What to Do Today to Pay Less Tax and Keep More Money

Hey there, real quick before we jump into the episode, listen, if your earnings treadmill hasn't set you free yet, running faster won't either. Listen, hustle without principles just going to burn you out. So here's what I want for you. I want you to join me for my money machine experience live. It is three free trainings. Deep dive into how to escape the treadmill and build a money machine that actually works for you. All right, Grab your spot here by going to moneymachinelive.com and I'll see you in the free training. Hey there, Mel Abraham here, and welcome to this episode of the affluent entrepreneur show. This one, you know, this time of year, it's starting to get cooler out. Leaves are changing depending on where you live. We're getting into fall. There's pumpkins, there's Thanksgiving, there's turkeys, there's meals, there's holidays, and there's taxes. Yeah. This one we're going to talk about taxes again. So in an earlier episode, we talked about how do you reduce your taxes when it comes to being in a business? This one we're going to talk about you personally. I get it. It's not really the kind of the holiday spirit. But here's what we know. You have the opportunity now, between now and the end of the year to put more money in your pocket by saving taxes than you do if you wait. So what I want to do is give you some things to consider, some things to look at in this episode to see what you could do today or at least before the end of the year to reduce your taxes and keep more money for your financial freedom. All right, so let's jump to the episode. I'll see you there. All right, welcome to this episode, the affluent entrepreneur show. This is the affluent entrepreneur show for entrepreneurs that want to operate at a high level and achieve financial liberation. I'm your host, Mel Abraham, and I'll be sharing with you what it takes to create success beyond wealth so you can have a richer, more fulfilling lifestyle. In this show, you'll learn how business and money intersect so you can scale your business, scale your money and scale your life while creating a deeper impact and living with complete freedom, because that's what it really means to be an affluent entrepreneur.

All right, welcome to this episode of the affluent entrepreneur show. So in this episode, I want to talk about taxes again, but this time I want to talk about it as it relates to you personally. We previously did an episode where I was talking about what could you do as a business owner as an entrepreneur to reduce taxes, we've got to talk about you personally because sometimes there's business taxes and then there's individual taxes. And whether you're a business or not, these could apply to you. And so here's what we know with tax rates that could approach, depending on the state you're in, 40, 50%, every single dollar that you save is going to be big dollars in your pocket. And you think about the fact that, that if I can save more in taxes, I then have more to live on, I have more to invest, and I have more to pave the road to our financial freedom. And that's really what this is about. So when taxes, as a percentage of our financial partnership, if you will, is that high of a percentage, it's important for us to look at it. Now here's the other thing to consider is you have a lot of tax planning opportunities if you do them in the right time and in the right way. But we have to do them if we want to take advantage of it. We have to do them prior to the end of the year, prior to December 31st, as an individual. And too often what happens is that I have a client or someone that comes to me.

Well, if they're a client, they won't come to me this way because we do it early. But a non client that comes to me in January, February, March, April, and says, hey, can you help me? Yeah, I might be able to, but I don't have a whole lot of options because we're past the year end. So this is why I want to do this episode now. I get it, it's before the holidays, you might be going, bah, Humbucky's talking about taxes. We should be talking about gratitude and all that. We are. But let's be grateful that we have the opportunity to reduce our taxes and make that happen. So we want to do this now, not two months from now, because then it's too late, but now. And so this is, this is where I want to go. I'm going to walk you through effectively 10 things that I want you to consider. Now, if you have a tax preparer, if you have a someone that is a cpa, a tax preparer, an enrolled agent, a tax strategist, they ought to be having some of these conversations with you. If they're not having these conversations with you around this time of year, then you might have to have a conversation with them. And that is to say, I'm not hiring you just to be the scribe of my tax return. In, in hindsight you're that their job. Yes, they can prepare the tax return, but you want to also know that they're looking out for you. If there is an opportunity for you to keep more money in your pocket, they need to bring it to you. And if they don't want to operate that way, then frankly, you might need to either get an additional person that's going to look at it like I do with, with my elite clients and some of my master's clients. We start to dig into that for them around this time of year. But if not, you got to find another one. I know it's hard, but, but the fact of the matter is, is that this is your money, this is your financial future, this is your opportunity.

Your opportunity to put more money in your pocket on an ongoing basis. Because think about this, you put a tax strategy in place that works this year, as long as they don't change the rules, it should work next year. So we should be able to extrapolate the savings year after year when we do it correctly. And so what I want to do is I'm going to jump to some of the strategies, realize that I don't know your specific situation. So this isn't specific tax advice. It is suggestions for you to look at and to have a conversation with your tax preparer, with your tax strategist to say, hey, does this apply to me? How would this calculate out? What would this look like? And then create the specific strategies that makes sense for you. All right, so let's jump to the iPad and let's get started. Let's do this thing and, and see what we can come up with. All right, so the first thing is this.

I want you to review your income, in other words, understanding all the income that you had. Because one of the things that might actually surprise people is that they have more interest income than they had anticipated. Because maybe they're listening to me and they put money into a high yield cash account. And back in the day, the sad day when we were only getting like 0.2% on a savings account, interest income really didn't matter. But when you're getting 5, 5.3% in a high yield savings account, you might actually have more interest income than you anticipated. And, and that interest income has had no taxes taken out. Taken out. So you might have some taxes owed on it and you don't want to get blindsided by it. So look at your income, your wages, get your year to date paycheck stubs, get your, your dividend statements, your investment statements. If you had gains or losses in the stock market. You want to pull all of those things together so you get a handle your arms around or your, your advisor gets their arms around all the income that you brought in this year. I just got done with my meeting with my wealth team and one of the things that we do in this meeting is I sit down with them and I show them here's my profit and loss for, for my businesses. So they can see the revenues coming in, they see the expenses, they know what the bottom line is. Here's all. So now they run, they run a portion of my portfolio, they run a large portion of my portfolio. So they know what's going on in the portfolio as far as gains, losses and, and interest, dividends. But I have a portion of the portfolio that I run that they don't see on an ongoing basis. They don't manage it. That's me. And I do different kinds of transactions. I do, you know, trading and stuff with options and things like that. And I bring in a fair amount of income doing that. Well, they're not aware of it and they're not aware of some of my high yield cash accounts and that kind of thing. So at the meeting I bring all of that to them and say, you got what you got? Here's what I have. Let's put it all together together and let's figure out what's the tax planning moves we need to make between now and the end of the year. And so we come up with a strategy. But the important thing is that you understand where all your income's coming from, what's taxable, what's not taxable, and, and how, how to, to navigate that. That leads me to the second piece. And the second piece is you're going to review your income. It's a good time to review your expenses. We'll talk about some specific expenses that are deductible or not deductible. Here's the thing to know, and I said this in the other episode, but the basic tax law says that everything you receive, whether you receive it in cash, check charge, barter.

It'S taxable.

And nothing you pay is deductible. That's the basic tax law. And the rest of the volumes of the tax code, all the complexity and the minutia and all that crazy stuff are the exceptions. So there's certain income that they say and give you permission to say you don't have to pay tax on it. There's certain expenses that they say you can take that as a deduction and so you want to know what is deductible. And if you don't, this isn't about you becoming an accountant or a tax preparer or tax strategist. You work with the advisors to understand what you can and can't do and how to document it in a way that it's supportable in front of the IRS or the state if, if God forbid, there's an audit. And the reason we want to look at expenses is I want to look at expenses that you might have today and I may want to look at expenses that you'll have in the first quarter that might be deductible.

And it might be better to accelerate them into this year. So paying something that you might otherwise pay in January, in December to try and accelerate the deduction may make sense. And so, so those two types of things start to play into it. Now. There, there is, there are some things to, to really like, look at more specifically. And, and this takes a bit of work to do this. But if you happen to be in a situation where you have a business that you are running and you are running a business as an llc, which is what most people will start out doing, which is totally fine, you run a business as an llc. The problem and, and this is something that, that some people don't, don't think about is because they don't know, and I just had this conversation with a client is that when you run a business as an LLC, you get this thing called a K1. So all the income from that business, the net, so you have the revenues, you have the expenses and whatever's the net, generally you pay tax on, on your personal tax return. Okay, now here's the thing. Because it's an llc, you not only pay something called income tax, which we're all used to. Well, I don't know if we ever get used to taxes, but there is something called self employment tax. And self employment tax up to certain limits is 15.3%. So it's a large number. And in the point of it is that if you are an LLC and you have a high net, say 70 $500,000 in net income, that's revenues minus expenses, and you're an llc, you want to start to look at the possibility of changing to an S corporation, making an S corporation election. Here's why. When you're an s Corporation, not 100%, the amount that they show on the K1 is no longer subject to self employment tax, you avoid that 15.3% that you pay as an LLC. Now you have to do something else in the process. If you become an S corporation, you have to actually take a salary. You have to be on payroll. So you are going to pay some level of self employment tax. But they call it Social Security. Okay, but what happens is that you can take a salary, let's say you have $200,000 coming from the LLC is net. Well, that would be all subject to self employment tax if it was an LLC. But what happens if you take $125,000 as salary as an S corporation? The other 75 is going to come pass through. But here's the difference. 125,000 you would pay Social Security tax on, but the 75 you wouldn't. And you wouldn't pay self employment tax. So you save taxes that way. Point being is that, that if you're an LLC and you have a higher level of net, you're, you're in the upper five figures going into six figures. Definitely if you're in the six figures, you want to have this conversation with your preparer, with your strategist, should I be an S corporation? And now they may come back to you and say well it's too late for this year. You gotta elect it within 75 days of the year end. So we can't do it. Hogwash. Okay, I was gonna say something else, but it's family show. All right. No, you can still do it. It is a late, it's called a late election.

And if you do a late election, it's under something called Revenue Procedure 2013-30. All right. And I know that this is technical, but I want you to know that if you, if it makes sense for you to elect to be an S corporation before the end of the year, you have time, there is paperwork to be done. It's, you're going to have to change some things, but you can do it. And we did. We had a client of ours a year ago that, that did this and saved twenty plus thousand dollars in taxes. It's worthwhile for you to take a look at it and see does it make sense? Are you a fit and go through the effort depending on where your income is. So I put that in as a, and as a side because that's not necessarily for an individual because you'd have to have an LLC that's a business to do it. But I just, I don't want you to think that you can't. And in fact I'm looking at one of my one on one clients right now doing the analysis for them. To see if they were an S corporation last year, how. How much would they have saved? Because they paid a fair amount of taxes that they didn't need to pay, in my opinion. And so we still have time to make the election for this year and do all of the gymnastics to. To get it to stick. So, so that's, that's something. When we talk about income and expenses, I want you to also think about that. Now, number three is to look at your withholdings and your estimates. And I look and I hear this all the time. You know what? I didn't get the, you know, taxes went up. I didn't get the. I didn't get the big refund that I'm used to getting. Well, here's the thing, the refund. Think about this. And this is the thing that, you know, I hear people say, say a lot, is that, well, my refund went, you know, taxes went up because I didn't get as big a refund. But you got to understand what the refund is, okay? You're going to have. You're going to have income.

Okay? You're going to have expenses that are deductions, okay, that are deductions. And that's going to give you, and I'm just doing this really ballpark, taxable income, okay?

And on that taxable income, they're going to calculate the taxes that you owe. So you end up with these taxes that you owe. But then from that, they're going to look at, say, say the payments you made and the withholdings you had. If you had a W2, and if I misspell. Don't, don't, don't send me hate mail. And then you have the net taxes, and that net tax is how much you owe on the return.

Or the refund. And what people assume. What people assume is that if they don't get as big of a refund, that this number taxes went up. Well, it could have. Your taxes might have gone up because your income went up or your deductions went down. I don't know. But the other reason you might get less of a refund or the other reason you might owe more taxes is not because taxes went up, but you didn't pay in the same amount. See, there's multiple things in that equation. And for some reason we say, well, my taxes went up. No, you may not have paid in enough or the same amount. And so we gotta understand where it comes from. And that's why what I want people to do is at this stage, to start looking at their withholdings, looking at their estimates to say did I pay in enough? Do I have enough paid in to not get slammed with a big bill? Now here's my feeling. Look.

I want you to pay in enough that you, that you have an opportunity to not have a big bill when come tax time because that's never fun. And I'm of the philosophy that you don't want a big refund other either ways because if you have a big refund, that simply means you paid the government way too much. They had the use of your money and they're horrible with it. So I'd rather you have it. So at the end of the day, I'd rather you have a really small refund or a really small payment. That's it. Because that means that you maximize the cash flow to you and you get to do with it what you should. And you should be falling the wealth priority ladder with what you do with it to build the wealth, to build the financial freedom to do the things that you want to do. And so, so this is why I say those first three things is figure out the income. Make sure that you've, you're, you're looking at your income, looking at the expenses slash deductions that you might accelerate. What are the withholdings, what are the estimates? Did you pay in enough? Now what's number four? So number four is to look at maximizing your retirement account. All right? You know, depending on what you, what, what kind of situation you're in. If you are just putting money into an IRA and you're under age 50, you can put $6,500 in. And so you may want to max out the IRA, you can put up to $7,500 in if you're over 50 because of what they call catch up contributions. So you know, how much are you going to put in, what should you put in? And you have time to put that in. But the sooner you get it invested, the sooner you have the, the soldiers, the employees, the dollars working for you. The other side of it is this. If you're participating in a 401k then you may want to look at maximizing the contribution of 101k, especially if there's a match involved. Okay. Now I still want you to follow the wealth priority ladder and, and, and we talk about it in the affluence blueprint and, and that type of thing that tells you what to do. Because if you have consumer debt and other things, we may need to clean that out first. But from a tax standpoint only, just the tax standpoint only.

You have the opportunity to put $22,500 away in a 401k this year if you're under age 50. If you're over, that goes up to 30,000. You get a $7,500 catch up. So you, you should be able to look at it and say, hey, should I put more in? Can I put more in? And if you're getting an employer match, then you definitely got to look at it. So maxing out retirement is.

One other thing to start to look at at this stage, you still have time to do it. Also, if you're in a situation where the 401k has a profit sharing element to it where there's this additional contribution the company can make for you, and if it's your company, then you make it for yourself because that'll push your ability to put money into retirement up to $66,000 if you're under 50 or 73,500. So you can see that you can, you can shield a fair amount of income from taxes by moving it into a retirement account properly and know that that money at some point when you're age 59 and a half or over will come back to you. Okay, so we want to look at maximizing our retirement at this stage. And then we go to number five once we've looked at that, say maybe you are in a situation this doesn't apply to everyone is to fund an HSA. Now HSAs are really, really great accounts if it applies for you. Now HSA stands for Health Savings Account. But a health savings account is a special type of account that allows you to pay medical expenses out of it. Now how, how it works and this is why. It's a beautiful account and there's some nuances to it I'm going to talk about. But, but you can put money into an HSA account that is tax deductible, okay? So you can get a deduction for it going in. And when you take the money out of that account, as long as it's used for qualified medical expenses, you never pay tax on it. And this year you can fund an HSA to $3,850 for an individual, 7,750, 7,750 as a.

Family. And if you're 55 and over, you can get an additional thousand dollar catch up contribution. Here's some stipulations. And then I want to talk about the best way to use this account if you do it.

Because it's the one account that could be.

Triple tax advantage. It's crazy. So the stipulation is, in order to have an hsa, it has to be connected to a high deductible medical plan. So it only works when you have a very, a specific type of medical plan. So you want to see is the medical plan, you're on HSA qualified, and if not, you, you know it doesn't apply to you. If it is, then you can look at it or you can change your medical plan to work. Now that's a, that's not something for everyone because if you have high medical.

Expenses, you may not want a high deductible plan because you got to put a lot of money out of pocket upfront. So this may not be the right thing for you, but if you don't, you might want to look at it. But here's, if you do, here's the, here's the way to do it. You fund the hsa. You take the tax deduction for the hsa.

And then inside the hsa, it's like a Roth, it's like an ira. You have that, you have that money and you invest it and it will then grow. So you invest it just like an investment account, put it in ETFs and index funds and that kind of thing and allow it to grow.

The best thing is this, is that if you allow it to grow and you still have medical expenses, instead of using the HSA.

To pay for those medical expenses and then you have the cash flow, pay the medical expenses out of pocket, allow the HSA to grow and keep the receipts, put them in a file, digital file and all that to make sure that you, you got it covered. Because watch what happens. Say I put, I'm a, I'm a family. I put 7750 in this year. So I take a deduction for, call it 7750 bucks, almost $8,000. By putting that money into an HSA, I take the tax deduction, I invest the 7750. It's probably going to be 6750 because they want $1,000 or so cash in there. So I invest it in funds and it's going to grow. If I have medical bills, I pay them out of pocket and I keep the receipts. Now, let's say you go 10 years down the road over 10 years, you do that a couple of times and you're funding it and it's invested. Now in 10 years, you have 10 years of receipts and you have 10 years of contributions and growth because you Invested it in the HSA. And after 10 years, you may have put in, if the rules don't change, $70,000, but the value of the account might be $140,000. So now all of a sudden you have an account worth 140 that you put in 70, and you say, I need some money.

And you go and dust off some of those medical bills and say, I need $10,000. I get $10,000 in medical bills, and I reimburse myself from the HSA. That's now up at $140,000. I take 10,000 out of it. I still have 130,000 left, and I take that 10,000 out tax free. See, the code, the IRS, they don't say that you have to reimburse yourself in the same year. You can keep that and allow it to grow over time. And now all of a sudden you have this other account that allows you to, one, take a deduction, grow tax free, take it out tax free also. All right, so if it applies to you, then an HSA is a really good vehicle to, to make sure that you're, you're funding and getting the benefits out of that. So that's number five. Let's see what number six is. Number six is to bundle. To bundle your donations. All right, so what do I mean by this? Here's what I mean by this.

Is that when.

They changed the tax code a number of years ago, they increased the standard deduction. So a lot of people don't, if they make donations, they don't get credit for it because they aren't making enough donations. So let's say that you're a charitable person, you want to donate, and say Maybe you donate $5,000 a year to whatever char. It could be your, your church, your temple, you know, animal cruelty. It could be whatever the charity is. And you donate cash and you donate $5,000 a year.

Well, you probably, if you don't have a mortgage and everything, you probably won't get much of a deduction for it because you're not, you don't have enough. But what happens if you go to the charity and say, I'm going to give you $10,000 this year, and it's for this year year. So you bundle your donations. Now all of a sudden you have a deduction that is at 10,000. You were going to give them 5,000 in one year and 5,000 in the next year, but why not give them the 10, take the deduction. See, when you turn around and.

Bundle the donations like that, you have a better chance to get a deduction if you don't itemize otherwise. So look at bundling donations. Now, there's another way to do this.

And this is what I have as number seven, because.

We can look at it from this perspective. There is something called a donor advised fund. And what that is is let's say that you had a big year this year, okay? And you had a lot of income and you said, I need a deduction. I want to give a bunch to charity. Say I want to give $50,000 to charity. But you don't know what the charity is yet.

You can go to a brokerage and say, I want to open a donor advised fund. Some of them have them. And what that is, is that you'll put the 50,000 into that fund, you'll get the deduction for it, and then over time, you can tell that fund which charities you want it to go to. It allows you to.

To make a large donation, even if you don't know exactly where it's going to go, get the deduction for it. And over time, you dictate where it's going to go. It can be invested, it can grow over time. It creates a charitable legacy. It's a possibility, especially for those that are charitably inclined to do that. And so this is an interesting way to do it. You can take.

If you have stock that is appreciated and you have big gains in there, you can, you can use that to put in there. And then you get a deduction if it's done right. There's some nuances there. You gotta hold the stock for a certain period of time. Say you have a stock that you bought for a thousand, but it's worth 10,000. You can put the $10,000 stock in there, take the $10,000 deduction and everything, and then do what we need to transfer it, liquidate it, and donate the proceeds that way. So donor advised funds are another way to bundle, if you will, your deductions, your charitable deductions, even if you don't know what charity it's going to go to. And then you can just disperse it from the fund over a period of time. All right, so that leads me to number eight. Number eight is something called loss harvesting.

Here's, here's the thing.

When you have a situation where you have gains on stocks, that's called capital gains. You get, you get taxed at a different rate than your income, but still you get taxed, and it could be anywhere from 0% to 20%, depending on your income. So 0%. If you don't have income above $90,000 as a married couple, 89,250.

Then any gains on stocks and sales like that, you'll pay 0% capital gains. Now you need to hold the stock for, or you need to hold the investment for over a year to qualify. But let's say that you sold some investments and you have big gains. Well, you're going to pay tax on it.

And so what typically you can do is what we call loss harvesting. Let's say you have some holdings that aren't doing so well and you have losses. If you sold them, what people will do is we'll sell the losers at the end of the year to offset the gains. So we reduce our taxes. Now I get it. You sell the losers. Now here's the problem. Most people, when they think of loss harvesting, what they do is they just sell the, the, the loser, the stock.

And they have now cash and they do nothing with the cash to do loss harvesting the proper way. What you need to do is you sell, you sell the loser to take the loss and offset the gain, but then you use the cash to buy another investment. Okay? Okay. Because we don't want our dollars sitting on the sidelines unless that's part of a plan. We want them out there working. But here's the caution, okay? There's something called the wash sale rules. Okay? The wash sale rules are this. You can't. Let's say you have a loss on Google stock and you sell Google stock on December 28th. Okay? You can't just go and buy Google again. That's a problem. What they'll do is they'll nullify the loss if you do that. If you buy the same thing.

Or substantially similar within 30 days of selling it for a loss, you will not get the deduction of the loss. So what we want to do is if we're going to loss harvest or sell something for a loss and we're going to reinvest, we're going to reinvest in something that isn't so substantially similar that triggers the wash sale rules so you can get the loss and keep the money invested all along. Okay? So that's, that's the, the loss, loss harvesting that you might be able to do. Look at your portfolio. This is why I said get the income and expenses. See what your gains are. Do you have losses, do you have gains that you need to offset to, to make that happen? That leads me to number nine and that is this, Is it time for you to think about converting any IRAs to Roth. All right, you've got two kinds of IRAs. You've got a regular IRA, which you put money in, you took a deduction for.

So that money, you take a deduction when you put the money in, and it grows, tax deferred. So you invest it and it grows and grows and grows and grows. And when you take the money out after age 59 and a half, you'll pay tax on all of it. Okay, so you got a deduction before you went in, but you'll pay tax on it if you draw it out down the road.

And everything. But then there's a second type of IRA that's called a Roth ira. And the Roth ira, when you put money in, you don't get a tax deduction. So you don't get a tax deduction for it. But then you invest it and it grows, but instead of it growing, and when you take the money out, you have to pay tax. You never pay tax on the money because you didn't take a tax deduction. So a Roth IRA is a really good thing to consider, especially if in your lower income years and lower tax brackets, to put money in a Roth, because the tax deduction isn't as valuable. And down the road it could be worth multiples, multiples of what you put in because of the investment growth, and you get to take it out fully tax free. Now, that's not a Roth conversion, that's a contribution.

The Roth conversion, though, is say that you have a bunch of money in an ira. I've got a bunch of money in an ira. What you can do is decide to convert some of it to Roth. Now, what that's going to do is it's going to trigger the tax. So if I convert $10,000 of an IRA into a Roth IRA, I'm going to pay tax on the 10,000. I'm not going to pay penalties, but I'm going to pay tax. You might say, but then why would I do this? This doesn't reduce my taxes. I'm actually increasing my taxes by converting to Roth. Yes, but if it happens to be in a year where your income is down, if it happens to be in a year where you're in a lower tax bracket, maybe this is the time to convert it. Pay the tax at the lowest rate possible at a lower rate, because once you convert it, the rest of that account is going to grow tax free and you never pay tax on it again. So all the growth from that point forward is tax free. So you might Have a year, maybe you were unemployed for half the year or your income went down, or spouse, the, your spouse, you had a baby and you took six months off, whatever it is, but it happens to be a year where you're in a lower tax bracket, lower income. This might be a time to look at it and say, should I convert to Roth? Now there's some nuances here too.

There's a five year rule. So when you convert anything to Roth, you can't touch it for five years. So you're locked for five. And the way it works is every conversion, each conversion has a five year rule. So if I convert this year, five years from that date, if I convert another portion next year, five years from that date. So it's, it is, each one has to, has to convert. And if you have.

Other, other things to, to, to look at, you know, from an income standpoint, you got to be really, really careful of it. All right? So but a Roth conversion in a lower income year, in a year when you're in a lower tax bracket, maybe something to consider because what you're doing, yes, you're going to increase your taxes in this year, but you're going to decrease your taxes long term because you never pay tax on that or the growth in the Roth IRA again. All right, all right, that leads me to number 10 is not necessarily tax planning, but it is year end planning you need to think about and that is this.

Update your trust, your will for life events, right? Look, we go through our days and in our years and things will change. Did you have a child? Did you get married? Did something happen? Maybe there was a medical issue, Is there a grandchild?

Did life events happen where now the trust or the will that you originally had isn't as valid and needs to be done? Did you go through a divorce? God forbid. You want to, you want to just review it doesn't mean that you gotta update it. You want to review it and make sure that it still makes sense based on your life circumstances. We'll do an annual review of our will and trust, you know, every year and just say things, do things need to change, you know, and.

By and large it doesn't really change. We've changed. I changed it when I got diagnosed with cancer, changed it when the, when my granddaughters were born. But that's it, you know.

So it's important to look at it because here's the problem is that if you don't have an updated will, if you don't have an updated trust, and God forbid something happens to you who.

The wishes that you actually had at the time of your death may not be the same as what you did in the will. And now they all have to follow the will and the trust, and it may not be the way you wanted it. All right? And so. So I think it's important to look at it. I remember when. When I got diagnosed with cancer, literally two hours after the diagnosis, I was in my attorney's office. We were walking through the trust, and I wanted to go through it. Now, Stephanie wasn't happy because in her eyes, what I was doing was end of life planning, which indirectly, you know, a trust and a will, that's what it is. Okay? But what I was really doing was I just wanted to make sure.

That she was taken care of, that there wasn't anything that was missed, that my son was taken care. At the time, we didn't have grandkids. You know, that my brother, that the people I cared about, the causes. I was behind that. It was done right and everything. So it wasn't really end of life planning. It was actually peace of mind planning. Because once we updated it and changed it and made sure that everything was there, then Stephanie saw exactly what needed to be done if, God forbid, something happens. See, Stephanie and I both experienced situations with our mothers when our dads passed away, where our mothers panicked. They didn't know what to do. They both thought they were going to lose their homes because they had no idea. I don't ever want Stephanie to feel that way. And so it was important to update it. And now we're good. She knows I know I'm good. So if you care about the people in your life and you want to. To care for them, and this is your intent, make sure it's documented. I get it. You have to pay fees, and you got to pay an attorney and all of that stuff, you know what?

It's better than not, because I. I want you to have the peace that the people that you love are taking care of the way you choose to. And the way to do that is to update the trust, the will. All right, so Those are the 10 things that I have for you right now. This is what I want you to do. I want you to use this as a checklist. I want you to sit down with your advisors, and I want you to go through it and say which ones apply, because you have a handful of weeks before the end of the year. Some of these you can get done after the end of the year. Very few, but if you want to take advantage of using the tax code the way it was meant to reduce your taxes, keep as much in your pocket so you can invest it so you can live life, so you can have it, have it working for you instead of working for the government, then we got to make moves today, we got to make moves now, right? So do what you need to do to make sure that you take advantage of all the things that you're entitled to take to reduce your taxes and keep more income in your pocket instead of someone else's. All right? I hope that this was valuable. I hope that this helps you. I hope that you get a chance to. To use some of this. And if, if questions come up or anything comes up, do me a favor, reach out, let me know, all right? I'm here for you. All right? Until I see you again on another episode, another.

Journey on the road or out there when I'm speaking, you know, I was always strive to live a life that outlives you. I'll see you soon. Cheers. Thank you for listening to the Affluent Entrepreneurship with me, your host, Mel Abraham. If you want to achieve financial liberation to create an affluent lifestyle, join me in the Affluent Entrepreneur Facebook group now by going to melabraham.com group and I'll see you there.

And that's it for this episode of Building youg Money Machine where we help you learn how to master your money, eliminate financial stress, and live a life of choice. If you found this valuable or helpful to you, here's what I'd love for you to do. If you do me a favor, go to Apple, Apple Podcast or wherever you're listening to this podcast and rate and review the show. It helps us tremendously to keep us at the top of the list so we can continue to get this information and this message out to people. Because I truly believe that financial freedom is your birthright and I want to help each and every one of you claim it. Thanks so much.