Tax Planning With Jordon Comstock and Ben Tuinel

Just to explain to the listeners, the reason why we have Craig on today. Craig, so our podcast is navigating dental insurance. The main thing we focus on is how to reduce those dental insurance write offs as a dentist, or a physician or doctor of any type, when you participate with an insurance carrier, you’re required to accept a discount or a negotiated discount. Consequently, 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. What you’re talking about here is the tax planning. You would incur a huge tax liability. In essence, you’re taking a discount on the PPO write offs, or PPO discounts, and then the income that you earned is an additional tax, additional money that you don’t get to keep.

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 taxes isn’t a fun thing. If you’re not setup 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. What is proactive tax planning and how can people maximize it? How can people maximize your version of tax planning?

They could maximize it by basically planning and communicating with their tax professional. Most people do not communicate with their tax professional. Unfortunately most tax professionals aren’t communicating with their clients on a regular basis. Most CPAs 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 a rear view mirror and recording history instead of making history.

Get your copy of my book the 10 Biggest Tax Mistakes That Cost Business Owners Thousands HERE!

We want to have our clients plan. People spend time, they research a car. They research things that they’re going to spend a lot of money on, but nobody is really doing … Or, a large portion of the people out there are not doing any planning when it comes to taxes and how they can save money.

Yeah. I think I could agree with that. My CPA only contacts me maybe three weeks before September 15th. We automatically file an extension. I don’t know if you do that with your clients, but as a business owner, how do we get CPAs … 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 CPAs?

Well, you should have an ongoing relationship with your CPA. What we do is, once we get our clients setup, we actually do a monthly call and we usually set them up via WebEx or Zoom, and we go over their profit and loss, and their balance sheet every month. It’s not just to look at the numbers, it’s also to see what’s going on, because 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. It’s that communication 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. 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, we’re not wasting anybody’s time.

That’s a nice position.

Nobody’s traveling from point A to point B. The client gets a lot of value out of that.

Yeah, I would imagine they get tons of value because … I always have tax questions for my accountant. Well, I got his cell phone, so he lets me text him, but yeah, I would love to have a monthly meeting. I think that’s super beneficial, especially with dentists. They get so bombarded and so spread thing throughout each month. They don’t have much time to go look at their profit and loss, and balance sheets. I think that’s a huge benefit that you guys do for your clients.

It works for everybody. They’re happy, and we make sure they stay on track and they save their tax dollars.

Awesome. What is the biggest mistake you see small business owners making regarding taxes? And maybe, do you have any examples that maybe you see dentists making as well? Answer just the generic one first and then if you have other examples of dentists.

The generic is one of we talked about is failing to plan. The second really is the choosing the wrong business entity. Typically, what we see is somebody starts a business and it could be a dental business, and they go to the attorney, and the attorney says, okay, we’ll form an LLC. That attorney happens to like LLCs. Or, we’re going to form an S corporation. Or you know what? You can be a sole proprietor. It doesn’t make a difference. They operate out of these entities and there may be a better structure for them to be operating out of, which can be more tax efficient. Those are the two big problems, failing to plan, and choosing the wrong business entity.

Dentists are business owners just like everybody else. I hate to say it, because I see there’s a lot of people that consider themselves a dental specialists, CPAs. They’re another professional out there that’s in business for himself, or herself, and eventually they may be looking to buy real estate to operate their practice out of, or buy other businesses such as other dental practices. We like to treat them just like every other business owner out there. Give them all the good advice and help them do the things they want to do, and do it in a real tax efficient manner.

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

Get your copy of my book the 10 Biggest Tax Mistakes That Cost Business Owners Thousands HERE!

Listen to the full podcast here.