What if your personal trainer was also your private chef? How easy would it be to eat healthy? What if your assistant was also your legal advisor? You’d worry less about keeping your business above board. What if your landscaper was also your handyman? Maintaining your home would be a breeze!
At Cook Wealth, we’ve always dreamed… What if your Wealth Advisor was also your CPA?
We may not be able to help with the logistics of getting physically healthy or keeping your lawn neat, but we can create a financial plan and manage your wealth in a way that optimizes growth and minimizes taxes. Because if your advisor and your CPA aren’t talking, each is only getting half the story.
By the way, helping with tax planning isn’t all we do for you here at Cook Wealth. When you work with our team you get more. Check out a full list of our included services here.
Our Founding Partner, Jon Cook, has been both a CPA and a financial advisor for decades. He started Cook Wealth with the belief that you can’t do the best financial planning without taking taxes into consideration. It’s like exercising without considering nutrition, or like cutting your grass but never watering it! These two factors go hand in hand.
You deserve both financial planning and tax advice. Each is too important to be left out.
When your financial advisor is your CPA, you’ll always get a call back
There’s nothing more frustrating than having a tax question, reaching out to a CPA, and never hearing back. But it happens all the time. Traditional CPA’s aren’t out to get you! They’re just incredibly busy. According to a 2019 study by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, the number of young adults pursuing a career in accounting has declined every year for the past decade. And a huge wave of CPAs are reaching retirement age and leaving the field in droves. There’s a massive talent leak at traditional CPA firms right now.
At Cook Wealth, we have several CPAs who are also CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ professionals. Here’s why:
Investing is only half the story when it comes to growing and maintaining wealth. Investments build your wealth, but wise tax planning is what helps you save it in the long run.
For a fee comparable to typical financial advising firms, our expert advisors and CPAs do more. A lot more.
Why does it matter? These are just a few of the benefits of working with an advising team that includes both CPAs and CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ professionals:
- It’s convenient! You upload documents one time, and we’ll take it from there.
- We’re more invested in your situation as a whole. No matter your question, you’ll always get a call back.
- Save costs and fees by consolidating your needs.
- No confusion on your long-term plan or goals.
- Balancing investment gains with tax benefits happens automatically.
- Deeper collaboration means we’ll catch things individual accountants or financial advisors might miss.
- You’ll never wonder which office you should call for your question.
And that’s just a handful of the benefits! There’s significant peace of mind that comes from knowing that all aspects of your financial health are being carefully tended to. Before you make any investment decision, we’ll talk about the long-term tax implications. Before tax season, we’ll make sure you’ve done everything possible to maximize your tax savings.
Here are a few real-world examples of how working with a dual CPA/CFP® professional saves you (and makes you!) money
Not too long ago, we were working with a client who had a significant number of shares of a Wasatch fund. The dividend date was quickly approaching, but we noticed that any dividends earned would trigger a hefty tax bill on the ordinary income. So we sold the shares prior to the ex-dividend date and bought them back soon after, at a lower cost basis. In the end, we helped that client avoid taxes on the ordinary income and obtained more shares of that fund in the process. A CPA or CFP® professional on their own might have missed this opportunity. But our joint advising team is always keeping an eye on the market and making strategic moves for our clients.
A second real-world example is how much our clients benefit from pre-decision planning, instead of post-decision mitigating. In a traditional financial advising situation, your advisor can only do their best to help you after a transaction has happened. But with a joint team that includes a CPA, the team can view your situation holistically. They can provide a recommendation before the transaction and maximize (or minimize) the impact post-transaction.
Who benefits from working with a dual CPA/CFP® professional or joint team?
Anyone with investments can benefit from having their financial strategy aligned with their tax plan. But particularly, this service is helpful for business owners, people with significant investments, those with a large inheritance or estate plan, and individuals who do a lot of charitable giving. In each situation, we’re dealing with complex tax needs and a detailed financial plan.
There’s no minimum net worth that benefits from tax planning and financial advising either. If you’re paying taxes and earning returns, whether you’re a young business owner or new to investing, tax sheltering and financial planning go hand in hand. Wealth advising helps you increase your assets and save your money in the right places, while tax advising helps you keep more of what you earn.