WealthFactory or Wealthability

[Karina Lucid]

I have recently consulted with both WealthFactory and Wealthability regarding tax and wealth planning. Both programs are pretty expensive. One purports to teach you how to find good advisors and the other purports to give you access to their advisors. I feel overwhelmed. All I know is I take take another year of feeling like somehow at the end of the year the government gets paid better by my small business than I do!!! 

[Bill Hampton]

Karina,

I recommend finding a financial advisor who specializes in working with real estate investors. You may want to consider working with your advisor remotely to expand your options.

I would also recommend looking for an advisor who is willing to work with you throughout the year. You want an advisor that can help you strategize and who is responsive when you want to know the consequences of the financial decisions you are making throughout the year.

You should also look for a Fee-only advisor who is not going to sell you products just to get commissions. 

Good luck and let me know if you have any questions. 

[Basit Siddiqi]

@Karina Lucid

The cost of the service that is provided has to make sense in relation to your portfolio.

If your cash-flow from real estate/investments is $2,000 a year, it makes little sense that the advice would cost more than that. That almost defeats the purpose of trying to attain wealth.

Regarding having a small business, you may be eligible for different types of retirement accounts, deductibility of health insurance and other things.

New Jersey also has a complex tax system - It may be worth while to work with a CPA in the tri-state area.

[Gray Harrison]

Hello Karina... Just stumbled onto this thread.  Just started speaking to the Weathability folks out of AZ.  Not sure if I am going to move forward or not.  Did you happen to make a decision one way or the other?  Can I ask how it is going?

[Janet Behm]

Katrina,

Both, WealthFactory and Wealthability have a target market of High Net Worth Clients. For people at that level, they are a very attractive investment. 
Both of them expect you to deep dive into your Business (generic and not focusing on real estate). Deep diving into your business, of course is essetial. Nobody cares about your businesses (Law and REI) like you do.

Think of it like our school system of 12-grades. These two companies are 10, 11, and 12. Many investors are in the lower 9-grades (10).

Let's aspire to wealth building and "graduating" to those types of investor services!

Best, Janet

[Brad L.]

@Janet Behm - I like your style! If you're ever interested at WealthAbility we host events specifically for tax professionals. If you like sharing what you've learned with others and also learning from a community that waaaaay into the deep dive and strategy know-how might be worth checking out. Love the school system analogy :-) 

[Janet Behm]

Brad, Thanks for the supportive comments!

Not interested right now. I've noted your offer...we'll see how the future unfolds...

[Samia Moughanni]

@Karina Lucid

Where do I begin? Tom Wheelwright’s WealthAbility is a full-on SCAM with shoddy ‘business practices’ that needs to be investigated for consumer fraud! Let me first provide you with an accurate and honest one-liner to summarize what to expect if you decide to work with WealthAbility followed by a detailed account of my own personal experience with the company.

Quick Summary: WealthAbility acts as a middleman, a go-between, that pairs you with a CPA. That’s it! They will charge you $25k to connect you with a CPA who is not a WealthAbility employee, they are contract workers. These CPAs have their own companies and are taking a pay cut working with WealthAbility in the hopes of gaining wealthy well-vetted clients.

Of note, there is a clear difference between tax strategy planning and tax preparation and the $25k paid was claimed by WealthAbility to cover both. We believed that the main portion of that fee would go towards the tax strategy portion where your designated ‘tax team’ would help you create a customized ‘tax strategy plan’ to minimize your taxes moving forward, while the tax preparation for a simple portfolio like ours was thought to cost no more than $2k of the total fee. We were okay with that fee aslong as they delivered on their claims.

Detailed Summary: In June 2023, WealthAbility swindled us out of TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS with the use of deceptive practices, false promises, and largely inaccurate claims of providing a "full-service" detailed and customized wealth and tax strategy plan, guidance for plan implementation, tax preparation and filing, and much more with a rigorously vetted CPA and support team. Grandiose claims that we initially read on the company website and then had repeated to us by Kirt Bassi, the client relationship manager, over the phone. The ethically correct thing to do would have been for Kirt to communicate to us during our initial consultation that we were not a good fit for the program given that we were already too advanced. We already had a strong financial foundation with a clear focus in real-estate investing. We did not need help in deciding what our investment niche would be; we needed help in creating and implementing a tax strategy plan for a married couple composed of a high-income earner and a real estate agent and business owner.

A few weeks after paying the $25k, we set up our first meeting with our assigned CPA and started the so-called “advanced tax courses” provided, which are generic modules that only vaguely introduce financial concepts, topics, and terminology. These courses are NOT advanced in any sense of the word. They are elementary at best and NOT tailored to the clients’ specific needs or interests which should have been conveyed to us at the beginning. Tom Wheelwright’s books contain more detailed information than the online courses do. After completing 3 of the 10 courses from the Road Map Courses, we started to express our concerns and dissatisfaction with the program to our CPA, who talked us into ‘giving the program a chance’ and continuing with the coursework and the meetings. We tried to stay positive and hopeful that we would see the value in the program and that it would be worth our time and money, but we were just kidding ourselves. Nothing changed and nothing got better.

WealthAbility inaccurately claims to thoughtfully pair their clients with an elite, well-trained CPA, and tax strategy team - but we were not given a team, just a poorly vetted arrogant CPA who was late to almost every session and who never took notes on our financial situation making us feel as if we were meeting him for the first time every time. On multiple occasions he had us wasting our time looking up unnecessary tax forms online because he wasn’t well versed in tax code. Even when pressed for customized tax planning advice, he could or would not deliver. Instead, he used our one-hour sessions to review and repeat the exact same useless generic information contained within the online modules and to sell us on buying his whole life insurance policy he sold on the side. In hindsight, we should have been paired with a CPA who specialized in tax code for real estate investors - our assigned CPA was not. Honestly, we should have been easy clients - we came to him with a plan in place wanting his help on claiming REP status, setting up a cost segregation for a rental property bought and functioning in 2022, so that we could file for 100% bonus depreciation for that tax year. He kept avoiding our requests and said we should claim it in our 2023 taxes instead… The last straw for us was when he tried to charge us another $7.5k to file our taxes which obviously ended our relationship instantly. That’s when we reached out to client services and expressed our dissatisfaction with the company in August 2023 (only 2 months after starting the program). Funny thing is that both Brad Doran and Alan Kirkham mentioned to me over the phone how they both knew that our CPA had a reputation for being disliked and having problems with multiple clients, but yet that CPA was still working with WealthAbility and was still being paired with clients! Since our 2022 taxes were due in October 2023 (CA extended due date), we knew that we wouldn’t find another CPA to do our taxes in time, so we allowed Brad Doran and Alan Kirkham to match us with another ‘WealthAbility CPA’ to complete our tax prep and filing, while they worked on coordinating a refund for us… a refund that was promised to us repeatedly, but still has yet to come to fruition.

Alan Kirkham is WealthAbility’s client success manager who is amazing at lying about doing things he has no intention of doing like providing a refund. He is also amazing at never following up, never reaching out or providing updates, and stellar at avoiding all communication attempts from the customer. He has promised countless times over several months (5 months to be exact) to come back to us with "a proposal by the end of this week" via email on 11/28/23 and "we will get this wrapped up this week" via email on 12/11/23 - and we are already in the first week of February 2024 without a proposal and without any progress in coming to a resolution. Those promises quoted are only from one email chain of ours - I have record of multiple others I’d be happy to provide to everybody and anybody interested. This severely subpar customer service, lack of timely correspondence and initiative from Alan Kirkham should be unacceptable for a company that claims to be top notch and superior to all other CPA / tax advising firms and charges clients a ridiculous $25k fee for their 'all-inclusive services'. Our last email from Alan confirmed our suspicions that we were getting jerked around by him admitting that it was his fault that the refund process was dragging on because he ‘knew what was in our best interest to do’ and that was for us to relaunch the program instead of giving us a refund. What a joke! What a scam! After giving Alan Kirkham 5 months to right this wrong and come up with a fair resolution, we have been left in the dark with no set plans or expectations and no true point of contact, which is why we have decided to share our experience here.

This whole experience was a huge disappointment, waste of money and time! I would NOT recommend this company to my worst enemy and I hope that I can prevent others from being scammed by WealthAbility by posting my personal experience on as many forums, websites, platforms as possible and by filing complaints to every agency out there that deals with consumer fraud. I encourage all others who have been swindled or have had similar experiences to share them too and to submit complaints to the Better Business Bureau, Department of Consumer Affairs, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, State Board of Accountancy, Federal Trade Commission, Police Department’s Financial Crime Unit, and the District Attorney.

For the potential franchisee owners who are considering this as a business, I would run the other way! And for the companies that endorse WealthAbility, I would think twice about putting your stamp of approval on such a sleazy sham of a business. As a business owner myself, I would not want to claim association with, let alone endorse a low-quality company with deceptive business practices, like WealthAbility – it just reflects poorly.

[Brad L.]

(copy/pasting from other thread full disclosure - sorry always seems odd to me not doing original composition LOL)

@Samia Moughanni - Hi Samia! I disagree with your version of events but your feedback and experience with us is relevant.

This was beyond our 30 day full guarantee and satisfaction policy when we were informed by you of your demand for something outside the contract well after that period. You had one desired outcome that was outside of the parameters of what we were able to make a reality. Those are the only facts I will share in this case and anything outside of that would be unprofessional.

I can assure you the employees involved in trying to help are good people that were doing their best to try and help solve the problem and didn't have any malicious intent. I should probably give some highly corporatized reply or something, but honestly seeing Alan and Kirt's names drawn into a public forum is hurtful to me. If nothing else I take responsibility for that and will work to improve our communication systems between our franchisees, client success and sales team that's valid.

As I have done before I'm a big fan of transparency and this forum, and will happily talk to anyone that has concerns about how we do business. In addition to that I love accounting and tax and love helping people and pointing them in the right direction even if our model isn't a fit for them hit me up any time! FYI we've changed our approach entirely and have lower fee initial entry points to avoid the challenges of long term project based arrangements so we can catch issues much sooner. This situation surely would have benefitted from this indeed.

All the best!

#bringback100%bonusdepreciation

[Samia Moughanni]

@Brad L.

1. You can disagree with my version of events, but I have emails to back it all up. Funny how you and Jonathan both were cc’ed on Alan’s last email on 1/26 that said, “someone within our company will get back with you on our proposal.” But neither YOU nor Jonathan or anyone else for that matter has reached out to us with a refund proposal, but yet you quickly respond to my comment on a public BP forum within hours.

2. If company policy dictates firm adherence to the contract, then why did you and Alan keep me waiting on a refund proposal for 6 months? Again, I have multiple emails to prove that. You also ran into my husband at the BuiltHow expo in Phoenix in 11/2023 where you told him the same thing you told me over the phone about knowing that the CPA we had been paired with had a bad reputation and a history of problems with multiple clients. You also promised to follow up with him and I, but never did.

3. Good people do not knowingly scam others out of 25k.

4. New business practices or not… any amount of money paid for their services is a rip-off. Just read Tom’s book!

5. For anyone who isn’t sure who to believe - please, do your research. Read the 2 complaints on the Better Business Bureau and all the one-star reviews on google (all have same detailed complaints). All the 5-star reviews on google claiming to be working directly with Tom are lies - you need Robert Kiyosaki riches to be working directly with Tom.

Thank you for responding, Brad!

[Samia Moughanni]

@Brad L.

[Karina Lucid]

I just wanted to let the community know that because of the amount of bad reviews I saw for Wealthability, despite the fact that I really think Robert Kiyosaki and Tom Wheelright offer great insights, it seems like Wealthability is not a really well run company. So I decided to go in a different direction and I hired a company called Wealth Factory, which sells a coaching program with an initial membership fee of $7500 and openly states that they are going to pair you with providers and that they do not do the tax preparation, investment, real estate, or other work they just coach you and help you see which professionals you need and then pair you up with them.  I had really hoped for more meaningful coaching but it’s kind of like an expensive dating service. *shrug*.  I honestly do not feel like they lied to me but I let myself believe that it would be a lot more helpful than it is. So I leave that there and say buyer do lots of research. That said, they did pair me with a tax professional, who has been a godsend, and has really been so much help to me in terms of getting some much more favorable treatment with my tax liabilities. 

[Brad L.]

@Karina Lucid - I'm glad you found a solution that worked for you a great tax strategist is a godsend and I'm glad you're in good hands. Be sure to check out some of our positive reviews as well, they are out there I swear it I've overseen 6,000 engagement in my career I haven't always gotten them right admittedly! But I do have references from happy clients, friends, family... ugh, well not my kids don't trust a word they say :-) Be well!

[Samia Moughanni]

To be fair with WealthAbility, I wanted to provide an update for the BP community - Within a couple days of my initial WealthAbility post on the BP forums I was contacted directly by WealthAbility. After a lengthy zoom call, I can finally say that I felt heard and cared about by the company. We were able to reach an agreement that was fair and favorable to both parties. I feel content with the outcome and am thankful for their recent efforts made towards rectifying the situation.