Blog: Trust & Estate Planning

The title poses these as alternatives, and they are not. If you are reading this you are a CPA or becoming one, and the question is whether to add a planning credential.

The honest answer turns on a single prior question: do you intend to deliver financial planning as a service? Because if you do, the credential is the easy part — and if you do not, no credential will change anything.

What Each One Is

The CPA

Information return deadlines cause more January damage than any other compliance obligation, and the reason is structural: the deadlines are not uniform. They differ by form, they differ by whether the copy goes to the recipient or to the agency, and they differ by filing method — and a firm that manages them as one date will miss some of them.

The other reason is that the work that makes January possible happens in November and December, and firms ...