When clients sit down with us for the first time, we often ask a simple question: What's your largest lifetime expense?
Most guess their home. Some say college tuition for their kids. A few mention healthcare.
Almost no one says taxes.
And yet, for many households, taxes represent the single largest expense they'll ever pay—often exceeding the cost of their home, their cars, and their children's education combined. Over a 40-year career, a household earning $200,000 annually may pay $2 million or more in federal and state income taxes alone. Add in capital gains taxes, estate taxes, and Medicare surtaxes, and the number climbs higher still.
Here's what makes this particularly frustrating: unlike your mortgage payment or grocery bill, your tax burden isn't fixed. It's one of the few major expenses in your financial life that can potentially be reduced through careful, proactive planning.
The Difference Between Tax Preparation and Tax Planning
Most people have their taxes prepared. Far fewer have them planned.
Tax preparation is backward-looking. It's the work done each spring to report what happened last year—tallying income, claiming deductions, and filing returns. It's necessary, but by the time you're sitting down to prepare, the year is over. The opportunities have passed.
Tax planning is forward-looking. It's the ongoing process of structuring your financial decisions—when to recognize income, which accounts to draw from, how to time asset sales, when to make charitable gifts—so that you keep more of what you earn. It happens throughout the year, every year, and it compounds over time.
The distinction matters because tax planning, done well, can lead to improved long-term financial outcomes depending on your circumstances. Small Decisions, Compounding Consequences
Consider a few examples of how tax-aware decisions can add up:
A couple approaching retirement has savings spread across traditional IRAs, Roth accounts, and taxable brokerage accounts. Without a withdrawal strategy, they might pull from whichever account feels convenient—often triggering unnecessary taxes and potentially pushing themselves into higher brackets. With a coordinated plan, they may strategically draw from different accounts in different years, smoothing their tax burden and potentially saving significant amounts over the course of retirement.
A business owner sells appreciated stock to fund a major purchase. Without planning, they face a significant capital gains bill. With planning, they might instead donate the shares to a donor-advised fund, take the charitable deduction, and use other funds for the purchase—achieving the same goal while potentially reducing their tax liability depending on their situation.
An executive exercises stock options in a single year, pushing their income into the highest bracket. A little foresight could spread those exercises across multiple years, keeping them in lower brackets and potentially saving meaningful amounts in taxes. None of these strategies are exotic or aggressive. They're simply the result of thinking about taxes before decisions are made, rather than after.
Why Coordination Matters
Tax planning doesn't exist in isolation. Every tax decision intersects with your broader financial picture—your investments, your retirement timeline, your estate plan, your cash flow needs.
This is where many people encounter a frustrating gap. Their CPA prepares their returns but doesn't manage their investments. Their financial advisor manages their portfolio but isn't deeply versed in tax code. Their estate attorney drafts documents but isn't involved in day-to-day financial decisions. Each professional sees one piece of the puzzle, and the opportunities that exist between those pieces—the ones that require coordination—often go unrealized.
At Brickley Wealth Management, we've structured our firm specifically to close that gap. As a combined CPA and financial advisory practice, we handle tax preparation, tax planning, investment management, and estate coordination under one roof. When we recommend a Roth conversion, we're doing so with full visibility into how it affects your portfolio, your estate plan, and your tax return. When we rebalance your investments, we're considering the tax implications alongside the financial ones.
This isn't about convenience, though it is more convenient. It's about outcomes. Coordinated planning can lead to better results for many clients, though outcomes depend on each client’s individual circumstance.
The Cost of Waiting
Perhaps the most important thing to understand about tax planning is that it rewards those who start early and stay engaged. The benefits compound—not just financially, but strategically.
Roth conversions are most powerful when done over many years, in carefully chosen amounts. Asset location strategies—placing the right investments in the right account types—require time to implement and time to pay off. Charitable giving strategies often need years of runway to maximize their impact.
Every year that passes without a plan may represent missed opportunities. Not dramatically, perhaps. But steadily. And over a lifetime, those missed opportunities add up to real money—money that could have supported your retirement, your family, or the causes you care about.
A Different Approach
We believe that taxes deserve the same attention and sophistication that most people give to their investments. After all, it's not what you earn that determines your financial success—it's what you keep.
If you've been preparing your taxes but not planning them, we'd welcome a conversation. At Brickley Wealth Management, we work with clients who want their tax strategy, investment management, and estate plan to work together—because that's when the real value emerges.
Your largest lifetime expense doesn't have to be as large as you think.