Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders, MBA - Interview with Terry Wheeler Founder & CEO of WE Alliance Wealth Advisors Discussing The Tax Blind Spot

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

WE Alliance Wealth Advisors if founded on the belief that an integrated Family Office style approach to wealth planning is the best way to protect and maximize the wealth client families work so hard to accumulate. Combine powerful proactive tax strategies, a powerful system of investing called Defined Outcome Investing, and a Family Centered approach to estate planning to deliver uncommon results while reducing risk for each client family. Founder Terry Wheeler’s book “Laugh When the Market Crashes” is a must read book outlining this investment approach.The firm and its founder traces its roots back over 35 years with its origins beginning at Dean Witter Reynolds. In the 1990s the founder added a law degree focused on tax and estate planning advocacy. The integrated wealth, tax, and estate planning approach now truly sets them apart in a crowded financial planning space.Learn more: https://weriaadvisors.com/Buy the book at www.LaughWhenTheMarketCrashes.comAdvisor Coaching at www.StrategicWealthLegal.comAny opinions, projections, or forward-looking statements expressed herein are solely those of the author, may differ from the views or opinions expressed by WE Alliance Wealth Advisors, and are only for general informational purposes as of the date indicated.All investments involve risk; please consult with a financial advisor prior to investing.Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-terry-wheeler-founder-ceo-of-we-alliance-wealth-advisors-discussing-the-tax-blind-spot

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of Influential Entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have back with this Terry Wheeler, who's founder and CEO of We Alliance wealth advisors, and we'll be talking about the tax blind spot. Terry, welcome back to the program. Hey, I think you're having for having me, Mike. Hey, you're welcome.

And I know that sometimes when you say, you know, like when I say this word, what do you think? I think anytime you hear the word tax, people get a pit in their stomach. So I want to hear all about the tax blind spot because if there are some blind spots, we can realize, uncover, mitigate fix and improve upon regarding taxes. I think anyone would hear that. So talk a little bit about where you start the conversation with your clients in this respect. Yeah. So when we're starting a conversation with clients, first thing that we want to point out is you don't want taxes to drive your portfolio. So there are three key lanes in planning.

One is how you create a good portfolio system, which we talked about in a prior episode with something called defined outcome investing, which is simply a better way to invest for a retiree. That is first. Then you do the tax overlay. Now, when you talk about taxes, it really is true. that it doesn't matter what you make. It's what you keep that matters. So we've got to keep fees to a minimum. Single biggest fee is taxes. So proactive tax planning is insanely powerful because so few people actually know what that is. They think a Roth conversion is the beginning and end of tax planning. And that's barely scratching the surface. So it's, we like to say there's two sets of tax code.

one for those who know and one for those who don't. And that's actually a quote by a guy named Justice Lernid Hand, who was a Supreme Court Justice, I think, in the 1890s. But there truly are two sets of tax codes, and most people use the wrong one. So people might think that, hey, I'm retiring in a year and I've got X number of dollars, right? This big number.

Yay, but they really don't because all of it might not be theirs. They've got that silent partner, right? the government, the tag Uncle Sam, and if it's not been taxed yet in certain accounts, that money that they see on their statement is not theirs. And whatever percent, you know, needs to come off in taxes, that's what they've got. So how do you bring that to their attention? Yeah, we have a nice cartoon that we sometimes put up that is somebody like tapping on your shoulders saying, hey, dad, I need some money.

And it's Uncle Sam taking 40% of your money. So we're in California. In California, if you retire with a $3 million portfolio, there's about $1.2 million of that belongs to taxes. Now, if you do good proactive planning, we can bring that down to a fraction of that. And typical $3 million portfolio, we might pick up easily a half million to a million dollars in savings through lifetime tax planning. So we're not talking about small dollars. It's a big, big difference when you do proactive tax. tax planning. So let's let's talk a little bit about deeper on that because I think when people hear that they go, oh, I've got a tax guy. You know, my tax guy or gal, they do my taxes, but it's

really tax preparation. It's like order taking, fill in the blank like, you know, next please, and they just fill in the blanks versus what you're talking about is not only tax planning, but proactive tax planning. What is that, the contrast there? Yeah, so CPAs can be extremely busy during tax time. They're seeing issues, but they're moving on to the next client constantly because they're in a tough business environment. So we like to bring the CPAs into the planning process, but not during tax time. The planning should be done in the fall, meaning we meet with every client typically from August to November to plan next year's taxes. And we're implementing a lifetime tax plan. So you should have a short-term plan. What are we doing for this year?

an intermediate plan and lifetime plan. And most of our clients who have built wealth, they actually are concerned about the next generation. So we do a multi-generational tax plan. As you go through that spectrum, if you're just worried about this year, you can save some taxes. If you're worried about lifetime,

we can save massive taxes. So ultimately, the goal is to figure out what the client's goals are as far as their time horizon for tax savings. Most common would be lifetime tax savings. and then what level of effort are they willing to put into their tax planning? So there are turnkey strategies that are extremely powerful. For instance, we do what we call a discounted Roth conversion strategy.

So we find people all the time just convert their money and pay the full tax bill. Well, we go through an approach to get rid of 30 to 40% of those taxes when you do the conversion. And that's a gift that keeps on giving over your lifetime where you can pick up a quarter million, half million or more in tax savings just without a loan. it's turnkey. It's easy. But then if we're trying to do a zero tax Roth conversion strategy, it's going to take some effort where we have to do what we call tax stacking, which is really combining more than one strategy together to zero out of tax bill. And it works very effectively if you're willing to put some work into your plan. You know, it's you've said so many things that are better huge, like put some work,

you know, work into your plan. It's your plan, right? So that presupposes you have a plan. And then it's not just inanimate that you set it and forget it. It might take a little bit of work, effort, checking. Huge, huge, huge. One of the things you said, I want to go deeper on multi-generational. I feel like so many people go, I want to retire at X. I want to have Y amount. And that's all they think about is that right there.

But how long are you going to live? You've got to get to and through retirement. But even past that is multi-generational. I think that there's too many people that don't think of what you're talking about there. So I want to go deeper because they go. If I could just retire with two cents to my name, yay, or no, I'm sorry, die with two cents to my name, yay. I made it to retirement. I lived.

I didn't worry, but I have no money left. Well, how about your legacy? How about your next generation? So where does multi-generation come into building that retirement plan? So it depends on the client because some clients do have that bumper sticker that says, I'm spending my children's retirement or my children's inheritance, excuse me. And if that's their goal to die after they spent their last dollar, then the plan should reflect that client's goal. If their goal is to take care of the next generation, which we work with a lot of higher net worth clients, that is part of their goal. So smaller portfolios, their biggest fear is running

out of money. Larger portfolios, their biggest fear is taxes. And then it's how do I take care of the next generation? And ironically, they also worry about outliving their money, but usually that's an easy fix with a large portfolio. So when you get to multi-generational, it has to be part of their goals because if it isn't, you don't need to plan for that. But if it is, we work with a lot of people with large IRAs. So Kaiser physicians, we work with a lot. And they might have a two, three, three, four, five million dollar IRA. Some of our tech clients might have a 10, 15 million dollar IRA. So when you got a large IRA, you're going to get a state to a stage in life where the government's going to force you to take the money out, even if you don't need it. That's what we call a required minimum distribution.

So what we can do before that stage is some tax planning to convert it to Roth money with a discount in a way in which you don't have required minimum distributions. That's one strategy. Another strategy, if you're spending the money and RMDs aren't a problem anyway, is we do big IRA tax planning. One of the really, really powerful strategies has a first level that is simply saying we're going to take, let's say you had a $5 million IRA. we're going to take that IRA and the children are forced to take it all out within 10 years under the tax code currently anyway. And those rules always change. If they take all that out and they have decent level of income already themselves, in California they could be losing 40 to 50% of that to taxes. So let's just say it's 40 between state and federal.

That on a $5 million IRA is $2 million. The strategies that we teach will defer that tax bill. all the way until your children die, the last death of your last child. So you get that $2 million to create additional wealth for their entire lifetime. Now, I'm an older parent. We had triplets when I was almost 40. They will live 40 plus years longer than me. So if they're making the income off $2 million for 40 years,

we're creating well over seven figures of additional wealth for them. But then we take it a step further. So most people have heard of the Rockefeller family. So we like to do a Rockefeller approach when it's appropriate for a client. And in this strategy, we have a second layer that really will even defer that tax for the grandchildren, the great grandchildren, and it can go as many generations as they make the money last. And this is done through charitable tax laws and it's very, very powerful. So ultimately, multi-generational planning is easy. for us to create a half million, million, or even more of additional wealth for somebody with a

large IRA. You know, once again, that statement was a master class that we can dig into for about a weekend seminar, but I'll just kind of sum it up by saying this. What I heard you say is there are some things called Roth conversions. There are some things called RMDs required minimum distributions. There's some things called charitable planning. And stand alone, those are wonderful things. but when they work together, they can give an exponential benefit,

but you need to have all of these working together in the right way, and it most probably is not put together by one person. So you should have an investment advisor, a CPA, and a state planning attorney. What is the power of having that kind of a team looking at everything to make sure all the pieces on the chess board are working together the right way? For higher net worth people, and I would actually say for everybody, it's mandatory. So we do integrated planning where our approach is we have all those disciplines under one roof. So I am a certified financial planner that went to law school for tax and estate planning.

So I happen to be one of these people that can do it all just myself, but we have a team that does it. We teach a course to financial advisors across the country that is the master class for tax and estate planning. So on the tax side, it is incredibly powerful. And many of these advisors, they want to serve their clients well. They're good people, but they are an expense on your portfolio. When they add tax planning to their practice, they're an absolute profit center for their clients, not only in how they protect the portfolio, especially if they embrace to find outcome planning, but the tax planning alone will be far more than the fees that you're ever paying a financial planner.

But too few of them, no tax law. They just don't do it. They just do Roth conversions and they think that's tax planning. And most CPAs are reactive, as you pointed out, not proactive. Once you get CPAs in and you start teaching them, which will teach CPAs also, they are then a very powerful member of the team. So in our plan, we don't do taxes, but we do far more tax planning than 99% of the CPAs out there. And it's not even close. And we teach the advisors to do that.

So I think having the team approach, you need a quarterback. And that quarterback should be a well-trained financial planner that is coordinating everything, including the estate planning, which I know isn't the focus today. But there we've got to build in divorce protection, remarriage protection. We protect the kids and the surviving spouses from creditors and predators. It goes well beyond simple estate probate avoidance. So the way everything fits together is the match. when you mentioned chess board, I play enough to know, you know, a little, but I know when you make a move and you leave your finger on the piece and you're looking at the board going, okay, is this the right move? Because I can still pull it back. My finger's still on the piece. And so it's like if I'm going to make this certain move, whatever the case is, you know, financially, you need to make sure you have your, you know, proverbial finger on the piece so that you've got all of the professionals like, hey, before we pull the trigger, let's make sure the estate planning attorney is, you know, in concur, you know, concur. You know, concur. You know, concur. You know, you know, concurred.

with what we're seeing here and the CPA. And once everyone's like giving their thumbs up, now, okay, now let's move forward. So having that team now. Sort of, sort of, Mike. I disagree just in the sense that truly get somebody from playing checkers to chess, which is what we try to do. You've got to have a quarterback that knows something about the estate planning, knows something about the tax planning.

If your financial planner doesn't have good knowledge in that, to me, they're probably not the right. financial planner for your portfolio. They need to have good knowledge because the person with the finger on that chest piece should be yours and your financial planners. And then they should be able to know enough to know that it's time to let it go without having to bring in the CPA, having to bring in the estate planner. It's a great theoretical approach.

But we do workshops and teaching all the time. The number of people that I've come across that have had all those disciplines in one room at one time arguing over how to create the best portfolio is zero. Yeah, that might be a zoo. Yeah, I've been in those meetings, but it creates confusion and you have a lot of big egos in the room. So a certified financial planner or just a financial planning professional, they really need to be trained in these.

And it's not that hard. If you want to do good for your client, you just have to spend some time studying and keeping up on it because this isn't rocket science. You don't, the attorney stuff is easy. You just need to know the issues. The tax stuff is easy. You just need to know the issues. But it's crazy how few people actually take the time to learn those things.

Yeah. But once you do as a financial planner, you have no competition. As a client of a financial planner that knows this stuff, you can rest. You can never going anywhere because you're profiting. Yeah. They are a profit center for you. They're helping you make so much money. So I'm passionate about trying to teach.

teach advisors how to do it right because our industry just isn't built to do it right. Yeah. They learn one little subset and that's not enough. Yep. So let's continue talking through that tax blind spot because one thing that comes to my mind is a blind spot or misconception is this. Hey, in retirement, I'm going to be in a lower tax bracket. Maybe you will.

Maybe you won't, right? So where is the fallacy in that and why should someone be willing potentially to pay more taxes today so that they can pay less over their lifetime. Yeah. Can I give you an example of a typical client that we see? So we happen to work a lot with Kaiser physicians as an example. And they get a large payout at 65. So we have a client that I'll just call Tom and Mary.

And this is going to be a hypothetical case that brings a number of physicians together. So it's not an actual client. But this client is getting, let's say, about a $4 million payout. Now, to get a $4 million playout, this is a physician that is not just a specialist, but a subspecialist making seven figures a year. They're getting a $4 million payout and they think they're just going to have to pay the $2 million tax bill. This client at this stage also has kids going into college.

And they are with a national firm that is on TV all the time. I won't pick on this individual's name, but you might be able to guess who it is. Sure. They've met with their tax planner. They've got they, all they talked about was Roth conversions. We met with them and we said, okay, first, you got kids going to college. And I shared a story with them where I've got five kids because we were going for one more. We got triplets.

So we have five children. I'm going to have five in college at the same time, which is crazy. Yeah. The tax planning I'm doing, we will eliminate through tax savings the cost of two full college educations. So through education tax planning techniques, I will send five kids to college for the cost of three. Wow. So if they're a hundred thousand apiece, I will save $200,000. We shared some of the strategies for them. Their kids were a little bit late in the game so we could save some, but not quite as effectively as me, because you have to plan early. Ideally, at 14 you start. Then we talked about

this big lump sum that they were just going to pay the bill on. So they had all kinds of tax issues, but this was the big elephant in the room. And we showed them a strategy that we're laying out over about four to five year period where we could potentially eliminate 100% of the $2 million tax bill. 100%. That's $2 million savings. And his response was, I literally just met with the tax person. I don't know why I'm hiding the name.

It was at Fisher. And they had no ideas. And you're looking at my portfolio and just looking at my statements and you're just like, you need to do this, this, this, this and this. And I said, this is just the beginning. Yeah. But they don't do real tax planning. They do it as a cookie cutter templates.

The way that we've always done it. We're institutional, you know, next. You know, it's like, okay, move on. Yeah, to me, that's what it is. They're trying to say, hey, we do tax planning as a marketing pitch so that you can feel like you're being taken care of. But in reality, they don't really know how to do tax planning.

I mean, this guy had issues everywhere. How on earth did they just talk to him about just doing a pay your full bill and you're done? For this guy, I'm going to give you an example, again, the same type scenario. They're going to move out of state before they get this because California is terrible. We're going to lose about almost 15% just to California taxes. So in a $5 million payout, that's $700. $150,000 in tax savings by simply buying your dream vacation place, whether it be on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe or in Hawaii or in Florida, $750,000 is a pretty good down payment that you get

completely free. This guy is a high effort guy that's willing to do all this. And that was just part of it. And then we did strategies where if he gets it all done, we are literally going to eliminate the entire tax bill of $2 million. tax planning is so powerful. You have to do it. And your focus should be in creating a portfolio that aligns with your tax planning.

Because if you do both right in tandem, you're not arguing over, did this guy get me one or two percent better than that guy or that gal? Because the tax planning alone might get you 20 or 30 or 40 percent more. And again, it really isn't uncommon that you're going to make an extra half million. million or more over your lifetime just through good tax money. You know, the interesting thing with that concept, Terry, is this. It makes me think of it's not a matter of let's strive and grow and grow and build more money and do this strategy and investment and the money is growing. The money's already there. Those payouts you're talking about is there. It's not a matter of let's get more and get more. It's a matter of let's keep more, keep more in your back pocket because it's going out if you do the

traditional way that people just think and they don't know some of these things. So the power of that is like it's like it's like found money. Like what did Benjamin Franklin say? A penny saved is a penny earned. So if you're saving them all that money, it's it's actually let's let's go, you know, contrary to Benjamin Franklin because really a penny saved is not a penny earned because if you earned a piece of taxes on it. So really a penny saved is like a penny and a half earned or whatever calculation. You're saving them cold hard cash of those hundreds of thousands of dollars. in those examples. Yeah, and people often are, we talk about good costs and expenses and bad costs and expenses.

A good planner is a profit center. And too often we'll see, we teach a lot and we'll see people come in and they're do it yourselfers, Vanguard type people. And they are constantly tripping over quarters to pick up pennies. Yeah. So they believe in that acronym, penny found is a penny earned, but they're tripping over quarters to pick up that penny because they think. think by by by not working with professionals they're making money and it actually could be costing

them seven figures so yeah a good planner is worth their weight in gold the challenge is how do you find that good planner because so many of them are just pitching product or pitching whatever it is they're selling and then they're they're giving lip service to tax planning without really understanding how to do it so part of our mission is to train as many advisors around the country so that they can help clients keep more of what they make because we can only help so many clients. Our calendar is not slow. It's very busy. So ultimately, I can't save the world myself, but we want as many people that work so hard to build this wealth and to get to that retirement. We want them to keep more. And if they do it right, you can look at it in two ways.

One, I'm going to have so much more to give my kids because I'm saving all this extra wealth. or two, maybe you're going to say, you know what, I'm going to retire five or 10 years early. Yeah. Because with this tax planning, I have so much more value in what I've already accumulated. I don't have to work another five or 10 years. I love it. So it's fun. Well, that tax blind spot can be quite lucrative.

And if someone is listening to this wanting to have maybe even a second opinion, hey, I was just told by XYZ company that I should do this. What do you think, Terry? What's the best way that they can learn more and reach out and connect with you? I think we'll put some links in the show notes. So go down there and you have links to our website. You have links to laugh when the market crashes, which touches on this. And I think we should also put the links for our coaching program for advisors.

Because the most impactful way that we can have this podcast work is to get some of these other financial advisors on board so more people can benefit from really good tax planning. So that is not a consumer training site. It's for financial professionals, but quite frankly, if somebody wanted to take it, they could. But I think visiting us at those links, so our financial and tax website is Strategicweldlegal.com. Our financial is we, RIAAdvisors.com, and they can connect to each other. But it takes both entities to be able to make this happen. So just visit us there, and you can either reach out to us, call us, fill out the forum, and we'll reach out to you,

but we'd be happy to meet with people and help them. I love it. They're looking for some guidance. Thank you, Terry. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you again. Yeah, you too. Thanks, Mike. And have a great day.

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