Tax Planning with Holistiplan

Intro:

Welcome to the Financial Planners Desk Podcast, a podcast designed for you, the financial professionals. We'll keep you up to date on industry trends in technology and marketing, and we'll always keep you in the loop on new regulations. Here's your host, independent advisor and OSJ, Richard Oring.

Richard:

Welcome to the Financial Planners Desk. So, last episode, you met our cohost Eric. On the second recording where Eric should be here, unfortunately, he's not going to be able to make it, so you're going to have me and we have a guest today so you don't have to just hear my voice the whole time. Eric decided to play golf. I guess it's the first time since COVID where he can get on the golf course and feel comfortable about it.

Richard:

But our guest is really interesting. His name is Kevin Loescher. He's a co-founder of Holistiplan, but more important, Kevin is like one of us. He's a financial planner, he started as that, he still has a small practice before he started this company, and he discovered while doing the financial plans, that there was a need for more robust tax planning software, not designed for accountants or CPAs, but designed for financial advisors. So, he and his partner started a company called Holistiplan to solve this problem. I personally have been using Holistiplan for about two years now, and I can vouch that it's a game changer for our industry. Kevin, thank you for joining us.

Kevin:

Oh, thank you, Richard. Thanks for having me, and thanks for the kind words about Holistiplan. Really appreciate it. And glad to have you part of the Holistiplan family, too.

Richard:

Thank you. Thank you. And not only am I using, I got my advisors on it. I love your pricing structure. Maybe we can go over that later on in our conversation, but it's nice how you can build it out for multiple reps. It's neat.

Kevin:

Sure. Yeah. Yep.

Richard:

So, Kevin, I got to ask you first off, I mean, I know the stresses of running a financial planning practice, but I mean, you're running your clients, you're running your staff, and you're running the marketing, the bookkeeping, everything, and running your practice. What made you decide to create additional stress in your life to start a technology company? Because it's not just a normal technology company, it's a technology company dealing with confidential client data, which then takes it to another level.

Kevin:

Yeah, yeah, definitely some complexity there. Now, I will say, so I was a career changer. I started in corporate finance and worked for Fortune 500 companies in the first decade of my career, and then I switched into financial planning in my early 30s. And I was with the practice, I went from part-time, like a paraplanner basically, to partner in that firm. But I left that firm in 2018. If I was still there running a staff of six, seven people and having 80, 90 client relationships, I don't think I'd have the time to start Holistiplan.

Kevin:

But I left there in 2018. I started my own solo practice, so I still am an advisor, but I only have handful of clients. So, I've, in essence, focused a lot of my time and energy on Holistiplan. I've shut the door to new business, for now at least, on the RIA side. And that gives me the flexibility to really focus on Holistiplan. Thinking back, I certainly would not have been able to partner up with Roger, my co-founder and partner, to build out the business around Holistiplan had I still had all the responsibilities I had at my previous firm.

Richard:

It's funny, as an OSJ and working with other advisors I get a lot of phone calls to support them and doing tax projections or brainstorming with them. Sometimes it amazes me that as an investment, an advisor, or financial planner, they don't take that extra step in their career path to learn more about tax planning. I know every couple of years I take tax refresher courses, I'm the only financial advisor there, they're all accountants. It's good for networking, I got to tell you, too.

Kevin:

[inaudible 00:04:05] COIs, right?

Richard:

It's funny, so I sold my tax practice in 2011 and when you prepared a return and there was a tax liability because the broker took a whole bunch of gains, the accountant always got blamed. We didn't do anything, but we got blamed because we're the one reporting it to them. Can you talk about why tax planning is so important for the financial planning process? And not just financial planning, I think also for people who just manage investments.

Kevin:

Sure. Yeah. And talk about shoot the messenger there, your story about CPAs getting blamed. Right? So, tax planning, yeah, important, like you said, for two reasons. I'll first address the financial planning piece. It's because taxes are intertwined with pretty much everything we're doing on the financial planning side, what insurance products makes the most sense, in many cases involves a tax decision or two, the estate plan can involve some tax situation as well, what saving vehicles to use. Roth versus traditional IRA is, in essence, a large part of a tax decision as well. Does it make sense to do it with after tax money or pre-tax money? Same with HSAs and things like that. Those are all tax decisions. How to do charitable giving, is in large part tax-related as well. So, taxes just are intertwined through every lots of different comprehensive financial planning tasks and processes and recommendations we're giving to clients. That's the financial planning side.

Kevin:

Then even, as you said, on the investment side alone, should you sell... Well, first of all, where should you put certain asset classes? Right? In the IRA or the taxable account? You want to make the portfolio as tax efficient as possible year in and year out. There's lots of research and studies about that and how that can improve your after-tax return of your portfolio. But then, how about distributing for your clients? Are you going to take it from the IRA, or are you going to take it from the joint brokerage account? And what are the tax implications of each? And what phase outs and limits and thresholds do you have to be aware of? Not just on taxes like net investment income tax, but also even things that aren't taxes but are driven by taxes like Medicare part B and D premiums. Right? And that's a cliff.

Kevin:

I'll give you an example. If you want to sell some Tesla stock, from portfolio standpoint you're saying, "Let's sell 50 shares of Tesla stock." Well, what if selling that 50th share of Tesla stock push them over a phase out or a threshold limit like a Medicare part B or Dm where selling 48 or 47 shares of Tesla stock wouldn't have? You could have gotten pretty much the same portfolio outcome but sold two or three less shares of something and saved them thousands of dollars in either taxes or tax-related expenses.

Richard:

So, Kevin I'll give you two client situations where things like that have happened. First one was when I had my tax practice, a single lady who owned a rental property, and I wasn't doing the investments, and her supervisor took a whole bunch of capital gains without communicating with her. And when I went to go do her tax return, she owed money. It was like the first year she owed money. She always got a refund. She's like, "What's going on?" I'm like, "Well, between your W2 income and the gains from your investment advisor, your rental loss wasn't being able to... You couldn't take it this year, so it's going to be carried over for when you sell the rental property, but you got phased out." And she was upset because she felt that her investment advisor got a copy of the tax return every year, sat down with her, and should've known better, or at least warned her about those capital gains.

Richard:

The second scenario was just recently for one of my clients I do the investments for, I don't do financial planning for. And all my clients, I always ask for a copy of the tax return and some clients just don't want to give it to you because they don't feel it's that important. So, every year she takes out money from her IRA and she takes more than her requirement and distribution, and she said to me, this year, she goes, "Is this what I should be doing?" I said, "Honestly, every year I ask you for your tax return, you get a letter, and you always send a request for your IRA. It's systematic every month going out to you, and you never really wanted to talk to me about it."

Richard:

So, she sent me her tax return, and when I analyzed it, I was able to reduce her IRA distribution in half, taking money from the non-qualified account. And with the conversation, she was concerned about leaving assets to the children, so with the blend of the two, they both have some tax advantages for beneficiaries, the IRA now 10 years or so. But I was able to make... She was at 85% of her social security to be taxed, now it was like 50% of that to be taxed. It allowed qualified dividends and long-term gains to be at 0%. We were able to save her close to $7,000 in taxes just by giving me a tax return.

Kevin:

Yeah. The tax return itself is such a window into your client's financial life and can impact so many things that we can do for clients. That's a great story. That's a great example of exactly why advisors should be doing tax planning, and I'd be willing to bet that client now is with you for life and future beneficiaries, as well.

Richard:

Hopefully.

Kevin:

Yeah.

Richard:

So, my dad, he was a CPA, used to say to me when he was teaching me tax preparation and so forth, he used to say, "Last year's tax return's the Bible to prepare this year's tax return." So, we can actually say, looking at last year's tax return for us is the foundation to do the planning to prepare the next year's tax return.

Kevin:

That's right.

Richard:

It's the foundation.

Kevin:

Yeah. That's exactly right, and that is, in essence, that approach is how we decided to build 1.0 of Holistiplan, which is you start with a prior year's tax return, you upload it, and you get a report that shows this is what happened, these are the types of opportunities you may have. Now you can take that next step and start to do some forward looking projections for this year and beyond.

Richard:

I know you mentioned a few ways people use it, but I can share two other ways I've been using it. One, I've always been doing this, maxing out tax brackets when they're low, taking additional money from IRAs. But here's the big one, with the new IRA beneficiary rule change, with tenure distribution, it might be worth trying to take more money out from the IRAs so the children can inherit more of the non-qualified assets since there's no more stretch. And you're asking the client what's really important to them, living comfortably for them or maxing out what is in the house... like the family's money compared to Uncle Sam's, and talking about strategies on how to do that and passing the wealth to the next generation. So, this program definitely allows you to do that.

Kevin:

Right. Yeah. You can max out brackets, but there's also little hidden gotchas, as you know, in there that you can think you're maxing out the 12% ordinary bracket, but then you pull the capital gains from being taxed at 0% to being taxed at 15%, even though you're still in the 12% ordinary bracket. I was an advisor that was doing tax planning for years in a more manual approach. Right? It was spreadsheets and Word documents and emails. I don't know... Well, I'm certainly not doing it that way today with Holistiplan. Holistiplan was born because of that. Right? Roger and I knew that there was a better way to do it and a more consistent way to do it and a far more efficient way to do it. And now, it's even more complicated with Secure Act, CARES Act, Appropriations Bill, now the recent American Rescue Plan Act, potentially more tax proposals coming down the pike here in the next six to nine months or a year.

Richard:

I don't think they're only going to be proposals. I think a lot of them are going to happen.

Kevin:

Something's going to happen, for sure. But as a person that was maintaining a tax spreadsheet back in 2013 and '14 and '15, and handing it over then to my colleagues in my previous firm, keeping that updated now, I would not want to have anything to do with it [crosstalk 00:13:22].

Richard:

So, I got into business in 1999, I started off working for a mid-size accounting firm, and I used BNA tax planner, which did tax projections. And this is before high resolution monitors. I don't even think we had color monitors. And if you ever used that program and you saw the size font, because they had to get everything to fit, I'm surprised I still have my eyesight and able to read. I do got reading glasses now, though. You know what? I was going to ask you another question. I'm going to stop for a second because I think what we really should talk about is the program itself. I actually look at your program as two separate programs, one where I can... I think you know where I'm going with the two separate software programs in one. Why don't you explain your program so people can understand what it does?

Kevin:

Sure. So, you start with the previous year's tax returns, so right now, it's April 22nd, lots of advisors are starting the process of collecting their clients' tax return from last year that's been prepared. So, you start there, you upload that to Holistiplan, the PDF output from the tax prep software, whether it's self-prepared or prepared by a CPA. All the software is producing a PDF document. You upload that PDF document to Holistiplan, and we're going to produce an output, a client deliverable that is a tax report that... [inaudible 00:14:52] demystifies that tax return. The tax return is going to be 50, 75, 100 pages, maybe even longer. The clients don't understand what all the numbers are. Even lots of advisors don't understand where to find all the numbers that are important from the tax return.

Richard:

Kevin, what amazed me when I uploaded my first program, I thought for sure it was going to get rejected with errors because when a client gets their tax return, when the accountant prints it, there's usually three versions they can print. They can print the filing version, which has less pages in it, it doesn't have all the supporting documentation, statements, worksheets. There's the client one, which is the next size up in page count, which gives you a little bit more data. And then there's the accountant version, which is like double the amount of pages, and they can tie in all their numbers. So, most of the time I'm getting a tax return PDF with a cover letter from the accountant, talking about two year comparisons, a whole bunch of schedules which no... It doesn't go to the IRS, but your program knows to ignore those and only grab the data, what it needs. I found that amazing.

Kevin:

Yes. And in fact, we encourage the advisors because a lot of advisors' processes were ask for the client to bring in a hard copy of the tax return, and then we as the advisor, or someone on our team, scans it and then creates it electronically again. It's like that file is going from electronic to print to electronic. So, we encourage advisors, don't do the print part. Don't have your client print it out. You don't collect the hard copy. Just sketch that full document from the tax prep software, any one of those three that you described. And yes, Holistiplan will actually just go and find the data we want to find for planning purposes, and for analytical purposes, to produce the report that is a white labeled report, the advisor's logo is what's on it, your disclaimer is on it. So, it's not a Holistiplan report, it's your report, but it summarizes that tax return in two pages with all the key numbers, the phase outs, the limits, the thresholds that you need to be aware of, a summary of schedule A and schedule B.

Kevin:

And then the analytical part of it, which is actually reviewing those, analyzing those numbers, comparing them to benchmarks, comparing them to... I used to have this tax return review checklist, or if anybody's ever gone to one of those [inaudible 00:17:28] sessions where a CPA says, "The 1040 is full of planning opportunities if you know what to look for." That's, in essence, what Holistiplan is doing, We've got the algorithms in there to find opportunities, we provide them in a bullet point list at the bottom of the report for the advisor to go ahead and dig into a little further, which is what takes you to the second part of the software.

Richard:

And which is nice because you can turn those on or off of your recommendations, and you can create your own, and it even as state, which is kind of nice. Because a lot of planning software excludes state planning.

Kevin:

That's right. So, that's actually a relatively new feature towards the end of last year, early this year, where what we're doing on that tax report is providing state specific, helpful hints. They're, in essence, especially for those advisors that have out-of-state clients... I'll give you an example. I'm in Virginia, I've been an advisor here in Virginia for 13 years. I know Virginia state taxes reasonably well. I know Maryland state taxes reasonably well because I've had a lot of clients in Maryland, but I don't know New York very well and I don't know California very well. But now with Holistiplan, I can know at least what the top tax opportunities are in California and state of Washington and New York, and I can formulate a game plan around those for my client that I might not have known the nuances.

Richard:

And that report, literally you upload it, takes about 10 minutes for the OCR to code everything, you get an email that it's prepared, you log on, you see this report, and it's really easy because it's broken down in categories like, "This is your marginal tax bracket. This is where you are. This is how much more room you have before you go to the next one, social security, Medicare, premium B." Everything you need to know on how much room you have to play with is right there. And one of the major numbers which I think is really important is the safe harbor number. I think a lot of people don't understand how the IRS calculates the tax estimates so you don't get penalized for next year. Meaning, if you win the lottery and you didn't pay a certain amount from previous year, you're going to get hit with interest on the additional income you received this year. But it's really easy to avoid that. I think that was a really nice thing to put on that report. It was really nice.

Kevin:

Oh, thank you. Yeah. Yeah. That was one of the... We've been iterating from the very beginning. Roger and I, again, advisor background, so that certainly helps. It's a software for advisors, designed by advisors, but it didn't stop with Roger and me. Right? We had beta testers that we knew that were advisors, and then we've continued this feedback loop, folks using the software, providing us feedback, us implementing that feedback. So, it's really, as software continues to grow, it's really like a crowdsourcing approach to making software for advisors that is part built by lots of lots of advisors.

Richard:

That's great. You want to talk about the second part of the program?

Kevin:

Yeah. So, the second part is now that you've kind of looked backwards and seen, "Okay, now I know what happened in 2020, I know where they are, where they were in 2020, and I know now some planning opportunities I might want to look into from the report, now let's quantify those." So, then you can switch over to the scenario analysis screen that allows... It's already pre-populated for you, so all that data in the tax return that we were hunting for and extracting that was important, we've used that data to pre-populate a scenario analysis screen. So, you referenced BNA, so instead of the, the process to start with BNA was you got to enter a whole bunch of data first to get started. Right? Taking the numbers from the tax return and figuring out where they need to go in either an Excel spreadsheet or BNA or whatever tool [crosstalk 00:21:33]

Richard:

And I paid more to do that work, too, in your program.

Kevin:

Yeah. Now we've done that work for you. So, now it's pre-populated, you know where everything goes, all you have to do is copy from the 2020 actuals over into a 2021 scenario column. And now you're starting from a baseline where all you need to do is change whatever numbers you want to change for your scenario and you're off and running with some forward-looking projections. And you can do multi-year projections all the way out to 2025. We've even streamed that for everybody with a couple of buttons, solve for max and range calc, which...

Kevin:

So, for example, if you know you want to do a Roth conversion strategy scenario but you don't know exactly how much to do, you don't know if it's 20,000 or 30,000 or 40,000, historically what I would have done is start with a low number, then pick a high number, and narrow it down to the middle, always check in my thresholds and MAGI and all that type of stuff. We've done all that for you, too. You click a button, solve for max or range calc, and we're going to give you the number of how much income you can add to the scenario that you've built, both for ordinary income and for qualified income, before you make the client pay a higher effective marginal rate on the next dollar of income. So, if the strategy is to fill up a bracket, we're giving you the number that you can use to fill up the bracket.

Richard:

So, Kevin, for two years, I've been using the program, I've never used those things, never even took the time to learn what they were because I knew going into what I wanted to do, so that probably will save me a lot of time going forward. You mentioned different columns for future years, but your program is really nice because you can do multiple columns and not do it for future years, but different scenarios for the year you're planning. So, instead of keep changing numbers back and forth, you can run one scenario and then tweak it a little bit on the next one to get where you want it, which I do quite a bit.

Kevin:

Yeah. I actually use that more frequently, and I know a lot of advisors do too. I'll show a client a scenario where we're going to just do nothing in 2021, then a scenario right next to it where we do a Roth conversion of X dollars. And then I'll show another scenario in the fourth column that shows let's not do the Roth conversion, let's realize some long-term capital gains. And then I can show the actuals from the prior year and then three different scenarios for this year of options. And then you can have that conversation with the client and which one... Get them bought in and part of the decision-making process.

Richard:

And your programmers and what you guys developed you were forward-thinking ahead of time because you see integration already coming out with your program. I know my CRM program, I use Wealthbox. I click a button to add a new household, it pulls it in from Wealthbox, I can take the report, export it with a click of a button right into Wealthbox. So, you must have been thinking of the API integration from day one.

Kevin:

We were. Yes. So, we've built the software to allow for API integrations, with anybody willing to do it, and we're having lots of good conversations right now, initial conversations, with other CRMs, but also non-CRM fintech companies where we're really coming up with some ideas of how we can do other two way integrations, as well, to just [crosstalk 00:25:02].

Richard:

All right, listening from eMoney, build integration with this company. You're not that strong with your tax reports. Your competitor might be, you're not. You're great at everything else, though. I know you can't say anything, but hopefully that's one company you might be working with. So, let's keep going on. All right, so you got this great product. Listening to this podcast I know, hopefully the listeners know, we should be doing tax planning. Why do you think the majority of advisors aren't doing it besides that they might be frugal?

Kevin:

Yeah. I think it's a combination of things. I think it's a little bit of trepidation about wanting to dive into the concept of taxes and figuring, "Well, I'm just going to focus on my lane, and I'll keep deferring to the CPA about anything tax related," but hopefully we've gotten across at the beginning of this conversation that you can't do that any longer. I think clients and prospects are expecting their financial planners to be more than investment managers. They're expecting us to talk about other parts of their financial life. As far as another reason why, it takes a lot of time. Right? You've been doing it. I was doing it manually for many years, too. It would take an hour or longer to go through the process that I just described. And if you're really getting into the quantification of it, I mean, it's two hours, It's three hours of work to be for one client just to get to the answer that you want. And you got to-

Richard:

Wait. And then generate the report where the client can understand it.

Kevin:

Exactly. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Then you got to generate a client deliverable. And then you got to think forward-looking and say, "All right, I don't want to create this ad hoc every single time I do this," so now you got to create a template and a process and a workflow to do all this. You got to create a checklist to make sure you're finding all the things you can find in that tax return. So, it was a lot of hard work to get educated on it, but then to do the work. So, I think that's what's stopping a lot of folks from doing it, as well. Our hope is that Holistiplan resolves both of those issues.

Richard:

Yeah. I think a lot of advisors are afraid of what they don't know. If I don't know the tax code inside out, I don't want to put myself in a position where I'm going to look stupid in front of my client if they know something I should know. But I think your program, you don't really need to know the code exactly. Even if you don't do any tax planning, just to input the return and have that two page report gives you enough information on how to handle that client's accounts better, or the financial planning better for that client. You don't need to be a tax expert. There are tax [alter 00:28:10] programs for projections for accountants, which will have all the IRS codes and things like that, but you didn't design it for them, you designed it for the financial planner.

Richard:

So, I get why some people haven't done it, but that excuse is gone now. There's a product out there which will do it for you. And the tech support is really good, too. If you don't know something or if something's not coming out right, your customer support is good to help. You're not just going, go look up the IRS code for your answer, our program's working properly. You'll get some guidance.

Kevin:

Yeah. We have a contact support link on every page of the software. I say every page. There's really, there's four or five pages. That's another thing we focus on all the time from the very beginning, is let's keep this intuitive, easy to use for advisors where you don't need to go through two days of training in order to get up and running. Hopefully you've experienced it as a subscriber where you could get up and running really, really quickly, didn't take a lot of effort. You upload a return, it's laid out for you really well, and you can figure stuff out pretty easily. And where you can't, like you said, there's a contact support link on every page where you can fire off a support ticket to our support team and they'll get right back to you.

Richard:

Our industry has changed so much. I mean, we can go back decades and look to see how much it's changing, and it's not going to stop, it's going to... We see the industry going more into the fiduciary responsibility for planners. We have to document it. Reg BI changed our industry big time. And I got to imagine it's going to continue changing. So, let's not talk about the past, but where do you see the next couple of years on... Because you have to project your future roll-outs, what do you think are industry changes where it's going to affect your software program?

Kevin:

Well, I mean, we've of course got the tax legislation thing. That's going to impact software, our software, and also what advisors, how they're advising clients. There's going to be things in there that might change the advice that we've been giving for the past five, 10 years to clients. And again, if you don't have software to help keep everything straight, then you're flying by the seat of your pants a little bit more on those recommendations. So, that's from a tax legislation standpoint. That's going to be pretty impactful to our industry.

Kevin:

I think as the years go on, there's a big debate about fee compression and whether it's going to happen or not, regardless of where you... Even if we don't have what folks are describing as fee compression, where if you're charging X, you're going to have to charge Y in five years, it might not happen that way. But what might very well happen is that you can still charge X, you can still charge what you're charging, but your clients are going to continue to expect more and more value and services for that fee because of the competition on the lower end, potentially. So, you'll still be able to potentially charge the fees, but the clients are going to expect more and expect you to know more about their financial lives and be even more engaged.

Kevin:

And again, next to investments and retirement planning, taxes, it's evergreen. You can talk about taxes with your client every single year. We file tax returns every single year. Even for clients that you think have really static income situations, you can get ahead of things that are going to change when they retire and start doing planning three years out and doing some things on the tax side now in preparation for retirement in two or three or four years. So, I think that's the type of thing that's going to change in the industry. I think more and more advisors are going to embrace tax planning then are today, still.

Richard:

I have another podcast I do for the general public. One of my episodes was talking about expectations, and I mentioned an example is you hire your accountant to prepare a tax return, they prepare the return, and you move on. And then you find out there was tax law changed for the current year and they didn't let you know. You file the next year's return and you owe money or you didn't get as big a refund, and you get upset with that account because you felt like they should have told you. And that's not true. You hired the accountant to do a tax return. You didn't hire them to do tax planning.

Richard:

An accountant, unless you're a really, really good client, they don't really want to do tax planning. That's not their bread and butter. It's the 1040s and it's the business returns. The business returns is what keeps the doors open. So, when I prepare a tax projection, I always let the client know, "This is my recommendation," and I write it up also, like a summary, I say, "Please confirm it with your accountant, or if you give me permission, I'll send it to them and call them." I got to tell you, that is a great way to get referrals. When you can do the work for the accountant and everyone wins, it's great.

Kevin:

Yeah, That's a great point. And that's actually another trend, I think, that we could see in the next five to 10 years, which is advisors working more closely with tax preparers and CPAs to build... so that the client sees a team of finance people working for them that are integrated, they don't have to be part of the same company necessarily. Right? If you've got a good relationship with a bunch of different CPAs, and you're doing these forward-looking projections which, like you said, they're not going to do proactively, if you can do it proactively and then position it with the client's CPA to say, "Hey, what do you think about this? I reviewed last year's tax return, they've got this going on this year, what do you think about this strategy?" You get the CPA to buy-in to it, as well, and then there's no issues about...

Kevin:

I know lots of folks say, "Hey, is this Holistiplan, the type of work that you're doing, is that stepping on the toes of the CPAs?" And we're like, "No, it's helping the CPAs. You just have to position it the correct way and build that team approach. Again, then you're going to get a client that's that much more bought in and refer their friends, because now they don't just have two relationships that they got to manage themselves, they've got a team and they know that they got their back and are looking out for them.

Richard:

I could look up my strongest referral sources. One's a divorce attorney, one's an accountant, and both of them is because I solve problems initially for the first client. And ever since that, they became strong referral [inaudible 00:35:20] for me, because they know that I'm thorough, I'll double check everything, I look at the investments, the taxes, I can think out of the box, knowing how retirement plans work, and all that. So, I think the best way to get referrals is not just asking, but show them that could be a professional, not just taking money to invest and charging 1%, that you know what you're doing and you understand the codes and so forth, and you can work with them to make them look good too. So, I think that's how you build your referral sources, not just asking, but proving it.

Kevin:

Right.

Richard:

So, I know we're... Go ahead, I'm sorry, Kevin. I didn't mean to cut you off.

Kevin:

No, go ahead. Please.

Richard:

No, no. Please.

Kevin:

Oh, I was just going to say, and it's hard... The terms financial planning or tax planning can be somewhat esoteric to a lot of prospects. Right? They don't know what that really means. It doesn't have a very clear definition. But if you can show them an actual deliverable, like a report that you produce for your existing clients to a prospect, that helps solidify, in their mind, what we mean by tax planning or financial planning.

Richard:

So, Kevin, we're getting close to the time, is there any last words you want to say before I close?

Kevin:

Well, I would just encourage everybody... First of all, thank you, Richard, for having me on. This has been fun. I love talking taxes and practice management around taxes, as well, so this has been a fun conversation for me. I would encourage everybody that's listening to go out to holistiplan.com, and we've got a seven day free trial. No risk. You can upload three returns yourself. So, part of what we wanted to build was an opportunity for advisors to get their hands, or at least fingers, a little dirty before they even have to make a decision about whether it fits for their practice and business. So, it's no risk, try it out, see what it can do, and let us know if you have questions.

Richard:

So, Kevin, thank you so much for being a guest on the Financial Planners Desk. I encourage everybody to take Kevin's advice, go to www.holisticplan.com. That's H-O-L-I-S-T-I-P-L-A-N.com. Check out their website, all their pictures and tabs on top. But the most important tab is on the far right, which is called Demo. Sign up for it, play around.

Richard:

The other thing is I really like your billing structure. So, I have other advisors in my group, so I pay for the subscription myself and you buy how many tax returns uploaded. And the way we did it is I have the company and then I have advisors, and when the advisor puts their tax return in, they code it for their eyes only. So, it's not just one license where everyone uses and can see each other's client data, You allow it to be one license and segregate the client data to the advisor's eyes only, which is really, really nice.

Richard:

So, if you have an office of multiple advisors, you don't have to sign multiple licenses, agreements. It doesn't matter if you let your admin login because it's not by user, it's by the uploads. So, that was ingenious thinking of doing that. I will tell people, start off trying it. You may want to eventually go up to the second tier because you're going to need it anyway, but it allows you to, for that one client who doesn't have a PDF, or you have to... I actually had an accountant who did not give me the tax return, but he gave me all the input sheets, so I had to manually enter the return. And there is a feature on the next level where you can manually enter data if you don't have it. It's the only time I ever needed it, though.

Richard:

So, thank you again. I'm going to have the link to the show notes on the podcast webpage. I want to thank all our listeners for listening. If you are interested in being a future guest or have topics, please contact me by going through my contact info on the podcast page. I greatly appreciate it. At this time, I'm going to say goodbye, and looking forward to talking to you next time. Bye-bye.

Kevin:

Thanks, Richard.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to the Financial Planners Desk Podcast. Feel free to share this episode with colleagues and other financial professionals in your life. And make sure you don't miss an Episode. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Google, or your favorite podcast app.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to the Financial Planners Desk Podcast. Feel free to share this episode with colleagues and other financial professionals in your life. And make sure you don't miss an episode. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Google, or your favorite podcast app.