Success Interview: Ronald Burrow of Packerland Brokerage Services and Ronald Burrow Financial

Ronald Burrow has been offering financial planning for over 30 years through Packerland Brokerage Services and Ronald Burrow Financial. In this success interview, recorded in 2023, he explains how he incorporated Medicare IRMAA planning into his practice — and how it helped him expand his business by leveraging IRMAA seminars along with relationships with CPAs.

The interview was originally conducted as part of the IRMAA Certified Planner education program, which Burrow completed and folded into his day-to-day planning work. What makes his story worth studying is not the credential itself, but the playbook: a veteran advisor with three decades of experience found a planning niche most of his competitors ignored, built an educational marketing engine around it, and turned tax professionals into a referral channel.

Watch the full conversation above, then read on for a breakdown of the two growth levers Burrow describes — seminars and CPA partnerships — and how any advisor can apply the same approach.

Ronald Burrow is a financial planner affiliated with Packerland Brokerage Services who also serves clients through his own firm, Ronald Burrow Financial. With more than 30 years in the business at the time of this interview, he had already built a mature practice — the kind of practice where many advisors stop experimenting with new service offerings altogether.

Instead, Burrow added a specialization: Medicare's income-related monthly adjustment amount. IRMAA is the surcharge that higher-income Medicare beneficiaries pay on top of their standard Part B and Part D premiums, and it sits at the intersection of the two things retirement clients care about most — healthcare costs and taxes. For an advisor whose client base skews toward retirees and pre-retirees, it is a natural fit.

As he describes in the interview, the designation training gave him the technical grounding — what IRMAA is, how the brackets work, and how planning decisions made in a client's early 60s ripple into Medicare premiums years later. The practice growth came from what he did with that knowledge.

The first lever Burrow discusses is client and prospect seminars built around IRMAA education. Seminar marketing is hardly new in financial services — but the topic matters enormously, and IRMAA has three properties that make it unusually effective seminar material:

• It is unknown. Most retirees have never heard of IRMAA until a letter from the Social Security Administration tells them their Medicare premium is going up. A seminar that explains the surcharge before it hits delivers genuine news, not a rehash of generic retirement content.
• It is concrete. The IRMAA brackets are published income thresholds with specific dollar surcharges attached. Attendees can look at the table and immediately see whether it applies to them — and crossing a threshold by even one dollar of income triggers the full surcharge for that tier.
• It is actionable. Because IRMAA is determined by modified adjusted gross income from two years prior, there is a real planning window. Roth conversion timing, capital-gain harvesting, charitable distributions, and withdrawal sequencing all move the number that determines the premium.

That combination — surprising, specific, and solvable — is what turns an educational event into a pipeline. An attendee who learns that their income two years ago is setting their Medicare premium today has an obvious next question: what does my situation look like? Answering that question requires a planning conversation, and the advisor at the front of the room is the natural person to have it with.

For advisors considering the same approach, the mechanics of how IRMAA is calculated — the MAGI definition, the two-year lookback, and the cliff structure of the brackets — form the core of a seminar that fills a room and generates appointments.

The second lever in Burrow's playbook is partnerships with CPAs. Accountant referral relationships are a staple of practice-growth advice, but they often stall because the advisor has nothing specific to offer the CPA's clients that the CPA cannot already provide. IRMAA changes that dynamic.

Here is the structural gap: the tax return a CPA prepares is the exact document the Social Security Administration uses to set IRMAA two years later. But tax preparation is inherently backward-looking — by the time the return is filed, the income that will trigger a future surcharge has already been realized. Most CPAs see the consequence only when a client calls to ask why their Medicare premium jumped.

An advisor who specializes in IRMAA fills that gap with forward-looking planning:

• Projecting a client's MAGI for the current and future tax years before December 31, while there is still time to act.
• Flagging one-time income events — a Roth conversion, a property sale, a large capital gain — that will push a client over a bracket threshold two years out.
• Handling the appeal side: when a client retires or experiences another qualifying life-changing event, filing Form SSA-44 can get the surcharge reduced based on current, lower income rather than the two-year-old return.

For the CPA, referring clients to an advisor with this specialty is not a favor — it solves a recurring client-service problem. That is why, as Burrow describes, the relationships compound: each IRMAA save gives the CPA another story to tell, and each referred client typically brings broader planning needs along with the Medicare question that opened the door.

Step back from the specifics and Burrow's approach is a case study in niche-driven practice growth. The pattern has three parts:

1. Pick a planning problem that is real, measurable, and under-served. IRMAA qualifies: it affects a meaningful slice of higher-income Medicare beneficiaries, the cost is stated in exact dollars per month, and relatively few advisors model it.
2. Teach it publicly. Seminars (and their modern equivalents — webinars, workshops, CPA lunch-and-learns) convert expertise into visibility. Education is the marketing.
3. Give adjacent professionals a reason to refer. A specialty that solves a problem CPAs see every filing season turns the strongest referral source in personal finance into an active channel.

None of this required Burrow to abandon his existing practice. IRMAA planning layered on top of the retirement income work he had done for three decades — it simply gave prospects and referral partners a sharper reason to choose him. Advisors who want to see where the appeal process fits into client conversations can start with our guide to the IRMAA appeal.

This interview was conducted under the IRMAA Certified Planner program, which historically trained advisors on Medicare surcharge planning. The underlying opportunity Burrow describes, however, has only grown: IRMAA thresholds, surcharges, and the two-year lookback still catch retirees off guard every year, and the advisor who surfaces the issue first still wins the relationship.

The practical requirements are the same ones Burrow built his seminars on:

• Know the current IRMAA brackets and how the thresholds move year to year.
• Be able to project a client's MAGI under different income scenarios — Roth conversions, RMDs, capital gains, pension elections.
• Show the client, in dollars, what a bracket crossing costs and what avoiding it saves.

RetirementAdvisorPro was built for exactly that workflow: it models IRMAA alongside taxes, Social Security, and withdrawal strategy so you can show clients — and CPA referral partners — the two-years-ahead picture that makes this planning niche work. If you want to see it applied to a real client scenario, schedule a demo.