Say No to PPO’s with Jordon Comstock and Ben Tuinel

We like you because we hate taxes,  it’s kind of all about keeping more of what you make. Yes, I love that. The Secrets of a Tax Free Life. I already liked the title of it. Before we go on to any other questions, could you summarize what you say in that book. I co authored this with about nine other people. My chapter was about,  how to make your child’s cleats tax deductible. One little thing about having kid’s dealing with your kids and stuff like that, that would’ve helped, my parents had 11 kids. A lot of cleats. Exactly.

My most recent book which I’m  going to offer your listeners, if they’d like it free, is the 10 most expensive tax mistakes that cost business owners thousands, they’re going to learn  different things that can save people money.

That is a huge offer. I’m actually excited to read that because, you know, as a small business owner, you’re paying so much in taxes and you have to think, Gosh, you got your teaching when you fill up the gas station in your tax, when you buy groceries, you tax everything you do when you hire an employee, you’re taxed. And I was doing the math the other day and I think the money that I spent in taxes in 2016 was over 50 percent of my income and over 50 percent of the business income. I think it just makes me upset, you know, that we have to pay so much in taxes. And unfortunately we don’t get too much of a say, other than voting for the politicians that spend the tax dollars. But it’s just so frustrating. So just to explain to the listeners, the reason why we have Craig on today is to talk about taxes, our podcast is navigating dental insurance and the main thing that we focus on is how to reduce those dental insurance write offs as a, as a dentist or a physician or a doctor of any type.

When you participate with an insurance carrier, you’re required to accept a discount or a negotiated discount. And so consequently when when you provide treatment, you’re writing off a bunch of money in order for you to be a PPO or an in network provider with a lot of these plans. So what you’re talking about here is the tax planning. In essence you’re taking a discount on the ppo write-ups or ppo discounts and then the  income that you earned is  taxed, additional money that you don’t get to keep. And so our podcast is all about how to help the doctors be more efficient when it comes to dealing with dental insurance. But we’re going outside of the topic today because I feel like this is key and important because, you know, taxes ere not a fun thing if you’re not.  If you’re not set up in terms of the right business and knowing what the right write offs are,  you’re losing thousands of dollars as a dental business owner. So what is productive tax planning and how can people maximize it, how can people maximize your version of tax planning?

They can maximize it by basically planning and communicating with their tax professional. So most people do not communicate with their tax professional. And unfortunately  most tax professionals are not communicating with their clients on a regular basis. You know, most CPA’s are really good at putting the right numbers in the right boxes. They’re being very compliant, but they’re not being proactive. It’s almost like they’re looking in the rear view mirror and recording history instead of making history. So we like to  have our clients plan,  people spend time, they research a car, they researched things that they’re going to spend a lot of money on, but nobody is really doing doing any planning when it comes to taxes, how they can save money.

Yeah, I think I could agree with that. I mean my CPA only contacts me maybe three weeks before September 15. We’ve automatically filed an extension. I don’t know if you do that with your clients, but like as a business owner, how do we get CPA’s to communicate. I’m sure you’ll get a lot of people calling you and you can help resolve that communication issue. But as a business owner where we only have control over what we do, what’s your recommendation there? How do we initiate communication or  what should be communicated to the CPA’s?

You should have an ongoing relationship with your CPA. And what we do is once we get our clients set up, we actually do a monthly call and we usually set them up via Webex or zoom and we go over the profit and loss and balance sheet every month. And it’s not just to look at the numbers, it’s also to see what’s going on. Of course, if we know what’s going on, we can help them plan and optimize the tax benefits from whatever they’re going to be doing. So it’s that communication that is key. We send them a link, they opt into the link for a date and time  that works for them. And then we have that call and because we’re able to do it from our office via skype or Webex or something like that, and they’re able to do it from their office, w e’re not wasting anybody’s time. Nobody’s traveling from point a to point B.  and the client gets a lot of value out of that. They get tons of value

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