Why Every American NEEDs a Trust | Mark J Kohler LIVE | Q&A

Welcome everybody to this week's live broadcast with yours truly, Mark Kohler, CPA, attorney, entrepreneur, real estate investor, crypto miner and ranch owner. Yep, I hit it all. So after Mr. Robot and Yellowstone, if I watch a show, I got to do it anyway. I'm here today to help you with your American dream. Saving taxes, protecting your wealth, making more, making it happen. And I know as an entrepreneur it can be hard, it can be difficult trying to bring multitask, be the head cook and bottle washer, the maitre d, the janitor, the one that opens and closes. It can be tough. But it's also so exciting to control your own destiny and make some more money. Do something you love. All the above, right? One in three Americans now have a side hustle or a side gig. Close to 40% of working Americans now is the estimate. That's a small business, folks. You got a rental property, that's a business. You got a side hustle, you're getting a 1099. That's a small business. So we're going to talk about it here today. Now, if you're on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, any of those platforms, please type your question below. I'll do my best to get to it. We're not going to be able to get to all the questions, but my team here and I want to say thank you to all of them being involved. I going to do my best to get to your questions. So I've got over here on a screen, I've got Facebook and YouTube. I got Instagram flowing in. There's Vicki. I see Vicki. Vicki R. Watch on an Instagram. Got to give her some love. So, yeah, oh, I love seeing everybody's names here because it's, oh, we got some boo Yankees and then some go Yankees. So, oh, let me just say I lived in New York for a couple years. I'm not a bandwagon fan. All right. I can throw down some pie, you know what I'm saying? Cheese slices on the street of New York. I love a good New York style pizza on the street. Anyway, I lived in New York. I can, I can claim it being a Yankee fan if you live there, right? All right, okay, so let's do this. Now the topic today that we wanted to present was why every American should have a trust. Now, last week's article I wrote on the blog was about Prince. Purple Rain, 80s pop music. You may know the song Little Corvette. Anyway, some of you are too young to enjoy Prince. He died about five years ago and his estate is a train wreck. The Biggest probate mess in the history of the state of Minnesota. No will, no trust. Now, I'm going to give you the myths and the misconceptions of why you may go. I don't need a trust. I don't have money. I don't have this. I don't have that. Slow down. I'm just going to give you some parameters. Now, this is not an infomercial to sell everybody a trust today. I just want you to at least put it on your radar. Maybe by the end of the year, then of next year. You get it done. Yes. Every year we have special. This time of year in our Memorial Day special, we save 20% for our client. We give them 20% on their estate plan. You can allocate it to where, just cash back or put it on another project at the law firm. But it's there and we want clients to be thinking about it. But this is not going to be a sales pitch. Next, shout out to Entrepreneur. Appreciate the team over there. Let me go live on entrepreneur.com. love Ryan Shea and everything he's accomplishing for Americans with the number one magazine in the world for entrepreneurs, and that's Entrepreneur. I've got Darren Charrington here, one of our attorneys in the office. He's awesome. He is just sitting here typing as fast as he can, answering questions for many of you. And I've got Corey and Ashlyn here helping with all the social media in the broadcast. Alright, now, Corey, I'm going to have to. Did my thing just die here? What's going on? Did I lose my whiteboard? Am I literally. Is our battery that dead? Okay, let me know what I got to do. Okay, Cory's gonna hook me up there. All right, so here's the deal. Oh, we're good. What did I touch? Did I screw up? You have to turn it on. It was on. Okay. Trust. Now, let me just. I'm just gonna spend five, ten minutes on this, then I'll talk about whatever you guys want. I'm here for you, okay? The type of trust I'm talking about is a revocable living trust. Certainly not every American needs an irrevocable trust. Some complex asset protection trust. There's the land trust strategy out there. Fine. Those are all other topics. I'm talking about a revocable living trust. Rlt. A revocable living trust doesn't give you asset protection. It doesn't save you taxes. It keeps your crap organized. And someday you're going to die. I hate to break it to you. And you May want to leave a mess for your family, but you've worked hard to build assets, equity in your home, maybe a retirement account, maybe you got a little life insurance, I don't know. But anything you've got, you get to decide where it goes. You can plan, you can say, I want it to go to this kid, no kid. I want it to go to a charity. I want to go my brother, my sister, my mom, my dad. Some people go, well, I'm single, no kids, not married. Well, that's the biggest question mark of all. Where does it go? That was Prince. He died single, unmarried, no children. Everybody's coming out of the woodworks, fighting over his assets. So the trust is the foundation of your trifecta. And I want it to own your home. I want it to be the beneficiary of your life insurance, any investment accounts, gold, silver, crypto, rock, rental property. And if you have rental property, you're going to put that into an llc. And the LLC will be owned by your trust. If you have an ira, like a Roth or anything like that, it'll be the beneficiary would be the trust. And then if you have an LLC for your side hustle, it'll be owned by your trust. And if you have an S corporation, many of you will graduate to that. Either an LLC taxed as an S or you just go straight to an incident. Your S corp will be owned by your trust. All of your assets would be owned by your revocable living trust. Okay, that's where it fits. Now let me give you the whys. Oh, I even told my team, I was like, I'm just going to go for it and just make sure I've got, I hit all my bases here. Get it? Yankees bases, huh? You know, it's the little things. It's the little things in a webinar like this. Okay, alright. The first misconception out there is that you have to be rich to need a trust. Wrong. Do you have a little life insurance? It's going to go to somebody, it's going to go into your estate. Do you have a little equity in your home? Do you have a little money in an IRA? I don't care if it's 10 grand, 100 grand or a million, it's going to go somewhere. And a trust helps you define where and how. So if you do have some young nieces or nephews or children, you're like, man, I don't want them running around like a trust baby, with an extra 50 grand or 500 grand. Burning a hole in their pocket. So when you have a trust, you can put all sorts of rules on how that money is distributed so you don't have to be rich. If you have any assets at all, they go into a bucket and you get to say, oh, they get money when they turn 20, 25, 30, 35, they can have money for college, they could have money to buy their first home, they could have money for a wedding, start a business. You get to put all these rules in here. You could say if they're still married to that bozo, they don't get anything. If they are on drugs, they don't get anything until their life's in order. I have two pages of ideas where you can jack up your kids or your nieces and nephews lives. You'd love it. It's called dead hand control. You just bring your hand out of the coffin and just mess with their lives. It's great. They'll need therapy for years. It's good for them. If you're going to give them money, might as well have it come with some strings, right? Put in a little budget for therapy too. Do them good. All right. Now that is a trust. And I know I sound like I'm crazy or this is joking, but it's kind of not. If you die with no plan, the courts are going to decide who gets your money. Whatever's left of your ira, whatever's left of your crypto, whatever's left of your rental, whatever's left of your 401k, anything. A court is going to give it to any of your beneficiaries when they turn 18 or an ex husband, an ex wife, kids, brothers, sisters, mom, dads. People are going to fight for it and it's going to be ugly and it's going to cost lawyers and time with the trust. None of that. It's your bible. You write the verses. You decide who gets what, when, where and how. We freaking write it down so it can't get challenged or it's going to cost a lot to challenge it. You put it in the drawer, you're done. You're done. I've edited my will and trust because they come together. I've edited mine once. I should say modified or restated. I did a one page amendment once in the last 20 years. You're like Mark, you're a lawyer, you're probably fiddled with it all the time. No, it's on the shelf. If something happens, take it off the shelf. But we've only made one change. It was after A family reunion didn't go so well. My wife's like, they raising my kids. Cut, cut, cut, cut. All right, so we did a little change. That was it. I'm not kidding. That was the only time we changed our trust. So it's good for generally the rest of your life. I recommend clients kind of modify it every five years. And you control the words. The rules, you can change at any time while you're alive, and then when you die, boom, it's irrevocable. Now, if you're married, you can give rules to your surviving spouse. If you're married with his, hers, and our children. You may say I carved this out for my first set of children. Then let's carve this out for each other and this for our new kids together. I don't know. You get to decide. So, again, you do not have to be wealthy to need a trust. So what are the benefits? You get to decide the rules for anybody. Charity, kids, whoever. You decide on the rules. You want to do that? You decide. Decide the rules. You know what? That looks ugly. Let's do this. Number one, you decide the rules. Okay? Number two, we avoid probate. There's no court. No court with the trust. Next. I think you protect your money from lawyers and family that wants to fight about it. So you protect money from the vultures. The vultures. All right. Oh, no. Vultures. How do you spell vultures? V, U, L, T E, R, S. U, R, E what? U, R, E, S. Vultures. That's a word you don't write every day. Okay, and then number four, what I like about a trust as well is it can be used during your life if you're in an accident, if there's something where you're incapacitated, you're in the hospital, whatever. Your backup trustee can run your affairs if you're missing, gone, sick, in a coma, who knows what. So you're going to be able to have a trustee back you up, and that's really big if you're unable to run your own affairs. Now, I'm going to give you number five, and then I'm just going to get into Q and A for you guys. You want to talk about the trust, Cool. You don't, we'll just hang around. Okay, so number five, I like a trust for privacy. Because with your trust, I want you to choose a name that's really anonymous. My trust is not Mark Kohler Trust. Whatever's on title for my home. Beneficiaries of assets and LLCs and blah, blah, blah. You're not going to know what it is. I want it to hide my assets. I want it to hide my address, hide my things. So you want to hide my things. And so you want to have a trust to help with identity theft. Maybe a stalker. Everybody should have a good stalker. But there's a point, you know, you're kind of done with it, you feel special, and then you're like, I don't want them around anymore. You know, you get a tro, that's called a temporary restraining order. And then you move on. Corey, this my producer, this good looking guy. How many, how many stalkers have you had in your life? Two or three girls? 35. Wow. Now I think you're, you know, joking around with me. Budgets and numbers there. All right, so privacy is a big deal. And in today's technology circles of everything being on the web, privacy is not a bad idea. Now, in my trifecta, and here's my trifecta, my operations, my assets and my trust. I love the trifecta. The trifecta. My corp. Everybody knows the name. Everybody knows the name. My LLC is to own my rentals. You can't find my assets without a lot of work. Paying lawyers to file lawsuits and dig it up. And as long as you're not a bad person and the government's not after you, it's gonna be hard for people to find your assets because my LLCs and trusts don't have my name on it. But out here, Mark J. Kohler, Inc. Great. Get ahold of me, Buy stuff, say hello, use our services, use our company. Because you want to brand your operations, but you don't want to brand your holding companies. All right, first question. Let's get into it. I got it. Right, the YouTube. Okay, that's where I was going. I got you. All right, Corey says first question he wants answered because maybe Corey's going to work on it this weekend. Corey wants to know, can you draft your own trust? Yes, you could. Recommended, maybe not. Let's break this down, and I think this will help in an estate plan. So estate plan, there's really two core pieces and then there's a bunch of little documents that go with it. The will and the trust. Now, we did a podcast a week ago. Go over to mainstreetbusiness.com or just type in Main street business on the platform you use for your podcasts, Stitcher, itunes, whatever it is, we did a whole podcast helping you write your own will. That's called a holographic will. You write your own will and you sign it. You have to write it in your handwriting and sign it in about 25 states. I was surprised. Actually, half the states, they'll recognize it. You don't need witnesses. You don't need it notarized. A holographic will, you're good to go. And we list all the states that. That's okay. In the majority of the other states. The other 20 to 25 states, you need two witnesses. And notarizing it, it's not a bad idea. But two witnesses that see you sign it. And you wrote it in your own handwriting. You can't print it out. You got a hand write it. That's a will. You want a will to go with your trust. They tie to each other, and it says, hey, here's who I am. If I die, put everything in my trust. And then your trust you is this massive book of all these documents that help decide. Look at this little trust. This is cool. So this is my trust. And it's going to be, oh, 30 plus pages. That's a lot of stuff. Now, so you could handwrite a will. In fact, on the podcast, we literally go from start to finish. We write out a will, and you can do it. But with the trust, you're going to download something, you're going to have to understand all the provisions and tailor it to your needs. Can you do it? Yes. Just be careful. Now, if you shop around out there this month, we're 1200 bucks, we do a will trust. Powers of attorney for health care. These are all the other pieces you should look for out there. Power of attorney for finances. Pull the plug if I'm a vegetable. Pull the plug if you can't find someone to pull the plug and you're a vegetable. Usually an ex husband or an ex wife. They're good for this. They'll just come right in, boom, you know, and then you're done. You know, you're up in heaven, you're happy. Camper, I know you got to keep this light. I probably am offending someone, but no one wants to talk about death, so forgive me as I keep this going here, but a pull the plug document, actually, you don't actually designate someone to pull the plug. You tell it. And this is a real document. You say, hey, if I'm a vegetable, don't keep me alive on machines. Turn it off. And you usually ask for two doctors to verify that you are a vegetable. And that's called a living will. In some states, like California, it's called a health care directive. So living will or health care directive. So we're also going to do a memorandum of personal property. Like, where's the piano, the guns, the wedding rings? Go. What else is in there? Darren? We got POA for health, finances, living will memo. Oh, funeral and burial instructions. I want them to just, you know, cremate me and drop me off the back of the boat like in Titanic. She just drops the big emerald, you know. You know, drop me off the back. All right. Funeral and burial. All sorts of good stuff anyway. You can do your own trust. Just be careful. All right? Do I have another question? All right. Am I good? Am I good? Okay, I'm going. Let's jump over to another YouTube and then I'm going to come to Instagram. Ashlyn, how do I find the questions in Instagram? I just see all the people that are here. I know there's comments and questions, and then it just disappears. Okay, someone says you're going to post this on YouTube. Do we post it on YouTube? Yes, we keep it on YouTube. The live. Go to my play list of live broadcasts, right? Yes. Okay. Go to Mark J. Kohler Live videos, Marc J. Kohler live videos and YouTube. You can watch them. All right. Also, oh, if any of you said, I'm just gonna have the Kohler team do my estate plan, it's normally 1500 bucks. It's $1200 during this month around Memorial Day. That's the last I'm going to say about it. If you want to get over to the website kkoslawyers.com and when you get over to kqslawyers.com you can just hit the estate planning special button, fill out the info, get it started. You'll have an appointment with an attorney. Done. Any state in the country. Now, we also have a Memorial day special@markjkohler.com I'm just getting the word from the team here. 30% off. Just over Memorial Day weekend on all the videos, all my books, all the goodies, the eight steps workbook, everything. 30% off. Use the promo code USA. That's the promo. And I'm constantly shooting new videos for three hours before I went live. I've been working on a one hour video on how to handle cryptocurrency taxation. I'm already into this thing. Five hours of drafting it, so that'll be in my tax and legal library next week. And once you're into my library, I've been running it for 10 years. You never pay again. Lifetime access. Okay. Laura, on Facebook, I'm just Going to start hitting some questions here. Laura Martin says, how does an S Corp deduct home office? Well, it's a little tricky. Home office is a little different in an S Corp versus a sole proprietorship. Now, if you watch the movie the Accountant with Ben Affleck and he got the part, I mean, normally I would have had the part. I was in it ready to go. And they said, you know what, Mark? Ben Affleck has a little more experience. So I, you know, but I posed, mean, I was legit. I was ready to go because I'm a, I'm a real accountant. So. But I thought Ben Affleck did a great job. Little shout out. Okay, now, in the movie the accountant in the first scene, Ben Affleck goes through the first scene, Ben Affleck goes through and talks about the home office deduction with that little farm couple. So if we do our trifecta, everybody, if you're a small business owner, you got to do home office. So let me just tell you how to do it. There's three places. Three places. If you have a side hustle, you might have a little sole proprietorship. Drive an Uber. That's a side hustle. You got to have a home office. Or you might have an llc. If you do home office, it's going to be on a little schedule. Your schedule c on your 1040, you're going to do a little work paper at the end. There's a simple and a standard method. I've got articles on my website under my blog. Just type in Home Office. I've got YouTube videos on this. On YouTube. Just type home Office Kohler. You'll see my videos on how to do it. This is option one. Just, it's easy, nothing special. If you have an LLC and you have rental property, I'm going to take a home office deduction over here. And it's going to be on a schedule E. It's going to be on a schedule E. So schedule C over here. Schedule E over here. Okay. Now Laura says, what happens if I have an S Corp? How do I do home office? You're going to take a lease expense, a rent expense. The S Corp is reimbursing you for the use of your home office. Remember, in an S Corp you're an employee. You're getting a W2. So if you're a W2 employee, the S Corp is going to reimburse you for the use of your home. And they're going to, we're going to put it on your s Corp. Your 1120s as a rent expense or a lease expense. Now it's tax free to you as an individual and it's a write off for your S corp. Now some of you accountants out there are going, whoa, whoa, whoa, Mark, if I'm going to rent your home to the S corp, then you got to claim rental income only if you're doing a fair market value lease or a fair market value rent. We're not. We're only going to calculate the reimbursed actual costs for the home office. So it's tax free to you and a write off for the S Corp. Now, it might be two or three hundred bucks a month times twelve to three, four grand. That's it. But we're going to do the work paper, the worksheet. See, there's a worksheet. When you do home office, we're going to do the same worksheet. We're going to do the same worksheet, figure out what the reimbursement amount is, and then we're just going to run it through the S Corp. I can even do a journal entry at the end of the year. So, Laura, get with your accountant. I've got articles on how to write off home office on s corpse and videos on YouTube. Check it out. Everybody should be taking home office. All of you. Even if you have a gosh darn part time job driving Uber. You have a home office. You do the books, you got a laptop. We're taking home office. Boom. Okay, Corey, you want me to start at the top on these? Okay? Now Darren Charrington's out there, our attorney extraordinaire here in the office. Type in answers to questions as fast as he can. All right? Are you going back to the top or am I just doing Lawrence? I doing Lawrence. Okay, on YouTube, Lawrence says, just need to know exactly how to buy my car at the end of the year and write it off. Car weighs 602. Sorry, 6002 pounds. Okay, now I just told you all you need to have a home office write off whether you're a side hustle, whether you're an S corp or whether you're an llc. I want all of you to have the home office. Lawrence. Everybody, everybody out there, you should have an auto deduction, period. If you have a small business in all these situations, you would 1099 rental or a literal business that you're cranking on every day, you need an auto deduction. Now Lawrence says, well, Mark, how do I buy it to do this? Now let me say this first, Lawrence, everybody out there if you're going to do the auto deduction, you've got two main methods, mileage or actual. Now actual is where you actually, you get to actually depreciate the truck, the car, the suv, write off fuel, repairs and maintenance. Now when you do actual, you're either going to fall into the car or the 6,000 pound and greater met rule. So, so there's, See what I mean? You're going to start off with auto, then you're going to decide on mileage or actual. And if you got your calendar. I don't have my calendar with me. Darren, what is it? This year is 56 and a half. Can you look it up real quick? 20, 21 auto mileage for business, I'm going to guess it's 56. So it's 56 cents. Now that's option one. But some of you might say I'm going to do actual with depreciation plus fuel repairs, maintenance and all that. Okay, well this is freaking awesome. If you have a 6,000 pound car or greater and Lawrence says I got a 6,002 pound vehicle, if you don't know what it is, you can google it or look inside the driver's door and look at GVW gross vehicle weight, that'll tell you if it's over 6,000 pounds. Okay? Now the write offs for a bigger vehicle are freaking amazing. Now again, Corey, help me out. Darren, maybe you can do this too. My article in January of this year on auto deductions goes through all the rules. And I'm going to ask these guys to cut and paste it down into the messages there. Please go look at it. I go through seven ways to write off your vehicle and go through all the rules. Okay? Now Lawrence didn't ask what the write off is numerically. He asked how do I buy the vehicle to get the write off. That's different. Now here, you're going to love this answer. Okay, you ready? This is a technical answer. I don't care. I don't care how you freaking buy it. And the IRS doesn't either. They don't care. All they care about is did you use it for freaking business. If you're going to buy a gallon of milk or go to a movie tonight, you ain't writing it off for business. If you go visit a customer tomorrow, you go to Office Max, you go to Home Depot, you go to Staples, you go take a customer to lunch, you take an employee to lunch, you go meet your business partner, you go check on your rental. Those are all business purpose miles now we're talking writing off your auto, Lawrence. Everybody, the IRS doesn't care if the business is on title. They don't care if the business owns the vehicle. They only care how you're using it. And guess what? I know some of you are going to ask, well, what happens if I wrap it with my logo and I paint on it? You know, Real Estate R Us? Or know, Buy my Subway sandwiches down here at the deli Nut. Doesn't matter. If you wrap it with advertising, it does not change the fact you went to a movie or went and bought a gallon of milk. It's how you use the car that matters. So I put it in blue here. You can own the vehicle in the LLC or not. You can own the vehicle in your S Corp or not. You can own the vehicle in your LLC for your rental or not. You can own it down here as a person or not. It doesn't matter. For tax purposes, I just want you to track what you do with your car or truck or whatever. Moped, motorcycle, rv, van, you know, whatever. I don't care. It's how you use it. Oh, Lawrence, do you. Do you mean asset protection? Now, we have a whole other different rule. See, if you say, well, Mark, the IRS doesn't care how I own my vehicle, I'm going to write it off. What happens about in a lawsuit. Do you know I had a phone call today with. I'm just going to. I'm not even going to say what part of the country is in. I know he listens to the show and is here all the time, so I'm going to give him a shout out. Rusty, you know, we talked about this this morning on a phone call. Rusty's been one of my clients for almost 10 years. Rusty's like, call me up, Mark, how do I own my vehicle for asset protection? Now, it's a whole other rule. Because if you own your car and you're out there on business, does that give you protection? No. Because you own it personally. And if you're stupid and texting and driving or drunk driving, I'm going to sue your A. Right. Well, I'm not a litigator, so I'm not going to see you. I'm a lover, not a fighter. But some lawyer is going to sue you because you own it personally. That was a good one. Hi, Ashlyn. I saw you smile. See, once in a while, I get my team to laugh. It's really hard work. So I'm hoping some of you are laughing, because if I get her to Laugh. I said something, right? All right. But if it's for asset protection, guess which entity I want to own your car. Not the. Did you smile too, Cory? Is that what I'm hearing? Geez. Okay, llc. I do not want your LLC that owns your rental to own your car. I want your S Corp to own it because your S Corp doesn't have anything in it. Sue me. I don't want you to sue me. But my S Corp is a shell. My S Corp is a shell. And as long as you're not drunk driving, I got a barrier for asset protection. Whoo. Deep right. We could talk about auto this whole time. All right. Okay, I'm jumping over to Facebook. Michael, why can't a carrier be enough for a good retirement? Oh, career. Okay, Michael, if you're saying, why can't a career be enough for good retirement? Well, Michael and everybody out there, and I don't want to talk down to Michael, but what happens if Covid hits and you lose your job? Is your employer dumping a ton of money into your 401k? Is Social Security and a little 401k enough? Why not buy a rental property every year? Do a little investing on your own. Take a side hustle and build more retirement. I just meet a lot of people that are in their 50s and 60s, and they're scared to death they don't have enough retirement with a career. So think about a side hustle. You know, I was talking to one of my employees yesterday, and I told her, do not quit your job. But I said, why don't you start a little side hustle and do this? And I gave her a killer business idea. I said, you can do it in the evenings of the weekends. You enjoy it, you're going to make more money at it, and you still keep your day job. And she's like, oh, my gosh, I love it. I may have her come back on the show and talk about it. Okay, Facebook, we got Lariata Swift. Can one create it if you are already. So I think she means trust. Can you already. Can you create a trust if you were already a victim? Basically, everything you said and had identity theft. Okay, so, Lariatta, I like your question. Lariata saying, mark, I already got jacked up with my. An identity theft situation, and it's too late. I'm not going to set up a trust now. Well, Lariatta, there's. There's always tomorrow. You're gonna get out of this hole. You're gonna get rid of that crappy person that took Advantage of your identity and maybe stole something of yours. Don't let it happen again. Right? Burn me once. Burn. What is that rule? Burn me once, something, twice, shame on me. Shame on you. I don't know. Oh, oh, yeah. Burn me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. So whatever. Whatever you're mumbling over there, okay? So Larry Otta, don't let it happen again. If you do, maybe it's shame on you. You've got to take precautions so that it never happens again. Do you know why? It's true some of the clients that are the most concerned about asset protection is because they've gotten burned before. So, Lariana, don't give up. Okay, Kevin on Facebook. How do you deal with negativity in business? You fire him, Kevin. Just get rid of them. Look it, I've been dealing with Cory and his pissy attitude all day, and I've about had it. I've had it. Cory. I don't need any more negativity. Okay? Jerk. That's it. I'm gonna throw my rock star at him. Okay, Kevin, I will say this. All of you out there, I like Kevin's question. Okay? Where could you have negativity first? You could have it with your employees. If you've got an employee, that's bringing down the morale of the others or yourself, I'm not kidding. Maybe you start creating a path to get rid of them. Number two, maybe the negativity is coming from your family. Surprise, surprise, right? This is where, and this is true, being an entrepreneur is not easy on a family. You've got to communicate with your loved ones, your partner, your kids, your parents, whoever you live with. Communicate with them about your passion, why you're doing this business. The more you talk about it, the more it's going to help the negativity. You hope, right? You can't sometimes get rid of family. So either you've got to talk through it and sell them on why you're doing this. Involve them in it. Maybe all of a sudden, when they realize why you're so passionate about your business, they'll get on board. Maybe the negativity will end. Usually if someone's negative, they're trying to send a message. Find out what that message is. Try to help process it. See if you can resolve the concerns. If family is not supporting you in your business and your passion, maybe you need to distance yourself from that person. It could be a marriage, it could be a relationship that's toxic. You don't get rid of them, but you Distance yourself. Third, you might have a customer that's negative. Right? You got a customer that's a pain in the butt. Finish the project and get rid of them. Right? Don't end a relationship where you're the problem child. End the relationship by fulfilling your part of the contract and then saying, I'm not going to do this again. Negativity with a vendor. You have a vendor that you hate working with and for some reason it's the only place you can buy your product or your services. Start shopping around. Start building a service inside your business to take care of that vendor relationship. Do some planning to slowly move that vendor out of your circle of contacts. So I don't know, maybe some of that helped. It's true. Being in business is hard enough than having people be negative around you. Right. Alright, I'm going to go over to Instagram here. Steven says, well, what are your thoughts on buying a rental property outside of the US Like Belize or Costa Rica? Hey Steven, I'm all about it, but I think you need to take me down there and check it out. I would never buy anything without having your attorney personally confirm that that Belize beach house is a good deal. So Stephen, give me a call, let's go and let's check it out. All right, all joking aside, I don't think there's, I don't, there's not a problem buying internationally in and of itself. The problem is, is it a good deal in Costa Rica or Belize? Now it may sound sexy that you're going to be able to take a tax write off to go check on your property, wherever it may be. I've had clients buy properties all over the world and I go, that's fine, I don't care where it's at per se. Tell me about the deal. Is it cash flowing? What's the market like? Well, it's going to make a ton of money in the future. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I want to buy properties that are cash flowing now, not hoping they're going to make money 20 years from now. Now some of you are in a different financial position where you can speculate on property and go buy something and believes and let it sit there for 10 years. Some of you, you have no business buying property and believes. You got, your personal finances are a train wreck. You've got personal debt, you've got negativity in your relationships. Your business is not making as much money as you want. I don't know if going out and buying an international property is a good idea at this time. So look at the deal first. Does it make sense? Number two, look at your overall circle, business affairs and your investments. Is this the right time to go make an investment somewhere where it's going to take money to get there and you're going to maybe have a language barrier. You're going to need professionals there. Now with all that said, what have I told my clients for years? Buy rental properties where you go, Stephen, if I'm going to Idaho, I'm going to go buy rental properties in Idaho, which I did. Then I ultimately moved here. It's been a good move. If you're going to Puerto Rico on a regular basis, maybe you should buy rentals in Puerto Rico. Just take your tax write off to go to Puerto Rico. If you're going there all the time, see if there's a good deal there. But analyze the property, make sure it's somewhere you're regularly going. Make sure it fits into your overall portfolio. You are going to need some legal structures that are particular to that country. Now we have a tax attorney in our office for international investors, people that are investing in the US and clients that are investing outside of the country. Christy Parker, she's a salt of the earth woman. Love Christy. I'm going to put her name here. Christie Parker. Call the office, make an appointment with Christie. If you're buying property offshore, get a consult for an hour. Say, Christy, what should I worry about? Is this a good time for me? Is it a good deal? What should I worry about? Now, if we haven't bought property for clients in Dubai, we're going to tell you, but we can also walk you through some checklists and some basic things to look at. So Christy Parker is at 435-586-9366. Make sure you get over there and get an appointment. Cory, can you see that number that keeps popping up? You know who it is? Would you call them and let them know that I am in the middle of a broadcast and check that out? Okay, let's see. Kevin asked another question. Kevin, bless your heart. It's one question per show. Wilmer, Jose Toro. What's the difference between a business trust and a family trust? One is a waste of time. One is one everybody needs. So here, let me give you a number here and here. Corey, take this right here. And let me be honest about that. I am not a fan of business trust. Did we record something for that? Cory, the business trust, are they legit or not? Is that on YouTube? You said we got a lot of views on that, right? What was the title of that business trust. Our business trusts. A scam. Wilmer, I am not a fan. Everybody out there, business trusts. Matt Sorensen and I are not fans of those, and we've been around for 20 years. Freak if they make us. If. If they worked, believe me, we'd be selling them. I mean, to be blunt, we're not a fan. Let's break down the differences a little bit, but I really recommend you check out that video in that podcast you've got. Business trusts. Business trusts are sold by people that are trying to either save taxes, avoid doing an llc, or trying to create some weird asset protection structure. Typically, the people that are selling business trusts are not there the next year to do your tax returns. They're expensive, and you better have a darn good reason for doing them. So I'm going to say expensive. There's usually a pitch involved that sounds sometimes too good to be true. Right. A revocable living trust. Every Tom, Dick and Harry has one for a reason. They make sense. They're affordable. They avoid probate. They're well recognized across the country. They're well supported. They have a specific purpose. That makes sense. There's a lot of promises with business trusts that are kind of off base and sometimes wacky. I know I'm pissing people off, and some of you are like, mark, I got a business trust. Their next best thing. You never heard of the Delaware Business Trust? Yes. Do I sell them? No. Could I? Sure. But I'm not a believer. Sorry. I've written books about this stuff, so. Sorry. Okay, I'm going to go over to Instagram. Let me see if there's another question here. Soldbyteen says you skipped over my Instagram question. Should I submit again? Yes. If I skipped over him, it's because I didn't see him. Let me see if I can go back and find it. Okay. Do you see it? Ashlyn, I can't. All right, I'm still. If you see that I don't ask your Answer your question, it's because. Yeah, it went by too quick. You got it. All right. Okay. I'm going to jump over to YouTube. Peter, if you depreciate a vehicle completely, should you sell or gift the vehicle? To minimize tax is to minimize the taxes. All right, everybody, if you depreciate your car, truck and you go. The actual method. Remember over here, we went through our. Our tax strategy of where's our auto? There it is. Okay. Mileage or actual. If you depreciate the heck out of your car, what do you Do. You're going to sell it, you're going to give it to yourself. You're going to be taxed on the difference between the fair market value and zero because you depreciated it down to zero. So that's called depreciation recapture. Peter. There's no way around it. There's no way around it. Now, some of you may go, well, Mark, if you've got to do depreciation recapture, why do you ride off the truck? Bonus. Depreciate the heck out of it. Why do you depreciate the whole thing if I've got to do depreciation recapture when I get rid of it? Because it's an interest free loan from the irs. Everybody think about this. Take a breath. This is deep. You ready? If I buy a truck for 20 grand and I write the whole thing off with depreciation and sit on it for three years and then it's worth eight grand three years from now and I get rid of it, I've got to pay the tax on eight grand because I sold it, I gifted it. Well, you're like, mark, why didn't I just do mileage rather than do that? Because you got a tax write off of 20 grand on day one. Would you rather have a tax deduction for 20 grand today or spread it out over five years? Take it all today, save taxes today, pay less tax today, even if you've got to give back some of those taxes later. It's an interest free loan from the irs. I know it may sound crazy, but if you run the financial model every time, you win because you're getting use of the money now, even though you may give it back later. All right, Marissa on YouTube says, how do you prove the IRS that you are using the vehicle for business? Marissa, great question. It's called a mileage log. Now, there's apps out there that you can just download and you're just like, oh, traveling for business. Oh, going here, going to lunch with so and so. Da, da, da, da, da. Now, Marisa, I'm not that anal either. I don't have a little yellow pad in my truck. And every time I drive around I go, ooh, I went to lunch with Darren. So I'm going to write that off. Or, oh, I traveled here for business. You. You kind of should. You should be able to recreate one. If you're a realtor. Let's use an example here. If you're a realtor, everywhere you're going, you're working on real estate, you're meeting Customers, clients, you're checking on property. I almost use the inverse. I'd say I went to the lake this weekend or I used it for personal to go to the movies or grocery store. So usually what I do is kind of take 20% and call it personal because I know 80% of its business. And if you had to produce a log, Marissa, you could do it. Rarely does the IRS audit on this. Now that doesn't mean you get aggressive and you cheat, but sit down and do a log for a week and go, yeah man, I'm 90% business. Alright, keep that log. And you could duplicate that if you needed to. In 20 years of practice, I have never. Now I know someone out there is going to go, well, I had to do it. But I'm just saying, in 20 years doing thousands of tax returns with my team, we maybe had one or two times, had to produce a log. The client was able to go and reproduce a log that was legitimate to show that they had business mileage. The IRS is not into chasing down pennies. They want to go after someone that's being overly aggressive. So Marissa, do the best you can. All right, Do I have the question? And Corey, I need some new ones and. Okay, resubmit your question if we miss it, I couldn't find yours. Iteen. Is that kind of what it was, Eileen? Maybe it was in the stories and you have to kind of add it. We're doing the best we can. Okay, I'm going to do a couple more questions and then we'll go from there. Ran Tian on Facebook says how to buy a new home with personal and llc. First time home buying this fall. Okay, now everybody, if you're buying your own personal home, you're going to close in your name. Okay? You're going to close in your name and it's your personal residence. And then I'm going to deed it over to your trust. Easy. I'm going to create privacy. Is the bank going to care? No. Are you going to have a due on sale clause? No. Close on the loan. Tell the bank whatever the freak they want to hear. Deed it to your trust. It's your own personal residence. Okay, Now Ran is probably talking about a rental. What do you do? You go out, you make an offer in your own name, you deal with the bank and you close. You get the loan based on no lie. You don't tell them, oh, it's really my home. No, don't lie. If it's not owner occupy, don't call it owner occupy, but go to the bank and get your loan. Then on day two, you deed it to your llc. Then on the lease agreement, the LLC is the landlord. You pay the mortgage with the llc. You collect rent with the llc. The LLC is the owner of the rental. Do not worry about a due on sale clause. Don't go in and ask the bank for permission because they'll freak out. The bank can't do anything without getting permission from three people up the chain. Just deed it to your LLC and let the LLC collect the rent and pay the mortgage. They've already sold your mortgage five times over, you know that. So let the LLC own it. As long as you did not change the underlying ownership, you still own it 100%. You technically haven't violated the terms of the mortgage. You never sold it to someone else, you never deeded it to someone else. You just deed it to an LLC, which you own 100% again. In 20 plus years, I've had one client that had to deal with a due on sale clause. I swear it's because they went and asked the bank permission and then they had to deed it back to their own name. As soon as they sold the mortgage, they deeded it back to their llc. Seriously, don't worry about it. So Ran, if you're going to go out and buy a rental, I've got articles on how to buy your first rental property. I've got get your LLC in place. Set up the LLC in the state where the rental is. If your rental is in Arizona, then you set up an Arizona llc. Don't set it up at Frickin Nevada or Delaware or Florida or Texas. You set up the LLC where your rental is. We charge 800 bucks. You can meet with one of my attorneys. They'll set up the LLC for you, answer all your questions, build a diagram, you're off to the races. Oh, Tiffany Young says, which book can I buy of yours, Mark? That explains the home office. Well, do I have a tax and legal playbook here? Oh, I do. You know what? I'm going to do this. For those of you that stuck around, I'm going to give away three books right now. I didn't plan on it, but I'm going to do it. I'm going to give one away to our Instagram followers. I'm going to give one away to my Facebook followers, one to our YouTube followers. So Corey, I want you to choose a winner on YouTube and Facebook. Ashlyn, you're going to choose a winner on Instagram and I'm going to announce those winners right now this is the book to get on all of those little small business tax write offs. Tax and legal playbook, second edition. You can get it at a discount this weekend by using the promo code USA. Go to markjkohler.com markjkohler.com and you can get my books or videos, all sorts of things. 30% off for Memorial Day weekend. Use promo code USA. But we have some winners. I need a winner. Corey, who's my winner on YouTube or Facebook? Talk to me, Tiffany Young. Oh my gosh. We are going to give it to Tiffany Young, the winner of a book. You have to give Corey your email so he can reach out to you. So Tiffany, you're going to email coreyarkjkohler.com Coreyarkj kohler.com you're going to say, I'm Tiffany Young. I won the book. He'll verify you and you're going to say, any winners? Email Corey. Now some of you are going to go, hey, Corey, I'm a winner. Give me a book, please. Don't waste his time. Email Cory and go, I won. I'm Tiffany Young. Okay, who's my winner on Facebook? Oh, that was Facebook. Who's on YouTube? YouTube. Let's go with Jose Guzman. Jose Guzman or Guzman have a trucking company with a C Corp. Should I change it to an S Corp? Probably. Jose, that's a great darn good question. I have a whole section in here on the S Corp. Go to my YouTube video s corp versus c corp. I'll answer your question there. Call my office. We can switch you over. It'll save you thousands nine times out of 10. But Jose, you are the winner of my tax and legal playbook. Email coreyarkjkohler.com man, my phone is blowing up. It's driving you crazy. Okay, who's my winner on Instagram? Your winner on Instagram is Dallas Stevens. Dallas Stevens. I know Dallas Stevens. I can't believe you chose his name. Is that Dallas Stevens from Cedar City, Utah? We were in Scouting together 15 years ago and taking kids up on the mountains, camping and hiking. I can't believe it. Dallas, if you're watching, good memories. Love you, man. He's in manufacturing. Been a project manager and manager out there in the good old. Does he respond yet? Okay. Dallas Stevens. Is that him? Dallas, I love you, man. You're awesome. Thanks for watching, bud. Dallas Stevens, good friend. We lived on the same street. Even that's a name from the past. Love it. I love you guys. I love my job. I love the American dream. It's hard. I know it sucks sometimes, but I'll be here every Thursday trying to answer some questions. Please get out there. Get on my website. Get some of my books and videos. I'm constantly shooting new content, long videos, explaining every little detail. It's in my tax and legal library. I got to make a living. But I'm here trying to give away as much free content as I can, answering questions. But get over to markjkohler.com lots of specials this weekend. And if you don't have your trust, if you don't have your estate plan, get over to KQOS lawyers. You get a whole hour with one of my attorneys. Any state in the country, get it done. It's only good for a couple more weeks. Anything else? Oh, my books. Markjkohler.com markjkohler.com 30% off this weekend. Promo code USA. And for you, three winners, Dallas, Jose and Tiffany. You email coreyarkjkohler.com apparently he's had over 30 stalkers. I don't believe him. But if you want to stalk Cory, start with his email. That's a good place to go. Why would I say that, Corey? Yeah. Okay, everybody. See you next week on Thursday, Rockstar Live on. There you go. My sponsorship is complete.