Erik Oliver: Tax Savvy Investing Tips for Real Estate Moguls

Unlock the secrets to slashing your tax bill and propelling your cash flow into overdrive with the expertise of Eric Oliver from Cost Segregation Authority. Our enlightening discussion peels back the layers of cost segregation, a tax strategy that's reshaping the way real estate investors manage their portfolios. By accelerating depreciation, you'll learn how to optimize your assets and keep more money in your pocket. This isn't just another dry financial talk; we're breaking down complex tax codes into bite-sized, actionable strategies that will revolutionize your investment approach.

The landscape of real estate investment has undergone seismic shifts, and in this episode, we navigate the nuances of bonus depreciation and its effects on the market. With Eric's deep-dive into the tax law changes, we reveal how property owners are winning big with these underutilized tactics. But it doesn't stop there; we also shine a spotlight on the critical role of tax strategists, distinguishing them from your run-of-the-mill tax preparers, and offer sage advice for those looking to leverage a side business for tax advantages. Tune in for this treasure trove of insights that could spell the difference between a good year and a great one for your real estate ventures.

More information at https://costsegauthority.com/

Follow David McIlwaine's Socials

YouTube | LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook

Join my newsletter @ MAC Assets

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Hey everybody, david Mackleon, with another episode of Bricker Gold and Hancock's podcast Today, I'm excited to have with me Eric Oliver. Eric is the Vice President of Business Development easy for me to say, with a head cold for Cost Segregation Authority. He holds a Bachelor of Applied Science and Accounting from Westminster College. Prior to joining CSA, eric was an ops manager for a multi-million dollar landscaping and designed for a Mithong Island, new York. Since heading in West and joining Cost Segregation Authority, eric has been speaking at local, regional and national events, has been featured on many industry podcasts. He brings with him a passion for identifying cost savings and educating CPAs and commercial real estate owners on the benefits of cost segregation. Eric, welcome to the show.

Speaker 2: 0:45

Thanks, dave, I'm glad to be here.

Speaker 1: 0:48

Yeah. So I'm excited to have you on, because cost segregation guys have a lot of value in them and I think what's really important to people to think about as an avenue of breaking your golden handcuffs is something I often talk about, which is it's not what you make that matters. It's what you make subtracted from what you keep and then how much you pay in taxes, and ultimately all of that yields a what you keep number and I can say that kind of complexly. But if you don't make any money, it doesn't matter what you keep. You pay a lot of money and then you pay a lot of taxes. You're not keeping a lot and that's kind of disheartening. So I'm a big fan of cost segregation. I've done it on all of my properties and I see a lot of value in it. Tell me, how would you describe cost segregation in simple terms to a layman?

Speaker 2: 1:42

That's a good question. I get the question a lot. I always go back to. It's really just accelerated depreciation on your real estate assets. So normally real estate gets depreciated over 27 and a half or 39 years. And just to make the math easy, let's say you buy a $390,000 office building. You're going to get a $10,000 write off every year against your income for the next 39 years. That's called straight line depreciation. That's what a lot of folks do. A lot of CPAs do that because that's what they're familiar with and it's easy.

Speaker 2: 2:13

And it's easy. That's right. It's actually incorrect, though, believe it or not, according to the IRS. But the IRS isn't going to tell you that, because it just means more money in their coffers. But the correct way to depreciate your assets. When you buy that $390,000 office building, you're not just buying the land and the walls. You're also buying some flooring. You're buying some cabinets, some countertops, maybe some appliances in the break room, some land improvement. You're buying a parking lot, you're buying a sprinkler system. There's a number of things that you're buying with that $390,000.

Speaker 2: 2:43

According to the IRS, we should be breaking these out and depreciating them over the correct useful life. For example, carpet is a five-year asset. Your sprinkler system is a 15-year asset, and so, instead of depreciating those values over 39 years, we're breaking or segregating those costs into different buckets, which allows us to frontload that depreciation day. Because I'm not going to own my office building for 39 years. I mean hell, the way I eat, according to my wife. I'm not going to be alive in 39 years, so I want my departure now, versus 39 years from now. So that's the whole idea behind cost segregation is just front-loading or accelerating that depreciation so we can create more cash flow today versus in the future, because a dollar today is worth more than a dollar in the future.

Speaker 1: 3:26

Yeah, and the way I talk about it with my investors often is we put it into buckets. The IRS agrees have different life spans, and one of them is a personal property bucket, one of them is a real property bucket, and there are a couple of ways to skin this cat, but when it's all said and done, as I explain it, you put your assets and you put the elements of your assets into buckets. The buckets have rules, and that's how you depreciate in a simple manner, and so that leads to one of the benefits of the tax cut of 2017, which was accelerated depreciation, often referred to as bonus depreciation. You want to give us a quick Lay down on what that is Sure?

Speaker 2: 4:10

You know, bonus depreciation has been around for a number of years. The government uses bonus depreciation to accelerate the economy or stimulate the economy. I should say so. For example, when the economy is not doing well, they'll increase the bonus percentage. You'll say okay, it was 50% bonus. We're going to make it 70% bonus because we want people to go out and buy stuff. And the reason that encourages people to go out and buy stuff is because if you were to go out and buy, let's say, a bulldozer, and you spent a million dollars on a bulldozer, and let's say a bulldozer normally gets depreciated over 15 years. Instead of taking 1, 15th of a deduction when you're buying that in a bonus period, the government says you get 50% bonus on that bulldozer. If I buy a million dollar bulldozer, I'm getting $500,000 deduction, or 50% of that in the first year. The other 50% gets spread out over the useful life of that asset or, in that case, the next 14 years. So how does that apply?

Speaker 2: 5:04

There's some rules around bonus. One is the asset has to have a useful life of 20 years or less. So a lot of misconception out there is. Bonus doesn't apply to real estate because remember, real estate is either 27 and a half year depreciable asset or 39 year. But what you don't realize is when you do a cost segregation study and, as you said, you segregate into those different buckets everything I put in that five-year bucket all of a sudden is now eligible for bonus. Everything that goes in that seven-year bucket is eligible for bonus and everything that goes in that 15-year bucket is all eligible for bonus. And, from the cost segregation standpoint, that's usually around 30% of what your improvements are your building improvements. So if you've got a million dollar building, we're going to put 300,000 of that roughly into those different buckets and now that 300,000 is all eligible for bonus.

Speaker 2: 5:52

And, as you mentioned, david, with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that was enacted at the end of 2017-2018, bonus depreciation was enhanced significantly, so it went from at the time it was 50%. Donald Trump was our president. Donald Trump owns real estate. Obviously, when he revised the tax code, it was very favorable to real estate investors and it increased from 50% at the time to 100%. So any asset with a useful life of 20 years or less put into service between 927 of 17 and 1231 of 2022 is eligible for 100% bonus.

Speaker 2: 6:27

So that's the first thing. The second thing is that they added it was quite slick how they did it they added five words to the tax code. So bonus prior to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, bonus was only eligible for brand new equipment. So in that bulldozer example I used, I would have to buy a brand new bulldozer in order to get bonus. I couldn't buy a used bulldozer. Well, with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, they added five words to the tax code. They added new to you, the taxpayer, it's actually six, I think, new to you, the taxpayer. What that means is now I can go buy a used bulldozer it's new to me, the taxpayer and now I'm eligible for bonus.

Speaker 1: 7:04

So let's stick into that for a second. Yeah, because that to me is a crucial distinction. Obviously tax policy and I might go a little bit down a rabbit hole, so bear with me for a second. You're good. Tax policy. As I view it and I'm going to be apolitical on this tax policy is the way that government tries to stimulate behaviors.

Speaker 2: 7:25

Yep, exactly right.

Speaker 1: 7:27

And so no matter and maybe that's the wrong word, because we could go Reaganomics, bidenomics, trumponomics, obamaonomics, who knows Everybody just put a president's name in anonomics behind it and you've got a policy. So, as we think through this, the idea here is that we will accelerate spending in the economy and thus we will incentivize the spin door to create capital expense, which will drive behaviors that the government wants to drive. Would that be a fair?

Speaker 2: 7:58

assessment. Yep, you hit it on the head.

Speaker 1: 8:01

That's exactly right, Right and so as I think about this, the objective at that point in time was to stimulate more capital expense. Yep, the Fed now is trying to stimulate less capital expense, so they've raised interest rates. So we can really see the ying and the yang of governmental policy based on what's happening over a period of time.

Speaker 2: 8:25

No, you hit it on the head. That's exactly right. And with bonus depreciation and then changing that component of that law that says it no longer has to be brand new, what that means for real estate bonus depreciation only applied to developers. Prior to that, you had to go build a brand new building and then all the five, seven and 15-year assets were eligible for bonus. But after that change, all I'm going to do now is go buy an existing building and I'm eligible for bonus, and so I can go buy an existing apartment building for a million dollars, do a cost segregation study. We segregate our 30%. All of a sudden I'm getting a $300,000 write-off because I'm getting 100% of those deductions in year one, and so it really has stimulated transactions by having this, and it's stimulated not just for larger investors or larger developers, but now it even applies to people who are going and buying single-family rentals. I can go buy a single-family rental now, do a cost-seg study and create a massive tax deduction and again putting that money back into the economy.

Speaker 1: 9:23

Correct and it really is valuable. Obviously, you can't depreciate the land it's on and you can't depreciate parts of the real property, so all of this has value. Now the tax act had sunset, so it was a five-year program of 100% depreciation. So 2022 is when the depreciation ended at 100%. We are now in 2023 where we're using 80% year one and then we can do the other 20% over the normal scale of the business, correct?

Speaker 2: 9:54

Correct. So that's still a very big number. 80% bonus is huge because remember we were doing cost-seg when we were just taking stuff from a 39-year asset, moving it to a five-year asset, which is great. But now we're saying we're going to move it to a five-year asset and on that five-year asset you get 80% of it in the first year. The other 20% spreads out over the next four.

Speaker 1: 10:13

So you hit it on the head.

Speaker 2: 10:14

It goes down 20% every year. So this year it's 80%, next year it'll be 60. I can tell I believe it's 2027 when it's down to zero or when we get a new administration or when they change the tax law. So in saying that, I did just read an article recently that the Ways and Means Committee had just made two proposals, or a proposal to Congress, to extend the 100% bonus through 2025. So we'll have to wait till the fall to see if that gets extended. But there's an opportunity, especially if the economy doesn't shape up well, that they may extend the 100% bonus for another two years. But we'll have to wait.

Speaker 1: 10:48

My experience in corporate America and in entrepreneurial America has always been the same about the government. As soon as I try to forecast what happens, something happens different. So I learned a long time ago I never expect the government to work in one way, shape or form, because it's just a headache and I lose more hair and I don't have enough hair to lose. So it's interesting. I remember when I first learned about this, I was sitting in a seminar and my I don't know naysayer came out and it was like okay, but once you depreciate something and you liquidate the asset, you have to recapture it, and this is something that's one of the things that we don't talk about much, and I like to talk about the things that people avoid talking about.

Speaker 1: 11:32

So my little bird brain says if I'm going to recapture that deduction, I'm going to pay my taxes anyway. So let's walk through that objection. As an investor, what really is happening with the recapture, and then the tax implications therein. And before you answer, I want to make it a slamer that I'm not a CPA. I'm not giving tax advice. Eric, are you a CPA?

Speaker 2: 11:55

I'm not giving tax advice. I always run up by your CPA, for sure I assault with your own tax professionals.

Speaker 1: 12:01

Now let's talk about depreciation and recapture recapturing that depreciation upon exit. Walk through that scenario.

Speaker 2: 12:09

So when you sell an asset, there's two types of tax you pay. You pay depreciation, recapture. You pay capital gains and the whole idea behind cost segregation is to take this depreciation upfront. But a lot of naysayers or people who aren't familiar with it will say wait, this is just a timing issue. If I take all this depreciation upfront, I just have to recapture all that depreciation on the back end, and that's not necessarily the case. The idea behind cost segregation is you're taking your deduction this year against my ordinary income. So let's say I'm in the highest tax bracket, I'm in 37% 5% state, so that's a 42% tax bracket. So I'm taking my deduction, I'm reducing my income at a 42% tax bracket. When I pay it back upon sell in five years, I'm going to pay it back at a capital gains rate of 20% or, at most, a recapture rate of 25%.

Speaker 1: 12:58

That's the first one, so pause. So inherently, what you're doing is you're changing your tax basis from ordinary income to capital gains income. Yep, there's a rate of Right there there's a huge arbitrage, as you said, and so, as a listener or an investor, one of the names of the game in my experience is that I want to have my tax basis assessed against the income that is taxed at the least amount. Yep, sorry to interrupt, please go.

Speaker 2: 13:28

Right, that's the first thing. Is the rate arbitrage. Now the second thing is I'm not even paying it all back at 25% or 20%, I'm only paying it some of it back. And I'm going to back into this example, david, because I think it makes more sense. Okay, I buy a building for a million dollars. I sell it five years later for two million. Hallelujah, yes, that's great. Double than value.

Speaker 2: 13:48

If I don't, when I settle up with the IRS they're going to say everything is doubled in value and we're going to charge you tax on that. Now my land has doubled in value over that time. My walls have doubled in value, but my dirty, nasty carpet that I've had for five years is not worth double what I'm selling it for. It's actually worth zero. Carpet is a five-year asset. So in that example I said I owned it for five years. My carpet has zero book value when I sell it. The problem is, when I don't do a Cossacks, that I have everything wrapped up in this one asset bought this one asset and everything in here for a million, sold this one asset and everything in here for two million, so I have to pay tax on that. So when you segregate the different items out I'm oversimplifying it for example purposes but that five-year asset, that five-year carpet, with zero book value upon sell, I pay no capital gains on that carpet. So again, I'm going to summarize Take your deduction at a high rate, pay back a portion of it Now that portion is dependent upon how long you own the asset pay back a portion of it at a lower rate at a future date and save the spread.

Speaker 2: 14:53

And that's the whole idea. And that's, david, why oftentimes we get called to do Cossack studies from commercial brokers who say my clients own this building for 10 years. They've just called me, they want me to sell it, but I asked them if they'd ever done a Cossack study and they hadn't. So before we sell this, I need you to come in and break up those components and tell me what the carpet's worth, so that when we sell it we don't sell the carpet for more than we bought it for. And so, yes, it is a timing issue, it is a tax deferral, but not always it attacks deferral. There's permanent tax savings upon exiting a property by using that strategy of taking your deduction at a high rate, selling it at a lower rate and saving the spread, and then don't pay it all back, you only pay some of it back. We're allocating the sales price to the right bucket, david.

Speaker 1: 15:41

And this takes down a couple of roads. So one one road is that when you depreciate a five-year bucket, a 10-year bucket, a 15-year bucket, the whole time of the asset is impacted by the amount of recapture. If you held the asset for 15 years, you'd have no recapture.

Speaker 2: 15:57

Right On the five, seven and 15 years. Well, 10 years, not on the five and seven, and a little bit on the 15.

Speaker 1: 16:04

Right, so it's a five, seven and 15, not five, 10. It's five seven, 15. My apologies, so I'm not a tax guy, I'm not a tax expert.

Speaker 1: 16:17

I'm a tax. I believe in paying my taxes and only my taxes. So if you're doing straight line depreciation and you hold the thing for 15 years, you are taking 14 years of depreciation value, but you could have been paying tax on a very large gain that is not realized in actuality according to the tax law. So you're leaving money on the table for your pocket and putting money into the tax man's pocket.

Speaker 2: 16:48

Right, and that's why the IRS, if you do it that way, they're not going to tell you that it's actually, if you read the tax code, it is illegal to depreciate your carpet over 39 years. It clearly states carpet is a five-year asset. But the problem is is that when you buy a building for a million dollars, as I stated earlier, my tax preparer doesn't know what that carpet's worth. They just know I paid a million dollars for all of it and so they're just going to do it all as one 39-year asset. But it's interesting we actually, on some of our studies we call it a look-back study where someone's owned a property for, let's say, five years and then they do the cost-sake study on the fifth year.

Speaker 2: 17:24

There's a form that gets filled out it's called the 3115, a change in accounting method and that form tells the IRS hey, I've been taking my straight line depreciation, but now I'm going to accelerate it and do it the correct way. And we actually are checking a box on that form that says we're going from an impermissible method of depreciation, which means the wrong way, to a permissible method, which means the right way. I was depreciating my carpet over 39 years. Irs, that was wrong. Let me fix it, and by fixing it I'm creating a massive deduction that I get to take in my current year.

Speaker 1: 17:54

So one of the things that's interesting about that illustration, which I'm kind of going on a limb, but not really. My experience with the IRS is as an individual taxpayer, as a small business owner in several different categories and dealing with accountants in several different forms, shapes and structures. What I've come to learn is the IRS is not irrational or unreasonable. They actually have rules and forms and if you follow them they're happy. And they give us a book on how to do cost-sake. So if they're publishing the book and you use it, it's not a problem.

Speaker 2: 18:34

No, it's not. That's a misconception. A lot of people think, well, if I do cost-sake or I've already taken some depreciation analysis and I changed my method, I accelerate it. No, you're right. The IRS issues what they call the IRS audit guide and that audit guide tells us exactly how we need to do our cost-sake study, exactly why we're doing our cost-sake study, and they are. They're very logical. It's not like they're trying to and they're not going to tell us when we're overpaying our taxes. They're not. They need the money, just like we need the money, but they will tell you if you're underpaying your taxes, but just like they're not going to tell us if we're overpaying.

Speaker 1: 19:08

I was talking to a co-worker, a peer of mine, who's a fellow real estate guy. He also has a W-2 job working in logistics and he's in the middle of a shipping negotiation, shipping some sort of turbine that's 90. Thousand tons, it's obscenely heavy, and he's shipping it to the Middle East and the Middle Eastern buyer is calling the sales rep saying that they've got a different lady number and that they're going to pay X minus 15%. And my guy's like no, that's a false lady number, you're going to pay X and if the guy can get the woman to take the deal for X minus 15%, he's going to Right. And every business you're in, if you're going to, if someone was willing to pay more, no one's going to stop you from doing that.

Speaker 2: 20:05

Right, especially the government Anybody if.

Speaker 1: 20:10

I walk into Dairy Queen and I hand the guy a 20 and the and the value meal is 1850 and I say, keep the change. He's going to keep it Right, Exactly. There's no distinction in this.

Speaker 2: 20:25

No.

Speaker 1: 20:26

So I say this because I think it's incumbent on all of us to recognize that we're responsible for our own decision making.

Speaker 2: 20:33

Yeah, absolutely. And to that point, david, I'll just add to that, because this is one thing that gets overlooked quite often. And as you're building your investment portfolio, your real estate portfolio, there's a huge difference between a tax preparer and a tax strategist, and I always give my CPA friends a hard time, and you know. But at the end of the day, if you're, if you've got a portfolio of properties and you're walking into Walmart and getting your taxes done by H&R Block, that's the problem, and I see it all too often, david, and people overpay tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds. I've seen hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxes overpaid because they didn't want to pay a trained professional, somebody who's a tax strategist. Yeah, it might be $2,000 to get your return done versus 200, but they're going to save you hundreds of thousands of tax dollars. So to those listeners out there always, I mean this goes without saying, but find a team and pay for an expert. There's a huge difference.

Speaker 2: 21:29

Tax preparers take your information, they run it through their software and it spits out a number.

Speaker 2: 21:34

A tax strategist should be meeting with you a couple times a year talking about what you're buying, what you're selling, what income you have, coming up with methodologies to reduce your taxes, because you from the start, david, you said it's not how much you make, it's how much you keep, and oftentimes we get our eyes focused on I mean, you see it in sports all the time. Everyone wants to be the leading scorer. Hell, watch the NBA. If you've watched the NBA lately, everyone wants to score 30, 40 points a game. But defense is hard to come by and so it's not a matter of yeah, I just added 50 more doors to my portfolio. Well, that's great, but if you just paid an extra $100,000 in taxes, guess what? It doesn't matter that you added 50 doors, because you're coming out negative. So you got to play offense and defense. And I just say that as a point of reference, because I see it happen all too often where people make a lot of money but they pay a whole lot of taxes they shouldn't be paying.

Speaker 1: 22:24

And I think that that rant, which I completely agree with, is more applicable than people think. If you're a highly compensated employee and you're a W-2 employee and your tax guy says to you my tax guy said to me when I was a W-2 is you don't have any choices, go find a new tax guy. Because one of the things I learned as an HCE was I could only contribute 2% more than the average income into my 401K, so I was capped. I couldn't hit a Roth because I was capped. I couldn't do A, I couldn't do B, I couldn't do C.

Speaker 1: 22:59

But you know what I could do? I could start a business, and that's not something that the average tax preparer to your point, eric is going to say. And if I start a business, I have to have it go in concern, yes, and I have to be willing to do the work. So, as a highly compensated employee, I started a business. On the side that business, I ended up generating six figures in revenue from as a side hustle, but I also generated six figures of loss and that made a huge difference in my effective tax rate.

Speaker 2: 23:39

Yeah, no, you've hit it on the head. That's exact. And it's not because your tax preparer or your CPA is not looking out for your best interests. They just don't have the bandwidth. I mean it's like you would never go to your general practitioner I look at CPAs as general practitioners. You would never go to your general practitioner to get heart surgery. That's not what they specialize in. They know general practitioners know a little bit about a lot of different subjects and the same thing with your tax preparer. So it's really important to find a tax strategist or somebody who focuses and specializes in real estate to be able to help you through these different scenarios. Because, again, it's not that your tax preparer is incompetent or doesn't want to, it's just they don't have the bandwidth. There's just the tax code is thousands of pages and it changes every year and so nobody gets to the top of that. And so finding somewhere there's an entire industry, right Tax code for a reason, right exactly.

Speaker 1: 24:29

So, hey, we're running up on kind of the last five minutes of the show and I always ask my guests some questions that I usually get divergent answers from, and you, eric, are no different. All right, as you look back with your beautiful tall forehead that shows a lack of hair, and I could say that's because I have a lack of hair as well. What's the best piece of advice or knowledge that you have today that you wish you had had 10 years ago in your career?

Speaker 2: 24:58

I'll go back to what I alluded to a moment ago, and that's just surrounding yourself with experts. You can't be the jack of all trades, is the? What is the saying? The jack of all trades is the master of none, right.

Speaker 2: 25:08

And so I've had to learn the hard way and multiple different scenarios throughout my life, that you know I'm not the best marketing person. I'm not, I've, I'm not a radio installer. And so pay the extra $200, eric, and have them install your radio into your car, because the way I did it it's shorted out after two months and I spent eight hours and multiple phone calls trying to figure the damn thing out. But I did it all because I wanted to. I was being cheap and wanted to save the $200 installation for you. I'm like, oh, I can YouTube this, I can figure it out.

Speaker 2: 25:39

And so I've had to learn that the hard way and multiple facets of my career and my life. But always find an expert. You can't be the expert at everything. Know what you're good at and be humble enough to say you know what? Marketing is not my thing. I need to go. Hire a marketing person or organization is not my thing. You know I'm a hell of a sales person, but I can't organize my life for anything. So getting the people surrounding yourself with people who compliment your strengths is very important, and you got to be humble enough and it took me a while to figure that out but be humble enough to say, hey, that's not my cup of tea and I hire somebody who is an expert in that. You'll end up saving money, time and frustration in the end, I promise.

Speaker 1: 26:19

I love that. Be humble enough to hire an expert. That's so accurate. And from the converse of something you wished you knew 10 years ago, what's a piece of advice that you followed in your career that you wish you hadn't, or something that you wished that you didn't follow? That's a common thought process. I always love to hear how people say, oh, I should not have done X.

Speaker 2: 26:44

You know, this is probably hopefully my kids never hear this, because I don't want my kids to know this. But one thing you know I grew up in a family we were all told to go to college right out of high school. And I went to college, spent a number of years in college thinking I was going to be a doctor, because doctors made a lot of money. And, damn it, I wanted to make a lot of money and I had no interest in biology, I had no interest in medicine, but I was young and naive and I wanted to make a lot of money. And so I think one thing, that one piece of advice is especially nowadays it's not always about going to college. I want my kids to go to college, I want them to educate themselves.

Speaker 2: 27:22

But you know, if you are, if your passion is fixing cars, then go to a trade school, become the best car mechanic and do what you love, because we're doing our jobs for the rest of our lives most of us for a good portion of our lives anyways. And so I went to school because that's what I was told to do. I went to school. I got a degree in accounting because that was my quickest way to get out of school, but I wish I would have really found out what my passion was earlier in life and gone in and done and become an expert at that.

Speaker 2: 27:54

You know, whether it's, like I said, being a mechanic, being a roof installer, the trades, being a salesperson, whatever it is, find your passion, and a lot of us don't know what our passion is when we're 18 years old, fresh out of high school and that was one mistake I made is I rushed into college just to get done because I was told that's what I needed to do. But I wish I would have taken a year or two off, really found what my passion was and then pursued that passion. Now I'm just selling Cosig, which I don't know that any of us ever grew up saying we were gonna sell Cosig. But I actually love my job. One thing I love about my job is working with people and solving a problem. But I joke, I do like my job.

Speaker 1: 28:32

Yeah, I love that. It's so accurate. And if you don't know what your passions are, it's okay to experiment. I told my I've got a 22 year old stepdaughter, a 21 year old stepdaughter, a 20 year old daughter, a 19 year old son. I tell all four of them the same thing Experiment, experiment, experiment.

Speaker 2: 28:48

It's okay to fail? Yeah, it is.

Speaker 1: 28:50

It's not okay to not experiment.

Speaker 2: 28:53

Right and no one's timeline. You don't have to have your career decided by the time you're 24. I mean, there's a lot of people who start late careers and love what they do.

Speaker 1: 29:02

The average person has five different careers in their lifetime.

Speaker 2: 29:05

Yeah, so I love that.

Speaker 1: 29:08

So is one final question. Is there one thought or quote or mantra that moves you day in and day out you'd like to share with our listeners?

Speaker 2: 29:19

Oh, I don't know. I know there's one and I can never remember it, but every time I hear this quote it resonates. Give me a second, let me think if I can remember it. Oh, I just heard it the other day because I think it was Martin Luther King. But and I'm gonna butcher this quote because I don't know it exactly but something along the lines of once you stop speaking up about what is it, once you stop speaking up about what's important, you've lost the battle, or something to that effect. I should know the exact thing. But basically, don't stop talking about what's important, because the moment you start stop talking about what is important, stop caring about what is important, you've lost the battle.

Speaker 1: 29:59

So it's no longer important.

Speaker 2: 30:01

Yes, exactly, exactly. So stick to your guns. Talk about what's important, be a change that you wanna see, obviously.

Speaker 1: 30:09

Love that, Eric. What's the best way for people to get a hold of you and to contact you if they have questions or thoughts and wanna learn more about Costseg?

Speaker 2: 30:15

Yeah, it's through our website is the best. My contact information both my email and my cell phone number up there it's wwwcostsegauthoritycom. Not only can you get my contact information on there. If you have a property that you think may benefit, or you may benefit if you find yourself in a tax situation, we always do a free analysis before we ever engage a client and you can go to that website, put in a little bit of information. We're happy to run some initial numbers to see if it's a good candidate for conflict aggregation. So those are the best ways to get a hold of me.

Speaker 1: 30:47

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on and you've been listening to another episode of Bricker Golden Handcuffs. Thanks, david.