Planning begins with a number

Ask ten advisors how to lower your taxes and you will hear ten strategies before anyone asks for last year's return. A cash balance plan. A cost segregation study. An oil and gas program. Each may be sound. None can be judged without a number to judge it against.

That is why every Trinity engagement opens the same way. Before we recommend anything, we tell you what you owe.

What the number is

The number is a projection of this year's federal and state liability, built from your actual facts rather than last year's return. We rebuild it in two passes.

The first pass is a position review. We read three years of returns alongside your entities, basis records and holdings. This is where the quiet problems surface: depreciation never taken, losses carried forward and forgotten, elections that were never made, income reported in the wrong place.

The second pass is current year construction. From pay stubs, K-1s, realized gains and the payments already made, we assemble the year as it stands today. A strong bonus, a partial sale, a new entity: each changes the answer, and last year's return knows about none of them.

The result is one figure, with every assumption written down.

Why it comes first

A known liability does three things a strategy cannot.

1. It sizes the opportunity. A deduction is worth your marginal rate times its amount. At $80,000 of federal tax, the room for structural work is very different from the room at $400,000.
2. It prices every recommendation. Each strategy carries a cost to implement and an obligation to maintain. Measured against the projection, the ones that do not clear their own cost fall away.
3. It shows what already went wrong. Many clients discover their largest opportunity is a correction, not a new strategy.

What happens next

With the number in hand, the work turns to structure: how income is earned, which entities hold what, when gains are realized, and which plans sit beneath the business. We present the opportunities ranked by net benefit, with the tax saved, the cost to implement and what each asks of you every year after.

Then we put them in place and confirm on the return that they worked.

Most planning begins with a product. Ours begins with a number.

This article is educational and is not tax advice for any specific situation.