Parker Carroll • Huntsville, AL
Infinity Tax and Financial Planning • American Portfolios Financial Services Inc.
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Proactive Advisor Magazine: Parker, talk about your path to becoming a financial professional.

​I graduated from Auburn University with a bachelor’s degree in biomedical sciences and later earned my master’s degree in biological sciences from The University of Alabama in Huntsville. I take a lot of pride in my 24-year career in the biotechnology, genetics, and pharmaceutical fields, primarily as a sales consultant. While I received many sales awards through the years, the most satisfying part of the job was assisting medical professionals in meeting the needs of their patients.

During that time, my husband and I worked with our financial professional, Andy Zorovich, to create a financial plan that would provide financial stability and allow me to potentially make a career change when the timing was right. The pharmaceutical field, while rewarding, is always changing, and job security can be uncertain—even for strong performers. We executed our financial plan faithfully and greatly appreciated Andy’s educational approach and sound financial guidance. His firm, Infinity Tax and Financial Planning, offered outstanding financial-planning capabilities, including contingency planning, and a focus on personalized client service.

When the industry’s need for pharmaceutical representatives changed dramatically during the pandemic, I decided to consider making a major career shift. After some discussion about my situation and desire to pursue a new career path, Andy presented an offer to join his firm in 2020. I enthusiastically accepted and believed that entering the financial-services field was another wonderful opportunity to help change people’s lives for the better. I also thought that my quantitative, analytical, and customer-service skills would be very valuable in this new professional role. I earned my licenses in 2021 and began working as a financial professional at Infinity Tax and Financial Planning in the fall of that year.

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Andy has been an excellent mentor, both during the years I spent working with him as a client and now in our everyday collaboration on clients’ tax and financial-planning needs. It’s reassuring to know that I have him and our full staff as highly experienced resources. Importantly, I understand firsthand the value of a strong relationship with a financial professional and wish to help others successfully plan for their own financial goals.

Describe your firm’s differentiation.

We have a fairly unique business model, offering clients access to tax preparers, accountants, financial planners, investment managers, insurance agents, and estate-planning advisors. Most of our clients initially become involved with Infinity Tax and Financial Planning through our tax services. Our clients appreciate that they can get most, if not all, of their financial-planning needs met in one place.

We can offer tax preparation and planning; financial and retirement planning; investment management; estate planning; simple will preparation; life, home, and auto insurance; and accounting and bookkeeping for our business-owner clients. The real benefit to clients is that they do not have to coordinate the efforts of multiple unaffiliated professionals. Our clients can receive guidance from various professionals who frequently communicate with each other, all under the umbrella of our firm’s coordination. This comprehensive approach and collaborative, team-oriented atmosphere lead many of our clients to refer us to their families, friends, and colleagues.

How do you approach the financial-planning process?

Everyone needs to have their taxes completed, and many people feel overwhelmed by the process. Most of our clients come to us because their taxes have become too complicated, they owed an unexpected amount, or they realize the benefit of tax advice that is more closely coordinated with overall financial guidance. We start by looking at the client’s tax return. This is like a blood test in a doctor’s office. You can tell a lot about a client by looking at their tax return. As we go through the end-of-year tax documents and ask the questions necessary to prepare an accurate return, we get a deep qualitative and quantitative perspective on the client and their family. After tax season, we invite each client back for a midyear review, where we really dive into extensive tax and financial planning.

“Financial planning and tax planning go hand in hand.”

During the midyear review, we build an asset map with the client that shows their income, assets, debts, cash flow, and life insurance. We can customize it to add items such as an analysis of the cash flow needed in retirement, future goals such as buying a vacation home or an income property, or planning for college funding or elder or long-term care—just to mention a few areas. We also identify any gaps or opportunities for improvement that may exist for optimizing their current financial situation. We find the asset map provides a comfortable way for people who may be uneasy speaking about detailed money matters to open up and have a frank and detailed discussion. It’s also a highly visual and easy-to-follow road map for each client meeting that is all on one page. The asset map gets updated as we work with an individual client or family over the ensuing months and years. We often discover opportunities to help with 401(k) rollovers, IRA consolidation, insurance needs, and risk reduction through noncorrelated assets.

Financial planning and tax planning go hand in hand. Because we do tax returns, the tax consequences of our investment guidance are always top of mind. We focus on tax-efficient investing, tax-efficient utilization of those investments, and tax-efficient means for passing the assets to beneficiaries. We are current on changes to tax law and how they will affect our clients.

What is your firm’s overall investment philosophy?

Our investment guidance lies at the intersection of a client’s tax planning, legacy planning, retirement planning, and insurance and risk-management strategies. The combined objectives of those areas, as well as a client’s risk profile and time horizon, drive their investment plan. We are fundamentally unbiased when it comes to specific investment vehicles and can access investment products and strategies from a wide universe of options that will work to meet the objectives of a client’s customized investment plan.

Once we have agreement with a client on their investment goals, we use sophisticated software to analyze their current portfolio and compare it to a new proposed portfolio construction and allocations. We are very concerned with achieving the proper balance of risk and reward and believe that individualized return objectives and risk-adjusted returns are far more important than comparisons to an arbitrary market benchmark.

There may be a role for both passive and active components of a client’s investment plan, and we work with several third-party managers. Each offers different approaches or strengths in their investment approach. One manager offers access to rules-based, dynamic risk management and tactically managed investment portfolios. These types of strategies seek to deliver favorable risk-adjusted returns and less volatility in any market environment. We find that many clients are more comfortable with an investment approach that focuses on controlling portfolio risk based on their specific risk tolerance. These strategies achieve that in part by having the flexibility to actively adjust strategy allocations in response to different market conditions. We believe this can enhance the probability that clients will stick to their investment plan over the long term and, in turn, increase the probability of successfully meeting their overall investment goals.

How do you describe your firm’s overall mission?

Andy speaks often about our mission of helping clients protect, grow, use, and bestow financial assets. We help protect client assets via tax mitigation, investment risk management, and insurance strategies. We look to help grow assets through tax strategies that can increase net income, budgeting techniques, and sophisticated investment strategies. We help clients use their assets wisely by following the principles of a goals-based financial plan. And, finally, we can help clients bestow assets to the next generation, charity, church, or another recipient in a tax-efficient manner. We take these four strategic objectives very seriously and are passionate about helping clients plan for financial success in tax-advantaged ways.