying in taxes, and usually overpaying in taxes is the greatest challenge that we see with elite entrepreneurs. I really hope that this guide helps you in finding the right tax strategist and if you find any of this interesting and want to learn more from us, go to prosperalcpacom. Email info at prosperalcpacom and we'd love to talk to you.