PODCAST
What Proactive Tax Planning is & How it Can Minimize Your Taxes
Episode 39:
Craig Cody is a Certified Tax Coach, Certified Public Accountant, Business Owner and Former New York City Police Officer with 17 years experience on the Force. In addition to being a Certified Public Accountant for the past 15 years, he is also a Certified Tax Coach. As a Certified Tax Coach, Craig belongs to a select group of tax practitioners throughout the country who undergo extensive training and continued education on various tax planning techniques and strategies to become, as well as remain, certified. With this organization, Craig has co-authored an Amazon best seller book, Secrets of a Tax-Free Life.
What you’ll learn about in this episode:
- Craig’s background
- What proactive tax planning is and how it can help minimize your taxes
- Why choosing the wrong entity for your business is a huge mistake
- The estate planning services Craig Cody’s business provides
- Why you need to constantly plan with a CPA (not just once a year)
- Doing bookkeeping the right way from the beginning
- Utilizing solo 401k plans and the need to have a CPA to do it correctly
- How often to speak with your CPA
- Little things that investors frequently miss
- Craig’s books “10 Biggest Tax Mistakes That Cost Real Estate Investors Thousands” and “Secrets of a Tax Free Life”
- The ripple effect of taxation that business owners create
Resources:
Transcript:
Mitch: This is Mitch and welcome to the Real Estate Investor Summit Podcast. We’ll gonna talk about tax planning today, there is a secret to making the money, there’s another whole side you’ll gonna keep that money, so we’ll gonna talk about the other side of that equation. About keeping that money, but right now, we’ll gonna say hello to our couple of our sponsors, and we’ll gonna right back.
All right. Welcome to the Real Estate Investor Summit Podcast, I’ve got Craig Cody on the line, he is a certified cash coach, certified public accountant. He is a business owner and former New York City police officer with 17 years’ experience on the force, all about integrity. In addition to being a certified public accountant for the last 15 years, he is also a certified cash coach. And so, as a certified cash coach, Craig belongs to a select group of tax practitioners throughout the country that undergo extensive training and continue education on various tax planning techniques and strategies to become as well as remained as certified on top of everything. With this organization, Craig has co-authored an Amazon Best Seller Book, Secrets of a Tax Free Life. Let me say that again, Secrets of a Tax Free Life. And so, Craig how are you doing today?
Craig: Am doing great, Mitch. Thanks for having me.
Mitch: I understand you are from Long Island?
Craig: Yes. I am about 20 miles outside of Times Square.
Mitch: All right. We’ll activity going in there right now.
Craig: [LAUGHTER] Yes, there is.
Mitch: So, let us just get right into it like what is proactive tax planning and how can it help Minimize your taxes?
Craig: Well, the difference between a pro-active tax planner and a typical accountant out there is, typical accountants are very good at putting the right numbers at the right boxes, okay. Looking in the rearview mirror, okay, recording the history that has happened. When you do proactive tax planning, you make history, okay? You look for missed opportunities, or new opportunities and tax strategies where you can save your client’s money, help them keep more of what they make.
Mitch: Well, you know, i’m a big advocate and I pushed [INAUDIBLE] bigger advocate sooner, because I learned in the last couple of years exactly how much money I was leaving in the table, when I went just from a tax guy who did the CPA, that did my tax returns to a strategist, which is exactly on a call today. I went the longest time running my business by the hair on the back of my neck. Never really had a balanced sheet. Never really haven’t, you know, I didn’t realized how much that is costing me. And also the anxiety of that, not ever knowing what your tax bills gonna be, not even having an idea of what it’s gonna be at the end of the year. I am embarrassed to say but we are always transparent in the show, we say the good, the bad and the ugly. And I’ll be transparent to say that it took me 15 years to finally get an order and have my– you know I have like 5 or 6 companies and are all off sheets of real estate business from hard money lending, to self-storages, to owner financed strategies to even some buy and hold properties, which am forced to hold because I don’t really like being a landlord. In some cases, I have to be for a while at least, and I was amazed at some of the ways I had been overlooking for years, thanks to strategist like yourself. That’s why I wanna have you on the show, one of the biggest mistakess that you see that some of the business owners are making regarding taxes?
Craig: I would say, choosing the wrong entity after not planning, the next biggest mistake would be choosing the wrong entity for their business. And so, people that have real estate and corporations, you see that quite often, see them in C-corporations versus LLC’s and not putting them in an entity, at all.
Mitch: Yeah. What about S-selection?
Craig: Well, that goes along with you know, the right time of entity as far the corporation goes, and typically we would not hold a real estate inside of an S-corporation, we wanna move it out and give it to an LLC. And the biggest part of really it has to do with down the road, getting a step up on basis if you only have [INAUDIBLE].
Mitch: Yeah. Okay. So, you do a lot of estate planning as well?
Craig: Yeah, we do estate planning and we got into tax planning via estate planning. Because, we–you know, I guess it was about 8-9 years ago when they changed the tax code and they changed the exemption amount from a million to $5 million per person effectively with discounts moving in an estate to you know, it must be around $50 million before they start paying federal taxes. So, it really cut back on the amount of planning that we were able to do, but then we went back and we look back, what we saved these individuals that we did the estate planning on in taxes and we saw, wow. We saved them actually on an annual basis, we also saved them a lot of money. And that was brought us into the tax planning.
Mitch: Am amazed, you know in my niche strategy of choice, the buying with other people’s money, and then owner financed it for double with my end user, I am taking down payment, collecting payments for 10,15,20,25-30 years. I amazed at how many people are getting themselves in pickles or bad positions because they didn’t make, there wasn’t a will, you see that a lot?
Craig: Yeah, we see that, and in fact in people who are older, they come to us and they assembled a decent amount of real estate, they don’t have a will, they only have an attorney and sometimes, they only have a tax planner before they come to us. And we just wonder.
Mitch: Yeah. They could have saved–if you do a will, not so much for yourself but to help to put at ease the people that you love, because when you don’t do a will, you leave your heirs or family members with a huge burden, and I am sure you’ve seen it.
Craig: Yeah. Tremendous burden, you know tremendous fighting especially when there’s a lot of money involved, you know i’m a big proponent of trust, that would kind of minimized that aspect of fighting. But, you know, a will is definitely better than nothing, okay? But, you are right there’s tremendous amount of people out there that have no planning when it comes to their death.
Mitch: You help people set up a will?
Craig: We worked with attorneys for that. We don’t do any of that legal work, you know. But, even it comes back to forming the entity for whatever their doing is. There needs to be a communication between the CPA and the attorney, okay? And obviously, the client, because the attorney may have to do it for liability reasons, and I may want it down for certain ways for tax reasons, we need to have a meeting with the minds.
Mitch: Absolutely. Absolutely. It is a big world out there and a lot of laws to read and understand. It is amazing to me how much there is in these tax codes, it is like trying to– I don’t know, I’d rather hit my thumb with a hammer than read some of these codes. God bless you, guys. [LAUGHTER]
Craig: [LAUGHTER]
Mitch: Yeah, so I got this question a lot, maybe we can go to it just a little bit further. Explain to us more, like what an entity should be. Right now, we have series of LLC in Texas, is that getting more prominent around the country? Or are you familiar with the series of LLC or are they rather than new?
Craig: I am familiar with them, they are not in New York yet, so we haven’t seen a whole lot of them but you know, we are dealing with them a lot of investors across the country and some of them are bringing them up. And some of them are using them, some are feeling that they are not cost efficient to use them. But, from what I know about them, it makes a lot of sense to use, a series of LLC.
Mitch: Okay. Yeah, great. So, can you help people with, ‘cause you’re a CPA, so you– in my understanding, is that you hand all your CPA all your books and everything, but the step before hand you needed books is you have to have books, can you help people get their businesses you know– I’ve gone many years without not having a real system, and it took me a while to find a CPA that would help me back in my previous systems and help me straighten them out, so that I was getting a penalty every month in the balance sheet, and it was really easy to put my package together from my CPA at the end of the year, because you know, I was getting that balance sheet every 30 days. And so then I just took the 12 and put them together and handed them to my CPA, and boy, that made my life a lot easier. I also, learned that I needed to check in before the end of the year, you know, you needed to do like a quarterly at least in my annual right? What do you suggest there?
Craig: Oh, yes. We believed in constant communication, so we have a couple of different, you know, everything always starts with tax plans for us and then we’ll be going into the typical tax accounting, you know we have clients that we do, if they are working with us, we are doing their bookkeeping with them, and we have a–probably our fastest growing service is our outsourced CFO services. And those were our clients are getting their monthly or quarterly penal, they may have investors that they are dealing with, so, instead of having the you know, the controller or the CFO next to you, you are hiring us and you are getting a team, you are getting a bookkeeper, you are getting a CPA for your day to day activities and you are getting me for the bigger picture stuff, which you know, typically we are doing that roles, we are doing the tax work, but we are not always doing the tax work, and like you said, that’s giving the investor a lot of knowledge, okay? And it’s the knowledge that you can implement.
Mitch: Yeah. And so, one of the– I mean, one of the things I had to learn how to look at penal and how to look at the balance sheet, and what was I looking for when I was sitting there, staring at it. I mean, what are we looking for in a balanced sheets and penal statements, to help improve our business?
Craig: Well, obviously you are looking at you know, you are looking at the value of your assets. You are looking at, you know, any depreciation that has been taken, depending on the length of time you are owning these assets, cash flow, and cash flow statement is typically when it comes to real estate, a very important statement that you wanna look at, okay? Because, that kind of tells the story, you know. Somebody told me a long time ago, it is all about the cash flow, all right?
Mitch: Yeah. I believe that. But, it is all about– so, one of my mentors who had run big big big businesses, you know. So, okay I had this penal balanced sheet, I mean my eyes go right for the bottom line to see what am making, but I said, “What am I looking for in the body of this”? And he said, “Look for your biggest expenses and that’s where–see if you can cut, you know”. What am I spending on the most on? Is there a way to do better here, you know? Can we, — is it time to outsource this or to get more professional or is it time to just shop again, you know? Because, most of them–one of my biggest expenses was insurance. And you know, I said, “what would I do about– this is one of my biggest expenses”. And he says, “Well, when was the last time that you shopped”. And I said, “Well, I can’t remember the last time I shopped. I just had this guy and I just keep sending stuff every time I get a house or whatever”. He says, “We need to shop”. Part of the problem with me is am really loyal, but the job or the responsibility of a business owner is to make that business profitable as you can, and sometimes there are some hard decisions and– but, I went back and I said, “Well, okay I just do this exercise”. And I went outside and started shopping, handing my policy to other competitors and asked them to tell me what they like about my policies, what they didn’t like, and what they could do better to save me any money. And amazingly [INAUDIBLE] to save me a ton of money. And so, I really perked up about looking at my biggest expenses and always knowing what they were, and always re-checking in to see if there’s a way I can minimize those expenses, even a little bit. Because, just a little bit of savings, can make a lot of difference for a lot of years, right?
Craig: Right, and go and see the bottom line, which is your pocket.
Mitch: Yeah. And nobody really look at the business like you, or no one can keep your business like you, it helps to have that CPA right behind you, or book keeper to help you. But, the point of bookkeeper right, is just to organize some documents of your activity. Is that right? Or is there other–
Craig: Correct. No, that’s the one obviously, depending on the level of the skill of the book keeper, that’s where you need, you know, your CPA to have more of a in depth look of what’s going on. And you could see your insurances as a big expense, but then the question is, how do you delved into that? To see, okay, what is that expense is made of? Okay, so where exactly that money is actually spent, you know. So, you should– communication is the key, being able to ask questions and have access is very important, okay, ’cause every dollop of saving is going to your pocket.
Mitch: Yeah. And so, I have a question for you, a lot of people out there starting out, I tell them, “When you are just starting out, start your bookkeeping then, it is simplest then, it hasn’t been messed up, there’s not a lot that people go back and fix. Try to get you know, set up right from the very beginning”. To me that seems to be drastically important, what’s your comment?
Craig: Most definitely, even if it’s just, you know, even if you are just starting out with your first property, and you know, you are keeping it in Excel. At least you are tracking what’s going on, and at the end of the year, if you go to your professional at that point, you could, you know make details of what’s going on, at a very minimum you should be tracking in Excel, okay? And you know QuickBooks is out there, or there are so many outsourced you know accounting services out there that you can use to help track all that stuff for you.
Mitch: So, you– will your company help someone from the beginning so they are set up right, and you know, most people think, “Well, I can’t afford in this stage of my business, am just starting out”. I say, “Well, you really cannot afford to because, one is, someone has to put in the time, and your time, in our business we don’t make our money doing books, we make our money finding great houses at great bargains and that’s where the money is”. Nothing happens until we find that great deal that we can capitalize on. And so, I tell everyone, try to delegate off as much as you can. There’s note collectors and note collection services, easy to get out, that will keep a certain amount of bookkeeping record for you, and then there’s book keepers that will just you know, the whole point is, is to categorize your checks right, and so you can actually pull off a statement on a house, and say, “How much do I have on this house”? You know, for the longest time, I was asking my office, “How much do I have on this house”. And then they will tell me how much I borrowed to buy it, but they weren’t telling me, “Yeah, but you just spent this money on a loan, you had, you know, fixed the roof”. And I did have all those expenses, where I could quickly pull them up and see exactly to the minute when I had this house. And that was early on, I didn’t make that mistake for a very long. But, that was one of the big thing for me, to be able to know exactly what I had in a house, ’cause when am trying to make a deal to sell a house, I got to know these numbers, you know. And I don’t have time to go back and methodically by hand, manually they’ll do this stuff, so– I think, we use QuickBooks Pros, what we use here. And so, when you first start out, your bookkeeping, you’ll not gonna have the expense that you’ll gonna have when you’ve got a business that as a 100 houses in it, right?
So, the bookkeeping bill will progress so, it’s small when you are little and it gets bigger as you get bigger, right?
Craig: Exactly. And you know, doing it right from the beginning saves a lot of headaches down the road, okay. And you know, just depreciation, like you said, tracking the expenses, you know, if you don’t track them correctly, if you don’t track them and figure out, you’ll gonna figure out at the end of the year, you know, our history most people would vastly underestimate the amount of money they spend on things.
Mitch: Oh, absolutely, incredibly. And the other thing is, if you are taking care of this one deal at a time, and as they are coming down the pipe, then your memory is much better. If you wait until the end of the year, you know, it is impossible to remember the transactions and proved that check was really for, what is it for, ’cause you know, it’s a lot of transactions in the past, and I just find it– my memory is only good for about 30 days, after that, I don’t remember anything.
Craig: You are no different from everyone else. That’s where you need to it, like you said, you need to do it, and you need to do it early. You need to do it continuously because the next thing you know, you have 10 houses.
Mitch: Yeah. And so, do you guys, help people set up traditional IRAs or Roth IRAs or Solo 401Ks, a lot of my student—
Craig: So, as part of the tax planning process, okay. Those are some of the things that we look out for people, as far as what they can do and how they can do, or maybe we need to do some creative things with management companies, and so, they could put away more money. It really all depends on people if don’t wanna pay self-employment tax because they have all these real estate and rental real estate, but sometimes, maybe it’s a little even bit better to pay a little bit of something, employment tax and pay a lot less income tax.
Mitch: And yeah, I also found out that having a Solo 401K. Personally, I have a Solo 401K, with checkbook control so that I can write checks and I don’t have to wait on the trustees and you know if they are on vacation– you only have to lose one deal, trying to wait for your trustee on a Roth ira traditional IRA, to give you the go ahead. You lose one deal because you cannot consummate fast enough to pull the money out, fast enough. And you lose $20,000-$30,000 of potential profit, you won’t do that again. That’s what I did, I said, “How can I get more control”? And I was, I learned about the Solo 401K, and last year, the Solo 401K saved me a ton of money, because I was able to give myself up like $25,000- $27,000 and my company could match it. And that was right off, when– a certain amount came off my bottom line, and then my wife was a part owner of the company can do the same thing. We like get a $107,000 moved out, half of it came from income, because it was put into not a Roth’s IRA’s retirement deferred plans, but it was great that I had it, because it is too late when you set up when you needed it at the end of the year, it takes a little [INAUDIBLE] while to step this stuff up, right?
Craig: Right. Your Solo 401Ks, you can actually took to really close to the end of the year, okay? We’ve actually had some set up, ‘cause it just basically you and your spouse, we had some set up the last week of December. But, now is the time to start doing that kind of thing, then you have to make sure that you have already done– I can give you all the criteria, and that is where tax planning comes in to make sure that you have and you can do those kind of strategies.
Mitch: And in being able to have a phone number to someone who understands more of the rules to all these different things, be it LLC or 401K or how much can I put in my Roth, or how much can I put into my traditional IRA, is really important, because I wanted to set up my daughter who’s been working for me for 20 years, taking every transaction as it comes in and doing all the paperwork for all the transactions as they go out, handling all the closings. And I want to set her up for 401K, and for the longest time, I thought I couldn’t, ’cause she doesn’t have her own business, and then I just picked the phone up one time and say, “Well, i’m not gonna stop at the first No”. Let me just ask somebody who’s smarter than I am about this, and see if there is something can be done about it”. And they informed me that I could give her, percentage of my company, and now she was, you know when you have Solo 401K, and correct me if I am wrong, ’cause I am a licensed CPA, but as a solo operator I could only pay out so much wages for the year, or I didn’t qualified as a solo entrepreneur, and if I had this one problem, the only person that was working that wasn’t a subcontractor, was my daughter. And she was knocking me out, of being able to get that Solo 401K myself. And so, it was brought to my attention, that I only had to was to give her a small percentage of my company, she is now a working owner and she wasn’t an employee and that changed my whole outlook on it, I was able to take advantage of that some stuff. Having that phone number to talk directly was very important to me.
Craig: Yeah. It what saves you, or saves her in taxes.
Mitch: Yeah. And we were able to get her a Solo 401k as well. And I like to give, you know, bonuses to my people, if I recognized that people aren’t really good stewards of their money, then sometimes, I give them money that can do now, but I like to put–give them money that they can put in their retirement plans, you know what I mean, so that they can have something in their future.
Craig: That’s a good thinking.
Mitch: So, I mean– how often do you and a business partner communicate with the CPA? I mean, is it in different levels, or what?
Craig: Well, obviously it is different different levels, but, monthly you know 2 at the [INAUDIBLE] quarterly, all right. And then if you are a bigger business, like you have operating weekly, okay. We have certain clients that we have weekly called scheduled for to go over certain things, all right. And then, we have our typical monthly calls, and there are some quarterly calls or meetings. But, you know it is also important when you are thinking about doing something to touch base with your CPA to see, maybe there’s more better way to efficiently to do it. I can’t tell you how many times people are wanna–gift their house to their kids, okay. It is a great and wonderful thing, but maybe, there’s a better way to do it, from establishing a higher basis in that property so that they can depreciate it, you know and get a better deduction. So, whenever you are doing anything like that, you should definitely communicate with your CPA.
Mitch: Yeah.
Craig: Am sorry.
Mitch: Go ahead. Go ahead.
Craig: But, you know, you can never have too much communication.
Mitch: And people think, CPAs are expensive and I just go back to the adage of ignorance’s is what’s really expensive, and there’s no way we can have a handle on all different hats that you have to wear in creative real estate arena. I mean, you have to be the guy that finds the house. You have to be the guy that finds the funding. You have to be the guy that sells the house, responsible for advertising, and employees and signs to be made, and signs being put up, and the telephone system and the insurance. And this is too much to do and to add, to try to become an expert in tax strategy by yourself is just ridiculous, it’s just like an ocean out there, as far as I am concerned. And having people like you that I can call off and bounce things off has saved me a tons of money. How do you find people use CPAs most effectively to their advantage?
Craig: Well, when we work with clients, we put them on a flat fee, okay. So, they don’t need to worry about calling us and running up a bill.
Mitch: Oh, very good.
Craig: So, that kind of takes the anxiety off them, and you know, we’ve been doing this for a long time and no one’s been unhappy by it works, they are not unhappy, and we are not unhappy. So, works for everybody.
Mitch: So, Craig, tell us the name of your company and where you are located.
Craig: It’s Craig Cody and Co, and we are located in Manhasset, New York.
Mitch: Okay, and I have a link here. So, if you wanna learn more, about Craig Cody and Co. then go to 1000houses.com/cody, make sure you make the C-O-D-Y all in lower case and that will get you where you wanna go. Anything we need to add in today’s segment? We could probably talk about this probably for years, so–
Craig: A couple of quick things that we see investors are missing. You know, they may sound like little things, but you know, most investors are a single member LLCs, and they should be taking advantage of medical expense reimbursement plans, which is Section 105 plans, so investors have kids, kids need tend to need braces, okay. Braces are expensive, Section 105 plans allow you to write those braces off, okay. They allow you to write off medical expenses that are non-deductible, you can also– another strategy is, hiring your kids, all right. We’d like to use the 11 year old and up, but court cases show that you can actually hire your kids at the age of 7. And that’s the way to either pay for their private schools, or pay for football camp, etc. And those expenses have deductible.
Mitch: Give them chores, and instead of giving them just an allowance, taking out of your pocket, set them in books and write them off, is that basically what you are saying?
Craig: That’s right. And the money goes to their bank account, and then the camp expenses come out of there, or their private school, and you make those non-deductible expenses deductible.
Mitch: Yeah. Unbelievable amount of things that you can do, but you just didn’t know. You don’t know what you don’t know, so, you know get some counseling from– get some professional counsel, on all-knowing CPA like, Craig and learn, where you’re missing the boat, and where you can get some write offs. You know, I just can’t express enough, how much I appreciate you being on the call. I’d like to keep it kind of short here and then if people want longer personal conversation with you, they can go to reinvestorsummi.com/cody, and I really appreciate you being on with us today. I know it’s a little short but I think these are the kind of topics that you really get personal with. And so, I think, we’ve given people enough infinite to why they wanna do that.
So, the name of your book is, tell me–
Craig: It is the, Ten Biggest Tax Mistakes That Cost Investors Thousands. And actually, that is real estate investors thousands.
Mitch: They’ll be able to get that out from the link that we gave out right? Okay. But, then I thought the name of a different book that you had there, Secrets of a Tax Free Life.
Craig: Correct, that was an Amazon Best Seller that I co-authored, that was, Secrets of a Tax Free Life. Surprising write off strategies most business owners missed.
Mitch: Okay. This brings off to a topic I want to touch on here. During the recent election, some people are really bashing Trump because he really pay very small tax from the amount of money he made, or her zeroed out, and tell me. Tell the listeners why this is not a sin and just talk to us about that issue.
Craig: Well, you know, Congress inactively passed a tax code, and it’s–there is no reason why we should not take full advantage of what the tax code says. And I am not familiar with the exact quote, but many years ago, former justice Rehnquist made a comment about that–that there is nothing wrong, to paraphrase, there is nothing wrong in taking advantage of the items in the tax code that allow you to write different things and structure things in certain way.
Mitch: Yeah and so, I wanted to make this clear, to the audience. It is your right and you are just operating by legal or acceptable practices to minimize your tax liability and if that gives you down to zero, then great for you, great job. You know if you start making more money, it gets more difficult to zero out, but there’s definitely ways to minimize them. And so, one time I had an attorney, let’s say we were on the opposite ends of the political spectrum and he had to get me privy to my finances for reason, and he made a statement to me and says, “This is what I don’t like about the Republicans or the Conservatives” or the whatever, how he said it. It was just, “You guys don’t pay any taxes”. And I had to sit this guy down who’s a very smart guy, you know, he wasn’t ignorant in any stretched of imagination, he was a pretty well respected attorney, and I said, look, look at how I see it, and I need your opinion on this. I told him and I said, “Look at me as commission sales person and the department that we are working in is taxes. I think the tax code is cleverly set up, to give entrepreneurs and people that are going out there without a net in creating business out of thin air, of their own initiative. The tax code wants to encourage people to do that. And so when they go out and start these businesses, with no personal guarantee, with no federal money backing them, no cheap government loans, and they go out there in their own volition, and start a company. One of the result is that, tax start being paid by– it creates taxes. The people have to pay. If you are hiring people, they’re getting money, and have to pay tax on the money. You are buying product, there’s sales tax and you know, all kinds of tax, structural and gasoline to be bought, we don’t know much taxes are in a gallon of gas, right? And you start taking in my case, in my business, we take this taxes, the inner city dilapidated houses that have no tax value, no one’s in them, the taxes are behind, you know the property taxes are behind, and we start paying those taxes to give them current, getting that money out into the municipality that desperately need them to function, and then we take these houses and we do them and we put owners in them, and increase the tax value of that property, where, you know, I bought houses that were accessed $20,000 by the time I got finished and sold it got reassessed next year and at a $110,000. You know and that’s more tax money coming in. And I had to look at my attorney’s eyes and say, “What is you don’t understand. I am causing more taxation over years and years and I could ever paid out of my pocket from my pay. And they give me a break for that for being that industrious, and he says to me, “But, you don’t even pay as much as you know, my secretary paid more than you paid in taxes”. And Warren Buffet has been quoted saying that and Warren Buffet is way smarter than he is living on his statement because, I said to my attorney about his secretary’s tax bill compared to mine, this is what I would tell Warren Buffet, “You know that I moved the economy more than your secretary. You know that I caused way more taxation more than that secretary and I am being rewarded for causing that different taxes all across the globe, for all those years that they’ll gonna have to be paid”. What is your comment?
Craig: I couldn’t have said that better, okay? You are 100% correct. You are the one, the business owners the one taking more the risk, okay, versus the person taking the job and gets the W-2, and you know paying more taxes but that person is not growing the economy, and that’s the reason why businesses gets tax rates, and that’s why the government wants you know, different businesses to stay in their cities and get some tax rates, because they generate money to the economy. So, you said it very well.
Mitch: Yeah. I don’t want to get into a big political argument here with anybody, but when people start to say, you know, they give these corporations tax rates, it’s because they cause tons of taxation, they cause products to move. They caused people to receive checks, every time someone receives an income check, then they’ll have to pay tax. They just do so much for the economy, and I think this what really grows the middle class, which is so important to the United States economy is a great vibrant middle class, and a lot of that middle class, if not a huge portion that middle class, and correct me if I am wrong, is from small and medium sized businesses that no one even knows of.
Craig: Yup. I mean, you know, you are correct.
Mitch: So, there’s politics for the day, please don’t shoot me in any way. I know there’s something differences of opinion, but that’s my [INAUDIBLE] on it. So, you guys wanna learn more and get smarter about how to handle your tax liability, make sure you go to 1000houses.com/cody, make sure Cody is all lower case, C-O-D-Y, and be sure to check out the book, where is it here, I wanna get it right. Secrets of a Tax Free Life. And also, tell us about the other book, what’s the other book called again?
Craig: The more [INAUDIBLE] book that I would say to deal is will be the, Ten Biggest Mistake that Cost Real Estate Investors Thousands.
Mitch: All right, you can find it in the link, it is kind don’t worry about it. Just remember, 1000houses.com/cody and you’ll see it all there, it will be on the show notes and you wanna have to write that down.
Craig, thank you so much for being on the show, I appreciate your time. It takes a lot for people to carve out an hour of their day, and I appreciate that you did it.
Craig: Well, I appreciate you having me. This is a great experience.
Mitch: All right my friend, thank you very much, and this is Mitch and we out, until the next Real Estate Investor Summit Podcast. Thank you very much for tuning in.
