Mark Kohler built his law firm using a professional corporation taxed as an S corp, placed it in a revocable living trust, then created separate LLCs to buy buildings and rent them back to the operating company. He also maxed out IRAs, Roth IRAs, and HSAs to reduce taxable income and keep money working across his own entities.
Chapters
When I started my first law firm, I started this entity. This entity was going to be my operational structure to build wealth. This was, to be honest, a professional corporation that I taxed as an S corporation. I asked myself, who's going to own this? Am I going to own it? Is my wife and I going to own it together? What was the long term picture? And that's when I started my revocable living trust. The trust was the structure that was going to own the business because if anything happened to me, I wanted to know where that wealth was going to go. So the trust became the receptacle for that operation. Now I was going to take a W and I was going to take a K1, and it was all going to flow down to a tax return here and all those goodies. But legally, I wanted to make sure that my trust owned my operations. And then I started to make some money and I'm like, okay, where do I put it? I'm going to come over here on the asset side and I'm going to create an LLC and buy a building. And one of the first investments I made that really made sense is we bought a building to rent back to our operations. The first best renter you can have is yourself. And so many business owners are like, paying rent to other people. Why don't we pay rent to ourselves? And that was the beginning of it. And I saw this trifecta start to manifest my future. And then we'd set up other LLCs to come with other rental properties. And, oh, I was going to start funding an IRA or a Roth or a Health Savings Account, and I started to build a structure that would create wealth and I was going to start saving taxes along the way and then taking my profits and building wealth. And everybody's structure is going to look a little different, but that's how I did it.
