Le manuel de la belle et unique facture : Que dire et comment le dire

So I’m Samantha Russell, the chief evangelist here at FMG. I help facilitate most of our webinars and love talking with all of you, hearing what is going on in your lives, and how we can help you market and grow organically, using great marketing. Susan, you’re up next.

I’m up next. Hi. I’m Susan Theater. I’m the chief marketing officer at FMG, and Sam and I love doing these.

And I look forward every time to the chat and just hearing your questions, getting your feedback. And this one, we’re super excited because we are not doing most of the talking. We have a guest interviewer. Who is, like, a plus plus.

You guys are really gonna enjoy this. So without any more talking for me, let’s get on to Clint.

Hi, Clint. Hi, Anton.

How can I help you?

A little bit about yourself.

Yeah. Thanks thanks for having me. This is, like, the most unique webinar I’ve ever done because I’m technically a lawyer, CPA, tax person. And, usually, any webinar doesn’t start off with, like, that sounds like a real podcast. So this is, like, a real podcast I would listen to.

So I’m very excited now, and I feel like I’ve, I’m at formal here. So you couldn’t No.

No. No. Yeah.

We didn’t do the five second disclosure.

Yeah. No.

Exactly. Yeah. So, yeah, my name is Clint Costa. I, am the senior wealth strategist at a firm called Coreo. We’re a national RIA firm.

We’re an FMG subscriber.

And, I work with all of our advisers across the country, bolting on to help them, with my experience, which is, fifteen years practicing law, and also tax tax law and practicing trust and estate law, and kinda doing all of the tax and and, estate work for our ultra high net worth clients, and again, really bolt on and assist our advisors across the firm with that.

Amazing. Well, thank you for taking time to join us. So to give everybody a lay of the land, what we thought we would do, obviously, here at FMG, we are your partner for all things marketing and communications.

So we are going to start by talking about the bill and what’s in it and what you need to know high level.

And then at the end or not the very end, but about sixty percent of the way through, Susan and I are gonna show you some of the resources that we have already created that are available to you. Some of them we’re just giving to you for being here. So even if you don’t currently use FMG, you’re gonna walk away with an amazing toolkit that you can use to talk about this. Go FMG marketing team.

Thank you for putting that together. But for everyone else, we’ll show you where in the FMG dashboard that there’s even more resources and tools that you can use. So that’s the structure. So stick around so that you get to, you know, both learn about the bill and then how you can use it in your marketing and communications.

Yep.

So I think we’ll, you know, Sam and I will monitor the chat, and we’ll strategically interject slash interrupt Clint if we see, like, thematic questions going on. But, otherwise, we’re gonna hand it over to you, Clint, to tell us what we need to know. And Sam and I are as interested as everybody on this call.

Alright. Sounds good. You’re giving a trained lawyer freedom to say whatever he wants. So I don’t know if that’s, like, smart. Well, I’ll just keep going. There’s no one here with an actual hook. You might need to send somebody to my house with an actual hook to pull me away if if I don’t hear now tell me to shut up if we don’t.

Yeah. So the ABBA. Right? So where do we even start with that? Right? I’m guessing if if for the folks who are on this webinar, you’ve probably already been looking for information.

You’ve probably already been very confused by outdated chat g p t responses to your questions because it just doesn’t seem like it’s super updated, up to July of twenty of this year, which is what we, where where we’re at. And so that’s why we’re here to help. So where I start is a lot of context. Right?

And I think whenever there’s a new tax bill, and this was true when the TCJA came out in twenty seventeen, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, it’s also true now. It’s been true in the interim.

I don’t know if anyone remembers the the movie The Great Outdoors with John Candy and and Dan Aykroyd.

Trying to think through and learn all of these tax provisions is kind of like trying to eat the old ninety sixer.

I don’t know if any if that’s a if that’s too dated of a reference.

You got you got one thumbs up.

Okay. I got one. We’ll see.

The context is really important, I think, in there we go. We got more. In in the world of of of being financial advisors. Right?

And and and continuing to try to bring a tax focus and help our clients for a variety of reasons. Okay. So first, where do I go with that? First, context.

Where are we? I don’t know if we’ve really seen as much change in the tax world as we’ve seen in the last eight years. So I’m gonna go back to the TCJA in twenty seventeen, which was a massive shift in so many play so many areas of the tax code.

Secure one point o, probably an absolute favorite of everybody in this on this, you know, call has had to talk about the ten year rule, the loss of the stretch IRA, all of those issues that came out of Secure, the fact that then Secure, the IRS took a long time to come up with the regulations.

We had then all the COVID stuff we kinda forget, the CARES Act, the ARPA.

Then we then we had the Inflation Reduction Act, which actually was one of the first things I wrote about when I came into KOREO, then Secure two point o, you know, just kind of general confusion around the sunset. That’s we were just talking about that. Everyone was thinking about writing about the sunset.

And then now we finally have the the o b three or the ABBA or whatever we’re gonna call it. I think at the same time, the tax advisory landscape has changed very significantly. So at Coreo, we’re deeply interested. Our our roots, our heritage is in, the wealth management groups of CPA firms, so we’re very tied into the CPA world.

And the CPA world is changing radically and rapidly, over the last, really, four years. So a lot of folks who are involved in that world look back to twenty twenty one when a firm called Citroen Cooperman took a a, the first kind of big private equity investment that has since actually been unwrapped. It’s it worked. It it did what they thought it would do, and so it’s continuing very significantly.

So what you have is a lot of private equity investment coming into the CPA world. It’s changing the nature of of how people get their tax work done, get their tax advice. A lot of that work really is shifting. What we see at Coreo, a lot of that is shifting to our advisors, who are being asked to do more, no more.

Right? You see the the the Kitsis tech map. There’s nine tax focused technologies in the fintech world right now. There’s probably many more to come.

And so, you know, that plus a lot of CPA firms really ditching ten forty practice. Like, if you’re not tied to I’m sure I’m not saying anything that the advisors on this call haven’t felt in trying to help their clients. Like, who’s gonna even do the ten forty?

A lot of CPA firms, if you’re not tied to a business or some larger thing, aren’t super interested in just doing one one off ten forties. It doesn’t work for their cost structure, and it’s not their ideal client anymore.

Clint, for our audience, what would you say are the I don’t I’ll throw out a number five, but, like, the top three five, whatever you have off the top of your head, things that you’ve seen in this OBB, I like the o b three or whatever it is Right. That are gonna impact the, you know, the majority of clients. What’s most relevant for everybody to be thinking about?

And and maybe if if we start talking about that, I think we’ll probably get some other questions digging into those.

Yeah. So I think, if if we’re gonna go with the top five or think about how the provisions come down, where I go is, first of all, the rates. So if you actually if you look at the foundational pieces of the of the ABBA, of the o b three, the big things that, the big pieces that drove most of the cost were the rates. So keeping the TCJA rates. So why is that important?

Being proactive about tax bracket management. Right?

I took a look back.

The twenty four percent bracket that’s sort of right the gold standards, like, where everybody wants to jam as much as they can into that twenty four percent marginal rate bracket.

In twenty eighteen, that bracket ended at three hundred fifteen thousand dollars of income for a married couple.

In twenty twenty four, it ends at three hundred eighty four thousand dollars. So that means that there’s seventy sixty nine thousand dollars approximately of additional income that you can get taxed that that just by virtue of the way that the tax brackets inflation adjust.

And so for clients, right, and this is kinda where I was going, like, for for for financial advisors, picking your lane in tax advice. Like, where do you wanna go with this? Do you wanna just be kind of a helpful, like, hey. Did you think of this? Did you think of that? Or do you wanna be kinda deep in the weeds of helping your clients, of projecting, and, of really helping them kinda work through tax planning ideas, especially if most of their wealth is tied up in investment assets where, that’s really our domain, right, as financial advisors.

And a lot of CPAs don’t wanna do it. So are we doing, like, multiyear tax projections, taking advantage? Like, oh, you’re gonna have a great year in your business next year. Everything’s kinda rolling.

You kinda hit your stride mid year, and so we see a little bit of that in your in your twenty twenty five. But twenty six, we’re gonna we’re gonna blow it out of the water. Okay. Amazing. Maybe we need to really think about stuffing as much income into that twenty four percent bracket, finding places for doing Roth conversions or we’re doing something else to do that.

That’s interesting too that you mentioned specifically, like, if, oh, you did a good year in your business. Because one of the questions that was presubmitted that came up over and over again was, are there certain opportunities we should be thinking about communicating to business owner clients. So I would say that that’s definitely one of them.

I think being involved yeah. So clients who have businesses, right, sometimes there’s this this viewpoint of, like, I’m gonna be a little bit hands off. The CPA has it. They’re figuring it out.

CPAs are super busy. If you if especially if the business isn’t taking advantage. I mean, there’s a lot of great CPAs out there. But if depending on the firm, if the CPA or sorry.

If the business is not large enough to, like, buy services from every arm of that CPA firm, they might just be getting compliance. And they might have a CPA who’s very, very busy and maybe not paying attention to a lot of these things either for the maybe for the business, it’s probably more likely, but for sure for the ownership. And so being aware of what’s happening in the business is really important. Now go to that.

The business focused provisions, I would say in general, are important. I think there it’s much harder in our world as a financial in the wealth management financial advisory space, even if we’re very tax focused. I think it’s hard for us to make a big impact. I think where we make bigger a bigger impact with the the business provision.

So that’s gonna be your one ninety nine cap a, you know, flow through, qualified business income deduction.

The the new bonus depreciation, which is really it’s what we had and went away, and now it’s back. So one hundred percent bonus. So client’s gonna make a capital expenditure. They’re gonna get one hundred percent cost recovery in the first year.

The larger one seventy nine, which is a very esoteric, you really have to be kinda from my perspective, even with my background, like, I’d have to look it up for three hours. You you have to be a CPA and in this world to know, like, well, what’s bonus? What’s one seventy nine? So it’s enough to know the one seventy nine is a little bit different, and there’s larger exemptions there. It gives gives business owners, still that ability to to take more depreciation.

The and then the, sorry, the, on the business, some of the other things that are very business focused. So business debt. If you’re capitalizing your business with debt and there are limitations on the interest deductions you’re allowed to have. If you have excess losses, right, that could be really important for a pass through, an s corp, or a partnership, an owner who has losses, like, oh, great.

I’m gonna take all these losses. Well, there’s limitations on that. So those are really important, and I think from my perspective, those are areas where you really have to coordinate with the CPA. You have to be in with the CPA talking about how are these things we’re projecting out.

We think we’re gonna have a loss. We’re gonna take you know, we’re gonna buy this huge piece of equipment. We’re gonna do something that’s gonna, you know, be be directly applicable and show up on the ten forty. What opportunities does that provide us in the portfolio?

Like, oh, this person also got in super early on NVIDIA. Like, could we possibly, you know, take some gains, take some chips off the table? We’ve been wanting to diversify. We know we have this big loss coming, but we don’t wanna get way over our skis.

You know, all of those things are really important, from that arise from the business.

I’m I’m gonna I’m gonna just a little just Yeah.

Keep we’re I’m going to do the hook a little just so we get through all the topics because time’s a little bit quiet.

Absolutely. A couple topics presubmitted, and then they’re piling on in the chat about the changes or advice on donor advised funds in twenty twenty five versus twenty twenty six. Another person just phrased it as charitable implicate implications. Yeah. Maybe talk a little bit about that.

I have notes for that. Alright. So charitable.

DAFs have not changed. So there there’s definitely some chatter around DAFs.

They have not changed from what we know in the past. Here’s maybe a little bit of the chatter. In the last couple years, there was an effort which I think is probably well dead. I haven’t checked back into it, but I think it’s well dead.

There was an effort to further define what a DAF is. DAFs are kinda weird creatures in the code. Like, you can’t look at a particular code section really and say that’s the DAF section. It’s a little bit of a patchwork that makes a DAF a public charity.

Treat it as a public charity. There was an effort to sort of define that in the IRS regulations, and what that was actually gonna do was the big upshot in what we’re all talking about at least at Koryo and what was coming out in our in the industry as the the news was developing was, like, you couldn’t manage a client’s DAF account and manage their personal account. That was the proposal which never has never been put in place. So that’s been on people’s radar.

Like, oh, there’s something with DAFs. There’s weird stuff with DAFs. The second piece with DAFs is with charitable now. Right?

The big changes to charitable are, first of all, which is kinda cool. For nonitemizers, we’ve gone back to having a, a a nonitemized, below the line charitable deduction. So we had that when in the COVID era, There was, I think it was six hundred bucks that you could you could donate and deduct without itemizing your taxes, which most people kinda stopped itemizing after the state and local tax deduction went got limited to ten thousand.

We now have that, but that has to be the only way you can take advantage of that is cash gifts to to directly to public charities, not DAFs. So that’s a that may be out in the ether. Like, that’s and that really speaks to what this ABBA bill is all about.

There are so many phase outs. There are so many little details. Why? Because they had to work within the reconciliation framework in Congress.

Like, it was in the news. You know? We were following it as tax, you know, tax, people. We were I was I was following it.

All these little things, one of the most phase out does everything have a different phase out, or is there sort of a time at which all the phase outs go?

It’s all different. So so the deductions are kind of all over the board in terms of what income levels they phase out. So I’m do gonna do this off the top of my head. I think, like, the child tax credit now, right, we’re at twenty two hundred dollars. That phase out starts at I wanna say it starts at four hundred for a married couple.

The phase out for tips over time, senior deduction, the new six thousand dollar senior deduction, those all happen at lower levels of AGI across different phase outs. The new SALT deduction happens, at from five hundred to six hundred thousand. There’s also a difference in terms of the aggression of the phase out. So do you get, like, couple hundred thousand dollars of income to to experience the phase out? So even if you’re above, you still get some or or most of the benefit, or is it quickly go from you get all the benefit to you get none of the benefit?

Those are details that have to just be addressed. And, again, it kinda relates to that first point I was making, which is if you’re a financial advisor, wealth manager, you’re getting involved in taxes, you’re offering tax advice to your clients, and trying to help them navigate this world.

Are you doing, you know is that part of your what you’re doing? Are you supported by the right processes and maybe people in terms of, you know, bringing that, like, a multi year like, we’re gonna find opportunities over a ten years period because we’re gonna have a long term relationship versus, like, oh, okay. Here’s what your income was this year. Here’s where we think it’s gonna go next year. Because a lot of those things, these things, you know, they they do take time, and you can find opportunities, especially if clients are gonna maybe have low income years, they’re gonna retire, so on and so forth. Really quickly on charitable.

What didn’t change are some of the basic tools we had. So QCDs didn’t change.

You know, I think they were inflation adjusted two bills ago or one bill ago. So QCDs continue to be qualified charitable deductions.

Instead of the RMD coming out to the client who maybe doesn’t need that income, they can fulfill their charitable desires with those RMDs. So that’s the same.

The rules for that are the same, public charities. The, sorry. The other one, in addition to the, the new non itemized, so up to a a thousand or two thousand single or married filing jointly for people who make, charitable gifts.

The other one that’s important there is the new, half of the that. Yeah. Sorry.

Yeah. I’m just gonna see what are we asking.

I was just gonna just pull up I was just gonna pull up our blog as an outline.

Like so, Clint, I think people are struggling because we’re just talking.

And so I think what might be helpful is is if we can go through you can either bring up the email or the blog has even more, but let’s start with the email. So just to segue a little bit into, FMG, we have written content to help advisers communicate both through blogs and emails and social posts some of the changes and the big impacts to their clients. And we broke it out into some of these categories. Maybe to help people because it’s such a big topic, maybe we can touch on each of these, and you can kind of we’ll leave them up on the screen so people can both read and ask questions as you talk through it. Sure. Why don’t we let’s say, Sam, which one should we start with?

We got the tax bracket.

To point out to everybody who’s asking about the school Everybody gets so everybody’s like, can you share that document?

So, yes, we are gonna share these we wrote emails, we wrote the blog, and we wrote social posts, and we are gonna share that with everyone, on this what you’re gonna get. Yeah.

Maybe maybe we let’s let’s pivot just a little bit just since we’re seeing some feedback. Why don’t we take them through this toolkit and how we’re going to help you communicate?

And then we can go back to the questions.

In the chat, why don’t you guys give us questions on the topics that you’re most interested in getting a little bit more detail on, and then we can have Clint opine on those.

That’s perfect. So, yeah, so everyone who’s here today, you’re gonna get this toolkit. It’s a PDF, but you’ll see that everything is clickable.

And within here, there’s emails that you can use that give an overview that you can send to both your clients, your prospects, and any centers of influence that you work with, subject matter experts, anything like that. Then there’s social posts. There’s a blog. There’s a podcast script, a video script, and a webinar.

And it’s you’re able to download it all and use each of the pieces. So this is the PDF, and then when you click on any one of those pieces, it takes you to something like this. So here’s the blog. Here’s the email, and you’re able to copy and paste this into whatever email provider that you use, and you could obviously still edit it as well. But we’ve broken into, like, what are the main takeaways that you would that clients would wanna know and that you would wanna communicate to them.

And so this is all given to you in that toolkit that we will be emailing out.

So this one is the email that I’m going through, and it’s all sourced at the bottom, by the way.

Yes. Here’s one question in the chat. The verbiage for the SALT deduction mentions forty thousand under a married filing joint pretense, but says nothing for single married filing single. Tax laws typically imply in some way or another that a deduction is halved for single MFS. Is that the case for the new SALT cap?

No. Yeah. It’s weird. That’s a weird one. It’s the same for single and married and married.

Good question.

And that’s a really important one, by the way, for everybody. If you have clients who are so, like, it’s it’s interesting. Right? In Illinois, where I’m at in Chicago, we actually don’t have it’s surprising to people.

We actually don’t have that high of a income state income tax rate. We actually have a relatively low income tax rate. It’s less than five percent. We have extremely high property taxes, though.

And so where people were, you know, excited in my world are or in my in locally is they get some of their, you know, deduction back, and it’s really a big theme of the ABA, which is the return of the itemized deduction for for many people. Right? So I’m thinking about two things. One, high state income taxes.

So that’s gonna be your New York, your California, your Massachusetts, and probably others I’m not thinking of.

And also high property taxes, Illinois, New Jersey, there’s other there’s other states that have that. When you take the ability to get to that forty thousand dollar level of SALT deduction, then you add on the fact that maybe there’s people who’ve taken higher interest mortgages in the last few years as rates have gone up thinking that they would be able to refi, and then you’re just kinda hanging on.

Obviously, for those folks who’ve refinanced during COVID and they’re sitting on their homes, which is a huge trend, you know, that’s not gonna affect them as much. But we’re in a world now where the itemized deduct the the world of people itemizing is coming back again.

And so what’s really important to know about that SALT deduction, it’s probably I’m gonna say it’s maybe the most important piece of of the ABBA is the how aggressively over that phase out range. If you make four hundred ninety nine thousand nine hundred ninety nine dollars, that’s your AGI, you get the full forty thousand dollar deduction.

As you go through that phase out range, you lose that deduction very quickly to six hundred thousand dollars of income. So once you’re at six hundred, you don’t get it. You’re back down to ten thousand. And so people may have seen this.

It’s been termed the salt torpedo, which sounds very ominous. But the idea is that as you go through that phase out range, because your income’s increasing and your deductions are decreasing, like your salt is coming down, the amount the amount you’re allowed to deduct, you’re actually getting up to, like, a forty six percent, almost a forty six percent tax rate. So Okay. Cool.

As we’re planning income doing income planning for clients, I talked about the bracket planning, like, how much are you stuffing into that twenty four percent bracket, then you go up to thirty two.

It really requires a multidimensional.

Like, we’re playing four dimensional chess.

Yeah. And I think one of the things you’re hitting on is that it there is so many details in this and the opportunity. So many people are asking, like, what are the opportunities? How do we communicate it? I think just even by virtue of if you send some of these communications as the adviser and you’re saying there’s a lot of moving parts, and this is a great time for us to meet and to go over this and talk about how it’s specifically gonna apply to you, and we’re working on the background. There and for somebody who doesn’t have an adviser who’s proactively sending these types of communications, their friends talking about it or if they they’re on your list as a prospect and they get it, what an amazing opportunity.

So, Susan, I think it would be good now since we were thirty minutes in just to talk a little bit about, how we think about, right, when we’re sending these emails. Mhmm.

Like, we have it here. Breaking down the one big beautiful bill act, that would be the subject line of this email.

And when we’re writing it, how it is really, really positioned to be able to be sent not just to your current clients, but to prospects and centers of influence so that you can really use it as an opportunity to grow.

Yeah. We I I think this is such a great opportunity to establish yourself as a, you know, forward thinking thought leader of your clients. They know something’s happening, but I bet most of them have not really dug into it. So for you to break it down everybody loves the word breaking down because I don’t wanna read something long.

So we’re sending you we’re getting some questions in the chat about, like, what are we sending? So we are literally sending you the email that we wrote in a Word document that you can just copy and paste. And if you are an FMG customer, these are pieces that we wrote for our do it for me customers, which is our our top package. So if you’re interested, we’ll put a poll up, in a little bit.

And if you’re interested in learning more about it, you can, raise your hand in the poll. We also have content beyond what I’m we’re including in this kit that is in our regular, you know, library for all of our customers, and we will continue to write content.

That’s one of the things that I think is one of the best value propositions of FMG is we’re always writing content on topics that are timely, and this one is going to have legs for a long time.

So So this doesn’t cost you anything, though, by the way No. Because people are confused. This is where everybody here is getting what you’re seeing on my screen for free. Yeah.

So you’ll just click on download now, and you will have the copy of the email, the copy of the social post. You can copy and paste it. And if you are not on FMG, you can send it out in your email. You can post it on your social.

You can add it to your website. We are giving it as a gift. And the webinar playbook maybe look at the webinar playbook because I think we’ve talked before about lead gen. And, I mean, most people on this call, I think, are interested in growing and lead gen.

We think webinars are one of the best ways to do that, and I think this topic is an amazing topic for a webinar. So if you click on the webinar playbook, we haven’t just said, here’s an idea. We’ve actually done everything from writing the you know, how you would tee it up to a CPA to invite them to maybe join you would be a great opportunity.

We’ve included, how to, you know, set up the webinar. We’ve included even how to do Zoom. So sometimes people are like, well, I don’t use Zoom. So So we’ve included, like, how to do Zoom. And if you expect a lot of people how to upgrade your Zoom and then everything from the email to promote it, the social post to promote it. I mean, we really give you everything.

And our whole philosophy, as you can tell, which sometimes doesn’t work perfectly because I think in this case, we probably would have done better to have some slides for you, so our bad. But for this, it it can be something where you and a CPA in an organized format are talking through, like, leveraging our script. So if you go if you keep going down or maybe it was higher, but I’ve got an outline of the actual webinar so that you go through the topics in a very, you know, coherent order, and you just hit on the things like the five changes to five twenty nines, the changes to AMT, the changes to, you know, what’s this new child account thing.

And you could hit on them very succinctly, and it’s just a great opportunity for you to partner with, a CPA. And maybe, Clint, you could tell the audience, everybody would love to partner with CPAs and get referrals. Right? What is the best like, we think this is a good idea, like a good topic to partner with a CPA.

How would you recommend to advisors to approach, you know, a potential CPA in their market that they don’t have a relationship with? What’s the best way to come at it sort of from a win win, not seem like, you know, it’s all in it for me? Like, how how can they leverage this to build a relationship?

Yeah. It’s a great question. It’s something we really focus on a lot at Coreo. You know, I think the bit from my perspective, the start is, like, who have you worked with? Like, you’ve you must have like, look in look through your book and and figure out the top three CPAs that you think do a great job for your clients.

That’s a great idea.

Them with that. Right? CPAs are awesome. I love them. I am one. I’ve never really practiced this one, but I did get the letters.

They’re very they’re super busy. Like, right now, one of the things, right, that’s that’s probably creating a little bit of a lag. You had July fourth when the bill was signed. The CPAs then had base I mean, that’s their that’s their vacation time.

Right? They have busy season. We’re they’re back in busy season now. They’re gonna be going all the way till the, October fifteenth extension deadline with nine fifteen, nine thirty, and ten and ten fifteen deadlines.

So don’t hit them now. But they’re then gonna gonna be focused on on the ABA mid October, late October, early November, pre pre thanksgiving. These are awesome times to think about tax planning for your clients and figure out the right approach. Maybe the CPA firm is you know, you’re working on that with your clients, then you’re bringing in new prospects for them. See again, CPs are busy, like, marketing time. They they wanna grow their practices.

Well If you can help them, that’s that’s that’s amazing.

Yeah.

And I was gonna say that is why one of the things we do have, just to maybe butter them up a little, we have this sharing our client brief on the one big beautiful bill act Mhmm. That, you know, we’re not just giving you if when you’re a part of FMG’s do it for me program, we don’t just give you content.

So, right, we’re giving you we’re giving you, by the way again, this is all coming to everybody for free. But what I’m talking about now is this is our dashboard in FMG, and we have different, subscription levels. And in our do it for me program, which you can see the label here, we regularly have communications that you can send to those CPAs, to the COIs that you’re working with.

Actually, we will send them for you as long as the contacts are in your email.

And, you know, when you’re ready, Sam, I think it could be a good time because we’re getting questions about our packages. It might be a good time to put the poll up at some point.

Okay. Yeah. Aubrey, why don’t we put it up while I’m just talking about this? So if you’re part of our do it for me program, that is part of what we do for you. Every single month, we would be sending out a calendar that looks like this.

So you see Susan up here at the top. She explains what marketing we’re gonna be doing for you that month, And then you can hover over any of these, and you could see it’s broken down color coded. Is it a social post we’re sending out for you? Is it a blog? This this month for September, the blog on Tuesday is gonna be breaking down the one big beautiful act, and then there’s a email that comes as a follow-up that you can send to clients, prospects, and centers of influence.

And so we’ve got these already set up. You have a concierge that meets with you once a month, and you’re able to say, yep. I love it. Let’s send it all.

Or, hey. You know you know I work with business owners. What should I specifically be sending to them, or how can we, you know, edit it for them? And then we have all these additional content pieces that are part of the calendar.

And, again, the name describes the program. We do it for you. It’s the do it for me program. So, yes, you can take, obviously, all the resources we’re giving you just around the one big beautiful bill.

But as Susan mentioned, really, this is gonna be something you’re gonna wanna be talking about for a while. You’re gonna wanna continue to drip on people, and that is one of the massive values of our program is as breaking news hits, we will send it out for you. As time goes on and you’re thinking about what am I continuing to drip on these prospects and clients, it’s all included, in this program.

Absolutely.

Yeah. So our goal today was to be able to have a an expert who could answer your questions, technical questions about the o b three, and then to tell you how we can help you capitalize on it with your clients and prospects. I will just say, May, like, I think lesson learned when he when we’re talking about technical topics, we should have slides that help bring it to life. So our apologies for that.

And it does seem like people are really interested in the resources to communicate, which is exactly what, you know, we’re here to do.

In terms of some other questions that I got for taxes, I did see something about, alternative minimum taxes and how that’s different in twenty twenty five versus twenty twenty six.

So, and real quick, I’d also saw someone just I’m not seeing all the com all the chat, but I saw someone mentioning, yeah, if you can find an enrolled agent, that is like those are the diamonds in the rough. CPAs are awesome and and but but sometimes they are a little more focused on business. Just sort of depends on their practice. EAs are tremendous, and and that’s a really hard designation to get.

On the AMT, what the ABA did the o b three. I don’t know what you should call it. I keep thinking about the subreddit, the tragedy subreddit. Like, what should we call this thing?

Is it the one big beautiful bill, the ABBA, or its technical name, which is an act to provide for reconciliation pursuant to title two of house concurrent resolution four Not that.

Don’t call it that.

I can call it that all day long.

The so what here’s what happened with the AMT. And, again, it really relates back to this whole idea of bringing back itemized deductions. Right? The AMT kinda doesn’t play well with some itemized deductions, specifically SALT.

Because SALT comes back into alternative the the calculation for AMT.

And so to the extent people weren’t deducting SALT, couldn’t deduct SALT, state and local taxes, It really didn’t play that much into the AMT. So what the TCJA did, the Trump tax cuts in twenty seventeen, increased the the the the, the the increase the exemption, which is the amount you get to subtract. And also just by operation of some of the other provisions took away some of the what are called, like, the add backs or the preference items. So that’s we haven’t seen much AMT in the last, like, really eight years.

That’s kinda pretty much continue under the bill.

What’s happened though with that is two things. Again, the return of itemized deductions, specifically SALT, which is a preference item or it’s really an add back. So that that puts people like, I’ve subtracted this from my income, but it comes back when you when you’re calculating AMT. The other thing that the the bill did is it said, okay. We’ve got these higher income thresholds, for the phase out of how we basically do this.

We’re going to bring those back to twenty eighteen. So they’ve been inflation adjusting for the last six years, and they’re gonna go back, I think actually, I think that’s a twenty six issue. They’re gonna go back. And so what what one of the opportunities we’re seeing is, like, if you’re seeing issues for potential preference items, specifically clients who have incentive stock options because the exercise of those is not a regular tax issue, but it is an AMT issue. So for people who are affected by that, and I know there’s a lot of financial advisors that help their clients with those, this is actually a year, like, you might wanna be talking to your clients about, hey. You know, you have those ISOs.

We’re gonna be kind of back in a world of AMT again next year. We might wanna, you know, hurry up and and and access some of those.

I think one of the things that’s really interesting, even just, like if if I’m a client, I know nothing I I’m letting giving everything to my advisor. I’m not paying that much attention, and then I see this list. Right? It’s like, doesn’t matter if you are getting ready to retire, you’re already tired, you have kids, you own a business, you’re married, you’re single.

There’s changes that affect you. And so from a marketing opportunity and a communications opportunity, I see it as a gold mine as a marketer because whenever there’s big changes like this, you can prove your worth by being somebody saying, I know your specific situation. I’ve dug into it. Here’s what we’re gonna do in your situation.

And getting these kinds of communications from your adviser makes you feel like, okay. They got my back. They know what they’re doing. And I do think, you know, sending this kind of stuff out and saying, maybe even at the top, if you know anybody that, you know, is looking for guidance on what this means for them, feel free to forward this to them. That’s such a great way to have a referable moment that, you know, people can, introduce you to their friends or family whose advisers are not talking to them about all these specifics.

I think the five one on that point, Sam, the five twenty nine content, I think, I find that to be so I think, you know, coming from a law background where we were general tax people and then moving into a financial advisory, like, it’s interesting, the difference in the questions and the difference in the priorities of the clients.

The five twenty nine world is one that a lot of questions arise. It’s really both on, like, a state and gift. Right? Yeah.

But also, like, what can I do with this money? And and we’ve had a succession now of a couple things, make it more possible. Like, in in the bill now, we have a higher limit for k through twelve expenses. So you can do twenty instead of ten.

And that starts in twenty six. Right?

That is I think you’re yeah. I think that’s right. I think that’s right. See, even I have to, like I’d have to go back and check to be quite honest, but we’re close enough.

The point being that when that comes in, right, it’s gonna be this year. You know, we’ve got a few months now or it’s twenty six.

There’s more stuff to do. We had the secure two point o, which gave us the ability to to ultimately roll over the five twenty nine. So we’re the five twenty nine is becoming this financial vehicle that CPAs, EAs I mean, maybe EAs, but, like, CPAs really aren’t touching. Right? As financial advisers, we’re typically helping our clients if even managing those accounts. We’re helping them get them set up, create the budgets, create the savings plans, the financial plans to get those things funded, helping the clients understand, like, what does this mean? If you have two hundred fifty grand sitting there, like, what does this mean?

Is the big change the k through twelve deduction or ability to contribute there? Or it also didn’t broaden the types of things that you could expense?

Yeah. So it brought in that. So k through twelve, like, tuition was already allowed up to ten. So now we’re up to twenty, but it included other expenses in that.

Yeah. Exactly. So, tutoring and books and supplies and, you know, those are the things which, like, I don’t know, for my son’s school, it seems like every kid’s going to the mathnasium or the thing or the tutoring or whatever. Right?

Because every we we all want Yeah.

No. I wish I my kids are now a senior in college and out, but I would have used it for lots of tutoring. Like, does SAT tutoring count? Could it be any kind of academic tutor?

I think it is, and I think it includes I thought it included, like, the the standardized test, like AP test material.

Like, I’m thinking, Sam, these are social posts, emails that we can write for FMG, which is Yeah. You know, just can can you, expense SAT tutoring, you know, against your five twenty nine? Like, that’s a header, which also works with chat, you know, with all the AEO because we’re framing it as a question, which, FYI, everybody on this audience, we are thinking very much about how we write our content so that it helps our customers be found in the answer engines, which is where people are asking these questions.

Yes. We’ve got an expert on the call. He said ACT and SAT coursework is now eligible. So these are, like, changes that matter to people’s lives. Like, these resonate way more than, like Yes. I was just saying smiling.

Yeah.

It’s way less. About the child savings account, I saw, like, a bunch of TikToks. And maybe oh, go ahead. Oh, yeah. I I was gonna say, like, I think anything that sounds like oh, wait. You know, because you think of the hook and people will write, like, did you know the government will give you a thousand dollar deposit for your kid, if they, you know, born in the next three years? Like, that works really, really well on social media to get attention.

So there’s a lot of things here that can really be turned into great communication pieces. Totally.

Yeah. And just to make it more confusing on the five twenty nine, I think you’re I think you’re allowed to make these more these larger distributions from accounts now, but the the ten to twenty thousand dollar limit goes up in twenty six.

The other right? So this is, again, like, these are details that you have to check into if you’re gonna actually suggest this to your client and work them through it. But if you’re just highlighting, hey. Did Did you know you can do more with your five twenty nine account? That’s a great piece. Right? And then let’s figure out the details later.

I think that’s I’ve got that as a October do it for me social post. That and the child account, which I thought was sort of you sign up for do it for me now, you’ll you’ll get that content.

Quick clarifying question because I think we’re going back and forth on this. Are living expenses like apartments and dorms and or room and boarding? I think I think we’ve been using our five twenty nine to pay for those.

Oh, you hope so.

Let’s hope it’s okay.

Is that Yeah.

That’s covered. Right?

Yeah. So that would have been in the earlier, and, to be quite honest, I would have to look that up.

There’s something that’s telling me there’s some limit on room and bore on on food, but maybe not Oh, maybe not food.

I think it’s Yeah.

I think it’s actual, like, if the campus gives you the bill for the dorm.

Again, these are all things that you like, I have to look them up.

I don’t have, like, all the other thing is Again, I think that’s the whole point of where the opportunity lies.

Yeah.

And I and I don’t think that a ton of CPAs, if you’re if you’re working on this with with those folks, like, these are really helpful. Right? So here’s what I’ll tell you has been really helpful and beneficial for me because it’s it’s it takes time to digest any new tax rules and especially something as, comprehensive as the ABBA even though so many things, you know, there’s this viewpoint like, oh, this was just an extension of the TCJA. I would argue with that.

I think it’s it’s And I wouldn’t market it that way, by the way, anyone listed out.

Right. Right.

Market it that way.

But yeah. And I wouldn’t. You you talk to CPAs. They’re like, well, it’s really just an extension. And then you start going through, like, well, what about EMT, the phase outs, the the, you know, twelve o two? Like, all these things. Anyway, point being, the, sorry.

There’s just there’s a lot here.

There’s a lot there. Oh, sorry. That’s right. As you’re digesting, what’s really beneficial is is what I’ve seen is really beneficial for me as a practitioner who’s trying to digest all these rules is, like, these little hits.

So it’s like, you know, I see something on the phase outs of the green energy stuff. Right? Because those phase outs are all over some of them end September thirtieth. Some of them end December thirty first.

Some of them don’t end into next year.

What are those? Like, how long can you go and, you know, still get a credit for a new EV or, like, whatever whatever you’re doing?

So actionable tips for everybody here. I think everybody is excited to get this content kit.

And, hopefully, if you’re interested in having support to have content written for you on a continuous basis on this bill and lots of other topics, If you’re interested or if you missed the poll, you can use the QR code.

Clearly, there is just a, you know, a lot to digest, a lot that still is even being sort of figured out, and we’re gonna be on top of it. But I think this kit hopefully will be worth the time that you spent on this call. And, Clint, we thank you so much for your expertise, and you’re such a you bring such a fun light to it as well. And our apologies I really do apologize that we didn’t have a more, structured and slides to go with some of the more technical aspects.

So thank you very much.

Yeah. So, we’re not perfect, but we love your engagement. We are so glad you joined, Clint. We’re so glad you joined.

Thanks for having me.

We’ll send this out tomorrow, probably, worst case on Friday. So everybody who has asked, will get all of those resources, and we’d love to get your feedback once you see them.

So feel free choose if you sign up with FMG ongoing, we will have lots of social posts, blog posts, and emails for you around this.

That will go well beyond the toolkit. So you can use the QR code if you wanna learn more, whether you’re a current customer, looking to upgrade to the do it for me program or someone brand new.

Awesome.

Thank you, Clint, and thanks to you as always.

Thank you all to our audience. Thanks for your time. Bye, everybody.