‘Taxes are part of everything’: Show Me Your Stack

Welcome to “Show Me Your Stack,” a series from Financial Planning in which we interview those who deliver financial advice to learn what tools they rely on to make it happen. Rising client expectations are driving the need for more powerful tech tools, and we’re digging deep to find out why advisors prefer certain solutions.

If financial advisors aren’t involved in tax planning, clients may miss the bigger picture, said Tushar Kumar, co-founder and private wealth advisor at Twin Peaks Wealth Advisors in San Francisco.

Founded a decade ago with his identical twin brother Vishal, the firm now has nine employees, around $410 million in AUM, according to the latest Form ADV, and about 430 clients — 131 of which are high net worth. (The latter is defined as clients with at least $1.1 million in assets managed by the advisor or a net worth exceeding $2.2 million, whether held individually or jointly.)

To best serve clients, Kumar said he offers to meet directly with their CPAs.

“A lot of times, the ideas for tax planning might actually be coming from the advisors or the clients,” he said. “The CPA is the one filing and ultimately signing off on it and making sure that we’re thinking about it properly. But we’ve also found a lot of CPAs … are not proactively bringing the tax planning.”

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When clients already have an existing relationship with a CPA, Kumar said he’s glad to collaborate. Other times their financial situation has grown too complex for a once-a-year filing relationship.

“They might be working with somebody who is just helping them file taxes, but they are not actually providing year-round consulting,” he said.

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In those cases, Twin Peaks can connect clients with one of about six CPAs they work with regularly. 

“There’s a lot of firms out there, good CPAs, that want to take care of their clients, and so they’ll tend to collaborate,” Kumar said.

To prepare for these sorts of ongoing collaborations, Twin Peaks Wealth Advisors also includes tax and estate planning in its tech stack, along with more conventional financial planning tools.

“If you’re an advisor doing financial planning, the taxes are part of everything,” he said.

Scroll down the slideshow to see what Kumar feels are some of the most important pieces of Twin Peaks Wealth Advisors’ tech stack: