Real Estate Investors
Real estate has real tax benefits. Using them on purpose is the job.
If you own property, or you're about to, you already know a lot of the return lives on the tax side. Cost segregation, bonus depreciation, the entity, how you pay yourself: the pieces are known. What's rare is one person who is both a financial planner and a tax advisor, who can tell you which of them fit you and when, with the rest of your life in the same picture. Most investors who come here come for exactly that, usually with a cost segregation question about a property they already own.
The tax valve
What real estate gives you that almost nothing else does is control over how much tax you pay and when. Depreciation can be accelerated through a cost segregation study and bonus depreciation, which moves a large deduction into the year you buy instead of spreading it over decades. An LLC holding structure can be set up. You can be paid a salary as the owner-manager, and that salary can go into a tax-deductible retirement plan, or more often into a Roth. Those are a couple of examples. The list gets longer as you own more property and different kinds of it.
Usually the point is to pay less, sooner, so there's more cash flow to buy the next property. For people new to this world the size of the deductions is hard to believe at first. Using them well is a planning job, and it's the center of the work here.
Where real estate sits
We're agnostic about what kind of equity you own. A small business, real estate, or shares of a public company: the key is that it generates income and it appreciates. With those two attributes, equity ownership is a good thing, and the plan is built around whichever kind is yours.
There are two layers to real estate, though. One property can be a huge time drag for an otherwise successful person, with no systems in place yet and money leaking here and there, and it carries single-property risk, which isn't so different from single-stock risk: one property can fail to work out for reasons that aren't under your control. At scale, or with real ambitions to get there over time, that changes. A portfolio of properties behaves like any other kind of equity, and the plan can treat it that way. How investments are managed in accordance with the plan.
Why your calendar runs earlier than everyone else's
Most people think about taxes before April 15. Moving that to before December 31 is a novel idea for a lot of households, and a lot of the moves that matter have a December 31 deadline. For a business owner the calendar moves earlier still, because the moves are bigger. For a real estate investor it's earlier again.
There's no single deadline. There's a chain. Say a large tax bill is coming this year, whether from real estate or something else in your life, and the answer is to buy a property, complete a cost segregation study, and take the depreciation this year. You have to identify the property, close on it, and finish the study before the year ends. Unless you move very fast, that decision has to be made by mid-fall. Waiting until the last minute costs an investor more than it costs anyone else, and the other way to say that is you have more opportunity the earlier you start. Tax planning explains the mechanisms.
How it's done here
Everything begins with The Keystone Method, where the plan, the taxes, and whatever investments there are get decided at one table over about six months, with the real estate and the rest of your life in the same picture. Then the work continues as Tax Advisory: your entire tax life managed for one monthly fee, the year projected and re-projected as it changes, the moves made early because for you they're bigger, and the returns prepared by the same person who planned the year. It's the same relationship a business owner has here, more hands-on than most tax work and more involved with projections, because the timelines are pushed up. The cost segregation study itself is done by a specialist firm; whether to do one, when, and how it's used on the return is decided here. Almost nobody is both a financial planner and a tax advisor. Here, one person is.
Before you decide
Questions people ask.
Bring the rest to the Explore Call.
I own one property. Is this for me?
Possibly. One property is a planning question in itself, including whether it should be one. If you have ambitions to own more, the earlier the structure and the calendar are set, the better.
Do you do the cost segregation study?
No. A specialist firm does the study. We decide with you whether one makes sense, when it should happen, and how the result is used on the return.
Does this mean you manage my investments?
Only if the plan calls for it. Real estate can be the equity you own, and a public-market portfolio can be left out of the picture entirely if it doesn't fit you.
What does it cost?
Keystone is a flat fee, $6,000 for a household and $12,000 when a business shapes the personal picture, refundable in full at any point during the engagement, for any reason. Tax Advisory afterward is one monthly fee. The pricing page has the schedule.
Tax advisory, tax planning implementation, and tax preparation are provided through Talley Tax, a separate business owned and operated by David Talley. Tax advice is given by Talley Tax. Talley Wealth and Talley Tax work in concert, and they are separate entities. Securities and advisory services are offered through Cambridge entities as described in the site footer; Talley Tax is not affiliated with Cambridge. Talley Wealth advisory services do not include tax preparation unless a separate Talley Tax relationship is established. About Tax Advisory.
The next conversation
Where to start
Bring the tax question, because that's the one you have. Fifteen minutes by phone with David, and if it makes sense to keep going, the Strategy Session is where the planning begins.