Tax Free Wealth

Welcome to my Tax Free Wealth summary!

“The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smaller possible amount of hissing.” – Jean Baptist Colbert

I went back and forth on this book. It’s perfect! Ohh, nooo! Bingo!

This book is for beginners. It’s my first book on the topic. At first, I thought it was a disappointment because the advice is very generic and broad. It’s a brief introduction to various topics without getting into the details which is ok if that’s what it’s meant to be. But, I thought it was going to dive in deep. It’ll give you a list of questions to further explore or talk to a financial advisor or CPA about.

To give an example from Chapter 18, a potentially huge piece of advice is dished out in the paragraph: Fortunately, business is also one of the best ways to reduce your taxes. Especially if you can turn your business into a passive investment like I’ve done with my accounting firm. (emphasis mine). That is followed up with a Tax Tip: Turn your business into a passive investment. When you do, you can use your real estate losses to offset the income from your business. It’s explained superficially only.

Further, I was disappointed that the author tried to make this book international. It’s a weak attempt. Just because you say Parliament, Euro, or Canada a few times, doesn’t make your book international. A deficiency of the book.

The bingo moment came towards the very end when talking about ever-popular mutual funds and their trap (you pay taxes on gains that weren’t yours). When your mutual fund sells stock, you pay tax on the gain, no matter if you bought in yesterday or last decade.

You are reading my book review and summary by Tom Wheelrwight, CPA. Be sure to check out my digital bookshelf for 100+ book summaries.

The author views the tax code as a set of incentives to drive citizens to do what the government wants them to do by applying different rules/taxes on different productive activities. An interesting perspective.

“It would be a hard government that should tax its people one-tenth part of their income.” – Benjamin Franklin (that’s 10%!! We’ve passed this decades ago)

There are four types of earners: Employees (E), Self-Employed (S), Business-Owners (B), and Investors (I). E/S pay the highest income taxes and B/I pay the lowest. The author contends that you must changes your facts to be taxed as a B/I

Topics to further explore:

• Real estate loans (like a refinance) aren’t taxable.
• Form an LLC and have your elderly parents become members. You can give a portion of your LLC them and the income will be taxes at their lower rates.
• Charitable trust: you can give you assets now but still take the income stream from the assets for the rest of your life (the value of assets in trust will avoid tax)
• Do your stock trading inside a self-directed Roth IRA
• Oil and gas are the only investments where you aren’t subject to the rules that limit losses from passive investments

Part of the problem is the different names of service providers in this industry: tax planners/advisors, wealth strategists, investment advisor

A Trust will:

• control your assets after your death
• avoid probate
• maintain privacy

A Will can:

• appoint a guardian for your children
• specify the distribution of your assets
• specify any other special requests

The key is to get as many assets as you can out of your estate (i.e. your township) during your lifetime while still maintaining control of those assets. (p. 187)….The key is to control your assets, not own them. (p. 194)

Some good quotes:

• People with lots of money have lots of time because they don’t have to spend their life trading their time for money. Instead, they can trade their money for time. (p. 29)
• Business isn’t always about doing something other people can’t do for themselves; it’s doing something they haven’t thought to do for themselves. (p. 55)
• The key to good passive investing is a good team. You need a great investment advisor and a stellar tax advisor, as well as a good lawyer and a knowledgeable banker. All of these team members need to work together to make sure your best interests are met. I’ve found the best way to get team members to work well together is to hire a wealth strategist. This can be one of the advisors on the team or a separate strategist altogether. The strategist can work to maintain the relationships between you and the other team members. (p. 82)

The author’s website is https://www.wealthability.com/

Did you know I’m an author? I wrote four books on real estate investing, travel, and language learning.

Thanks for visiting and thanks to Tom Wheelrwight, CPA for writing Tax Free Wealth!