PPP and Covid Relief Breakdown | Main Street Business Podcast |

Foreign.

Welcome everyone to the Main Street Business Podcast. So delighted to be with you today. Recovering from a long night of reading a 5,000 plus stimulus bill.

You got through the whole thing?

I got the chapter like six. I skimmed it.

I was like, I was up all night and I was like, oh, my word. Well, welcome everybody. If you're new to this podcast, my name is Mark Kohler. I'm here with our amazing co host, Matt Sorenson. Both of us are tax lawyers specializing in a variety of small business, tax, legal, asset protection, make you money stuff. We've been doing this podcast in different formats for over 10 years. We have over a million listens. Great reviews, stars. We're glad you found us. If you're just joining us, because we're going to break down this PPP for the 10th time.

Is it the 10th?

We've got a lot of podcasts and stuff on. I've written a lot of articles on Entrepreneur. My latest one went up just this morning. Actually. It's number one on the site. Feeling pretty cool about that. But there's big stuff. If you've had a PPP loan already or if you're looking for another PPP paycheck protection program loan, we'll hit that. There's a lot of other stuff in there. This bill is not just about PPP and stimulus checks as you may have seen in the headlines. There's a lot of other stuff in this. So we'll try and give you some highlights on those items and get into detail on the big ones.

Yeah, and here's our format for today. For many of you that are regular listeners of our show, listeners where you're going to forego the weekly tax tip and legal tip. We are also going to start with the business provisions of this new stimulus package and a little bit of broad commentary as to what's going on with this thing and then we'll go hit. I think it's about 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7 other key provisions that I think the majority of

Americans are going to care about. There's a lot in this.

So.

But we're going to start with the business stuff here. And with that said, Matt, let's just jump. And I have a couple commentary points just before we jump into the business. Do you have anything you'd like to say in general about this? What comes to mind?

I do, but I don't want to stick my foot in my mouth and say something political that's going to piss half the listeners off and make the other half happy. Let me Just say there's a lot to love and hate in this bill, as with anything out of Congress. So. But I think it's a good shot for small business right now. It's better than nothing. And I think for everyone here there's kind of something for everyone. There really is. Whether you're an individual, you're self employed, you own a business with employees, you're the solopreneur, you got a side hustle. There really is something here for everyone where I think everyone will get some benefit out of this bill. Not just from like the broader economy and the trickle down and everything, but I really think there's some direct benefit you're going to get one way or the other.

Everybody's going to get something. I think we'll see.

Now that was Matt Sorenson, the politically correct one of our show in a rock star here. I'm the sponsored one of the show. I get a special sponsorship with Rockstar.

I can go to most stores around

the Rockstar doesn't care what Mark says. They don't censor him. You know, he's just. They know what they're getting when they sponsored him.

Yeah, they Basically I get two for two rock stars for approximately $3 at most convenience stores around the country. And I love however I go, they've got that special for me. Few other people take advantage of it.

But

my commentary is this. Congress did not do themselves any favor. If I was just talking to a family member before the show and telling her about, she's like, I heard it was 5,000 pages. Really, 5,000 pages for Covid? And I was like, oh, no, no. See, every year the government does an appropriations bill. And if you heard the government was maybe going to shut down a couple of weeks ago and they were fighting over the appropriations bill and they thought, you know what, since no one can agree on anything, let's throw this Covid stuff in the middle of the appropriations bill, which is usually thousands of pages long, which no one reads, no one cares. There's once in a while a little, you know, the government spent, you know, 500 grand on a toilet for the army and Philippines or something, but no one cares.

Garbage usually.

But because we're in this lame duck Congress, everybody's in a hurry to get this out the door. They threw them in the same bill. So now everybody in the country is actually reading this bill going, holy crap, we're giving money to Guam.

For what? And

this is a weird thing because the bill is so packed with, oh, twists and turns and the thousand other Things literally a thousand other. Be patient with everybody as we're trying

to break this down.

Yeah. Well, let's get started on the big one.

Yeah. For business.

And one last point for any of you that just joined us. We have I think a solid five star rating. If you would like to subscribe to this show, we highly encourage it. We do a show every week with tax and legal tips that are practical for any small business owner. Investor tips that you can rely on and actually use. We throw in a lot of dumb humor and movie quotes just to keep it real. Mostly that gives us the 4.5 stars, not the 5, but you know, it depends our humor. Also, this is Pod, a podcast that's broadcast with video on YouTube. You can get over on YouTube and just type Main Street Business Podcast. It's on Stitcher, itunes and Spotify. So there's. I got that out, Matt. So there's the.

We're out there. We've had a million downloads of the show over the years. So if you're feeling like I'm so such a dork for listening to this podcast, you're in good company. There's millions of dorks out there listening to this too. So

the PPP provision, because there's other things for business owners. Love a couple of them. But let's just talk about PPP for a moment. Your article on this is fantastic. If you just type Sorensen and PPP in Google or go to the entrepreneur.com webpage, mass is front and center. But Matt, what would you say about ppp? You break it down.

Well, let me hit something. Let's hit the big headline. There's a second round of PPP loans. So if you've got a PPP loan already, small business owner, you can now come back and get a second draw on. This is what they're calling. They're calling these second draw loans where you get another loan. There's a lot of cool things for existing PPP loans we'll get to in a second. But the big news is there's another round of PPP loans, 300 billion approximately set aside for it. But it's a little more tricky to get this time.

I was just going to say if you qualify. So I'm going to take a stab at this and Matt Sorensen is the expert. So some of these things are less than 300 employees. You have to show you had 25% reduction in sales and you can only get no more. Well, and it's over two and a half months of payroll. If you're Food industry, you can get three and a half months of payroll, right?

What else do you see as a qualification?

That's pretty much it. If you got a PPP loan in the first round, you have to have used the full thing already or say that you're going to. It's going to be depleted. So. But yeah, you get two and a half months of payroll. So if you're, what you do is you take your 2019 average payroll. If your average monthly payroll was 100 grand in 2019, you're gonna get two and a half months worth of that 250 grand. Restaurants and other food service businesses got a perk. Congress threw a lot of stuff in here for the food and restaurant industry because they've gotten hammered. So restaurants get thrown three and a half times their payroll. So they'd get up. They had 100,000amonth average payroll. They're going to get a $350,000 PPP loan. So that's a little unique from last PPP round. Now you get 24 weeks to use it, just like we had last time, 24 weeks to use the money. You can use it for wages, rent, mortgage, interest. Now they added some other qualifications. You can use the money for covered property damage, protective equipment you had to hire in your business to protect your employees or customers from COVID some operating expenses that they approved you can use the money for. So what you can use the funds for got broadened under PPP. But if you've got 100 grand of payroll and you get a PPP loan for two and a half times that, that's 250 grand. You get 24 weeks to use that. That's like, that's like six months. You're going to use all that money pretty much on payroll, you know what I mean? And you can get it forgiven just like the original PPP loan, you can get it forgiven. You have to use 60% of the money on payroll though, to get it forgiven. As long as you do, you'll get the whole thing forgiven.

Love it. Now, a couple other things. Just on a practical note with our first read and as we're getting into the. And we're going to get into more details next week we're scheduled after the holiday, Christmas holiday, lots of holidays going on after the Christmas holiday. We'll be holding at least a full one hour to an hour and a half webinar where we'll get into more details and do Q and A. If you're following us on our newsletter,

that's going to be a Great way

to get a ping when we go live. That'll be through the entrepreneur.com site as well as our social media sites. But get over and check that out next week where we get into more detail. So if some of you are like, guys, I have questions.

You're just hitting the broad surfaces. That's right. That's what we're doing. We're trying to get out as much info as we can in this short

podcast while you're commuting to Grandma's.

Now, the practical advice we're giving people is, hey, if you got the PPP before you have less than 300 employees and your sales really did get reduced by 25% or more, go for it. Don't feel like you're gonna have a target on your back. Go apply for this dumb thing and yeah, it'll be forgiven. Which brings us to point number two of this whole thing. Just for.

Yeah, let me say back on that first part, though, just to get a little like, you know, to get your first PPP loan, the rule was economic. You had economic uncertainty. Okay, if you could say my business has economic uncertainty, Every business in March of an April of 2020 could have said that. So everybody pretty much qualified for ppp. Now, in the end, not every business needed it. And I think now that we've had some history of businesses and how they're affected by Covid, Congress said we're not letting everybody get it, we'll only let those affected get it. So what you have to do is you just have to show one quarter that you were affected. So you could take one quarter in 2019. Let's say it was third quarter of 2019, and you can compare it to third quarter of 2020 and you can say, all right, was my sales down 25% in third quarter, 2020 versus 2019? If it was 25% or more, you qualify for this second round of PPP funding. You don't have to have all quarters. There's just one that you have to hit to get it and qualify.

And I love it. And this is where we get into the details. And what I like about this provision

and really love is that a lot

of business owners have been blindsided and barely have time to do their bookkeeping. So you don't have to do a

whole year of books.

You just have to get a quarter's worth that you could provide some verified documentation. You're probably going to have bank records that'll really support that. Which brings me to the point that you're going to Go back to. You're probably the same bank, unless you had a bad experience. You may want to choose a different bank this go around, but you're going to still apply through a bank. I think the banks are going to be better prepared to provide their portal quickly to apply. Banks are anxious to get your business, think they're going to. They've learned a lot the second round too. So you're going to go, banks provide whatever verification they want and then you're off to the races. We have not seen the application yet.

So, yeah, I think SBA has like, there's a couple of things they have 10 days on and some things they have 24 days on. I think they might have like only 10 days actually to get it out. So.

Yeah, so forgiveness. Matt, before you get to forgiveness, I want to shout out to the sba. We've had actually some phone calls with some pretty higher up level individuals at the SBA that have said, we love your podcast. We've said it around the office, thank you. You know, and we want to give them a shout out too, because I'm

serious, you know, you can have some run of the mill crazy experiences. When you call the IRS or the DMV or this or that, there's how many different government agencies out there. But the sba, their people have been phenomenal. Every time I've called, they've been friendly, they've tried, They've literally called people back, they've sent emails, they've. I just, we can't say enough. The SBA employee, they never. A year ago, still a year ago, they never knew this. They signed up for this crap this year. And yeah, so just amazing.

Yeah, they got a lot of assignments in the bill. There's so many sections in the bill where it's like, SBA's got to do this in this many days. SBA want to do this. SBA will issue guidance on this. You know, it's like, yeah, well, someone, someone's holiday schedule, you know, trips just got canceled.

Sorry.

Okay, so forgiveness for all of us people that got PPP that may not do the second round.

Yeah, yeah, good news for you too. There was this dumb thing from the irs. They issued guidance saying, hey, if you, your PPP loan got forgiven, we're not going to allow you to expense the money you use the PPP loan on. So if you're like, hey, I used all that PPP money on wages and other qualifying expenses like you told me to, but then you get it forgiven, they're going to be like, oh, you can't take those expenses. They're not deductible. And that was the position the IRS was taking on this. Well, it literally took an act of Congress here to flip that. Literally, because that was not what Congress intended and there's definite bipartisan support on this issue. And now you can rest easy. When your PPP loan is forgiven, it will not be taxable to you. You'll still be able to expense the, you know, the money that you use from the loan for the wages and other things that were legitimate business expenses in your business. So that was a big development for existing PPP loan borrowers.

Oh, huge. And just a little commentary. Mnuchin, the treasury secretary from General Caspian in Hollywood who's amazing, you know, he's

all he's saying is, hey, we're trying

to save the train wreck coming down the road here. When you give this money away and then you don't tax it either, it's only going to cost our future generations more and we got to pay this money back someday.

So I think he's like, hey, I

just was trying to do what I would be charged to do as the treasury secretary. So Congress, you want to, it's on you.

So yeah, I think the treasury secretary as being in charge of the IRS always gets the bad cop badge. Right. Congress can be good cop when they want. He's always going to be bad cop. Poor guy.

So he's been awesome too. Just what a tough job he signed up for. Okay, now here's another.

Now let me say one other. Oh, I was going to put another note on this, and this is in my article too, is if you had an Eidl advance where you got the thousand dollars per employee or maybe you're early at the 10 grand that's also considered. Those are also forgiven. You don't pay those back. And they're not forgiveness of debt income either. If you use the money in the business, you can still take the expenses on it. So that's another cool pickup for any of you that got the Eidl advances

because you had to reduce your PPP loan by Eidl and all this. They're like fair got Eidl, keep the frickin money, you know.

Yeah.

And so good doesn't reduce ppp. Now I was going to throw out something else for a bit. We're staying on this business owner concept. We'll come to unemployment and stimulus checks and landlords and childcare providers. We'll get some of these other little things that are out there.

But for business owners, what I like

to is the ertc, which is the employee retention credit, which this year we all got used to this point that, oh, I get five grand if I keep an employee, I retain them or rehire them or whatever.

And so there was a lot of

businesses that said, you know what, I

did the math, I'm going to do the ERTC instead. Because you couldn't do both. You had to choose PPP or ertc. And those businesses that chose the ertc, some big ones out there, there wasn't any press on that. Bad press, you know, a lot of

people got pummeled for taking the PPP

money up or whoever.

Then there was other restaurant owners out there. Let's take the ertc. No one noticed. And we'll still get hundreds of thousands, which they needed, which is fair. But they did it without getting smack. The smackdown. I watched this on the other night on WWE Smackdown.

Yeah, it was, it was pretty sweet

and I kind of watched, I did, I watched it for about 10 minutes and I was like, all right, I've had enough. But I love that show, fighting with your family. That true story girl from England that fights in the wwe.

Yeah, that's great.

Such a good, warm hearting. I just loved it.

Now let me say on ertc, this is something that we're going to need some guidance on. Treasury has got some guidance they got to give to and I presume they will on ertc. They've increased it. Right. Because you should be able to get five grand. You can get up to 14 grand possibly now per employee under ERTC, which is huge. There's some calculation basics here we can try to give some broad strokes on. But the other thing is now you can use ERTC even if you did ppp. So ERTC is going to. This employee retention tax credit is something that those that have already used PPP can also maybe look at now using ertc.

Yeah.

And did we get guidance on whether that was taxable or not? Did they come clean? Do we know on that? Do I get to deduct the payroll used by the ertc? I wasn't sure on that. I know we got that question a lot last year and everybody. Because the Treasury.

I would think so.

Why wouldn't you? I know.

Otherwise why would they issue a tax credit if they are going to take away the deduction? Doesn't make sense.

Yeah, I hear you, but it's also. But I got that question consistently throughout the year going. I got the crtc. Do I get to deduct the payroll with it because I don't want to get clumped in that PPP bucket. So there's more guidance coming. Like again, folks, please, if you get to our website mainstreetbusiness.com or mainstreetbusinesspodcast.com you can sign up for our free weekly newsletter. We've been doing that close to 15 years, blog article after blog article. Okay.

And I'll say this too on ERTC too, the IRS gave guidance about this previously though that's not for owner employees only the non owner employees can use ertc. Okay? So if you're a solopreneur, even if you had PPP and you're like, oh, I want to do ERTC now, you

can't do it, I'm sorry, I'm kind of a color commentary with stupid WWE and Rockstar. But I'll say it was interesting. You saw in the news a lot of people that abused the PPP or the ir, bought a Ferrari or this or that, bought a put in a pool and but the one that actually we had firsthand knowledge of, there was

some folks that called us for help

when the IRS showed up on their

business is they were promoting the RET, the ERTC where you get this $5,000 credit and they were helping S Corp owners get the credit for them, their spouse, their kids and double and just taking that money and running and getting a commission for it. The IRS was not happy now and see they when the first bill came out, you could have pulled that off, but within weeks they said not for owners. Well, they forgot to read the second change or the third change. And so this is why I want to commend all of you listening today is that this is a moving target from week to week, month to month. And you need to make sure that you're aware of this and that you know enough to smell something rotten in Denmark if your tax provider is giving you some weird advice. If you're like hold on, are you sure? Because I was listening to the Main street business podcast and they said this and these guys are writing in commentary and you know, you're sure. So I'm glad many of you are listening because you got to be the watchdog. You're going to go down if your accountant screws us up. It's not just your accountant. You sign your tax return at the

end of the day.

So make sure you're aware of this stuff.

I love it.

You're all of your listening.

Okay, well anything else for business owners, man?

Oh, well, there is the meals.

Yes, you go ahead, you get the. Oh, I love this one.

All right. Yeah, I'll let you. I'll unveil this one. Okay. I think this is a play to the restaurant industry which has been hit. One of the hardest industries hit from COVID is business. Meals will be 100% deductible in 2021 and 2022.

Oh my gosh, right now it's only

50% deduction or

so big.

This is so big because this helps even you small business owners that are not going to do the ppp, not going to do the ertc. And this has been a big deal where the restaurant industry is saying, please help us out. And they said, well, let's make it 100% write off. Why don't we get people to go to eat more? Makes sense to me. But please don't go out and start googling three martini lunch because there are these leftist nut jobs out there.

Sorry, before I start alienating some of

our listeners, why did you even bring that up? Whenever you say don't start looking for this, everyone's going to go look for it.

Yeah, well, I mean, is so much

better than me because I kind of

read my hate mail once in a

while and it just makes me so mad. And I'm like, seriously, this is a perk for the big corporations and rich people. No, this is a perk for small business owners.

It.

And now we still don't know details. Is this going to include meals in the office? Is this going to include takeout and food in the office? And if I bring in bagels and donuts on Friday, is that 100%? So lots of little details. We're going to wait to see on this one. But this is a big deal because if you normally write off, let's say you spend 10 grand in dining, very common for small business owners to spend 10 grand throughout the year. That's 800 bucks a month. If you're a realtor, that's a couple hundred bucks a week. Very, very common. And 10 grand a year with a $5,000 haircut is now 10,000 a year write off. If you're in a 30% bracket, you just say 2 to 3 grand in taxes right there. So that's a stimulus check right there, falling in your lap of two to three grand.

So love it for a couple of years.

2021 and 2022. That was a nice one. All right, you want to hit the individual side?

Yeah, let's do it.

Okay. So for you business owners, there's Some good individual stuff here you may want to know.

Yeah, you can purchase. You're a business owner and you're an individual.

Okay, let's start with stimulus checks. Yeah, right there. Yep.

$600 stimulus check. Government's been through this before. And if you were in the system before, you got your check quickly and it was auto deposit, Mnuchin, Love to get that word out there that we're gonna start putting money in people's bank now that Everybody's filed their 2019 tax returns and or got a stimulus package, a stimulus check in the mail. The system should even be more efficient. You should get this money automatically deposited in your paycheck. It'll be based on your 19 tax return. You have to have made less than $75,000 a year. If you make more than 100 grand a year, zero for single, 150 for

those married, filing joint one 12, 112,500 for head of household. And remember, this is 600 per individual. So married couple is going to get 1200 bucks plus per child. And there's no cap on the household side. So for any of you, you know, Mormon families, Catholics, other crazy people that have, you know, 10 kids, you know, that's 600 bucks a kid. They're finally paying off, man.

That's it. You know, gloves are off. Mark Kohler is now just went after two religious groups right there. I love it. Also, it's one thing to offend our listeners, but our own employees and partners. Rick, a partner in our firm has nine kids. Or is it 10? I can't keep track. Is it 10?

So I don't think they forget every once in a while too.

Yeah. Does he really get 600 per kid?

Yeah, well, I don't know where his income is, but so, yeah, he's. Now, this is another thing. If you have children, your phase out goes up too. So it's, you know, it's 150 married with no kids. If you have kids, you get, you get a, with a more dependence, you get a higher phase out. So I think like two dependents. For example, a married couple is going to be 200 grand where the phase. So a lot of people will get the stimulus checks and it will be direct deposit in your bank account. Mark said direct deposit in your paycheck. It'll be direct deposit into your bank account.

That's all right. So it's teamwork. Let me say you get double the payment if you have a teenager, triple if it's a daughter between the ages of 12 and 18.

Yeah. Because you need it.

Do not quote me on that.

Of course.

Matt and I are parents of teenagers and pretty much after six o' clock

we are hunkered down in our bedroom

in a corner, rolled up in a ball saying move out

Mercy. All right, so now this is based on your 2019 income. So this is gonna be based on your 2019 return. 2020s aren't filed yet or due and they're like, we're trying to work this like literally within a week or two where they're gonna start sending direct payments out on stimulus. So what's that?

Go out and woohoo, start throwing down on your credit card, you know, some Christmas. That was again something that Dave Ramsey would never say. And that was a joke. I want all of you to fund

your retirement account with this money. Seriously, you do not listen to our show. Enough if you're new to our humor here because we want you to take all that stimulus money and just drop

it in your Roth ira.

Oh, let the stimulus check keep giving.

That's right, that's right. You can set that up of course@directed ira.directed ira.com. that's our, our company for those that want to self direct and invest their IRAs. But okay, all right. Stimulus checks are cool, of course. What else we got for individuals?

Unemployment? Do you want to give a little?

Yeah, the unemployment. Right. That's been extended. You get it. There's the federal kicker on it, which was, which is now 300 bucks. I believe. It used to be 600.

It was about 600 a week up through July or August of last year.

Okay. Yeah. So there's gonna be another 300 added on to that for those on unemployment or need to get back on it right now. And that's gonna go for 11 weeks. Okay, that's an 11 week extension into March, I believe.

I thought I saw April 19th somewhere so bad. What would you.

Okay, 11 weeks,

I don't know. Okay.

But time will tell.

Well, yeah, it's an 11 week extension. Depends on I guess where you are in your current week. So if you've already. Yeah,

and I will say this too about the unemployment. That's $300 to clarify a federal benefit on top of whatever you're getting in the state.

Yeah.

Per week like before.

They're allowing the states to administer this. So if you don't qualify with the state, you're not getting this federal and you just still follow all the normal rules of looking for jobs and da da da da da, do you qualify? But if you do Get a state check. You were getting 300 a week through the end of the year and it was going to expire. President Trump had extended that and now he's saying, boom, we're going to extend it further into 2021. I thought up until April 19th that maybe 11 weeks. We'll get you some info on that. And again, we were focusing our research on the business owner. So we, we have some clients that

are on unemployment, but the majority of

you are out there knocking down the bushes, you know, a small business owner.

So be patient with us.

All right?

Yeah. Anything else on unemployment you want to say?

No, that's pretty much it on that. All right. There are some, like there's the charitable contribution, by the way, which is an above the line deduction. You don't have to itemize to get this. That is 600 bucks for those married filing joint. That's for 2020 and 2021. That was already in there. 300 if you're single, 600 for married filing joint. So that's a nice thing for many of you. Now, the standard deduction has been raised so high, a lot of you that normally give to charity aren't even taking your charitable deduction anymore. You're just taking the standard deduction. Well, now you're going to get your standard deduction and are going to be able to throw that charitable deduction up to 600 married, 300 single, onto your 1040. So that's going to help reduce your tax liability for this year.

And next, some brief commentary. If some of you are like, why are they doing this? You will quickly learn in life that the government motivates us to, to do things by giving us tax breaks. Hence you put in handicap excess in your business, you get a tax credit or you get this or that. If you buy an electric vehicle, you get tax credits. If you give to charity, we will give you a bonus.

So they're trying to help America save itself by saying, you give a little

bit to charity, we'll give you a

write off and maybe you'll feel good

enough to keep giving. So we'll see how it goes. Little gateway drug to giving more.

Okay, landlords. Now, this is kind of business related to, but it's kind of an indirect thing. I wasn't thrilled by this because we have a lot of clients that own real estate and there's been this eviction moratorium all across the country. In a lot of states, they're starting to raise that moratorium. But people aren't rushing out to evict Others because they look like Scrooge. Notice how to relate current timing in

our life with holiday.

Good job.

Yeah, I learned that in acting class.

When you're out as a comedian, you're trying to bring relevant current timing. Okay. Anyway, but you don't want to look like Scrooge. So here's what they did. They allocated $25 billion to help renters pay their rent. And if you meet certain qualifications, the government will give you money to pay your rent. And there's a lot of detail that.

Yep.

I've had to deal with this, by the way, as a landlord on one of my single family rentals where I have to fill out freaking thing every month to this assistance organization through the city where the tenant lives, who applies for it and they send me a check, you know, six weeks later, totally late, but they do send it. So it's kind of a pain in the end. And it's good for tenants and it's good for landlords. Hopefully it's just not getting abused like a lot of this stimulus stuff. But yes, I think if you're a tenant and a landlord, I mean, I'd rather get it than not. And, you know, you can't foreclose or you can't evict them.

So I just think some of these are abused because everybody's like, this is too much work. I'm just going to go hold someone outside, you know, hold someone up outside

of a 7 11.

You know, this is. If I have this much paperwork, it doesn't pay. But anyway, the more. Now the federal government did put across the nation moratorium, which I think is effective. Matt, in all the states through the end of January, they're saying no evictions again. Okay. So states that are in the middle of an eviction, I think you're going to see municipal courts and say any evictions in the process in the court system out till February. So if you're a landlord and you were hoping to get someone kicked out,

I'm sorry, you got another month of hell.

There's some exceptions to that. I know, like because I've had clients on evictions and on foreclosures where if the property is vacant or been abandoned, then you can obviously evict tenants abandoned or vacant, move their crap out or whatever may be there also. Same thing for foreclosing. So when we're starting to see that on some of the foreclosure numbers are starting to tick back up because a lot of lenders are finally starting to do that where they Are abandoned or vacant. They're like, well, now we are going to foreclose on those ones at least. So let's get this ball rolling and see.

This is another chance to plug our show. In the past, we've done shows just dedicated to landlords. Matt and I are landlords. We encourage real estate investment. We're not saying real estate investment is bad. It comes with good and comes with bad and it's good stuff.

Yeah.

Pros and cons.

But as a landlord, if you're new to this game and you've been really upset with COVID and someone left the place and left their stuff in there, you just can't take it to the dump. You're going to get sued and.

Oh, true.

So we'll have some. You can go back into our history and listen to. We should do a whole show on evicting. You should, Matt.

We do. We should do one. We should do a eviction show. I mean, oh my gosh. People are like, what kind of lawyers are these? Geez, that'd be fun. A show on evictions.

Well, we want people to invest. We invest.

And then you've got some renters in a tough situation.

Yeah, I mean, part of the eviction process is trying to work it out. You know, sometimes you gotta.

I would not use that word, Matt May, but I would say in a tenant with tough circumstances.

Mm, yeah.

And you want to figure out how

to get them out and get on

to making money with your. Because you've invested hard earned money in a property and you handle it. So anyway, there's 25 billion out there. As a landlord, I would recommend you learn these rules, get that information to your tenants and help assist them. Yeah, money, that's the big thing. Because when you're a tenant and you're looking at getting evicted, you're. It's an emotionally. It's hard. You know, we've all at some point in our life been a tenant. I have. I was in college or in other times. I rented in the last 10 years as we were building a house. And when you're a tenant, you feel like your hands are tied. It's very difficult. So if you're a good landlord, get out there, help them fill out the paperwork and you're going to get a check and it's going to help them feel more secure. It might, you know, it's a win win.

Yeah, it's a win win. It gets them their debt paid and it gets you paid. You got to, you know, go through some paperwork and everything. But. But stay on top of it. For sure.

Okay. I only have one more.

Okay. Let's say I know there's a bunch more, but some of them are kind of, you know, they don't pale in comparison to these ones we're talking about. There's so much in this, guys. It's actually, I mean, it's kind of exciting.

I'm going to choose one more and then, Matt, you may wrap up the show or give one more. I thought this was good for child care providers because we have a lot of business owners that are child care providers. That's a small business.

It's great. Small business.

But when Covid hit the cost of trying to sanitize a children's area so that you could make parents help parents feel safe dropping off their kids, it was astronomical. And so you closed down your childcare facility. Parents are trying to go work, their kids are not at school. They got to find childcare. They can't find child care. It was a big cluster. And so it was. So Congress said, you know what, we're going to give money to child care providers in grants to get Covid safe. And you can apply for this. The state regs, states are directed to come up with regulations and a procedure within 30 days. So you can apply for money to get your. Because they want you back in business and they're going to give you free money to do it. And then that way people can drop off their kids to go get back to work. You make money, the parents make money, the kids get quality daycare and they're safe.

Win, win, win, win, win.

So, yep, that's out there.

Okay, cool. There are some other things in here on some other tax credits. There's some flexible spending accounts. You can roll over your flexible spending account from 2020 into 2021 if you didn't use the balance. That's not normally something you can do. The employer side payroll tax credit, when you give an employee Covid sick paid time is available, which small businesses still have to provide Covid paid sick time that does not dip into the employees regular sick time, but you do get a tax credit as the business owner for that. That's still there and being extended into the. Into 2021. So there's a lot of other things in there. We'll be hitting those, of course, in later topics and make sure you're following the newsletter because some of this is hard to digest in one shot. We wanted to just get this out there fast, get you guys the down and dirty. We're still waiting for the president to sign it. The White House has indicated they will, but it's been passed by the House and Senate. The bill's massive. These are the high points, though. These are the things that are mattered we want to get focused on so you know what to be expecting in your business right now.

And with that said, enjoy your Christmas holiday or whatever holiday you're celebrating. And hopefully while you were doing a little driving over the hills and through the woods, you were able to listen to this podcast and made your drive a little more enjoyable and informative. See, don't you feel better, people?

You learn something and hopefully you had

a little smirk or a laugh or you at least rolled your eyes.

Yeah, we'll take an eye roll. We'll take that.

That's a win in a tax podcast.

Are you kidding me? That's a slam.

Done.

Yeah. All right, thanks everybody.

Get over to mainstreetbusiness.com, sign up for the newsletter. Subscribe. Give us five stars. If you love this, we'd appreciate it. Share it with your friends and family. And Matt, any final words of wisdom this time of year?

This time of year, just enjoy your family and loved ones. Take some time off here. I'm like the worst. I gotta follow my own advice here. Take some time off. Enjoy the time with those you love. Refocus back on all these financial and tax issues after the holiday.