Communicating With Your CPA On the Freedom Formula For Physicians Podcast

Well, I think the taxes and I don’t want other frustrations that, that I’ve had with a lot of CPAs is that they prepare the taxes, but they truly aren’t involved in proactive planning. So I’d love to hear from you what you–what do you see as the difference between a bean counter and someone that is proactive? How can someone know that ahead of time?

Well, one way is, I ask people when was the last time your accountant or your CPA came to you with an idea of how to save taxes and typically I get that glazed over look and it’s never. Most CPAs are very good at putting the right numbers in the right boxes, recording history, but they don’t help you make history and what we do is we help our clients make history.

What do you think that should look like then? I mean, should that be meeting twice a year, then three times a year, four times a year? What, what should someone expect, you know, from a proactive CPA?

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Very, very good question. It really comes down to communication. You need to communicate on a regular basis with your CPA because you know as a CPA once said to me, “The doctor doesn’t call you up and ask you if you’re sick”, your clients, they can’t expect you to know everything, so you need to communicate with them and when you communicate things come up and people talk about things that they are looking to do and you’re able to then steer then in the right direction to do it in the most tax efficient way.

Sounds good to me. Well, it sounds like what, as people meet with a tax preparer or a CPA, they should really be thinking about–meaning once a year probably isn’t enough, right?

No, I mean that’s not nearly enough and you know, we did a lot of clients, they’ll come to us and they’ll want to work with us this time of year and we explained to them that if you want to work with us, you need to work with us throughout the year. Of course, if you’re doing them yourself also disservice.

If you only work with them during tax season or at the end of the year when the typical tax planning is to figure out how much money you’re going to owe and you need to make this payment. That’s what most accountants think is tax planning. Looking in the rear view mirror, I like to look forward and see what we can do and how to minimize your tax bill.

I think this is a great segue. Now in this podcast, we’re all about helping doctors slash their taxes, slash their debt and live a liberated lifestyle and focus on this topic a lot and we’ve talked about, and I kind of call it skimming the cream off. We’ve talked a lot about side hustles, and S corporations and LLCs but Craig, for you today, I’d really love to dig into your depth of knowledge and just go over some unusual deductions that folks may not be aware of. So I have a few notes of some stuff that I thought might be good to go over, but I’d love to hear from you since we’ve covered some of the basics here in the past. Let’s really dig in to some good stuff. People should be aware of whether their W-2 or they’re paid 1099 or however they get paid by cash truck or railway. What do you think, Craig? What are some good ways that folks may not be aware of a ways to slash their taxes?

Well, not all strategies work with every type of entity. So most of the strategies do not work with a plain vanilla W-2 person, but let’s talk about a medical expense reimbursement plan.

Medical expense reimbursement plan allows you to hire your spouse and the reasonable compensation that you are paying your spouse is basically a medical expense reimbursement plan. So there’s no 1099 or W-2 to provide that person with and then you get to deduct your spouse and her family, or I’m using the word our family, their medical costs. So that may be braces for your kids, that may be cosmetic dentistry, that can be eyeglasses, contacts, anything that’s out of pocket, and it’s typically going to be an excess of what you’ve already taken in your eight page essay.

YOU SHOULD REVIEW THE THE NEW TAX LAW CHANGES WITH YOUR CPA BEFORE IMPLEMENTING ANY TAX PLANNING STRATEGIES.

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