Neal McSpadden on Proactive S-Corporation Setup and Real Estate Depreciation

If you take your money and take it to Vegas and put it on black and lose, that's still a better use in my opinion than handing it over to the government. That's the goal is to keep money in your pocket and not in the government. Taxes is something we all have to deal with. There's no getting around it. You cannot escape it unless you know exactly what to do. And if you're not aware of it, it's going to eat you alive. I've been a strict W2 earner and there's absolutely nothing you can do. You're going to be taxed at the highest rate possible as a W2 earner. I don't think a lot of people even think about what that means. If there's any principle at all in taxation, the guiding principle for business is that [Music] welcome everybody back to the best podcast on the net, Remnant Finance.

We’re once again welcoming for the second time our first repeat interview, I believe, our good friend Neil Mcpadden with Tact Sherpa. He’s been representing us for a couple years. Neil has we talked about his background on the last one, but just quick a quick recap. He had a background where his his story I’ll let you tell your story, Neil, of how you got started actually because you can do it just as better than I can even though I’ve heard it 10 times. Yeah. You know, it’s it’s a story that is not too uncommon for many entrepreneurial types where, you know, you go a few years and suddenly you start getting nasty letters from the IRS. So, my nasty letters said I owed them about a little over $1.3 million. And this was back in 2007 this started. And that was the beginning of my tax journey. So like most people, I

ignored those letters, which is which is which is not what I officially recommend doing these days, but that’s what I did. I ignored them. I ignored them. I ignored them. So I went through that whole process. First, you get letters, and then after a while, they start sending you certified mail where you have to sign for them. And if you ignore those, you’ll start getting phone calls. And if you ignore those, then they’ll just go after whatever they can find. And in my case, at that time, so that whole process takes like two years. In my case, by about 2009, they started garnishing my paycheck. I was I was tutoring high school kids at the time. And I went from making peanuts to making nothing because they were taking all my income. And so that really got my attention, as you might expect. And then I started

looking around for someone that could help me fix my problems. Then I found I found a guy who used to be a Wall Street tax attorney and had gone out into his own private practice and he helped me fix my problem. And in that whole process, you know, the reason I’d gotten into trouble was because I was doing entrepreneurial type things. I was trying to find my way after deciding not to become an engineer in the corporate world after some early experiences deciding that wasn’t for me. And so, you know, I had by that point I had about a decade worth of school of hard knocks, learning business and marketing and all the things that go into, you know, trying to make money beyond just working for somebody else. When I started fixing my own tax problem, I saw his business and he was growing at the time, but had

no business skills really. And so, we ended up, you know, basically partnering up. I helped him with business operations. He helped me with my tax problems and then ended up teaching me the tax game from from this perspective that I didn’t know at the time was very different. You know, he was always focused on planning first and saying, “Okay, given the client’s situation, what can we do? What options do we have available? If we do X, Y, and Z, we end up with this different result rather than just taking whatever they have and putting it in the computer like is which is what most tax professionals do.” So that really set me down a path of very planning focused approach in the tax world and I worked with him for about a decade and then decided to go off on my own back in 2019 and really started in 2020 and then I

don’t know if you remember but the whole world shut down there was there was this thing that you know maybe we don’t say the name of on on YouTube still I don’t know what the current rules are but um you know tax sherpa went into 2020 and you know the the plan had always been to be remote and we ended up being forced to be remote anyways so that that kind worked out. We went through that whole time and then in November of last year, I actually bought an office here locally. I’m I’m in the Atlanta area and so, you know, we acquired a book of business and now I’m back in the office helping clients and some people come in person, but most people are still remote these days. So, that’s kind of the journey. You know, over the years worked on over 50,000 tax returns and helped,

you know, save hundreds of millions of dollars worth of taxes. So that’s the goal is to keep money in your pocket and not in the governments because we we will be better stewards of it. Even if we’re poor stewards of it, we’ll probably be better stewards of it than the government will. So for me, and this this gets down to like like hardcore philosophical outlook, for me, if you take your money and take it to Vegas and put it on black and lose, that’s still a better use in my opinion than handing it over to the government. You know, if we think about like taxes is something we all have to deal with, right? There’s no getting around it. There is a web of code and and taxation on everything you do repeatedly the same dollar in your life coming in going out being taxed over and over and over and over and over

when you die being taxed when you you know there’s so much in the tax code you cannot escape it if unless unless you know exactly what to do the tax code is a road map um I just grabbed my copy of the the tax code and if you can if you’re watching you can see it’s really thick and I I’ I’ve put a little paper section in the part that defines income. The rest is how to not pay it essentially. So there is a road map here and there’s a way that you can get out of there, but you need someone like a sherpa tax sherpa. It’s like if everyone is required to climb Mount Everest, you don’t have a choice. You have to climb it and you might just die on the way. Like would you rather increase your odds of getting there having someone who

knows the lay of the land, knows exactly what to do. We can’t be experts in in this and do our regular job, but you ought to have someone on your team who knows this stuff inside out because if you’re not attentive to exactly what your exemptions are, what income you’re making, how to find these carveouts, if you’re not very well verssed in that, you’re going to get eaten alive. Yeah, that’s that’s for sure. You know, every every tax season I see people online talking about it’s like, well, you know, if the IRS knows how much I I made, what what do I have to do all this paperwork for, right? If they already know the number, right? And the answer is they don’t know the number. In fact, if you do what I did, so the so the reason I started getting those letters back in ’

07 was because if you go several years without filing a tax return, the IRS will file, it’s not an actual tax return, they call it a substitute for return. They will take whatever information they have on you and they’ll do a tax calculation. They’ll and if at the end of that calculation you owe money or you they think you would have owed money, then you’ll get a letter and that’s where those that’s where those things are generated. If at the end of that calculation they decide you probably would have gotten a refund, you’ll never hear from them. So in that case, they thought I owed $1.3 million. But when they do those substitute for returns, they do it in the way that is the least favorable to you. And you know that’s not an accident, right? So when people talk about like, oh, you know, this whole system is redundant. It’s

like, well, not really. You know, a $100 shows up in your bank account. Like what is that? Well, I don’t know. It depends. It might be income. It might be a gift. It might be a loan payback. It might be loan proceeds. You know, it could be all different kinds of things. And and when you file your taxes, you’re telling the IRS and, you know, whatever state agencies what actually happened with the money in your life as far as how much of it is taxable and how much of it isn’t. And it’s it’s up to you to to do that in a way that is both accurate and it is, I would say, an obligation on your part to do it accurate and in a framing that is as favorable as possible to you. Yeah. That doesn’t really hold as true with a W2 employee, right? Because they do have

an accurate assessment of what the person received. If you have no other income outside of a W2, if you have a W2 only and that’s that’s all you have going on in your life, then yeah, that would be correct. But even then, you go out to dinner and somebody venoes you 100 bucks, is that 100 bucks income? I don’t know. Good point. Good point. So, last time we had you on, we talked about Kamla. We talked about the unrealized tax gains. Thank goodness none of that came to fruition. But between both her election and the the tax plan that they that was floating around there in the the ethos or in the in the ethers I mean but now so the big news in the world before we start talking about some individual stuff and how you can help people and why they need you let’s chat

about what’s going on in the world. Yeah. So funnily enough Australia has gone started going down the path of the unrealized capital gains taxes. uh just well I think last week or the week before they there were some announcements about that but fortunately that is dead for now in the US that whole idea and it would be unconstitutional in the US in my opinion anyway but that that’s not necessarily going to stop them. Uh right now we have the big beautiful bill which is the Trump tax package 2.0. one version of the bill has passed the House and it is now in the Senate and they’re doing their negotiations. And so just the regular legislative process, if the Senate makes changes, which they’re going to, then it has to go back and they have to reconcile the the bill to make sure they can pass a version that

is for both the House and the Senate. So we don’t know what the final exact language is going to be because there will be changes, but we have we have kind of a framework at this point and details to be decided. So the major things are that for the most part tax cut and jobs act which was Trump’s 1.0 tax reform back in 2017 is going to be made permanent. So when Task Gun Jobs Act was originally passed, it was passed in a way that though it had a 10-year window and those 10 years are almost up. And it just so happens that because, you know, he Biden got in and then Trump is in again, he happens to be president again at the end of the 10 years as well as the beginning of the 10 years, which is, you know, historically unusual, obviously. But yeah, so so they’re going

to remove the time limits on the original tax cut Jobs Act for most things. For the older people in the audience, you might remember there were these things called exemptions. Those have been gone for, you know, since 2017 and will continue to be gone, so forever. So, we used to have a smaller standard deduction and then we had exemptions based on the number of people in your tax household. So, now we just have the single larger standard deduction and that’s going to continue from here on out. Other provisions, the qualified business income deduction, which is the tax break for people who have qualified business incomes like passroughs for sole proprietorships or escorps or partnerships or real estate, things like that. That’s going to continue. They’re talking about increasing the rate at which you get that break from 20% to 23%. That’s the max. So that’s potentially interesting.

A whole lot of things that we used to have in the old days that were eliminated in tax cut jobs act is going to still be eliminated. So like we used to get moving expenses as a deduction federally. We used to get unreimbured employee expenses. So when people say it’s like, “Oh yeah, I have a job. I have a W2, but I work from home, so I have a home office.” No, you don’t. It only works if you have your own business. It doesn’t work if you’re a W2 because that’s an unreimbured employee expense which are no longer deducted. So things like that will be able to be deducted again, you’re saying. No. So that that so those were eliminated by tax cut jobs act and that elimination will continue basically. Okay. Okay. Um, so like in the old days if you if your house uh pipe sprung a leak and you had

$20,000 worth of damages, in the old days you could deduct that as a casualty loss. Now and continuing, you can only deduct that if you are also in a federally declared disaster like a hurricane or earthquake or something that a lot of these tweaks are just being made permanent. And then there’s these other things that are being introduced. So, the no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, the no tax on social security did not make it into the current version of the language that we have. Instead, what they did was they added a $4,000 deduction for seniors. The no tax on tips thing was interesting. So, in the big beautiful bill, there’s a provision that says no tax on tips and lays out all the ways in which there are no taxes on tips. And basically, there’s going to be an additional deduction above your standard

deduction. So, if you’re a waiter at a fancy place, let’s say make 80 grand for the year, 20 in salary, and 60 in tips, then you’ll be able to deduct that full 60,000 from your income, and you’ll only pay tax on 20, which is virtually nothing. So, when they first started talking about this, I had noted that there has been a bill that’s been introduced every year into the Congress for doing that same thing. And I I assumed that they would just take that language and just stuff it into the big bill, which is kind of what they usually do. But in in actual fact, that’s not what they did. They they wrote their own version. And then after the House passed their version of the Big Beautiful bill, the Senate passed the no tax on tips bill as a separate bill. Now, there are differences between the two, though. So,

the Big Beautiful bill had unlimited deductions for tips and then that went to the Senate. The Senate version had a limit of 25,000 and that has now gone to the House. And so, you know, there’s been a lot of back and forth about, you know, if the negotiations fail in the Senate as far as the big beautiful bill, maybe they’ll use this carve out kind of approach where it’s like, okay, these uncontroversial things that we think we can get passed, we’ll just pass those individually and then whatever’s left over, we’ll we’ll put into the big big bill. But, you know, it’s it’s just a circus basically. Does this mean if either one of those pass that everywhere I go, they’re going to hound me even harder for tips for every single thing I do, every service I get? The worst one just just to go off on a tangent is when

I I’ll stop at Panera Bread once in a while and all they do is hand you a cup and at one time they had the little spinning iPad like now it’s now it’s just the stationary one in front of you but at one time they had that spinning iPad and I remember like the cup was next to it and she handed me a cup and spun the iPad for a tip and I was like I got to get my own coffee over there. Yeah. I I at a limit where it’s like oh the the system’s going to ask you a question. I have nothing to do with it but it’s there you know. I like that. Yeah, it’s it’s going to ask you a question. And then I like when like like there’s four buttons and it gives you three options like 10, 15, 20% and

other. So to to hit zero, I have to go into the second page of the menu to choose it. And so that they watch you hitting all these buttons. Now they know you’re not tipping them for handing you a napkin. Yeah. And if you look at the numbers on that, if you look at the the sales pitch for, you know, Square and Stripe and all these businesses that implement that, it works because people are going to default to the easiest thing and if you set your lowest option to 15%. And now where you become conditioned to, you know, like you go, it used to be get a good meal, good service, 20% tip, that’s that’s reasonable. It’s like 20% of your total expenditure and most people are doing it on the total amount after taxes. So like we’re already over tipping. But now you, like Brian said, you pour your own

coffee or you get a donut and you’re still paying 20% because that’s the lowest option they give you. The the percent increase that they that those machines generate for shops is astronomical. And and I don’t think economically there’s really a justification for like if we assume the IRS’s premise, if we assume all of their givens about what income is and how to get around it economically, not taxing tips doesn’t make sense. though it is a great sound bite, it is a great political, you know, headline. If a waiter is making 80% of their income via tips or 40%, you know, like that is their income, it’s just in a different form. I feel like we should just get rid of tipping and like Japan does. It’s way better over in Japan when you just pay the price you see. But that’s not going to happen. We do accept tips. We have

Venmo. We have ways that you can tip our you if you want to have some taxfree income, I’m I’m happy to take it. So the the devil is in the details when it comes to tips. So you have to be in an industry that is historically known to to have tips. There’s got to be voluntary. There can’t be any coercive element or it can’t be, oh, if you don’t tip me, I can’t do the thing. I can’t be part of it. They’re supposedly assuming one version or the other passes, they’re going to come out with a list of like, you know, businesses, business types that are allowable for tips. But it it actually does create a problem at least for those businesses because, you know, up until now, especially if you’re like if you’re a self-employed hairdresser, I’ve got a number of clients that that do hair just on their own. You know,

they go to clients houses or they work out of their basement or whatever, they’re just recording revenue. But now you’ve got to go back and fix all your records saying, “Okay, how much was tip and how much was service income.” So, you know, there there’s definitely issues that go along with it. But but yeah, I mean to your point on there is no logic as to like why this would be treated specially. It’s just a it’s a reward for this voting block of you know it’s just based on campaigning. People ask me all the time it’s like well why is the taxes this way for this thing and why is it that way for that thing? It’s like there is no reason. It’s just because Congress says so you know that’s that’s all of taxes. There’s also in the big beautiful bill which is hard to say

without laughing because it’s so preposterous. like we’re just going to like we’re beating the out of you with a with a bag of nickels every single day of your life, but we’re going to remove two nickels. We’ll put in a dime even though it’s it’s a little bit less weight, but the amount of coins like it’s just it’s this, you know, big beautiful way to keep beating you. I mean, the whole the whole idea is frustrating, but for the big beautiful bill, there’s the child tax credit. There’s some changes to that. There’s the USmade vehicle and then the salt cap. if you can talk about what those are and what what those will likely mean for listeners. Pretty much anybody who has children, almost anybody, unless you’re very high income, gets a credit for children under the age of 17. And it’s just it’s just a tax credit that

just gets calculated unless you don’t have a social security, which is my current situation. True. For almost all these provisions, you have to have a social security number, which is interesting because prior to this, if you were an iTuner, you you would apply for a number from the IRS and say, “Hey, it is individual taxpayer identification number. It looks exactly like a social security number, but it starts with the number nine instead of 0 through eight. And these are for for non-citizens who need a tax identification number for whatever purpose. And so, historically, most provisions applied equally to iTun holders and social security number holders. And almost every provision that I’ve looked at in the in the BBL specifies it has to be a social security number that in order to get this benefit. So the child tax credit is one that’s you know pretty much everybody

who has kids gets and it’s the numbers have changed over the years. So child tax credit is interesting because it’s can be non-refundable or refundable depending on your your income situation and the numbers have changed over the years. So used to be 1,000 and then it was up to 3600 during the lockdown period. there were people were getting direct deposits a lot of people for like 300 bucks a month per kid and there were different numbers if they were under six or under 17 or whatever. So right now it’s looking like they’re going to raise the total the max credit for the child tax credit up to potentially $3,600. So you know that will be subject to negotiation. We’ll see where that ends up. But that seems pretty likely that that number is going to get increased. Have more kids people. Oh well that’s that’s part of the thing. There’s also

the mega accounts which we should circle back at some point. So there’s that the the deduction for cars which are they have to at least be assembled in America in order to qualify and the interest you would pay on buying one of these cars would be deductible up to $10,000. $10,000 on the price of the car or $10,000 in interest? Interest. Yeah. And and it doesn’t work for leases. You have to actually purchase the car. You have to purchase by financing it. Yeah. Well, there’s no interest if you don’t if you don’t. Oh, okay. I thought it was on the purchase price because we’re going to get a new car by the end of the year and I actually asked you are Toyota Sequoas built in America and and I think they are. So, I was like, “Oh, sweet. I’ll let you know get 10,000 deduction there,

but not if we do a policy loan and purchase it in cash at the dealer and take the note ourselves.” Yeah. And and you know, at that point, maybe it’s worth bag of nickels. Maybe it’s So, this is this is the weird distortions that get introduced. is like well well under that scenario let’s assume everything passes as is like is it worth getting the financing and then taking the policy loan to pay the financing in order in order to book the interest in order to get the deduction maybe you know it could all just like this is the thing with taxes like it could just not be like there could be a you know a flat tax where consumption drives what you contribute but there’s so much of this stuff where it could just not be instead of you know needing a needing to spend a

whole career you’re dedicated to the ins and outs of this thing that could just not exist, which I’m glad people like you are willing to do this. It just drives me bonkers trying to trying to navigate this thing. Yeah. Well, you know, I’ve spent basically my whole adult life fixing government problems. So, I I used to help kids going through government schools actually learn stuff and pass tests, you know, so fixing fixing the problems with there. And then I moved into the tax world fixing helping people fix the interactions with government through their businesses and personal finances and everything. So yeah, I mean if the government were just, you know, not intrusive and did what they said they were going to do well, I wouldn’t have a career. So you know, there’s that. on the on the IBC front with what we were just talking about, could somebody get creative and

create like a you know, for me like Brian Moody Financing LLC policy loan to the LLC and then write the loan to Brian Moody the the person. Yeah. For that vehicle potentially. I’d have to think about that. So I mean, you know, insurance companies do provide lines of credit to finance companies. So that’s not an unusual arrangement is whether you are, you know, if you’re like both sides of the thing, does that still work? I’d have to think about that’s where a cash value line of credit could come in handy. Would that Yeah. Or is that just adding another Yeah, maybe. So stupid. If and when the bill gets passed, you got to go into like a lot of times it’ll say it’ll have language like and the secretary of so and so will will publish a list within 90 days of things that qualify and stuff like that. So, so

you got to wait for those and then figure out, okay, based on that, what can we do? So, if you started a company that used your policy to finance other people’s purchases, I would say, you know, that that would definitely work. But financing your own, you know, I’d have to I’d have to look at the details and and obviously none of this matters until bill actually gets passed. But but yeah, so I mean it introduces all the all kinds of shenanigans that could potentially be be played. So So yeah, so that that’s that’s the car interest one. who said the the salt cap. Uh salt stands for state and local taxes. So if you open up your schedule A on your tax return if you have one, that’s the itemized deductions. So basic primer, you calculate your itemized deductions, which are the allowed deductions for a

personal, you know, 1040. Certain categories are allowed to to reduce your income. If that number at the end of that the end of that schedule is greater than your standard deduction, then you take the itemized. If it’s less, then you just take the standard because that’s bigger, right? Salt is part of that. So that’s that’s the taxes you pay for state income taxes, local income taxes, local property taxes, stuff like that. And before tax cut jobs act, that was unlimited. So if you were a high-income person in a high tax state, uh just working on somebody’s file where they live in New Jersey and they pay 20 grand a year in property taxes with for a kind of normal house, right? Just because New Jersey has the highest property taxes in the country. In the old days, that deduction was unlimited. So, if you paid $20,000 in property

taxes and another $10,000 in state income taxes, well, you got a $30,000 deduction on your itemized deductions and that was generally enough to exceed your standard deduction and it would reduce your taxable income and reduce your taxes. Okay? So, tax cut and jobs act comes along and they say, “Okay, Salt taxes are limited to $10,000. If you pay $20,000 in property taxes and 10,000 in income taxes to New Jersey, then you the deduction that you get for federal purposes is still $10,000 because that’s the cap. And so what it did was it, you know, paid for, you know, quote unquote paid for a lot of other tax cuts by punishing people in high tax areas. Now, as it happens, those high tax areas tend to vote Democrat. So politically you have to admire the strategy of like, okay, we’re going to stick it to Democrats in order

to pay for our tax cuts to our Republican friends. Well, that’s, you know, in effect what happened. So, but ever since then, people have been upset, right? And understandable. So, if you used to get this huge deduction and that got wiped out, I would be mad, too. I would say don’t live there. But, you know, that’s that’s just me. Well, yeah. Out here in California, you know, the land of fruits and gays, you know, we’re paying 13% on income tax. That’s higher than some people pay in federal, but everyone’s paying that out here. It’s it’s insane. Well, you know, California does have brackets. So, but you but you go through those brackets pretty quick. So, now the current negotiation is where are we that going to adjust this cap on salt and for whom, right? So, the latest thing this morning was that okay, for filers who

make less than 400,000, we’re going to raise the cap from 10,000 to 20,000. And there have been all kinds of different proposals floated from the Congress, but that’s the latest one that I’ve heard this morning. And you know, again, we’ll see where it comes down in an actual piece of legislation that has passed, but it’s almost certainly going to stay in some form because eliminating the cap would, you know, quote unquote cost government too much in that, you know, that would allow more people to keep their own money. So, you know, they need to, you know, they do these uh budget scorings from the Congressional Budget Office, CBO. They they publish these reports and they say, “Okay, if based on our assumptions of the future 10 years, if we implement this particular piece of legislation, the effect on the on the debt and the deficit is going to be

XYZ.” And so, you’ve probably seen these headlines over the last week or two saying that, “Oh, it’s going to add $3 trillion to the debt.” It’s like, well, maybe, right? I’ve never seen a CBO projection be right ever about anything, but you know, but based on their assumptions and if you plug in the numbers into their model, then okay. And their assumptions include no reduction in spending, right? It’s even economic activity. From here on out, people don’t really adjust their behavior. There are no recessions, you know, all this kind of nonsense that is not real. Uh but that’s how they do their reports and they kind of go from there. But in those reports, they say, okay, the measures in this bill, some of them will raise money and some of them will cost money. And again, cost is in terms of less tax money coming into the government. When

they do all that, you know, politically, it is it is advantageous for the Republicans to put in these measures that will offset some of the cuts with increases so that the net budget score is not as bad. And again, as bad as from the government perspective, that’s where the sticking point of that negotiation comes in. And then, you know, a lot of people, both Republicans and Democrats, don’t want to see highincome people in high tax areas get a benefit that would be, you know, special pleading for fat cats basically. So, that’s been an issue with the Democrats on that side. I don’t dislike the idea of Democrats being forced to complain about paying higher taxes. There’s something poetic in that. But one thing that I want to talk about that is a huge huge thing that everyone in the IBC community should be focusing on is the estate tax deduction

sunsetting along. So it seems like now last time we talked we didn’t know that by the end of 25 this could go away. And what the estate tax is and I’ll take a shot at it and you correct me where I’m wrong on this but here’s why I think it really applies for our our clients and people that are practicing IBC. The estate tax is when you die in order to pass money on to the next generation. There is a limit of how much you can do before you assume a 40% tax. Now, if your spouse is still surviving, there’s an unlimited deduction. So, if I die, everything that I’m worth goes to my wife untaxed for the unlimited marital deduction, but when my wife passes before it goes to our daughters, anything over a threshold, the estate tax limit, is going to be taxed at 40%.

that goes up with inflation and that’s gone up over the years. Right now it’s doubled per the TCJA. Currently it’s I believe 13.5 million and for a couple 26 million. So if I die I pass it on to my wife without deduction or without any tax. And then when she passes if we’re worth over 26 million now every dollar over that is taxed at 40. That’s the estate tax. But if the TCJA were to sunset without being extended or without these being made permanent that amount would get cut in half. and where that matters for IBC clients like that. You know, I personally only know one friend and client where that’s a major consideration for most of the people like $26 million is not the ballpark that that we’re anywhere near or honestly really think we’re ever going to get to. But if that cuts in half and we’re now at the you

know whatever that would be is it six and a half right now is the single person. I mean, right now, if you if you are a 30-year-old officer in the military and you’ve gone through the process with us, you have your whole life IBC policy and you’ve captured the rest of your insurability via convertible term, you’re probably worth $56 million. And if you look at your illustrations, when you’re 70, that’s probably gone up to $10 million. If this estate tax limit gets cut in half and you live a long life, you are going to deal with the state tax. And there are ways to mitigate that. It’s not like a you can’t mitigate it, but you have to get we have to get into some more serious, you know, either irrevocable trust. There’s different ways that you can mitigate that, but you need to be thinking about it now. Whereas before,

especially if it stays at 13 per person, it’s 26 for a couple. It’s not really in most of our our realm of possibility. We want to get there, but can you talk about one, am I offen the explanation of the estate tax, the chances that it’s going to stay at 13.5 and above? All right. and continuing to grow. Any further thoughts on how we should be thinking about that if it were to cut in half and some like we might be subject to that if our policies keep growing, you know, 10 20 years from now. Yeah. So, I mean, your your basic explanation is is is basically right. I mean, the numbers change year to year because of inflation adjustments. If I’m remembering correctly, the last time I looked at the the big beautiful bill was they were raising it to 15 million flat um and then inflation adjusting from

there. If that provision expires, then yeah, it does go back to the old limits because again, we’re in this 10-year window coming to the end of it. And so, yeah, that that could be an issue for sure. There have been a lot of a lot of tax provisions that were created, you know, decades ago and just, you know, lost track with the real life inflation that we’ve experienced, right? So, estate tax was one of them, alternative minimum tax was another. And these things were were numbers that were picked, you know, 30, 40, 50 years ago. and they said, “Oh, yeah, we’ll adjust for inflation.” You know, some of them didn’t actually, but but some of them did. But like, you know, the the numbers that we get from official measures, you know, they don’t track quite in line with real life. And so, you know, let’s putting it mildly, right? So, you

know, so now we’re in this place where the estate tax applied to virtually nobody when it was originally created, now applies to more and more and more people just as a percentage of the population just because the numbers people are dealing with have inflated, you know, compared to the trend line that the that the law is on. So, yeah, that that could certainly be an issue. And this whole thing with estate tax. So, so one is a lot of people consider it double taxation, which it is because you have income that you’ve paid tax on and then if that income is still in your bank account at the end and it’s above some magic number then you have to pay or your estate has to pay tax on it again. So, so that’s one element and the other from a practical perspective is that it raises almost no money. So the

people who it would affect pay people like me at estate attorneys and and other people to make sure that it ends up not affecting them because the fees they pay for good professional advice is far less than the tax. And so when you look at the actual government reports like the IRS publishes a report every couple years called tax gap analysis and and they lay out the different categories of of revenue that they bring in and the state tax is like almost nothing. So, it’s sort of just a lawyer and accountant support tax, you know, because because all those people will end up doing those things like the irrevocable trust, like the like the charity structures and all those kinds of things in order to avoid that because it’s so egregious. And and it is worth noting that some states don’t follow the federal. Most do, but some don’t and

have their own threshold limits that are lower. So, I think that just plays on the ignorance of a large portion of the of the voting block. you know, the mouth breathers out there who just want to who just want to see that, hey, there’s somebody rich and they should get taxed and their kids shouldn’t be dress trust fund babies who don’t have to live the way I did and struggle. They’re just going to mouth breathe continuously and never look into the fact that these people are wealthy because they’ve made good moves. They might not even be smarter than you, but they’ve made good strategic moves and they’re going to continue to do that to mitigate the effect of that. But so politically it looks good for that voting block of low IQ people. Basically the the I’m looking at the tax gap report from 2022. It

raised 30 billion and the IRS thinks it should have been 35. So they think million. Billion. Oh billion. I was like if it was million it’s a total waste of time. Billion. Yeah. It’s still not. Can I add one I’m going to add one piece here just to underscore my my point. how comprehensive this web of taxation is if you don’t understand it on the estate tax going through my CLU certification the book I’m the module I’m doing now is all about taxation life insurance and it just makes you want to stick a screwdriver through your eye all the caveats and ways that this thing is is tax not the insurance is taxed but the value of your estate is taxed so they have what’s called the generation skipping transfer tax and so I know that when I die and it’s going to go to my

children if I’m over that threshold 40% of it’s going to go to the government. And so what I could say instead is, hey, if I’m going to die and it’s going to get hit by this 40% tax, anything over the threshold, what if I just leave it to my grandchildren instead, so that at least it only gets that hit once. And the IRS says, they came in, they said, “Hey, wait a second. You’re sending it to your grandkids for the purpose of it not being taxed going to your kids and then going to their kids.” It’s like, “Yeah, of course, you idiots.” Like, obviously that’s what I’m trying to do. you put in this this horrific, you know, absurd double taxation illegal way to to skim more money. Yeah, of course. I’ll send it to my grandkids. And they said, “Okay, your your grandkids become a skip

person. Your children are the non-s skip person.” Maybe I have that backwards. Your children are the non-skip person. So, if I were to give my grandkids, if I were to leave them that money in my estate, they would say, “Wait a second, back it up. You were supposed to give it to your children. We want you to give it to your children so we can get 40% there. And then we want them your children to give it to their children. So we want 40% there. So if I’m using 10 million, they would say, “Wait a second. You can’t I give my grandchildren 10 million. IRS takes 4 million and my grandchildren have six.” The IRS said, “Wait, nope. That’s not right. We want more.” You were supposed to, which of what if you don’t have a good relationship with your children? It doesn’t matter. Like it’s my call. Like

I can leave the money to whoever I want. But they say, “No, we want you to leave it to your children.” And so then they would get 6 million and then they would leave it to their children so that then the IRS would get 40% of that and that you’re going to double you’re going to essentially triple tax that because like you said the estate tax is already a double tax. So the generation skipping transfer tax. It it’s so unbelievable that that’s allowed to happen. And it goes to Brian’s point that people just don’t know. People don’t care. No one’s reading about this stuff. And when you start reading about it, besides being, you know, bored to tears, you also get pretty angry at how how comprehensive this web is. So I I say that to just to drive home the point like the tax code

is full of this kind of stuff and if you’re not aware of it, it’s going to eat you alive. Like you have to be very conscious of it. So that’s a that’s a good pivot point. Let’s talk about because I’ve been on both sides of this. the the first thing that you can do to mitigate taxes is own a business of some sort to generate some sort of revenue. I’ve been a strict W2 earner and there’s absolutely nothing you can do. You’re going to be taxed at the highest rate possible as a W2 earner. So now we move on to somebody that starts some sort of entity, some sort of business and earns money in an entrepreneurial fashion. How can you help them? What can they do? What do you offer to somebody? And actually let’s even before that or you know what let’s talk about that and then

at the end I want to talk about what it would look like if somebody calls you. You know if we refer somebody like how you specifically can help them do these things you’re going to talk about. Yeah. So owning a business versus being an employee are very very different things. So Hans do you have that that book that you held up earlier with the with the tab? So that’s the US master tax guide. They publish a new one of these every year. And if you look at that yellow marker that he has there, that front part is just a bunch of tables. It’s saying if your income is this and your filing status is that, then you’re going to owe this much in tax. Yeah. Gross income defined starts right. Yeah. And so there there’s a whole bunch of tables saying that okay, if your if your income

is this, then your tax is that, right? And then after that, the whole rest of that book is all about definitions, caveats, exceptions, and all that kind of stuff. And so that comes in because you’re the two very different things. If you’re an employee, you earn money. You are allowed a very limited number of things to deduct maybe and then you pay tax on that total. On a business, you earn money, you spend money on, you know, allowable things and most things are allowable. It’s a whole conversation, but you spend money on allowable categories of thing and then you pay tax on the remainder. So employee, you pay tax on basically the whole thing. As a business, you pay tax on what’s left. So that difference in order of operations is really what makes the whole the whole difference when it comes to tax strategy and all the things

that you can do. It’s going to depend on well who you are fundamentally. And you know I’m of the opinion that basically everybody should be in business and of some kind or some fashion. Now I know that gets a lot of push back and people say it’s like well I’d want to be a business owner. I want to just work for somebody do my thing and go home. It’s like, okay, well then you’re going to get hit with a hammer. So that’s basically that’s basically the story because, you know, all all those exceptions and everything, it’s it’s all carrots and sticks, right? Tax code is is written in a way to one, you know, raise revenue for the government to pay for all their spending, but also to kind of economically engineer society. So they they pass tax advantages for things that they want more of and they pass

taxes for things they want less of, right? So, you remember a couple years ago there was the whole thing with the clean energy bill, which is also potentially going to be repealed with the with the big beautiful bill and they wanted to encourage more solar and and other alternative energy production and said, “Okay, we’re going to give you tax credits for this and a whole industry spawned on the back of that for, you know, creating companies and opportunities that comply with this particular incentive.” So the government wanted more solar, they got more solar because they they passed this particular bill that affected the the tax situation. And so it’s it’s all carrots and sticks. The least or I guess the most stick thing you can do is be an employee for somebody else cuz not only do they get you up front, but you’re also going to be paying FICA, you know,

your your payroll taxes for social security and Medicare. And your deductions are extremely limited. You know, before tax on jobs act, there were a few more things, but it was still limited. And especially in our post tax cut and jobs act world, you know, it’s by far, you know, business is incentivized because of the difference in order of of how you earn, spend, and and then pay tax. So, you know, if if people take away nothing else, I would say that’s that’s thing number one. If you have at all the emotional capability to to be in business for yourself, that’s going to be, you know, the biggest advantage that you can get. I want to highlight something you said and and you know really put that out there. So for a W2 employee the order is you earn it gets taxed in in multiple ways. It gets taxed in the FICA level gets

taxed social security which part of the same thing. It gets taxed in the federal state local wage tax and then you get to spend. And so what he’s saying is versus that is if you are self-employed or have some sort of self-employed income, it’s earned, much of it for those things to qualify as spent and then you’re taxed on what remains. So it flips that spending and that taxing side of it, which is a huge advantage depending on how your expenses move. And I just really want to highlight that because I don’t think a lot of people even think about what that means. Like so if you’re a W2 employee, even if you can find a side gig, you can probably turn a lot of those things that you’re spending on after taxes to something you’re spending on before taxes. So, you know, for years and

years, people used to complain about Amazon about how, you know, they make billions and trillions of dollars and they pay no tax. It’s like the reason they didn’t pay any tax is because they spent it all. They spent it all on improving their business, right? And so if if there’s any principle at all in taxation, the the guiding principle for business is that if you are spending money in the pursuit of making more money, then that’s okay. So that that’s that’s generally going to be an allowable deduction. People will call me all the time and and ask me about lawyer fees. They say, “Well, I I paid $10,000 to this lawyer. Can I deduct that?” I said, “Well, depends, you know, what you paying for.” You know, if it’s for your divorce, no. because that’s just keeping what you already got. If you spend them on suing somebody because they didn’t

pay you, then yes, because that is in the pursuit of additional income. So, when it comes to when it comes to business structures and things like that, that’s kind of a somewhat guiding principle that you can reasonably follow most of the time. I think I got enough caveats in there, but yeah. So, that’s that’s job number one is, you know, what do you have going on? How are you structured? I I would I feel remiss if I didn’t make this point that, you know, when it comes to the W2 side of things, you know, so yes, you you pay uh payroll tax, you know, social security, Medicare and or FICA, however you want to call it. And very few people recognize that as an actual tax. They just, you know, it just kind of goes off into the ether because when you file your income taxes,

the social security part and Medicare part is not part of it typically unless you switch jobs or something in the middle of the year. So that’s that’s one element. But then the other element is that, you know, there’s withholding, right? Everybody’s familiar with with this that, you know, oh, I made $60,000 on my W2, but I had $10,000 of withholding. So, you know, that’s the money I have already paid in to the government on behalf of my of my income for the year. And I always want to remind people that this started back in 1943 during World War II as you know, one, it was an emergency measure, right, to because they were trying to fund the war effort. And the second thing is that this was the brainchild of Milton Friedman. You know, Mr. Free Markets was all about, you know, taking your money away from you upfront because they found

that when people waited till the end of the year, they didn’t pay you so much. You know, it’s a surprising thing. So, that’s when uh the current withholding system was was created. And I just want to remind people of that. And, you know, especially for your audience, they’re probably more versed in the the history of our monetary system than than others. Our audience certainly is of the pro most likely of the mindset that you know it’s your patriotic duty to pay as little in taxes as you possibly can. And one thing that’s talked about a lot is the reduction in So, so Biden surged the IRS numbers, which is very indicative of how he views Americans, how that administration, not not him, he was just a vegetable, but you know, the people that faked his election and got him into office illegitimately and he was just,

you know, sitting in a coma and someone else was doing this. But what they what they felt about the American people was obvious by how much they increased the workforce of the IRS. Now that’s being reduced. they’re doing a lot of the buyouts and and offering, you know, these severance packages to their employees, including the IRS. So, I’ve heard kind of two things. I actually I think it was from you on our most recent call, but they were reducing the size of the force, but then increasing AI. So, is is there any reason to expect less enforcement, less chance of audit? I I’m I’m 90% It had to have been you that that told me this, right? Yeah, probably. So yeah, it’s it’s hard to tell because there have been so many different headlines and stories about headcounts at the IRS, but my best guess is 30 to 50% of the workforce is gone

somewhere in there. And a lot of that, you know, was taken from enforcement, from audits, basically. So it’s an open question as far as how, you know, how audits will proceed in in the near future. Obviously, the next administration could always reverse course and hire more IRS agents, but for now, it looks like the audit rates will pro probably be lower. Now, they are trying to implement AI, but you know, really, who knows what that means. So, until we see some actual, you know, audits and some actual work that comes out of the IRS post all this stuff, we don’t really know what’s going to happen. You know, there there are already most notices, most letters that the Iris sends out will will if you look at the top right corner of an IRS letter, it’ll have like a a letter code. And if it says like CP2000 or CP62, the

CP means computer process. That means no human was involved in creating this letter. It was just some automated thing that was triggered in the Iris computers and they sent this thing out. That’s not AI, but it’s already an automated process and those things will certainly continue. Will AI be implemented in a way where they could actually make, you know, informed decisions about tax filings and things? You know, I have no idea. You know, you guys would would be more familiar with government contracting than I am. But, you know, it’s like if a company is brought into the IRS to implement AI, you know, whatever that means. Like, what does that turn into? It’s like, well, whatever it turns into, it’s probably not going to be a thing for 10 years at least, you know? So, so who knows? That’s for sure. So, real quick, let’s do do a quick walk through. We we

chatted real briefly before we were on before we were recording and it’s it’s literally a conversation I had yesterday just to just to give a little idea of going back a couple minutes here. A friend of mine works for a local company. He works for his family company and he’s paid on a 1099 status, but he’s just paid as an individual and pays a lot of taxes because of that because it’s not even W2 income and he’s not set up as a business. Can you give like the five steps of, you know, maybe three steps, whatever you want to do, a short overview of like what he should be doing that would be better. Yeah. So, if you are a self-employed and as a 1099 recipient, you are self-employed regardless of how you think about it. And you know, whether he should be a 1099 or W2, that’s that’s a question for

the for the labor lawyers. Can you just explain 1099 for someone who doesn’t know what that is? Uh, so 1099 is a is a series of forms that gets filed at the end of the year. So, a 1099 NEC, which is stands for non-employment compensation, is companies saying, “I paid Joe at least, you know, I paid Joe this much during the course of the year, and here’s I’m informing Joe, and here’s a copy for him. I’m informing the IRS. Here’s a copy for the IRS, and I’m keeping a copy of this for my records.” And so, if you receive a 1099, you will often say, “I’m a 1099 contractor.” There are other kinds of 1099s, but when we say, “I’m a 1099,” that’s the kind we’re talking about. So the thing about receiving a 1099 is that well one it’s income. So you’re going to have income

tax associated with it but also whatever the net earnings on that and net is an important word there is also subject to self-employment tax which is the which is the individual version of social security and Medicare/fica payroll tax. So it goes by many names but it’s all the same calculations. If you just get the 1099 and then reported as self-employment income and that’s it, then yes, you’re gonna pay a huge amount because you’re paying whatever income tax plus you’re paying 15.3% for for self-employment tax. And then the question becomes like, okay, is that the right way to go? Probably not. So, you know, if you are self-employed, then you know, at least in in what we do, we go through a series of steps. So, like step one is we try to understand your whole situation. you know, are you married, are you not? Do you have kids? Do you

have real estate? Do you have investments? Do you have this, that, and the other? And we try to get a general understanding of your whole situation. And then based on that, the next step is to figure out, you know, your your entities, you know, so what should you have in order to maximize your or or minimize your your your tax liability for the whole situation of which the self-employment is going to be a part. And then once we have that defined it’s like okay once in in this entity what strategies should we apply what can be deductions how can we create taxfree income how can we potentially create tax credits all those kinds of questions become there and then at the end we’ll talk about you know income optimization as far as you know if we need a salary or if we need profits or or what have

you which is all dependent on you know each step depends on the one that comes before. So that’s kind of the the general process. So, just off the top of my head, without knowing the guides, you know, it’s hard to give generalities, but if you are self-employed in general, you should at least have an LLC to cover yourself because that’s going to limit your liability. That’s that’s what the LL in LLC is, limited liability. And if you’re doing work, you know, outside of your home or maybe even inside your home, you want to limit the the potential liability if something happens, there’s an accident or whatever, that’s the legal consideration. On the tax side, once you have an LLC, you have options because an LLC for tax purposes, for federal tax purposes, doesn’t actually exist. You have to tell the IRS, I want to be treated this way or that way for tax

purposes. I could be a sole proprietorship. I could be a partnership. I could be an S corporation. I could be a Ccorporation. And, you know, again, depends on the situation, but usually the the right answer is going to be an S corp. And then that brings in a whole other suite of options and obligations that come along with that. But you know that’s that’s the beginning of the planning process. uh figuring out it’s like okay if you know whatever the 109 amount is if 60,000 100,000 200,000 whatever the number is we we build that in and then we say okay if we do this and then we do that and we do the other thing how can we change the tax load from being this sky-high number down to something that you know maybe you’re not happy about but you at least feel better too awesome

and then that person could probably start working in some of the things that they do that are qualified expenses because are spending money to go do this job that could then become a tax reduction. Definitely, if you do nothing and you just get ten income, you are generally going to be filing a schedule C on your personal tax return, which is, you know, you were asking about audits earlier. So, it’s it’s it’s debatable at this point, but in the past, that has been the highest audit risk way to have income. And the reason for that is because you’re you’re in the cohort of people who aren’t managing their taxes and then get into, you know, they get into Turboax or whatever software they’re using and they say, “Oh, I owe this giant amount of money. Let’s put in some other stuff over here that that lowers that amount.” And so basically

the the self-prepared schedule C’s have a huge rate of fraud and the IRS knows this, right? So they they audit them at a higher rate. So, you know, by shifting it to a different tax entity, you could reduce your risk of audit just overall just by making that one change, which I’m a fan of in general. Obviously, there are there are other costs associated with it, but generally worth it. We’ve got several of our clients that have performed an entity and have started working with you and and all of them across the board have reported very positive results and I can say the same thing for myself. So if someone wants to get started with you, what’s just a brief overview of your process? How do you approach the calls and you know what what might it cost someone? I know that’s specific to the individual, but

what’s a brief overview of your situation? So the easiest thing is you go to just texturer.com and then up at the top link or up top bar, you know, there’s a book a call and you can talk to one of our tax experts and we’ll go over that that process of determining what your situation is. The first talk is just gathering all that information so that you know and everybody’s situation is different. Uh we just talked to somebody uh last week who hasn’t filed taxes in four years but has this huge bill that she thinks she owes and you know she’s probably going to owe some of it. And so that’s that’s the factf finding part of the job. And then we come back as a team and we talk about it you know amongst the group and then we figure out okay what strategies can

we apply you know this person has real estate this person did this that the other. So, you know, how can we how can we fit this together? And then we’ll have a follow-up call kind of going over the the basic options and it’s like, okay, based on what you’re telling us and the numbers that you’ve given us, we think we can do x, y, and z, and we think we can save you 10,000, 20,000, whatever whatever the number is. Sometimes it’s it’s a huge number, sometimes it’s, you know, a smaller number. Just just depends on the situation. And from there, we figure out what’s the best way to to engage. So at the at the lowest level, obviously we can just file tax returns, right? And that’s just going to be depending on how complex your filings are is going to be, you know, just a flat rate. At the

highest level, we have people who actively we work with throughout the year to not only plan, you know, the plan the taxes for the year, but also implement that plan and update them throughout the year. And so that’s obviously going to be a higher engagement, it’s going to be much more work involved on all of our parts. So people think like, well, I’m hiring you, so you do everything. is like, “Well, we still need you to participate.” So, that’s kind of like the two ends of the spectrum. And there there are some in the middle options where, you know, I’ve I’ve I’ve created like DIY type materials and calculators and spreadsheets for the people who really just need the guidance and then can do it all themselves. That tends to be fairly rare, but that is an option. Most people need not only the guidance, but also the implementation for for us

to do all that. But yeah, so the numbers vary it, you know, it might be a few hundred bucks for a tax burn. It might be many thousands uh a month depending on what level of involvement that we need to be with that particular client. So, it’s hard to give one number, but that’s kind of the rage. And if somebody comes in that has had an inferior tax planning or tax service in the past, will you give them a look back and try to help them with previously poorly planned? Uh some things are fixable, some things are not, but we will definitely give it a review. if there is something to fix, you know, then it’s then it’s just, you know, regular tax work at that point as far as just filing returns. But, you know, a lot of times we end up in the situation where we’ll

look at last year’s, well, he did this and if we had been there, we would have done XYZ and it would have been this much less. But, you know, at this point, we can’t actually change anything. But going forward, we can make those same similar type of decisions and save you. you know, going forward, you know, I used to back in the old days, I used to give hard numbers to people. And I had this one woman, she came into my office, she was a home health aid, and she worked for like, I don’t know, five or six different places, which was fairly common in that industry, different agencies that she worked for. And she, you know, when when everything was cobbled together, she made a good bit of money, and she was all 1099. And, you know, so, you know, we set her up with

her own LLC and, you know, did all these things and drastically lowered her taxes. And I I had told her, I was like, “Well, how long you been doing this?” And she said she’d been doing this job for eight years. I said, “Well, you know, if we had seen you eight years ago, we would have saved you I forget what the number was.” It’s like4 or $50,000 over that time. And she just started crying in my office. So, I was like, “Yeah, I’m not going to put such a fine point on it for for people uh I don’t think anymore.” But yeah, we we can we definitely do review past tax returns and and try to highlight issues. If there’s fixable errors, we will definitely fix them. I was talking to a client a couple weeks ago. She runs a jewelry store and you know, I’m looking

at her books and you know, it’s got certain numbers on it. I’m looking at the tax return. Some of the numbers are the same, but some of them are different. Like, where did this number come from? She says, I don’t know. I said, okay, well, we need to figure out what’s going on. And so we’re still in the process of figuring out where the taxpayer got this particular number that added $100,000 worth of income to her bottom line and then caused her to owe, you know, a large amount of money. We do definitely review the past to to figure out what is going on and and what needs to be fixed or what can be done better going forward. I also want to point out that as far as to give you a shout out for our audience and anybody that may come across this like Neil practices

infinite banking he’s very very familiar with the concept I I’ve often heard the question through our industry is like does anybody know an accountant or does anybody know somebody that understands IBC because most people you know most of the time they’ll just tell them put your money here save on taxes now the whole thing that we always hear in standard financial planning and and standard tax planning services. So Neil understands it. If you’re an IBC company out there, I suggest you give him a call. If you’re, you know, if you’re a similarly situated company or listen to our podcast, call Neil. He understands what we do. He understands what you do. He does it. So it’s an it’s a really easy fit within our industry and it’s awesome. So when I first met you, I forget number of years ago now. Yeah. You were like, “Yeah, I I do obviously.

I do obviously.” You know what I mean? And then and then you were getting your stuff rolling and I was just like, “Well, this is such an easy fit.” because that was one of the problems was you could never find an accountant who understood our industry. So, huge shout out there for anybody that listens and any other businesses that listen, man, give them a call. It’s awesome to work with somebody on the tax side who understands what we’re doing in the whole life space. Yeah, I’m a fan. And in fact, you know, one of the typical strategies you’ll hear from your traditional uh finance person or traditional tax person is like, oh, you know, you put money into an IRA or a 401k. And you know, that does work. It does defer taxes. It doesn’t avoid taxes, but it it defers them. And you know, when I talk to especially when I

talk to people who I know are are in the IBC world, it’s like, well, do you want to contribute to retirement? Because if you don’t, then we can just ignore this part. But, you know, but but I like to make the option available because some people do do both actually and uh have have enough cash flow to make it work. And you know, then the then the question becomes like, well, you know, how do I pay for stuff? Do I take a uh do I take a policy loan in order to fund, you know, a retirement plan? And it’s like, you know, the numbers can work. You know, if you’re paying I forget what interest rates are now, like 6% 6 and a half%. If you’re paying whatever whatever the interest cost is on the on the policy loan in order to get if you’re in a higher

bracket, you know, a 35 or 40% tax deduction, then, you know, maybe it makes sense. It’s very personal. It’s very subjective. And so, you know, I just like to make people aware. And at the same time, I’m not going to, you know, criticize people for the choice of, you know, whether they do or don’t want to contribute to traditional finance plans. But, you know, I’ll just we’ll just go through the options and you make your own make your own decisions. Well, we’ll put the link to book a call with you. My final thought and and I guess plea for the audience is we have some calculators, some software where where you can you can input a lot of different variables and see projections. And one thing, one exercise that helps people understand the time value of money and what expenses can do when you’re looking at a portfolio

growth is if you take a 30-year projection, you can dial the interest rate to whatever you want and you see in 30 years I’ll have, you know, this will be $3 million. Once we add a 1% expense fee on there, which is very standard assets under management, we add that 1% over 30 years, you’re going to lose anywhere from 25 to 30% of that projected value. with 1% assets under management fee. What are we paying in taxes? Double digits. 10 if you’re making no money, 30, 40, depending on where you live, depending how much money you make. 1% assets under management fee can destroy a third of your wealth on that projected timeline. However, you want to set the assumptions of how it’s going to grow. You’re giving it up whether market’s going up or down that 1%. What can 30% do to your wealth? And if you’re

not thinking about this and you don’t have a strategy at all and your only strategy is to look back and have someone file your taxes with a retroactive here’s what here’s a here’s what happened last year we’re not going to change anything and here’s our number today without any kind of planning for the future we’re putting these things in place now I mean I went from being a Turbo tax filer to now I have entities you guys helped me set up we retroactively set them up for the previous year like all of these things that I had no idea we have to go through and and and like if you don’t Oh, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you need help with this. Like, this is not something that you’re just going to master on your own. And so, please give Neil a call. If everything we said

today, if if if there’s a single piece that didn’t make sense to you, it’s worth exploring. You should pull every thread and make sure that you’ve got this thing buttoned up because they have a plan for you and it is suffocating. And that’s all I got. Yeah. And I will say on my end of it, you know, the without even talking about what the fee is, but the fee was it’s worth it. I mean, what what what you pay to get good tax advice and keep more money in your life is worth every penny. We always want our clients to be in a in a positive situation. So, whatever we cost, you know, we will save you, you know, multiples of that. Y can confirm. All right, Charlie, you got anything else? No, man. Just check out Neil at Tax Sherpa. Like said the uh we’ll link

to that in the show notes and please like, subscribe, share this, and give him a call. I I promise it’ll be worth at least an exploratory discussion, especially if you’re a business owner. All right, cheers, y’all. See you. [Music]