Listen Now:
The Smart Take:
We welcome Kevin Kroskey, CFP®, MBA, back in action, joining Tyler Emrick, CFA, CFP®, on this potpourri-type episode.
Hear Kevin’s perspective on the last episode, coming changes in the residential real estate market, and why they will be good for consumers. He’ll also share some lessons learned from this tax season and differences between tax-only clients and clients who receive coordinated tax and wealth management services.
Hear Tyler share recent client stories from new clients about the issues and ramifications of not coordinating financial, legal, and tax matters properly.
And be sure to listen at the end when they discuss the recently released college ranking, called “A First Try at ROI”. This study and the resulting calculator look at the cost outlays for 4,500 colleges and the ROI – return on investment – in earnings over time. Is the Ivy League worth the cost (if your child can get in)? What about a pricey private school vs. a public in-state one? And who had a wiser decision-making process for their college selection – Kevin or Tyler.
That and more on this episode of Retire Smarter.
Here’s some of what we discuss in this episode:
- Increased transparency in real estate is generally good and facilitates better buying and decisions, better pricing.
- Why having a detailed-oriented team working alongside can provide big financial benefits.
- The biggest challenges facing first-time homebuyers.
- Why so many people end up with a surprise tax bill and what we do to help our clients avoid that.
- The role we play with individuals and business owners when it comes to tax planning.
Learn more about the Retire Smarter Solution ™: https://www.truewealthdesign.com/ep-45-retire-smarter-solution/
Sign up for our newsletter on our podcast page: https://www.truewealthdesign.com/podcast/
Have questions?
Need help making sure your investments and retirement plan are on track? Click to schedule a free 15-minute call with one of True Wealth’s CFP® Professionals.
Subscribe:
Click the below links to subscribe to the podcast with your favorite service. If you don’t see your podcast listed with your favorite service, then let us know, and we’ll add it!
The Hosts:
Kevin Kroskey, CFP®, MBA – About – Contact
Tyler Emrick, CFA®, CFP® – About – Contact
Episode Transcript:
Walter Storholt 00:00
Coming up on today’s episode, we’re going to expand our conversation from the prior episode about the financial impact of the latest industry shifts in real estate. And although Tax Day is in the rearview mirror, it doesn’t mean we should stop talking about that important subject. In fact, we have some compelling clients stories as it relates to tax returns, that’ll clearly highlight the importance of making sure that your financial professionals are communicating effectively with one another. And do you feel like you’ve got a good ROI from your college education? Well, new data is out that ranks the ROI of 4500 colleges and universities find out where yours is on the list. And can you guess some of the surprising schools that had a negative ROI? All that and oh, yeah, Kevin is back to join us for this episode. So you know, it’s gonna be a good one. Let’s get started.
Walter Storholt 00:52
Walter Storholt here alongside Kevin Kroskey. Yes, he’s back. But I feel like I should flip it. I don’t think you deserve top billing anymore. Here, Kevin. It’s, it’s really, it’s really been the Tyler show. So I really should say Tyler Emrick first certified financial planner, true wealth design, also a chartered financial analyst. But yes, ladies and gentlemen, he’s back. Mr. Kevin Kroskey. Back on the show with us as well. Also certified financial planner. And, guys, it’s great to be back in and have the whole gang together here. How’s life treating both of you?
Kevin Kroskey 01:22
Well, first of all, thank you for that intro. I’m happy to be back. You know, my kids, I have a five and 10 year old girl, or five and 10 year old girls, excuse me, who listen to these movies that are playing in the car when you’re driving and Secret Life of Pets has been one. It’s been on reedy for years. And I think it’s the second one of those where it’s kind of like what I’m doing today. It’s like, Hey, I haven’t been here for a while. So I’m coming back. I’m peeing on the tree of the podcast and making sure I still own this sucker.
Walter Storholt 01:50
How do you feel about that analogy? Tyler?
Tyler Emrick 01:52
Come on. We’re happy to have any time anytime.
Walter Storholt 01:56
Absolutely well, and it’s fun to have you back not only for the conversation and the financial guidance and just some good laughs along the way as well. It’s gonna be fun to dive into all of this and can’t wait to get to
Tyler Emrick 02:06
Yeah, and make a wall. Make sure you got that egg head alert on standby in case he can get by an episode.
Walter Storholt 02:15
We’ve got wiggle factor queued up to get a return of I
Kevin Kroskey 02:18
be surprised. A piece of price is illegal factor comes at least you never know where the conversation is gonna go. But that’s where we’re starting with what we think we’re going to talk about anyway. I’d be surprised but you never know. I’m
Walter Storholt 02:30
gonna have to make a new one. Now that’s I don’t know something about a dog peeing on a on a hydrant or on the bush or something like that. Or whenever you do come back, you’ve already given me a great idea for your next.
Kevin Kroskey 02:41
set the bar really low today. I love it. That’s right. That’s right. Yeah.
Tyler Emrick 02:44
Well say can we can get pretty tundra corn real estate. Right. I mean, I think that’s our first topic on the agenda. I know the last podcast that we recorded. We talked a little bit about some of the changes going on in the industry and, you know, some of the litigation that’s happening and how it might affect buyers and sellers. But you I know you had some commentary, and maybe you can use that as a good starting point.
Kevin Kroskey 03:06
Yeah, sure thing happy to. So you know, I Tyler do listen, your podcast and I one, one of the reasons why I haven’t been back is because I think you’ve been doing a fantastic job all the way around. And while you always make us look better and sound better to so appreciate you both but with your last podcasts on the real estate and some of the changes that are going on in the industry. I mean, one of the things that stuck out, in my mind that you had spoken about was just how the increased transparency is generally good and facilitates better buying decisions, better pricing, you know, things are in more of a black box or opaque, then there’s a lot of ways to kind of maybe protect margins, if you will protect those commissions or protect margins in any business for that matter. So the transparency about you know, really kind of separating the buyers and sellers commission is a good thing. One of the things kind of stuck out in my mind. Analogous that was, you know, a lot of this, the buyers don’t really they don’t they pay for it, you know, if I’m a seller, I get the net proceeds, right? And so whatever kind of split or whatever is paid, I mean, mathematically, analytically, I should care about my net proceeds when I’m making the sale. But that’s kind of, you know, in this sort of like, you know, opaque zone one part of the reason that we have jobs salary, it’s certainly not the only one but, you know, one of our mantras is that true wealth is like you know, don’t make the client do the math, do the math for them make it simple, clear and understandable. And I don’t know about you guys, but you know, when you look at the settlement statement for a real estate closing, you know, there’s, there’s a lot that’s going on, there is so much so I remember back in 2012 My wife and I sold our first home and moved into the home that we’re at now and it was also the year that I bought the office building. We’re troth designs the main offices today. So we have three transactions that year. Every one of them all three had errors on the settlement statement. And think about, like, who’s looking at this, you know, we had a mortgage when we bought our new house. So the mortgage loan officer was looking at it, the title rep was looking at it, you know, the realtor was looking at it, as matter of fact, there’s two realtors, who, at least in theory, should have been looking at it. And even on the commercial mortgage, there was mistaken there’s generally, you know, there’s, you know, banks involved, bank underwriters, things like that, the commercial agent, you know, there’s tends to be just very broadly a little bit more sophistication in the commercial market, rather than the residential market. And those errors range from like a $500, home warranty that I was being charged for, and declined, all the way up to about a $15,000 error on the part of the sale of my starter home, and the commercial mortgage was a $5,000 error. So this is, so it should be simple, right? That all of these professionals that were engaged in these transactions, they’re all screwed up three, for three,
Walter Storholt 06:04
I just want to chime in Kevin and say, I’m just I’m raising my hand to 2018, when we bought our house, exact same thing, there were things that we had paid for, with a check out of pocket, that shouldn’t have made it to the settlement statement. And yet, they just assumed that we had rolled it into the mortgage. And there it was listed. So we had like two entries that had to get taken off. And I was the one that caught it. And so same situation at your first home purchase. That was the second home purchase. Yeah,
Tyler Emrick 06:29
okay, I could throw I can throw my hat in the ring here. I mean, hopefully not a 20k mistake. But I think back We purchased our first home back in 2014. And, you know, kind of looking back, and I was in the financial planning industry to kind of come clean here. Right, I was working for one of the biggest discount brokers in the industry, you know, providing financial planning advice. And to be frank, at the time, I certainly did not understand the some of those closing documents and settlement documents that you’re mentioning, Kevin, you know, going back to it, we went through the process, you know, almost two years ago now again, and it’s amazing, you know, going through it, understanding kind of how it works and understanding what’s all on those documents. I look back through my first run, I didn’t see any necessarily mistakes. But I was leaning on those professionals to help me make that decision, and was really in kind of a vulnerable spot maybe more vulnerable than what I should have been at the time. You
Walter Storholt 07:20
guys are making me paranoid man, we’re gonna go back.
Tyler Emrick 07:24
Well, it’s one but not 20k mistake. That’s
Kevin Kroskey 07:26
a big it’s, it’s, you know, this is a perfect example, not really where I was going to take my real estate comments, but something we can weave in later. But you know, when you have all these people, you have the realtors, you have the mortgage loan officers, you have the title company, and you have, you know, the buyer and seller. You know, there’s a lot of handoffs that are there. And if there’s not some coordination amongst the group, somebody that’s taking leadership, taking ownership, making sure that things are done, right, guess who it comes down on, you know, it comes down to us less informed nonprofessionals. Now, Tyler and I aren’t normal. And I know my wife always says that, but I think she means in a different way. But we’re very detail oriented, we have a good financial understanding. And candidly, we can figure a lot of things out just through critical thinking. But when you don’t have that coordination, I mean, that’s what it comes down to. I mean, things are people are going to be in their little box, maybe not worry about some other things. And there’s no, there’s no leadership overall. And that just creates, you know, a lack of clarity, you know, on the whole situation. So we’ll kind of save that, and we’ll get back into some of the other things. But for the real estate specifically, though, you know, the thing that I was going to comment on that settlement statement, yes, there may be a buyer’s and seller’s commission that’s listed on there. But there’s, there’s a lot that’s going on that statement, and it’s not clear unless you’re looking at it regularly, or unless you really spend the time to understand it. So even though it’s listed, and arguably, it’s transparent, I think maybe even potentially more, the issue is that it’s like, it’s like a third party payment problem. So even if you do have transparency, you know, because the buyer is not paying, you know, the portion for the buyer’s agent commission. They’re like, Well, what, what does it matter? You know, and it’s somewhat of a, I think, an uninformed perspective to take because, again, you know, the seller, at least in on a rational level, should be concerned about the net proceeds that they’re getting. So the overall, everybody should be mindful that, you know, if they’re going to use a buyer’s agent, and say, the buyer’s agent gets a 3% commission, you know, on a $500,000 house, you know, that’s 15,000. Now, if they don’t, if they if they value that, and then want to spend that 15,000, then they should do so. But first, you know, if maybe they’re buying a home in their neighborhood, maybe they’re already familiar with the neighborhood, you know, maybe they’re comfortable negotiating, maybe for whatever reason, they just don’t feel the need that they need a buyer’s agent and a rational basis. You know, if you’re not using that buyer’s agent, you know, it’s $15,000. In theory, you should be able to offer that seller $15,000 less because they’re still going to get the same net proceeds. Now, not everybody’s rational. So I’ll kind of set that aside for a moment. Doing the math is again, something that, you know, people just get kind of get caught up in. But that third party payment, it’s just like health care, you know, you get your health insurance and me being a business owner and Tyler to now you know, he’s seeing the full cost of this health insurance all the way around rather than just what the employee pays. And so you get a better appreciation for what the true cost of something is, you know, if you’re on the employee side, you know, you’re just kind of really caring about what you have out of pocket, which is only a piece of it. And you know, the health insurance company, the employers paying the rest. So you have this third party payment system, it just completely clouds, the decision making process, when you’re going through that. So third party payment, no bueno. Just not good. So if you’re using your money out of your own pocket, you’re gonna make a better decision overall. And that sort of transparency and competition is going to drive better pricing, better value creation, if that creative destruction process of, you know, just yeah, sure, there’s going to be winners and losers. But those are, who are going to provide more value over time are going to be the winners. And it’s going to raise the level of value that the buyer is getting for that. And theoretically, the sellers Well, to me, it’s not only that’s transparency, but if people are paying out of their own pocket and making that much clearer and avoiding 30 part payments, you know, the seller compensating for the buyer and what they’re getting from the buyer’s agent, I think that’s going to be a lot better overall.
Tyler Emrick 11:20
Well, if you think about just where the real estate industry is, right now, with prices, where they’re at, obviously, no ideal, know what’s going to happen and where we’re going forward. But you look at where interest rates are right now, you know, comparatively speaking, you know, we’re in the mid 7% range, I think I checked yesterday morning for a 30 year fixed rate, national average, certainly your credit score can change that rate up or down substantially. But the mid 7% range was just back in 2021, we were down in the low two. So that price becomes even more important as we’re starting to think about financing and the leverage involved and how that in payment comes in, especially for any not just the home first time homebuyers, but anybody looking to buy or sell the home, you know, some of these changes, bring light to that and transparency and just help people make better decisions, then, you know, head outcomes, hopefully will be pretty good.
Kevin Kroskey 12:10
Yeah, a couple of things that I sell to you that I’ll just make an another brief comment on. We’re not like just downing real estate agents in the title for the last one, or at least the description for the last episode about kind of separating the wheat from the chaff, you know, I think is a good one, you know, there’s in, in the economy, there’s different sort of toll takers or rent seekers, if you will, and, you know, any of these sorts of like the National Association of Realtors is a powerful lobby, obviously, you know, they kind of lost out on this, you know, settlement here, and we’re seeing these reforms now that are happening. But you know, it happens all the time in many industries. One of the ones that, and maybe I’m biased, being bald, but I’m always like, just curious, you know, why do people that like cut hair need a license with the state, I mean, is there, I get doctors, I get, you know, attorneys, so on and so forth. But what’s the ramification is somebody doesn’t have a license to cut hair, I just don’t get that one. So people put up barriers to kind of protect their turf. And these are sort of rent seeking behaviors that you see in different parts of the economy. And I think some of those are coming down in real estate. I think I’ll read a comment of somebody that I definitely respect in many ways. I was kind of surprised by their comments here. But the writing about some of the changes and kind of their conclusion was, you know, this is going to set back the way that we buy a home like 50 years. And I think that couldn’t be further from the truth. One of his main points is the problem is that most buyers don’t have funds to pay their broker out of pocket. So and I think this directly hits that those first time homebuyers disproportionately that you just mentioned, Tyler, there’s a lot of work and working with first time homebuyers. I can see that for sure. One, we’ve probably all been there too. You know, I was in the mortgage business early in my career as I was working through grad school, what have you. So I have some direct experience over the years that maybe makes me a little bit more informed, but they’re less, the balance sheet is less cash rich, if you will, you know, you’re just starting out, you got you know, maybe you got kids, you certainly may have some loans, not only for the home that you’re seeking, but for your autos, maybe there’s some student debt, you know, you’re just starting out early earning years of your career. So it’s natural that you have less cash. So, yes, now, and I double check my sources on this. My brother is one of the largest mortgage loan officers for US Bank, by volume and by units in the country. So I double checked my sources there. He’s kind of like a rain man. And when it comes to like underwriting roles, and per my brother, my, my very good source here, you know, he confirmed what my initial reaction was to this. So currently, I mean, you can have a credit from the seller, you know, to pay closing costs, it may need a little bit more clarity around this from Fannie and Freddie as well as maybe some of the banks for their Portfolio loans, but you can have you know, 3% The value of going towards the buyers costs. So it can actually be higher than that too. So if it’s depends on the loan program 3% is kind of the bare bones could be as high as 6%. If your loan to value is, you know, maybe less than 75% or less can actually go up to like 9%. So there’s plenty of percentages there. Again, if we’re talking about like, maybe two or 3%, for a buyer’s agent, when granted, there’s other closing costs for title and what have you. Sometimes, you know, you’ll write these contracts where even like the credit to help with closing and less cash out of pocket will go towards like prepaids. So your taxes and your insurance as well. But point being there’s, there’s already plenty of flexibility there, in most cases, to go ahead and pay for some of this and not, you know, screw up closing where it’s, it’s like, Hey, you’re not going to be able to buy a home. I think that’s really short sighted there.
Tyler Emrick 15:50
Well, I’ll say Kevin Vegas, choosing your real estate professional, that much more important to you and working with someone that understand some of these opportunities that fit your specific need, whether you’re a first time home purchaser or cash flow is important to you, as you purchase a home or whatever the case is, you’re having the professionals that have the knowledge and the expertise to be able to guide you through this is extremely important. Yeah.
Kevin Kroskey 16:11
Oh, totally, for sure. The, I think something else I’ll kind of connect us all together, I hope in a moment, but a quote another thing that this person had written, the settlement hopes this change will force buyers brokers to work for less, I think that’s a stretch, I think, sure, you know, the increased transparency, making the decision, you know, if you’re putting yourself in that those buyer shoes, like okay, hey, you know, I need to go ahead and get this done. Here’s how much cash I have, here’s my closing costs, which again, they should all understand this all in advance, they should not just go out and start shopping for home, which is probably what most of them do, it’s a very emotional decision. And there’s some excitement, and then it’s like, Oh, we got to figure all this sort of financing stuff out. Second, not not a good approach, by the way. But and I don’t think it means that they’re going to have to work for less, it’s just they’re going to make this cost benefit decision, you’re gonna have to have somebody that’s taken more of a leadership stance here and explain this and how it can get done. A lot of realtors don’t understand how financing works, you know, the they may be involved first before the mortgage professional. Again, I think that’s putting the cart before the horse. I think ultimately, this could maybe give a good nudge to people work more holistically, more integrated, you know, some words that we often use on the wealth management side of the business to and we’ll talk about here in a moment. But just to really kind of, you know, take that leadership and walk them through this entire process and not be piecemeal, and come down, you’re onto those first time homebuyers or any buyer or any seller for that matter. You know, when I think about this, economically, real estate professionals generally prefer the listings, right, they go out, and they sell to the home seller, and they get the listing. And I don’t want to say they’re not so involved after that. But you know, if you’re a buyer’s agent, particularly working with first time homebuyer, I would, I would speculate, and I think I’m probably right, there’s a lot more work involved in those first time homebuyers it’s a big decision, a lot of emotion going into it, they don’t know, you know, they probably think that they can get a lot more than what they can at first. So you got to kind of inform them on what the market is and what they can buy. Whereas the seller, you know, the listing agent gets the listing and kind of, I don’t say the work is done, but until they get some offers, it depends on like how aggressive they’re being or not being most buyers, I think the stats are like more than 90% of the buyers themselves are finding the homes online and then sending that over to a buyer’s agent or something like that. So that’s really kind of where it’s emanating from. But what I see is an opportunity for some of the more motivated higher value producing agents, whether on the, you know, the listing side, or on the buyer side, you know, this stuff needs to be brought together, you know, don’t just go for the listings. But if you’re really going to provide a better service overall, you know, why not have a good person or people on your team that can be the buyer’s agent that can go ahead and facilitate both of us provide a more integrated, holistic solution. Yes, there’s more work over there on the buyer’s agent side generally, hey, I mean, that’s what this transparency and removing the third party payment is going to do for competition it’s going to be an opportunity for some others are going to be kind of competed out. And maybe those licenses are going to go away and not renewed. And it’s going to bring up the whole value chain for the entire market overall.
Walter Storholt 19:27
Well, great breakdown guys, I feel like we could have done a whole follow up episode just on a just on the real estate side. So take a breath there on that topic. And let’s shift gears to the tax conversation. Not something you guys have been busy with at all over the last couple of weeks, right?
Tyler Emrick 19:43
April 16 right come on. You’re on the other side behind us the 15 has passed or on the other side. Yeah, sorry.
Walter Storholt 19:50
Let’s be a good fit should
Kevin Kroskey 19:51
have made that disclaimer to begin with. I’m kind of in that haze. I feel like I got punched by Mike Tyson over the last several weeks I got that brain fog or something Hey, guess the IRS is? Well, we’re
Walter Storholt 20:01
just excited to talk about something other than taxes.
Kevin Kroskey 20:05
So Tyler, I don’t know, it was maybe like, three, four episodes ago, but I think he talked about, you know, maybe some surprise tax bills, maybe just kind of give a quick, you know, set up before we get into some of the things that we can weave into the conversation today.
Tyler Emrick 20:20
Yeah, no, I think the gist of that podcast was really around the idea of, hey, when you have your tax time, I think, for a lot of families, you know, there’s a lot of unknowns. And they’re just gathering their tax documents. And maybe they have an idea of what their refund is going to look like, or their tax bill might look like. But sometimes, things happen throughout the year that can really vastly change that preconceived idea of, well, hey, this is what I’m expecting, when I file the return. It’s really fascinating to me, just how many financial professionals in our industry don’t help out families with that tax side of things and that understanding so that way, there isn’t that big surprise tax bill, I feel like this year, maybe even a little bit more than most was a a year where a lot of families got that surprise tax bill, whether it was the higher interest rates, so there’s interest payments kind of flowing through it on the tax return, or whatever the case may be. I feel like our industry as a whole does a pretty poor job of helping families understand what their tax withholding looks like, what their tax strategy should be going into a year, and really just bringing it all together for them. Point in case we were sitting down with an individual for the first time just a couple of weeks ago. And the individual had done a search online, found us on the web, found our website and listened to a couple podcasts and decided to come in and have a what we call an initial consultation, where we’re just, you know, kind of sit down and try to understand the situation a little bit more. And, you know, this individual had been working with a financial planner for a number of years, he spoke very highly of them. And, you know, I had to I had to ask, like, what are you doing here? You know, why are you coming to see us? And, you know, he was very clear that he was working with a more just purely investment professional, his financial planner, literally when they set up distributions for him, when it came time for retirement just said, Hey, what tax withholding Do you want me to do? On your distribution? You know, he said that when he got asked that question that kind of dawned on him a little bit that he might be underprepared for the transition, you’re in some of the decisions that are in front of them. He liked this individual. He had been working with him for a number of years, but he realized that this individual just hadn’t set up their business and didn’t have the knowledge and expertise to help them with the entire financial picture. So he was coming to us to really get that understanding and get a plan in place, and help them understand not only that tax situation, but how his investments and other things are integrated. You know, I asked him, when we provided the holistic advice that we do, there’s a lot that we have to know. And you know, I was curious on how he was managing the investments with his investment professional now. And I asked him so how do you come into a year and understand how much of the investment income or tax impact from trading impacts your taxes? Do you guys we call it a capital gains budget, you know, heading into the year and saying, Hey, this is the maximum, we want to hit the tax return from trading activities. And this individual had a sizable account and non retirement assets. So as we all know, those interest and dividends and buys and sells all have a trickle down effect from a tax standpoint. And you know, when I asked him that, he’s like, Well, that’s, that would be great if we had that. And I can absolutely communicate it with my investment professional I’m working with now. So just little subtle things like that. And having and gaining clarity around what your tax picture look like, I think was kind of the crux of that prior episode and trying to help families understand that there is a little bit of a better way. And taking that holistic approach really helps avoid those surprise tax bills, because let’s be real guys, I mean, no one likes paying taxes and having a surprise bill. You know, whatever it is never a fun thing when it comes time to file this taxes. Yeah,
Kevin Kroskey 24:12
completely agree some surprises are no bueno. We I’m not sure if we shared it on the podcast. I know we did through with our clients and just through our email newsletter, but we’ve been doing tax returns now for our wealth clients come in close to 15 years, it’s been a while, you know, started small and continue to grow. And then we just continued to see the benefits of it. It was a good experience for the client. We were already doing the planning work. We needed a lot of the same documents for their financial planning that they would give to their tax professional. A lot of tax professionals candidly just don’t want to do a lot of the smaller 1040 work you know they want to work on the businesses with recurring revenue and what have you. Also the tax industry is at an incredibly severe understaffing. For years, I think the peak college enrollment reached was reached in like 2008 or 2009. And has been on a big decline since then. So there’s, like, huge challenge there from just like a human capital standpoint to. So we,
Tyler Emrick 25:14
Kevin, you’re saying CPAs? Isn’t the sexy job out of college right now?
Kevin Kroskey 25:18
Well, I can, I can tell you that the excited.
Walter Storholt 25:21
I had a friend in college, and our whole suite made fun of him relentlessly, because he would just always talk about how he’d wanted to be an actuary his entire life. And he was like, I can’t wait to be an actuary. I’ve been dreaming about it since I was a little kid. And it was just, it was a theme throughout all four college years of just him. No, boy,
Tyler Emrick 25:41
you might be one up in us.
Walter Storholt 25:45
I saw it as a relatively even parallel, but yeah, a little bit of the same.
Kevin Kroskey 25:49
Sorry to cut you off. My train of thought?
Tyler Emrick 25:55
We did. Yeah. So you’re on track for Hey, CPAs hard to find enrollments down.
Kevin Kroskey 26:01
So it’s, so we we’ve had CPAs on staff before we’ve kind of done a fully outsourced and, you know, kind of a hybrid model and everything in between and, and last year, we acquired two small CPA firms and added five team members to our tax and accounting division. So if we were growing that significantly and plan to continue in the future, it’s like the real estate analogy I mentioned, when you’re the wealth manager, I mean, you’re thinking about, you know, your Ford, you’re kind of imagining what you your life wants to be sure you’re kind of looking at the president and understanding your cash flows and opportunities and risks and all that. But it’s I think a general, it’s a lot more sort of positive endeavor, you know, that’s, it’s a little bit more, it’s better, just like maybe being the listing agent is better being doing the tax work is a little bit more about being in the buyer’s agent, when you’re kind of always repenting for sins that, you know, I don’t only say you’re repenting for sins the IRS does. But there’s, there’s a lot of things we get notices all the time our clients do, and then they forward it to us. And or it’s not only the IRS, but it could be state and begrudgingly local, you know, a lot of our clients are Ohio MPa, and both have local taxes, which is such a joy to deal with. But you know, you have these things that happen. And it’s like, man, we got to deal with this. And sometimes they think it’s like, oh, we is preparing the tax returns, did something wrong. And it’s not I mean, you know, we have a give you a quick example. You know, if anybody’s ever made a joint estimated payment, maybe there’s some years you file joint, maybe there’s some users file separate. When you do that, you know, the rules, IRS has own roles, or you can allocate if you make a joint tax payment, say maybe you had a refund from the prior year, and you were a joint tax filer get credited towards next year, pretty common thing to do. But then next year, we determine Hey, it’s actually better for separately this year. Well, IRS has rules are Hey, you can allocate that those dollars, it’s $1,000, any way you want between the split return between the spouses, the partners, it could be 500-500-5050, it could be 1000, and zero. But if you do that, if it’s not 5050, those the taxpayers are gonna get a notice. It’s like the IRS doesn’t even know their own rules, or at least their technology is not sophisticated enough to do a simple adding up between those, those two returns. So it’s just something that we deal with, it’s more of being the tax preparer and doing some tax work. It’s absolutely central, right. I mean, for compliance purposes, we have to do it. It’s also important from a planning perspective, but it’s like being the buyer’s agent on the real estate side, it’s, it’s, it’s not as enjoyable, you got these deadlines that you have to work around. So it kind of kind of creates this sort of like peak demand, and you know, like busy seasons and things like that, which is not enjoyable, if you’re working in that environment, particularly, you know, the younger generation that doesn’t want to go and do that and work, you know, 5560 hours a week. There’s ways around that, but it takes some retraining of your clients and spreading the work. So it’s a much tougher business at a
Tyler Emrick 29:02
phone call a couple of weeks ago with an individual that had just started working with us last year, and he was meeting with the CPA to actually go in and follow His return. And the crux of this is getting the idea that not only is it tough, and there’s deadlines, and certainly there’s intricacies there that the CPA has to understand and know, but also, a lot of times your CPAs don’t have all the tools in their toolbox to really help make decisions and they can get very narrow, focused on this year’s tax return. And I think this story is kind of a great example of that, because, you know, he had given me a call from a CPAs office and the CPA was wondering, why did we do a Roth conversion, we took his income up to what we call the limit, which we’ve talked about that many times on the podcast, and the CPA just couldn’t quite understand and saying, Hey, there’s no way you’re normally just individuals in the 12% tax bracket. You took them out to the 22. Why did we do this? And we could easily go back and say, well, once this individuals in this case, his RMDs kick in actually Lee, he was going to be well, within the 22% tax brackets and under current tax laws would be in the 25. We understood is state goals and, you know, kind of passing that money down to his heirs and how important that was. And we made that decision of taking his income into that 22% tax bracket based off of factors that we really took a lot of time to kind of get out of them and understand the situation and run the projections and understand at least have an idea of how this tax bracket is going to change. And we I was able to kind of talk the CPA through that a bit. And, you know, she kind of sat back and said, okay, yeah, that makes sense. And she had no idea how much was in his retirement accounts, and how much his required minimum distribution was going to be. So that she didn’t really have all the tools to be able to help make that decision. And if you’re a listener, and you’re thinking about and you work with an investment professional, and a life insurance agent, and a CPA, and these individuals know little bits and pieces about your situation, but not the whole picture, you know, a lot of times that puts them in a tough situation to be able to provide the advice that’s needed to really put you in the best situation going forward. So I just wanted to kind of add that, that I think that, hey, CPAs have challenges, and inherently with the way the business is set up to be able to give really, really good advice, not saying all of them don’t do that. But the vast majority, if you’re talking to your CPA once a year, and you’re bringing in tax documents, you know, things are kind of done at that point. No, no.
Kevin Kroskey 31:21
Absolutely, we had through kind of acquiring and merging in this team, and there was about 700 tax only clients that we added, I mean, there was just a huge distinction between, you know, the work and the process and experience for our wealth clients, where I would say it was a well oiled machine, we had all their information, it was well organized and communicated, you know, we didn’t have any surprises with tax bills, because we already been looking forward and planning just like you had talked about Tyler, on the other hand, you have the tax only people, you know, say it’s just a non business owner, and, you know, they’re coming in, you know, their information is piecemeal, they give you stuff, there’s a lot of back and forth, which really kind of, you know, does not make the process, you know, go well, and adds cost to it and time during a busy time of year. So that’s, that’s, this is probably me bemoaning a little bit just getting through for 15 Don’t but don’t worry, we’re gonna we’re going to institute some positive changes for these tax only people, then they’re coming in, then there’s a surprise, you know, tax bill, because even if they did talk to this, the CPA, I mean, I mean, how much planning can you really do when it’s, you know, the years already closed, and you’re like you’re coming in during, you know, busy season, and if you’re not extending the return, and you’re not doing like fourth quarter projection, it’s just there’s a big difference between tax planning and tax compliance work. So just because you see a tax prepared, you know, certainly I would not expect that that’s going to rise to the level of doing any proactive planning. And to Tyler’s point, they don’t have the information anyway. But one, it was kind of like a pat on the back for the work that we’ve done, and how we’ve done it with our wealth clients overall, and coordinating this. And believe me, we’re kind of get a little wonky, but you know, it is not easy, for sure to go ahead and take that tax information, you know, actively incorporate it with the trading decisions that the trading team is making on a daily basis, you know, loopback in the advisor when you need to communicate this stuff to go ahead and for the for the tax preparation, it’s a lot. We, I think, candidly, we’ve built a really good business and really good service model for service models for wealth clients. But because of the complexity that’s involved, it’s also a lot more difficult to go ahead and staff because you can get a trader who’s maybe really good at trading, but you know, they don’t really not privy to and don’t fully understand some of the tax decisions that go into trading. So that’s new, and so you have to train them. And it’s great, but it’s definitely been a challenge as we’ve grown to continue to kind of staff some of these positions, so you kind of have to home grow a lot of it or train a lot of it. But again, I think you look at it, when it’s just like, you know, that listing agent, you know, if they’re there, they have this opportunity, they have a lot of relationships, you can you can figure this stuff out, if you know, kind of just think through a take that leadership position, you take the ownership and the leadership for it, you make it easy for the client, you walk them through, you’re about all these things, you’d be there easy button, and it’s a much better experience, you know, much higher value creation, you know, for them, and then you know, it’s going to make you a more competitive and desirable place where people are going to continue to hire you and move forward and you can continue to reinvest and continue to get better. So we’re definitely seeing that and even on the business owner side, you know, so we we’ve had, we keep having more business owners as clients, but, you know, it’s definitely been a minority, you know, we have 200 Business Owner clients, you know, that joined us recently through these acquisitions. Man, you see it all, you know, you kind of we all have our own reality because, you know, you know how you are. Tyler and I are kind of, again, abnormal. We’re highly detail oriented, we’re very analytical. So that’s how we’re coming into it. We had, I’ll share two brief stories, one on the business owner side, I mean, a lot of these business owners were bringing in their account running records that I wouldn’t call them accounting records. It’s just like, hey, we put some stuff in this QuickBooks thing. And here’s what we got. It is a train wreck, we literally had one prospective client that we met with and spent quite a bit of time with, not going to give many details just to go ahead and not disclose anything about this person that could identify them, but they had a lot of investors in their business. So whenever you take on investor money, there’s, and it’s not just your own money that’s at risk, there is a much higher level of responsibility and fiduciary responsibility that goes with that. And, you know, their bucks said that their cash position was minus $400,000. Now, not that they had liabilities, which kind of maybe made them, you know, a liability of minus four, but cash. Now there, can you have negative cash, monies or is as low as it goes minus $400,000. And like, literally, this prospective client, who’s not a client, but it gave me no reason to believe that he was not like honest and trustworthy, but he was taking on investor money had about 100 investors and his cash on his books at minus $400,000, I can tell you from an investing perspective, if I was looking to invest our clients capital into a private investment, you know, in we’ve talked about this before, unfortunately, some of these small smaller operators, opaque, illiquid, private investments, and really where a lot of the frauds happen. This could be one of those, this is one of those reasons, you know, there’s not the checks and balances that are there, there’s just not the level of sophistication that you need to be an institutional investment. And it was just astounding to me that this person had about 100 investors and had minus $400,000, in cash on his books. And that’s how they came in and came in quite late, you know, behind getting 10 99k ones out to the investor. So one, that’s kind of the business owner, yeah, hey, you really need to have this you should have it done monthly, or at least quarterly, should be up to date, do not go into your tax professional in the first quarter expecting that all your accounting work is going to be fixed, and then your tax is going to be prepared. So that’s unfortunately, I knew there was an issue there going into this, I didn’t appreciate how widespread and to what degree it was. So that’s something that we’re going to have to fix and really help our clients. It’s not just fixing the business, but it’s getting them, it’s going to be a better experience for them, it’s going to be better experience for us overall, just that leadership was not there before for somebody to really help progressively make those changes and make it a better experience. So that’s something that we’ll be working on moving forward. And then the other story that kind of resonated with me, and the one that stuck out Tyler was, we have a client, he’s mid 40s, doing well and not a business owner. But he had a unique opportunity with some company stock. He has a CFP that he works with he has a CPA that he worked with, there was a retiring CPA, who’s whose practice we had bought, he asked the CPA about this question about, you know, this company stock, and the CPA candidly gave him the wrong answer. And we had to deal with a situation it was not kind of there was heavy investing implications. In the decision, there was big tax implications as well. The advice was not coordinated. You know, the CFP and the client and CPA did not talk to the client’s credit, he did ask the CPA, I don’t believe he reached out to the CFPB about it. You talked about surprise tax bill, there’s $153,000 that, that they’re going to have to pay and they do well, but this is this is they did not have this money, they did not have this liquidity. So we’re scrambling to help them solve this tax problem. Because the advice wasn’t coordinated. So it’s kind of a recurring theme, you see little things all the time, you know, whether it’s a settlement statement, and that whole process on the real estate side, or, you know, it’s on our side with kind of coordinating the tax work, the investing decisions, the financial planning, you know, all of that and making kind of it in a coordinated fashion and make it sing. It’s, it’s a lot. And I think some people when they see things go wrong, and that’s when they begin to get a deeper appreciation for it. We had a client years ago, and I’ll shut up after this. But there was kind of some interesting dynamics in the situation. I was the primary advisor on the relationship, they actually terminate our relationship. And then we kept in touch, we became friends, you know, it’s one of those things. What’s funny is like, they say, oh, you know, this isn’t personal, it was business, it’s BS, it’s personal. We have a personal relationship, you are hiring me in part because you know, you want me to care and I do care and, and there was some interesting family dynamics that I brought to light and that was kind of a troubling issue for them to talk about and me shining the light on it because of what’s showing up in their finances didn’t make the situation better. So I think my perspective is is like kind of a left because it was easier to leave and not deal with it then to deal with it. They came back about a year later. We had a conversation and they’ve been clients for I don’t know I’m probably since 2018. Now, and they had an experience elsewhere. That was not good, these things were not coordinated, they had some issues. And it was really after they kind of left and then came back that they really appreciated, I think more what we were doing, and then some of the family dynamics, you know, they’re still there. And it’s a difficult thing to kind of talk through. But I think they appreciated me bringing it to light and actually talking about it and kind of just having an open conversation about how it does impact their financial situation. So it’s kind of, maybe you don’t know what you don’t know, a little bit part of it’s our job to make it clear about how we’re different. And it’s not easy. Candidly, you know, if you got all these financial people, and again, the one example, the guy had a CFP, you know, there’s talking to CPA 153,000 are surprised tax bill. So it’s difficult, but, you know, hopefully things like this was sharing some of these conversations and stories does bring it to light. And we’re just not looking for a pat on the back. But we don’t mind those, of course, but also just helping make people help people make a better decision about who they’re going to bring on their team, some of the issues that they are going to have to confront, and maybe bringing to light, some of some of the unknown unknowns that we’ve talked about quite a bit throughout the years, see, got all this pent up podcast, talk that it’s just,
Walter Storholt 41:17
it’s great, you’re gonna have to come back more often.
Kevin Kroskey 41:22
And keep the episodes shorter, right.
Tyler Emrick 41:25
We haven’t gone a little while for a little while, for sure. And I know we have maybe one more topic we’re going to get to, but I want to throw in one other quick story if I could, just on this idea, and maybe put buttoned up the idea of like this coordinated approach and, you know, having a relationship with your advisor and the help, and, you know, just potentially how difficult it can be and just how important I frankly, I guess it can be but, you know, we’ve been focusing on that relationship between your taxes and your financial professional. But it’s not only there. I mean, I’ve seen it with attorneys as well, you know, I had just in the last six months had an individual where her mother had passed, and her mother had a trust. But as common with many families that I work with, there wasn’t much of a communication between the parents and her on, you know, what the desires were what was said in this trust. And, you know, so she was really going into it blindly and dealing with the grieving of losing her mother, and your mother, her mother had an attorney that had they’d worked with for a number of years. So I think there was some trust built up there. And the individual called the attorney when her mother passed, and the attorney literally just said, Hey, come talk to me when you have the death certificate. And so she took it at face value. And that didn’t take some time. And in her situation, I think it took almost a month to get the death certificate after mother’s passing. And by the time she was able to get in for a meeting with the attorney, during that meeting, she come to find out that she had a time clause and they’re on the fence the official terminology, Kevin, you might be able to come back at me on that. But essentially, there was a clause on there that said, hey, we’ll give you the opportunity to purchase our house, but you have to notify all of their beneficiaries in the trust within 45 days, well, the 45 days had passed. So she had lost that opportunity to be able to do that. And then the house is actually going to get sold and split among all the other beneficiaries. So there are circumstances and situations in there to where, you know, she put some trust into that lawyer to help guide and give advice and, you know, lawyer maybe drafted that trust a number of years ago, maybe he or she wasn’t familiar with the details of it until they got in or whatever the case may be, but having a financial professional to kind of quarterback that those relationships and help with those transitions and bring up scenarios like this, to where it could have some pitfalls. And really just making sure all your ducks in a row I think can really help things be facilitated the way that you expect them to and avoid some of the some of the downsides. Like in her situation, not having the opportunity to purchase the house, you know, and Kevin situation, you know, with the first time the real estate that was purchased that 15 $20,000 hit. So I think it’s just really goes back and to kind of put a button on just how important it is to have that coordination between your professionals.
Kevin Kroskey 44:03
I’ll say it another way, you know, if we kind of just made the statement about hey, if you’re going in for your see your tax guy or gal, you know, maybe once a year, maybe you’re not even talking to me, you’re just dropping stuff off. You know, don’t expect any real planning to come out of that it’s all reactive at that point and just kind of just doing the compliance and moving forward largely, well, that’s once a year. I mean, you may go a decades before, you know, after you put your legal documents in place, and then, you know, revisit them again. So, you know, just go ahead and magnify what I said about you know, don’t expect much from the tax guy or gal two point being again, you need that quarterback. It’s something that we’ve been improving on I could drone on for quite a bit of time with my frustrations of working with attorneys and estate planning. It’s just highly transactional. It’s just not how we work. And we certainly do our best to serve our clients and are much more involved than most advisors sometimes to the attorneys dismay. And because we asked a lot of questions and make sure things get done and done well and implemented at a reasonable price is on to boot. But, but we’ve made some big strides there. And we’re going to continue to so I think that’s, that’s the whole example. I mean, with us going into the, if I put a loop on it before we do that, maybe bit of fun here and close the episode about the realtors. And you know, the creative destruction and the value creation is ultimately going to happen from this increased transparency to us going into, you know, the tax business, which is, candidly, it’s more of a pain in the butt kind of business compared to the core wealth business. But it’s necessary. And I think our clients need that leadership need that coordination, and to estate planning as well. I mean, that’s what you’re seeing in a lot of the leading wealth management firms that are doing, you know, they’re adding a lot more value, they’re not only being the easy button for one aspect of your life of your financial life, but multiple aspects and bringing it all together. So you can really in trust that it’s being done done well. And you know, people can just go ahead and spend their time where they want to, and having the clarity and confidence that it’s being done well for on their behalf. So that’s what you’re seeing. So I think all the topics that we went through today, really have that common thread going through them. The last one not so much. I think this is this is a little fun, and perhaps a little instructive for anybody that is going to be talking to their their child or their grandchild about college decisions here. So Tyler wants to go ahead, and I’ll pass it back over to you. Yeah,
Tyler Emrick 46:30
so we’ve found some data on college selection, and ranking return on investment between colleges and universities. Maybe we’ll link it in the show notes below. But, but essentially, it’s a nice little tool for you to look at the colleges across the US and really stack rank it based off of what we call a net present value. So for sake of not hitting that egg head alert net present value and internal rate of return. These are two calculations that we do in our industry quite a bit just for,
Walter Storholt 47:07
let’s say, just for all time, and
Tyler Emrick 47:09
we spelled it out. But yeah, so it’s a way for us to judge things, right. So net present value, essentially extrapolates out over a certain time period, 15 years, 20 years, 40 years, whatever the case may be, or the time period that you’re analyzing, and kind of brings those future cash benefits from your education back to a single dollar. So that way, you can kind of compare them and I don’t know, Kevin, you’re chuckling a little bit. But my alma mater wasn’t too high up on the list. I don’t know if I’m gonna keep it. Keep it quiet here. But the tool allows you to sort by state. And really, I think it’s kind of fascinating. And we were going back and forth on just the difference between private and public and state schools and tuitions. And you know, what actual education and degree really reaps the benefits from a cash flow standpoint, which isn’t the only benefit of getting to a degree, I must say, the time was an Ivy League or anything like that. But I did go to the what would the Harvard of the Midwest, we don’t know if it still holds that title or not. And granted, I did go there with the good out. I did go there wanting to be a history teacher, though. So you know, coming out of my degrees are in stats and finance, so completely different. So about six months in I changed course. But I did go there looking at their education program, which was the
Kevin Kroskey 48:34
calculator, if anybody wants to search, if you just search a first try at ROI, ROI is just three letters stands for that return on investment. So again, it’s kind of you’re looking at the cost for the college, as well as the time, you know, time and costs are there. Perhaps unsurprisingly, at least I think for many is, you know, if you’re in college, shorter for maybe like a technical school or something like that, and you start earning sooner, and those earnings can certainly be valued with compensation. They lose a lot of those more technical schools like nursing and what have you, or have high ROIs, some of the highest actually. And then the Ivy League education is definitely up there. You know, it can’t really infer necessarily why I’ve always told my wife I said, Not intentionally offend but Deaton college or Dayton university or whatever it’s called, has like this really good reputation in Ohio. And it’s crazy expensive. And I’ve always said to other FYI, like our neighbor has gone there. So just be mindful about what you say about this repeating in our backyard when our families get together, but it’s really pricey. And I made a comment to my wife, I would never send her child there and just how much it costs. Like I just don’t think it’s a positive return. And this study is basically kind of shown and there’s been there’s been a lot of others over the years. It was like Chicago City Schools. It was not called But it was I can’t remember like what grades it was, but it was in economics, if you have a natural experiment, so often those don’t happen. But if you have them that reveals a lot of the best data, so it was some sort of a lottery system that the Chicago schools had where certain kids got plucked and won the lottery, when we’re able to go to a much better school, probably safer, better, all those more resources. And then they follow those kids longitudinally over time. And basically, the conclusion was, you know, there really wasn’t a discernible difference, it really came down to, you know, kind of that nature and nurture that you’re getting at home. You know, if you’re going to be successful, you’re going to be successful, whether you went to the ninth grade school, or the really good school, and the long and short of it is this first tried ROI really kind of showed that. Additionally, something my wife and I talked about the same conversation was, she said something? Well, you know, what, if Aubrey wants to go to school for music, and I said, you know, that’s great if she has a passion for music, but I don’t know if that’s a wise college decision. And if you do that rank sort again, I’m not saying there’s no value in arts or music. I mean, I like both quite a bit. But all of those schools on general have a negative ROI. Negative, maybe it’s a little bit more of a passion, rather than a good career and move for a lot of people when you’re looking at it from a financial analytical standpoint. But So Tyler, would you say, the Harvard of the Midwest, and then our partner got me, I went to Case Western Reserve, I always heard that was like the, the Harvard of the Midwest and, and truth be told, I think that bears more fruit based on this study versus the school that you went to, and I went to, so Tyler went and got it
Tyler Emrick 51:45
sorted in Ohio cases up there, number one, number one. So they were number one, I
Walter Storholt 51:50
checked mine, guys that were in the top 300, and all the all the metrics.
Kevin Kroskey 51:55
See, we all turned down, Tyler, I think you’ll appreciate this being a statistics and Decision Sciences major, you know, I had a pretty high math score on my SATs. And so I figured I’d use a very methodical statistical analysis on selecting my college. And really what resulted was looking at the schools that had the most favorable girl to Guy ratio.
Walter Storholt 52:21
And that was the very first thing you checked every single college are into the
Kevin Kroskey 52:24
mind of a 17 year old boy, which is why my girls get a little bit older or moving to Alaska, or it’s very cold. And
Tyler Emrick 52:33
that’s why we might be so sensitive, right? I mean, I, I didn’t choose my school on the best measures, either. We have a team member who her kids are starting to look at, it’s fascinating just how much is available to the kids nowadays to the schools to be able to educate and go on the visits and just understand and, you know, I was talking to her a little bit. And it was really fascinating how much finances and the tuition is playing into the decision that he’s getting ready to make her son. He’s a junior, so he’ll be there next year. And I just think through on my decision matrix was nowhere near the things that it should have been. So it’s, it’s great that some of those activities are out there. And certainly being able to have some of those resources to help you make whatever decision is going to be best for you and your kid,
Kevin Kroskey 53:19
I think this one’s another, it just in general probably applies to so many things. But just like I commented, you know, don’t start shopping for a home, it’s very emotional, you’re excited, you’re kind of putting the cart before the horse unless you have your financing, and all these things kind of in place before you go out and do that and know what you can afford and your budget, and how that’s going to impact other areas of your life. And when you kind of know prioritize how you want to spend your disposable income, you know, same thing here with college. I mean, I you know, if unless you’ve kind of, I would start looking at this, something like this, that, you know, has some validity to it has some good analytics, just don’t start going to the schools, of course, you want the best for your child, right. And sometimes, you know, higher price connotes, you know, higher value, which isn’t always true is what we’re kind of seeing with this, this first trial ROI study that just came out. But I think that’s a word degree.
Tyler Emrick 54:10
Kevin, right. I’m sorry, like degree like, Hey, are you going for associates? Are you going for bachelors? Masters, I mean, being able to sort and understand what schools specialize in that particular degree. And, you know, what does that ROI look like? And what are some of the pays scale that individuals are coming out of school with that particular degree getting? I mean, I think the tool is pretty sweet, not that
Kevin Kroskey 54:29
remote, you know, totally. And it’s one of the things that things do you think about the some of the whole other conversation, but just thinking about some of the changes that continue to happen, you know, in the economy, you know, now we have like, you know, not only robotics, kind of eliminating manufacturing jobs, but increasing productivity, but you have, you know, AI that’s doing a lot of things and it’s kind of regurgitating a lot. So maybe it’ll kind of do some of these base level stuff. But you know, graphic designers keep getting impacted by it. So many, so many I should say, just not graphic designers but we have a client who MIT is one of the highest ranked schools on that first try to ROI. And I actually spoke to him yesterday about their tax return as we were wrapping it up. And their daughter is now a sophomore at MIT. And they said, you know, I’m sure you guys have already seen this, I imagine it’s getting a lot of play for your population, because your daughter’s going there. But, and they hadn’t. So they were surprised and really pleased to hear you know, as they’re stroking checks for about 80 grand a year for their daughter to go to MIT. It’s like the, it’s one of the top ones in the nation for, for ROI. So they were, they were very happy about that. But their daughter, they’re both doctors that her daughter was going to become a doctor, and she made a change in the coding. And I said, Well, that’s interesting, because ai is doing coding now. But, you know, they said, you know, that was our concern, too. And, but you know, it’s kind of doing the base level, and they’re adding value on top of it. So I that seems to be a common theme, you know, some of the creative stuff, some of the taking it to a higher value, I guess it goes all the way around. But you start with the math, start with the analytical when you’re looking at college, when you’re looking at really any of these decisions that we were talking about, whether it’s real estate, college, what have you, we’re not saying be completely on empathetic, but But you probably should be when you’re doing investing decisions, it’s probably better to be more psychopathic, and just not affected by the emotions rather than being affected by emotions, and start with the math. And then we even the emotional, don’t start, maybe we should, I don’t know, Tyler, give some counseling to our valued team member here, and see if it’s, if it’s received or not. And at least make them aware what they do with it. But start there, if you get emotionally start going down a track. And then it may be one that you don’t get off, or maybe difficult to get off. And you end up with a less than optimal decision, at
Walter Storholt 56:48
least use this metric to sort your college list first, and then you can go with the female to male ratio criteria.
Tyler Emrick 56:55
And remember where you found.
Walter Storholt 56:59
Yeah, speaking of which, we can link to that in the description of today’s show. So go check it out, wherever you’re listening to today’s program, and you can look up your school or schools that you’re interested in or that maybe your kids are interested in as well and see where it falls in line with this ROI conversation. Guys, we’ve covered a lot of ground today from college conversations, still talking about taxes and tax planning, and that great illustration of how it’s so different than just I think you use the word tax compliant Kevin or tax filing, just kind of turning them in on April 15, or a couple days before big differences there. And then, of course, another great conversation about real estate and the change in that industry and how that’s going to impact people in the future as well. All great stuff today. And I know it’s probably got the wheels turning, we had to hit on something that our listeners are going to be interested in and maybe have more questions about. And if it does spark you to some questions makes you think about putting together a full blown financial plan or you’d like maybe at least a review of how you’re currently planning for your financial future and for retirement, don’t hesitate to reach out in fact, you can go to true wealth design.com and click the our We write for you button, then you can schedule a 15 minute call with an experienced advisor on the team. Again, all you have to do is go to true wealth design.com and click that. Are we right for you button. Or you can call the old fashioned way. 855 TW D plan 855 T WD plan, all that contact info in the description of today’s show as well, guys, we got an egghead alert. It was a full show a full day today. So really appreciate your insight and guidance. And Kevin, come back and join us don’t be a stranger and let’s let’s do another episode soon.
Kevin Kroskey 58:35
All right. Sounds great. Thanks, guys.
Walter Storholt 58:36
Yeah, thank you, Tyler. Thank you so much as always, and we look forward to chat with you again in a couple of weeks. Oh, absolutely. He’s great. All right. Sounds good. Thanks for joining us everybody. We’ll see you next time right back here on retire smart.
Disclaimer 58:52
information provided is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment tax or legal advice. Information is obtained from sources that are deemed to be reliable, but they’re accurateness and completeness cannot be guaranteed all performance references historical and not an indication of future results. Benchmark indices are hypothetical and do not include any investment fees.
