Announcer:
It’s time now on KROS for Financial Focus, brought to you by NelsonCorp Wealth Management. The opinions voiced in this show are for general information only, and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. Any indices mentioned are unmanaged and cannot be invested into directly. Registered representative securities offered through Cambridge Investment Research Incorporated, a broker-dealer, member of FINRA, SIPC, investment advisor representative Cambridge Investment Research Advisors Incorporated, a registered investment advisor, Cambridge and NelsonCorp Wealth Management are not affiliated. Cambridge does not offer tax advice. Now, here’s today’s Financial Focus program.
Nate Kreinbrink:
Good morning and welcome to this week’s Financial Focus, brought to you each and every Wednesday morning right here on KROS. This is Nate Kreinbrink. I have Andy Ferguson with me. We had a little switcheroo, we talk Medicare the third Wednesday of each month, and we get to talk taxes the last Wednesday of this month.
Andy Fergurson:
And I heard that there was an uprising amongst the people, that they were livid.
Nate Kreinbrink:
That they were expecting tax talk and they did not get it.
Andy Fergurson:
And we’ve got to give the people what they want.
Nate Kreinbrink:
We’ve got to give-
Andy Fergurson:
That’s my mantra, you’ve got to give the people what they want.
Nate Kreinbrink:
It is.
Andy Fergurson:
They demand this tax information.
Nate Kreinbrink:
It is definitely hard to believe that we are last Wednesday in September.
Andy Fergurson:
Isn’t that amazing?
Nate Kreinbrink:
And it is officially fall.
Andy Fergurson:
Yeah, October will be here next week and homecoming and pumpkins and all this stuff, frost. We’ll have frost before the end of next month, isn’t that crazy?
Nate Kreinbrink:
Yeah. We had a workshop down at the Quad Cities last night, and I was sitting at a table with a guy that, for his job, annually, he would track the first snowfall every year.
Andy Fergurson:
That was his whole job?
Nate Kreinbrink:
Well, no, but because of what he did, he would always try to have that idea, so he knew the timeframe when that would be. And it is usually sometime in the first week in December, the traceable snowfall, that’s not that far away.
Andy Fergurson:
That’s not that far away. I remember not too long ago, we were trick-or-treating in the snow.
Nate Kreinbrink:
Yeah, not fun, not fun. Well, let’s talk taxes. The reason you were not here last week is you were at an IRS conference for the whole entire week, and you brought with you this morning a binder that is literally two inches thick. We’re not going to have time for that today, Andy.
Andy Fergurson:
We’re not going to have time for that, but I’ll try and stick to the highlights. Yeah, I went to the Tax Forum in San Diego. The IRS puts on a Tax Forum every year, they pick about five or six cities, and accountants and financial advisors and lawyers from all over the United States and the American territories go to this forum to get educated by the IRS. Now, one of the things that I’ll add as a caveat is that the education that we got didn’t have a lot to do with the new tax law that was passed July 4th because the forum was developed before that law passed. And so, I heard a new name for that, we’ve been calling it the One Big Beautiful Bill, and at the Tax Forum, they were calling it OB3, so that keeps us from having to say all those words.
Nate Kreinbrink:
Having to say all that, which that flows a lot better.
Andy Fergurson:
Yeah. So you may hear me reference OB3 when we’re talking, but that’s the One Big Beautiful Bill.
Nate Kreinbrink:
You’re talking like a tax man now.
Andy Fergurson:
I can’t get away from it, it’s part of our lives, taxes are super important. And really, what it is is I don’t want people to come in and be surprised in April, because I’m the messenger, and when you get bad news, sometimes you get angry at the messenger. I don’t want them to be upset with me for something that’s been law, but also I don’t want them to be upset period. If you know something’s coming, it’s easier to prepare for, it’s easier to deal with. My grandpa said, “You never hit the deer that you see, you always hit a deer that you don’t see.” So yeah, it’s just about education and making sure everybody’s ready and understands what’s going on. One of the things that’s happening this next week, so the IRS has a deadline of September 30th, and that deadline is going to be the end of paper check transactions at the IRS.
Nate Kreinbrink:
And that’s both in and out, correct?
Andy Fergurson:
In and out. So they are not going to accept check payment, they’re not going to send out checks. Now, I have a sneaking suspicion that they’ll cash your check for a little while because they want your money, so if somebody has sent the check already or is sending a check, it’s probably going to go through. But they are eliminating that paper transaction process, and we’ve talked about that a little bit in our office, and we’re expecting some excitement from that because we have a lot of people who still want to pay with a paper voucher, they want to write that check, put it in the mail, mail it off to Ogden or Philadelphia or wherever and have it processed the long way, and we still have a lot of people who receive their refunds with a paper check.
I’m not as concerned about those that need to pay, because there’s going to be lots of ways that you can pay online, where you can get online and do bill pay or something like that. But there’s going to be fewer ways to receive the money, and that, I think, is going to be a little bit more concerning maybe. I think about those that maybe don’t have bank accounts or kids or deceased persons, how is that money going to get back to the taxpayer? I think that’ll be interesting to see how it is. But that’s happening, so we need to prepare for it. Bring a blank check when you get your tax return done this year, make sure you have a way to get that money back to you, because they’re not going to send you a paper check.
Nate Kreinbrink:
Well, and like so many other things, I know Social Security transitioned to this a few years ago, pushing everybody to their online site to create your own account to be able to do everything on there, whether it’s the mailings, whether it’s a correspondent, whether it’s a check on transactions, anything is on there. And the IRS is now trying to do that with, again, creating an account through the IRS, and now you have your own account to go in and now you have to see anything that was sent out to have an online presence with that.
Andy Fergurson:
Yeah. And I don’t think there’s any way for you to receive paper checks from Social Security at this point. When you’re signing up, you’ve got to sign up with-
Nate Kreinbrink:
The only thing that they do is they provide you with essentially a debit card, and then every month, they credit to that debit card anymore as far as with that. But no, there is no paper check from Social Security. If you don’t want to have it directly deposited, you get a debit card of whatever and they just credit it to that card each month. You run out of it, well, you’ve got to wait until next month until you get more money put onto it.
Andy Fergurson:
Until they put more money on it, yeah. So that’s effectively a bank account. And there will be a lot of complaining and moaning and worry about this process at first, but it’s going to be better. I can’t tell you how many times I deal with people who say, “Well, I sent a check,” or, “The IRS said they didn’t get my check,” or, “I didn’t get my refund. The IRS says they sent me the refund and it’s not here, now what do I do?” So this will be better. There will be fewer lost or stolen checks, there will be fewer opportunities for it to go sideways. The good news about these digital transactions is they’re traceable, so if your bank sends the money somewhere, your bank can tell you where it went.
Nate Kreinbrink:
And when it was received and whatever.
Andy Fergurson:
Exactly. And if it goes to the wrong place, they’re going to know that it went to the wrong place, but it’s going to be traceable, so there’s a lot of advantage to that.
The other thing that came out of this conference is there’s definitely an increased push for people to use the online resources at the IRS. I went to a presentation, and it was put on by the group that develops the online platform for the IRS, and I went and talked to them afterwards in the exhibit hall, there was a speaker’s corner there and I went and spoke to them, and the lady who develops the IRS website said that she received an initiative from the director of the IRS. The director of the IRS called her office and said, “You have to reduce call volume at the IRS.”
So we’ve been crying about that for years, that the call volume at the IRS is so high that you can’t call and get to a person. And so, the director of the IRS went to the online platform and said, “You have to reduce this.” And she’s like, “We don’t take calls.” But he’s like, “I want people to be able to answer their questions through the online platform.” And so, she looked at the data that was given, and of the top 10 things that people call the IRS for, eight of those things you’d be able to answer through an online profile.
And so, I think you’ll see a push, I know it’s going to happen in my office, I’m going to push people to get an online profile, because they’ll be able to answer their own questions and we’ll be able to eliminate this two hours of hold waiting for the IRS to not get an answer. One of the features that’s on that online platform that I thought was super cool is they’re going to have a live chat, so if you get on an online platform, if you log into the IRS through your online account, there’s a chat box, you can talk to an IRS agent right away through that chat box. Now, you’re not talking to them on the phone, you’ve got to type, but you can get your questions answered, and I think it’s going to be incredibly powerful and I hope that people take advantage of it. I know it’s going to be a transition.
Nate Kreinbrink:
Right. It’s change again and change is change.
Andy Fergurson:
It’s technology change and that’s hard. There’s still people that, and I can be guilty of this sometimes, there are people who don’t go through self-checkout because it’s a change. There’s just a lot of things that are hard to deal with. There are a lot of people who still pay all their bills with paper checks. But you think about, we’ve been doing this for years, the utility companies have pushed this way, the cable companies, all your streaming platforms that you have, none of that do you write a paper check for. If you have Netflix, it’s coming out of your bank account or off your credit card.
Nate Kreinbrink:
You’re not paying them directly.
Andy Fergurson:
You’re not sending them a check. And so, we’ve done this with other institutions, it’s just are we ready to do it with the government? I think a lot of people hold back because they think the government is less secure or less trustworthy, but they’ve got your information already and so there’s no real reason to withhold it. They know where you are, they know everything about you. We’ve just got to-
Nate Kreinbrink:
Go through this one.
Andy Fergurson:
… go through this hoop so we can get our money back.
Nate Kreinbrink:
It’s all good stuff, and I know, again, we’ll continue to go over this in the coming months as we get to the end of the year and transition to that point. But I know you’ve got a lot of stuff to go over, which we are going to put on hold.
Andy Fergurson:
We’ve got two things today.
Nate Kreinbrink:
We’ve got two things and it took us the whole time. So again, we’ll continue to hit those topics, but if you’ve got any questions, give them a call. Did want to mention real quick here that every Friday, the NelsonCorp team is wearing jeans for charity. Money raised in the month of September will be donated to the Skyline Center here in Clinton. As always, Andy, I appreciate you joining me.
Andy Fergurson:
You bet.
Nate Kreinbrink:
Nate and Andy bringing you this week’s Financial Focus. Thanks for tuning in, and have a great rest of your week.
Announcer:
Financial Focus is a production of NelsonCorp Wealth Management in Clinton and Davenport. The opinions voiced in the show are for general information only, and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. Any indices mentioned are unmanaged and cannot be invested into directly. Registered representative securities offered through Cambridge Investment Research Incorporated, a broker-dealer, member of FINRA, SIPC, investment advisor representative Cambridge Investment Research Advisors Incorporated, a registered investment advisor, Cambridge and NelsonCorp Wealth Management are not affiliated. Cambridge does not offer tax advice. For more information, visit our website at www.nelsoncorp.com.