From EY to Entrepreneur: My Journey & Lessons Learned I Christian Rivera DSH #517

It's a good dinner.

You get a meal from a good restaurant.

I'm big on food, actually.

So that might be enough to sell me over for a year.

To work 80 to 90 hours a week.

Well, I do that anyways.

Yeah.

But not on a salary.

So that's, yeah, I see what you're saying.

Yeah.

There's no incentive to put in extra 40 hours.

Right.

The upside isn't there as much.

No commission at all.

All salary?

No commission.

That'd be tough to stomach because you're basically working 40 hours for free then.

Right.

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All right, guys, all the way from Boca Raton, we got Christian Rivera.

We're going to talk taxes.

Awesome.

Taxes.

We don't put too many people asleep.

Yeah, it is one of those topics that are boring and vulnerable, right?

But very important, though.

Very important.

But we can make it fun.

Hopefully.

I'm sure you got some interesting stories.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

So how long you've been doing this?

So I studied accounting up until about 2012, and then I've been in the space since then.

So about 13 years.

Okay.

Yeah.

And originally you were in corporate America.

You didn't go straight into this, right?

Yeah.

So I went to school in Albany, New York.

Then right after that, I started working for Ernst ⁇ Young, which is a big four accounting firm.

Yeah, that's a big deal.

Yeah, yeah.

It was tough to get in.

And it was, I worked a ton of hours, but it was a lot of great experience.

I worked with some of the biggest companies in the world, you know, Hess Corp, Barnes ⁇ Noble, Squarespace, you know, a lot of really, really big companies.

I worked on IPOs.

I worked on all kinds of cool stuff while I was there.

You probably can't name drop the specific companies, but were these big ones profitable?

Some were, some weren't.

It depends.

So if a company was,

it depends.

So Barnes ⁇ Noble was a company that each year would struggle.

And it was a public company.

It actually just went private recently, but it was a public company.

They were struggling for a long time.

Oh, yeah.

Because they were in the in-person

retail space, and they tried to get into the e-reader space

early on, but they were kind of beat to market by

the Kindle.

Exactly.

Didn't Amazon buy Barnes and Noble, though?

No, it was a separate company.

Maybe somewhat owned by Amazon.

I'm not sure, but it definitely wasn't Amazon directly.

But Barnes Noble has been a public company forever.

And then just recently, like two years or so ago, it was actually acquired.

So they were taken not public.

Got it.

And that's usually a sign that the finances are rough when they go from public to private.

It could be, could not be.

It depends on a lot of things.

At the time, I wasn't working at Ernst ⁇ Young, so I'm not entirely sure about the specifics.

But

yeah,

they were no longer public.

So you had to beat out a lot of people to get that job.

Do you know how many people applied?

I don't know for sure, but I did go to a small school, which was a little bit of a disadvantage.

But, you know,

it was hard.

It was, you know, three to four steps in the interview process.

They would ask technical questions, even though you don't have a lot of experience.

And

yeah, it's just, you know, a lot of entrepreneurs don't come from a college background.

So

for me,

It was very much, you know, I had to keep my grades up and make sure I finished school, get my CPA license, license, all of that stuff.

So it's a lot of pre-work to get into one of those opportunities.

But for me, I was in the right place at the right time.

Nice.

Couple that with some hard work.

You know, it just works out.

So I was at UI for seven years and worked probably 80 hours a week for most of that time.

Yeah, I worked a lot of hours and I was overtime every week.

Yeah, except they pay you with a salary.

So there's no overtime.

Just overtime?

Nah, just a cab ride home and

they'll pay for your dinner.

And usually it's a good dinner.

You get a meal from a good restaurant.

I'm big on food, actually.

So that might be enough to sell me over for a year or so.

To work 80 to 90 hours a week.

Well, I do that anyways.

Yeah.

But not on a salary.

So that's, yeah, I see what you're saying.

Yeah.

There's no incentive to put in extra 40 hours for

the upside isn't there as much.

No commission at all, all salary?

No commission.

That'd be tough to stomach because you're basically working 40 hours for free then.

Right.

And even if, so when I was at EY,

they would encourage you to try to sell work when you were at client sites.

And they would, even at a very young age, they would send you to a client site and say, hey, listen, these are the services we offer that aren't currently being offered to this client.

If you can upsell some of those services, you know, it'd be really great.

And even when you convert on those, it was kind of like a pat on the back type deal.

You know, you would get an annual performance bonus, you know, a decent salary,

but...

No commissions or anything like that.

I mean, it's a great job for people that are, you know, lifetime or career accountants.

But for me, it just wasn't, it wasn't the right fit long-term.

Was there at least a bonus structure?

Yeah, performance-based bonus.

Okay.

So that's good.

I think every company should at least have that, or else your employees are going to be miserable.

100%.

You need some sort of purpose.

So you transitioned from there to e-commerce accounting?

Yeah.

So

when I left

EY, kind of a crazy situation, but I knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur.

You know, I was the type of person that in high school, I used to sell bubblegum.

In college, I used to do people's homework for money.

Nice.

Even when I was at UI, I tried to do some side hustles, most of them failures, but still never stopped trying.

I always had that entrepreneurial instinct.

And

one day I decided that if I'm going to be an entrepreneur, I have to go all in.

I can't do the salary and then, you know, try to do it on the side.

I have to be all in.

So

I just decided I was going to leave and I started picking up clients on the side.

And I had all different types of clients from police officers to doctors to self-employed people to, you name it, mostly friends, family, you know, anyone that I could do a tax return for,

I would do it.

And that's how I got started.

And I left EY and at the time, one of my clients

actually told me, hey, you're leaving EY.

I'm starting a startup company company in the SaaS space.

And I want you to come work for me full-time and be the CFO.

And at the time, I was like, I'm not quitting a job for a job.

I'm quitting to be an entrepreneur.

And I was fortunate that they were super motivated to bring me on.

And they said, hey, if you can come work for me for 20 hours a week and I'll match your current EY salary,

you know, would you consider that?

I was like, yeah,

I'll do that.

Can I keep my own business, keep working on my business on my in my free time?

And um, that was that was pretty much it.

That was my bridge from corporate America to working part-time as a CFO for a startup company, and then uh caught some lucky breaks from there and and uh really expanded on the accounting firm side.

Nice startups, but back in the day, it was it was very general, it wasn't e-comm immediately.

Got it, and startups have their inherent risk too, yeah, mostly funding, which was uh, which was what kind of forced me to go all in on my business stuff.

So for me,

when I left EY and I was working for the startup company, you know, I was working part-time.

My salary was pretty good.

I was living in South Florida.

So

I wasn't all that incentivized to focus on the business as much as I probably should have.

And what happened was the startup company basically ran out of money.

And I was the highest paid employee at the time.

So I was the first person where they said, listen, you're going to have to take a 70% pay cut until we figure out our fundraising situation.

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And that's what kind of forced me to go into the e-comm direction because I had clients in that space and I saw it as an up-and-coming space.

So that's, that's where kind of we were in the e-comm space.

And timing was great because back in 2019, e-comm was hot.

Very much so.

Drop shipping was like at its peak, I'd say in those years.

Definitely, definitely.

So you caught a few clients there.

Yeah.

So basically what happened was when I, so when I quit EY and I had accounting clients,

I had a friend who was a very successful CPA.

He had his own firm, this guy, Brandon Hall.

He was the real estate CPA.

And he

hyper-focused, he specialized in real estate.

And I had a call with him.

I said, you know, I'm trying to figure out this accounting firm thing.

I'm struggling.

And he said, do you feel like every client's different?

Every client has their own issues.

He said, you got to niche down and focus on one area.

So you become the expert.

That way you have no competition.

You know, if you need an accountant to do a tax return, you know, all the accountants are the same unless unless they understand your issue specifically.

So he said, you got to find a space and niche down and go all in and focus just on that space.

So

my thought was, well, I lived in New York City at the time.

So I was like, well, I'm going to be the Uber accountant.

I'm going to do, I'm going to be the accountant for ride-sharing services, Uber, Lyft, et cetera.

And I started to get clients doing that.

And what I found out very quickly was that Uber Lyft

and all those companies, all their drivers don't really make that much money.

So they don't really have a lot of budget for bookkeeping and tax planning and setting up tax structures.

So that was definitely a tough lesson.

But

looking forward, I came across my first e-comm client and I noticed that they were doing tremendous.

They were

making a lot of money in the space.

They were definitely my most successful client at the time.

So me as an entrepreneur, I looked into that space as something maybe I should get into.

Should I do e-commerce?

Should I be a dropshipper?

And then it kind of clicked.

Well, wait a minute.

This seems to be a really up-and-coming space.

Maybe there's no accountants or tax people in the space.

And that's kind of when I came across that there was a gap in the market for people who need good tax advice or bookkeeping or sales tax advice, et cetera.

And that's how I kind of decided to go all in on the e-commerce accountants.

I love it.

I had an Uber driver in Boston once, and he was actually making $100K a year, which is crazy, but he was working 80 hours a week.

Yeah.

And he was on his third car.

Right.

So it is possible to do six figures as an Uber driver, but you got to commit.

Right.

And even as someone who's a service provider for something like that, that person, even if they do 100K a year in profits, they don't.

But it wasn't profit.

Oh, it was not profit.

No, it was gross.

Oh, gross.

Okay.

So, you know, if you if you net that down to a number, imagine trying to approach someone like that and saying, hey, are you willing to pay premium for accounting tax, bookkeeping services?

It's not.

It's a tough sale, yeah, because he's probably only netting like half that maybe.

Probably.

With gas and car expense and repairs.

Yeah, it's not the not the best profession, I'd say.

Yeah.

I would do it on the side, but I wouldn't do it as a main thing.

Right.

It's, there's a lot of flexibility in that space.

So it's a great gig if you want to

do that to earn some income to pay your bills to really prioritize something else, maybe a business or going to college or something like that.

So let's talk e-commerce because there's a lot of people selling online.

Have you seen any good strategies on saving money on taxes for e-commerce owners?

Yeah, so it depends on a lot of things.

Tax planning is very complicated.

So it's very much depends on a lot of things.

Where you live, are you a U.S.

citizen?

You know, where's your inventory sit?

Some of that stuff makes a big difference.

But the way I like to summarize it is first,

Are you a U.S.

citizen or not?

If you are a U.S.

citizen, your options are definitely more limited because the IRS, no matter where you live, is going to try to tax you on your income.

So if you live, if you're a U.S.

citizen, but you live in China or Dubai or U.K.

or wherever, it doesn't really matter, the IRS will still try to tax you on your income.

And they do give you

some tax benefits, like they'll give you a tax credit for what you pay for taxes in those countries.

But any extra amount that you were supposed to pay to the IRS, that maybe there's a lower tax rate someplace else, the IRS will collect on that difference, basically.

Even if you don't live in the U.S., exactly.

Right.

As long as you're a U.S.

citizen.

We must be the only country that does that.

No, there's others that do it.

There's others that do it.

But

the thing, it's basically the IRS taxes you, if you're a U.S.

citizen, on your worldwide income.

And you get tax credits for taxes you pay elsewhere.

But keyword is income.

Yes.

Exactly.

Yes.

Pretty much the only exception to that is if you do Act 60 through Puerto Rico, where you get an exception where you get introduced to a lower tax rate.

If you do the structure correctly, you do an Act 60 corporation, you can get all the way down to 4%.

But basically, to summarize it,

if you're a U.S.

citizen, your options are definitely a lot more limited.

If you're a non-U.S.

citizen, right?

Meaning you, so if you're non-American, meaning you're not a U.S.

citizen and you do not live in the U.S.,

then it's a little bit different.

If you're doing business in the U.S., that's where you have to be careful.

If you live in the Netherlands and you're doing, I don't know, an agency for local businesses over there, obviously not much U.S.

tax risk.

But if you're operating in the U.S., you have to be strategic and make sure you're doing things correctly.

So with non-American entrepreneurs,

If you're dropshipping, let's say, for example, you don't have a physical presence, meaning you don't live in the U.S., you don't have inventory, you have no employees, then you can set up an LLC in the U.S.

You can have a U.S.

bank account, U.S.

credit cards, U.S.

payment processing, and you still don't have to pay U.S.

income taxes.

You could do business in the U.S.

and not pay any U.S.

income taxes.

The idea is it's a flow-through structure, so you pay taxes in your home country and theory.

So we have quite a few clients that it's changed now, but that over the years have done,

you know, their structure through Dubai, where they were maybe born and raised in the U.K., but they have a structure through Dubai.

And that structure owned the US LLC, where they would basically get away with paying no income taxes for a long time.

And then there's obviously the other way, where if you're

not a US citizen, you don't live in the US, but let's say you live in a place that has an outrageous tax rate, let's say 45%.

You can actually force US income taxes through like a C-corp structure and pay 21%

in the U.S.

So there's a lot of cool things we could do with foreigners.

So I, you know, my background's in tax, so I geek out on tax planning.

So the foreign guys we could do a lot of cool with.

But the U.S.

citizens, there's, you know, two to three to five buckets that we could fit you into.

Yeah.

Um, if none of those work, you're kind of SOL for the most part.

How much would you say people have to make to make the Puerto Rico move?

Because part of the thing you have to do is buy a house there, right?

Not necessarily.

It's the amount of days that you spend there.

So

the rules are very complicated, but there's two main things you have to focus on.

The one part is you technically have to export products or services into someplace else outside of Puerto Rico.

And the money has to go back into Puerto Rico through an Act 60 corporation.

So basically think if you're an agency owner that provides marketing services digitally to Americans, right?

If you're sitting in Puerto Rico running that business through an Act 60 corporation, that's a great great fit.

Or if you're a dropshipper and you're sitting in Puerto Rico, you have an Act 60 corporation, which owns a Shopify account and you're shipping from China into the U.S., that's also a great fit.

A big part of it is having that Act60 structure, like an actual corporation that is an Act60 corporation out there.

The second part to it is a physical presence test.

So you basically have to spend a certain amount of days in Puerto Rico.

Off the top of my head, I think it's 180 days.

So whenever a client asks me, hey, you know, I'm interested in doing a Puerto Rico structure.

You know, does this work for me?

Before I talk about any of the business stuff, I say, are you willing to live in Puerto Rico 180 days or more?

Because they're quite strict.

There's a lot of audit risk around that.

They track your phone, I heard.

I don't know the specifics about how they catch you, but I do know that there's a lot of audit risk around it.

And I do know people that have been disallowed that Act 60 status.

But as long as you're open to being physically present there,

for the most part, you can make it work if you have an e-commerce business or a marketing agency.

I would say you got to factor in the lifestyle, too.

Are you willing to sacrifice?

I heard the food's not the best.

Yeah.

Well, I'm biased because I'm Puerto Rican.

But, you know, it's funny.

I'm what they call New Yorkan.

So I was born and raised in New York.

But my, you know, I love Puerto Rican food.

In my opinion, in terms of

it's not the healthiest for you, but it's rich.

It's very, it's very, very tasty food.

But for me, living in Puerto Rico, there's a lot of poverty there.

It's probably not a good idea to have nice things, nice cars, jewelry, that kind of stuff.

Not to say I'm that type of guy, but I know a lot of successful entrepreneurs are like that.

You know, you work very hard and you've taken a lot of sacrifices and, you know, you want to buy a Lamborghini or buy a really really nice house or wear nice jewelry, you know, if you live in a place like that that has a lot of poverty, you know, it's probably not the best idea.

Yeah.

But

there's a lot of really great communities out there of entrepreneurs and investors and

could be good for networking.

So for the right person that's open to living in a tropical climate, you know, be surrounded by a lot of successful entrepreneurs and investors and enjoy the benefits of saving a lot of money in taxes, it could be the right move for sure.

Have you taken advantage of any tax credits?

Amazon pays $0 in taxes, right?

Even though they're doing billions.

So the Amazon situation is a little bit loaded because with a corporate structure, there's multi-levels of tax.

So where the corporation itself may not pay a lot of money in taxes, a lot of times the owners are paying a lot of money in taxes.

So

for someone, I'll give you an example of

like a tax planning opportunity that could work.

Outside of, so let me summarize it.

Let's say you're U.S.

citizen.

A lot of my, I would say 60 to 70% of our clients are U.S.

citizens.

When I say the options are limited, step one is figuring out a tax structure.

So a tax structure is usually either a C Corp or an S Corp structure.

Those will get you out of paying self-employment taxes, which is an ugly tax that's basically a double tax that the IRS does.

Once you get beyond that, there's not much of a magic wand.

You usually have to do things to save money in taxes, invest money in places or

something in terms of services or something like that to create the tax benefit.

So I'll give you an example of one that our clients like that are on the more risk-based approach side.

181 credits.

So

film projects based out of Los Angeles,

I don't know if it's just limited to California or not, but there are tax incentives that if you're in the movie business, essentially, you can accelerate a lot of deductions.

So if you think about the people that are coming up with these projects, I'm not talking about major movies like the Avengers or something.

I'm talking about independent films.

A big investment that a lot of my clients just did was the movie Rust.

It's like an independent film with Alec Caldwin.

But it's with these indie films, a lot of times they're looking for funding.

So they're...

They're looking for the funds to create the film and they're interested in the upside as an investment.

Whereas a lot of the people that are investing in those independent projects are looking for tax benefits.

So what they do with a lot of these projects is they figure out how to structure the investment so that the upfront tax incentives go towards the investor.

So someone who's looking to invest for tax purposes, they get allocated oftentimes disproportionately, a lot of those tax benefits.

So they get a return on investment.

If you invest $10, you might get $20 in tax benefit, that sort of deal.

Whereas the people that actually want to capitalize on the upside of the project, actually make money on the film, they aren't the ones funding the project, but they're the ones that enjoy the upside of the project.

So Section 181 deductions are pretty common in the tax planning space.

But it's just an example where if you want to do tax planning as a U.S.

citizen, that's something that takes substantial investment.

I mean, our clients,

I think the minimum last year for an investment was $150K

to put into the project.

And then you get a return on investment through tax savings.

So it's not like a one-to-one, you put in $150, you get 20, you know, 200 back.

It's your benefit is you're getting allocated tax savings.

I like that one too, though, because it's also a networking play.

Yeah.

You get to meet the actors, the directors.

Yeah, I'm actually going to be in

Nice in the next couple of weeks.

And during that time, just luckily, I didn't plan this on purpose, but I got invited to go to the Cons Movie Festival.

And that's in Nice?

No, it's close to Nice.

It's a place called Cons.

It's south of France.

So it's going to be cool.

Yeah, I just so happened to be there during the time of the movie festival, and it's apparently the biggest movie festival in the world.

So it's pretty cool.

And that's all from saving taxes.

So it's like a double win.

Yeah.

So I want to talk about exits, right?

So Mark Cuban just tweeted out, I'm paying $350 million taxes to the IRS, and I'm happy about it.

Is there steps?

Because I know you've had some exits, right?

Is there steps you could take before or during the exit to save on the capital gains tax from that?

Yeah.

So there's a couple of things that you can do.

So it depends on the type of exit you have.

So there's two types of ways that you can sell your business or have an exit event.

So an asset sale and there's an equity sale.

So on the equity sale side of it, It's a little bit easier.

Basically, when I say an equity sale or an asset sale, what I'm saying is what are you selling?

So if I own a corporation, right?

Let's say I own a corporation that has 100 shares in it and I own 100 shares.

If I sell you the 100 shares, you now own the corporation, right?

That's what's called an equity sale.

So,

with those types of exit events, there are tax benefits to where oftentimes, if you do things correctly, up to the first $10 million

in the capital gains on that exit event can be tax-free.

Wow.

Yeah.

So

there's a holding period, like you have to hold your shares for a certain amount of time.

And there's rules specifically to that.

But it's pretty rare for small businesses to go through an equity sale, in my experience.

Again, I work with mostly online sellers, people that are in e-commerce.

So most of the time, they're on the other side of the spectrum, which is an asset sale.

An asset sale is basically: let's say you own an LLC, and that LLC owns a Shopify store.

If someone comes and acquires that brand, they may not acquire the full LLC.

They'll just acquire the Shopify brand, the ad account,

maybe your payment processing.

They'll acquire specific assets, your creative, maybe members of your team, that kind of stuff.

So

with an asset sale, the main play there is two things.

The first thing is holding period.

How long did you own those particular assets?

If you hold it for over a year,

then you're enable you it enables you to get long-term capital gains tax rate which is fixed at 20 right um which is pretty tax friendly if you have an exit event of a hundred million dollars you pay twenty million dollars in tax you know net net you're walking away with a much lower tax than you would pay if it was ordinary income which is up to 37 percent in taxes so as long as you hold those assets for longer than a year um it brings you down to a much lower tax rate uh we do have,

and we've only dealt with one or two clients that did this, but there are trust structures where basically right before the exit event, or maybe right before, you kind of have to plan a little bit in advance, but you set up a trust

structure where some of those assets go into the structure or maybe the LLC altogether.

And what happens is the exit event happens and you no longer own the business entity that the

trust does.

So the tax implications are basically delayed.

Basically how it worked with our clients is

gains or the proceeds go to the trust and it's taxed basically when they pull the money out of the trust.

It's not, you know, you're permanently getting rid of the taxes, but it's a way to defer the taxes so you don't have to pay, you know, in my example, that $20 million up front.

It can sit in that structure.

It can be reinvested into other things

and you can pull it out for personal need

as needed.

But that's a lot more complicated, a lot more structuring expensive.

You got to deal with lawyers to set up the structure.

There's a lot of planning that goes into it.

That makes sense.

What are your thoughts on trusts and when the right time to open up a trust is?

Yeah.

So,

you know, our clients ask us about trusts all the time.

And I think if there's

not a ton of tax benefit to trusts, it's mostly on the legal side.

So

with trust, I like it as an asset protection play.

So, you know, people that are married and things are very volatile, or you're trying to protect your assets from lawsuits.

Like one of our clients has some pretty severe FTC concerns right now.

And they set up a trust structure to protect themselves from that.

Got it.

So for legal protection, I think it's really great.

But for me personally, you know, I specialize in working with entrepreneurs.

I always like our clients being in complete control of their money.

And part of that is you're going to have to pay income taxes.

Don't overpay on your income taxes, but pay what you need to and be in complete control of your money.

Obviously, do some asset protection through legal entities, right?

If you're going to have two different businesses, set them up in two separate legal structures.

Yeah.

So they're protected from each other and you're protected from those businesses.

But other than that, my preference with our clients is always to, or at least what I advise to our clients, is always

operate, make money, pay your taxes, don't overpay.

We'll help you to strategize.

But once you pay those taxes, you're in complete control of the money.

You could do whatever you want with it.

Whereas if you go through a trust structure, it gets a lot more complicated.

I do have friends of mine that purchase real estate under a trust just for privacy reasons as well.

So for privacy, there are states that you could set up legal entities that you can have the same type of privacy benefits.

But yeah,

I'm not as familiar with using trusts for privacy purposes, but the main issue with a trust is depending on whether or not it's revocable or irrevocable, the question becomes, do you have control of those assets or not?

If a court could prove that you have control of those assets, you know, the trust structure goes out the way.

Oh, really?

So they could still sue and get those.

Yeah, it's possible for sure.

So it has to be under someone else's control.

right exactly but even under that situation how many people do you really trust that if you're gonna if you're gonna acquire a multi-million dollar asset that you personally can't make any decisions for it has to go through someone and the thing is a lot of times about trust is you have to have a person that is really in control of the trust assets and the closer they are to you the more that a lawyer or in a courtroom, you know, that stuff can be thrown out.

You know, if it's your brother, your girlfriend, your mom, you know, those are people that are very close to you.

If it's, you know, you're someone you met once in your life,

you know, how much do you really trust that person?

That would probably hold up in a legal situation, but how much do you really trust that person to make those decisions?

I'm glad to see you speak on this side of trust because a lot of people on social media are just like open up a trust and they don't talk about the repercussions or anything.

Yeah.

And look, I'm a pretty conservative guy in terms of,

you know, I try to advise our clients to make decisions that they're in control of a lot of things.

Social media, you brought it up, there's all types of theories and suggestions and advice.

People say crazy things online.

I would say at least three to five times a week, clients will send us a message on Slack and say, hey, I saw this tax planning strategy.

Does this apply to me?

And 70, 80% of the time, they're wrong.

And even worse, sometimes it's our own clients.

And I love our clients.

And sometimes they don't understand fully what we're doing in terms of their tax structure or their tax planning.

And they kind of spew out the version that they think it is on their head, in their head.

And,

you know, it's taxes complicated.

It is.

I got hit with a crazy one last week.

I don't know if you've been hit with this one.

This guy gave up his U.S.

citizenship.

Yeah.

Just to save on taxes, basically.

Yeah.

I mean, that's definitely something you can do.

Giving up your U.S.

citizenship

is a big deal.

I've never had a client give up their U.S.

citizenship,

but it is an opportunity.

If you're going to go through something that drastic,

I would say move to Puerto Rico.

I mean, if you're going to do something crazy, like you're going to leave the U.S.

altogether and not be a U.S.

citizen,

might as well live someplace where you can keep your U.S.

citizenship and experience much better tax benefits.

I think U.S.

is one of the strongest citizenships to have.

What are your thoughts on dual citizenship?

Because my dad was born in the U.K.

and he said I can get my passport whenever.

Does that impact taxes at all or not?

From a U.S.

standpoint, no, it might.

On the U.K.

side,

I would say you would have to consult with a U.K.

person, but on the U.S.

side, you're kind of screwed no matter where you go.

If you went to go live in the U.K.,

the simple fact that you're a U.S.

citizen, if you were to do this podcast out there and you're generating money from whatever, from sponsorships or whatever,

that income would be taxable in the U.S.

to the extent that it's not.

Yeah, you mentioned that earlier.

Because there's people trying so hard to get Dubai citizenship, but they probably don't even know that they're still going to be taxed U.S.

Yeah, if you're a U.S.

citizen, it unfortunately

won't work.

Yeah.

But that's on an income level, though, right?

Personal income.

So

even if it's through a corporate structure, they have something called guilty tax.

Not guilty, like COVID-19, but G-I-L-T-I.

Guilty tax is basically the same thing where there's a minimum tax rate that you pay if it's through a corporate structure.

That so back, let me rewind.

Back in the day when I worked at Ernst ⁇ Young, I used to do tax planning for big multinational corporations.

And one of the best tax planning strategies we would do is we would set up a structure in Ireland or another, it was mostly Ireland, but in another country that has a much lower tax rate.

And all you had to do is set up a corporation.

You get an office out there, employees, all of that stuff.

They own the IP out there or they have the IP leased out or something like that.

And there was significant tax benefits that existed.

Through Trump tax reform, there's a lot of great things that it did for small businesses.

But for big companies, what it did was it took away those rules where you can set up a company overseas and save a lot of money in taxes.

So what it did was it forced a lot of big companies to bring their money back to the U.S., which obviously is great for our economy here in the U.S.

But

the main reason why i bring that up is because part of the rules with that is that guilty tax where even if you set up a structure where let's say a corporation owns a dubai corporation yeah in dubai now there's a tax rate but you know zero percent for a long time you know once it flows up to that u.s structure there's still that guilty tax that exists that's good to know christian any other tips you want to close off with or anything you want to promote uh just our our brand if you're an e-commerce entrepreneur um we we specialize in working with e-commerce entrepreneurs.

We have agency clients.

So,

yeah, tax planning, bookkeeping, sales taxes.

That's what we do.

Cool.

What's the website for that?

TheecommerceAccountants.com.

Oh, the one.

Like the very best e-commerce accountants.

Love it.

We'll link that.

Accountants plural.

I love it, dude.

Thanks for coming on.

That was fun.

Thanks.

Hit them up for your accounting needs, guys.

Otherwise, I will see you tomorrow.