Is Your Practice Financially Naked? Asset Protection for Real-World Dentists with Gary Harker

We work hard to build wealth, but are you taking the time to actually protect it? Yes, you have insurance and have established an LLC, but that doesn't mean you're covered.

In today’s episode, expert Gary Harker of Legally Mine shares three simple asset protection moves you can make right now to protect your money, lower your risk, and stop bleeding money in taxes. You’ll get ideas for building wealth for your kids and simple ways to get proactive so you can keep more of what you earn!

Topics discussed:

• The truth about lawsuits in dentistry
• The biggest misconceptions about insurance and LLCs
• How to separate your business and personal assets
• Three simple asset protection moves you can do right now
• The importance of trusts and estate plans
• Strategies to reduce your tax burden and protect your wealth
• The surprising reason you shouldn't hire a dental CPA
• How to start the process and talk to your CPA

SET UP A CONSULTATION WITH GARY @ LEGALLY MINE CLICK HERE

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This episode was produced by Podcast Boutique https://www.podcastboutique.com

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Transcript

Why Protection Matters Now

Paul Etchison 0:02

You may not realize it, but you could easily lose everything you've worked for with just one lawsuit or unexpected event. That's why you need to stop waiting, be proactive, and get the right estate plan and asset protection in place. Today, I have an expert in asset protection and tax strategies, Gary Harker, on the show, and he's gonna share what every dentist can do to protect their wealth, their family, and their practice. Because we're exposed in more ways than we think. And having insurance or an outdated estate plan, it just isn't enough. Today you're gonna learn where to start, how you can save major money in taxes, what professionals you should work with, and why you might not need a dental-specific CPA. There'll be no legal jargon that you don't understand, just clear advice that will help you take the next step towards protecting everything that you've built. Let's get into it. You are listening to the Dental Practice Heroes Podcast, where we teach dentists how to step back from the chair, empower their team, and build a practice that gives them their life back. I'm your host, Dr. Paul Etcheson, dental coach, author of two books on dental practice management, and owner of a large four-doctor practice that runs with ease while I work just one clinical day a week. If you're ready for a practice that supports your life instead of consuming it, you're in the right place. My team of legendary dental coaches and I are here to guide you on your path from overwhelmed owner to dental practice hero. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back to the Dental Practice Heroes Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Paul Edgison, and really excited about my guest today. This one's going to be an interesting one. This is somebody that I met at the Dental Nachos event in Philadelphia, and he spoke there and it kind of just caught me by surprise as something that I was like, wow, this is really interesting. And I think this is something my listeners can really benefit of. We've got Gary Harker from Legally Mine, and essentially he's an asset protection and tax consultant working with wills, estates, tax mitigation strategies, and all that stuff. Like, what is asset protection? Well, we're trying to like keep your stuff, like keep what's legally yours. So welcome to the podcast, Gary. I'm so excited to have you on.

Gary Harker 2:12

I'm excited to be here, Paul. I remember uh at Dental Nacho's, I was sitting there, and you actually spoke too. So I got to hear your presentation before you got to glean on some of what we were doing. So I'm super stoked to at least be invited to be here. So thanks for having me.

Meet Gary Harker And Legally Mine

Paul Etchison 2:29

Awesome, man. Glad to have you. Let's talk about what you do, because I think a lot of this the services you provide is like we're dental owners. We're talking about dental owners. I know this goes for any owner, but we always think like, oh, that'll never happen to me. What are some common like misconceptions people have about I guess like lawsuits and liability as far as dentists go?

Dentists’ Blind Spots And Lawsuit Risks

Gary Harker 2:53

Yeah. So dentists, first and foremost, is insurance as like a blanket and they think it's going to protect them. And I think if a blanket's going to protect you from the cold, but not from a gunshot, right? So it's a nice comfort place. But at the same time, when there's a judgment in a lawsuit, they're going to pull from the insurance when the insurance pays, they're going to recoup their cost by inflating your premiums. That's just historically what happens, right? The other misconception is that my insurance protects me. The reason why I say that, I was just on a call with a dentist who was sued for sexual harassment. It's like, how do you refute that? Like, what are you doing? Like, what levels do you go to to protect yourself from sexual harassment? Wrongful termination. And then you get the Me Too movement. You're like, oh my gosh, are you serious? So I'm not going to say that he's guilty or not guilty. But what I am going to say is the motivation to sue him was there because he had a lot of money. And so lawsuits are not about righting wrongs. Lawsuits are about money. If you have money, they will try to go after that. And your malpractice doesn't cover sexual harassment or wrong for termination, which is the number one and two that we see in dental practices. The other things that we see within dental practices is actually for dentists, is not the dental practice. It's going home. It's your children, it's your spouse, it's you driving home. It's life happening type stuff. And we think that you can only be sued for how much insurance you have. No, they're going to try to sue whoever they can and what for whatever they can. So I think the biggest misconception, if you go back to it, is that I have enough and it's insurance is there. We're good. They just don't look at it from a 360 perspective. They look at it very unilaterally. This is the only way I'm going to get sued as a dentist. It's just not the case, which is sad.

Paul Etchison 4:40

Yeah, you know, it's interesting, is like we often see, and I don't want to like this come off the wrong way for any listeners, but we often see like these GoFundMe's for these really like tragic things, like people, you know, passing away too early. Like, but ultimately what it comes down to is a lack of planning. There's no life insurance. They weren't set for anything like this to happen. But then I think about myself and the situation like we're talking about today. I don't necessarily feel like I was set before I started talking to you guys. And it's it's amazing that nothing happened to me, but I just had somebody in that I know fairly close, like had turned left in front of a car. The car hit a tree. The person driver passed away, and this was a high net worth individual. And he's going through a lot of things right now that I don't necessarily feel like he would be going through if he wasn't high net worth.

Gary Harker 5:29

No, it's totally true. I mean, there's a I can give you case by case, like there's so many of them. But there's a a dentist in San Antonio, and her son was got in a car accident who was 16 years old, and she's responsible. She's the over 18, right? So she's under 18, so the mom's responsible. And the car that she's driving is also mom's. And so what's named in the lawsuit? Well, mom is and the car is. Now she was a client of ours, so here's what happens: the car is in a separate LLC, and her assets, her personal money is in a separate type of entity. And so when they tried to sue her, the maximum they could get was the insurance. So the lawsuit for that one, there's going to be a lawsuit. There was a wrong that occurred. The maximum they can get now is the insurance. In fact, the insurance has leveraged to not settle for as much because they know that they can't sue you personally above and beyond that, because there's nothing to get. And so that's where the true asset protection comes into play. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like I'll back up on that and just articulate that if you have, let's say, a million dollars worth of savings and investments and whatnot, and it's in your personal name, when you are sued, whether as a dental practice owner or in this case, as the parent of an individual who was driving a car and it's your car as well, and they sue you, they're suing for the million dollars you have in your savings and investments. They're not suing for the value of the car anymore. So when you take that money and you put it into a different basket that's like a completely different legal entity, it's excluding that now from a lawsuit. That's what asked for protection is, it's dividing it up.

Paul Etchison 7:04

So, I mean, you share this example of this dentist in San Antonio who was a client of yours and thankfully is protected because of the work that was done up front proactively. Proactively is the biggest word. You gotta be proactive. Well, you can't react to it. By the time you're reacting, it's probably much too late. I mean, do you have a similar story of somebody, maybe a doctor or dentist, that thought they were protected and turns out they weren't?

Gary Harker 7:27

Unfortunately, yes. And they're the ones who usually call me. They're saying, hey, I just got in a car accident. Can you help me? I can't. I don't want to wear orange for a number of years. Okay. Orange is not the new black in dentistry. I think that one of the things that happens a lot with our clients is just the weight and relief and just having peace of mind. Because we're talking about asset protection. I get it. One of the things we're not talking about is estate planning, trusts and wills. You recently just went to India, yeah?

Paul Etchison 7:57

Mm-hmm.

Gary Harker 7:57

And it was pretty awesome. Any time during your trip to India, were you ever concerned about your well-being in life?

Paul Etchison 8:07

There were moments. There were moments.

Real-World Lawsuit And LLC Shielding

Gary Harker 8:09

I'm just I'm joking. Anytime you go to a third world country, I always play that. But I remember the first time that I flew internationally, I was like searching for a napkin in the event that I crashed, I could have my will on a napkin so that if I didn't survive, hopefully the napkin does, right? Yeah. So it's just, it's when you have, I would say, tell people, when you have kids, when you're married, or when you have over $100,000, that's when you need to create a trust. And I can give you, my brother passed away when he was 39 years old. He was struck and killed by a drunk driver. After he was hit, he got life flighted to Denver Hospital from uh Casper, Wyoming, is where he got hit. And so all my family flew out. I'm one of nine boys, so he was one of nine as well. And I had my mother, father, and his, my brother's wife was there. And so I want you to imagine this emergency room with end-of-life type care going on. And I had my mother and my sister-in-law in a room with a doctor's asking what we want to do. Do we want to keep him on life support? What are we trying to do here? And here you have two women who absolutely love this man. And I think everyone in their sane mind would say the wife should be the one who gets to make the decisions. But try telling that to a mom who's raised this boy for 39 years. You don't want to make decisions in the valleys of your life. You want to make decisions on the peaks of your life. So when things are going good and it's you're feeling great about life, that's when you prepare for the valleys. Gratefully, my brother did have a trust. And it was articulated in the will that was inside of the trust that his wife would make the decisions. And my mom had to be physically removed from the room to let them have those decisions. And legally, they could do that. She didn't have to be forced. But legally, if it came down to it, she would have been removed from that room because she had no rights to be there, other than his wife, my sister-in-law, allowed her to be there. That was it. So those decisions are made now. They're not made then. But the term is called probate court. So if there was no trust for parents and they pass away and their family and friends are, how do we divide these assets up? Even if there is a will, the average length of probate in the United States is eight and a half years. It's like family and friends fighting over the dumb things. Like, I get the second house. No, you get the no, I get it. No mom told me I got it. No dad told me I get it. So it's just that type of stuff. It's just be proactive, do it now, because nobody wants to fight over it. And when you're in heaven or or hell, wherever you want to go, if you're there, you want to make sure that your family is like, hey, I took care of them. They're good. I really didn't care who got the second house, but they, whatever. I'm going to make sure they're not fighting over at least.

Paul Etchison 11:07

I could tell you that I've been around long enough to see families fight and get completely destroyed when somebody passes away, when they're trying to decide who deserves what. And never, never, never do people agree on who deserves what. And I can tell you from my own personal experience, when my father passed away when he was 49, and no planning, nothing like that. And there's some things that were in joint. They owned, like they refinanced the house with him and his new wife. And we didn't get anything. Me and my brother didn't get anything. And the wife just said, hey, you know, sorry to hear about your dad, but move on. See you later. It sounds really horrible, but that's actually what happened. And we didn't have a leg to stand on. We tried to get attorneys, there was nothing. And it was just like, man, like you just it always seems like someday, and it's something that I think we should take more seriously. I would say, like, let's talk about the estate planning. I mean, obviously, we always procrastinate about it. There's different ways to do it. What are the intricacies that you guys would do versus like maybe going to something like legal Zoom or just getting like this cookie cutter sort of thing?

Estate Planning And Avoiding Probate

Gary Harker 12:10

Yeah, I think for the estate planning portion of it, there's different variables. LegalZoom might be a good option for some people. I would say for people who have assets that are like businesses and have a net worth of something, they want to divide specific assets, it's just insufficient because most of those assets, so assets should go inside of entities that go inside of a trust, right? So if you have a trust and you skip the entities and go right to the assets, it becomes really labor intensive. And so working with someone who that's like an estate planning person, now you can go to any attorney. I think we're very comparable to any estate planning attorney. The difference is we usually offer a package deal for people, but I don't think that we're any different than anybody else. Some people like to go state specific, which I totally understand why you'd want to get an attorney from your state. You're not obligated to do that. I think the difference is with Legally Mine, I should say this. You can have multiple types of trusts. So you can have irrevocable, revocable, you can have land trusts, you can have special needs trusts. Like I was on a call with a dentist an hour ago, and his 22-year-old son has epilepsy. So they need a special needs trust. We're going to roll that into it. We're going to create something for you too. So just the ability to have flexibility without overcomplicating it to the point where you're having to pay for multiple trusts, just get it all done at one spot.

Paul Etchison 13:32

That's helpful. So, I mean, have you ever seen any situations where somebody did estate planning maybe by themselves or really wasn't tailored to high net worth individuals and it really caused a problem for them?

Gary Harker 13:44

I think what happens is, yeah, you do it all the time. It's just, it's not that they did it wrong. It's that they did it 20 years ago and haven't got it updated. I think the big changes they're saying when you want to go from a revocable to an irrevocable, I would say 99% trusts are revocable, so you can modify them at any time. You don't have to be set. As soon as you convert it to an irrevocable trust, it's done. Like you can't undo it. You have to wait till that asset is sold or you die. So it's very, very rare that you go into an irrevocable trust. What's nice is when you have a revocable trust and you pass away, it becomes irrevocable. So your heirs can't change it.

Paul Etchison 14:25

We talk about the estates, the wills, not the most, you know, exciting subjects, I would say. You know, it's like things that are going to come into play when we're gone. But you set up this asset protection by setting up some entities that protect your assets from lawsuits and stuff. But also you get to have some tax benefits as well from doing all this stuff. Talk about that.

Gary Harker 14:47

That's the sexy part, right? That's the sexy part. It's uh, I think I would say every dentist believes they overpay on their taxes. Okay. Unless you're not paying anything. Then you're like, you're loving this. Our CPAs are not hired to save us money on taxes. I'm gonna repeat that. CPAs are not hired to save you money on taxes. My point. When is the last time your CPA called you up and said, hey, we need to have a meeting to go over this new tax strategy or these tax strategies that you should be utilizing? Some CPAs have that, or some clients have it. I would say it's less than 5%. And I think dentals professionals especially get caught up on the fact that they have a dental-specific CPA. I want to provide caution for that. Usually what that means is number one, they understand the deductions within and the terminology of a dentist. And so they're very familiar with the terminology. It makes you feel warm and fuzzy. I get it. I would encourage you to look towards someone who's entrepreneurial. So, what CPA is an entrepreneur themselves or understands entrepreneurship and ask them how much they pay in taxes. Because your goal is not an IRS agent to fill out applications and forms for you. Your goal is to reduce what you're paying in taxes. So that's the first thing I would do is find the right type of CPA. The second one is hiring a tax strategist. Now, strategist does, I think there's three layers of tax. The first layer of tax are deductions. These are things based upon how you spend your money, what we're going to reduce, because you're already spending the money anyway. So let's utilize this as a tax advantage. And sometimes they'll even say, hey, look, you're making enough money. You need to buy a car so we can reduce your tax lobby. Go spend some money. That's not a good tax strategy. I'm just going to be very blunt with you. Why are you spending money on an asset you don't typically need just to reduce your what you're paying in taxes?

Paul Etchison 16:40

I always thought that was weird too, is like when the dental suppliers will come at the end of the year and they say, hey, look at it was a tax strategy to buy a big machine to get the was a section 179 right off. And I'm just like, Yeah. It doesn't make sense to me that you would spend money to save money. That's right. Yeah.

Trusts, Updates, And Irrevocable Traps

Gary Harker 16:56

So you're saving, but you're saving your tax liability. So what they're saying on that is let's just say that you make so most dentists are making over $300,000. So I'm just going to use $300,000 for a baseline here. Some of you are making more. That's fine. Very few are making less. But if you make $300,000, you're going to be paying taxes about 33% of anything above that's paying $33 taxes. And so when you purchase a machine that costs $100,000, there's a tax write-off of $33,000. So yes, there's a benefit if you needed the device. Totally get that. Right? If you don't need the device, then you're like, oh man, but now I'm that means I'm going to pay $33,000 more in taxes. Right? So the level two tax strategy looks at legal entities. So outside of just your business, what are other legal entities that you have where we could shift money around to different accounts so that you can reduce your tax liabilities? Right? So let's just say that you want to do 401ks and IRAs for your children, but you don't want to do that for your staff. It's not because you're a bad employer, it's just because you care about your family more than you care about your just messing with you. Okay. We could say that. I know, but it's just everyone thinks it.

Paul Etchison 18:13

My 401k started off very great. It was awesome when we had like eight employees when we got to like 40.

Gary Harker 18:19

You're right.

Paul Etchison 18:19

It started looking at this and be like, why does this make any sense for me anymore? It doesn't make any. I'm getting my ass kicked on this.

Gary Harker 18:27

Yeah. So what you do is you have a second entity. So a second entity can have multiple purposes for it. But the whole idea is if your kids are employed instead of being employed by your practice, I'll give you my scenario. Okay. So my children are employed by a separate entity. It's a marketing company. It's my marketing company. Me and my wife have it. My contract with them, with that marketing company. So I contract out, $50,000 a year goes to the marketing company. Okay? Totally makes sense. Of that $50,000, $45,000 goes to three kids because each child can make $15,000 under the age of 18 and they know I paid taxes on it.

Paul Etchison 19:08

Oh wow. $15. Okay.

Tax Strategy Beyond Buying Equipment

Gary Harker 19:10

$15. Now here's the here's what's really unique. Notice I have two separate entities. Most dentists have an S corporation. They should. Okay. If you paid your children through an S corporation, they have to file a tax return. They have to pay income tax. However, if they're paid through a partnership, which your business isn't, so you create another entity that is a partnership and you pay them through a partnership, they don't have to pay taxes on that money. So you're leveraging a legal entity to pay kids that are doing work for your business or on your business, or the rule is are they doing, are they performing a task that is reasonably related to the production of income? Put the child in the chair and you be sitting there next to it at in the operatory and you've got your devices and you're operating on this child, but you can't see their face. But you know that their legs don't go halfway down the chair. So you know it's a child. That child is your child. Okay. If um, what's that? Uh like lotion commercials can pay people for their hands. I'm sure you can pay your kid for just a silhouette of your child, too. That's the point, right? So these tax strategies, yes, you could pay your kids directly from your business. Fine, there's a little, there's some tax savings there, but it's more advantageous to put them through this partnership. So you have to have a second entity for that. Now, I wouldn't just do it just for that purpose. So we're gonna have this other entity also maybe shelter some money in case of a lawsuit. So you're gonna put your financial assets inside of there too. Great. Okay, there's a lot of flexibility that everyone can have, and your situation will change. So, Paul, in the last 10 years, how much moving and shaking have you done in business? Have you ever been set or have you had to adjust a little bit? Oh, adjust. Yeah, it's always changing. Always changing. So, what value would it have to you to have an attorney or a group of people on your side that said, we'll adjust the legal structure and your tax strategies based upon how you're pivoting?

Paul Etchison 22:25

Yeah. No, that would be super valuable. And I think there's a it's one of those things that a lot of people we just don't even understand it's even an option. And there's benefits like to like to come back on your point, uh, Gary, about paying your kids. Some people say, Well, why would I want to pay my kids anyway? You can now use that tax-free money to pay for their sports. That's right, the private school. And since they've already paid, they essentially they've paid their taxes on it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but they can also throw a portion of that into a Roth, which is after tax money that you will never ever be taxed on. That's right. That can grow. So there's a lot you can do with it.

Gary Harker 22:59

You're doing six thousand dollars per kid on that. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. And if you did that, it's like 500 bucks a month. If they go from eight to eighteen and you did do anything with it, by the time they're 50, they'll be millionaires. Because you've got compounding interest over and over and over again.

Paul Etchison 23:16

Yeah.

Second Entities And Paying Your Kids

Gary Harker 23:17

Yeah, you're absolutely right. You think I pay for my child's cheer, her gymnastics, son jujitsu, travel soccer, those types of activities that we know every one of us, if we have kids, we all know our kids cost more than $15,000.

Paul Etchison 23:33

What are some other things that dentists maybe are not so aware about that are opportunities that they can capitalize on?

Gary Harker 23:39

Yeah, so I would call it tier three strategies. So tier three strategies are basically where you're going to pay an expert to do this work. So in the dental world, you have general practitioners, right? They're gonna do the cleaning and they'll do a couple of root canals here and there, a little bit of endo. But if there's a bigger case and they need to resource that out, it's the same thing. We're not specialists in this, we're gonna farm this stuff out. You got your surgeons, you got your endodontists, period, and whatnot. Those individuals live off of referrals. Okay. They don't necessarily market to anybody else. So the same thing in a tax strategy, one that's I think is underutilized because it's misunderstood is research and development tax credits. Now, research and development tax credits are you look at the time that you invest in the training and implementation of products and processes. So your business andor just the on the business or in the business, both. So I'm gonna give you an example. If I go to your office, Paul, there's a good chance that you're not gonna greet me. It's gonna be your front desk. And then the front desk is gonna tell the hygienist to come and grab me, and I'm gonna go walk back to the operatory and they're gonna clean my teeth and they're gonna use a couple of instruments. Now, that whole thing was a process. I'm checking in, I'm received by somebody else, I'm taken back, and they're gonna use a product as part of that process. And they're gonna do cleaning and then a slight evaluation and some recommendations. They're gonna bring the doctor in. When they bring the doctor in, that's a new process. The doctor's gonna use a couple of instruments. They might even order an x-ray or whatnot and say, what do we need on this? And they will do another evaluation, part of the process using other products. And now we're training all of the people, the hygienist, we're the dental assistants, and the doctor, all getting trained on how to use all of these devices as part of the process. Who is paying for this time of all those employees? You are. It's going right out of your pocket. How are you recouping any of those costs? I didn't know I could. And my CPA hasn't come to tell me that I can, so I haven't done anything about it. So, what I'm asking you to do is be proactive and this get the ball rolling. You actually have to take something in proactive. You have a case, you'd have to be a client of legally mind for us to be proactive to call you, because I'm not gonna call every dentist out there and say, hey, guess what? You could qualify for. No, so you're proactive in that sense. We're gonna call you and say, look, based upon your situation, we can save you some money on this and this and this. So, research and development, you would have a one-on-one call. They do an evaluation, they do a five to seven day study. So they ask for some documents from you, the questionnaire. There's a five to seven day study that they do on this. They come back and say, it looks like we can save you X amount of dollars. We're not 100% sure on this because we need to look at some more data that we're gonna be pulling over the next three to four months as we do this study. It looks like we're gonna save you. Like I just got done with one two days ago. They're saving the client $90,000. And here's what's fun: they're doing 2025 taxes, 24, 23, and 22. They're going back three years plus the current year to see how much research and development this individual and their office has done. And they're pulling the numbers from what you're paying as income. That includes distributions, that includes salaries, that includes salaries from all of your employees, anyone who's part of those processes, those products, that equipment. They're pulling it all in. But this is free money that's coming back to you. It's I'm gonna pay somebody to do this. I can basically step away, you do all the work, you come back and say we're gonna save you $500,000 on future and current taxes. So, Paul, if you only owed $150,000 in taxes this year and we can save you $500,000 in tax credits, you effectively don't pay any taxes this year to the IRS. And you have rollover minutes of tax credits that would apply for the next up to the next 20 years. So when you have a big tax bill, it's there. So I really like that because it goes back to the individual, not the business. But let's just say one year you had a big capital gains because you sold the property, that's gonna go against the capital gains too.

Paul Etchison 27:46

What would you say to the person, the dentist that's listening and saying, Well, this sounds fishy. I don't want to go to jail. This doesn't sound legit. This doesn't sound legal.

Tier-Three Strategies: R&D Credits

Gary Harker 27:55

The first thing I would say is, I do want to go to jail. So I want to give you strategies that put me in jail. I would say this: there's a difference between being a compliance officer and a strategist. Most CPAs are compliance officers. They're if you scale one to ten, how aggressive do you want to be? You're here. If you want to be super aggressive, that's offshore accounts as things outside of the United States. There's thresholds, I would like to say, on how far you can push a strategy, and that changes every year. I would say legally mine is slightly aggressive. They're like on a six on a scale of one to ten.

Paul Etchison 28:28

No, I think that's what most dentists are looking for. There's like we're looking for more aggressive strategy and people to get out in front of and like be more proactive and think about stuff rather than just being like, well, that's just how it is. Sorry, that's the tax law. And I think we're just worried that we don't want to push the envelope too much. Yeah. I think if when you talk to these like tax attorneys and stuff and you see how creative they can truly get, you realize that a lot of the stuff we're doing is not really pushing the envelope all that much at all. Like it can get pushed very far. I mean, there's these are laws, these are things that are interpreted, and there's always loopholes and stuff like that. So, Gary, talk about legally mine. And if someone was to reach out to you, like what do you guys provide? I know we kind of talked about a bunch of different things today, but if you could summarize, what is the service that you provide to the clients that you work with?

Gary Harker 29:19

So, legally mine, like I'll tell you you can do estate planning, trust, wills, living wills, last maternity type stuff, end-of-life care type things. Number two, asset protection. You look at personal, professional, entrepreneurial, real estate, any type of asset that you have or would like to create, we protect those assets in using legal entities. We leverage state laws. We leverage the verbiage inside of the documents that give you more control. That quite frankly, no attorney is looking at. Less than half of 1% of attorneys voluntarily list that they specialize in asset protection. They do not change the fine print. We will change the fine print if it's necessary for asset protection. That's the second thing that we do. The third is the tax strategies. Now, tax strategies does not mean implementation. So we will give you, based upon your legal structure, what tax strategies you should be utilizing. We are going to bank on the fact that your CPA understands level one deductions. Okay. So level two stuff is things that they just aren't looking at or they don't feel comfortable with quite yet. They might need a further explanation of how to do that. So the mesh point is something that's also included. We'll talk about that in a second here. But those are the three asset estate planning, asset protection, and tax savings. The mesh point with your CPA, here are six strategies, or here are 20 strategies that we recommend you using. CPA looks at it. Well, we're already using X amount, but we're not using these. I need a further explanation on these two or three. Cool. Give us a phone call. There's a mesh point where our tax strategist will work directly with your CPA. And if you want to be on the call, which I highly recommend you're on the call, you can learn how that conversation's happening and what your CPA is now responsible to do. That's their job. You can also see how much money you're going to save on taxes at that point. That's what Legally Mind does in a nutshell. Now, there's also a service aspect to this. The service aspect is we're going to take the existing entities that you already have and we're going to make them asset protective in nature. If you need a registered agent to So that you can leverage laws in states that you don't live in, like Alaska, Wyoming, Delaware, they have laws that don't allow dissolution of entities. So that would be a really good state to have a management company. We would be your registered agent for those states. In continuing, if you wanted a strategy every year for taxes, that's another thing we do. Your life has changed, like you said, Paul, in the last 10 years, multiple times. Your tax strategy would have changed every single year based upon number one, your circumstances, the money that's coming in, and quite frankly, politics. What laws have been put into place that you're not aware of that will affect your taxes? Big, beautiful bill. Did that affect people in taxes? You better believe it. Depreciation schedule instead of waiting over five years, you can do it all right now at 100% rather than 50% over five years. There's little things like that that we're you have to be aware of. And that's where Legally Mind steps up and says, we're doing this for all of our clients. You're flagged. If you're giving this strategy, we need to pivot. Or if you make X amount of dollars, we need to pivot. We'll flag you and call you at the beginning of the year or whenever that strategy is available. But we also, we also have annual meetings for every one of our clients. So we can talk about taxes as many times as you'd like to, but taxes, estate planning, asset protection, we do at least one call a year to ensure everything's going well. Usually turns into about three or four calls a year where you'll have with our team. That's all part of our program.

Paul Etchison 32:43

All right, Gary, if someone's listening, they're like, okay, it's time. I've got to go through the process of doing it. Maybe I'm not excited to do it, but I'll feel so much better when it's done. It's something I need to do to protect my family and those that I love. How do they get in touch with you?

How Legally Mine Works With Your CPA

Gary Harker 32:57

There's a couple of ways you can do it. You can go to legalymine.com and there's a contact us button there and just ask for Gary Harker. The way that I would do it though, Paul, is why don't we just put up on the screen or in the description of this a link to my appointment calendar? Okay. And so when they go to the appointment calendar, just reference Paul Etchison or the name of your podcast, and then I will honor an event discount as if they were part of your group.

Paul Etchison 33:23

Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Yeah, that will be in the show notes. Uh link right to Gary's calendar and let him know the Dental Practice Heroes podcast, and they'll give you the event discount. Love it, man. Thank you so much. Well, hey, God, thanks for coming on and talking about some stuff that I think a lot of us need to hear. And it's one of those things that, like I said, we we don't love setting it up, but goddamn, you've got to do it. So, listeners, I mean, we are high net worth individuals. The rules that are for everybody else are a little bit different for us. We've got a lot more to lose. And man, you should protect that and protect the people that you're gonna leave behind should you ever leave this world. So that's what Gary does, and that's what I've working with legally mind. Everyone there has been awesome to work with. And I'm just about done. Where it's like I could say, hey, I did it. It's done. Now it's just maintenance. So dude, that's awesome.

Gary Harker 34:14

That's for you like three months. Yeah. That's pretty darn good. I know that that's I love hearing that. So good.

Paul Etchison 34:21

Cool. Well, thanks so much, Gary. Thanks for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. Hope some listeners reach out to you. And that was that was awesome having you on. Really had enjoyed our conversation.

Gary Harker 34:29

Likewise, can't wait to hang out with you a little bit more.