So we’re glad that you’re here however you found us. And, really, what we’re gonna do today, we’re gonna talk at a high level about why, you know, tax planning and talking about it in your marketing really can fuel organic growth for your firm and how to actually do it. So, you know, we don’t wanna have one off campaigns that we constantly have to manually run. How can we systematically set it up so that it just runs in the background?
So we’re gonna talk about it as a marketing opportunity first. I’ll talk about that. And then for anybody who is not already using Holistic plan or who wants to just look at other ways to utilize it and market it on their website, that will also be part of the conversation. Kate will be showing off some functionality.
So if you have questions, please, please, please feel free to put them in the q and a, then Kate and I and both of the ladies on the back end from our teams will see those. If you just have a comment that you want everyone to see, though, you can put that in the chat. Alright. So I’m gonna go ahead and share my screen here.
And if you would just help me out, Kate, and let me know once you can see it.
Keep you updated. It’s fun to look through our chat and see where everybody’s calling in from, people who are living on permanent vacation in Florida, it seems.
Oh. All over the place. Yeah. We got some floor okay. I actually always saw that.
How do I go to future proof if I’m in Florida? There’s still I think there might still be tickets available. Just go to future proof what is it? Future proof citywide is the name of it that you wanna look up.
Okay. So today, we’re talking how to turn taxis into a year round growth engine. And, again, I’m Samantha Russell from F and G. If you haven’t checked out F and G in a while, you should definitely give us another look.
These are just some of the recent awards that we have won, and it’s really just an all in one marketing suite that is very specific to what you need. So some people just have websites with us. Some people do all of their marketing with us, and we’ll show you lots of examples of great marketing that you can use as some creative inspiration as well. Kate, do you wanna introduce yourself?
Yeah. I’m Kate Laws, like Samantha said, and I’m our partnership relationship manager at HolisticLan. I deal a lot with other companies who are trying to work with HolisticLan and trying to bring better, you know, value to their advisors. Holistic Plan is a tax planning software that works to read in the client’s ten forty and make tax planning a very scalable thing that you really can do for your entire book of business.
Love it. And we love partnering with you guys, and we have partnered actually, I think, a couple years now. And every year, this is one of our highest attended webinars that we do. So we know so many people are interested in it.
So why are taxes key to growth? I found some new data that I think you might all find really interesting. So if you’ve never heard of it, there’s something called Google Trends where you can go and you can look up what are people searching for and how is that changing over time. So if we look at the term tax bracket in retirement, we can see that over the last few years, it has become a much, much hotter search term.
Right? So people are much more interested in knowing what their tax bracket and retirement’s gonna be going to Google. I don’t think that more people, Kate, necessarily wanna know this now than three years ago, but I think people going to the Internet to get the information is what is increasing. Would you agree?
Absolutely.
I mean and the more people are going to meet with financial advisers, they’re kind of expecting to have these conversations or they’re talking to their friends on the golf course and hearing about things happening in the world, and they’re thinking, I probably should look into this on my own.
And so I’m sure those trends are following those kinds of patterns with people.
Yes. One I love that. That’s so true. So just one other search trend, how to pay less taxes. Sure.
Right, same thing up into the right. But I think one of the things that’s really interesting is, obviously, we see every year during tax season, the interest goes up, but the trend line is staying up into the right. So you can really capitalize on this interest in your marketing because people are not just asking their friends how to do these things. They’re going online and looking for answers to these questions.
And this comes from the Edelman Financial Engines, Wealth in America report, but they asked people who did not yet have an adviser, and this did skew more affluent. So it was weighted more heavily to people who are affluent than not that they asked. But they asked, what were you most interested in getting help on? And these were the top four areas. You can see tax guidance is neck and neck with Social Security, Medicare, and developing a financial plan. But interesting, once you flipped it and you looked at the high net worth audience, tax guidance became number one.
So if you’re trying to target that audience, this is a great way to focus your marketing. And, of course, if you’re not already offering any kind of tax guidance, Kate will be showing us very soon how you can start to do that.
Yeah. And it’s an easy way to impress that audience as well. Right? Coming in from the jump and saying, we’re actually gonna go ahead and cover this before you have any questions.
And one of the things that I thought was so interesting was this fun chart where they ask people how much do you like dislike certain things. And tax planning was disliked about the same as spending a week with your in laws. So I don’t know if anybody here loves their in laws or dislikes them way way more than that. But what I actually think is interesting is it’s not disliked that much.
Right? Relatively speaking, people dislike public speaking, getting stuck in traffic, cleaning a toilet, all of those things a lot lot more than they dislike tax planning. I think the issue is it can often feel disjointed. Right?
So you have a CPA over here. You have an adviser you’re already working with, and that’s why we see and, Kate, I know you guys have a lot of data and rees and resources on this. People wanting an adviser that is not just gonna say, okay. I’ll hand that all off to the CPA, but to really incorporate it into what they’re doing.
And I know so many of you are already doing that. Maybe tell us in the chat. Is this something you’re already doing? And do you feel like you’re marketing it well if you are?
Kate, you’ve I feel like I cut you off there. Go ahead.
Oh, no. You’re fine. I just think a lot of people think that they’re getting tax planning. You know, they’re talking to their adviser, and they don’t understand what tax planning really means.
And so maybe that’s why they don’t like it. We often don’t like the things we don’t know. It’s scary and daunting. And so I feel like people see tax and they know that they have to deal with it, but they don’t necessarily know how.
And so it doesn’t surprise me that people would say they probably don’t wanna talk about this with anybody as much as they don’t wanna spend a week with their in laws.
I love it. So we have a lot of people saying, yes. I do offer it, but I don’t market it well. And that’s truly what we find more than anything.
And, again, it’s such a great opportunity if you do it because look at this. This was in the LinkedIn post I shared that some of you said you came from, but this is data from CEG Worldwide. They actually bought the Spectrum Group if anybody was familiar with them, And they this was published on Michael Kitsey’s blog. If anybody wants the link to the whole blog post and all the slides, it’s really, really interesting.
But it talks a lot about what do investors want versus what do they actually feel like they’re getting. And so if we look at tax, right, eighty nine percent of people desires, specifically wealthy investors, desire tax planning from their adviser, but only twenty four point eight percent feel like, okay. Yes. I’m actually getting it.
And so is that a lack of communication?
Is it perception? Either way, the opportunity can be ripe to pick up some of those people who really are looking for someone who’s, you know, going to help them.
Okay. So what do you do? This is the part that you all really, really wanted help with. So we are gonna dig into some of the marketing specifically. Keep your questions coming. We see them. We will get to all of them and answer them live.
But first, maybe tell us in the chat, do you talk about tax planning on your website in a very dedicated way? Like, do you have a whole page where you talk about how you incorporate tax planning? If you use Holistic plan, do you show it off at all?
I’m gonna give you some food for thought as we go through. But the first thing that I really think is important is explaining in layman’s terms how you help with taxes is so important. Kate’s nodding her head. Yes. Right, Kate? We I think we tend to, in this industry, overcomplicate and use extra jargon where the consumer is like, just tell it to me straight.
Yeah. It just it happens so often with people who are like, I’ve tried to talk about taxes with my clients, and they glaze over. You know, we hear that a lot. If I try to start having this conversation, they get stressed. I can see it kind of on their face that they don’t wanna be talking about this. So the solution becomes how do we have these productive conversations in a way that is comfortable for our client and comfortable for the adviser who maybe isn’t super comfortable talking about adjusted gross income and marginal brackets and the like. You know?
Yes. And even what you just said, don’t put that on your website. Don’t sell some adjusted gross income and marginalized tax brackets. This is why I have this example here, which is the more you can simplify it, you, yes, have a dedicated page.
But especially in this new world of, you know, I’m talking a lot about AI search. If you think about what would somebody go and look up and ask have those very basic questions on your website. Right? So I love this.
Simple simple language is the best. And there’s actually a lot of research that has been done in marketing that shows so a normal magazine article is written at about a grade level. The Wall Street Journal’s written about a seventh grade level. You do not want to overcomplicate it.
I put up to a ninth grade, but even honestly, best is sixth or seventh grade. And you can see what we have here. When people think about tax planning, you know, they think about what can they do this year. But reality, we see it as a long game.
Where are tax rates going? What will income look like for you in the future? What’s your giving plan? And the more you can have question, answer question, answer on these websites, also, the more likelihood you have of coming up when people are doing different types of searches to find somebody who can help them with taxes like this.
And I’ve linked all the sources, by the way, for these examples. So if you wanna check any of them out afterward, use them as creative inspiration for your own site, feel free to do that. Now here’s something, Kate, I know your team can help with, which is if you are using Holista plan, which, again, we’re gonna show off a little bit later how you can use it, you want to show that off on your website because I love the way this premier retirement plan advisors have it. Uncover hidden tax savings with Holistic plan.
And then they have a whole page on their site where you can scroll through, and it has screenshots of what the tool does and how it, you know, analyzes the tax return. So, Kate, maybe you could talk us through a little bit. What can your team provide if somebody wants to show off a list of plan if they’re using it already on their website?
Yeah. We actually have a full marketing toolkit that shows off different parts of the tool that you can download, and then upload to your website. You’re also there are, actual reports and explainers all come out as nice PDFs. You actually can upload them and send them to your clients, but also put them on your website, taking screenshots of different parts of the tool so that you can really show that off and make sure people know that you wanna provide that full scale holistic planning for them.
I love that. And we have some people in the chat saying they’d love to connect with anyone that’s actively using Holistic Plan in their practice. I’m sure Kate can connect you with people, but also maybe on the chat, you guys can help the two folks out who are using it. Here’s just another example of a website that is showing off Holistic plan.
And I like the way they say using AI to identify tax opportunities in your plan. So capitalizing on what we’re all talking about right now, explaining that it’s not just the adviser looking it over, but they’re really feeding it into technology that’s gonna pull out these insights. And I’m always shocked by the number of people who are working with an adviser where the adviser sometimes has never even seen the tax return because, you know, the clients are not giving it to them. Kate’s shaking her head.
It’s happened so often.
You know, we have a great analogy that we’ve used recently where would you go to, you know, your doctor’s office and say, I think something’s wrong with me, but you can only look at the left side of my body. I’m only gonna let you test the left side. The right side, I’m gonna keep for myself. And we know gathering those tax returns can sometimes be like pulling teeth. But if we’re looking at the entire financial situation, the tax return is the key to unlock everything.
Right. And one of the things and I see a lot of questions coming in about holistic plan. I promise we’re gonna answer all of them. Of course, Kate’s gonna walk us through them, so keep them coming.
But if you are using a tool like this or you’re helping with tax planning, think about how powerful it is. This is from a website that F and G helped build or we did build, I should say, but we incorporated Holista plan elements into it. So and our team is very familiar with using can you guys still hear me? Oh, yeah.
You’re good. Sorry. It’s like my AirPods were connecting, which I didn’t have in, so I wanted to make sure. So our team is familiar with adding all these elements.
But this adviser used the sample documents that HolisticLan will provide to you and did a video walk through to say, here’s how I help my clients get an even bigger bang for their buck, uncover, you know, different things through the tax return, and he just walked through exactly how it works. So, again, Holistic plan will give you these type of sample documents. You’re not obviously using real client data. A video like this, if somebody’s comparing two or three advisers and nobody else is talking about taxes and you’re not only talking about it, but you’re showing how you analyze the tax return, this is gold.
I mean, this could not be better of a system to use. And all you have to do is record yourself. You can use Veed, Loom. We can put those tools in the chats, but anything like that to just help you really get your point across.
I mean, we have advisers come to us all the time. I actually interviewed an adviser a couple months ago who said he had a large client come into his firm who had seen six advisers before him. And this is like a prospect. You know, not even a current client we’re doing tax planning for. And the client sat down.
This adviser pulled out the report. He you know, as he’s talking to him, he pulled it up, and the adviser stopped him. It or the client stopped the adviser and said, you know, I’m sold. You have already shown me more in the last five minutes than any other adviser did.
You know? Did he pull up a report based on the the client’s tax return or, like, a a sample?
No. The client had brought in their tax return because they were shopping around basically at different advisory firms. He’s like, I have my tax return, brought it in, and this adviser put it in the system. And while he was, you know, getting to know the client, you know, it uploads in forty five seconds, which I’ll show you later, and pulled it up and just walked through it with him. Had a great conversation, and the client was a forever client with that adviser.
I love that story. Yes. I mean, I think a lot of people can talk a big talk. And one of the things I always say about taxes, Kate, and I think you can relate to this is when it comes to lead generation and marketing, a lot of people are focused retirement planning and thinking about the future and college savings and things that are years in away.
You know? We as human beings are really bad at focusing on long term payoffs. The pain points that we’re dealing with today are what consume us, and taxes come around every single year. So as we saw in those Google trend reports, every year, there’s this inflection point, which is right now where you can capitalize on it.
So, hopefully, you can all leave here today if you’re already using list of plan and add some of these elements. And if you’re not, you can even just add on your website through some of the things that we’ve showed you language messaging that reinforces that this is something that you’re doing because right now is the time to capitalize on that uptick in interest.
Absolutely. So when you are sending, you know, traffic to your website, you’ve got the messaging. The one thing you really wanna make sure you do is collect their interest. So this is all gonna lead down to a path of hopefully getting their tax return and being able to wow them.
So first, though, you know, they’re checking out your page. They’re looking at the type of tax planning that you do. You wanna collect their information. Not everybody’s gonna be ready to schedule a meeting so you can, you know, collect their email address.
We at FMG have all sorts of resources like this. So this is an out of the box resource. Avoid these six common tax errors. You can put it as a pop up on a specific page.
You can add it as a, you know, just a block text here on any page of your site, and this is just widgets. So if you have a website with us, you have our marketing program, you just click it, it pops it in. And now every time somebody is on this page and they wanna get this information, they put their info in, and then it’s put as a lead in your FMG dashboard. And as you collect those leads, then you can drip on them relevant information as well as get them to give you your tax returns so that you can wow them even more.
So, again, in our system, we automate this whole thing. So it’s all working in the background. Right? So somebody goes to your site, they download this common tax errors form, then you can set up a sequence like this.
So you can see they get this email. It’s gonna say thank you for downloading it, and then we have delay seven days. If in seven days you don’t hear from them, it will send them a follow-up email. Very, very high level, not, like, you know, pushing them, meet with me, meet with me, but just giving more value.
And this is really how tax planning becomes a growth engine year round for you because you collect the lead in January, February, March when they’re stressed. And then year round, even if they’re not ready to commit right then, you can be showing them how you’re incorporating tax planning into your marketing. Now we’ve got some example emails here. We’re gonna send all of you a great kit with a ton of communication samples that you can use whether you’re using FMG or not.
And these all come from our do it for me program where you get paired with a marketing strategist, and we will implement your marketing for you. But we put together this one, and this is a great segue, Kate, for you to actually show off the tool. So this is an email template that’s basically asking clients to upload their tax return. Now you could obviously use it with prospects as well, but everyone here again is gonna get a version of this email. But, Kate, you wanna talk about how you provide everyone with a link that’s unique and they can just pop it into an email like this.
Yeah. Absolutely. So Holisa Bayne uses a specific client upload link. Sometimes our users don’t know this exists in their households.
But to connect this with, you know, the awesome marketing that FMG is able to send to all of your prospects or clients, we are actually able, you know, to copy a specific link for your client and dump it into this email. And that will be a secure link for them. It lasts about twenty one days, and they can upload their tax return that way. And then it will be waiting for you in HolisticPlan when you log in on Monday.
You may be over the weekend, you send it out. And by the time you go in for that meeting, it’s already in the system waiting for you, and it requires no manual input from you besides putting that link into the email.
Love that. And we know the conversion is a lot higher when we make it easy for people with less clicks. So I absolutely love that. So I think what I’ll do, I’m gonna come back to the social post part, and we’re gonna switch over since that’s a good segue to this part.
So let’s talk a little bit about Holistic plan. I see we have some questions. And then, again, we’ll end after we show Holistic plan. I’ll actually log in to FMG.
So for anyone who is using both or who would love to use both, you’ll be able to see how you can use both systems together.
Yeah. Absolutely. And before we even hopped into the tool, I wanted to offer this helpful distinction. When we talk about tax planning, just often people say that’s not my job.
You know, I’m not the person who needs to talk about tax planning with this client. But I like the sentence that we’ve created here, but explaining how decisions affect your taxes is not the same as telling your client what to do with that. And so what HolisticLynn does a great job of is pointing out facts on the tax return. It’s like, here’s what’s true about your client’s last year return.
What your client chooses to do and what you like, what your client chooses to take their CPA is their choice to do. But for you as the adviser, you actually can summarize this for them, make it very approachable. And that’s the idea of this tax planning, taking something that’s really intricate and making it digestible in a way that you can have that conversation with the client. And it’s a good kind of segue into, like, what is holistic plan and what isn’t.
And so it’s not tax advice. Right? We don’t wanna we’re not taking the point of a CPA. That’s the next one down there.
You know, we’re not going in to replace them.
We wanna make sure that in the holistic approach of doing financial advising for our client, that we’re understanding the tax impact that our investment decisions are making. You know, if you’re doing any sort of gains or loss with your client, if you’re doing retirement planning, the odds are you’re already doing tax planning with your client. You’re just doing it in the dark. And so Holistic Plan really gives you a full picture of, you know, here’s what that impact is gonna have.
Are you gonna trigger Irma for your client? You know, if we do a Roth conversion, how much are they gonna pay this year? And who else win helps paint a really pretty picture of that, not just for the adviser, but also for the client. And ultimately, it builds confidence with the client.
So there’s, like, three different opportunities that I’ll show here before we hop into the tool, and they’re pretty simple. Right? We’ve talked about it a lot already, but demystifying the tax return is a word and phrase we’ve been using a lot at Hellasaplan, Britley. Because a lot of your prospects have never seen their taxes laid out like this.
And I say like this because I’m gonna show you in a second exactly what I’m talking But it’s really easy for them to just skip over their return, file it away in a cabinet, and never look at it again till the next year. And you’ve got a pot of gold laying at the bottom of that cabinet. We wanna pull that out and make it something that is really helpful for the client to understand what those numbers mean, where their income comes from, and ultimately just build confidence in that client. But our second opportunity is looking at the client’s financial situation.
You know, we looking at dividends and interest, we’ll take a look at that on the tax report specifically.
This is great for prospecting because oftentimes you have clients and maybe you have a few of their accounts, but you don’t have all of them. So if it’s a current client you’re using Holistic Plan four, they might have not told you where all their accounts are, but they definitely told the IRS. Right? Because they they typically frown upon that.
I’m not telling them where certain accounts live. And so it’s gonna give you a great outline of if I don’t have these accounts, maybe we can be working towards winning their trust and gaining these accounts. But if it’s a prospect, we’re gonna start from the jump knowing where all those accounts live and make sure we’ve got all the correct information to make a good investment decision. And the last one is future projection opportunity.
We won’t get into this today in holistic plan, but if you’ve been in there, you know that we can do different Roth projections. You can show them filing differences between we talked to Samantha earlier about a lot of this feels down the road. You know, we’re planning for a Roth conversion down the road or planning for college down the road, but wholesome can also do things for now. Like, maybe you’re getting married or maybe you’re going through a divorce.
And what would that look like for me tax wise to show those differences? So there’s a lot of different projection opportunities in holistic plan, but we really think that the tax report alone uncovers so much and is so valuable that it’s worth showing to your client even if you’re not prepared to go into the projection portion of it.
But oops.
Okay. So I think you’re gonna go I’m gonna pass the reins over to you. And while you’re doing that, I just wanna say, it’s so true. I, sadly lost my husband a couple years ago, to cancer. And when I became a widow, I had no idea that I mean, you just don’t think about these things. I’m in my thirties.
I never expected him to pass away, and then he does. And then all of a sudden, I find out later that my tax I’m gonna pay more in taxes, basically, because of my status. You know, I’m not married anymore, and it’s like but I’m not divorced. You know?
It felt so it felt so horrible, honestly. But I would have been being able to project it and see it in advance was really, really helpful. My adviser used this, would use this Holistic plan. So I am here as an example to say it really, really does help and make a difference.
Yeah.
And it can just build that trust and relationship with the client of, hey.
I know you’re going through this difficult situation, but I wanna walk alongside with you and make sure, you know, we’re all gonna pay taxes. You talked about earlier the Google trend of people saying, how can I pay less taxes? We know that we’re going to be paying those taxes. The important part is not being surprised by them and not not planning for them and making sure that we can make those adjustments as needed.
So if you’ve been in Wholesplim before, this will look very familiar to you. But I wanna show you how much you can uncover for a client with super minimal input on the adviser side. So we always start with our household. That’s the best place to start.
Creating a household, we actually only require that you put the client first and last name in. That’s all you need in order to put their return into the system. Now, obviously, taxes and our birth date have a lot in common, so that would be great if you know the client’s birthday or even the year. You could put that in.
But if we’ve got client one, if we’ve got a married filing joint client, we can put the second client in there as well. Actually already created a client scenario over here that I’ll hop into and show in a second. But just by inputting those two pieces of information, I’m gonna use Abigail and John Adams over here, but I’m gonna click upload real time.
I know. I was like, who can I think of that would be a popular couple? And I was like, I didn’t wanna upset anybody. So historical felt felt safe. You know?
Founding fathers that you could never well, I thought about well, you know, I thought about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, but don’t know how that would go over.
That would be a great one.
I would that. That’d be fun.
I think it’s one who’s little bit older who could show me a little more age milestones that I’ll show here in a second. But all I’m gonna do is click twenty twenty four, and then I’m literally just gonna drag and drop this file right here and hit upload. So as I’m in the conversation with the client, I can be doing this on my computer, and they can be sitting across from me. And as I’m learning the names of their kids, where they go to school, you know, what they’ve done for spring break the last year, and maybe by about the time I get to the name of their dog, this will be uploaded and ready to walk through with them.
It goes through what’s called our optical character recognition software. And what this is is it’s just a tax engine that we’ve built that reads in the ten forty and is geared to look through each one of those boxes and identify them. And it sends it straight through our code and then spits it out on the other side. And so you’ll see the arrows in the bottom right hand corner will tell you that it’s processing.
If it ever ends up in this middle section, it normally just means that it needs to go to manual review. This can be helpful sometimes because it can often mean that there’s a mistake in the return. So you’ve had a lot of advisers catch mistakes for their clients. But you’ll see in the, you know, minute that I’ve been walking through that with you, it’s actually already ready to go.
So we’ll go ahead and hop in to this client’s household and get started there.
We mentioned earlier demystifying this tax return. You might be an adviser out there who is saying, have never walked through taxes with my client ever. That is scary. That is above my pay grade. Maybe that’s something that you’ve never even walked into.
And so I wanna show you a tool that sometimes gets missed that we actually created for the adviser to help you in the report.
So if we go into the tax section here, we can click into our returns, and we actually have what’s called our tax explainer. And I’m always moving my little Zoom screen around here so I can see what I’m looking at. But our tax explainer here was initially created for the adviser to help them understand the report before they’re talking to the client. So we’re gonna hop into that piece first.
And what this is gonna do is make something that feels really daunting very simple. We have a lot of words like, I mentioned earlier, AGI, you know, above the line deductions, things like that.
And you’re like not put in your marketing.
Yeah.
Yeah. Don’t put in your marketing, but it’s important for you to know as the adviser. So when you hop in here, I mean, income and wages, you might say see total income listed on their return or their report and say, I don’t even know what makes up their total income. You know, I don’t even know where this number comes from.
But the explainer does a really great job of saying, you know, it’s their ordinary income plus our capital gains and qualified dividends. That’s what equals our total income. And you don’t have to guess where that’s coming from. It’s actually gonna show you and outline it for you below.
So this is really helpful as you’re preparing for that client meeting.
If you’re someone who’s super comfortable with taxes, maybe you wanna use this for your client to say, you know, these words aren’t scary. I actually wanna bring you down to earth and make sure that we’re on the same page before we just start throwing words at you.
So adjusted gross income, something that before HolisticPlan, before I worked here, probably would not have known. You know? Our adjusted gross income is gonna be our total income minus our above line deductions, and that’s gonna give us our adjusted gross income. So I go I won’t go through every single section of this, but this is a really powerful tool that often gets missed. It can be really helpful in walking through this with the client.
I’m gonna hop into the report again. I always have a marketing lens. I think Oh, yes. For those of you, you know, who are looking to use this again as a growth engine, you can run a whole email campaign to prospects saying, has anyone ever walked through your tax return with you and showed you, you know, maybe things that you’re missing or helped you analyze it, think about next year and and doing some more tax planning or getting tax guidance. And that could be such a great way, you know, to to do a whole campaign just just about that. But go ahead.
Oh, yeah. And even telling doing a campaign about, you know, like, who’s double checking your return for you? Like, HolisticPlan, I love to share this story. We had a client who ran a return for a brand new client that he had and found a thirty thousand dollar error in the return. From the CPA? Yes. And was able to amend that return and get his client money back.
And so oftentimes, like, that could be a whole campaign in of itself. Like, you know, who’s going back and double checking this for you? Oftentimes, the client themselves is not gonna go through and look every part of their tax return over.
Or they don’t know what they don’t know.
They don’t even know what they don’t know. Right. We’re actually gonna get into another thing about that here in a second. So the tax report has a lot of great information in it.
If you’ve been in tax report before, I’m sure you’ve seen all of this. I again, I’m not gonna go through each section of the tax report. But what this does is it gives you that thirty thousand level view of the entire ten forty. So something that you might have needed a magnifying glass to look through before gen genuinely, my eyesight’s bad.
I could not see that small box probably out the for that case.
I know. It’s my father’s fault. I blame him. He’s got bad eyesight, but this makes it it blows it up really big for you and makes it super easy. You could just read this to your client. And oftentimes, even knowing their marginal bracket, knowing their average rate can completely change the way they look at their financial financial situation.
The part I like to hit on the most is this marginal tax bracket situation. We do break it between our ordinary income and our qualified income. But what this does is it actually lays out for them line by line. Hey.
Hey. You land in the twenty two percent bracket. That doesn’t mean that all of your income is taxed at twenty two percent. What does that mean for you?
So, you know, that first twenty three thousand dollars is actually taxed at the ten and then the twelve. We got this graph on the right hand side that shows you a better breakdown of how much is actually taxed at that threshold. So talk about for prospecting and showing somebody, you could have somebody come in and show them just this and say Yeah. This is the this is the kind of the tip of the iceberg of what I wanna talk to with you about.
But I want you to know that we’re gonna go in deep. Like, the report in and of itself is in-depth tax planning. It’s walking through with your client their whole tax situation.
Another part I wanna hit on especially for I mentioned it earlier just like that prospecting situation, but also with your clients is the schedule b. If I had a dollar for every time a financial adviser came up to us and said, schedule b made me money today. You know? Like, I walked through and they look in schedule b and there’s an account that maybe the client inherited.
There’s an account maybe that they opened when they got out of college and then never looked at again. I know that was the case for me. You can come in here and say, okay. We’ve got a good amount of dividends coming, you know, from this Schwab account or we’ve got some interest over here at this Bank of America account.
If your client is looking to, you know, achieve certain goals, if they’re looking to make up some money made from a new purchase that they wanna make in the next year. This is a really great picture of their entire entire financial situation that becomes a really clear conversation to have with the client. If they’re a prospect, it gives you kind of an idea. You don’t have to talk about it, but it gives you the adviser the idea of, you know, what are we dealing with here?
You know, what kind of accounts do we have out there that they might give to me, they might not give to me, and just generates good conversation.
And Love that.
The last part of the report that I’ll hit on again, there’s so much goodness in here. I could talk about the report probably for this entire webinar.
But down here at the very bottom, have observations. So like I said earlier, we separate tax planning from tax advice, and this observation section is a great way of differentiating that. We’re actually just stating facts that show up in the report. So I’ve highlighted a few here, but, you know, telling your client, you’re in the twenty two percent marginal tax bracket.
You might wanna consider a Roth conversion. You know? And you have the ability to do that in HolisticPlan. The one that I love is this is a business owner.
And so it’s saying, hey. Schedule c, which is, you know, where they get their business income, does not include any expenses on line nine for any car or truck. Like, do you have a vehicle that you use for your business? These are questions that you can ask your client to get more information, to make sure you’re saving them money on their taxes.
There might be some deductions that we’re missing here.
Well, and I think in the chat, we have a lot of people saying, how did HolisticLand find the errors? You know? And somebody else gave a great example. Mike said, I found a twenty four k refund opportunity for a prospect last year.
They are now a client. Good job, Mike. Yeah. But a lot of people are saying how, and I think this is such a great way to illustrate that.
Just by these observations and follow-up questions that you can ask, you can really unearth potential gaps.
Oh, yeah. And our tax engine is coded to do all the mathematical equations. So what often happens, the technical side of it, is that math adds up and or that math maybe calculates itself, and it doesn’t add up. So it goes to our support team, and our support team actually reaches out to you and says, hey.
It looks like there’s someone added a zero where there shouldn’t have been a zero. In the case of the thirty thousand dollars, I think they calculated something twice. So oftentimes I mean, the CPA, we love CPAs. We would never want to, you know, say anything disparaging.
But oftentimes, their tax season is crazy. They’re doing, know, hundreds of these.
Yeah. Right.
And so we wanna actually build that bond with the CPA to say, like, hey. We wanna work together to help this client. And I feel like the tax report is often a very good place to start with that. Absolutely. Yeah. And I’ll show very quickly, Sam, where people can find that client upload link, but then I’m happy to switch it back to you.
Show where they can get it, and then I’ll show you all how you can embed it into the email system through FMG to send it out.
Perfect. There’s a few places where you can find the client upload link for John and Abigail Adams. What I’ll do is actually just go directly into their household, make it very easy.
And on the sidebar here, we just have a whole tab that says client upload links. So I’m go very specific link for them, and I can create the upload link. And for me as the adviser, all I would do is select the client, select the year. So maybe they just got their returns back, so I’ll select that twenty twenty five, create the link. And then it actually will tell you that it’s been created, and we can copy it and drop it directly into that marketing email so it’s ready to go out to our clients.
Couldn’t be easier. I love that you have it labeled so simply because we all we all searching for it.
No one wants to be digging.
Searching for it.
Exactly. Exactly. Okay. Alright. Let take the reins back here. And I had some people asking too where to find the FMG downloadables and, lead magnet.
So okay. When you log into FMG, can you see my screen again? Yep. You’re all good.
So I just went over here to content library, and then you can see here, I wrote the word tax to do a little search. And now we have all these different types that are gonna come up. So you can see, is it a social post? Is it an email that’s gonna go out?
Is it downloadables? We have Instagram posts. We have so much, and you can search by category, by type, all different kinds of things.
And so here, just to give you an example, we were talking about that common tax errors to avoid. And the if you wanted to use that here we go. Click this way. So I put a funny banner from my LinkedIn in here.
So this would not be this. This would be the logo of your company. But you can see. Right?
So if they downloaded that common tax errors to avoid, then they would, you can fill it out so that you would have their your firm name.
You know, you can fill this all out to make it really specific to you. And then, again, there’s another follow-up. So if you can either use the sequence as is or you can edit it. So it’s up to you.
And once you click the button, it’s gonna bring it in here. You can decide how many days in between that you want when you go to edit it. You can preview the email. So, again, it’s really creating a entire drip campaign.
And then once you set it up once, it will run-in perpetuity. So you add that six common tax errors to avoid to your website, which I’ll show you where to find it, and it’s going to keep running in the background. So you don’t need to edit you can certainly edit things if you want year after year, and we do update because, things do change every year. We update all the resources yearly.
So here under I went into the content library. And, again, if you’re not familiar with FMG, we are an all in one marketing platform. Some people just have a website with us. Some people use all of our marketing resources.
So everything from they have automated marketing, which means social posts are going out on their behalf. Emails are going out on their behalf. We have events toolkit. So if you wanted to host a webinar where you invite a CPA to join you and you talk about common tax errors, and then everyone who you you want to register, you can collect registrations from this system and then send the follow-up drip emails automated from this system.
So it’s really an all in one platform.
But, again, we know that for many of you, you don’t wanna have to go to Canva, make the asset, put the asset on your website. So our team in the background creates all of this year after year with up to date information often, you know, in partnership with partners like CalistaPlan so that you can just add it to your website. So here’s just another one. Five ways Americans are overpaying in taxes, and it’s a series of images.
We say it’s an Instagram carousel. You could obviously use it on LinkedIn as well as a carousel. You just download, the images. There’s all kinds of here’s one tax day is here, and so are extensions.
And for each one of them, it will tell you, here’s one twenty twenty six IRA deadlines are approaching. This is written as a white paper. You can add to any page of your website. And once you want to use it, again, you get to decide, do you want to edit it, or do you wanna use it as is?
So, it’s really, really up to you. And if you wanna use it, then you’ll click use. You can make any of the edits. And then once you add it to your website, your compliance team will have to review it.
Now I’m gonna go in and show you under what I already scheduled under email here.
So here’s all the things I have scheduled to go out. And, again, you can see your open rate, your click through rate. So you can be tracking as contacts are coming in, what are they opening, what are they reading.
I have this finding your insights in your tax return piece already ready to go. So let’s say I’m gonna edit it, though. I don’t wanna send it as is. So here’s the piece, and it’s basically saying this is why we wanna get the tax return for you. It’s gonna unlock insights. And right here is where you would just paste your secure link. So up here, we see the little button there, insert.
Just gonna click that and then this, and then we get to decide if we want to paste in our URL that we pulled from Holistic plan. And then I always suggest open the link in a new window, not the current window. Otherwise, it will kick, you know, you when they open it, it will take them off of your page. So you always wanna open it in a new window.
And that is it. And then you can when you go to schedule the email, in this case and, Kate, I wanted to be clear about this. These are oh, this would be an email, like, a one off. So this link is unique to that client, but the email’s already written for you.
So you can keep the template in here. You know it’s already been approved by compliance once. You don’t have to keep getting approval every time. You can send to an individual person.
You just put their email in, and now you’re good to go.
Yeah. Absolutely. It’s crazy to see how much you can accomplish in something like FMG. Like, you know, we talked about disorienting and, like, feeling like things are not fluid. And it’s so nice to be able to have, you know, the tax planning piece over here and then everything basically waiting for you in FMG to say, great. Now it’s ready to go to your clients, to your prospects, and it’s basically, you know, three clicks to be able to make it happen.
Yes. And I’m gonna show you two things. I’m gonna show you where you could add the lead magnet on your website, but I just wanna show you first. For many of you, this is a really busy time of year. So if you click on the little marketing schedule in FMG, it will show you the calendar.
And then any day that you don’t have something, you can click add content. So you can see at a glance. Oh, man. I don’t have anything scheduled.
I have a couple social media posts, but I don’t have any email scheduled for two weeks to any of my clients or prospects. So you could either go into our automated section and choose an automated email that you don’t have to ever come back in and, you know, opt into. It’ll just go. Or if you like to be more hands on and write your own emails, you can go into this email section and choose some emails that we have or and, you know, schedule them out.
So this really gives you a really, really nice overview. But let me just go here into the website and show you where you would add those, little widgets. So on any section that this is called a a visual editor, so we make it really, really easy to keep your website up to date. So let’s say right now you wanted to add a banner about tax season, you can just click this little add a section button, and you can decide.
Do you wanna add just a text section? Do you wanna add a couple boxes as a callout? Do you wanna add a contact form or a button? And here is where you can see, again, the things like the ebook forms right here listed out for you.
Also, we have these different widgets. So, again, whether you wanna do a specific call to action like, hey. It’s tax season. Here’s the link or, you know, contact our team for your secure link, and then you would email them the secure link.
You could do that. But these are where all those premade widgets that we have will be available for you to add. We also again, any of these can be just dropped into your website. So if you wanted to add a new section, format it, that is where you do it.
I think the thing I really, really wanted to impress on it upon everybody, though, is not just talking about taxes to clients during this time of year. You wanna be building it into your calendar all year long. And on that note, we get so many people who say, this is all great, but I don’t wanna log in to my marketing software and have to make these updates all the time. Like, I don’t have time to do that.
That’s why I wanna can we just hire you to do it for us? So we actually came up with a program called the do it for me marketing program. And every single month, you get a calendar like this that’s sent to you. So this was the one for February.
And so you can see we have things like twice a month, an email is gonna go out that is gonna go to all your clients and prospects if you want. We have versions for clients and prospects. So this one for February had tax prep versus tax strategy, talking about what you talked about, Kate, and how it differs. We had a blog post that will get added to your website for you, and so you’re paired with a strategist that actually implements this for you.
So they will go over all of the options. They’ll say, here’s the content we recommend.
We’re gonna add these two blog posts to your website. We’re gonna send these emails out, and you’ll notice we have a client and a prospect version and a COI. So your CPAs, your centers of influence, they’re also gonna get that constant communication from you, which we know is so important. And then we even give you things like a marketing tip that you could deploy or outline to record a video.
So all of this is in there. And, actually, in case people wanna learn more, I won’t I won’t get too in the weeds because I see we have a bunch of questions. But, Aubrey, maybe you could put up a poll. If you wanna learn more about FMG’s, do it for me program specifically because there is so much to this so that we will help you market your services better and figure out how this all goes, year round to create this growth engine, then you can just say yes, please, and we will get in touch.
Okay. Let me go back here. And I see I’m gonna just put this up. Everyone is gonna get this tax season content kit, which has the email to put the link in to get the upload, you know, that you can use with Holistic plan. If you are a Holistic plan, user, and it’s gonna have all of these templates, a blog post, a social media post, a video script that you can use to market your tax planning services. But while we have that up, Kate, what kind of questions can we answer for people? Because I can see you’re reading them.
Yes. I know. I’m scrolling through a lot of these. I know some people are mentioning the compliance aspect of the client upload link.
I will say that a lot of our if you’re involved with any of our larger broker dealers, the client upload link is approved by them. And if your compliance has an issue with the redaction of the Social Security numbers and things like that, for one, we always tell people we do not hold on to any of that personal information clients. We actually don’t even read it in. So I could put in Samantha’s tax return under my name, and our system wouldn’t know the difference.
But if your compliance has an issue with that, we also have an auto delete feature. So if you wanted to upload the return and then have it completely delete after the fact, you could also turn that on. So sometimes that’s a workaround that people will use if they’re not comfortable with the client upload link.
And I saw somebody asking, could you create an email signature with just a client upload link, but that would not work. Right? Because it’s unique to each client. It is unique to each client.
So we are on our road map. That would be a goal for us eventually is to have one link that could, you know, help multiple of your clients, but we’re in process of figuring out since it is so secure, we wanna make sure that that is for one specific client. And so we talked a lot about that actually at our recent off-site. But for now, it’s that singular client who gets the singular link to be uploaded into the system.
Awesome.
And I know I someone mentioned that they have Wealthbox as their tech stack.
I do know that we have an integration with Wealthbox, so you’re you’re welcome to turn on that integration and pull over client information.
That way, gonna pull up And FMG does as well.
And that is one thing I should mention. Oh, yeah. With all these tools, obviously, we want the contact information to be up to date. So if you’re sending things out, as long as it’s updated in the CRM and it then it will be reflected.
So for instance, if somebody downloads that six common tax errors and they get added to your CRM, you can see that. You can continue to drip on them. If you added a page all about HolistaPlan and you wanted to add a call to action, like, wanna see a demo of HolistaPlan? Contact us, and we can upload your tax return.
Then you can mark that, right, in the system. So you see all those people came in because of interest in getting their tax return analyzed, and then you’re able to make sure that they’re in that specific group group.
That’s that’s so awesome that technology works that way. Like, even you explaining that, like, that’s that’s incredible.
Another one that I saw was, can you run side by sides showing the difference with the married filing joint and what impacts that would have? Yes. So I didn’t get into our scenario piece, but you actually can model the different situations, and you can do one simple thing. Like, even just changing the tax year will show you the differences between the scenario. Changing the filing statuses, people will often show that, and it’ll show the impacts throughout each part of their financial situation that that it goes through and touches. So that’s in our scenario piece as well.
Great. I think there might be I think we got through a lot of the big questions, and there might be some more specific ones. So, Kate, maybe you could tell everyone if they wanted to get a demo of holistic planning, go through different scenarios, what would be the best way to do that?
Yeah. So we actually have partnership with FMG. So we have an FMG landing page that you can use to sign up. So if you’re using FMG and you wanna use Holistic plan, you can sign up to that link, get a little bit of a discount, which is helpful.
And that will actually lead you through where you can start a trial. And if you want to also where you can schedule a demo. And Alana, who’s on our team can actually throw that link directly into the chat. So she might have done it already, but she can probably throw it again here at the bottom.
And that’s how you So is that a free trial where they can kind of test it out beforehand?
Or how does that work?
So we offer a seven day free trial. So you could go in, you get three households uploads into the system. So if you have your own tax return, you just wanna take a look at what Holisticuffin offers, you actually can just upload that in your first couple of days. You could gather a prospect or a client’s tax return and throw it in there. You do have the opportunity to do three of those in your first week.
And we we basically are giving you as almost a free trial of FMG’s do it for me program. That’s the content kit that you’re all gonna get. So you’re gonna get, if you were working with us as a customer where we’re implementing your marketing and all your content strategy on your behalf, what kinds of emails, social posts, blog posts would we be putting out there for you, and that is all gonna come to you. It’ll be in a PDF form, obviously, because we don’t have access to everyone’s websites and social media accounts to post it for you, but you’ll be able to check it out.
And if you like what you see and you wanna talk about us doing that for you year round, you can reach out. Well, this was so helpful. I learned a lot, Kate. Thank you so much for joining us, and I hope everybody else on the the call learned at least one or two things that they can walk away and implement as well.
If you, again, wanna talk with our teams, we’d be happy to chat with you. But thank you all so much for your time today, and I hope everybody is going to have warm weather soon and happy spring breaks. Yeah.
We’re praying for that. Thanks for having me, Sam. It was really fun to get to chat with you and learn more about FMG as well.
Yes. Alright. See you soon. Okay. Bye.
