The Get Ready Money Podcast
The Get Ready! Money Podcast with Tony Steuer features insightful conversations with financial experts who are changing the way we think about money. Listen each week to catch up on the latest financial trends and hear practical advice from Tony and his expert guests aimed at demystifying the complexities of finance, so you can build healthy habits that ACTUALLY work.
Each episode will leave you with tips for implementing small changes that can have a big impact on your financial future. Tony’s podcast is perfect for listeners seeking to get ready, be prepared, and transform their financial future.
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The Get Ready Money Podcast
Take Control of Your TAXES Now! Featuring Catherine Tindall
On the latest episode of The Get Ready Money Podcast, I spoke with Catherine Tindall, CPA and host of the Financial Advisors Want to Know Podcast about changing the way we think about money and proactive tax planning.
In this episode we discussed:
- Address the fear of tax planning by shining a light on it.
- Why you should learn how to read your own tax return and learn what’s going on.
- You can gain control by learning how the tax system works.
- Know when you need a CPA and the questions to ask when looking for a CPA.
- Dial in your relationship with your tax professional, their process and how they can support you.
Catherine Tindall, CPA, is a strategic tax planner and partner at Dominion Enterprise Services, specializing in optimizing tax strategies for Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs), Independent Broker-Dealers (IBDs), and 1099 financial advisors with annual revenues between $500k and $10M. Passionate about proactive tax planning, Catherine focuses on collaboration to empower her clients to achieve growth and financial success. With a track record of helping advisors save significantly on taxes, She is dedicated to ensuring her clients futures are secure and prosperous.
Catherine also hosts the "Financial Advisors Want to Know Podcast, " where she shares insights on reducing income taxes, staying compliant, and sustainably growing advisory firms. In each short form episode she tackles targeted topics with expert guests aimed at helping advisors scale intelligently and build their practices to 7-8 figures.
Connect with Catherine Tindall, CPA:
Dominion Enterprise Services (here)
LinkedIn (here)
YouTube (here)
Podcast:
Financial Advisors Want to Know Podcast (Spotify)
Resources mentioned:
Internal Revenue Service (here)
Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits!: 4 Keys to Unlock Your Business Potential by Greg Crabtree and Beverly Herzog (Amazon)
The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It by Michael Gerber (Amazon)
The Get Ready Money Podcast and its guests do not provide investment advice. All content is for educational purposes. Guest opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Get Ready Money Podcast and Tony Steuer.
Are you looking to get ready, be prepared and transform your financial future? Then you've come to the right place. This is the Get Ready Money Podcast with Tony Stewart, where Tony has insightful conversations with financial experts who are changing the way we think about money. Catch up on the latest financial trends and hear practical advice from Tony and his expert guests so you can build healthy habits that work, Be empowered with tips for implementing small changes that can have a big impact on your financial future. So sit back and get ready to hear from today's guest.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Get Ready Money podcast changing the way we think about money. I'm pleased to be joined today by Catherine Tindall. Catherine is a certified public accountant and host of the Financial Advisors Wanted to Know podcast. In this episode, we'll be discussing Catherine's insights on how we change the way we think about money and proactive tax planning. Catherine, welcome to the Get Ready Money podcast. Thanks for joining us today.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me, Tony. Glad to be here, yeah excited for the conversation.
Speaker 2:So you know, to get started, tell us a little bit about yourself. What is your origin story?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I'm a CPA, my specialty is in tax work and my background is I've been in accounting basically my whole career, got into tax work pretty early on, after doing a couple different accounting gigs and what I really you know, early on in college I never thought that I wanted to be an accountant. My parents actually had a small tax practice and they told me with one of my electives, that I should take an accounting course, and so I did it just to appease them and I fell in love with it because I just enjoyed how logical it was and then also just realizing, especially talking to them about their experiences with their clients, there's so much fear and misunderstanding that happens with financial matters for most people, and then there's an even higher grade of fear and misunderstanding when it comes to income tax, and so I really enjoy the combination of the logical work that goes along with it and then the you know the human element of having to explain something that's complex and expensive in a way that takes that fear away for people.
Speaker 2:I think you know people get caught up in the word taxes rather than the word. You know than the emotions that taxes bring out in people.
Speaker 3:So how do you talk?
Speaker 2:to people about the fear.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think the biggest piece is, you know there's kind of a, there's a, there's a couple of different camps, right? So, like, my specialty is I work for financial advisors and I work for their firms specifically with a tax strategy, and then you know tax compliance, so helping them navigate. Okay, this is what the future is going to look like for you. Like, we know what the current rule set is. If you earn as much as you think you're going to earn, this is what the taxes will be. The year isn't over yet. Cinderella's carriage hasn't turned into a pumpkin. You can make changes and you can pay less, but what are the options there? And so I think for most people, if you're in the camper, you have that level of complexity. Having a tax professional with you that's taking that approach is really significant For people who don't have that, say, you're just a W-2 employee. You don't have a lot of other sources of revenue or things like that that create complexity within your tax filing situation.
Speaker 3:I think the fear for a lot of people it just comes from a place of ignorance. People don't understand how these things work. They're also afraid of the IRS and what the IRS can do. The IRS can levy your bank accounts, they can create a lot of havoc. They're also a really inefficient organization to work with, so it's really easy for things to get screwed up with the IRS and really hard to extricate yourself from the screw ups. So people are afraid for kind of those those two reasons.
Speaker 3:And in the case of somebody who has a business or has any kind of complexity, it's really around finding the right tax professional to work with. Like that's the core of what you need to be paying attention to, because for you to actually sit down and learn how the tax code works is kind of a waste of your time. Having somebody with you who can look at your situation and give you strategic advice is going to be a lot more powerful than you trying to figure out what kind of capital gain you're looking at for selling something. So it's really it's that piece of the more complex situations For the less complex situations. I do think it's worth people's time to understand how these things work, because hiring a tax professional isn't. You know, depending on what you've got going on, you're probably not going to want to pay for having somebody with you strategically and so being able to educate yourself on how the system works.
Speaker 3:There's a ton of resources on irsgov. Honestly, chatgpt is really good. Like if you just have a conversation with chat GPT, it actually does a pretty good job with explaining a lot of concepts around income tax and you just have a conversation with it from, like, your level of understanding. But those you know it just in terms of like how I actually address people's fears because I'm mostly dealing on the business side the fear really is just coming from they don't know what the bill is going to be and that's just a matter of doing projections and, you know, figuring it out what it's going to be, and then you can plan for it. Once you know what it is, it's like once you shine the light on the boogeyman he's not that scary.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that. Once you shine a light on it, you can start to address it. So you know, let's talk a little bit more about the different types of tax help that people, can you know, retain. They can get a bookkeeper, they can get an enrolled agent. They can get a certified public accountant. Can you tell us a little bit more about what is a certified public accountant, cpa and some of these other things?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so with the different. So I think a lot of. And it's funny because, like I'll go to cocktail parties and I'll tell people, oh, I'm a CPA, and then all of a sudden they start asking me all these you know personal income tax questions or things like that. And you know, oh, can you do my taxes? And it's like no, my specialty is pretty specific.
Speaker 3:I think people don't realize that accounting as an industry is very varied. So you have professionals that are. So when somebody's a CPA it doesn't necessarily mean they do taxes. So there's a lot of CPAs in private industry where they work as accountants for businesses. You have a lot of CPAs who are just in what we call a test work, so doing audits of financial statements. A lot of CPAs in forensic accounting. Like there's all these different areas that CPAs can be in. So when somebody says, oh, I'm a CPA, that doesn't actually tell you a whole lot other than they know. You know they're going to know what the difference between a debit and a credit is and you know, understand the general principles of accounting, but what their specialty is can be different.
Speaker 3:I think most people encounter CPAs who are tax professionals just because that's where most of the need is in the profession is dealing with that annual compliance requirement.
Speaker 3:And so when people say, oh, I'm going to go to a tax professional, there's a couple different version flavors of that right. So you can have people that do taxes who are not licensed. So the US system doesn't require people to have a formal license in order to file taxes for other people. You do need to have what the IRS calls a PTIN, so you can have somebody who says that they're a tax professional and, honestly, if they don't have a designation of CPA or EA or there are some other nuanced designations, if they don't have an official designation which you can ask them for, they've probably only filed for a PTIN. I see a lot of I've seen this in the field a lot of people who do tax work for other people who have no educational experience, like they've just kind of learned it on the fly and because the US system runs like a voluntary, it runs like a farm stand, it's like you can do your own you know you don't need TurboTax.
Speaker 3:You can print the forms out from the IRS and hand fill them out, like that's how they've been designed, you know. So you don't need somebody else to do your taxes, it's just it's so complex that you know we use software and depending on the complexity that you have, you get into. There's certain grades of when TurboTax is appropriate, when it's appropriate to have a tax, you know, maybe it's OK to have somebody who isn't licensed, but it depends on your complexity and their knowledge level. Other areas where it's like, no, you really want to make sure somebody is an EA, which is an enrolled agent, which in my opinion, is. I've met, you know, I do continuing education with people who are enrolled agents as teachers. So I think when people look down on the enrolled agent designation, I don't. It really it's the same thing with CPAs. It depends on how much self-education that person has done, how much experience they have and just their ability to navigate the tax code, which is idiosyncratic to the person. The designation doesn't produce a certain effect like that. You can have somebody who crammed for an exam and doesn't remember any of the information. So it's, you know, between the different designations. That's some of the difference.
Speaker 3:But with the CPA license it's the most rigorous of the tax designations, just because it's. You have to basically have to get an accounting, a degree in accounting, in college, and then most states require that you have to get the equivalent of a master's degree and then from there you have to have a certain number of hours of experience, which is usually like at least like a year or two of experience in the field, working underneath other CPAs, and then you have to pass a four-part test, that's 16 hours of testing. That I think of people who take it, which is you already have to have a degree in accounting to even sit for it. I think fewer than 20% of people pass the first time taking it. So it's pretty rigorous. But the CPA license isn't specific to tax, so tax is a portion of it, but it's also financial statements auditing. There's a bunch of other things that get rolled up under it because it's really comprehensive accounting. So do most people need a CPA?
Speaker 1:I don't know it really depends on what your situation is. Are you going to?
Speaker 3:save more money working with a CPA? Also same thing. It really depends on what your situation is. Are you going to save more money working with a CPA? Also same thing. It depends on how the practice is structured.
Speaker 3:I see it very variant where some CPAs don't really care about that. They're really great at compliance but not going to offer you any ideas on how to save in tax because that's just how they're structured, the service that they do. So it's one of those things where the US landscape it's really variant. What you can get from a product from a tax professional depends on what their designation is, depends on how they're structured, depends on the complexity of what your situation is and it's really hard for consumers to make a right call on that Like. Very often I see people where they make the wrong call, consumers to make a right call on that Like. Very often I see people where they make the wrong call and the fact that there's no like in the public education system I don't think hardly anywhere has tax education for people. It's hard to know what's the right choice.
Speaker 3:That's really interesting.
Speaker 2:I had a follow-up question, but before I do, what is a PTIN?
Speaker 3:So a PTIN I forget what the abbreviation, the pieces of the abbreviation, but it's basically your I think it's prefer something. Id number it's basically your identification number over to the IRS. So when I sign a tax return, my name will go on it and then my PTIN goes on it so it lets the IRS track what I've been submitting. And so anybody who does any kind of tax work, whether or not you sign tax returns, needs to have a PTIN with the IRS so that they can know who's preparing returns. So here's one thing that you should always be aware of If you have somebody who's doing tax work for you that you are paying them to do the tax work, when you look at that front page of the return that 1040, look at the bottom where it has the signature areas for you and your tax professional, and you always want to make sure, if somebody is preparing a tax return for you, that their name is showing up on that return.
Speaker 3:And then there's a little, there's a code, digit code, in the P10 box that you should see both of those things so that if there's an issue the IRS can see that you didn't self-prepare that return. So that's a really common thing where I'll see people where they're called ghost preparers, where they prepared returns for people, but then they don't put their name anywhere on the return, and so there's no way for the IRS to know who's filing these returns. And so you just want to make sure, if you're paying somebody else to do your return, that there's information. You just look at page one of the 1040, which is the form that individuals file. Right at the bottom you'll see prepared signature and you'll see their. Their name should show up, their address should show up and their P10 should show up. You want to make sure that those are present.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I would say that's an you know, maybe not a warning sign, but something that you know, is something that consumers may want to check further. So just you know, before we get into the other questions, is do you have any other tips on questions that people could ask, you know, when they're interviewing a CPA or other tax professional?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think the first, the first piece, is know what you need. So trying to figure out what, what grade you're at right, I had somebody come into my practice a couple months ago who was doing over a million dollars in revenue in a real estate portfolio who had been self-preparing his tax returns. So he waited way too long to get a tax professional involved and so had been overpaying in tax for a very long time and also had some compliance issues because he was self-preparing pretty complex tax returns. So I think that's the first step is really know what you need. If you are a very simple W-2, you work a nine to five job, you don't have equity, you don't get stock equity options that are crazy. You maybe own your own home. You don't have passive income, really Very likely you're a good candidate for TurboTax because there's not a lot of complexity there. Now if you're a high earning W-2 person, maybe that changes, but it depends on what your goals are. It also depends, you know, if you're working with a financial advisor. You know oftentimes financial advisors can be helpful for addressing what needs to happen in the. You know what grade of tax professional you need because they're also used to. Most of them are used to reading tax returns. And so if you're a high earning W-2, even if you're fairly simple, it might become the right time for you to hire a tax professional in order to do your work. And then, if you have, if you're self-employed and have a business that is at all complex, it's probably worth your while to hire a tax professional, because those returns are just hard to do, they're hard to get right and also they're pretty expensive on that income. And so because for a lot of people that becomes expensive really quickly, paying a couple hundred dollars for a tax professional to at least look at it is helpful. And then if you have significant passive income or just strange things in your return, you have equity stock, equity options that vest in weird places and show up on your W-2, you're going to need to get a tax professional in order to get that right.
Speaker 3:But it's you know. Start with what grade of person do you need? And then, once you know what grade of person that you need, you know for the TurboTax people. You know you're good, you're in TurboTax, you know it doesn't. It always doesn't hurt to. If you're not sure, just talk to a CPA and say, hey, do you think I need you. Most CPAs have so much work that they're not going to try to sell you something you don't need, right? And then, too, most CPAs prefer to have more complex work.
Speaker 3:But in terms of if you have a complex enough situation where you do need to hire a tax professional, the questions that I think you should be asking I think people lean too much on experience. A lot of it comes down to what you're trying to get out of the relationship. Do you just need forms filed? If so, then your question should just be around tax season expectations what's their experience? Tax season expectations what's their experience? What's their process?
Speaker 3:If you're at all complex, something that I think is an essential thing is making sure that is the person who prepares my return and the person who reviews my return two different people. Is somebody going to review the work before it goes out? What's your process? Because it's really easy to make mistakes, it's really easy for stuff to get messed up, and so, if it's only going through one set of eyes, if you're at all complex, like you own a business or have real estate holdings, having that two-level review system is really important, even if the person's a CPA. I've seen this happen. I had this. I had a conversation with a CPA over the summer who had screwed up this person's return because he didn't know to ask them. You know they had given him the information incorrectly from the bookkeeper, but it was something where when he explained the situation to me, I was like you know, that's really something that like is in a second level review checklist that somebody should have caught and thought through. So it's just one of those things where, even if somebody is a CPA, that's not a guarantee on their quality. Unfortunately and the other unfortunate part is that the IRS enforcement regime is so lax that a lot of the time you could have a CPA, this guy had been screwing this up for like five years in a row and so now it's like five years of returns got picked up. So it's really hard to tell.
Speaker 3:I think a big key piece when you're interviewing them is getting a sense of is this person actually a tax nerd or are they just punching a clock?
Speaker 3:Because if they don't have a passion for the income tax code, that's not a good sign and you really do have to be self-educated Even if you do the licensing. And even somebody's had a past history with a CPA firm. I used to teach continuing education to other CPAs and some of the questions I would get back from people who had like 30 plus years of experience, I was like geez, there's just a monkey business going on here. So even like, how many years of experience somebody has is not a guarantee either. I think really the main guarantee is do they specialize in serving who you are? You know if you're complex? And then when you talk to them and ask them questions and just say, hey, I know you probably don't go into detail, like can you explain this, that or the other, it's like how much of a tax nerd are they? Like asking them those kinds of those kinds of questions can be helpful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I think that's great advice and I think it applies across, you know, any type of professional. Just because somebody is a professional that we've all experienced somebody with a lot of experience not always being the best person to work with.
Speaker 3:So I think that's that's wonderful advice.
Speaker 2:So you know. You know, let's run through what I call the get ready questions. These are questions that I ask every guest. What basic money concept do you wish people knew?
Speaker 3:A basic money concept I wish people knew was them having a structural understanding of how our US tax code works and that if you, the first piece that I see people screw up is, they immediately get pushed into the. I'm just going to be a W-2 employee and I'm not going to get creative with how I earn my income, and it's one of those things where, for some people, that is the right answer. They should just be a W-2 employee. That's the gifts they've been given, that's the calling they have in life Awesome, that's great.
Speaker 3:But I think it's a myth that's perpetuated too much that everyone needs to be in that bucket and also, when you're in that bucket, you are extremely limited on ways that you can control your income.
Speaker 3:In order to control your income tax rate, there's not a lot of things available if you're a W-2 employee only and you don't have any other sources of income to reduce how much you pay in income tax, and so proportionally, you're going to be paying a lot of income tax compared to if you think more strategically with how you earn your income based on how the income tax code works.
Speaker 3:So a lot of people get into real estate because real estate has a lot of tax advantages to it. A lot of people can get into running their own businesses because there's also some significant tax benefits depending on how you run it. But I think the core money concept is realizing you will be spending a significant amount of your time each year working for free for the government that's what income tax is and so realizing that that is something you control it's not a given and that if you want to learn how the system works to reduce that amount of time, you can do it, and you don't necessarily need to be a W-2 person. Most people fall into that, but there are ways to get around it if you want to and if you're serious about building your wealth. Understanding and having a strategy around what you're doing with income tax is extremely important because otherwise, as your earning goes up, you're going to be getting like a 30 plus percent haircut every year on what you earn to income tax if there's no strategy going with it.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. Hey, I love that. You gain control by learning how the system works and I think that applies across the money world. Is you know, learning education allows you to be more efficient with your financial life and, as you point out, that presents you know options for people. So what is one simple thing you can do each year to set yourself up for financial success?
Speaker 3:I would say something that's a good thing to have. I'll keep it on the tax side, for financial success is really dialing in your relationship with your tax professional and having that figured out and then also making sure that that is structured in a way that's going to support you. So a really common thing I will see people do is they'll have a tax professional. All of a sudden. They'll have a year where you know if they're self-employed, they have a 30% growth year and then they don't realize. You know they think that the tax professional is paying attention.
Speaker 3:And the tax professional unless you're coming back to them and saying, hey, I'm actually making more money this year, I need you to run a projection for me. I don't know how much I'm actually going to have to pay because you based everything on the information you had, which was last year, but that's not going to be relevant, and so you need to make sure every year that you're keeping that relationship sane and that you have good expectations there. A big part of that requires you to not wait until the last minute. My profession is really heavily understaffed, and so if you need to make a switch, it can be really hard to find firms that are even accepting new clients because there's not enough people doing this kind of work.
Speaker 2:Wow. Well, that's something for people out there listening, thinking about careers for themselves or their kids.
Speaker 3:Yeah, do what I did with my parents, what they told me. Take an accounting class, see if you like it.
Speaker 2:Well, my dad's a CPA and I took an accounting class and I didn't really jive with it, so I went in.
Speaker 3:That's how you know?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I didn't go very far. I went into investments, so that's pretty close, but definitely not the same. So what? Money myth are you trying to break?
Speaker 3:What money myth am you trying to break? What money myth am I trying to break? Honestly, for me, I think it's just ignorance around taxes. That's the biggest thing that bothers me. It's something that I think even I see this on the lawmaker side of lawmakers will pass these rules of tax administration, but they don't understand how the system works and so they do things that disadvantage taxpayers because it's hard to administrate. I see that a lot. So I think the big myth that I think needs to be broken is that income taxes are scary and that they're not understandable and that it's okay to be ignorant of them. I don't think it's okay to be ignorant of them. I think everybody needs to spend the time to get themselves self-educated on it, with just the basics of how our system works and how you know. I think everybody should be able to read a 1040, like be able to read a basic income tax return and understand it.
Speaker 2:Do you have a resource that you'd recommend for that?
Speaker 3:In terms of general tax education, irsgov is really good. They have a lot of really good resources on there, so I'd recommend going to the irsgov website and you can just pull up the forms and there's form instructions on the back of them. There's also, like I was saying earlier, ChatGPT is actually really good to have conversations with and you can ask it questions in your own voice and if it says something that you don't quite understand, say, can you explain this to me? Like I'm a sixth grader, I think it's actually a pretty good. It does a pretty good job with explaining things like that. So I would say that's a good resource too, because you can approach it at the level that you're at, depending on the complexity of what you have going on in your life, because you can give it context and say, hey, I do this, that and the other. What should I know about this?
Speaker 2:That's awesome and I'll have a link. I think everybody knows irsgov, but I think, as we talk about chat GPT, as people need to remember too, chat GPT is not a substitute for a CVN. You shouldn't take tax advice or legal advice from chat GPT or love advising. Yeah, so I wouldn't take tax advice or legal advice from chat GPT or love advising.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I wouldn't take tax advice from it, but I would use it as a crutch for helping you to understand some of how the tax system works, so that when you talk to a tax professional, you're not paying them a couple hundred bucks an hour to explain remedial topics to you.
Speaker 2:That is awesome advice and you know that's for people who have my book, the Get Ready Blueprint. That's something that I talk about is, you know, spend a little time getting to know things and use your time. That you know. You know be organized when you spend time with your advisor so you can optimize the time spent. So what advice, catherine? What advice would you give your younger self if you could go back in time knowing what you know now about money and taxes?
Speaker 3:I think probably the biggest advice I would give myself to the past is that I should have read entrepreneurship books when I was a teenager, because for myself and for my disposition, that was really what I found my calling to be, and I wish that I had figured that out sooner in life.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. Why do you say that?
Speaker 3:So like this is a whole other rabbit hole.
Speaker 3:But I'm really interested in personality typing specifically like cognitive functions and how people are wired, and I'm a very unique subtype and I didn't, you know, for years I felt like I didn't fit in and all this, you know, things that normal teenagers feel anyway.
Speaker 3:But it wasn't until I was an adult and actually had somebody bring this up to me and then I learned about it that I realized, oh, this is why I'm like this and other people are like that, and so for me, I get a lot of enjoyment around running, you know, running and growing a CPA firm and being a technical advisor, but also being a business owner and what goes into that.
Speaker 3:And I wish that I had known that about myself earlier and I wish that I had found things like the e-myth or just well, a lot of the books weren't even around when I was a teacher. But just getting into entrepreneurship and learning about how business really functions and works, I really wish that I had encountered that side entrepreneurship side earlier, because even though I did a business degree in college, an accounting degree that had significant business management portions to it, that education is lending itself for you to be a high quality employee in an organization, rather than for you to run, grow and scale a business, which is just very different. So that's I would say, that's the. That's why I would say that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, that's important and you know, I feel the same way as a finance major and I you know, and I know people in our audience a lot of them are financial advisors and financial coaches. You know, take the time you are running a business and these are things to think about, so you know, to start to wrap up, what is your number one favorite money resource, whether it's a podcast, book, newsletter, app or website. What would you recommend to people that you've loved yourself?
Speaker 3:There is a book that is great and I'm going to screw up the name of it, but it's by Greg Crabtree and if you run a business, google Greg Crabtree and I think it's Simple Numbers, big Profits it's something like that, and basically what that book is is teaching you how to read, like how to pay attention to financial statements, how to pay attention to cash flow, how you should be running your basic profitability in your business. I think it's a great intro guide for people who are running their own businesses. I see a lot of people that do profit first, which is also really good, but I think profit first kind of falls short in certain areas that the that Greg Crabtree book actually does a lot better at, and so I I I would say that's probably my favorite.
Speaker 2:That's awesome and for everybody watching and listening, I'll make sure I have the right title on the show notes so you can check it out. So, Catherine, what is your number one tip on changing the way we think about money?
Speaker 3:I would say my number one tip I'm going to keep this on the tax side is learn how to read your own tax return, learn what's going on in there. And if you don't want to take the time to really understand what's going on, if you have a tax professional you feel comfortable with during the off season, so sometime during the summer, reach out to your tax professional and ask them if you can pay for a consultation for them to actually walk you through and explain your return to you, because a lot of them it's not something that we normally do for people, but I think it's worth it for people to get self-educated and just say, hey, I know this is a weird engagement, but I want to actually understand what's going on. Can we just book 30 minutes for you to just help me read this so I can understand it? It can be a good way for you to actually dive into really understanding what's going on.
Speaker 2:That's awesome and I think you mentioned something in there too. That's. Key for people is to understand when you're working with a professional. As you said, do it during the summer. I don't think any CPA is going to appreciate it if you try to schedule that in April.
Speaker 3:Yeah, honestly, that's probably worth a mention too.
Speaker 3:My top tax money tip is if you're working with tax professionals, you need to understand what they're dealing with.
Speaker 3:So, basically, when the season starts, we have an extremely short window of time to get a lot of work done, and so anything that's non-essential just needs to get pushed outside of tax season.
Speaker 3:Most tax professionals, you know they're working crazy hours because it's usually multiple layers of process in order for returns to get done.
Speaker 3:It's usually multiple layers of process in order for returns to get done, and if it's not an emergency thing, you know even things like I would leave it to the tax professional to tell you what their process is, rather than you saying, ok, like I want to have a phone call when you finish the tax return, it's you have to leave it to what their process is a lot of the time, and so when you're interviewing tax professionals, it's good to have that conversation in front of okay, tax professional, what is your process, how does this work on your end, and then you realizing, as a client, don't expect to be able to shift that around.
Speaker 3:That's really going to be unfair to the tax professional If you have different expectations or things that you're going to want from what their standard process is. If it's that important to you, you should probably find a different tax professional that's doing what you want in order for it to work. And if you want to be throwing in extra meetings in there, you have a bunch of questions or stuff going on. It's going to be hard for them to, you know, address that unless their service model is structured like that, and they've already you know, penciled that time in.
Speaker 2:That's awesome, that's awesome advice and I think that optimizes your time with your account, because you want to you know and with any providers you want to. You know work. In a way, you're working together with them and collaborating, and you want the most efficient work from them. So, Catherine, where can people learn more about you? Where can they check out your podcast?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so my podcast is the Financial Advisors Want to Know podcast. It's for financial advisors growing and scaling their practices. We cover a variety of topics between other advisors coming on people who support advisors, like attorneys, coaches, consultants. We also do technology episodes and some tax episodes. So you can find that on YouTube I think YouTube, spotify and Apple. It's the Financial Advisors Want to Know podcast and I'm the host and my firm is Dominion. We are a CPA firm that specializes in advisors and our focus is proactive tax advisory strategy work, helping people pay less in tax and then, on top of that, doing the compliance work of filing income tax returns. But we're a proactive first kind of a firm which is, I think, a little atypical for the industry. But you can find me also on LinkedIn. I'm very active on there and it's just my name, catherine Tindall, cpa. You can find me on LinkedIn and would love to send me a DM. We can talk.
Speaker 2:Awesome. That's how we met and for everybody watching and listening, as always, there will be links to Catherine's podcast, to her website and to her LinkedIn profile so you can get in touch with her. So, Catherine, thanks very much for joining us today on the Get Ready Money podcast.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you, tony, I appreciate it yeah this was a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:I hope everybody picked up something and, as always, thanks for tuning into this episode of the Get Ready Money podcast. If you learned something today to change the way you think about money, please be sure to subscribe and to tell a friend. Until next time, let's change the way we think about money. You.
