Tax planning principles designed to enhance your after-tax outcomes
Tax-Smart
Investing
Only half of the story is told when performance is based on pre-tax results.
Tax planning focuses on the after-tax result, the only number that should really matter.
Keep more vs. pay more in taxes?
We believe in implementing a prudent investment philosophy that is backed by academic and scientifically validated investment principles and processes but even that is not enough. We believe that applying a tax planning approach can be the answer to uncovering predictable yields and lowering taxes.
Uncovering potential tax savings help you keep more of what is yours as well as allows your focus to be directed where it should be, growth in after-tax results.
Each financial decision made has tax implications. Without a tax planning strategy aimed at tax efficiencies to lower taxes, you give up unnecessary gains. This is the framework we use to focus on after-tax outcomes, partnering with our clients, not just during tax season, but all year long in the pursuit of your goals in the most tax-efficient manner possible.
Your CPA Should Not Be Your Only Tax Planning Architect
Financial advice should begin with understanding how money flows in and out of your life, focusing not on what your earn, but on how much you keep.
Tax-Smart Planning
Understanding the tax implications of all of your financial decisions
Tax-Smart Investing
Looking at your investments with a strategic, year-round tax-focused approach
Tax-Smart Business
Implementing tax efficiencies that can directly impact your bottom line profitability
Tax-Smart Retirement
From pre-retirement provisions to withdrawal strategies, ideal tax diversification in retirement
A time-tested method designed to maximize after-tax wealth
Tax-Smart Investing is a tax planning approach to your financial decisions
Alignment of taxable investments, tax-deferred, and tax-free retirement accounts
Establish your unique balance of reducing tax exposure while preserving market exposure
Investment accounts designed for and measured by after-tax performance
Reduced tax consequences of planned or unplanned distributions in retirement
Financial and tax planning with the goal of diversifying short, and long-term tax liability
For loved ones and causes that matter, give in the most strategic and tax-efficient way
Business financial planning that can help reduce taxes, streamline expenses, increase profitability, and enhance continuity or exit strategies
It’s common to feel anxiety when it comes to personal finances, but how much of that anxiety is shaping your financial decisions?
Studies have shown that emotional decision making can reduce investment returns by over 4%
Before we consider saving money, making money, and spending money, we should consider the subconscious, early life lessons regarding our thoughts around money. Even when it’s just about a volatile stock market, how do you decide when to buy, sell, and hold? Why is it that you can get great financial advice, that supports everything you want and need, and yet still feel hesitation?
What we all recognize is that we have behavioral biases that can affect even the best-executed plan of action. We each have our own decision-making styles and communication preferences. Money-related decisions by their very nature heighten fears, amplify needs, test strengths, and trigger stress behaviors. How you feel about money, matters just as much as the choices you make.
Take a quick 2-minute survey to understand your potential biases, and how they may be impacting your personal financial decisions.
How much could you be leaving on the table?
Tax Planning Orange County
We examine your finances as well as current strategies with the goal of implementing tax efficiencies and applying those principles to better future financial decisions.
For the best tax planning strategy in Orange County, contact us today!
Ideal tax planning is collaborative effort
Tax Planning is proactive planning to reduce taxes. This is most often initiated by a good CPA, and less often by your financial planner. We see this as backward. Your CPA shouldn’t have to place all their efforts to find ways to reduce your tax burden, they should be fine-tuning the tax architecture that has already been put in place for you.
CPAs and financial planners rarely communicate or collaborate on behalf of their respective clients. The financial planner is proactive with your investments, but not lower taxes, and the CPA is stepping in to reduce taxes but is not involved in discussions of strategies. Each is working on a vital part of your financial life, independent of one another.
We believe that this process is better served if your financial planning is focused on tax planning strategies, optimizing your taxable, tax-deferred, and tax-free accounts, taking into account your income today, and your needs for tomorrow, all while focusing to reduce taxes and capital gains but maintain capital market expectations. This, in turn, benefits from an open dialog with your CPA for two-way communication to better serve your financial interests and truly give you a complete tax picture.
Strategic focus designed for lowering taxes
The power of compounding returns in the absence of significant tax drag can truly play a major role towards lower taxes. Successful investing often places more emphasis on gains than efficiencies. A tax planning approach to investing by incorporating strategies designed to reduce the impact of taxes incrementally over time is the pathway to help you achieve better outcomes.
Our goal is to help you navigate the complex world of tax implications of your investments through asset location and allocation across taxable and non-taxable accounts, and taxable trusts, along with tax-smart withdrawal strategies to align your present actions with future goals for lower taxes.
We believe that when it comes to investing, it’s not what you make, it’s what you get to keep those counts. Taking a long-term, big-picture view when building wealth allows for a well-planned execution of small implementations that lead to achieving your financial and lifestyle goals.
Examining results in after-tax dollars
Taxes On Investments
Think of taxes as an unavoidable investment fee. Tax-managed investing offers performance, focused on lowering taxes for better after-tax results.
Enhancing efficiencies, expenses, profitability, and growth
Financial Planning For Business
With simple shifts in processes already in place, you can achieve higher levels of financial efficiencies, and tax savings, letting you focus on business operations.
Business planning can go far beyond sustaining your business
Business financial planning has a great deal to do with a vast number of details that come together to help you make better-informed decisions, taking into account immediate and long-term goals. Being better prepared, you can react more quickly to the unexpected, assess risk factors, capitalize on opportunities, and lower taxes through a tax planning process.
Our role is to provide clarity around efficiencies that may be costing you time or money unnecessarily. Apart from sensible cash flow management, budget allocation, and necessary expenses, there are aspects of what may already be in place that can benefit from exploring more closely:
- What are you doing with excess cash?
- Could you benefit taxably from changing your corporate entity structure?
- Are there cost-saving measures you can implement without reducing quality or services?
- Do you have a retirement plan in place that has benefits that outweigh your costs?
- Do you have a continuation plan in place in the event of death or disability?
- Have you thought about succession planning or an exit plan when you’re ready to retire?
We ask the questions, it’s up to you to decide where the value can be applied.
Planning retirement to avoid the pitfalls
Taxes in retirement will be determined by how well you prepared prior to retirement. For the purposes of tax planning, how you have saved and where your savings has been located are the primary considerations.
Ideally, you do not want every penny of your retirement income to come from taxable sources. You also don’t want all your sources to be associated with the stock market so you can manage the inevitable down years and draw from other sources of income.
In your working years, the importance of what you can afford to spend is directly correlated to the income you earn. Getting a promotion, a raise, or changing jobs can enhance your flow of income. In retirement, passive income from investments, social security, pensions, or what you have saved personally and through employer-sponsored retirement plans, along with the taxes on those sources, become your set sources of income.
We will guide you through the various considerations in preparing for and maintaining your ideal retirement. We will help you show how different types of income are taxed, how to avoid transitioning into a higher tax bracket, maximize social security, develop thoughtful withdrawal strategies, and most importantly, be in a position to take advantage of the opportunities, as well as being prepared for the challenges. Retirement is unlike any other chapter of your life, you only get one chance to get it right.
Preparation for tax efficiencies in retirement
Taxes In Retirement
When you shift from living on income to living on your retirement savings, your choices should be strategic and we can design your best options.
You Decide How We Work Together
Flexible options to engage in financial advice in the way you prefer
You may have done a great job developing and maintaining your financial portfolio and perhaps all you need is an occassional review of strategies and sound advice for major financial planning considerations as they present themselves. In this case, we are here for you as needed, providing advice on an hourly basis.
You may prefer to have a dedicated team to design your short-term and long-term strategies to manage and monitor your financial world through an open line of regular communication and financial goal planning of your work and personal investments. In this case, we are here to provide advice on a regular basis as a traditional percentage of assets under management, working as your partner to navigate challenges and capture the opportunities.
You may have a situational need for a specific goal and require an unbiased opinion. This generally means a specific product solution, which compensates a representative with a commission for placing business with them. As an independent firm, we work with all major A-rated companies and have no ties or requirements to any one company, solution or product. This allows us to honor our duty to focus on the best possible solution for your needs rather than a company controling and restricting our options, or compensation weighing unjust bias into any recommendations.
Imagine the possibilities
Lowering taxes doesn’t require making dramatic changes in what you may already be doing.
Implementing a tax planning approach can result in long-term benefits to your investments, retirement, business, and even the tax burden you can potentially avoid for your loved ones in the future.
We believe in proving our value by showing you what could be possible.
Let us help you with tax planning in Orange County, today.