In episode 55 of Wake Up to Wealth, Brandon Brittingham interviews Brian Boyd, a Tax Attorney, as he discusses the importance of understanding tax laws and how they can be used to your advantage, particularly in real estate investments.
Tune in to gain valuable insights that can help you change your perspective on wealth and financial literacy.
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Brian Boyd
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This is Wake Up to Wealth, a podcast dedicated to helping you change the way you think about wealth. And now, here's your host, Brandon Brittingham.
Hey, this next segment is brought to you by my good friends at Rocketly.ai. That is Rocketly.ai. If you're in the real estate business, especially the investment side, and you need a platform that can run your real estate business and talk to leads through AI when you're not able to talk to them and can qualify and get to all the leads you can't get to. Plus, it has an amazing piece of technology with it called Lead Detector that helps get all the people that come to your site and not opt-in to opt-in to turn into a lead. These are my good friends at rocketlead.ai. I'm part of this company as well. I use it to run my real estate business, my real estate investment business. Go check them out. Again, rocketlead.ai. Thank you guys for sponsoring this segment. Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of Wake Up to Wealth. And I just want to say, We're in 2026. I want to say thank you to everyone who's been a supporter of the show in 2025. Uh, we are now sitting at over 2.8 million downloads and the last episode we did, thank you to you guys got over 110,000 downloads and it's still running. The whole purpose of the show was to bring on really cool and smart people like our guests today, and just teach you guys about money because a lot of us were not taught about money growing up. and not taught the right way. And one of the big things that I've spent a lot of time, effort, education on of learning about is taxes, because most people don't get it. So I've got a really smart guy who I followed on social media for a long time and consumed his content. And what's so crazy is it's funny how small the world is. We have mutual friends that we actually got on the phone with each other not that long ago. And first thing I said is, dude, I got you on the podcast. So today I've got Brian Boyd as a guest who I followed on social media for probably over a year before I got the chance to meet him. Thank you for coming on the show today.
Absolutely, man. I'm happy to be here. I'm happy to just riff for a little bit. And let's try to give people something to talk about.
So tell people who you are and kind of what you do by trade.
Sure. So I'm a lawyer, uh, based out of Nashville, Tennessee. I grew up in East Tennessee in Chattanooga and went to the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga. Then I went to law school at Sanford university in Birmingham, Alabama. And then from there, I went to law school again at Georgetown university in Washington, DC. and got a master's in tax law. I then worked at Ernst& Young in Washington, D.C. doing corporate transactional work. They called us consultants at the time. Eventually I made my way back to Tennessee and had my own law firm for about 16 years. And now I'm a partner at Thompson Burton. We have offices in Nashville, Franklin, Huntsville, and we have an office in D.C. But I am the resident tax attorney at the firm. So my daily practice is we do a lot of real estate, like very heavy real estate driven at this firm. And so I look at all the deals. I make sure they're tax efficient. I try to figure out any problems in the deals themselves to save our clients money. And there are a lot of ways to do that. But every deal, just like every person, it's different. It's like a fingerprint, just like our listeners. Everybody's listening for a different reason, even though we could categorize them for one reason. They want to be smart about money. Well, how does that work? And so for me, it works by understanding who the person is and what their goals are. and reverse engineering where they are today to get them to where they want to be in the future. So, for example, if you were doing a deal and you were buying some real estate, you may want to buy it. In your mind, you're like, oh, this is just a simple buy. I'm just going to give them the money in exchange back for the property. Well, there may be a more efficient way to do that so we can take advantage of tax deductions, tax credits, things like that. So my job is to set up that paradigm for the client so they have options in front of them, whether they're selling a property and doing a 1031 into another one. They may not want to get back into property management. They may want to do a 721 up-read exchange or a DST exchange. or they just want to cash out. So, you know, there are a lot of different things to talk through. And then the other option is they could always do a slow man's 1031, which is also called a lazy man's 1031, as long as you're in the same calendar year. So that's my job on a daily basis. Other than that, I do a lot of mergers and acquisitions. I do a lot of business dispute stuff, trying to sort out partners when they're sideways with each other, how to pull them apart. And again, I'm heavily, involved in real estate on a day-to-day basis and a lot of tax planning for clients. Now, that's my day job. On the other side of this, I'm also a real estate investor. My wife and I own about 20 pieces of property and that's kind of our passion. We have properties, Montana, Tennessee, Middle Tennessee, East Tennessee, Southeast Tennessee. Clearly, I'm from Tennessee, so I know the area, and that's why I like to invest here. But I talk to real estate investors all the time, all across the country. part of any plan I put together is I have to suggest real estate, because it is such a friendly way to grow wealth, create and take advantage of deductions now, so you can grow that wealth over and over and over again. which is really the best and most efficient way to generational wealth in this country. I think I saw a statistic that they're like 85% of all millionaires got in the United States got started in real estate. Somehow they were associated with real estate. So it's a proven method of growing wealth and sheltering income at the same time.
Yeah, and I'm glad you mentioned that coming from your purview of seeing it from a lot of different angles, because I'm obviously very bullish on investing in real estate for a lot of reasons. So what are kind of what's kind of some of the low hanging fruit for people that are listening to this? that you share a lot of good stuff, by the way, we'll, we'll get to that at the end, because I want you guys to follow him because he puts a lot of great free information out on social media, which is awesome. But like, what's some low hanging fruit that maybe people don't know about that, you know, real estate provides, you know, from a tax perspective that you would say is pretty relatively easy to do and figure out but most people just don't even know that exists.
Yeah. The low-hanging fruit out there is Treasury Regulation 1.469-1TE32A. You probably know it as the short-term rental loophole. But that only requires 100 hours to take advantage of the deductions. So you have to work 100 hours on your short-term rental to unlock those deductions if you're a W-2, which is wonderful because so many W-2 earners out there are limited in what kind of deductions they can take. But this treasury regulation, the short-term rental loophole, allows you to take advantage of some of the deductions that are available to you and your investment without having to achieve real estate professional status under Section 469, which requires 750 hours a year. That has to be more than anything else you're working for making money in. And for example, if you're a W-2, it's not going to be possible to do that, because most W-2 people work 1,800 to 2,000 hours a year. So on the low side, you'd have to work 1,801 hours a year in real estate to achieve that status, whereas the short-term rental loophole only requires about 100 hours a year, which if you break it down, is a little over two hours a week. So that is something that so many people don't know about. And then to your point, that we mentioned earlier, if you utilize a cost segregation study and bonus depreciation on that, those deductions explode. And so you may have a massive loss in your first year on paper, but you're going to see the cash flow increase. because what you're not paying in taxes that year, you can then reinvest into another property and do it over and over and over again. And suddenly you look up in two or three years and you've got multiple properties and suddenly you can achieve real estate professional status because you're spending that much time in it. And so that is really low hanging fruit that most people don't understand. And if I were being honest with somebody, I would say real estate has to be part of any investment portfolio you have. It has to be. There's no way around it. It's like not having a mutual fund. Right? Even if it's just an index fund out there, put your money in it. Let it grow. Let the interest compound. Well, the same is true for real estate. You put your money in the real estate. You take care of that asset. You manage that asset. The debt's going to be paid down by the people renting that asset from you. And the market forces are going to appreciate that asset, creating a delta, which then in turn allows you to go in and borrow money out of that equity you've created from the appreciation and the depreciation, and then use that money over and over and over again. And that's bank money. That's not you coming out of pocket. That's you just taking money out of your investment and increasing your holdings. And then suddenly, You know, the world looks very different. You're not doing that nine to five every day. You're setting your own schedule. You're looking for deals. You're managing property. You're talking to like-minded people. And so that low-hanging fruit is actually a gateway into a whole new life. And so many people just don't know that.
Yeah. And I'm glad you mentioned that. And so for, if you're listening to this and some of this doesn't make sense. So essentially think about it like this. If you're a W-2 employee and let's just say your tax liability was $50,000, just giving this to you as an example. and you bought a short-term rental property, and using his example of being able to use that loophole to get a cost segregation depreciation, and check me on the math if I'm wrong, because I'm doing this on the fly. Let's just say that you bought a half a million dollar property, and you did a cost seg. From our buddy Jeff's math, it's usually about 25% of sales price. Would you say that's fair? Yeah, that's fair. Yeah. So 25% of sales price, we buy a half a million dollar property, right? So we're at a hundred plus thousand in some change, right? That if you're not, if you don't understand how this works, what he just gave you the game on is with a depreciation and doing a call stack in the first year, you can actually take that depreciation and take that as a paper loss on your taxes. And that is freaking one of the biggest hacks in the world for you to get wealthy. So let's just say that you had to pay that $50,000 in taxes anyway, but instead of paying it to the IRS, you bought a property, right? And not knowing your tax picture, let's say the depreciation wiped out your federal tax liability. but you still pay the 50 to get the house. Well, where would you rather put that 50 to the IRS or in an asset that you control that has all the benefits that he just said? And what's so crazy to me is there's so many people who don't understand this. And to Brian's point, this is actually not difficult. right? This is in the tax code. It's available under the new big, beautiful bill. 100% depreciation in the first year has come back. And I'm glad you mentioned this because I wasn't even thinking, oh God, you got to be a real estate professional. I mean, this is a good one because a W-2 person could actually get ahold of this.
Absolutely. And one of the things that I want our listeners to understand is when people hear the word tax, they freak out. And, you know, there's no point freak out. It is a set of rules. And if you understand the rules, you can you can play the game. And so this tax code, our tax code, the last one that was reiterated back in 1986. It's very, tax-heavy from a policy standpoint for people that don't invest in real estate. And so it really pushes the public policy of invest in real estate. And the public policy behind that is the government is not in the business of building housing. That isn't their business. They don't want to do that. They want people like you and me to go build or buy and be real estate. And so they reward us for that. And that's everywhere from the bonus depreciation you see under Section 168K to the expensing under 179, to the tax deductions under 162, to the interest deductions under 163. There is so much in the tax code that really focuses on real estate. and they make it easy for you. Take, for example, Section 8 housing. I kind of have a passion for Section 8 housing because we do have a dearth of real estate in the country that is affordable. And so Section 8 is a program out there that will pay your rent for you while you're trying to better yourself and get out of that situation. So, so many people look at Section 8 and turn their nose up to it. But at the same time, our government, our tax code, has incentivized providing affordable housing. I think there are actually credits out there available. And for those listeners out there, a credit versus a deduction, we're talking apples and oranges. A credit is like a dollar-for-dollar reduction of your liability. A deduction is a percentage off of your gross income that then generates your liability. You always want credits if you can get them. Deductions are great to have, but remember you're only getting that deduction at a percentage. A credit, that's a whole other world. It changes your tax profile. And quite frankly, if they're going to offer you credits, for example, in affordable housing, and you say, let's say you do affordable housing in a qualified opportunity zone. You hold that asset for 10 years. And on the disposition, you get a step up in basis at the fair market value. I mean, that was designed just for real estate and it's a game changer. And if people would look at the tax code as what opportunities are available as opposed to what penalties am I trying to avoid, I think the mindset changes the paradigm and that would really open up a lot of wealth creation for our listeners out there.
Yeah, that's a good point. And, uh, I think a lot of it is you mentioned this and I think you're, you're spot on is when, when people hear taxes, they just kind of freak out and they kind of freeze. And, and one of the things that I just kind of see and find is even, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs don't even really know or understand or learn about this. And when you think about the percentage of income that taxes take from you to not learn about it. If you look at it as an expense for your business, it's probably the largest expense. And when I started thinking like that and learning about things like this, it completely changed my perspective because it's like, I can find a way to shield 37% of my income every year, understanding this game. Then I can take that money and invest it into an asset that I understand, which is real estate, which is going to grow and all the things that you mentioned. But there's so many people who just kind of turn a blind eye to this because I think of the, you know, it's just, we hate talking about taxes.
Yeah. And, you know, quite frankly, I almost blame our educational system, right? So we graduate high school and we don't know how to balance a checkbook. We don't know anything about taxes. We certainly don't know how to fill out a 1040-EZ, which is really the form you fill out when you're working at McDonald's in high school, right? So we don't know anything about that. It takes sitting down and actually saying, okay, this is a content that I don't know anything about. And I've got to read it. I've got to learn about it. Well, how do you do that? If you go to college and you major in accounting, or you go to a community college and you get a bookkeeping background, that kind of gives you an entree in, but it doesn't really get deep into taxes. You have to end up going to law school or getting a master's in taxation, which there are programs out there. I did one. The sad thing is taxes touch everything in our life, from sales tax, to property tax, to income tax, to use tax. There's a tax for everything, and it's crazy to think that there's a tax for everything, and this country was created because we had a tax on tea. Because we rebelled against it. Right, we rebelled against it. And here we are taxing everything. But people out there should just take 10, 15 minutes and just Google whatever you're looking for and try to get a better understanding of it. Now, when they do come to somebody like me, it's typically because there's a complex issue or they're doing cross-border exchanges, something's going on. At the end of the day, people need to understand that it's a rule book. And if you can understand the rules and how they're interpreted, then you can play the game. And I don't say play the game by trying to cheat on your taxes or anything. I'm talking about taking legitimate IRS approved deductions through strategies. And real estate is a strategy. Just like owning a small business out there is a strategy. Let's just take a small business, for example. Let's say you buy a laundromat. Okay, well, it's typically passive. You're not in there washing somebody else's clothes for them. They're in there putting their own quarters in. Well, you have depreciation of the machines, right? Well, you can expense that in one year under Section 168K. Well, that's a huge deduction, and it's a cash business, so you're putting cash in like every day into your bank account. It's a great way to create deductions and passive income. Can I say something on this really quick?
So I have some short-term rentals as an asset class. And one of the things that I do is on the laundromat thing, it's actually a business we're looking into buying. I mentioned this, I want to say this because My laundry, the laundromat that that's closest to me for our short term rentals, because I'm all about operational efficiency, you know, we take our linens and stuff and have them wash it right when we have turnovers or the short term rental. So, I happen to just go there one night with my fiance, because she helps run my portfolio. And dude, I mean, it was 60 freaking people in the laundromat. Do you know what I mean? Like, it was just... And so, out of curiosity, because I have an entrepreneur's mind, I was like, babe, if you don't mind, make a couple of phone calls or whatever. Just pull in the back of the parking lot here. I just want to watch this. And we sat there for like an hour. And I mean, the traffic in and out of that place just blew my freaking mind. Like it was just like, and again, if you talk about recession proof business, laundromats are never going to go anywhere.
No, you're absolutely right. And you know, just a little bit of a side note here. I got into real estate through owning a laundromat. I was like, yeah, I was out turkey hunting one day with a buddy of mine who's a client also. And he he builds laundromats. That's his business. And he owns three of his own. And we were just walking through a field and we just started chatting about it. And I was telling him how much I was working. He's like, look, you need to make money while you sleep so you can have more of a quality of life. And so I ended up cashing out my retirement account. I had a SEP at the time. I cashed it out and I built a laundromat. And the deductions I got in the first year, I wasn't even looking at it for the tax play. Inductions I got in the first year were incredible. I was like, this is insane. I ended up selling it a year later for four times what I built it for. That's called a Ford multiple. And I got that and I moved it over into real estate, and I just took off in real estate. But the deductions were incredible. And people don't realize that there are recession-proof businesses. Laundromats are definitely recession-proof. And I like to talk to people about, hey, get into a business that you know people are going to spend money on. They're going to regardless. And, you know, I like to break it down into two very simplified categories, pets and children. There was no budget. There's not. Yeah.
That's a good, good point.
I mean, if you think about it, your, your pet gets sick, you run them to the vet.
Oh, dude. Listen, I rescue dogs. I've got 10 dogs. I'm getting ready to rescue another one on Friday. Trust me. I got an open, open checkbook.
Yeah, I've got three dogs and they live in the lap of luxury. I mean, they're basically little fur babies running around the house. So we don't have a budget for our dogs. It's like, okay, if the dog's sick, we call the vet. If the dog gets hurt, we take them to the vet. We pay the bill. We don't think about it. And those are businesses you can invest in that there is no limit. Daycare centers, there's no limit. Anything your kid needs, there's no limit. You don't budget for it. You just like, this is what we have to do. And if people would look at businesses like that, being a passive investor in some of those businesses, it's a great plan. And the returns are really good. I know private equity has been buying up vet practices, daycare centers, Dog parks, interestingly enough. I mean, it's crazy. Grooming facilities, they buy them up and they love them because there's no cap on what somebody will spend. So if you're on the other side of that, you're owning the business, it's a great play. And that is also you going back to the tax conversation, you get the deductions, you get the cashflow. It's a great way to grow wealth.
Yeah. I'm, I'm glad you mentioned that. Cause you're giving people just a different perspective. They probably never thought of on the real estate side or just taxes in general. What, what's another kind of low hanging fruit that is kind of like, this is kind of easy to access, but again, just people just don't know about it.
Yeah, so it really determines are you a business owner and get a K-1 or you have passed through treatment onto a Schedule C on your 1040 or are you a W-2?
Let's go business owner.
All right, so if you're a business owner, I would say the low-hanging fruit that is out there that their financial planner has already told them is like, pay yourself first, fund your retirement account first, and then pay for things.
I'm glad you mentioned that. Great point.
So everything, you know, a lot of people have 401ks, they have solo 401ks, SEPs, simplified employee pensions, defined benefit plans are a big deal for those making more money you know, more than they actually need to utilize in one year, I would say, Hey, get a defined benefit plan. Yeah.
Could you be out to talk about that? Cause we do that. And, and I think that that I was educated on that a long time ago by. Thank God I've had an amazing freaking accountant who somehow I convinced her to come on the dark side and, and work with me as my CFO. Um, but she put that in my head very early and we've been doing that for a while and. You know, I kind of fought her on this, Brian, and I'm glad I didn't because of what that has kind of grown to and what it shielded me from taxes. So if someone's listening to this and doesn't know what that is, we, if you wouldn't mind, break that down really quick.
Yeah, so a defined benefit plan kind of has three components to it. It's got a profit sharing component, it's got the 401k component, and then it's got another component that It's very difficult to explain, but there's basically three levels. And an actuary comes in and they look at your income year over year. So you have to pay that actuary every year to come in and analyze you to tell you how much you need to put into the plan. Now, plans can be five years. They can be 10 years. They can be 15 or 20 years. You just have to figure out what is your plan? When is your time to retire? and they reverse engineer it back saying, hey, you need to put in X amount of dollars to fully fund the plan for this year. And then ostensibly, at the end of the plan when you're ready to retire, you basically get a pension for life. And if you have maxed out the plan, I've seen numbers showing that, yeah, your plan is going to pay you $280,000 a year for life. That's incredible. I mean, forget about social security. Who cares about that? It's a deduction now to you, very much like contributing to your 401k is a deduction. It's before tax dollars going into the plan that's gonna grow. And once you finish funding the plan, it's yours for life. Now, the great thing about it is like your 401k, you can contribute $23,500 as an employee. on the business owner side, you can contribute as an employee and the employer contribution to max out, I think it's around 69, $70,000. The setup is very similar. This year, I think the number is $72,000 that you can fully fund, but that's 25% of your adjusted gross income up to whatever that number is this year. I haven't looked at the indexing, If you're over 50, you can contribute another $7,500. It's a catch-up contribution. For the IRA, there's also a catch-up contribution. I think it's like $1,000 or something. The defined benefit plan can be hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Imagine if you're making $500,000 a year, but you're grossing 1.2 billion, right? So you can actually take $200,000, put it into a defined benefit plan, bring your gross down so your taxability is also lower. So it's really a game changer. You're taking it from a 37% tax bracket down to the next bracket, which is great. Who wouldn't want to do that? So, you know, it's something to think about for a business owner out there because it does really change your profile. Now, if you have a lot of employees, you need to go through an analysis. Are they gonna be in the defined benefit plan? Is there a way to segregate them out? You're gonna have to talk to a pro about it. I don't do the analysis for people on that, but there are companies out there.
No, but I'm glad you mentioned it. Again, this is... You know, this is stuff that, you know, I would consider myself before I started learning about money, a pretty savvy entrepreneur. And, you know, I was making a lot of money, but I actually didn't know a lot about money. Right. I didn't, I didn't understand all these mechanisms of wealth that wealthy people used. Because I was just like, man, I'm making a shit ton of money, right? Like, I didn't understand all these other things. That's why I love bringing people like you on here, because most people just are not taught about all these different things. I always say that there's two economies. the educated and the non-educated. And I don't mean educated like, you know, degrees like you have, obviously being extremely intelligent. I'm talking about being educated about money and understanding the tools. Like you've talked about cost segregation, the different legal loopholes, defined benefits. It's like, that's the shit you got to learn about because that's how you become wealthy.
Well, there's, there's another component that I just grew up. or is a financial planner. And so I grew up knowing about insurance. I understood the value of investing in mutual funds, compounding interest, and then life insurance. I'm a big proponent of life insurance, universal life. And people out there think of life insurance like, oh, it's expensive. If you think about it that way, I would just ask everybody to change your mindset, at least during this podcast, and think about it as an investment. Is it sexy? No, not at all. It is as boring as it gets, but you know what it is? It's safe. It's consistent, and it's gonna grow, and you can put all sorts of bells and whistles on your policies. I like to do a paid-up edition rider on mine, so I'm never gonna hit that MEC level. I'm constantly just gonna be stacking cash. And then that leads into self-banking. So once you stack cash into these policies, you can- Which I do this, by the way. I do it too. I borrow against the policy. I'll go buy a house. I'll refinance that house, pay myself back. And I don't have to deal with the problems of having to go to a bank to get pre-approved or anything. Because once you borrow your own money and you're paying yourself back, you buy the property, you refinance out of it a little bit later, and maybe you're doing a DSCR loan or something along those lines, you're off to the races. It changes the game completely. You're no longer having to scrimp and save because you have almost like a forced savings account that's growing year over year.
Yeah. I've got, uh, I've got two, well, I've got multiple policies, but I have two, what I would call kind of, I call them family banking policies. It's just my vernacular for them. But that, that take, you know, they're hitting my bank account every month, right? The money's going in every month. And, uh, the other thing too, is God forbid something happens to me or you, you know, a large amount of liquid goes into my estate to take care of my family. And I can use it while I'm here.
You can use it while you're here. And upon your death, it's tax free to the recipient. And a lot of people don't understand that. And that is so very important. So let's just use easy numbers. Let's say you have a million dollar policy. You're putting money into it every month. You pass away. your spouse or your family or whomever is the designated beneficiary is going to get a million dollars tax-free. Now, if we're looking at that at ordinary income rates and it were taxable, the IRS would get 37% of that. So $370,000 just went out the window. No, I mean, that money upon death is so important to our beneficiaries. Now, here's how I've used mine. We've talked about these self-banking But when my son was three months old, I bought him a whole life policy. And I've been putting money into it every month. Now, a lot of people out there have heard of a 1031 exchange, but how many of them have heard of a 1035 exchange? A 1035 exchange, it allows you to swap insurance policies. So- When he was like eight, he's 14 now, I had enough money in the policy. I called my broker and I'm like, I want a 1035 out of this into a better policy with more bells and whistles that grows faster. So put all these riders on it. And when he goes off to college, I have a 529 plan, but I can also borrow from that policy, pay for his tuition, pay it back. And then when he graduates, and a lot of people have given me a hard time about this, I'm gonna give it to him. I'm just gonna assign the policy to him like, hey, here's your start in life. And by the way, I used this to put you through college. Yeah, they're after-tax dollars, so it's not like a tax play, but it's a way to utilize your policy in such a way that you're not having to freak out, oh, do we have enough scholarship money to get enough student aid? No, I don't need to worry about it. I'm just gonna take from this policy that I've been putting $250 a month in since he was three months old, and it's gonna pay for everything.
That's really cool.
you know, when I borrow from it, and I write the interest check back to the company, I can deduct that interest check. So, you know, people need to think about, yeah, it's boring, but why is it boring? Is it boring because you don't know about it? Or is it boring because it's not sexy? Yeah, this isn't an episode of billions, right? We're not hedge fund managers doing insider trading. This is real life application of what is available to us right now. And at retail, we can just go out and get it if we want it. So that is another way I think people don't understand money. It's like, it's a tool. Yes, we need it. We need to pay bills. We need to survive. But money is really just a tool. Funny story, I've got a buddy that I hunt with, and he married into a very wealthy family. And we were sitting down talking one night, very late. Believe me, the bourbon was flowing. And we just started talking about what's it like, because he's a billionaire now. He married into a wealthy family. And he was like, well, The way it's changed me is I don't look at money the same way. It's not a need anymore. It's how can I utilize this to better my life, better the life of people around me, and do things that I've always wanted to do. He has a passion for teaching. So he can go take a teaching job and not have to worry about the income because he's got money. Now, insurance is the same thing. It's just a tool. And if you know how to use that tool, much like you and I use it for self-banking, it changes the game. And it's not about taxes necessarily, even though there's a tax component to it. It's really about understanding how to utilize, for example, a shovel. Yeah, it can dig a ditch, but what else can it do? And if you start thinking about it that way, I think it's going to unlock a lot of possibilities.
Oh, thank you. Um, I'm asking you two more questions. Yeah. And dude, you're just such a wealth and breadth of knowledge. One, uh, I just, cause I think this is cool is you caught my attention one day of talking about somebody owes you money. Do this, share that with our audience.
Yeah, I was at Jiu Jitsu and I was talking to my social media manager. She was there filming and she's also a Jiu Jitsu practitioner. She was talking about somebody that owed her money. They didn't pay her for something. I'm like, well, just send them a 1099-C and forget about it. It's like, well, what would that do? I'm like, well, it's a discharge of debt. So you get a deduction for the bad debt write-off. And they now have income that is going to trigger the IRS to look at them because you're going to send in this form and the IRS is going to know you discharged them from that debt. So that becomes income to them. And she's like, well, say that again. So I think I was eating a chicken sandwich or something.
Yeah, you're sitting at a table like you eat.
Yeah, I was just sitting there eating lunch right before class and So what I said was, hey, if somebody owes you money, just send them a 1099-C and forget about it. I've had a lot of people in the comments like, well, how am I gonna get my money? I'm like, you're not, you're discharging it. You're getting the deduction for it. Now there are a lot of rules around it. Like you have to have a bona fide debt. Somebody has to owe you money. It's not like my baby daddy didn't pay child support this month. That's a court issue, take it to court. This is if you have a loan or a bona fide debt. And there's been a lot of consternation within the comments there. But the idea is, hey, utilize the tax code to take what is now a liability to you. And you're never going to see that money. They're never going to pay you. You don't want to go through the hassle of dealing with it. to turning it into a deduction, which is a benefit to you. And that's just one way to utilize the tax code. A lot of people were in the comments like, oh, an individual can't do it. Oh, yeah, they can. They can absolutely do it. Now, And this gets into a little bit more detail of that, but there is case law out there that says an individual can do it. And there's also the fact of the, you know, it's done routinely through the bankruptcy process. You know, you discharge the debt. And so a lot of people just don't understand that. They just like, oh no, it's only financial institutions. No, I mean, if somebody owed me a debt and I had a loan agreement with them and I discharged it, I can absolutely turn that into the IRS and say, hey, now this is a bad debt. I'm writing it off. It didn't come to them. So it got a lot of attention. And I didn't realize it was such a big deal to people, but that's how tax lawyers, strategists, and tax practitioners think about the tax code. We don't think about it as punitive. It's not punitive. It's just a set of rules. And that's all we're doing. We're just taking the rules and applying them. And then, you know, the really good tax practitioners and strategists think about, okay, the rule says this, but it doesn't say I can't do this.
Yeah. Interpretation. Yeah.
Yeah. It's all about interpretation. Like, well, if I do this, which the statute doesn't say I can do, but it doesn't explicitly say I can't do it. How does the IRS look at that? And so you start doing research, but yeah, that's how like strategists think about things. And I do a lot of strategy for people. I'm like, well, it says we can do this. But what if we did this? It doesn't say we can't do it. And what is the authority that would allow us to do it? So you start looking into it. And that's just one of the things where that 1099c video came from. It's like, it doesn't say you can't do it.
Thank you so much for that. Now, another question. You put a bunch of really good stuff out all the time. I want our listeners to follow you. How can they follow you? And where can they see some of your stuff?
Yeah, so I'm on Facebook at Brian T. Boyd. I'm on Instagram at Brian T. Boyd. And I'm on TikTok at Brian T. Boyd. And I've got a YouTube channel as well. I think it's Brian T. Boyd Tax Practitioner or Tax Lawyer or something. And I put out a lot of content. We've uploaded a lot of the courses I've done to YouTube because they're long form. And that was something I was selling as courses that I've now made available to everybody, including the 1099-C. Like, how do you do this? Like, what's the process? There's a whole video on it. You can go look at it. And my goal for all that social media was really just to take what everybody thinks is a Byzantine tax code, which it is Byzantine, and break it down to people in a in a relatable way. There's nothing fun about talking about taxes. There's nothing sexy about it. But you know what? You could learn something that may save you money. And if I can save you a little bit of money through my content, I'm happy to do that for you. Because it is, it's difficult. You go hire somebody like me, you're gonna pay a lot of money.
You go hire an accountant,
you know, and unfortunately, most accountants are historians, they look back at what you did, they don't really look forward. So, and I'm not giving, you know, accountants and CPAs a hard time, I'm just saying that is the nature of their job. And so somebody like me, I'm looking at, okay, well, this is what we want to see. So how can we get there? And that's my job. But yeah, I mean, that's social media content. I enjoy making it. My social media manager, her name's Dani. I want to say hi to Dani. She helps me with all of it. And she makes me more relatable than I am in person because I'm typically very reserved. And, you know, I'm not extroverted by nature. So she makes it more relatable for me and she does a good job. So.
Well, I, uh, you are a wealth of knowledge. I follow you on social media and I followed you on social media for a while. And I pay attention to your stuff because you put really good stuff out there. So I would tell you guys all to find him and follow him. And, uh, I want to say thank you so much for coming on here today. You dropped, which I knew you would a, whole bunch of good shit that my listeners can get. And then this is just tip of the iceberg. So follow him. And again, everybody, thank you so much for supporting the show. It gives me the opportunity to bring really smart folks on that know about money that can teach you the tools to become wealthy like Brian did today. Thank you all so much. And Brian, thank you so much for coming on.
Thanks for having me, Brandon. I really do appreciate it.
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