3 Ways To Pay Less Taxes Before The End Of The Year

Hey, everybody, thanks for hanging out with me. It's a Sunday morning here in Austin, Texas. I'm a little bit hoarse after a wild Thanksgiving week. I hope you'll forgive me. I spent the Thanksgiving week with my mentor, Travis, who has taught me more about marketing and sales than many probably anybody else alive. And one of the things that I told him was he lives in Russellville, Arkansas, and I live in the busy downtown area of Austin, Texas. And one of the things I told Travis while I was there was, you know, there's something about spending time with him and something about spending time in the grounding area of the middle of nowhere in Russellville, Arkansas, drinking a cup of coffee that makes me feel really grounded, relaxed, present, and like I can do really big things. So I wanted to do a video with you. That was a Sunday morning video over a cup of coffee with a hoarse voice and my Sunday clothes and my Sunday relaxing clothes. Hopefully it inspires you to relax and think bigger as well. I think as entrepreneurs, we're so busy in the hustle and the grind that we forget to decompress. And it's when we decompress that we actually have those expansive big thoughts that really are what create the big breakthroughs in our businesses and in our lives. It's funny, I could sit here and analyze a problem and try and strain a problem, strain to fix a problem, but as soon as I go to one of my mentors and relax, things just start to. To open up in my mind. So I hope that spending some time together this morning does that for you. And what we're going to talk about is I'm going to give you three ways that I am paying less taxes this year. I have made it very public over the last couple years. I don't like taxes very much. I don't think taxes do a lot of good. I think taxes should be lower. I think entrepreneurs spend money wiser than governments can, and we should keep as much money in the hands of individuals and business owners as possible and keep it out of the hands of politicians. So I have done three things a little bit more intentionally this year, and I'm going to give you a couple bonuses at the end. Of the three, there's three that I am personally doing that I would like to share with you. And then there's a couple other recommendations that I will encourage you to look into as well. By the way, if you want more on this stuff, if you are an entrepreneur who needs that breakthrough to think bigger and you want kind of the tactical things to Help you pay less taxes, make more money, improve your marketing and sales. We're doing an event in Austin, Texas, December 7th, 8th and 9th with some of the best in the world on this stuff. It's called the Capitalism Conference. And tickets are open for a few more days@the capitalism conference.com okay, so the first way that I am paying less taxes is through capital gains. So capital gains are taxed at a significantly lower rate than normal income taxes. And the difference is, capital gains is the difference between what something was worth at one point and what it's worth when you sold it. And the beauty of this is that it applies to businesses. So businesses, whether you buy a business and sell a business or you start a business and you sell the business, the proceeds that you get from selling the business are usually taxed at capital gains, which is 20% versus the 39.5% that it is on normal income.

That's half, that's half the tax rate that you would pay if it was just normalized income. So for those of you who are empire builders, for those of you who have your sight set on a million dollar or a ten million dollar or hundred million dollar business or exit remembering that your tax burden is half what it would be if you take it as income and you start thinking about ways that you can get capital gains income, what are some of the ways that you could get more capital gains income? You could be thinking about, what parts of my business do I plan on selling? What do I want to go out and buy because I know I'm going to resell it? Do I need to have a part of my business that is made to be bought and sold? Meaning back in the day I used to buy and sell a lot of websites, an income stream, and also as an investment, we're going to talk about that. Number two. But are there parts of your business, other portions of your business where you could structure it a little bit differently? For example, there are, there are parts of my business that I think, how am I going to build this? How am I going to do this thing? And then I remember, oh, I can just go buy it from somebody else and operate it like a sale, separate business. And then if I ever want to sell that, it's going to be taxed at capital gains versus tax at normal income. So getting as much in capital gains as possible is number one. There are also ways, and I'm not an accountant or a tax attorney, you should just take my advice as entertainment value only. But I have heard and I have not focused on this. But I have heard that there are certain ways that you can take distributions for your company that are taxed at the capital gains rate or the dividend rate versus being.

An income stream at normalized income.

Forgive my scratchy throat today, but let's go on to number two. And number two is a carryover from number one, and that is that I'm buying a lot of businesses and websites. Because when you buy a business, specifically Internet businesses, there are appreciated, appreciated. There are accelerated depreciation opportunities. What that means is if you buy an income source, most of the time, you have to still pay tax on the amount that you invested into that business. But in a lot of cases, web businesses have faster depreciation tables, which means that a large portion of what you purchase can be written off, sometimes immediately. So you could take your income that you made this year, and rather than writing a check to the government, you could buy some other businesses with that. And when you buy that, you can write a large portion of that off as an expense and take away the tax burden. And now you have a new income stream that you basically paid for with the savings on your taxes. Pretty darn cool. There's going to be a couple people at the Capitalism Conference who specialize in exactly this, and I would encourage you to set aside some time with them. You'll want to meet Garrett Gunderson. Garrett Gunderson is kind of the wealth strategist of the 1%. You'll want to meet Ken Courtright, who specializes in buying websites. Specifically, he will be partnered with Thomas Smale, who helps people buy businesses and websites. So these are all people that you want to meet at the Capitalism Conference if you decide to join us. The third area that I am looking into that I'm focusing on is Puerto Rico and easements. So some people call these loopholes. They're totally legit. There are ways to have money in Puerto Rico and have businesses in Puerto Rico that allow you to be taxed at a much lower rate, sometimes 15% or less. And that's ongoing. So if you set it up this year, it's good for next year, the following year, and the following year, 15%.

So beautiful. So I'm looking at some ways that I can have businesses operating out of there. And this is why, if we go back to, number one, the capital gains, if we look at how we can structure our businesses so that certain pieces of operations are separated from one another, that allows us to have some operations in Puerto Rico, for example, and we can sell certain percentages of that Business rather than have everything under one company taxed at 50%. So this is how we can be a little bit more strategic. The other one here is easements, like conservation easements. These are ways that the government incentivizes certain investments. So if you invest in certain restoration projects or conservation attempts, you can get an accelerated write off for this. So what that means is if you put $10 into one of these projects, you might get a $40 write off or $50 write off. So they're incentivized for you to invest in these projects. And by invest, they're kind of like charitable donations. So you don't get anything for them except an appreciated write off, an accelerated write off. So $100 is really like $250 in tax savings. So by maximizing that, and there's a limit to how much you can use, but you basically get free money for just putting it into the incentivized program. Some pretty cool opportunities there.

I want to rapid fire give you a couple more, but before I do that, there is one specific individual who specializes in Puerto Rico and in easements who will be speaking on our investor panel at the capitalism conference this December 8th and 9th, and he's going to be talking about these cool tax advantages that entrepreneurs can use in order to pay less to the government. So he'll be speaking at the.

Capitalism Conference on our investment panel. So one of the cool things that we do at the Capitalism Conference is we focus really heavy on the business side and on the marketing and sales side. And then we have breakouts and certain panels that are all about investing for passive income, investing for fewer taxes, investing for keeping more money in your pocket, growing your wealth. We're going to be talking about cryptocurrency, which I have mixed feelings about. We're going to be talking about little places where you can have passive income that not a lot of people talk about. We're going to talk about stuff like this, places where you can pay less taxes. So this is all going to be going on on a three day experience, the Capitalism Conference. One of these conversations might save you $100,000 in taxes next year. It might put an additional hundred thousand dollars into your pocket next year. One person that you meet may become that mentor that I have, like Travis, because I met Travis at a conference kind of like ours. And now I drink a cup of coffee, hang out and have these conversations with him. And I credit millions of dollars to those conversations. I was having a text conversation with my business partner, Matt, and he was saying he was like, man, can you think about.

How much Travis has affected our lives? That one meeting where we were at an event in San Diego in 2009 and I met Travis and Travis introduced me to Matt. Matt and I go on and start a $10 million a year business. Travis has taught me San sales and marketing, which has made me millions of dollars. That one meeting made me millions and millions of dollars. And those types of things happen at events like the Capitalism Conference. And one of the ways that you can save more taxes is by taking any expense or any investment that you want to have at the end of the year and making them before December 31st. So we have this package at the Capitalism Conference. It's called our Elite Access Pass. And the Elite Access Pass gives you a backstage pass, which allows you to meet the other speakers. It allows you to hang out with me in the green room. It allows you to have these types of conversations that allows you to exchange contact information with those who just got off stage. So when they get off stage, you get out of your seat, go with them, hang out with them in the, in the green room, have a cup of coffee with them, have conversations, exchange contact information. And we only sell 12 of these spots. We have a handful of them left, and they'll go really quickly right towards the end of the event. But if you're the type of person who wants an additional write off right before the end of the year and you know it's going to be paid for because one conversation is going to make 10 times that return, you can go over to the capitalism conference.com, click on the Elite Access Pass and you can sign up for that and get a nice tax write off before the end of the year. Or if you already have a ticket and you want to upgrade, just shoot me a message on facebook or email supportapitalism.com and we will make that adjustment for you.

Okay, a couple more ideas for you on saving taxes. One, I'm always looking for depreciable assets. One of them is real estate. Real estate allows you to write up, it's about 3% per year, so it's depreciable over 30 years. Now, 3% per year doesn't sound like a lot, but here's the beauty of it. Depreciation is a write off no matter how you finance a property. So if you've got, if you have.

If you have a hundred thousand dollar house.

And you get it for 85, sorry, $15,000 down, and you finance the 85,000.

You are only in it for $15,000. But you get a $3,000 write off every year for 30 years. And guess what? That's going to go up over time. So if you raise money to buy something, even a business or a house or an apartment building, you get the depreciation as if you had paid cash for that business or that property. That is where people really pay fewer taxes. That's really where people will.

Dramatically impact the amount of taxes they pay over the long term. It's one of the reasons why I'm pretty sure Donald Trump will never release his tax returns because he has a ton of real estate. He'd be an idiot if he paid any taxes because he has so much real estate that he's gotten from raising money that he probably has almost infinite write offs because he's been buying real estate and depreciable assets. This is also why Jeff Bezos builds so much infrastructure at Amazon. They build a ton of infrastructure because it basically eliminates their tax burden through the depreciation expense. So I'm always looking for depreciable assets. So real estate is one, websites and businesses another.

The next kind of hack I'm going to give you this is really cool and you'll want to double check with.

Your tax professional, but I learned this one from somebody named Ron who was on our investment panel last year. And this has been verified by Garrett Gunderson, who is speaking at the Capitalism conference this year.

I've heard from them this loophole that checks out which allows you to rent your personal residence to your business as long as it is less than, I think it's less than 15 days a year. And you stay with me on this. The way this works is if you rent your house to your business and you charge $1,000 a day, that means that $14,000 can be transferred from your business to yourself with no tax expense. So it's basically an expense for the business, tax free income for you. So it's a way to transfer money from one entity to another with no tax hit. There are nuances to this. You need to be able to have documentation on this. So check with somebody who's smarter than me. Please take this as an idea, not, not a plan. Check with people smarter than me on the nuances of this. But that is one of the things that is available.

And there was one more. Ah, yes.

There are certain structures that allow you to put money away tax free or allow it to grow tax free. So there's two that I like. One is called captive insurance. It's basically Putting an insurance company inside your company and it allows the company to have an insurance expense which could be hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. But for you, since you're the owner of the business, it's not income, because insurance deposits are not income, they're deposits. So basically the way this looks is the company makes a deposit. You own this company, but you don't pay tax on this because it's a deposit, not income. So you can invest in this and it will grow without you having the tax hit. So if you've got $500,000 at the end of the year that you're going to invest in anyway, but you're normally going to put half of that towards the government, one of the things you could do is keep that in the captive insurance. It has to be a legitimate insurance company. There are people that can help you do this, but it has to be a legitimate insurance company. You put the money in the insurance company and then you invest it from there and you get to keep it rather than giving it to the government. Again, there are nuances to this. It's a process. There are people smarter than me that can help you with it. And they'll be at the Capitalism conference. And the last one is whole life insurance. Whole life insurance allows you to put money, kind of like into a 401k, but you're putting it into an insurance policy. And you will pay tax on this, but this will grow tax free over the long term at a very favorable rate and allow you to access the money too and invest into other depreciable assets. Now, I'm using a bunch of big words, so please forgive me, but basically the way this works is you can put money into an entity, it grows tax free, and you can take that money and invest it into places like real estate, invest in the places like websites and other places that allow you to reduce your tax burden. So this is growing tax free and you can use it to buy other assets that are going to reduce your tax burden. Again, check with people smarter than me. I've done podcasts on that strategy specifically. And all of this, all of these can save you tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars before the end of the year.

Or in 2018. And one conversation with the right person is going to help you save all that. And you'll be around other eight, nine figure business owners at the Capitalism conference in a couple of weeks that will give you the insights, the breakthroughs and the ideas that are going to grow your business, help you break through seven figures. Get to eight figures and I'm reserving some time, I have some time on stage where I'm going to be going through my nine figure plan, the hundred million dollar plan. So we are going through how to blast through seven figures, scale to eight, set the stage for nine figures while increasing your cash flow so you can have a lifestyle that you want and paying less taxes all along the way. So encouraging you if you want a tax write off before the end of the year, write it off by getting a VIP pass or an elite access pass. The government's going to pay for half of it anyway. You're going to have a big breakthrough by meeting people in the VIP area, in the green room. You're going to get big ideas. They're going to put thousands of dollars in your pocket before the end of the year and it's going to put you on a new trajectory in your career. Career. So reserve the time. From December 7th through the 9th, come to Austin, Texas. Reserve your ticket at the capitalism conference@thecapitalismconference.com they'll be closing a few days before the event because we are like 80% full anyway, maybe even more so by now. So I'm encouraging you to grab your ticket before they close. Hope this video was valuable for you. I appreciate you watching. Hope it saves you 50 to $100,000 before the end of the year. And if not, rewatch this video next year at the beginning of the year so you can plan out some of this stuff and come to Austin, Texas this year so you can meet with some of the other individuals who can help you implement this. Because if you do this now, there are ways for you to actually save you money before the end of the year. All right, I'll see you guys in a couple weeks. Thanks for watching.