2336 - The Untapped Tax Strategies That Build Wealth in Real Estate and Retirement Accounts with Oro Tax Advisors' Danielle Michel

0:04Well, hey, Thoughtful Leader. Welcome to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur. On this show, I interview purpose-driven founders, experts, and change makers who are making a real impact in the world. Want to be a guest? Simple. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click podcast. I'd love to promote your story to our audience of over 100 ,000 and across over 2 ,300 daily episodes and counting. Want to get booked on other great shows like this? Simple. Go to podverified.com and get your free guest authority score. Thousands of hosts are looking for high quality guests and Podverified connects you the right way. Now let's dive into today's episode.

0:58With us right now, it's Danielle Michelle. Danielle, you are a serial founder. You are the CEO and co-founder of Oro Tax Advisors. And you can get to, our friend can get to everything that you do through your personal website. And that's DanielleMichelleVentures.com. Danielle, it's great to have you. Hey, how's it going, Josh? Thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here today. Yeah, yeah. Well, before we get going, you always love just kind of learning what's going on in the lives, personal lives of our founders or, you know, folks, leaders that we talked to on this show. And I understand you've got a couple of puppies.

1:37Yeah, I'm kind of in past the newborn stage, but more into the taller stage right now. I went to a rescue, was thinking about it over a weekend. And it's just so hard. I mean, once you put yourself in that situation, you feel bad for them. So I ended up getting not just one rescue that weekend, but instead two rescues. So yeah, We are full-blown puppy stage, seven months and about 10, 11 weeks right now, two totally different months. Wow. And so they're mixed breed dogs. What are any predominant breeds that are coming out in the dogs? Yeah. So just like they have those tests now for DNA for humans, there is one for dogs.

2:16And I'm going to do that. But we are predicting that the one that's about seven months is like a pit bull boxer terrier type of mix. And then the other one that's about like 11 weeks is definitely has like hound in her and probably Aussie. So that's what our prediction is right now. Yeah. Okay. So I've got an Aussie and I'm partial. I like herding dogs. Our last dog was a border collie. Yeah. Two very distinct personalities too. That's going to be fun to see how that works. So congratulations on your home instantly growing in abundance. seemingly overnight. That's got it, I'm sure at this stage too, keeping you pretty occupied.

3:00For sure. Plus my three boys. So yeah. Oh my goodness. Yeah, for sure. Well, Danielle, tell us about your work. Again, I mentioned your website, DanielleMichelleVentures.com. And yeah, who do you work with? And tell me about Oro, obviously. Yeah. So I consider myself like a true serial entrepreneur, which means I have a wandering eye for business. I never say to one thing, but my core foundation, like by trade, I am a CPA. I've done all the different things outside of being a CPA, like inventing different technologies. I have patents. I've brought things to market, had physical fitness studios, et cetera, but I've owned a tax firm for over 10 years where we do specialized tax credits.

3:40And now we launched a new firm in addition to that firm called Oro, which it means gold in Latin and Italian for the gold standard or tax advisors. I have partners that have come in with me on this as well. And we are really just trying to level out the playing field. You always hear about the 1%, like the wealthy, the people that have this elite strategies, the ones that make billions of dollars and don't pay any money in taxes. How is that legally possible? And what we're doing is we're trying to democratize that process. We're making it more available to regular people. So you don't have to hire like a 10 person team of attorneys and a 10 person team of CPAs for family offices.

4:18And we're actually building this out for regular entrepreneurs, regular small businesses, businesses of mid, large size, et cetera. And we do a lot of strategy proactive. So we don't believe in seasons, no tax season. This is a conversation. I would talk about it all year round. Yeah. Well, it is true. It's, and again, I think I'll speak for myself and maybe other business owners at taxes we think about when we have to, you know, and certainly, you know, when either quarterlies are due or, you know, again, the annual tax return comes due and, you know, we take the shoebox and kind of say, all right, well, here's everything.

4:57So obviously, I think, Danielle, and you probably get asked this a lot, and, you know, we're talking to a room, a lot of SMB founders, a lot of folks that have been at the helm for a little bit of time. What are a few of the tax strategies that you find are probably some of the most underutilized, but yet are available to a lot of us? Yeah, that's a great question. I actually don't get asked in that way as frequently, believe it or not. Of course, it can be broad, and the common term for accountants is known to be it depends. I'm going to give you a real answer, so we'll skip the it depends. So where I see underutilization is definitely on like the real estate side.

5:41Real estate is one of the best tools if you're interested in investing in any capacity, because not only can you get something that can provide you a cash flow, you can have an appreciating asset. But in addition to that, there's monumental, significant tools that you could utilize like bonus depreciation, cost segregation, real estate professional status. I can go on and on. But if you're interested in real estate at all, that alone can wipe out significant tax dollars. It's frequently misunderstood, but it is underutilized for sure. If I had to say one more, I would also say for people that are willing to invest, IRAs and 401ks is what most people know what to do.

6:25And that's giving it to a custodian, like a Fidelity, and then choosing maybe an age of when you're going to retire and then saying how aggressive your plan is. And you kind of like set it and forget and maybe work with some financial advisors, which could be great for the market. But if you're interested more in diversifying your portfolio, a lot of people just stock up these funds in the background or try to, right, from a retirement standpoint. There's actually different ways that you can self-direct your IRAs. Instead of just putting it into traditional markets, you can actually buy businesses with your IRAs.

6:56You can actually buy crypto. You can buy gold, which is flying right now in the market. you can buy alternative assets, not just traditional stock market and bonds. And people don't realize that that even exists. And if they do, they don't realize how important it is. You can invest in other people's things. You can become like just a loan. You could provide a loan, a payable to somebody else. So it provides alternative assets. There's a lot of regulations when it comes to that. So you have to make sure you can't just do it the way that you want to do it. You have to make sure you stay in compliance, just like anything else.

7:26But that's another thing that I see very underutilized because there's a significant tax savings. If you can grow things in a Roth IRA, because Roths come out after tax. So you can actually put$10 ,000 into, let's say, a Roth self-directed. And let's say you grew that to$100 ,000, that will come out tax-free. So if you know how to move your money around and make investments, it's a significant tax savings. Okay. And those tips all presume that someone, a business owner, has money to invest and they are comfortable in taking, you know, and they may be, listen, and I think there are a lot of SMBs that, you know, they're not flush with cash.

8:05They're maybe heavily invested in their own business because they believe in themselves. They're betting on themselves. They might be a small consultancy or agency. And so from a, for someone in that perspective, where if you were to tell them their eyes would glaze over and say, yeah, no, I just want to pay less to the IRS. And I'm pretty much month to month at this point, which I just want to make sure we're advocating for those folks out there because that is actually a big group. Yeah. And you're exactly right. That's a great point. So for the small businesses, um, one-on-one is making sure you have the right entity set up, right?

8:42Like an LLC is great to start with from day one when you're just trying to get your boots on the ground. But the second that you have employees, you should be considering and looking at it into an S-corp because there's distributions that you can get tax-free. You can avoid social security. So that's an easy tax savings. Even if you're not profitable yet, you still are paying yourself something. Even if you're not taking like true salary yet, looking at like the right entity structure is a big miss for sure. And then optimizing your deductions and understanding what you, what you're eligible for.

9:13So you'll know about like the traditional things, which will be like the expenses and obviously like meals and things that are just truly for business or payroll, or if you're not at payroll yet, then maybe office supplies, or if you're renting a place, then like the rent and the electricity and the utilities that go into that, that's known as like normal operating expenses, which will offset normal revenue. But there's additional things besides that, that you can do to maximize your deductions. There's something called accountable plans where, you know, you have like the work from home deduction.

9:46A lot of people have home offices and that's great because it's generally like a percentage of your square footage you take and then you apply it against your utility. So if you have a mortgage or if you're renting a place, whatever it is, it's usually a percentage of that if it's a home office versus renting it out a place when you first get started. But there's ways to max that out even more than home office. There's something called an accountable plan that is very, very overlooked. I rarely ever get a client that's doing it, but you can actually charge like base market rent for technically like your home office space if you're under a score so maybe i'm only getting like maybe you rent out my 500 square foot um room right like my office in my home but which would be in a market rate of like two thousand dollars somewhere else i'm not going to get that in a percentage when i just do something like that so it's it's taking the normal operating expenses and then seeing what else you can do and there's a lot of other things if you're strategic, but that's why strategy is important because you can't just file a tax return and like click boxes and say, I did all these things.

10:50You have to, you have to commit and you, I want to make sure that the tax like tail doesn't wag the dog, meaning like you're not putting all that work in if it's not worth it too. So you want to make sure that the deduction is needed. The deduction makes sense and it's applicable to what you're taxable, if you have taxable income or not. Yeah. Thank you so much, Daniel, for spending all that time to kind of share some really, really great tips. Oro Tax Advisors, who do you work with? And tell me more about the services that you provide and how you might be different than other CPAs, tax preparers, tax services that are out there.

11:30Yeah. So I have a partner, John Heyer, who is known as allegedly one of the top tax attorneys in the US. He really hones in on these specific things like self-directed IRAs and those more advanced topics. And then Jason as well, we have as a partner, and he is really, really good at compliance, right? Meaning everything that you have to put on a tax return, understanding what you can and cannot do inside and out. So we have a really good dynamic between all of us. and the way that we do what's different is in order to get a tax attorney and a CPA like understanding structure and then also should I have an LLC should I have an S Corp should I actually file it right like what state should I file it should it be my state or should I do like the lo and behold Delaware Wyoming that I always hear about has better tax advantages is that true And then it comes down to strategy, right?

12:26So we are very proactive and we plan all year round versus just getting a tax return and then filing. And we rely heavily on AI and things like that to automate processes to make it more affordable. if you want to make it more efficient yeah that's wonderful yeah efficient and affordable yeah so that's that's the the big difference is you'd have to hire an attorney to set up your llc which we do um or c corp or s corp whatever it is you'd have to hire a tax preparer to prepare your tax returns which we do you'd have to hire an advisor which is usually not the same person as your tax preparer and we're hitting these like again these we're focusing on entrepreneurs investors and we We call them money movers.

13:06That is our target market. Entrepreneurs, investors, people that want to move money. So your website is, your personal website, Danielle, is Danielle Michelle Ventures. To our friend that's been listening to our conversation, go to your website. What would you recommend? Where do they go from there? Yeah. So we'll have on there a link for Oro Tax Advisors as well. So if you're interested in that, there's information there that you could get directly. it'll just redirect you onto the tax website as well. Otherwise, if there's anything that you wanted to speak to me about directly, then you can fill out the form there.

13:42And then that would get through to someone on my team who would notify me as well. So that's the best way to get in contact. Yeah. And also for someone that's, you know, maybe not necessarily ready to grab a call, do you share resources for folks that want to follow you and engage with you and learn from the work that you're doing? That's a great question. Yeah. So across all platforms, Danielle Michelle Ventures, like we have a YouTube and Instagram, all that stuff, but I also have a community. So it's under Oro and you have to be a business owner, but there's a free one as well, where we do live weekly calls with tax experts.

14:20And then we also do like investment calls. Like we have someone coming on for gold this week. We'll have someone coming on for like pension plans to explain that. And we do live weekly calls. If you're in our community. There's an app and everything like that. And right now, because we just launched it, it is no cost. If you meet the criteria, there'll be different levels eventually, but right now it is an open community. So it's under Oro as well. Again, you could reach out and we can get you the links and all that information there. Just let me know what you're looking for. Excellent. All right.

14:51Danielle Michelle, again, co-founder and CEO of Oral Tax Advisors and on the web at DanielleMichelleVentures.com. Danielle, thank you so much for the conversation. Thank you. Loved being here. Thanks so much, everybody, for listening. And Josh, you're doing a great thing. Keep it up. You're killing it on your content. Thank you.

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