How to Pay Less Tax Legally Using the Same Strategies as the Rich with Chris Shockowitz

You know, and, and talk about that, 'cause I think one thing I find interesting is, is with your background in technology, what, I mean, what, ultimately what makes you really good at what you guys do is understanding the code, right? The, the product, right? As it relates to filing taxes and, and how to be more efficient with your investments and, and around the tax code.

But how, how does that kind of translate? 'Cause i-in essence, like, you, it's almost like you're taking your product development skills and applying it to The wealth management world

Yeah, that's exactly right.

When I look at it, it's just another...

You know, when you're doing very large programs, the financials are a big part of it.

There's the people skills, you know, the people management, the actual, you know, program itself that you're managing.

The program has finances associated with it.

I also actually, uh, owned and managed real estate while I was working at Intel.

So I went from an eight-unit apartment complex and kept flipping it, and I went to an 85-unit complex.

It was all my money.

Bought it for, it was about 12.5 million, and when I got out of it, I got out of it right before 2007 'cause I had a cousin who told me that, "Hey, uh, the financial system..." They actually worked in the financial system in Japan, and they said, "Hey, the same thing that happened to Japan is gonna happen in the US.

You should get out now." And so I believed him, so I got out, and I paid a ton of taxes.

I had to pay taxes on over $3 million.

[chuckles] And so by the time you pay that tax bill, uh, you know, that, it's pretty painful when you spend all this time basically building up all this wealth and just to watch a big chunk of it go away, especially in California where the taxes are high.

So when I exited Intel and I was looking for something to do that was meaningful, the whole, you know, I had a lot of financial acumen.

I had a lot of business acumen from working, working at Intel, a lot of real estate acumen from when I did my real estate adventures.

So getting into this space, it was really just taking those skills and then, you know, I could talk to somebody, like I have a person who's selling essentially an insurance company.

It's all P&C, pretty vanilla insurance stuff, but, you know, the company's worth $12 million, and they're selling it where, uh, they're getting 8.5 million up front, then getting some back payouts over time.

So I understand how that works.

When I talked to that person, you know, what I realized is that they never did the, the due diligence on their LOI.

So, uh, I actually brought him to a lawyer, and I'm, I'm hooking him up with a, uh, a business analysis person to just do a double check to see if they're actually giving us a fair price, right? Based on all the details of your business, is that number, you know, 12 million, is that, is that the right number or should it be more? They didn't know, right? They just didn't know the questions to ask.

And so what I really find in, as you're talking to people about different tax scenarios, it's just knowing what questions to ask.

And the other thing is that most people don't really understand the tax code or realize that about maybe 10% of the tax code is actually designed to tell you how much you owe in taxes.

Yeah.

All the rest of it is telling you ways that you can not pay taxes.