The One Big Beautiful Bill has passed, and it could put thousands of dollars back in your pocket. In this episode, we’re breaking down how this powerful piece of legislation could help lower your tax bill and supercharge your returns, whether you’re relatively new to real estate investing or actively scaling your portfolio!
Welcome back to the “Real Estate Rookie” podcast! Today, we’re joined by Amanda Han and Matt MacFarland from Keystone CPA, who break down the latest tax bill, what it means for rookie investors, and a few of the best tax strategies to implement. We’ll cover things like 100% bonus depreciation, cost segregation studies, and the short-term rental loophole. You’ll even learn about the extended qualified business income (QBI) deduction that benefits many Americans—including real estate investors!
But that’s not all. We’ll also provide realistic examples of how a rookie can double their write-offs, the “marriage loophole” that helps couples maximize their tax savings, and the biggest (and most expensive) rookie tax mistakes to avoid at all costs!
00:00 Intro 00:46 New Bill Breakdown 07:57 Sponsor: RentRedi! 08:35 Depreciation Example 16:15 Short-Term Rental Loophole 21:58 Rookie Tax Mistakes 26:13 Year-End Tax Moves 32:41 Connect with Amanda & Matt! How this content was made
Taxes might not sound exciting, but what if I told you there's a brand new bill that could
put more money in your pocket and change how you invest today?
And today we've got two of the best real estate CPAs in the game.
You guys might know them.
They've written several books for bigger pockets.
They're my personal CPA and good friends of bigger pockets, but we have Amanda and Matt
from Keystone CPA, and they're here to break down the big, beautiful tax bill, what it
means, why it matters, and exactly how rookies can benefit from it.
Welcome to the Real Estate Rookie Podcast.
I'm Ashley Kerr.
And I'm Tony J. Robinson.
And with that, let's give a big, warm welcome to Amanda Hahn and Matt McFarland.
Guys, thanks for joining us today.
I appreciate having you both.
Yeah, thanks for having us, guys.
It's fun to be here.
So for those who aren't tax nerds yet, what is the big, beautiful tax bill, and why is
everyone in real estate talking about it right now?
Well, first of all, it's called the one big, beautiful bill.
We're referring to it as the tax bill, but the bill actually has a lot of different things
outside of taxes as well.
That's why they called it the one big, beautiful, because it's sort of all-encompassing.
But what we really love about the one big, beautiful bill is that for the first time
in many years, we are seeing a bill or new tax law that benefits not just real estate
investors or large corporations, but it actually benefits a lot of people.
Of course, real estate investors is one of them, but just average W-2 earners, homeowners,
and people who are looking to purchase cars, and even parents as well.
But of course, the intersect of all of that with real estate is what's been super amazing,
for us at least, as real estate CPAs.
Yeah, I think people are, obviously people are talking about it because it just passed
last month, and it was, there was a lot of lead up to it, right?
They were talking about it probably at the beginning of the year, so that it's kind of
from our perspective, it's nice that it actually passed, and now we have some time to do some
planning for clients and put things into action before the end of the year.
Just from a rookie perspective, why should you care about this as a rookie investor with
maybe just one deal or planning to purchase your first deal?
Yeah, I think from, as Amanda mentioned, there's a lot of things that are impacting real estate
investors and just individual taxpayers in general, so sometimes I think there's bills
that are, hey, they're just skewed to business owners, they're just skewed to real estate
investors or individuals, but this kind of encompasses a lot of things.
So I think the biggest one in there is depreciation expense.
I think that's going to have the biggest impact for even just rookie investors too.
You know, a lot of rookie investors start out with house hacking, and that's actually
one of the things that Matt and I did ourselves as one of our first deals, and with the One
Big Beautiful Bill, one of the newer benefits is that if you own a home, regardless of whether
it's a rental or not, it basically 4X'd the dollar amount that we can write off as our
primary home property taxes.
And so if you're a rookie investor, you know, you're like, hey, should I buy a duplex where
one unit is going to be my home, the second unit I might rent it out as a long-term, short-term
or mid-term rental, now we have potentially a much larger write-off because we can always
take advantage of the traditional, you know, rental-related expenses, but even the part
now that is used for a primary home, we can maximize our deductions there as well.
And of course, like Matt said, the 100% bonus depreciation is, I think, bringing a lot of
eyeballs to real estate, where people who are like, should I do real estate, should
I not do real estate, we're seeing more people getting into the rookie investment as their
first property because of the new tax incentive.
I definitely want to talk about the bonus depreciation because I think that does have
a big material impact on tax bills for a lot of the folks who are listening right now.
But if you guys just think about, and you just touched on one, Amanda, but if you guys
think about maybe the four or five other big important parts of this bill that impact real
estate investors specifically, let's just quickly hit what those other maybe important
highlights are.
Well, I just think, you know, in general, one of the goals of investing in real estate
is so that we can try to bring down our total taxable income, right?
And a lot of the things in the tax bill, although not specific to real estate or specific to
rookies, do provide greater incentives.
For example, we mentioned if you are a parent, right, there's additional tax credits that
are available.
Or if you're looking to buy a new car for the first time ever, you can write off a interest
expense on your personal vehicle.
However, as with many things in the tax world, those come with income limitations.
So traditionally, for someone who says, hey, I make too much income to get these tax benefits,
well now with the investment of rental real estate, right, if I wasn't in real estate
before, now I'm getting into real estate, that potentially brings down my taxable income,
which then allows me to get additional benefits beyond just my initial plan of real estate
deductions.
Another one I was thinking of too is I think there's a lot of rookies out there that are
still, you know, working the side hustle, right?
Maybe they're a real estate agent, maybe they're doing fix and flip wholesales and, you know,
kind of getting into the rental property side of things.
But with those active businesses, one of the things that the One Big Beautiful bill did
is it's continuing on the ability for people to get what we call a qualified business income
deduction, QBI.
So people can get 20% of their income from their business to be tax-free.
So a realtor could make $100,000 and only have to pay tax on $80,000.
So the nice thing is that the bill has continued that on because there was talk that that was
going to expire.
So I think that's something that people can take advantage of when they've got, you know,
Schedule C income, maybe an S Corp doing some sort of active income, some sort of active
business on the side.
Yeah, I want to touch on that one because I think that's one that a lot of folks don't
know about.
So Matt, what you just said is that I can basically take 20% off of whatever income
I generate in my rental portfolio and only pay taxes on the other 80% that's left.
Yeah, exactly.
So this would apply to people having an active, it could apply to rental property income as
well.
Obviously, a lot of rental properties, well, you know, strategically can create losses.
So that wouldn't apply to the ones with losses.
But yeah, certainly if you've got a good portfolio going with rental properties and you're doing
it day to day and you're kicking off a profit of $50,000, you can get 20% of the tax free
for sure.
Yeah, what's really interesting about Qualified Business Income Deduction is this came about
in 2017, I want to say, and for many years when we review, you know, new clients who
come to us, we review their tax returns.
It's something that's often missed.
And, you know, we would just chalk it up initially to, OK, it's brand new.
Some people don't really know about it.
But now that's years later, it's interesting that it's still something that's missed.
But, you know, now that it's been extended as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill, you
do want to make sure if you think this is something applicable to applicable to you,
you do want to make sure you're taking advantage of it.
And one of the reasons, one of the ways you can check pretty quickly is it's actually
on your individual tax return.
So regardless of whether you're holding your rentals in an LLC or a partnership, the Qualified
Business Income Deduction shows up on the first page of your personal 1040 form.
There's a line called Qualified Business Income Deduction.
So you can start there and see if there's a number.
It should be a negative number, obviously, right, because we're saying that the first
20% is potentially tax free.
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So, Amanda, do you think you could walk us through an example?
Say I'm a brand new investor with one rental property.
How might my taxes look before and after implementing the things from this bill?
Yeah, it's really interesting.
One of the one of the catchphrases we've been telling people is after the one big,
beautiful bill, your tax savings may have more than doubled.
So that gives you an idea of kind of the power of the law change.
So prior to the change of the one big, beautiful bill, bonus depreciation was at 40 percent.
And now after the enactment of the bill, it's now at 100 percent.
So if we just give a very simple example, let's excuse me, sir.
Let's say you buy a rental property for one hundred and thirty thousand.
And, you know, we say one hundred thousand dollars is the building.
You know, maybe prior to the bill change with bonus depreciation, we might expect
about fifteen thousand dollars of first year depreciation if you're doing cost
segregation and, you know, just accelerating as much as you can.
But now using those same numbers, one hundred thousand dollars in that building,
you could probably write off thirty thousand dollars or more just in first year
depreciation. So you can see the significant difference in tax savings or the tax
depreciation amount using, you know, one and using one specific rental property.
You guys mentioned a few different terms in there.
If we can, I just want to define some of those.
So we talked about depreciation, cost segregation, accelerating.
Can we just kind of break each one of those down?
So when we talk about depreciation for a rookie investor, what does that actually mean?
Yeah. So depreciation is probably one of the best things about investing in real estate,
rental real estate from a tax perspective.
So, you know, unlike if somebody was going to go out and buy Google stock or whatever,
they buy Google stock, they don't write right off the cost of the stock right now.
They don't even write that off until they sell the stock down the road.
But the difference with rental real estate is the IRS does let you take a paper write
off for a portion of the purchase price of your building every year, kind of due to,
you know, normal wear and tear.
So Amanda's example, talking about that one hundred thousand dollar building where
we're getting there, take we get a certain amount of depreciation every year that we
can use to offset our cash flow from the property.
So not uncommon for a rookie investor to, you know, get, hey, I got three thousand
dollars of cash in my pocket.
But with my depreciation expense on my tax return, my taxable income from that rental
is now zero because basically that paper write off is sheltering the cash flow from
taxes. So that's a huge advantage to investing in real estate compared to, you know,
other investments, obviously.
And then when we talk about accelerating that depreciation, walk us through that.
I mean, what we love about depreciation is that not only is it a paper loss, like Matt
just said, but there's so much flexibility in how we utilize this concept of
depreciation. So the IRS allows us to just take it in a normal, standard way.
Typically, you write it off over twenty seven and a half years if we're talking about
residential properties or we could accelerate it.
And so that's the whole concept of accelerated depreciation, which is to say, OK,
instead of waiting evenly over twenty seven and a half years to write off the
components of my building, I'm going to write it off faster.
And you do so through a cost segregation study.
And for those of you, if this is a new term to you, you don't have to worry.
It doesn't mean you have to become an engineer or do any of that stuff.
You simply hire a firm that does cost segregation.
And so you provide them with your property information, generally the address, property
tax records, probably the purchase closing disclosure.
And what they'll do is they will have engineers on their team to analyze the building.
And what they're trying to do is they're trying to say, OK, instead of just calling this
whole hundred thousand dollars building, they're going to help you break out the building
into different components like specialty plumbing, specialty electricals.
And with those numbers, then your CPA could follow your tax return using faster
depreciation because the IRS has a set of law that says certain things we can write
them off or depreciate faster than other items.
So from an investor's perspective, especially for rookie people, I think a lot of people
are scared by a lot of these terms and definitions and like, what do I have to do?
And the good news is you as an investor don't have to do too much.
These are things that are done by a cost like firm as well as your personal CPA.
Now, as a rookie investor that has one property, you're probably not generating a ton
of cash flow to even need to offset it with depreciation and doing a cost
tax study. But what if you have a W-2 that is very high income?
How can you use some of these deductions from the tax bill to actually
apply them to your active income?
Well, I think I think before we get to that, I think just to your first point, kind of
bringing it home, it's not uncommon for let's say that you have one of your rookie
investors is making a hundred thousand dollars or less.
They have the ability to actually generate and use up to twenty five thousand dollars of
rental losses against their W-2 income.
So it's not uncommon for us to see somebody who's just getting the game like Amanda
would mention house hacking earlier.
Right. Not uncommon for someone making ninety, ninety five thousand dollars that they can
get a fifteen, twenty thousand dollar depreciation expense on their property through
doing some bonus depreciation, accelerating some stuff.
I mean, that would wipe out 15, 20 percent of their income on their tax bill.
So that's definitely a viable option for people who are kind of just getting started and
making under one hundred thousand dollars.
Now, to your point, once somebody makes kind of over one hundred and fifty thousand
dollars, has that high W-2, that's when some other tax laws kick in, some limitations
that we can talk about. But I think there's opportunities for everybody.
Yeah. And I'll just say before I answer that question, too, is cost segregation.
We just kind of gave some numbers and it sounds really amazing.
One of the common mistakes we see rookie investors make is they'll go ahead and just
get a cost segregation study.
Some of those are pretty affordable.
You can get one for a couple hundred dollars online.
But before you do a cost segregation study, you need to talk with your CPA because what
we want to know is whether or not you should do a cost segregation study.
Right. If your income is too high where your rental benefits can't offset W-2 income,
then that might be a scenario where I want to delay doing a cost segregation study into
a future year when I can actually use it to offset my W-2 income for tax purposes.
So I think for those people who are making, you know, let's say over one hundred fifty
thousand dollars in W-2 and they are investing in, you know, long term rental real
estate on the side or getting started, you know, building up their portfolio, they're
still going to want to look at utilizing that depreciation, at least offset the cash
flow. Then if they have more depreciation and it can create a loss on paper, then we
look at, you know, can can they or their spouse qualify as a real estate professional?
If they can do that, then whatever losses they can generate from their long term rental
real estate can be used to offset deduct against their W-2 in the current year, which
can provide significant tax savings.
It's what we call the marriage loophole.
You know, if you're working full time, you can't be a real estate.
Marriage tax advice right here.
If you if you can't be a real estate professional, then marry one.
Yes.
We actually just had a guest on who talked about how he got started in real estate, and
it was because his father was a real estate investor and he kind of like mentored him
along the way. So we made that joke of like, oh, so you married into a real estate
investing and you got to find a wife that has a dad that invests in real estate to get
started.
We tried to copyright realestatematch.com, but I think somebody already took it.
But something that's important that you guys just highlighted that I think I see a lot
of rookie investors misunderstand is just because you generate paper losses from your
rental portfolio, that doesn't automatically mean that you can apply those paper losses
against your W-2 or other forms of active income.
There are certain boxes you have to check, one being qualifying as a real estate
professional to be able to take those losses and apply them to your W-2 income.
But that's also part of the reason that I think short term rentals got such, you know,
there's such heavy interest in that space.
Not only because of the cash flow perspective, but because it's easier to qualify those
paper losses with a short term rental than it is to qualify them with a long term rental.
So can you guys talk about the differences between the long term rental and the short
term rental strategy for applying those losses?
Yeah, for sure.
So let me first define what real estate professional is, and I think that will help the
listeners understand why do we care about all this?
So contrary to popular belief, real estate professional does not mean you get a realtor's
license and start selling real estate and showing houses on the weekends.
Real estate professionals, a set of hours that you have to meet in order to to get those
tax benefits to offset W-2 and other income.
So three major ones.
One is you have to have at least 750 hours in real estate.
You know, some people might be not too difficult.
And this is year by year.
The second one, which is the more difficult one for most people, is you have to have more
time in real estate than your other jobs or businesses combined.
So if you're someone working full time at a W-2 job that's over 2100 hours, then you'll
have to have over 2100 hours to be a real estate professional.
So that's why we say, OK, if you're a high income earner, you're working a full time
W-2 job. Very difficult for you to become one unless, again, if you marry into one or
you marry someone who has those profile.
And then the third role is you have to meet material participation, which basically is
you're involved with the day to day operations of the rental properties.
So as you can see, for someone working full time, difficult to have more time in real
estate than their job.
And that's where the short term rental loophole comes in, because when you invest in
short term rentals, you don't have to be a real estate professional to use the losses
against W-2.
In other words, we don't care how many hours you're working at your full time job.
You don't have to exceed those hours.
And this is why we see a lot of high income earners or just, you know, this have to be
high income anyone, right?
Low income earners, high income earners.
You know, we got doctors, CPAs, celebrities, athletes who use the short term rental
loophole because they can continue doing what they do in their day job or their business
and have short term rentals as almost like a side hustle and still be able to get the
benefits as long as they meet material participation hours.
Yeah. So as you mentioned, Tony, it's just it's just with the short term rental, the
tax laws are just different than what the long term rental laws are.
And so it just makes it easier for people who generate losses on their short term
rentals to use those against their W-2 and other active income.
As Amanda mentioned, you just have to meet with the time you spend on your short term
rentals. You just have to meet one of the material participation tests.
Now, one of those is did you spend 500 hours a year working on your short term rentals?
And this could be you and a spouse.
This could be one short term rental.
This could be 500 hours over five short term rentals combined.
There's a lot of flexibility there.
If you can't get the 500, sometimes it could be as little as you spending 100 hours.
And as long as you spend more time than any other single person spent on your property,
your short term rentals, then you can qualify.
So you can see how it could be a lot easier to get that.
That bar is a lot easier to cross than 750 hours in real estate or more time in real
estate than your other W-2 job, which could be 2000 hours.
Yeah, and I think that's the part that I really want Ricky's to understand is that not
only is the the bar a little bit lower, but there's also multiple ways that you can get
over that bar. So just make sure that for those of you that are watching and really
want to try and reduce your W-2 tax bill, like how much you pay in your W-2 job, these
are the kind of questions you should be asking to your CPA to make sure you've got the
right strategy, because I think a lot of folks aren't even aware of this.
And if their CPA isn't well versed in the short term rental side, then maybe they're not
even giving them that direction.
So I think that's the goal of this conversation is to point them in the right way.
When I do, I will say that the short term rental tax loophole is probably one of the
most frequently seen mistakes for me as a real estate CPA, because I try to post a lot
of content on social media about the short term rental loophole.
And inevitably, I will get a lot of people who comment and say, this is illegal.
There's no way you're working in your short term rental more than your job.
You know, my CPA says I'm not a real estate professional.
So here's the key for all of you guys who if you're already investing in short term
rentals or you want to and you're talking to your CPA, here's a warning flag to show
you if they don't understand it.
OK, so if you're telling them about the short term rental loophole and they mention
anything about real estate professional status, that means you're working with the
wrong person. Right. Because we said for short term rentals, you don't need to be a
real estate professional. If they ask you anything about your income level or say you
make too much income, Tony, you can't benefit from it.
They're also referring to real estate professional.
Or if they ask you about how many hours are you working at your job?
That's the third warning sign that they're not understanding what the loophole is and
how it works.
So that's one red flag with this new bill.
Are there other red flags or different ways that maybe someone's CPA or even just the
investor themselves could interpretate some of these wrong and make some bad decisions
here that aren't actually maybe legal to do?
I think the I mean, outside of the bill, I just in general, right, I mean, bill or not.
Right. I think it's the people who kind of make the mistake of trying to do it all on
their own. Right.
They hear about something on a podcast or they hear somebody speak somewhere and they
say, oh, I'm going to go do a cost like management.
I'm going to go to a cost tax study.
Well, let's slow down.
I'll just put the brakes on.
Can you benefit from a cost tax study?
Do you need one? What's your income going to be this year?
What's your plans going for?
What are your goals? Those are all the kind of questions you should be having an
intelligent conversation with your team of advisors, your tax person included.
So I think the other mistake we're waiting until March or April next year when, you
know, a lot of people I think still unfortunately, hey, I'm going to talk to my CPA
once a year in April when I drop my tax stuff.
And then let's talk about last year.
What can I do? And it's like, well, there's there might be one or two things you can
still do, but there's a lot more opportunities now if you have that conversation at
this point in the year. Right.
I think one thing for everyone just to kind of keep on top of mind with respect to the
new one big, beautiful bill, you know, there are a lot of benefits.
We're talking real estate specifically with 100 percent bonus depreciation.
We still get up to 20 percent of our income potentially tax free if it's qualified
business income for rentals and things like that.
But the IRS just came out and said they are not going to change withholding tables as
a result of the new tax change, which is what we were hoping for.
Right. Because we know everyone's getting more benefit.
Will you automatically change the withholding table so that for people who still have a
job or run their own business, the withholdings are being adjusted automatically
right through the change in how the tables are working?
So they recently came, I think last week or two days ago and said they're not going to
change it. And so as a rookie investor or just any investor or taxpayer in general, if
you think any of these benefits apply to you to the extent you have a W-2 job and you
are withholding taxes, make sure that you are talking to your CPA about whether I
should change my withholdings or adjust my withholdings.
Right. Because I'm buying I'm buying new rentals or because now we have 100 percent
bonus depreciation, because what we always want to do is we want to keep more money in
our pocket every month rather than waiting until next April to then potentially
get a big refund. Right.
As good as a big refund sounds, it's basically an interest free loan that we've given to
the IRS. I just want to comment on one thing, too, because you guys are giving a lot of
great advice. And, you know, Amanda, you talked about people coming at you in the comments
on social media. And I think social media, if it's not coming from a truly
knowledgeable CPA who knows and understands real estate investing, you can get a lot
of bad information. And I saw a reel the other day of some guy who's a real estate
investor. And he was talking about how if his contractors ask him to get paid in
cash, he'll pay them in cash, but then just create an invoice that's higher than the
amount that he paid in cash.
And then there was another CPA who was reacting to that and she was like, this is literal
tax fraud. So I just, you know, that's how we bring on folks like Amanda and Matt to
give you guys like the real deal, legal way to put my fraud out there in the open
Internet. It was the craziest thing I'd ever seen.
I was like, I don't even know if he knows what he just said.
Right. But I think that's that's the point here, is that like if you don't go to the
right source, you can end up seeing something online and thinking like, OK, this is this
is great advice. Let me just lie and say that I overpaid this contractor by this
amount. And you end up, you know, you go, you end up going to jail.
Right. So I want to talk a little bit more because Matt, you alluded to this as well
of, hey, we can't chat in April about how to make last year's taxes look better.
Like we need to we need to start that conversation sooner.
So I want to get into what Ricky should be doing, like the top action steps I should
be focusing on. Guys, we're recording this in the summer of twenty twenty five.
As we think about the year end coming up, what are like the top two or three things
that rookie investors should be doing within their portfolio and in conversation with
their CPA to give themselves the best chance possible of reducing their taxable income
going into next year? You know, one of the best things to do for anyone, not just
rookie investors, is to make sure to take some time to do tax planning and
tax planning. I know for a lot of people sounds pretty scary, but tax planning.
I mean, as you guys know, right, it's really just a conversation.
It's a conversation about what has happened already this year and what do we expect to
happen for the rest of this year?
Because it's in those conversations that your CPA will put their thinking hat on and
advise on certain things.
You know, hey, for the rest of this year, I think I'm going to make another three
hundred thousand dollars.
Well, which entity is it going to be in?
Is it a is a rental income?
Are you splitting it with another partner?
And it's in these conversations that your CPA or accountant can help guide you on.
These are the top three, four or five things that we need to make sure we do move money
around, set up entities, close down entities, buy new properties or rehab an existing
property so that we can match up our expenses, write offs and depreciation with the
income that we've already generated so that by the end of the year, our numbers end up
where we want them to be.
One of the things Matt and I joke about is, you know, for sports, at least I said, I
don't care what the sports score is during the game.
All I care about is what are the numbers at the end of the game when the clock runs
down to zero? So that's a similar concept.
And we talk about year end tax planning is between now and the end of the year.
We're working with all the numbers and the transactions to say, OK, by year end, then
now we have the optimal number of income matched with expenses.
So we pay less tax next April.
So obviously, that's debatable whether that doesn't matter watching a sports game, you
know, that you don't have to watch it to the end.
I mean, obviously, that's we're not going to go that we're not going to go that far.
But but I think the other thing, too, is we're going to have a lot of clients being
aggressive and purchasing more properties between now and year end just because of the
bonus depreciation. So I think for everyone out there, I think the idea is, yeah, sit
down and have that conversation because you can quickly decide, like, are you somebody
that's got a long term rental portfolio or you're trying to build one or you're maybe
you're shifting to the short term rental loophole?
How do I utilize one or both of those strategies in my situation?
And it's better to have that conversation now so you can tweak things between now and
year end versus, hey, I'm in December 1st.
Let's have that conversation like, oh, crap, I've only got three weeks left.
Right. Like so I think just being being proactive and, you know, getting on the calendar
with your your CPA or tax person so that you can make those tweaks and, you know,
pivots as need be between year and between now and year end.
Yeah. So it sounds like in a nutshell, the the mistake that a lot of rookies make is
waiting too long to engage their CPA in productive conversation about what they should
be doing. And we can't we can't effectively strategize
our taxes looking backwards.
Right. And it seems like that's what a lot of rookies try and do is they go and file
their taxes and say, OK, well, what can I do now to reduce this when in reality it
should have gone the other way around?
Well, as we look forward, what are the things I need to plan for in order to do that?
And I think that's the mindset shift that a lot of rookies need to make is a obviously
working with someone who, you know, to your point earlier, Amanda, like isn't spitting
out some of these red flags to show they don't really know the tax code as it relates
to real estate investors. But then second is making sure that once you find that
person, you're giving them all the information they need to give you the right strategy
and return. Yeah. And I think a common rookie mistake, too, is thinking
that tax planning is not for me or tax planning is not for me yet because I'm
a rookie because I'm starting out.
I don't make enough money.
I don't own enough rental properties.
Right. That's a common mindset for our clients who are new coming into us.
And and, you know, a question people ask me or us a lot is how much money do I have
to make or how many rentals should I own before I start doing tax planning?
And the answer is it's not about either one of those things, because you can be making
five million dollars a year of W-2 income.
If you don't plan to own real estate, if you don't plan to invest in anything, you're
just going to spend all that money.
Then tax planning is not for you because there's not much you can do to reduce taxes
if you're just going to spend all of that money on personal things.
But you could be someone that's brand new starting out like that's if you're making
70, 80, 90 thousand dollars of income, your first rental, it's a house hack duplex.
There are a lot of things that could be done to save on taxes or even wipe out your
taxable income. Right.
So it's not about how much income or how many properties it's about.
What is your plan in real estate?
Is that something you plan to start, grow and scale or exit?
Right. Or is it not really part of the equation of what I'm even looking at?
I'm just in the spending phase of my life.
Well, Amanda, I think you described me perfectly as a client coming to you, not taking
this serious soon enough and waiting until I built my portfolio.
We were at BP Con one year and I'm sitting by the pool on my computer, you know,
gathering my tax information because my taxes were due in two days.
So I was definitely one of those people that did not do any kind of tax planning or
anything like that. And I waited too long.
And eventually it just like all caught up to me to be this big mess that I had to
try and sort out and just like get organized and gain control.
So now I have everything prepared and ready for my CPA this
year when I file my taxes.
Yeah, I think it's just something unavoidable.
People like I think people like to avoid the thought of taxes and delay until the
last minute. But yeah, for a lot of people, it's like you have to feel the pain.
Right. Once you have a very painful experience of working on taxes by the pool at BP
Con. Where did I put that closing statement from that property?
Switching through old emails.
Well, Amanda and Matt, thank you so much for joining us today.
We really appreciate you taking the time to come and enlighten us on tax
strategies for 2025.
Where can people find out more information and reach out to you?
And best place to find us, our website is KeystoneCPA.com.
We have a lot of free information, free resource on there.
So I would definitely check that out as a good starting point.
Yeah, I mostly found on Instagram as well as YouTube as AmandaHanCPA.
And we did write two books for BiggerPockets.
I think you can find them at the BiggerPockets bookstore and also on Amazon.
Well, you guys, thank you so much.
We really appreciated you coming on today.
I'm Ashley. He's Tony.
And we'll see you guys on the next episode of Real Estate Rookie.