Adam Torkildson
speaker
77 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Adam Torkildson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Yeah, and I love how all these principles, they apply in all aspects The aspects of a business, whether it's operations or marketing or fulfillment or whatever, insurance and taxes, they all have that app, that same application of set it and forget it. And I did want to touch. So the third area of tax savings, legally avoiding taxes, et cetera, is has to do with investments.
And I'm by no means an expert in investing. I've done about a dozen angel investments over the last 10 years. My very first one that I did, the company is still in existence. The very next one that I did went bankrupt about a year later. And so my own track record is by no means perfect. But I have learned over the course of the last decade my own investment thesis.
And if you don't know what that means, it's just my own rules around how I invest. And for me personally, my investment thesis is essentially, is there monthly cash flow involved? Am I going to be getting regular distributions, whether it's quarterly or monthly or even annually? That doesn't matter. But is there a cadence of cash flow I can count on?
Number two, is there a tax advantage to this particular investment? And I've done several that you would never think of. One of them was I financed a solar field in Bakersfield, California. And I was able to write off the entire amount of money I put into that. Plus, I got a 30% tax credit On top of that, so 100% of the money I spent building it, complete write-up.
I got another 30% because of the solar tax credit in California at the time. And I think it's still about the same. Each state kind of varies, but California has always been more advanced in their green, eco-friendly initiative, et cetera. And there are other states that... Nevada is another one that has had a lot of those traditionally, historically.
So if I can put money into something that's going to provide me monthly cash flow that I don't work for anymore, so whether I'm dead or alive, it's going to keep coming in. That's one of my major goals. Additionally, if there's a way for me to use that investment money as a write-off on my tax burden, then I feel like it's a huge win-win.
And I don't know exactly how to calculate the ROI on 130% tax advantage, but it just means that the money I've spent is essentially, I make it back in that first year, and then everything after that is pure profit. That's basically how I think of it. Is that a good way to think about that?
Yeah. And I agree. I, the very first brick and mortar, uh, investment I made was a total disaster. It was a hair salon. It was only a couple of blocks from my house. So I thought it'd be easy to manage, uh, And it cost me about as much as a really expensive MBA would cost. And so I look at that as my MBA in business because I learned a lot about what I'm not good at in those operations.
And I learned what to look for in future investments. And that's all that I use those opportunities and those experiences for. And I like that you brought up Bitcoin first, even though you're not in it at all. I just wanted to say, for me, it fits my investment thesis. Because the way that I invest, it's through mining Bitcoin specifically. I'm not going out and purchasing any Bitcoin myself.
I did buy mining machines from an outfit in Texas, and the full expense of each of those servers was a tax write-off because it's a hard physical asset. And so I got my tax advantage, and the price of Bitcoin has been high enough on average ever since I started that it's consistently brought me a monthly profit. Sometimes the profit is crazy good. Sometimes it's just the barest, thinnest margin.
And that's where a lot of people really have a tough time putting any money into it because of the volatility. And I get that. So if you want to look into Bitcoin as an investment strategy, there's a lot of research that you can do. Google exists for that reason. And I can even point you in the direction of some really smart people to talk to.
They will take your phone call and just chat with you because they love promoting Bitcoin. And they're really, really smart people. So I like talking to smart people as opposed to only using Google. And that's why I love meeting people like Charles. He's now someone that I can email and ask something to if I need to. And I like having that network available to me.
Yeah. I actually only have one more tax strategy worked. And this is in a very specific use case. And it's around health insurance. And I know a lot of people really... I know a lot of W-2 people who, when they're looking for jobs, they always look at, what benefits can I get by working at this particular job? I have not looked at life that way for a really long time.
So I don't understand that mindset myself. But... I invested in a company that this is all they do. They're experts at setting up these group health insurance plans in a very specific way that helps lower a very specific type of tax for the small business owner. And it adds money on to the W-2 employee's paycheck. And it gives them some, what I think are pretty amazing benefits.
And this is all stuff that's set up using a specific IRS rule, just like everything else we've talked about. And this one has to do with section 125 of the IRS code. So it's that specific. And it's sometimes called a cafeteria plan. So the company I invested in, they will go in and There's some minimums. The company has to have at least 10 full-time W-2 employees.
And they can't have more than... I think it's 1,000. I could be off on that. But anyway, there's a range that this plan works for. And again, the companies have to be based in the United States. And the W-2 employees have to be based in the United States. And what happens is... It's fairly simple on paper.
Instead of taking the insurance premiums out of an employee's paycheck post-tax, get out pre-tax. And the end result is the employee's taxable income gets reduced by doing that because they're taking out money from their paycheck pre-tax, which makes their total income look smaller.
to the irs but we're actually able to put more money onto their w-2 paycheck because of that and it reduces fika taxes for the small business owner per employee per year of about 500 per employee per year so the more employees you have the more you're paying in those fika taxes And so this really starts to add up a hundred employees.
That's 50 grand in FICA taxes right there that you're just wiping off your books with a switch that you set up one time and your, whatever your insurance plan was at the time, it's not going to get any different. It's not going to get any worse. And it's actually probably going to get a little bit better because there's a lot of insurance providers and this isn't,
going to replace an insurance plan. It will either add to, or if you didn't have one in the first place, it becomes your insurance plan. So what questions pop into your head about this?
Showing 41–60 of 77 · page 3 of 4
← Previous
Next →