What to Do Today to Pay Less Tax and Keep More Money

With tax rates approaching 40-50% in some states, every dollar saved is significant. 

What can you do right now to reduce your tax bill and keep more of your hard-earned money?

In this episode, I share a checklist of 10 impactful tax strategies to consider implementing before December 31st. From reviewing your income and expenses to maximizing retirement savings and potentially converting IRAs to Roth, learn practical tips that may help lower your tax obligation and increase your take-home pay.

The time to act is now. Let's make sure you're not overpaying in taxes and that you're on the path to a more prosperous financial future. 

So, join me as I uncover the secrets to paying less tax and keeping more of your hard-earned money.

IN TODAY’S EPISODE, I DISCUSS: 

• Updating wills and trusts for life events
• Tax advantages of S corporation over LLC
• Reviewing income and expenses for tax planning

RECOMMENDED EPISODES FOR YOU
If you liked this episode, you'll love these ones:

• Annuities...Investment, Insurance or Scam
• What to Do Now to Lower Taxes Before Year End
• Q&A Why Taking a 401K Loan Can Destroy Your Wealth
• My Favorite Investing Accounts (And How to Maximize Your Returns)

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Transcript

1:56

Hey there. Mel Abraham here. And welcome to this episode of the show. This one. You know, this time of year, it's. Starting to get cooler out. Leaves are changing depending on where you live. We're getting into fall. There's pumpkins, there's Thanksgiving, there's turkeys, there's. Meals, there's holidays, and there's taxes. Yeah. One, we're going to talk about taxes again. So in an earlier episode, we talked about how do you reduce your taxes when it comes to being in a business? That's when we're going to talk about you personally. I get it. It's not really the kind of the holiday spirit, but here's what we know. You have the opportunity now, between now and the end of the year, to put more money in your pocket by saving taxes than you do if you wait. So what I want to do is give you some things to consider, some things to look at in this episode to see what you could do today or at least before the end of. The year to reduce your taxes and keep more money for your financial freedom. All right, so let's jump to the episode. I'll see you there. All right. Welcome to this episode, the affluent entrepreneur Show. This is the affluent entrepreneur show for entrepreneurs that want to operate at a high level and achieve financial liberation. I'm your host, Mel Abraham, and I'll be sharing with you what it takes to create success beyond wealth so you can have a richer, more fulfilling lifestyle. In this show, you'll learn how business and money intersect so you can scale your business, scale your money, and scale your life while creating a deeper impact and living with complete freedom, because that's what it really means to be an affluent entrepreneur. All right, welcome to this episode of the Affluent Entrepreneur Show. So in this episode, I want to. Talk about taxes again, but this time I want to talk about it as it relates to you personally. We previously did an episode where I was talking about what could you do as a business or as an entrepreneur to reduce taxes. We got to talk about you personally, because sometimes there's business taxes and then there's individual taxes, and whether you're a business or not, these could apply to you. And so here's what we know. With tax rates that could approach, depending on the state you're in, 40, 50%. Every single dollar that you save is. Going to be big dollars in your pocket. And you think about the fact that. If I can save more in taxes, I then have more to live on, I have more to invest, and I have more to pay. The road to our financial freedom. And that's really what this is about. So when taxes as a percentage of our financial partnership, if you will, is that high of a percentage, it's important for us to look at. Now, here's the other thing to consider. Is you have a lot of tax planning opportunities. If you do them in the right time and in the right way. But we have to do them. If we want to take advantage of. It, we have to do them prior. To the end of the year, prior to December 31. As an individual, too often what happens is that I have a client or someone that comes to me. Well, if they're a client, they won't. Come to me this way because we do it early. But a non client that comes to me in January, February, March, April, and says, hey, can you help me? Yeah, I might be able to, but. I don't have a whole lot of options because we're past the year end. So this is why I want to do this episode. Now I get it. It's before the holidays and you might be going Ba humbucky, he's talking about taxes. We should be talking about gratitude and all that. We are. But let's be grateful that we have the opportunity to reduce our taxes and make that happen. So we want to do this now, not two months from now, because then it's too late, but now. And so this is where I want to go. I'm going to walk you through, effectively ten things that I want you to consider. Now, if you have a tax preparer. If you have someone that is a. CPA, a tax preparer, an enrolled agent. A tax strategist, they ought to be. Having some of these conversations with you. If they're not having these conversations with you around this time of year, then you might have to have a conversation with them. And that is to say, I'm not. Hiring you just to be the scribe of my tax return. In hindsight, that their job, yes, they can prepare the tax return, but you want to also know that they're looking out for you. If there is an opportunity for you. To keep more money in your pocket, they need to bring it to you. And if they don't want to operate that way, then frankly, you might need to either get an additional person that's going to look at it like I do with my elite clients and some of my master's clients. We start to dig into that for them around this time of year. But if not, you got to find another one. I know it's hard, but the fact. Of the matter is that this is your money. This is your financial future. This is. Your opportunity to put more. Money in your pocket on an ongoing basis. Because think about this. You put a tax strategy in place that works this year. As long as they don't change the rules, it should work next year. So we should be able to extrapolate the savings year after year when we do it correctly. And so what I want to do. Is I'm going to jump to some of the strategies. Realize that I don't know your specific situation. So this isn't specific tax advice. It is suggestions for you to look at and to have a conversation with your tax preparer, with your tax strategist, to say, hey, does this apply to me? How would this calculate out? What would this look like? And then create the specific strategies that. Makes sense for you. All right, so let's jump to the. Ipad and let's get started. Let's do this thing and see what we can come up with. All right, so the first thing is this. I want you to review your income. In other words, understanding all the income they had, because one of the things that might actually surprise people is that. They have more interest income than they. Had anticipated, because maybe they're listening to me and they put money into a high yield cash account. And back in the day, the sad. Day, when we were only getting, like, 0.2% on a savings account, interest income really didn't matter. But when you're getting five, 5.3% in. A high yield savings account, you might. Actually have more interest income than you anticipated. And that interest income has had no taxes taken out. So you might have some taxes owed on it, and you don't want to get blindsided by it. So look at your income. Your wages, get your year to date. Paycheck stubs, get your dividend statements, your investment statements. If you had gains or losses in the stock market, you want to pull all of those things together. So you get a handle your arms around, or your advisor gets their arms around all the income that you brought in this year. I just got done with my meeting. With my wealth team, and one of. The things that we do in this meeting is I sit down with them and I show them, here's my profit and loss for my businesses. So they can see the revenues coming in. They see the expenses. They know what the bottom line is. So now they run a portion of my portfolio. They run a large portion of my portfolio. So they know what's going on in the portfolio as far as gains, losses, and interest and dividends. But I have a portion of the. Portfolio that I run that they don't see on an ongoing basis. They don't manage it. That's me. And I do different kinds of transactions. I do trading and stuff with options and things like that. And I bring in a fair amount of income doing that. Well, they're not aware of it and. They'Re not aware of some of my high yield cash accounts and that kind of thing. So at the meeting, I bring all of that to them and say, you got what you got? Here's what I have. Let's put it all together and let's figure out what's the tax planning moves we need to make between now and the end of the year. And so we come up with a strategy. But the important thing is that you understand where all your income is coming from, what's taxable, what's not taxable, and how to navigate that. That leads me to the second piece. And the second piece is, if you're. Going to review your income, it's a. Good time to review your expenses. We'll talk about some specific expenses that. Are deductible or not deductible. Here's the thing to know, and I. Said this in the other episode, but the basic tax law says that everything you receive, whether you receive it in. Cash, check, charge, barter, it's taxable and. Nothing you pay is deductible. That's the basic tax law. And the rest of the volumes of. The tax code, all the complexity and. The minutiae and all that crazy stuff are the exceptions. So there are certain income that they say and give you permission to say. You don't have to pay tax on it. There are certain expenses that they say. You can take that as a deduction. And so you want to know what is deductible. And if you don't, this isn't about you becoming an accountant or a tax preparer or tax strategist. You work with the advisors to understand what you can and can't do and how to document it in a way that it's supportable in front of the IRS or the state, if, God forbid, there's an audit. And the reason we want to look. At expenses is I want to look. At expenses that you might have today, and I may want to look at expenses that you'll have in the first. Quarter that might be deductible, and it. Might be better to accelerate them into this year. So paying something that you might otherwise pay in January, in December to try and accelerate the deduction may make sense. Those two types of things start to play into it. Now. There are some things to really. Look at more specifically, and this takes. A bit of work to do this. But if you happen to be in. A situation where you have a business that you are running and you are running a business as an LLC, which is what most people will start out. Doing, which is totally fine, you run. A business as an LLC. The problem, and this is something that. Some people don't think about is because. They don't know, and I just had this conversation with a client, is that when you run a business as an LLC, you get this thing called a K one. So all the income from that business, the net, so you have the revenues, you have the expenses and whatever's the. Net, generally you pay tax on your personal tax return. Now here's the thing. Because it's an LLC, you not only pay something called income tax, which we're. All used to, well, I don't know. If we ever get used to taxes, but there is something called self employment tax. And self employment tax up to certain limits is 15.3%. So it's a large number. The point of it is that if you are an LLC and you have a high net, say 7500 thousand dollars in net income, that's revenues minus expenses. And you're an LLC, you want to. Start to look at the possibility of changing to an S corporation, making an S corporation election. Here's why. When you're an S corporation, not 100%, the amount that they show on the. K one is no longer subject to self employment tax. You avoid that 15.3% that you pay as an LLC. Now you have to do something else in the process. If you become an S corporation, you have to actually take a salary. You have to be on payroll. So you are going to pay some level of self employment tax. But they call it Social Security. Okay, but what happens is that you can take a salary. Let's say you have $200,000 coming from the LLC as Net. Well that would be all subject to self employment tax if it was an LLC. But what happens if you take $125,000 as salary as an S corporation? The other 75 is going to come pass through. But here's the difference. 125,000 you would pay Social Security tax. On, but the 75 you wouldn't and. You wouldn't pay self employment tax. So you save taxes that way. Point being is that if you're an. LLC and you have a higher level of net, you're in the upper five figures going into six figures. Definitely. If you're in the six figures, you. Want to have this conversation with your prepared with your strategist, should I be an S corporation? And now they may come back to. You and say, well, it's too late for this year. You got to elect it within 75 days of the year end. So we can't do it. Hogwash. Okay, I was going to say something. Else, but it's family show. All right. No, you can still do it. It's called a late election. And if you do a late election, it's under something called Revenue Procedure 2013 30. All right? And I know that this is technical, but I want you to know that if it makes sense for you to elect to be an S corporation before the end of the year, you have. Time, there is paperwork to be done. You're going to have to change some. Things, but you can do it. And we had a client of ours a year ago that did this and saved 20 plus thousand dollars in taxes. It's worthwhile for you to take a look at it and see does it make sense? Are you a fit and go through the effort depending on where your income is? So I put that in aside because that's not necessarily for an individual because you'd have to have an LLC that's a business to do it. But I don't want you to think that you can't. And in fact, I'm looking at one. Of my one on one clients right now doing the analysis for them to see if they were an S corporation last year, how much would they have saved? Because they paid a fair amount of. Taxes that they didn't need to pay, in my opinion. And so we still have time to make the election for this year and do all of the gymnastics to get it to stake. That's something. When we talk about income and expenses, I want you to also think about that. Now, number three is to look at. Your withholdings and your estimates. Look, and I hear this all the time. You know what? Taxes went up. I didn't get the big refund that I'm used to getting. Well, here's the thing, the refund, think about this. And this is the thing that I. Hear people say a lot is that, well, my refund went, taxes went up because I didn't get as big a refund. But you got to understand what the refund is, okay? You're going to have income. You'Re going. To have expenses that are deductions, that are deductions. And that's going to give you, and I'm just doing this really ballpark taxable income. Okay. And on that taxable income, they're going. To calculate the taxes that you owe. So you end up with these taxes that you owe. But then from that they're going to. Look at, say, the payments you made and the withholdings you had, if you. Had a W two, and if I misspell, don't send me hate mail. And then you have the net taxes. And that net tax is how much you owe on the return. Or the refund. And what people assume is that if. They don't get as big of a. Refund, that this number taxes went up. Well, it could have, your taxes might. Have gone up because your income went up or your deductions went down, I don't know. But the other reason you might get less of a refund or the other. Reason you might owe more taxes is. Not because taxes went up, but you. Didn'T pay in the same amount. See, there's multiple things in that equation. And for some reason we say, well, my taxes went up. No, you may not have paid in enough or the same amount. And so we got to understand where it comes from. And that's why what I want people to do is at this stage, to start looking at their withholdings, looking at their estimates, to say, did I pay in enough? Do I have enough paid in to not get slammed with a big bill? Now here's my feeling. Look. I want you to pay in enough that you have an opportunity to. Not have a big bill when come tax time, because that's never fun. And I'm of the philosophy that you. Don'T want a big refund eitherwise, because if you have a big refund, that simply means you paid the government way too much. They had the use of your money. And they're horrible with it. So I'd rather you have it. So at the end of the day, I'd rather you have a really small. Refund or a really small payment, and that's it. Because that means that you maximize the. Cash flow to you and you get to do with it, which you should. And you should be following the wealth priority ladder with what you do with it to build the wealth, to build the financial freedom, to do the things that you want to do. This is why I say those first. Three things is figure out the income. Make sure that you're looking at your income, looking at the expenses, deductions that you might accelerate. What are the withholdings, what are the estimates did you pay enough? Now, what's number four? So number four is to look at. Maximizing your retirement account. All right? Depending on what kind of situation you're. In, if you are just putting money into an IRA and you're under age. 50, you can put $6,500 in. And so you may want to max out the IRA. You can put up to $7,500 in if you're over 50 because of what they call catch up contributions. So how much are you going to put in? What should you put in? And you have time to put that in, but the sooner you get it invested, the sooner you have the soldiers, the employees, the dollars working for you. The other side of it is this. If you're participating in a 401, then. You may want to look at maximizing the contribution of the 401K, especially if. There'S a match involved. Now, I still want you to follow the wealth priority ladder, and we talk about it in the affluence blueprint and that type of thing that tells you what to do. Because if you have consumer debt and other things, we may need to clean that out first. But from a tax standpoint only, just. The tax standpoint only, you have the. Opportunity to put $22,500 away in a 401 this year if you're under age 50. If you're over, that goes up to $30,000. You get a $7,500 catch up. So you should be able to look. At it and say, hey, should I put more in? Can I put more in? And if you're getting an employer match, then you definitely got to look at it. So maxing out retirement is one other thing to start to look at. At this stage, you still have time to do it. Also, if you're in a situation where the 401K has a profit sharing element to it, where there's this additional contribution the company can make for you, and if it's your company, then you make. It for yourself because that'll push your. Ability to put money into retirement up to $66,000 if you're under 50 or $73,500. So you can see that you can. Shield a fair amount of income from taxes by moving it into a retirement. Account properly and know that that money. At some point when you're age 59. And a half or over will come back to you. Okay, so we want to look at. Maximizing our retirement at this stage, and. Then we go to number five. Once we've looked at that, say, maybe you are in a situation and this doesn't apply to everyone. Is to fund an HSA. Now, HSAs are really, really great accounts. If it applies for you. Now, HSA stands for Health savings account. But a health savings account is a. Special type of account that allows you to pay medical expenses out of it. Now, how it works, and this is why it's a beautiful account and there's some nuances to it I'm going to talk about. But you can put money into an HSA account that is tax deductible, so you can get a deduction for it going in. And when you take the money out of that account, as long as it's used for qualified medical expenses, you never pay tax on it. And this year, you can fund an HSA to $3,850 for an individual, 77. 57,750 as a family. And if you're 55 and over, you can get an additional $1,000 catch up contribution. Here's some stipulations, and then I want to talk about the best way to use this account if you do it, because it's the one account that could. Be triple tax advantage. It's crazy. The stipulation is, in order to have an HSA, it has to be connected to a high deductible medical plan. So it only works when you have a specific type of medical plan. So you want to see, is the medical plan you're on HSA qualified? And if not, it doesn't apply to you. If it is, then you can look at it or you can change your. Medical plan to work. Now, that's not something for everyone, because. If you have high medical expenses, you. May not want a high deductible plan because you got to put a lot of money out of pocket upfront. So this may not be the right. Thing for you, but if you don't, you might want to look at it. But if you do, here's the way to do it. You fund the HSA. You take the tax deduction for the. Okay, and then inside the HSA, it's. Like a Roth, it's like an thaT. You have that money and you invest. It and it will then grow. So you invest it just like an investment account, put it in ETFs and index funds and that kind of thing. And allow it to grow. The best thing is this, is that. If you allow it to grow and. You still have medical expenses, instead of. Using the HSA to pay for those. Medical expenses, and then you have the cash flow, pay the medical expenses out. Of pocket, allow the HSA to grow, and keep the receipts, put them in a file, digital file and all that. To make sure that you got it. Covered, because watch what happens. Say I'm a family, I put 77 50 in this year. So I take a deduction for, call it$7,750, almost $8,000, by putting that money into an HSA. I take the tax deduction, I invest the 7750. It's probably going to be 67 50 because they want $1,000 or so cash in there. So I invest it in funds, and. It'S going to grow. If I have medical bills, I pay them out of pocket and I keep the receipts. Now, let's say you go ten years down the road. Over ten years, you do that a. Couple of times and you're funding it and it's invested. Now, in ten years, you have ten years of receipts and you have ten years of contributions and growth because you invested it in the HSA. And after ten years, you may have put in, if the rules don't change,$70,000. But the value of the count might be $140,000. So now sudden you have an account worth 140 that you put in 70. And you say, I need some money. And you go and dust off some of those medical bills and say, I need$10,000. I get $10,000 in medical bills, and I reimburse myself from the HSA. That's now up at$140,000. I take 10,000 out of it. I still have 130,000 left. And I take that 10,000 out tax free. See, the code, the IRS, they don't say that you have to reimburse yourself. In the same year. You can keep that and allow it to grow over time. And now all of a sudden, you. Have this other account that allows you. To, one, take a deduction, grow tax. Free, take it out tax free also. All right. So if it applies to you, then an HSA is a really good vehicle. To make sure that you're funding and. Getting the benefits out of that. So that's number five. Let's see what number six is. Number six is to bundle your donations. All right, so what do I mean by this? Here's what I mean by this is that. When they changed the tax code. A number of years ago, they increased the standard deduction. So a lot of people don't, if. They make donations, they don't get credit for it because they aren't making enough donations. So let's say that you're a charitable person and you want to donate and say, maybe you donate $5,000 a year to whatever charity, it could be your church, your temple, animal cruelty, it could be whatever the charity is. And you donate cash and you donate $5,000 a year. Well, if you don't have a mortgage and everything, you probably won't get much of a deduction for it because you don't have enough. What happens if you go to the. Charity and say, I'm going to give you $10,000 this year and it's for. This year and next year. So you bundle your donations. Now all of a sudden you have a deduction that is at 10,000, you were going to give them 5000 in one year and 5000 in the next year. But why not give them the ten, take the deduction. See, when you turn around and bundle. The donations like that, you have a better chance to get a deduction if you don't itemize otherwise. So look at bundling donations. Now, there's another way to do this. Also. And this is what I have as number seven, because we can look. At it from this perspective. There is something called a donor advised fund. And what that is, is let's say. That you had a big year this year and you had a lot of. Income, and you said, I need a deduction. I want to give a bunch to charity. Say, I want to give $50,000 to. Charity, but you don't know what the charity is yet. You can go to a broker and say, I want to open a donor advised fund. Some of them have them. And what that is is that you'll. Put the 50,000 into that fund, you'll. Get the deduction for it, and then over time you can tell that fund which Charities you want it to go to. It allows you to make a large donation, even if you don't know exactly where it's going to go, get the deduction for. And over time, you dictate where it's going to go. It can be invested, it can grow over time. It creates a charitable legacy. It's a possibility, especially for those that are charitably inclined to do that. This is an interesting way to do that. If you have stock that is appreciated and you have big gains in there, you can use that to put in there and then you get a deduction if it's done right. There's some nuances there. You got to hold the stock for. A certain period of time. Say you have a stock that you bought for 1000, but it's worth 10,000. You can put the $10,000 stock in there, take the $10,000 deduction and everything, and then do what we need to transfer it, liquidate it, and donate the proceeds that way. So donor advised funds are another way to bundle, if you will, your deductions, your charitable deductions, even if you don't know what charity it's going to go to. And then you can just disperse it. From the fund over a period of time. All right, so that leads me to number eight. Number eight is something called loss harvesting. Here's the thing. When you have a situation where you have gains on stocks, that's called capital gains, you get taxed at a different. Rate than your income, but still you. Get taxed, and it could be anywhere from 0% to 20%, depending on your income. So 0%, if you don't have income. Above $90,000 as a married couple, 89,250. Then any gains on stocks and sales like that, you'll pay 0% capital gains. Now you need to hold the stock or you need to hold the investment for over a year to qualify. But let's say that you sold some investments and you have big gains. Well, you're going to pay tax on it. And so what typically you can do is what we call loss harvesting. Let's say you have some holdings that. Aren'T doing so well and you have losses if you sold them. What people will do is we'll sell the losers at the end of the. Year to offset the gains, so we reduce our taxes. Now I get it. You sell the losers. Now here's the problem. Most people, when they think of loss harvesting, what they do is they just. Sell the loser the stock and they. Have now cash, and they do nothing with the cash to do loss harvesting the proper way. What you need to do is you. Sell the loser to take the loss and offset the gain, but then you use the cash to buy another investment, okay? Because we don't want our dollars sitting on the sidelines, unless that's part of a plan. We want them out there working. But here's the caution, okay? There's something called the wash sale rules. The wash sale rules are this. Let's say you have a loss on. Google stock and you sell Google stock. On December 20 eigth, okay? You can't just go and buy Google again. That's a problem. What they'll do is they'll nullify the loss if you do that, if you buy the same thing or substantially similar within 30 days of selling it for. A loss, you will not get the. Deduction of the loss. So what we want to do is. If we're going to loss harvest or sell something for a loss, and we're. Going to reinvest, we're going to reinvest in something that isn't so substantially similar. That triggers the wash sale rule, so you can get the loss and keep. The money invested all along. So that's the loss harvesting that you. Might be able to do. Look at your portfolio. This is why I said, get the income and expenses. See what your gains are. Do you have losses? Do you have gains that you need. To offset to make that happen? That leads me to number nine. And that is, this is it time. For you to think about converting any IRAs to Roth. You've got two kinds of IRAs. You've got a regular IRA, which you put money in, you took a deduction for. So that money, you take a deduction. When you put the money in, and it grows tax deferred. So you invest it and it grows and grows and grows and grows. And when you take the money out. After age 59 and a half, you'll pay tax on all of it. So you got a deduction before you went in, but you'll pay tax on it if you draw it out down. The road and everything. But then there's a second type of IRA that's called a Roth IRA. And the Roth IRA, when you put money in, you don't get a tax deduction. So you don't get a tax deduction for it. But then you invest it and it. Grows, but instead of it growing, and. When you take the money out, you have to pay tax. You never pay tax on the money. Because you didn't take a tax deduction. So a Roth IRA is a really. Good thing to consider, especially if in your lower income years and lower tax brackets, to put money in a Roth, because the tax deduction isn't as valuable. And down the road it could be worth multiples, multiples of what you put in because of the investment growth, and you get to take it out fully tax free. Now, that's not a Roth conversion, that's a contribution. The Roth conversion, though, is say that you have a bunch of money in an IRA. I've got a bunch of money in an IRA. What you can do is decide to. Convert some of it to Roth. Now, what that's going to do is it's going to trigger the tax. So if I convert $10,000 of an IRA into a Roth IRA, I'm going to pay tax on the 10,000. I'm not going to pay penalties, but I'm going to pay tax, you might. Say, but then why would I do this? This doesn't reduce my taxes. I'm actually increasing my taxes by converting to Roth. Yes, but if it happens to be. In a year where your income is. Down, if it happens to be in. A year where you're in a lower. Tax bracket, maybe this is the time to convert it. Pay the tax at the lowest rate possible at a lower rate, because once you convert it, the rest of that. Account is going to grow tax free. And you never pay tax on it again. So all the growth from that point forward is tax free. So you might have a year with. Maybe you were unemployed for half the year, or your income went down, or you had a baby and you took six months off, whatever it is. But it happens to be a year. Where you're in a lower tax bracket, lower income. This might be a time to look at it and say, should I convert to Roth Now? There's some nuances here, too. There's a five year rule. So when you convert anything to Roth, you can't touch it for five years. So you're locked for five. And the way it works is every. Conversion, each conversion has a five year rule. So if I convert this year, five years from that date, if I convert. Another portion next year, five years from that date, so each one has to convert. And if you have. Other things to look at from an income standpoint, you got to be really careful of it. All right? But a Roth conversion in a lower. Income year, in a year when you're. In a lower tax bracket, may be. Something to consider, because what you're doing, yes, you're going to increase your taxes. In this year, but you're going to. Decrease your taxes long term because you never pay tax on that or the growth in the Roth IRA again. All right, that leads me to number ten. Is not necessarily tax planning, but it is year end planning you need to. Think about, and that is this update your trust, your will for life events, right? Look, we go through our days and. Our years and things will change. Did you have a child? Did you get married? Did something happen? Maybe there was a medical issue. Is there a grandchild? Did life events happen where now the trust or the will that you originally had isn't as valid and needs to be done? Did you go through a divorce? God forbid. You want to just review it doesn't mean that you got to update it. You want to review it and make sure that it still makes sense based on your life circumstances. We'll do an annual review of our will and trust every year, and just say, do things need to change? By and large, it doesn't really change. I changed it when I got diagnosed. With cancer, changed it when my granddaughters were born. But that's it. So it's important to look at it, because here's the problem, is that if you don't have an updated will, if you don't have an updated trust, and. God forbid something happens to you, the. Wishes that you actually had at the time of your death may not be the same as what you did in the will. And now they all have to follow the will and the trust, and it may not be the way you wanted. So I think it's important to look at it. I remember when I got diagnosed with cancer. Literally 2 hours after the diagnosis, I was in my attorney's office. We were walking through the trust, and I wanted to go through it. Now, Stephanie wasn't happy, because in her eyes, what I was doing was end. Of life planning, which indirectly, a trust and a will. That's what it is. Okay? But what I was really doing was I just wanted to make sure that. She was taken care of, that there. Wasn'T anything that was missed, that my son was taken care of. At the time, we didn't have grandkids that my brother, that the people I. Cared about, the causes I was behind. That it was done right and everything. So it wasn't really end of life planning. It was actually peace of mind planning, because once we updated it and changed it and made sure that everything was. There, then Stephanie saw exactly what needed to be done. If, God forbid, something happened. See, Stephanie and I both experienced situations with our mothers when our dads passed. Away, where our mothers panicked. They didn't know what to do. They both thought they were going to lose their homes because they had no idea. I don't ever want Stephanie to feel that way. And so it was important to update it. And now we're good. She knows I know I'm good. So if you care about the people. In your life and you want to care for them, and this is your intent, make sure it's documented. I get it. You have to pay fees, and you got to pay an attorney and all. Of that stuff, do you know what? It's better than not, because I want. You to have the peace that the people that you love are taken care of the way you choose to. And the way to do that is. To update the trust, the will. All right, so those are the ten things that I have for you right now. This is where I want you to do. I want you to use this as a checklist. I want you to sit down with. Your advisors, and I want you to. Go through it and say which ones apply. Because you have a handful of weeks. Before the end of the year. Some of these you can get done after the end of the year, very few. But if you want to take advantage of using the tax code the way it was meant to reduce your taxes, keep as much in your pocket so you can invest it, so you can live life, so you can have it working for you instead of working for. The government, then we got to make moves today. We got to make moves now, right? So do what you need to do to make sure that you take advantage. Of all the things that you're entitled. To take to reduce your taxes and. Keep more income in your pocket instead of someone else's. All right? I hope that this was valuable. I hope that this helps you. I hope that you get a chance to use some of this. And if questions come up or anything comes up, do me a favor. Reach out, let me know. All right? I'm here for you. All right? Until I see you again on another. Episode, another journey on the road or. Out there when I'm speaking, always, always strive to live a life that outlives. I'll see you soon. Cheers. Thank you for listening to the affluent entrepreneur show. With me, your host, Mel Abraham. If you want to achieve financial liberation to create an affluent lifestyle, join me in the affluent entrepreneur facebook group now by going to mel Abraham.com/group, and I'll see you there.