Hold Your Family Board Meeting Immediately | Year End Tax Tips #4

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Hey everybody, we are here live today, coming to you with my tax tip number four for the holiday season. And this is legit. We've got Thanksgiving tomorrow and I'm going to talk to you about how to write off even my rock star right here because someone put right there in the chat, mark, how are you going to write off that rock star at your Thanksgiving dinner? I'm going to tell you right now. All of you need to be holding your family board meeting this holiday season. And why? What better time than Thanksgiving? So this is for you, rockstar. I'm a rock star accountant. That's right. All right, now here's the deal. You don't have to be a billionaire to have a family office. All of you should have a family board. If you have an llc, it's a board of advisors. If you have a corporation, it's a board of directors. This is a legitimate tax write off. In fact, it's critical to success to be meeting as a family. Your business is family. Family is business. And what better way to talk about the holidays and to talk about family than to all come together at one and make it a tax write off. Dinner. You can go out to dinner and have a business meeting, right? Well, why can't you take the debit card or credit card, the company card down to Costco and buy all the fixins for your Thanksgiving dinner? Totally legit, totally honest and ethical. And I encourage it. I in fact, demand it. You need to do this immediately. Now, I'm a CPA attorney, best selling author. I've been helping small business owners for over 20 years. And I love the American dream. I love Main Street America. And we sometimes think that we're a different class of people when it comes to the corporate strategies that the big companies have been using for years. Well, we can do the same damn thing. We can actually take our small business and treat it the way we should, elevate it and have our own family board meeting. Now, I'm going to give you the procedures. I'm going to talk about the specific write offs and we're going to bring it all together. So let's go procedures first. This could be right after the Thanksgiving dinner. It could be around Christmas, before New Year's. You're going to call your family members young or old, mom and dad, grandpa and grandma, the kids. Any kid over age 10 should be sitting at the table watching and learning and you're going to say, we're going to have a board meeting. Now, this isn't halftime. During the Cowboys football game. This is a legitimate time that everybody's going to come together and sit with the TVs off and you're going to say we're having a board meeting and you're going to call it to order and you're going to say all of you here are on the board and I have some important topics to cover today and I need your advice. I just got emotional here because when you ask grandma and grandpa to sit at the table and say, hey, I'm trying to build a business, I'm trying to build wealth, what would you do? I promise you they've been waiting for that opportunity to share what they know. Our family members, our senior family members have life experiences we don't talk about enough and ask them for advice. And when you have a 10 year old sitting there listening to grandpa and grandma talk about when they started a business, when they were in their 20s or 30s or 40s, and they're sharing strategies on how to build wealth, it's priceless. You're going to take notes and you're going to go through an agenda. Our law office will give you A list of 25 things to talk about. But they're the easy thing and we can do this after the fact. We'll help you through this process. It's totally expensive though. We charge $200. I know, I know. Call it ripoff. I get it. $200 to give you a 25 point checklist of things to talk about with your family that matter. Do your boi report, that special report you've been hearing about that has to be done with the feds and make sure you're good with the state. It's called mainstreetbusiness.com. get over there. We'll give you the process. Boom ba da bang. But with Thanksgiving being tomorrow, don't stress, you're still going to hold your meeting and you're going to get together and talk about, here's what we're going to buy, here's what we're going to sell, here's what we're invested in, here's what we'd like to invest in. Here's the debt we're trying to get out of, here's how much we're trying to save. And guess what? I want to talk about your businesses. Hey little Johnny, hey little Susie. Hey bro this, sister that. What are you doing for business? How can we help you? 50 million Americans have a side hustle, aka small business. Let's talk about everybody's business. Let's roundtable you're getting your mastermind group together, which is your family, to help mastermind for them and for you. How many of us wish we talked about money with our family and not make it this evil Taboo topic We can't talk about around the dinner table. We need to change it. We need to stop the dialogue of not being able to talk about family, business and money at the table and start embracing it and talk about how we can help our family step on our shoulders and do bigger and greater things. And you take notes, they sign it at the end. I attended. You vote on things if you want. They don't own your business. They're not going to be officers or directors or managers of the LLC or the corporation. And you're going to all sign it and you're going to put it in your corporate book. Oh, you don't have a corporate book. You don't have an operating agreement and bylaws and all the pieces and parts you're supposed to have. So if you get in a lawsuit or an audit with the irs, you have your crap together. Maybe this is a good time to clean that up too. When you talk to Main street business and you talk to one of the paralegals, say, can you give me a cleanup? My entity needs cleaning up and we'll get it all dialed in. So you take those minutes, they're called meeting minutes. Write them down. It doesn't have to be typed up. All the family members sign it and you put it in your corporate book or save it for when you get your corporate book put together. That's your meeting. It now legitimizes your entity for in the case of a lawsuit or an audit. And when you hand it off to our team, we're going to add additional things to it to make it even get better. With special write off elections, you need to have in there legal provisions that you need to have in there. And it's going to tighten it up and you're going to feel powerful and you're going to feel like a real leader and you're going to feel like you're doing it the way it's supposed to be done. And when you start getting organized, you start opening up the ability to be receiving for the universe, for God and the divine to say, you know what, you're ready for more. Because when you have your crap together, God says, you know what? I can give you some more blessings and some more responsibilities and opportunities. You know it, Call it the universe, call it whatever you want. Let's get ready to receive Having a family board meeting is legitimate. So you're going to hold the meeting. Everybody signs it, you put it in the book. That's the procedure. You're done. You don't file it with the state, you don't file with the irs. You're good, you're good, but it's there if you need it. Now what do you get to write off? You just had a formal business meeting. You can write off the airfare to fly in grandma and grandpa or the kids from college. You can write off the auto that you may have driven three hours to go to this place. Wherever you're having your Thanksgiving dinner, you can write off the food for the family dinner. And if you've already paid for the turkey, you can reimburse yourself, write yourself a check from your business to you for your family board meeting dinner, and put under it dining. It's a write off, tax free income to you and a write off in your business. Next, not only do you have travel and you have dining and paying for anybody's extra hotel and airfare, Airbnb, Uber, whatever. And by the way, I would recommend put the family maybe at an Airbnb down the street. It makes. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? All right. Now there's another rule called the Augusta Rule. Some of you may have heard about this, where you can rent your home to your business, totally legitimate. You can rent your home to your business for up to 14 days for the fair market value of the use of your home as if you were to Airbnb it out to someone else for a corporate meeting. And that is a write off in your business and tax free income to you. It's been on the books for years now. You got to document it. Having a board meeting is freaking documenting it. And you're going to come up with a fair market value of what an Airbnb same size of your house would cost for a two day situation. Because remember, even though you're having the meeting tomorrow, people have to get there tonight and they may even need to stay one more night after the meeting. What the IRS allows you to do is write off the day of travel to get to the meeting and the day of travel after the meeting. Totally legit. We've been doing this for years. Never audited. This is on the books. So you're going to be writing off all the travel, the rental of your home to the business and you're going to document it, print out a little picture, a screenshot of what the normal rental would be in your area. For that cost of your home, for that two to three day period for the corporate meeting. Now I want to just tell you there was an instance. Many, many of you that follow me have heard this story because it changed my life. When I was holding a board meeting with my family and I had my teenagers in the room. It was about six or seven years ago. One of my kids, near the end of the meeting, when we were about to go play, they said, can we keep meeting? Can you keep teaching us about business, dad? Can you keep talking about what really matters? I don't want to go play. I want to be right here. Your kids are starving for this relationship with you, young or old. Your parents want this relationship with you, your best friend, your brother, your sister. We all have those near and dear to us where we could open up another dimension to our relationship. Talking about money and business and it's okay. And you get a write off for that. That's it. That's the procedure. That's the write off. Let your business pay for all the expenses or reimburse you for those expenses. People, this is in my top 10 write offs and it's a perfect time to do it before year end. You can hold this meeting four times a year, you can hold it once a year. A lot of people ask, do I have to do this? Yes, you're required to do this. Now there's a ton of other questions I'm sure you have. I'm live on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, whatever portal you're watching me on right now. Write up your question on the family board meeting, travel year end tip. I want to help give you the tools you need to take this tax write off. And while you're writing up your questions, let me just say if you're a tax advisor, you have a family member that's a tax professional or a bookkeeper or an accountant. Please let them know right here we are training our accountants around the country to be Main street tax Pros certified advisors to build an advisory practice with an affordable certification program that's a total immersion into street smart tax strategies. And then weekly trainings and semi annual conferences where we freaking turn loose the best strategies in the world. Now I taking the bar exam, I went to law school, I took the CPA exam, I got a master's in accounting, worked at all the big accounting firms. You don't learn this in school, you don't learn these on exams. You learn it networking with a community that wants to find cutting edge strategies. And that's what we built at Main Street Tax Pro. So if you're interested in that, click on marchacoler.com, get a demo. And if you're looking for a tax advisor at that same website, marcjkolar.com go up to services and the network and you can find an advisor that speaks Mark Kohler. And these people, they're my tribe, and I learn from them as much as they learn from me. All right, let's hit some questions here. I got to get home and work on my stuffing. I'm doing a cornbread stuffing this year. I'm really excited about it. I've been drying out my cornbread now for 24 hours. It's time to put it in the oven. I'm so stoked. It's going to be good. Any recipe tips? I'm open to those, too. If you'd like some help, we can get the Butterball hotline right here on right now if we have to. All right, what's our first question?

Okay, first question. What is the youngest that a member of your family board can be? I have a three year old, a five year old and a ten year old.

You know, that's a great question. I would like to see the three and five year old getting compensated for little duties around the business. Maybe cleaning the office, shredding paper, emptying trash, going out to the rental property and pulling weeds and construction sites, picking up nails, whatever. So having them work in the business. I've seen clients put kids on compensate them at age 2 because they're in the artwork or the pictures or videos of the website for the business. That makes sense. But to be on the board, they've got to be cognizant of what's going on. They need to be not able. They don't have to make comments, but they got to be knowing what's going on or the IRS would be like, what the hell? I think a 10 year old would be fine. And there's a lot of kids out there that are 8, 9, or 10 years old that are listening and learning, and I'm okay with that. So it's your call. There's no specific rule on this. It's just they got to be present, you know, and I don't think a three year old is going to be cutting it. So not even a five year old. Okay, next question, next question.

How much of a family trip can I write off if we make it a family board meeting, can we write off the entire week or is it just the one day?

Neither. It's three days okay, so let's say you're going to go on a family vacation and one day is going to be your family board meeting. You can write off one day of travel to get there and one day of travel to leave. So a three day period. Now what constitutes, constitutes other business days, at least four hours of work or a critical meeting that couldn't be held, the business day of the board meeting. So this is where clients will go on a family trip and they'll go to a conference. So they take the family members to a. We took our kids down to grant Cardone's 10x conference in Vegas and we had all the teenage and young adult kids there and they all attended the meetings. And as long as everybody participates for at least four hours a day, the rest of the day you can cut loose. So four hours of business a day constitutes a business day. So you have your board meeting one day, maybe you attend a conference of four hours for the other two or three days and then bookend it with travel. So if you have rental property, you may go work on the rental property for four hours a day and then cut loose and do some family activities, conferences, meeting with clients. But when you're traveling as a family, I need you working on property or a business that you own in that area or having that board meeting or attending a conference. It's all doable. Depends on the facts and circumstances. When you meet with your tax advisor. Bring it up. Next question, next question.

I'm going to add my four children. Is there a limit to the number I can add? I have a niece and a nephew that I would also like to add if I can.

Okay, so on the board, there's no limit of board members. There's corporate boards that have 13, 15 members. Not a big deal there. But let's keep in mind what my internal strategy is here. I've got two goals. One, I want kids and family members, young or old, mom and dad on the board that I want to help educate or learn from, train and feel their presence and leadership. So that's number one. So if you're going to add niece and nephew to this, just to be nice, you might be adding more craziness to the meeting than necessary. I don't know. But I want people in the meeting that I'm trying to influence or be influenced by. Number two, I'm trying to take a tax write off for the crap I'm paying for, whether it's travel, the dining or whatever. So if you're paying for niece and nephew to be there Then you better get them on the board in order to write off the expenses to get them there if they're going to add to the conversation. If you're trying to be a good aunt or uncle to them, great. So just know why you're doing this. Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should. Next question, next question.

Can I still do my 2024 board meeting this late into the year?

Your 2024 board meeting? Damn straight. I'm going to be holding mine probably on December 29, I think is our scheduled board meeting for the year. I don't care if you do it on January 5th or December 30th, just do it once a freaking year. We've held them in the summer, it's whenever it works. Now I want to hold them at least once a year and try to hold them on a regular month of the year so that it works with your corporate book. But you can do them quarterly. Families that have a lot of crap going on, you maybe should be having them quarterly. You've got multiple rental properties, kids working in the business. These are important meetings to have. Probably the third reason is I want to make the business better. I need their advice. I need them to participate. This isn't a sham. This is legit. So I'm loving it. Anything on social media questions over there? Kirby? I need to be covering. Okay. All right, next question. Dana, next question.

If I put my wife and close friends on the board of our IRA llc, can we take the same?

Okay, crazy talk. Who was that? Throw them out. I'm just, just joking. Okay? We are not doing this for tax write offs in our IRA LLCs. That's a special purpose LLC where our retirement accounts are the owners. Now should you have a board meeting for your retirement account entities? Sure. But you're not taking a frickin write off. You're not compensating yourself, you're not benefiting yourself. You're having a meeting because you want to freaking make your IRA LLC more powerful and grow in wealth. I'm all over that. But there's no write off benefit there. Prohibited transaction. And you know we set up your llc. I'm sure we've given you that guidance, so be careful there. But all the other. Now here's another pro tip. I own, I don't know, five or ten companies, whatever. When I go have a board meeting with Matt Sorenson, it's for our law firm. He and I are on the board. We go have regular quarterly board meetings to talk about our law firm. Our Main street tax pro, we've got an advisory board and then an internal board. We have two boards we might meet quarterly or once a year. My family board meetings going to have multiple entities, and we're going to do minutes for four or five companies all at the same time. So if you have an S Corp and an LLC with a rental, hold both meetings at the same time tomorrow. And that's cool. It's all good. Next question.

Okay, you actually just answered the question. I believe if we have multiple LLCs, is one more meeting per LLC appropriate, or can we combine all of them?

You need to have a board meeting for every LLC or corporation, but you could hold the board meeting time all at once and just check off all the different companies. So do it all tomorrow, but knock off board meetings for four companies. So in that same time slot, but technically you're having four different board meetings. You're going to keep four different minutes. You can't just do minutes for one and say, this is for four companies. Because what you're again trying to do in our Main street paralegals. Mainstreetbusiness.com they're going to take what you write up and put it on steroids. They're going to add tax, elections, legal verbiage, type it up, make it look pretty. Boom. Goes in your corporate book and for 200 bucks, done in your BOI report, your state filing, they'll take care of all that. So go do this internally and then hand it over to the paralegals and say, make it pretty. And they're going to make each minute paperwork perfect for each entity. Next question.

I also want to just quickly shout out Liberty, who gave us that last question. She also, over on Facebook, gave us a fantastic cornbread stuffing recipe. Recipe. Oh, I need it over on Facebook. Everybody can go check that out.

Okay, I gotta have it because I'm looking at my cornbread recipe here. I'm pretty excited about it, and it's with bacon and pecans. So I'm headed to the grocery store right after this to get some of the ingredients. Molly and I are making rolls, green bean casserole, and the cornbread dressing. That's our responsibility tonight. I don't know. What are you in charge of, Kirby? Brie. Oh, that's right. She's doing baked brie. She's part of the charcuterie team. We have a whole team on charcuterie. I mean, that's a big deal. All right. Okay, next question.

Can you write off a cruise or other activities as part of the retreat

a cruise is so hard. They got so abused in the 90s, the IRS crushed us with some tax regulations that it's really just hard to write off the cruise experience. Now an all inclusive in Mexico. Bing. Sign me up. Freaking sandals and Tahiti. Boom. Your dad sandals down in the Bahamas. All good. Once you get on a ship were jacked up. And the reason is so many people think about, I've been on cruise ships. You're going to have a board meeting for four hours a day on the Alito deck when they're up, you know, partying with Jamaican drums. It just doesn't happen. You say you're going to do business on the cruise ship and the IRS is like, this is a big free for all. Which I'm not opposed to. I mean the cruise ships are great, but do a cruise ship for personal go do all inclusives and other travel for the board meeting Now. Now, by the way, let's get serious too. All joking aside, where I like to do the board meetings is where you own your rental property, where you might have Airbnbs or long term rentals. If you buy rental property near grandma, be holding your board meetings when you go visit grandma and work on the rentals. Because now I'm writing off a whole week. Because see you're working on the rental every day so it's a lot easier to write off the whole frickin trip. Next question, Our next question.

Can I have a board meeting with one half or one section of the board in one meeting and then the rest in another meeting?

Yes. You could also zoom in other members. So if some of you are in person and you're going to zoom in the other members of the board, that's great. You can have two freaking board meetings. You just keep good notes. As long as it's legit. It's legit. So some people could be. And I know one of the questions is out there. Some of you may be embarrassed to ask, can I do this in a foreign country? Absolutely. Go hold your board meeting in Italy now. Again, I can only write off one day and to travel to get there. And the bigger your company is, the easier it is to write this off. But don't overdo it. Pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered. Now by the way, I want to ask this too. I got to ask a favor of you guys and I'm so grateful for our tribe and our community and our viewers right now. I want to ask all of you if you will please take today's video not just for Me. But for the families out there that you love, too, and send this, this video, this link and put it on your social media and send it out to five other families. Send it to five other families, you know, have small business and say. And I think you can tell them, I would hope you would. And say, this is a game changer. This is a game changer for our family and for our tax strategies for our small business. This Kohler guy, he's for real. And the family board meeting, the family office, the Main street family office is for real and you can do it. Please share this on all of your social media channels tonight. Remind people at Thanksgiving tomorrow to sit down as a family and talk about a little business and money and investments and then reimburse yourself for all those expenses to get there. Completely legit. Thank you. All right, next question or two? Okay. What was that? Okay. I think one more is. Oh, okay. So if you want to turn. Okay. Something about where's your corporate book and where do you keep it? The corporate book is a document that has your articles, your minutes, your bylaws, all the pieces and parts with stock certificates. You should have this for your LLC and you should have it for your corporation, and you should have it for each entity. I know some of you may think, Mark, that's. That's a pain in the butt. It's expensive and all that, but what you're. Once you get it, you're done. Then you're just shoving paperwork into it year after year. But while you're doing it, it's insurance. It's insurance because if you ever get in a lawsuit, that's the first thing in discovery. It's the first thing you show up with, with your lawyer to show that you've got a legitimate business. And if you get audited with the irs, it's the first thing you show to justify the travel, the dining, all those expenses and other provisions that are in your minutes that need to be there. All right, well, thank you, everybody. Thanks for sharing your favorite holiday recipe. Thanks for sharing this post with your other family friends. And I truly want to say thank you this time of Thanksgiving for your support and what we all are trying to do to elevate Main Street America and to help small business owners everywhere make ends meet and live their dream. It takes a village to raise a village. So, you know, we're all in this together. So travel safe. Have a good time over the holidays. I'm going to be back next week live on Wednesday because next week is our 360 event. We do it every six months. It's tax and legal360.com you could watch virtually and we've got a flash sale going on right now. If you get over to markjkohler.com you can get a discounted virtual ticket and bring the family around to watch it over. Thursday, Friday and Saturday, 25 classes with 20 plus speakers on tax strategies for your business and legal ways to grow your business, legal strategies and then a whole other track on building your business. It's going to be an incredible event. It's already sold out in person so get online for the virtual ticket. 4 or 500 bucks tax write off and you can watch it as a family or a couple or whatever with your kids or your spouse. So that's tax and legal360. Now I'll be here live on Wednesday to give you another year end tax tip and then we'll be running into the event for the next three days. So excited. So I hope to see you there on the virtual. It's a live chat. You can jump between classes on the Whova app. It is super cool and if you are a tax professional, a lawyer, financial professional, you get continuing education credit to attend. So check that out. Tax and legal 360. Thanks everybody and have a freaking awesome holiday.