Ep #71: Secure Act 2.0 with Steven Jarvis

Full Episode Transcript
With Your Hosts
Micah Shilanski and Steven Jarvis

Micah: Welcome to another amazing episode of The Plan Your Federal Retirement podcast. I’m your host Micah Shilanski, and today I have a very special guest joining me to talk about one of my favorite topics. Steven Jarvis CPA. Steven extraordinary, bud. 

 

Steven: Well, I’m glad to be here, Micah. Does that mean that I’m your favorite topic? You left out what the topic is? 

 

Micah: Well, I was trying to say oh, they gotta stay tuned. No, you’re not my favorite topic. Sorry about your CPAs isn’t my favorite topic either I know I’m just losing credibility all the sudden. But taxes, yeah, taxes there we go. So as my audience knows man I love just chit chatting about taxes which is actually fantastic because, Stephen least my opinion, I know you specialize in this as well. You work with individuals who work at advisors number one, and you work with and really helping them work with their clients specializing in tax planning for retirees. Is that right? 

 

Steven: That is correct. Yeah, that we named our firm retirement tax services. We just want to take all the mystery out of it. 

 

Micah: That’s right. Be really clear. For our audiences, well, you should know that Stephen just recently published a book which I read, it’s fantastic. It’s don’t get killed in taxes. Oh, he’s holding it up right here. Don’t get killed in taxes and see but one of the things that I liked about this, and this is a taxpayer facing book, it’s not an advisor book. It’s not a tax geek book. As much as I do love jumping into those. I do love the fact that you when you guys wrote this book, you and PJ DiNuzzo you focus on what are the strategies we as advisors use you as a tax preparer use to help clients reduce their taxes over the long term and help kind of demystifying it and kind of walking through these things. And there’s really important stuff that it’s so easy to overlook when we’re doing tax planning. 

 

Steven: Yeah, a lot of the thought process behind the book was okay, there’s hundreds of millions of Americans that have to are required to pay taxes every year, but when were they ever taught how any of that works? And so it’s again, it’s meant if you pay taxes, the book is meant for you and we go through to to your point of demystifying things, we go through and talk about some common myths that people believe on taxes and then give us some real basic building blocks. This isn’t reciting the tax code or giving anyone a PhD. This is helping you understand what it is that you have to do every year and then to your point, we go through 20 different strategies that are pretty common for people either planning for retirement or in retirement, that not all of them are gonna be relevant but again, it’s meant for the person paying taxes to understand oh, here’s why this is important.

 

Micah: I just love ti.  To push his book, just that is a highlight what he has done. He’s put a lot of great effort into that. I appreciate it, so Steven, thanks for putting the energy into that. So Steven, today, we wanted to get together and we wanted to talk about the Secure act 2.0. Now before you tune out in the podcast, we promise we will go I will try Steven back from going to tax geeky on this but there’s some important things that affect us not only as taxpayers, as potential retirees, retirees, but as federal employees. And so these are things that I wanted to make sure we had a chance to kind of address and there’s still some unknowns, right and sometimes even I get the impression when I’m talking to clients is that we’re like hey, the laws pass. Now we know what’s happened. And boy, man, we would love that. But the reality is the law gets passed by Congress, and it creates a bunch of confusion. And generally you have the tax industry financial planners CPAs saying, alright, we think it means this, then the IRS at some time in the unknown future comes back and says nope, it actually means this. And then we got to scramble. A little bit. So we have had some clarification on things, which is great. So I would love to talk a little bit about that. I’d love to talk a little bit about kind of overall the secure act 2.0. How it affects what are things we got to think at our taxes and get into some tax planning some action items. Steven, is that sound fun to you? 

 

Steven: Sounds like a lot of fun. Let’s do it.

 

Micah:  Fantastic. All right. One of the things I forgot to mention to listeners, I do apologise, this came out Secure Act passed or whatnot and I am on vacation actually for watch. There’s a little bit of extra background noise here. Oh, there’s a little bit of the backdrop as well as the audio but hopefully it’ll be okay and we can jam through this.

 

Micah: Alright, so Steven, I guess the first thing I would kick off is when the Secure Act was was passed, what is the secure act to and why does it matter? 

 

Steven: What is the secure act 2.0? Well, we’ll we’ll leave all of my pontificating to the side. Secure 2.0 was a 4000 page spending bill that was passed that included depending on how you count it included around 100 different rule changes specific to retirement. And so it’s a lot of different things that have the potential not just potential it will impact really every taxpayer at some point in their life. And oh, I can constantly see every every taxpayer at some point in their life because it changed rolls around RMDs as an example, a change contribution limits. It did all sorts of things around Roth options. And so if this bill by Congress that year I would, I hope we’ll call it a gift. Just seems like hey, here’s one more chance to make this a little bit more confusing. But it’s important to all of us just because of how all those new nuances affect our planning decisions.

 

Micah: Yeah. Now one of the things whenever we’re looking at law like this, and we’re starting to go through these tax changes, there’s a couple of ways that I look at them is a number one, okay, what are they trying to do in from a tax standpoint, from an investment standpoint, retiree standpoint? And then number two, what are the action items I need to bring to my clients? So that’s the way that I’m going to focus looking at it. One of the ways I don’t focus on looking at them, and that’s the same thing, what I want to talk about clients is it says, well, why did Congress do A, B and C? Well, it’s even this is the problem with this administration. It’s the same problem as the previous administration. They don’t return my phone calls, like I got great ideas, I’m telling you, but anyways, so they don’t want to take my advice on this type of stuff. So this is what it is. We’re going to digest it from that standpoint, and we’re going to take it from a retiree standpoint. So yes, it was in the consolidation, Appropriations Act, all of this other stuff, and a subset of that was the secure act. And one of the things that I’m gonna say how this affects federal employees and why you need to listen, is because this changes RMDs and because of this and right before this pass, there is more clarification on an irritated IRAs that came out. And both of those things directly affect you as a federal employee. And one of the things that even I talk to all my clients about all the time is their RMDs required minimum distributions. For those listeners who may not know so the RMDs came out and at first it was April 1 year huge reach 70 and a half was the first then that got changed in secure Act 1.0 And it and pushed it to 72. So you have to take these distributions until 72 years young, and then at 72 years, and now you’re at 2.0. Now that got pushed up to 73, potentially 75, depending on you are old to our and so it’s changed it yet again. So we have these multiple rules that are out there. So I want to go through how those work. And then RMDs again, is a calculation that IRS gives us every year of how much is the minimum you have to take out from your tax deferred accounts. And Roth IRAs. Great news is there’s no RMDs on those. But there is on your IRAs on your TSP account. And Steven I let me know if you’ve ever run into this but I run into clients that have done a great job and saving and their retirement accounts, maybe their TSPs or IRAs, etc. They’re growing that money. They have a finite fantastic pension that fantastic social security they don’t really need to take that money out. But then all of a sudden, they have to take this RMDs and I see two things happen. Number one, it bumps into a higher, they weren’t anticipating and number two, it increases their Medicare premium. Do you see that too? 

 

Steven: Yeah, all the time. Micah, there’s one quick thing I want to throw out before we get too much further and I think you’ve already covered this with a lot of clients you work with. One of the things that I always immediately look for at a toxic tax law changes. I like your focus on action. Is there any immediate response I need to go out and take care of right away next week next month, and the great news is please push back on me if you saw this differently. There wasn’t anything insecure to point out that someone needs to rush out and change immediately. Certainly things we need to make sure we’ve addressed before the end of the year as we go through our planning cycle, but great news for all your listeners. If you’re if you’re just learning a little bit more about secure boot 2.0. Don’t Don’t rush out tomorrow and make a drastic change. If want to throw that out there. So coming back to RMDs Yeah, absolutely. Those are those are issues that come up of you know, the name of the book, don’t get killed on taxes. That is a great way to get killed on taxes is to wait until the last minute when the IRS is now forcing you to take these distributions. nd as people hear, Oh, I have longer to before I have to start taking these distributions. I’m just going to push that off. I’m not going to do anything until that comes. That’s a great way to get killed on taxes because not only will your balance be bigger at that point, which means you’re required distribution will be bigger pushing you into a higher tax bracket. Micah you talk about this all the time. We already know the tax rates are going up in a couple of years. And that’s if Congress does nothing. So we’re we’re pushing off a bigger balance or waiting until tax rate rates get higher. If we just wait and let this happen to us by default. 

 

Micah: Yeah, so that’s a really important clarifications. We got to be proactive in our tax planning, right. That’s why every year you should be looking about how much should I fund? How much should I do a Roth conversion? How much should I fund pre tax now, we’re not saying from this go and Max on your Roth IRA, but it may not be a bad idea to be something great to do which every single year you’re looking at this in being proactive. And the other thing as we started going through this, I want to talk about how the secure act is going to work with regards to the required minimum distributions and one through a couple of examples. So one of the things that we talked about was that the secure act change how RMDs work, and one of the things secure 1.0 says take an RMD until you’re 72 years young, and now that’s changed and some understanding of what Steven jumping here and correct me if he reads it differently is that if you already started taking your required minimum distributions nothing has changed. If you were 72 last year or older and you’re already taking your RMDs you continue as scheduled. There is no adjustment. There’s no exemption, you still have to take your RMDs. If you haven’t started taking your RM DS last year, as in in 2022 you were not 72 but in 2023 for the 72 you do not have to take RMDs for 2023. You don’t question I should say this better. You do not have to start your RMDs for 2023. So if you’re already taken on, you still got to take up if you haven’t started and this was the year you had to start you got bumped one year to 73. So we’ve been 2024 would have to start the RMDs it’s even makes sense as far as we’re working through that.

 

Steven: Yeah, and there’s you’re spot on like there’s a couple of really important things in there to reinforce especially as I see how other people are talking about secure 2.0, one of my least favorite headlines I’m seeing right now is no new RMDs in 2023 Because I don’t think it really hits the point on the head. Because I’ve talked to clients where they think oh, a new RMD well, I took an RMD last year that was last year’s RMD now I need to take another RMD so that’s a new RMD .Absolutely you need to take that new RMD or we mentioned inherited IRAs earlier we can come back to that there are situations where you need to take a new RMD this year. The other one would be in your first year I mentioned this earlier Micah in your first year, you have to take RMDs you can wait until April 1 of the next year. So if you turn 72 last year and you said you know what, I don’t want to do it by the end of the calendar year. I’m gonna wait till April 1. You still have to take that RMD before April 1st If you turn 72 in 2022. But yes, we have this we’ll use very loose air quotes here we have this gift of an extra year. If you are turning if you haven’t already started your RMDs previous to 2023.

 

Micah: All right, so I get tax nerdy sorry, warning out there. I need to have a sound effect warning for this. But one of the one of the things that’s even I heard you say which is 100% correct, but we have to be careful. And I know you know this is you said if you were 72 last year and you elected to defer your RMD because that is correct. You don’t think till April 1 that you’re following you turn 72. Well, let’s say you did that, Stephen. How many RMDs do you have to take this year? So last year you were 72? You chose to defer your RMD until 2023. How many do you have to take this year?

 

Steven: I feel like that’s a trick question, Micah because you could split it into multiple chunks and I could get it to the biggest numbers I want but to your point. Yeah  we’ve got to make sure we address at the dawn and then 2023 before 12/31. Because we only get that election to defer until April 1 once so yes to your point. And I know this the reason you’re bringing this up this gets missed all the time that people think I let’s just wait and not recognizing. Oh perfect. Now I’ve put two distributions into the same year.

 

Micah: Now 99 times out of 100 it does not make sense to defer that RMD to the next year. It just doesn’t right there’s there’s all this theory I hear about what I’ve been working with federal employees. I’ve been doing this for over 22 years. And I look at tax projections all the time. And Steven I know you do as well. And in 99 times out of 100 It makes no sense to defer or yes there’s the one and 100 case where somebody sold a property this year or they’re getting an inheritance or something big is happening this year, where it makes sense to defer and take two RMDs next year, but be really really careful about that one, because you are the one that’s responsible for making sure both RMDs get taken. The other thing that I start getting really cautious about especially with new clients are coming in, is I really want to your overbeek .They’re required beginning date, which means they’ve had to start their RMDs if they’re over the age to start the RMDs I always want to go back and I want proof from the custodian that they had satisfied their RMD for the previous year. Because let’s take a client and let’s say we take on a new client who’s 73 years old, and he goes yeah, great news. I’ve already taken my RMD for this year. And okay, well what does that mean? Does that mean that you took it for this year out of spite last year? Does that mean you took you know, where are we at for this? So you always want to go back and verify this whenever you’re moving accounts whenever I’m working with a new client etc. So for federal employees, I say a lot of caution here. 99 times out of 100 take the RMD the year in which it’s due would be really really important. Other pro tip I’m going to go off on this other pro tip I’m gonna say this with processing hundreds of RMDs with clients. By the end of the year to do this custodians get backlogged. They just do because everybody waits to the end of the year to do stuff. Then they go on holidays right then they have breaks and sometimes RMDs getting missed because custodians don’t get around a process think processing them in time. TSP you could be really careful with that one as well because you’re gonna take one distribution within 30 days. So you got to make sure you’re ahead of the game taking these distributions. 

 

Steven: Yeah, absolutely. 

 

Micah: All right, so sorry, I’ll get a little tangent on RMDs. When they went and started, we talked about, you know, if they’ve already started, you got to keep them going. Steven, let’s make a little bit of a transition and let’s talk about these inherited IRAs. Because when secure act 1.0 pass, it eliminated the stretch IRA for us, right? We used to be able to God forbid, but if you passed away, you left your IRA to your kids. You could stretch that over your kids entire lifetime. So instead of them having to take all the money out at once to be taxable. They could divide it by their life. I’m oversimplifying this, but they can divide it by their life expectancy take a little bit out every single year. Then when secure at 1.0. past that went away. That turned to a 10 year rule. But the IRS has recently come out with guidance on what 10 years means.

 

Steven: Yeah, Micah, I’m laughing because you kicked all this off saying hey, when tax law changes that they’re they’re not really final or official or clear those things. And when 1.0 happened and it switched to this 10 year timeline, I guess the kind of the the talking heads the powers that be kind of looked at that and said, Oh well, this means there are no RMD requirements. That’s clearly what the IRS meant. So we’re just going to we can plan it however we want across that 10 years, but it’s up to us. And then the IRS came out later and said, No, you silly people. We absolutely meant there’s an RMD requirement on top of that 10 year thing. And then everyone said, What does this even make me. COVID happened and we had a couple of years where they said oh well let’s just not worried about him at all. And now we’re here to 2023 what that meant, and they said, Okay, you need to go ahead and start taking care of that this year. Again, back to my point about the no new RMDs on inherited IRAs for IRAs that were inherited in 2021 or 2022. You absolutely are going to have new RMDs in 2023.

 

Micah: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that I’m going to say to be very careful of with with our clients, let’s say that somebody and we talked about this a little bit warnings kind of on previous podcast, but let’s say you inherited an account a loved one had passed away. And you were playing here at it under secure act 1.0, which is in the last couple years. And then you decided to defer your r&d. So let’s say you got this inheritance in 2020. There was no RMD requirements in 2020. They were waived because of COVID. And then you were saying hey, I’m under a tank. I’m not going to take any money out of this account, and I’m going to take it out in a lump sum in the future. So you got the money in 2020. There was no RMD for 2020. That was waived than it was 2021. 2022 you did not take an RMD because you said hey, I got 10 years to take this money out. Now the IRS has come back and said no you don’t you have 10 years to deplete the entire account, but every year you have to be taking money out of the account as an RMD for those two missed RMDs because in this scenario, they are missed for 2021 and 2022. What happens what does the client need to do?

 

Steven: Yeah, so the the IRS in true IRS fashion came out with a notice to try to clarify this. And in that notice it varies. There’s a section that’s very specifically says guidance for and they use some terminology, but it’s basically guidance for people who didn’t take those RMDs and 2121 and 2022. And it says in there hey, we’re not we’re going to waive the penalties if you didn’t take those RMDs and Micah, you and I both had the same files. We read that where we said okay, but wait, you’re waiving the penalty, but do we need to go back and take the RMD or not, at least at the point where we’re recording this that still hasn’t been clarified. So for my, my opinion, my reading of this, that was the IRS is guidance on okay, here’s what you should do, and they left out any indication that you need to go back and take those RMD. So as I’m working with clients on inherited IRAs, if they did not take those RMDs and 2121 and 2022 We’re not going to go back and now make those up. We’re gonna start with 2023 and move forward.

 

Micah: But this is a little unclear. Just to be clear, it is unclear, right? This is money. We are making an educated guess we think the IRS is determining because the IRS is not clear on this. Is that a fair statement?

 

Steven: That is a fair statement is that is that the same approach you’re going to take Micah?

 

Micah: I’m going to ask my clients for their tax tolerances, right. I’m saying hey, we don’t know, deferring. It is an option. The IRS could come at you scenario. The IRS comes back in two years and says you should have taken those RMDs out I’m not going to charge you a penalty and maybe it’s become an excess contribution after that was 6% Or is it just the 10% penalty is reduced to because that’s another good thing with the secure act. They’ve reduced the required minimum distribution penalty from 50% down to what 10%? 

 

Steven: Make 25 %, how generous

 

Micah: Scale so generous. So yeah, it’s reduced which I love. So I’m telling clients a worst case scenario, the IRS could come back make you take the money out and pay the penalty, right that is the worst case scenario more than likely you don’t have to take it out. Mister and miss client as you lay your head on the pillow tonight. Is this going to keep you up? If it is take the money out was pay the taxes on? It’s not going to keep you up. Okay, well then let’s move forward with it because it’s the it’s our best guess. And sometimes we just have to interpret it. We have to guess a little bit on what’s going to happen. Good news is this is what a lot of financial advisors and CPAs are saying. So this isn’t some rogue opinion out there.

 

Steven: Yeah, yeah. Cuz unfortunately those clarifications can take months or even years. I mean, this example we’re talking about secured 1.0. We’re years past that now and we’re still trying to sort out these last details.

 

Micah: Yeah. Okay, so we talked about the So what’s another thing that this is going to apply? Well, one of the things that you have to be thinking about is for federal employees, what is your tax plan going to look like now? Now the great news is we talked about it before in this podcast, a great tax planning tip was be using a QCD a qualified charitable distribution. This is when you reach 70 years young from an IRA. Nope, you can’t do it from the TSP. It’s not my rules, I promise. It’s the TSPs limitations. So he can’t do from the TSP what you can do from an IRA. You can send money directly from an IRA account to a charity and it’s 100% tax free transfer Steven In fact, it doesn’t even pop income on your tax return. So it doesn’t matter if you itemize deductions or don’t itemize deductions, you can still do that. Is that a correct statement?

 

Steven: That’s a correct statement. Then the other thing that it does for you by doing a qualified charitable distribution is it takes it out of our adjusted gross income and that’s really important for Medicare use you mentioned Medicare adjustments earlier. And so even if you do itemize, it’s worthwhile to do this. Because now we’re going further up the tax return and taking it out of the equation.

 

Micah: Now, this is really important because a lot of clients well, nobody really likes it when they get bumped into what we call it an extra Irma bracket. RMA is the income adjustment for Medicare they do not line up dollar for dollar tax brackets. So different tax brackets are different with RMA etc. So basically, I think, Steven, you probably have these numbers better than me. It’s a round up married filing joint $194,000. So roughly $194,000 is what they just came out with this last October. Is that about right? 

 

Steven: That’s about right. Yeah. 

 

Micah: Okay. So that’s the number now. That’s the number they set for two years ago, by the way. So means as we’re guessing at what these numbers are going to be going forward, but when we’re working on tax planning, and again, this is what I would really encourage my federal employees to do. I like my 10 year tax projections. I like to sit down when you retire, say the next 10 years, where’s your income going to come from and how much you’re going to pay in taxes. Now, why does 10 years matter? Well, one year at a time, you’re kind of playing cat and mouse, right? You’re playing checkers one year at a time say hey, what’s one move I can do that kind of jumps, the other opponent beats areas that have a couple of dollars, but I’m not interested in a couple of dollars. I’m interested in illegally beating the IRS said if 10s of 1000s of your dollars in an order to do that, man, you got to look at the taxes from a longer term perspective. That Steven you do tax returns every single year. Do you agree with that? Do you disagree?

 

Steven: I wholeheartedly agree with you, Micah I unfortunately I think that’s the exception for tax professionals. But I wholeheartedly agree with you. And so, earlier when we talked about just deferring your RMDs for an extra year to 73 or a little bit in the future all the way to 75. If we just let that happen. That’s that’s not an advantage, in fact that we’re probably going to get killed on taxes. But if we’re taking this 10 year approach, and now we have an extra year, an extra couple of years to have an intentional plan. Okay, now that can be a good thing for us, because we’re intentionally looking for those years where we would otherwise have relatively higher or lower income, and then making intentional decisions to say, Yep, I’m going to bump my income and this year on purpose, because I know that that’s going to set me up over that 10 years to save on taxes over on long run.

 

Micah: That when we say taxes, that right yeah. And so if you are not working with a tax professional that is looking at the taxes in the next 10 years, you need to find people that maybe you got a great prepare, I’m not trying to dig on your prepared maybe they do a fantastic job, but maybe they’re not the ones that are going to do the long term tax projections for you. If you need to work with someone’s going to do that. Because man we can see mistakesafter mistakes that happen when we’re not playing the long game with the IRS.

 

Steven: Micah, how do you help your clients or how do you empower your clients to vet that from a CPA? Because that can be really hard to discern if someone’s going to do more for me than just file a file a tax return?

 

Micah: Yeah, well, my clients they hit the easy but they hired us and so we just do it and so regardless of the CPA is going to help with that or not. We are going to make sure that we’re doing tax planning with the client now one of the art of is to work with that CPA. So one of the things that I want to know is I want to know that has the CPA, you don’t want to work with a new one. Do they look at taxes into the future? What do they think about upcoming tax law changes? What do they think the client should do in the next couple of years? And if the CPA kind of my default answer, there’s always exceptions, but the default is that the CPA is in the mindset of defer, defer, defer, defer defer, because in the future, their income will be less. That’s generally a bad sign now, and I wish I could say I was joking about this, but it happened to me at the end of last year, I was working with a client CPA was a new relationship and talk with them and I want to do a Roth conversion, Steven, and the CPA was like, No, we should wait because their income is going to be less than the future. And I said, Well, that’s fantastic. Could you tell me what year will be less than the future? And there was silence. They’re like, well, when they go to retire, their incomes going to be less. And I said, Well, hold on a second. I said great news is they they’re a federal employee. They have a fantastic pension. One was under the old Retirement System, one’s under the new plus Social Security. I said really, their income is not going to be less when they retire. their taxable income is going to be darn near the same when they retire because of pension income, Social Security, etc. So when is their income going to be less? And he just kept saying, well, in the future, it will be it just will. That’s just how it works. So when I start getting answers like that, that are just very vague rules of thumb, and someone can’t distill it down to when they say their income is gonna be less one year at a time, okay, I’m dealing with somebody who’s playing chess checkers and a chess game, and they may be a great repair, but they’re not looking at the long term picture.

 

Steven: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense to me and for your listeners who don’t yet have the pleasure of working with you or working with a financial advisor who is taking the reins like that. Just one question. I would I would encourage you to consider asking your tax professional is what can I expect from your team outside of tax filing season? Great question. Just so that you’re hearing from them. Honestly, a lot of the responses you’re gonna get is well, great news. We’ll we’ll get back to you next year and let you know what we need for the next tax return. And that’s gonna be an instant sign to you that they are, they might do a great job of filing your return. They’re not doing anything planning related. And so that’s a simple way to start learning some of that context without feeling like you’re just digging right into their personal life.

 

Micah: Yeah, Amen. All right, Steven. This podcast is all about action items. For our listeners that they can take and implement. So as you’re the guest, I’ll put you on the spot. What’s the first action items that our listeners should be able to take this week and be able to start implementing?

 

Steven: Yeah, I love that you’re focused on action items. I’m gonna go in the opposite direction and reinforce a non action which is you don’t need to rush out and change anything tomorrow because of Secure 2.0. Well, you need to have this somewhere on your radar for this year to make sure you’ve talked to someone about how Secure 2.0 impacts your plan, but it doesn’t have to be tomorrow.

 

mICAH: Correct. I’m gonna say it needs to be in the next couple. of months. And here’s the receiving pushback on this. If you say I’ll deal with it later. Later means 12/31 which means it’s not going to happen. So so this is the one that says no, you gotta have a plan that’s out there if you have inherited one that does affect it. Yeah. So there’s nothing you got to rush out right now. But don’t use that as an excuse to never get around to it is a fantastic. Selfish plug right here. I’m gonna say join us for a webinar. Tammy and I are gonna have a webinar on March 1, it’s gonna be fantastic. It’s the first of a four to five part series, by the way, so make sure you join us on that which will be great. And then Steven, I’m gonna say another action item for our listeners to create this year. So I mean, it’s not this week action, but creating an income plan, a tax plan for the next 10 years, even if you’re not retired. No one understand how much you pay in taxes. No one understand where your money should go to pre tax to Roth. Should you be looking at conversions? How do agencies come into? This seems daunting. Start with where you’re at right now. Start with your current tax return. It’s going to change in the next 10 years. You want to work with professional make sure a professional can do this next 10 year projection, if they can, if they don’t know what it is, maybe they’re not the one to work with. But that’s definitely something you should be looking at this year. Steven, anything on your end?

 

Steven: No. This sounds like a great action plan for all your listeners.

 

Micah: Awesome. Steven, thank you so much for joining us. I do enjoy nerding out with you on taxes. I really appreciate your expertise on this. And if our listeners want to follow more about what you’re doing, I know you have a great podcast with a Benjamin Brandt that talks to taxpayers on tax planning work in our nation. 

 

Steven: Yeah, the retirement tax podcast, the least boring tax podcast, you know.

 

Micah: Fantastic. So make sure you follow Steven there and until next time. Happy Planning.

 

Steven: Happy Planning

 

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