Your CPA Is Trained to Work for the IRS, Not You

Most CPAs, they talk, they don't listen, and they're transactional. Here you go. Here's the to do list. I'm going to file your returns, I'm going to do your bookkeeping, and that's it. They're not proactive.

They tend to be reactive. They're waiting for the other shoe to drop. It's not their fault. It's what they're trained to do.

They're literally only required to know about 25% of the tax code to pass the exam. They don't seem to realize it. They're really trained or programmed to work for the irs. Foreign.

Welcome to Truly Passive Income. I'm Clint Harris.

And I'm Neil Henderson.

Chris Miller is a tax strategist and founder of One Atlanta Tax Solutions, where he helps high income earners and business owners implement proactive tax strategies that can legally redirect 50 to $100,000 or more back into their pockets every year.

With over 15 years of experience bridging the gap between the financial world and the tax world, Chris specializes in six and seven figure tax deductions that most CPAs simply never bring to the table. Chris, welcome to Truly Passive Income.

Thank you. I really appreciate you guys having me on the show. It's been an honor.

Absolutely.

We were having a great conversation before we started, and we eventually actually had to stop and say, all right, this is burning up stuff that we could be doing live on cameras. You talk about being the bridge between the financial industry and the tax industry.

Can you walk us through what that actually looks like in practice when you sit down with a new client who has never had those two words connected before?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So simply put, I don't know, I would say kudos to CPAs for positioning themselves this way.

But for whatever reason, in my line of work, and I've been, you know, almost 20 years doing this, my partner, my original partner's my father. He's been doing it for over 30 years.

For whatever reason, whether you're in the financial industry or the tax world, CPAs have positioned themselves as, like, one of the top advisors for very successful people. And I don't fully understand it because I know, like, their role. I know what they know.

But, like, I'll be going over an investment strategy with a client and they'll want to bring their CPA on it. And I'm like, well, that's fine.

I don't know what he or she brings to the table or what their expertise are when it comes to, you know, multifamily or whatever. But for, for the point being, is CPAs good for them have put themselves in that position for good or for bad?

I would probably lean towards the latter because I've just seen, you know, a lot of missed opportunities, a lot of money left on the table. And, and really, again, it, it's not their fault.

Like, we're actually here to come alongside the tax professional and help them to see what they're missing out on, actually see additional streams of revenue that they could be making as business owners themselves that they're missing out on. Because most CPAs, they talk, they don't listen, and they're transactional. It's, here you go, here's, here's the to do list.

I'm going to follow your returns, I'm going to do your bookkeeping, and that's it. They're not proactive. They tend to be reactive. They're waiting for the other shoe to drop. And that's, again, it's not their fault.

It's what they're trained to do. They're literally only required to know about 25% of the tax code to pass the exam.

They don't seem to realize it, but they are, they're really trained or programmed to work for the IRS. So the IRS is super happy to have all these conservative CPAs running around America doing their, doing the Lord's work for them.

But we're here to really be, be an advocate for these solutions that are tried and proven, that some have been around for well over 10, 15, 20 years, and they were, obviously, we have to educate them on how things work.

So for the client, what I really simply say first, foremost to set the stage is, Mr. You know, I'll be like, Neil, do you work for your CPA or does your CPA work for you? What do you mean, Chris? Well, it's just important for me to understand. Does your CPA tell you what you can and can't do when it comes to taxes?

Are you the kind of client where you sell your cpa? No, that's too high of a tax bill. You need to work harder.

Because this is the, probably the number one response I get from clients who make significant money like, well, north of half a million, you know, over a million a year. The CPA will say, well, Mr. Client, you know, Neil, Clint, you should just be happy you're making that much money, not about the taxes you're paying.

You know, in other words, it's like, you know, don't worry about that. That's just part of the game. And it's like for us, we're here to say, no, that's not the case. There is a solution, There are options.

Our number one goal as a firm is to put more money back in your pocket so that you have options, so that you have choices.

Because to have options, to be in a position and say I got more money because I was more efficient with my tax planning and now I can invest in this deal with Neil and Clint because I have that option, they're taking that option away from you by really just not being proactive in their tax planning. So we're here to help them and ultimately help the client hold on to more of their hard earned dollars.

I'm not against the CPA though, so please don't hear that. I'm doing a CPA roll up myself right now with a bunch of CPAs. I love them. If properly tuned, they can be a really good money machine.

Yeah, I'll speak to that as well.

I think honestly, I probably have maybe an unpopular opinion and maybe I'm a little preconditioned on this because I do use a tax strategist that has helped me significantly in the past. But I think that there's an assumption that most CPAs should be able to do what tax strategists do.

And that's not the case across the board most of the time. I do think that CPAs a lot of times get blamed for things that they probably shouldn't get blamed for because people have a very high expectation.

And the reality is most CPAs can only do so much with the information that you give them.

You're providing them the information, they know the rules, they're going to apply it to the forms and then the deductions are going to be there and you're going to end up with a number.

What you're looking for, honestly, is someone that knows the strategy and knows the rules so well that they know where the legal loopholes are that can advise the CPA on exactly what they need to do, how they need to do it, and the order of operations. I think a lot of times the CPAs get blamed for savings that you wish you had and it's outside of their scope of excellence.

And what you really need is a tax strategist kind of calling the plays from the sidelines and helping them know exactly how to implement the information or how to do it. And I think you said it the right way. To me. It also seems like there is some natural contention there between some CPAs and some tax strategists.

As you know, is a lot of times the CPAs want to try to act like they are in that role. And sometimes they are. There's some great ones out there, but it's not necessarily mutually exclusive. That's not always the case.

The best situation is when you have them working in conjunction, a second set of eyes, the tax strategist coming up with a plan that's the best way to execute. And then the CPA is the boots on the ground actually getting it done.

Is that how you, that's how I personally see that relationship and kind of how I've been trained to frame it that way. Is, is that how you see it across the landscape?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean we did, we just did a meeting yesterday with a big, big actresses, her business manager and tax professional.

And they do, as a family, they're doing 30 plus million a year. So big dime taxes. But they're not getting the kind of solutions that we provide. We can save them. I think we did the math.

I mean, it was millions and millions of dollars of savings.

But her CPA was very friendly, very open minded, had a really good hour long conversation, went over three of our core strategies that would work for someone who has a lot of just business income, you know, ordinary income, but unfortunately you have that. And then you also have the CPA that sees us kind of as a threat because they think they do what we do. Like you're saying.

And instead of being open minded and being like, hey, maybe what they have is a good option not just for this one client, but this could be good for multiple clients. And, and it could be a whole new revenue stream for that CPA if they would be open to it.

But they just see it as territorial and they, a lot of times they just throw enough crap against the wall, hope something sticks and scare the client away from doing what they do with us. And again, that goes back to them being in that really trusted advisor position. That is like a super important position to be in with your client.

When do clients typically engage with you? You know, tax season is, is tough.

It's tough for me to get my CPA on the phone and I'm trying to imagine trying to get me and my CPA and a tax strategist on the phone together. When are you guys typically engaged?

Yeah, great question. So obviously people love to reach out to me in January, February, I made too much money.

Do you have anything that goes backwards, which we'll talk a little about a little bit today about? We do have a couple options. We Used to have more, but the CARES act did some cool things, but that has run out.

So normally speaking, and just in doing this for so long, it's Q3 and Q4. That's when people very heavily pick up doing it.

In my line of work, I don't, I probably network more in the summer than anything and travel too, because the type of clients I work with, that's when they travel. I mean, affluent people, they have fun in the summertime, so I don't really stay as busy then.

And because we're not actually filing the returns in house April 15, it's not as crazy for us unless the clients just are like, hey, I need this document or this K1 to send to my CPA, you know, can you help me with that? But for the most part in Q3, Q4 is when everybody is trying to figure it out. Now we do have some of our strategies where they incentivize.

Like we'll talk about today, you know, we do some things with bonus appreciation and if they lock it in sooner than later, there's a higher likelihood of that deal going into service this year.

So obviously everybody understands significant savings in taxes. That's, that's a no brainer. But, and I'm not asking you to give away the secret sauce here, but what kind of strategies are we're talking about?

I mean, obviously you talked about bonus depreciation, which just came back 100% bonus depreciation just came back through the one big beautiful bill, or at least it will in North Carolina when they finally vote, hopefully in the next few weeks to implement the tax law. It's a ridiculous hang up, but you know, cost segregation, bonus depreciation, qualified opportunity zones.

Like we're familiar with like the real estate side of things because we do syndication and storage.

But without giving away too much, what are some of the tools that you have in your tool belt that you, you find yourself using that most people just don't know about or, or should have access to but don't?

Yeah, those are all common.

So couple things that we have that maybe you haven't heard of, but I'll kind of go into greater detail of why what we have that you've heard of is still a little different. Just like the call I did yesterday, similar podcast to you guys, Doc, former physician as well and all.

A lot of passive income guys, a lot of white coat investors, but we have like leverage charitable deductions. So right now when you give to charity, you know, you just get a charitable deduction. But what if you could put in 50,000 and get 250,000.

You know what if there was a 5x multiple on that charitable strategy? And that's done creatively through bulk bulk buying of a product that gets donated. And you bulk buy it, you get it at a basically a massive discount.

We've got aviation leasing, which is incredible for I have some pro athletes, some NFL guys. There were two brothers, won't say their names, but very well known, they bought a handful of planes last year to wipe out their income.

So on the federal side, you can basically wipe it out completely.

Do they have a high, a very height, A big height podcast or something like that?

I'm sorry, they do, they do for sure. But the group I use that I trust very, very, very, very much on the aviation side, their clients of theirs.

And that's the same same group I'll use for all my big, big W2 people.

So they'll spend money on a quote unquote business expense or something like that. That's a deduction. And then they lease airplane hours and then they can use those anytime in the future.

So yes and yes to a degree. But here's the thing. In the aviation deduction world, me, us three could go into business together and have one partner who's full time in it.

The three of us don't have to get. There's like 720 something hours. There's over 700 hours. You have to get a year to get this qualified deduction. Just one partner has to get that.

Well, my guy is full time in it, so he gets those hours. We partner with him. So on paper, the NFL guy is in the aviation business on the side.

So what does it matter if he has a $10 million w, if he's got a big $10 million, you know, deduction over here from that business, it's going to wipe it out. And it's just that simple. So. And yeah, it does get leased out. So it actually makes money.

I mean, the people that know what they're doing in the plane business or it actually is a good business if you know what you're doing, you get a really good deal on the plane. But those guys don't have.

I mean, I always tell people doctors are one of the worst because they're a lot of times high W2 income earners and get crushed in taxes and they get taken advantage of a lot too by a bunch of crooks. But outside of that, it's pro athletes. I mean, you got a perfect example. I tell people this all the Time. I think it's a great, paints a good picture.

Gustav made like 41 million last year. After federal and state taxes, he was like 19 million. The average American says, so what? He made $19 million.

I say, well, he just funded an entire Society with $22 million. Like, that's crazy. That is not, that is not how our tax system should work. That is insane.

So we're here to be an advocate for them and help these people know that there are solutions. Because it's not like, yeah, paying taxes is important and we need that to stimulate our economy.

But you got to understand, people like us are the backbone of America. You know, people like us that are hiring people employing people that are also paying taxes.

We're doing so much to stimulate the economy as small to medium sized business owners, they need us, our economy needs us. And if we're bled dry in taxes, how much can we really help?

Yep, absolutely.

I, I mean, I think we all understand the importance and the value of taxes, but I don't know anyone that completely agrees with the way that that money is being spent. I know a lot of people that don't agree with the way that any of the money is being spent. But, you know, that depends on which news you watch.

But at the end of the day, you know, obviously we all want to pay the money that we owe and not a penny more. But our job is to understand the rules so well that we understand the legal loopholes.

And here's what I've learned about taxes over the last, honestly, 10 years, but more so since we've been in commercial development. The tax code is written as an economic incentive. It is, it is written purposefully to push people to do certain things that drive the economy.

1031 Exchange was something originally designed for farmers to help them level up from a smaller farm to a bigger farm without having to pay taxes on the gain every time.

Everything is designed as an economic incentive. And the rules and the loopholes are there for a reason. But it changes quickly.

And the people that take advantage of it are going to get a strategic advantage. And the people that don't, won't. And that's okay. But that's the purpose of the tax law.

It's not crooked for you to look for the legal loopholes and rules that are there. They are designed to be an economic incentive. So that's something. I had a mentality shift there. So that's just a little Clint Harris sidebar.

Took the words out of my mouth.

I want to ask you about. You've talked passionately before about the idea of building retirement where every dollar is untaxable.

And I know that you've used the term untaxable lifestyle. I'd love to hear more about that and hear you expound on.

Sure, yeah.

I mean, if you do proper planning with utilizing trust and entity structuring and series LLCs, people that really like some of the firms that we work with. There's one group that I work with where we have the crown plan. So, like, that's.

Anybody making really north of 500,000 could qualify for it, but they're soup to nuts doing it all.

But the ultimate goal is one day that client's gonna wake up and everything in their world is going to be protected and sheltered from taxes through layers of entities and trust. Nothing is nothing. None of it's gray. It's all above board.

It's all following the tax code exactly to the T. But if you really think about it like, you know, go, let's go back to the physician. You know, where you came from, the biggest thing that a physician has going for them when they retire one day is a big qualified pot of money, Right?

Big, big, qualified pot of money. That's usually. That'd be your average physician. But personally, I hate qualified money. I think it's the worst place to store money.

When I go over it with a client, I put their, here's your $3 million in your 401k, your SEP or your solo K or whatever. And I draw lines over it vertically. And the client's like, what is that?

I'm like, well, this is your, you know, your SEP, your 401K, but it's in prison. So what do you mean? I'm like, well, the government and your employer have all the control over that until you're.

Until you quit or you're 59 and a half, you don't really have any say so over that money. And then when you do have say so over that money, every time you pull a dollar out, they take 30 cents of that dollar. And so why is that efficient?

It's not.

So a big thing we're doing right now for clients, you know, actually Clint is doing Roth conversions and getting people out of those accounts to get them into something more tax efficient. Because ultimately, if you think about, like, the ultra, ultra wealthy, I mean, they. They don't want much of their assets at all in taxable things.

They want everything to be protected, everything to be sheltered. So it goes back to the options thing.

If you don't have a big tax bill or you have a very limited tax bill, you have significantly more options than the next guy who does it.

Well, you said two things there I want to touch on. One is I absolutely agree with you. We previously had a doctor come on this podcast and call traditional retirement accounts money jail.

And I think he's spot on. It is money jail. It's very locked in. You can do certain things, but it's really limited about what you can do.

And the other thing I want to touch on is you mentioned the kind of gray. You know, we've had conversations with tax strategists before.

I'm not saying for mine and Clint's personal returns, actual limitation isn't out on that. You know, and sometimes I'm trying to remember back.

I think my mom and dad talked to a tax strategist back in the 80s, and this guy's, okay, here's what you want to do. You know, you're getting killed right now in your W2 income. So what you want to do is go.

Go to Mexico and get a divorce, you know, and now you're, you know, step one, step one, go to Mexico to divorce, you know, and then, you know, and then we're going to start a business. You know, you're going to become an llc, and it's like all this, like, thing. And first of all, my mom, My mom's worst nightmare was divorced.

She was married to a fighter pilot. So, like, instantly, she's like, like, strike one and strike two. Like, everything this guy was saying sounded like, I'm.

I think I'm going to end up in prison. Oh, you know, talk to us about, you know, the. The pushing the limits without, like, risking an audit or worse.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good question. So, you know, for us, like I said, we've been doing this for over 30 years combined.

We've never had any clients get audited for anything that we've done, any of the strategies we've recommended. They've gotten audited, like the call yesterday.

And I'm sure you guys have experience with this, he just kept bringing up conservation easements like he was in them. He's had to deal with that. He's got lots of, lots of clients, just like I'm sure you guys have.

That was a real popular thing for doctors, you know, 15 plus years ago. And so we used to do them too. And they're perfectly legit if done properly. But we don't mess with them at all anymore. We haven't in years.

Because why, why even go down that road if there's going to be extra scrutiny or a potential red flag? We would rather not. We want to go the smoothest course possible.

So for us, like we're spending an enormous amount of time doing research and development and vetting all of these strategies that we recommend. So once we stamp it, we, we're saying, hey, this has our seal of approval. We've had multiple tax attorneys, look at this.

We have opinion letters on this from reputable law firms saying how they'll defend it in the event of an audit or review. So we're kind of doing all that for the client so the client doesn't have to.

And then I still have clients that are, you know, make, you know, let's say paid.

I had clients, two brothers in the personal injury space pay 6,7 million a piece in taxes last year and they had their lawyer vet a bonus depreciation strategy that we recommended with some basically tiny houses. And so they paid the tax attorney 60 grand to vet it. Tax return was like, this is great, I love the structure.

The only thing he did was he just recommended some verbiage in the document to be changed that benefited all of us as a firm.

But to me, like when that stuff happens, that's just further proof that we're doing very good due diligence when a very reputable law firm sees it and also okays it.

Yeah, let me ask you this. You, you talk about you got a lot of high net worth individuals that are utilizing your services. That's the, that makes sense.

That's where we always see the same thing. Successful tax strategists, like, that's the low hanging fruit, the people that have the biggest amount to save.

A lot of our listeners are passive investors or like we said, you know, tech people, white coat professionals, medical field, whatever it may be.

But mostly people find this podcast because they're looking for passive syndication strategies, whether it's storage, multifamily, you know, RV parks, mobile homes, whatever it may be, car washes.

So for that investor, a lot of times those people may be Starting as limited partners and LPs that are doing $50,000 minimums or a hundred thousand dollar minimums and kind of starting to grow and take off.

When is the right time for an investor, real estate investor, to look, to engage with someone like you like, do you wait until, okay, now we're making some real money and we got to think about a time to preserve that.

I know you're trying to build your book of business and of course you want those big fish, but I'm talking about specifically value that we can provide today for the listener. When is the right time for that investor to think about talking to a tax strategy.

So if they're like solely passive income and kind of living off that, obviously if there was going to be a sale they would, the sooner they would get in front of us the better. Preferably before there's an LOI letter of intent sign.

But you know, really the, the uniqueness about us while, yeah, I don't, I don't personally like most of my people make, you know, seven figures and up. I do have a team of people and we're not like saying no, we're not going to help the normal guy because we all were once that ourselves.

And you know, always best advice I ever heard is anytime you look down on someone, it's to pull them up. And I like that. So we actually, through one of our, or a couple of our strategies, we can go pretty low.

I mean I can take a guy with passive income of 200,000 a year if he's living off that and he's like, hey, I'm happy with this number because this is all I need. And I want my money to last and create a legacy which I totally get. $200,000 A year.

If you've got everything paid off of, you can live a very good life. We all know that. And it just goes up from there. But we can actually still help that guy.

So, you know, so one of our options or solutions is a, I'll just kind of go into this particular strategy. So these are tiny houses. We're all super familiar with them, but they have a different real estate qualification. Right.

They're not considered real estate because they're portable. So they can go, they can be used for passive income but they can also be used, like I said earlier, for W2 income.

But the cool thing about this structure is it's a 10 to 1. So you put a 10th of the what it's worth down, so 17,000 down and you get a $170,000 house right. So it's a 10 to 1.

So that 17,000 down is going to wipe out 170,000 of income.

And then you bo. You can bonus depreciate the whole thing. Even though it's a. It would be a what, a fixture or a piece of like, what is it, a piece of equipment?

Basically.

Yeah. You can bonus depreciate the entire structure. Exactly. So that's a really, really cool option. What they do with them is so it.

So our stuff, what you'll learn that's different about maybe some of the strategies that you guys are familiar with versus what we have to offer is all of our stuff has a multiple on it. A dollar in is always getting you really, at minimum $5 back. So we're really. Everything is a 5 to 10 range, depending on the strategy.

So a dollar in getting $5 back, you know, on average. So it's a really, really good deal for the client. But everything is, is, has a leverage effect in what we offer.

Also it's all turnkey white glove service. So client is just signing documents, putting money down and then everything's done for them.

And what they do with these structures is they put them on at resorts with like golf courses, for instance. So they got them down in Orlando, they got them in Arizona and Phoenix, but they rent them out.

So you want to golf two, three days, but you just want to, you don't want to maybe spend as much money staying in the hotel. You can rent these tiny houses. You know, you're not in the house, you're golfing, you're out the whole time.

And they'll average, they'll bring in 1, 2, 3, 4 grand a month in the busy, in the busy months, up to four grand sometimes. So you're not just getting the deduction, you're actually also getting that income down the road.

I love that. Love it. The multiplier effect is. That's crazy. I love that value. Just putting down the down payment.

But being able to depreciate the entire value, that's a veteran move.

They're covering the note. So all of what's going net to the client after it rents is after all the payments. And any kind of costs are covered.

Yep.

And then when you're winding that down, if they ever, let's say they have to sell it, that's gonna depreciate over what, five to seven years or something like that. So at the end of that timeframe, if they sell it, there's no recapture, right?

Correct. Correct. Correct.

It's not bonus Depreciation, accelerated depreciation over like 30 or 39 years. It's, it's short term.

Right. All right, I'm an idiot. Or that are very similar strategy in that. But it's done through a trust.

So the grantor trust is what gets all the participation hours. So the client doesn't even have to do the a hundred hours, which is great for a busy physician who doesn't have time to do that.

Mm.

And because it's done through a trust, there's basically a backdoor exit at any time in the future. So say the client's like, I'm done. I got what I needed out of this. I don't really want to mess with it anymore.

Or I feel like the market's changing and it's not going to rent as well. They can basically be dissolved of it and wash their hands clean and be out.

Very interesting. There's a lot of buzzwords in there. That's a, that's gotta be. You could do a whole episode just on that and probably get a lot of downloads.

Yeah.

So I want to start wrapping this up. I've got one more question before we ask our last question.

You studied self made millionaires earlier in your career and concluded that most of them built wealth through business ownership and real estate rather than the stock market. How has that insight shaped the way that you advise clients to redeploy tax savings you help them create?

And can you share any real example of that full cycle from tax savings to wealth building investment?

Yeah, good question. So I did. Seems like a lifetime ago. 3, 8, 4 Kids before, earlier than this. But I did, I studied them.

And what I realized was it's, it's rare that you were that farmer who bought Apple stock, you know, when nobody knew what it was and then woke up one day and you were a kazillionaire like that. Just that it's so rare you hear those stories.

But what you hear more than anything with all the people that we know is it was going into business for themselves and it was investing in real estate. I mean, I tell people all the time too.

Like, you realize some of the wealthiest people in the world right now didn't even get their wealth until they were in their 50s and sometimes 60s. I mean, most of them didn't have that kind of wealth in their 30s or 40s. But simply put, it's, it is, it's.

It, it's because it's what's tried and proven in America. Now, I think obviously on the real estate side, we have to be a lot more careful and picky with what we're doing.

That market's, it's a little, it's fluctuated a little bit lately. But I for myself, it's not just what I do for my clients. I've done this myself. So I've built my wealth.

I'm in a position where I could live off my passive income. You know, I'm almost 40, I could live off my passive income. That was the whole goal of what I did in the planning that I did that.

The same thing that you guys are doing and have done is you set yourself up to succeed regardless of what happens in the market. And if you have enough passive income coming in from those investments, no matter what happens, you know you're good. One.

Number two, if you all, if you lead with a tax and efficient plan because again for wealthy people, what's their biggest bottom line expense on their personal side, what's their biggest cost? It's taxes. Taxes are the greatest wealth eroder for successful people.

Even people making four or five hundred thousand dollars a year make four hundred thousand dollars a year. You're paying a hundred thousand federal tax a fourth of what you make a fourth of your year that you worked, you just worked to pay Uncle Sam.

So if we can create efficiencies with that, number one, there's an ROI on tax savings. So we're putting you know, easily 25 to 35% back in their pocket. So let's just say conservatively like let's just say it's a 30% ROI.

That right there is insane. Like most people don't average 30% a year. If you take 30, the 30% savings you got and then you run it through an investment with you guys.

Or let's just say like we have a fund that we do that's like 11 to 13% with a 12 month lockup for our clients who just want cash somewhere to store cash it then you're going to tack that onto it. So now you've just made 40 something percent or say your thing is 20, you just made 50 something percent.

It didn't have to do with taking risk, it had to do with creating efficiencies. And that's ultimately we're trying to help people realize is your taxes is your biggest waste.

Let's be super efficient with that and then let's figure out where's the best place to put money. Where's all the money going? What is tried and proven in this country to create wealth. So to get to full circle of Your question is?

I can literally show a client if they're, if they're wealthy enough that they're making enough money in five to seven years through efficient tax planning and the type of investments that we all do, some of them, I've been able to double their net worth. I mean, it's incredible. So, because people just aren't.

I mean, it's the power of compounding interest and then the factor of, the power of like, man, this is. I got 50 grand a year extra that I was paying the taxes. I was already saving 50 grand a year too.

So now I'm able to save a hundred thousand dollars a year, you know, through this type of planning. And it snowballs and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. But, but yeah, we like, we love the, the private equity space.

Personally to me, where that and AI is where all the money's going.

Yeah, I, we say this a lot.

And when I'm on other podcasts, I say it also is that I think the average American, especially if you're a high net worth individual, focuses often on the wrong things.

They're focused on cutting out those small little Nibbler expenses, you know, the Starbucks whatever, which is, you do have to keep track of that because it can add up.

And they don't spend enough time focusing on figuring out how to cut their housing costs, their car payment or their taxes, which are the three biggest bills that most people have. If you can figure out how to tackle those things, it's a, it's much, probably a much higher leverage point than your Starbucks habit. So I love that.

But I do want to ask one last question on this, is that how do you avoid the tail wagging the dog?

Because, you know, if we're always, we're chasing, chasing this lower tax strategy by investing in a private equity deal that's going to give us all these tax benefits, but the deal goes south, then, like what have you, like what have you, what have we really done there? And I, and so I wanted to hear your opinions on how do you avoid that. What sort of advice do you give people on?

Yeah, I mean, obviously for us, I mean that's, that's, that's the hard game. You know, I mean, we've, we've all been around the block. You know, I always say, you know, we all learn hard lessons.

More than likely we've all had some duds and lost money. I think the key is, is, is when that happens, you got to be a big boy and put your pants, pull your pants up one leg at a time and not cry about it.

So many people want to just cry about 50 grand or 100 grand and it's like it's, you know, it's gone. Like there's no sense in crying over spilled milk. Let's get it together and rebuild, build it back up. It does happen.

If you want to play in the big boy pond, you just got to be prepared for that's the cost. And I've just learned that some people are not geared towards that. So it's really important too to discern what type of client it is.

If they're a real conservative person, hey, just put your money in the s and P500, you're good. I'll see you later. I don't waste my time. Don't waste your time. Here's the thing.

Number one, when you do the stuff that we're doing, you don't need everything to strike gold. You just need a couple things too.

If you have one or two things, 8 to 10x like we were talking about earlier, and the other two or three don't really make any money. Wipty did.

So number one, number two, what I've learned in my, in my profession is, you know, stockbrokers will talk about a diversified portfolio, but I kind of say like bull crap because it's all correlated to the market. I want to have money in the market. I want to have money in businesses and franchises.

I want to have money in real estate and multifamily and private equity. I want to have some money in crypto. For me, I want to have such a big spread in all my investments so that they're all uncorrelated from each other.

So no matter what, when one is up, the other is down, or vice versa, it all works out. So I think that's the game. But ultimately our clients are probably relying on us to really do the due diligence to not get them in the bad deals.

And then lastly, I'm real big on recession proof businesses. You know, certain industries that are recession proof, let's just be real.

You're not going to fix your own roof, we're not going to fix our own plumbing, we're not going to fix our own electrical, certain industries. Garage door, you think you take that for granted? Garage door breaks and you can't use it. You're going to get a garage repair.

I got out there right away. All of those businesses are big, big, big merger M and A businesses.

Right now, mergers and acquisitions are happening heavily in all of those industries and they're Recession proof. No matter what happens, those, those businesses are still going to succeed.

I love that. All right, Chris, we got to start wrapping it up here.

You've obviously done a great job of, of educating us, establishing yourself as a subject matter expert. We certainly appreciate your time today, so thank you very much for that.

For anyone that is interested in trying to learn a little bit more about this topic, we used to ask like, is there one book you. The way I'll ask it is this.

When people ask you about how they can start learning about more of this and maybe they're not quite the level where they need to engage with you.

When you're giving people advice and recommendations, is there one book or one resource or one speaker or anything like that that you point to that you find yourself referring to people more than any other?

I would not, not so much, I would say as one person. I mean typically we have, we have a library of information on our website. We typically send them there.

What I'm actually working on, I kind of like that you brought this up.

So it's very close to launching, but we're working on an AI software where the client or the advisor will simply log in, input their information through their last two, three years tax returns. It's going to print out a deliverable report for them to see an MRI of their tax situation in a way they'd never seen it.

And then it's going to give them good, better, best. Like here are the top three recommendations from the inventory of strategies that we have.

There's going to be a little summary they each can read on and then if they want to learn more, they simply would click on it and schedule a meeting. So that's very close to launching. Ultimately that's what I will steer people towards when it comes to that.

There's, there's a ton of book, good books on, on taxes. I just don't typically, if I'm being completely honest, my clients are so busy they don't have time to read books.

So I kind of answer that myself because they just don't. So we just send them to less is more.

So if I can give them a one pager that gets the point across or I can send them a 10 or 15 minute video that gives them a summary. We've got YouTube videos, things like that. I'm a visual guy myself, so I try to think of how does it.

What's the easiest way to get this message across to the client. So typically we're just sending them to our website. One Atlanta Tax Solutions dot Com.

I love that. You know, it's a classic. Who, not how. When you get to that level, you don't want to read a book about how to do all those things.

You just want to know who I can hire that knows how to do all those things for me.

Spot on.

Chris Miller. So Chris Miller, you just said it. I'm going to ask you to say it again.

If any of our listeners want to connect with you, find out more about what you guys are up to at 1 Atlanta Tax Solutions or connect with you through your website, what's the best way for them to do that?

Yeah, so one Atlanta tax solutions.com you can look up any information on us, you can schedule a meeting with us.

There's also a phone number that calls, that goes directly to our assistant where you can get on a call with me or Alex, he's kind of my right hand guy.

Neil and Clint, for your listeners, what we're offering today for them because we really do like working with guys in this space that see the benefit in what you guys do and what we do because I, we believe we're kind of wired differently. You know, I talked to someone the other day about, you know, well, you can make so much more money if you were doing your own business.

He's like, yeah, but I like this job security. And I was like, well that's the difference between you and me.

You know, it takes, you got to be, you got to have courage to, to be self employed and to be an entrepreneur or to invest in certain things. But for your listeners, normally how we work is we charge 10% of what we save you.

So I don't know about you guys, but nobody's ever offered me a 10x, you know, deal but you, we save you 100 grand, we charge you 10k, half up front, half when we're completely done. Nobody ever says no because again, you're 10x in your money.

But we're offering to waive that fee, that annual fee of 10k or 10% that we would normally charge for any of your listeners that reach out to us to schedule meetings.

That's awesome. Well, thank you Chris Miller. We certainly appreciate your being here. Thanks so much for your time. Neal, anything from you?

Yeah, I'll just ask. Is there, so just mention truly passive income or is there a particular link they should go to?

Just go, go go into my website and yeah, if they mention truly passive income, mention your show, that's exactly how they should do it. Absolutely.

All you gotta say is truly passive income or Clint is handsome. Either of those gets you right through the gate. Chris Miller thank you so much. We certainly appreciate your time today.

Thank you. Neil and Clint, thank you so much.

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