From childhood tax surprise to CPA: A profession leader’s journey

Decades before Oscar Vives became a successful CPA whose specialty is advising clients on retirement income, he went to a store in Florida, excited to buy a video game priced at $49.99.

Vives, 9 at the time, had just arrived from Puerto Rico. With $50 in crisp bills saved from gifts, he approached a cashier, who gave him the bad news: He didn’t have enough money to cover the sales tax, which Puerto Rico didn’t have at the time.

“I didn’t know how to speak English initially, but I was good with numbers,” said Vives, who was certain the cashier was wrong. He walked away empty-handed, and he doesn’t recall if he ever got the game.

With that background, the irony of his profession isn’t lost on Vives, CPA/PFS, CFP. “Who’d have thought that my work would involve taxes down the line?” he said in an interview with the JofA.

Vives, 35, an executive financial planner with Sensible Money in Tampa, will speak Tuesday, Nov. 18, at the AICPA National Tax Conference in Washington, D.C., on “Creating Tax-Smart Retirement Income Plans.”

Vives is the previous chair of the AICPA Personal Financial Specialist Credential Committee and is on the AICPA Personal Financial Planning Conference Committee. The AICPA Standing Ovation Program has recognized Vives for his professional achievements in personal financial planning.

CPAs, especially those in tax planning, “have no choice but to come in to touch some of these retirement-specific questions because clients are just talking about it,” he said. “How do we think about their holistic lifelong tax plan in the context of a retirement plan?”

During the conference session, Vives said, he also will discuss approaches to create investment income for retirement because “one of the questions that people tend to have is, how do you actually create the dollars from the investments … to give me my monthly paycheck?”

Among the people who rely on Vives for investment advice is his mother, Nilsa Ortiz, who raised him and his two siblings after she and his father separated, prompting the move from Puerto Rico to Jacksonville, Fla. She worked several blue-collar jobs to keep the family together, and she works to this day as a factory production worker.

“She always tells me, ‘Babe, I appreciate that you do that for me,’” said Vives, who helps his mother financially. “But it’s my honor. Honestly, it’s my honor because the reality is without her sacrifices and everything that she went through — blue collar and just pushing through and waking up early and doing all that, really for the express purpose of giving us an opportunity. I don’t want to let that sacrifice go in vain. That was always my motivating factor.”

His childhood circumstances motivated him to succeed, said Vives, who said he read the biographies of people like Warren Buffett when he was a teenager.

“I had this thing in my heart that if I could just learn some of that information that these gurus know about the financial markets and all of that, I can maybe climb out of my economic situation as a family and do OK in life, be able to take care of my immediate family,” said Vives, who is married with three sons.

Enter his high school principal, who, knowing of Vives’s love of math and finances, set him up to meet his financial planner. The financial planner became a mentor who hired Vives as a bookkeeper after he graduated from high school. As luck would have it, the location of Vives’ desk meant he could overhear conversations between the financial planner and his clients.

“I’m like, I want to be that guy. I want to do his job,” said Vives, who has a bachelor of business administration degree in accounting and financial planning from the University of North Florida.

The financial planner advised Vives that his best path would be to become both a CPA and a financial planner because clients would trust him more if he had a background in both.

“He said, ‘Oftentimes I’ll have a tax strategy for clients that I want them to implement, and they always come back to me with “Oh, I’ve got to talk to my CPA,” like they dismiss my knowledge of the tax law,’” Vives recalled. “And he said, ‘So, being the young buck that you are, go get your CPA and no one will ever question you when you tell clients to do something for a tax reason.’”

— To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Martha Waggoner at Martha.Waggoner@aicpa-cima.com.