The Influential Advisor

075: The Personal CFO Revolution: Interview with Bestselling Author Erik Brenner

• Paul G. McManus

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In this episode of The Influential Advisor podcast, host Paul interviews Erik Brenner, founder of Hilltop Wealth and Tax Solutions with 32 years of experience in wealth management. Erik discusses his innovative "Personal CFO" model that brings comprehensive financial services under one roof, including integrated tax planning and wealth management. The conversation explores how this approach can transform retirement planning for successful individuals by breaking down traditional silos in financial services and providing family office-level services to non-ultra-wealthy clients.

Guest Bio

Erik Brenner is the founder of Hilltop Wealth and Tax Solutions, an independent registered investment advisory firm. With 32 years of experience in the financial services industry, Erik built his practice after growing up in a family business in the aftermarket automotive industry. He specializes in providing comprehensive wealth management services that integrate tax planning, investment management, and estate planning under one roof.

The Personal CFO Model

  • How the model differs from traditional financial advising by combining multiple services under one roof
  • The importance of integrating tax planning with wealth management
  • How this approach provides family office benefits to clients who aren't ultra-wealthy
  • Why coordination between financial professionals is crucial for optimal outcomes

Five Critical Retirement Decisions

  1. Timing Your Retirement
    • Financial implications of retiring earlier or later
    • Balancing emotional readiness with financial preparedness
    • Benefits of working longer during highest earning years
  2. Social Security Claiming Strategies
    • Why "it's not grandma's Social Security anymore"
    • How couples can maximize benefits through coordinated claiming strategies
    • Consideration of life expectancy, health history, and age differences between spouses
    • Tax implications of Social Security benefits (15% may be tax-free)
  3. Distribution Strategy
    • Importance of tax-efficient withdrawals from retirement accounts
    • Why emptying accounts sequentially isn't always optimal
    • How proper distribution planning can lower lifetime tax burden
  4. Healthcare Planning
    • Medicare eligibility at 65 and planning for the gap years
    • Strategies for obtaining healthcare coverage before Medicare eligibility
    • Consideration of long-term care costs in later life
  5. Estate Planning
    • Common oversight of not having or updating estate plans
    • Ensuring assets pass according to your wishes
    • Going beyond document creation to implementation and funding strategies

The Window of Opportunity

  • The critical period between retirement and Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs)
  • How taxable income often drops during this window, creating tax planning opportunities
  • Strategic Roth conversions when in lower tax brackets
  • Addressing the "balloon" of tax-deferred savings before mandatory distributions

Breaking Down Financial Silos

  • How separate financial professionals (insurance, tax, investments, estate) often don't coordinate
  • The value of comprehensive financial planning across all domains
  • Preventing contradictory advice from different specialists

Client Stories Highlighted

  1. Claire's Healthcare Savings
    • Saved over $31,000 in healthcare costs before Medicare eligibility
    • Strategic income management to qualify for healthcare subsidies
    • Example of how proper planning can enable earlier retirement
  2. Henry's Pension Loss

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Speaker 1:

Today on the Influential Advisor podcast, we're exploring how the personal CFO model is transforming wealth management for successful individuals. My guest, eric Brenner, founder of Hilltop Wealth and Tax Solutions, has spent 32 years helping clients navigate the increasingly complex financial landscape. After growing up in a family business, eric built an independent wealth management firm that serves entrepreneurs, medical professionals, business owners and those planning for or living in retirement. His approach offers something truly unique combining sophisticated investment strategies with integrated tax planning under one roof. If you're wondering if you're making the most efficient financial decisions, this conversation reveals what's possible when your advisor breaks down the traditional silos in financial planning. Eric, how are you doing?

Speaker 2:

Hey Paul, I'm doing well. Thanks, it's great to see you. Great to see you, hey Paul, I'm doing well.

Speaker 1:

Thanks, it's great to see you Great to see you, so I've been looking forward to our author interview today. So thank you for making the time and for our audience. Let's go ahead and kick things off. Tell us a little bit about who you are and what led you to what you do today.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so thanks, paul, and it's great to be here. I've been an advisor. This will be my 32nd year. I really started in the business as an entrepreneur, had an entrepreneur mind, grew up in a family business and we sold those businesses and really the financial advisor business attracted me. I founded the firm Hilltop Wealth and Tax Solutions and we are an independent registered investment advisory firm and we'll talk more about this. This is really what the book is about, but we've really developed over the years and felt the need to be truly comprehensive.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and just out of curiosity, what was the family business that you were engaged in before?

Speaker 2:

It was aftermarket automotive.

Speaker 1:

Okay, very cool, and something that you do which I think is fairly unique in the marketplace is that you work with people both on the wealth and the tax side. I find oftentimes those are siloed into two different categories.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's true. A few years ago we decided to really integrate tax because for a lot of our clients that are in retirement, tax is their biggest bill. It's really not healthcare, unless they really have extreme healthcare needs, long-term care needs, things like that and what we were finding was your typical CPA or accountant is putting numbers in the box. The other thing that we saw was people's assets were growing and they were growing in accounts like retirement accounts, iras and so forth that were deferring tax. And we saw, and continue to see, this issue of the balloon getting bigger and eventually it's going to pop. So we have fully integrated the tax business. So we do have a tax and accounting piece of the business and that's grown quite nicely over the years.

Speaker 1:

Nice, and is your background? Is it on both sides, or how have you gotten into both sides of the business?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so no, the background's finance and financial and I've always had an interest in tax a bit more and have done some little more deep dive in the tax side. But when I decided to look at having that as a service, really what we did is I went out and found a tax partner and so she runs the tax side of the business on the day-to-day and really has that tax background to help with the integration.

Speaker 1:

Fair enough. So exciting part of today, which is the author interview and of course, as the time we're recording this, we're is the author interview and of course you're. As a time we're recording this, we're in the final stages of publishing your book, the personal CFO revolution. We'll dive into questions, but just big picture, what motivated and inspired you that now was the right time to write this book?

Speaker 2:

We just feel as though there, when people are saving and investing and they're moving along through their financial journey, there's education about how much you should save and where do you save. Of course, we are more responsible for our retirements now than ever, and as people get to almost to retirement and they start coming down the financial mountain and they start this journey, which really the book is centered around that there's a lot more decisions that people have to make now compared to their parents or their grandparents, and so the coordination of the CFO was really bringing a concept that has been available to the ultra wealthy for a long time, and that is a family office environment. A lot of people may not know what a family office is, but it is basically someone. The ultra wealthy work with family offices and they take care of everything financial. We want to be their resource, and so we say your chief financial officer, we're here to help you in all aspects and coordinating all your financial life so that you can really make good decisions before retirement and then in retirement.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I can relate to that personally, even more so just in the past couple of months. I have a financial advisor and I have a CPA, and they don't. I introduced them and my expectation was that they would coordinate a little bit behind the scenes and give me cohesive recommendations, and I only did discover that they were not as cooperative as I had hoped, and so the CPA unfortunately has to go. But as the consumer of it, it's like I want, just by extension, the family office is that, especially as your wealth grows, you want all the expertise that you should be getting, but you also want that coordination on your behalf. Because I'm not educated to make these decisions, I need to rely on you and your team to inform me about what I should be thinking about, what's most important.

Speaker 2:

Exactly, and one of the things about the family office concept is that we have access, so we are able to bring our clients access to strategies, certainly investment types, and service and advice and give them access to that, and I think that's a real key.

Speaker 1:

So the title of the book is the Personal CFO Revolution, as we mentioned. And what is a personal CFO and how is it different from a typical financial advisor?

Speaker 2:

I think the differences are a couple really major differences. One of them, we already mentioned, is tax. Very few firms really offer up a tax service and so we always tell clients we don't hide behind tax, because we can run it through our tax projection software. We can talk about tax, since we are an independent firm, and then we take it over to our tax side and they run it through the super duper software. And then we take it over to our tax side and they run it through the super duper software and then we can come up with a plan from a tax perspective. Other pieces of it are that because we are a fiduciary RIA, we by law must act in the best interest of the client. So they have us on their side and they know that. Look, we don't get paid anymore if you invest in A, b or C right, and so we want to bring that together.

Speaker 2:

The other piece of it is we often find that is put off and we understand why. But as estate planning, we just see a lot of times where people A don't have an estate plan or it's very old, and if they have an estate plan, that may just be documents, but they didn't finish off by putting in strategies in place, or what we call funding, and so, instead of us sending them off to remind them get an estate plan done, we have the ability to complete that and help them through that. And then the other piece of it, paul, is that the CFO is look, if you're going to buy a business, if you're going to buy or lease a car, if you're going to make these other decisions certainly retirement being a big one we want to be on your side and say look, we're helping you here comprehensively.

Speaker 1:

So oftentimes we, as a business owner, we might have a CFO on our team and they're tasked with doing a number of things for the business because they have that expertise doing a number of things for the business because they have that expertise. But in this case it's oftentimes the individual who may or may not be a business owner, but it's really having that person that you can go to, that has access and that comprehensive advice, so that I don't have to go to three, four or five different people, get potentially conflicting advice or, to your point, just never do it. So in your book you talk about the five critical retirement decisions. What are these five critical retirement decisions and why do they matter so much?

Speaker 2:

They are critical. I first talk about timing your retirement. Just, maybe by putting off retirement a year or two means you're putting more into your retirement plan. Right? You're probably at your highest earning years. Maybe there's market sensitivity, like we're going through right now. Maybe there's healthcare decisions. So a lot of times people don't wanna put retirement off, but I think they wanna look at what is the timing of the retirement and what does it mean financially? I look at it as there's the emotional decision to retire from something, but then there's also the financial decision. Then the second thing that comes into is our pension. So everybody has a pension, everybody.

Speaker 2:

If you have Social Security, and Social Security claiming strategies are often overlooked. In the book I mentioned, it's not grandma's Social Security anymore. We have clients that have a lot of Social Security per month, and so what they don't do is they don't, because once you make that decision, that's it, and so they really don't put a plan in place and say when's the best time to draw, should I draw, should I delay, and so forth, and it's different for each person. Can you give an example? Sure, especially when you have a couple, oftentimes to get the most out of Social Security, one may delay. So you can delay up to age 70 and one may take early before their full retirement age and then determine what that benefit total is going to be. It also is not just your decision, because if one of the spouses passes away, well, one of the social securities goes away and so you hop up to the higher one. If people have health histories, if one spouse is much older than the other spouse, that comes into play. The other thing, paul, that I think is often overlooked is not all social security is taxed In the current environment, and I know there's talk of whether it's going to be taxed or not taxed or whatevered In the current environment. And I know there's talk of whether it's going to be taxed or not taxed or whatever. But in the current environment there's a piece of social security that's not taxed and that's up to 15% of your benefit. 15% of a higher benefit is a higher amount that's tax-free and that's also not considered often. So all of these variables come into play into a situation determining really what's best for the individual.

Speaker 2:

Then the next one. We go so social security distribution strategy, so you distribute money when it may not be just in your best interest to distribute an empty one pot, then go to the next pot and go to the next pot. So how does that come into play? That's where our tax planning work and tax work that we dive into makes a huge difference. We look at it obviously this year or next year, but also what's it going to look like in future years. So that's a big piece of that.

Speaker 2:

And then the fourth one is healthcare. So how we plan for healthcare certainly once you get to 65, medicare, you get yourself some Medigap insurance and how we plan for that. If people are going to retire prior to 65, then it's a planning on okay, where's healthcare? Do you have to buy healthcare? How's that going to look for you? Healthcare could also look at the long-term care costs, things like that, because obviously that can be very expensive later on in life. And then the last one is the estate plan, like we talked about. You hear about these well-known folks that die without an estate plan hundreds of millions of dollars of an estate and they didn't have a will nor trust, and that piece of it, to wrap it up, is really important in making sure that your assets pass the way you want them to pass.

Speaker 1:

How does that happen? I can see someone that maybe hasn't accumulated that much money not doing the estate but as your assets and your net worth increases, is that fairly common to see people without an estate plan?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, when you look back at history, there's some pretty well-known folks that didn't have it. Yeah, it's one of those that like taxes. If you owe taxes right, you file or they're going to come after you and people fear uncle Sam. Yes, but on the estate side, no one's there to say there's a deadline to get this done, and I think that's a big piece of it. People don't want to think about it because obviously you're thinking about when you pass away and they also don't maybe realize the consequences, and so it really doesn't tie as much to the money.

Speaker 2:

Now, if the ultra wealthy are these people that have a lot of wealth. If they're working with someone again on a but we can be on a client for years, and if they don't take hold and go through with it and get it done, you know there's nothing we can do. So we just try to make sure that we're there. We're making it as easy as we can, but let's get this done, because we really hate to see hard-earned money and net worth get hung up and get taxed more, hung up in probate and just costs they shouldn't have.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, okay, so you covered the five critical areas and decisions.

Speaker 2:

It is and it's also being able to carry it out. So what you were saying with the accountant CPA, it's being able to carry it out and say, instead of saying, yeah, you should do this for some tax stuff, go see, see what they say, so we can carry that out for them and make sure that we're following through with it from a coordination perspective.

Speaker 1:

This sounds like a great service. You probably have a line stretching outside the door. Where have you been my whole life?

Speaker 2:

We do have people that have done some of what they're on their own, but then they get to a point of a lot of people have a lot more to manage. They have multiple accounts, multiple places. Those can be taxed differently. They can have four or five different kind of streams of income and they're all taxed differently. As far as a coordination goes, not everybody wants that service but we're finding more and more want that as they're in retirement.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and how do you implement that? Is that you meet every so often on a scheduled basis. What does that look like in real life?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so typically if it's a new relationship, there's a lot of work to work through initially and lay out a plan and then it really depends on the situation. So sometimes it's a couple times a year, sometimes it's more. It depends on the client, what the needs are, what we're working on. Sometimes they'll go and we're smooth going. Certainly, tax time they've got to gather their tax stuff and so forth. But we do a lot of planning where we clients know where they're going to land from a tax perspective. It's still a deadline, so it depends on the client.

Speaker 1:

And at this point, here we are in 2025, after COVID. Are you finding that more people? You're working with people across the country. Is it more locals in your office?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we're finding, actually, that we are working with more people Zoom and across the country. So we are not state specific. So we certainly meet people face to face as well, but technology has brought this on. And then the services the services that we provide, if they're searching out that for a service One of the things, paul, I always tell people in my seminars and others when I ask people if you have a relationship with an advisor, when's the last time they asked for your tax return? And almost everybody says they've never asked for my tax return, then you really don't have a comprehensive advisor, because there's no way they can give you comprehensive advice without having your tax return. And so we find people that want to have that kind of relationship and make sure they're making good decisions.

Speaker 1:

Continuing, a couple of questions. Back in the book, you speak about something that you describe as the window of opportunity between retirement and what's called RMDs, or required minimum distributions, and so why is this window of opportunity so important?

Speaker 2:

The window of opportunity is this so if you're upon retirement, let's just say 65. Why is this window of opportunity so important? The window of opportunity is this so if you're upon retirement, let's just say 65. So between age 65 and if you're required minimum distribution age is 73. You've got those eight years before you're forced out minimums out of your retirement plans. Maybe you haven't drawn Social Security yet because you're not at full retirement age, which for most people now is 67, in Social Security. So you've got this opportunity where we see often, where income, taxable income drops off, that doesn't mean they don't have assets and places to take it from, but there's taxable income that drops off substantially. So you're in a much lower bracket for a period of time and the opportunity becomes what's the IRA money? What's the retirement money going to grow to? What's that projected? What are those required distributions projected at? Should we do some balancing there, taking money out even if it's not needed for income at a lower bracket?

Speaker 1:

It's that balloon that you were speaking of it's growing.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, exactly, and that's the way we're saving money. 25, 30 years ago, 401ks really didn't exist and people had pension, and the good part is that people have done and the people we work with they've done a good job of saving. The markets have cooperated over the years and so this now balloon has gotten to a size and now they have, or will have, a tax problem based on distribution. So you're in low tax, potentially low tax brackets. You've got this opportunity. Before then, uncle Sam forces minimums out. You certainly would not wait till after 70 for Social Security because they pay you no more. So that's the window of opportunity from retirement up to required mental distribution age.

Speaker 1:

Okay, very cool. I talked to a lot of financial professionals. I don't think I've heard it described so specifically with that much clarity, so it's interesting to know. So in the book you share a story about someone named Claire and I know that we're keeping names separate for confidentiality. In the story with Claire, you saved her over $31,000 in healthcare before Medicare. So tell us about that. How is that possible? What did you do?

Speaker 2:

Obviously, prior to 65, there is no Medicare. So oftentimes people initially, when they come to us, say I got to work till 65 because I need healthcare. Well, there's now what's the opportunity for folks to buy on the marketplace that's often referred to as Obamacare.

Speaker 1:

Which is expensive.

Speaker 2:

That's what the thought is. It can be expensive. However, if your income stays below a certain level, then you get subsidies, and so what happens is that sometimes we can manage someone retiring prior to 65, keeping their income that's reported below a threshold so that they get a subsidy, and oftentimes a substantial subsidy, so that then when they get to Medicare, of course they're on Medicare. You could have a lot of assets, but what shows up and where do you take it from and what's taxable? So in that situation which we've done a lot and we manage a lot of these is people need to think about that as they're saving, because if they're saving in a place that will be 100% taxable when they retire, they may not be able to get the subsidies, versus if they diversified their saving strategy, they could tap a different bucket that would be less taxable. Yeah, we've done that a lot and it really is helpful for somebody that, okay, it's ready, it's time to go, I've got enough money, want healthcare, and so it's a great way to bridge the gap between retirement and Medicare.

Speaker 1:

Do you find that a lot of people wait until 65 to retire for the reasons of Medicare? When you discuss this concept with them, Do you find that people start making decisions to perhaps retire earlier? Or what's the reaction that you see as you discuss these things with people?

Speaker 2:

Once we have this discussion and the plan shows, they have enough money. So it's just a matter of how do we proportion it out? We've had many times where clients are here whether they're new, or we've been working with them, but a new client and can I do new? Or we've been working with them but a new client and can I do it or not? And we tell them you can do this and we're going to help you through this, and they literally will turn in their notice, sometimes the next day or the next week, knowing that they can do it. And I tell people if you have enough assets and you've done a good enough job and you have the ability to utilize what's out there, the law, what's the subsidies, let's do it. Don't be miserable at what you're doing just because of that.

Speaker 1:

Another question and I think we've touched upon this a little bit, but I'll ask you is that you use the term silos in the book and you talk about the concept of breaking down silos in financial planning. Can you help explain what you mean by that?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, the silos could be. You have insurance and it's siloed with insurance or an estate. So when you go to and get your estate done, right there's a lot of great estate planning attorneys, but it's often estate siloed. I've had situations that people got their estate done and the attorney never asked about, never gathered a net worth statement, they never asked about their financial assets Tax. We talked about that, so that's siloed. So really, what we're doing is we're looking across channels, right, not being siloed, and saying if we do this, how does it affect this and this?

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

Often advisors are challenged with giving advice on Social Security because you don't get paid for it. Yeah, again, these silos versus working together and bringing it together was very important.

Speaker 1:

And that essentially, I mean the overarching theme is the idea behind the book, which is your personal CFO and, additionally, the concept of the family office is that you bring all of these things under one roof so that you don't have these silos that don't really serve your best interests.

Speaker 2:

Exactly.

Speaker 1:

All right. What I love about your book is that you take these financial concepts, but you do a great job of telling stories to make them more relatable to everyday people. And so in the book, you tell a heartbreaking story about a man named Henry again, privacy, not his real name who lost $100,000 in annual pension income. And so, whether it's him or just what do you see when it comes to people such as Henry, making mistakes with their planning?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we've had some sad cases. This one was certainly a sad case and this was prior to us getting introduced to him. And so him and his wife both were going to retire and he was pretty much a do-it-yourselfer and he thought he was making good decisions and his wife had a really good pension. And they decided that instead of having the pension to have a benefit for the spouse, she would just take life only, which means if she passes away he has no pension. And so they made that decision and really no planning at all, just saying we want the most money, and unfortunately she became ill and passed away shortly after retirement. All of those years put into the work, the hard work, and she got very little. Yeah, and If we would have been introduced to them earlier, I believe we would have been able to advise them as to what the best decision is. But you know, when you get into the higher dollar amounts over time, you cannot project life expectancy. That's where really professional, experienced advice can help you make those right decisions.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, do you find that there's a pattern or anything? When it comes to DIYers or do-it-yourselfers, when they come to realize on their own accord that it makes sense to start working with someone like yourself, do you see any through lines or patterns there?

Speaker 2:

One is it just gets too large for them to do it. We work with a lot of professionals doctors, business owners, successful entrepreneurs, as well as pre-retired and retirees and so they've been successful in their own, but they in a lot of really smart people. But they also realize this is not their, this is not their forte. Probably if they could spend the time hours on it that they could do it. So a lot of it is how do they keep up? We do this hours and hours a week and we have trouble keeping up with all the tax law changes that have happened over the last just handful of years. There's really no way someone could keep up with them and hold down a career and understand them and how to integrate. So the whole thing about the personal CFO and the mountain analogy, paul is, it's just gotten way more complex.

Speaker 1:

I would imagine that a wire do-it-yourselfer generally does it because they think I don't want to pay fees, I want to save money. I can do this myself. But to what you're just saying, it could be the opposite. Right, it could be Henry or others that you could be actually costing yourself potentially a lot of money and benefits.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely. We do a lot of tax mitigation strategies, which means mitigate your tax Not talking about saving in a 401k and deferring tax, talking about reducing your tax bill now this year, and we continue to look for those strategies in the tax code that allow people to reduce tax this year Someone that's a do-it-yourselfer. You're just not going to run across those and or have the access to them. Yeah, so oftentimes, and what we get compensated to help people, oftentimes we can actually save them more than what our cost is.

Speaker 1:

I find that's. I think it's underappreciated, right. So, since I've been working with an advisor myself, I find one of the best things is that I don't make short-term emotional decisions right. It's my money, obviously, but I also value the support that I get from an advisor. It's almost a sounding board, it's accountability, it's just a check on making impulsive emotional decisions which, just from my own experience, I didn't fully appreciate until I began engaging an advisor.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's. A great point is that the worst decisions is to make financial decisions based on emotion. Helping people see it is a big value add.

Speaker 1:

Which is hard not to do because money is inherently emotional and so it's very hard to not make emotional decisions good or bad. But just as I'll do this but putting the brakes on it, pausing and being a little more reflective is definitely a good thing- yeah, absolutely. So, as we start to wrap up, is there any question that I haven't asked you, that you'd like to share, anything that's important to you that we haven't talked about?

Speaker 2:

No, I think that the question a lot of times is in retirement there's simplification. That's another reason as the personal CFO kind of especially as people get into retirement initially, if they want to travel and see grandkids and have flexibility and freedom, simplification is key and so that's very helpful for a lot of our clients to know that it's all under one roof. And it's going to be even more of a key, as I said, because of the complexities of navigating their downward climb on the mountain in retirement.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I would imagine when it comes to couples, that's even more important because if, traditionally or whatever, maybe the man is a little bit more engaged in the finances and then he passes away as I understand, 80% of men die married and 80% of women outlive them, and if the surviving spouse is now suddenly thrust into having to understand these things, I can imagine the benefit of just seamlessly working with someone like yourself.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and that's a great point. We do have a lot of people that we've started to work with over the years and, yeah, they want help immediately, but they're also thinking about they got nudged from the spouse. Right, I want to have a relationship, so if something happens to you, I know who to go to, because, unfortunately, a lot of times, if they go somewhere, they may get misled, may get missold something they shouldn't own, and so that is another important piece.

Speaker 1:

It's almost protection for them. You may not be always making the best decisions as we age.

Speaker 2:

Exactly, and the kids the adult kids right at the time would be boy. They just feel better. We meet them often and they're not in town or they're not around them, but they feel better that mom or dad has a resource that they can rely on so that they're making the good decisions.

Speaker 1:

One of the things I hear which to me sounds counterintuitive, but I guess I understand it is that oftentimes the folks you know who have saved been great savers their whole life and they've accumulated a lot of money and they're not going to spend all their money down. One of the things that I understand that they are sometimes challenged with is actually learning how to spend more money and enjoying the actual money that they've accumulated. Do you have any perspective on that?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's true. Sometimes they've got plenty and every situation is different. Some are very charitably inclined, some of them want to have it to their kids or grandkids while they're living. You know, the challenge is what are you going to need later in life? You can have health care costs with long-term care costs and so forth skyrocket very quickly. But typically they got there for a reason they did well, made good decisions with their money, and now it's just about making sure they've got enough and then passing it on the most efficiently.

Speaker 1:

If readers, if someone were to take one key message from your book and there's multiple important messages but if they were to take one key message from your book, what would you like that to be?

Speaker 2:

I'd really like them to think about retirement's different than 25 years ago, than your parents or your grandparents. It is going to get more complex Retirement plans, iras, 401ks and so forth in the United States right now is at about $40 trillion that is yet to be taxed, so there are laws that have changed in the recent years to help push that money out sooner. So people have much larger accounts, which is a good thing, but from a tax perspective, so I'd like to take them out. That the planning side is not necessarily will you have enough. Often the people we work with mostly they've got enough. It's now being the most efficient with what you have. And look, you can. You have two choices with your estate you can give it to the ones you love and care about, or you can give it to the IRS, uncle Sam, probate, court costs and so have you ever had someone say I want to give it to Uncle Sam?

Speaker 1:

No, where can our listeners learn more about you?

Speaker 2:

Hilltop Wealth and Tax Solutions or get a copy of your book. Yeah, so they can get a copy of the book. They simply go to hireapersonalcfocom On there. They can get access to the book. If they want to find out more, we do a 15-minute introductory call with one of our team members. Find out more about them. They can find out a little bit about us, and then we determine whether or not we think it would go to an initial discussion with a wealth manager and if we can't help you, we'll let people know that.

Speaker 1:

Who makes a good fit, Aside from income and assets and things like that that make a good fit, but just from a personality cycle, however you define it, who makes a good fit and who doesn't make a good fit.

Speaker 2:

I think one is advisor receptive. So advisor receptive, someone that wants to take advice right, and that's a good fit. And then we fit into categories, as I said pre-retired five years or less, typically, and retirees, medical doctors and medical professionals, and then entrepreneurs. Maybe they're in a point now where they're starting to think about selling the business or just making their business grow further and they need the financial on the team. Those really are the people that we can really make a big impact in their lives.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, fantastic, I've enjoyed the conversation. Congratulations on the book and thanks so much for your time today. Thanks, paul, all right, bye for now.