Tziona Simchi on the Joy of Tax

Part of our Joy of Tax series, where we sit down with the CPAs of Gelt to talk about what makes this work matter.

When Tziona Simchi tells people she's an accountant, she gets a familiar set of reactions: Really? You? Isn't that boring? Do you use a calculator?

She's heard them all. And early in her career, she admits, they got to her. "At first I was like, so then I have to go into something else. My personality is better suited for something else."

Then she thought deeper into it.

"There's so much more to it that people don't understand," she says. "I think it's the fear of accounting that makes people view it as boring. It's intimidating to a lot of people. And that's a big reason why I'm here: to help people understand what it is, to help them make the big financial decisions in their lives. Taxes always affect your decisions."

Watch the clip below for the Joy of Tax in her own words, then read on.

The accidental tax strategist

Tziona didn't set out to fall in love with taxes. She went into accounting in college because it was "the base of business," and business was where she wanted to be. But as her coursework deepened, something shifted.

"I started to understand the nuances of accounting and how it affects literally every business and every personal matter that comes up. It gave me purpose," she says. "The nuances of taxation brought me into a narrow focus: how I can help people do best with their hard-earned money."

Her favorite explanation of the job, though, came from her husband. When their kids asked what mommy does, she listened in with her ears wide open as he told them: "Mommy helps people spend the perfect amount of money to help the garbage man clean, and to help the streets stay clean, and to make sure the government has exactly what it needs so that we could live in a clean city."

"I left that conversation like, wow, I'm a true hero," she laughs.

The click

Ask Tziona what the good stuff is, and she doesn't talk about spreadsheets. She talks about trust, and about a very specific moment she calls "the click."

"When I'm explaining a strategy and you see that click in their head: all of a sudden, wow, now they understand. Now they don't just feel like they're giving $5 here and $10 there with no idea where their money's going. They actually understand," she says. "That click is really what motivates me to wake up every day and keep going."

Two kinds of wins

Tziona measures success in two currencies: relief and dollars.

The relief story: a client came to Gelt after years of bouncing between CPAs, carrying a problem that originated in 2018 and compounded year after year. "You could see it just weighed on them. It's like anything on your to-do list that you move to the next day, every single day," she says. "Every year he was like, I know I have to deal with this, but I don't know how. Nobody's teaching me."

She took him back to the beginning. They corrected the prior-year returns, fixed the mistakes, and built a strategy so he'd never land in that situation again. "Seeing him feel that sense of relief was everything. Now we're just proactively going through tax years like everybody else."

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The dollars story starts with conventional wisdom. Elect S-corp status, set your reasonable compensation as low as possible, minimize self-employment taxes. That's the standard playbook. "You're like, yep, that makes sense, let's do that," Tziona says. "But maybe it's not always beneficial to have the lowest compensation. There are so many other factors that go into the computation of taxes."

For one client, she ran the math the other way. A higher reasonable compensation (around $188,000) let him max out his retirement contributions, maximize his qualified business income deduction, and finally fold in health insurance premiums he'd never incorporated into his deductions before. The result: roughly $30,000 in tax savings, every year.

"From the overall picture it was amazing," she says. "And from a liquidity perspective, he was happy to contribute more to retirement. It just worked out in his case."

"We're never bored"

Tziona came to Gelt four years ago from big accounting firms in America, "looking for something innovative and different than the black and white accounting I was doing before."

The difference, she says, is the rhythm. Traditional firms run on compliance: get the work done, survive tax season, then dead time. "Here at Gelt, we're never bored. We're always looking out for what's next on the agenda: how is this next legislation going to affect each one of our clients? How do we make sure each person a new rule is relevant to receives that information? How do we project somebody's income for quarter two and quarter three estimates so they're not stuck in any surprise movements?"

"Strategy, proactivity, reaching out to clients all the time, trying to get to them before they get to you. That's how Gelt is different. We're constantly by your side."

And the focus is bigger than the numbers. "Our focus is ongoing strategy and making our clients feel loved, appreciated, that we want to help them and that they trust us," she says. "I feel like I've definitely achieved that here."

Frequently Asked Questions

Should S-corp owners always set the lowest reasonable salary?
Not always. The standard playbook minimizes salary to reduce self-employment taxes, but that ignores other factors. For one client, a higher reasonable salary (around $188,000) maximized retirement contributions and the qualified business income deduction and allowed health insurance premiums to be deducted, saving roughly $30,000 a year. The right number depends on the full picture.

What if I've carried a tax problem for years?
It can usually be fixed. One client carried an issue from 2018 that compounded annually. Gelt went back to the beginning, corrected the prior-year returns, and built a strategy so it wouldn't happen again. The relief, Tziona says, was everything.

Carrying a tax problem you can't shake? Talk to a Gelt CPA.