Not the return. The years around it.
Your accountant files last year. Somebody has to plan the next twenty.
Preparation and planning are different jobs. One reports what already happened, accurately and on time. The other decides what happens next, and almost nobody is doing it, because it has no deadline to force it.
- Discipline
- Tax
- PILOT layer
- Income & Tax Strategy
- Starts with
- A Clarity Map Session
What you probably arrived with
The questions this answers.
If none of these is your question, this is likely the wrong page, and one of the other five is probably the right one.
What is the tax bill sitting inside our retirement accounts, and when does it come due?
Should we be converting to Roth, and if so, how much and in which years?
What happens at 73 when withdrawals become mandatory?
How do we keep required withdrawals from raising our Medicare premiums?
The thing almost everyone believes
What is assumed
“A good accountant is tax planning.”
What is actually true
A good accountant is essential and is doing a different job. Preparation is backward-looking and deadline-driven; planning is forward-looking and has no deadline, which is exactly why it gets skipped. The decisions that matter most (conversions, asset location, the order of withdrawals) have to be made before the year ends, not while the return is being filed.
What we actually do
Four pieces of work, in this order.
Mechanisms rather than benefits. Each of these is a thing somebody sits down and does, and you can tell whether it has been done.
Price the deferred tax bill
A tax-deferred balance is not what it says on the statement. Some proportion of it belongs to the IRS, at a rate that will be set by law and by your other income in the year it comes out. Knowing roughly what that share is changes almost every other decision.
Find and model the low-bracket years
Between the last paycheck and the first required withdrawal, taxable income is often unusually low. That window is the largest deliberate tax opportunity most households get. It has an end date, and it does not reopen.
Locate assets, not just allocate them
Which investments sit in which account type changes the tax drag on the whole portfolio without changing the risk at all. It is one of the few genuinely free improvements available, and it is invisible to anyone looking only at allocation.
Sequence across years, not within one
The point is never the smallest bill this April. Pulling income forward into a low year to keep a later year out of a higher bracket looks like paying more tax, and often is not.
Decided alongside this one
These three change the answer here.
Which is the entire argument for a family office: none of the six can be settled properly on its own.
Plain answers
What people ask about tax planning.
Should I do a Roth conversion?
Sometimes, and the honest answer requires numbers nobody has run for you yet: your bracket now, your likely bracket when withdrawals become mandatory, what other income lands in each year, what it does to Medicare premiums, and what your heirs’ brackets look like. A conversion is a decision to pay tax early at a known rate instead of later at an unknown one. That is a good trade or a bad one depending entirely on those figures.
Do you prepare tax returns as well?
Ohio Tax Advocates, one of the related firms, does preparation. Advocate Wealth Solutions does the planning. Having both under one roof is the point: the plan and the return are made by people who talk to each other, so a strategy is not quietly undone at filing.
Isn’t tax planning only worth it above a certain amount of money?
The dollars saved scale with the size of the accounts, but the proportion often does not. A household with a moderate tax-deferred balance and a narrow window before required withdrawals can be exactly the case where sequencing matters most, because there is less room for a mistake to be absorbed.
Start here
This is one of six services, and they are decided together.
Which is why the first step is the same whichever page brought you here: a Clarity Map Session, showing where your income, your future tax bill and your estate documents actually stand. Free, no obligation.
30 minutes · No cost · No obligation