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Bill Lampton Ph.D.
Bill, Hi there. Welcome to the biz communication Show. I’m your host. Bill Lampton, the biz communication guy, bringing you communication tips and strategies that will boost your business because of the conversation that I have with a highly qualified guest who shares her expertise with us today. And I’m very happy to welcome Kristine Stevenson from Austin, Texas. She’s the owner of Proverbs 1616. LLC and is a central Texas author, speaker and radio show host. She negotiates tax debt settlements with the IRS for individuals and small business owners, and specializes in assisting first time self employed individuals and small business owners helping them straighten out their money mess. How many times have we needed that? With seven years of experience at the IRS in Austin, Texas, her expertise led her to write the book How to avoid trouble with the IRS 10 best tax tips for the self employed gig worker and indie contractor. The book became an Amazon number one hot new release. Kristine Stevenson is regularly quoted in many online financial sites such as Fox Business News, MSN money, Yahoo Finance, debt.org, and Business Insider, Kristine and her husband enjoy their seven adult children and 11 grandchildren. And here’s a interesting point, especially they occasionally raise backyard chicken, so she’s extremely versatile. Hello, Kristine, welcome to the biz communication show
Kristine Stevenson
Hi Bill, great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Oh, it’s
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
super to have you here. And before we talk very much about the specifics of your business, one of the items that I noticed since we became connected on LinkedIn, one of the items I noticed was where you talked about the great value, professionally and personally, of taking time away, as I time away from the work, as I remember, you had a cabin that you went too far a week. So I would like for you to explain to us why you feel that way, and I think it counteracts what you and I have heard so much from many other professionals. Many other professionals say, work, work, work, produce, produce, produce, get up early, stay up late, work, weekends and those kinds of things. So tell us, please, is this something you’ve been doing a while, or something that’s a long standing habit, and what’s the value of it? Please?
Kristine Stevenson
Wonderful, wonderful question. So particularly for self employed people, especially that’s the focus of of that comment and the post actually put on LinkedIn when you’re self employed, and if you work from home, such as I do, the tendency is to keep working. Keep working. The next thing for the client. What does my client need? How am I going to serve them next. And you can get caught in this, this, this long daily cycle of work, work, work, work, as you said. But if you don’t take a break every day and then for a longer period of time, the vacation time, I think you suffer mentally, physically, your physical health, emotionally, spiritually, all these things start to go down the toilet, and it’s very important to maintain the opposite, good health, a good spiritual life, good mental health, good emotional, physical health. All these things are important. And my own personality, I tend to I tend to get very focused. I can literally sit for six hours. I’m so involved in my research, what I’m doing for the client, for somebody else, time just passes by. And while that’s great for research and productivity, it’s terrible for my health. I’m sitting, and that’s bad. I have a very sedentary lifestyle. Know, and many people do so, getting out, walking around, stepping away from electronics. I love nature. I encourage people. I encourage my clients to go out. As a matter of fact, I had a client last night. He’s an airline pilot, and he has a lot of responsibility, as you can imagine. And on his days off, he’s got a lot of things to take care of, but I remind him, hey, you need to put 30 minutes aside. Your assignment, your homework is to go out and walk for 30 minutes. Get out. Do nothing. No phone, no ear pods, earbuds, no nothing. Take a stroll. A stroll. How many times that’s an old fashioned kind of word? How many people go for a stroll these days. So I just know the benefits of that for all those reasons, mental health, physical health, emotionally, spiritually building space in our busy, busy world, in the coaching world, we talk about slowing down to speed up. So those breaks are very, very important, and then a long term break to get away from it all that cabinet,
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
I like that slowing down to speed up. And one of the points you made, that I want to underscore is that many of us who are entrepreneurs and self employed, you alluded to this, Hey, one of the problems is that we’re working at home, and there’s not much of a place to get fully away unless we leave the house and and a couple of comments. Additionally, I remember, and I think of it often, the words of a country music song, which said, what do you get when you work your fingers to the bone, you get bony fingers Exactly. And I so agree with what you’re saying. In fact, it’s not. I’m not the only one who agrees with that. I’m sure you have seen many posts on LinkedIn where research is showing that people who take breaks, people who get and for me, it’s eight hours of sleep. You come in refreshed, you come in energetic. You got more emotional stability. And Ariana Huffington is one that I quote on this very often, because she she posts often about the value of sleep and rest and recreation. You talk about the strolls outdoors. Kristine, thankfully, I have a little puppy who requires that
Kristine Stevenson
we go great
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
rather than doing one long walk a day. It’s better for both me and the puppy to take a 10 minute walk here and a 10 minute walk there. And when you come back, you have, not only mentally and emotionally, you’re refreshed, but your eyes are rested. Your brain is rested. It’s it’s just a very good habit to form. And for some people, as you say, who can, and I think of my friend Diana booer, who can just sit for a long time. Diana told me she will. She’s written 50 books, and she said sometimes she will sit at the desk for 10 consecutive hours writing, okay, that’s not my style. It wouldn’t work for me in any fashion. So I wanted to bring that out, because with with all that you do, and with the complex work that you have, it takes, it takes incredible mental alertness, and it’s you don’t run your car at 100 miles an hour all the time. I hope you don’t. We need that refreshment now, getting to your profession, I would say that being a an IRS advisor, coach, teacher, instructor, I would say that that would be somewhere in the 95% range of the most demanding professions, because it’s so complex and you’re often dealing with people who you have to give a lot of education to. So my major question would be, why is that your mission? And how did that become your mission?
Kristine Stevenson
Yes, so why it’s my mission is a couple of things. First of all, I know how stressful it is to deal with the IRS for the the regular, average person, and I don’t mind dealing with the IRS. I like it. I enjoy it. You’re qualified to, I’m qualified to also, and, and I, I know that I bring that value to people. I can take the weight, the burden, off of them. And that’s a that’s a real gift, in my opinion. So I that’s part. My mission is to help ease the stress of dealing with the IRS, and
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
I’ll agree to that stress. I think just the if somebody uses the initials as IRS, yes, it really gets to your nerves. It
Kristine Stevenson
does. It’s the worst creditor to have, and they have a lot of power. They can freeze the assets in your bank so you can access your money. They can put a lien on your house, which might complicate things if you try to sell your house. They can, in an extreme situation, padlock the doors to your business. That’s a very extreme example. But they do have that power, and we’ve heard the horror stories in the news media, and I never let my clients get to that stage, ever, ever, but that’s so that’s part of my mission, is to take that burden off of them. And I enjoy, for the most part. I get frustrated, but I enjoy working with the people at the IRS. I I speak IRS. I like to talk about that sometimes on my radio show. I know the lingo. I know the the manuals, that
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
which the rest of us do not know, right? Yes, so I have a little
Kristine Stevenson
bit of an inside scoop there, so I can talk to them, not necessarily, as you know, I am an enrolled agent, which is a credential that I was awarded from the IRS. So I’m licensed. I’m a professional, and I maintain that license through continuing education, but I can speak to the employees and and help say, Look, you know, I know in your manual, it says this, But what about this other situation over there? So I can, I can speak and relate to them in their own language. So that’s part of my mission. That’s part of why I do this. And what brought me here again is the seven years I spent working inside the IRS and and it’s a very specialized bit of work. Most CPAs or enrolled agents or tax attorneys, they’re not doing this specialized work. This is my niche, or my niche, depending on how you want to pronounce that. And I love being able to drill down into that and specialize and
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
and bless you. We need that, yeah, and
Kristine Stevenson
I want people to avoid trouble with the IRS. Hence,
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
we need your expertise. I was audited once by the IRS. It’s not a comfortable experience, and it was, it was almost humorous the way it wound up because they, after the thorough audit, the examiner said to me, you, you are, you are not in trouble. We’ve everything is correct, no problems. And I said, Well, then why was I audited? And her reply was, because you, for your level of income, seemed to be paying a heck of a lot of interest, and I said politely, at my level of income, you got to borrow some money.
Kristine Stevenson
There you go. Yes, yes. There’s all sorts of reasons.
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
One thing that I’ve even got friends who say this and they think that they’re being financially sound. I have friends who will say, Oh no, I do my own taxes because I don’t have to pay somebody else to do it. How do you counter that statement?
Kristine Stevenson
So I would say this, those are the DIY ers, the do it yourselfers, and I, myself, am a DIY person. I like to do things myself, and sometimes you get what you pay for. And I have helped people prepare tax returns across all spectrums, and there are those that are absolutely afraid of the IRS, no matter how simple their tax return is, and they want someone else to do it. Boom. They just they go to H R Block or one of the other services, they get it done. And then there’s the DIY ers who like to use the retail software, such as free tax USA or Turbo Tax, or any of the number of softwares, software retailers that are available. They enjoy that process, and they don’t want to pay a professional, a CPA, an enrolled agent such as myself, because they don’t necessarily see the value in what the professional is bringing to the table. Oh, well, I can. I can do it myself with this software, and that’s true to a point, but the problem becomes, do you know the reason behind the question being asked in the software? And if you don’t know the tax law behind it, you might do something wrong. Quick. Case in point, I had a gentleman come to me several kids in college and still at home, and he wasn’t getting he wasn’t getting his child tax credit that he thought he should be getting for his kids. So I went through his return and he had indicated that his kids were were not at home, they were away at college, and they didn’t live with him all year long. Well, if you don’t know, the rule states that if your kids are away at college, they’re still considered living at home. And you’re going to lose out on some credit. And that’s what happened. So I took a look at his tax return, and I fixed it, and I got him $3,000 more. So he’s a DIY. Thought he knew the rules. Wanted to save some money not going to a preparer, but he ended up having to pay me anyway to fix the problem.
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
Well, I’ve I’ve reason for so many years in my own case, that there are many professionals that I pay because I cannot do what they do. If somebody comes to repair my roof or my plumbing or my electricity or my car, it’s just not it’s not feasible for me to try to do what experts can do. So I I’ve always looked at it this way. Where else, not, not very many places can you spend a few $100 to save several $1,000 that’s exactly I would imagine that there are many, many instances where that happens with you. There
Kristine Stevenson
is yes. And here’s one other thing I will say, it’s not just the money that you’re saving if you want to do it yourself, or that if you want to pay someone else, it’s the time and the agony, yeah, yes, yes. What is the time value of your money? If you have to spend eight hours preparing your own tax return on a Saturday, for instance, what else could you be doing with that eight hours? What else?
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
Or if you equate that to a work day, what in eight hours would you be earning? Yes, if
Kristine Stevenson
you’re self employed, you’re spending your time preparing your tax return during a work day, for instance, on a Thursday, well, that’s eight hours. You’re not You’re not sending out proposals or tracking down accounts receivable or doing some other income producing activity. So it’s a it’s a trade off. Those are conversations I have frequently with people that want to do it themselves. Well, there’s value in that, but there’s also value in paying someone else. Yes,
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
exactly. This is magnificent information, and I know that there’s very helpful information in your book. So I want us, in just a few seconds to get back to our conversation and have you tell us about your book. Please be right back.
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Bill Lampton Ph.D.
you’re here with us on the biz communication Show. I’m your host, Bill Lampton, with our guest, Kristine Stevenson, Kristine, I mentioned before that short break that we want to hear about your book. What prompted you to write it? What did you try to accomplish with it, and how will a reader benefit from it?
Kristine Stevenson
Absolutely, part of the reason I wrote the book was based on my knowledge and time at the IRS I spoke to 1000s of small business owners across the United States. Many of them were scheduled C filers, single member LLC, sole proprietors, and often they had the same the same issues, over and over and over again, and it was after the fact. So I was more limited and how I could help them figure out what to do with the letter that they got from the IRS, and so understanding, well, if they did these things before, then they wouldn’t have these issues after. So that was swimming around in the back of my mind. But the real impetus to get this going was I belong to a group of financial coaches, Ramsey coaches. I myself and the Ramsey preferred coach. And in this circle, there’s maybe seven, 800 900 coaches, and we belong to a forum, and new coaches come out of the training program that Dave Ramsey has, and they’re all new business owners. They’re all self employed, independent contractors at this point, and many of them were asking the same questions in the forum, do I need an EIN How do I pay tax to the IRS? Should I form an LLC? I kept hearing these things over and over and over, and I thought, gee, this is like my time at the IRS. Why not write a book? Keep it simple. Keep it short. Use plain English. Not. IRS jargon, and I started writing, and I gotta say, once I started, it poured out of me. I could not, not write this book. That’s, that’s, that’s how, how fast it came out of me. I wrote 80% of the book and 20% of the time, and the other 20% of the book, I took 80% of the time. But that’s what was behind this book to help people
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
tell us how we can get the book. Please, yes, sir.
Kristine Stevenson
It is on Amazon. It’s a paperback. I also have it recorded. I paid for a professional to record me, and it’s so it’s an audiobook. It’s also a Kindle version, also on Amazon, the audiobook is available on on any of the major audiobook platforms, Google Play, Nook, Spotify, Audible, it’s, it’s out there to go listen.
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
So you’ve provided, you’ve provided the information and two different ways to satisfy whether we want to read or whether we want to listen
Kristine Stevenson
right exactly or both at the same time. Yes,
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
yes, that’s, that’s great. Okay, I see the cover of the book behind you there, right?
Kristine Stevenson
Yes. How to avoid trouble with the IRS,
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
which that title itself should. That should attract a lot of people, very much. So it
Kristine Stevenson
does. I have many, many of this, these coaches that I, that I work with. I send them a copy of my book, and they read it, and then they become, they become my marketers. For me, they realize, Wow, this is, this is really good stuff. And they have many clients that are also self employed, so they’re buying the book and sending it to their clients, which is the perfect, perfect scenario that you want. They they are my advocates for this book and and I appreciate your support. I appreciate everyone’s support that buys the book and leaves, especially leaving an Amazon review, because it’s, it’s good information. I make it funny. There’s stories in there about my clients. It’s, it’s a really, it’s a really good book. I’m very proud of it very
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
fine. And I’m, I know there are many who are viewing and listening our conversation who will want that book. You could not have a topic that’s that’s any more universally recognized. I’m quite sure that in many ways, you’re not just an IRS expert. You’re also, it appears to me, you’re a financial advisor. And one phrase that I’ve seen you use, and I’d like for you to elaborate on, is that you you help people recognize their budget busters. Tell us about that. Yes,
Kristine Stevenson
budget busters, before I say that, I do want to make a quick clarification on the language. I am not a licensed financial advisor. That is something different. I understand what it is, but I’m not licensed in that sense. I am a I am a coach, and coaching people with their money is helping people behave with their money, versus an advisor is helping the money behave, behave well in the stock market, hopefully so money masses. That’s a huge thing. A great example is as a parent, we have kids, we want to put our kids in all sorts of soccer practice and ballet lessons and swimming and all sorts of things that we want for our kids. Those things nickel and dime our budgets, and it can be detrimental and the budget, because we don’t want to not give those things to our kids, especially if we come from a background that we maybe didn’t have those things, and we don’t want our kids to, quote, suffer and not have those things because I did so. So those are the kinds of things, or car repairs, unexpected car repairs. Huge budget buster, my husband, we had to put a transmission in his truck and simultaneously get a new some of their some of the thing, I forget what it is. I’m not a car mechanic. But anyway, we had to lay out $4,500 just like that. And because of where we’re at, where we’re at with our money and what we’ve done, we were able to cash flow that so we didn’t have to resort to using a credit card. So CAR, CAR issues are a big budget buster, medical expenses, yes, all these things that pop up unexpectedly that bust our budget. I have a process for people to avoid that, and that’s part of what the coaching is. It’s let’s set money aside so we don’t bust the budget. And that’s a process
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
that old saying about saving for rainy day, absolutely,
Kristine Stevenson
we know it’s going to rain, not a matter of if, but when.
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
When you again sometime are my guest on the biz communication show. I We don’t have time to talk about it now, but I, I would like to at least mention it, that I would imagine that you sense as I do that there could be vast improvements. In the educational system teaching us Financial Literacy and Financial Planning quite early in life, because we form habits early in life, and they are, some are good and some are not so good, and we neglect some habits that we want, but I would think that that’s a topic that you would be glad to explore.
Kristine Stevenson
I very much want to explore this when I wrote my book, part of the intention behind it was to figure out somehow, to put this into a curriculum of some sort I would love, dearly love to create an instructional program for high school kids, maybe high school seniors, because everybody at some point in their life is going to have to file a tax return. I mean, bar none, with rare exception, and this is a real skill set that would come in handy as you leave high school, as you get into college, sort of maybe leave the nest, you know, Mom and Dad’s nest from home to be able to create that sort of thing has become very near and dear to my heart. A year ago, I wrote down in my journal my next project is to create some sort of curriculum, and I’ve actually begun that process. Now I’m going to be working with someone that’s going to help me build that and it will be both for small business owners that have nothing to do with the school, because we do have a terrible lack of education about basic finance and taxes in our in our education system, but also to figure out how to work this into a curriculum in in schools and high schools particularly so I’m very excited to begin exploring that process. I’m
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
glad I brought up that topic. It it would meet a felt need, as we talk about because the the trouble that we get into financially is preventable with planning? Yes, absolutely it is. It is preventable with planning and with knowing experts such as you and your coaching and others who who can guide us just through some basics that that would help us so much. Kristine, this has been a marvelous conversation, very enlightening, very energetic as I knew it would be. I’ve learned so much. I know our viewers and listeners have so I know people will want to get in touch with you. So please give us your contact information. Absolutely
Kristine Stevenson
the best place is to go to my website, which is www dot Proverbs, 16, sixteen.com and on my landing page, there’s all sorts of buttons, radio buttons. To get on my calendar, you need to press that button. Get on my calendar. We have a nice conversation about what’s going on with your money. It could be business, it could be personal, but we’ll have a conversation Other than that, getting a hold of me by by phone. I have a Google Voice number, which is 737-234-0196,
give me a call, leave me a voice message, and I will call you back. Absolutely. Call you back,
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
and you have demonstrated today that you’re a very knowledgeable person. You’re a very approachable person, and you are dedicated to your profession, to helping us through a very complex arena so that our lives will have more security and serenity. That’s great. And now that you’ve given your contact information, I am happy to give mine. Invite you to check my YouTube channel. Bill Lambton, PhD, is the way you’ll find me there. I started posting instructional videos in the year 2007 I now have over 500 of them. I would say, don’t look at the ones in 2007 but the most recent ones, many of them are the biz communication show, where, as is the case today, I host an expert, and we have, I don’t like to really call it an interview. I like to call it a conversation. And through that, both you and I learned those tips and strategies that I talked about at the first so on my YouTube channel, when you go there, be sure to hit the subscribe button. My tagline is biz communication guys. So my website, quite logically, is biz communication guide.com and while you’re there on the website, you can subscribe to my podcast. Very much like Kristine, I’d be very happy to talk with you my phone number, 6783164300678316430,
Zero call me for a no obligation, discussion of your communication problems and challenges, and we’ll see what assistance you need, and who’s the best person to get that for you. It may not be me, but it could be me, so be happy to talk with you. And now I want to ask Kristine again a very enlightening conversation in 30 seconds or so. How could you pull together what you’d like to leave with us today?
Kristine Stevenson
Well, what I would like to leave for the small business owners in particular inside my book, which is the 10 best tax tips. I want you to drill down. We didn’t talk about this, but I want you to drill down. I want you to go open a business checking account. That’s one of the best things you can do for yourself. And if your money is a mess, start tracking all of this inside your business account and you can get a hold of it. I really want to encourage you to do that. These are the things that I help people do. So go open that business checking account that will really help you.
Bill Lampton Ph.D.
Thank you. Thank you again for being our wonderfully enlightening guest today. And I encourage people to get your book. I encourage people to talk to you about your coaching and your IRS assistance. They will be better for it, I’m sure. And thanks again to all of you who joined us today on the biz communication show on the video portion are on the podcast. I’m your host. Bill Lampton, the biz communication guy, looking forward to being with you again soon. You
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
