EP 009 - How to Determine If You Need a Tax Plan

I meet so many business owners who don't know what a tax plan is and never engage a tax professional to create a forward looking plan to minimize their taxes. If you're interested in learning if you need a tax plan and what the benefits may be, check out this video!

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Okay, welcome everybody to my live webinar. The topic is how to determine if you need a tax plan. This is going to be great for some of you guys and most business owners that I know. And when I say business owners, I am including you real estate investors. Most of you guys have accountants who wait until the end of the year to discuss uh your taxes with your accountant. After the year has closed and it is tax season, so that January to February time, you don't quite really have the uh there's only so much that you can do with your accountant to maximize your situation and reduce your taxes. After the year's closed, the books are closed and the year is done. There's only so much that we can do, right? Uh, you know, for instance, a 401k. If you haven't opened it in that year, you can't create it and write it and contribute after the year is closed. So many other things that we have to consider throughout the year. We want to be thinking about our taxes in a more of a proactive way once we own a business and invest. And the way that we do that is with tax planning. So, what I'm gonna help you guys out with today is understanding what a tax plan is and determining if a tax plan is necessary for you. So, let's start off. Let me share my screen here. Okay, so I'm gonna walk you through just some of the agenda for this meeting and give you an understanding of what we're gonna cover. I want you guys to put all of your questions in the QA. I will address all of them. So feel free to ask wherever you would like to ask. I will address all of them. Um, also, I want you to know that at the end of this presentation, I'm going to present to you and explain to you what a discovery session is. A discovery session is a free consultation where I can evaluate your prior year returns in your current situation and assess the value of a tax plan. And this is just a chance to maybe get some freebies and get some some quick questions answered on your current taxes and understand if you may be missing out on potential tax saving opportunities that can be created with a tax plan. So I can help you out with understanding what kind of value we can create with the tax plan. So to start, this is what we're gonna cover. What is a tax plan? So we're gonna identify, I'm gonna give you a better understanding of what I do when I tax plan. I specialize in tax planning, so my firm focuses on this forward-looking tax plan and creating tax savings for my clients. Uh, who needs a tax plan? So I'm gonna give you an understanding of the type of people that I work with and who may be good candidates for a tax plan. When we need a tax plan, we're gonna discuss when is a good time to start thinking about tax planning. How much should you invest into a tax plan, right? So I'm gonna tell you up front, tax planning is typically more expensive than your typical preparation. It is more expensive because it is a more detailed type of service and it will add more value to your wealth building, but it takes a greater level of analysis. So it is an investment and it can be a costly investment. So I'm gonna help you out with evaluating how much you should invest into a tax plan. Whom should you hire for a tax plan? I'm gonna give you an idea. If you are thinking about hiring people or you know, you're not quite sure who you want to work with. Here are some things that we can think about. And I'll tell you right away, I may not be the perfect candidate for a tax plan. So this is gonna help you understand who you should be working with with a tax plan. Sometimes I refer people who aren't right for me. Uh, so we're gonna discuss this. I love that you guys are putting in questions, keep on putting them in, and I'll address it at the end. And then finally, we're gonna talk about discovery sessions, what that should look like with me or maybe another certified tax coach or tax planner, and what you should expect to get out of this and what I might be able to help you out with. So, to start off with, what is a tax plan? A tax plan is a forward-looking engagement where we are focused on creating future tax savings. So at the same time, when I say that this is a forward-looking engagement where we're creating future tax savings, as we are analyzing your circumstances and prior your returns, we may even find opportunities to amend the return. And maybe if they're you know, if we haven't been doing things right, we may be able to create some immediate return on the investments from that amended return. I just had a client, we noticed that there were tons of missed opportunities in 2019. We amended the 2019 return. That client will save an additional $69,000 from that amendment, and moving forward, we are going to save that client an additional estimated $100,000 to $115,000 in taxes per year from now implementing the tax plan. So it's a forward-looking engagement to identify tax saving opportunities. Now, most of you have not seen a tax planner or really haven't had an opportunity to discuss tax planning with your CPA, and I want to give you an understanding of what I do and how it's different from your typical tax preparation engagement. First, I want you to uh I'm gonna compare uh tax preparation versus tax planning and give you an idea of what the difference is in working with someone like me who focuses on tax planning compared to tax preparation. So, as you can see in this in the slide, the tax preparation is a backwards-looking engagement, right? So it is we're really trying to what we're trying to do here is when we're doing the tax prep, we are evaluating and we're looking at the documentation of the income you've received in prior year, and we're recording it, we're submitting this prep, you know, this return to record how much you owe in taxes. Not a whole lot we can do to help you save money in taxes. When we are doing a tax plan, we are looking forward and into the future, and what can we do to anticipate these tax liabilities to minimize your taxes? So, right now I am working with my clients to plan for 2021's taxes. If you are just doing tax preparation, you're not really thinking about 2021. So people really don't think about 2021's taxes until March of 2022 when the books is closed and they're trying to figure out how much they owe. And as I said earlier, it's a little too late to do much of what we'd like to do as tax planners to help you reduce your taxes. Compliance objective is more associated with tax preparation. So when you were doing the tax preparation, our goal is to maintain compliance and file your returns timely so we don't have any late filing fees or anything of that nature. With a tax plan, our objective is to save taxes, save money on taxes. So it's a little bit of a different overall objective here. When you do tax preparation, if you do it right, obviously you're going to be able to maintain compliance, hopefully. With tax planning, we also have the ability to improve your chances of maintaining compliance. Because when I work with my clients and I coach my clients to understand what you need to write off, my clients will find them, even though we're reducing your taxes, we're actually improving your ability to uh to really survive the scrutiny of an IRS audit because, as part of the tax plan, we are now understanding what we can write off, how do we document these write-offs? So we have everything in place and we are preparing to have everything to substantiate what we are doing, what we're writing off in our positions and tax elections. The tax preparation is a yearly service. Every year, obviously, hopefully, you guys are all doing this and filing your taxes. With a tax plan, we start this. This tax plan should be is a more should have a multi-year impact. So, some of my clients, like I was just talking about, we created a tax plan and we are creating processes and systems and ideas and fundamental principles that we are going to be focusing on that will create at least $100,000 of tax savings, not just for 2020, but in the future years in 2021, 22, 23, where you're gonna still see the benefits of this tax plan. Also, when you're doing preparation, you it's a more of a detail-oriented type of approach. If you're your CPA is gonna you know do what's necessary to have all the details and have all the documentation, and it's all about having the completeness and accuracy of all this action and activity for you and your business, your W-2 income, and recording it properly with a tax plan is more of an analytical approach where we're anticipating and we are forecasting what your future possible marginal tax rates will be and what are going to be your future revenues and expenses, and how are we gonna time things, how are we gonna structure things, all the all that stuff right there. And the last area I want to that kind of separates the two is when you are in when you are paying someone for a tax preparation service, they're doing your taxes, is more of an administrative expense because it's just something you need to keep your business going and stay in compliance. It's not really something that will uh you know really free up a whole lot of capital, but with a tax plan, it's more of an investment into your future. Just like you guys who are investing in real estate, you know, you're you'll be lucky if you get you know an 8% or a 10% cap rate. I will tell you right now the return on investment for a tax plan will exceed any real estate investment you will ever make. When you compare, when you look at the return on investment from a tax plan, it is usually going to be 500 to 1,000 percent per year in additional tax savings created from that tax plan. Uh so this is more of an investment into your future as opposed to something where you're just paying to have a service done to keep your books in order and stay in compliance. So here are some of the things that we think about in the tax plan, some of the things that I work with with my clients as part of the tax planning engagement. Entity structure and tax selection. So, do we need a C Corp or an S-corp? There might be an opportunity to create spin-off businesses and spin-off entities, create active income or passive income. When we look at your business and the mix of the activities, we're gonna evaluate what entity structure is most beneficial from a tax perspective. Write-off optimization and hidden write-off identification. Here's where we look at what you're doing and in your relationships with your family, and what are your daily expenditures, and how can we turn some of these things into write-offs? Are we capturing all the write-offs for your business? How can we create processes and systems for documenting and identifying every possible write-off available for you and your business? Depreciation optimization. So, this is when we start thinking about maybe there's an opportunity to increase your depreciable basis based on the estimates of the land and the building value if you're a real estate investor, maybe cost segregation to accelerate depreciation. How can we drive this depreciation to bring your taxable income as low as possible? This is some of the analysis I do with just about all my clients who invest in real estate. Also, we think about retirement planning and account utilization. Maybe you want to borrow from your solo 401k, create a solo 401k, maybe an IRA or a Roth, Roth IRA rollovers. How can we utilize this? How can we possibly invest with our IRAs or maybe lend? What can we do with all these different retirement accounts to best set you up for success? We also think about expense documentation coaching. So making sure that not only are we identifying these write-offs, but we are documenting it in a way that will prepare you for any IRS scrutiny and making sure that your records are organized so at your end we're capturing all these write-offs. Asset protection. So when we're evaluating your entities and the values of LLCs, how many LLCs? We are thinking about this in from not only from a tax savings perspective, but also from an asset protection perspective. So we know that so we can take advantage of these entity structures as best we can to protect your personal assets. Compliance coaching, as I you know, as I've discussed earlier, we're looking for compliance coaching. Uh, that's just to make sure that we are doing things properly so we know by the end of the year, not only are we minimizing our taxes, but we have the proper evidence to substantiate our returns that will minimize our taxes. And also other things like college funding, college financing, uh other types of things that I probably should have mentioned, medical expenses, how can we create write-offs as best we can for medical types of expenditures, HSAs, you know, other sorts of fringe benefits we can create to fund medical expenses. These are all things that we analyze in the tax planning. And then estate planning. I am not an estate planning expert, I'm more of a tax strategist, but I do coordinate with attorneys who focus on estate planning, and that is something that we consider in the holistic mix of you and your family's personal finances when we conduct these tax plans. So, not only are we looking at your businesses and looking at things at a business level, we are looking at the holistic picture of the income from you and your spouse, and how can we, when we look at how all these activities combine together, how can we make the right decisions that will minimize your overall taxes? Who needs a tax plan? So if you are let's start off by identifying who doesn't need a tax plan. If you are a W-2 employee, let's say you're making $80,000 a year and you don't have any sort of business or business or side hustle, there's not a whole lot that I can do for you to minimize your taxes. I'm sorry, I can't do the whole lot. Uh, because your taxes are just gonna be coming out of your paycheck, is predetermined, you really don't have much of an influence on this. We may be able to talk about some things you're doing with your retirement accounts, or maybe you have investment accounts, or maybe you want to self-direct a retirement account or something of that nature, and you maybe you want some guidance, but for the most part, if your income is just coming in from a salary, I probably can't help you out very much. Also, if you're just starting off and you're just getting things off the ground, you really want to know what you can what you can write off and identify that. If you're somewhat self-educated and you have good records, there might not be a whole lot I can do from a tax planning perspective. But if you're operating at a loss, you might think that you don't need a tax plan. You say, you know what, I'm operating at a loss, I really can't afford a CPA. That might not be a good decision. You might be overlooking some opportunities because there's a lot that we can do with your losses to create additional write-offs. We want to make best use of these business losses, especially in 2020. Because of the coronavirus, in 2020, we're allowed to carry these losses back against prior years income. So we can actually, if we were we're having a loss, one of the things I work with some of my clients on is let's create as many losses as we can possibly, or at least identify these losses as best we can, and we can carry them back against prior year earnings and get a refund against the taxes we paid in prior years. So there's still opportunities, even if you aren't expecting to pay a whole lot of taxes in 2020. Who needs a tax plan? Once you start investing in real estate, you probably could use a tax plan or at least some greater guidance uh from someone who specializes in real estate taxes. So, some of the things we can do with the tax plan is you know, if you work full-time in real estate, you're a real estate agent, or maybe you're flipping houses, you have that real estate professional tax status. Now we want to create tons of losses, we want to accelerate your depreciation with a tax plan. We can think about all sorts of combinations of strategies to drive down your tax liabilities. Lots of things that we can do there. If you own a business, and now we start thinking about the S-Corp tax election to possibly reduce your self-employment tax, maybe even a C Corp in some circumstances, maybe multiple entities, maybe spin-off entities, all these things that I kind of discussed earlier. These are the things we want to start thinking about, and at least the utilization of an LLC and not commingling your funds. So once you're a business owner, you want to at least talk to someone, talk to someone who works with other business owners and understands tax planning to see what you might be missing out on without a tax plan. You know, things like pension plans for your business, maybe retirement accounts, or at least knowing what you should be writing off if you don't quite know. Now is a time to start thinking about creating a tax plan to build that foundational understanding, systems, and processes, so we know we are taking advantage of all the tax incentives and benefits that come with owning a business. When do you need a tax plan? I would say you should probably start thinking about tax plan once if you're a real estate investor, once you get a deal under contract, once you close on that deal, let's start thinking about a tax plan. If you're a business owner, once you start actually investing and start actually investing in some startup costs or purchasing some equipment, now's a good time to start at least talking to someone such as myself who specializes in tax planning, who can help you out with identifying what tax type of tax planning needs are available. If you have been in business for quite some time and you've never had a tax plan, if you perhaps uh think you may be overpaying in taxes, or even if you're paying very little, it you know, you might need a tax plan. You probably do if you're making over a hundred thousand dollars a year and and you're you're not doing any planning or you're just self-preparing, you're probably missing out on some opportunities. So so, but one of the things to best answer this question of when do you need you need to have at least some actions that you're taking in your business, or at least you know, for some more complex entity structures uh that you're gonna do. Let's say you're a foreign investor and and you want to know how to properly structure an investment before closing on a property, these are the times when you want to start engaging in someone to do a tax plan. How much should you invest into a tax plan? Now, when we think about this, what I want you guys to think about is back to understanding return on investment. Now, I don't know too many real estate investments that will generate a 100% return on investment in year one. But I still see real estate investors buying property year after year and self-preparing or just going with their cheap, you know, bargain tax accountant around the corner instead of investing into a tax plan because I'm telling you right now, the tax plan will generate with me, you're gonna see a minimum of 300% return on investments per year for that tax plan. It's gonna be the best investment you've probably ever made. So, how much should you make? I want you to consider the tax savings you're gonna be getting out of this tax plan. My pricing is based on the complexity and the value that I can add to your business. And prices range depending on a wide variety of air of things that I look at. I'll tell you right now, though, if you are a beginning investor and you just have one rental property. And it's your first time owning a business, and you want to understand what to write off, how to write it off, if it's cost segregation study is necessary, all those types of things, we can do a very affordable tax plan. It'll typically be somewhere between seven and nine hundred dollars. Um, now some of my tax planning clients I charge a little bit more because we are gonna go uh a little bit more in depth, and sometimes there are greater complexities, but you want to consider your return on investment. So even if you don't go with me and you're going with another tax planner, you want to understand what's the return on investment from this tax plan. So, how much tax would I be paying before if I didn't have the tax plan compared to if I did? And you should see at least, I would say, a 200% return on investment. So if you pay $10,000 for tax plan, they should say you've viewed at least $20,000 per year in taxes. Uh, oftentimes, like I said earlier, we'll see about a three to uh $300 to a thousand percent return on investment per year for this tax plan. So if you're investing, I would say focus more on the return on investment than the price. So if someone quotes you at a tax plan for $20,000, you know, this is gonna be more than you'll you've probably ever paid for an accountant. You know, it it might you might be taken aback at first uh by the cost here. And and you know, I've I've had some people who who really aren't familiar with the tax planning process, and they'll tell me, well, last year I only paid my accountant $2,000 and you're telling me it's this much. Well, well, let me ask you, how much did your did your how much tax planning did that accountant do? And does it make sense to invest $20,000 into a tax plan that saves you $100,000 per year? You know, the answer to me is pretty simple. So when you're analyzing this, make sure that it is worth it that as long as you're gonna get your money back in the form of tax savings and then some in year one, you should be all right. But be just be prepared. Like I said earlier earlier, this is an investment, it's not an expense. We don't want to pinch pennies on a tax plan. So even if you you know you find that it is you know a tax plan is a little expensive, you how much more are you gonna be spending overall for your business and in your taxes without a tax plan, right? So if this tax plan is really expensive, but the the you know, going by what we and what a good tax player can do for you, it you know, the more you're spending, the more tax savings you're gonna be able to create. So this is you know, this can be the best investment of your career with the right account. Who should you hire for your tax plan? Now, what I suggest you you think about is think about your current account and what they're doing for you. A lot of people feel like they need to come to their account and they if they don't know the right questions to ask that account, they are not gonna uncover that magical question that unlocks all the tax savings, right? They don't even know what to ask their account or what opportunities are available. You know, they they don't their account doesn't tell them about cost segregation, doesn't tell them about the benefit of uh an S Corp or a C Corp property management company or any or maybe to invest with your retirement accountant. If you feel like your account isn't bringing these opportunities to you, this accountant probably is not going to be the best person to engage in a tax plan with. You want to work with someone who really focuses and specializes in tax reduction strategies and the most advanced tax reduction strategies there are. So, you know, when I work with my clients, we usually onboard them, we start them all off with a tax plan. So from day one, we hit the ground running with the most effective tax strategies for their situation. You want to find someone who is gonna not only be proactive with you and be asking you the questions that you don't think to ask, you want to think, oh, I didn't even think to ask that question. I didn't even realize that it was possible to invest with a retirement account. I don't even know what I don't even know what cost segregation is. You want the account who brings these ideas to you instead of you having to overthink about what's available. I tell all my accountants, you know, you have to tell me about your life events and and what those events are. I I keep in touch with my clients throughout the year, not just year end where we got to do the tax preparation. And I'm also constantly driving into what are your life circumstances, what are your life events, changes in jobs, changes in what your goals are. And also I inform them on changes in the tax code and opportunities created from the CARES Act, PPP loans, all these sorts of things, thinking ahead of time and throughout the year. So you need to uh you need to work with someone if you're interested in tax savings and tax planning, who is going to work with you throughout the year and who is going to come to you with the opportunities and the questions. And also, you want to think about the industry. You want to work with someone who not only specializes in tax planning, but who also will has who also has a decent amount of knowledge in uh about your industry. So, you know, if you might go to an accountant and say, hey, do you work with tax do you do tax planning? And they go, Oh, uh, yeah, yeah, sure. It says on my site. That may not be the right person. You know, when they when they list the industries they work with, and it's just it's just this giant menu of all these different industries, it's just like a you know, just a select all. Sure, we do that. We'll work with a dentist, we'll work with a real estate investor, you know, we'll we also work with entertainment, you know. Unless it's a large firm with a lot of people, you know, you might find yourself uh you might find yourself working with someone who really doesn't have the ability to identify those industry-specific tax incentives and benefits and tax credits and everything that you can be doing to optimize your situation. Uh, so the you know, uh if you want to find a specialist, you maybe ask around. You know, if you are a dentist and you want someone who specializes and is great with working with dentists and has done it before, ask around, ask in your network, ask me. I'm a certified tax coach. Uh I spend hundreds of hours um talking to either real estate investors, business owners, or other CPAs. I know people who, if if what you need is outside of my scope, I can connect you with someone who can help you out with creating that tax plan to optimize your tax savings. It looks like I put that slide twice. Okay, discovery sessions. A discovery session, as I discussed earlier, is when it's a free consultation where I look into and evaluate what you are doing with your tax savings, what has been reported on your prior return, how are things looking for the current year, and based on what we're projecting and what we see and what your goals are, uh, what kind of opportunities may be available if you invest in a tax plan. Now, I'm going to put uh a link in to the um the event on Facebook, and I'll also put it in the chat, or you can email me, mark at markprobergcpa.com. If you want to block off some time to just to begin this initial discovery session, I'll look at your prior year returns and also we'll have a phone call, it's a free phone call for an hour where we look at where you're going, what you've been doing in the past, and basically here's a chance for us to identify missed opportunities and assess how much of an impact a tax plan can be. So, and you know, sometimes I'll look at a client's return. One time I had a client prospect who said, Hey, my my wife says I'm paying too much in taxes. I said, All right, send me send me your returns. Let's let's take a look and I'll get back to you. And I told him, uh, it looks like you're actually paying the right amount in taxes. Sorry to let you down there. Um, but you know, at least here's a chance to know, see if you're missing out on any tax savings opportunity. It's free, it's a chance for you for us to meet and at least you know establish a connection. Even if you're not the right fit for me, I can refer you to a specialist. Um, but I highly highly recommend the discovery session. You'll at least get a couple of tax tips and pointers that can send you in the right direction. So that's all that I really wanted to talk to you about. I am going to stop sharing my screen and I'm gonna look into the chats and the questions and see what we got here. Uh, what can you talk about the S-corp? How dividends work in it and investing retained earnings in limited partner real estate deals. Great question, Noah. S-corps are um can be really beneficial, but they can also kind of back that strategy of creating an S-corp can backfire on you, and you can actually wind up paying more in taxes and filing fees if you do it prematurely or it's not necessary. So when you have an S-corp and you let's say you elect, and most of you guys are if you create an S-corp, you are electing an S-corp from an LLC. So you when you have the LLC and then there's no tax election for it, the LLC is a general flow-through entity. What that means is let's say you make a hundred thousand dollars through your S Corp through your LLC, that money will just flow through to you if you're a real estate agent, or you know, you typically this is active income, you're a real estate agent. We see a lot of S Corps for real estate agents, or maybe you're a flipper, general contractor, the money flows through to you, and you pay taxes on that income at your marginal rate. However, you get this thing called the qualified business income deduction, which is at 20%. If you are a general contractor of some sort, sole proprietor, real estate agent, you look at your schedule SE and see what the damage is from that self-employment tax. If you're playing self-employment tax, what we do is we create that S-Corp. That S-Corp pays you a what we determine to be a reasonable wage compensation, and only that amount is subject to that self-employment tax. Now, the amount above that is going to be what you describe, what you're describing as a dividend distribution. The benefit we see is after you paid your reasonable wage, the uh the amount exceeding that amount will flow through to you and will not be taxed, will not receive that painful Social Security tax, which is gonna be 15.3 percent of your first $137,700. Now, um, if you all if all of your uh income in this LLC is just regular rental activity, so if it's just a long-term buy and hold rental, you're not gonna be paying any payroll taxes anyway. So it doesn't make sense to do the escort tax selection. Also, not to get too complicated with you guys and dive too through too many rabbit holes, um, but that distribution that doesn't receive the payroll taxes, that's the only amount that you get that 20% QBI deduction for. So that salary that you're paying yourself doesn't get the QBI, so you lose some of that QBI deduction. Also, you got to start you know issuing yourself a payroll. You gotta the form 1120S for S Corp is a little more expensive. So you really gotta make sure the juice is worth the squeeze for this S-Corp creation. And what I tell my clients and prospective clients is let's monitor your activity. If you're a new business owner and we're not quite ready, we're not quite at that income threshold where it makes sense. Let's monitor the activity of this business. And once it makes sense, you know, and we're ready, we will choose that S-Corp tax selection. We can always do the late S tax selection if we need a little bit more time, it'll almost always go through. Um, and this other part, oh, so limited partnership deals. If it's a limited partnership, so let's say you have uh it's a limited partner and you are a general partner, then you are actively participating, you will also get that uh you will be subject to that self-employment tax. Uh, limited partners, if you do not materially participate, and you can determine if you're just materially participating based on a seven-prong test, you can look that up. Um, if you do not materially participate, then you also will not have to worry about that uh payroll taxes. Um, another thing about the uh we want to think about with a limited partner, the general partners uh the in a general in a limited partnership will be subject to they will not receive that same type of asset protection. So if you're a general partner in a limited partnership, only the limited partners are gonna be protected, have their personal assets protected from this partnership. So if you are a general partner, you want to create an LLC to work under, and that LLC becomes a general partner. Now the LLC gets that asset protection. That was a long answer, Noah. I hope that helps you out, and uh, I hope that made sense um to you, non-CPA listeners here. Uh, sometimes I need people to bring me back down to planet Earth. Um, where is a kitten? Uh you guys got to see the kitten, uh my mascot. Um, do you recommend to use life insurance plans as a source of loans for investing in real estate? Now I am aware of life insurance. I'm also aware of the Kaizen Infinite Banking where you can actually leverage funds to invest in life insurance. The answer, unfortunately, to this question is something you'll hear from a lot of accountants is it depends. A lot of my investors, I'm gonna need a sip of this cat water. A lot of my investors are um early investors in the earlier stages, and they would rather use their funds to invest in real estate than to invest into life insurance. Because when you invest in real estate, especially you have that real estate professional tax status, you can do some things to create some losses and write-offs from those investments that will reduce your overall tax liabilities and you're investing in assets that are going to grow in value and depreciate and actually create write-offs, even if they're cash flow positive, and you have a good tax planning CPA. But uh life insurance is and can be a very powerful strategy that you can use as uh something to maybe have a diversified source of asset wealth building uh you know devices in your portfolio. Also consider the fact that there is also from the purpose of estate planning, there is that value from for having a life insurance policy. You can borrow from that in the future, and you know, you do pay fees on managing it, but you can take you can borrow from that without paying taxes. So it really you gotta do just depending on your liquidity, how much working capital you have, what are the benefits. Are you finding a deal in time? Do you just have money you want to park? These are all variables that we want to consider to see if it makes sense for you. But at the end of the day, I'm still gonna have to just say it depends. But yes, you could borrow from it to invest in real estate. Are your fees fixed per year or do you charge hourly? So, my fees I typically will do value-based pricing. So, when I if I do a discovery session, uh, we will analyze the complexity and the value and how much time it's gonna take to do a tax plan for you. And that tax plan is typically gonna be a one-time fee. Sometimes I'll break it up into a two-time fee. So there's no hourly billing. The reason why I try to shy away from hourly billing is because then my clients are afraid to call me. And if my frying my clients are afraid to call me, then I really can't help them out as much because I can't learn about their situation and and when they're gonna be doing significant transactions, so we can consider things like 1031 exchanges to defer capital gains taxes, you know, all sorts of variables. If my clients feel like they're on the clock, they're not as comfortable. So I typically will do a one-time fee for the tax planning, and for um monthly types of services, we will do uh perhaps we'll get them on a monthly plan to keep me on retainer, and that will include the tax prep. If we're just doing it more of an a la carte service, they don't need as much guidance after the tax plan, then we will do a la carte and I will just charge for the tax preparation. However, uh there are certain circumstances where there is too it's a little bit too tricky for me to evaluate the scope and and how much involvement I will have in in this uh type of engagement. So there are occasions where I will propose an hourly engagement because I just don't know how many hours and how much time commitment is going to take for me. Sorry, that's another really long question, but that's how I do it. Um do we have so it looks like uh we have I've answered all the questions in in the chat as well in the in the QA. What I recommend you do is um write my email in the chat right now, mark at markprobergba.com. If you have any follow-up questions, I want you to email me at that email address. I'm also right now, I'm gonna upload a link. If you are interested in that free discovery session, let's say you're not quite sure if you need a tax plan. Let's I'm also gonna put this link in the in the Facebook event for this webinar. But if we're at the point where we want to where uh you think that you may or may not need a tax plan, you can uh schedule a discovery session with me, send me your prior returns, and let me understand what your goals are, and I can give you an assessment of how much value I can add and and how much tax savings we can create together with a tax plan. So, you know, click on that link, book a time, it's free. You'll you know, it'll at least at the very least it'll help you uh gain comfort that you're not missing out on any tax saving opportunities if we find a tax plan is not really necessary. Uh, but I want you to click on this and at least you know, shoot me an email and give me your thoughts. I would I would you know just look in the chat, you'll see those links. Um, I just posted the link to the discovery session right there. Um, and like I said, at the very least, it's a chance for us to talk and connect. I love meeting business owners and real estate investors, so it'll be great to have you guys on board. Uh, looks like we've answered all the questions. I hope some of you guys got some value out of this this webinar. Uh, it's going to be on my my YouTube site as well in case you want to watch the replay or send this to someone who is maybe you know someone who's thinks who uh maybe they're missing out on there, maybe someone you know is overpaying in taxes, and maybe they might want to consider a tax plan. Send it their way. I would greatly appreciate that. Um, you know, subscribe to my YouTube channel and uh let's stay in touch. Would love to have it love it if you keep me as a resource. That's all I got for today. Hope you enjoyed the webinar. About to log out, enjoy the rest of your night and have a happy holidays.