thank you for this
and yeah I've run into that issue, quite annoying
but as Arantor pointed out, simply change mine and the persons post count 
I developed this tip/trick after I migrated a forum that had +2500 members from vBulletin to SMF - the forum had been in existence for several years and about 450 of the members had paid subscriptions.
I guess I could have written some SQL to manually increase the post counts of long-term/financial members but this method allows the member's true post count to be shown and is not affected if the "Recount all member post counts" maintenance task is run.