Help clients make the most of tax season

As a professional building a business, you know that to succeed, you need to answer when opportunity knocks. Opportunity is knocking now.

Can you hear it?

It’s knocking amid the steady drip (growing louder as the days go by) of tax season and the rapid approach of April 15. It’s signaling a chance for you not only to reinforce your value to clients but help them prepare for a better future.

Many advisers work with clients on tax planning and filing. If you are one of these, you’re already having important conversations about income, deductions, capital gains and losses and other key tax issues.

If you don’t regularly work with clients on their taxes, all it takes is a telephone call. That one call sends the message that you not only are engaged but actively looking out for the financial well-being of your clients. And that is why you’re in this business in the first place, right?

Chances are pretty good that over the course of pulling all their 2014 tax information together, your clients may have reached out to you to check on 1099-DIV forms, details on investment purchases and sales or other data, so the ice most likely has been broken.

But with less than two weeks left before the tax deadline, most clients are still very focused on that task.

So the first questions you ask should be whether your clients are on track for filing either their taxes or an extension, whether they have everything they need from you and if there is anything you can do to assist them.

Presuming the answers are yes, yes and no, now would be a great time to bring up a couple of key planning issues: retirement and, for retired clients, Social Security and Medicare.

A LOOK AHEAD

As Tim Steffen, director of financial planning for Baird’s Private Wealth Management group, writes, tax season is the perfect time to help clients take a look back — and ahead — at their retirement plan.

First of all, certain clients (those who are younger than 701/2 and had earned income last year) can make a contribution to a traditional individual retirement account for 2014. In addition, some clients make be able to take deductions for contributions.

There is also the discussion around Roth IRA contributions. If a client’s income is too high to qualify for a tax deduction for IRA contributions, a Roth contribution might be in order.

That leads to the bigger question of Roth conversions. Though it’s too late to do a conversion for 2014, if clients did a conversion last year and the tax consequence is bigger than expected, they have until Oct. 15 of this year to undo it.

Turning to this year, there is no better time than now to go over retirement plan contributions. Ensuring that clients are contributing as much as possible to their retirement accounts and squeezing as much efficiency out of that process as possible (for example, by determining whether a Roth conversion makes sense this year) will help them sleep more soundly at night.

As for clients who are retired, helping them better understand Social Security and Medicare can be a lifesaver.

Clients have a lot going on at this time of year, and they are no doubt acutely focused on getting their taxes done on time. If you’re interested in once again proving your worth to them, seize this opportunity.