The Tax Trilogy: A Three-Pronged Approach to Elevate Your Practice

Essential Tax Skills & Strategies for Holistic Financial Advisors

Taxes can be the single greatest retirement expense. Are you providing your clients with the planning strategies they need to maximize their income and minimize their taxes?

The Tax Trilogy is a three-pronged approach we use to teach advisors advanced tax planning, tax management, and tax strategies preparation. These help you differentiate your business and holistically advise your clients.

You’ll learn these concepts and more through The Tax Management Journey® training. It helps you attract and retain higher-net-worth clients by integrating taxes, finances, investments, and insurance into one overall plan.

Why Be a Financial Advisor Who Offers Tax Planning, Preparation, and Management?

Incorporating The Tax Trilogy’s concepts into your financial advisory — highlighting the importance of tax management in tax planning — is one of the most efficient ways to get in front of new prospects and grow your business.

And it’s just as beneficial to your firm as it is to the clients you serve.

What The Tax Trilogy’s Approach Helps You Do

Differentiate Yourself as a Financial Advisor

While many clients would prefer their financial advisors to include strategies to mitigate taxes, not every advisor does. Stand out in a competitive market as a financial advisor offering tax planning, preparation, and management.

This emphasizes your commitment to securing your clients’ financial future.

Improve the Client Experience

Enhance your clients’ experience by offering them convenience and peace of mind. Why? They have all their tax and financial needs covered under one roof.

Clients will know your firm not only for your depth of expertise. They’ll also know you as an easy choice when they want to save time and streamline their lives with one financial professional.

Win More Business and Help Enhance Your Client Retention

With The Tax Management Journey®, you’re well-equipped to attract new clients. That even includes those in the $1 million to $5 million demographic.

By demonstrating your ability to minimize tax liabilities while maximizing income, you’re on your way to winning prospective clients’ trust and strengthening relationships with existing ones.

Charge Larger Planning Fees

CPAs don’t offer tax advice free of charge, so why should you? Two things are value-adds for clients that you can monetize for your firm:

  • The additional tax management expertise you learn through The Tax Management Journey® training
  • The support Prosperity Capital Advisors provides through The Tax Trilogy

Deliver Powerful Tax Management Strategies to Clients

These are the seven steps of The Tax Management Journey®.

1. Understand the Order of Money

An order exists to how clients should accumulate money and take distribution upon retirement to help increase net after-tax cash flow. We leverage the tax-efficient funnels tool to help them visualize how to save for retirement and turn retirement assets into tax-efficient income.

The U.S. tax system is a dynamic pay-as-you-go system, and many opportunities for proactive tax management lie within the brackets. We use a tax measuring cup visual aid to educate clients on ordinary income tax brackets and capital gain tax rates. It also illustrates annual tax management opportunities.

Unfortunately, tax traps exist in the code. Within this concept, we share ways to articulate the importance of proactive tax management:

  • Before your client takes major withdrawals from their retirement accounts
  • Before they elect to receive Social Security income

It’s not about what you make; it’s about what you get to keep. Taxes can create a major drag on investment returns. It’s never been more important to ensure you allocate your client accounts with the right type of investments. That means not just diversification but also from a taxation perspective.

We have tools that illustrate to clients that there are certain investments they should hold in their retirement accounts vs. their post-tax accounts vs. their tax-advantaged accounts for increased efficiency.

Within this concept of tax management, we arm you with tools to help your clients maximize both charitable and intra-family gifting. By doing so, they minimize their income tax and their families’ future transfer tax management advice, ensuring wealth passes efficiently to the next generation.

Everyone has to pay taxes, but the U.S. tax system allows flexibility on when you pay. You can defer income through retirement accounts or deferred asset sales. Or you can recognize income through Roth conversions or strategically timed asset sales.

This creates incredible opportunities to amplify your value with proactive tax management of these accounts and assets.

Tax management is a moving bull’s-eye. Your clients’ personal circumstances change each year. Tax management is about evaluating the tax policy landscape and your clients’ unique needs. Then, you strategically think several moves ahead to ensure you maximize their income and minimize their taxes.

The Tax Management Journey® Training

Get ready to elevate your firm to be a one-stop shop for truly comprehensive financial plans. This comprehensive, two-day training program delivers a seven-step process that you can even repurpose into a professional tax planning presentation for prospects and clients.

That process equips you with confidence, tools, and strategies to assist current and potential clients with their tax planning needs.

Developed and Taught by Industry Leaders

Prosperity Capital Advisors Founding Partner and President of Wealth Management Dave Alison, CFP®, EA, BPC, helped develop the Tax Management Journey®’s systematic, scalable approach through his own expertise.

As an advisor to many wealthy families and retirees, he realized many of these clients need and expect tax advice. In fact, they needed it in their financial plans to help protect and maximize their wealth.

Rather than let clients and prospects choose another advisor with these capabilities, Dave — along with tax scholar and instructor Christopher Woehrle, JD, LL.M. (taxation) — now teaches advisors everywhere the importance of proactive tax management.

Together, they show advisors how to factor it into their financial planning model.

Discover the Value of The Tax Management Journey®

You acquire the tools and strategies you need to prosper when you attend The Tax Management Journey®, helping you reach greater heights:

  • Expand your business lines.
  • Enhance your value proposition.
  • Attract more clients.

Discover the value of this comprehensive program and take your financial advising to the next level.

Learn more about the Tax Management Journey® training event, and see whether you qualify to attend for free.

Don’t Have a Tax Prep Practice Yet?

The Tax Practice Builder® Shows You How to Build One

The Tax Practice Builder® is an eight-step process designed to help you integrate tax preparation into your practice. It covers strategies for hiring, creating systems, developing marketing approaches, and building workflows.

This approach can help turn tax prep into a significant lead generator for your practice and position you as a comprehensive solution for financial and tax planning.