A prospective couple came to us recently. Two W-2 earners with RSUs at their respective companies. A rental property they’d held onto when they upgraded houses. Maxing out both 401(k) plans and 529s for their two young kids.
They’d been managing all of it themselves. “I’ve been doing an elementary job, based on what I know,” she said. “But our financial situation is much different than it was five years ago.”
There was a growing list of questions the internet wasn’t equipped to answer, and it was clear that TurboTax wasn’t going to cut it anymore.
Midway through our call, she asked me a question I don’t get very often: “Is it normal to have the CPA and the financial advisor at two separate firms? Because we were specifically looking for one place.”
I told her it wasn’t that common, and that most firms keep those roles separate. It’s one of the things that makes what we do at Tannery Company different. Then I described what I hear from people who’ve tried to manage it the other way: you end up as the go-between, playing the role of quarterback.
She didn’t have to think about it. “Yes, we want to avoid that,” she said.
They hadn’t been able to put a name to it. But they already knew what they were trying to avoid. Most people don’t figure it out until they’ve experienced it.
It’s not a fee or a missed deduction you can point to on your tax return.
It’s what happens when your CPA, your bookkeeper, and your financial advisor are all doing their jobs well, but none of them are doing it together.
We call it the coordination tax.
And if you have multiple advisors who aren’t communicating regularly, you’re probably paying it.
Tannery Company operates as a single source for tax, accounting, and wealth management, because we’re all in the same room. We see what it looks like when those disciplines actually talk to each other. And we see, pretty clearly, what’s lost when they don’t.
What It Costs You Financially
Most of the people I talk to come in with a version of similar feelings:
Things are going well. But something isn’t quite adding up.
Income is up, life is moving. But they feel like they should be keeping more of what they make, and nobody’s told them why they’re not.
There are so many moving parts, they’ve stopped being certain who’s on top of what. (Spoiler: usually no one person is on top of it.)
This isn’t because the advisors aren’t good. It’s because their advisors aren’t talking.
Here’s what I watch happen:
- The bookkeeper produces accurate books, but accuracy and tax-readiness aren’t the same thing. The decisions that live between them (like timing, structure, classification) often don’t get made because nobody’s asking them together before the year closes.
- The CPA prepares an accurate return, but can only work with the information at hand. They see what happened. They don’t see what the advisor sold last month, what distributions are coming, or whether any of it changes the picture before year-end.
- The advisor manages the portfolio without knowing where the year is landing on the tax side. Nobody flags that realizing a gain now would push the household into a different bracket. Nobody checks whether this is the year to do a Roth conversion or wait.
- Ultimately, nobody is holding the full picture. Each advisor sees their piece: W-2 income, RSU vesting, rental income, portfolio distributions. But none of them are checking whether the pieces, combined, change the answer.
Everyone’s doing their job.
Nobody’s doing it together.
The stakes are real. Even a missed $1,000 credit, captured consistently year over year, compounds into something material over a decade.
The bigger hits are harder to see. At the right time, a Roth conversion can mean six figures in tax-free growth over a retirement horizon. But without visibility into both sides of the picture at the same time, it’s too easy to miss.
For households with two incomes, RSUs, a rental property, or any combination: income is sometimes managed separately but taxed together. And the gap between those two realities can be costly.
What It Costs You Mentally
You might think that the financial costs aren’t painful enough to make a switch. But what about the cost of your time and energy?
Think about what it’s like to manage care across multiple medical specialists who’ve never spoken to each other. Your cardiologist adjusts a medication. Your endocrinologist does not know about the change. Your primary care doctor cannot access either file. Each doctor may be making a reasonable decision, but no one is checking whether those decisions work together.
So you carry the information between appointments, re-explain your history at every visit, and hope nothing important gets missed.
At some point you realize: you’ve become your own care coordinator. Nobody hired you for that job. Nobody is paying you for it either.
That’s exactly what happens with a fragmented advisory team. (And I say this as someone who sits in on these conversations weekly: the parallel is uncanny.)
I hear a version of it on discovery calls all the time. It usually sounds something like: “Our advisor just said, ‘make sure to tell your CPA,'” or “I’m sure balls are getting dropped, I just don’t know which ones.”
What’s happening is that the client has become the connective tissue in their own advisory team. And they’ve been doing that job for so long, they’ve stopped noticing it’s a job.
You start a meeting with your CPA by summarizing what your advisor has been doing. You start a meeting with your advisor by recapping what happened on the tax return last year.
When your CPA and your advisor land on different recommendations, you’re the tiebreaker. Nobody framed it that way. It just happened. Now you’re the one deciding whose read is right, without the training to fully evaluate either. (I’ve watched people carry that weight for years before realizing it didn’t have to be their job.)
You’re not just managing your finances. You’re managing a committee.
That load accumulates. Since nothing feels like a crisis on its own, it’s easy to miss it. But it’s a low-grade drain on your time, your clarity, and your confidence that everything is actually being handled.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
When Caution Has a Cost
Now the reality is that some people have separate advisors because they aren’t ready to put everything with one firm.
At Tannery Company, we’ve had clients who came to us for tax first, and brought their investments to us a year or two later. They were open to everything under one roof but wanted to get to know the team better.
That’s not irrational, but it does have a cost.
We think you should know what it is before deciding whether it’s worth it.
Ask yourself:
Do you know what that arrangement is costing you, financially and mentally? And is it worth it?
For some people, the honest answer is yes. For others, it’s a startling realization the answer is no.
Six Questions to Find Out Where You Stand
Take a couple of minutes to consider these questions:
- Are your investment accounts tax-smart? In other words, does your advisor know enough about your tax picture to let that inform their decisions?
- Are you capturing available tax-advantaged investing opportunities? Does anyone on your team actually know the answer?
- Who knows what about your full financial picture? Map it out: who has which piece(s), and who (if anyone) has all of it.
- Where do you find yourself explaining context, repeating information from one advisor to another?
- Have your advisors ever pushed back on each other: questioned a decision, flagged something they saw the other doing? If not, it likely means they don’t have enough visibility into each other’s work to do so. Real coordination often involves some friction or trade-offs.
- What is the value to you of having multiple advisors? Be honest about what you’re actually getting from the arrangement.
There are no right or wrong answers here. The goal is visibility, so that you can make an informed decision.
If You Didn’t Like Some of What Came Up
Most fragmented advisory arrangements got that way because each individual relationship made sense at the time it formed.
But if “I don’t know” showed up more than once in those questions, or if the mental load of coordinating your own team felt familiar, it’s time for some honest conversations. Start with the other people involved in the financials (spouse, business partner, parent/child, etc), and figure out what you want to be different.
What changes when coordination works:
- You stop being the connective tissue between people who should be talking to each other.
- You stop re-explaining context at the start of every meeting.
- You stop going into April not knowing what’s coming.
- Decisions get made with the full picture, not a partial one.
For most of the people we talk to, that last shift is the one they didn’t know to ask for. Not just that the numbers improve (though they often do), but that someone is finally holding the whole picture, and it’s not them.
Ready to have a different kind of conversation?
