Practice Makes Perfect: Unlocking Tax Alpha in 2026

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GREG HALL: Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of Accrued Interest, PIMCO's podcast dedicated to serving financial advisors and their clients. Today we have a terrific episode for you. We're featuring Devin Ekberg, who is a Senior Vice President in our Advisor Education group.

This is a group, a SWAT team if you will, within PIMCO that's dedicated to helping advisors manage their practices better, to bring value-added services to their clients sort of away from the investment function. Certainly, related to the investment function, but all of those things like tax planning, onboarding new clients, dealing in multi-generational clientele that really make the difference between running a good practice and a great practice. So, Devin, thanks for joining us today to have this conversation. It's great to have you.

DEVIN EKBERG: Thanks, Greg. I really appreciate it. This is a great topic and always happy to have a great conversation about it.

GREG HALL: Yeah. And this is part of an ongoing series that we're committed to doing more of. We kicked it off last year. We're calling it Practice Makes Perfect, at least here on the podcast. Always a question mark whether the lawyers will let us use the word perfect in any context, but we'll see if that makes it through. And we're going to try and bring this content to listeners of the pod as we go through the year. But right now we're heading into tax season, so this is going to be a tax-oriented conversation.

We may have just lost half the listeners because it can be an unpopular topic, but it's critical for advisors that are trying to help their clients navigate in a world that has changed quite a bit over the last couple of years. So Devin, maybe why don't we just kick off. I'm going to kick you an open-ended question. Talk to us about what's going on in tax for advisors right now.

DEVIN EKBERG: Yeah, there's certainly some trends. Part of my role is that I get to travel the country. I get to work with advisors from every business model and from every firm. I get to see the conversations they're having with their clients and I get to see those interactions. I get to see what's working and what's not working, and how advisors are positioning themselves with their clients. And this topic of tax advice is just coming up.

We did a survey of high-net-worth individuals. We asked them, okay, what is it that you want from your financial advisor? Of course, the things that matter, like investment management and financial planning, are always at the top of the list. But tax planning is becoming a big topic. And like 90% of clients expect their financial advisor to address at least some form of taxation, but only about 20% report that they feel like they're having those conversations with their financial advisors.

So, it's this huge gap from a client's perspective. And advisors are stepping up their game. They're learning the ins and outs of the tax code, how it affects their clients. They're having great planning conversations with them, maybe not trying to position themselves as tax advisors necessarily, but providing tax education, which I think is super important.

GREG HALL: Right. Building up a baseline of familiarity for their clients so that at least they can kind of approach the tax advisor if there's a separate, you know, tax planner involved in the process in a knowledgeable and secure frame of mind.

DEVIN EKBERG: Yeah, exactly. Right. I mean, almost every decision that financial advisors make for their clients has some form of tax impact. And so, they're becoming a lot more intentional about working with CPAs and estate attorneys and kind of being that intersection between taxation, but also not just from an investment perspective, but on the individual's perspective. If they're selling assets or selling property or selling a business, for instance, they're getting pretty deep into the conversation to try to add value there.

GREG HALL: Sure, sure. That's obviously tax planning. It varies based on the client's situation. It varies based on the assets being held. It's different for the ultra-high net worth than it might be for typical folks out there. And so there's lots of dimensions to it. What's different this year? I mean, as we head into April and everybody starts thinking about how they're going to make decisions and plan, talk to us about some of the recent legislation and what's top of mind as we head into April.

DEVIN EKBERG: Yeah. Well, what's different is that we just passed one of the biggest, most consequential tax legislation bills in recent memory. So in July of 2025, of course Trump signed into law the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Now this was a huge bill. It had all sorts of defense spending and border spending and things like that.

But one of the main focuses was extending and making permanent the provisions that Trump passed in his first administration under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. So all of those provisions were set to expire or sunset in 2025, and there needed to be some form of proactive legislation to make those elements permanent, which it did. And then it added a whole bunch of other stuff on top of that.

GREG HALL: Right. So remind me, what did it make permanent? And then we'll talk about some of the newer stuff.

DEVIN EKBERG: Yeah. Well, one of the biggest things was it lowered the marginal tax rates. That was the whole point of that Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, not just from a corporate level, but on the individual marginal tax rates. They lowered them. So the highest marginal tax rate today is 37% at a federal level. It used to be 39.6%. But they basically lowered them and only made it temporary.

The way they passed that bill originally, they had to put some form of sunset provision in it. And that actually made things really complicated. If you think about the number of conversations you have with your financial advisor about whether you think tax rates today are going to be higher or lower in the future, having a moving target makes it really difficult to plan. So making that stuff permanent — and I always joke there's no such thing as permanent in the U.S. tax code.

GREG HALL: Yeah. But it's as permanent for now.

DEVIN EKBERG: But it's as permanent as it gets. In other words, another Congress has to come in and get something over the finish line, which you've seen is really difficult to do. So, it's as permanent as it gets. They lowered that. They made a lot of changes to how deductions work.

They raised the standard deduction to the point where about 90% of Americans claim the standard deduction instead of itemized deductions. And that's really the source of the tax savings that the Trump administration was trying to accomplish. So now there's a bunch of landmines for advisors. In other words, we just don't want advisors to be the ones that accidentally mess something up given deductions and other things like that.

GREG HALL: Yeah. I mean that's a big word — landmines. What do you see as some of the potential mistakes that folks can make given some of the new rules? I suppose you're talking about opportunity cost, right, since we're talking about tax savings.

DEVIN EKBERG: It's all of the above. So for example, I'll just give you a really topical example. The new One Big Beautiful Bill introduces these very large deductions, larger than other deductions have been in the past. But they also have these phase-out ranges depending on the client's AGI, or Adjusted Gross Income.

Now it's always been true that the higher the client's income, the less likely they're going to qualify for some of these deductions. But in the One Big Beautiful Bill, the deductions are so big and the phase-out levels are so steep that we could accidentally be in a situation where a financial advisor is recognizing income, say for instance in their portfolio or capital gain or something like that, that not only raises their AGI but also eliminates the tax deductions they'd otherwise be eligible to claim.

So the combination of those two things — you’ve got to be very careful. You could make a decision that has a much higher marginal tax rate than just the headline marginal tax rate that the client might have.

GREG HALL: So let me just make sure I understand that correctly. So I choose on my client's behalf to sell a position. I realize a capital gain. I'm looking to create liquidity or I'm taking profits or whatever my motivation was. I realize the capital gain, that adds to my AGI. So I pay the taxes on the sale, I add to my AGI, which potentially has bracket impacts for me, and then I also lose a few points of deductibility in other parts of my tax plan. That's a triple whammy, I suppose you're describing.

DEVIN EKBERG: Yeah. It's a big deal.

GREG HALL: To use a technical term, you know…

DEVIN EKBERG: It is a technical term. It's a big deal because those numbers are not just a few points. It's actually pretty significant. Let me give you a perfect example.

GREG HALL: Yeah.

DEVIN EKBERG: So the SALT deduction, the State And Local Tax deduction — famously they put a cap on it in the first Trump administration of $10,000. So if you lived in a high-tax state, that was a pretty unpopular thing, right? Well, the One Big Beautiful Bill raised it to $40,000, so people were a little happier. So that's a big deduction, but it phases out at a relatively modest level of income between 505,000 and $606,000.

So what happens is that the more income you start recognizing above $500,000 in this hypothetical example, you're now not only paying higher taxes on the new income at a 32% or 35% tax bracket, depending where you fall, now you're losing that deduction at about 30 cents on the dollar.

So if you add up all of the different taxes you're accumulating in this range, exactly, your marginal tax rate could be as high as 50%, not just the 37% that you might otherwise be attributing to. So, I don't know — I love Roth conversions as a financial planning concept — but if you're doing it at a 50% marginal tax rate, I don't know if you'll really ever get the benefit of that later on. It's very unlikely that your future tax rate in retirement would be as high as 50%.

So there's all sorts of little things financial advisors really have to be mindful of. Where does your client's income fall, or where does it expect to fall? What itemized deductions are they expecting to harvest from their tax situation? And then we've got to be careful from a financial advisor's perspective to not accidentally disqualify them by not having that conversation in advance.

GREG HALL: That's interesting. Yeah, I'm thinking about my own tax planning while you're speaking.

But it's interesting to me. First of all, if you've got an adjusted gross income of half a million dollars, congratulations — that's a lot of money. But what you described, Devin, is a narrow window, right? At 500 and change, and then as soon as you click over 606.

And that could be very easy to do in the context of a high-net-worth or mass-affluent portfolio that has a lot going on — preparing for retirement, doing a lot of really good things to plan for the future — and then unexpectedly triggers one of these results.

What else in the bill is something that you think advisors ought to be paying attention to, either as an opportunity or a risk?

DEVIN EKBERG: Well, just to take one extra step further — we mentioned one range there between 505 and 606. It turns out that at almost every level of income, there is some deduction or some threshold.

So we have a chart that we use in our education programs where it shows at every income level there is some phase-out that you should be aware of. And we use that to emphasize the need for professional advice on those sorts of things.

GREG HALL: Maybe we can link to that material in the show notes, or at least to the website where folks can hopefully access it.

DEVIN EKBERG: Yeah. There are some big ones. I mentioned the SALT deduction as an example. There were a few other things that I thought were interesting.

They brought back the Qualified Opportunity Zones, which was a feature of the first Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Those are all scheduled to end in 2026, and then a new tranche of those begins in 2027.

GREG HALL: Right. These are designated geographic areas where the administration's attempting to incentivize investment and giving tax breaks. Is it mostly a real estate phenomenon?

DEVIN EKBERG: Yeah, mostly real estate. And it's only in zones that are said to be underdeveloped. They want to spur investment in those areas, so they have to be designated as qualified opportunity zones.

For someone who's looking to defer capital gain recognition on another asset that they're selling, those assets can be transferred to this qualified opportunity zone and qualify for an extended capital gains deferral.

So I think that will be a conversation that we start seeing in the next year or two. Those will probably be announced in the next year or so, but those were really popular the first tranche, and I think the second tranche will be just as popular.

GREG HALL: Okay.

DEVIN EKBERG: And you're going to hear a lot more about Trump accounts. These are Section 530A accounts. Those will be launched later in 2026 as well. And I think there's going to be some interesting planning conversations around that.

GREG HALL: Tell me more about those. That's not something I've actually paid a lot of attention to.

DEVIN EKBERG: The idea was to create a new form of account that had some features of accounts that we already have, sort of like IRA accounts. But they're designed to be able to contribute to children under the age of 18.

They will launch a pilot program for the U.S. Treasury to fund these accounts with $1,000 for newborns born between 2025 and 2028. You can contribute up to $5,000 a year on behalf of your children post-tax. There's no tax advantage necessarily to those contributions.

Other third parties can make contributions as well — employers, charitable organizations. There have already been announcements of some pretty high-profile individuals like the Dell family contributing to those who qualify.

Now there's a lot we don't know about these accounts yet. We don't know how they're treated. The rules change when the beneficiary turns 18, and we're not really sure what we can and can't do with those funds after they turn 18.

But the idea is to give children a head start and start the compounding process way earlier, which I think is a good idea. I think these will become as popular as 529 plans for college education or custodial-type plans for children.

GREG HALL: So is the benefit of the 530A account that income and capital appreciation within the account occur without tax? Or does it just sit outside the annual gift exclusion and the limits on transferability due to estate tax rules?

DEVIN EKBERG: What will happen is that there will be post-tax contributions during the period between newborn and about 18 years old. There will be a portion of contributions that were post-tax, and then there will be earnings which at some point will be taxed.

Hopefully you don't do anything with those funds and you keep them until the child is age 60 and you've got 60 years of compounded growth. But a portion will be taxable and a portion will not be taxable.

It's not clear whether they can be rolled over into other accounts like a Roth IRA or a traditional IRA.

And you brought up an interesting point — a question that hasn't been answered yet is whether these contributions are considered a present interest or a future interest. That matters from a gift tax perspective.

GREG HALL: Of course.

DEVIN EKBERG: Right now, the way the current law is written — though I don't think it was intended to be written this way — it’s considered a taxable gift, or at least it has to be reported as a taxable gift on IRS Form 709.

That's going to confuse a lot of people, and I think they'll probably rewrite the legislation to consider it not a future interest but a present interest so it's treated the same way like a 529 plan contribution would be.

GREG HALL: Sounds like we've got some details to work out on this before advisors can rely on it as a robust long-term planning tool.

DEVIN EKBERG: I think so. But I think you're going to start to see some strategies and other things like that. And that's just one thing out of a thousand that was introduced in the One Big Beautiful Bill. So, education in this area is pretty key.

GREG HALL: Yeah. Certainly something to prepare for. Well, let's keep going. What else is top of mind?

DEVIN EKBERG: An interesting conversation that's been coming up recently — and this is something PIMCO has been talking about broadly speaking for a long time — is the difference between active management and passive management.

We came across an interesting case recently that I'll share some details with you just to emphasize the point of how advisors really have to be aware of some of this stuff.

For example, Treasury securities have been taxable at a federal level but not taxable at a state and local level. There's an exemption for state and local taxes. Treasuries are priced in a number of different ways, but some part of the price and yield of a Treasury suggests there's a tax benefit to its holders.

Now, when you hold a Treasury, the taxation of that Treasury is pretty straightforward. But when you hold a mutual fund that has Treasuries in it, you're entitled to what's called a pass-through exclusion. Okay? So in the state of Colorado where I live, if I hold a mutual fund that holds Treasury securities, when I fill out my taxes I indicate the percentage of the mutual fund that's held in Treasuries so that I can calculate that pass-through exemption for myself that will ultimately make its way to my state tax form. That's how it works.

GREG HALL: Okay.

DEVIN EKBERG: Now, there are some states that have passed legislation — I'm talking California, New York, and Connecticut — where they only recognize that pass-through exemption if the income derived in the mutual fund exceeds 50% of the income that the mutual fund creates.

DEVIN EKBERG: Now, if you looked at something like the Bloomberg Aggregate Bond Index, which is the most commonly used benchmark for passive mutual funds, the Treasury allocation is around 45%. So 45% of the income that you get in the mutual fund is priced in yields as if there's a tax benefit. But in those states the recipient is not receiving the tax benefit — they're not eligible to receive that tax exclusion.

Most people are not familiar with that. That's just a level of detail that CPAs rarely get into, let alone a financial advisor.

Now, if you looked at an active mutual fund — and I'm not just talking about PIMCO, I'm talking about all active bond managers — if you look at a fund whose benchmark is that Aggregate Bond Index, you'll find that their holdings in Treasuries are much lower than the 45% in the benchmark. For example, it might be as low as 13% to 15%.

GREG HALL: Sure. Because they're making active choices to own other things.

DEVIN EKBERG: And there are plenty of reasons to make those active choices. But if you're an end client in California or New York or Connecticut and you're not receiving that pass-through exemption, now the mutual fund is less exposed to that. So you're avoiding a little bit of that tax drag, for lack of a better term, because you're not as invested in that particular area as the index would suggest.

GREG HALL: Yeah, that's a subtle point you're making, but it's interesting. So I live in New York, I'm sitting in California right now, and I love both places — this isn't a complaint — but the taxes are meaningful.

And the point you're making is that as an owner of Treasuries, I'm much better off isolating my Treasury holdings and making sure I get the exclusion at the state level or the deduction at the state level, and then isolating my active bond ownership — my positions further out the curve, if you will — and keeping them separate so that I am maximizing my ability to deduct from a tax perspective.

And if I get lazy about that and group them together in an index fund that combines them, I'm actually leaving money on the table and possibly even getting hit a little bit coming and going, right? Because you're paying for the securities based on other people's tax benefit that you're not actually ultimately realizing.

DEVIN EKBERG: And that's it, right? It's priced as if you are receiving a tax benefit, but because of the allocation percentage and things like that, you're not receiving the tax benefit.

So the best answer is, it depends. It depends on your total situation. It depends on your other holdings. It also depends on whether that particular holding, whether it's a direct holding or through a mutual fund, makes sense given the overall portfolio.

But we did an analysis with a client that was based in California, and we estimated this tax difference at about 20 to 25 basis points. You can decide for yourself whether that was worth making some adjustments, otherwise, but being aware of that extra 20–25 basis points might not matter too much. But that could be the difference between a successful financial plan or not over a long period of time.

GREG HALL: No — fortunes have been made or lost on less than 20 or 25 basis points compounded over a really long time. And again, I think it's just an indication of the complexity and the granularity of the tax code. Then you add different state layers to it.

And it's a terrific opportunity for advisors not just to create value on behalf of their clients, but also to demonstrate those clients that the value of financial advice — picking up pennies like this over time — can be incredibly meaningful.

DEVIN EKBERG: Yeah. I put myself in a client situation, and if my advisor came to me and explained what I just explained — which is kind of a long way to describe a small thing — but if my advisor came to me and said, “Hey, the reason we selected this investment over this investment was exactly this thing like it matters enough for us that we wanted to make a change here.” Well that gives me some confidence that my advisor has the larger picture too.

I don't know if you've ever heard this story — have you ever heard of Van Halen and the Brown M&Ms story? Have you heard that story before?

GREG HALL: I've heard of Van Halen and I've heard of Brown M&Ms, but I don't know that I've ever heard them in the same story.

DEVIN EKBERG: I’ve got to tell you this story, because it tells me how I should appreciate my financial advisor.

So Van Halen in the 1980s obviously sold out these huge stadiums and everything like that, and they had a really complex show — pyrotechnics, elaborate design in the stages, things like that.

GREG HALL: Yeah, the good old days.

DEVIN EKBERG: Exactly, the good old days.

But one of the things famously in their rider contracts was that the bowl of M&Ms in Van Halen's dressing room had to have all the Brown M&Ms removed.

So you take the level of effort that it takes to prepare that bowl. The reason that became famous was because people said, “Look at these Van Halen guys — they're such prima donnas that they have to remove all the brown M&Ms from the bowl.”

But it turned out, in an interview later on, they said they actually did that on purpose. They stuck it right in the middle of the rider when they were explaining all the safety components — the stage setup, the pyrotechnics — they put this right in the middle of that.

So when the band arrived, they didn't have to check whether all the safety protocols had been followed. They just go right to the dressing room and looked at the bowl of M&Ms. If the brown ones were removed, they had confidence that the rest of the staff was building according to their specs.

But if the brown M&Ms were in the bowl, then they knew they had to go line by line to make sure the staff had followed all the safety protocols.

GREG HALL: That’s--

DEVIN EKBERG: So they put it in as a bit of a trick or a trap.

Now, the reason I told that story is because if my financial advisor came to me and told me, “Hey, we just adjusted your portfolio exactly for this reason — the tax benefit of active versus passive management,” that's the Brown M&M for me. If they found that, I can have pretty big confidence that they are considering all of the things that matter to me if they pointed out that one small thing to me. I hope that makes sense as a story.

GREG HALL: No, that's a great story. And I had no idea.

In fact, I made a joke on the way into the podcast this morning about you know “no blue M&Ms in the green room.” We don't actually have a green room and I don't get M&Ms, but it's a classic narrative of prima donna behavior.

It's phenomenal to hear that it was actually an Easter egg they used to make sure their more important instructions were being followed.

That's great. I'm going to take that one away.

Let's talk about other commonly used tactics to reduce tax burden. We've got Dave Hammer on the podcast in a couple of weeks. Dave is our head of municipal bonds at PIMCO, and we've had him on before.

How are we thinking about the Muni market right now? How are you seeing advisors incorporate that into portfolios and overall plans?

DEVIN EKBERG: Yeah, that's a great question. So, I love Dave. I could listen to him all day talk about Munis as an asset class and all the reasons that—

GREG HALL: You should tune into the podcast then, Devin. It won't be all day, but it'll probably be a good hour.

DEVIN EKBERG: I will. So what comes to mind for me is that beyond all the reasons that Munis might be attractive or not from an asset class perspective, Munis are often used to control that taxable income, that AGI number that we were talking about.

So what you should know is that Muni income — tax-exempt income — is not included in the AGI calculation for the purpose of calculating those deductions that we were talking about earlier.

Well, there's something called modified adjusted gross income that does matter in some ways, but specifically for these deductions, municipal bond income is a way that you could earn some income without accidentally triggering a phase-out of some of those deductions.

Something that's come up a lot this year is, I mentioned that a lot of clients have these very large cash holdings, more so than we've seen in historical data, and maybe for good reasons. Maybe the yields have been attractive enough. Maybe they're looking to make large purchases or deploy those as investments tactically later on.

But if that cash holding is spitting off a lot of ordinary income, especially in those ranges that really matter, that's a very expensive form of ordinary income from those cash holdings. So we saw a lot of people, for lack of a better term, convert those cash holdings into municipal bond holdings instead.

It used to be that for Muni bonds, the way tax-equivalent yields work is that it makes sense for those in the highest marginal tax bracket — 37%. But because you're using them strategically to preserve some of those deductions under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, we found that Munis actually made sense even for folks in lower marginal tax brackets. Not just 37%, but 35%, 32%, and actually as low as 24% under certain circumstances.

So that broadened out the audience of potential people who might benefit from Munis.

Now, I would argue there's some downsides to this. You've got to be careful if they're over age 65, for instance, and they're Medicare recipients. Municipal bond income could hurt them in other ways. It could increase their IRMAA surcharges or the proportion of Social Security that might be taxable. So there are always trade-offs that you have to look at on an individual basis. It's not for everybody, but that was a pretty powerful move to broaden the scope of people for whom those Muni bonds might make a lot of sense. More so than historically.

GREG HALL: Well. Yeah. We'll have Dave on to talk about what he likes and dislikes in that market and maybe get into the investment side of things. But it's interesting to hear that you think the applicability has widened.

And then we still have this double or triple-whammy effect by virtue of adjusted gross income and some of the deductions. So that seems like a pretty prevalent theme here — to be super careful about how you're allocating your income-generating assets in portfolios.

Let me ask another asset-class question. Real estate has been through a bit of a funny journey over the last five or six years. Very popular strategy for a lot of wealthy investors as the private REIT phenomenon took off. Obviously that's been in a bit of a holding pattern, seeing some signs of resurgence now after consolidating valuations that may have gone ahead of themselves.

Is real estate a topic that's coming up more often in advisor conversations about tax management specifically?

DEVIN EKBERG: It is, for pretty good reasons. I'll let the portfolio managers discuss from the investment side why the timing and the asset class itself may be attractive, but it's not really a secret that real estate has more attractive features in the tax code than something like W-2 income, for instance.

So generally speaking, I don't think it's dangerous to say real estate is more tax-advantaged, but there are specific reasons. First of all, something called QBI — Qualified Business Income — under Section 199A. That was originally introduced in the first Trump tax bill and now made permanent with the One Big Beautiful Bill.

QBI is a broad category. It includes things like pass-through business income — if you own an LLC, a partnership, or an S corporation, that is considered QBI. But one lesser-known version of QBI is REIT income — Real Estate Investment Trust income, or any fund that elects to be taxed as a REIT.

That income is considered QBI, and you get a 20% deduction on QBI as a result of the One Big Beautiful Bill that's now permanent.

What's really interesting is that all the other forms of QBI are subject to phase-outs at relatively modest income levels — except for REIT income. There are no phase-out levels on that QBI deduction.

So you could hypothetically earn millions of dollars a year and never be phased out of that REIT income as qualified business income. So a 20% deduction on qualified business income is essentially a 20% tax savings on that form of income compared to ordinary income.

That's one piece. The other piece is that because real estate is a depreciable asset, and that depreciation is a non-cash expense that offsets the net income of the fund, when you distribute interest or cash to investors there is some portion that is taxable income and some portion usually and almost always some portion of what we call return of capital.

GREG HALL: Right.

DEVIN EKBERG: Now that return of capital, now that's not immediately taxable, but what it does is it acts to reduce the investor's tax basis in that investment. So in the future, at some point when they dispose of that, you know, it's treated as a capital gain as opposed to an ordinary income.

So the fact that it's a deferred tax number one is the benefit, but then it's converted to a capital gain treatment as opposed to an ordinary income tax treatment.

So all of those three things together — QBI eligibility, return of capital, and capital-gains treatment later on, that actually makes it pretty attractive, you know, for folks as an investment compared to, you know, something that's more typically taxed.

GREG HALL: Yeah, it's interesting. We haven't featured a real estate theme on the pod in a while, but our teams have been busy and active in that space. Over the last couple of years the asset class fell out of favor because of lockups and gates that occurred with some of the private REITs, so it fell out of the conversation.

Which is always interesting from an investment perspective because that's often when things begin to get interesting.

I know our teams have been excited about opportunities in real estate debt over the last few years, and they're starting to see markets open up and valuations become less bound to history and more reflective of future expectations in an asset class that doesn't necessarily have the same degree of market sensitivity given its current valuation state as other things you could be buying right now.

So that's definitely an interesting theme we should pick up on. And I'll use your point as a catalyst to get a few of our portfolio managers on the pod here and talk about that more completely.

DEVIN EKBERG: You raised a really good point that I should emphasize because it's important. I don't like it when advisors make a decision purely based on tax consequences or not. The decision to invest in real estate shouldn't only be a tax decision — the tax tail shouldn't wag the dog.

They should have compelling reasons that the asset class itself is attractive — valuation, timing, or its role in the portfolio. Those are all things that I consider to be probably the primary reasons to suggest an investment like that. But at some point you can stack on the benefits, say, okay, here are the reasons we really like this as an asset class, but your client, you know, you as a client in your tax situation, there's these stackable benefits on top of that that are related to your tax situation too. So it's really important to not let the tax tail, you know, wag the dog itself.

GREG HALL: Yeah, of course. And that's a good disclaimer.

Hey Devin, just being mindful of time here — how can advisors best stay up to date on this? These are busy people, and the level of nuance you've gotten into here just in the quick 30 or 40 minutes we've been talking is pretty deep. What do you recommend advisors do to stay on top of this?

DEVIN EKBERG: This is an area of focus for us. We've developed curriculum as soon as the One Big Beautiful Bill came out. We put together some lectures and some series and things like that.

It's been one of the most requested topics from our group in front of advisors at conferences and, you know, workshops and things like that. So we've developed a great deal of this, not just, you know, to tell you what the facts were of the bill, but, you know, how do you actually implement this into your practice and how do you have conversations with your clients?

Another area PIMCO has been all over is Libby Cantrill. You know, she looks at the legislative environment that's out there, she's been all over it, you know, when the One Big Beautiful Bill came out. But even as new updates come out and, you know, as political winds change here and there, she's all over that as well.

GREG HALL: Libby is our head of public policy, friend of the podcast. She's been on a couple of times and she is tireless. She publishes Washington Watch, an email that goes out to clients that details a lot of these developments, both political, geopolitical, sometimes on Fed topics and other things.

So she's pretty broad ranging, but you're right, she was on top of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, not just in terms of its implications for advisors and their clients, but frankly we need to embed that analysis in our own investment decisions. So that's certainly an area that we keep a close eye on. Devin, is your stuff available on the website? Can advisors go to pimco.com and take a look at some of the—

DEVIN EKBERG: Yeah, some of it is. We've got it in the form of articles or videos and other things like that. For real deep dives, advisors can reach out to their PIMCO representative, their account manager, and they can easily get us to join a call or a consultation and other things like that. So we've interfaced with a lot of advisors through our account manager network.

And then the last thing I would say for advisors, if taxes has not been an area of interest or focus for them, I would encourage you to think through from a professional development perspective. There are lots of programs out there, a lot of designations that you can earn, not just to have the letters after your name necessarily, but some of them are really focused on this area, and it truly brings value. This concept of tax alpha to the end client.

And more and more I'm seeing that as a big differentiator, especially for those advisors that are targeting the higher net worth segments. So really important.

GREG HALL: Yeah, and I would imagine advisors that work for a larger platform probably have resources internally dedicated to this that they can call on as well. We know that a lot of the partners that we work with who run significant wealth management networks have been investing heavily in this area to make sure their advisors can bring the right quality of advice to clients. So that's another avenue that—

DEVIN EKBERG: I've been really happy with seeing some of the investments internally at some of these home offices, hiring the right people. And we've worked directly with those home offices to create and help deliver some of that content to their advisors. So we do that all day long. It's great.

GREG HALL: All right. Well, Devin, thanks for joining us. I know you're busy. I remember getting a call because you had somehow booked, I believe it was last year or the year before, you were number one or number two in the firm in flight miles logged as you ran around the country sitting with advisors in their communities, sitting in their branch offices doing symposia and presentations. So I know you move around.

I know that you like to evangelize the benefits of not just tax awareness but all areas of practice management.

So thanks for taking the time to speak to us today. Thanks for helping us reach maybe an even broader audience than you do when you run around. And hopefully this results in a lot of follow-up conversations and gets people in a frame of mind as we approach tax season to look at some of the brown M&Ms on behalf of their clients and make sure that they're doing the best they can.

DEVIN EKBERG: Always a pleasure to talk about this topic and the other topics that we talk about. And thanks again for the opportunity.

GREG HALL: Alright, everybody. Well, that was a really enjoyable conversation with Devin. Really appreciate you tuning in to listen today. I know tax can feel like kind of a dry topic, but it really, maybe for that reason, is a great place to look for ways to add value on behalf of your clients.

And Devin's one of many resources we have here at PIMCO to help you think through those issues. As always, if you'd like to learn more about what we discussed today or go deeper on any investment topic, you can visit us at pimco.com. If you identify yourself as a financial advisor, you'll be taken to Advisor Forum.

Advisor Forum is our one-stop destination for everything that you need to have quality and timely conversations with your clients. We try to deliver that to you in as practical and efficient manner as possible, knowing how busy you are, especially at this time of year.

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