In this Indianapolis Business Journal article, Senior Investment Advisor Ronald Patberg,CFP®, shares why coordinating tax planning with other financial decisions can help preserve more of what you've built.
View the article in the Indianapolis Business Journal, published on October 23, 2026.
You’ve spent years building wealth. Have you spent any time deciding how to keep it?
As a business leader, you can watch your investments closely and question every decision that touches profits. But how much time are you spending planning for taxes?
“Preparing taxes is not the same as planning for them,” says Ron Patberg, CFP®, Senior Investment Advisor at Donaldson Capital Management.
For most of us, taxes are handled once a year. The documents are sent to a CPA, a return is filed, and then the year ends. This work focuses on what has already taken place, but tax planning is an opportunity to plan ahead.
Why the blind spot exists
Financial decisions are usually handled individually. For example, business sales, stock compensation, retirement elections, charitable gifts, investment changes, and estate planning all affect taxes and are often decided separately.
If you consider each of them separately, you won’t be able to tell whether these decisions are all aiming at the same goal. A retirement decision by itself might go against a charitable giving plan drawn up in the same year. An investment choice could weaken the business transition that had been planned five years earlier. Although each option may appear reasonable on its own, they could be heading in different directions from one another.
“Planning should be done all at once, not in separate parts,” Patberg says. “It’s the only way to know whether the various parts work together or against each other.”
Where it shows up
Concentrated stock is a common issue. You build wealth linked to a single company or industry. While concentration is common with stock purchase opportunities, it also involves risk and tax implications that become more difficult to manage the longer diversification is delayed.
Planning issues show up in retirement contributions. You contribute enough to activate the company match, then stop thinking about it. But the best available options may not be the ones you’re using, and your current contribution level could mean a different retirement income than you expect.
Charitable giving follows the same pattern. You probably focus on how much to give, not how you give it. The way the gift is arranged affects both its impact and tax efficiency and can be advantageous to both the non-profit organization and the family.
The same problem arises when selling a business. You spend years building your business and only start thinking about taxes when you are ready to sell it. By that time, the number of options for tax savings has diminished. Proper planning should begin many years before the sale, not just a few months before it.
The real question
You didn’t build what you have by accident. The same level of deliberate planning should be applied to taxes.
“The question isn’t whether you’re paying taxes,” Patberg says. “It’s whether your decisions are working together.” Each dollar unnecessarily lost to taxes is a dollar that cannot be invested, given away, passed on to your family, or reinvested in the business.
Building wealth is only half the equation. Keeping it matters just as much.
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