Tax Advice Near Me: What Are the Best Strategies? –PillarWM

High net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals are typically on the look-out for tax saving strategies, which is why they search for tax advice near me. However, with a high income, you need strategies from an advisor who has experience in dealing with high-value portfolios. The Ultimate Guide to Choosing the Best Financial Advisor for Families worth $5 Million to $500 Million is ideal for ultra-high net worth investors who are looking for expert advice.

STRATEGIES FOR FAMILIES WORTH $5 MILLION TO $500 MILLION

7 Secrets To High Net Worth Investment Management, Estate, Tax and Financial Planning

The insights you’ll discover from our published book will help you integrate a variety of wealth management tools with financial planning, providing guidance for your future security alongside complex financial strategies, so your human and financial capital will both flourish.

Clients frequently share with us how the knowledge gained from this book helped provide them tremendous clarity, shattering industry-pitched ideologies, while offering insight and direction in making such important financial decisions.

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Pillar Wealth Management is an individual, fee-only, fiduciary wealth management firm that gives financial advice to clients worth 5 million to 500 million in liquid investable assets. Our wealth managers can implement specific tax strategies that are applicable for high net worth or ultra-high net worth investors. Schedule a call with one of our expert wealth managers to learn more about our tax planning services.

Table of Contents
Why Do You Need Tax Advice? Who Can Give Tax Advice Near Me? When Should You Hire a Tax Advisor? Tax Strategies to Save Your Wealth Working with Wealth Management Firms for Tax Management

Why Do You Need Tax Advice?

As a high net worth or ultra-high net worth individual, you are hit by the highest tax bills in the country. This means that the money you spent all your time and effort earning and collecting gets deducted in taxes. That is why you need tax advice near me to help you legally bring down your tax bill.

Tax avoidance is a legal technique that financial advisors use to help their clients bring down how much they owe in taxes. They are aware of allowable tax deduction methods, which can help you retain most of your wealth. This is different from tax evasion, which uses illegal means to avoid taxes, such as misreporting your income or creating false deduction claims.

Types of Taxes

Some people might be ignorant of the types of taxes they are liable for, which can leave them stunned to find a chunk of their wealth missing without knowing where it went. The tax systems that are most relevant to high net worth and ultra-high net worth investors are:

• Progressive Taxes

Federal and state income taxes are examples of the progressive taxation system. It implies that the more income you have, the higher taxes you are liable to pay.

• Regressive Taxes

Regressive taxes get lower with your income or follow a flat rate. It is commonly used in your social security account taxation.

• Consumption Taxes

Also known as retail or sales taxes, these are applicable to the goods and services that you buy. These are indirect taxes since you pay them at the time of purchase, and the government collects them from the retailer.

• Capital Gains Taxes

These taxes are paid whenever you sell an asset or valuable item, such as a car or jewelry. Depending on how long you’ve owned the asset, you can be liable to pay the short-term capital gains rate or the long-term capital gains rate.

Who Can Give Tax Advice Near Me?

If you’ve decided you need a professional’s advice on your tax management, you might be thinking,“How much does tax advice cost?” or “Where can I get tax advice for free?”

While anyone can claim to give you tax advice for free, there always remains a question of how reliable or suitable it is for you. Reading blogs online can give you some idea of what to do, but implementing that advice and customizing it for your unique financial situation is a completely different story.

Coming back to the professionals in this field, tax advisors or tax consultants are financial experts who have advanced training and thorough knowledge of tax accounting and tax law. Certified Public Accounts (CPAs), enrolled agents, tax attorneys, and some financial advisors also give advice on taxes.

The advice and services of a tax advisor differ with the taxpayer’s individual situation. For example, you will need different advice if you’re setting up your retirement account than if you were planning to invest in real estate. In any case, you need to ensure you choose the best advisor for you, especially if you have more than 10 million dollars in liquid assets. Our Ultimate Guide to choosing the best financial advisor for ultra-high net worth families can help you.

When Should You Hire a Tax Advisor?

It might have crossed your mind, “When should I get a tax advisor?” If you feel that your tax bill is eating up too much of the wealth you’ve accumulated, you might want to hear out some tax reduction strategies. A tax advisor can use strategies that suit your unique situation and help you meet your goals. We discuss some of these strategies in the next section.

Wealthy investors who experience a major life event such as marriage, divorce, the death of a spouse, having children, buying a new house, unemployment, retirement, inheriting a large amount of wealth, or more, can benefit from a tax advisor.

Tax advisors can help you find the right deductions and credits applicable, legally reduce your tax liability, prepare and file your tax returns. Rich investors have diverse investment portfolios, and a tax advisor can help you calculate the taxes you owe for each asset. If you would like to learn more about improving your portfolio’s performance, you can read our Performance Guide, which highlights the“Shifts Multi-Millionaires Must Make to Achieve Financial Security and Serenity.”

Tax Strategies to Save Your Wealth

When you’re searching for tax advice near me, it is not enough to settle for any old method or technique. As high net worth or ultra-high net worth individuals, you need strategies that are exclusively made for people with a wealthy status. Pillar Wealth Management specializes in tax planning and fiduciary advisory services for the wealthy. Schedule a consultation with one of our expert wealth managers to learn how we can help you cut your costs as much as possible.

Here are tax strategies for ultra-high net worth clients that can help you save money and reduce unnecessary losses.

Maximize Contributions to Your Health Savings Account

Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) grow tax free and can be used for healthcare expenses at any time. If you contribute money to your HSAs, it will count as a tax deduction, thereby reducing your overall taxable income.

As a rich investor, a lower taxable income can also help you with your portfolio’s performance. You can get in touch with our wealth management team to learn how.

Maximize Contributions to Your 401k Account

Similar to contributing to your HSAs, any monetary contribution to your 401k account counts as a tax deduction. With a lower taxable income, you are liable to pay fewer taxes. Not only do you save your money, but you also end up growing your retirement funds.

Set Up a Donor Advised Fund (DAF)

Let’s suppose you set up a donor advised fund for 300,000 dollars. Over the next two decades, you can donate certain amounts to multiple charities. The tax deduction you claim will be according to the year that you set up the account, i.e., the entire 300,000 dollars can be claimed for a tax deduction.

An expert can help you use this strategy by pairing it with your required minimum distributions or a Roth conversion so that the deduction from the DAF can offset the conversion cost.

Increase Your Charitable Donations

For couples, the recent tax laws raised the standard tax deduction to 24,000 dollars. Wealthy investors can easily surpass this amount, giving them the opportunity to claim deductions on donations up to 60% of your adjusted gross income and 30% of appreciated assets to charitable causes. This will reduce your tax burden and help you achieve your philanthropic goals.

Convert Your Retirement Accounts to a Roth

Timing is crucial with this strategy. In IRAs, your money has to be withdrawn and taxed starting from the age of 72. Roth investments grow tax free, which makes it attractive for many investors to convert their 401k accounts and IRA accounts into a Roth account.

You will need to pay taxes for the year in which you make the conversion, but after that, you will not owe taxes on any future gains – knowing when to make this conversion can be complicated since there are many variables to consider. If you want to learn more about this, you can read our hardcover book, The Art of Protecting Ultra-High Net Worth Portfolios and Estates – Strategies For Families Worth $25 Million To $500 Million.

Don’t Rely Too Much on Active Management

As a high net worth investor, you know that each transaction or trade you make gets taxed. Any gains you generate in a brokerage account get reported, and thus, taxed. Actively managed portfolios or accounts involve frequent trading, which can lead to unnecessarily high taxes with minimal investment performance. If you want to learn more about the strategies that we use for our clients, you can read our 5 Shifts Guide. It highlights 5 critical shifts for maximizing portfolio growth strategies for high net worth and ultra-high net worth families.

Plan Your Wealth Transfer Wisely

When a wealthy investor dies, their wealth is heavily taxed before it makes its way to the investor’s chosen heirs or beneficiaries. Estate planning is crucial in this aspect, as you should make sure that you avoid leaving wealth in tax deferred accounts to your inheritors.

You can choose to pay taxes beforehand by withdrawing money earlier to reduce the tax burden on your beneficiaries. The decision you make depends on your values, the size of your estate, and the estate taxes that you will be liable to pay.

A wealth manager can help you make these decisions as they have the knowledge and the experience to provide you with customized solutions. If you want to hire the best financial advisor to suit your financial situation, you should read our Ultimate Guide.

Real Estate Strategy Adjustment

According to the recent tax law, the minimum mortgage value for which you can cut down payments has been reduced to 750,00 dollars. Moreover, you cannot deduct the interest on other homes.

Hence, real estate is less suitable for tax minimization, and your real estate strategy should be geared towards gaining profits and generating income. Again, the circumstances will differ with each individual case. Working with a tax advisor or a financial advisor will help you figure out the most appropriate move for you.

Working with Wealth Management Firms for Tax Management

Looking for the best tax advice near me can be overwhelming when you don’t know who to trust with your finances. At Pillar Wealth Management, we understand that you have financial goals and aspirations that require more than high performance. We believe that tax minimization is a vital part of cost control and achieving financial security. Our wealth managers have over six decades worth of experience in helping clients with 5 million to 500 million dollars minimize their taxes by using strategies that suit their unique financial situation. You can schedule a Wealth Management Analysis meeting with our team to see where you stand financially.

Authors

Hutch Ashoo

Chris Snyder

To be 100% transparent, we published this page to help filter through the mass influx of prospects, who come to us through our website and referrals, to gain only a handful of the right types of new clients who wish to engage us.

We enjoy working with high net worth and ultra-high net worth investors and families who want what we call financial serenity – the feeling that comes when you know your finances and the lifestyle you desire have been secured for life, and that you don’t have to do any of the work to manage and maintain it because you hired a trusted advisor to take care of everything.

You see, our goal is to only accept 17 new clients this year. Clients who have from $5 million to $500 million in liquid investable assets to entrust us with on a 100% fee basis. No commissions and no products for sale.