5 Year-End Tax Strategies The IRS Wants You To Ignore…

So we're gonna sit around after turkey dinner and have a meeting about our business. That's called a board meeting. And guess what? You get to write off travel wherever it's at, all the dining and the hotel for at least two days to get there, have the meeting and get out. That's a write off. This is the beauty of the American dream. The people that know the rules save more money. Rich people know the rules. You want to be rich, know the rules. Now I know I'm preaching the choir because you guys are freaking here. This is not going to be a waste of your time. Some of you may have gotten sent this link. Some of you know me from many years of following my messages about the American dream. Saving taxes, building wealth, protecting it people. I'm a legit CPA attorney, partner in a law firm, accounting firm. We've got a trust company helping clients self direct their retirement accounts. And I've been teaching this for 20 plus years. I'm going to throw down today 5 of my 20 year end tax strategies. If you're a tax advisor, this is what you got to be talking about with your clients. If you're a business owner, you need to be bringing this up with your advisors, talking about it and making sure that you are captaining your ship. These are legit strategies. They're practical and they make sense. This is not fringe stuff. We're not talking about some stupid Delaware statutory trust or Nevada or Wyoming. Not that some of those strategies can work for about one out of 500 people. These are main street everyday strategies. They're going to save you thousands of dollars. All right, here's the 5, the retroactive S selection which means some of you may be an LLC this year. Is that the right move or not? You have until the end of the year to fricking fix it. If not, I'm going to unpack this later. Quickly nail your payroll down. That's number two. Do you have payroll in your S corp? Are you paying yourself out of your sole proprietorship? How do you pay yourself in your business? I want deal with that because it's a year end strategy. Number three, make a sale. Now I'm going to be doing some kind of technical stuff that this 20, some of them are just basic, you got to know. And one of them is making a sale before year end. I'll explain why here in a moment. Number four, holding your board meeting before year end during the holidays. You don't have to have a corporation, you don't have to have an LLC to have an advisory board. It could be an incredible tax write off for travel and dining this holiday season. So I'm going to break that down. And number five, the HSA policy, the health savings account. Open enrollment starts in about 10 days. November 1st through January 15th is open enrollment. If you don't take action during that time period, you're going to lose out on the entire HSA strategy next year. So this is a year end deal that saves you next year. And I have so many clients this year frustrated that they missed it last year end. So I want to cover that. Let's unpack these five. And for you again, business owners, you want to write down these five, bring them up with your tax advisor, be like, what the hell? Why aren't we doing these? And again, if you are a tax advisor or a tax attorney, this should be on your checklist. And my Main street tax pros, they know this, this is what they're doing. They're doing year end consults, covering these 20 and then tailoring it to clients. All right, so let's go. We got to get to the whiteboard. Can you take me over there, Robbie? Okay, everybody, this is legit. We're not just going to screw around here with some, you know, fluffy little broadcast. As we talk about these five and this subsequent 15 strategies, we have to put it in perspective with what's called the trifecta. The trifecta is a trademark strategy that I created five to 10 years ago. Somewhere in there, we filed for a patent trademark. And that is to explain how your tax and legal should be structured for anybody, someone just starting and someone worth $100 million. And I've got clients all in between that use this and freaking love it. So, okay, here's the whiteboard. Here's what it looks like. It starts with at the bottom, your trust. Revocable living trust or 1040 tax return. Any of you that are, you know, regular followers of me, you're, you're sick of it. You could draw this on your kitchen table all night long, but we are going to split your life into two sides. We're going to put operations over here and assets over here. This is your business entity that you make money. Maybe it's a sole prop, maybe it's an llc, maybe it's an S corp. We're going to talk more about that. And then over here is your llc, which you're going to hold rental property in. And we're gonna. Other strategies are short term rentals, long term rentals, self rentals, buying a piece of Real estate in the next freaking 60 days might be a great move. So we can be talking about that too. So this is a trifecta. Boom, boom, boom. This is where we're dealing with ordinary income, which is taxed at the highest rates. And this is passive income. This is what wealthy as you see out there, influencers buying real estate, doing syndications, blah blah, blah, crypto notes, real estate. We want to create passive income over here, which is more tax preferred, which we love. And then over here is our ops. Okay, now when I talk about 20 strategies, my 20 strategies pervade this whole diagram. Like we have, we have to say, what are the 20 ways I can save taxes this year? And if I don't do it before December 31st, I'm SOL. I'm not talking statute limitations. I guess I kind of talk about two different things. All right, okay, so save your questions up. We're going to dive into this now. Number one strategy, and I'm not going to say it, they're in the importance. I'm just going to throw down 20 of them. I just want to lead with this one because so many Americans, small business owners set up an LLC and think it's saving them taxes. It doesn't. An llc, limited liability company, whether you set it up in your own state or frickin Wyoming or Delaware or Florida, I do not care. Does not save you taxes. It's for asset protection and the ability to convert to an S corp when the time is right. Let me explain what's wrong with an LLC in certain situations and then why we want to be able to do a retroactive S election. This is a huge topic. We're not going to be here all day. So I'm going to move through this fairly quickly. I've got YouTube videos, I've got, I've got best selling books on Amazon on this. No one has more books, but YouTube videos, downloads and podcasts and blog articles of me on this. This is it. You guys are at the right spot. Okay, so Robbie, let's show him here. Let's say you have an LLC and you are a landscaper, you're a realtor, you're selling online, you're an influencer, you're an affiliate fee, you're doing consulting. Any of those things, you'd be driving Uber. That is a small business. And you could have an llc, which is good. It's not saving you taxes, but it's giving you flexibility. Let's say you bring in 100 grand and this and you take expenses of 25,000. So 25,000 in expenses. Some of those are year end strategies. We're going to come to auto dining, travel, computers, electronics, blah blah blah. That's not the point. You're going to net 75 grand. So you're making about six grand a month. Say you're making six grand a month. What hits you first is self employment tax. Now many of you that follow me, you know this, but hang with me because there's a trick here. The self employment tax is 15.3%. That's going to nail you for 10 grand. Then you're going to pay fed and state, not the state tax where you frickin set up your llc, like a Wyoming or a Nevada where you live and do business. You can't get out of this. You Californians, you Illinoisans, New Yorkers, you're going to get, you're going to get hit with this at the state level too. So you're a 10k fed state, you're getting hit with three different taxes. Not good. This sucks. So the strategy we want to do, which is going to bleed into strategy number two is we could do an S corp. Now this is where the I'm going to come back to strategy one which is a retroactive election which you got to do before you're in. So the S Corp says I make the same hundred grand, I spend the same 25 grand on a bunch of freaking expenses. I'm killing it. I make 75 grand but instead of paying the F word FICA self employment tax on the whole damn 75 grand, I split it. And let's say, and some of you accountants might freak out here, do not freak out when I say what I'm about to say. Because reasonable comp, everybody's got to stick up their butt in the accounting industry on reasonable comp. I don't know why in 25 years I've never had a client audited for taking inappropriate, legitimate, legitimate reasonable comp. Now just so Robbie, this show what reasonable comp means is you're going to take a W2 and the rest is going to fall out as a K1 or a distribution or a draw. There's all these different words for it, okay? But you're going to take part as a W2 in this equation. Accountants buckle up because you're going to want to freak out. I might do a 1/3 allocation. I have a payroll matrix. We're going to come to that in a minute on strategy number two. But again I stand behind these tax returns and sign them. And if a Client gets audited, I'll pay the frickin bill. I know this works. I teach CE on this. And I'm a licensed CPA and attorney in I don't know how many states helping clients all over the country with this for 20 plus years. So keep your pants on. So we're going to go with a 33% allocation. I'm going to take 25 grand in salary and 50 grand in a draw or a distribution. K1. Now look what happened everybody. I only pay FICA here. I just saved 15.3% on 50 grand. So this 50,000 is protected with the S corporation. So now I just saved around $7,500. 15% times 50 grand. The more you make, the more you save. So boom. That's savings. $7,500 is not chump change. And the cool thing is the more money you make, the more you save. And some of you may like, well this has got to be high risk. Not everybody does it. Joe Biden had a freaking S corp the year he became president because he got a book deal for like $13 million. You know, his payroll was 700 grand. He took about a 5% allocation on payroll and saved over 500 grand in Medicare and Obamacare. It was on the page 32 of the wall Street Journal. Donald Trump, real estate professional, owns real estate, takes depreciation, pays $600 in tax and it's like he's a criminal. Holy shit. Front page, right? S Corps, everybody does S Corps, everybody does real estate. I don't care if it's Biden or Trump. Can we get over the politics on this and know that we are all in business together? If there's a good freaking strategy, let's take advantage of it. It's not anything illegal. It's not like we're bad or unethical. This is the beauty of the American dream. The people that know the rules save more money. Rich people know the rules. You want to be rich, know the rules. Now I know I'm preaching the choir because you guys are freaking here. All right, so here's the strategy, okay? If you were an LLC in 2023 and you're like, oh my gosh, Mark, this is freaking awesome. I don't want to pay FICA on all of my income. You can backdate your LLC to an S corporation all the way back to 1123 and I going to nail my payroll amount, which I'm going to come to in a minute, that reasonable comp I talked about, we're going to nail that before January 15th. You got to be doing it before year end so you can do your payroll. You can't say you're an S corp without doing payroll. You've got to file some damn reports before year end or right there in January. And you got to engage with the payroll person before year end. And you want to make this s election before you're in. If you don't do the payroll in the s election, you miss out on the strategy for 2023. You have to do the back date and the payroll. That's the tip. So any of you. I have clients that drive Uber. They're on board of directors, they're doing affiliate fees, they're a landscaper, they're a plumber. Resident aliens that don't even have a green card can do this. They're working their asses off mowing lawns and paying self employment tax out the butt. We want to make sure that we're all doing this as small business owners no matter what side of the aisle or you're on the American dream so we don't take that LLC and backdate now again, some of you accounts out there are freaking. Well, Mark, you got to make an s election within 75 days. Oh my gosh, that was back there on March 15th and you missed it. No, we're okay. There's a reproc ruling from 1996 you attach to the 2553 so you can do a retroactive s election to the beginning of the year. Yes, it works. And I know it's expensive. Everybody out there, it's expensive. Our firm, we charge $200. $200 to do this. I'm not even trying to sell that here. I just want you guys to follow and learn and grow and work together as a tribe here. You want to get to my law firm? We'll make sure it's down here in the link. You want to get to your certified tax advisor. I'm training tax advisors around the country@markjkohler.com, there's a link to tax advisors you can find that know this that only charge a few hundred dollars to make this election. Okay, so strategy number one. If you're a small business owner and made more than 40 grand this year and you don't make this retroactive s election, you're going to pay over 3,000 to $4,000 more in tax than you should have. And I've got dentists and realtors and brokers and contractors and landscapers and plumbers and blah blah, blah that make 100 or 200 grand and never see this coming because their accountant is afraid to take a strategy. Guys, you don't need the accountant that was a band buddy up in the bleachers in high school. You need the accountant that was under the bleachers smoking pot. That was me. I'm just joking. Was that my inside voice? Okay, sorry. Get an accountant that's not afraid to take a freaking risk in a strategy here. All right, Now I'm going to add strategy number two, because they go hand in hand. And then. Robby, any questions on this? Let's unpack it. I'm here for you guys. This is good. Okay, so back to the whiteboard when you do your trifecta, okay? So here's your trifecta again. You're gonna take this LLC and you're gonna convert it to an llc taxed as an S corp. It's one freaking form. It's not hard. Your accountant should be excited to do this for you. If your accountant says, mark Kohler's full of crap or you're crazy, this accountant has gotta be fired. I've got hundreds of accountants that follow me around the country, soon to be thousands that are certified be on a weekly basis doing trainings that will do this for you in a heartbeat. This is normal stuff. This is not high risk. Okay? So you make your selection and you backdate it to 1123. Number two strategy. That's number one strategy. Number two is you've got to nail your W2. You got to choose what is that payroll figure going to be? And it's going to depend. It's going to depend on the type of business, how much time you put in, what do you do, how much money you make, do you have a day job, Are you married? Does your spouse have a day job, are they helping in the business, blah, blah, blah. And this is where a tax advisor or one of our attorneys, we're going to help you peg this number. And whatever you pay us, we're going to save you 10 times doing this. You don't have to use my firm or one of my advisors. Find an account that knows what the hell they're doing. And whatever you pay them to do this should save you 10 times in that amount. Was that easy? Okay, now here's the payroll matrix. Has been taking the country by storm doing this for years. In the matrix, the more money you make, okay? And I should say, the more distributions you take, you accountants, you know what I'm saying, The more distributions you take, your payroll goes down. What Mark, payroll goes down. Payroll as a percentage of your distributions. So if I have a client that's making 100 grand, their payroll might be 40%, but if they're making 400 grand, their payroll might be 20% because it's reasonable comp. So your payroll percentage goes down, it's counterintuitive to the money you're taking out of your business. It's called Kohler Payroll Matrix. Got articles on this on Entrepreneur magazine all over the web. I stand behind it. I've never had a client audited following the parameters of the payroll matrix. It's okay. It's okay, people. Holy crap. This is Main street planning. If your account's not talking like this, you got. And I'm on strategy number two. All right, number three, strategy. Number three strategy was called make a sale. Okay, now what do I mean by that? People, remember, take a breath. Remember when you were a little entrepreneur in high in elementary school and you owned a lemonade stand? When did the IRS say you were in business? When are you in business? Think of that lemonade stand. I go buy lemons, sugar cups, ice. I make this crazy awesome sign. I go set up on the street. Am I in business? No, you're in startup mode. And that's how the IRS treats it. So any of you this year that have been to real estate conferences, note conferences, you've been getting trained on lemonade making techniques at Country Time Lemonade headquarters, you've been doing all of this stuff, paying for cell phone and conferences and laptops and blah, blah, blah, marketing, but you haven't been made a sale. You don't get a write off this year. For those write offs, they go into a bucket called a startup cost. So let's go whiteboard here for a minute. So here again, if we're in 2023 and you've got all these expenses, I'm spending for this, I'm spending for this, I'm spending for that against cell phone and this and that, blah, blah, blah. I'm spending all this money. You are. All of those costs go into a bucket called startup. Now you'll get to write them off, but not until next year. And they could be limited too. So there are startup cost. We want to unlock that. And so if any of you haven't had a sale yet, we want to make a sale right here by November 1st. Go freaking sell something. For example, let's say you're doing an online business and you're preparing to go live or whatever, turn it on and have your brother in law Buy your product, go. If you're doing any sort of consulting, have your mom hire you as a consultant and pay you, bink you're in business. Generate a sale, get your business account open, get your LLC open. Just so you can say, by the way, opening the LLC doesn't put you in business. You got to have a sale, but they got to put the money somewhere. Venmo, through Zelle, through Apple, pay whatever you want. All to go to your business account. So you can show the IRS I opened my entity, I made a sale. Now you're in business. Now I can take the startup cost right back to whiteboard. I can take this startup cost and write it off this year. I can write it off in 2023 if I have a sale. I gotta have this sale right now in 2023. So if I don't, this is why. This is a year end strategy. Clients call me up in January, hey, can I write off all these costs of going to Tony Robbins and going here and da da da. Did you make a sale? No. Then you don't get a runoff. Well, why didn't someone tell me that back on October 19, 2023? Well, I'm telling you now, that's strategy number three. Strategy number four, board meetings. This is number four. Okay, so here's what's cool in our trifecta. Remember, you could have an LLC with some rental properties. You could have an LLC drive an Uber, selling online, being an influencer, whatever. You could have an S Corp with a legitimate storefront or just a 1099 as a realtor driving around town or a consultant or broker. Okay, all that's good. You could even be a sole proprietorship like Danielle, just kind of getting going in every one of these situations. You can form a board just like Microsoft has a board of directors or Apple or General Mills or whatever. So your S Corp holds a board meeting and your LLC could create a board of advisors. B of A. You could have a board of directors, your LLC could have a board of directors and your sole prop. Could have a board of advisors. You don't report it to the state, you don't report the notes to the irs. You, you sit down and have a meeting. Now. Why are you going to do this? Why is this a year end strategy? Because guess who's going to be on your board? Can we go off the whiteboard? Guess who's going to be on your mom, your dad, your brother, your sister, your best friend, your kids, your spouse. And let me see, every November we have a board meeting it's on a Thursday. Everybody sits around the table. I remember us eating turkey for some reason. And then after dinner we all sit around and talk about trying to build wealth and real estate and our small businesses. And we engage the children in conversations about money because heaven forbid they learn about financial literacy and effing school. So we're going to sit around after turkey dinner and have a meeting about our business that's called a board meeting. And guess what? You get to write off travel wherever it's at 100% travel to get there, to have that meeting, all the dining and the hotel for at least two days to get there, have the meeting and get out. I can't write off 10 days in the Caymans for your little business, but we could write off two to three days somewhere where you're going to meet. You may just be taking a flight to Duluth, Minnesota to go have your meeting with your parents. That's a write off. Engage your grandma. You know what's crazy, which is really an interesting emotional, spiritual part of this. Call up your mom or dad or your grandparents or your best friend and go, you know what? I need your advice. I'm trying to build my business. I'm trying to better live the American dream. It's hard. I'm lonely. I need some advice. I was listening to Mark Kohler. I'm going to have a board meeting. There's no liability to you. We're going to take notes. I'm going to take advantage of tax strategies in that meeting called Accountable Plans. I want to write off my home, office, my auto, all these things. And our Office has a $200 board meeting experience. We give you 20 questions to talk about, document it, put it in your corporate book and maintain your company every year for $200. We've been doing it for 15 years and there's rip off companies out there that aren't even lawyers that do it for 600. We help you have the meeting call the law firm will help you have the meeting, document your llc, your corporation. Maybe your books are a mess, let's clean them up at the same time. But when you call your mom and dad and go, hey, would you, Can I get some advice? They're going to feel it. It's special. Your best friends are like, what? You want my advice about business? Yeah. Young or old, male or female, corporate or entrepreneur, it doesn't matter. I normally like three to five people on your board and you're going to hold that board meeting. I want to write off travel to go have your Board meeting and the dining experience with it. When I say travel, that's hotel, air, Uber, Airbnb, taxi, blah, blah, blah. All of that is travel. I got articles on this, I've been writing about it for years. My experienced business owners have a board meeting. Last strategy today. This is number five, a big strategy. I love this strategy. So many Americans think they're young. I've got young kids in their 20s and they're like, you get a write off your health care, do you? Don't you? I'm like, not really. If you just go on to your 1040. Okay, let's do this. Let's go whiteboard. So let's say you've got your 1040 tax return here, Robbie. 1040. And I'm going to try to write off my medical expense. Well, you go out there and you add it all up. CO pays deductibles, eyes, dental, prescription drugs. And let's say whatever it is, if you try to itemize and write this off, that's what they call it, itemize. It's a schedule A deduction. You can only write off every expense over 7.5% of your income. It's called adjusted gross income. So if you make 50 grand, you take the math and you go 7.5% times 50 grand, I can only write off every expense above 3750. That's stupid. If I make 100 grand, I can only write off any expense above 7500. And it gets worse and worse. Trying to itemize is terrible. I never recommend it. Okay, so you go, mark, how do I write off my medical? Next rule. If you're a small business and you are an LLC or an S corp, you are entitled to write off all of your health insurance. Health insurance is 100% write off. When we talk about medical, we're talking about, again, the CO pays the deductibles, the eyes, the dental, the prescription drugs, all that stuff. How do I write that off? There's only two ways to do it. As a small business owner, you might have a flexible spending account at work. Use it or lose it, whatever. But if you're a small business owner, you have two options. You can do a health reimbursement or a health savings account. HRA or hsa. Uh oh, spoiler alert. This might be one of my other 15 that we're going to cover next week. The HSA is what I'm talking about now. The HSA is super cool. Health savings account. In order to have a health savings account and take a write off for all for up to, let's see, this year it's up to 3,700, 3,750 for single people, about 7,500 for married or head of household. So to write off all that medical plus your health insurance, you have to have a high deductible health care plan. Hdhcp High deductible health care plan. Now you can go on healthcare.gov, you can go to an independent agent, but you have to buy this plan and have it effective in 2024. Well, the enrollment period is November 1st through January 15th. Now if you buy it before January 15th, it'll be effective February 1st. That's fine, whatever. Just get it effective in 2024. So you want to be shopping right now. You want to be shopping for a high deductible plan to be effective February 1st or January 1st in 2024. Now here's what's cool. The health savings account lets you take a write off right here on the front of your tax return. And if you don't spend goes into a bucket and carries forward. It's not a use it or lose it. So this bucket starts to grow and you can invest it, you can buy real estate with it and have all the profit go back in there. You can have it the rest of your life. And this HSA pays for all your medical. You don't have to wait till you're 59 and a half like an IRA. You can take it out tomorrow. If you're young, you can put the money in, take a huge tax write off and turn around and use it or invest it. And as it grows, it'll pay for your medical for the rest of your life. If you die, it goes to your spouse's hsa. There's we have a whole class at tax and legal360 on HSAs. It's that critical. Your accountant should be talking to you about this. So get to the conference. Sign up for the virtual. At least the flash sale this weekend will save you several hundred dollars. The link is down below. Tax and legal 360, 30 classes. One of them is on the HSA. I've got articles. Go Google Kohler, HSA Kohler, get on YouTube. I've got videos on YouTube. There's a lot to unpack. And so when you get into the learning about the hsa, you're going to find out real quick. The first step is to have the policy. If you don't have the policy, you can't do it. And so that's why It's a year end strategy. If you want to take the Write off in 2024 and build this money tax free and get a tax write off to do it and pull it out tax free. Look at this. You get a write off, it grows tax free, it comes out tax free. Holy hell, it's better than a Roth IRA for medical for the rest of your life. The year end strategy is you got to get your insurance in place now.