Well, the end of the year means it's time to start looking ahead to tax season. There are a handful of steps people can take right now to set themselves up for an easier time come April to get you set for the 2024 tax season. Dan Geltrud joins us now. He's a certified public accountant. He's the founder of Geltrud and company and accounting and financial advisory firm. Great to see you, Dan. 

All right. What do we need to know about this filing season, if there's any big changes from last year? Well, there's not a lot of big changes year over year. And look, it's late in the game, but it's not too late. So there's a few things that you should really be looking at right now. First, make those charitable contributions. If you are itemizing your deductions, you want to make sure that you absolutely take advantage of giving to charity. 

The next thing is you want to maximize your contributions into retirement, specifically your IRA. So now you have the chance to contribute up to $6,500 if you're under 50. If you're 50 and up, you can contribute up to 7500. Don't miss that opportunity. Let me say this also, and I always give this tip out to the chasers and I remind them on a regular basis, but I want to remind the general public going into 2024. 

Right. You guys need to plan for and budget accordingly to make sure that you maxing out on your contributions to your 401 or your Roth 401. So in a very general sense, and I'm going to give you some more tips that I am advocating for you guys to do in addition to whatever it is that he's saying. In a general sense, your 401 is a vehicle to retirement, but more importantly, it's also a contribution into your net worth. 

We don't trip about anything outside of net worth. As a matter of fact, money doesn't even mean anything. And the net worth, the number for your net worth, basically shows that you're creating income outside of whatever it is that you generate on your regular job, that you no longer have to be dependent on using your body or your talents in order to generate Revenue. Okay. One of the reasons why we want to contribute into our 401 ks, but for me, I actually contribute into a Roth. 

Four hundred and one k. And here's the difference. For those of you that are new to the channel a basically pretax, right? So that's money that comes out of your paycheck, that goes into a retirement account. And usually most jobs contribute something into it. Whether it's 50%, considering that you contribute up to 6% or 5% or whatever. So that's free money. At the very least, even if you don't max out, you want to get up to the maximum amount that you can get from your job because it's free money over a period of time. 

And I'm telling you, I don't know what you people are thinking, but over a period of time of years, because you will pretty much work for the rest of your life. Over a period of time, that adds up to big money. That rolls over and compounds into much, much bigger resources. If you are just foregoing free money. That's weird to me. Right? That's weird to me. But also there are tax benefits that are deferred, meaning that, let's say, for example, you make $90,000, right? But then you can contribute up to next year, $23,000 into your 401k individually. 

So if you marry, you can do it. They can do it, you can do it. If you're single, then you can contribute up to $23,000. I believe this year it was 22 five. Well, that also puts you in a lower tax bracket, because you go from a higher tax bracket to a lower tax bracket, considering that you not only contributed into something that's going to continue to grow over a period of time, and you won't be broke when you retire, but also you can pull from it if you ever need it. 

You can borrow from yourself and it reduces your tax liability and your burden, considering that you make a significant amount of money. Now, me personally, I contribute into what I call a Roth, four hundred and one k. And that is post tax, meaning that I already get taxes taken out of my regular paycheck because I got a regular job for a lot of people, that's just now discovering me. 

Yes, I have multiple streams of income, roughly about seven or eight different multiple streams of income. But I also have a regular job, and you can see me dialed in, even though I'm not necessarily signed in at this particular moment, I am signed in, but my computer is just locked up because I don't want you all to know where I work at. But I do a Roth 401K, so mine is post tax. 

I pay my taxes ahead of time, and then what it allows for me to do is to grow that portfolio tax free going forward. So whatever it turns into going forward, I no longer have to pay taxes on that ever again. Right. So whether you defer your taxes by doing a regular four hundred and one k or you do it and pay your taxes ahead of time and then still contribute. 

You still need to max out by the end of the year. I always suggest that people max out and the way that you do that. And here's another tip. Right? You want to make sure that you're planning it to where you increase or lower your contributions. You always should be at a minimum. Your minimum should be whatever it is that the job will match you up to. But then you always want to make sure that you increase or you decrease it based off of the final paycheck that you're going to have at the end of the year. 

There's two ways you can do it. You can do it, the minimum until you get to a certain point throughout the year, and then you go into a maximum. Or you can calculate how much you want coming out of your paycheck, depending on how many different pay periods you got throughout the year, and then you can start contributing based off of that amount. But my point is, you don't want to max out early. 

Never, ever, by any means max out early into your four hundred and one k or your Roth 401K. Well, Anton, why don't we want to max out early? Why wouldn't I want to max out by April? Why wouldn't I want to max out by October or August or November, even in the beginning of December? Well, because you miss out on the free money. And this is something that they don't tell you. 

You miss out on the free money if you max out by October or August or whatever like that. And this is one of the reasons why I used to get on my father very early. When I was younger, my father would be like, yeah, I maxed out on my 401K by whatever June. And I would be thinking to myself, when I got older, I was thinking to myself, dang, why did he do that? That's stupid. 

Unless his job didn't give him a match or a contribution. That's stupid. But he was just trying to be so overly responsible, but he didn't realize the amount of money that he was missing out on. Right. But when you max out early, and let's say you max out by October, well, once you hit that $23,000 threshold, you lose out on all of the free money that your job is supposed to be contributed into your retirement. 

Right. So even if you're slightly under the threshold of $2,300, you don't miss out on all of the contributions that your job max out on or give you as a result of matching your contribution to incentivize you to continue to retire. Right. Never ever, under any circumstance, max out early because you're basically not getting all of the free money that your job has available to you. All right. 

Never max out early, even if you only at 22,000 by the end of the year, or 22 five or 22 seven. And I've shown you all my w two s inside of the Patreon and stuff like that. Never ever max out early because you're basically leaving free money on the table. All right. Let me see what else he got to say really quickly. Next thing, if you have gains, specifically, like in the stock market, maybe things went well with your stock investments. 

Take a look at whether you can trigger some losses to offset those gains and thus lower your tax liability before the end of the year. Okay, those are good ones. What advice do you have for people who recently had a life change? Maybe they got married, maybe they had a baby. Somebody in the chat said, I thought the max is 6100. The max is 6100 for the Roth Ira, the individual retirement account. 

That's what you can contribute to yourself separately from your 401K. Your 401K has to be administered through your job or your Roth. Four hundred and one k. The IRA, which is the Roth IRA, the individual retirement account, is something that you contribute to separately. You can contribute up to $6,500 separately to that. But your 401 is through your job. Your IRA is through you personally. You can sign up for that on any major account. 

I use fidelity. They're not paying me to say this, but your IRA, your Roth IRA versus your Roth. Four hundred and one k is completely separate things. They're both retirement vehicles. They're both ways in which you can increase your net worth, but it's completely separate from each other. The administered through your job. That's what you get the matching contribution for. There's a change in your life status year over year, more than likely. 

And somebody is right, they do increase it. They increase in it every year according to it in order to account for inflation. It's going to have a tax impact. So what you want to do is if you have an accountant reach out, give a call, let them know what you've done, and then try to do that calculation to see where you're going to fall before the end of the year. 

The last thing you want to have happen is that when it's time to file in April, what do you know? You find out that you owe instead of getting a refund. Nobody likes that kind of. Let me also give you three more tips because they just giving you the surface level stuff. I want to give you guys three more tips. The first tip that I want to give you is that drop my household. 

The first tip that I want to give you is that they're always going to say, go and talk to a CPA, and that's cool. I have no problem with people talking to cpas, but I think that you should also learn and understand the tax code and start to try to understand money yourself. Most of the stuff that most regular people do, you can do yourself. Yeah, you can get advice from a CPA, but unless you have very complicated taxes, or you have multiple different businesses, you're switching over from an LLC over into an S corp, or you're trying to make sure that you get into all of the offsets and stuff like that. 

Most people do not need to talk to a CPa. But if your life is starting to become more complicated because you're starting to make more investments, you have multiple streams of income. You got basically paid as a contractor instead of as actual employee. You didn't have taxes taken out of you, then that's when you start to seek more professional help. But even with that, you still need to educate yourself on what you need to do in order to make sure that you understand what they're doing. 

Because ignorance of the law does not mean that you are not still held to the same standards. So even if your CPA advise something, or some cpas may be better than others, you're still responsible for your own problems within your own finances. And you could be making suggestions to them or asking the right questions. But if you ignorant, then they don't know what to ask and they're going to give you general advice. 

Second thing is, tax strategists are much different than cpas. Cpas are going to give you insight and information based off of the law, and they're bound by the law in order to tell you what you're supposed to do. And if you don't know the right questions to ask, then it's going to be a completely different situation than a person that both employs a CPA and a tax strategist. 

Well, Anton, what is a tax strategist and why you have a tax strategist? Tax strategist is there to look at my individual situation and to make sure that I'm getting all of my deductions and also to make recommendations to me that I may or may not be familiar with based off of the fact that they know how my finances is going to work. In addition to what they anticipate me having to pay and then how to make sure that I get the proper deductions or that I spend a certain amount of money in order to not trigger certain tax thresholds so I can be under amount that I'm paying for the federal government, a tax strategist is exactly what it says. 

It's a person that is paid in order to ensure that you are protected and that you get all the legal deductions or that you're developing a strategy to prevent yourself from having to pay more than you have to legally to the federal government. The CPA is going to give you all of the insight and make sure that you stay within the bounds and a law to do things legally. 

Tax strategist is also supposed to work in tandem with you to ensure that you're getting all of the money that you need back into your pocket, or that you can budget effectively to ensure that you trigger certain amounts or that you're reducing the amount of money that you got to pay to the federal government long term. Last but not least, this is the last thing that I want to tell you because you guys already know the basics. 

If you've been following me all throughout the year, of course you're supposed to pay off your debt. Of course you're supposed to lower your lifestyle. Of course you're supposed to save. Now, let's assume that you've done all of that and assume that you paid off your debt and that you on top of things and you're starting to save, but then you're making a lot more money or you got a second job and you don't know what to do because of course, you maybe not talk to a tax strategist, or you talk to a tax strategist. 

But here's one of the biggest things, one of the biggest things for us is that we are very careful about. And here, let me remove this off of the screen. I am very careful about pre planning to anticipate how much money I'm going to have to spend to reduce the amount of money that I got to give to the federal government. When I say spend, it may be investing, it may be creating new business, it may be deploying more resources into growing my business faster than I usually would have. 

So let's say, for example, let's just use a baseline number. Let's say, anton, you're going to make a million dollars, or you anticipate based off of what you made this year and then the growth trajectory and how you anticipate business going because you have to plan for when you listen to these analyst calls from these publicly traded companies, they're telling you what they're projecting to make so that you can make an informed decision as to whether or not you should invest in a company. 

Well, you should also do that personally and wish your own businesses. You should be able to predict. Okay, listen, this is what I anticipate making this year is how much I think my business is going to generate. Well, what does that do? That gives you a better window and a better view. And budgeting is not just how much you make per month. Budgeting is how much you're going to generate per year. 

Some of you may make money based off of your w two. So that's going to inform how much you're supposed to put as you're withholding so that you're not owing on your tax burden. Then you may have some additional income from your business, and then you may get some contracting work and that you're an employee or you're not an employee. You're a contractor to another job or another position, or you're a consultant, and you're generating a lot of revenue with that. 

Well, you're supposed to paint the whole financial picture so that you can then make an informed decision on how much money you need to deploy so that you're not giving more money over to the federal government. That's a part of what the tax strategist does. Right. So let's just say, for example, you're going to make a million dollars a year. Well, at a million dollars a year, you don't want to be in the highest tax bracket. 

So now you got to figure out how to get rid of the money. Right? What do you mean? How do I get rid of the money? Well, things that you are already going to do that you can get a tax deduction as a result of. I'm incentivized as a real estate holder in order to take certain deductions. I'm incentivized as a business owner or as a real estate holder to reinvest back into my business in order to ensure that I don't have a big tax burden. 

If I'm deciding that I want to sell a property this year, then I don't necessarily want to pay the taxes on it. I may want to do a 1031 exchange in order to reinvest into it to forego the amount of money that I would have had to pay in taxes from a profitability perspective on that property. Right. So my point is, when you get the bigger picture, and everybody's financial situation is different. 

Everybody is at a different space in their life. But when you get the bigger picture and you can anticipate what's coming, then you can make more informed decisions on where you can deploy your capital. Okay, well, you know what? We need to spend more money on investing and vlogging and capturing other locations, or we need to go and do bigger deals over into this space. Or maybe we can have more money spent on content creators, or we can hire more people and invest in that. 

Or maybe we put more money into the studio. Or maybe we move from putting people up in hotel rooms in order to get an actual location where we have all of our guests come and stay in, such as what I got in Detroit today. Right. So you start making different moves based off of what you're projecting, and you're not reacting based off of what you're currently making. It's a different way in which people that have resources move. 

We know the type of money that's going to come in. So now that's going to inform me when I did my giveaway in December. As far as investing in business owners, I could say, well, you know what, next year we probably going to double that because I'm already pre planning for how it is that I'm going to operate within the budget that I'm going to generate from different businesses. 

Maybe, you know, you're going to be taking a loss on this business because you're going to be deploying way more capital over here, but then you may be making a huge profit over here, and so you need to account for that. You need to plan for that. That way you don't get any surprises and they're like, oh, man, you owe $300,000 on your tax bill this year because you were not very intentional on how it is that you're budgeting. 

You were so busy on making money, but that I actually made more money than you, even though you generated more revenue than me, because I actually was deploying certain strategies and was able to project how I was going to get rid of the resources in order to continue to grow my net worth versus just making a bunch of money. It's a lot of people that make a lot of money. 

Very few people know how to keep the money. That's the game. There's a lot of big money makers. Very few people actually get rich because then they get mad at the fact that they got to give the federal government a bunch of money, and then they get mad at other rich people that know how the game work and they say, well, they're using a loophole. It's not a loophole. 

It's a part of the tax code that allows us to continue to generate revenue and it incentivizes us to hire people, grow the business, keep money circulating throughout the economy and at the same time growing our net worth. The game is net worth. And the only way you can grow your net worth is projecting. The game is not earnings. Earnings come with it. That just comes with the work ethic. 

The game is net worth. All right, remember that. Make sure that you're pre planning when you do your budget. Don't just go by based off of what you think your bills is going to be. Go based off of what you project yourself to make throughout the entire year. And then also what you project yourself to make. All encompassing businesses, w two, contracting, all of that, right, 1099 employees. 

What you anticipate paying other people, whether you need to give people a raise, whether that benefits you to actually pay them more and give them a raise depending on where you at in your financial profile, okay, whether or not you married, whether you can get certain deductions when you get married, whether you need to put different things in other people's names that you married to in order to. 

It's a lot of different ways that you can finesse the game. If you go on to buy a vehicle, okay, if you're going to buy it, then buy a vehicle and you got the cash to do it. Get a vehicle that's over 6000 pounds. Don't let them show you anything in the dealership that's under 6000 pounds. Why? Because you get a tax deduction as a result of it. 

All of the rest of the vehicles need to be in your business, business names. Why? Because the businesses, if you're using it for the business, which you should be, because that's why you're buying it for the business. You can then write off the entirety of the lease payment instead of having to take different depreciation strategies against those. By buying another vehicle, you buy the one and you make sure that it's over 6000 pounds. 

And that's why everybody is driving around in g wagons and g 63s because they're over 6000 pounds. And then the rest of the vehicles you want to strategize depending on how your budget is to make sure that you're buying them for your business. Specifically because you can write off the entirety of the lease payment as it relates to that business. And then you'll see people online talking about well they don't own that car. 

They lease it. You got them right? They leasing it because it's a reason why they only own that car and then they're leasing that car and the one that they bought was over 6000 pounds because there's a strategy associated with it. But when people speak out of ignorance and you hear them in a rap song it's different than talking to people that actually live it and understand how money work. 

So whenever you subscribe to a channel, including here at the millionaire morning show or whenever you decide to rock out with somebody, even if you don't like them, take the meat, spit out the bones and make sure you get the game and apply it to your life. .