Kitces: 10 Questions to Ask When Building a Year-End Tax Planning Checklist

Preparing a checklist for end-of-year tax planning purposes is another way that advisors can make financial planning more efficient and scalable, according to Michael Kitces, head of planning strategy at Buckingham Wealth Partners and chief financial planning nerd at Kitces.com. When advisors know they're going to be reviewing clients' financial plans at the end of each year on a consistent basis, "we can have a checklist that we go through with clients to say: 'Here are all the things we want to touch on to make sure that we're capturing'" to maximize savings for clients, he said Thursday at a webinar on scaling advice. The webinar was hosted by fpPathfinder, a membership service offering financial planning checklists and flowcharts, of which Kitces is a co-founder. "When we set a calendar and schedule around how to do this, we can then create standardized deliverables about how to do it efficiently," he explained. Kitces broke the issues to focus on in a checklist down to five separate areas: taxes, cash flow, insurance, estate planning and other issues. See the gallery above to see 10 questions that can help advisors build end-of-year checklists to review with their clients.