Between his day job as the chief planning officer of Focus Partners Wealth, his work as a content producer for Kitces.com and his service as a tax planning faculty member at the American College of Financial Services, Jeff Levine spends a lot of time thinking about the evolving role of financial planning professionals.
There’s probably never been a better time to be a self-professed “financial planning nerd,” Levine recently told ThinkAdvisor. The broad scope of services a firm like Focus Partners Wealth brings to the table lets its planners truly go above and beyond for their clients across the full spectrum of wealth management needs, he said, from tax and estate planning through to lifestyle considerations, portfolio management and more.
That means advisors are delivering greater value to their clients than ever before, Levine said, and there’s never been more demand for the expertise that skilled planning professionals bring to the table. For that reason, Levine and many colleagues have also been able to establish a strong presence online and at industry events put on by the likes of Kitces.com and the American College, giving them an opportunity to have a positive impact beyond just the number of clients served directly or those supported by the firm.
“That’s always been an important thing for me. It has been really fulfilling establishing a bit of a voice online,” Levine said. “As a planner, I can support only a limited number of families by myself. As a chief planning officer, I can have a broader impact across Focus Partners Wealth. With my broader outreach on X and LinkedIn, I can hopefully give some benefit to a much broader network of people. That’s meaningful for me.”
Of course, Levine added, advisors and firm leaders also face some real challenges, especially the risk of falling prey to “shiny object syndrome.” The fact is that advisors’ days are already full, he said, and clients have their own busy lives and a limited amount of time to dedicate to planning considerations.
“That means we have to be judicious about the tools and services we are bringing to the table, even as we seek to do more for our clients,” Levine said. “At the end of the day, though, I’m incredibly optimistic about the future and what’s going on in the financial planning profession, especially within our firm.”
Here are some additional highlights from our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
THINKADVISOR: Can we start with your reflections on the past 12 to 18 months both for your firm and for the financial planning industry in general? I speak with a lot of advisors and firm leaders, and there’s a lot of optimism out there.
JEFF LEVINE: Yeah, the first thing is, overall, I’m incredibly optimistic about what's going on. The biggest and most positive trend I’m seeing is that firms, including ours, are expanding the breadth and depth of their resources and capabilities. That has a direct positive impact on clients.
As an example, we just recently added a new expert to my team who was formerly a social worker. She brings an amazing expertise to the table when it comes to helping families navigate very difficult elder care issues and related challenges that can significantly affect clients' lives and finances.
We’re able to use her expertise both to train up our financial planners, on the one hand, and on the other, we are able to provide her expertise directly to clients for a much lower cost than would be the case if they had to go outside and get that kind of help from a third party. The same is true in many other areas of planning, for example budgeting, cash flow management, estate, etc.
Finally, I would say I'm optimistic about the outlook for advisors to utilize powerful planning technology, as well as the opportunity for firms like ours, with our significant scale, to deliver cost savings and added value to our clients. It’s just a great time to be working in this industry.
How have you seen client expectations evolve during the course of your career and what are your expectations for what they will demand in the future? Are clients more discerning about the importance of planning compared with investment management alone?
LEVINE: There’s a lot we could discuss here, but what I can say definitively is that Focus Partners Wealth is finding a lot of success by putting ourselves out there as a planning-focused firm that does all the things we already talked about and more. Today we lead our pitch with planning. It’s not that we want to diminish the value of high-quality investment management, because that is obviously still very important. But that’s not what we hang our hat on, so to speak.
It’s also important to acknowledge that there are different levels and styles of what “planning” means to different people and different advisors. There are some firms out there that put terms like “holistic advice” on their website, but maybe all they’re really doing is running a few Monte Carlo analyses with respect to funding a retirement portfolio. They’re useful, sure, but Monte Carlo analyses about the potential of depleting a retirement portfolio isn't the same as building a genuine financial plan for the whole household.
We put a big emphasis on added value tax planning, for example. A lot of firms are still squeamish about doing anything that has to do with tax planning, but we feel that’s not the right point of view. We believe advisors can and should engage in tax planning, but they need to have the right expertise and access to the right tools and resources. As in other areas, the real key isn’t to know everything about the tax code. It’s to know where you can go to get reliable answers to your clients’ important tax questions.
Finally, in our model, we are striving to strike a balance between doing as much as we can with our clients without overwhelming them in any given meeting or interaction. For example, you can’t show up to an hour-long client meeting and expect to run them through 18 or 20 different ideas to implement.
What have you learned about the best ways to build client loyalty and elevate the firm’s reputation as a skilled and caring partner?
LEVINE: It’s about both the big things and the little things. For example, we have a policy of regularly helping our clients check if they have any unclaimed property that they have a right to, whether that’s an old retirement account or some kind of past overpayment rebate they could collect.
What I can say is that it’s very rare to help a client regain control of anything like a life-changing amount of money. We’re not generally going to find that a client with a million dollars in their retirement portfolio suddenly realizes they have $700,000 sitting in some forgotten 401(k). Generally, we’re talking a few hundred dollars here or there, or maybe a four-figure sum every once in a while.
It might seem like a trivial thing in terms of the helping to build a client’s overall wealth, but I can’t tell you how significant that effort is when it comes to demonstrating to our clients that we are a diligent and serious partner in their financial planning journey. They know that if we take a few hundred dollars seriously, we're going to treat their full suite of assets with a ton of care and diligence.
Finally, what’s on your year-end tax planning checklist for the typical advisor? Anything specific to 2025 that we should keep in mind?
LEVINE: I like to talk about year-end tax planning through the lens of flowers — you have annuals and then you have perennials. In the grand scheme of things, this year is a fairly tame one in terms of those random one-off issues that are only going to apply at the end of 2025. That's thanks to the nearly wholesale extension of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that the congressional Republicans and the president accomplished earlier this year.
One pressing item for this year, though, is the expiration of certain clean energy tax incentives when people are making home improvements. The time to take advantage of the Biden-era tax credits is running out. While state-level incentives may continue to exist, understanding the set of federal changes will be key to avoiding unpleasant surprises at tax time.
On a more general basis, it’s always worth asking at year end about whether you have any room left in your tax bracket to do a strategic Roth conversion. Now is also the time to consider starting or further funding a 529 plan account. Technically, this is a state-by-state issue, as some states have a later IRA-style retroactive contribution option for early 2026, but many do not.
Finally, I would encourage clients and advisors to think about the topic of bonus depreciation and whether it makes sense to make a bigger capital investment at the end of this year or early next year. From a depreciation standpoint, depending on the purchase, it can make a substantial difference to make the purchase in late December versus early January.
Pictured: Jeff Levine
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