Optimizing Your Money So YOU Get To Keep It
What is your most important asset? Is it the money in your savings account? Your properties? For our featured presenter, it’s different. And it’s the most critical element on this particular timeline, in this particular universe. We all have this asset, but what you do with it and how you use it has a direct impact on retaining what you earn. The easiest way to improve your finances is to hire Relax Tax.
Relax Tax will help you retain more of what you earn. It's why they focus on leverage, tax, insurance, and debt because that's the magic lever. People who work with this stuff make it complex on purpose and fight with each other because they're all trying to optimize their dollars, not your dollars. Relax Tax focuses on optimizing your dollars and it just works magically. They start with what you earn and work from there, and that's the math.
Time Importance
Dennis believes that time is the most critical asset we have and math is universal so those are the two principles on everything that we drive everything upon. There are two overriding principles: that time is the only most efficient asset that you'll ever have and that math is absolute.
What Dennis does at Relax Tax is very simple: they apply math to the fundamental core principles. “We have a guarantee that we are going to be able to make it so that you retain more of what you earn by applying these simple principles.”
When it comes down to running and retaining more of what you earn, it's all built on the fact that you need to have liquidity. You need to be able to pay your bills when you need to. It’s the most important piece of your financial life and your business. After that, there's a level of physical assets that are required. You need a car to get to work, you need certain things. Then this is where the leverage comes in the tax insurance and from there you want to have your retirement savings and then you have your growth income.
Elements of a Tax Return
What are taxes? Taxes are just the government going back and asking you for an annual report on these particular areas. It's not an accident, it's not a coincidence. The government is just trying to understand what you have in your physical, financial situation and they're just looking for a report on it, that's all taxes is and a reconciliation.
Relax Tax’s Guarantee
When Dennis meets with a client they establish their baseline. They make sure that they understand where the clients are today and what their goals are. That’s the Relax Tax’s guarantee, it is 100% based on where you are today and at the end of the year you'll be in a better place than where you were.
People make this stuff a lot more complex than it has to be but it's that simple. Dennis takes your tax return, they go through every element of your tax return and give you suggestions. They don't just come back and look at these documents that you're required to provide and just blindly look at the numbers. To understand the situation, they ask questions like: “Where did these numbers come from? How are you getting to these numbers? Is that optimized?”
You won’t get some complicated spreadsheet, though they do have a spreadsheet version for the people who want to get in the weeds. What you’ll get is a summary of your next steps of what they suggest you do to get closer to where you want to go. Where you want to go is what you told Dennis at the initial meeting. They'll get you where you want to go. It's fundamental, it's math, and it's saving you time. Everything they do is looking to save you time because again, time is your most valuable asset.
Client Portal App
They also have a mobile app and a portal. All you need to do is load all your documents in. If you have a document or have a question, just toss it into the portal and then Dennis and his team will address it.
Income Tax
This is where 99% of people think and focus on taxes. People focus on the letters and the numbers on the forms but these forms that the government gives you are actually reports of your income and where it's coming from. You need the said forms in doing the taxes by default and Dennis addresses each one of them. While doing that, they show you actual items on how you can improve, what the forms are telling you, what are the things you can address. Moreover, Relax Tax does this throughout the year, not just every April 15th. In fact, they don’t take clients in April because it's way too late. Relax Tax help and work with you throughout the year.
Expenses and Its Categories
The other thing is your expenses. There are deductible and non-deductible expenses but the government breaks them down into general categories such as Medical, Homes, Auto, Taxes, Utilities, and Others, and Relax Tax addresses each one of them. The government has this for a reason and that is because it's fundamental. These are the areas that impact everything.
Insurance That You Need
The next step is getting into your insurance, there's insurance that's deductible and there's insurance that's not deductible. There are different types of insurance but you have to have these insurance policies because these insurance policies secure the liquidities. Some are legally required and some are just logically required. If you don't want to pay too much for the insurance that you have, Dennis and his team is going to review the different insurances that you have and give you suggestions on how to save on them, do different things to address it better, and everything comes back with your actionable items.
Debt And How To Manage It
Not having any debt is not always a good thing. Debt can be a powerful tool. Having too much can be a very bad thing and it's all relative to your situation and where you are. Dennis goes through and tells you your areas of debt, what can you do, how can you improve them, how can you not improve them, and your action items custom to you. “This is what you need to do about your debt and these are the suggestions.”
Assets or Liabilities
A lot of times people don't really truly understand what is an asset and what is a liability. A lot of times they consider their liabilities as assets but in fact, it's really a liability. That's what's consuming a lot of why you're not retaining more of what you earn. Dennis helps you get to your goal by following the format of the tax return and all the things that are part of filing your taxes.
Investments
Investments have to be reported back. Relax Tax will assess all your investment products and tell you what you have, giving you suggestions of what you can do based on the math as fundamental principles. “This is what works, this is what doesn't work and this is where you need to go.”
Financial Hierarchy
It all loops right back to the same place. It all brings you back to where you are now and gives you suggestions. Dennis sits down about four times a year, or three or twice a year depending on your needs. They literally give you a to-do list. A list that applies to multi-multi millionaires and a list that applies to people who are at the poverty level.
Wherever you are on this hierarchy at this time, the goal is to move you up and that's what they do: help clients move up that hierarchy by taking it one step at a time. Going through what you need to do and the next steps that'll get you further where you need to be. And when they’ve exhausted everything, the day they get to a point where there’s nothing left to do, and your situation still hasn’t changed, Relax Tax will fire themselves and you don’t need to pay them.
Relax Tax will help you retain more of what you earn. It's why they focus on leverage, tax, insurance, and debt because that's the magic lever. People who work with this stuff make it complex on purpose and fight with each other because they're all trying to optimize their dollars, not your dollars. Relax Tax focuses on optimizing your dollars and it just works magically. They start with what you earn and work from there, and that's the math.
Their main goal is to help their clients find ways for them to earn more. Because if they earn more and retain more then they're exponentially better off.
What is your payment model? Are you paid for your time or is it based on how much you save?
Dennis: We actually have a subscription. What we do is based on the type of tax return you have. We have a tax prep group because there's people who just want us to do their taxes so we'll just do your taxes if that's what you want. We are selective and limited in the clients that we use. We turn down clients who want to cheat, go do that somewhere else because we just don't do that. The first step is to load up your information into our portal and we have a process in which we go through and our process works and if you don't want to do our process that's wonderful, not everything's right for everybody.
It's a subscription model. So based on the type of tax return you have, our rates are pretty much in line with what a normal tax or less than what most people charge for a tax return. But because we'd have to do this for the tax return anyway so we're really paid. We take it on a monthly basis and we make sure the customer's committed. We get the payments upfront and it's a subscription model because we like to talk about “do you want the person who's going to be after the fact or do you want the person who's there with you all along?” If I'm with you all year round, I don't have any questions when it's time to do your taxes because I know what the answer is.
Workflow Automation
Dennis: “We're really really good at automation. We've automated a lot of this so it already comes back with the information you gave us. If the information isn't there, it'll keep asking you for the information. That's when we start doing the tax return. We've made it efficient for our business to do it and then we pass those savings to you. We don't have big fancy buildings, we are virtual. We cut out all those costs, we have the best software, we have the best tools to do our jobs, we don't have big buildings and we don't have fanciness.”
Positive Feedback from Clients
ABOUT DENNIS HARABIN
I am a CPA obsessed with helping people to retain more of what they earn so that they can pursue their passions. Relax Tax takes a holistic approach to tax planning that makes us more of a Financial Architect than just a Tax Preparer.
Get to know Dennis Harabin more!
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