The Wealthy Lawyer: Practical Financial Strategies for Legal Professionals, with Darren Wurz

Stephanie Everett : 

Hi, I’m Stephanie. 

Zack Glaser: 

And I’m Zack. And this is episode 558 of the Lawyerist Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today, Stephanie talks with Darren Wurz about financial planning and building wealth as a lawyer. 

Stephanie Everett : 

Today’s show is brought to you by paxton.ai, so stay tuned. You’re going to hear Zack talk to them in just a second. Speaking of ai, 

Zack Glaser: 

Yeah, yeah, I mean that’s always on our brains. Every time I think of how to do something, I’m like in the Geoff Woods book, how to do something, can I use AI to do it? So recently I saw there’s a trend going around LinkedIn and all that. That’s in order to show that AI is keeping your information and your chats, you ask it to give a quirky description of you, which is neat. And my quirky description involved my stray cats and cross country and things like that. But I thought of a more useful mechanism for the artificial intelligent prompt, which was describe my faults. What are the things that I can work on based on the conversations that we’ve had? What are the things that I can work on? And man, well, first thing I asked it to be nice, I was like, please be constructive. 

Constructive criticism works great. And it gave me five very specific things to look at. It was like, it actually called them growth Edges. It was like Zack’s Growth Edges, AKA, the stuff that could make you unstoppable. And it gave me five very specific things. And I thought, okay, that’s neat, but this is stuff that I kind of know. So I went another step into it and I said, what small tasks can I do in order to work on these? What small daily tasks can I do to work on these? Because just putting in the reps of working on your deficiencies or whatever it is, is helpful. And so it gave me five, what are called micro tasks, five individual micro tasks I’m supposed to do at the end of the day. And I was like, no, thank you. That is way too many micro tasks. But they were cool. It was like it has a thing where it’s task avalanche risk. I have a tendency to have a lot of tasks that exist out there, and it’s like prioritize clarity over capacity. So each morning choose one must move task and market with a fire in teamwork. And that’s the win for the 

Stephanie Everett : 

Day. Nice love. 

Zack Glaser: 

Everything else is gravy. But he also knows that I work in teamwork, 

Stephanie Everett : 

But 

Zack Glaser: 

That was one of his suggestions. Okay, cool. But I’ve got five suggestions. It’s five things I have to do with today. I wanted it a little bit tighter. So I said, give me a microt task for each day of each day of the week that relates to all of these, make them kind of work with each other. And so I have one task at the end of the day, and it came back with five a Monday task a Tuesday. Tuesday is tool audit touchpoint. It’s basically check on, are you using all the right tools? Did this make today easier? Is it necessary? That’s it. That’s my Tuesday, my, and all these things work on my little deficiencies or really, I like to think things that I can turn into a superpower 

Things that I can flip. So what’s your prompt, Stephanie? 

Stephanie Everett : 

Yeah, I love your prompt and I want to go do that next. I did ask to get the quirky described me, but I’m going to do that 

Zack Glaser: 

One. No, it’s fun, right? 

Stephanie Everett : 

Yeah, no, it’s super fun. But my prompt tip for the day, which kind of leads into our conversation that we’re about to have, I’m about to have with Darren, which was all about personal finances. So I just experimented and I took our personal household budget and fed it to chat. And honestly, my prompt wasn’t much. I just kind of said, what do you think? Because I honestly didn’t know what I wanted to ask it yet. I was like, let me just get something started. And it broke it down. It gave, at a glance overview, it said, Hey, here’s working. Well, you’re doing a good job saving. 

You have moderate lifestyle expenses. And I had a lot of categories. It thought that that gave me some clarity. But then it was like, here’s some areas to watch or reassess. And it talked about our streaming and subscriptions. They’re like, Hey, how much it’s reasonable, but often bloated. So maybe do a semi-annual audit. And I mean, I won’t get into all, but it gave me about four specifics of some things that we should watch out to. And then it gave me some opportunities to consider. And then it asked me, do you want me to do this next or do you want me to do that next? And that’s where I think people need to know keep going with it. So this was just a fun little prompt to see what would it tell me about our budget. I 

Zack Glaser: 

Think that’s actually a good point. And to me, for this kind of prompt tip, I think the big thing is mine started off with a small prompt as well. Describe my weaknesses based on our chat, make it constructive criticism. That’s it. But it was the follow-up that comes with it. Okay, let’s move on from there. Let’s keep going. And I think people, I get the feeling that people don’t continue to do that, continue to hone in. 

Stephanie Everett : 

Yeah, well do that. Have some fun with it and share your favorite prompts with us. We love hearing them and sharing them. We do that inside our lab community. We have a whole AI channel both for our lab community and honestly our team, even team by team now we’re sharing prompts that the team can use all about figuring out how are you using these tools and what’s working and what’s not. So I encourage people to join communities if you haven’t, so that you can learn more. 

Zack Glaser: 

Yeah, absolutely. Well now here is our conversation with our sponsor guests, and then we’ll head into Stephanie’s conversation with Darren Writer for that. Hey y’all. Zack, the legal tech advisor here at Lawyerist, and today I’ve got Tanguy Chau from Paxton with me. And we are talking ai, generative ai, but generative AI that you can use for legal research and creating documents. Tanguy, thanks for being with me today. 

Tanguy Chau : 

Thank you very much, Zack. I’m very excited to share with your listeners what we’ve been working on in the last few months. What’s new with Paxton? The big release for us has been an upgrade to or AI assistant and to be implementing specifically for the purpose of drafting long form documents like motions or settlement agreements, complaints, things that are whole size documents. And happy to give you a little bit of overview of the problem that we’ve observed in the space and how we implemented a different approach here. 

Zack Glaser: 

I think that’s an interesting place to have iterated over because I think a lot of our listeners probably have run into this thing with LLMs or AI products where I can use it to help me leverage something small. But when I get into asking it to create something bigger, if I were to make it would require me to think, to outline to go through, we ask it to do that. And what comes back is disappointing. And I think that’s what you’re getting at is that if I ask my AI agent to draft me a memo on this point of law or to create this contract, then it’s going to be potentially pretty disappointing in a very, very rough first draft. 

Tanguy Chau : 

That’s right. I think that when you use general purposed AI tools, they tend to try to do too much in a single step If they’re predicting the next series of words, if there is a divergence between what you intend to do versus where they’re heading, by the time you are drafting a long form document, the end result is just vastly different from what you had intended. And so when you ask the prom like draft a settlement agreement, it may give you something that looks okay on the surface, but once you dig a little bit deeper, you’ll see you start seeing the cracks, you’ll start seeing that there are missing clauses. There’s shallow legal reasoning. Sometimes there’s poor structure and there’s a lot of copy paste, repetition type of work. And that, honestly, that just doesn’t cut it for real legal work. And lawyers need an output that is not only correct, but it’s comprehensive and was structured and reliable. And that’s the gap that we aimed to close with this long form drafting of the AI assisted. 

Zack Glaser: 

When I think of a LLM or something like that, creating something, I like to remember it creating images, even if it’s creating a thing that is written. Because anytime I look at an image that Dolly or something creates, it’s just when you look too deep into it, it’s broken. It’s got things wrong with it, somebody’s got a sixth finger or something like that. And I think that’s what we wind up with a lot of these longer form documents because it’s just saying what’s the most likely next word. So how do you guys get past that? 

Tanguy Chau : 

So it’s very similar to how you do it, which is you break down the problem. If you’re trying to draft a long form document, you break down the problem into sizable pieces. There’s a funny quote that says, how do you eat an elephant? 

Zack Glaser: 

Yeah, 

Tanguy Chau : 

You eat it one bite at a time. And so the way that we do it is through a agentic workflow. So we’ve implemented a multi-step modular process that breaks down a long, large, complex tasks into digestible pieces just like any lawyer would in drafting a long document. And so we build intelligence at each of these distinct stages from understanding the matter to conducting legal research, to outlining and drafting and refining. And the result is something that is dramatically more coherent, more relevant, and ultimately just more useful for the user. And the way that we achieve that is by forcing the system to actually think and outline its work before it starts writing. So it’s a little slower. It takes a little longer to generate the output, not meaningfully. So sometimes it’s like 30 seconds to a minute or a minute and a half, but the output is a lot more useful. 

Zack Glaser: 

I think that’s a good point. That’s one of the things I try to remember with the, it takes a little longer to generate the output. It is generating actual output that you want. So it doesn’t really matter. Almost it is actually doing the thing that you’re asking it to do as opposed to if I were to use an AI agent or chat GPT or Paxton or something, I would generally do, like you’re saying, break it down like, okay, here’s my discreet question. Here’s something that I can do. So you’re saying that you guys have essentially taken large language model and a gentech and just said, okay, let’s use this together. Let’s put these things together and we’ll assess what needs to be done. Okay, step one, do research, make an outline instead of saying, please do research and write this thing at the exact same time. 

Tanguy Chau : 

That’s correct. That’s right. So it breaks down the problem into many different tasks and so on. Paxton, for the listeners, they can go on Paxton AI and see an actual, first of all, they can see the differences, but they can also experience it themselves and just say, Hey, let’s just give it a try. See what the difference of output. And so we published examples of the output that you obtained from a chat, GPT and Claude and some other models as well as other competitor models to Paxton versus what Paxton outputs. When you ask to draft a settlement agreement in a multi-party commercial dispute, for example. That’s what we showed, and we made it clear that that needed to have confidentiality terms, non-disparagement payment schedule and things like that. Look, I mean, the chat GPT output is possible, right? It’s just, it’s okay. Right? It’s fine. It looks kind 

Zack Glaser: 

Of like the picture. Yeah. 

Tanguy Chau : 

Yeah. It has a six finger. Yeah, 

Zack Glaser: 

But you can tell that it’s supposed to be a hand. Yeah, that kind of thing. It looks, yeah, okay, you squint a little bit, 

Tanguy Chau : 

But then, and we published this and you can see, well, once you take the time to break down the problem into analysis and planning and drafting and review and refinement stages, now you unlock the next level, which is you have cleaner structure, fewer redundancies, and it feels like this is something that was actually written and it mirrors the way that lawyers think and work. And so I think it all comes down to why does it matter? And I think it matters in the end because time is precious, right? And lawyers are under pressure to produce high quality documents fast. And too often the first draft that they get from general AI tools end up needing major rewrites. And once you start using the agentic approach, that changes that, it gives you a smarter, more polished starting point. And so you end up spending less time on editing and more time on adding your own strategic insights to the documents. And it feels a lot closer to the work that you would expect from a colleague, from an associate that is just much higher quality work. And so that’s really why this work matters. 

Zack Glaser: 

Yeah. Well, and like you said, you guys have published these results. You put it on, if people want to see what you’re talking about here, it’s at Paxton ai slash post slash expanded Paxton AI assistant. We’ll put that link in the show notes, don’t worry. But I’m looking at it right now. And you guys have, like you said, you have a specific prompt that you put into chat GPT and the same specific prompt you put into Paxton, and you’ve got a side-by-side comparison right there, what came out. But the thing I really like here is this image of what’s going on the multi-step process. Because a lot of times will tell people that my chat GPT instance is sitting next to me and it’s an expert that is sitting next to me, but it’s paying attention to its phone. And so it’ll give me answers. 

But every now and then I’ve got to say, Hey, pay attention to me. Are you really being serious here? Is that really the right answer? And this seems to say, okay, we’re going to make it focus. We’re going to make this thing focus on what we’re doing and take these steps that a human would take. I mean, right here we’ve got analysis, planning, drafting, review, and refinement. That feels like the steps that I would take, but I would tend to grab an AI tool and do each of those discreetly or even more discreetly something inside of that, because I don’t trust the tool right now because I’ve gotten those. If you squint, it looks good products out of the products I’ve been using. 

Tanguy Chau : 

Yeah, I think that a lot of the work that we did and validating this approach wasn’t just breaking it down, but then applying it to thousands of different queries and different outputs. So I know that we published one, and I guess I wish we had showed the breadth of the applicability of this, but what the teams spend the last few months doing is just testing this across thousands of different requests. So here we give an example of a settlement agreement, but that approach has been tested and validated and refined across millions of different types of documents that represent thousands of different use cases. 

Zack Glaser: 

One of the things I really like about Paxton is that people don’t have to just take our word for it here. They can go kick the tires themself. If they go to paxton.ai, they can try it out for free and click on try it out for free. They can run it through their test because lawyers are skeptics. Okay, cool. You guys, Paxton has kicked the tires and people can go in and take a look at it and try it for free@paxton.ai. Tanguy , I appreciate your time here and I appreciate you explaining this to us. Thanks. Absolutely. I hope the people will check it out again, Paxton do ai, P-A-X-T-O n.ai. We’ll put all that in the show notes. 

Tanguy Chau : 

Perfect. Thank you very much, Zack. 

Darren Wurz: 

Alright. Hi, I’m Darren Wurz. I’m the founder and CEO of the lawyer, millionaire Founders Network. We are an exclusive membership community focused on serving law firm owners and helping them with their personal finances and business strategy. Many, many years ago I was a community-based financial advisor and then slowly grew my business and niched down to serving law firm owners. I really love working with law firm owners because I’ve built and grown a business myself, so I understand a lot of the unique challenges and opportunities that they face. So we’ve built our whole service model around really focusing on serving them and helping them around investments and tax planning and cashflow and all the great stuff that they need help with. 

Stephanie Everett : 

I am excited to have you on the show and to have this conversation. It’s one I’ve wanted to have for a long time because I suspect many of us have heard throughout our lives that we need a safer retirement, and that probably translates into 401k or IRA. That’s probably what people think about, but I think I suspect that there’s a lot more to the conversation that we need to dig into. So maybe as a way to just get us started, when we think about money mindset, what kind of shift do lawyers who own their own business need to make in that regard? What would you tell people? 

Darren Wurz: 

Oh, great. Yeah, that’s a deep question and I love it. Well, Stephanie, it’s great to be here with you. When I first started focusing on law firms and law firm owners, the small firm roadmap was one of the first books that I read, and this is kind of a dream come true. I’ve wanted to be on your show for a long time, so I’m really excited to be here. You’re right. There’s so much more to think about. I think with mindset, one of the biggest things that law firm owners struggle with is the idea of knowing where’s enough, where the goalposts should be, the goalposts keep moving throughout our whole lives. And it’s easy to be in that mindset when you’re so focused on growth. You’re constantly trying to grow your practice, seeking more revenue, but really understanding the place at which you’re happy and fulfilled. That’s really a big challenge because it’s so easy just to be in that growth mode permanently. And the biggest trick in life, we just read the book, the Psychology of Money in our book club, and Morgan Hausel talks about one of the biggest secrets of success is figuring out how to get the goalposts in to stop moving. And I think that’s a really big one for law firm owners in particular. 

Stephanie Everett : 

Yeah, that’s a good point because, and I like that idea of what is enough. 

Darren Wurz: 

Yeah. So as financial planners, a lot of what we focus on is not necessarily just the numbers side of things, but the life planning. What is the life that you are really seeking to build, and how do we design a financial plan that supports that and help you reach a place where you can achieve that? And it’s not always, it’s fun working with law firm owners because the definition of retirement is often a lot different. Many law firm owners don’t want to retire. They want to keep working, but they want to do it more so on their own schedule. And so how do we build a financial system and a plan that fits around that model? 

Stephanie Everett : 

One thing I hear, I’m sure you hear a lot of, so I want to give you a chance to just address it, is this idea of I’ll figure it out later. 

Darren Wurz: 

Oh, sure. 

Stephanie Everett : 

Or maybe what’s probably hidden behind that? The worry, the fear that if I actually come to someone like you, I’m going to learn that I’m way off track. And so I think sometimes that’s probably also what kind of keeps us avoiding the issue is because it’s like, well, what’s the point? They’re just going to tell me I don’t want to hear the bad news. 

Darren Wurz: 

Yes, you’re so spot on. There is a lot of fear that I find law firm owners face, and I see this happen a lot where a law firm owner has built a great business and the business is running well, but the profit margins are really slim and they’re not able to really save. Maybe there’s still some student debt that’s left over. They’ve been through a lot of expensive things in life, putting their kids through college, and so they feel very far behind in where they should be in building wealth sometimes. So there is a lot of hesitancy to meet with someone like myself, but I just like to remind people that you’re not alone. That’s normal. In fact, I’ve been there, people in my team have been there. We’ve been through big life events, we’ve been through divorce, we’ve been through credit card debt and college debt, and there’s no shame here. We’ve seen it all. We understand it all. We’re not going to judge you based on where you are, and there’s no perfect place to be. And I think it’s normal for law firm owners to be a little bit behind the curve because you’ve been investing so heavily in your business and trying to get your business running, and that’s okay. 

Stephanie Everett : 

I’m curious if you have any examples or stories of someone who made this shift who maybe made some changes and was able to start building wealth as you talked about, because I think that just sometimes that idea feels 

Darren Wurz: 

Really 

Stephanie Everett : 

Out of reach. 

Darren Wurz: 

Yeah. One of my first clients is actually, a great example of this, owns a pretty decent sized law practice on the east coast. And he came to me because he was really struggling to build wealth. I mean, he had an IRA had a 401k, but wasn’t able to really max it out in the way that he wanted to. And really the problem revolved around cashflow. There were a lot of expenses. As lawyers, there’s a temptation to expand your lifestyle to a certain degree, and the business makes you feel that way. If you run a business that’s making well over seven figures, it’s easy to feel very rich, to feel very wealthy when maybe you’re not. And so there’s a tendency to spend a lot of money. So we had to figure out the cashflow first. And what we did, we dug into the numbers. We really, and I know this is one of the things, it’s like, oh my gosh, I don’t want to open up my credit card statements with somebody else and show someone else what I’m spending. 

But it all starts there, and if you can just get over that initial hurdle, it really becomes a lot better. There’s no judgment. We looked through his expenses, we helped him figure out where the money was bleeding, helped him create some systems where he was saving automatically and building up an emergency fund for both his business and for himself personally. And a big part of it was figuring out how he was paying himself. So he had a big question around when should I take draws from the business? He was hesitant to draw money from the business, but then as a result, he was taking money from the business ad hoc, there’s a roof issue and I’ve got to take $10,000 out the business accounts. And so it was just a mess. There was money flowing back and forth. And when you’re in that state of chaos, it’s impossible to really start, maybe not impossible, nearly impossible in many cases to really start building an accruing wealth. I’m happy to say that a few years later, he has built up several hundred thousand dollars, funded those emergency fund accounts, and then started building additional investments on top of that. And it’s automation. It’s having the courage to look at the numbers and make some changes and creating systems for yourself. 

Stephanie Everett : 

And I think the other concern, I know when I started working with my financial advisor, the term lifestyle creep was first introduced to me because I think that that is what you’re describing is like, well, I make good money. Why shouldn’t we go out to eat tonight? Of course we can afford to go out to eat tonight, but suddenly before you realize it, we’re going out to eat maybe five nights a week instead of one. And that adds up. And so I think there’s this game we play with ourselves of I’m doing well and I should be able to go treat myself to these things. And before we know it, we really are spending a lot of money instead of said, maybe investing in the idea of building wealth, not just spending money, but I’m going to actually invest and build this wealth, which is a shift we need to make. 

Darren Wurz: 

Yeah, lifestyle creep is such a big thing, and it’s so easy to fall into, and we’re conditioned to often feel like we need to have a certain standard of living. And it’s so easy to sign up for things. We sign up for these subscriptions and we all complained that we were paying too much for cable. But after you add up all the subscriptions you’re paying for, 

Stephanie Everett : 

Yeah, cable looks pretty good. 

Darren Wurz: 

Right, right. It’s crazy. Yeah. 

Stephanie Everett : 

And I think people are probably hesitant that you don’t want to give up probably is what it feels like when you first do it. But as someone who’s gone through the process, I can tell you that now I look at my portfolio and I’m pretty excited. So it’s like, okay, maybe I did give up. I traded. So maybe it’s not looking at it as giving up, but you’re trading one thing for another 

Darren Wurz: 

And you’re really discovering where your happy place is. I think when you really dive in and you really think about what makes you happy, you’ll find that a lot of the material things that we want don’t move the needle. And there’s a lot of studies on this where income moves the needle to a certain level, but then above a certain level it doesn’t make that much of a difference. And I think sometimes it’s very helpful for people also to see the potential that saving can create. When you look at what compound growth can do over a 10, 20, 30 year period of time, that can be very inspirational. And I often encourage people that it starts small. You may look at retirement and think, oh my gosh, I’ll never retire. There’s no way. And I need to save so much money. It’s crazy. But if you start small, start somewhere. 

It doesn’t, don’t have to start saving a thousand dollars a month, but it could be something very small just to get you in the habit and start that, start moving things forward. Because I tell you what, Stephanie, I see this all the time. I see law firm owners who struggle to save, and I’ve been encouraging them to start putting some money aside, but they stay in the same place, they stay stuck and 10 years later, they’re in the same place and they haven’t moved the needle. And one of the exciting things about working with law firm owners too, is we can talk about the business side of things. So we can talk about there are more ways to increase the amount of money. It’s not just saving personally, but it’s also looking at your business and how can we maximize the profit margin in your business? How can we grow the revenue strategically and smartly in your business? So those are really fun conversations to have 

Stephanie Everett : 

Agreed. I love when we’re able to unlock that for business owners. I think one of the other opportunities we should touch on before we get to taxes, sorry, stay tuned. It’s coming. People, I started by saying people think about saving. And traditionally their minds go to 4 0 1 Ks and IRAs. If you’re an employee, a lot of times that is your major vehicle. That’s where you’re going to have the opportunities. But as your wealth grows, as you are a business owner, people might not realize that you actually have a lot of other opportunities. I can say I really feel like it’s been in the last three or four years where I’ve really been able to diversify my portfolio. And I talk to people now about some of the kind of stuff I’m investing in, and they look at me, what? That’s crazy. How are you doing that? 

And I just want to spread the news. You can do it too. And it’s fun. It’s kind of cool. And to think I’m invested in this soccer field tournament complex. It’s like a multi-use. It’s got hotel and retail and soccer and flag football tournament space. As a soccer mom, I’m like, I’m all for it. Yes, that’s probably my riskiest investment, but it’s kind of cool that I got to do that. And so maybe if you could just talk a little bit about those opportunities, not specifically obviously, but that people may not realize there’s other things they could be thinking about and considering that have real big benefits. 

Darren Wurz: 

A hundred percent. That’s where we start really thinking outside the box. And that’s why I love the model that we’ve created. So we work with our clients on a flat fee basis, and that really frees us up to think more creatively about investment opportunities. You want to have the core equity stocks and bonds portfolio, but then, yeah, let’s think outside the box. What are some other businesses that we could invest in? Maybe you want to start another business. Real estate is where I see a lot of law firm owners end up going, but there are so many other things you can think about to set up other streams of income for yourself. And that’s the name of the game is income. It’s all about income. When it comes down to it, that’s the recipe. When you invest in your 401k, that’s what you’re doing. You’re trying to get to a place where you can turn that into income. So that is what it’s all about. And I love that concept of thinking about other businesses that you could be a part of or other things, alternative investments that you could participate in, and those can create a nice tax benefit for you also, which is another side of the coin. 

Stephanie Everett : 

Absolutely. So let’s go there. So we’re recording this on April 15th. It’ll come out in a few weeks. I don’t know the exact date, but today is tax day. It’s the day in the US at least that most people know. I mean, I filed my extension, so nothing is happening today, let’s be honest. But let’s shift and talk about taxes because I think a lot of people may not realize that there are legal totally ethical strategies that you can do that have tax benefits or consequences. 

Darren Wurz: 

Yeah, a hundred percent. And especially as a business owner, there are so many things to think about. So one of the things we do with our clients is help them strategize around their taxes. We’ll review their tax returns before they’re filed and after they’re filed, and then create a tax strategy for them. So I think the statistic is something about 15% of tax returns filed by preparers contain errors, which is a pretty high number. There’s pretty good odds that you have some mistakes in your tax returns, and we see it all the time. We see $10,000 plus mistakes that have been made that we’re able to correct for folks. So that that’s step number one. I think. So few people are actually reviewing the returns to make sure that they were done correctly. And that’s a big easy win oftentimes, 

Stephanie Everett : 

Or they review ’em, but they’re like, well, I don’t know. It looks pretty good. And for many years, I mean, I think too, a trap we sometimes fall into is, I had a guy that I worked with a CPA that for years, I’d call him and I’d be like, should I be doing something different? Should I be doing something more? And he’d be like, I don’t know, Stephanie, what did you hear from your friends? And I was like, well, nothing. I just want you to tell me. And I found he was very, and then I kind of did some research and realized there’s kind of two camps. There’s some people who are very sort of just reactive. Their business model is built on filing returns. That’s what they do. They’re going to prepare those returns and file them for you. And then I kind of found this other group that’s like, no, we actually are interested in the strategic proactive help. And they were able to give me some new ideas. I was always kind of frustrated with that old guy, if I’m being honest, that I was like, well, it’s, I don’t know. It’s not my job you’re supposed to be telling me. And so I think if you’ve had that experience with your CPA, maybe you’re thinking, okay, I don’t know. Is there really anything I can do? Is it really worth it, I guess? 

Darren Wurz: 

I think there definitely is. I mean, I hear that all the time from law firm owners that their CPA has just told them, well, just be happy you make the money you make. There’s not much you can do. I think most CPAs are trained to be very conservative in their approach to taxes. They really make sure that you’re not audited, that nothing’s a red flag. There’s a saying, anything’s deductible until you’re audited. 

But there are things you can do that are perfectly safe, that are legitimate. If you’re doing them properly, you’re maintaining proper documentation, especially around things like your home office deduction, your use of vehicles, employing your members of your family, your spouse, your kids. And there are so many little small things too, like your HSA accounts that many people don’t think about. And as financial planners, we like to think really long term. So we’re constantly thinking about how taxes relate to your investments and Roth conversion strategies. And thinking about 20 years from now, how do we make sure that you’re optimizing your taxes over a long span of time as well. Now, I do have to say, be careful to your audience because I see that on social media. There are so many tax planners, there’s a lot of bad tax advice out there on social media. So make sure you’re working with someone qualified fake, because you really do want to be careful, but as long as you’re doing things legitimately that are in the tax code that are written for business owners, our tax code is set up to be helpful to business owners. So there’s a lot of great things that you should be taking advantage of if you can. 

Stephanie Everett : 

I mean, obviously we don’t want to get our advice from TikTok, but you bring up a good point, and I am kind of curious, are there a couple of key questions that you should be asking the person that you’re working with to kind of vet them? Somebody may say, well, I don’t know. How do I know if they’re they’re qualified? What would you tell us? 

Darren Wurz: 

Yeah, your designations are good places to start. The CPA, although the CPAs tend to not necessarily be tax planners all the time. Have they been through some kind of training for taxes? We’re CFPs. So we can do tax planning. We can’t give tax advice like legal tax advice, but we can definitely strategize around different things you can do. So make sure that they have some qualifications. 

Stephanie Everett : 

I like that. And I remember the person that I’m working with kind of said, listen, bring on the audits. Because I mean, he kind of reframed how I thought about it. Not that we’re doing things risky, but he was like, listen, we don’t mind when our clients get audited because to your point, we have all the documentation right down to this is the exact code or opinion or whatever it is we’re relying on. If we’re doing our job, you should not be worried that an audit is going to uncover something wrong because we’ve done our job. And that as a client obviously gave me some assurance and was like, yeah, okay. Well that’s good. I guess as a lawyer, lawyers, you’re always like, if this contract got tested in court or in litigation, would it stand up? 

That’s kind of the same attitude. And I think maybe on that point as we sort of wrap up, get the help might be my advice. One of my takeaways from this, I remember once a long time ago, I did file my own taxes and then we opened another business and I was like, maybe I should get a CPA. And they did the review and it’s just kind of embarrassing, but they found a mistake that I had made that resulted in me getting a very large check. We did an amended return and I didn’t know any better. And from that point on, I’ve always given the advice guys, just like we say to lawyers, you don’t want to represent yourself, hire a lawyer, it’s worth the investment. The same goes with this financial stuff, both on the tax side but also the investment side. I know it’s easy to get out there and think, well, I can just do some research on the internet and figure out what investments I need to make because the information’s out there. But having a trusted advisor like you, having someone that can walk you through it and answer questions to me, so worth it. So I know that you’ve done a lot of work, so I just want to take a minute, get to know Darren. He didn’t mention this in his intro, but he’s also published a book, right? 

The Lawyer Millionaire. 

Darren Wurz: 

That’s right. That’s right. 

Stephanie Everett : 

So we’ll put a link to the book in the show notes also for how you can get in contact with Darren. He also has a podcast that you can check out, and I’ve been listening to some episodes lately and it’s great. They’re quick and fun and easy, all about finances and things you need to be thinking about. So I just would encourage everyone to check out Darren’s work and I’m so glad that you were able to join me today. This has been really great. 

Darren Wurz: 

Yeah, thank you so much for having me on, Stephanie. I would definitely echo that. Build out your team. The most successful law firm owners I see have a really well-developed team of experts that they rely on. And I think a big part of it is just giving you some peace of mind to know that things are handled, that someone’s looking at things for you. It just gets that out of your brain so you can focus on the good work that you’re doing in building your business. 

Stephanie Everett : 

I love it. And then you’ll love tax day. I mean, 

Darren Wurz: 

Hopefully, yes, 

Stephanie Everett : 

Maybe not love it, but maybe you’ll hate it a little less. 

Darren Wurz: 

Right, right. Definitely. 

Stephanie Everett : 

Alright, well thanks Darren for being with me today and look forward to continuing to listen to you on your show and learning from you. 

Darren Wurz: 

Absolutely. Same too, Stephanie.