Eric & Melissa Broughton - Saving Thousands of Taxes In Real Estate

Busy Bee Advisors was established in 2017 by Melissa Broughton, a seasoned accountant. Identifying the benefit to business owners of having a single resource for their accounting and tax services, husband Eric, a tax professional, joined the company in 2020. Together, with more than 20 years of combined bookkeeping and tax experience, they are living their passion for helping small business owners and real estate investors gain financial clarity in their business. In addition to their work with Busy Bee Advisors, they host a popular podcast called The Real Buzz, designed with small business owners in mind who are serious about reducing their tax liability. 

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

And we'll be on our way. Broughton is your last name, right? Yes, I double check. I had a Broughton that I grew up with spelled the same way, but just want to double check before I advertise it.

Speaker 2: 0:16

So people get all kinds of creative with how they pronounce it.

Speaker 3: 0:19

Broughton.

Speaker 1: 0:20

Brotam, I'm sure they do. I'm sure they do so. All right, I will get us going as soon as we're good to go here. Okay, hello everybody, welcome to another episode of Real Freedom Real Estate Leverage Freedom talking about building time and financial freedom through different opportunities in real estate.

Speaker 1: 0:43

I am your host, mike Swenson, and for those of you that are looking to get started in real estate or look to scale your journey within real estate, you can feel free to check out our website, freedom through realestatecom.

Speaker 1: 0:57

It's just a great spot for you to be able to learn and grow and kind of figure out what your next steps are, and today is going to be an incredibly valuable episode for those of you that are in your early stages or looking to maybe tweak and scale and grow and not necessarily sure how to best help.

Speaker 1: 1:15

It's in regards to taxes and bookkeeping and finding the right professional for you and helping you along your journey. So today we've got a husband and wife duo here, eric and Melissa Brotten, and they are with Busy B Advisors, and so they've launched their tax and bookkeeping business a handful of years ago and really helping on focusing on business owners and also realtors and investors to find the right professional, help them in their journey and really be a good asset along the way. So if you haven't, if you've been trying to do it on your own, now's the time to throw in the towel. Call in the pros and help. And so they also have a podcast called the Real Buzz, designed for small business owners who are serious about reducing their tax liability. So welcome Eric and Melissa, we're excited to have you.

Speaker 3: 2:05

Thanks so much, mike, thank you.

Speaker 1: 2:07

Great. Well, why don't you go ahead and just share a little bit about your background? You know what you guys did before you launched your business together and kind of what you're doing now, and we'll take it from there.

Speaker 2: 2:18

Well, mine is pretty boring. So my background was in corporate finance and accounting. In 2017, I left a controller position and decided that I would kind of scale back a little bit while our kids were still well, while our oldest was still in high school, and I started the firm in 2017 and we kind of took off really quickly. In 2018, eric left his previous position and decided to jump on board, and it's been a lot of fun, I will say, ever since.

Speaker 1: 2:57

So yeah, eric, anything that you want to add to that?

Speaker 3: 3:02

Yeah, I mean, you know my travel and path to where I'm at now has kind of been a windy road, but it seems like I always make my way back to the real estate, real estate trade, through one way or another. I used to be a superintendent and I used to build new single family residences. And here I am back now helping real estate agents here locally and nationally, you know, to find the best fit for their business structure and kind of help them plan for what they want to do, not just, you know, alleviate or take care of what they're currently doing.

Speaker 1: 3:38

Yeah, Well, yeah, let's kind of get started. For people that are will kind of start small and grow here, kind of thinking about maybe a business idea and how it's evolved and changed over time. But for somebody that's just getting started, you know, in the real estate industry, maybe it's as a realtor they're going to get their license, maybe it's a real estate investor or something they want to do in real estate what are some of the things that they should be considering as it relates to setting up a company and that sort of thing? Like, do we try to?

Speaker 1: 4:12

You know, I always talk about I'm a recovering perfectionist because I'm a detail oriented admin person and a lot of times, those folks in the industry that really push, you know, pedal, pedal down. It's hard for me to want to go faster. I know sometimes I need to go faster. I want to have all my ducks in a row but kind of walk through that balance of I've got an idea. Maybe I want it to be something, maybe not, but how do I make sure I've got the proper setup and all that?

Speaker 3: 4:40

Okay. So the first thing you want to do is kind of look at where you're at and where you want to go to. If where you're at right now is that you have a W2 job and you have one rental right, that's a pretty easy and simple setup You're looking, expanding past that, maybe losing the W2 job and making your way up to six doors or ten doors or 20 doors, you really want to look at what your corporate structure needs to look at. As you're going to that direction, I recommend in that instance you start by getting the LLC. That's your standard limited liability corporation. It protects your personal assets from your investment portfolio. Then you make the next step. That's going to be filed as a schedule C. I don't want to get lost in too much of the minutiae because Melissa tells me I do that I nerd out on it All the time.

Speaker 2: 5:37

All the time. You've already said things that have confused you.

Speaker 3: 5:42

I probably have. I'll step back a little bit to a broader picture. You need to protect yourself and your business. You also make sure that you have a real responsibility to yourself, to make sure that you are fiscally responsible to what you're trying to achieve. The best way to do that is to get away, first and foremost, from the schedule C, sole proprietor self-employment taxes. That 15.3% on your net profits is excruciatingly painful to watch people pay. Move towards an S-Corps, corporation or partnership. Which one of those is going to be best for you? It depends upon who you're working with. S-corps are great to start out with. Partnerships are also good to start out with. The downside about partnerships is that you're splitting everything with someone else and you may not be splitting the expenses evenly, so maybe that's not the right route to go, so let's focus on S-Corps.

Speaker 2: 6:47

Can we just back up for a second? I think what a lot of business owners don't understand is that the automatic default. If you don't make a choice, your automatic default is a schedule C. So if you make no choice, you go to school, you take your classes, you take the real estate exam, you become a licensed agent. Maybe you take it a little bit further and you become a broker or you're an investor. Your default for your company is a schedule C and as a schedule C you're hit with a double taxation. And we want to urge and help it's almost like it's a public service announcement we want to urge and help people to understand, to move away from that as quickly as possible. Back to you, eric.

Speaker 3: 7:38

So, going into an S-Corp, there are a couple of rules that you need to follow and, of course, all of this stuff is predicated on.

Speaker 3: 7:44

You need to talk to your tax professional and when you have an S-Corporation, you can use it to do so much more than you could as if you were for sole proprietor or even if you were in a partnership.

Speaker 3: 8:01

Being an owner of your own company but also being an employee of the same company has a lot of benefits because you own the company. So you get to decide to a large degree of the employees and how employee benefits and maybe employee reimbursements are set up. So when you look at the overall picture, you really want to work with your tax person on saying, ok, this is where I want to go to, what am I currently at and how can we reduce that? And on average, working with clients just by showing them a couple of different things moving to an S-Corp things of that nature shows them that they save anywhere from 15 to $35,000 in a year on their tax liability. Now imagine you're doing that same thing now for 10 years. You just saved yourself $150,000 to $350,000 in tax liabilities that then you could outright buy one or a couple of properties with that tax money that you saved.

Speaker 2: 9:05

You know he's sweet because I'll say that the tax system is rigged, but it really is.

Speaker 2: 9:12

So the system is set up so that you, as the consumer or the client, tells your if you're using a tax preparer, tells your tax preparer what you think is relevant information.

Speaker 2: 9:24

The tax preparer then just enters that information onto the appropriate forms and your taxes are filed. Where we and by we I mean Eric and I where we really found that there was such a need in this industry, was that we felt that clients deserved education and almost you know, almost like an advocate on their side, of explaining to them things that they could do or things that they should be doing, and really working with people to pull that information out, so asking those questions. I mean, I'll hear him on the phone and it's kind of funny because his appointments are generally supposed to be 45 minutes or an hour and I'll be looking at the you know my watch and it's like wow, he's been on the phone for an hour and a half with somebody. But it's really that he's just so dedicated I should say we're so dedicated to just pull that information out of people, the things that people don't realize, that they, you know, that they necessarily need to provide.

Speaker 1: 10:28

Yeah, and we were. We were talking offline before we started the recording. Just how you know, people may assess is their, their tax person doing a good job, based on how much they like them or based on how much money they get back at the end of the year. And the realities are so much more. There's this huge thing that you don't understand. That it's you know.

Speaker 1: 10:50

I would advise you know it's the tax professional's job to kind of educate on what you're missing out on by how you have it set up. You know, as a realtor, you know we talk about hey, I can help you get the highest price for your home and somebody might not choose, let's just say, the best realtor out there that can get them the top price, and they choose somebody else because they really like them. Well, that person might have sold their home for $15,000 less than they could have and they're happy that they had a good experience, but they left $15,000 on the table. And that's kind of the same thing here. You don't know what you're missing out on unless somebody points it out to you. And that's the challenge because, yeah, if you like your tax person or you get a rebate back at the end of the year or refund. You think they're doing a good job, but what you don't see is what's what's out there that's missing, and it's up to you guys to kind of point that out to them.

Speaker 3: 11:37

Well, most of the time when you get a refund, you're getting back a portion of what you already paid throughout the year. So if you've got a W2 job or you pay quarterly taxes and you get a refund, it's not, in my mind, a woohoo moment. I feel that most of the times, if I can get a client and I get it set up just to the point where they get a refund that's around $500 or less, or they pay around $1,000 or less then I did a good job because we narrowed it down to what was actually paid throughout the year and cash flow that was not available throughout the year. You've got a CPA. What are you currently talking to your CPA? Your enrolled agent, your tax preparer, your accountant? What are you talking to them about? Or are you talking to them at all? I mean, most of the time you get a engagement letter at the beginning of the year, maybe in December or January, saying hey, tax season is starting up, let's get our contract and maybe here's an organizer for you to put your stuff together and send it over, and then you submit your information. Maybe you have a review with them, maybe you review it by email paper and then they file the taxes and then you don't hear from them until December at the end of the year or January of the next year.

Speaker 3: 13:04

How often are you engaging with your accountant saying, hey, here are my books, take a look at them. Am I short somewhere? Does it look like I'm over in other areas? Can you help me out with that? Does your CPA say?

Speaker 3: 13:21

Or your accountant say you know, how many children do you have in the household? Are they employed by your business? Should they be employed by your business? You know, do you have a home office versus having a brick and mortar office or having both of them? You know how are you working synergies of those potential deductions and making your life easier by having greater access and making things that go from being a personal expense in your home and pushing them over to a business expense. How do you do that? How do you turn that vacation trip that you want to take your family on and also, at the same time, have it be if in part or not all of it covered as a business related? You know how do you go through that process. How do you dot your eyes and cross your keys, because one of the biggest things I hear from people is that? Well, you know, I've been with my accountant for a long time and I haven't been audited and I just feel that that's the best way to go.

Speaker 2: 14:25

And I've been getting money back, so it's a bonus all around. Those are some myths that should be busted.

Speaker 3: 14:31

And I'm like there's no such thing as a safe bet. The IRS will come in. The IRS doesn't send you a letter saying that you missed deduction. They'll never do that. You'll never submit your taxes and they'll say oh, you forgot to include your home office or your mileage or something of that nature. You know they're looking for things that are abnormal or you fit a certain class of qualifications that they want to do an audit. You can't necessarily predict what you do with your taxes is going to trigger an audit. There's lots of people out there that they use the term red flags. I'm like kind of really dislike that, because here's a red flag, you've got to schedule to see business, that's it right there. That's a huge red flag as far as the IRS concerned, because that's where a lot of people maybe are not as honest as they should be in reporting how much they made or how much you know deduction wise was actually there.

Speaker 2: 15:33

So it's fair to say that the corporate structure is just I'm just kind of trying to bring it back is because there's a lot of information you're given to people. The corporate structure, corporate entity is kind of one of the tactics we look at. There's so many other things, as far as maximizing your deductions, that we look at with our clients. We really are just very passionate about working with real leaders and real estate investors. We've had a chance to speak in a couple of conferences. We've had some very entertaining and interesting travel experiences as a result of those conferences. But you know, there's just a they're such a unique group, so I'm quite thankful that we're able to be on your podcast.

Speaker 1: 16:23

Yeah. Now one question that popped up when you were talking about you know, maybe you start out, you've got one investment property, maybe you started your LLC For people that are growing their portfolio. Sometimes I hear people say, hey, every single property should be in its own entity, from a kind of a shelter perspective. Is something where to happen. Sometimes that leads to a lot of difficulty in terms of taxes and filings and bookkeeping and all that. So, as people are starting to grow, maybe by the number of properties or the numbers of doors, is there any tips or advice you can give for people in terms of trying to keep it simple yet safe in terms of how they grow and strategic?

Speaker 3: 17:10

When you open up an LLC and you decide whether or not to put one property or multiple properties in it, the question that you need to have is am I isolating this asset and protecting it from the rest of my assets, and in why? So if you get one property and you put it into one LLC, then that means that if something happens with that one property, in most instances I'll say that it stays with that one property. So if you have five doors in one LLC, then those five doors are all subject to each other's woes and a wheel and well. So you have good things that happen within that bubble and then you may have something negative that happens in that bubble, but it stays in that bubble. So it.

Speaker 3: 18:00

But it comes down to complications or making it complicated. It really comes down to how you want to protect yourself. So if you want to put every property in its own LLC, that's fine. You just need to collectively report that income through one structure or another. So if you have an S-Corp and you're just a sole proprietor on that, then you do need to report that income on an individual basis. If you have everything in LLCs and then you have an S-Corp, that's managing the properties as a managing company, then you have to report the taxes on the properties individually, but then you also have to report the management income generated through your S-Corporation.

Speaker 3: 18:46

The level of complication can go from being somewhat very simple to being this broad web of potential confusion, and that's where you need a good accountant to look at what you have going from a top view to where you want to end up being. You have 10 doors, each one of them in their own LLC. You have an S-Corp that you're managing all of the properties and the properties are individually owned by you. You need to look at that and then have the accountant ask you the questions of where else are you going to go with this? Are you using these properties to leverage with each other to generate additional buying power? So those things all have to come into account when you are pushing things forward. But you want to start with it. Keep it very simple and don't keep properties in your name directly. Keep it in an LLC. That's my first and foremost recommendation is to put your properties into an LLC because you want to make sure you separate your investment from your household.

Speaker 2: 19:59

Well, I think one of the things that Eric really excels at is not just that I'm unmarried to him, but I think this, but one of the things that he really excels at is making sure our clients understand why they're doing what they're doing Totally different industry. But he had a consultation a few weeks ago with a lady who owned a jewelry making business and they sold her and her partner sold exclusively at Farmer Smart. So somebody had convinced them to set up an S corporation and so they have this S corporation that they had paid a significant amount of money for. They had no understanding of how to stay in compliance with the S corporation and they really didn't need it. It was almost the I think the analogy you use like having the whole fire department come over to rescue the cat in the tree. It was just over, it was totally overboard. So we really want our clients to understand why we're making the recommendation, and sometimes it takes you know, I know you've had multiple conversations with clients until it seems like they grasp it, eric, isn't that true?

Speaker 3: 21:17

Well, you didn't mention that my meetings sometimes are scheduled for five minutes and I'm on for an hour and a half because I want to make sure that a client has an understanding of why I'm making the suggestion that I'm making and that they become comfortable with the concepts that are being told to them. You know, there's a lot of the times where I'll meet with a new real estate investor maybe has three doors and works a W2 job and I talk to him and I start picking at what he's got going on to get to get information out of him.

Speaker 1: 21:49

And he's like, oh yeah, I own all three of them.

Speaker 3: 21:52

And yeah, I don't. And I just collect the money and I paid the mortgage on it. And then, all of a sudden, I'm like, do you are the properties that held in an LLC or that? No, I didn't. I decided not to go with any of that. And I'm like, well, okay, there's some work we need to do, right, because there's no sense if you're going to go through the process of developing but you also want to go through protections, right? So you want to have both.

Speaker 3: 22:21

And you want to have scalability, right? You want to be able to. When you start doing something, you want to be able to easily do it over and over and over again with each new property without having to try to reinvent a wheel for the entire structure. So, why not build it to start, for the concept of scalability? And then you have people that go well, why not do a C-Corp? C-corp is a completely different creature. Although the tax benefits for that is great, you're talking to someone that's in the neighborhood of you know, like a half a million to a couple of million worth of rents. Now that's where you want to start looking at C-Corp creations being your vehicle versus having an S-Corp with the LL.

Speaker 2: 23:06

So I'll throw some kind of one sheet over to you, Mike. So step for your listeners, just so that they can get a visual on some of the stuff we've talked about. Our industry is a little bit, I don't know. I guess it can become a little bit dry if we're not too careful. But we definitely try to take the approach of understanding where our clients are at and helping them to get the most benefit out of our services.

Speaker 1: 23:36

Yeah well, and I think it's important for the listeners to understand like this may not be for many people.

Speaker 1: 23:42

It may not be your favorite topic, but that's why it's important that they have people like you out there to be able to help them. And you've gotta be able to, you know, kind of endure that conversation to set you up well for the future. Because, yeah, you might be paying thousands of dollars to the taxes or you might be exposing yourself to huge amounts of liability when you haven't done this well, and so you know it's kind of like you can't be an ostrich in this scenario and just bury your head in the sand and hope that everything's okay, because there can be, you know, lawsuits that come out and you know, if you don't have things properly set up, they can come after your personal assets and they can come after the other things that you've worked so hard to build. And so I think what people need to understand listening to this is there's a lot at stake here to have this done well and to be able to ideally reduce your tax liability, to open up more doors for the future to be able to grow you know, to open up more doors, literally for the future to grow your real estate holdings right, and so if you're able to save thousands of dollars of taxes, that's now thousands of dollars of purchasing power that you have to continue to grow your business or to find other properties or whatever that might be, and so there's a lot at stake here for people to do it well and at least understand enough to know how to set this up correctly.

Speaker 3: 25:05

Absolutely, and there's so much. There's so much that changes on a regular basis. Every time we have a new presidency, every time we have a new Congress you know there's always they always make changes to the tax code and that trickles down to us tax preparers If you don't keep up to date and you may be missing out on some absolutely fantastic short-term tax planning that just by itself saves several thousand dollars to you directly a year. Or to generate tax credits, and some people overlook tax credits.

Speaker 3: 25:45

In this field, and I feel especially for people that may be listening to this now or watching this on YouTube you know there are a lot of ways to generate tax credits and tax credits are worth four or five to one, so the ROI is four to one on that at a baseline and go for it. If they're available to you, go for them, and on our website we have some information on certain types of tax credits. There's a lot of things that you can find out there, but once you start doing your research and gaining your Google or Duck Duck Go education, make sure you come back to a professional to put it all together for you so that you stay legal Right, because there's a lot of advice out there on how to do something, but they don't necessarily walk you through the steps on how to maintain a legal status for that. If you do, you know, get a knock on the door from your state, your state board or the federal government.

Speaker 1: 26:50

Yeah, yeah, melissa, you say something.

Speaker 2: 26:54

Yeah, I was the gaping mouth one, but I think the only thing that I would say is there's the piece really to keep in mind is that everybody's tax situation is so completely unique. I mean you could have two people who are both W-2 or earners standing next to each other and they're gonna have two completely different taxes.

Speaker 2: 27:16

So my recommendation is, you know, I would urge this isn't really a pitch, but I would urge you to reach out to us through our website and schedule a consultation. You know we won't call your tax preparer and say, hey, they're cheating on you. I promise we. You know the conversation doesn't hurt. So if anything, if you really are attached to your current tax preparer, it could give you some talking points so that you can have a conversation with them to see if you can get from them what it is you deserve. And if not, then you know we are of course happy to help and happy to meet.

Speaker 1: 27:58

Yeah, yeah, and I think this year for people listening like, let's have this year be the year that you reach out, you talk to somebody new, you get a fresh opinion and hopefully make sure that you're defending yourself in terms of, like, what the past is, but then also be able to kind of put yourself on the offense in the future so that you can continue to grow. And so you know, let's not bury our head in the sand here. Let's make sure that we're doing this well, and you guys certainly can be the right people to help them. So how can they reach out to you? What's your website?

Speaker 2: 28:31

Busybadviserscom.

Speaker 3: 28:37

Or I need bookkeepingcom.

Speaker 1: 28:40

I need bookkeeping. A good vanity URL always goes a long way. I'm a fan as well. I've got a GoDaddy account full of URLs for that, so, yeah, so thank you so much, eric and Melissa, for coming on and sharing. And yeah, there's so much we can talk about and yeah, every situation's different. So if you're listening to this and you're like I don't necessarily know what to do, I don't know how to set things up properly, reach out to Melissa and Eric and they can help get you started along the way and hopefully get you on the right path. So, thank you so much for coming on. We appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Speaker 3: 29:12

I hope so. People out there find someone that they can talk to more than one senior.

Speaker 2: 29:16

Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 29:18

Awesome. All right, I will hit stop.