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Today, we have a phenomenal episode featuring Stephen Hall, a recognized
tax expert and entrepreneur. Stephen’s wealth of knowledge in tax strategy and his entrepreneurial journey, which includes scaling an accounting firm to serve over 2,500 businesses, make him an invaluable resource for those keen on mastering their financial futures.
In this enlightening discussion, Stephen highlights his role as the Go-to Tax Advisor for syndicators, business owners, and fund managers. His firm, Robert Hall & Associates, has served high net worth individuals for over 50 years, and he brings that wealth of experience into today’s conversation.
Stephen delves into the nuances of tax planning versus tax preparation, emphasizing the importance of proactive strategies. He unpacks the myths surrounding taxes that often lead investors astray, revealing instead how tax efficiency can rival, if not exceed, investment yield in building wealth.
This episode is a treasure trove of insights on maximizing your financial potential through strategic tax planning. With a focus on creating tax-efficient partnerships and leveraging industry incentives, Stephen provides a roadmap for how listeners can legally minimize their tax burdens and optimize investment returns.
In This Episode
- The critical difference between tax planning and tax preparation
- Common tax myths that cost investors millions
- Tax-efficient investment strategies for real estate professionals
- Upcoming changes in the tax landscape in 2025
Stephen, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Dave. I’m excited to be here.
Yeah, always good to connect and really looking forward to the discussion. As we were chatting, it’s interesting because I was thinking about it in terms of some of the topics that I love to bring to our investors. Tax is definitely up there in the top three easily, because the way I see tax is it’s literally one of your biggest opportunities. It’s as big as the actual investment yield itself. But people just don’t think of it that way, right? Because we’re all looking at what kind of yield we can get, a 10%, a 20% type yield. But what if you could get that 20% yield and reduce your taxes by 20%? That’s when you’re talking about exponential wealth growth.
So really excited to have you on the show and really kind of unpack some of your strategies and things, especially as not only a tax professional but as an entrepreneur and investor yourself and how you’ve been able to leverage those strategies. But for those folks who aren’t familiar with you or your firm, please just give us a little bit of background in terms of your origin story and how you got into tax and investing.
Well, thank you, Dave. I’m honored to be here. So my background is I’m an enrolled agent and I started in Los Angeles geographically, where it’s one of the top five cities in terms of high net worth individuals that reside in the region. I grew up in the business. I’m a second generation owner of a firm called Robert Hall and Associates out of Glendale, California. As a result of being in Southern California with the skyrocketing real estate prices, as well as the entertainment industry where you have hundreds of thousands of folks that have over a $1 million net worth, it was easy for us to understand the problems they would incur with the high tax rates. For example, in California, your tax rate could be as high as 13% at the state level. Plus, in today’s rate, you could be as high as 37%. So daily we were challenged with the opportunity and the challenges to find ways to reduce those tax liabilities for all the different entrepreneurs that came through our doors for the past five decades as a firm.
Yeah, and so can you help the audience really understand this? I think this is such a really critical part of understanding tax. It took me a lot of battle wounds working with different CPA providers out there, but talk to us about the difference between tax planning versus tax preparation.
Definitely. So when you do tax planning, tax planning is where you’re putting on your strategic hat and you’re trying to forecast what your revenue is going to look like and what you want to do in terms of an ROI and what vehicles you can go into to reduce your tax liability. Whereas tax preparation is just a redundant compliance process on a checklist where you take the data you’re given and you put it on the appropriate forms based on what was executed during the calendar year. The way I always say it is tax preparation is reactive, tax planning is proactive. So you always want to be proactive on the planning side. That way, when you get to the reactive phase of preparing the filing, you were proactive enough to prepare the tax liability you’re planning for versus being reactive to the forms you receive at the end of the year to find out what you owe to the government.
Yeah, and that should be explained in college.
Absolutely. It should be explained in college. And also, when you look at our tax system, you have to understand the tax system. When you look at states like New Jersey or New York, it comes from the English Empire that established new versions of York and new versions of Jersey. So our tax system was birthed from the English system. The English system favored owners of businesses, owners of companies, not employees.
That’s why this tax system we have favors self-employed businesses or equity owners at companies where you have shares in stock, providing favorable treatment. This was the origination of our tax system—to favor the investor because early on, even in the times from the British Empire, they recognized those business owners were the ones that would create the jobs. So it was important for them to give the investors as many favorable tax structures and vehicles as possible so they could grow their economy and keep their people employed.
Yeah, great insight right there because I think most people feel as if taxes are just something you have to pay or it’s a penalty, right? I have to pay these taxes. And it’s a big paradigm shift to be thinking about actually partnering with the government and seeing taxes as a roadmap of incentives.
You’re absolutely right with the word partner. For example, since post-COVID, more and more folks are realizing they don’t have to be in the geographic region where they resided. For example, I moved to Florida. So I’m here in a tax jurisdiction that has zero tax. But let’s say you’re a business owner in New York and you want to relocate. You can now negotiate with the states about relocating your business if you have employees or a real estate footprint. These states will come and help recruit you. They will want your business. Some of these states will give you tax credits or a five-year property tax abatement on the building you need for your warehouse, or they’ll give you a matching program on your labor to incentivize you to move and create jobs in their community.
For example, if you move to Texas, you can contact the governor’s office, and the governor’s office of Texas will hand-hold you and help you identify the right location to move to. They will help you get set up financially and help with matching funds to invest in the infrastructure that you need. Another example: I was working with a colleague looking to buy a window manufacturing company, and we were looking at the loans available. There are community manufacturers loans programs in every state that will subsidize the interest rate to encourage you to move to that specific area through the economic development department. These economic development departments are now getting very competitive for your business. It’s just a matter of being aware of the incentives that are available for you and your industry. When you do more of a geographic search in multiple states and multiple cities, you can get all these constituents to start bidding for your business.
Yeah, really interesting. Maybe I would call that geographic tax arbitrage.
Well said. It is. That’s basically what it is. Absolutely.
Now I heard something the other day, tell me if this is valid. Let’s say you’re a California resident and you transition to Florida, but you keep your house in California for three months out of the year, but you’re in Florida for nine months. Is the state still looking for revenue from you?
So that’s a great question. California is one of the most aggressive tax agencies that try to enforce taxation, even if you’ve left the state. As of right now, if you’re a non-resident of California and you still own property, however, you spend less than 180 days in that state, you’re a non-taxable resident in the state of California. However, the Franchise Tax Board, which is the administrative arm of California, will occasionally attempt to make the argument that you still are a de facto California resident, which is not the case. If you do have that issue, it’s important to have a California tax attorney who’s very familiar with the Franchise Tax Board administrative law process to make that argument that you’re not a California resident.
Got it. Interesting. Tell us about some of the biggest misconceptions that people have about taxes.
Tax is literally one of your biggest opportunities-it’s as big as the actual investment yield itself.
Great question. So the biggest misconception people have about taxes is that when you have a gain, you just have to pay the tax. That’s the biggest myth that’s out there. You can plan if you’re proactive, and when I mean by the word proactive, if you have a large gain or you’re going to have a significant event, it’s important to plan at least 24 months in advance. That way, you can plan accordingly to redeploy the title or ownership of that asset to another vehicle. When you just sell that asset, that asset goes into a different tax ID number than your social security number that could potentially grow on a tax-deferred basis over time or potentially be tax-free altogether, depending upon what your goals and your long-term financial goals are or your estate planning goals are.
Any other myths that come to mind?
Any other myths that come to mind would be that the IRS is looking to audit anyone. That’s a myth. The reality is the IRS, with their computer systems now and with artificial intelligence coming up, they’ll know what your revenue is because the banks every quarter are regulated. So as a result, when you open up a bank account tied to a tax ID number, the chances are the IRS servers will know what you make. And as long as you report your deposits and report the expenses based on the AI servers, they’ll know pretty clearly if you’re trying to game the system or if you’re compliant with the system. So you can’t be cute anymore to try to hide from the government because those AI servers are pretty robust.
Also, for example, this past week, BOI, the Beneficial Ownership Information Statement, for those of you that are listening to the current presidential administration, just canceled that regulation. That beneficial ownership information form was another layer of red tape for all business owners to tell another government agency, the Treasury Department, who owns the trust or who owns the business. They also want to know if there was a trust involved who was really in control of that trust.
But the confusing part about all this is through the FDIC. If you’re a bank, the FDIC requires all banks to report all that information anyway to the regulators that are managed and controlled by the federal government. So it was just a redundant layer of information. The reason why I’m bringing that up is because that information that the banks are regulated by, whether it’s the state agencies or the federal agencies, the Treasury Department will have access to that information anyway to know where your money is and who owns those accounts. As you onboard a new checking account or a new bank account, that information is in the bank servers to know who the owners are in reality. You can’t hide from the government. And that’s a big myth. People think they could just hide or open up another checking account. It’s that nature, and that’s not the case. With technology, you can find anything anywhere.
Hmm. Are there any dirty dozen or things right now that you would advise investors not to do? And let me give you some examples, things like conservation easements or let’s say captives, or things of that nature.
Great question. So the first thing that comes to my mind is cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is a great alternative investment. In fact, we just saw the presidential administration is supporting the currency and proposing to put it into the reserve portal within the Treasury. But you do have folks that say, “Hey, I want to store my crypto in a cold wallet, and then I’ll sell my crypto and put it back into a cold wallet.” They think that they can get cute and get away with it. But the reality is that’s being monitored because once you sell it online somewhere, there are nets out there that will track that ID number. So you are not anonymous. You will get caught eventually with that cold wallet if you don’t report it to the Treasury Department.
I’ll give you an example. When the Swiss swore secrecy on all those account holders for US taxpayers about a decade ago, the US Treasury Department went to Switzerland and said, “We want you to divulge all of your account holders that are Americans.” The Swiss fought it for two years, but in the end, when the United States threatened Switzerland with economic embargoes, Switzerland caved in. As a result, every account holder that was in the database in Switzerland was exposed for every US taxpayer that was hiding money in Switzerland. The problem is, you may have inherited an account from a long-lost cousin for $100,000 and kept it in that account in Switzerland. You may have only earned $10,000 on that account over the years. Well, now the US Treasury Department, the IRS, wanted to penalize that account 50% of the account value at that moment in time.
So it would have been a lot cheaper to pay the tax on the interest you’ve earned on the account rather than paying a 50% penalty on the total value of that account. The moral of the story is if you have cryptocurrency and you have it stored in a cold wallet and you think you’re not going to get caught, think again, because the statute of limitations is unlimited in that example. With AI and the progression of all these servers, I would not take a chance to try to hide from a regulator with cryptocurrency in terms of selling it because you will get caught.
The reason why I’m bringing that up is because when you bring up the conservation easements and the listed captive insurance programs, in the beginning, those two programs were great programs. The problem is the Treasury Department and the IRS said, “Wait a second, some people are abusing the program.” As a result of that abuse, they went to the other extreme to over-enforce those areas. So then those areas became listed transactions. That’s what could happen depending on a promoter that’s promoting a special crypto and saying, “Hey, you can put it on the cold wallet. You don’t have to tell the government anything.” Guess what? That kind of language patterning is going to be exactly what the US Treasury is going to look for and make it a listed transaction. They’ll look into it and find out who the registered account holders of those accounts are.
When we talk about conservation easements, conservation easements are great. You just have to make sure the appraisal is, in fact, real on the underlying value of the asset. Also, post-2024, the government has a safe harbor regulation now about the value that you can associate with specific easements. So they’re still valid. You just want to be very aware of who’s promoting that easement and find out which tax attorneys they’re using to protect you as the member of the partnership that’s investing in that easement. That way, the case will follow the safe harbor regulations to prevent a taxable event in the future. That’s the key.
The reason why these easements got such a black eye is because some of these appraisers were over-inflating the value of the assets. It wasn’t even a tax loophole; it spoiled the spirit of it. The whole spirit of the conservation easement was to preserve land for conservancy purposes in the United States. That way, we’d have more parks, more national parks.
Yeah.
Or more state parks, city parks, you name it, or a wildlife refuge. Unfortunately, some of these promoters took advantage of the law and overinflated the value of their appraisals, which created the problem that it has today.
The biggest myth is that taxes are just something you have to pay. With the right strategy, you can legally pay little to no tax.
Yeah, like a 10 to one valuation or something. Something really high, yeah.
Correct. So where they get cute and try to over-inflate what was really truly intended for. Unfortunately.
Yeah. Since you opened up crypto, what are your thoughts on capital gains with the new administration? Do you think there’s any chance that goes away?
Great question. My personal opinion is this current administration is going to try to increase our gross domestic production as high as possible, our GDP. So this administration will want to do whatever it can to make this economy grow as fast as humanly possible. So as of right now, any capital asset that’s invested is still subject to a capital gain.
So cryptocurrency is still taxable. But could it potentially be an exempt vehicle down the road? The jury’s out. I don’t have a good answer yet. We all would want that to be the case, but I can’t confirm that that’s going to happen. Because I’ve not seen specific draft legislation that supports that theory at the moment.
Got it. Stephen, help the listeners with a couple of strategies that you like for, and I’d like to break this into two parts, right? One being for the business owners, entrepreneurs out there, and then the second portion would be really for folks that are W-2 income providers.
Great question. First of all, let’s look at the fastest growing area of capital appreciation, that would be cryptocurrency. So if one bought Bitcoin for let’s say $300 and it’s worth $3,000 a coin, or what is it worth now? $80,000, $90,000 a coin? One of my favorite vehicles, if you’re over 50 years old, is a charitable remainder trust where you could basically, as long as you plan ahead, you could contribute that currency into a charitable remainder trust. And then down the road, when you plan on selling it, all that money can go into the trust. Following some annuity-type calculations, you’ll be able to take a small percentage of that money out every year and let the rest of those funds continue to grow on a tax-deferred basis. But over your lifetime, if you want to, you could have the remaining interest go to a charity.
And that charity could be your family’s foundation, which is exempt from taxation. Ultimately, for example, I know some folks that bought Bitcoin at $200, and now they have a $20, $30 million value of this portfolio. And it’s single-handedly being one of their largest assets in their whole portfolio. They don’t want to keep it all in that portfolio because they’re worried about volatility.
So the charitable remainder trust would be a great vehicle to use to sell the asset, pay as little tax as possible, get a charity deduction, and be able to diversify without losing 23% of it to the federal government and as high as 13% to state governments, depending upon where you live, to tax.
So that’s an example of a fast-appreciating asset. Now, if you have a business, it depends. For example, if you were to sell the business, you could roll it up and defer your gain into private equity, your stock gains with your partner. You could do a partnership rollover, for example, if you’re selling your business. That’s an example. One of my favorite vehicles to use if you’re planning on selling your business for x dollars and you’re hoping to get another bite of the apple and so you sell it to a large private equity firm for y dollars, there’s a chance to defer the gain and then sell it for a bigger dollar amount down the road. And the same token, defer the gain on the first bite of the apple, roll it over to the next company, and then that next company, when they grow that vehicle, you can ultimately have a bigger exit. At that point in time, two years before you sell that, you could plan accordingly, whether it’s putting the money into a foundation or a charitable trust or other types of trust that may make sense for you and your family to minimize the tax liability from an exit of a business.
Yeah, that’s excellent. And this is one of the biggest reasons really I wanted to have you on the show too. I mean, it’s all about what we talked about at the beginning, right? Being proactive with your taxes and doing this planning. Because if you’re a business owner out there, you’re likely going to exit at one point or another. But having the knowledge and having a strategy upfront is really key to kind of maximizing your gains on the back end.
And also timing. We talked about this last week with another group that when you have private equity coming into your industry, there’s always a beginning and there’s always an end to liquidity in a specific industry. So when you start seeing a flood of capital in your industry, don’t think it’ll last forever because you could be a mediocre company in a capital-rich environment and sell for more than the highest respected company, highest EBITDA type company in a down market. So it’s really important to look at your timing as well. So it’s not just waiting till you retire. It’s also looking at how liquid is that industry at the moment and whether there’s private equity going on a buying spree in that industry. And if they are, look long and hard and start planning now because you may want to exit sooner than you thought you should.
Good point. Any other strategies that you like or investment vehicles that you like that are tax efficient that you could share?
Absolutely. So if you’re married and your spouse is an empty nester where the kids are in college, it’s a great opportunity to look into potentially making your spouse a real estate professional where you could buy assets, real estate buildings, like storage facilities, mobile home parks, apartment buildings, industrial buildings, you name it, and your spouse could be the professional managing that ecosystem.
Because if your spouse spends over half of her time or his time in real estate and over 750 hours in real estate, we could take the losses of all of those assets and offset them against the other sources of income you may have. But now when we talk about the word losses, there are two types of losses. There’s operational cash flow losses, and then there’s losses on the actual building itself.
Because through the building itself, the government requires you to depreciate it over a 20-30 year period, depending upon if it’s a residential property or commercial property. Well, guess what? You can actually accelerate a portion of that 20-30 year depreciation schedule of that building in a shorter period of five years. And based on the State of the Union address that was voiced this past week, there’s an opportunity that Congress will bring back that 100% bonus depreciation. And if this current administration brings back the bonus depreciation retroactive to January 1 of 2025, there’ll be an even greater opportunity to accelerate depreciation and show a larger loss in 2025 to offset against your other sources of income as a real estate professional.
Yeah, we are all hoping for bonus depreciation to come back for sure. Actually, that’s exactly what the commercial real estate market needs, right? It’s either that or a drop in interest rates to really get it back on track. Because I think the Fed completely torpedoed the entire industry with all those rate increases, but this would be pretty huge for that. Since we’re talking about that, can you also help investors understand recapture a little bit? I know that can be a complex topic. So if you’re talking about some of these paper losses, not operational losses on an investment, let’s say you invested as a passive investor in a syndication, you’ve gotten to enjoy bonus depreciation throughout that investment. Can you explain how recapture works?
Definitely. So if you have $100,000, let’s say you buy a building today, an office building, and you’re accelerating that depreciation, instead of getting $3,000 a year for 30 years, 33 years, or we want to accelerate $100,000 in one year. So you take that $100,000 deduction in 2025, but now in 2027, you say, you know what, Dave, I want to sell that building. So you sell the building.
The government will want you to take that $100,000 deduction you took in 2025 and pay taxes on that $100,000 you already took in 2025 in 2027. Now, the reason why that’s not a big deal is because when you took the deduction, if you’re in the highest tax bracket at the federal level of 37%, you save $37,000 in tax when you took the write-off. But in 2027, when you want to sell that building, you cash out on that $100,000, the government is going to say, okay, we want a portion of that money back. They’re going to charge you 25%, which is $25,000. So now you’re still ahead because even though you saved $37,000 in 2025 and you’re paying back $25,000 in 2027, you’re still ahead by that gap of $12,000 for recapturing that depreciation. Now, the other option is that most real estate investors are aware of for those that are not in real estate. There’s another vehicle you could use called a 1031 exchange where you could roll that building over from the in 2027 when you plan on selling that building, transfer the profits of that building to a new building. As long as the building is equal to or greater in value, then you can roll that depreciation over and pay zero tax when you sell the building in 2027 and roll that profit over to a new building.
Yeah, interesting. What do you think in terms of, you’ve got some of that recapture. Let’s talk about, again, let’s use that same scenario, right, because we have a lot of passive investors here who are investing in different syndications. So they’re getting that bonus depreciation. You’ve got some of that real estate coming up in the year. Would you say that it’s wise to then reinvest, let’s say you make that profit back in year five, the property exits, you’ve got some recapture due and everything, but now you get your profits plus your original capital back. Would it make sense to actually redeploy that into another opportunity? So you start the clock again on getting that new round of bonus depreciation?
Absolutely, it definitely makes sense because then you could take the loss on the next deal to offset against the gains on that first deal or you could elect to, if you’re a tenant in common investor, just roll that profit over to the next deal. That way you pay zero tax anyway.
Yeah, so this is really essentially what a lot of family offices are doing and ultra high net worth, right? Continuing that role and then avoiding the taxes all the way through.
Absolutely. Also, family offices also deploy something called the Renewable Tax Credit Program, which is the passive investment tax credit, the ITC, the passive investment tax credit. So when they say the family has 10 million in passive income, they can offset that 10 million dollar passive income with a tax credit investment. So, for example, if you earn 10 million in passive income, that could represent a $3.7 million tax bill at 37%. So that family office will invest $3.7 million in tax credits to wipe out that tax bill. And then beyond that, they’ll achieve a return on that money on the growth of that investment as well.
Yep, got it. How about any strategies, I don’t want to leave out W-2 earners here, any of your top strategies to help W-2 offset their income?
Yeah, so W-2 earners could start a business or, for example, if they want to buy short-term rentals, short-term rentals such as Airbnb. If you’re actively involved in managing a short-term rental, you’re exempt from the real estate professional rule. So you could buy a building, a house, rent it out. And as long as you have short-term tenants in there where you use it with Airbnb or VRBO, one of those sites, or you could do it on your own, it’s considered a business. So therefore you could accelerate that depreciation, that 30-40 year depreciation schedule in year one, and you’ll be able to take that loss on your short-term rental and offset it against your W-2 income.
That’s an example. Another example would be a fee simple charity donation, which is not a conservation easement. It’s another form of a charitable partnership where you could put $100,000 into the vehicle and achieve a $450,000 charitable deduction. But there’s a cap. You can only deduct up to 30% of your income through that kind of a vehicle. So if you make a million dollars a year, you’ll be capped at $300,000 for the charitable deduction for that kind of a vehicle. That’s another great vehicle to use to offset against your W-2 income. And the third vehicle is, and what did Trump say the other night about the gas, about the fuel industry, oil and gas? Drill, baby, drill, that was his slogan. Well, and the tax code is favorable towards the oil and gas industry. For example, if you invested $100,000 in an oil and gas well, the government will give you an $85,000 deduction. That $85,000 deduction would save you $31,000 in tax. So for every $100,000 you deploy, you could potentially save up to $31,000 in income tax in the first year for investing in an oil and gas well.
In the beginning of the podcast, I said, this system favors the investor. And so when you look at these vehicles, this is all about investing money into growing an economy or investing money into real estate to improve it. Investing money into exploration for oil and gas to improve the economy of our system, our financial system. That’s the key.
Yeah, no, 100%. And it took me a long time to really discover that if you can actually partner with the government and actually understand how the code works, there can be incentives if you can leverage it properly. So then it changes your thinking. Every time I start a new business, buy a new asset, dispose of something, I’m constantly thinking about how can I do this most efficiently by partnering with the government, doing what they want you to do. And it takes a little while to get your head around that. But I think once you can do that, and I think it’s important also that you have to be an active partner with your proactive planner, like Stephen here, to put all of this in place. You can’t just magically hand everything over to your CPA and say, hey, reduce my taxes, right? It all starts with this education and then understanding of that so you can work on it together. Would you agree?
I agree. I mean, for taking it a step further, let’s say you’re a serial entrepreneur and you want to start another company. Sometimes we’re trying to plan before you even incorporate to figure out what vehicle do we want to use? What jurisdiction do we want to be in to maximize the tax savings? I’ll give you an example. In the startup world, when you invest in C-Corps, that way, even though C-Corps folks think, I don’t want to never want a C-Corp because it’s double taxation. Well, guess what? If you’re going to start investment in a C-Corp and put two million, let’s say 10 million to work for a new investment you’re doing, the government will give you a $10 million exclusion on your gain or 10 times your basis. So if you put 10 million into a new business and you exit it seven years later, the first 100 million you make will be tax-free in the form of a capital gain. Again, this is what the British set up from day one and the Americans took over when we became a tax system is to favor the investor. Here’s why. When you’re a serial investor or a serial entrepreneur, what are you going to do with that capital after you have a liquidity event? You’re going to reinvest. Every time you reinvest, you’re creating more jobs, you’re growing the economy.
Yeah, no, 100%. That’s really well said. Stephen, as an investor yourself, any particular investments or tax-efficient investments you like in terms of your favorites?
So my favorite is, when you have a down market in the stock market, like we’ve had, for example, when DeepSeek came out and the market corrected about 20% one day, that’s a great time to convert. One of my favorite vehicles is when you see a short-term drop in the market, it’s a potential to do a Roth conversion because the next day, if you want to redeploy your capital, you can just either go back in the market or you could transfer your money into a vehicle called a self-directed IRA and redeploy that capital into alternative investments. And I’m a big fan of that. So that way, if you’re growing your capital pretty quickly, you can grow tax-free through the Roth vehicle that’s available to everyone here. Give you a great use case: Peter Thiel, one of the founders who capitalized Facebook for Zuckerberg’s venture, well, he capitalized that half-million-dollar investment through a Roth IRA. Today, he’s got a couple of billion dollars in that Roth IRA that will never be taxed.
Nice. Awesome. Stephen, if you could give just one piece of advice to the listeners about how they could accelerate their wealth trajectory, what would it be?
The advice I would say is that when you look at tax, tax could be your largest creditor. So if you don’t plan, you’re going to lose 30 to 50% of your money if you don’t plan ahead. So what I always say is by planning, you could potentially reduce that exposure to zero. And if you’re already taking risk in an investment vehicle out there, why create additional costs in your overhead when you exit that successful venture and pay the government again? But if you can prevent that, you just doubled your money or close to doubling your money with the right tax vehicle in place. So that way your hard-earned money continues to grow because you’re already taking risk when you’re deploying that capital. So why take on an additional creditor if you can prevent it? So that’s my biggest advice. After all that risk you’ve taken to deploy that capital and all that dealings you’ve done, it does pay to take that extra time to do due diligence ahead of time on your tax structure. So that way when you do take that risk on whatever investment you’re going into, you can keep the majority of those funds in your pocket. Thank you.
Sage advice. Well, Stephen, I really want to respect your time. I know I could continue here for a couple of hours on having a great masterclass and continuing to geek out on taxes. But folks, this is real money and this is, I think, low hanging fruit for a lot of people. And you should be looking really at taxes since they’re your number one biggest expense as to ways to really optimize those in addition to your portfolios as well. So I really want to thank you for being here today and really sharing your knowledge, Stephen. It’s just a wealth of information. And if people would like to learn more about you or your firm, what’s the best place for them to connect?
The best place is on our website, RobertHallTaxes.com. It’s our website address, or you can shoot me an email at [email protected]. It’s a great way to send over your questions or any inquiries you may have.
Awesome. Thanks again, Stephen.
Thanks, Dave.