Hi,
Only 47% of financial advisors actually offer tax planning as part of their service, according to a 2025 industry study. For the other roughly half, taxes simply aren’t part of the conversation, even though it’s one of the biggest controllable costs in your entire financial picture. So let’s be straight with you about what that gap actually costs.
Does that gap really cost you money?
- Not every advisor needs to be a tax expert, and plenty of good investment decisions get made without one in the room
- In the short term, a well-chosen fund or a solid allocation can still perform fine even without tax coordination
- That said, anyone ignoring taxes in your long-term strategy is leaving money on the table
So what is the real risk?
The missing conversation isn’t the danger by itself. It’s the warning light. It shows up as a steady, quiet drag on your return that compounds for decades, because taxes touch almost every decision you make with your money:
- Investors in funds without tax management lost an average of 2.14% of their annual return to taxes, compared to 0.92% in tax-managed strategies, a real gap of over a full percentage point every year
- Across the industry, that adds up to an estimated $600 billion a year in unclaimed “tax alpha,” money that could be saved but usually isn’t
- On a $1,000,000 portfolio, even the lower end of that gap is $10,000 or more a year quietly leaving the table
Who tends to feel this most:
- Anyone with investments and a tax preparer who’ve never spoken – nobody is checking whether a trade, a conversion, or a withdrawal actually makes sense on the tax side before it happens
- Business owners with both personal and business accounts in the mix – the more moving pieces, the more coordination actually matters
- Anyone making or considering a big financial move – a Roth conversion, a large capital gain, or a business sale is exactly where uncoordinated advice gets expensive
- High earners in a high tax bracket – the bigger your tax bill, the bigger the dollar impact of a 1% drag
The people who keep the most of what they earn aren’t always the best stock pickers. They’re the ones whose investment plan and tax plan were actually built together. That is not luck. That is coordination.
Because the tax side and the investment side of your life usually sit with different professionals who never talk to each other, so no one catches the tax impact of a move until it lands on a return, and by then it’s too late to do anything about it. That’s exactly where things slip through the cracks.
That’s why we built a team that does both – our CPAs and our in-house, fiduciary Certified Financial Planner working from the same plan, so your investments and your taxes are never looked at separately again. Here’s exactly what that looks like:
- A year-round strategy – built around your income, business, and goals, and kept current as life changes
- Year-round proactive planning – ongoing moves, including capital gains timing and Roth conversion analysis, to cut what you owe instead of scrambling once a year
- A CFP on your plan, not just your portfolio – checking that your allocation actually matches your goals and your timeline, not a generic model
- Annual review – so your tax plan stays aligned with your portfolio as the markets and the tax laws shift
- Personal and business tax returns – prepared based on that same plan, by the same team
Reply to this email by Monday and we’ll set up a free 15 minute session with our CPA and our CFP together. Bring your most recent tax return and a recent investment statement or two, so we can show you exactly where coordination could be saving you money, not generalities.
Sincerely,
—
George Dimov, CPA
Licensed and Insured
(833) 829-1120 toll free
(212) 994-8081 Fax
www.dimovtax.com