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.
