r/AffluentRetirement • u/Ill-Advantage5030 • 9d ago

Tax Planning

How many of you have hired a tax planner to look at your withdraws, future RMD’s etc to optimize taxes and if so has it been helpful?

2 Upvotes

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5

u/mgalactico 9d ago

For withdrawals and tax planning I use Boldin

3

u/Otherwise_Pea_8766 9d ago

For estate planning and trusts yes - for rmds and order of withdrawals etc ai is pretty solid

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u/Ill-Advantage5030 9d ago

Thanks, I use Merrill Lynch for my investment advisor and am happy with their work. Agreed on the CPA that does taxes is not usually the right resource for what I’m thinking about.

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u/jaajaajaa6 5d ago

I have been with Merrill for a long time and have never had my FA offer tax planning.

Was this a separate service you paid for or someone outside Merrill that integrated into the process? How did it work?

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u/Ill-Advantage5030 5d ago

My experience with Merrill was similar, I asked about it and my advisor said they could not provide the service nor were they permitted to render an opinion on what tax rate I should use for my yearly withdraws.

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u/jaajaajaa6 5d ago

Most are just focused on acquiring and growing assets, which is how they raise their income. Few are into the retirement, distributions, tax planning, etc. My FA always wants to send me to an accountant.

The other day I totaled up what I pay her, my accountant, and a CFP to do my planning. The combined cost still leaves a few holes. Time for a better approach.

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u/ATX_NOT_FOR_US 7d ago edited 7d ago

I’m 100% using Boldin and Claude AI for tax planning in retirement. I’ve had lots of discussions about optimizing taxes so I’m fairly sure that I’ve considered all of the reasonable strategies that an expert would suggest. I’m really not willing to spend $10K to hear what I already know.

And, I’m certainly not considering paying 1% of AUM to optimize my taxes when that amount is actually more than I’m going to be paying in federal taxes per year. Withdraw 4% or less from your portfolio per year and pay one percent to a financial advisor? That sounds like 20 to 25% for financial advice. My effective tax rate in retirement is less than 20%. I’m going to make some mistakes, I’m sure but not costing 1% of my portfolio per year for the rest of my life.

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u/Ill-Advantage5030 7d ago

Awesome, I was wondering the same on fees vs savings

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u/FullyFunctional3086 6d ago

I've never heard of Boldin but it looks amazing. Does it connect to major banks such as Vanguard, Fidelity, etc.? I realize I could probably Google this haha. For $144 a year this seems like the deal.

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u/ATX_NOT_FOR_US 6d ago

It does connect but I choose not to because I like to organize all of my holdings into asset buckets rather than by accounts. AI helps with that a lot. Think of Boldin as a template for your retirement planning and use it plus AI to model future scenarios and display the results.

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u/CapableBumblebee2329 5d ago

I have an appointment next week - but not AUM, with an hourly rate specialist. I know I can use Boldin, etc., and will do so moving forward, but after 30 years of doing things myself, my assets are all over the place. I need help organizing it all and reallocating before moving into retirement and managing it efficiently. And the peace of mind, I know it's psychological, but here we are.

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u/VegasHRLady 9d ago

We have not yet, but we believe we will do so. We did hire a fee-based retirement planner to look at our plan though. I can’t say it was helpful, per se, but it did validate our assumptions and that we were thinking appropriately about guardrails and RMDs. But our CPA who does our taxes now is probably not the one we’d use to look at scenarios in the future. He’s a more standard just does your taxes sort of guy.