FAQs

There are 3 ways that we serve our clients and those 3 ways are:

• BUILDING a Custom Tax Strategy Roadmap
• IMPLEMENTING that Custom Tax Strategy Roadmap
• PROACTIVELY PRESERVING your tax savings through regular “tax tune ups” designed to maintain the current strategies and implement new strategies as they are appropriate.

To answer the question of “how much do your services cost” we’d like to give you that answer specific to each of the 3 service levels.

To get answers to those questions, we invite you to check out the FAQ’s that follow.

Building A Custom Tax Strategy Roadmap: Every client that chooses to work with MakeTaxesFair.com starts with the introductory service of BUILDING your CUSTOM Tax Strategy Roadmap.

With this service offering, we uncover your custom path for you to get out of the wasteland of overpaying your taxes.

The investment in this service is a flat $1,500 with the guarantee that if we do not show you 5x that investment in tax savings that we will REFUND you the $1,500 making this a completely risk free investment.

And there is no commitment beyond the Tax Strategy Roadmap.

After your Tax Strategy Meeting where we DELIVER the roadmap to you, you can choose to execute on your own, choose our DIY support system, or enlist our aid fully with our Full Service Implementation option.

Implementing Your Tax Strategy Roadmap: The second way we serve our clients is we provide a custom IMPLEMENTATION service of that roadmap. With the Full Service Implementation route, we work with you to execute and apply the tax savings strategies found in your Custom Roadmap.

The implementation phase of our unique system is no longer than 3 months.

In one short quarter we work with you to fully execute and capture those tax savings.  The answer to the question of how much is the investment in this phase or service is this:

It depends.

Our fee for services in the implementation phase is really driven by several factors such as:

• How many businesses you have
• How many owners there are
• How many strategies need to be implemented with you

With each of these factors there are considerations for both complexity of the case and time that needs to be spent with our clients to properly implement the strategies to not just save money on taxes now, but to lay the foundation for tax savings for years to come!

We do not base our fee for this service on any sort of percentage of tax savings. That is called contingency pricing and this is considered to be an illegal activity by the IRS.

So, if the investment for the implementation of our services “depends” then how do we determine how much this service costs?

Well, when we create your CUSTOM Tax Strategy Roadmap (see the first service we offer above), we deep dive into your business and life so that we can cross reference your information with the rules of the US Tax Code. This enables us to not only determine which strategies you are eligible for that you aren’t currently using but to also calculate exactly how much money can be saved.  

The outcome is a clear understanding of the work that needs to be done to implement tax strategies for you and your business.

That clear understanding also allows us to give you that custom quote for your Implementation services that are needed based on the amount of meetings and hours of work.

Our implementation fees for this service are based on:

• How many tax strategies need to be implemented
• How many of those strategies are baseline strategies, intermediate level, or advanced level complexity
• How many businesses you have

If you’re looking for a range for budgetary purposes, the simple cases (1 business, 1 owner with no other ventures such as real estate, etc.) start at $7,500 and our most complex cases can be upwards of $75,000 or more.

Keep in mind that in those cases our fee for the $1,500 Custom Roadmap is applied toward the cost of implementation support.

And there still is an ROI focus for you as a business owner.

In the case of the $7,500 investment for implementation, that business owner is realizing $15,000 to $50,000 in tax savings.

In the case of the higher investment in implementation services of $75,000 that client is realizing tax savings of $250,000 plus!

The bottom line is that an investment in the Make Taxes Fair Implementation services will increase your bottom line because of the tax savings that are being achieved.

Maintaining Your Tax Savings With A Proactive Approach: Once a client has exited the Implementation phase of their tax planning engagement, we move into the “Proactive Preservation” phase.

Our unique approach goes above and beyond what most business owners now experience from their current CPA. Your tax returns still need to be filed and this is absolutely handled by the Make Taxes Fair team as part of this phase.

However, we go above and beyond your current CPA experience by:

• Conducting an annual- beginning of year meeting with all clients (held in January)
• Administering an annual “How Audit Proof Are You?” analysis
• Presetting your tax strategy meetings for the year at the beginning of the year
• Initiating our unique Audit Monitoring Service at the beginning of each year
• Delivering monthly touchpoints through our unique Tax Strategy FOCUS System
• A quarterly “CEO Club” webinar featuring industry experts to help build your business

These elements all combine to deliver an experience that is both consistent and intentional in helping us stay connected to you and your business throughout the year to not just maintain but Proactively Preserve your tax savings as your business grows and evolves.

The investment in the Proactive Preservation phase depends strictly on how many tax filings you need completed.

This service is billed monthly starting in the first month immediately following the end of the Tax Strategy Implementation phase (if you recall from the prior FAQ’s, that Implementation phase is a 2-3 month delivery timeline.)

We invoice for this service monthly as we are delivering tax savings information to you monthly, meeting with you as frequently as once a month, and delivering to you the quarterly touchpoints in the form of tax strategy meetings. So our payment schedule matches the services we provide for a proactive approach.

Most people are already paying their CPA $2,000 or more for just the tax filings with little to no execution for tax planning to help their clients pay less in taxes. The majority of CPAs and accountants are simply acting in the role of “Happy Historians”. They are not taking an active approach and they do not have their business structured in a way to be able to deliver that to you.

You deserve better than a “Happy Historian” to be guiding you the navigation of the tax mess and we have built our entire model around “doing business on purpose” as we say to guide you and support you on a consistent basis during the year.

If you are ready to get your CUSTOM TAX STRATEGY ROADMAP and see what tax savings can be had for you, we invite you to start now at www.MakeTaxesFair.com/get-my-roadmap

The truth about business and taxes is that things are always changing. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of events that happen to all of us every year that result in either more tax being charged or an opportunity to further pay less tax. Here is a very short list of just a few examples of the events I’m talking about.

1. Getting married
2. Having a child
3. Buying a business
4. Selling a business
5. Death of a parent or spouse
6. Major medical expense
7. Moving your personal residence to another state
8. Moving your business to another state
9. A charitable donation
10. Buying or selling stock or crypto

The reason we work with you in an ongoing fashion is because we have spent tens of thousands of hours studying the tax code and the more than 430 tax strategies within it to know every single one of these events and how they affect tax. The highest and best use of your time is to be an expert in managing and growing your business and NOT being an expert in taxes.

This is why our clients partner with us. We communicate with you consistently during the year so that we are aware of everything happening in your life and ensure that none of the new opportunities to further reduce your tax liability pass you by.

This is the element of the service model that the majority of CPAs and accountants miss that results in their clients overpaying the government by thousands of dollars year over year.

We execute the delivery of this through our Tax Strategy FOCUS System to ensure that we are capturing the new strategies that could be available to you and your business while maintaining the strategies that are currently in place to keep your hard earned profits in your business and family where they belong.

Tax preparation or “tax compliance” is simply the process of reporting history. This is why we say that most accountants and CPAs are stuck in the role of the “happy historian”. They are just taking the records you bring them from the past year and checking some boxes on the forms that get filed to the IRS.

Doing the work of compliance or tax reporting is not easy work. But when you’re doing the work of simply reporting and putting the right numbers and information in the right boxes on the tax return there isn’t any proactivity being done. In fact, the year has closed and the time for action to reduce the tax damage has passed.

Tax Strategy or Tax Advisory is different in the sense that there is a proactive approach that is being taken. At MakeTaxesFair.com we work with our clients in a systematic way to fully assess your tax situation and make sure that you are optimized in every area of your business from a tax efficiency perspective.

The starting point for this is the creation of a CUSTOM TAX STRATEGY ROADMAP.
Building your Custom Tax Strategy Roadmap gives you the path to freedom from large tax bills.

The implementation of that roadmap takes place through regularly scheduled meetings and action items from those meetings to ensure that you take action to proactively change your tax situation.

No, the creation of a Tax Strategy Roadmap is a standalone service. The Implementation services for your Tax Strategy Roadmap are also a standalone service. Once you have implemented your Tax Strategy Roadmap, then the Maintenance phase of the tax strategy does include the tax return preparation.

At MakeTaxesFair.com we believe in Transformational services and not just Transactional services. If you are simply looking for someone to prepare your tax returns without the proactive tax strategy or tax advisory services, then we are respectfully not the right fit for you. We believe that you can do better things with your money than the government, and foundationally, we work with all of our clients in the Tax Strategy phase before anything else. 

The Tax Strategy FOCUS System is our proprietary system to deliver tax savings information to you on a monthly basis.

What this consists of is:

A monthly newsletter that is FOCUSED on the 2 things that every business owner should be focused on that month to optimize taxes

A monthly Tax Strategy FOCUS Webinar where we dive into those topics on a deeper level to help business owners fully understand the strategy and take action

Those elements of the Tax Strategy FOCUS System are available to the entire world at no cost. We believe that “Friends Don’t Let Friends Overpay The Government” and delivering tax saving strategies to our friends in the entrepreneurial space is incredibly important to us.

For our clients, as part of the Tax Strategy FOCUS System, we also deliver these additional elements as part of the system:

• A one to one follow up call for our clients regarding the monthly FOCUS topics (this is booked at the discretion of our client and if they feel that they are stuck and need additional support)
• Access to the recordings of the FOCUS webinar
• An invitation to our CEO Club events
• Access to the recordings of the CEO Club events

The Tax Strategy FOCUS System is built on the CLEAR EDGE Framework and is designed with your busy life in mind to help you triage and focus on what matters most to your business right now as the year progresses.

To sign up for the FREE elements of the Tax Strategy FOCUS System or to share this with the world (remember, Friends Don’t Let Friends Overpay The Government) you can do so at www.MakeTaxesFair.com/system 

The CLEAR EDGE Framework is the MakeTaxesFair.com proprietary framework through which we examine and execute tax strategy and planning for our clients.

The pillars in the CLEAR EDGE Framework are:

• Credits- Tax credits are often missed and we identity your eligible credits to pay less in taxes
• Legal structure- Your legal structure impacts your taxes and we help you optimize this pillar
• Employees- We help you hire, retain, and reward employees in tax efficient ways
• Accumulation of Wealth- Growing your wealth in a tax optimized way is vital
• Retirement planning- Or what we call “future planning” is also vital for tax efficiency

• Exit planning- Selling a business and other appreciated assets can be done in tax efficient ways
• Deduction optimization- We help you find all the missing deductions that you should be taking
• Getting organized- Organization can bring tax savings and business efficiency
• Efficiency- Applying the CLEAR EDGE Framework will give you a level of efficiency in your taxes that you have never seen before.

The CLEAR EDGE Framework is the foundation for how we serve our clients and combined with our Tax Strategy FOCUS System comes together to provide a clear path for our clients to have 

Let’s connect! We’re accepting inquiries from potential clients now and you can book a time to connect with our team using the links on our website at www.MakeTaxesFair.com

We encourage you to check out the other FAQs as well as we have worked very hard to provide transparency about the investment in our services as well as answering other questions about the process in working with us to transform your tax outcome.

Our entire process is designed to be unique and proactive. We are geared to create a transformational outcome rather than engage with you in a transactional process. And we welcome the feedback from our clients and prospective clients regarding the experience in working with us to consistently be improving in how we service our clients and community.

What makes us unique is the fact that we are proactive in every way in our relationship with you. What we mean by that is we are asking you a lot of questions to seek out the information in your life and business that works for tax strategy. We then uniquely analyze your information in context of our proprietary framework to   plug your information into our system and  bring you solutions to your tax problems without you having to ask.

We also do this with our Audit Protection system and continue this trend throughout the year to make sure there is never an opportunity to save on tax and be compliant that passes you by. In every sense we are seeking out solutions for you and bringing you answers before you ever have to ask for them.

Taxes are incredibly complex and can definitely be a scary thing. After all, we are talking about the Federal and State Governments and YOUR MONEY here.
And this is why we seek to provide education and transparency around who we are, who we serve, and how we serve you!

We invite you to check out our RESOURCES page on our website as there are many tax strategy pieces of training and playbooks available there.

We also have built the process of the Tax Strategy engagement process intentionally to begin with a Custom Tax Strategy Roadmap (see the FAQ above regarding what it costs to work with MakeTaxesFair.com).

The creation of a Custom Tax Strategy Roadmap is a standalone service  offering with a solid Money Back Guarantee (we find you a minimum of 5x savings or you get a refund and you get to keep the Tax Strategy Roadmap). By providing this Custom Tax Strategy Roadmap and giving you the elements of tax savings, we find that this helps to build trust and transparency.

In our experience, the vast majority of CPAs and accountants are stuck in the rut of just filing tax returns for their clients. They are busy business owners themselves and most lack a system to help their clients in a proactive manner.

It’s also our experience that the vast majority of CPAs give advice such as “put money into a 401k” or “buy more equipment for your business” and don’t go much further than that for any proactive tax planning.

While those two things are components of tax planning (Retirement Planning and Deduction Optimization specifically) that only scratches the surface of what can and should be done to optimize your taxes and legitimately pay less to the government.
At www.MakeTaxesFair.com we examine every client through the CLEAR EDGE Framework.

This is:

• Credit optimization
• Legal structure optimization
• Employees
• Accumulation of Wealth
• Retirement Planning
• Exit planning
• Deduction optimization
• Getting organized
• Efficiency is obtained!

Using this framework, we conduct a Tax Savings Assessment for all of our clients to ensure that each of these pillars is optimized and not neglected to uncover tax savings for you.

At the end of the day, if you have not examined your taxes to determine if you could save 30, 40, or 50% (maybe even more) on your taxes, then you are wasting money on taxes and neglecting a potential source of what we call “untapped profits” that you could be keeping in your bank account.

We understand the value that we bring to business owners, and we can measure that value in terms of tax savings!

If you are satisfied with where you are at and do not believe you are overpaying the government then there is no need to make a change. 

The truth is that anyone can get audited at any time.  As far as advanced tax strategy goes the answer is still “no” you aren’t more likely to get audited.

The term “advanced” simply indicates a level of sophistication and technical difficulty that is involved in using these strategies properly.

However, that doesn’t make them dangerous. We get to know your business intimately and gain an understanding of what opportunities are available to optimize your taxes by simply applying the IRS Tax Law to your situation.

We understand the rules and guidelines of the tax system and guide you to implement those effectively and legitimately.

The strategies we implement wouldn’t be of value to you if they couldn’t be done legitimately. We make it a priority to make sure that whatever strategies we recommend for you, they are done properly and are a fit for your financial life.

An audit isn’t something that is within anyone’s control and is completely a decision of the IRS. Our goal is that in the event an audit does happen to you, you are prepared with all of the proper reporting and documentation so you can just hand it over to the agent and go about your business rather than scrambling to find information for them and feel like your time is being wasted.

If you want to know just how well you’d fare in an audit, take our “HOW AUDIT PROOF ARE YOU?” quiz.

No, you aren’t putting your business partners in danger by using these tax strategies. Your financial life takes everyone you do business with into account and that includes spouses and business partners. Everyone that is a part of your financial life gets considered when determining which tax strategies are a fit for you to use.

If you want to know just how well you’d fare in an audit, take our “HOW AUDIT PROOF ARE YOU?” quiz.

The answer is “yes” we can do that but it’s a matter of figuring out if it’s financially viable or not. Going back and opening up a previous tax return is not a small task. Think of it like tearing down an existing building and then constructing a new one in that same spot. We have to go back and analyze the previous filing and then make necessary adjustments and file it again. This just simply means that there has to be a significant savings to be had in order for this process to make financial sense. However, if we analyze the numbers and the savings are significant enough then we can definitely do this

The analysis is included with our paid services and the decision to amend past returns is yours to make

The correct answer is, “Maybe”. It really is true that every single case is unique and we would never recommend any one strategy to someone without first understanding everything we need to know about your business and personal financial life. You could have a friend of the same age, with the same business in the same state as you and that does not automatically qualify the both of you for the same tax strategies. We need to fully understand how your life and business operate and consider multiple factors before making any recommendations.

It’s also important to note that many people execute on tax strategies improperly or fall prey to bad advice for their situation.

The mantra “just because they did it doesn’t mean we should” definitely applies.

What we can guarantee you is that the MakeTaxesFair.com team will guide you through the process to identify the appropriate tax strategies, assist you in applying those strategies legitimately and ultimately TRANSFORMING your tax situation to obtain optimization.

If you’re curious to know what strategies are the right ones for you and exactly how much tax money you can save, then find out here. It’s a FREE analysis for you!

Everyone always talks about the tax laws changing, and it’s true, they do, but most of the time the changes aren’t as widespread and significant, or as frequent as most people think. Most of the time it’s just a piece of the law that changes and many of the “baseline tax strategies” that are deployed in a tax plan are time tested and have not changed for years.

While changes in tax laws are something that are not in our control, being in the know and having awareness of changes that are coming in the near future is in our control. We keep up to date with the current laws and any future changes that have been announced. 

At the end of the day there is only so much that is in our control and we make sure that if it is possible to control then we do that. As for the rest of it, we don’t let it stop us from moving forward. 

Not doing a tax strategy because the tax laws MIGHT change is like not getting that piece of software that you really need for your business but you’re always waiting for the next update before you buy it because you don’t want to have an old version. 

The truth is that if you are always waiting then you are doing just that and staying in place. Not having the software will cost you far more than getting it and having to update a few months later. 

Same goes for tax strategy. Not doing it because laws might change will cost you far more money than doing it and having to make adjustments to law changes several months down the road.

Yes! The answer is yes because taxes are just a math problem and the tax strategies that we use are according to the US tax code and WILL save you the money that we tell you. 

It’s not a ballpark figure and it isn’t wishful thinking. As long as the work is performed correctly and follows the guidance we give then it will result in the savings that we propose.

If you’re curious to know what strategies are the right ones for you and exactly how much tax money you can save, then find out here. It’s a FREE analysis for you!

No, we are not attorneys and when it comes to legal matters we will always give a recommendation to an attorney when we have one for the job or simply advise you to use your own counsel. 

As a business owner you know that the lines between accounting, legal, HR, finance, retirement planning, and many other areas of expertise can sometimes be blurred or intertwined. Rest assured that we are confident in what we know and whenever a topic of discussion overflows into another area such as legal we will never guess at the answer. We will always make sure we get accurate information before moving forward.