Structure Matters for Tax Efficiency: From Mutual Funds, ETFs, SMAs to Tax-Aware Long-Short

In today’s episode, we’re tackling some big topics relating to year-end tax planning:

💼 Investment structure matters – How mutual funds, ETFs, and more advanced vehicles impact your tax bill.

📈 ETFs = efficiency – Learn how they avoid unwanted capital gains distributions.

🔄 Tax loss harvesting – The strategy behind realizing losses for long-term tax benefits.

🧮 Direct indexing – Owning individual stocks for customized control and better tax outcomes.

⚙️ TALS™ Investing – The next evolution in creating ongoing, flexible tax advantages.

Listen Now:

The Smart Take:

Go Deeper Into the Conversation:

0:00 – Intro

4:12 – Typical investing vehicles

14:10 – What is tax-loss harvesting?

17:09 – Direct Indexing

23:48 – Tax-Aware Long-Short Strategy

27:32 – Limited Partnership

 

We broke down the Tax-Aware, Long-Short (TALS™) Investing in these episodes: 

Part 1: The Long and Short on Tax-Aware, Long-Short (TALS™) Investing

Part 2: The Long and Short on Tax-Aware, Long-Short (TALS™) Investing

Part 3: The Long and Short on Tax-Aware, Long-Short (TALS™) Investing

 

Learn more about the Retire Smarter Solution ™: https://www.truewealthdesign.com/ep-45-retire-smarter-solution/

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The Hosts:

Kevin Kroskey, CFP®, MBA – About – Contact

Tyler Emrick, CFA®, CFP® – About – Contact

Episode Transcript:

Tyler Emrick:

Today, we’re diving into the topic that gets overlooked far too often, and that’s how the structure of your investments impact your after-tax results. We’re going to walk through how mutual funds, ETFs, direct indexing, and even more advanced tax-aware strategies like tax-aware long-short, or TALs for short, can help improve your after-tax returns.

Walter Storholt:

Hey, we’re back on Retire Smarter for another episode. I’m Walter Storholt, alongside CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER and a chartered financial analyst, Tyler Emrick, of course, a wealth advisor with True Wealth Design. And we’ve got a great episode today as we talk about some really important tax conversations. And end of the year, people start thinking in that mindset a little bit, so we’ll dive into that in just a few moments. But first, Tyler, life is hopefully treating you well. School’s in session, pumpkin spice lattes are back. You got to be enjoying this October so far.

Tyler Emrick:

Oh, absolutely, yeah. We’re right on the doorstep to fall, certainly my favorite season of the year, so yeah, pumped, pretty excited. I am coming off a little bit of a cold sickness from last week, so you might be able to hear my raspy voice a bit. We did do a little bit of traveling last week, so obviously picked up something going out, but no, everything’s really good in my world right now. How about you, Walt?

Walter Storholt:

We’re going to use some AI to try and clean up any nasally leftovers for you there.

Tyler Emrick:

It’s amazing, the wonders of AI, isn’t it?

Walter Storholt:

Yeah, absolutely. The Make Me Don’t Sound Sick app or something like that, I’m sure.

Tyler Emrick:

You got it. Or hey, if you want to make anything sound better, let’s just throw some AI behind it.

Walter Storholt:

That’s right. Absolutely. Yeah, we could definitely throw in some deeper voice or whatever you want.

Tyler Emrick:

No, absolutely.

Walter Storholt:

Make you sound like Morgan Freeman or something like that.

Tyler Emrick:

Last week, when I was on some of our team meetings, as soon as I jumped on, my voice was so low, everyone was like, “What is going on with you?” So I was like, “This is how it’s going nowadays.”

Walter Storholt:

Yeah, those things happen. Well, things are good on this end. We just had a trip to Yellowstone and it was pretty incredible, so highly recommended it. If it’s been something on your bucket list, definitely make the time to go do it. It exceeded expectations, which I thought would be hard to do because you hear so many good things about it, but it was a blast.

Tyler Emrick:

I would second that. I haven’t been personally but heard wonderful things. So hopefully that’ll be on the old book a list eventually.

Walter Storholt:

I would show some pictures, but I took 8,500 pictures on the trip, so it’s going to take me a little while to cull them down just a little bit.

Tyler Emrick:

I’m sure there’s a good one in there, maybe two.

Walter Storholt:

Maybe next year I’ll share pictures on a call about it.

Tyler Emrick:

No, that’s awesome. No, that sounds pretty great. Going to Yellowstone and then jumping into a podcast talking about finances, I don’t think I’m going to be able to top that, but [inaudible 00:02:51].

Walter Storholt:

We saw several grizzly bears and we wanted to make sure that we didn’t get attacked, so we had our bear spray with us. So I’m curious, is there something, Tyler, in the financial world, do I have bear spray, the equivalent of it, to stay away from taxes attacking me? That’s a little bit of a segue for you.

Tyler Emrick:

We can try to find some. That’s a great analogy. I don’t have any bear spray right now. Well, maybe we do. Some of our tax-aware long-short investing, some of the things we’ll get into today a little bit, we could consider that bear spray-

Walter Storholt:

I like that.

Tyler Emrick:

… to get away some of the taxes. Sure, yeah, we got spray.

Walter Storholt:

There is a little bit on my shelf back here somewhere. If it wasn’t so potent, I would do a demonstration, but that sounds like a bad idea.

Tyler Emrick:

Yeah, letting off some bear spray in a small room, I don’t know.

Walter Storholt:

Not try that.

Tyler Emrick:

It doesn’t sound like the best idea. No, that sounds good, man.

Walter Storholt:

Well, take us through this. We’re getting closer to the end of the year, so this is when people start, if they’re proactive, thinking about taxes and moves they can make. I know this is something that is a really important part of what you do at True Wealth Design, so I’m looking forward to your insights.

Tyler Emrick:

No, absolutely. And I think generally our podcast topics tend to evolve around tax towards the end of the year. The last one that we just recorded, kind of that year-end checklist type of podcast. If you haven’t listened to it, certainly go check it out. Today, we’re going to dive in a little bit more about this concept or idea of the structure of the investments you use, or maybe a less fancy way to say it is just the investment vehicles that you’re using and how that can really drastically impact your tax situation. We’ll start with some of the very well-known investment vehicles, things like mutual funds, ETFs, talk a little bit about that and how you should be thinking about that in your own portfolio and trying to dial in your own tax strategy.

And then we’ll move into some of the newer, I would say, vehicles and strategies that have come up over the years that for those individuals that really don’t want to give Uncle Sam anymore than his fair share, those will be good to pay special attention to. But as we’re diving in, we’re going to start really right on the ground level here and we want to talk a little bit about just the basics of what types of vehicles are most individuals and families using in their investments. Walt, you could probably say it right off the top, right, mutual funds have certainly been around for a number of years and are really a staple in a lot of families and individuals’ portfolios and have been used in everything from retirement accounts to investing accounts and the like.

They are really, really a good vehicle to use. And the way they work in their most basic form are they basically are pulled vehicles, which means that they are things that you can put your money into and invest, and then they will actually take that money and invest it based off the mandate of their mutual funds. There are thousands of mutual funds out there that invest in a whole host of things. There’s mutual funds that invest in the S&P 500 stocks. There are mutual funds that invest in bonds or tech companies or the like, and they are just a wonderful vehicle for you to simplify that investing process and get many, many investments or stocks or bonds within one vehicle or one structure, okay? Now, just as anything, they have their pros and cons.

One of the cons of mutual funds are their tax inefficiency. So if you hold mutual funds in your retirement accounts, not a big deal, right? We’re not necessarily looking for tax-efficient vehicles in retirement accounts because either you’ve already paid the taxes on it, in the case of a Roth or an IRA or a 401k, you don’t pay taxes until that money comes out of the account. So we don’t necessarily have to worry about some of these inefficiencies from a tax standpoint that mutual funds have. But if you’re an individual that have investments outside of retirement accounts, in brokerage accounts or taxable accounts, then these mutual funds can become extremely inefficient vehicles to invest in from a tax perspective.

And there’s one big culprit and it’s called capital gains distributions. Well, I’m sure you’ve ran into capital gains distributions. And what that is is essentially by law, these mutual funds have to pay out the gains that they realize over the course of a year. That means that in November, December, these mutual funds will have distributions that come to you whether you want that money or not. And of course, good old Uncle Sam looks at those distributions and they are taxable to you. So you can get a pretty nasty surprise from your mutual funds because of the gains that they’ve realized over the year. And in some cases, well, you could actually have a mutual fund that has lost money over the course of the year in your account, but yet still has to pay out capital gains distributions at the end, which is sort of a double whammy, right? You’ve lost money, you have a tax consequence because of the investment vehicle that you use.

Walter Storholt:

My brain says, “That’s not how that’s supposed to work,” right?

Tyler Emrick:

Yes, absolutely. So there can be a very big disconnect there. And the real world data suggests that some of these mutual funds pay out upwards of 10% per year. I was just sitting with a family yesterday, they had just started working with us and we were going through the investments that kind of came over, and they had two of these mutual funds in a taxable account and the year prior, they had had a pretty sizable capital gains distribution that hit their return.

My recommendation was for them that, “Hey, we need to sell out of these.” We’re going to have to realize some gains on there, but the benefit that this is going to provide in the [inaudible 00:08:53] by putting them in ETFs, which we’ll get to, will alleviate some of those downsides and some of those capital gains distributions and give them much, much more control over when that tax hit comes, which is extremely, extremely important. So mutual funds is that first investment vehicle and certainly probably the most tax inefficient.

Not that there aren’t tax-efficient mutual funds out there, but there certainly are a whole host that have these capital gains distributions that we need to be just very mindful of. And that’s where ETFs come into play. That’s exchange-traded funds, which in this world is kind of that second vehicle that we want to touch on. And a lot of individuals listening here might go, “Yeah, ETFs are much more tax-efficient.” That’s probably their biggest selling point, right? [inaudible 00:09:40].

Walter Storholt:

That’s why they came into existence, right? To solve the problems of the mutual fund and be kind of their replacement. Is that sort of a very simplified view of them?

Tyler Emrick:

Absolutely. They have this mechanism called an in-kind redemption mechanism, which essentially avoids that triggering of the capital gains distributions. So they don’t have to play by the same rules that mutual funds do. In theory, they do the exact same thing a mutual fund does. You put your money in an ETF, the manager that’s managing that ETF goes and distributes that cash and invests based off their mandate of the ETF just like a mutual fund, but they have this huge leg up to where they don’t have to kick out these capital gains distributions. And the long-term benefits of that are very, very broad and very, very good. That’s why a lot of times you’ll hear individuals say, “Hey, for your taxable accounts, we want to be investing in ETFs over mutual funds,” and they’re trying to avoid that issue of capital gains distributions.

Now, that’s just one of the benefits of the ETF structure. I would argue that over the last handful of years there’s been some legislation that passed that actually have made ETFs even more advantageous and beneficial. There was this SEC ruling in 2020. The rule is 18f-4, if anybody’s interested or want to look that up. Probably not on your own to-do list. But what this rule does is it allows ETFs to invest in derivative products. And what that does is these derivative products actually allow ETFs to become even more tax-efficient. And the use case that I’m thinking of is a very similar one to the mutual funds and those capital gains distributions. So if you’re sitting here and you’re listening to me on the podcast today, or Walt and I on the podcast here today, interest rates have gone up and they’ve been up for a handful of years now. Maybe not a handful of years, but certainly a few years.

So a lot of you might be going, “Hey, I’ve got money sitting in a savings account,” or, “I got money sitting in a money market account and it’s paying me market rates right now around 4%,” a pretty healthy interest rate. Now, the downside to these savings accounts and these money markets accounts are that that interest will actually hit your tax return in the year that it’s paid. You have no control over it, and it is actually taxed as ordinary income, which, generally speaking, is a higher rate for most of us than what we call a long-term capital gains tax bracket. So when we have our money sitting in savings accounts, we have our money sitting in money market accounts, these interest payments, albeit 4%, well, after we account for actually the tax hit, well, they can be certainly very tax inefficient.

Well, with this law change, these ETFs now being able to use derivative products, they’re able to replicate some of these cash-like investments and able to instead of pay out interest payments, they’re able to pay out in the form of capital appreciation, which is basically just the ETF price appreciating in value. That’s how we think about a stock going up, “Hey, stock A is worth $100 a share, at the end of the year, it’s worth $120 a share.” That’s capital appreciation, price appreciation. You don’t have to pay taxes on that 20 bucks that you gain until you sell it. The same concept here. And it’s become a very, very efficient way for individuals that keep a lot of money in cash that might look at their tax return each year and go, “Boy, I had $30,000, $40,000 of interest hit my tax return this year.”

That’s a pretty big tax bill if you have that much money sitting in cash. Well, these ETFs can get a similar cash-like exposure, but flip that and postpone and delay that tax hit and actually turn it into long-term capital gains, which is actually very, very advantageous versus ordinary income. ETF structures are wonderful and certainly from a tax perspective, have a big leg up over mutual funds.

Walter Storholt:

I am retiring smarter already, Tyler.

Tyler Emrick:

Exactly.

Walter Storholt:

But seriously, you own mutual funds, you own ETFs for years inside your portfolio, and then here you come along with some new information and nuggets that I’ve never heard before and I’m retiring a little bit smarter because I’m understanding some of these nuances now.

Tyler Emrick:

No, absolutely. I think to take advantage of the nuances, to your point, Walt, you got to kind of get down in the nitty-gritty a little bit and understand some of these nuances. If you start having surprise tax bills, you’re going to find out those nuances pretty quickly, right? But this idea of paying taxes on the portfolio income that’s distributed from these products, I think is a big piece of the equation. We’re going to get ready to talk about some of the more advanced investment vehicles here when we start talking about direct indexing and then the tax-aware long-short investing strategy. But before we dive into that, I think it’s important to understand the concept of tax-loss harvesting. If you Google search and say, well, now it’s ChatGPT.

Walter Storholt:

Correct. [inaudible 00:14:54].

Tyler Emrick:

If you do the search and say, “Hey, what should I be aware of at the end of the year from a tax standpoint?” And most of those lists, and one of those prompts that come back, is going to say, “Hey, you should be looking to try to harvest your losses in your investing account.” So again, I think it’s very important to say, “Well, what is that? What are they actually talking about?” Because this is a very important benefit that these more complex strategies are going to provide, this idea of tax-loss harvesting.

Speaker 3:

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Walter Storholt:

I feel like tax-loss harvesting is just also something I’ve gotten a lot of marketing about over the last 5, 6, 7 years, Tyler, just in the various accounts that we’re in from a retirement standpoint or brokerage accounts and those kinds of things, I feel like I’m getting hit with marketing about tax-loss harvesting a lot.

Tyler Emrick:

Absolutely. And as we think about tax-loss harvesting, what it is is it’s when you look at your portfolio, specifically the portfolio that is not in retirement accounts.

Walter Storholt:

Gotcha.

Tyler Emrick:

We’re talking about taxable brokerage accounts now. Inside of there, you take an inventory of your investments, and some of those investments might be up, some of those investments might be down, and tax-loss harvesting is simply saying, “Well, hey, can I sell some of those investments that are down at a loss and use that to offset maybe other gains that I had in my portfolio throughout the year?” Or the IRS will actually allow you to offset about 3,000 of it against your ordinary income each year and to actually take a loss. So it’s taking that inventory of your losses of the investments over the course of the year and saying, “Hey, do I want to sell that investment, realize it, and either use it to rebalance my account and take gains somewhere else, or maybe take a loss and lower my taxable income for the year?”

That is what we are getting at when we’re thinking about loss harvesting or tax-loss harvesting. So this idea, tax-loss harvesting is very much amplified as you think about this next investment vehicle that we’re talking about, and this is the idea of direct indexing. So what direct indexing is, and I think it’s important that we first differentiate between how is it different than an ETF and a mutual fund, right? An ETF or a mutual fund that, say, invests in the S&P 500, you’re going to put your money in that one mutual fund, and then that manager is going to go buy the 500 stocks in the S&P 500, and that manager or that company is going to manage that for you all within the mutual fund. So when you log on to your statement online, you’re just going to see one line item, mutual fund or ETF, S&P 500, right?

Well, when we do direct indexing and we want to accomplish the same thing, we want to invest in the S&P 500, well, what you are now saying is, “I don’t want to use the ETF or mutual fund wrapper. I want to just go buy the 500 stocks myself.” So when you log onto your account, you’re going to see 500 names in the S&P 500, and you are investing in that index directly. So that’s where it gets its name from, direct indexing.

Walter Storholt:

Okay.

Tyler Emrick:

Now, you might be sitting there-

Walter Storholt:

It sounds like a lot of work.

Tyler Emrick:

You nailed it, Walt. I was going to say, “You might be sitting there going, ‘Wow, that sounds like a lot of work.'” That’s exactly what I was going to say.

Walter Storholt:

My gosh, the size of that statement.

Tyler Emrick:

Why do I want to do that, right? And yes, the statements can be very, very long. Well, the reason why they want to do that is this idea of tax-loss harvesting. So when you get down into the weeds about performance of an index, for example, say the S&P 500, in any given year, about a third of those stocks in the S&P 500 would actually be negative, their price for the year. They would actually have losses.

Walter Storholt:

Say that one more time, Tyler, just so it sinks in.

Tyler Emrick:

About a third of the stocks in the S&P 500 on any given year experience stock price declines or losses in a given year. Now, you combat that against, “Well, hey, the S&P 500 historically averages around 10% per year.” So what you’re telling me is that the S&P 500 can be up 10% on average, but yet still a third of the companies in the S&P 500 lost money? Yes, that’s what we’re saying. So when you think about harvesting losses, when you direct index, what you’re able to do is you can go in and those third of stocks that actually have losses, you can realize those for your own benefit. When you do that in the form of an ETF or mutual fund, you’re just seeing that the account’s up 10%. On average, the S&P 500, it’d be up 10%.

So you do not have any direct losses that you can harvest because you’re in that wrapper, right? But if you direct index, you’re able to go in and harvest losses because you can go into the bottom third or whatever stocks loss and sell them and realize those losses, and then use those in a tax-efficient manner. We actually like to think of those losses and harvested losses as a tax asset because it’s a benefit. You can take those losses and use them however you want. If you don’t end up using them all, they actually just roll over to the next year and you can use them the next year. So they never go away. So this idea that your account could be up in value, but you still have tax losses, the idea of direct indexing is why they add that complexity is to be able to get that. Does that make sense, Walt? Are you following me on all that?

Walter Storholt:

I’m tracking with you now? Yeah, absolutely. I don’t know if this is where you’re heading next, but my obvious next thing is, okay, but then once I sell them, what do I do?

Tyler Emrick:

When you sell those in the direct indexing strategy, what they’re doing is they’re just rebalancing into similar stocks and weightings. There’s wash-sale rules that you need to be worried about, but these programs that run the direct indexing, they definitely work around that. So really your exposure should be about the same in a direct indexing strategy. There’s a little bit of what we call tracking air to the benchmark, but mutual funds have that little bit of tracking error too. Within the strategy, there isn’t too much of a, “Hey, you harvest those losses and then they redistribute them, and then they’re managing that count,” right?

Walter Storholt:

Tracking error to the benchmark would’ve definitely gotten you the egghead alert back in the day before we went to video. We still need to make an egghead alert video version.

Tyler Emrick:

I haven’t heard about the egghead alert in a while.

Walter Storholt:

Our audio listeners became accustomed to it. Whenever Tyler would go a little too far in a term, he’d get the egghead alert.

Tyler Emrick:

I’ll make one more comment about tracking error. Tracking error is just saying, “Hey, if the benchmark, the S&P 500, was up 10% and your portfolio was only up 9, the tracking error is the 1% difference there.” You were a little bit off on the benchmark, and it can go either way.

Walter Storholt:

Similar to a standard deviation in some other mathematical example.

Tyler Emrick:

You can think of it that way. I would argue that was more of an egghead alert comment on it. I’m tracking you, Walt. I don’t know, you’ve been listening to me too long. Now, this idea-

Walter Storholt:

I’m just trying to make my calculus teacher, Mr. Mayo, proud from back in high school.

Tyler Emrick:

Now, this idea of direct indexing has some downsides. One of the downsides certainly is complexity, right? Because you’re going to have 500 individual positions inside of your account in the scenario that we’ve kind of been working down here. But also what happens is, well, generally the stock market goes up more than it goes down. That’s why we invest in the stock market, right? So using these direct indexing strategies, one of the issues is that over time, generally within the first three to five years, direct indexing works great, you’re able to harvest those losses, but then even the losers of the portfolio turn in and they start to turn a profit, because again, market generally goes up over time.

Normally, the first three to five years are your tax-loss harvesting years, and then at the end of year 5, 6, 7, 8, now you’re at a point to where you’ve harvested pretty much all the losses and you’re left with the 500 stock positions and the complexity. So it’s a little bit of a downside to using that direct indexing strategy. I’d say it’s a big downside, frankly, because depending on how the market moves and the volatility, this harvesting of losses is short-lived, okay? And that’s where I think the next iteration or where the more tax-aware long-short strategies, or TALs for short, strategies that we’ve talked about in the past, come into play. Maybe this is a good time to maybe do my public service announcement too, that, hey, the goal of these strategies is investment returns, not losses, right? Awesome byproduct of how the strategies work, but make no mistake about it, the priority is to earn money and get benchmark returns or plus some tax [inaudible 00:24:23].

Walter Storholt:

It’s always made tax-loss harvesting a tough sell, right?

Tyler Emrick:

Yes, absolutely. I’m locking in my losers.

Walter Storholt:

I’m locking in a loser. I thought I wasn’t supposed to do that, right?

Tyler Emrick:

Yes. What happens is with the tax-aware long-short strategy, which is kind of, again, that next evolution, is essentially it solves the two issues or that issue with direct indexing because what happens is with the tax-aware long-short strategy, you’re actually able to essentially indefinitely harvest those losses, which is extremely advantageous. And then the second thing that it does over direct indexing, it actually amplifies those harvested losses as well. In implementation of this strategy, we’ve seen in year one individuals being able to harvest 30% of losses of their initial investment in year one. Their accounts were still positive, you still have good positive returns, but the structure of the investment allows you to gain this tax asset of harvested losses, which we can then use very, very tax efficiently down the road. Now, the way it does this is it creates a long-short overlay.

What happens is when we do that, the short positions generate more consistent short-term losses, and then we also have more inherent positions within the portfolio that give us the ability to harvest those losses as well. So it works much, much better in a wide array of market volatility than what we would look at with just a more basic direct indexing strategy. And I think the biggest benefit here is saying, “Hey, this tax asset of these harvested losses, how can we use them going forward? How can we use them to offset some of our taxes?” And they could be used in a number of ways. Certainly, they can be used to diversify out of a very concentrated stock position. They can be used for business owners who have a big capital gain hit because they sold their business or whatnot. That is a tremendous benefit. So if you’re a small business owner, you’re looking at an exit, something like a tax-aware long-short investment strategy can be invaluable to you as well.

Walter Storholt:

Is that something where you would need to be doing the TALS a few years in advance of selling the business in order to leverage that? It’s not like that.

Tyler Emrick:

The earlier, the better because you’re right, you’re harvesting these up over a period of time and these losses can roll over from year to year. It’s all about proper planning, right, Walt? So, hey, if you know you’re looking at an exit in a couple of years, you start implementing this strategy, we’re able to harvest more and more of those losses, get them built up. Again, you’re getting benchmark performance returns, so your account value should continue to increase, but on your tax return, we got this tax asset of harvested losses that can be used to offset big hits down the road from the sale. Absolutely.

We could even take it one step further as well. For individuals that have large K-1s or W-2s and things like that, the next step is, well, if you’re considered a qualified purchaser, we can look at a limited partnership, which would be the even next step above and beyond your typical tax-aware long-short strategy. And this is for those individuals that have a large tax hit that they potentially have coming or on a year in and year off basis have substantial amounts that they send to good old Uncle Sam. These limited partnerships give us the ability to do some really, really unique things where we turn your portfolio losses into business losses. And for any business owners that are listening to the pod now, ding, ding, ding, those business losses are our most tax inefficient ones. Those are where the IRS really hits us from a tax standpoint.

So if we’re able to use our portfolio to help offset those, that’s when things start working out really well, and all that planning kind of comes to fruition. We talked about a ton, Walt, but at our basics, we went from mutual funds, most tax inefficient, to one step up, to ETFs and some of the unique things that were going in there, and then moved on to some of our more complex strategies where we’re talking to look at direct indexing and what we would see at the top of the scale here from a tax efficiency standpoint, the tax-aware long-short strategy. So as you’re looking at your own portfolio and you’re looking at those assets that you have outside of retirement accounts, any number of these strategies can be very advantageous, and the implementation I think is really worth looking at if you’re looking at, “Hey, I got a pretty big bill each year to go to Uncle Sam.”

Walter Storholt:

Yeah. It just shows the depth, and I know I say this a lot of times on the show, but the additional layers that you guys go into in your planning at True Wealth Design. So I always appreciate you peeling back that onion more than anything else you see out there because it helps us retire smarter. Even if we don’t have the ability, if we’re an everyday saver investor planner for retirement to go out and do these things on our own, we know that you’re there then to help implement all of these things and make it so we don’t have to go buy all 500 companies and block off our calendar for a week to go do all that.

Tyler Emrick:

And which strategy fits for your situation too, right? And to understand that you got to understand what your tax situation looks like to be able to adequately fit into, “All right, hey, where on that spectrum do you fit and where is it going to be most efficient for you and your family?”

Walter Storholt:

All of these things fold in on one another, right, in terms of what works for somebody.

Tyler Emrick:

Yeah.

Walter Storholt:

Yeah, very good. Well, if you’d like to talk to Tyler and the team at True Wealth Design about this, about whether it be TALS or mutual funds, ETFs, “I don’t know if I’ve got the right stuff in the right places. I’ve done a great job saving for retirement, but I’m really not quite sure what to do with it. Now that I’ve built the nest egg up, I’m worried about taxes.” If you’ve got those question marks about your portfolio and about your plan still sitting out there, don’t hesitate to reach out. You can schedule a review of your financial situation. The first step is a 20-minute discovery meeting with the True Wealth team. You meet with an experienced advisor, and you’re going to find out if you’re a good fit to work with one another and take next steps from there.

You just go to truewealthdesign.com, look for the Let’s Talk button, and schedule your strategy session that way. Again, that’s truewealthdesign.com. We’ve got it linked and more contact information in the description of today’s show, so you can find it easily. Tyler, good breakdown on all of this. One last real quick little thing. I’m hearing that this isn’t really one of those age topics when it comes to retirement planning. Often with retirement planning, we’re talking about an age bracket. This seems to shirk that a little bit. This is more about how much you have accumulated, what your tax situation is. Somebody in their 30s or 40s who might be going to sell a business in a couple of years would benefit from something like this. Am I’m tracking that okay?

Tyler Emrick:

100%. You got it.

Walter Storholt:

Okay. Excellent. Wherever you are, if you’re an ideal fit for maybe one of these strategies and you want to find out more, definitely reach out. Again, truewealthdesign.com. Tyler, great episode. Thanks for the help today.

Tyler Emrick:

That was fun. We’ll catch you on the next one.

Walter Storholt:

Go get you a pumpkin spice latte, my friend.

Tyler Emrick:

Of course.

Walter Storholt:

We’ll see everybody next time right back here on Retire Smarter. Until then, take care.

Speaker 4:

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