Podcasts about wyoming llc

Jonathan Feniak is a business attorney and the driving force behind LLCAttorney.com. After successful careers in logistics and finance, he became a licensed attorney at 45 to help make legal protection and business formation more accessible to entrepreneurs. Jonathan now helps clients across all 50 states establish LLCs, protect their assets, and structure their businesses efficiently—with a focus on practical, cost-effective solutions that deliver real protection.     Make sure to download our free guide, 7 Questions Every Passive Investor Should Ask, here. Key Takeaways Asset protection begins with proper business formation—but it doesn't end there. Many business owners form LLCs but fail to “respect” them by observing corporate formalities, rendering them ineffective in court. Wyoming is one of the best states to form a holding company due to privacy and strong charging order protection. Creating a holding company structure helps simplify asset management, estate planning, and liability isolation. Revocable living trusts are a low-cost way to ensure smooth inheritance without the burden of probate, especially across multiple states.     Topics From Corporate to Counsel: A Third Career Attorney Jonathan began in logistics (UPS, DHL), then transitioned to finance and wealth management. At 45, he pursued law full-time to combine strategic advising with legal structure and protection. His mission is to democratize access to real legal solutions—without the inflated price tag. What Most People Get Wrong About LLCs Forming an LLC is just step one—maintaining it properly is where most fail. Respect your LLC by: holding meetings, documenting decisions, separating finances, and keeping the business in good standing. Improperly managed LLCs are often disregarded by courts, leaving owners personally liable. The Power of Holding Companies Use a Wyoming LLC as a holding company for privacy, asset protection, and estate efficiency. Helps shield your name from public documents and reduces the impact of being linked to failed partnerships or lawsuits. Holding companies simplify asset transfers to heirs and reduce exposure to out-of-state probate. Estate Planning and Life Events Estate plans should be revisited every five years—or after any major life change (e.g., marriage, children, death, relocation). A revocable living trust paired with an LLC holding company offers clean transitions for heirs and minimal disruption. Overcomplicated estate plans often backfire; keep it simple and update as needed. Avoiding Snake Oil and Legal Overkill Many providers push unnecessary structures—like offshore trusts or layered LLCs—on inexperienced investors. Jonathan emphasizes reasonable, effective solutions tailored to the investor's current risk and net worth. Focus on clear, scalable strategies that grow with your portfolio.    

Tax season is in full swing, and in this Tax Tuesday episode, Anderson Advisors attorneys Amanda Wynalda, Esq., and Eliot Thomas, Esq., tackle numerous listener tax questions with practical advice. They discuss the Section 121 exclusion for primary residences, explaining how married couples filing separately can each qualify for the $250,000 capital gains exclusion. They outline strategies for converting personal residences to rental properties using S-corporations and installment sales to maximize tax benefits. Amanda and Eliot clarify 401(k) withdrawal rules, explaining when penalties apply and options like the Rule of 55 and hardship withdrawals. You'll hear recommendations on optimal entity structures for real estate syndications, explanations of the short-term rental "loophole" for active income classification, and when to use trading partnerships versus simple LLCs for investment accounts. The episode concludes with a breakdown of key Tax Cuts and Jobs Act provisions set to expire in 2025, including individual tax brackets, standard deduction changes, child tax credits, and bonus depreciation, highlighting potential impacts for taxpayers.   Submit your tax question to taxtuesday@andersonadvisors.com Highlights/Topics:   "I understand that you can sell your primary residence and receive an exclusion from capital gains taxes on the first $250,000 if you're single and $500,000 if you're married filing jointly. However, I can't find any rules regarding if you're married filing separately. Could you please confirm if married filing separate also qualifies for the exclusion? Also, could you talk about how making improvements adds to the basis?" - Yes, both spouses filing separately can each get the $250,000 exclusion. Only one spouse needs to be on the title, but both must use it as a primary residence for 2 of the last 5 years. Improvements (new floors, additions, HVAC systems) add to your basis, which reduces taxable gain when you sell. "Can I use both cost segregation and bonus depreciation from an S-corp you sell your personal residence to for the Section 121 exemption? Also, what is the accounting treatment if you sold your personal residence to an S-corp using an installment sale?" - Yes to cost seg, no to bonus depreciation (not allowed for related-party transactions). For accounting, record the property as an asset on the S-corp with a liability for the note owed to you personally. You'll recognize all gain in year of sale (which is actually beneficial to utilize the Section 121 exclusion), and interest payments will be recorded as interest income. "Do I have to officially quit my job and be retired to take disbursements from my 401k? At what age can I take disbursements from my 401k? Are there any negative tax implications from taking early disbursements?" - You don't need to quit your job to take distributions if you're 59½ or older, though your specific plan may have different rules. Early withdrawals before 59½ incur a 10% penalty plus ordinary income tax, unless you qualify for exceptions like the Rule of 55 (if you leave your job at 55+) or hardship withdrawals for specific situations. "What is the best entity for tax purposes to invest in real estate syndications?" - A Wyoming LLC (disregarded) or partnership is typically best. This gives liability protection while letting income/losses flow directly to your personal return (important for using passive losses). Avoid S-Corps (reasonable wage requirements) and C-Corps (trap gains/losses on corporate return). "Regarding bonus depreciation and the short-term rental loophole, are either the 500 hours or 100 hours and, more than anyone else, material participation tests prorated for the year? For example, if a property is purchased and put into service in November, those hours would be difficult to achieve." - No, these hours are not prorated. You must meet the full hour requirements between purchase and December 31st. Consider using the "substantially all participation" test if you personally perform nearly all work needed, even if under 100 hours. "If I purchased an investment apartment and repaired windows, floors and incurred other miscellaneous expenses to make it ready for renters, can I write the expense off on my Schedule E? I didn't receive any income for that apartment as of yet." - You can only deduct expenses after the property is "placed in service" (available for rent). If not in service yet, these costs must be added to the property's basis and depreciated. The $2,500 de minimis rule lets you expense (not capitalize) individual purchases under $2,500, but only after the property is in service. "I'm starting to do wholesale investments. I'm still a W-2 employee, yet I will resign soon. Is it recommended that I start my LLC now, and why?" - Yes, start your LLC now for liability protection when entering contracts. Begin with a disregarded LLC in the state where you're wholesaling. Once established and generating consistent income, consider making an S-Corporation election to save on self-employment taxes. "I have a trading account, but I do not actively trade in it. Should I set up a trading partnership for it?" - If you're not actively trading, a simple Wyoming LLC for asset protection is sufficient. For active traders with significant expenses, consider the limited partnership structure with a C-Corporation general partner to shift some income and deduct expenses that aren't allowed on personal returns. Resources: Schedule Your Free Consultation https://andersonadvisors.com/strategy-session/?utm_source=the-best-entity-for-real-estate-syndications-and-maximum-tax-benefits&utm_medium=podcast Tax and Asset Protection Events https://andersonadvisors.com/real-estate-asset-protection-workshop-training/?utm_source=the-best-entity-for-real-estate-syndications-and-maximum-tax-benefits&utm_medium=podcast Anderson Advisors https://andersonadvisors.com/ Toby Mathis YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@TobyMathis Toby Mathis TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@tobymathisesq Clint Coons YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@ClintCoons  

Real Estate guru Sherif Medawar discusses the benefits of investing in real estate and explains how individuals can set up their own real estate funds. He emphasizes the importance of productive assets that generate income and provide leverage with banks. He shares his extensive experience in the market, including owning historic properties in Old San Juan and luxury homes in San Francisco. He also highlights the value of giving back and teaching others, offering free live events and training to help aspiring investors. He explains the process of setting up a real estate fund, including the five P's: people, projects, positioning, performance, and profit. He provides a turnkey solution for individuals to customize their own funds and attract investors. The funds can be used to finance various types of real estate projects and assets, offering a fixed return to investors and the potential for compounding over time. He also discusses the advantages of his fund structure, including no fees and the ability to refinance assets instead of selling them. In this conversation, Sherif discusses the benefits of real estate investing and how to set up a successful real estate fund. He explains the process of finding single tenant buildings and attracting national tenants to increase property value. Medawar also shares insights on reducing taxes and asset protection through equity stripping and setting up a Wyoming LLC. He emphasizes the importance of staying proactive and promoting new programs during challenging times.Takeaways• Investing in real estate provides the opportunity for income generation, leverage with banks, and protection against inflation.• Setting up a real estate fund allows individuals to attract investors and finance various types of real estate projects and assets.• Sherif Medawar emphasizes the importance of giving back and teaching others, offering free live events and training to help aspiring investors.• The process of setting up a real estate fund involves considering the five P's: people, projects, positioning, performance, and profit.• Setting up a real estate fund allows investors to pool their resources and take advantage of larger investment opportunities.• Finding single tenant buildings and attracting national tenants can significantly increase property value.• Reducing taxes can be achieved by routing income through structures in U.S. territories like Puerto Rico.• Asset protection can be achieved through equity stripping and setting up a Wyoming LLC.• During challenging times, it is important to stay proactive and promote new programs to stay ahead of the competition.Sound Bites• I believe unless you have productive assets, meaning assets that produce income, you really will not be able to retire.• With real estate, you can have the leverage with the banks. You can have an asset that over time will beat inflation and then keep bringing you income.• I try to give people what I hoped and was wishing somebody would give me when I was starting. So I structured when I started making a lot of money in real estate, I realized I should help others. I should teach. That's the way to give back.• You cannot make it so enticing and over promise and then under deliver because the investors are going to be very upset.• They get the cashflow, they get the upside.• You just went into a property that was vacant. Put the national tenant, it jumped in value.Listen & Subscribe for More:

Garrett Sutton is a corporate attorney, asset protection expert and best selling author who has sold more than a million books to guide entrepreneurs and investors. For more than 30 years, Garrett Sutton has run his practice assisting entrepreneurs and real estate investors in protecting their assets and maximizing their financial goals through sound management and asset protection strategies. The companies he founded, Corporate Direct and Sutton Law Center, currently help more than 13,000 clients protect their assets and incorporate their businesses. Garrett also serves as a member of the elite group of “Rich Dad Advisors” for bestselling author Robert Kiyosaki. A number of the books Garrett Sutton has authored are part of the bestselling Rich Dad, Poor Dad wealth-building book series. Garrett attended Colorado College and the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a B.S. in Business Administration in 1975. He graduated with a J.D. in 1978 from Hastings College of Law, the University of California's law school in San Francisco. Garrett is licensed in Nevada and California. Garrett is a member of the State Bar of Nevada, the State Bar of California, and the American Bar Association. Garrett lives in Reno, Nevada has been recognized as a Lifetime Achievement Member by America's Top 100 Attorneys. Ted Sutton is a licensed attorney who is the son of Garrett Sutton. Ted was born and raised in Reno, NV. He graduated from the University of Utah with a B.S. in Mining Engineering. During one of his summers, he spent three months working at a mine in Chile. This experience made him realize that legal matters interested him more than engineering ones. After graduating in 2018, he took a leap of faith and decided to attend law school the following year. Ted attended the University of Wyoming College of Law in the fall of 2019. In his third year, he served as the Student Director of the Business Entrepreneurship Practicum, where he helped clients form and maintain LLCs. He graduated in May 2022. Ted is now licensed to practice law in Wyoming and Nevada. What You Will Learn: Who is Ted and Garrett Sutton? What is the Corporate Transparency Act? How does the CTA affect anonymity previously enjoyed by business owners using registered agents and LLCs? What is the importance of structuring business and real estate ownership to protect personal assets, especially in the context of lawsuits? How does Corporate Direct assist clients in structuring their entities for asset protection and compliance with the CTA? What is the Wyoming LLC? The significance of having an LLC as a first line of defense against legal claims, alongside good property management and insurance. How can trusts work in conjunction with LLCs to facilitate smooth transitions of property ownership to heirs without probate complications? The importance of patience in the investment journey and the value of having mentors to guide you. Ted and Garrett Sutton share how everyone can contact him. Additional Resources from Ted and Garrett Sutton: Website: https://corporatedirect.com/ Email: tedsutton@sutlaw.com Phone: +1 (775) 824-0300 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/corporate-direct-inc-/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/corporatedirectnv/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT-pLv4_qmcTH-Xnu_uEyNQ Attention Investors and Agents Are you looking to grow your business? Need to connect with aggressive like-minded people like yourself? We have all the right tools, knowledge, and coaching to positively effect your bottom line. Visit:http://globalinvestoragent.com/join-gia-team to see what we can offer and to schedule your FREE consultation! Our NEW book is out...order yours NOW!   Global Investor Agent: How Do You Thrive Not Just Survive in a Market Shift? Get your copy here: https://amzn.to/3SV0khX HEY! You should be in class this coming Monday (MNL). It's Free and packed with actions you should take now! Here's the link to register: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_sNMjT-5DTIakCFO2ronDCg

Real estate guru Cherif Medawar discusses the benefits of investing in real estate and explains how individuals can set up their own real estate funds. He emphasizes the importance of productive assets that generate income and provide leverage with banks. He shares his extensive experience in the market, including owning historic properties in Old San Juan and luxury homes in San Francisco. He also highlights the value of giving back and teaching others, offering free live events and training to help aspiring investors. Cherif explains the process of setting up a real estate fund, including the five P's: people, projects, positioning, performance, and profit. He provides a turnkey solution for individuals to customize their own funds and attract investors. The funds can be used to finance various types of real estate projects and assets, offering a fixed return to investors and the potential for compounding over time. He also discusses the advantages of his fund structure, including no fees and the ability to refinance assets instead of selling them. In this conversation, Cherif Medawar discusses the benefits of real estate investing and how to set up a successful real estate fund. He explains the process of finding single tenant buildings and attracting national tenants to increase property value. He also shares insights on reducing taxes and asset protection through equity stripping and setting up a Wyoming LLC. He emphasizes the importance of staying proactive and promoting new programs during challenging times. Takeaways • Investing in real estate provides the opportunity for income generation, leverage with banks, and protection against inflation. • Setting up a real estate fund allows individuals to attract investors and finance various types of real estate projects and assets. • Cherif Medawar emphasizes the importance of giving back and teaching others, offering free live events and training to help aspiring investors. • The process of setting up a real estate fund involves considering the five P's: people, projects, positioning, performance, and profit. • Medawar's turnkey solution provides a customized fund structure with no fees and the ability to refinance assets instead of selling them. Real estate investing can be lucrative and provide long-term cash flow and asset growth. • Setting up a real estate fund allows investors to pool their resources and take advantage of larger investment opportunities. • Finding single tenant buildings and attracting national tenants can significantly increase property value. Reducing taxes can be achieved by routing income through structures in U.S. territories like Puerto Rico. • Asset protection can be achieved through equity stripping and setting up a Wyoming LLC. • During challenging times, it is important to stay proactive and promote new programs to stay ahead of the competition. Sound Bites • I believe unless you have productive assets, meaning assets that produce income, you really will not be able to retire. • With real estate, you can have the leverage with the banks. You can have an asset that over time will beat inflation and then keep bringing you income. • I try to give people what I hoped and was wishing somebody would give me when I was starting. So I structured when I started making a lot of money in real estate, I realized I should help others. I should teach.That's the way to give back. • You cannot make it so enticing and over promise and then under deliver because the investors are going to be very upset. • They get the cash flow, they get the upside. • You just went into a property that was vacant. Put the national tenant, it jumped in value. If you have any questions in general you can reach our office at: VastSolutionsGroup.com Phone: 415-854-6512 Email: info@vastsolutionsgroup.com Monday-Thursday 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM (Pacific) Thank you for listening!

Today on Tax Tuesday, Anderson attorneys Eliot Thomas, Esq., and Amanda Wynalda, Esq. delve into listener questions around inheritance taxes on property and stocks, strategies to minimize capital gains when relocating homes, and the intricacies of 1031 exchanges and syndication investments. Additional topics include LLC taxation, depreciation on rental properties, and the choice between independent contracting and LLC formation in Florida. Submit your tax question to taxtuesday@andersonadvisors.com Highlights/Topics: Is there any capital gains tax when my son inherits my property or stock? - It depends. With traditional stock it's fair market value when you pass. There's no tax to transfer it. I'm selling my home in South Florida soon and we like to relocate to North Carolina. I would like to reinvest a portion of a rental property into a rental property and another smaller home when I move to North Carolina. What's the best way to pay the least amount of capital gains taxes after selling my Florida home? - We're assuming a primary residence, and considering the 121 exclusion. If you lived there 2 of the last 5 years…. How does a 1031 exchange work? What about a reverse 1031?- If you have an asset used as a rental, not being flipped, you want to defer the gain by buying a “replacement”. Time frames are very strict- 45 days. You need a qualified intermediary. If I'm selling a property, all the investors wanna roll their money into a future investment through a 1031 exchange. Is there a legal way to still do a 1031 for the investors that want to participate? - If this is a partnership, that partnership owns the property. It could be changed to a ‘Tenancy in Common'…. I have recently opened my Wyoming LLC, got up a bank account, a business bank account for the LLC,and funded the LLC out of my personal account. I have since used the deposit of funds to make a limited partnership investment in a syndication, very popular investment. How do I best document these transactions for tax purposes? - Everything goes back to bookkeeping. Troy from our bookkeeping dept says with any capital contributions to the “equity account” for a syndication, you will receive a K1, that you can adjust at tax time based on the loss or gain of the company. If my LLC distributes dividends to the partners, do the partners pay tax from the money they receive from the LLC? Should I take depreciation on a rental property if I don't have a tenant that year or should I wait until finishing repair? Although it is habitable. I'm a licensed realtor by the way. - When you purchase the property, the building can be depreciated a little bit each year, but land is not depreciable until it is sold. Check out cost segregation and bonus segregation. When it is advertised or posted as “Available for Rent” and truly rentable, that is when you MUST begin taking depreciation. As a realtor, you may aim for Real Estate Professional Status… Is it better to work as an independent contractor than to have an LLC in Florida? - Those two things are not opposites. When you're talking about from the tax side, you're usually looking at it being paid as an independent contractor versus being an employee. We look at the pros and cons of this question. Would a new start-up with no revenue for the first two years file taxes for those years or only when the third year when the revenue was generated? - If it's a partnership or C Corp, you may not have to pay taxes if there's no income. It depends on how your business is set up. Additional Q&A listener chat questions are addressed Resources: Schedule Your Free Consultation https://andersonadvisors.com/ss/?utm_source=aba&utm_medium=podcast&utm_content=how-to-avoid-paying-capital-gains-tax-on-inheritance Bookkeeping Services from Anderson https://bookkeeping.andersonadvisors.com/ Anderson Advisors https://andersonadvisors.com/ Toby Mathis YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@TobyMathis Toby Mathis TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@tobymathisesq Clint Coons YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@ClintCoons

Big news! Podscan.fm, my B2B SaaS that alerts you when your keywords or topics are mentioned in any podcast anywhere, has received bootstrapper-aligned funding from Calm Company Fund.Booya!I share why I, ever the solopreneur bootstrapper, said yes to venture money, what that enables, what risks I see, and just exactly how this kind of non-crazy funding works.Calm Company SEAL: https://calmfund.com/shared-earnings-agreementCalm Company 5-year learnings: https://calmfund.com/writing/five-yearsCalm Company SAFE: https://calmfund.com/writing/shared-earnings-safeThis episode is sponsored by Acquire.comThe blog post: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/funded/The podcast episode: https://tbf.fm/episodes/309-fundedCheck out Podscan to get alerts when you're mentioned on podcasts: https://podscan.fmSend me a voicemail on Podline: https://podline.fm/arvidYou'll find my weekly article on my blog: https://thebootstrappedfounder.comPodcast: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/podcastNewsletter: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/newsletterMy book Zero to Sold: https://zerotosold.com/My book The Embedded Entrepreneur: https://embeddedentrepreneur.com/My course Find Your Following: https://findyourfollowing.comHere are a few tools I use. Using my affiliate links will support my work at no additional cost to you.- Notion (which I use to organize, write, coordinate, and archive my podcast + newsletter): https://affiliate.notion.so/465mv1536drx- Riverside.fm (that's what I recorded this episode with): https://riverside.fm/?via=arvid- TweetHunter (for speedy scheduling and writing Tweets): http://tweethunter.io/?via=arvid- HypeFury (for massive Twitter analytics and scheduling): https://hypefury.com/?via=arvid60- AudioPen (for taking voice notes and getting amazing summaries): https://audiopen.ai/?aff=PXErZ- Descript (for word-based video editing, subtitles, and clips): https://www.descript.com/?lmref=3cf39Q- ConvertKit (for email lists, newsletters, even finding sponsors): https://convertkit.com?lmref=bN9CZw

In this episode, Mike Jesowshek answers various listener questions regarding tax strategies, S corporation elections, hiring children for tax benefits, and setting up retirement plans for businesses with non-owner employees. The episode emphasizes the importance of structuring businesses correctly to maximize tax savings, including the considerations for S corporation status, late elections for business structures, the benefits of hiring family members, and the intricacies of purchasing a business and tax implications. Mike also discusses the potential of setting up retirement plans for employees as a tax-advantageous move for small businesses.[00:00 - 00:36] Introduction to Q&A Session[00:36 - 10:10] Q&A with Mike Jesowshek, CPA part 1Mike discusses the permanence of S corp elections and the possibility of revoking them.He explains the conditions under which a late S corp election can be made for businesses already in operation.Employing your children in your business for tax advantages has benefits.Mike discusses the tax implications of seller-financed business purchases and the importance of understanding the nature of the purchase (asset vs. stock sale).How the capitalization policy for items under $2,500 affects tax deductions.[10:10 - 23:50] Q&A with Mike Jesowshek, CPA part 2Owning multiple LLCs under one holding company can simplify tax filing and considerations for asset protection.Separating entities based on active participation versus passive income sources, such as rental properties is important.Mike gives an overview of retirement plan options for small businesses and the tax benefits associated with offering them to employees.What is the best setup for businesses operating between California and Florida?Mike's advice on consolidating tax filings for multiple LLCs under a Wyoming LLC, emphasizes the need for legal advice on asset protection.What about hiring young grandchildren and its tax implications?Setting up a separate LLC for Airbnb or furnished property businesses.What are the tax benefits and options for setting up retirement plans for small business employees?[23:50 - 24:14] Closing SegmentDirect Quotes:"Hiring your kids is potentially a great way where you can get a business deduction and they pay no income taxes on that income, again, potentially." - Mike Jesowshek, CPA"You cannot save taxes by simply learning tax strategies. You save taxes when you learn them and then you implement them." - Mike Jesowshek, CPA"If you're starting a new business, start that business where you're operating. That's going to be the easiest piece." - Mike Jesowshek, CPA______Podcast Host: Mike Jesowshek, CPA - Founder and Host of Small Business Tax Savings PodcastJoin TaxElm: https://taxelm.com/IncSight Packages (Full-Service): https://incsight.net/pricing/Book an Initial Consultation (IncSight): https://app.simplymeet.me/o/incsight/sale-------Podcast Website: https://www.TaxSavingsPodcast.comFacebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/taxsavings/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TaxSavings 

Ever wonder how cryptocurrencies and real estate investments play together in the sandbox of taxation? Or how to pay your family members through your business in a way that could benefit everyone's wallet? We've got answers to these questions and more. Welcome to another episode of Tax Tuesday, where tax experts Toby Mathis, Esq., and returning guest Jeff Webb, CPA, and CFO of Anderson Business Advisors share their expert advice. This episode delves into the nuances of crypto transactions and the impact on your tax bill, along with a deep dive into payroll complexities that could save you a headache—or better yet, a hefty fine. Plus, we discuss why paying children through your business isn't just a clever maneuver; it's a strategic move that could pave the way to a tax-free goldmine. Submit your tax question to taxtuesday@andersonadvisors, and check out our new “knowledge room” available to Platinum members, from 9a-2p daily. Highlights/Topics: I owned a condo for the last 28 years and depreciated it down to zero. In January this year I sold the condo to the renter and installment sale. For the next 10 years, I'll receive monthly payments, with a balloon payment at the end of 10 years. My question is as follows Do I have to recapture the depreciation and pay tax on it? Am I too late to do a 1031 exchange at this time? - If you've already sold it, it's too late. 1031s do not work well with installment plans. What would be the best way to sell a small business and limit as much as possible the tax implications? - a stock sale is best, but almost no one will go for that…. When are crypto earnings taxed?- When you sell it, you pay capital gains tax on the difference between your buy and sell. What activities classify for the 750 hours? Does training, traveling, searching for properties? - It's going to be real estate activities in your real estate business. Training, traveling, and searching for properties is “investor” activity I self-manage a single short-term rental that I own. I want to pay my kid, who is 16 years old, for doing legit work for the Airbnb at a reasonable rate. Do I just write them a check every month based on the hours they log, or do I have to hire a payroll company to issue them a check? I do not have any other employees. If I don't hire a payroll company, how do I issue them a W2 form? - you really should hire a payroll company, if you 1099 them, they will have to pay tax. I'm planning to start lending money to real estate investors. Other private money lenders I know do their lending businesses through an S-Corp. I currently don't have an LLC or an S-Corp for lending. I have a Wyoming Hold LLC that I opened to use for real estate investing. Which would you advise is best for private money lender an LLC, an S-Corp, any other, and why? - Do not do it through your Wyoming LLC. I like the S corporation rather than the LLC… I have a 50-50 partnership with a friend and we own two short-term rentals together. Each of us is maturely participating in one short-term rental each. Is there a way to take full cost-seg advantage against our respective W-2s or can we only take 50% of one property against your W-2 and the other person? It will go to the passive bucket and vice versa for the other property. - Couldn't we both get that deduction? Yeah, you probably could if we go back to the aspect that it's a trade or business I am a W-2 earner. Can I save taxes if I buy a long-term rental? - Probably not. Probably not at this time. Unless you're a real estate agent. I'm getting a lot of pushback against cost segregation from my accountants. They say that it could trigger personal property issues in Maryland and that the cost of the study is prohibitive. - So what? The personal property taxes and most states is based on The Advalorium they call it. It's based on the current value. They usually have depreciation schedules of their own and it's not that much property tax. Resources: Infinity Investing https://infinityinvesting.com/ Email us at Tax Tuesday taxtuesday@andersonadvisors.com Tax and Asset Protection Events https://andersonadvisors.com/real-estate-asset-protection-workshop-training/?utm_source=aba&utm_medium=podcast&utm_content=when-are-crypto-earnings-taxed Anderson Advisors https://andersonadvisors.com/ Toby Mathis YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@TobyMathis Toby Mathis TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@tobymathisesq Clint Coons Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@ClintCoons  

In today's Tax Tuesday episode, tax experts Toby Mathis, Esq., and returning guest Jeff Webb, CPA, CFO of Anderson Business Advisors, discuss the usual mix of complex and simple tax questions including questions around paying minor children through your LLC, gifting vs. inheriting property, structuring your stock trading business, and how and when to use cost segregation to get the biggest tax benefits. Submit your tax question to taxtuesday@andersonadvisors. Highlights/Topics: “When dissolving a C-Corporation with a single share holder and having a net operating loss, does the loss go on the shareholder's personal return and can the loss be offset against personal income?” No, because that C-Corporation is its own entity. However you probaby finance some of those losses. Anything that you invest in the company that you don't get back will be a capital loss to you. “I jointly-own an inherited property that is currently on the market. Can the expenses that I have (utilities, staging, maintenance, repair, taxes) be added to the cost value?” It depends on how the property is being used once you inherit it. “Can I deduct expenses for working at home and what forms can I use?” That depends. If you're an employee, then no deduction anymore for employee work expenses. “My wife's father wants to sign his house over to us and her brother.  What tax advantage is that to her dad? And what tax issues does it raise for us? Should we start an LLC or some other structure?” No tax advantages for Dad. When dad transfers the property over, it's a gift. And when you give an appreciated asset you receive the basis of the gifter. If it is an investment, it is best to start an LLC. “When you have a C-Corp (no income at this point, a Wyoming LLC that owns two LLCs with rentals), which entity pays for general expenses like memberships, cell phones, internet, education, etc?” When you have an LLC with rental (C-Corp), then you pay the C-Corp and management fee. The C-Corp then covers all the expenses. “How does paying for your child (under 18) help with taxes, if any?” If under 18 through LLCs, there is no employment tax. “Can you benefit from cost segregation at any time?” The longer you wait, there's nothing left to depreciate. A tiny benefit, if any. “Need to move from sole proprietorship to some form of business entity. [...] C-corp? Something else?” Jeff is not a fan – there's a lot of landmines out there. If you're doing well, you want the capital gains. Put your cash in an LLC with an 80/20 split. Watch how to structure a trading business! “I currently own a home in one state (Oregon) and I am looking to purchase an investment property in another state and plan to do so using an LLC or an S-Corp. [...] What would be the easiest way to go about this?” Do not own in an S-Corp! Buy the AZ property in a land trust and LLC.  Have someone guide you through this process “If I invested $30,000 in a marketing class to start a marketing company, do I have to amortize it over 15 years to see any of it back? Can it be a business investment and get it all back?” The only ones that can do this are C-Corps. “Is 1245 property subject to depreciation recapture if the rental property is sold with capital gain?” Gain is subject to recapture. You're going to pay ordinary income tax. Send us your questions, and check out the event schedule listed in the resources section. Resources: Infinity Investing https://infinityinvesting.com/ Email us at Tax Tuesday taxtuesday@andersonadvisors.com Tax and Asset Protection Events https://andersonadvisors.com/real-estate-asset-protection-workshop-training/ Anderson Advisors https://andersonadvisors.com/ Toby Mathis YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@TobyMathis Toby Mathis TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@tobymathisesq    

Join us for an enlightening journey into the twisty labyrinth of asset protection with our esteemed guest, Lee Phillips. Prepare to have your misconceptions about Wyoming LLCs shredded as we expose the truth about asset protection and tax strategies. Lee, with his wealth of knowledge, sheds light on the major threats to your assets, including lawsuits and the IRS, and offers some golden nuggets of wisdom on how to protect what's yours.We'll guide you through the complex maze of LLCs, trusts, and corporations, helping you understand their unique roles in providing asset protection. Lee will unravel the enigma that is the charging order protection, a concept unique to LLCs. We'll also dispel some myths surrounding privacy in today's world, explaining why setting up your LLC in the state where you operate is not just a good idea, it's essential.The podcast wouldn't be complete without an exploration of tax strategies and retirement planning. Did you know that the decision by Wyoming to allow LLCs to be taxed differently has opened up new avenues for tax shelters? We compare Roth IRAs and Standard IRAs, considering how the tax rate at the time of withdrawal could tilt the balance in favor of one over the other. Finally, we'll dive into the legal maelstrom surrounding LLCs, state laws and the high-stakes implications of not registering your Wyoming LLC. Hold tight, because this is going to be a wild ride!Support the showif you enjoyed the show be sure to check out my info:https://app.wingcard.io/ROB3SA64

On this episode of Passive Income Pilots, Tait & Ryan interview Clint Coons.Clint Coons is a founding partner of Anderson Business Advisors, a legal and tax firm that has grown to over 450 employees. He specializes in helping real estate investors create and implement solid entity structuring plans. Clint's personal investing experience has been key to his success in this field, having acquired over 200 properties, from small single-family homes to commercial buildings. As a prolific writer and educator, Clint has published numerous articles, videos, and workbooks on real estate investing and asset protection. He authored the book "Asset Protection for Real Estate Investors," which uses real-life examples and personal experiences to provide valuable insights and strategies.Clint shares valuable insights on asset protection and LLC strategies to safeguard your investments. Clint outlines the most important foundational tools to protect your assets, including separating your liability exposure and whether you need an LLC before investing in real estate. He dives into various strategies to protect investors from lawsuits and other legal liabilities, including tips on where to set up your LLCs and setting up estate plans, trusts, and wills. Clint also sheds light on tax returns when you have LLCs and the significance of holding companies in your asset protection plan. Enjoy the show!Show notes:[2:11] Brief overview of Anderson Business Advisors and Clints's expertise[4:30] Separating your liability exposure[7:23] Do you really need an LLC before you can start investing?[11:25] Structuring your investments and protection strategies[16:02] Where should you set up the LLC?[24:49] Wyoming LLC vs. Delaware LLC[26:51] Hire the right people to help you protect your investments[27:49] Common advice for pilots[31:31] What to do after setting up your living will and trust[34:41] Annual maintenance of your LLC[41:36] Tax returns, holding companies, and disregarded LLCs[48:45] How to find Clint[49:35] OutroProtect your investments today and stop unnecessary risks, and join the join the Real Estate Asset Protection Live Stream Workshop and Seminar:Legal DisclaimerThe content of this podcast is provided solely for educational and informational purposes. The views and opinions expressed are those of the hosts, Tait Duryea and Ryan Gibson, and do not reflect those of any organization they are associated with, including Turbine Capital or Spartan Investment Group.The opinions of our guests are their own and should not be construed as financial advice. This podcast does not offer tax, legal, or investment advice. Listeners are advised to consult with their own legal or financial counsel and to conduct their own due diligence before making any financial decisions.The hosts, Tait Duryea and Ryan Gibson, do not necessarily endorse the views of the guests featured on the podcast, nor have the guests been comprehensively vetted by the hosts.Under no circumstances should any material presented in this podcast be used or considered as an offer to sell, or a solicitation of any offer to buy, an interest in any investment. Any potential offer or solicitation will be made exclusively through a Confidential Private Offering Memorandum related to the specific investment. Access to detailed information about the investments discussed is restricted to individuals who qualify as accredited investors under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended.Listeners are responsible for their own investment decisions and are encouraged to seek professional advice before investing....

Welcome to another episode of the Tax Tuesday show. Host Toby Mathis, Esq., joins our regular guest Eliot Thomas, Esq., Manager of Tax Advisors at Anderson Business Advisors, to help answer your questions. We send a big thank you to all our people online answering your questions today - Patty, Dana, Dutch, Jared, Kurt, Ross, Tanya, and Troy. On today's episode, Eliot and Toby answer listener questions including inquiries about wash sales, what taxes apply to inherited stocks and real estate and the appreciation on inherited real estate, buying vehicles and how much is deductible and when, and setting up a brokerage account for a charity so it can receive donations of stock. If you have a tax-related question for us, submit it to taxtuesday@andersonadvisors. Highlights/Topics: If I have a company and want to loan money to another company using a promissory note, but I don't want to charge them interest to do so, are there any tax impacts to my company? What is the recommended way to do this if so? – if it's over $10,000 we got to charge interest to what it boils down to. Do you need to pay both capital gain tax and estate tax for inherited stocks? – Well, typically, if you inherit something, you're not going to pay any tax because of the approximately $12 million lifetime exclusion. If the gift or inheritance was over $12 million, in this case, you're going to receive stocks at stepped-up basis. Does real estate appreciation restart for 30 years after inheritance? Will real estate appreciation be re-depreciated? – I think what they're trying to get to here is will you be able to depreciate again at 27 and a half years if it's a long-term rental and yes, you will. I have an IRA owned single-member LLC that has invested in three syndications. Two of the three have losses over the last several years, which means it's just kicking down passive losses, it doesn't mean you lost money. One was sold last year and has profit, which is fairly common. Do you use a 990T to report both losses and profits? I don't have to report profits or losses on my 1040, correct? - You don't have to report it on your 1040 because it's all in your retirement plan. Does the holding period for real estate start on the acquired date or the place in-service date? If bought in November 2020 and placed in service, placed in service March 2021, sold December 2021, is this long-term or short-term capital gains? - It's going to be long-term. We're going to go from the date where you closed, that's where the holding period starts. When will we recoup the loss from a wash-sale if we're no longer investing? - We wouldn't run into a wash-sale in this instance because you sold the stock, you take your loss, it's only if you buy back stock or a similar security that you would run in a foul of the wash rule within 30 days of it. When bonus depreciation goes away, what will be the process for cost segregation? How is it calculated and how much will be allowed to be deducted at what time or intervals? - we still can do cost segregation which is just an alternative, We're still going to deduct it. It's just how much is going to go into that 5-year property pile, the 7, the 10, 27.5. I have a 501(c)(3) that I started with Anderson—Kareem and his team are killing it by the way. It is ridiculous. The average wait time to get a nonprofit exemption certificate approved by the IRS is right around seven to nine months. We've been getting them, in some cases, in a matter of days. I was wondering if you were to donate appreciated stock to the charity, how to donate that to the charity properly and how do you record it as a personal donation, with appreciation? Does the charity need to start a brokerage account to receive this stock? – We certainly want to set up a brokerage account in the charity because when it receives that stock, they'll have a place to put it. Should I set up a C-Corp LLC for land flipping business even if I just started, no deals yet? Should I start with the pass-through first then change to a C-Corp once I get more volume? – I would set that C-Corp so you can start building up losses and expenses in that C-Corp. When you flip it and you have that gain come in, you're automatically offsetting against that gain. When you buy a bigger van for the business, do you depreciate it or show it as an expense on the year you buy? Where do I find a list of business expenses that are 100% deductible and other expenses are not? – Well first of all for the van itself, how you're going to depreciate depends of course on the size if it's over 6,000 pounds, etcetera. You probably got bonus depreciation a lot more of it. It may not be 100% anymore, but we probably solved the 80% going on. Is there a maximum number of LLCs that I can use for the IRC-280A deduction? I have two LLCs and I was wondering if I can take the deduction for both? Also, I have a nonprofit and was wondering if I could also have meetings for a nonprofit and the fee for using the space would be a donation from my LLC? - Well, 280A is a provision, it actually comes under a section that is dedicated to not letting you deduct personal expenses in your house particularly. – if you donate $10,000 to your nonprofit, is that the nonprofit can use it for nonprofit purposes. How do adjusted gross income AGI levels affect capital gains? Is it true that AGI below $76,000 will pay no capital gains? - Actually, AGI doesn't have anything to do with this. It's taxable income when we talk about the brackets for capital gains. The $76,000 is an old number. It's approximately $83,000 I think this year. I'm opening a new IRA that will be managed by an IRA with custody TD Ameritrade, it will be funding a new IRA from existing IRAs, so it sounds like a rollover from the same custodian. I have a Wyoming LLC Anderson just set up. Should I open the new IRA in the name of the LLC and will it be a problem moving funds from a personal IRA that is titled with my name? - You can roll one over into the other, but what caught my attention was this Wyoming LLC- you can't just have that connected to a retirement plan. Your IRA needs to set up its own LLC that it owns, and then it can transfer funds into that LLC and go do investing in real estate or what have you. But you do not want to take some other outside LLC that we set up for you and connect that with your IRA, we're not allowed to do that. Rapid-fire chat questions answered at the end of the show Resources: Email us at Tax Tuesday taxtuesday@andersonadvisors.com Tax and Asset Protection Events https://andersonadvisors.com/real-estate-asset-protection-workshop-training/ Anderson Advisors https://andersonadvisors.com/ Anderson Advisors YouTube http://aba.link/youtube Toby Mathis YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@TobyMathis Toby Mathis TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@tobymathisesq  

Join me on this episode of STR Unfiltered, I'm joined by Jeff Hampton, a member of our Super Team and a highly knowledgeable investor who leverages his expertise as an attorney to provide valuable insights on the legal aspects of short-term rentals. Tune in as we dive into the intricacies of co-hosting agreements, risk management with LLCs, the positives and negatives of forming a Wyoming LLC, and strategies for avoiding probate as an investor. You don't want to miss out! Receive a free consultation from Jeff Hampton at: https://www.strlawguys.com/ Watch this podcast each Tuesday on our Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnheh3vx0hT5Y7uHWhBs8kA Exclusive Pricelabs Offer Here! Use code BILL25 & get 25% off for the first 3 months (offer valid for new users only) ake the next step towards growing your vacation rental business by enrolling in the STR Host Academy! With our comprehensive training, you'll get the tools you need to increase your profits, attract new guests, and dominate your competition with marketing. Don't wait any longer to start seeing results. Enroll in the STR Host Academy today!  https://www.strhostacademy.com/hostacademy You can find more of Bill online at: Bill Faeth Linktree: https://linktr.ee/bfaeth?utm_source=linktree_profile_share<sid=660cbc9b-4a7e-4ed9-a654-900180b83af1  The Free Build STR Wealth Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/284886002732508 Build STR Wealth: https://buildstrwealth.com/  BK Hot Picks: https://bkhotpicks.com/  Instagram: @BillFaeth73 Tik Tok: @bfaeth Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's Tax Tuesday again, and today we're mixing it up – this episode is hosted by Anderson Advisors' Michael Bowman, Esq, who welcomes two of Anderson's expert tax pros, Eliot Thomas, Esq., and Kurt Bergfjord, Esq. And as always we've got our talented and experienced tax advisors manning the chat questions in the office. On today's episode, the guys review all the documents and receipts that you should be gathering up in preparation for filing your taxes, and answer multiple listener questions around the pros and cons of C-Corps, S-Corps, Partnerships, and the audit magnet - Sole Proprietorships. The discussion also covers our episode title question - are there benefits to putting your primary residence in a trust - which is really only for asset protection and estate planning - there are no tax benefits to doing so. If you have a tax-related question for us, submit it to taxtuesday@andersonadvisors. Highlights/Topics: "Even if I show income on my tax return from rental and business activity as a sole proprietorship, and self-employed but no taxable income because I use my large net operating loss to cover all taxes, is my income still considered income or will it be a hindrance as far as getting an investment loan or home equity line?" – It depends - Some are going to look at this, it will ding you, and you won't be able to get a loan. Others will take it into consideration and analyze the tax return. "I currently have two LLCs in California that I file as a partnership. Should I create another LLC as a holding for both LLCs? And should that be disregarded or filed as a partnership as well? Of course, there is the additional cost of $800 for California as well. What's your suggestion?" – from the legal point of view, it might be a better idea to have that holding company and all those assets coming into it. "How can a full-time LP investor in private equity in real estate syndications as well as stock investor utilizing options for income, structure such as to offset income of these activities with expenses, syndication conferences, to vet sponsors, subscription services, travel for investment briefings, computer equipment, expenses, et cetera? Assets are held in a Wyoming LLC and property trust for the stocks. Would a management C-corp make sense having one ‘client?' I am aware of people in my circumstances that write off expenses on their schedule C, but I recall Anderson doesn't recommend that." – If we could utilize that management corp, maybe we can capture some of those benefits that you otherwise wouldn't be entitled to. "How is REPS applied to a tax return?" – If you are a real estate professional (REP)for all intents and purposes, then you can actually turn that otherwise passive income into non-passive income. I's going to be on Schedule E page one or Schedule E page two if you have a K-1 "We have seven rental properties set up with the ABA structure. My husband works full-time for the government. I manage our home and rental properties. Two properties are mortgaged, the rest are paid for. Now, both in our 50s, we're financially comfortable with a large cushion. We got retirement funds, mutual funds, properties, kids, education funds, et cetera, but we are getting killed in taxes every year. I feel like we are working to pay taxes. We don't live extravagantly, and still drive the same cars for 10–15 plus years. Taxes feel like a punishment for saving when we were younger." - Ideas to save on taxes include becoming a REP, depreciation, cost-seg study, there's even a nickname- “short-term rental loophole” "What are the tax benefits of putting my primary residence in a trust?" There is no asset protection, but if it's in the right kind of revocable trust, then we still get to take advantage of our section 121 of tax exemption from gains on the sale of your primary residence—$250,000 single, $500,000 married filing joint. "I want to be as anonymous as possible. What is the best business structure and ways to submit taxes? I do not want the tax info to flow down to my personal taxes." - When we talk about anonymity, anyone looking at your personal tax return is really not going to have too much of a purview into your business activities. “Should I do a cost seg for a condo?” It depends - Have you had it for a while? are you a REP? Are you renting it out? Have you been appreciating for a while? "What is the best corporate structure to have in place that can also allow for tax savings?" We've covered this - C-corp, S-corp, partnership, and then the worst would be sole proprietorship. "What tax incentives are there for real estate investors to not have to pay an absurd amount in taxes?" - REP status, short-term rentals, cost seg studies, 1031 exchange, keep good books! "As a real estate investor opening my first LLC, which is the best for me to use, S-corp or C-corp? - it depends - do not put appreciating property in a C-Corp, but C is good for short terms or flips. "I started my LLC last year to begin my search for buying a business or real estate. Currently, I am a W-2 employee while I get started. My question is, can I write off any expenses since I did not make any money in my LLC? We've incurred expenses, but I don't have any income.” - was it open for business, or are you in the exploratory phase? timing on when to deduct may be more important. Resources: Email us at Tax Tuesday taxtuesday@andersonadvisors.com Tax and Asset Protection Events https://andersonadvisors.com/real-estate-asset-protection-workshop-training/ Anderson Advisors https://andersonadvisors.com/

In this episode of Anderson Business Advisors, Toby Mathis speaks with Eliot Thomas, Managing Tax Advisor at Anderson Business Advisors. There are lots of people helping to answer questions online - Patti, Ander, Matthew, Troy, Jared, Piao, Ian, Dutch, and Dana are on. There are so many people here. You have a whole bunch of tax professionals that are here to answer your questions. You can just go into the Q&A and put in a question. You'll hear Toby and Eliot discuss several listener questions around how to report capital losses in the stock market, a few questions on real estate and business LLCs vs. S-Corps, C-Corps, and Sole Proprietorships, disregarded entities, entertainment meals vs. business meal write-offs, and an in-depth discussion about a real estate contractor not filling out a W-9 and all the difficulties that might present. Submit your tax question to taxtuesday@andersonadvisors. Highlights/Topics: "Hey, I'm looking to start a new business. I need to choose a correct business entity in order to maximize my tax benefits, so I need to know if starting the business as an LLC and potentially working the business out of my home would be the best option for me." – by all means, you want the LLC for that asset protection, but the S-corp or the C-corporation—have those great reimbursements. "Can I write off my stock holding loss at the end of the year to reduce my W-2 earnings?" Yes, but we're limited potentially just to $3000 of capital loss that will offset against ordinary income, that being your W-2. "What are the rules for HSAs for people over 62?" – For 2023, the amount is going to be $3850 if you're single, and I guess it'd be $7750 for a family plan. If you are on Medicare, you can not contribute tax-free to an HSA. "I became a real estate professional in 2021 and have a significant net operating loss due to depreciation. What are the limitations of carrying the NOL backward in 2020 and 2019 to use that to lower taxes in the previous year?"-- As of right now, we don't get to carry back NOLs. We just carry them forward. "If my partnership LLC did not conduct any business this year, do I still need to file a Form 1065? -- You don't have to file 1065 for that first year. I'm in the process of setting up my real estate business. I already have a Wyoming LLC as a holding company. It's treated as a disregarded entity, but I have no investment in real estate yet. If I file my taxes this year before I acquire an investment property, what is the process for changing the filing election of the LLC from disregarded to a partnership for the new property?" – You don't have to do anything but file that return, or you could file the Form 8832 and declare it as a partnership. "I am new to real estate flipping and started my first flip last year. Construction was completed this year, and it closed this year. I asked my contractor if I need to complete a W-9 last year, and he told me not until the project was complete. Now, I'm realizing that I should have had him complete the form in 2021 for the amount I paid him and again this year. Can I now ask him to complete the W-9 and file the form for 2021 and 2022? The other issue is I had issues with this contractor for faulty workmanship he did on the flip and in the process of filing suit. What if he refuses to complete the W-9?" If you're dealing with a contractor who's organized as a business, chances are you still want that W-9 to prove that they're a business. "What forms do I need to fill out for my accountant to show capital loss in the stock market?" – Usually, you're going to get a 1099-B from your brokerage house. They can just use that, and that's really all you need. "As an owner-operator trucking company designated as an LLC, can you write off 100% of the operating fuel costs?" – If the truck that was burning that fuel was used 100% for business, absolutely. "I am a lender on a note to an LLC. What are the best practices for collecting payments and tracking interest payments for reporting purposes; separate bank account for the payments or create an end-of-the-year interest statement for myself?" - I like the separate bank account. Keep it separate from your personal obviously. "I attended your Las Vegas event. Please confirm if we are to refrain from listing items as entertainment when filing taxes." - They're probably referring to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act getting rid of entertainment. There is no deduction for entertainment. If you are getting a meal that is for entertainment purposes, you cannot write it off. Business meals only for 2022. "I'm looking to convert from an LLC-S to a C-corp in 2023. Should I stay on a calendar or fiscal year schedule? What are the pros and cons?" – I like the fiscal year for C-corp because it tends to give you more flexibility, especially when it comes to payroll items or contributing to, say, Solo 401(k)s or something like that. Visit us at andersonadvisors.com. Grab one of the free events. We're going to do a ton of them this year. Resources: Email us at Tax Tuesday taxtuesday@andersonadvisors.com Tax and Asset Protection Events https://andersonadvisors.com/real-estate-asset-protection-workshop-training/ Anderson Advisors https://andersonadvisors.com/ Anderson Advisors on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaL-wApuVYi2Va5dWzyTYVw

Brian T. Bradley, Esq. is a nationally recognized Asset Protection Attorney. He has been interviewed and a featured guest on many top shows such as: Bigger Pockets Rookie, Flipping America Podcast with Roger Blankenship the “Flipping America Guy” and member of the Forbes Magazine Real Estate Council. Brian was selected to the Best Attorney's of America's List 2020, Lawyers of Distinction List three years in a row (2018, 2019, 2020,) Super Lawyers Rising Star List 2015, nominated to America's Top 100 High Stake Litigators List, nominated to the 2017 Law Firm 500 Award. Brian also writes on high-end asset protection. Ownership of real estate has many benefits from an investment and tax standpoint. There is downside risk, however, since the value of real estate holdings may be significant and can be used to cover damages awarded in a lawsuit. Therefore, it's important to consider asset protection strategies relating to real estate holdings in order to minimize such risk. In today's episode, Brian lays out how asset protection really works from a legal standpoint and dispels some common myths that are thrown around in the industry. Episode Link: https://btblegal.com/ --- Transcript Before we jump into the episode, here's a quick disclaimer about our content. The Remote Real Estate Investor podcast is for informational purposes only, and is not intended as investment advice. The views, opinions and strategies of both the hosts and the guests are their own and should not be considered as guidance from Roofstock. Make sure to always run your own numbers, make your own independent decisions and seek investment advice from licensed professionals.   Michael: What's going on everyone? Welcome to another episode of the Remote Real Estate Investor. I'm Michael Albaum and today I'm joined by Brian Bradley, asset protection attorney and he's going to be dropping some knowledge about all the things we should be aware of as real estate investors when it comes to protecting our assets. So let's get into it.   Brian, what's going on, man? Thanks so much for taking the time to hang out with me today. I really appreciate it.   Brian: No, absolutely Michael, thanks for having me on. It's going to be an important topic, a fun topic, I'm gonna try to keep it fun and not legally dense and you know, just like I'm not anyone's, you know, Attorney here legal guru. So we're just gonna be talking generalities, right? We're gonna learn a lot in this, you know, it's gonna be a lot of fun and as you're building scale and making more money, you know, you're getting a bigger red button on you and so like this world of where we're gonna be talking about asset protection is kind of a big deal. There's just a lot of ways to skin a cat, different layers, different strategies for where you're at in your life. So, you know, I think as we break these down, hopefully I can, you know, make this will make a little bit more sense for you and your listeners.   Michael: Yes, it will. Thank you. I am super excited to learn a lot because before we hit record here, you and I were chatting about some of the topics that we'll be covering today and I was like, what is that totally brand new. So I'm really excited from a self-serving perspective. So give everyone that quick and dirty background who doesn't know Brian Bradley, who you are, where you come from, and what is it you're doing in real estate today?   Brian: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I'm an asset protection attorney, you know, we're talking about it off recording, like from Lake Tahoe, so you know, big snowboard ski, you know, ski bum, you know, Lake bum, I got into asset protection from the litigation side of the law, I was selected to America's best attorney list 2021-2020 Super Lawyers rising star 2021-2015.   Michael: My guess is that no, that's not like an online survey, you filled out to get that…   Brian: Oh, no, and another do with me, that's really just people that you work their butt up in court, and then they recommend you or judges recommend you and I have nothing to do with it and it's actually pretty, you know, I appreciate even just the nomination, let alone winning it, you know, to where I think they only say 1% of all attorneys in the nation even get nominated for those awards, let alone then, you know, 1% of those even gets picked to as a as a winner and so…   Michael: Congratulations…   Brian: Thanks, yeah and for me getting into, you know, asset protection, which will define what that is, you know, in a minute, like, that'll be like our think our base starting point. I just, I just got into this weird area of law, because when I like money, I like investing, I like, you know, not paying as much taxes as you know, as I can and as you grow, you got to be smart with your money, right and who can take it from you and so as a trial lawyer starting out, I just had so many clients who were being sued and their lives just turned completely upside down coming to me after they're already being sued and at that point, you know, you're just too far down the rabbit hole, you know, it's like going to get a car insurance after you already got in an accident or, you know, home insurance after your house already, you know, caught on fire, it's just, it's not gonna happen and so I see a lot of people thinking that they don't need to do anything is another misconception. You know, it's kind of human nature, right? You know, like, I'm just gonna ride lady luck. I'll deal with it when I when, you know, it hits me later on and that's just not how anything that needs to be proactive in the legal sense is going to work like insurance or asset protection. Wishful thinking is not a protection tool. You know, that's how everything you know, like, go to Vegas, go to breaks and hit the roulette table and see how long your wishful thinking is gonna last for you, right? You know or, you know, as you're leveling up, people forget about this. Like, as your wealth is leveling up, you're leveling up, you don't level up your protection, you don't level up your insurance. Yeah, people go buy an umbrella policy, but they don't realize what an umbrella policy is just like everything else, right? You know, it just provides more access and money to, you know, for coverage, but it doesn't, it's not the same escape clauses, you know, like, there's no insurance in the world that's gonna say, okay, hey, if I go punch you in the face, are you gonna cover it for me? No, like, they don't cover you for intentional wrongdoings or allegations of fraud and intentional wrongs and so that's how they have their escape clauses out especially for very big cases. You know, if you're talking about like a million dollar or more lawsuit. A couple other big misconceptions that we need to address as we lay this landscape is just, you know, the revocable living trust, if people think like, oh, yeah, I have a trust, right, that you know, they don't realize trust. There's a lot of different types of trust. Your family estate plan, your revocable living trust are not designed to protect you while you're living in they don't have the lead have teeth to be able to. So once you pass, they're only designed to avoid probate not protect you while you're living from lawsuits and then over the last five years, I've noticed this massive misconception about the use of limited liability companies. LLCs and they just think that they're like, you know, Silver Bullet Dracula slayers and you guys miss, like, first word first letter, like limited, I tell you. Whereas, whereas this happened, where's this come from? Like, they're not hiding the fact they tell you like they titled it telling you limited liability. So like, now we have to reeducate people on this, like, yeah, don't put everything in the world under one LLC. Otherwise, if it gets pierced, you're gonna lose it on like, What are you talking about, which we'll break that down, you know, in a little bit. And then the sad thing is like, and I think it's worth explaining is this, if you just look around, and you look at, you know, our legal system and the world we live in, it's just broken, it's a broken system, you know, and we're so happy nirvana and just to like, kind of lay this framework down a little bit more. We're no longer about justice. We're about redistributing wealth from the haves, which is you, your listeners, people trying to grow and accumulate more to the have nots and over the last 40-50 years, things that didn't happen in the past, or that weren't allowed to happen in the past like contingency fee lawyers or law from advertising their common place. and then this created a cultural shift of a predatory legal system that's no longer about justice. So it's about profits now and then when you get on the road of high net worth, in affluent families and wealth, this level of protection, now we have to deal with taking a macroeconomic, more of like a global look about what's going on and the big picture here is really that we have a global financial system that has structurally deep rooted issues. You know, we have government backed fiat currencies that are now in question. This is also including the US dollar. So don't think like, just because we're in the US, we're exempt from all of this, you know, monetary policy today, you know, the one that exists is, you know, inflate or die and then you got governments looking for a deep and accessible pools of financing and meaning our money, you know, the hard workers, the people who are investing, along with financial repression, monetary economic manipulation. So this just adds all the challenges that we have to deal with when we're looking to protect your assets and so asset protection is that modern best bet to level this playing field by using a lot of the tools and the combination of the tools that we're going to talk about today to make it very hard for you to be collected on and so what this is really about is just like a talk about giving you peace of mind, lifestyle preservation, and you know, really just how collectible are you at the end of the day…   Michael: Love it. But well, I am all about doing things to help peace of mind and insulate ourselves from the world at large. This you happy world at large. So help us understand Brian, like, what are some of the things when someone says asset protection to you like, Brian, I gotta protect my assets? What does that mean to you? What alarm bells are going off in your head?   Brian: Yeah, absolutely. One is like, do you understand the difference between tax mitigation and asset protection and I've been getting this a lot, you know, especially this last year, obviously, as we see what's going on, you know, within inflation, taxes and everything right now, asset protection is not tax mitigation, like that's your CPE and wealth managers job. If creating an asset protection plan or an asset protection, trust or going offshore, you know, where to create tax havens like one that's illegal, it's fraud, you know, so system won't work, and then you go to jail for that type of stuff.   Michael: So don't do that is what you're saying.   Brian: That's not what this is about. So people always like, oh, I want to protect my assets and I don't want to pay taxes, completely two different things. The asset protection plan is to protect your assets from predatory lawsuits and litigation, not saying I want to not pay taxes, that's tax mitigation, talk to your CPA and wealth managers. First, lock down your assets from lawsuits because if you get sued and lose everything, what's your miracle working CPA going to be able to do for you if you have nothing for them to work on, so order of operation, protect your assets, then let them work through the system that's created to actually like mitigate, you know, forced depreciation, all those wonderful things that they do cost segue analysis…   Michael: Yeah but Brian, to that, to that point, really quick. I'm just curious, like, do you work with a lot of CPAs because I can see, I can envision a scenario in which the legal side of things is super buttoned up super tight, but maybe isn't very tax efficient and so my guess is there's probably a happy medium, or some input that a CPA or wealth manager can inject into the situation to help make both things as tight as possible.   Brian: Correct. You got to, you know, the issue generally is people don't involve their lawyers until later on down the line and it creates a lot of problems. So for example, a lot of CPAs will set up S Corps for investors, especially real estate investors for some reason, and great for tax purposes, horrible for litigation and I get this call a lot, you know, and most of my clients are calling with like 50 $100 million of real estate all stuffed in one S Corp. Okay, great again, for tax mitigation, horrible for let's say you get sued and now you're S Corp and all the shares get frozen and cease, there is nothing I can do for you. At that point, I can't move assets out and then even if I want it and you realize like, oh my god, I have so many pieces of property under one corporation like this is very risky, I need to start diversifying and employing these assets out, you're stuck, you're not going to be able to and I just had this call yesterday with a potential client. The reason is, when you're all the benefits of the S Corp, right? You know, deferred taxation and all this stuff, you're kicking the can down the road, once you start taking the assets out, you have to pay the money back and so people don't generally have millions of dollars sitting in their bank account saying like, okay, hey, I feel like you know, taking all the assets out of my S Corp now and now I'm going to go and pay the piper and the IRS. So because you don't have that money sitting around to pay the IRS and the taxes, we can move the assets for you and I'm not going to force you to go, you know, and have the IRS coming after you to collect on you and move the assets out anyways, because now you're just creating a bad situation for the client. So the lesson here to learn is if you're thinking of investing, you need to talk to both the lawyer and the CPA, because a lot of CPAs, they shouldn't be giving you legal advice. They're not lawyers, and they're not going to understand the aspect of what happens actually in court with s corpse and C corpse, when it comes to litigation, and why we don't want to use those to protect your assets. So we have to all talk together. The problem is I get this all I get the mess after the fact right, and then I have to start supporting afterwards and so when done, right, really, the modern, you know, estate planning is asset protection, what we're doing is creating legal barriers between your assets, and your potential creditor, the person suing you, the person trying to come after your money before it's needed and that's it, you know, it's like a safe for your gold or your guns or your valuables. Anything of value, you know, you want to put behind the legal barrier and out of your personal name so that it's not easily attached with a lien or reached and so I just like the rich, I really liked the Tony Robbins saying success leaves clues. The rich don't own things in their personal names their businesses do their trust, do they just get the beneficial use and enjoyment out of them while separating out that legal liability and we do that through just like different tools and mechanisms that we have kind of like key concepts and roadmaps like LLC is limited partnerships and trust.   Michael: Got it. Okay and so when real estate investor comes to you, they're just getting started. They are moist clay, you can totally mold them, they don't already have a bunch of issues. What is your go to, like ideal scenario for asset protection?   Brian: Yeah, so there, I mean, you're just starting out your green horn, like really just going to be an LLC and insurance and that's where you're gonna go, okay and as you think about how to use these systems and how to grow within them, okay, I want you and your listeners to think about winter, okay, like we were talking about this before we started recording like I'm from Lake Tahoe, snow, cold snowboarding skiing, I lived in Michigan, freezing cold arctic, you know, minus 40 degree weather for a while, well, I'm in Portland damp cold, you got to really layer you and so the first entry layer is as your base layer, when you're getting dressed, it's going to sit on your skin. This is the equivalent of an LLC and insurance. This is you know, when you're just starting out investing in you have zero to three units, or you know, zero to three properties, you're exposed net worth generally is like 250,000, net or below and then as you grow, and you add more assets, and you hit around that four unit or four property mark, you could be starting to invest in a couple different states as well, you know, you have now around like 500, to 700,000 exposed nets, what you need is a mid-layer, which is usually a little bit thicker, that's going to be made out of like a merino wool sweater, or for you ladies a car and again, this is your management company, like a limited partnership and I can break down that later on if we have time and then when you hit around that 1 million net worth mark, you know, you're gonna want to water shell waterproof layer. This keeps you nice and dry and warm when the weather's really bad. You know, this is your doomsday lawsuit protection layer is going to be an asset protection trust and specifically for our clients, we use a hybrid trust, which is combining an offshore trust and domesticating it through the IRS. So when a client comes to me, I receive it I realistically, you want four things you know, you want you're going to want an effective plan to have, you're going to want to control your plan. Three, you want a reasonable and sustainable cost, you know, depending on what layer you're at, is going to be individual for the for the client profile and then four you want a plan that's going to be easy to maintain compliance on what the IRS like I can create the strongest thing in the world for you. But if you're not going to be maintaining it and you don't want to do the IRS compliance with it, eventually you're just going to stop doing it and the whole system falls apart. So as you go through the valuation process and you're talking to different attorneys and you're vetting the process, just remember the acronym ECCC effectiveness, control cost and compliance and as long as you can start checking off all those boxes, you know you're gonna have a really good system. If you want to I can break down the first layer if you want to Trying to kinda go there like LLCs, or just really wherever you feel like directing this.   Michael: Yeah, so I think our listeners probably have a good handle on LLCs. But I would love if you would walk us through what this hybrid trust is because it's not something that I'm familiar with, I've never heard of before.     Brian: So yeah, and I think the reason why is like not many people focus on asset protection at a high level, you know, I think events like insurance, a lot of people wonder not only purely asset protection attorneys, right, they're generally business attorneys who do some asset protection or their real estate, you know, attorneys who do a little bit and they take continuing legal education course, learn about LLCs, and the kind of stops there and like insurance, they kind of tried to cast a large net nationwide, what was one thing you can cast nationwide and LLC and so I kind of think that's why like, the base layer, knowledge kind of stops there, because not many people just focus on, you know, very, very strong protection. This comes with the asset protection trust. So it's this final layer, the bad weather, you know, the outer shell waterproof layer, is this asset protection trust, it's going to be really the heart and soul of the system, especially when you have over 1 million exposed and that wealth and what I mean exposed is like your 401 K is exempt. So I don't include that in a net worth evaluation, because it's already a reset protecting some states, like if you're a Florida resident, we have a very strong homestead exemption of 100% of your of your primary residence. So I will take that out of the equation too, depending on the state you're in and the homestead. So what we're looking at is exposed unprotected, and that, you know, equity and wealth, all right. The great thing about trust is that they can be sculpted, to fit how you need them and they can morph as you need them without dealing with funding issues that you're going to fall into an LLC and other business entities that get their protection pierced, meaning now you're going to be held personally liable. So I just love trust and having a trust at the very top of the planning is very powerful and this is where picking the proper jurisdiction for a trust really comes into play. The standard 101 trust that I'm sure like everybody's familiar with, you know, kind of started in the 60s is the family revocable living trust. So you know, like when trust, you know, trust don't die. So then when you do, you act, and you fund your trust, which a lot of people forget to do, like, oh, I created my estate plan, and then they never transfer title into it. Remember, fund that fund the trust, if it's just, you know, your revocable living trust, the benefit of it is when you pass you don't have to go through probate, you can just skip the court system and probate and it changed the landscape of estate planning. Then you have what are called land trusts for real estate, you know, you hold your land, and then you connect them to an LLC. But land trusts don't have any protection in and of themselves. They're only as strong as the LLC that they're connected to, you know, so they're just a privacy mechanism, not a protection mechanism. Okay from there, you have higher levels of trust. They're called asset protection trust and I really want to spend the time, you know, with this and break down the three different types, you know, and after this, I think you and probably 99% of your listeners are going to know more than 99% of all the attorneys out there about asset protection, trust, they came, yeah, they came about in the early 1980s. You know, and so an asset protection trust is what's called a self-settled spendthrift trust. All sell settled means is that you created it for yourself, you know, they're for you, by you, as your own beneficiary, and they have very important spendthrift provisions in them. So this lets you protect your assets while you're actually living, you know, from creditors trying to sue you from not having to relinquish control of your assets. The difference is that they allow you to protect your assets, not just for your grandkids, but for yourself, which you weren't allowed to do in the past and then like I said, you're probably familiar with another type of self-settled trust the revocable living trust. They're the same and that they're self-settled created for you by you. The difference is that with an asset protection version of this trust, it includes these critical provisions called spendthrift provisions and what spendthrift provisions are is they are provisions that allow you to protect your assets from the creditors, they're the actual teeth behind it and for those to work, the trust them has to be not revocable, but it will revocable. So it's a very different type of trust, you know, just like chocolate or vanilla, both ice cream, just different types of ice cream.   Michael: Yeah…   Brian: You know, this is where the fun really starts to actually happen. There's two major school of thoughts here you can go international meaning offshore, another country jurisdiction, you know, you hear about Cook Islands, Cayman Islands, Belize, in the Bahamas, or domestically here in the US, you know, Nevada, Delaware, Wyoming, Texas, um, so you can set them up here in the United States and you know, if you don't mind, I think a great way to talk about it, just kind of talking about it through historical context, because I think if you understand the foundations of both offshore and domestic then you understand the principles of how we combine them together and why you want to   Michael: Yeah, let's do it.   Brian: Alright, cool. So again, you really have these three options, right, you can establish them offshore, you're going establish them domestically, and then we can hybrid them out like a hybrid car, take the best of both worlds put them together. So from the historical concept, the offshore trust actually came first, in 1984, when the famous Cook Islands, they created the first asset protection trust. I like and choose the Cook Islands if and when it's applicable, just because it literally offers the best home court advantage and why it's the best is because asset protection is just what these trusts in the Cook Islands were specifically drafted for and the power here is they have this wonderful word called statutory non recognition of any other jurisdictional court orders in the world, including the United States and so what this means is that if you have a judgment against you, in the United States, and you took it down to the Cook Islands, your US judgment is literally worthless, it literally has no value whatsoever. statutorily the Cook Islands they prohibited from recognizing it even from their own constitution and so if somebody wants to sue your trust, and it has a Cook Islands, you know, clause in it. So as a Cook Islands trust, they will have to start their case all over from scratch, the person who's suing you, they're going to have to prove their case beyond the reasonable doubt. This is the murder standard, the highest legal standard in the world that 99% sure standard. Not that you know, 51%, preponderance of the evidence, I'm not sure we don't know what happened. But we don't like the way they look right now. So let's just let's just give it to them. You know, you can't get a contingency fee attorney to represent you, because they're just not allowed down there. It's an ethical in the Cook Islands, just like it used to be unethical here in the United States. But then that got changed in the 60s, the claim meaning the lawsuit, you know, it's not amendable. So what this means is that it can't be changed or amended after the discovery process starts like we can do here in the United States. Like we can literally just say, okay, I'm suing you for this, dig around start discovery, then completely change what We're suing you for, because we started using as a fishing expedition. The person suing you, yeah, no, I mean, this is just like standard trial tactics is like, okay, hey, let me just flood you with discovery and like, start poking around and say, oh, hey, we didn't even know this was right here. Now I'm gonna add this to the complaint and sue you now, for this looks like a better cause of action anyways, I can't do that down there. But we can do it here all the time in the US.   Michael: So it sounds like I need to go move to the Cook Islands.   Brian: Now. Well, here and maybe not right, because you know, there's, there's cons to things, we'll get to the cons in a minute. So the person suing you, they're gonna have to front the entire court costs by the judge from New Zealand and if you lose your pay, you know, and I honestly think this is one of the worst things that we don't have here in the United States, though, like the loser doesn't need to pay the legal fees and the cost of the winner. So if you get sued for something completely bogus, I mean, a frivolous lawsuit, and you spend $200,000, defending yourself on legal fees, then the judge finally is like, this is ridiculous. I'm throwing this case out, you're still out 200,000 bucks, you know, the person who sued you, they're not going to be getting the bill for that because our legal system in the United States, they just that will discourage lawsuits and our legal system is run by trial lawyers who don't want to discourage lawsuits and there's only a one year statute of limitations. So if you go back to those four things I mentioned, right, remember, like effectiveness, cost, control, compliance, I mean, effectiveness, five out of five stars, nothing really nothing beats statutory nonrecognition. So what about the other ones, right, you know, control costs and compliance. This is kind of his kryptonite, you know, these are the drawbacks. If you're going to be purely foreign, like a purely foreign trust, you have a lot more IRS reporting, compliance and disclosure. So you have these things called IRS forms 3520 3520 A's. What this is, is a full balance sheet disclosure of everything that trust owns, and sometimes even the entire trust agreement to be disclosed and submitted to the IRS and it is expensive for this IRS forms to be done every year. Also, you're going to have factor compliance, because you're going to have a foreign bank account at that time.   And of course, we're these trusts to work, you're going to be out of control of the trust. That's why they work so good. That's why they're the creme de la crème and clients are just not comfortable with this. So while we literally have the most effective trust in the world, by far, it's not something that I generally start with, I probably only say like 1% of my clients, I will go to a purely foreign trust with which then brings us right to the second option. Okay, we're not going to be going forward and what about these domestic trust? Yeah, they came about 10 years later down the road of all places, Alaska started it out and then not to be outdone, obviously, you're gonna be like, Well, hey, we're Wyoming and Nevada and Delaware like this is what we're known for. So we're jumping on the gravy train, right and then now about 19 other states now have created some form of asset protection, self-settled trust statutes. So we're seeing as a state starting to jump on board seeing yeah, our legal system is a threat and things have to get done to protect your assets and so as to protection the United States is very is very important to understand this ballot on It's just the concepts like how you go about doing it is very important. The issue with a purely foreign under the purely domestic asset protection trust is that, you know, we live in the United States of America, we have a Constitution, Article four section one for Faith and Credit Clause. What this provides and means is that every state has to grant the full faith and credit to the judicial proceedings of every other state. What this is means what it's telling you is that, for example, Nevada can pass and has passed an asset protection statute, okay, but it cannot ignore a California or Washington or like another states court orders. So where the Cook Islands can literally just throw that California judgment in the trash. Nevada can't do that. Nevada has to respect it constitutionally and even litigate it and then you have courts that are just simply ignoring the choice of law clause. So I mean, like literally, like bait levers more dissent in re Hubber, cucumber Steelman, Dover still all great facts, all great cases, they should have one of those cases, and judges literally just use their superpower public policy, we're ignoring the you know, choice of law clause, trust is breach means loss of assets, that's just completely unacceptable and so because of the case law that we're seeing, I'm not a big fan of a purely domestic asset protection, trust or anything purely domestic without something offshore built into it. This is why I prefer the hybrid version called like, we just call it a bridge trust, but it's really just like a hybrid, hybrid trust, think of them like a hybrid cars, okay? What we're doing just combining the best of both, and then making a better product and so these trusts have been around for almost three decades. So they're not, you know, the new lady to the dance, they've been around for about 30 years now and at the end of the day, what you're doing is taking a fully registered foreign Cook Island, offshore asset protection, trust, what all that for two years of solid case law, again, so it's fully registered offshore from the day we created with the offshore trustee, they're there in standby just in case you need them and then we build a bridge back to the IRS for IRS classification. So the IRS is literally taking this foreign trust and then they're classifying it as a domestic US trust, by complying with USC Section 7701. It's called the court test control test and so because of that bridge, as long as we have our compliance in place, we stay classified domestically and what this does is that the trust is now going to be cheaper to create. So generally, a purely foreign trust is going to cost like 4550, even $60,000 plus $12,000, a year to maintain very expensive, a hybrid trust is going to be cheaper, you're generally gonna be talking about, you know, 23 to 30,000, to set up a hybrid trust, plus no IRS tax filings whatsoever, while you're domestic because it's classified as a domestic US grantor trust, so you have no more IRS tax filings, unless God forbid, we have to break that bridge and now you also get the power of the offshore trust. If and when we need it. It's in our toolbox now, just like a contractor who says like, okay, hey, I don't need to use all my tools today. But I'm going to need them possibly at some point. So now I can use them as I need them. Versus coming to me later on after the fact oh, my God, Brian, I mow somebody over with my car, like, can you help me? You know, like, I want that foreign trust? Well, no, sorry, it's after the fact I can't do it now. But if we have the hybrid, I could have engaged it. So that would be like during the State of duress, we would break the bridge, stop being an IRS compliance, you are what you are a foreign trust. Until that point, you want to be classified domestically. So that hybrid trust is very, very effective, you may control of your assets, you may take control the trust, right up until that doomsday scenario where you don't want to be in control of it anymore. You know, maintenance and compliance with the IRS. Very simple. So at that point, you've now checked off all the boxes, effectiveness, cost control and compliance check, check, check, check, check and so this is where you know, for our clients, we generally are starting with these hybrid trust.   Michael: Wow, this is wild, is super cool and so are you thinking that most folks that are in that kind of million dollars of expose net worth, this is where that starts to make sense.   Brian: That's exactly like, so our main client profile that comes in you would think they'd be like, you know, 10s of millions of dollars for us, like realistically, I would say 75% of our clients generally around that 1.2 million, exposing that. Some high risk, probably like a doctor or surgeon lawyer, or just straight real estate investors. I have some of my favorite clients, nurses, firefighters, cops who self-funded their retirement through cash flowing properties, and now they're about to retire and they realize like, I can't lose all of this now because this is literally my nest egg and my legacy. Yeah, they need to lock it down and so you generally see the average client profiles like 1.2 to 2 million of exposed net with some risk, and it makes sense at that point. Yeah, get the LLC get the limited partnership get the trust for like 30,000 dollars locked down a million plus, and then sleep well at night. That's when the investment kind of makes sense for this type of protection.   Michael: Yeah, that makes total sense and what would you say because I would imagine, after listening to this folks might go to other attorneys they work with mentioned this type of hybrid trust and they might be told now you don't need an LLC is good enough. I mean, what's the I know, we've talked about kind of a counter argument, but how does that conversation get ahead?   Brian: Most of the time, I was, say, like the one the estate planning attorney, they will know about this, because their knowledge base, you know, is just not going to be around, let alone foreign trust. I mean, there's not that many people who even know like that much detail about how a foreign trust works, let alone using the incorrect domestic asset protection trust, you know, how many times I have California residents, using the Nevada asset protection trust, and the person who set it up for them, like the lawyer has no idea like, okay, what about this case? We're still in 2012, California case that said, hey, you're a California resident, we don't recognize asset protection trust, because we don't have the statutes here. So your Nevada asset protection, trust, and sorry, it's worthless, it's not gonna it's not gonna work, you know, so unless you go to an actual specialist and say, hey, here's the case law, here's what's going to happen down the run. Most people don't have that level of education, because they're not in that world. They don't exist in in it. So I feel bad for the clients because where's the knowledge come from? You think you're going to an attorney who was specialized in this, but you're not taught this in law school, you're not taught this for the bar exam, so how you develop this level of knowledge is really just did you get into the right group of people and were you passionate about it enough to like transition your practice into it… That's why I do these talks is just to educate people and you know, just the base thing, like, why not just an LLC, they're disregarded entities for tax purposes. So they're disregarded for taxes. That means it's disregarded to you for lawsuits and liability, meaning you're pierced. If you're using them for real estate. They're not businesses, they're holding companies, which means the number one argument that will win and pierce that every time is well, Your Honor, this is an actual business. It's an extension of Michael is just a holding company. Boom, you're pierced funding issues, bad accounting systems, like there's four ways to pierce that veil right there and I don't even have to think part about it. Charging, charging order protection mean, like what state do I go set these things up in? You know, how many times I hear people like, oh, just go create a Wyoming LLC? Are you a resident of Wyoming? Is the asset in Wyoming and the answer is no to either one of those, you just tried to buy another state's jurisdiction, that you have no connection to try bringing another state's laws to like California and other state that you're not connected to, and there's no reason to, you're gonna get laughed out of court. Like, it's just you can't go by other states more beneficial laws and bring them, you know, to another state that, you know, that has no jurisdictional connection to it and anonymity is the other like, really, like, flavor of the last like, two years is like, oh, create this anonymous, Delaware or Wyoming? Trust and Ghost the lawsuits, right? Yeah, well, that's not how these that's not how it works but that's how it's being sold by, you know, law firm salesmen and promoters. Yeah, create this and get a really crazy operating agreement and then next thing, you know, like, you're never gonna have to show up in court. I'm sorry, you have a personal agent of service for these out of state law firms their sole job, like, let's say, Mike here is my, you know, personal agent of service, he's gonna get my service and he's gonna say, hey, Brian, here's your service. That's why dude, you just…   Michael: Got to show up in court…   Brian: Court now and amenities done at that point. So the only way that an amenity works is you show up the court, a judge is gonna say, Hey, you're getting sued for a million bucks. Here's your you know, asset disclosure list. Tell me everything that you own, because we didn't know what can be collected on or not, at that point, and amenity or a quote, unquote, air quotes, Secrecy is now up to you. So you're gonna decide, am I gonna lie under oath and hope to god, I don't get you know, my operating agreement will hold up and commit perjury in court, or do I just disclose it. So like, you're the weak link at that point and then if you lie and commit perjury, under oath, you're going to jail on top of losing your assets. So it makes more sense just to say, hey, create a proper asset protection plan, LLC in the state that is layered up into a management company, once you hit the net worth put in the trust, and then sleep well at night because at the end of the day, I don't care if you lose your lawsuit. I care about it for your collectible or not, you know, like you can lose the 10 $50 million case. I just if the asset protection trusts setup strong and in the right jurisdictions with a proper exit strategies, does it mean that you can be collected on and then it lets me settle a case for pennies on the dollar…   Michael: Dang this is nuts, Brian… This is like or this is earth shattering stuff. We got to have you back on to talk more about this. But I want to be very respectful of your time get you out here for people that have a similar response and you're like, holy crap, I gotta call this guy Brian, immediately. Learn more about this, reach out for your services. What's the best way for folks to get in touch get a hold of you?   Brian: Yeah, one great resources, jump on my website, www.btbegal.com , I use it more as an educational resource with a lot of case law client studies. I just want you to be educated at the end of the day like, listen this here's the case law. Like, that's what lawyers should know about, especially trial lawyers. That's why I'm a good trial lawyer. I tell stories through case law and then another great way is through my email, you know, Brian: B R A I N @btblegal.com. I do you know, free 30 minute consultation, whether we're a great fit or not, like we'll figure that out over the phone. I would just rather how people have an educated decision, and then they can like go shop around.   Michael: Love it, love it. Well, hey, man, thanks again for coming on. Really appreciate the time and we'll definitely be in touch.   Brian: Yeah, for sure. Thanks brother…   Michael: All right, everyone. That was our episode, a big thank you to Brian for coming on talking about a lot of things that we've never heard before on the show and definitely bring up some excellent counterpoints to be thinking about as always, if you enjoyed the episode, feel free to leave us a rating or review wherever it is to get your episodes and we look forward to seeing the next one. Happy investing…

As a lawyer in Nashville, Tennessee, Brian Boyd helps clients with real estate, construction, and business matters. It is with that knowledge that he and his wife, Dawn, have grown their portfolio to a six-figure income. Brian earned his BA from the University of Tennessee—Chattanooga, a JD from Samford University's Cumberland School of Law, and an LLM in Taxation from Georgetown University Law Center. When not practicing law or working with Dawn on their real estate ventures, Brian can be found on the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu mats at his local gym. His newest book is Replace Your Income: A Lawyer's Guide to Finding, Funding, and Managing Real Estate Investments Today Brian talks about corporate structures, how they differ, and what you could be doing to protect your assets. Episode Links: www.briantboyd.com. www.boydwills.com --- Transcript Before we jump into the episode, here's a quick disclaimer about our content. The remote real estate investor podcast is for informational purposes only, and is not intended as investment advice. The views, opinions and strategies of both the hosts and the guests are their own and should not be considered as guidance from Roofstock. Make sure to always run your own numbers, make your own independent decisions and seek investment advice from licensed professionals.   Michael: What's going on everyone? Welcome to another episode of The Remote Real Estate Investor. I'm Michael Albaum. And today with me, I have Brian Boyd, who is a legal tax professional as well as an author and active investor. He's gonna be talking to us today about what we need to do to protect our rear ends. So let's get into it.   Brian, what's going on, man, thanks so much for taking the time to hang out with me today. I appreciate you.   Brian: Hey, Michael, thanks for having me today. I'm glad to be here.   Michael: I am super excited to chat with you. Because you are a legal attorney and investor something we don't often see too much of.   Brian: Yeah, I am. I started out in Washington, DC as a tax attorney at a company called Ernst and Young. And over the years, I got into real estate and investing because I was representing a lot of contractors and developers and started looking at the way they were doing their businesses. And from there, I started tweaking their models trying to figure out well, how can I make this a little bit more tax efficient, create a little bit more loss with a lot more cash flow. And so that's when my wife and I in 2017, decided to get into real estate investing on our own. And now we're up to 25 doors, and we're cash flowing just fine. You know, in, in fact, maybe in the next year or two, she could step away from her full time job. And we'll just manage real estate.   Michael: Man, I love it. And so is your background in tax or on the legal side of things, or both.   Brian: So I have a JD and I have an LLM, which is a master's degree in, in law. But It specializes in tax. So yes, I do corporate formations. I do business transactions, helping people the real estate, anything and everything to do with businesses, individuals and their finances. In real estate investing. That's what I do. So there was a time I used to go to court, but I don't go to court anymore. My partner goes to court, and I just do business transactions and real estate investing.   Michael: Man, I love it. And before we get everyone's hopes up, you are located out in Tennessee. But is that the only state in which you practice in? Or can you help folks all over the place?   Brian: So I am licensed in Tennessee and Vermont of all places. My partner is licensed in Tennessee in Maryland. But if it has to do with federal law, I can work all over the country. However, if people are asking specifically about California law, I'm not your guy, call a local attorney speak to a local attorney. But from a structural standpoint, I can give you the basics and kind of point you in the right direction. But unless you're in one of those jurisdictions, and you want me to practice in those jurisdictions, those are the jurisdictions I'm limited to.   Michael: Okay. Well, let's talk about that for a minute. Because I think we were chatting before the show, we hit record, and there are a ton of Californians physically moving out to Tennessee. But my guess is they're probably a lot of Californians investing out in Tennessee. And so for those folks that maybe live outside Tennessee, but are investing in Tennessee, in terms of structuring their team around them, should they be thinking about having a local attorney local to them, as well as someone such as yourself or a an attorney located where the property is? How should you be thinking about that?   Brian: No, that's great question. I actually had an attorney contact me a few weeks ago and he is a he's in Chico, California. He called me and said, Hey, I properties in Tennessee. Can you help me on what? Yeah, I'll absolutely be happy to help you. And so what we did is we structured a Tennessee holding company with a wholly owned Tennessee subsidiary. And even though he's out there, he owns the LLC here. And as he invests around the country, like Texas, or Florida, or you know, any of the other states, you know, we'll set up other holding companies to represent those entities. But he can stay in California and own these companies, as long as they're structured properly, to pass through to him over in California.   Michael: Okay, awesome. Well, Brian, give us like, the quick and dirty if there is such a thing of what investors need to know, because I think a lot of our investors are starting to scale their portfolios that got a couple of deals under their belt, and they're really looking for some asset protection. What are some things they need to be aware of and where have you seen people go wrong?   Brian: So I have seen people go wrong with a few misnomers about what they believe series LLCs are and what land trusts are. So a series LLC, I know that everybody hears therefore multiple properties. and they are. But they also don't understand that when you have a series LLC, you have to have a separate bank account, a separate tax ID separate books, all of that creates an administrative burden on you to keep all these bank accounts separate all these books separate all these tax IDs separate. And typically I see those used more efficiently if you're a developer, that way you can develop a series, sell it, and not worry about it. Again, if you're holding your assets in series LLC, and you have series one through 10, for example, that's 10 tax IDs, that's 10 sets of books, that's 10 book keeper entries every month for those separate things.   Whereas if you just have an LLC, and you treat it properly, so your corporate veil cannot be pierced. And a corporate veil is the corporate formalities that you have to adhere to. So your corporate structure is honored by the courts. And typically, here are the things that people get popped for, they'll pay for their groceries out of their LLC, they'll pay their own mortgage out of their LLC, or they'll just treat their LLC like a checkbook. And that's not what it's for. It is a standalone entity, and it has to be treated and respected that way.   So if you don't do those things, you're fine. Your one LLC is going to handle it just fine. For example, my wife and I have, we have a parent company, and that parent company has two LLC is underneath it. And one LLC is for our portfolio over here. And the other LLC is for that portfolio over here. And it all flows up into the holding company, which is a perfectly fine way to structure your holdings. Yes, it is more filing fees every year, it's three filing fees. But if you're trying to get away from filing fees by creating a series, LLC, you're losing the war to win the battle on a filing fee. Because you're gonna pay all these other expenses for tax IDs and book entries and bank statements. And you're just creating a mess. I would not use series LLCs.   Now as it relates to land trust, we mentioned that earlier, I've heard a lot of people say, Well, I want to use a land trust. Why do you want to use a land trust? I understand that land trust, get it out of your name. And I'm well aware of that. But it doesn't really create any protections like an LLC would. A lot of people say, Well, I want the anonymity of an LLC, well, you can have the anonymity, you know, of an LLC without using Land Trust. Many states, Wyoming, Tennessee, Texas, you can file your LLC documents, and your name won't appear anywhere on there as long as you use a registered agent. So you can receive the benefits of the anonymity that comes along with the land trust by simply using the LLC. And you'll get more protections with the LLC.   So I would encourage your listeners to go talk to a lawyer about setting up an LLC to hold their assets, I tend to eschew Land Trust, they don't really provide the protection that people think they do. Unless you're using an irrevocable trust, which is a trust that gets it out of your estate. Not only does it get it out of your estate, it gets it out of your control, and you can't do anything with it, you have to go through a trustee and that trustee is supposed to use their best judgment on what to do for the trust. So think about that, as you move forward. And these these ideas that people read about online, I really like LLCs, my wife and I use them, I encourage my clients to use them. So that's just coming from my experience and what I do day to day in my practice.   Michael: Yeah, from a lot of the folks I've spoken to it sounds like the LLC has come like the Colt 45. For real estate investors. It's reliable, it's standard issue, it can do a lot of the things you need, you need it to do. It's nothing fancy, it just can get the job done.   Brian: No, absolutely. I agree with that statement completely. Okay, cool.   Michael: And, Brian, I think you're a good person to ask because I think we have similar styles of investing and asset protection, which I'm glad to hear. It sounds like you've broken down your portfolios into two separate LLCs What comfort what level of comfort do you have with the size of your portfolio in each LLC, before you want to further break it up or bring additional LLC online?   Brian: And you know, that's a good question. So the way we have treated our LLCs is we go by city, what's in each city. So for example, in Chattanooga, we have an LLC for Chattanooga, and Knoxville and Gatlinburg, we have an LLC for those properties. And in our short term rentals are Montana and the West Tennessee property. We have a separate LLC for that because they're out west So we've kind of broken it down over here, over here and over there. And then we have a parent LLC over top of it. So it's not really a matter of the number of doors or number of properties that have in an LLC. For me, it was geographic, and being able to keep everything separate. And especially for our bookkeeper to know that, hey, these are Chattanooga, they're in that LLC. When you run that k one, it needs to include all these properties. Same over here. So it wasn't a matter of my comfort level with the number of properties, it was just a matter of how can I segregate out all the separate assets that we have and make it user friendly? And also, we're not clumping all of our assets into one LLC. We're spreading them out. But we're doing it geographically.   Michael: Right. Okay. And as you and your wife do start to scale, I mean, is there a number of value that you that you'd see hitting in a particular LLC and saying, oh, that's maybe a little heavy, and that LLC, even if I'm investing in the same geographic area, let me bring online, another LLC, just so I don't have so much value sitting in a singular bucket? Or is not? Is that not really a concern of yours?   Brian: No, that's not really a concern. And here's why it's not a concern. It's because it doesn't really matter how much my entire portfolio is valued at, I'm always going to be deploying that equity somewhere else to get into another deal. And that equity may get deployed into another LLC. So it's not really a matter of oh, we're too heavy in this particular market. If I had 1000 doors in Chattanooga, I would still leave everything in that one LLC.   Michael: Okay, right on. Let's talk about insurance for a minute. Yeah, how much is enough?   Brian: I would tell people, you can't have enough. You can't. So we, we have homeowners insurance on every single property. And then our LLC is have business insurance as well. So we also have business insurance for the LLC. And each property is fully insured. And then we require renters to have homeowners insurance. And on top of that, we require renters to use a product called say Rhino, which is security deposit insurance. So they're not paying us a security deposit that we're holding an escrow for them, they're paying monthly, you know, let's say, you know, a month's rent is $1,000, we typically require two and a half months of rent for a security deposit, will Rhyno only requires them to pay like $8 per 1000. So they would much rather pay 20 to 24 bucks, as opposed to tune $2,500 in security deposit. And over the over the year, it comes out a lot cheaper for them. And we're safe and secure, knowing that as long as they're paying that Rhino insurance. If we have to make a claim, it's there, we've got it, they'll take care of it. So we're we're layering insurance, on insurance, on insurance with every everything we can do. So not only from a corporate standpoint of the company, and the asset, but also the tenants and the security deposit. So that's four layers of insurance.   Michael: Run that by me again, what rino does so so they are basically ensuring the security deposit, then you can make a claim for damage against that security deposit up to that limit.   Brian: Yes, yes, absolutely. That's exactly what they're doing.   Michael: And what about the tenant that goes haywire, decides I'm gonna stop paying rent? I'm not paying this right. No nonsense. So they stopped paying it. They've paid six months to date. How does that work?   Brian: Yeah, we make a claim. Like if, and so we're, we're on top of our rents and our tenants. And it's in our lease that you have to pay all this stuff. And they do. And if they don't we just make a claim immediately.   Michael: And how is your claim experience spin with those folks?   Brian: We haven't had to make a claim yet. But the person Yeah, the person I learned this from, he turned us on to it. And we're like, what, have you ever made a claim? He's like, Yeah, they paid us in four days. I'm like, done. You know,   Michael: Yeah, I'm sold. I gotta go check this company. What's it called?   Brian: Say Rhino. Okay. And, you know, we looked into it. I did my research on it. I think they just did another round of fundraising. And we were sold. We've talked to him, they're easy to work with. They won't reject any of your tenants regardless of credit. As long as you approve them, they're approved. So I take it look, yeah, no longer holding escrow and no longer dealing with security deposits. Let them deal with it. And our experience so far has been great. Let's knock on wood. I don't have to use it. But if I do They'll also pay attorneys fees. So, if you have to let somebody Yeah, go make a claim.   Michael: Man, this podcast just took a wild left turn, but I love it. I've totally here for it.   Brian: Yeah, it's, it's, it's great. And that all goes into ensuring our company, ensuring our tenants making sure everything's taken care of, but also protecting us, because we have put a lot of money a lot of time into these assets. And, you know, we want to protect those assets.   Michael: Yeah, no, it makes total sense. Speaking of Brian, let's talk about this topic for a minute, because you're another good person to ask because you have both short term and long term rentals. Do you see a difference in risk exposure between the two and grouping both asset classes in us in the same LLC?   Brian: No, I don't. The only risk that you run with short term rentals is the seasonal market. In that, you know, we were just talking about Gatlinburg, you know, and people don't realize that the high season is actually summer in Gatlinburg, and it's not winter, which is kind of weird. But yeah, people don't want to go to cabins in the winter. So you've got to be able to weather those low months. But no, I would keep both assets in the same LLC if it's in the same geographic area for me.   Now, that's not to say it's not right for you. And you know, we could also talk about what's best for you. But no, it doesn't matter to me. Because for us, as everything flows up into our tax structure, we've created this, this LLC step tax structure, that everything flows to the top as a pass through. So everything's flown to the top and the parent company pays all the mortgages on everything. So if you have long term rentals that are just, you know, clicking along and you have a week, month, say in Gatlinburg, like we both know that January, February is a week, month in Gatlinburg. You know, there's plenty of money just to go ahead and pay that note. So that's, that's how we do it. And that's what I encourage clients to do. Because you're, you're not really breaching the corporate veil of everything flows up in the parent company's paying for everything. And that's how we structured it. So we're still, you know, adhering to the corporate formalities, respecting those corporate formalities, and everything is paid from the parent company.   Michael: Okay, cool. And then from like a legal risk mitigation perspective, short term rental doesn't sound like it poses any additional risk as compared to a long term rental.   Brian: No, I wouldn't think so. Because the the management companies and I don't know, if you use the management company, but they have them sign all these documents, and they have their own attorneys, or all these waivers in there, and they have to put a security deposit down, you know, to rent the property and, you know, a cleaning deposit. And there's so many different deposits that we tend to get good renters at all the properties.   Michael: Okay. Okay, fantastic. And as someone is thinking about scaling their portfolio into multiple properties, maybe some different asset classes, from an entity structure, is there anything that they should be aware of, or they should be doing differently, if they've already, you know, started using LLC us in the past?   Brian: I would stay with LLCs. If you if you turn to like a C Corp, you get the double layer double layer of tax. If you turn to an S corp, I think you're gonna have to deal with more corporate formalities than you are with an LLC, an LLC is very flexible with what you can do with it. I wouldn't go with a partnership, a general partnership doesn't tend to have the protections nor does a limited liability partnership. You really want the corporate structure of the LLC to stay in place.   So there is no other entity out there that I would encourage people to use other than the LLC. You know, reasonable minds can differ on that. I wrote a chapter in the book on it. But at this point, I am not advising clients to use any other structure other than the LLC, it's very flexible, it's easy to buy and sell assets through and quite frankly, you know, it's it's easily respected in the state of Tennessee and in other states as well, I'm sure you know, LLCs are just common now, you know, as common now as s corpse were in the 60s 70s 80s and up to the 90s.   I would also encourage people to look at Wyoming, Wyoming is on the cutting edge of LLC formation. You know, they recently came out with a new type of LLC that has to do with crypto currencies and blockchain protections. It's it's crazy what they're doing out there. Tennessee follows shortly thereafter and we're all still trying get our heads around it because one, I'm not a crypto guy. I don't know a whole lot about it. But you're starting to deal with like blockchain technology for the way people can vote. It's, it's really fascinating. So I do like Wyoming, I have a Wyoming LLC for one of my assets. And, you know, it's a great state as well.   Michael: I dig it. You mentioned your book, let's talk about that for a minute. What's it called? Where can people find it? And what should they expect to find if they get a   copy?   Brian: Sure. It's, it's called replace your income, a lawyer's guide to finding funding and managing real estate investments. And they can find it on Amazon. Or they can go to www.BrianTBoyd.com. And they can order it through there. So the reason I wrote this book is because I'm having conversations very similar to what we're talking about now, about, how do I form things? What do I form? Why do I form it? Should I put all my assets in one LLC? And this book came about as a compendium of all those conversations I've had over the years with, with clients in real estate investing, how do they get started? How do they find properties? How do they get a loan? You know, what kind of loans are available? What platforms do I use? Do I do I use, Say Rhino? Or do I use Bildium? Or, you know, what's available? How can I do this using technology to leverage efficiency here? And so it's 13 chapters on all of that, including tax benefits, finance tips, how to structure an LLC, what you need to think about when you're putting together an operating agreement? You know, what's the difference between an operating agreement and bylaws? What's the difference between a charter and an articles of organization. I try to break it down. As if I'm talking to my 11 year old son, anybody can understand it. And that's what I want people to know about this book. It's, anybody can invest in real estate. You don't have to be a professional or have, you know, a six figure income, you can be a college student and start house hacking. You can easily you know, get a loan go buy a small two bedroom, one bath apartment somewhere, and get a roommate, move a roommate and then charge them rent and now your house hacking and now your real estate. And so it's possible for everybody.   Michael: Yeah, I love it. I love it. Brian, curveball question here. What's the best compliment you've ever received?   Brian: That I married up?   Michael: Is that Is that a compliment to your wife? Is that a sort of backhanded compliment to you?   Brian: It's probably a backhanded compliment to me, but I I, I could not do what I do without my wife, my wife is, you know, she's an inspiration. She basically runs the entire company. She only lets me talk to people if she can't figure it out. And she is the backbone behind this company. And the funny thing is, I had to drag her into real estate investing, I kept telling her about all the tax benefits of this honey, we can, we can make passive income. And, you know, let me tell you about appreciation and depreciation and how we can, you know, offset some of our income taxes. And she didn't believe me. Now, mind you, I have a master's degree and like, I went to school to do this. And I actually did this for a living for years. And somebody handed her Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and she read it and we're lying in bed when I was like, Hey, did you know that? If we did this, we could pay for a car?   I was like, yeah, she's like, did you know we could write our phone bill up? I'm like, Yeah, I did. She's like, did you know like, we could buy a computer and write it off in one year? I'm like, yes. I've been telling you this. And she doesn't believe it coming from me, the guy who has two graduate degrees and does it for a living, but she believes it from the guy that wrote the book, and I'm like, Okay, well, maybe I need to write a book and she'll she'll listen to, but she still doesn't listen to me. So it is what it is. But she she runs this company. And you know, I couldn't do without her. So when somebody says, I'm married up, I'm like, Yeah, I did. And I'm very lucky I did.   Michael: Amazing. So amazing. Well, Brian, that brings up maybe my last question for you. Before I let you out of here. I think there are a lot of folks probably listening to this that have a partner significant other that aren't interested or aren't involved with a real estate investing, but they would really like them to be or they need them to be. And so you went through this struggle with your wife, how how should people be thinking about bringing their other partner into the fold?   Brian: What I would tell them is you don't have to buy the book. You can look online and see the tax benefits of it. Is that You're going to create positive cash flow. And you're going to create tax deductions that's going to offset not only your cash flow, but your current income tax liability. So if you would like to pay less in income taxes every year, look at real estate investing. Look at it. You know, if you decide not to do and it's not for you, okay, don't do it. There are other things you can invest in. But our Congress has codified our public policy of investing in real estate in our tax code. It is there for you to take advantage of, look, when it comes tax time every year, I always kind of get a little tense, but then I'm like, Okay, well, let's go go buy another property. And then we can cost segregate that property, accelerate the depreciation, and create a larger tax deduction for ourselves, and it's not so painful come tax time.   I'm sure you know that as well that, hey, we can cashflow this property. And, you know, the government actually is encouraging us to go buy real estate, the government is encouraging you to succeed. And that's all I want for anybody is to succeed. You know, this book, I think it's 19.99. It's a lot cheaper than sitting down with me for an hour. And this is everything I've already talked about with people, and I do on a regular basis. So if your spouse is struggling to get on board with your idea of real estate investing, you know, maybe buy the book for them and show them that, hey, this is possible.   You're talking to a guy who worked two jobs to put himself through law school, and then two jobs while I was in graduate school on top of that, and I'm still paying off student loans. But you know what, I paid off a student loan last week. And I did it because we got a refund. That came back to me as a result of the deductions I have through real estate. And the first thing I did with that check was, hey, it's enough. I'm going to pay off that loan. And I did. So it's, it's a real example of how real estate can affect your bottom line.   Michael: I love it. That is awesome. And congrats on getting that loan paid off. That's really exciting.   Brian: Oh, thanks so much.   Michael: You got it. Brian, we're gonna get you out of here. If people want to continue the conversation, learn more about you. What's the best way for them to do so?   Brian: They can get in touch with me at the law firm. The website is www.BoydWills.com. And, you know, you can reach out to me on the Brian T Boyd, Facebook page and on Instagram.   Michael: Okay, amazing. We'll be sure to do that. Brian. Thanks again for sharing some amazing wisdom man. Appreciate you coming on. We'll talk soon.   Brian: Thanks, Michaels. Good to be here.   Michael: You could take care.   All right, everyone. That was our episode. A big thank you to Brian for coming on and sharing some wisdom about LLCs asset protection, tax benefits and some loopholes that we can take advantage of as real estate investors. As always, if you enjoyed the episode, feel free to leave us a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and we look forward to seeing on the next one. Happy investing

Garrett Sutton is a corporate attorney, asset protection expert and best selling author who has sold more than a million books to guide entrepreneurs and investors. For more than 30 years, Garrett Sutton has run his practice assisting entrepreneurs and real estate investors in protecting their assets and maximizing their financial goals through sound management and asset protection strategies. The companies he founded, Corporate Direct and Sutton Law Center, currently help more than 13,000 clients protect their assets and incorporate their businesses. Garrett also serves as a member of the elite group of “Rich Dad Advisors” for bestselling author Robert Kiyosaki. A number of the books Garrett Sutton has authored are part of the bestselling Rich Dad, Poor Dad wealth-building book series. There are three types of entities most commonly used to own real estate: Limited Liability Company, S Corporation and Limited Partnership. Tune in for todays episode where Garrett provides a quick summary of the best entities for real estate investment. Episode Link: https://corporatedirect.com/contact/ --- Transcript Before we jump into the episode, here's a quick disclaimer about our content. The Remote Real Estate Investor podcast is for informational purposes only, and is not intended as investment advice. The views, opinions and strategies of both the hosts and the guests are their own and should not be considered as guidance from Roofstock. Make sure to always run your own numbers, make your own independent decisions and seek investment advice from licensed professionals.   Michael: Hey, everyone, welcome to another episode of the Remote Real Estate Investor. I'm Michael Albaum and today I'm joined by Garrett Sutton, who is an attorney, investor and author with over 1 million copies of his book sold and today Garrett is gonna be talking to us about all the different entity structures we should be aware of as real estate investors, as well as wherever we might want to think about forming those entities because it plays a big role. So let's get into it.   Garrett, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. I really appreciate you taking the time.   Garrett: Thanks, Michael. It's a pleasure to be with you today.   Michael: No, no, the pleasure is all mine ad I'm super excited to chat with you. I know a little bit about your background and what you do kind of on a day to day basis. But I would love if you could share with our listeners who you are, where you come from, and what is it that you're doing in real estate today?   Garrett: Well, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area like you and I moved to Reno in 1989 and Nevada is a great state for setting up LLCs and corporations along with Wyoming. So I practiced corporate law since 1978, and became associated with Robert Kiyosaki and have written a number of books in the rich dad advisor series and you know, have enjoyed talking to people around the country around the world about how to protect your assets. As you start investing in real estate, you need to think about how you're going to protect that real estate because we live in a very litigious society, people sue each other all the time and unfortunately, they don't teach this in school, you have to get this information on your own and so that's what we provide is the information you need and then we offer a service to help you protect your real estate and brokerage and other assets.   Michael: Love it and just right off the bat, I read one of your books for our Roofstock Academy book club, it was a great read, so I can definitely vouch for it. But what are the books that you've written and then what talk to us about your most recent book?   Garrett: Well, I've written a number of books in the rich dad advisor series, including start your own corporation, that's kind of a foundational one, and then run your own corporation, a lot of my clients and I set up a corporation now what do I do, and you have to run it properly. Then I also did loopholes of real estate, which is kind of the tax and legal strategies for investing in real estate and then the newest book is veil not failed and that deals with the corporate veil, you set up an LLC or a corporation to be protected and too many people do this themselves, Michael, they just set it up online, and they don't realize that there are additional steps you have to take to stay protected and so if you don't want your veil to be pierced where someone can sue the company, there are no assets there. They can go through the veil of the company and get it your personal assets, if you don't want that to happen and that's why you set up an LLC.   Michael: That's the point, yeah…   Garrett: It's that you don't want it to happen. You need to follow these corporate formalities and so that's what the book veil not fail is about kind of stories, horror stories of people who didn't follow the rules and then in the latter part of the book, it shows you how to follow the rules so you can stay protected.   Michael: Yeah, great. and where can people find out if they're interested in picking up a copy?   Garrett: Amazon has it the veil not fail. It was supposed to be out in April, but we have this thing called supply chain problems.   Michael: I've heard of that.   Garrett: Not enough paper out there. So it's not out until November but you can go ahead and preorder it.   Michael: Fantastic. Garrett, let's talk about I think a pretty hotly contested and debated topic in the real estate space and that's LLC versus no LLC, I think and it's tough because we're I'm California based. A lot of our listeners are California based and so to have an LLC in California, you're paying at minimum 800 bucks a year and with today's cash flow based on some real estate investments that can eat in to your investment pretty significantly and so I've heard folks say, you know, forget the LLC, go get umbrella policy, go get high liability limit insurance and call it a day. Don't worry about it. What are some risks pros cons associated with doing that, that you've seen folks run into?   Garrett: You know, there's a whole area of law called Bad Faith litigation, and that's when insurance companies collect the premiums and then find a way not to cover you. All right, the insurance companies have acted in bad faith over the years. errors in collecting the premiums and then having exclusions, that little tiny print that you never read and so, you know, the insurance companies, let's face it, they have an economic incentive to not cover every claim and so they're going to find reasons not to cover you and so I always recommend that people have insurance. That's the first line of defense but these LLCs are the second line of defense, in case the insurance company doesn't cover you, or what about a situation where your insurance is, say 2 million, but the judgment is 4 million, right? I mean, you're personally responsible for that extra 2 million. If the property is in an LLC, they can get what's inside the LLC. But if you've done it, right, if you if your veil is strong, they're not going to be able to reach your personal assets for that extra 2 million. So the idea that you're just going to rely on insurance is, in my opinion, quite naive.   Michael: Yeah. Okay, I love it. I'm of the same opinion. I always, I never like to play my hand, though but I love hearing that because I come from the insurance world. So I know how bad things can go and I also have seen how they're supposed to work. But I think you're totally right, there's totally an economic incentive to not pay claims and the insurance industry as a whole gets kind of wrapped in with the folks that are doing the latter, not the former. So I think it makes a ton of sense. But Garrett talked to me about I've heard this concept, and this idea that, okay, there's this, you can be over insured, there is such a point. Now, if I go get a $10 million umbrella, because I really want to be protected. Does that then put a target on my back for a claim or a plaintiff to say, well, hey, he's got a pretty a pretty massive insurance policy, you know, I was only going to sue him for a million, but let's go after the full 10.   Garrett: Well, I mean, there are a number of factors there. I mean, having enough insurance is not a bad thing. If the claim is a million, it doesn't give the attorney the right to try and collect 10 million, you know, I mean, the claim is a million. So you know, the fact that you have extra insurance isn't a bad thing. The attorneys, you know, what we like to do, what we tell our clients is you want to have enough insurance to cover any claim and so you want to have insurance on the property fire casualty, right? You want to have a personal umbrella policy of insurance covering your home and your autos because I think that's the biggest risk out there is a horrific car wreck, right. Do you need that umbrella policy, a commercial umbrella policy over your various rental properties, maybe I had a part such a policy for a while but here in Reno, it got pretty expensive and so I just have regular insurance on the properties. I have regular insurance for my home and autos and I have an umbrella policy for me personally and so you get in that horrific car wreck. There's enough insurance money for the attorneys to get at. They know how to get at insurance monies, they get a percentage of what they collect and then if everything else is held in LLCs you know you'll have a an LLC if you own a property in Oregon, you have an Oregon LLC on title, you own a property in Utah, you'll have a Utah LLC and tie on title and then those two LLCs are owned by one Wyoming LLC. That's how we like to structure things and the attorneys are going to have a tough time collecting from a Wyoming LLC and so they leave you alone on the LLC. Do you have enough insurance to pay the claim and they'll leave you alone on the LLC is that's how we recommend our clients structure things.   Michael: Okay, and why Wyoming LLC because I know you made a very deliberate point of saying where is formed, what's the point?   Garrett: There are three really good states out there and they compete against each other to be the best which is good for us. Instead of having one federal law that applies to every single state. After the American Revolution, each state wanted their own corporate law and so now we have each state with their own corporate law in Delaware, Wyoming and Nevada compete against each other to be the best. You know, the filing fees every year that come in are pretty good. It helps fund the government. So the reason I like Wyoming over Nevada and Delaware is all three protect the owner of the LLC the charging order is the exclusive remedy and all three, but in Nevada and Delaware the annual fee is $350 a year and in Nevada they list your name on the state website. In Wyoming the annual fee is $62 a year and your name does not show up on the State web site. So Wyoming offers lower cost, better privacy and equal protection. So a lot of our clients set up Wyoming LLCs.   Michael: Yeah, okay, well, I'm sold. So being a California guy, though, this is what I've heard and would love your insights. So I've been told that California they want their piece of the pie. So I've got to register any LLC that I own. In California, because I'm a resident here, I live here, even if it has not doing business, because the way California defines doing business is basically me living here. So if I do I own property in Oregon, I own it with an Oregon LLC, that LLC is owned by the Wyoming LLC, but then I gotta register both of those here in California?   Garrett: No, you raise a very good question. So in our example, we had an Oregon LLC and a Utah LLC and if those were owned by you, as a California resident, we'd have to pay 800, twice, once for Oregon, once for Utah, by having the Wyoming parent there, the Wyoming LLC, and we qualify that one to do business in the State of California. You don't have to pay the 800 for Utah, or Oregon. So that's a way to save the $800 for all the title holding LLCs yes, one of them has to pay right $800 to the state of California and you know, California has gotten a little bit looser, you don't have to pay the 800 the first year, that $800 is a credit on the first $50,000 in profits. So it's not like it's wasted. So, you know, I've had people move from California to Nevada, because of that $800 fee. It's just infuriates people. But there is if you love living in California, there's a way to work it so you have protection, and you don't have to pay $800 for every single LLC you own across the country.   Michael: Okay, fantastic and then in going back to that example, if I've got the I've got to register the Wyoming LLC here in California, do I lose out on any of the anonymity that Wyoming affords me because now it's registered here in California?   Garrett: Yeah, you'd have to list your name in California.   Michael: Okay, all right. Yeah, maybe I will think about moving, who knows? All right, Garrett, in your book, and I want to get really nice here for a minute, because I've got you. You talk about quitclaim deeds versus warranty deeds and I think a lot of our listeners out there have utilized this practice, or have heard about this practice because if you go get a conventional loan from a traditional bank, they won't lend to an LLC. So you go get the name the loan in your name, then transfer the property title to an LLC after the fact, right. In the book, you talk about quitclaim deeds versus a warranty deed, can you give us a little bit of insight into what the difference is and why someone should think about using one versus the other?   Garrett: Well, the warranty deed or the grant deed says, I warrant that I own this property and if I don't, if I transfer it to you, and I don't own it, for some reason, you can sue me. All right. So it's a more powerful deed. The grant deed, the quitclaim deed rather, says, I don't know what I own. But I'm transferring whatever I own to you and the title companies go, well, he quit claimed that property and so that severs the title insurance, right because he didn't know what he had and so we're not going to cover him on it on a quitclaim deed and so and too many people pronounce it quick claim.   Michael: I know, I know.   Garrett: You know, and it's the same deed with a couple of different words in it. But you really always want to use the grant deed or the warranty deed because in many cases, you sever the title insurance, when you use a quitclaim deed, okay, and that's….   Michael: Okay and that's even if you're going from yourself as an individual owner to an LLC that you own 100% of?   Garrett: Right, yeah, just ask for the grant deed. Also, if you're buying property from someone, you want to insist on a grant deed or a warranty deed, because if they don't deliver the title that they've promised they are going to deliver, you have the ability to sue them for failure to perform.   Michael: Okay, super good to know, super good to know, Garrett, as people who are just getting started on their investment journey, I mean, what's the appropriate time to set up an entity because I've heard people say, I'll do it later. I'm too small. It's too expensive. You know, what are your thoughts there?   Garrett: Right at the start, you know, it's just not that expensive. We do not charge a lot of money to set up LLCs for people. It's very affordable. It's a business expense, you get to write it off. But I'll give you an example Michael and I I've told this story 1000 times, but I was in San Francisco at an event and I gave a talk about asset protection and this lady comes up to me and she goes, Well, I'd like to transfer title. I just bought a duplex and I'd like to transfer title into the name of an LLC. I go, that's a great idea. I go in California, it's $800 per year per entity and she goes, oh, I can't afford that and so I'm giving a talk in San Francisco again and she comes up to me and says, I've been sued by a tenant, I'd like to set up that LLC now. Well, it's too late, right? You know, the tenant rented from you, in your individual name, UX, they have a claim against you as an individual, and they can reach all of your personal assets as a result and once you've been sued, or even threatened to be sued, it's too late to set up an LLC. I mean, you can't put a seatbelt on after the accident. Yeah, right. So you really want to set this up right at the start and I've heard CPAs say, oh, well, you know, just set it up when you can and that's bad advice. I mean, you know, the joke I tell is that CPA stands for can't protect assets. It's just, you need to set this stuff up right now.   Michael: Yeah, yeah. Okay. I think it makes a ton of sense and I love the seatbelt analogy. I think that really hits home for a lot of folks. So as someone that's getting more sophisticated with their investing strategy, what like tools or strategies should they be aware of as they're starting to scale up and they're investing?   Garrett: Well, I think having that Wyoming, LLC is the parent holding LLC is a good strategy. We talked about an Oregon LLC and a Utah LLC owned by one Wyoming LLC and that Wyoming LLC is passive. It's not going to hold real estate, it's not going to do business with anyone, because if someone sued the Wyoming LLC, they could get at Wyoming at the Oregon and the Utah LLC. That's what the Wyoming LLC owes. So that Wyoming LLC is passive, it doesn't do business with anyone because we don't ever want it to be sued. All right. So that's a key strategy in protection. Now, if your clients are holding brokerage accounts, right, bank accounts, gold and silver stock brokerage accounts, in their individual name, the same rules apply. If they get sued personally, and they have all these assets at a Charles Schwab account in their individual name, someone can very easily get those and so what we do is we set up an LLC for the paper assets for the bullion and if you get sued, and that horrific car wreck, they're in an LLC, it's much different, much more difficult for an attorney to get at those because the exclusive remedy in Nevada and Wyoming is what's called the charging order and that is a lien on distributions in the state of California if you own an LLC that owns a piece of real estate in California, the law in California is that the car wreck victim can go to court and the judge can say yes, you've been injured, you can set forth the sale of the duplex. All right, and that is not good asset protection. So we like Wyoming and Nevada where the court says, okay, you have a claim. But here's the remedy that we offer in our state, you are entitled to distributions that come through the LLC, you can't barge in and force the sale of the real estate, you have to wait for distributions to come and that's not a good use of the attorneys time. You know, monitoring if distributions are made there on a contingency fee, they get paid when they collect on the insurance monies. So their time is better spent going to the next case that has insurance. So that Wyoming LLC that offers the charging order remedy, not where they can barge in and force the sale of the real estate but where they have to wait and monitor distributions that go to you. It's a much better system for protection than choosing a weak state like California, Utah is a really weak state, New York is weak. So we have to understand which states are strong and weak and structure your plan accordingly.   Michael: Yeah, interesting and Garrett, talking through all this kind of makes me beg the question of in our Utah, Oregon, Wyoming, California LLC example where the Wyoming LLC owns the properties. There is a holding company rather, if the tenant in Oregon falls and Sue's sues the owner. I mean how far Is this go and where is the court date held, how does that all work?   Garrett: Well, if you, if the tenant has is renting from the Oregon LLC, that's or they're in contract with, so the claim would be tenant would sue the Oregon LLC, the lawsuit would take place in Oregon, right? That's where the property is. That's where the tenant fell. The action stays within the Oregon LLC, it doesn't give the tenant a right to go down to the Wyoming LLC, which is the parent, it doesn't give the tenant the right to go over to the Utah LLC. That's a separate business entity. So the key here is that if the tenant sues, you want to get notice of that lawsuit as soon as possible, right, you want to turn over this claim to your insurance company, so that they can assist in settling the case. Too many people, Michael have this idea that if they use a land trust, where no one will ever know who the owner is, and no one will ever serve you is just nonsense because you want to get notice of the lawsuit as soon as possible. In the Land Trust scenario, they say, well, geez, no one will ever find out who the owner is. Well, what happens is they go to court and they say, Look, we tried to sue the land trust, we couldn't find out who the owner was and the court says, okay, well published notice in the newspaper. So they published it little two point type in the newspaper that We're suing the Oregon LLC, or the Oregon Land Trust, rather and you don't get notice of that either. They go back to court and say we tried to serve them, we published notice in the newspaper, and no one ever showed up. The court says default judgment, meaning the tenant has won and then when they're trying to collect, you know, you find out that you've been sued, the insurance company can say, Well, look, you should have had notice of this lawsuit, we could have defended you, but we're not covering you now. You didn't give us the proper notice and so this whole idea of a land trust and privacy is just nonsense. You want to get notice of a lawsuit, so you can turn it over to your insurance company.   Michael: Yeah, that makes no sense. I guess it's kind of like the ostrich approach like if I stick my head in the ground, I don't see it. I don't hear about it. It's not a problem.   Garrett: Yeah, it is a problem.   Michael: Interesting, okay and Garrett talked to us about some of the different entity structures that are out there. Because there's the C Corp, the S Corp, the single member LLC, multi member LLC, like should we as real estate investors be thinking about utilizing some of these different corporate structures or is really the LLC that that kind of 45 of structures.   Garrett: Pretty much the LLC is the way to go, if you're going to hold real estate, you in some cases, the limited partnership can work. If you're syndicating real estate and you want to absolute control, the limited partnership can work, you're not going to hold title to real estate in a C Corp or an S Corp or any other kind of corporation, tax wise, it's just not the best way to go. So the LLC is pretty much I mean, 98% of our formations for real estate are LLCs. The other 2% would be LPS for syndication purposes, or, you know, for estate planning purposes where mom and dad with an LP, the general partners, which would be another LLC can own as little as 2% and have absolute control over the property. So mom and dad through their LLC have 2% ownership, the limited partnership has 98% ownership owned by the kids as limited partners, and the kids can't force mom and dad to sell the property. So there are cases where the limited partnership works but in the vast majority of cases, it's the LLC that is on title to the real estate.   Michael: Okay. Good to know, good to know. I had another question for it and it totally escaped my mind.   Garrett: Well, how about fail not fail the new book?   Michael: Yeah…   Garrett: You know, people have these promoters out there just say that most wrongheaded stuff about LLC. I mean, they say that you don't need an operating agreement- wrong. They say that you never have to issue stocks or timber membership interests certificates- wrong. So you you'd need to treat your LLC, like a corporation whereby you have to follow these formalities. You have to have the annual meeting, right and the idea that you never have to have a meeting is when you get into a court of law, you're in front of a judge or a jury. I want you to have a minute book with the minutes of every yearly meeting in it and these promoters say, well, you never have to have a meeting. I want you to walk into court and tell the jury, yeah, I ran this property for 12 years and never had a meeting. It just doesn't work.   Michael: It's not going to fly.   Garrett: It's not going to fly. So you know, the reality is, when you're in a courtroom, the reality is not when you're in office with a promoter telling you don't have to do anything to maintain your LLC. It's just not accurate. Yeah, so that's why I wrote the book, because there's so much misinformation out there about corporate formalities. So with a corporation, you need to follow the corporate formalities and with an LLC, you need to follow the corporate formalities because someone suing can pierce the corporate veil on a corporation, they can pierce the veil on an LLC. It's very, and the rules are not hard to follow. They're really easy. It's just if you don't follow them, they can go through the LLC and reach your personal assets.   Michael: Yeah no, that's such a great point and also, Garrett, I mean, to that point, if someone listening is thinking about reaching out to an attorney for help with forming for entities or restructuring entities, I mean, what are some questions they should be asking and things they should be looking for, with an attorney that they want to put on their team?   Garrett: Well, does the attorney invest in real estate? I mean, I think that's a good question to ask because, you know, I invest in real estate, I've been through the wars and so it just helps you appreciate what the client is going through to have done that yourself. You know, I think some attorneys specialize in personal injury. In contract cases. I mean, you want someone who really knows the ins and outs of LLCs, and appreciates that we have good states and weak states, and that you have to put the combination together to fully protect the client.   Michael: Yeah, that makes total sense and we're recording this, let's see September 2022, what is like the reasonable cost to form an LLC, and then what are any kind of maintenance fees associated with maintaining the LLC?   Garrett: Well, we charge a flat fee of $795, in that, and then the filing fees are on top of that. So Wyoming, for example, is $100. That 795 includes the registered agent for the first year. So you're not paying any extra for that. We also have a system whereby we keep all your documents and if you have lost your operating agreement, we give you a portal where you can go on and download your documents. So we kind of have this backup service for you and then so you pay the 795, the first year, and then the second year, it's already formed, so everything drops down, you only pay 125 to four, the registered agent. Now we give you a book that shows you how to do the minutes because you really should do the minutes every year and even though we give you the book with the forms in it, a lot of people don't do it. So we offer a service where for $150 a year, we'll make sure that your minutes are done and we want to keep you in good standing, we want you to have those annual meeting minutes in your file, just in case you don't want to be in a courtroom and say I never had a meeting.   Michael: Right, it's too late, then like you said, Garrett, this has been super informative and people want to reach out, continue the conversation, take advantage of your services, what's the best way for them to get in touch?   Garrett: Well, they can go to https://corporatedirect.com/schedule/ and set up a free 15 minute consultation with an incorporating specialist that you'll work with this person all the way through the process and they'll give you a quote for what our services entail and you know, just see if there's a fit, we're happy to talk to you and so we set up entities in all 50 states, maybe you're you set up your entity already, it's an LLC, you don't have an operating agreement, you haven't issued the membership certificates. Don't tell anyone but we can clean it up for you. We also offer a registered agent service in all 50 states. So if you've got one company here, one company there we can be your one company to serve as the registered agent in all 50 states. So we'd be happy to help your listeners Michael and you know, have them call corporate direct or go, go visit the website, corporatedirect.com and there's plenty of information and articles there and kind of tells you what we do.   Michael: Amazing. Well, Garrett, thank you so much for that. One final question before I let you out of here. We've said the term a couple times. But for anyone who maybe isn't familiar, can you bring them up to speed on what a Registered Agent is and what the importance is?   Garrett: Well, the Registered Agent is someone in the state where you set up the entity or where you're qualified to do business and the idea is that instead of having someone who's trying to sue you search all over the state of Texas for you, right? The Registered Agent is an address where someone suing, you can go and serve the registered agent with service of process. So it's just it's kind of an efficient way for the justice system to work. It's one place where you can serve an LLC or a corporation, and then they're responsible for forwarding that on to you and so you want to use a reputable registered agent service that knows the importance of a lawsuit, if we get a notice of a service, we're on the phone immediately to our client, because you've only got 30 days to get an attorney and answer that complaint. So you don't want a mom and pop that is going to go out of business or doesn't appreciate the consequences of being served with a lawsuit. So it's an important function and if you fail to pay the Registered Agent, they're going to refuse service a process and then they're, you know, the person suing us is going to go back to court and get, you know, authorization to publish notice in the newspaper, and again, you're not going to get noticed to this cert of the claim. So you want to have that registered agent on your team at all times.   Michael: Yeah, yeah, super great point and the Justice Department looking for efficiencies. That's not something I maybe I've ever heard before. So really exciting stuff.   Garrett: It's something that does exists, so…   Michael: Oh, Garrett, thank you. Again, this was super informative, and I definitely would love to have you back on once your book comes out in November.   Garrett: That sounds great. Thanks, Michael.   Michael: You got it, take care. We'll chat soon.   Garrett: All right.   Michael: All right, everyone, and that was our episode a big thank you to Garrett for coming on. Definitely take advantage of that. 15 minute free consult if you're interested. As always, if you liked the episode, feel free to leave us a rating or review. We'd love to hear from you all and we look forward to seeing on the next one. Happy investing…

Announcement: I have a new show called “Crypto This Week.” It's a weekly, five-minute news comedy satire focused on the world of crypto. Check it out on YouTube here: Crypto This Week with Richard YanGuests:Kain Warwick (twitter.com/kaiynne)Edmund Schuster (twitter.com/Edmund_Schuster)Host:Richard Yan (twitter.com/gentso09)Today's motion is “DAOs are better than corporations.”Crudely speaking, DAOs are chat rooms with a joint bank account. More sophisticated DAOs code up treasury management decisions to be dictated by the outcomes of on-chain community voting. DAOs generally operate with a culture of maximal, real-time transparency. And there are very restrictive rules about what the governing body of DAOs can do.As DAOs gain popularity, we are increasingly seeing claims of how DAOs are superior to the corporate form. In the summer of 2021, the state of Wyoming even passed a DAO-related law that will provide liability protection for DAO members who organize as a Wyoming LLC.But are DAOs truly revolutionary forms of governance as they're made out to be? This remains up to debate.Our two guests today are the founder of a major DeFi protocol and a returning guest in the form of a law professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science. It was a great debate, I hope you will enjoy it as much as I hosted it.If you're into crypto and like to hear two sides of the story, be sure to also check out our previous episodes. We've featured some of the best known thinkers in the crypto space.If you would like to debate or want to nominate someone, please DM me at @blockdebate on Twitter.Please note that nothing in our podcast should be construed as financial advice.Source of select items discussed in the debate (and supplemental material):DAOs related to Synthetix: https://decrypt.co/37011/synthetix-is-now-controlled-by-three-daosEdmund Schuster's paper on smart contracts: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3476678Wyoming DAO law: https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2021/04/22/state-lawmaker-explains-wyomings-newly-passed-dao-llc-law/Guest bios:Kain Warwick is the founder of Synthetix, a protocol for trading synthetic tokens that wrap non-crypto assets such as currencies and stocks. Before Synthetix, Kain founded Blueshyft, a cash payment gateway for online services in Australia. In July, Kain published an article called “DAO First Capital Formation” where he advocated DAOs as a powerful mechanism for fundraising of new crypto startups.Edmund Schuster is an Associate Professor of corporate law at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on corporate law, law and finance, takeover regulation, as well as the economic analysis of law. In October 2019, he published the paper “Cloud Crypto Land” that discusses inherent obstacles in the legal system that prevent blockchain systems and smart contracts from being truly useful. He is a self-declared no-coiner.

Thinking of opening a Wyoming LLC?  In today's episode, we're going to dive into them!  Mark Pierce is an attorney, an accountant, and the owner of Cloud Peak Law.  With over r decades of experience, Pierce has truly seen it all, at least from a legal perspective.  This is apparent from the diversity of fields in which he has assisted clients over the years.  Those fields range from bankruptcy in a state plan, oil and gas, and securities.  Beyond law, Pierce has flexed his entrepreneurial muscles scaling a transportation company from $3.2 million in gross revenues to over $11.6 over just a six-year window.  He has also assisted in developing and managing a software company from its startup phase in 1986 to the acquisition of over $50 million in sales by 1999.[00:01 - 04:19] Opening SegmentLet's get to know today's guest, Mark PierceA diverse background in business and lawMark shares how he disliked accounting, getting into law school and real estate[04:20 - 11:29] Beginning a Wyoming LLCBenefits of a new LLC in Wyoming A Preview of Beginning a Wyoming LLCTennesse Law versus Wyoming LawWhat to do when you end up with an incompatible partner[11:30 - 20:27] Asset Protection with Wyoming LLCThe Privacy Side of BusinessYou have a right to privacy but... All about asset protectionAdvice for Mark's clients [20:28 - 24:12] Final Four SegmentWhat Mark would invest in with only $20,000 Find somebody who knows real estateHow Mark would help in a real estate mistakeAvoid anything that looks floppyMark's way to make the world a better placeProvide the right product for every priceReach out to our guest - see links below Final wordsTweetable Quotes“You may be able to do something in Tennesse, but you can't do it in Wyoming.” - Mark Pierce“You are not required to disclose everything you do day to day to everyone out on the streets.” - Mark Pierce“You should know who you're doing business with.” - Mark Pierce-----------------------------------------------------------------------------Connect with Mark Pierce through mpierce@cloudpeaklaw.com and LinkedIn.  Visit the following links https://wyomingllcattorney.com/ and Real Estate Holdings to ensure you get the right protection and services you deserve.Connect with me:I love helping others place money outside of traditional investments that both diversify a strategy and provide solid predictable returns.  FacebookLinkedInLike, subscribe, and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or whatever platform you listen on.  Thank you for tuning in!Email me → sam@brickeninvestmentgroup.com 

Thinking of opening a Wyoming LLC? In today's episode, we're going to dive into them! Mark Pierce is an attorney, an accountant, and the owner of Cloud Peak Law. With over r decades of experience, Pierce has truly seen it all, at least from a legal perspective. This is apparent from the diversity of fields in which he has assisted clients over the years. Those fields range from bankruptcy in a state plan, oil and gas, and securities. Beyond law, Pierce has flexed his entrepreneurial muscles scaling a transportation company from $3.2 million in gross revenues to over $11.6 over just a six-year window. He has also assisted in developing and managing a software company from its startup phase in 1986 to the acquisition of over $50 million in sales by 1999.[00:01 - 04:19] Opening SegmentLet's get to know today's guest, Mark PierceA diverse background in business and lawMark shares how he disliked accounting, getting into law school and real estate[04:20 - 11:29] Beginning a Wyoming LLCBenefits of a new LLC in Wyoming A Preview of Beginning a Wyoming LLCTennesse Law versus Wyoming LawWhat to do when you end up with an incompatible partner[11:30 - 20:27] Asset Protection with Wyoming LLCThe Privacy Side of BusinessYou have a right to privacy but... All about asset protectionAdvice for Mark's clients [20:28 - 24:12] Final Four SegmentTweetable Quotes“You may be able to do something in Tennesse, but you can't do it in Wyoming.” - Mark Pierce“You are not required to disclose everything you do day to day to everyone out on the streets.” - Mark Pierce“You should know who you're doing business with.” - Mark Pierce-----------------------------------------------------------------------------Connect with Mark Pierce through mpierce@cloudpeaklaw.com and LinkedIn. Visit the following links https://wyomingllcattorney.com/ and Real Estate Holdings to ensure you get the right protection and services you deserve.Connect with me:I love helping others place money outside of traditional investments that both diversify a strategy and provide solid predictable returns. FacebookLinkedInLike, subscribe, and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or whatever platform you listen on. Thank you for tuning in!Email me → sam@brickeninvestmentgroup.com

Jonathan Feniak helps business owners to determine if wyoming based holding companies and other risk management techniques are appropriate. To connect with Mr. Feniak please visit his website at www.wyomingllcattorney.com. As always to discuss anything that is keeping you up at night, email david@parallelfinancial.com

What are the legal aspects of forming your LLC when investing in commercial real estate? We are talking with Garrett Sutton, a corporate attorney, asset protection expert and best selling author who has sold more than 900,000 books to guide entrepreneurs and investors. You can read this entire interview here: https://montecarlorei.com/llc-strategies-to-protect-your-real-estate-assets/ How should a real estate investor organize their LLC’s for best protection? We like having an LLC set up in the state where the property is located. If you buy a property in Oregon, we set up an Oregon LLC to be on title to the Oregon property. And in all 50 states if a tenant sues, or the law where the property is located is going to apply, if we have a number of LLC’s and we want to protect against the outside attack, that tenant suing is the inside attack, they have a claim directly against the LLC that holds the real estate, the outside attack is you get in a car wreck. It has nothing to do with the real estate but your insurance doesn’t cover the claim. And in that case, we like Wyoming and Nevada to own the Oregon LLC. If you have a property in Utah, we’d have an Utah LLC. Let’s dive into all of the documentation that you guys will be sending us after an LLC is formed. We submit the Articles of Organization to the state. It’s a very short form because this one document is a matter of public record. Anybody can look it up and see what’s on it. We don’t want to put too much information on that. Then behind that public document, you’re going to have the Operating Agreement, which is the roadmap for how you’re going to operate the LLC. Who are the members of the LLC? What percentages do they own? When are we going to have meetings? Can we have telephonic meetings? The Certificate of Formation comes back from the state saying, Yes, you’re formed, and the filing. The EIN stands for Employer Identification Number. That’s like a social security number for your business. We also have minutes of the first meeting. The membership certificate is like a stock certificate. How does an investor pays himself with an LLC? If you have real estate, and you’re just holding and receiving income from real estate, and we consider it passive, then the money would flow from the LLC to you as a distribution and you’re going to owe tax on that as well. You’d write a check from the LLC, to you personally and then you would cash that check and put it into your personal bank account. So we’d have money coming into the LLC from rents, let’s say you own a duplex, the rents come into the LLC, you pay all the expenses at the LLC level, and then you make a distribution from the LLC to yourself. What else is important for our audience to know? 1. Every year you have to pay a fee to the state, like we mentioned, Wyoming is $50 a year. 2. You have to have a Registered Agent in the state where you’ve set up the LLC and a state where you’ve qualified to do business, like a Wyoming LLC qualified in California, you’d have to have a Registered Agent in Wyoming and California in that case. 3. You need to have the separate bank account, as we mentioned, you can’t co-mingle funds. 4. You need to do the minutes every year. 5. You need to make sure that on all documentation, you’re using XYZ LLC and you’re signing as manager, not as a personal owner of the property. Garrett Sutton (800) 600-1760 www.corporatedirect.com Join our newsletter here: www.montecarlorei.com --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/best-commercial-retail-real-estate-investing-advice-ever/support

Privacy and anonymity are cornerstones of an asset protection plan. Filing your own annual reports for your Wyoming LLC will publish your name on the interwebs. Schedule a free, quick call to talk about your asset protection strategy. https://livemorecarefree.com

Vincenzo Villamena is the founder and CEO of https://onlinetaxman.com/ (Online Taxman), a U.S. tax accounting firm that provides hassle-free U.S. tax preparation services online to expats and international entrepreneurs. He also founded https://globalexpatadvisors.com/schedule-consultation-ea/ (Global Expat Advisors), a sister company that specializes in global structuring and offshoring solutions.  Prior to starting his own firms, he served as a partner at 4 Corners Inc., where he advised high net worth individuals in private equity investing and tax matters. He also worked in audit, tax and valuation at PricewaterhouseCoopers, involved in Fortune 100 audit engagements and M&A transactions and has a Masters of Accounting and Bachelors of Business Administration. This episode with Vincenzo is a must listen to, especially if you are an American Expat. All other country expats, you need to listen too.   What's Covered In This EpisodeYou will never look at doing your taxes by yourself again. Vincenzo and Mikkel discuss things like: Expats living overseas - what they need to do Why it's important to choose a specialist Myths that people believe about who needs to file their taxes and how much money they make before filing (you're going to LOVE this one) Who has to file Can you skimp on your tax accountant? What's the downside of not filing properly Cryptocurrency Capital gains and so much more!! Mikkel and Vincenzo discuss horror stories. That darn IRS!! Then the discussion turned to corporate structures. Fascinating! Have you ever wondered if you should have an https://www.escapeartist.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-going-offshore/ (offshore bank account?) and if so, where is the best country to do it in? a Wyoming LLC? what the benefits are? Then this is the episode for you.   NOTICE TO ALL ENTREPRENEURS!!Do you spend most of your day concentrating on the offence? How can I market more? How can I get more customers? More revenue? Vincenzo suggests concentrating on the defence. The discussion then turned to Puerto Rico and the decision was made to do another podcast episode just on Puerto Rico and Act 20/22. We are also going to write some articles about Act 20/22 for American Citizens.   How to Contact Vincenzo VillamenaAs listeners of the Expat Money Show and readers from https://www.escapeartist.com/ (Escape Artist), we're working with Vincenzo to offer you a discounted consultation. You can reach Vincenzo at https://globalexpatadvisors.com/schedule-consultation-ea/ (Global Expat Advisors)   Related Articles & Podcast EpisodesIn https://expatmoneyshow.com/episodes/ep-082-shlomo-freund-financial-freedom-for-expats/ (Episode 082: Shlomo Freund talks about Financial Freedom for Expats) or https://expatmoneyshow.com/episodes/joel-nagel-how-to-protect-your-assets-offshore-markets/ (Joel Nagel in Episode 063: How to Protect Your Assets so No-One Would ever Dare to Sue You)   Final ThoughtsThis was such an amazing interview with Vincenzo. I learned a ton, so much so that as promised above, we're going to get him back on the podcast to just talk about Puerto Rico and Act 20/22. There is so much great information for all expats, regardless of where your country of birth is. If you would like to stay up to date with all new content that comes out at https://expatmoneyshow.com/subscribe/ (The Expat Money Show) make sure you sign up below for our newsletter; EMS Pulse. – My behind the scene daily correspondence where I give you all the intel as I travel the world and build my business, develop key relationships and invest in non-traditional investments overseas (very profitably I might add!) Support this podcast

This week’s episode of The Crushing Debt Podcast is for our real estate investor listeners. I interview bankruptcy lawyer, asset protection lawyer, and CPA Mark Pierce about asset protection. Mark is a Wyoming attorney who uses Wyoming LLC laws, and asset protection trusts to help his clients avoid liability.  Specifically, we talk about: Advantages and disadvantages to form your LLC in your home state or Wyoming; Wyoming Asset Protection Trust v. Land Trust; Lending and Insurance aspects of the Wyoming Asset Protection Trust; Series LLC; and more. Please contact Mark at MPierce@cloudpeaklaw.com or www.WyomingLLCAttorney.com.  Please also contact our sponsor, Attorneys First Insurance, if you are an attorney or title company interested in malpractice insurance. If you have investment questions for me, you can reach me at Shawn@YesnerLaw.com or www.YesnerLaw.com 

Today's Flash Back Friday comes from Episode 947, originally published in January 2018. Jason Hartman wanted to make sure that the practice of asset protection is understood by every investor, because it can make or break your portfolio if done wrong. As such, he invited Rich Dad Advisor Garrett Sutton back on the show for a long, in-depth interview. We'll finish it up tomorrow with the second half, but today the two discuss the inside/outside attack on LLCs, discuss which states have weak and strong LLC protections, and how to protect your properties properly. Key Takeaways: [4:26] The impact of controlling the money [7:58] How music has impacted societies around the world [10:43] Want to go to the Icehotel in Sweden with Jason? [13:11] The inside attack versus the outside attack [16:54] California has the weakest asset protection laws in the union [19:00] Why Wyoming LLCs can protect your other LLCs better than any other state [23:34] If you have your state LLC inside a Wyoming LLC domesticated in your state, which state rules apply? [25:44] Why is it called an "Armor 8" strategy and when is it a good choice? [30:37] How the Wyoming LLC provided a win for a car wreck causer Website: Get Garrett Sutton's Slides here

Today's Flash Back Friday comes from Episode 947, originally published in January 2018. Jason Hartman wanted to make sure that the practice of asset protection is understood by every investor, because it can make or break your portfolio if done wrong. As such, he invited Rich Dad Advisor Garrett Sutton back on the show for a long, in-depth interview. We'll finish it up tomorrow with the second half, but today the two discuss the inside/outside attack on LLCs, discuss which states have weak and strong LLC protections, and how to protect your properties properly. Key Takeaways: [4:26] The impact of controlling the money [7:58] How music has impacted societies around the world [10:43] Want to go to the Icehotel in Sweden with Jason? [13:11] The inside attack versus the outside attack [16:54] California has the weakest asset protection laws in the union [19:00] Why Wyoming LLCs can protect your other LLCs better than any other state [23:34] If you have your state LLC inside a Wyoming LLC domesticated in your state, which state rules apply? [25:44] Why is it called an "Armor 8" strategy and when is it a good choice? [30:37] How the Wyoming LLC provided a win for a car wreck causer Website: Get Garrett Sutton's Slides here

Ep#2 From Selling Books to Flipping Apartments with Vinney Chopra   Achieve Wealth Vinney Chopra  Title : From Selling books to Flipping Apartments with Vinney Chopra     James: Hi, audience, welcome to Achieve Wealth Podcast and my name is James [00:12unintelligible] today, we're going to be talking to Vinney Chopra who has been in many podcast that most of you have heard, but I strive to make my podcast different from everybody else. I'm going to be asking different questions.    But at a high level, Vinney Chopra has done more than 200 million multifamily portfolios, you know more than 3,100 apartments under management. He spent a lot of money on his internet education, it's been more than 37 years and he's also a motivational speaker with more than 10,000 speeches given. He's an investor, educated motivator and well known for his smiles, welcome to the show. Hey Vinney, welcome to the show.    Vinney: Thank you, thank you so much, James.     James: [01:00crosstalk] something on your introduction, you can continue giving your part of the production.     Vinney: Oh, totally; no you did a fine job. I came from India with seven dollars, some of the friends know me and I'm a mechanical engineer and sold books, encyclopedias, just to let your audience know and also, I became a promotional speaker.   We've been investing in single-family homes, James, for over 35 years and just found out that a single family is not going to get us where we wanted to go. As a family with two children and my wife and I, we moved to California near San Francisco. A lot of people talk about real estate here somehow, you know, and of course, the houses have gone in value, a rental property is beyond, have gone in value.    Then I got stuck; I became like, you know broken in 2004 in California. And at that time, I had to make a decision, do I sell single-family homes and make money that way or do I do something different? And I wanted to do something different so that's when the world of syndication hit me and multifamily and I've never looked back; it's been an exciting journey.     James: Good. Well, you are like me, I started single-family. I'm an electrical engineer, I came into the US, somewhere in 2008 and we were here before that but 2008 was when we fully relocated here. It's basically a mind-blowing thing on how much you can achieve in the US.    Vinney: Yes. Yes.     James: So question for you; when you came with six dollars or seven dollars in your pocket, did you come in as an engineer or did you come in as a student or how did you come up?     Vinney: You know, I came as an engineer. I was working for Larsen Toubro so actually I resigned there so I had just the qualification of a mechanical engineer, but then I came here to go to George Washington University as a student of MBA in marketing.    James: Okay.    Vinney: Yeah.     James: I did my MBA too but I did it before I came to the US. So question for you; when you're a single family, I mean, I have my own perception about single-family and multifamily, but why not you tell me what is the difference that pushed you from single-family to multifamily? What was that point?     Vinney: You know, the big thing was, we were owning every money. I have the amount, you know saving Streamwood will go ahead go to Arizona go to this place that place buy you know, single-family homes, 450,000, 180,000 like that and then lease them. Actually, we used to do the master lease in that one with the option to sell, the option to buy actually, back then and we'll get a little bit higher down payment from the residents, but then they started looking into staying in our home as if they're going to buy it in two years, by fixing their credit and things like that.     But what I found was that a lot of these buyers were not able to buy after 2 years, first of all, so the property was still in my lap. And then we were living in California so it was quite tough to manage them so 10%, 8% of the rental was going into the management companies anyway who were living there. Then I was able to do my own contractors and everything because they would charge me too much money so I try to make contractors and keeping them in my iPhone and if they tell me there is something needed in their apartment like in Arizona or in Georgia or in Texas,  I'll go ahead and send my own contractors and make deals with them.     So it kind of involved me more than I wanted to and yet at the same token when the boiler went out, James or something went out, it was total cash flow gone, you know the whole end of the year you work hard a little bit, but then at the end, nothing happened. So that's why multifamily made sense to me; like in 2004, where if I buy 20 units and if one person leaves, I still have 19 intact there or two people leave, we have 18 intact economies of scale all that stuff.     James: Yeah, so I think just to clarify some things that we may have touched; the lease option is basically an option to buy when you get a single family and basically it's a very good model single-family rental because now the tenant could have a higher down payment and they are taking care of the house like their own house, because they think that they're going to be owning it in two years and for us, we think that they're going to take care of this in two years, but sometimes it doesn't work that way [05:54crosstalk] single family I think, you are talking. A lot of times, you make a lot more money in single-family in terms of cash on cash return if you buy it right out, I would say, right?[06:06inaudible] you can have a big cap X and wipe out your entire cash flow and I see the big money you make in single family or the more stabilized cash flow you make is when people are staying there for long term.     Vinney: Yes. Yes.    James: [06:21unintelligible] two years, four years that they don't disturb you anymore, then you start making money [06:24unintelligible] in one, two years, you are not going to be making any money in a single-family.     Vinney: Yes, that's so true James.     James: Yeah, but one thing I realized is I try to do the lease option in Texas and I realized in Texas, they have some kind of six months restriction or they just don't allow lease options in Texas.    Vinney: Oh, I see I see, I didn't there. Yeah, I didn't. That's really good information over there. So let's go to multifamily; I mean, why did you choose this asset class? I mean I try to make this podcast independent of asset class because, for me, any asset class goes in cycles so why did you choose multifamily?     Vinney: Very good point, you know, I think being an engineer and you are also an electrical engineer, we have a logical mind, right? So when people told me that you know, hey, do you want to go into office space? I started learning about office space, and I said, okay, what are the factors that will really affect that office space if the business leaves or their business goes down and they have a five-year lease? Then, of course, you know if they don't pay your rent, I mean, they can't pay rent if the business is going down and things like that, kind of made me realize that I'm stuck with that resident or that tenant, I should say in the commercial lease that I'm thinking. And then we looked at Hospitality again the hotels and all that. I looked at in the industrial but something which really made sense to me was multifamily apartments.    Because in apartments my paycheck was not based on one tenant, that was the biggest thing which kind of logically made sense to me. That I had 100 tenants in 100 unit; my first one was only 14 units as many of you people know and 14 units, next one was 109 units, right away and it just made sense, logically. Even if we have two three four people leave, it doesn't matter because we have so many others, you know to take care of the residents and take care of the mortgage and expenses and everything.     The other factor, James, was also the value-add function, that was a huge factor. The value-add was amazing because you are able to do forced appreciation, is the word we use now, in multifamily as compared to like leasing a building for 10 years or five years, five years plus, five-year clause with a small appreciation; you can only do so much.  So the numbers don't really work that high with IRR and the return on investment. I find with the multifamily by increasing the rent and increasing the NOI, decreasing the expenses, you're able to bring the value of the multifamily much higher than a commercial building I could make so those things kind of made sense to me.    James: So one of the challenges in multifamily is, I mean as many income streams, you can see rate but one of the challenges in multifamily that I've seen and a lot of operators have seen is basically a property management. Because now, I mean compared to office, office is you know, that's high vacancy and all that but you're dealing with professional tenants [09:58unintelligible] here, you're dealing with class B and C, I'm sure that's a focus that you are looking at as well. So how did you solve that property management problem? Because that's a big problem.    Vinney: You know, it is a huge problem, James. You are 100 percent, right and your audience would really like to look into this one because we did hire, by the way, a well-established company out of Dallas when we bought in Midland, Odessa areas there; the nearest one was Dallas and they did a fine job, by the way, they did a fine job.    The only trouble was that we were not really getting hold of the situation of cash flow because they were doing cash and accrual together and that can mess you up very badly because what they are saying then is, at the end of the month we say, "Oh, how much cash did we make?" They said: "We made this much, oh, by the way, you can't touch it. You cannot touch it because we have so many bills from this month, we need to pay yet." They're going to come next month so they keep 10,000 per month in the balance and give us this small to give to the investors, I mean that was really, really sad.    So anyway, the other thing was, they were spending money like nobody's business because it's not their money anyway. Every dime, everything was being charged, which I can understand; every travel, everything. I mean, they bought something for the thing, they charged it, right? So that's when my partner and I decided: "Oh my gosh! We're not gonna do it."    So we hired a professional consultant who had great Property Management skills and she was also teaching; also, by the way, we paid her 35,000 at top, 35 or 30 thousand. We always believed in paying the money to learn from the very best people; that's what happened with me with Trowbridge, with Kim Taylor our syndication attorney who's done 26 syndications, 27th now; my big fund, 50 million dollar fund, they have done that too.     But the thing is I believe to get from the master, learn from them quickly and then apply just quickly apply that you know. That's what we did; we started our own management company and we have never looked back.  Of course the hiring and keeping the morale up, I would say, having the challenging issues.    James: When HR issues, right? So now [12:38inaudible]    Vinney: Exactly; we didn't have it before, we have an accounting department, big one, accounts payable department right here. Then we now have with Moneill Investment Group, Moneill Management Group, we have a full HR person full-time, benefit person and payroll in a consultant.    James: How many staff do you have in your [13:03inaudible]    Vinney: We have 67 full-time staff right now, we are thinking to hire more so if we're going to go higher and then of course as we sell, we just sold two properties. I'm so happy because we had some pretty big paydays, you know last few times, you know, and so we are selling some assets but we are looking to buy more too.     James: So how's the structure of your property management? So you say you have 67 staff, do you have a CEO for your property management?    Vinney: I'm the CEO of the company, but then I have asset managers or team leaders, we call them, asset manager or team leaders and then there are Community managers at each property. Like we own 10; we owned eight now over there in the [13:53crosstalk] yeah, they are Community Manager or Property Manager.  We don't use the word property manager, we use the word community and we never say apartment complex, we always say community, Moneill communities.     James: Oh, that's good.     Vinney: Yeah. Moneill Premier Communities; that's how we promote ourselves.     James: Yeah, and we call our tenants, residents right?    Vinney: We always call our tenants residents; residents lifestyle of the Moneill communities that kind of thing. We bring cafes, we bring dog parks, we bring a lot of great stuff, media centers. Every time when we buy an asset, I put 10,000 easy into the restructuring of the leasing office, you know, and buy brand-new computers, brand-new everything, brand new desks, all that because it just says a lot to the residents; that a new company is taking over and they are not slumming it, you know, they're going to invest in to the property.    James: You don't have Regional Managers; you have Asset Managers and you have Community Managers.    Vinney: We do; every property has Community Manager then Assistant Community Manager or leasing agent, we call it slash leasing agent, plus lead maintenance that will be the lead tech and then the fourth employee or team member at that property is called porter or helper.    James: Who does the Community Manager report to?  Vinney: The Community Manager reports to the Asset Manager; team leader or asset manager.     James: You are doing exactly like what we do; we spend a lot of the office and our office looks really nice, new computer, we take care of our staffs and all that. So among the amenities that you have installed, you have 3,100 units, which community do you think is the most appealing to class B and C residents?     Vinney: Okay, good point. You know we made a lot of money in Midland Texas, by the way. We were making 45 thousand dollars net-net every month, literally so that is a Premier Community Cornerstone; we sold it, by the way, now and we gave our investors 40 percent IRR, 40 percent returns per year for years and three months in a row.    James: No, no my question really, is the community; is it the dog park is better [16:29 crosstalk]    Vinney: Oh, I see.    James: The community that you think is the most valued by Class B and C [16:36crosstalk]     Vinney: I would say you can get good mileage, I'm so glad you said it, curb appeal. I would say definitely flagpoles; I buy these flagpoles from Georgia, these are 30 feet high. Flagpoles, not just 20 feet slim ones, I pay $700 per flagpole, but they make a statement. I mean people going [00:17:00unintelligible] by the road, they look at it, they say, "Oh my god! Wow! How beautiful it's like and four of them." I always put four, I never put two. And then I buy the biggest flags like, 8X4 or whatever they are so they fly high and we change the flags also every 3 to 4 months; we have different colors, things like that. So curb appeal is big in my thing, right?     The second thing we do is definitely get the restructure or do new flooring if you need to, for the resident Center or office, the leasing office because that needs to really show class; class is important and then, of course, the furniture, right? For the residents Media Center, I go to Del company dell.com. I have a business account and I buy for $483 all-in-one, 24-inch, these big monitors, which is already included with that CPU and also $483, beautiful. And then I buy desks, very beautiful ones, you know, I may send some pictures to you and that way, it gets also the residents can use that anytime. Keurig machines, always Keurig machines, K-Cups, cookies, an ice chest, you know, all that so that you know, that is big but then dog parks, let's talk about that.    Some people have talked about dog wash, I have not instituted that at all yet, but dog parks, yes. We are very cheap, $99; $99, you could buy these beautiful dog waste green, whatever the stations we call them and we put them six seven eight of them all around the community right away, that's shows.   And then also I am very big in bind sign. It's been big in signs and the best things to get it is actually from Amazon. I'm buying my products from Amazon like crazy. I have, you know, like set up each of my properties even the lights fixtures, I'm finding them 40% cheaper on Amazon compared to [19:29unintelligible] supply, HD Supply.     James: Correct. Correct.     Vinney: It's amazing.     James: So what about in the miscellaneous income right? So in your miscellaneous income, you have your covered [19:40unintelligible]     Vinney: Yes.    James: I know what other things like insurance and all that, which miscellaneous income gives you the most bang for the buck?    Vinney: Okay, the number one, which I do it right away from the get-go, is the utility reimbursement, utility reimbursement drop systems is my number one priority and I go to the hilt. I try to get to the maximum; 90% collections of my bill after water, trash, pest control, and gas all that Because electricity is given to the residents, individually meter, but then I'm very big in also looking at our vacant units electricity bill, how much are they and outside lighting. If the sensors are not working, I buy the sensors right away because we don't want the outside exterior light to be burning 24 hours, they need only come to on dawn and dusk so that's a huge part.   You were asking me some things about what other facilities, playground. Playgrounds are great.    James: What about the washer-dryer income, do you tend to buy washers and dryers?    Vinney: Oh, big time; I have written most of my properties brand new contracts if they are expired. I get paid about six to seven thousand dollars as a sign-up bonus. At Cornerstone, I got 35,000 sign up bonus, by the way, for bringing cable inside my community. So I gave to this local company my contract for cable for all the residents and they gave me 35,000 bonus and I've done that several other places also.    Now in New Houston, I have one property, we charge $20 per resident for cable; it's all central and then we pay, I think we make about half of that is profit, by the way. But I love the coin Max new machines, which are the card reader machines; card reader, no more coins. So whenever you actually get in to buy a new property, you talk to the rep of that Community, even though they have already five more years or ten more years still coin max lease is there but you could ask them to change the machines and make the laundry, we call it clothing Care Center or like that nice fancy name or laundry, clothing center.    James: Under a contract, they allow you to change?    Vinney: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, you say: "Oh my God! These machines are no good, they are breaking down."    James: What if I tried to terminate the whole contract first?    Vinney: Well, I don't think you can terminate, they have strict laws and all that but they would love to help you and work with you. That's what I did, by the way, and they will help you paint and all floating also, I use some of the money from them to do that. Like the property I just sold [23:04unintelligible] Nasa; very nice property, beautiful gardens everything and the seller put in 3.6 million into it, renovating it when I bought it. But the laundry facilities, both of them were like shambles, totally shambles so I took up on that and got brand new machines, brand new everything so it was nice.     James: What about the interior rehab; usually, what's your budget and what do you think is the mix the most bang for the buck?    Vinney: Okay, I would say the fixtures; see the thing is like I find of course counter-tops, kitchen counter-tops and the bathrooms many of the bathrooms, I even changed them put the one single shell in there or some times I even do the tiling, depending on the community.    James: Are you talking about the back-splash?    Vinney: Back-splash tiles in the bathrooms also; that works pretty well. And you can buy these really cool ones which look like you have put like 20 different tiles, but they're in a mesh so you just put it in there and put grout in there and it' quickly done; it's amazing and it's beautiful.    James: And it comes in square sizes, right?    Vinney: Exactly. But we do try to do the light fixtures; that's a big one in the bathroom like in some of my nicer communities, we are putting these lights, LED lights, like when the water comes out, the lights come. And then switches, it's very cheap; you could buy these switches and then put USB in there, that's all.     James: I actually think I should try this; how much does it cost the switch with the..?    Vinney: Not that bad you go for bulk; I always put Google; whatever I want, I put Google and try to save your Amazon Beats somewhere else and I buy them 200-250. Sometimes even the Chinese; oh my gosh! I came across a supplier in Atlanta, they've got a big warehouse and they can sell what I can buy at Home Depot for whatever, 1495, they gave me for 695, oh my gosh! So every dollar saved is a dollar earned.   I tell my teams, I tell my community managers, I taught them now. I said you got to get three bids and then after you find out and you want that company to do it, ask them for 18% off again on top of it. James, most of the time, I get that 18 to 23 percent odd number; it has to be an odd number. I tried it nine years back and ever since I've been doing it and it's so important that you tell them: "Hey, I really appreciate you, I like your work, everything but our budget does not have that." Bring it back to the budget and then they would love to do it because they have these full-time employees and if they don't have a job, shew!    James: I mean when you have a big amount of a number of units, they are willing to really work with you so that's really good.     Vinney: They really do, they really do, exactly.     James: So you use vinyl flooring, I would say?    Vinney: Yeah, we do faux, those are really great; you can cut them, you could put them, they are very durable and some of them, I think we work with several different vendors and they give us really good things. Please, also some of your audience, if you are looking at me or seeing, please ask your district manager to give you some of their remaining flooring in the warehouse; they will deep discount them.    James: Oh, really?    Vinney: I don't mind.     James: Why not?    Vinney: No, I mean, we did it in some of my renovation deals just recently. They said: "Vinney, okay, we'll sell you at half the price."   I said: "I'm fine, sure."    James: Do you sell vinyl plank or do you do vinyl roll?    Vinney: Okay, vinyl plank also and rolls also, we do both.     James: Okay, depends on whoever gives the cheaper, right?     Vinney: Yeah and depends on if it's a 'B' asset in a nice area that way.    James: What about advertising? What do you think is the most effective advertising [27:42unintelligible]      Vinney: I am so glad you're asking me, James.     James: I know the details, right?   Vinney: You do, you know, you are a great performer, I can tell already, you know. See the thing is, 81 percent of the residents when they are looking into moving into a community, they Google search. When you Google search apartment in Angleton, for example, Texas where my assets are and other places, you will come to my property first; wow! Why? Because apartments.com has 81 percent of the market and I actually, worked with them and they gave me a discount of $150 per month to get all the assets as a bulk so I tried to do that. It's good to do master businesses and you know preferred vendors we call them.     James: Okay, so use apartments.com or?    Vinney: Apartments.com, our own website, Craigslist, we do everything; oh, yeah, all three.    James: Do you do Google AdWords?    Vinney: OK, Google AdWords; we haven't done that much because what we find is that, most of the time people are able to drive-by; I'm very big on drive-by that's why I buy those flag poles and everything and then we do Master canvassing the business. So we give 5 percent off and I would love to send you some--you know, my daughter actually Monica is very much involved in our business now and she is the graphic genius and she's actually taking care of all my CEO responsibilities, I love that. But the best thing is that she designs and our graphic artist in the Philippines,  they design a lot. Also, by the way, I can put you in touch with them, they've been with me like for the last 5 years, let's say, you know because my Moneill Investment Group, Management Group is only 4 years old.    I started four companies, first of all, I can say four you know, like ideal investment, ideal management, with my partner. We did 14 syndications, then I did 12 syndications in two years and two months in my Moneill Investment Group in 2014, November, I started that. We were in 67 employees like that within the two-year span but I didn't count my old payroll, by the way, that was about another 35 before so in total, we had about over 100 at one time.     James: So you basically have given up on third party property management company?    Vinney: Oh, no, no way. No way because again, I don't want to sound very arrogant; they do a good job, but they have profitability built in every place. I mean, even the contractors I hired, it's amazing how much kickbacks to get in this whole business. There is profit profit profit profit; they charge you 30% for the materials, they charge you 30 to 40% above the labor even 50% above labor. You know, it's amazing.    James: Just so much because it's not their baby.    Vinney: No, it's not. That's the hardest part; you can find some great property management companies, but you have to work so hard to find them because the thing is, it just will not work for them. You know, I mean, you got to get honesty; honest people are there, they are there.    James: but do you think this property management company used---I mean what I've heard is, you have to still be a very active Regional Manager type of even though you give it a third party, you can't just leave it to them.     Vinney: No, you cannot; see the thing is, actually that's how I teach my students also to work with smaller property management companies because they will like to give you more weight. You have to learn the business; the idea is to make your own property manager, it's not rocket science. It seems like that way, it's not that bad at all because once you hire Property managers who have 15 to 20 years of experience, that's what I decided in my new company, right?    I said I'm not going to hire people who are like two years three years four years because they are just learning; I want to pay a little higher amount, but let's hire some better quality managers who know the fair housing laws who have gone through several CCIM, you know other property management32:35crosstalk] yeah, right exactly, who know the situations and then we train them, by the way now. So in our company, Monday at 2 PM and Friday at 2 PM, every week we train our team through Zoom meetings all across our properties, that's their set time.     James: So, what do you train them on?     Vinney: All different topics; like leasing 101, taking care of the MMRs and how to do this, how to do marketing, how to do all this and we record all that. So now we are designing a Property Management Academy from my Online Academy, which is going to be multifamily management Academy. I already have the domain name that I got five years back because I knew I'll be doing that.    James: That's very good. So, let's go back to a different topic other than the property management side of it; let's go to Asset Management, buying deals, acquisition, right? So, is there a deal that you thought was a bad deal and you walked out of it and later you realize it was a good deal?     Vinney: You know, that's a good point, James. I would say that once I walk out of there, I don't keep any contact with a broker because once I make a decision, I'm fast, quick, you know, I mean, I think Grant Cardone says that, yeah, I follow him little.  But the thing is he says winning--no, he didn't tell me; he tells his audience that you got to really do your due diligence even before you put 'LY'. Once you put 'LYs' go with a letter from my broker also, by the way, because whenever I get a pocket listing, I send it to, Brandon Brown LMI Capital, my broker and he underwrite it.  He gives me everything I need to know; I also give the address to my insurance agent and he gives me the real cost. Also then we go to the assessor's office, we find out the property tax also in real terms, what it's going to be. Those are the big, three things that you need to close on the property. I'm happy to tell you that I've closed on all 26 syndications on time and never faltered from LY to contract to closing.    James: That's good; that's a quality of a good buyer [35:14inaudible]     Vinney: People like that; like in Houston, I started buying and there was no property in the county I wanted to buy, James. I went to the big Cheese's and I shared with them, you know, I'm a broker in California, my humble opinion, I know you're saying in the area I want to buy that there's nobody there, there's no listing. Would you please call the buyers who you sold to five years back and tell them, are they interested in selling to this Indian chap who wants to buy their properties? I said that to ARA, to Marcus Millerchap, to Houston property; all these people, within three months, I started getting listings, bucket listings. I mean. they were just coming from every which way and I was syndicating, every second month, I was closing a deal.   James: Do you like Houston mark?    Vinney: I love it. I love it. I think if anybody's listening to me, you're missing the boat if you're not in Houston, especially after Harvey; rents went up, they stabilized, I own 10 properties there. I've sold two already, one to Sienna Willa; just to let your audience know, just to kind of give them a little taste of it, 3.550 I paid, three million five five zero but it had 16 unit burned down. Sixteen units, one building was burned down so I bought it and we just sold it for 8.6 million.    James: Wow! That's awesome.    Vinney: My investors are loving us and everything and I knew I'll double their money in four, three to three and a half years or something which I did so that's exciting. So Houston is there, just that it's not oil dependent as it used to be. It's medical, big medical center, IT, NASA and Retail Center.  So those are all very positive things along with oil also some portions of it and petroleum and gas and all but Houston is the way.     James: So really, let's switch back to slightly different more personal stuff so why do you do what you're doing?    Vinney: You know what, I don't need to do anything, to be truthful. We are fully, fully very well settled, everything and I just have passion. I'm 67, by the way; I'll be 67 in August, August 27, please send me flowers- just kidding - when I was doing W2 job, James, I would really get up at six thirty seven, quarter to 7:00, 7:00; I'm up at 4:30, I'm up at five o'clock now, doing my miracle morning, doing my chanting and listening and yoga and all that and my exercise and I'm on the vision board now for the next 25 years.    James: Wow!    Vinney: Up to 92; I'll be 92 then but you got to have that passion and I'm so passionate. What would I do, otherwise watching TV, looking at all these news that I cannot do anything about it or volunteer? I love to do a lot of volunteer work, which I'm doing but the key thing is how much can you do?    You got to have the passion. So my real passion right now is that 50 million dollar fund to buy quarter billion dollar in real estate and then sell and then teach. I think my passion also is now I've been a motivational speaker all my life; 37 years career in motivational speaking and fundraising, that's what my business, by the way.   I only worked like four months in a year for 37 years, real work; each month I had almost fun, my life has been like that. So with my teams of people, I can delegate quite well, I can compartmentalize quite well and I just enjoyed traveling. My family goes out for four, five, six, vacations and I come into my office and just crush it.     I have a lot of topics I want to talk more and I do Master coaching now also for such a small price. I get people telling me, you should be charging 40,000, 50,000 easy for what you are giving us and I charge five, only five so it's ridiculous.  But I'm not here to make money, my money comes from Acquisitions.    James: Absolutely; I think that's important because the audience needs to know sometimes people do stuff not for money, right? I mean, yeah, we do it for money but there's a lot of 'why' behind it.    Vinney: Exactly; you know the family, the education.  I mean, why I got into real estate was to give good education to our children, you know, he went to Berkeley, Monica went to UCLA, not a single loan. No, nothing; Mom, Dad took care of everything, you know like that. Retirement, other things, buying, you know.    James: Family is the time when...    Vinney: Yeah, charitable trust all that, you know and building schools, all the good stuff, it's so important in life. So as you asked me in the 'whys'; I am so fired up at this stage in my life and I feel that I have a lot more years to give.    James: I think you're thinking you can contribute a lot more to humanity, right?     Vinney: Surely; and the passion also James, if you don't mind, it's with youth. I also own Youth Academy, youth multifamily Academy, youth school training, all that. My passion is to teach students from high school level to even College levels to really get into the entrepreneurship model. Getting into designing an LLC, forming a Wyoming LLC and cheaply, very cheaply but then saving the money and getting it to the 401k and all that and starting a business on the side as they are learning so that by the age of 21- 22 to have a duplex they own themselves. They could live in one side and the other side, the resident will be paying for there and it will be free and clear.     James: [41:47inaudible]    Vinney: You know, that's my passion and I want to convert my lectures into Spanish, Indian language and French and Italian like that.     James: So we are coming to the end so I know you have to run somewhere but one question; do you have like 3,100 units and [42:08unintelligible] operator, is there any funny story from tenants that you can share with the audience?    Vinney: Oh my God, lots of them; oh my God James.     James: The funniest ones?     Vinney: The excuses we get from the residents, you would not believe. I mean, they said, oh we wrote a check and the dog ate it. I know this is ridiculous. What! You say, what! Oh, yeah, I had the money order and this happened that happened; we get so many different ones.     Now, we do texting; we do texting, by the way, through our software we could text, we can get them to opt-in and then we can text them, rent is due on the first, it's late on the fourth, but then they have all the sobbing stories. I mean, again, I have a bigger heart but my property managers, they align me. They say, Mr. Vinney, you got to just not give because we have to be fair housing laws, right? You have to be only fair, you cannot give any preferential treatment to anybody.     But you know, we do have within our company, I would love to mention, you know, we have like a grant we established. So that's where some of our team members need some extra money, we are able to do it through the grant. Harvey happened, we donated, my wife and I donated, into the grant for our team members and we got them trucks, we got them other stuff and cars and things like that, you know, because they were helping us.    You know, it's no fault of theirs that Harvey came and they lost their vehicles and things like that but funny stories, oh my gosh! And oh, wait a minute, not only just the residence; I know, I know, I mean, how about even the team members too, we have lots of community stories. One thing I would like to say that is no matter how difficult the situation comes, we should always take a first look at it because things happen for a reason.     We need to listen to what they are trying to say, we got to just listen and then find a win-win situation. And many times if we do that way a lot of times the residents feel better, they do, the team members feel better and you every aspect, vendors. I get really antsy when they're not doing their job correctly and this and that and shoot out some emails and all that but then I say, "Hey I was a little bit harsh, I apologize but we need to get it though."    James: So how can my listeners find you?     Vinney: Oh sure; actually, we have two different, very nice; they could text the word 'learn' 4 letter word to 4 7 4 7 4 7. So they can just text that and my team members will be able to send them my academy information, what's entailed, some testimonials; I'm getting testimonials like crazy from my students who have crushed it within three months, they are buying like 200 units and 150 units, raising two million dollars by using my deck of the cards, credibility kit and all the things and scripts. But then the other one is syndication; if they can text the word syndication to 474747, they can reach my team also, and that is to partner with me. They can also invest with me, partner with me on the GP side and invest as an accredited investor in the fund.      James: Good, thanks Vinney for joining me today. Basically, my first podcast and was really happy to have you here and my audience, you know, hope for me to bring more quality content to you guys.  As I said, I'm going to ask different questions, not the normal high-level questions, we want to go deep into the details.    Vinney: I would love to, James if I can refer any way and get congratulations to you. If you want me to hit certain other aspects even just going deeper for your audience as you get their questions, I would love to spend time with you.    James: Yeah, I mean, I think that's important because a lot of podcasts goes super high level and you want to learn. I mean, if I want to spend [46:41crosstalk] I want to learn as much as possible in this.    Vinney: That is so true, that's missing, I think you know. I know my friend Whitney has started syndication and we are going to do there also because people want to listen and they say what can I apply it right now.    James: And for those who do not know, we launched our book this week, Passive [47:02inaudible]    Vinney: Congratulations, I'm so proud of you.     James: Yeah. Thanks, in two days, we have international bestseller because even in Canada, we hit number one too so that was...    Vinney: I love it. I love it. That's so wonderful, congratulations.    James: You can go to Amazon and get it and there's a free audio-book which will be announced at the end of this podcast.    Vinney: Awesome. Well, I'm buying it right now, I'm going to go to Amazon. Hey guys, everybody, buy James book. Yes. Yes.  James; We have 21-star reviews right now and a lot of really good reviews, I didn't expect. It was a small [47:34unintelligible] project, you can't make money selling books.  Vinney: No you can't, it's like parting knowledge, that's so true.     James: I want to make sure my passive investors get educated as well because it's just mixed makes it much more better.     Vinney: Totally, totally, alright James. Thank you. Thank you so much.  

Welcome to My USA Corporation! You are in the right place to start your business in the United States. You are going to start an LLC in Wyoming as a less expensive and most business friendly State. Here's some simple steps: Please go to My USA Corporation Europe website press Start an LLC button (blue) select from the drop down menus Wyoming, Owners are non US persons/companies, Recommended Package and press Next Step button Now you are on the pricing page all included items is strongly recommended if you want to drive your US business with no headache Please feel free to select or deselect any additional items like Certificate of incumbency also Banking Resolution if you are going to visit the US to open a bank account. Please select the documents delivery options - it may be electronic delivery only - you will receive all the documents as a P D Fs or if you need hard copies of the documents you may select USPS - US mail international delivery or you may select FedEx or UPS delivery options. US address is mandatory to start a company in the United states so please make sure SHOW ME - US business and mailing address option is selected - on the next page just select My USA Office address and desired location from a drop down menu. It's recommended but not a must to have a business in the same state your company is forming. If we are incorporating in Wyoming the best choice will be Cheyenne. But Wyoming allows to use any US address nationwide, for example, it seems address in New York is more prestigious - please feel free to select it. The rest is as simple as one, two, three - just fill the contact information and company information blocks, then go to the checkout and the payment. Thank you for your order! Now we will work on it and your company will be formed within the estimated time - for Wyoming LLC complete company registration time is 3 business weeks. Your LLC will be formed in one - three business days, the rest is obtaining your new company's E I N and the rest of documents preparation - Certified copy of articles of organization, operating agreement, certificate of incumbency and banking resolution if selected. Done! Now you are US business owner. We wish you a good luck with your new business! Thank you for choosing My USA Corporation for your business needs! My USA Corporation is your reliable partner since 2009. https://www.myusacorporation.com/eu/form-llc/select-state.html

Toby Mathis and Jeff Webb of Anderson Advisors are here to answer all sorts of tax-related questions that focus on everything from applications to forms and QuickBooks. Do you have a tax question? Submit it to Webinar@andersonadvisors.com. Highlights/Topics: Will income earned by lending money to real estate investors reduce Social Security benefits or increase taxes on them? Income vs. earned income; until full retirement age, benefits are reduced; when full retirement age, it doesn't matter what you make How do I get the 20% deduction from Trump's Tax Plan? The 199A Deduction is a 20% deduction on qualified business income, but you need a pass-through entity; QBI 20% deduction vs. 20% of taxable income are compared, and you get whichever is less When you make a contribution out of your own account to your LLC as a member, are you taxed on contributions? No. It’s a contribution to an entity that becomes your capital and money you can take back out tax-free, if you haven't used it to recognize losses What is the best business structure recommended against asset, structure, and personal protection? With any passive activity, use a passive entity - LLC taxed as a partnership/limited partner; whomever has control of entity decides what's distributed What is the best way to set up QuickBooks when I have a Wyoming Holding LLC and several other LLCs holding real estate in other states? Create one set of books with Wyoming LLC as the primary; do a classified income statement for other states What are the tax forms for 501c3? Use Form 1023 to apply to be an exempt charitable organization; yearly recording forms include 990-N If someone has rentals in their self-directed IRA, how are they impacted as UBIT - does it make a difference on the number/dollar amount? No UBIT, if it's a rental; UBIT is for an active business inside an IRA; passive income is almost always exempt Can I have recourse debt in a 401K or IRA? Can I have non-recourse debt? You can’t have recourse debt, but you can have recourse debt What are my options to re-distribute funds from one LLC in several entities to separate investments? You can always move it from one to another with no tax implication Can I write off costs for rehabbing out of the country? Yes. Worldwide profits; if it's income-producing property, you report it to the United States I lent money to a real estate flipper. She gave me a promissory note, but it wasn’t recorded with the deed of trust. Now, she is in default. Can I foreclose? Document it because you can’t foreclose until you file your secured interest Is there anything I can do to reduce my taxable income? Yes. There are lots of things you can do - make contributions to qualified retirement plans, charities, and C Corp I purchased a new computer that cost less than $2,500. Is that a straight expense in the current tax year or some weird depreciation thing? Section 179 deduction; you can buy up to $1 million and write it all off For all questions/answers discussed, sign up to be a Platinum member to view the replay! Resources U.S. Social Security Administration Trump’s Tax Plan 199A Deduction QuickBooks Tax-Wise Workshop 501c3 Unrelated Business Income Tax (UBIT) 990-T 990-N Section 179 Deduction 1244 Election Kiddie Tax Anderson Advisors Tax and Asset Prevention Event Toby Mathis Anderson Advisors   Full Episode Transcript: Toby: Hey, guys. This is Toby Mathis with Jeff Webb again. Jeff: Good afternoon. Toby: If you don't know, Jeff Webb's a tax manager here, and I am one of the partners. I'm not an accountant but I'm an attorney. Jeff is actually a CPA. This is Tax Tuesdays. If you've never been on Tax Tuesdays before, all we do is answer all sorts of questions. Let me see here whether I've got the right question field up. Look at that. We've got a bunch of people asking questions. Let's see. We'll get to all your questions, making sure you can hear us in the question and answer part. Just say, "Yes, I can hear you loud and clear," to make sure that we're getting through to everybody. If you do that, then we appreciate it. There we go. I'm getting a whole bunch of "loud and clear", "loud and clear", "loud and clear". All right, if you don't know the format if Tax Tuesday, it goes like this. We answer a whole bunch of questions. We answer the questions that people ask via the email that I'll be giving you at the end of the webinar, and we grab a whole bunch of them, and we just start answering them. If we can't answer the question or the question that you ask is too complicated, too specific, too long, then I grab it and kick it off to a staff or we answer it the following week, depending on how cool a question it is. That being kind of the overview, this is where we're at. We're going to go through these and we're going to make sure that we're answering all the questions. Let's see if I can actually make these slides advance. Look at that. That's weird. I didn't even know what that W there is. It's kind of cool. "Will the income I earned by lending my money to my real estate investors reduced my social security benefits or increased my taxes on them?" That's an interesting question. There's, "How do I get a 20% deduction?" I'm picking these literally from people's emails so don't yell at me for the typos. "When you make a contribution funds to your own account to your LLC as a member, are you taxed on contributions that you contribute to an LLC?" "What is the best structure–" and that is the weirdest thing I've ever had. "What is the best structure recommended against asset, structure and personal protection for a Multi-Family Home Investor acquiring and holding rental properties, especially if working–" and I'm going to go through each one of these. "What is the best way to set up QuickBooks when I have a Wyoming Holding LLC and several other LLCs holding real estate in various other states?" Those are our opening questions. We have a few more. We're going to go through a ton of them, and I'm already getting a bunch of questions on the Q&A portion. We will get to those but, first, we're going to knock these ones out. The first question: "Will the income earned by lending money to real estate investors reduce my Social Security benefits or increase my taxes on them?" The first thing is there's the benefit itself. In this particular question, I looked it up and I believe there were 61, so they're receiving Social Security benefits before they reach the full retirement age. Full retirement age varies between 65 and 67. The reason this is important is because, once you reach that age, it doesn't matter what you make. Until you reach that age, you will have your benefits reduced on what you're receiving. When you're pulling out Social Security early, 50 cents on the dollar once you get over $17,080.Of course, it's indexed for inflation, but it's a little bit over $17,000. I think this year it's $17,080 or something like that. What that means is, if you are lending money, then that would be counted as income. However, if you're under the full retirement age, they only count earned income. The question here is, "Until you're at full retirement age, will the income earned by lending money to real estate investors reduce my Social Security benefits or increase my taxes on them?" The answer is a big, resounding, "No." This will not hurt you in any way. Once you hit full retirement age, now we have to be worried about how much of your social security becomes taxable. When they look at your tax ability of the benefit, now we're looking at all sorts of income, everything that you make, and it's going to push it up. That's the one where it's not that you reduce the benefit but it becomes taxable. Jeff: Fairly quickly, additional income starts making your Social Security benefits taxable. They're never going to be more than–85% of your benefits are never going to be taxable. I'm saying this totally backwards. Toby: What it means is that the most they're ever going to tax your benefits is 85% of them. If you're getting $20,000 of benefit, the most you'll ever pay tax on is $17,000. You'll still get $3,000, tax-free. The sad part is you didn't get, really, a deduction when they took it out the first place. That's the old double tax that you hear about with Social Security. Anything else you want jumped into? This is kind of stuff. It makes your brain go numb so you're doing it right. You're actually asking good questions. Jeff: Just the matter of when you should take Social Security is such a huge question. Toby: Because you can start taking it. When is the earliest, is it 64? Jeff: I'm going to say 62, but maybe it's earlier depending on their age. Toby: It does depend on their age. There is a before-a-threshold and after-a-threshold. Now, I forget what the threshold is. What you do is you go to the Social Security Administration and you run your scenarios and they'll give them all to you, or you can contact us. We have folks we could send you out to that have software because it is complicated. Depending on what month you were born in and all that stuff, how many days–all of this gets factored in as to what's the earliest you could start receiving benefits. Once you start receiving the benefit, they let you receive that benefit only so long as your income is low and it's your earned income. If you're trying to get the benefit when you're 62 and you make too much money, you're going to lose a bunch of the benefits. If you start making–if you're 62, start pulling out the benefit and you have passive income, not that big of a deal; it doesn't reduce it so that's really cool. Enough of that. It makes my head hurt, Social Security. Do not rely on Social Security. There, I said it. Yeah, Social Security is one of those things that, when it was set up, the average life expectancy of people on Social Security was two years. It was really there to catch you if you're really old and didn't have any other benefits. Now, we use it almost like it's a retirement plan that's not what it was intended for. That's why it doesn't work to do it. Here's the next one. "How do I get the 20% deduction from Trump's Tax Plan?" First off, it's not Trump's Tax Plan. It's the Tax Cut and Jobs Act and it was passed by our wonderful Congress because, technically–though, they seem to forget this–Presidents don't write laws. Now that we got that out of the way, they did put this thing called a 199A Deduction, which is a 20% deduction on qualified business income from pass-through entities. Follow me here. The first thing we need to have–and I'm going to write these up–is we need to have a pass-through entity, and you can be an LLC taxed as–this is a 1065 that's partnership, a sole proprietor or as an S Corp. Those are your choices. Technically, it could also be a trust. Then, you look at other entities, S Corps and just flat out partnerships, including limited partnerships, all that fun stuff. It's passing through; it doesn't pay its own tax. Then, you need qualified business income. I'm just going to call it QBI, which just means income. Generally speaking, it's active income, but they also include real estate, if you are making money on real estate in which you participate in some fashion. The only type of real estate that's not included as far as we can tell–because they're still giving us regulations on it, but the proposed regulations make clear that real estate, rental real estates included, is if you have a commercial building and triple-net leases that you're giving out where you're not really taking on much of the risk, then they're not going to let you have the qualified business income. Then, they compare that qualified business income 20% deduction versus 20% of your taxable income, whichever is less. Why is this important? Because if I'm a sole proprietor–let's say I have $50,000 that I'm making–that I would get a $10,000-deduction under the QBI. Let's say that I take and contribute into my retirement plan–a husband-and-wife sole proprietor is still the same thing, and they both put in–what's a good number–let's just say $10,000. Then, my taxable income is actually $40,000 because I rode off–I made tax-deductible contributions into my IRA of $10,000 so I would take the lesser of that. Then, they do this wonderful thing, is they then say, "Well, if it's a special service company, we're going to put a cap on how much QBI you can actually make." It's not really QBI; it's actually your taxable income, and they say, "We'll only let you ride off so long as your taxable income is below a threshold." If you're single, that threshold is $157,500, and there's a phase-out for the next $50,000. To make your head spin, it goes from $157,000 to $207,500. That's the easiest way to look at it. If you're married, filing jointly, those numbers are $315,000 to $415,000. Jeff: What's an example of a special service? Toby: Special services are something that it is you and your skill that makes the money, and they use–it's going to be doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers, real estate agents who are solo, somebody who–it's their skill so like a carpenter who doesn't have a bunch of staff. That's going to be a special service. If you get above those thresholds, you are done. Somebody's asking a question which is pretty interesting. A single-member LLC counts. You have a flow under you so that's when you're sole proprietor or just going under your tax return that's passed through entity so you're fine. The interesting here is that you can control your taxable income. Even on those thresholds–and when we teach this in the class, we actually go through a learning chart where we say, "If this, then this. If this, then this." If you're a special service, we just need to make sure that we can control your income, and the way you control your income is by splitting it with tax-free, tax-exempt or separately-taxable entities. Let me give you an example. If I have a C Corp and it makes a bunch of money, great, that's not income to me. I don't want to pay myself a whole bunch of money and make whatever my other business is that is or where I'm going to meet the threshold taxable because I'm losing that 20% deduction. Let's say I have $200,000 coming in. As an individual, I can get some donations and deductions into a retirement plan and I get myself underneath that $157,000 and I have another $200,000 in C Corp that I pay myself. If I leave the $157,000 as is and I don't take any money out of the C Corp, I'm going to get a 30-something thousand dollar deduction. It's just going to come off the top. It's a 20% deduction so almost like I spent. If I took the money out of the C Corp–and, by the way, that C Corp is a flat 21% tax rate now so it's going to pay 21% so it's not horrific. If I paid myself that money, I push my taxable income over the threshold, now I get 0 deduction on my qualified business income. That's why it's important. If it is not a special service, then those thresholds trigger something else. It takes us to an area where we can write off up to 50% of the W2 income or 25% of the W2 income for the business plus 2.5% of the assets. Jeff: No, you're right. I'm just jumping ahead of you. Toby: Yeah, so what we're looking at, then, is you better have a regular business that actually has salaries. If you, for example, as a sole proprietor, single, are making–what would be a good example–$200,000 and you're over the threshold, you're phasing out, you'd have to go to the second test. You're over the 157 and the second test is now pushing you at 50% of W2 wages, and you have zero so your deduction is going to be zero. You're going to get literally nothing. You might get a few dollars because you're not quite at the 207, which is the top line of the actual phase-out so you'd be phased out about 90% plus of the benefit. Now, let's say you converted that sole proprietorship to an S Corp and, instead, you paid yourself a salary, so same situation, $200,000. Let's say I paid you $75,000 of salary. Then, the QBI or the monies that's flowing through is actually the net income and net profit, so you'd subtract the 75 off. It would be $125,000. You compare 20% of that number, which I should grab the calculator, whatever that number is. Jeff: It'd be 25,000. Toby: Yeah, 25,000, and we would compare it to one-half of the W2 income, which would be 37,500. You'd get the lesser of the two. You'd get a $25,000-deduction just because of the type of entity. That's the one I have to do. Somebody just said, "I have almost 300K in real estate and other income. Is there anything I can do?" A single person? Yeah, there's something you can do because, remember, it depends on whether you're special service and then it depends on the business, and there's one last thing: It always comes down to your taxable income. "What other ways can I use to control my taxable income?" The most obvious is I split it with a C Corp, I give it to charity–and it could be my charity–or I deduct it by putting it into a tax-deferred retirement plan. For example, same situation, I'll use the $200,000 and they do a 401K. They put a husband and wife each–they're under 50. They each contribute 18,500–or, actually, the example I used was a single person so I would have to say I put 18,500 and in, and they get a 25% deduction on the 75,000. They would put in–again, I'm using crazy numbers so what would that be? About $18,750 or whatever that is–around under $19,000. I can put, in essence, about $37,000 right into the 401K, and that reduces my taxable income. The taxable income goes from 200 down to almost the threshold, and now I don't have to worry about it. It makes my life so much easier. I'm just going to get a nice big, fat deduction and I'm happy as a clam. That's how this stuff works, but if you don't do it before the year ends, you're toast. This is going to be my–this is why you need to have some sort of somebody doing tax planning. How do I get the 20% deduction from the new tax act? Very deliberately. You make sure that you have the income flowing under your return and then you make sure that, if there's a disqualifying factor that would cause you to lose it, that you look and say, "What's better? To just walk away from it and not worry about it or would I be better to take a couple of actions to allow myself to take advantage of the deduction?" It's a freebie, guys. If I make $20,000 in real estate, that rental real estate–that's my net after all my depreciation–I get a $4,000-deduction. I'm only recognizing 16,000 under this taxable income so that's a nice little benefit especially if I'm a high-income person so that's what I'd be looking at. Jeff, do you want to do this one because I'm […] barding the answers again? Jeff: No, that's alright. "When you make a contribution out of your own account to your LLC as a member, are you taxed on contributions that you contribute to the LLC?" No, actually, you're not. That is a contribution to an entity that becomes your capital, your owner's equity–we can call it a lot of things–your owner's capital in that company. That's actually money that you can take back out also tax-free assuming that you haven't used it up to recognize losses or maybe other things like that. Toby: We get that a lot. I'll give you a real-life example. Some guys were doing a syndication on apartment buildings and they were telling people, "Hey, we're going to return your capital out of the profits and you're not going to have to pay any tax on the money that you receive up to your investment." I said, "Hey, that's not really the case." Here's how it works: I can always get back my contribution, and it's tax-neutral; it means nothing. If the company makes zero, no profit, it can always give me back my money and I pay no tax, but if the company makes money, I'm taxed on my portion of that gain no matter what even if they're giving me extra. I was like–what they were doing was they were saying, "Here's a little thing. We'll make some profit. We'll just give you your money back. You want to pay tax on it?" I was like, "No, that's not how it works. You actually have to pay tax on the profit in proportion to your ownership, and it's a little bit funky." Jeff: This is a case that, sometimes, we see where a client will tell us, "I had deposits of $100,000 into my business," and what they fail to tell us is that 50,000 of it was their own money. We want to make sure that we're able to differentiate what the owners are putting into the company versus what income they're making in the company. Toby: There's a couple of questions. Somebody says, "My head is spinning." We do record this. If you're platinum, you're going to get a recording of it in your little platinum area. Somebody asks, "Is this pre-recorded?" No, it's not. We're doing it live but I'm answering the questions that people have emailed me first and, yes, we have about 50 questions that are in the queue that we're going to go through here in a second. Jeff: We don't have a three-second delay or anything? Toby: No, I don't think so. I could give you a 10-second delay. All right, "What is the best business structure recommended against asset, structure and personal protection?" I don't know what that means. I'm going to assume they mean to protect the business–for a Multi-Family Home Investor acquiring and holding rental properties, especially if working as a team member with other investors? Here's what I'm going to say: Anytime you have a passive activity–that is, when you buy the property or the cash flow and the appreciation–you're going to want to use a passive entity, meaning an LLC taxed as a partnership or a limited partner. Don't do anything else. That's it. There's maybe some really weird exceptions but I'm going to say, 99% of the time, you're going to end up using an LLC, and it's either going to be disregarded even if you have other people in or it's going to be a partnership. If anybody does anything differently, they're doing some weird stuff. If you have other investors, then it depends on your relationship with those investors. I'm not going to going to get into securities, Reg Ds and all that but, generally speaking, you're going to have it taxed as a partnership, but the most important consideration is always going to be control, who has control of that entity, because that's who decides what's distributed. That partnership agreement or the operating agreement of the LLC is really going to be important. You do not want to do this stuff half-arsed. You want to make sure that you're actually really addressing this stuff. At Anderson, we tend to be very protective of the manager, meaning we want you to have control. If it's your project, we don't want people to force you to do stuff and, on the flip side, if you're investing and you're a client, we're always going to say, "You don't want to be forced to kick in more capital against your will." Those are the things we always look at. Where does that one go? Here we go. "What is the best way to set up QuickBooks when I have a Wyoming–" and this is going to be so you, Jeff, because Jeff loves QuickBooks. "What is the best way to set up QuickBooks when I have a Wyoming Holding LLC with several other LLCs holding real estate in various other states?" I'm going to draw this. There's my Wyoming LLC. It's either going to be a 1065 or disregarded, and it holds all these cute little LLCs in other states. Let's say this is Texas LLC, Washington LLC, Nevada LLC, Georgia LLC, and they're all going to flow up to that Wyoming. I want to keep my books straight because, if you know QuickBooks, they will sell you QuickBooks for this one, this one and this one. You'll end up with four sets of QuickBooks and you'll drive yourself crazy. What do you do, Jeff? Jeff: Here's what we like to do: We like to create one set of books with the Wyoming LLC at the top being the primary set of books. Then, what we do is what we call a classified income statement where each of these four LLCs below the Georgia, Nevada, Washington and Texas where they're all kind of their own set of books within your Wyoming LLC books. All this income is going to flow from those bottom four up to the top one anyway and, while we need to keep the entities separate so we can report them that way, ultimately, what we're reporting is what's coming through the whole kit and caboodle. Toby: Yeah, we only need to worry about setting up QuickBooks for this guy right here, and then we set up these guys as classes. All that means is we have one set of books. Jeff: Yeah. You can still pull an income statement for your Georgia LLC or your Texas LLC to see what's just in that but, all in all, you still have one set of books. It makes it easier and you don't have all these inter-company transfers that you have to track. Toby: Oh my god. I'll tell you, we're horrible on that. He's giving me the look. See, here's the problem, is if you have different companies with different sets of books, you've got to close out the previous sets of books and then open up the new company. It's a process and it takes a few minutes and it's really annoying when you're trying to enter stuff into it. It's going to save you a whole bunch of time to use one set. Jeff: Yeah, then you don't run into things like, "Well, I transferred money from Georgia, the taxes that I did it, I record it in both companies." When you record them on one, you end up re-recording it in both. Toby: Yeah, and there's some fun stuff. Some of them just ask for a basic QuickBooks question, jump in the line. It's hard to set up classes in QuickBooks, not horribly, but if you don’t want to learn–QuickBooks is one of those things where you're going to spend some time with it. You just have a bookkeeper do it. Anderson does that if you want. All right. If you have questions–you guys, I know you do because there's a ton of them already in the little queue here. Here's how it works: If you want to ask a more detailed question, if you have a question that you didn't hear answered on the webinar, you can just email them on in to webinar@andersonadvisors.com, and, that way, we can put it in that queue and we can answer it just like we just did. We're going to break those out. Those will be separate little videos, each one of those, so that you get your answer. Somebody was saying, "My head was spinning about 199A." You can go back and listen to that. Better yet, you can come to some of our other webinars or come, actually, to the Tax-Wise Workshop and we go through this stuff. Spend some time with us. If you invest a little bit of time in taxes, it will pay off in spades. Other questions–some people just answered this stuff. "Can you go over the tax forms for 501c3? Jeff: There's a couple of forms for the 501c3. To apply the BF 5O1c3, there's what's called the Form 1023. It's the application to be an exempt charitable organization. Then, there's several different yearly recording forms. The 990 is the primary one where you report, among other things, what your income was, what your balance sheet looks like, your plan, your purpose, who you've dealt with. What were you going to say? Come on. Toby: Basically, if you're making less than $50,000 in your 501c3, you're doing a 990 post-note card. You're just doing a real basic here. Literally, it looks like a postcard. Jeff: They don't do that anymore. Toby: I thought they're still– Jeff: All these old people still call it postcards, but it's a… Toby: They do that in the 10… Jeff: But it's a 990N and it's filed electronically. Toby: Yeah, I know but it's the same thing. Jeff: It's still close. Okay. Toby: It's a postcard. Oh, my god. Yeah, you do it electronically now but it's really simple. You go above that, then you're going to be filing a little more detail. You get about 250, you're filing very detailed. Never do it yourself. Just hire an accountant to do it, and those guys–we do them. They're not horrifically complicated unless you have a huge void that everybody's taking money. You go American Red Cross, you can go look at the actual tax forms that everybody files because they're all public record. You can go in there and take a look at anybody and see just how complicated it is. What you'll realize is that the more the stuff they're doing, the more complicated it gets, and not doing ton it is pretty simple. We have ones that are $5 million non-profits and it's a few pages. Then, you have ones that are $1 million but they've got everybody and their mother with their hands in the thing, and you're doing a lot of reporting. That one might be more complicated. If you're a church, you don't file anything. If you're religious and you're a religious organization, you don't file anything; you file zero tax forms. Jeff: When you have an accountant do these 990s for you, they're going to ask you a lot of questions because there's a lot of questions on the form that they don't have the answer to, basically about what it is the non-profit does and things like that. Toby: All right. "If someone has rentals in their–" basically, again, if you have those tax forms, this is one other thing, is that's the tax compliance on an annual basis. If you're setting up a 501c3, you are doing–more than likely, 501c3 is an application called a 1023. If you're doing a 501C6 or some of these others, that's a 1024. Jeff: Wow, I'm impressed. Toby: Yeah, sorry. It's stuck in my head. Those are the applications for exempt status. Your business, your non-profit, is in existence and it's considered exempt from Day 1. Even though you haven't gotten your exemption approved, you actually have 28 or 29 months to get approved, and it relates back to the day that you started. You can actually do a 501c3 and be up and running in a matter of weeks if you want to. All right, from Lisa: "If someone has rentals in their self-directed IRA, how is it impacted as far as unrelated business income tax (UBIT) and does it make a difference on the number or dollar amount?" You want to do this one or would you like me to? Jeff: Why don't you do this one? Toby: All right. Self-directed IRA and it has real estate? You have no UBIT if it's just rental. That's not unrelated business income tax. Unrelated business income tax is when you're doing an active business inside an exempt organization, inside an IRA, or church, or something else, and you're running a mini-mart then they tax you on it because it's unrelated business income so not related to your exempt purpose so they tax you on it. Passive income's always going to be–I shouldn't say "always"; it's almost always exempt. I guess there's possible–if you have some royalty stuff, it's possible, if you're advertising, that the exempt organization tax, but for your IRA for rentals, don't worry about it. Here's what you worry about when you're doing an IRA with rentals: It's usually the case–this is what we've seen–is that people will oftentimes want to lever that real estate. In an IRA, you have something called–I'm just going to blank on it–unrelated debt financed income. There we go, UDFI. Unrelated debt financed income means–or just call it debt finance income–the portion of the profits that are coming from the debt. If I have a piece of property, I have a 50% loan on it, then 50% of its income is going to be taxable to the IRA. It's not allowed to have that type of loan and not pay tax on it. A 401K is allowed to have that type of loan, and it doesn't pay tax on it. It's one of those weird things where you're like, "Hey, should I be an IRA or 401K?" More often than not in our world, you're going to want to be the 401K. It has different rules, and one of the big ones is the ability to use debt. Now, here's something for you. I think I had poll questions on this. This is fun. I'm going to send a poll out to see whether you guys are listening. You guys can answer this, and what it is, "Can I have recourse debt in a 401K or IRA?" Let's see about that. Isn't this kind of cool? Jeff: It is cool. Toby: We're going to see whether or not you can have recourse debt in a 401K or IRA. For those of you who don't know what recourse debt, recourse means, "I can go after you. I have recourse, and I can go–" basically, a personal guarantee, personal guarantor. We got a lot of people voting. I will share the results with you once we're there. Jeff: What if Lisa is flipping instead of renting in an IRA? Toby: Then, we don't have any cases on it. Jeff: Great. Toby: What we always say is do five at a max. Here's the thing: If you disqualify an IRA, the whole thing's disqualified. What I want to do is if I'm flipping in a self-directed IRA, I want to make sure only that money is in that IRA so if I have a disqualifying event, it's only for that one little IRA. So, I may have two or three IRAs. Good news: People are listening. That's always good news. We have about–50% of you guys voted. I'm going to go ahead and close this thing in about a few seconds. Let's see. There, I closed it and now I'm going to share it with you. Do you want me to tell you the answer? You cannot have recourse debt. 36% of you guys just disqualified your plans, and you have a 10% penalty plus it's all taxable. Sorry to say that you just destroyed your plan, but you cannot have recourse. This is half the fun. What's the next question I could ask you? I could throw up another poll at you. Let's see. Get out of there. Let me see if I can do this. All right, what's the next one? Here's a better one: Now that you know you can't have recourse debt, I'm going to launch a new poll. "Can I have non-recourse debt in an IRA or 401K?" This is where accountants and tax lawyers have– Jeff: Disagreements? Toby: No, this is where it's so much fun. Are you kidding? Let's see. Somebody's saying, "No." What is non-recourse? Non-recourse means you can't hold the person responsible. There's no personal guarantor. You can only go after the property so the property is truly asset-based lending. There's nobody on the hook for that loan if it goes south. A typical non-recourse loan in a plan–this is kind of cheap because it's going to give you the answer–is they're going to look at the other plan assets and so they're going to secure the other plan assets. They're going to make sure that they're not over-leveraged. In other words, they're not going to give you a 99% loan to value; they're going to give you a 60% loan to value or 50% loan to value. We'll see if you guys still get the answer even though I just basically gave it to you. This is fun. I'm just going to stop this one and I'm going to share it because the numbers are pretty done. It looks like 86% of you said, "Yes." Can I have non-recourse debt? 86% of you are correct. You can have recourse debt. Here's the trick: In an IRA, that non-recourse debt creates debt finance income so you have to pay tax on the portion that you're making but it doesn't disqualify your plan. In a 401K, you do not pay the debt finance income, and some of you guys are not too pleased with me for that, but I'm getting giggles out of it. That's enough with polls. I could have polls all day long and we would have a lot of fun. Last one: "I hold some assets in LLC–"and, by the way, this is the last one from people that have shot it in but it says, "You don't pay tax until withdrawal, correct?" No, if you have debt finance income, you're paying it in the year in which the debt finance income–you actually file a 990 T. You actually have to report it. "I have some assets in an LLC that is a day-trading entity." You're brave. "If this generates sizable profits–" I just love traders. "What options are out there to re-distribute funds from one LLC in several entities to the separate investments?" You can always move–if it's yours, it's like–an LLC is a safe so I can always move it from one safe to another, no tax implication. This is one of the questions we had earlier. I can always put money in, take it out. Somebody was talking about an opportunity zone. The opportunity zone's awesome. It's where you take capital gains and invest them in the opportunity zone. It's actually called the growth opportunity zone, and you defer the tax on that income. The max amount you can defer that tax is until 2025 right now. Then, you get a portion of that as non-taxable. Then, the growth–if you leave it in the opportunity zone for 10 years, all that growth and the gains on the investment itself are tax-free, and that's pretty interesting. Growth opportunities, we'll be talking about that as they give us more information. Somebody says, "Can you take the poll down?" I thought I did. I'll make sure polls, hide. There we go. Sorry about that, guys. Everybody's telling me, "Flip off the poll." I'm flipping it off. I like your opportunity zone discussion, and think about a bank, and loan out funds to other LLCs you use. You could do that. Then, it's interest unless it's all you. In which case, you don't charge yourself interests. "I am told that funds in an LLC are much like funds in a savings account. I pay taxes on the gains my funds make, and funds can be withdrawn at any time." That is true as long as it's disregarded or taxed as a partnership. I want to make sure that we're very clear. LLCs that are partnerships are disregarded. Yes, you can do that. If it's an LLC taxed as a corporation or LLC taxes in S Corp, little bit different. An S Corp probably has a huge difference. Jeff: Yeah. You can even pull securities out–even if it's a partnership–pull securities out and put them somewhere else. Like what Toby's saying, if it's an S Corporation or corporation, if you pull securities out of a corporation, you have to recognize gain immediately. Toby: It sucks. Appreciated assets is considered wages, right? Use an example here. Jeff: We had a client who had a couple of $100,000 of securities in a corporation, wanted to move it somewhere else, and we tried to explain to him that if he pulls securities out that are now worth 250 and he's only got a basis of $100,000, he's going to have capital gains of $125,000 in that corporation. The corporation will pay gains and then, for you to take it out, that's got to come from somewhere else, so either a salary, roan repayments or dividends. It doesn't work out well. Toby: No Bueno. The other one is people that real estate in an S Corp and then they need to take it out to refile it or something. All that appreciation is wages. It's horrific and so we have oftentimes say, "Hey, if you're going to do this S Corp, it's cool." The capital gains still flow down to you; it's just that you can't take it out. You've got to leave it in there. Jeff: Can we  re-running into that more and more where the banks are running to take it out of the LLCs and stuff? Toby: They got horribly hosed during the downturn of people doing weird stuff. What happened is I would do a financing in an entity. Say I'm the owner, and then I would sell Jeff my ownership and the entity and the bank had no idea that I'm no longer the guy that they were dealing with that they gave the loan to in their mind and had sold his interests. They had no idea. One day, Jeff comes back in and says, "By the way, I'm the owner of this LLC, not the guy that you loaned the money to." No Bueno. They don't like that. All right, we got a lot of questions to go through so if you have questions, you can always email them in. I'm going to start going out through these things, and we have questions from almost an hour ago. People were asking questions before we even started. "I did a cash-out refinance from my residence to invest in private lending or to buy rentals. California only allows 150,000 to deduct interest expense for residence." That's actually the new federal rule. "For the portion that is more than 750, can I deduct the interest as investment expense?" All right, so here's the rule–and, Jeff, I'm [...] barding, but I deal with this stuff all the time. Your new limit is–unless you owned your house prior to–during 27 and perhaps during the first quarter of 2018 if your loan was already in process before December 15th of 2017, don't try to remember this stuff; just know that if you're in that weird period, you may qualify, then you're up to a million, but it has to be for acquisition indebtedness. Acquisition indebtedness means, "I bought the house," or, "I improved the house." That's for the mortgage person to be deductible on your Schedule A, which is your itemized deduction. If you're using the money for something else, then it has to be deductible on that something else. For example, if I am buying rental real estate, then the interest–you'd be writing off the interest on your Schedule A, essentially, against the income from that rental real estate. You are no longer writing off your mortgage interest personally as the individual residing in it; you are now writing it off as part of an investment. Anything you wanted to add on that? Jeff: No. If we're talking about buying a piece of investment property like you're just going out and buying more land, hoping that it'll go up in value, then it would be considered investment interests and go back on Schedule A. Typically, we want to keep it–if it's in a business interest or rental property, something like that, we want to keep it there. Toby: Again, the Canadians have been dealing with this for a lot longer than us guys. You cannot write off interest if it's not for your home in Canada unless it was used for an investment. People actually have to go re-file their houses, they get all the cash they could, pay down their house, re-file it so they could show that they used it for an investment so they could actually write off the interest. I think it was called Scotts transactions. It's weird. Hey, I'm not Canadian. This is another question: "Say I deducted a newsletter subscription in 2017 but received a refund for it in 2018. Do I need to add this back as income in 2018 or no?" If you wrote it off and it means your basis is zero, give you the money back, what does that sound like? Jeff: Income. Toby: Income. It is income. At the same time, I see people saying, "Hey, what if I reimburse myself from my cell phone out of two companies?" Now, each reimbursement represents–I said, "Well, you can reimburse yourself up to your expense. Anything above that is income so it becomes taxable." Fun stuff. Yes, you would report it, but only–your cash basis tax first. You report it in the year that you received the money back. "You've saved me so much money. I call y'all my friends." I love that when I get stuff like that. That's not really a question but I'm going to repeat it because it's better than, "Flip off the poll." Not that I had too many of those, but I had a few. "Can I write off costs for rehabbing out of the country?" This sounds like something for Jeff. Can you write off? US taxes. Jeff: Yeah, you do have investment in another country. Toby: Worldwide profits, baby. Yes. Jeff: If it's income-producing property, you're going to be reporting that to the United States. Any expenses you have on that property will go towards that also. Toby: If you're rehabbing a property, it sounds like dealer activity and active business. I may be little interest–I probably want to be looking at structures in the Bahamas if that's where it is. I'd be looking at something that's taxable there so you don't get into treaties and all sorts of fun stuff. "Do I have to pay $800 off the top to the franchise tax board when we start our corporation?" Jeff: No, California has an exemption to corporations that are first year only. Toby: Yeah, and that $800–this is, if you like tax cases, there's Veritas 1, there's Veritas 2, there's Northwest Energetic Services, there's Bakersfield Mall, and they're all versus your friendly–what is it called? Not the franchise tax. No, it's whatever. I forget what they're called. Jeff: We know what it's called. Toby: Yeah. Anyway, I'll remember it as soon as I could. I'm trying to think about it, but they keep suing the Board of Equalization, the BoE. It's $800 and they say that's the minimum tax, but they say, really, it's a fee because if it was a tax, then it'd be an unconstitutional tax because it's not attached to the income. They keep trying to call it a fee. They lose and then they change it a little bit and they lose again. That's just an aside. California is kind of evil. "We live in Washington. We have a Nevada C Corp which fully owns a watch and LLC and employs the kids. What are the recommended strategies to optimize for college tuition?" Wow, so you're doing a great thing. You are going to run them through payroll. When you're applying for things like scholarships, if it's going to be based on income, you're going to show that income. You're going to show those returns, but those kids should–most of that income is going to probably be underneath the standard deduction. Right now, it's $12,000. They're going to pay zero and they're going to pay very little on any amount over that. Plus, if you're smart, you're putting some of that money in a Roth IRA and they're never going to pay tax on that. It's smart to do this with your kids. If I paid tuition out of my tax bracket, it's coming out of my highest tax bracket. If I'm in the highest tax bracket, that's 37%. If my kids pay for their tuition and are working for the company, and they have to do something, then they pay at a third tax bracket, which, quite often, is zero. I do this with my own daughter. Last year, I think we paid $500 in taxes total for the year when it cost me $8,000 if I was doing it, but she has to do something. She has to actually work for the company and do stuff for the company. Other stuff you could do to optimize is dump it into–defer it into a retirement plan. If you want to do a 401K, they can put the first 18,500 of their income and they can defer it. You're still reporting it. I'm not sure it'll have an impact on scholarships or not. I have not seen it have much of an impact, but that's what I'd be doing, is the benefits far outweigh anything with this on the scholarship side. It is huge. Here's one: "I lent money to a real estate flipper. She gave me a promissory note, but it was not recorded with the deed of trust. Now, she is in default. Can I foreclose?" When you loan money to a flipper with no deed of trust, that's called a gift. I'm just kidding. You need to make sure that you're documenting it. You cannot foreclose until you actually file your secured interest. You got to have it filed and then, yes, you can actually start foreclosure proceedings if you want, if they don't pay it. You definitely want to make sure that, when you're giving notes–there's something called "first in time, first in right". You want to make sure you know it's recorded and you have your deed of trust against that house. Otherwise, somebody else could go slap theirs on first. There's also places where they get priority. In Nevada, for example, the HoAs get super liens. They actually step in front of the primary lender. It sounds weird but it's true. You want to make sure that you're documenting your loan and covering yourself as best you can, make sure that you're getting a personal guarantee and, if they have any other assets, you may want to slap a lien on those, too. All right, "With a new company, there's quite a lot of expense reimbursements. Since I don't have a lot of revenue yet, I haven't paid it back. Is it okay to carry it over a year or should I go ahead and pay it back even though I'm still in the red?" Jeff, this sounds like you unless you're zoning out there. She has a new company, she has lots of expenses, she doesn't have any money that she's made yet, so should they pay it back, carry it forward? "Can I pay myself, reimburse myself in the future year?" The answer is yes, you could reimburse yourself whenever. The question really becomes, "Do I want to capture all my startup expenses in the first year?" Jeff: Yeah, I think you do. You want to capture as many expenses as possible even if you're not getting directly reimbursed right away. Toby: Yeah, you have two choices whenever you fund a company. You can fund it with your cash and then it's going to have a loss and it's going to carry that loss forward if it's a C Corp. If it's an S Corp, you can actually take that loss. I've contributed $20,000. That's my basis and it loses 20,000 and, technically, I'd have a $20,000-loss with an S Corp. Usually, we're seeing this in C Corps, and you just carry it is a payable and a receivable. It's payable to you, you would say, "Hey, it owes me some money. It's kind of like this." I always use Krispy Kreme in my examples. I go out for Anderson and I bring in 12 dozen Krispy Kreme for a meeting or something, and the others say, "Hey, I'll pay you back but we don't have the money right now." It doesn't mean that it goes away; it means that I'm sitting there, waiting for them to pay me back. If they pay me back in two years, all it means is they can't write that off as a deduction until they pay me back so they're not going to have a loss if I'm carrying it as an IOU. If I give them the money to buy the doughnuts and they buy the doughnuts, they get the loss right away even though they haven't returned my money to me. They could return that money to me at any time. For me, it's always going to be tax-neutral. "Do I need to be on payroll with my real estate income or can I just take distributions from my LLC?" This is regarding Trump's 20% deduction on the plan. If it's investment real estate, you never have to take a seller as long as it's rental real estate. If it's flipping and it's in an S Corp, then you would have to take some salary if you're taking distributions. I don’t want to twist it. This sounds like it's just an LLC with rental property. You do not have to take it. The 20% is for 2018 onwards. If they think that it has a sunset clause, the end of 2025. Is it the end of 2025 that it ends? Jeff: Yeah. Toby: Yeah, so 2025. Here's a really long one. Boy, this is a really long one. Let me see if I can condense this. "I have a Wyoming LLC that is the sole member of a second LLC that is disregarded entity. I funded the Wyoming with 8,500 and the Wyoming funded the other bookkeeping QuickBooks balance sheet shows an owner equity 100% of 16,500. This is offset a balance sheet with capital contribution. While this does end up with net equity of 85, it gives the impression of the equity, which is incorrect. Is there a different way of handling?" Do you see what they're doing? Jeff: This is what we call–anytime you have combined financials or tax returns, you're going to have a–you may have a payable from one to the other where you've lent money to the other company, but when you do the combined financial or tax return, this is what you call an eliminating entry. If you lent $8,500 to one, those two entries are going to offset each other and it's going to be zero on your tax return. Toby: He's looking at it and saying, "Hey, they took the eight that I put into the second and added it to the 8,500 that I put in the first," and it's only 8,500 and then 8 went to the second LLC. Jeff: Yeah, I think you just need to clarify that it was the same money that– Toby: We're doing it and we'll take a look at it. We'll grab that name and, when we can, I'll print this out. "Can SMLLC, single-member LLC, disregard an entity under an MMLLC, which is a multi-member LLC taxed as a partnership, be converted to a single, multi-member LLC taxed as if–" you guys are killing me, "And would the tax changes be implemented?" What you're really saying, Billy, is, "Can I spin off a single-member LLC, make it into a multi-member LLC and change it to an S Corp?" The answer is yes. We just have to make sure that we follow the S Corp rules, which means there's got to be natural persons owning it, resident aliens–if it's somebody from out of the country, that they reside in the United States in certain trusts and even certain single-member LLCs. All right, to the question about–this refers to qualified business income. Sorry for lack of a better–no, Janet, you've already got it. "Since rental real estate is included for the 20%, are you also required to be a rep for that to be true?" No. You automatically get it. "High-tech network engineer, does it qualify as special services?" If you're not a network engineer and it's just you, then I would say probably yes. If you have a company and it's not so much you but your company has its own–like it's lots of people and it's just known, then the answer is no. Then, you're not. Jeff: Yeah, there were some specific carve-outs. I think the architects got a carve-out of this, but there's a few industries that have been specifically exempted from those specialized industries. Toby: I'm not sure but software engineer–I would say that if it's just you, chances are going to be under the special services. "When I file taxes, the taxes for the rental property show up on my tax showing a schedule form that is Schedule E. I almost $300,000 with my real estate and other income as a single woman." I think we already talked about this one. "Is there anything I can do to reduce my taxable income?" Yes, Janet, you can make contributions to qualified retirement plans. You can make contributions to charities, including your own. You can make contributions to C Corp if it has a business relationship. There are lots of things you can do or, if you have anybody that you need to pay salaries to like kids or somebody that's working with you, that would be something else you could do to lower the taxable income. "If you were writing out another slide, it's not showing up on my computer." Sorry, Sir. I think that's where all they go. "What about an IOL as a tax-deferred compensation for my property management income?" That would not work. An IOL is tax-neutral although you can do tax-deferred compensation where it's taxable to the entity and it's not taxable to you under certain circumstances. If I do tax-deferred income like, "Hey, I'm taking deferred compensation," I need to be at a losing. Usually, non-compete is going to be the thing that makes it work. We use these especially in the non-profit world where somebody says, "I don't want to be paid; I want to work, but I do want to get paid eventually for all the work I'm doing now. Rather than pay me this year, pay me when I'm 65 and maybe I wipe it out or not, but as long as I have a non-compete with that–" it's saying, "Hey, basically, if you go work for somebody else in a competing industry, you lose all that deferred compensation." You should be good. "I purchased a new computer that cost less than $2,500. Is that a straight expense in the current tax year or some weird depreciation thing?" Dean, it's called a Section 179 deduction. You can buy up to $1 million, you're good. You can write it all off. Otherwise, that would be depreciated. They also have 100% bonus depreciation, so we're going to catch it no matter what. Bonus depreciation is, if it's less than a 15-year property, you can write it off this year. You're not required to. Somebody says, "Is 199A or that 20% a 20% tax deduction or a 20% reduction?" No, it's a 20% deduction against your qualified business income. The net effect could be much more than 20% depending on your tax bracket. If you're not in a high tax bracket, then the net effect won't be huge. If I'm in the highest tax bracket in a state that's taxing me where I'm at 50%, that 20% deduction could be worth a ton. It could be worth significant amounts especially if I'm in a company that's not a specialized service and I meet the requirements. I could have hundreds and thousands of dollars of qualified business income being exempted, and that could be worth hundreds and thousands of dollars to me from a tax standpoint. We already did this one. Somebody who had their spinning left. You can go in bite-sized pieces, guys. We're going to break these things down, and I understand that we're going through fast, but that's half the fun. We're not dwindling around here. "My self-directed IRA received a K1 for net rental loss for a passive investment of $50,000. Do I need to file a 990 T to show loss? Does the IRA custodian sign the return or can I sign?" Jeff: Here's what happens: If your IRA is a partner in a partnership, that partnership is required to issue a K1 to all of its partners. That doesn't mean you have to do anything with the K1 in your IRA. You're not going to recognize any taxable income until you actually start taking money out of the IRA, especially since this is a rental property we're talking about. Toby: Cool. Hey, this is a really good one. By the way, if you ever do a 990 T and it says self-directed IRA, your custodian does have to sign, and they like to charge you for that. "401K, 401K." "I have a C Corp with accumulated losses and would rather close it than repurpose it. Is there a way to direct the loss of my personal taxes? Is it possible?" The answer is yes. It's called a 1244 election. It should have been made when you issued your stock. If Anderson did your C Corp, we already did that because I do it with every single corporation. You can then write off as a single person up to $50,000 or up to $100,000 if married, filing jointly, and then it could be used to offset even your W2 income. Jeff: Going back to one of the earlier questions, this is one reason we want to start recognizing reimbursements and stuff as early as possible to establish those debts to you early on. Toby: Yeah, I had this happen and we actually had–the one time this was ever audited was because this accountant refused to give him a $67,000-deduction. It was one of our clients who was a trader who was ready to launch and go into his business and then his employer made him an offer he couldn't refuse and gave him a whole bunch of our money. He took a $67,000-loss. He had never made a dollar in the corporation. We went under audit. We won. Yay. It took two seconds because it was a single letter and we gave him the law, and it's a statute. The IRS is just a policing agency. If there's a statute that's clear, they don't sit there and fight with it. I think it was a $38,000-reimbursement–what do you call it–refund. Awesome first-timer. We love first-timers. Thank you for joining us. "I want to receive an invite, a reminder to a different email." We can give you that. You can always use this when you register for the Tax Tuesday. Just put in your other email. "Interested doing sandwich lease options. What is the best business structure and what document can you provide to protect myself from sellers suing me if a tenant or buyer stops paying rent or if a tenant or buyer trashes the home?" That's a tough one. You're literally leasing it and then re-leasing it with the right to buy. Let me think about this one. How am I going to do this? I'm going to be doing that through an entity. The way you protect yourself is to keep very little amounts of asset in that entity so that if you're sued, it's not you; it's the entity itself, and the entity doesn't have much to lose. That's a tough one. I tend to stay away from stuff like that. I want to buy the property and then you do a lease option in an LLC. Jeff: Make sure you have insurance. Toby: Yup, make sure you have insurance, too. That could happen so the tenant trashes the place and somebody else says, "Hey, wait a second." That's why there's always risk. What you do is you just keep it to a low. "Is it hard to set up classes in QuickBooks? Does Anderson do this?" It's not hard and, yes, we do it. "How long does it take to set up a class in QuickBooks?" Jeff: No, you'd have to ask bookkeepers. Toby: Jeff's such an accountant. Yes, it's actually very easy. Jeff: Actually, the bookkeepers are really good at it. They do it all the time. Toby: It's literally all you're doing, is setting up another class. It's almost like a revenue class so you might have revenue that comes in from plumbing and then selling products in your plumbing business and then, "Hey, I have one that's a consulting," and that might be another class. It literally takes two seconds. "What if the Wyoming LLC owns a C Corp which owns an LLC?" I don't know what that means, but what we mean is–I imagine for the 199A. We're just going to look at it is the C Corp owns an LLC that's not going to be qualified for the 20% deduction. The LLC that owns the C Corp, if it's doing other activities, might qualify for the deduction. Here's the problem: In the qualified business, the part I didn't tell you about is what is qualified business income. Dividends, interest, capital gains are not included in that definition so if you're issuing interest from a C Corp to the LLC that flows under your return, you're not going to be getting the 20%. "If you set up QuickBooks with a single entity and use class as a separate income, can you also print a balance sheet by class?" Jeff: Yes, you can do it if the balance sheet is also classified. Toby: Okay. See, we're good. We're getting there. We only have about 200 more questions to go. I'm just teasing you. We've gone through about three-quarters of them. "What is Jeff's last name?" Webb. "I have a rental company. This will be my first year doing taxes. What can I expect to pay on my capital gains? What are some determining factors?" Isaac, if you're a rental company and you're selling–like if you have capital gains, it's going to be depending on whether you sold it within a year or after a year. If it's less than a year, it's going to be ordinary income to you. If it's over a year, it's going to be taxed with either 0%, 15% or 20%. If you make over 250,000, you're going to get to add no another 3.8% and then whatever your state tax is. What are the determining factors? How much you make. If you're married, filing jointly less than 77,000, your capital gains rate is zero. All those things come into it. You can always write us at webinar@andersonadvisors if you want to ask specific questions. "I'm in the process of setting up QuickBooks account for my C Corp. I have a construction business and a hair salon that are DPA-ed as C Corp. I am flipping single-family residents in Wyoming LLC? I have sub-expense and sub-income accounts for those." This is getting long. This one, we may want to answer next week because this is kind of cool. It's talking about sub-accounts. I'm just going to table that one unless you want to jump on it. Jeff: No, I think there were a couple of issues in there. Toby: Yup, "But you don't pay tax until the withdrawal, correct? That was just with regards to the IRA." Steve, you do need an account and, yes, you don't pay the tax until you withdraw, add up in IRA. If you have unrelated business income tax or debt finance income out of an IRA, you'd pay it in the year that it was generated. "Can I set up an entity to receive W2 income and max out top […]?" Yes, but you can't do it out of a self-directed IRA. The reason being is that you are a disqualified person so you cannot do that unless you do something called a ROBS transaction, and that's going to be a major topic for another day. That's if your IRA invests in a C Corp that you set up and there are ways to do it and then you could actually pay yourself, so there. "I recently rolled over a 401K to equity trust IRA account, lending funds to other investors charging interest. Is interest income taxable to the IRA?" No, you can do that all day long, and equity trust is having to sign all your docs. My recommendation would be to set up your own 401K so you can sign the loan documents. Somebody says, "How many times a year can you roll over from 401K to IRA or reverse rollover?" It depends on whether you're doing a direct rollover. Jeff: You can do a trustee to trustee every day if you want, meaning you're going from TDM trade to Bank of America. You can do those as long as it's directly being transferred. You can pull the money out once to yourself once every 12 months, and it's a rolling 12-month period. If I pulled it out today, then I wouldn't be able to do it again until next October. Toby: Somebody asks, "Can I roll individual stock holding into Roth trading account if the current value is under the 550 limit, and how?" The answer would be, really, no; you're going to have to liquidate the holdings, open up a new account in the Roth IRA and then contribute the 5,500. It's a pain in the butt, I know, but I don't make the rules. It's this whole Bank Secrecy Act and all this stuff since they flew planes into trade centers. "Is the old rule dead on personal residences two out of five years?" No, that's still the rule, and we still use it like crazy. That's exception 121. Jeff: Yeah, they were talking about making it five out of eight years, and that got thrown out so it's still the old two-out-of-five rule. Toby: Yup. "Do my startup costs carry over two years if my net was negative?" It's actually 20-something years. Jeff: 15 years. Toby: 15 years now? Nate, you can carry forward your startup costs. Is it 15? Jeff::Yeah. Toby:  "Hey, wait a second. I have an S Corp. They keep charging me the 800 fee ever

It’s time for Toby Mathis and Jeff Webb of Anderson Advisors to answer your questions about taxes, the IRS, and much more. Do you have a tax question for them? Submit it to Webinar@andersonadvisors.com. Highlights/Topics: What is Nexus? Why do I care? Nexus is a state’s right to tax your income; different types (tax and physical), state laws, and throwback rule - how they affect you Does IRS reimburse me for corporate expenses? Misconception about reimbursement from the client’s company or IRS; IRS doesn’t give you money, but let’s you write it off How do I qualify for a real estate professional status? Requires 750 hours as #1 use of personal professional time; know importance of passive activity loss and logging time What are self-dealing rules for non-profits, IRAs, QRPs? Particular entities can’t interact with a disqualified person - can’t sell them anything; but self-dealing exceptions exist Am I dealer or investor? What’s the difference? Investor is passively involved, dealer is actively buying/selling real estate; can depend on the intent and timeframe Why set up an LLC that does flipping as a C or S Corp instead of a partnership? Because it’s taxed as ordinary income and subject to self-employment tax What is UBIT? Unrelated business income tax is when a plan/non-profit isn’t doing what it’s set up to do; can have passive activity until it competes with active businesses I hold rental property in a self-directed IRA. What can I do? There’s things you can/can’t do, especially add value to a property, so find a property manager and IRA custodian My wife’s previous employer’s stock options were exercised and have peaked. If we cash in, what’ll be the tax consequences/burden? Long-term capital gain and opportunity zone I’m helping a friend with a crowdfunding project. What are tax consequences with no deductions? Does he pay tax on donated money? No tax for less than $15,000 per donor How to aggregate all properties? Disadvantages? Election form that your print with your tax return to identify properties; doesn’t free up large losses tied up If real estate investing part time, are you considered a part-time investor? You’d be a part-time investor, not real estate professional; determining factor is to document time How do I get the 501(c)(3) tax-exempt? Use the 1023 application How do you create an LLC in an IRA? IRA custodian enters into a contract with a company to create an LLC, or set up a 401(k) to roll the IRA into it without a custodian Investing in LLC for holding rental property. How do you avail to a 1031 exchange? Need a 1031 exchange facilitator and LLC must buy or sell the next property within 180 days If I receive social security benefits at 62 and not currently employed, but do receive interest income. Will it affect my SS benefits? Can be isolated into its own taxable entity My wife and I are the only shareholders and both take a ⅓ salary. Is that the right amount? You should take a ⅓ of the net profit as salary instead How do you put an LLC on hold? Do nothing with it or pay the state; file non-activity return Will real estate holding LLC taxes partnership qualify for 20% pass-through deduction? Yes, if not triple net property For all questions/answers discussed, sign up to be a Platinum member to view the replay! Resources Anderson Advisors Tax and Asset Prevention Event Toby Mathis Anderson Advisors U.S. Supreme Court Reverses Long Standing Law On Collection Of Sales Taxes Northwest Energetic Services LLC vs. California Franchise Tax Board Throwback Rule SALT Limit After 24 years, wealthy inventor gets his day in tax court – and wins 10 Tax Deductions That Will Disappear Next Year Passive Activity Losses - Real Estate Tax Tips Real Estate Professional Status - Becoming More Important - Very Hard To Prove Acts of self-dealing by private foundation Unrelated Business Income Tax Opportunity Zones Frequently Asked Questions About Form 1099-INT | Internal Revenue Service Exemption Requirements - 501(c)(3) Organizations Form 1023 Taxbot MileIQ Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Provision 11 011 Section 199A - Qualified Business Income Deduction FAQs   Full Episode Transcript Toby: Alright, welcome to Tax Tuesday, this is Toby Mathis joined by our tax manager Jeff Webb. Jeff: How do you do? Toby: We're going to get jumping on here. We're just going to jump right in. no time like the present to just get business done. So first off, happy Tuesday. Second off, let's jump into a bunch of questions that are giving us a steady feed from folks even before we got started. I'm sure I'll be more happy than to answer your questions. I also got emails in from folks that I may be trying to make sure I answer all of those and we'll just make sure that we're getting through each and every question to the extent humanly possible within this hour. So the first one is, what is Nexus and why do I care. Second one is going to be, does the IRS reimburse me for my corporate expenses. Third one is, how do I qualify for real estate professionals, technically real estate professional status. What are self doing rules for nonprofits in QRPs. I'm going to throw in IRAs in there as well. Am I a dealer or an investor, what difference does it make. Those are the ones that we're going to hit one after the other in succession. I'm making sure that we're getting through these. So the first one is, what is nexus and why do I care. Jeff, do you want to hit tax nexus because there's different types of nexus. There's physical presence for lawsuits and there's tax nexus for taxation. I'm going to have Jeff hit the tax and then I'll touch base on the physical nexus. Jeff: So when we're talking about tax nexus what we're primarily talking about is a state's right to tax you on your income. For example, you may live in Nevada, have a rental property in California. California has a right to tax any income on that property because you're doing business within California. There are different roles, there have been numerous cases on nexus. Toby: Most recently, our Supreme Court reversed a physical presence test that the error that Amazon, everybody that was an online retailer use to avoid state sales tax and that was just changed. Jeff: Yeah, on that one in particular the Supreme Court as Toby said, gave the states the right to tax online sales in their states. The thing is, the states now have to write tax walls to accomplish this. Most of the states don't have anything that accomplishes this. Toby: A lot of times, ignorance is bliss. People would avoid sales tax like for example, I live in Washington, Florida, Oregon and avoid the sales tax and they ignored Washington's use tax. A lot of states have this. You don't pay sales tax and you go someplace where there is no sales tax, you still owe sales tax on it but they call it use tax because you brought the physical item into your state and you never paid sales tax on it. So then they would say, "Aha." And the really interesting thing – there were actually some interesting cases that were popping up from the nexus, ones that came out of Washington, was Northwest Energetic Services too and that was a case in California where they tried to tax an organization that was registered to do business there that didn't actually do any business in California but they wanted to tax its worldwide revenue. The franchise tax board of the board of equalization lost that one and they had a few others but what you'll find is that this is a continuously active in generating area of tax law and we tend to fall into the category of ask for forgiveness not for permission all the time because if you ask a state whether you should be paying tax, they will gladly say yes even if it's not a legitimate tax. They'll tell you that you have to pay it even though it's made to be unconstitutional, unlawful, you fill in the blank. Even if you don't owe it, they'll oftentimes just answer, "Yes, of course you should." They can't actually be giving you any tax advice anyway so it's the wrong party to be asking. I'm sure Jeff you get to deal with that more than I do. Jeff: Yeah, in a state like California, it used to be an old joke for the CPA's that you could be flying over the state of California, make enough business phone call and California would want to so you have nexus and we can now tax you. They're also a state that's very difficult to leave if you're a resident. We had a case where somebody, NBA player for the Sacramento Kings was traded to Seattle Sonics and moved there. Toby: Yeah, now the Oklahoma City Thunder, I was there when they move, horrible. Jeff: The state of California wanted to say, "No, you're still resident of California, we're still going to be taxing you because you got friends here and you have club ownership, some relationships. California in particular is very tenacious with Nexus. Toby: Yeah, so you're going to see things evolving over the next few years since the Supreme Court decision was literally this last, I think it was just months ago or end of the year last year. You're going to see the states trying to fill in the blanks. So you have some states for example in drop shipping, Pennsylvania would tax you if you drop ship out of their state where it used to not be, other states did before. We were talking earlier before the webinar, Jeff and I were talking about what is like a claw back. Jeff: Yeah, it's called a throwback rule that says if your sales into a state that doesn't have taxes then where it got shipped from can tax instead. Toby: Somebody's asked, what are the worst three states for nexus. It really depends on what you're doing, but I would say just off the top of my head probably New York, Connecticut and California. They're pretty heinous. Look at the states that just filed a lawsuit against the federal government under the SALT limitation which is the State and Local Tax Limitation. You'll see I think there was four states Maryland was one of them, where they try to hit you with so many different taxes. It's not just business, it's on your personal as well. It's just for nexus, for a person, it's really easy to figure out, "Hey, where do you live?" Because when I say it's easy, it can be difficult if you have two residences that you spend time with equally. They're going to add up things like how much utility you use, where your driver's license is. Where your kids go to school, where your vehicles are registered, you're going to look at those types of things. There's Hyatt v. Commissioner Case or what was it, Hyatt versus board of equalization I think is actually what it was. Where a gentleman moved to Nevada and the California franchise tax board sent agents to Nevada they climbed to his garage and break into his apartment to prove that he was actually residing more in California than he was in Nevada because his tax bill would've been so great and when they got caught, they said they're immune. Our Supreme Court and Scully I remember the opinion was scathing on them saying, "No, you're immune in your jurisdiction. When you cross the state lines, don't expect any immunity." They just harassed that poor guy. They were climbing around his house. So let's just narrow it down though. You asked a question what is nexus. There's two sides, there's tax nexus and then there's physical nexus. In the physical nexus again where you reside, it's pretty easy. If you live there, then you have a physical nexus in that state, it's where you have a house. In the business it's no different. In a business, you have to decide where it's going to have its main presence and the courts have held having a bare office and nothing more isn't going to be sufficient. You actually have to do something there. That's when you actually have to have a physical office space. We use virtual office where it's doing more than just maintaining a registered agent. There we're actually giving conference facilities, phone answering, we'll do document prep and things like that for the governance of the company so the company can actually have a physical presence. The reason that you do that is to make sure it has a home. So if somebody's coming after one of its shareholders or members, one of its owners that it does not draw that entity into the state where they're located. So, if I have owners in a company and I have my company set up in Wyoming and they sue me in Nevada and they sue somebody else in Texas and somebody else in Florida, you don't have a choice between the Nevada, Texas and Florida where the shareholder or where the members of the LLC are located, they would actually have to go to Wyoming where the actual entity is located. That's what you're trying to do. So if Anderson does my meeting notes, that's why that's important. We're not talking about Canadian, US the nexus pass. I could tell you a fun one. We had a client that just got nailed by California. It's actually under the FBAR which is Foreign Bank Account Regulations. They had some interest on a bank account that was there for a condo they had in Whistler and they sold the condo in Whistler and they didn't report, I think it was like $70 or $76 worth of interest. Jeff do you know these off the top of your head? How much the penalty is? Jeff: No. Toby: If the IRS catches you, it's 50% of the account balance per year. But if you go under amnesty which they have taken an amnesty was a $38,000 fine which they paid for that $76. Canada is still offshore. Anyway, so what is nexus and why do I care. It gets a little convoluted but the reason you care is you don't want to draw your company into your state, you want to make it very difficult for somebody to get a hold of your assets if they're coming after you. From a tax standpoint, it matters because we want to keep our business activities to the extent possible in the lowest taxing jurisdiction as humanly possible. So that's that one. Jeff this is one of your favorites, I know. Does the IRS reimburse me for my corporate expenses? Jeff: Of course they do. IRS is really giving out money. We get this question more often than you would think. I think it's a misconception that clients are being told that their companies can reimburse them for certain expenses which will reduce our taxes and sometimes the clients are hearing IRS is going to reimburse us. The only time you get back money from IRS is if you pay money into IRS for taxes and you don't owe them any tax or maybe overpaid them. Toby: Yeah. IRS is a policing agency. Your taxes when you pay it, they don't even go to the IRS, it goes to the US treasury. So the IRS is merely, pay my boss, is all they are. So they don't give any money out whatsoever so the IRS does not reimburse you for your corporate expenses. What the IRS does is it enforced the laws which is the United States code and issues regulations interpreting that code and is basically the enforcement arm for the US department of treasury. What ends up happening for corporation is they're allowed to reimburse shareholders many expenses that are not included on the shareholder's personal tax returns. So it sometimes seems like they're giving you money when in all reality, they're allowing you to not pay tax on your expenses which is always the battle because there's lots of rules out there that say things are not deductible. Nothing more telling them what we just had happened in this tax change where they eliminated all miscellaneous itemized deductions. All of them are gone in case you've been sleeping. In 2018, you do not get to write them off anymore. Jeff: Now that's your union dues, your tax preparation fees. Toby: Any unreimbursed business expense if you're a teacher and you're providing stuff for your classroom, you don't get to write it off. Jeff: If you're paying substantial amounts to your broker for advisory fees. Toby: That's a huge one. We're going to see that one come back and bite people in their touché. Jeff: That's no longer deductible. Toby: So it's horrible. So no, the IRS does not reimburse you for your corporate expenses. Your corporation reimburses you for your corporate expenses and the IRS lets you write it off. How do I qualify for real estate professional status. Jeff do you want to play with this one or do you want me to handle it? Jeff: I'll do a little and then you can correct me. So real estate professional has a hours commitment. I believe it's 750 hours a year. Toby: So it's a minimum of 750 hours. There's a second part to that too, you know that. Jeff: And the 750 hours can be earned by you or your spouse. What's your second one? Toby: The second one is it has to be the number one use of your personal professional time. Jeff: Oh, correct. Toby: The way I always explain this is if you did 1001 hours doing bicycle repair and you did 1000 hours of real estate, you do not qualify as a real estate professional. But if it's reversed and you did 1000 hours of bicycle repair you did 1001 hours of real estate activities, then you do. And the reason this is important is because ordinarily, your real estate expenses are offset your real estate income and you can only take losses from real estate. In other words, the excess depreciation, or repairs, or whatever, your losses are limited to $3000 a year against your other active income. So that's called the passive activity loss rule. Jeff: $25,000. Toby: If you materially participate and then you have $100,000 to $150,000 scale up. There's some little nuances which don't bring your head with. At the end of the day, there are restrictions on taking passive activity loss. Real estate professional status removes that restriction. The other thing that's really important about real estate professional status is it is per property. So if you have three properties, you'd have to meet it for each of the three unless you elect to aggregate all your properties on your tax return. We have seen this missed by accountants who don't do real estate. They don't aggregate and there are actually cases on the book where people had to fight and they literally had tons of properties they easily met the 750 if you aggregate it but their accountants miss the aggregation election. Jeff: And the sum of 750 hours is not just for your rental properties. Toby: Any real estate. Jeff: Any real estate activity. Toby: Yeah. Jeff was actually right when he said your spouse could qualify, either you or your spouse if you're filing jointly. Jeff: So if you have a full time job and you're getting a W2, I can guarantee you that you will not legally qualify. Under audit, you're going to lose. However, if you have a full time job and your wife does not or your husband does not, they can qualify to be that real estate professional. Toby: We had a fun one. A good friend of ours and a colleague in Georgia was making somewhere between $2 million and $3 million a year in his professional practice. His wife qualified as a real estate professional and he quite literally bought enough commercial property and did something called cost segregation where you're rapidly depreciating it where he generated enough loss off the real estate to offset his income. The IRS audited it, he is self represented because he knew the rule. It withheld, he stood up. His wife just did their real estate activities and he did their practice and at the end of the day, she met the requirement for the real estate professional status and the rule is pretty straightforward. IRS didn’t like the outcome but that's not their job. So they picked a fight and lost the audit which is not uncommon. All right, so how do I qualify for a real estate professional. Keep a log of your time and make sure that you're aggregating all of your real estate activities. Even if it's for a closely held company, it's still going to match, it's still going to work. Next one, what are the self dealing rules for nonprofits in QRPs. I'm going to add in there IRAs as well since when we talk about a qualified retirement plan, we're really talking about 401K and 401A. This is going to dovetail in with one of our other questions that came in off the internet as well. But here's how it works. If you are in a particular type of entity where it says you cannot interact and engage in business with a disqualified person, you could not sell them a $1 million building for $1. It is an absolute prohibition against self dealing. The most important first step is determining whether or not you're within one of those rules. Then if you are, then you look and say are there any exceptions to that rule. So for nonprofits, nonprofits are going to fall into broad categories foundations, private foundations are one. These are nonprofits that aggregate money and give money to other nonprofits, they don't do anything. And in that one, you have an absolute bar from self dealing. The next one is an operating nonprofit that is doing something and in that case, you just have to use arm's length transactions. So we look at that, that's our step number one. So let's go back to the first one, private foundations then you look and say, are there any exceptions. The only exception is reasonable compensation, it can always be reasonably compensated. But other than that, no more transactions. So for nonprofits 501(c)(3) you can enter into transactions as long as it's an operating nonprofit. It can give you benefits, it can pay you and it can engage in sales and other transactions between you and the agencies so long as they are arm's length. And the way you make sure it is arm's length is you have non-interested parties looking at it saying, "Hey, that looks okay to me." somebody who doesn't have a dog in the fight. Now we go to QRPs and IRAs. In either one of those, you have absolute prohibitions against self dealing with disqualified parties and disqualified parties are lineal descendants which would be grandparents, children and their spouses, great children and their spouses. It does not include your siblings. So what's interesting is you could actually engage in transactions with your IRA for example, loan money to your brother. You cannot loan money to your mother. You could not loan money to your kids or your grandkids, you could not do a second on their house, you could not do anything between the company. You could not buy a house from them. That is an absolute bar that's called, disqualified party. Jeff: The way I kind of look at it as to whether you may be violating self dealing rules is, are you benefitting from a transaction between you and the nonprofit or the QRP or the IRA. That's really what they're out to prevent. And unfortunately the rules are pretty severe for violations of the self dealing. Toby: If you self-deal, you're just going to disqualify your IRA. If you're using a QRP and you're using a 401K, then we have different rules, and in that particular case, it would just disqualify the money that you actually were utilizing. Their far more lenient. Jeff: I had a client who had a QRP, it was actually defined benefit plan, who had a required minimum distribution to make and the plan was not funded at the time. The client had to make a loan to the QRP, which is a self-dealing but unfortunately there's an exception for that that one was quickly repaid. There was no profit or interest earned on it. Toby: Was it within the 60 days? Jeff: I believe it was within 60 days. Toby: There's some more fun stuff. Then we go into the 401Ks and this is where you get into people acting on behalf of the company. I know that there were some questions, that were already posed in the chat feature here. You're not supposed to be getting any personal benefit or using those funds at all when you have an IRA or a 401K. In an IRA, it's much more severe because you have a custodian. So if a renter for example is paying you money and they pay it to you individually, technically you have a violation of the self dealing rules because you just received money. Even if you go ahead and put it right back in the IRA, you're going to have an issue because technically you weren't supposed to receive the money, the custodian was supposed to be receiving the money. So you should actually have rental money going to your custodian if you’re using an IRA. If you’re using a 401K or 401A, which the profit sharing plan or 401K, then you are the trustee and you're able to accept the money and endorse it right into the account and make sure that the money goes to the right place. IRA's are a little more difficult. To get around this, a lot of people with IRA's will set up an LLC which you can be the manager of. Actually, the IRA is technically the member— you're in non compensated role and we have to make sure that the LLC agreement says that if we drafted it, then we make sure that we're putting in the non-prohibitionals. You cannot personally benefit from these activities. It has to all go back to the retirement plan. People will do the LLC and they will be all right, now I can go ahead and accept the funds through the LLC, that's how they do with an IRA. If you're doing with the 401K, we're going to suggest that you still set up an LLC anytime you have real estate, just because we don't want the liability to flow through to you. But there, now, you don't need the custodian. You could technically do it inside the 401K directly though you should still have the LLC and it's the same scenario where you're able to accept the proceeds. That's not going to be a technical violation because you're acting on behalf of the plan. And that is not a violation of the self dealing rules. So the biggest takeaway from all this, is that you can act on behalf of the plan. The second a just qualified person starts to get personal benefit, you have violated the rules and if it's an IRA, the whole thing is violating—considered a taxable event, which should be that 10% penalty plus income tax on it for the entire amount if it's at 401K or 401A, it would just be the portion that you violated. We tend to be very bullish on using 401Ks and 401A's, profit sharing plans around here also known as QRP. And this is why, because they're far more forgiving and they have a less moving pieces. I hope that explains that. We're going to have—I know there's a couple more questions that are in here, that are going to be relevant to this section as well. Let me jump on to something. The questions, this is something you can ask detailed questions via our email. I will answer them, Jeff or Tony, whoever's from the tax department here. We will answer these on the tax Tuesday. We will also more likely be responding back out to you directly as well because we want to make sure you get your questions answered, but just jot down that address, webinar@andersonadvisors.com and feel free to shoot them in. Since our last one, Tax Tuesday, we had a couple of questions and I want to go through these. Number one was from Karen out of Alaska, "I have a revocable trust in Alaska that owns and sells real property, does the trust to pay income taxes on the profit or does the profit end up on my personal tax return? Is it taxed at the same rate as everything else? So the most important word she used in her question was revocable, because trust come in two flavors, revocable are irrevocable. If they're irrevocable, then we have two choices, we don't have to worry about the irrevocable.. Since it's revocable, it's a grand tour trust is ignored, it's you, for tax purposes until your dead. So you're good, sorry, sometimes I'm blunt. So if you're buying and selling real estate, real property it's taxed no differently than if you're on the real property. Now here's the rub, it also gives you know asset protection. So revocable trust is giving you know asset protection with that real property, so I would really strongly suggest that the revocable trust actually be the owner of an LLC that is buying and selling the real estate and depending on how quickly you are turning this, will depend on whether that say, S or a C-Corp., if it's a flip versus if it is a long-term holds, then we just put it as an LLC. It would either be disregarded or taxed as a partnership. We want it to flow under our return. Those are kind of our choices. There was a question, I don't know if I got to that. I'm going to skip back to our slides. There's something about—Am I a dealer or an investor? So I want to make sure that I'm getting this one right here. Because this is relevant to one of these questions. A dealer and an investor is something that we talk about in real estate, you want to hit on this? Jeff: No, you're doing fine. Toby: An investor is someone who's passively involved, a dealer is somebody who is actively buying and selling real estate. So if you buy real estate with the intent to hold it for its long term appreciation cash flow, then you are an investor. If you buy real estate with the intent to sell it, then you are a dealer. The easiest way to conceptualize this is if I am an investor, I am passive. If I am a dealer, then I am a supermarket with inventory. And I'm putting my real estate on a shelf and it's constantly for sale. Just like at your grocery store, it may take a couple years for something to sell. I'm just imagining the items that are on the shelf. Jeff: Your durable goods. Toby: Right, so you sell something, I used to do liquidation. We would grab all the expired items we would sell them but let's say, it doesn't matter how long you held them. A lot of people think, well if I held it over a year, I can't be a dealer. That's not the case, we actually have cases on the book where they held it over 10 years. What matters is what your intent was when you buy it. And the difference it makes is active income versus passive income. The difference is an investor can 1031 exchange and defer all other taxes. An investor can get long-term capital gains, an investor can do installment sales, an investor can spread out the tax liability over a long period of time. Whereas a dealer is active. It's subject to social security taxes, it's taxable immediately even if you don't receive the money. It is active ordinary income, it's no difference than I just sold that box of Cheerios on the shelf that I've been waiting to sell. It makes a huge difference. Dealer activity we're going to isolate inside of an S-Corp or a C-Corp. Investor activity, we're going to make sure it flows on your personal return either by using a disregarded LLC or a partnership LLC, one of the two. Jeff: Intent has really made a difference in a couple of cases. One, where somebody bought a property that they go allow their child to live in, something end up happening then they sold it after a short time. They were considered to be an investor not a dealer. Toby: It doesn't even matter. It does not matter whether you ever rented it, there's plenty of cases where somebody tried to rent it and they were going to use it as a long term hold and then things change and they sold it. Just know that if you buy or sell within a year, the presumption is going to be that you're a dealer. If you hold for over a year, the presumption is going to be that you're an investor but it's not a guarantee. We're going to get back to these questions. How does Flip LLC income flow into S-Corp and then what will be distributions of the seller? So, we talked a little bit about this last week but I'm going to go and we're going to hit this. When you set up an LLC, it doesn't exist to the IRS. So when you say how does the Flip LLC flow into S-Corp, it doesn't. A Flip LLC is an S-Corp if you elect to have it be treated that way with the IRS. The income is just going into an S-Corp. Then you have to decide what your salary will be because if you know anything about an escort S-Corp, you want to make sure you pay yourself a reasonable salary if it's making money. The rule of thumb to use is, one third of your net income should be paid out as salary. That's just a rule of thumb but it's all in all reality the IRS has this funky test where you're supposed to say, "Hey, what would it be? What could it be paid?" they never tell us exactly. So I'll just say this, pay a third, don't worry about it. If you get too much money, if you start making over $300,000, then we're going to have a chat but where you're going to be on our radar anyway, we're going to be making sure you're paying a reasonable salary anyway. The reason this is important is because the salary is subject to old age death and survivors in Medicare also known as FICA or social security and the distributions are not. So what you would do is you'd be cutting your social security tax by about two thirds if you did it that way. I hope that explains it. So it makes its money and it pays it out. We do need to make sure that if you're flipping, that the money goes into the LLC. Jeff: A quick comment on distributions on an S-Corporation. Distributions are typically the money that's already been taxed are in you're just pulling the cash out. What you don't want to do is go out and get a bank loan in S-Corporation and take distributions from that for several reasons. One, you don't have basis in those distributions. Two, it gets into the whole finance distribution issues and things of that nature. So you really only want to be pulling money out of the company that you’ve already been taxed on. Toby: Fair enough and then if you don't pull any money out of an LLC that's taxed as an S-Corp, you don't technically have to pay yourself a salary. You just let it sit in there and keep growing which your accountant is not going to tell you because they don't know that. The reason I know that is because I have spoken to probably 100 accountants that missed that one. It says, why do you want the LLC that does flipping set up as an S-Corp or C-Corp instead of a partnership? Mark, we were just talking about that because it's taxed as ordinary income as subject to self employment tax. So the reason we want that in an SRC is so that you do not get classified as a dealer because then all of your real estate is dealer real estate and you could lose all your long-term capital gains, you to lose your 1031, you could lose your installment sale. So we want it to be a separate taxpayer from you so the IRS notes clearly who the investor is and who the dealers is and then you can reduce the amount of tax hit by using the S-Corp that will reduce your self-employment tax significantly, if you add a 401K to it, you could eliminate your tax or defer it out into the future. If you use a C-Corp, then depending on what your expenses are, we can also eliminate all your tax or at least reduce it significantly. So that's why we use that. All right, we have a whole bunch of questions to go through so I'll go through this. What is UBIT and UBITA. UBIT is unrelated business income tax and the easiest way to understand this is when you have a tax deferred entity or tax, it's not actually a tax rates, it can be tax rate if it's a Roth but when you have a qualified plan or a nonprofit and it is not doing what it's set up to do, so let's say in an IRA or a 401K or a 401A, or a nonprofit, they're all set up to do certain things. They're allowed to have a passive activity which is rents, royalties, dividends, interest, even capital gains and it can have those and you don’t have to worry about it at all. But once it starts competing with other businesses, active businesses, now you have an issue and that's what's called—let's say that you have these ordinary businesses. Then they would be taxed, generally speaking it's going to be the highest rate at 37% I believe is what it's going to be as kind of a disincentive to engage in traditional businesses inside those exempt organizations. The easiest way to look at this, let's say you set up an IRA and it runs a mini mart, you're going to pay tax on those profits just like anybody else would. The exception is if that IRA owns a corporation that does not pay out the profits directly. It would have to own C-Corp and then it would only receive dividends and then those are considered passive. So it gets funny and a little bit difficult. The other one is let's say you set up a nonprofit, that's for—what's a good one? Helping Vet and then it sets up a pizza business on the side and starts competing, it buys a bunch a Domino's franchises. It's going to pay tax on the Domino's franchise. It doesn't get a big huge competitive advantage selling pizzas because it's a nonprofit. It would have to be for its charitable purpose and that's UBIT. Jeff: One place we see a lot is like hospitals, they're usually tax exempt but they may have a gift shop which they have to pay the business income tax on because it's not directly supporting them but it is a business. Toby: But you're allowed to do that for like what is it, Salvation Army and some these other thrift stores. They'll let you have one for a church and whatnot. If it's ancillary, if it's completely ancillary and it's just being used like thrift stores I think are one of the few exceptions, gift shop absolutely, you're head to head. Here's another one and I think that this may be what Diane was looking at, it's debt financed income. What that is, is if I'm using the leverage, then there's an exception for IRA's where it cannot use loans to generate income, it's considered an unrelated debt financed income. It will be taxable That is not the case for 401Ks and for 401As, which is what—if you've ever been to one of our events, you hear us railing on the idea that if you are going to finance real estate, real estate is considered passive and it's considered okay not UBIT. The only way you make it taxable is if you leverage it inside of an IRA, so don't do that. If you're going to leverage it, make sure your rolling that IRA into a 401K or profit sharing plan which is the 401A. So there, that's my two cents. I figure that maybe they had a funky—UBITA, I have no idea what that is, but it looks neat. I think they were probably referring to get financed income, since those things usually go side by side. All right, we have a ton of questions that have been posed and this is so much fun, we have like literally a jillion questions, if that's the number. All right, so here's the first one, if I cash out refinance or borrow an equity loan from my primary residence, use the money to do private lending by rental property, can I deduct the interest expense as an investment expense beyond $750,000 amount? They're throwing some things in here. This is actually a really long question, I'm giving you the thumbnail sketch of it. Hey guys email those types of questions in, because nobody's going to be out to follow this, but here's what here's what they're saying, we now have a restriction on your mortgage interest, it's $750,000. If you borrow on your house, and by the way it's $750,000 now, if you had a loan on it up to $1 million, you're grandfathered in, if those prior to what was it, 12/15/2017, you're good or if you got your long before April 15th and you already started the process before December 15, don't you make my head hurt. Long and short of it is, let's say $750,000, but your house is worth $1.5 million. You borrow money out of your house. You will not be writing that off personally, you are capped at $750,000 and that's on your schedule A. Whether or not you're getting any benefit out of that is to be seen because you have your standard deduction. I imagine it's going to be above the standard deduction if you're borrowing up to $750,000. Let's just say we have our $750,000 and we borrowed an extra $500,000, it can't go on your schedule A, but it can go someplace else. The someplace else would be, for example, if I put it into my schedule E, because I'm using it to buy rental property. Then I can use the income of the rental property and I can use the interest being paid as a separate expense, it's just going on a different tax form. The other route that you can go is, if I give that $500,000 and I loan it to a corporation and the corporation re-loans, in the words the corporation is going out loaning its money out and it's reimbursing my interest, then in all reality the loan is really to the corp, and I'm not getting any tax benefit but the corporation is reducing its income by reimbursing me the right to use basically my line of credit. This is no different than if you do this with your credit card. It's reimbursing you, so you make no money on it, but you don't pay tax on it, it such a fancy work around. That's number one. Next question, I hold rental property in a self directed IRA. I do tenant screening, manage the rental, hire vendors to do the repair work and I don't physically work on the house. Good, because you can't physically work on the house, you can do everything else, you can hire, do screening. I would actually have a property manager on it. All income expenses come and goes to the same self directed IRA account, hopefully that's with the custodian or you have an LLC, disregarded to the IRA. Somebody asked this, the IRA custodian sets up the LLC, you can't do it. You shouldn't be going out and doing it yourself, paying your money, you should actually have the IRA do it to keep it clean. Is it allowed? Yes, some people say, "If only I don't work on the house myself, that's okay," and they're correct. Some people say, even screening, collecting rent is not allowed, can you please clarify? You should not receive the money, the IRA should receive the money, you can direct you to the custodian though. You can even get the check and hand it to the custodian, forward it to the custodian, whatever, as long as what you're doing is not adding value to the property. That's the big no, no. Don't go get a paint brush and start painting the house because you're increasing the value to your personal efforts. Next question, my wife's previous employer stock options were exercised and we feel have peaked, cost basis 132, market value 280, if we cash in, what will be the tax consequences and how can we reduce the tax burden? We need to pull the trigger shortly. Aziz, this is you, there's two ways you can do this. First off, you're going to end up with long term capital gains, so it's not horrible. Secondly, there's something called an opportunity zone which just enacted at the end of the year and the just published out all these zones. If you reinvest the money in a opportunity zone, you defer to the tax. In the opportunity zones, there's tons of them. It's any neighborhood that is considered—that needs public support and there's a laundry list. I would actually encourage you to go Google, opportunity zone, tax and you'll find a big old list. But the communities in your area that are typically low to moderate income house. If you took your entire amount of increase, so let's say that we have $150,000 of taxable capital gains, you could buy $150,000 of opportunity zone properties and pay zero tax. Now, the question is, what happens when I sell? So there's holding periods and the minimum holding period, I believe, is you're going to be looking at five years, where then you're going to not have to pay tax on 15%, I'm going off of memory. So you'll have to excuse me if I'm not spot on, but it's 15% then it jumps up. At 10 years, the entire $150,000 is no longer taxable. And I believe that you're not going to be paying tax on the gain in the opportunity zone, it's kind of a two pronged, are you familiar with that one, Jeff? Jeff: Somewhat, I know that you replaced the old enterprise some number of years back. Toby: Something to look at, but would be it. The last way to avoid tax is give them, before you exercise it, is give that to your non-profit, if you have one and you would get a $280,000 deduction. And then the nonprofit can sell it zero tax. You'd get a monster tax and you could have these too, you could say, "Hey, I really need to offset a bunch of the tax, so I'm going to make a contribution," it doesn't matter what your basis is, it only matters, the fair market value of those assets and if you transferred let's say $140,000, half of it, let's see transferred $140,000 worth of stock, you would get $140,000 tax deduction and it can offset your income up to 60%. In either case, if you're pretty confident that we can mitigate or eliminate that tax bill if you wanted to. If you keep it out of state, somebody says, if you keep it as state for 36 months, can it be avoided? I am helping a friend with crowdfunding project and due to medical needs, we'll need a large sum, maybe $100 million what would his tax consequences be if he has no deductions? Does he have to pay tax on donated money? Fred, generally speaking, if you're getting these little gifts, as long as they're less than $15,000 there's no tax and when I say $15,000 that's per donor. So if I do a crowdfunding and everybody gives $100, there's no tax to the recipient. So go ahead and raise them a bunch of money. Jeff: Keep in mind when you're doing this crowdfunding, if you're contributing to a crowd funding, it is a gift, it's not a donation. Toby: And it's not a tax deductible donation. In 2017, I sold a rental house and took a $40,000 note. In 2017, I received $944 in interest but have not issued a 1099-INT. I did report the amount on my personal 2017. What should my next step be? Wait until 2019 or file now. So he's the one who holds the note, he was paid interest. What do you have to say? Jeff: This is kind of a darn if you do and darn if you don't. There is a penalty for not issuing the 1099. You did the right thing by reporting the amount of interest. However, there's a penalty for not following the 1099. There's a penalty for filing them late. Toby: What's the penalty like? Jeff: I think it's $50 or $75. I think it's $50 up to $99. Toby: So what you're saying is do it next year? Jeff: I didn’t hear anything. Toby: Hey do it next year unless they start digging in. I've had that, we actually went through a super audit here once and they went through every—they let you fix it. So I just wouldn't do it. I would just do it next year and say, "Hey, oops." How to aggregate all properties. What are the disadvantages to doing. You file an aggregation election, is it a form or you just check in the box? Jeff: It's an election. It prints out a form with your tax return. It says exactly what properties or investments you're aggregating together. The only real disadvantage is. Once you aggregated these properties, let's say you have two houses and one has significant passive losses. When you become a real estate professional, those passive losses gets stuck in there. Normally they get freed up when you sell that property but once you aggregator properties, it's all considered one property. So it doesn't free up those if you have a large losses tied up, it doesn't free them up until you get rid of all your aggregated properties. Toby: Cool. Nicely put. Are the purchase and sale of mortgage notes considered real estate for real estate professional status I'm assuming. Jeff: This is my gut feeling, I would say no. it's more of a lending, more of an investment in the notes. Toby: Depends on whether you're ending up with the properties. It depends on what your intent is and if your intent is just to buy and sell mortgage notes, then you're dealing with lending. In order to be real estate, it's really got to be focused in on the purchase and sale of real estate. Jeff: So we kind of run into the same thing with construction companies and such that they meet the test for certain things but not for other test. There are some input to it so real estate broker is kind of the same thing. Toby: Here's the thing, so this is Dean. Dean, if I am in your shoes, I am documenting the time I'm spending in real estate. so even though I may be going after a note, if the reason that you're going after the note is with the intent that possibly end up with that property and you do the research and you can back it up, then you add it into the real estate column as far as your time and you aggregate all your time. The only time this is going to come up is if somebody audits you in goes through all of your records that thoroughly which is rare that that happens. But let's say that it does, then you're the one who's tracking all of your expenses and your time. Then it would be up to the IRS to sit there and say, "Hey, that was actually for the mortgage." and so the old adage is pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. You don't take all of it but you aggregate that a little bit. Jeff: Can I bring up a pet peeve? I hear on the radio frequently about all these auditors that IRS has hired and they haven't had a real hiring since 2010. Toby: They're so toast right now. Jeff: The last big hiring they did most recently was to deal with Obamacare for that audit purposes. But really, they're dealing with almost a skeleton crew anymore. Toby: We just got proposed tax forms for 2018. We don't even know, we just had proposed regulations issued on the tax changes two weeks ago, three weeks ago. They're way behind the eight ball and sometimes we put ourselves in a disadvantage. Don't be crazy about it, but you can be pretty aggressive and especially if it's the truth. If what you're spending your time on is real estate, count it towards real estate. So if you're doing real estate investing part time, can you be considered a part time investor? Yeah, you'd be a part time investor but you wouldn't be a real estate professional. So the biggest important thing and this is for Darlene and Ken, is to document your time and if you go over 750 hours and it's more than you spend than anything else, then you're going to be a real estate professional. Otherwise, you're just an investor, unless you are buying properties to sell. So when you say investing, that means you're going to hold on to them, you're letting them depreciate a little bit but you get the cash flow. Does time spent lending money on real estate for real estate qualifiers and real estate professional. No investing, didn’t we just answer that one? It depends on your real intent of investing in the note. A lot of people are buying notes to end up with a real estate in which case then I'd say probably. Jeff: No, what if she's gap funding? Toby: If you're gap funding then I would say no, then you're lending. So you really have to take a look at the totality of the circumstances. I wish I could say yes or no. what we want is a yes and there's a way to get there. So it's making sure that you're documenting things to support your position. We could dig into that a little bit more, if you want to shoot us the email then let us dig into it. Then the next tax Tuesday, I can answer that one and Jeff can answer that one with a little bit of research behind it. Nexus question, "I'm a resident in California, I'm moving to Arizona. I plan to keep a single family rental in California. The California houses and the land trust is owned by Wyoming LLC, does California have the right to tax my pension income after I move in addition to my income in California rental." Shelly the answer is, it depends on where the rental was earned and whether you're taking out over a 10 year period then the answer is, no. and my guess is that you're going to be a big no. They will be able to tax technically the rental income that is being derived from California but for the most part, that's going to be zero. Jeff: A really important number to remember when you have a property in more than one state is 183. That's typically the number of days you need to spend in a state to be a resident in that state. Toby: "How do I get the 501(c)(3) tax exempt?" Marie, that’s the 1023 application. Yes, it's the 1023 application. So with a nonprofit, I always look at these things in threes, we file with the state which is a corporation. We document it to make sure there's no shareholders which is for private parties, and then we file with the feds and we're telling them we want to be an exempted organization and that exemption is done via 1023. So we go through that process. When we set them up, we set up about 3,000 of them successfully. "How do you create an LLC and an IRA?" Darlene and Ken, what you do is you have the IRA custodian internal contract with a company like us and we create the LLC, or we set up a 401K, roll the IRA into it and then we'd let you do it so you don't need a custodian. "Is this recorded and will a replay be sent out?" Robin, it's made available to anybody who's platinum and then I'm cutting out a bunch of the Q&As and will throw them all over the internet. The recording, yes we record them. Join platinum, it's fun. "If I sell a partial note to a family member from my QRP, is that disqualified?" it depends on the type of family members. When they're your kids, yes. If it's to a brother or sister, no. then you can do it. When you make a contribution and that's just the whole disqualified person argument we had earlier. So you can always ask again, ask the question specific to your situation, we'll give you a very specific answer. But just know that if you sell a partial note out of your QRP, it depends on the relationship of the family member. If it's lineal, you have a problem. Which means kids, parents, grandparents you have a problem. If it's horizontal, siblings, not a problem. If it's the spouses of the disqualified person, you're going to have a problem. "Investing in LLC for holding rental property, how does one avail to a 1031 exchange?" Here's how it works, so I'm not going to worry about this. The 1031 exchange, you have to have a 1031 exchange facilitator. The LLC has to buy the next property. So you sell one and buy one within 180 days and there's some other roles in there about when you identify it or you do a reverse exchange where you buy the replacement property then sell the other property within 180 days. But neither cases, in the name of the LLC, you don't have to do anything else. "I should be able to still qualify as an investor and still be active in real estate by investing more than 750 hours." yes, but in actually is a full time job. So if you have a full time job as a real estate professional, then you're good. But remember, your activity as a real estate investor has to exceed your activities of any other profit making activity. So if you work and you work 1,500 hours, even if you did 1400 hours as real estate, you are not a real estate professional, still below that 1,500. Investment in LLC for holding rental property, how does or somebody asked that. If you in invest funds to have an equity in a project, oh my god, this one's going to kill me, built by someone else, I'm trying to think what this is. So you're investing funds for a piece of an LLC in which you are passive and they are a builder, are you a dealer? So Judith, no, you are a passive investor in an active business, is what you are. I see what you're saying, what she's asking is, "Hey, I have Bob the builder come up to me and says, 'Hey, we're going to build this big apartment complex, we're going to develop and everything. You put in $100,000 everybody else puts on $100,000.'" You are passive. You are not considered the dealer. Here's a fun one, did you already read this one? Jeff: No, I haven’t read this one. Toby: Okay, I am planning to receive social security benefits at 62, and currently not employed. I do private lending to real estate investors through promissory notes. So I do receive interest income in the amount of $40,000 to $50,000. Will this affect my social security benefits? At what point to social security benefits are taxable? So Joe, the answer is that there are certain types of income that are exempt from calculations, social security, Jeff you know off the top of your head? Jeff: If you're receiving earned income and that's all social securities could ever know about, so we're talking about self employment income, W-2 wages, that's going to affect your social security benefits. Toby: But if you're just receiving interest income, is it going to affect it? Jeff: Well, here's the thing, if you're in the business of lending money, we would typically set you up as a business, either on schedule C or through an S-Corp or something. That interest you receive wouldn't be, interest income, it would be business income. You'd be able to deduct certain expenses from that income… Toby: We got to look at it, because usually you're going to want to be treated as active, in this particular case you're not going to outdo yourself. Jeff: The downside of this is, any money, any net income you have from this business of lending money is going to affect security until you're 65, or 67, full retirement age. Toby: Joe, the answer is, we may one isolated into its own taxable entity, so that it doesn't affect you. We may. Jeff: I kind of feel like this would be in a great place for an S-Corporation. It's not earning income flowing through to them. Toby: Would he have to take a salary? Jeff: Yeah there we go. Toby: I'm going to take a look. Joe, that's a great question, could you submit it to the webinars at Anderson Advisors, so we can research it. In that way we can hit it in two weeks, to get you a much more thoroughly research, because you're asking a very complicated question. That’s just not going to be at the top of our head. We're going to make sure that we don't step on a landmine. Jeff: So the answer's, maybe. Toby: My wife and I are the only shareholders and we both take a one third salary. No, you should take about one third of the net profit as salary, total between the owners. So greater than 2% shareholders or you and your spouse, so you could each take, I'll throw numbers out, let's say you made $100,000, you could each take up to $18,500. If you're under 50 and immediately dump it into a 401K and not pay any tax. So, "Hey we like that." We have a medical coding business, perfect, yeah, so that's when we want to take a look at. "This is so much fun, really appreciate it," I hope that's not sarcastic, Al. "I opened a couple of LLC, I'm going to use to purchase flipping, can I put them on hold until I do? Do I have to do tax returns?" It all depends on what you're doing with those, the answer is, yes you could put them on ice. "Thanks for the answer on UBIT." Diane, no problem. See we actually do answer questions here. "What are the legal benefits of incorporating in Puerto Rico, if any compared to Nevada?" If you live there, I think they give you 4% tax rate, but you actually have to reside there. There's legal benefits, not really any, other than the tax benefits and the fact of the matter is Puerto Rico has Spanish law, which means they could probably take your company from you. But you can still go down there and Jeff… Jeff: Well, I mean, there are certain industries that have great tax benefits pharmaceutical companies was always a big one. Some of those old laws have sunsetted but might be a good opportunity. Toby: Cool, look at all these questions. All right, some people are saying nice things, great. I like nice things better than, "You guys are jerks." In 2017, I was self employed under my LLC, I have not filed my taxes yet and not considering retirement. Would I still be able to do that? What is best options?" Casey, are you under—self employment under my LLC. So it depends on whether—it was an S-Corp. Did you file an extension because you would be able to do a retirement plan either a sub-IRA or if you already had the 401K then you can make a contribution from the company for it. It would either be a 401A or a 401K. or sub-IRA, I think those are going to be your... Jeff: And if you do extension, you have 11 days to get it done. Toby: Yeah, you have 11 days. Casey, get off your butt. All right, Brian wants advice with the start up pre revenue, he is offering 10% stock, "Not sure I want ownership that subject to capital calls, expectation, potential—is it better to take an offshore [inaudible 01:06:53] until there's more value in the company?" It really depends, so Clark, nice to see you. Awesome. I know Clark's brother very well, studs, nice family. All right, friends, if I was going to have a piece, the whole thing is, if I'm putting money into an endeavor, it's going to be, "What am I going to get out?" It would really depend on the agreement, I don't want to be subject to having to put more money in, nor do I want my interest necessarily being diluted by somebody who is. So one of the one of the ways you can do it, is sometimes do it is a convertible note where you loan the money, so you know you can at least get it back, but it's convertible into equity at the fair market value at that time. You guys can actually agreed to this ahead of time. So that if you decide you want to contribute it, you see they're doing what you want but then you convert it into equity. Otherwise it just remains a note that they pay you on. Clark, that's probably the route I would go. Jeff: But the assumption here is, this is a C-Corporation he's talking about. Toby: I don't even care… Jeff: Well if it's an S-Corporation that we wouldn’t be able to have all these secondary notes and stuff. Toby: If it's an S, I could so convert it. Jeff: Could you? Toby: Yep. Jeff: As long as it converts into the same… Toby: Yep. The risk is I don't want to have a convertible debt to anything other than an individual that would qualify for S.. Jeff: Okay. Toby: But I don't see S-Corps raising money this way. It's almost always C-Corps with partnerships. So the ones that I've been personally involved in, we did three levels of financing this exact way with Vegas Tax fund. That's the little Tony Hseih group and they dumped a bunch of money to a company called Role Tech. You can look them up online, because we exited that wanted with the sale to Brunswick. In a way they did all their money was purely—that was a C-Corp, but it was purely through convertible notes. All right, "What are the best tools you can recommend for tracking time mileage and expenses for real estate investors? My desire to be paperless and get everything out…" People use Taxbot for mileage, it's mileage IQ, MileIQ, I think it's the one that I use, but if you're tracking time, it's just using—sometimes is just using your calendar or spreadsheet. Let's see, "Is full time realtor, a real estate professional?" Chances are, you're going to aggregate and all that. "I understand and agree." I'm not sure I understand that. "I executed a 1031 exchange where trust all the owned property, sold it, and took title of the up leg property in the trust using 1031 exchange. But now I want to transfer up leg property into an LLC." Diane, there is no time restriction that you have to hold it as long as you are the one and still the end beneficiary. If you extend loan through an LLC owned by Roth IRA, they want to transfer, sell the remainder, but then season it out to a lower interest rate. Can Roth continue to receive the full payment from the borrower and the relay the portion?" Yes, as lines is non-convertible, same as you do in an S-Corp. "Is the answer the same best self administer S 401K? So what they're asking is," If you extend a loan through—we're just going to call it the Roth IRA, because the LLC looks right into it from a tax standpoint. And then you sell the remainder of that then season notes. So you start collecting and then you sell the note because it's doing really well and you say, "Hey does anybody want to pay me for this?" I know a guy that that's what he does. He puts the notes together and he sells his notes out and so he can get the money to go to another one and he aggregates them altogether, they call it flying in flocks. The lenders flock together and together they do a loan and he sells his portion. Yeah, you could sell it and then you can continue to receive it and keep a portion of it. the only issue you have is if it's a convertible note then you wouldn’t want to do a convertible note because boom, that Roth IRA depending on the type of entity if it's an S-Corp you'd kill the S-Corp's status of it. How do you put an LLC on hold? You get quite literally do nothing with it or you just pay the state and then you file a non activity return. You say it's not doing anything. So you're allowed to do that or you just do nothing. Which is what I tend to do. It just depends on your state. If there's not much penalty then I just kind of sit it and then two years later I might reactivate it. Will real estate holding LLC taxes partnership qualify for the 20% passed through deduction? Yes, it will. Here's the deal, as long as it's not triple net property. What she's asking is, "Hey, I have a whole bunch of LLCs and they all receive rental income and there's a net income amount." let's say it comes through with $50,000 there's something called a 199A deduction that was enacted by the 2017 tax cut and jobs act. And it gives you a 20% deduction off that amount or 20% of your taxable income whichever one is less/ but if you earn over a certain amount so for individuals it's over, $100,575 if it's a married couple it's $315,000 which is going to make your head hurt I'm going to suffer memory here. Then you scale up and then you have a new test it's 50% of the W2 income that's being paid on that particular busine

#161: What makes you weird makes you successful. Embrace what makes you “abnormal”. Why? Because being wealthy isn’t normal. Inflation transfers wealth from lenders to borrowers. Therefore, be a smart borrower. Next, Rich Dad Advisor Garrett Sutton joins us with updates to protect yourself and your real estate with Limited Liability Companies (LLCs). His website is CorporateDirect.com. We learn about common asset protection mistakes. Garrett tells us why flip properties and buy-and-hold properties should be in separate LLCs, and more. When you establish a Wyoming LLC which presides over your other LLCs, you get better protection and you reduce your audit risk. LLCs vs. LPs also discussed. Want more wealth? 1) Grab my free E-book and Newsletter at: GetRichEducation.com/Book 2) Actionable turnkey real estate investing opportunity: GREturnkey.com 3) Read my new, best-selling paperback: getbook.at/7moneymyths Listen to this week’s show and learn: 00:50  What makes you weird? Embrace it. That’s often what makes you wealthy. 05:54  The New Orleans Investment Conference. 07:37  I'm the newest writer at Forbes. 09:55  Inflation transfers wealth from lenders to borrowers. 12:57  Garrett Sutton interview begins. 15:05  Common asset protection mistakes. 16:37  Buy-and-hold vs. flipping and asset protection. 18:55  Does every property need its own LLC? 21:04  LLCs in multiple U.S. states. What makes Wyoming special. 24:17  Reducing your administrative time in maintaining your LLCs. 24:50  Lower your audit risk. 26:33  California. 29:58  LLCs vs. Limited Partnerships (LPs). 32:41  Living Trusts. 34:34  New IRS rule to conform with by December 31st. Resources Mentioned: CorporateDirect.com | 1-800-600-1760 RidgeLendingGroup.com GetRichEducation.com GREturnkey.com

Jason Hartman wanted to make sure that the practice of asset protection is understood by every investor, because it can make or break your portfolio if done wrong. As such, he invited Rich Dad Advisor Garrett Sutton back on the show for a long, in-depth interview. We'll finish it up tomorrow with the second half, but today the two discuss the inside/outside attack on LLCs, discuss which states have weak and strong LLC protections, and how to protect your properties properly. Key Takeaways: [4:13] The impact of controlling the money [7:45] How music has impacted societies around the world [10:30] Want to go to the Icehotel in Sweden with Jason? [12:58] The inside attack versus the outside attack [16:41] California has the weakest asset protection laws in the union [18:47] Why Wyoming LLCs can protect your other LLCs better than any other state [23:21] If you have your state LLC inside a Wyoming LLC domesticated in your state, which state rules apply? [25:31] Why is it called an "Armor 8" strategy and when is it a good choice? [30:24] How the Wyoming LLC provided a win for a car wreck causer Website: Get Garrett Sutton's Slides here

“When you operate through the right legal structure, you can do so in a way where you are not paying US tax each year on the profits of the business.” Stewart Patton Today listeners it is my honor to welcome the founder of U.S. Tax, Stewart Patton to the show. Stewart is a U.S. tax attorney and expat entrepreneur currently residing in Belize. He specializes in helping U.S. citizens who live and invest outside of the U.S. understand and optimize their tax situation. Everyone knows the challenges one can have with taxes. Entrepreneurs have a much bigger job dealing with taxes than the average person, and those expat and digital nomad entrepreneurs have even another layer to figure out. Stewart, being one of us himself has figured out how to handle these challenges and he makes it as easy as possible to handle your finances while abroad. I have been studying this stuff for years but, I am surprised how many entrepreneurs don't know about or understand how their taxes work. So today, we are going to talk to Stewart about some of the little-known advantages of being an entrepreneur abroad, how to move money where you need it, when you need it, and how we can maximize our business profit and minimize our taxes. 6:48: What are the advantages to creating a business inside the US vs outside the US? 10:51: Which is the best, Wyoming LLC, Nevada C-Corp, Delaware LLC, Texas LLC? 13:00: For Digital Nomads - What qualifies for not living in the US? 13:33: Foreign Earned Income Exclusion 21:23: Where are some good places to incorporate abroad? Panama Hong Kong Jersey Ireland Gibraltar Singapore St. Kits St. Lucia Belize 26:16: Panama Papers Half-Pat: Not an expat, just half in (The U.S.) and half out. You don't spend enough time outside the U.S. to incorporate outside the U.S. Contact Info: Website: http://www.ustax.bz Stewart's Podcast: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tax-savvy-expat-podcast/id1182538684