Fighting the Good Fight with Patricia Gentile

The Pattie Gentile Show as heard on WADK Radio Ep 30

Patricia Gentile Taxpayer Defense Attorney, CPA Season 2 Episode 37

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0:00 | 41:31

Pattie Gentile's "Fighting the Good Fight Podcast" is now a weekly radio program! Heard Saturday evening's at 6 and again Sunday morning at 10 at www.wadk.com or 1540AM Newport RI.

Host Patricia Gentile continues "Defending Taxpayers & Solving Their Tax Problems". With this new format, The Pattie Gentile Show will be your weekly appointment with Host Pattie Gentile & her guest experts as they discuss the latest tax news, issues and cutting-edge strategies to resolve and prevent tax problems.

Here on episode 30, we welcome back Dan Pilla, leading Taxpayers' rights advocate and head of TaxHelpOnline.com

Regarded as one of the country’s premiere experts in IRS procedures, he has helped countless thousands of citizens solve personal and business tax problems they thought might never be solved.

Enjoy and tune in on WADK.

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SPEAKER_05

This is Patricia Gentile founder of New England Tax Relief and host of the Patty Gentile Show. A client once wrote me, quote, My husband and I found ourselves in debt to the IRS for $167,000. I had contacted a company that said they would help. After I paid them six thousand dollars, I found out that they took my money and ran. I was desperate and searched for a local tax attorney and found Patricia. She was able to get our tax debt reduced to thirty-six thousand dollars. End quote. The moral of that story is that you really need to be able to trust the person you choose to represent you with the IRS. With over forty-three years of combined experience as a taxpayer, defense attorney, and CPA, I have successfully resolved hundreds of difficult IRS situations. One-on-one, personal attention is the hallmark of my representation, and my strategies are customized to your specific needs to completely resolve your IRS issues. So go to my website, New EnglandTaxrelief.com, and schedule a free telephone consultation or call me at 1-800-880-8388, where a live person will always answer and take your message 24-7. Welcome everyone to the Patty Gentile Show. And in studio with me, as always, is my producer, John Ayanouzi. We broadcast from WADK out of Newport, Rhode Island, every Saturday evening at 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. And the show is replayed again on Sunday morning at 10 a.m. So I just wanted to say if you were listening to last Sunday's replay, going into the last segment of the show, there was a technical miscue. So don't think what you heard was not correct because it was. You weren't losing your mind. It actually was my guest over the Christmas and New Year's holidays. He's past Christmas and New Year's holidays, Dr. Evelyn Lee Ellis, who was discussing her stress relief techniques. So I invite you to go back to that uh podcast and uh take in those techniques. She provided us with uh five stress relief techniques that you could do if you weren't driving and listening to the podcast. So there's my warning there. But I want to give a shout out also to Bruce Newberry, excuse me, who's WADK's morning with Bruce, Monday through Friday, 7 to 10 a.m. for troubleshooting that segment. And he brought in our last segment in full. You got to hear it, my coaching corner. Uh, and I just want to thank you very much, Bruce. Here's my shout out for doing that as well. So actually, you got an extra benefit last week if you listen to the Sunday morning replay. Got a little something extra there. Um, and and before we get into other things, John, uh, I want to mention that in um my last segment today, which I like to call my coaching corner, I'm gonna provide what I think is a clear understanding of the innocent spouse relief. And this is a type of IRS tax relief for spouses. I think it's a good time to bring it in. I get a lot of questions about it, and I want to give a clear understanding to that. Um, but John, before we get into the meat of the show, do we have any new uh downloads of the podcast, listeners that you can see in our analytics?

SPEAKER_00

We want to welcome two uh new areas. I believe they're new. The first is Hackensack, New Jersey, and I continue to tell you this the mid-Atlantic Patty seems to enjoy the show. And second was Margate, Florida. Margate, Florida. We had two new subscribers from Margate. So welcome to both of them. And let me just say this this time of year where we broadcast, Patty, you are the we're the envy of the Northeast at the very least. I mean, the the yachts are returning, uh, the festivals are returning.

SPEAKER_02

Right.

SPEAKER_00

Newport, Rhode Island is just a hotbed of activity, and we're so happy and pleased to be broadcasting to these folks who are coming back for uh, as they say, to have a summer. They're having a summer.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah, absolutely. And we have one more uh big event uh in June and June 13th, to be exact, which is Taylor Swift's wedding.

SPEAKER_00

Oh boy, you are not kidding. That is that is, I mean, think about the vendors uh who will benefit from this. And just the Swifties are so loyal, they'll probably flock to the island. I don't know what that means for Bruce Newberry's traffic report, but it it's it's gonna be it's gonna be quite a summer in Newport, and I'm so pleased that the Patty Gentile show is uh a part of it.

SPEAKER_05

I am too. I like that. That's uh festive and exciting, and we're we're broadcasting out of there. That's good. I I I want to say that you know, we started the show, the radio show. I've had the podcast Fighting the Good Fight with Patricia Gentiles since March of 2024. But as of September of 2025, we have now the Patty Gentiles show, and I really appreciate the fact that our listeners, the downloaders from everywhere, you have statistics there of where they're coming from, is creating an organic show here, and I really love that. I'm somebody who loves things happening from a grassroots perspective. I I'm just a grassroots person. Um did and did we have any?

SPEAKER_00

Well, on that theme, well, yes, on that theme, here's a grassroots question. There's nothing more grassroots than person to person. And I'll name the station just because they're not a competitor of ours, but WPKN, which is heard uh in um long on Long Island, as they say, and in Connecticut, uh, someone who works at WPKN is also a subscriber and listener of WADK and your show, and asked a good question, and I couldn't answer it. In a scenario, by the way, this gentleman's name is Brendan, Brendan Troller. Uh in a situation where the previous year you owed federal, okay, you now file this year for 2025 and you break even. You're in the process of paying federal back, but guess what? You're getting a nice chunk of change back from the state. Will the federal garnish the state?

SPEAKER_05

Uh, great question. That that's a great question, Brendan. And thank you for listening. I really appreciate that. What happens is that the IRS would have to send the State Department of Revenue a notice of offset, which is a levy of your state refund in order to even be able to grab any part of it or the whole thing. And because you are on a payment agreement with the IRS, they don't see the need to do such uh an enforcement type collection action like a levy. And so enjoy that state refund.

SPEAKER_00

Now, let me ask you this because I have heard, and maybe I've heard it on your show, the state pursues even more aggressively than uh the Fed. Is that true?

SPEAKER_05

Uh it depends on the state. It does depend on the state department of revenue. Not every state department of revenue has the level of resources to be in actively enforcing collections. The of course, your your larger states, they have more resources, they can do that. And so it depends on the state. Audit you before the IRS does, um, come after you with enforcement collection action. That's usually a shock to me because that I think happens uh occasionally. And and and then it depends on the state. There are some states you won't even, they just don't have the resources to to put forth for enforcement collection action. I want to give out our phone number. This is where you can text these questions, or if we have a poll question, answers, or if there's a topic you'd like to hear. 603 204 0104. I'll say it again. 603-204-0104. And recently, I actually have a listener, we have a listener that tends to send me pictures on the holidays, and now recently she became a new grandmother. She's in the 716 area code. I I'm shouting out to you, please text me your name and your exact location so we can acknowledge you because I really appreciate what you celebrate. Your pictures that you celebrate. Uh I mean, it shows me that you are celebrating because of the pictures you sent me. So, congratulations there. Uh, I'm just before we go into the commercial break, John. Uh I do want to say, I wanted to acknowledge that Monday, April 20th, of course, was Patriots Day for the states of Mass and Maine, Massachusetts and Maine, but it was also the 130th running of the Boston Marathon. And I want to give a shout out to those who who ran, walked, completed, tried everything. Because the the sport I'm going to do this weekend coming up is I'm going to be in Rito, Nevada, Reno, Nevada, doing the USBC Open Championship Tournaments. And if anybody's been following the show since September, I actually joined a bowling league for the first time in my life, and I am now going to the USBC Open Championship.

SPEAKER_00

That is so exciting.

SPEAKER_05

Yes. So come on back, everyone. We've got uh the next topic I think you're going to find very helpful and interesting. And in this segment, I had seen this IRS has a newsletter that they send out electronically that I subscribe to, and they actually were saying, What should taxpayers do next now that April 15th has uh gone by? And especially if you uh didn't place yourself on extension, and so now you're in a late filing situation. So I'm going to address both. If you place yourself on extension, what this gives you an opportunity to do, and if you did not place yourself on extension, and that what the extension means is that you make a request for an extension of time to file the tax return for an automatic six months to October 15th. And if you're an entity like a corporation or a partnership or a trust until September 15th, but if you did not place uh yourself on proper extension of time to file the forms, now you're in a late filing situation. Let's start with what extensions really mean. And I can tell you that there was four strategic advantages of going on extension. Maybe some people ran into the their professional tax preparer, didn't have enough time to get to the return. Maybe they gave uh the preparer the information just a little too late, approaching the April 15th uh deadline as well. But you know, extensions. I I used to do uh strategy with clients who, for example, had those SCP SEP IRAs, and it gave them time, we place them on extension, and it gave them time to be able to uh collect the income that they wanted to, or the funds to actually make that SEP IRA contribution. Now that's a SEP, it's not a traditional IRA or a Roth IRA. Those were those contributions, if you wanted that deduction on your 2025 return, had a deadline date of April 15th, whether you filed the return or placed yourself on extension or you you didn't do either. Also, there's no reason to rush a return, you know, it's dependent on incomplete information. So that was another good reason. There is no reason to rush, but the key about extensions were that it was an extension of time to file the forms, but not an extension of time to pay the tax. And so I've mentioned in previous shows that I was doing a lot of numbers crunching with clients that needed to go on extension, but we wanted to make sure that if it looked like there would have been a tax balance owed, if they were to file the forms on April 15th, that they paid that in with the extension. You know, extensions also allow for more time for planning, tax planning elections. And there are certain elections that must be made by the time the return is filed. And so now you get this time to work with your client if you're a tax professional, uh, or your client was trying to get together information that may qualify them for certain elections now on this return that they need to file. And, you know, clients that had complex investment portfolios like cryptocurrency activity, or that were evolving family dynamics that need extra time to ensure accurate reporting. Uh, in particular, I have a client who's both her parents, both, she lost both her parents in 2025, and I her parents were also receiving income out of the United States coming into the country. And so we had a lot of documentation to make sure we had all proper documentation, not just to file a United States federal return, but also uh if you needed to file any types of form regarding international income or assets. So it was you do want to take that time. Now, for those who let's just say who procrastinate on taxes, maybe you call yourself a procrastinator, um, maybe you delay or you send documents and piecemeal. Look, many of these tax tasks, let's say, can trigger a unique and often uncomfortable blend of emotions. I'm well aware of this. For over 43 years of doing taxpayer defense and resolution and representing non-filers as well as all all these tax seasons every year. You know, I understand that you can have fear, you can have shame, you can have overwhelm, you can have uncertainty. And so, you know, you have that fear of making a mistake. Maybe you have shame and self-judgment that you're embarrassed about, your financial habits, or you're behind on your bookkeeping. Um, maybe the tax requires decision making and document gathering and attention to details. So that's like overload, especially on the brain. Maybe you've had a negative past experience. And how do you design? You have to design a system to reduce the overwhelm. And I definitely have steps that I use, depending on the client and depending on what the issue is, to help you get through that and not be overwhelmed, and we can walk through that together. Coming up in our next segment is our guest, Dan Pilla. And if you've been listening to both my podcast and the radio show, I I tend to have Dan on. It it seems to fall this way on a quarterly basis because it's just a it seems like so much goes on within about a three, four month span. And I'd love to have Dan on to talk about what's been going on and maybe what's coming up currently. Dan's background is literally for over four decades. He's been the nation's leader in taxpayers' rights defense and IRS abuse prevention and cure. He is regarded as one of the country's uh premier experts in IRS procedures, no doubt about that. He he is regularly featured on radio and television, as well as major newspapers, leading magazines and trade publications nationwide. He's presented testimony to Congress on several occasions. And he's he had the book How to Get Tax Amnesty and the New York Times number one bestseller, which I used back in 1994 to win my first uh tax representation case. I submitted an offer and compromise. I followed that book, and it's history from there because I became a member of his taxpayers' defense institute, and I'm also on the advisory board. I'm a consulting member on the advisory board. Dan's my mentor in this business of tax resolution and taxpayer defense, and I'm looking forward to having you listen to Dan as we look back at how he saw the past tax season under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. So you don't want to miss Dan.

SPEAKER_01

Change of sea.

SPEAKER_05

Welcome back, everyone, to the Patty Gentiles show. And in studio with us today is our guest, Dan Pilla. Welcome and thanks for being on today because we have some topics to talk about.

SPEAKER_06

We do have some topics, Patty. And I first of all I appreciate you having me on. It's my pleasure. You and I've worked together for what 35 years or so, maybe more not to portray our ages here or anything, but we go back an awful long time, and it's my pleasure to uh to work with you on all of this stuff.

SPEAKER_05

Yeah, and I appreciate that. Uh, I always say you're my mentor, and by the way, I loved seeing all your books up on Amazon. Uh, you know, it's all going back to the first book I bought and started to follow in the taxpayer defense and resolution uh work, which was the number one. New York Times bestseller, how to get tax amnesty. And I won back in 1994 my first case, my an offering compromise, and this is before the IRS, I think, even had the form out. You know, and it almost was like I had to have an inside skinny from you to know where to get the form and how to uh present it and et cetera. And I got that through the How to Get Tax Amnesty book.

SPEAKER_06

Well, one thing is for sure, Patty. Back in those days in the early 90s, uh, you could count on one hand practically the number of offers and compromises that were filed with the IRS because, first of all, they denied, I mean, they just never even talked about the program. Very few people knew it existed. Almost no tax professionals knew it existed, and no citizens, of course, knew it existed. And so it was quite a revelation when I published that book, How to Get Tax Amnesty, to show people, individuals and tax professionals, exactly how to do this.

SPEAKER_05

Yes, you're absolutely right. Big time revelation. Uh, I've always loved that your slogan or motto is you know, there's no such thing as a hopeless case because I've come to know that's true.

SPEAKER_06

Yeah, it is true. It is true. Absolutely. And the reason for that is because there's so many different strategies that the IRS has available. I mean, this is not this is not witchcraft. We don't have pixie dust or a magic wand that we wave to make tax problems go away. We use the procedures that the IRS has that are ingrained either in the tax law or in the IRS's uh administrative procedures that people just don't know about.

SPEAKER_05

Uh, speaking of taxes, one of the things I wanted to ask you was, you know, how did you think this past tax season went, especially with the one big beautiful Bill Act provisions? That uh I mean, I had clients on the personal and business level that did so well and qualified for so much of uh those provisions. I just wanted to get your your overview about it.

SPEAKER_06

Well, well, well, you your your experience based on your firsthand working with clients is what we've seen across the country. Middle income taxpayers benefited significantly from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. There's no doubt about it. The reduced tax liability on ticks, tips, reduced tax liability on overtime, the additional enhanced standard deduction for seniors. Those three things are big deals, Patty. And the people that benefited the most were middle income Americans, not the not the not the rich people that the uh that you know that the so much of the media ran around saying that this bill is only going to benefit the rich. Well, it didn't benefit the rich at all. It wasn't the rich at all who who uh who got their tax liabilities reduced as a result of that. It was middle class citizens, and that's who the bill was pointed at. So now, in terms of uh the tax season itself, I'll tell you what, going into it, I had a lot of concerns. And the concerns were based on what we knew happened in 2025 with the IRS, where they lost 25% of their workforce, right? The agency is down to now about roughly 76,000, 77,000 employees, and they were right you know just north of 100,000 at in January of last year. And so I was very concerned that the combination of the loss of employees and the additional uh changes, substantial changes to the Internal Revenue Code that had to be programmed into the IRS's return processing computers in order to receive those things now this filing season was going to create some very significant hiccups. From what I can tell, Patty, there weren't any significant hiccups, right? Those returns were filed, they've been processed. Of course, we're, you know, we're just a few uh a week or a few days or whatever it is now away from the filing season. So it remains to be seen uh whether there's gonna be a tremendous amount of hiccups, but all of the experience that I've had by talking to people like you around the country is we have not seen uh the kind of hiccups that I anticipated. Now, that said, I will say this, and this gets back to our earlier point about the tax uh reduction from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The average tax refund in 2025 for tax year 2024 was about $3,100. The average tax refund so far this year, from data I've seen from the IRS, is that they're up about five to six hundred dollars a refund. And again, these are wage earners. These are the people who overpay their taxes typically are not self-employed people that make high income, and they're most definitely not, you know, the mega rich millionaires, and they're not getting tax refunds, those people, right? The people that are getting tax refunds are the wage earners, and those tax refunds are up five or six or seven hundred dollars on average. And the reason for that is because the tax liabilities for those people are lower under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. There's just no question about it. It's undeniable that this bill has helped middle-income citizens, does not help rich people, lower, you know, low-income people don't pay taxes anyway, so it doesn't make any difference uh for, you know, for the you know, poverty-level people that just don't pay anyway. And so this bill helped the middle-income families, uh, you know, Mr. and Mrs. Smith with the two or three kids that uh in um in many cases are struggling to make ends meet with two jobs, sometimes two and a half jobs. This is a big deal. This bill is helpful for those folks.

SPEAKER_05

It definitely was a big deal. I love seeing the senior, the additional senior deduction, literally wipe out what would have been taxable social security built into their, you know, taxable income was a part of their social security benefits. That was a part of taxable income. And because that's swept in, that really wiped out a lot of tax I saw with seniors.

SPEAKER_06

Um, and I yeah, no, no, no, one thing about that is that that I think is a little bit disingenuous on the part of the administration is they they continue to tout no tax on Social Security. I know that's not true, it's not accurate as you well know.

SPEAKER_02

Right.

SPEAKER_06

We get they get certain people, not all seniors get it, because you got to be under a certain income level, right? You can't be a high income person. And I think the cap is 150,000 for married filing jointly, Patty. Am I right?

SPEAKER_05

Yes, and $75,000 for filing single.

SPEAKER_06

Right, exactly. So if you're a single person getting Social Security benefits alongside of your wage income, and you're over that $75,000 cap, you don't get the benefit of that enhanced standard deduction.

SPEAKER_03

Right.

SPEAKER_06

So you're still gonna pay taxes on your Social Security. And so it's not accurate to say no tax on Social Security. And so I, you know, I just bristle when the administration continues to say that. But but to your point, you're exactly correct, the vast majority of social security or social security earners, Social Security, let me rephrase that. The vast majority of people getting Social Security benefits are still in that middle income level, under 150,000 married filing jointly, under 75,000 for individuals, and they're getting the benefit, and that's alleviating a significant part of their tax liability, which is a good thing.

SPEAKER_05

Yes, and that's what I saw, and uh I loved that aspect. Me personally, um, I was very interested in the SALT state and local tax provision that increased the maximum deduction from ten thousand dollars up to forty thousand dollars. That was a big deal. I wanted to see how many people that I knew, uh including you know, myself and my husband, were capped off at ten thousand dollars when our real estate taxes, our state income taxes, you know, just those two together would put up over ten thousand.

SPEAKER_06

Oh, yeah, no question about it. And I saw the same thing here in Minnesota. Minnesota's a high-tax state. I think we're about fifth or sixth on the list. California's and New York probably neck and neck, one and two. Massachusetts is on that list, of course, New Jersey and you know, the top 10 are mostly in the Northeast, and then you got Minnesota, and then you got California. And and I it was a big it was a big deal for me because between the real estate taxes on three pieces of property and the state income taxes, we were way north of the $10,000 cap. So that's a big deal as well, the fact that they increased it to $40,000. Now, here's the other thing that people need to understand, and this is another way that the administration makes me bristle. They say, you know, we've eliminated that that that uh that cap on on salt taxes. Well, no, they didn't eliminate it. They pushed it up to 40,000, but that's only going to stay there for three years, and then it comes back down again, and there's a phase out on top of that. Still true that high-income people do not get the benefit of these breaks. These breaks are pointed at the middle class, and that's just simply undeniable. And for the media to run around saying that it's nothing but tax cuts for the rich and for Trump's billionaire buddies, it's demonstrably false, Patty. And that drives me crazy.

SPEAKER_05

Make sure you join us next week when Dan talks about the recently passed bill in the Senate that was bipartisan support, where it deals only with taxpayers' rights and has nothing to do with tax cuts or tax increases, and it's called the Taxpayer Assistance and Service Act.

SPEAKER_01

Time after sometimes you picture me and work Spend my days with a woman and kind, smoke my stove and drink all my mind.

SPEAKER_05

Now, I want you to know that is separate from the second type of tax relief for spouses, which is called injured spouse relief. I'm going to discuss innocent spouse relief, where you can get relief from paying additional taxes if your spouse did something wrong on your joint tax return and you didn't know about the errors. What's interesting about this is that I was looking specifically at a United States tax court case called Sample S A M P L E versus Commissioner, decided in November of 2025. And what's laid out in this case, and especially for tax professionals out there who are helping a client file for innocent spouse relief, that you can obtain a copy of this tax court case very easily. It is public record. And you can read what the the judge, the court wrote in in their memo. But the court explained that there's you know three avenues for innocent spouse relief, and the code section is 6015, 6015, and that can be looked up as well. But there's sections in each section 6015 B. It's what we call the traditional innocent spouse relief. It offers a taxpayer relief from an understatement of tax, meaning a return that does not state the correct tax because of either unreported income or bogus deductions. The next section under 6015 is C small C, and the first one was 6015 small B. It allows for the allocation of a tax underpayment between separated or divorced spouses, and an underpayment is a tax liability stated on the return, but not paid. The third avenue in this code section 6015 is subsection F. It's under small c subsection F. And this is where the relief is especially valuable because it is the only subsection that allows relief from a failure to pay or an underpayment as well as a failure to correctly report the tax due or an understatement. So you're talking about an underpayment as well as an understatement. And the court explained that there's three ways to which you can make a request for innocent spouse relief. One is filing the actual form 8857 directly with the IRS. And you could later petition the United States tax court if the request is denied. A second way to file for innocent spouse release is if raising innocent spouse relief as an affirmative defense in a deficiency case, meaning the IRS has issued a notice of deficiency saying this is the amount that's owed on a married filing joint taxpayers. And at that point, you can actually defend yourself if you're the spouse that's innocent about this underpayment by actually raising it then at that point in a deficiency case. And the last way of requesting an innocent spouse relief is actually raising the innocent spouse relief at a collection due process hearing. And what that is, is when you're working with IRS appeals, you have requested, you've exercised your right and requested a collection due process hearing where you're trying to resolve taxes that the IRS has assessed you and is demanding you to pay. And so you go through IRS appeals and a collection due process hearing, and you can raise innocent spouse relief there at that level. And the last tax year, the couple legally separated as well. The last uh tax year that they were looking at, what they have is what they call threshold factors that must be met to even qualify for the relief in the first place. And if the taxpayer, the petitioner, the innocent spouse satisfies all of those factors, as the wife did in this case, the court inquires into whether or not the requesting spouse qualifies for the next level, which is streamlined relief. And streamlined relief requires that three conditions must be met. And if the streamlined factors are met, the taxpayer is entitled to innocent spouse relief. But if they're not met, the court now has to conduct a multi-factor balancing test using at minimum factors such as marital status, economic hardship, knowledge, legal obligation, significant benefit, compliance, and physical and mental health. So in this court's analysis, there was no clear answer. The factors were largely neutral, but it was obvious there must be a way of answering this question. Whether granting the relief would be equitable. And the court said that one way of looking at this, we think, well, and I'm quoting the court now, is whether there was a point when sample the wife should reasonably have reacted to her husband's tax troubles by disentangling herself from the economic union of a married couple and especially from the filing of the joint returns. So bear in mind that that's how the IRS, or if you're in United States tax court, that's really the question in the end after they go through all this process and procedure. And so the court ended up deciding that there was a point in time in those six years that the spouse should have reasonably she was reasonably ignorant of her husband's underpayments, but starting right in the middle of that six-year period, she knew of the understatements. And so the court granted relief for the years that they felt she was ignorant about her husband's underpayments. And so I would like to summarize the decision where it sounded like it was good to be ignorant because that spouse did get the relief in those years. But if you know or have reason to know, then you will lose any innocent spouse request. But if you don't know, you just might win. So please contact me at newenglandtaxrelief.com and schedule a free telephone consultation to discuss any issues you may have, either as a taxpayer or a tax professional providing assistance to your clients for tax resolution. And call me at 1 800 880 8388. And until next week's show, have a great week.