Tax Strategies & Financial Planning for business owners and Real Estate Investors
I'm happy to welcome Ryan Giolitto. Ryan is a CPA tax partner with Foley and Giolitto. And I wanted to bring on Ryan because it's very important to know that you can't just have a regular CPA, you need to have someone that wants to sit down with you and wants to give you some advice
Foley and Giolitto spend more time than any other CPA does to save their clients tangible tax dollars. 100% of their resources are allocated to achieving the absolute best results for their clients. As a result, they typically save their clients more than 3 times what a normal CPA would.
Most CPA firms offer little to no helpful guidance outside of tax season. They believe they have a better way of doing things, where they provide guidance throughout the entire year to optimize each and every one of their client’s business and personal tax situations, on a customized basis.
In this episode, we’re discussing…
[1:42] Everyone needs a CPA, having one on their team, whether you’re investing passively or you’re investing an as a general partner
[3:07] What the biggest problems are with clients and the situational analysis founded on most cases
[5:06] The mistakes that most CPA’s do with their clients about tax return
[8:45] The importance of getting financial advice from your CPA, to have a tax plan and the execution
[13:24] How to reduce tax liability, within the law, and timing strategies
[15:28] How to handle a tax plan and strategies at a higher income level
[19:42] The advantage of real estate investors on K-1
[21:42] Why he’s passionate about helping people especially with taxes
[22:45] How to remain 100% liquid and be able to reduce taxes and why is important to work with a financial advisor and plan together
[25:35] A capable CPA is a very good advisor and really does a financial planning
Ryan’s Top Tip’s
“Our job is to educate on exactly how aggressive and where it falls in the spectrum so that client can make an educated choice. So, we're more along the lines of education, and ultimately, you know, if it's your tax return, in your client, you can take an aggressive or conservative position that is in line with your line of thinking, but we want you to be educated on where you're at on the spectrum”
“A lot of CPA shops they're running a very heavy volume of tax returns, and their focus is getting those tax returns done. The critical thing to them is, they want to get the data and quickly get the tax return done and, meet with the person to finalize it as quickly as possible. And so, under that system, you're not going to have a lot of advice or a lot of stopping one way to think about things”
“What we do is we look at every return that we look at, we look at it from the standpoint of can it is done better? Can the person's return that we're looking at? Can they save money? Can they be in a better financial situation? Are they doing something that makes no sense to us? Do the numbers look weird? We look at all those things”
“One of the biggest areas where you're spending the most money, which is taxes as a higher income person, there's no plan. So, that's what we help people do is really get a tax plan that coordinates with what their financial goals are. And when you put those two together, you can really make some magic happen”
“What will your tax situation look like when you file and we will run that scenario, to determine if you know, that's a good or bad situation. And we may find that, given the numbers, you have a very good situation, or we may find that given the numbers, you have a very high tax potential tax liability. And the benefit of doing that before the end of the year is we can now suggest different strategies to you before the end of the year that you could do to lower that tax bill”
“As your income changes, and if you're not planning ahead, and you just go into tax season and get you returned on and realize that you lost a credit or deduction that you could have prevented, you could have prevented that with planning”
“Typically, on a real estate investment, the nice thing about what you're going to see on a K-1 is a loss due to depreciation, so you're going to actually not have any taxable income to pay on at the same time, you're getting a cash outlay from your investment. So that's why real estate can be pretty powerful for some”
“If you want to remain 100% liquid, there's a very good chance that no one's going to be able to reduce your taxes because you're not reinvesting. So, I think that's the very first thing that, that I would recommend for any of the real estate investors is determine, how much cash you have available to really put toward that goal, reducing taxes”
“Work with an advisor, I say advisor and I don't necessarily mean financial advisor, it could be a financial advisor, or it could be someone else. But the most important part of that advisor role is you want someone that's independent. So, you don't want a portfolio manager and you don't probably want an insurance salesman because those people are going to be biased toward allocating assets to things that they get paid for”
Mike’s Top Tip’s
“You want a team member, someone that you know they're part of the family, that part of my team, and you're looking out after me on how I can benefit the taxes because I don't know anything about this stuff. I mean, no one's asking us and making sure we're doing this. So, I think it's just so important that a CPA is just more than just a number cruncher”
“You may say, it looks like you're gonna have a higher income. And it looks like maybe next year, a couple of years taxes might be going up. So, you need to utilize the losses now or take advantage of different things because I can't imagine with every four years or every couple years, and your CPA and the tax laws. I mean, it has to be like someone full time just to learn what's going on”
“I had some advice when I sold a complex about whether or not to do a 1031 exchange. It's a rule for forward or just going to take the tax hit. So, there's, just a lot of different scenarios, because sometimes you may sit there and say what if you can't find something, well, the law is benefiting you right now. And it's not going to cost you that much money to go ahead and take a tax cut, to offset because the fact that we made a lot of money certain year”
Resources from Ryan
Foley & Giolitto CPA, PLLC | Email
ABOUT RYAN GIOLITTO
Foley & Giolitto CPA specializes in building effective tax and financial plans for business owners and real estate investors. The firm is known for spending more time, energy, and effort on improving their client’s financial situations than anyone else in the marketplace. Prior to founding Foley & Giolitto CPA, Ryan Giolitto worked for several larger Chicago CPA firms where he specialized in tax consulting for businesses operating all over the US and in several international jurisdictions.