Don't Forget These 5 Strategies Before You File Your Taxes for Last Year

Foreign. Welcome everybody to another week of living on Main Street America and trying to save taxes, build wealth, protect our assets from a lawsuit. My name is Mark Kohler, CPA and attorney, author. Trying to play my part in helping you live your American dream. I've got five strategies that you should think about before you file last year's tax return. We're coming up on March 17, the deadline for S corporations and 1065 partnership tax returns. So if you have an LLC, even with your spouse, a child, business partner, rental property, small business, anything, LLC with two members or an S corporation, that's an LLC taxed as an S corp. Your deadline is March 17th. Well, you can file an extension, that's fine. By six more months. There's no cost in paying taxes or some filing fee. You actually reduce your chances of an audit by extending. So do not be stressed out freaking out your accountant or yourself that you've got to file a tax return in the next two weeks. An extension is fine. I'll be extending all of my s Corps and LLCs, but we're thinking about last year's taxes. So I've got five strategies that I think are absolutely critical to consider that might, you know, move the needle, save you some taxes. Now, I also want to do any Q and A, any questions you might have on a strategy that you've been wondering about that you're like, can I pull this off for last year or not? Lots of options, lots of options. I'm just trying to come up with the big five that are really going to move the needle the most. Of course I want you going through all of your credit cards, looking for any expenses with dining, supplies, materials, Best Buy, Apple Store, any expenses for marketing or services or legal or travel, auto, anything at all that you can think of that might be related to your business last year. I don't care where you paid for them. If it was even cash, credit card, debit card, whatever, put together a schedule. Make sure you're going over that with your tax advisor. Now, if you don't have a good accountant, if you're doing this on your own as well, before we get to this five, I want to say this too. Let's get you a better tax advisor. And I've got the tax advisor network. This is now over 1100 CPAs, enrolled agents, accountants, bookkeepers, attorneys, certified financial planners, life insurance agents that have become tax certified to help quarterback getting your tax return done. They can get the resources put together to have a good tax prep, experience, payroll bookkeeping, and give you tax Strategies that work, that are street smart strategies. Some of you like mark. I'm a CPA. I do 40 hours of CE every year. I already know this. No, you don't. I do 40 hours of CE every year. Shoot me in the head when I'm done with those CE classes. You know they're not bringing you cutting edge new strategies every year. They're scared to death they're going to get sued if they don't teach you out of the book. I teach CE courses. My program is 40 plus hours of continuing education. If you're looking for your CE, check it out here. So the links are down below. If you're an accountant, an attorney, life insurance agent, cfp, and you want to learn how to be a tax pro, please check out this QR code down below. Click on the link and do a demo with one of my new client representatives. They'll just tell you about it and see how it looks and go from there. Okay, these five strategies. Number one, now I'm going to kind of go through, I don't know if any particular order here, but let's just deal with one that I love. I'm a huge fan of this. And you have until April 15th to go get a deduction for last year. It is the Health Savings Account. The Health Savings account or hsa. Now if you want to contribute to this, you have to have a high deductible plan. Last year if you set up your plan by December 1, you would have qualified. And if you're single you can put in 4150. If you're 50 or older you can put in an extra thousand. So 5150, you can do that now before April 15th, that's your deadline. I love this deduction. If you are married or head of household, you can do 8300 or 9300 makeup if you're over age 50. So this is a good deal. Now what I love about this. Let me just show you something, Patty. My wife and I, we are, we have been combining our HSAs and we have formed an LLC and we have our HSAs in this LLC. And we're actually going out and doing another cattle operation. We're buying cattle. We have a rancher that's going to put them in his herd. And our estimates, we're going to buy 10 bred heifers right now. That'll equate to 20 cows in the next couple months. And we're going to think, we think we're going to make about a 25 to 30% ROI on a cattle operation. Pretty easy to self direct your hsa so you can get a tax write off. Now for last year's contribution, put in this year's contribution, combine the two, maybe partner with some of your other family or friends, form an llc, buy a rental property, go buy some crypto, go buy into a note, buy some cows, buy into a small business down the street. So that's strategy number one. Okay, Number two, and I'll get through these five, and then I'll take any Q and A. The next one is last year, and this one falls under to me, the auto expense. A lot of people undervalue the auto expense. The first thing that I want you to do on this, there's a lot of different options is look at every vehicle in your universe. You may have teenagers driving a car that help out running errands. Your spouse drives a car. You have a truck, you have an suv. Look at every vehicle and you can do either mileage or actual. And even if you just put 500 miles on one of the cars, let's grab it and take that write off. And for last year on mileage, you're looking at 67 cents. And that's a big deal. I mean, for every 10,000 miles, that's a $6,700 write off. That adds up really quick. So you want to look at all the miles on every vehicle. The other strategy I even think about your rv, maybe you took your RV to a conference, to a. You drove it and checked on a piece of real estate. You went and met with customers or clients and you took supplies somewhere. You worked on some real estate together. So look at your RV as an option. It could even be motorcycles. You drove your motorcycle to go check on some your real estate project or meet with a client or who knows what. But the one that's also in here, that's kind of a good one, is you don't have, you didn't have to buy a new vehicle last year. Maybe you contributed it. What I mean by this is, is let's say last year you started your business and you started doing some real estate, okay? And you did a fix and flip or a rehab or some wholesale or a rental property, and you have a truck and you're like, well, I didn't go buy a new truck, Mark. I guess I can only do miles. Nope. If you use the truck last year for more than 50% business, and it's the first year, you haven't taken any mileage in the past. So you had a vehicle last year you used in your business. That means you contributed the vehicle to the business. That's as good as a purchase. So we get to take the basis or fair market value, whichever is less. So let's say you bought it for 20 grand and now it's worth 15. Don't care what the loan is. Well, if you put that vehicle into the business last year and it was 90% business use, let's just have some fun with it. So say you bought it, purchase price. This is a old truck that you have laying around that you just contributed to the business. And some of you. Well, I. Mark, this is. This is March. I can do this for last year. Yeah, hang with me. So you bought a vehicle, this old truck, for 25 grand maybe five years ago. And it's been sitting there. You've got a car that you use for commuting and your other business or whatever. And so you have the ability to say this is 90% business use. So what's your current basis? Meaning what is it worth right now? The fair market value. You get to take either the lesser of the value or your basis. And you've never written it off before. So your basis is 25. And your fair market value now we said was 15 grand. Okay, so 90% business use. So we'd multiply that by 90 would mean that this is 13,500. That's your basis. It's the lesser of what you bought it for or what it's worth times your business use. Okay, well, now I get to take that and take right off of the. Right out of the gate, a bonus depreciation. And last year was 60%. So that's 13,500. That's $8,100 write off. Plus you get to take fuel, new tires, repairs, maintenance, all of that. And you don't. That can run you into a loss. You could still do some 179 and some regular depreciation. This is just bonus right out of the gate. So this $8100 write off if you're in a 20, 30% tax bracket. Holy crap. We just saved two or three grand here. That adds up quick. So this is where you could contribute an old laptop, a copy machine, a fax machine. Have you ever heard of a fax machine? They're kind of neat. I don't. Have you ever even used a fax machine in your life, Dana? Maybe it's been a year, 10 years ago or more. He's young. So. Okay, so anyway, any equipment that you're using in Your business, a vehicle. We can contribute it by doing a journal entry, making sure it's justifiable that I did use it in my business last year. A lot of people don't realize I could depreciate that with bonus depreciation and take a big write off for last year. Still, that was number two. Okay, number three, I'm going to throw down. All right, the 401k or the IRA. Now that may not sound too sexy to you, but again, my Roth IRA, which is in my 401k, so I have a Roth 401k. I bought XRP back in October, November and it's been on a run and I've been playing the dip this week. It was up on the weekend, it's down right now. And after the crypto summit this Friday. Woo. I'm excited. Now that's not investment advice. Do your own research. But I am kind of bullish on the crypto market and that's all I do in my retirement accounts. So check this out. You could do right now whatever your profit is. You got to find out what is your profit for last year and you could kind of estimate that you don't have to have filed your tax return. You could kind of come up with an estimate because you can fix it later. So what we could do is figure out what your profit is for last year. If you're a sole proprietorship or just a plain old LLC, that's option one. Or if you're an S corporation, option two, you can still set up a 401K. This is an option number one, a 401K. And you can put 20% of whatever your sole proprietor LLC profit is, or with an S Corp, 25%. And this is a profit sharing plan. So you don't get to put in your deferral, you're just going to be able to put the company piece. Well, your company gets a tax deduction for that. So if you had 80 grand in profit. Wow, okay. I mean I can put away 16 grand here, that's a write off and I could put away 20 grand here. You could put that immediately into a self directed, for option a, self directed structure and buy again real estate crypto, form an llc, invest in a business down the street. I love it. So that's very common. And you can stack it. What I like to do is stack this where you put your IRA down here on the bottom piece of this which is seven grand or eight grand if you're 50 or older, and then this 20 or 25% profit from your business. Now this is looking at arrears. This is last for 2024 and you missed the deadline to set up a 401k. So whatever that number is, we can stack that and put that all into your an LLC if you will, or self directed and invest in what you know best. The deadline for your IRA is April 15th. The deadline for your S Corp is going to be because you're going to extend here in two weeks. You're going to extend for six months which will put you to September 15th. And if you're a sole proprietorship, you're going to have until October 15th. So you could earn the money later this year and drop it in and still get a write off for 2024. So that's pretty freaking cool. So that's your third option, is that right? I've got. Okay, okay, third option. Boom, boom, boom. Okay, I'm going to go with cost seg next. So what cost segregation means, this is number four option is you own some real estate. If you don't own any real estate for last year, you can take a snooze, return an email or a text here for three minutes. But cost segregation means you have some real estate. It could be a long term rental, ltr, it could be a short term rental, it could be a self rental, meaning you're renting this building or this business back to your business. So you're just, you're self rentaling it to your business. This is a great option here because if you've got any real estate that was on the books last year, what you could do is do a cost segregation and what that generally means and I want to make sure you qualify as either a real estate professional or the short term rental loophole or the self rental. You have to be one of those three to take advantage of this. I'm going to put that here. 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. If you're not one of these three, doing this cost Sega is a waste of time. So here's the land, here's your building and you're going to segregate it into its pieces. And maybe 30 to 40% of it might be determined to be personal property. It's like appliances, carpet, window treatments, air conditioning, sprinklers, fence, any equipment, any property that's 5, 10 or 15 year property, we're going to add that up and whatever that amount is in dollar value is, we're going to bonus depreciate it for last year which is again we're going to take 60% of that. So you have to do a cost seg study. Those can run anywhere from 750 to 3 grand, depending on the company you use. We've got all sorts of options we help clients with. But if you owned real estate last year, we could go carve out that deduction and take it this on last year's tax return and that's going to save you money now. So another option that I really like is the cost segregation. Okay. Which brings me to number five. And this is a big one. And it doesn't work for everybody, but it's a very common strategy and that is called the DB plan, defined benefit plan. And I just called my good friend Randy Lupke over at Lifetime Paradigm and called them before I went live and just confirmed that they're still doing these plans for clients last year. Now what a defined benefit plan, and let's compare the two is a DB versus a defined contribution. Defined contributions like a 401K or an IRA. It's very specific how much money you get to put into it. But then it's going to be invested and you're going to invest it in your bucket. And what comes out, we don't know. You could lose all the money. Who knows? It's a big question mark, your ROI on this 401 IRA, but it's very specific how much money you can put in. I was just telling you, 20% or 25%. Well, a defined benefit plan works backwards. It says, all right, when you turn a certain retirement age and you get to choose the age of your retirement, let's say it's 60 years old and you're male or female and whatever your salary is. Now we're going to do the math here and figure out what your pension. Yeah, I know that's crazy, that word's still used, but let's call it a pension. What is your retirement benefit? We're going to define that benefit now. That's why it's called a DB plan. We're going to define your benefit now that you're going to get in the future and we're going to work backwards. So if today is 20, 25 and your retirement is 25 years out, or 20 years out or 10 years out, or who knows what, we're going to figure out what that benefit needs to be and we're going to work backwards based on present value and interest rates and say, okay, well that means you have to put away this much today and you get a write off for that. We can, after three years, we can kick that out and turn it into a Roth. Pretty cool. But this number, we don't know what it is. And it's going to grow to, I mean, it could be anywhere from 20 grand to 250 grand. The older you are, the more it needs to be because we got to make sure that benefit is available for you when you're ready to retire. So we got to set that money aside and make sure it's there for you. So if you've had a big year last year, you're scared to death about the taxes coming down the pipe. You're like, I'll take a write off. I'll put this in a plan that I can self direct and invest. I can go buy cows or real estate or crypto or whatever I want, make that money tax deferred and I can either convert to a Roth IRA or I can just leave it alone. And when I retire, it's going to pay out a pension to me. I even can kick it out to a 401k if I want. But these DB plans are pretty cool. So I know Randy, he might be in chat, might give you his contact info out there too. All right, so those are my five strategies. The health savings account, contributing equipment or vehicle to your business that you've already done. We just offered you the journal entry. A 401k or IRA cost segregation on a piece of real estate that you own. Or a DB plan. You can't take a write off for paying your kids last year because if you didn't pay your kids, you can't say you paid your kids. You got to have actually done it. We can't do a health reimbursement arrangement. We can't say I went out and invested in oil gas. I can't say I set up a captive insurance company or can't say I went and bought something I didn't buy. So the write offs are going to be really tricky for last year. So these five are the big ones, the most I can do and help people. So Dana, let's do some Q and A and I'm here for you. I hope I can help answer some of your questions. Everyone maybe for 15, 20 minutes here and see what we got. Sometimes it's fun hearing what other people ask and you're like, oh my gosh, I didn't even think to ask that. So what do you got?

Well, starting things out. We have a question from somebody who says they have been doing transportation as a side hustle to meet ends meet. So they're a W2 earner, but they work with 1099 jobs and wants to know how they should put this on their tax form. They just. And they specified they just got an LLC as well.

Okay, first, great. You're a part of the 40 plus million Americans that are doing a side hustle. Did you hear that? They have a W2. They're getting a 1099 doing transportation. Maybe they're a driver, Maybe they're driving Uber. Who knows what? So how does that play out on your tax return, if you will? So I like to do the trifecta. As you guys know, I'm going to put your operations over here, your assets over here, and hopefully you have a revocable living trust. It owns your home. Maybe you have some rental property. Maybe you have a 401k from an old job or current job. Remember this person said they have a W2, so it's maybe paying into the 401k. You might have an IRA, might have a health Savings Account. Right. See the picture? Maybe a rental. So kind of exciting. This is their home. And then they say, lo and behold, I'm getting a 1099 over here. Now, does an LLC save taxes? No, an LLC will not save you any taxes. We don't care if you have an llc. We may if we convert it to an S corporation this year, but we can't do anything with last year. And an LLC is not going to save you taxes this year. Pay attention more in my future conversations about an S corporation. We might convert it. So the 1099 came in. So what you're going to do is down here is your 1040. Now, one thing I'd recommend is if you're not ready to file your taxes come April 15, don't file an extension, it's okay kind of estimate. Send it a little money to the IRS with your extension and don't rush. So many people are like, my head's going to spin off my head if I don't. My head's going to spin off my head. My head's going to spin off my shoulders or explode if I don't do my tax return by April 15th. Holy crap. You reduce your chances of an audit by extending. Let me repeat that, everybody. There is less chance you're going to get audited if you extend. Now, if the IRS owes you money, go file with this person with the 1099 they're probably going to owe. So we don't care. We're going to send in a little money, file an extension and get to work finding A good accountant or preparing my tax return every night and having fun and watching old movies and really sharpening the pencil. I love saving money. So the 1099 is going to go, what's it called? Into a schedule C. You can do this on TurboTax. If you're going to do it yourself, there's a page one and a page two and you're going to do this tax return and you're going to put your 1099 right at the top. And then you're going to take all the write offs you can. And I've got my 30 point ultimate tax guide you can get on my website, my book, tax and legal playbook. I'd love to. You know what are my top write offs? I love to do articles like that. Please check them out. But I want you to dig up every expense you can. So let's say you brought in 25 grand on your 1099 and we come up with 15 grand in write offs. Home office could be on there. Who knows what that means? You netted 10 grand. That's going to come in here on your tax return and then your W2 is going to come down in here onto your tax return. So that's how you report it goes on a schedule C. Not too hard. You guys can do it. Fun stuff, exciting. Next question.

Well, really quick actually a follow up question. I don't know. He didn't specify in here. He or she didn't specify. But the way that they worded the question. What if they formed an LLC in 2025 but the 1099s are for 2024? Does that make a difference?

Doesn't make a difference. The 1099 is going to go onto your 1040 whether you had an LLC last year or this year or no LLC or no llc. People, I hate to tell you this, LLC don't save taxes. In fact, I love all of you to type it in. Chat somewhere. What are LLC is good for? What are they good for? Asset protection number one. Asset protection number two. I can convert it into an S corporation when the time's right. This person here, I don't know what I do. I need to know how much their W2 is for and how much their 1099 was for and how much we can dig up in expenses. Once I knew that, then I could decide if I'm going to convert that LLC to an S corp and I can backdate converting it to an S corp to the first of this year. So that's good. But I don't have all the facts. So keep, stay in tune. This is good. You're a small business owner. Now that 1099 is a gateway drug. This is your, your path to American dream. Let's make some money and sock it away. Next question.

Okay, next question. We have a couple people asking one. They, they seem to be surprised that you can indeed self direct your hsa and they want to know where. Who do you use to self direct an hsa?

You bet. So this is good, everybody. So let's say you have an employer and they give you a W2 and they may have a 401k, whatever. Maybe they put a little bit of money, just a little bit of money in an HSA for you. Rarely do employers max it out. But remember last year you could put in 4,150 or 8,300. That's what you could do. Let's say your employer puts in $1,000. Okay, fine. They set up your HSA at like a third party administrator. I don't know. It could be a Fidelity hsa. Wells Fargo used to have an HSA plan, whatever. So you just get a debit card and you get to spend that money tax free on any medical. They're going to invest it and maybe give you 1 or 2% if you're lucky. Okay, that's cool. So let's say they gave you $1,000 and you're married. That means minus the $1,000, you could still put in $7,300. You still have that much to put. So what you want to do is take that 7300 and you can do it until April 15th. Where I go is directed ira.com directed ira.com and I open an HSA account and then I contribute. So that's, I go there. Step one, I open the account. Step two, I transfer in my 7,300. The money your employer put in your HSA at work, if you have one, it's kind of there. I mean, you can use a debit card, maybe take it out. You could take it out now just call your employer and go, I want that money. And freaking move it over to this one. But it's your money. You don't have to wait until you're fired or retire. HSAs are different than retirement accounts. Okay, so then you transfer in the 7300 and then you call up, fill out a form and say, invest my 7300. Oh, we have a crypto HSA too. So an HSA account, it could be a regular or a crypto. And within about two days. You've got an app on your phone to buy crypto with your hsa and oh my gosh, I'll tell you this right now, I think, I'm sorry, I'm just, I'm excited. I've been checking out Gemini, which is the platform directed IRA uses, and ooh, it's still holding low. The markets are still kind of down. This is good because there's a big crypto summit Friday that Donald Trump's involved with and I'm just hoping XRP stays under $2.50 because I want to buy a bunch before the weekend. But anyway, so you can go buy crypto. And if this goes up a buck, that's about a 30% return. Now if it goes up a dollar, I see about a 25% return. So you're looking like this would go up by two grand with a 25% return. So anyway, invest in what you know. Don't buy crypto if you hate it, I don't care. Pool it with other IRAs and 401ks and form an LLC and buy chickens, buy cows, buy surfboards and resell them. We have clients that have bought soccer teams, they bought racehorses, they bought cattle, they buy small businesses. Your brother in law needs two more tractors in his landscaping business. You're like, hey, I'll buy him with this. I want 10% of your business. All right? Your HSA now owns 10% of his business. You don't have to buy Tesla stock. Anyway, we go on and on. Get over to the directed IRA podcast. There's so much there, you'd love it. Directed IRA podcast, Next question.

All right, next question. On the strategy, as an s Corp deduction, 25% profit share. Is there any issue if it's just my wife and I in this S corp. And how is that profit share distributed?

Oh, well, I love it. There's no problem. So in your trifecta, your S corp would be here. Now, when you say you and your wife are in it, I need to tell you that 25% contribution to the 401k is based on the W2. So when I say profit, I need to be careful and I apologize if it's a sole proprietorship or LLC is 20% of the profit on the S Corp. It's 25% of your W2. I bet someone in chat was already trying to correct me. I'm sorry, everybody, but 25% of your W2, 20% of profit. So when you say you and your wife are in the S Corp, I'd want to know what your W2s are. And then you can drop that in the 401k. You can still do your Roth for last year, you can still do your HSA for last year. The kids can do their Roth IRA for last year. So I mean, you could stack all of this and then throw it in an LLC and go buy a rental property. So there's an option, but it's 25% of the W2 for you and your wife. You would have both had to have taken a W2.

Okay, up next, we have a question.

Yeah, let me throw out a strategy here too. I want to just say this real quick. If you say, well, I'm the only one on a W2, my wife's not, you could 1099 her into a sole proprietorship still and take 20% of that and put it in the 401k. So we can still carve out the money. We could get unique. So get over to one of my tax advisors at the TaxPro Network. The links down below. TaxPro Network. Okay, the question is.

Okay, the question is, if you get a 1099 that is issued to you with your personal information, can you transfer that to an S corp?

Yes, it's called nominee income. So what we would do in your trifecta is you've got your S corp, I assume you took your W2, you're going to get a K1, you're going to file an extension by March 15th or 17th this year because it's on a Monday. 17th is on a Monday. If you get a 1099 personally. Excuse me. We put it on a schedule C as income. Then on page two, we call it nominee income and we put down the ID number, the ein of the S corp for the same amount. So if it was $20,000 here, 20 grand here, zero it out. And what happens is that 20 grand, now it goes in there. So it's kind of like 1099 your S corp and then the rest of this is no self employment tax provision. Pretty awesome, right? Boom, boom. Next question.

Up next. We have a pretty good one here. Nice technical one. We bought our first apartment complex on January 25th or in January of 25. I'm a mortgage broker, W2ED, and my wife is a realtor in an S Corp. We put our apartment in an LLC. It's on a seller carry over or carry for two years and need to show Good Inc for 2026 for refi. What are some things I need to be looking at this year?

So they own the rental, It's a rental property? Yes, it's. He called it an apartment. So it's kind of. I'd probably say it's a condo. I guess it could have been a New York City apartment that people buy apartments, I call them condos out here in the west. Okay, whatever. Okay. So he said his wife's an S corp, is a realtor and he's got a W2. Is that what he said?

He has a W2 as a mortgage broker.

Okay, so husband's a mortgage broker. This is cool. Great combo. Husband, W2. And he's probably got a 401k at work. I want you to learn the matching out strategy. I teach it all the time. Google that. Kohler Matching Out. So you each have a W2. Your wife owns the business 100% and she's the realtor. Love it. Okay. And then what they say they want,

it's on a seller carry for two years.

Then they bought a rental in 2025 and the seller is doing a carryback. So basically it's like the bank. So who cares? Don't care. So that's the bank. The seller is playing the bank. So hopefully they formed an llc. You want that for asset protection and if you didn't, you can still do it and just transfer the property into the llc. So now the LLC owns it. Your trust is going to own your LLC 100%. And I'm going to transfer your wife's ownership to the trust too, under a stock transfer agreement. We do this for you when we set up a trust in an estate plan. That way if anything happens to your wife, there's no probate good at estate planning. It's all clean and she can still be the realtor and do the 1099 and all those goodies with her broker. All right, so now they're saying, well, this is the first time we ever had a rental. That's exciting. And oh my gosh, with your wife being a realtor. See, now my strategy that I explained earlier, you could do the cost seg on this and take a massive write off. Oh, dude, this would be good. And that's going to help offset your wife's W2. Your W2, that's a big deal. So you're going to collect rent. This all goes on what's called a schedule E. And it's two pages as well, page one and two. And you're going to, that's going to flow over here to your 1040 where your W2 is going to come in your wife's W2 is going to come in. The K1 from the S Corp is going to come in and this loss, because we're going to generate a loss on your rental. Even though it's cash flowing, that's going to come in and we're going to net it out and you're going to freaking save taxes, buddy. So if you seriously don't have a good tax advisor yet, if you're asking this question hanging out here, go over to www.markjcohler.com and go to services and go to the tax Pro network. And we send referrals every day to our network. And if you want to be an accountant and be on our network, I don't take any of your profit. You have a relationship with the client and I just train you. I bring you clients. I want you to kill it. There's so many people that want to become a tax advisor. It's so important. Here's a QR code that way. Sorry, QR code. And come check it out and just do a demo, Check it out. It's risk free for seven days. You can try the whole thing out and you'll freaking love it. It's a community. It's amazing. So if you're looking for a tax advisor, these advisors all speak Mark Kohler. They have to do two days of training every week with me. 900 quiz questions, 80 different topics. And they know all this. It's freaking awesome. Okay, a couple more questions.

Yeah, so they clarified There was a 13 unit apartment that they got.

Oh my gosh. They bought an apartment building. Oh, 13 units. Oh my gosh. Keep going. Anything exciting?

It was for 1.1 mil. And also they particularly enjoyed the truck being contributed as a good strategy.

Oh, they don't have the trust.

No, no. The truck contributing.

Oh, the truck. Okay, so you're gonna put the truck in the mix and cost seg. Oh my gosh. And your wife can still do a solo 401k. Guys. You could take care of the solo. If you had a high deductible plan. You could do the hsa. Holy crap. You could take advantage of all five of the strategies I shared. Wow, that would be super cool. Guys. You're sitting on, on a 1.1 build. You guys want to know how this works? So here's, check this out. So here's this 13 unit apartment building, right? 13 unit apartment building. It's got land, parking lot, all those goodies. And so we're going to say, and it was 1.1 million. We're going to at least take 20% off for land. And just to round up, what I'll do is I'll take 300 grand for land. So that takes 1.1 million minus the 300k for the land. So now we're at 800 grand. That's the building on a cost seg. For an apartment building you got to at least get 30%. So I would say, and you might get as high as 35 or 40, but you take 800 grand times point three. I'll be conservative. That's $240,000 in depreciation that you can do a bonus on of 60%. So you would get $150,000 tax deduction and the rest of the depreciation you'd probably get another 20 to 20, 20 to 30 grand in depreciation with just straight line might be able to do some 179 in there. It's going to depend on the rent. Your wife's a real estate professional. Oh my gosh. So with all your other write offs in the truck, you're probably sitting on 200 grand in write offs. So pretty cool that 13 unit. All right, next, next.

I have an Airbnb in the basement of my current home. I saved receipts for the costs. What form can I use for the write off?

Schedule E. So if you have an Airbnb, you're going to do schedule E. And I'm glad you're being honest here, you don't want to just do that under the table. So you have your 1040 tax return, your short term rental Airbnb, you're going to show all the rent that comes back net. I have three Airbnbs. Love playing with it. Don't know if you're using price labs or whatever you're using for your pricing and then you're going to take all your write offs and you're going to depreciate half of your house. Theoretically, if your basement is the same square footage as the upstairs, you would depreciate half your house, which is going to allow you, when you go to sell your house to to do a 1031 exchange. So if the basement is down here, you would 1031 exchange that into another rental and then you would sell your home up above tax free. Until then it's Airbnb. And so you're going to put it on schedule E and drop it in your 1040. With short term rentals, you're going to be able to take the same write off as the Realtor of the last question. So you could do a cost seg on your basement if you want. Plus you're going to take regular depreciation. I would meet with one of my tax pro advisors. Guys, if you pay a grand or two grand for someone to actually do your tax return that knows what the hell they're doing, they should save you 10, 20 grand in taxes. I want you to. When you spend 1,000 with an accountant, they should be saving you five or 10. Then you're like, well, I can do it myself. No, you can't. This is why when I go, I do not. I stay away from the plumbing aisle at Home Depot for a reason. Because I get so excited. They're like Legos to me. Oh, I want to play with plumbing in my house. I'm going to fix my Airbnb and I'll do the plumbing. I have three Airbnbs. I love to fix my Airbnbs at night. So fun. Patty and I put on our tool belts. We'll go. We did Halloween two years ago, working on our Airbnbs at Halloween, handing out candy as we had our tool belts on. We were, you know, Chip and Joanna. It was a lot of fun. But I don't do plumbing. I'm not good at it. I will screw it up. If you don't do plumbing every day, don't do plumbing. If you don't do tax returns every day, don't do tax returns. Now, you want to know the strategy? You're here for a reason. You're the quarterback of your. I mean, the captain of your ship. You're the owner of the team. Now you need a quarterback to move the ball down the field. That's your tax advisor. Last question.

All right, last question. Can we move an existing DB plan to a new administrator? Our admin is saying the client cannot roll it over to an ira. They are also non responsive, so our client needs stronger support.

Okay, so that Randy Lube Key. I know Paradigm is a weird name to spell, but go to Lifetime Paradigm and I'll write Randy's name. Because you can just Google this if you put Lifetime. Randy Luebke. It's a German name. I love this guy. He was a co author of my book right here, Financial Freedom. He was co author of my book. This guy's got a. He's a mortgage lender, a real estate broker, and an RIA Certified Investment Advisor. This guy knows what the hell he's doing. Call Randy's office and say, I got a DB plan. Now, if the DB plan is with an employer, if it's not been around long enough. If it's underfunded, I mean, there's a lot of factors. When I say you can roll it out to an ira, you can if you meet certain rules. So meet with Randy and go, hey, Randy, buddy, tell me what my options are and it'll totally help. He may say leave it alone. He may say move it. I don't know. So go do a consult with Randy, everybody. I want to say thank you for being here. The American dream is real. Don't give up. It's an honor to be here with you. If you find my Q&As and our lives helpful at all, please share them with your family or friends. Tell them to hit the bell icon. And when I go live, they're going to get a ping and they'll know. Give me a five star if you could. Thumbs up this Thursday. In two more days, I'll be going live again and I'll be doing our regular weekly news bulletin. What's going on in the tax policy world? Where we at with the House and the Senate on the new tax legislation for you, the business owner and what's how much is it going to save us? I'm tracking it very, very closely. What's going on at the irs? Are we getting a Doge refund? What's going to happen with the tariffs? I'm trying to let you know. Everything. Taxes, every Thursday with a live and so I'll see you in a couple days. Thanks so much.