This is one of the most important episodes I’ve ever done. If we don’t act now, we are in trouble! John Hyre came on the podcast to discuss big and destructive changes coming to tax legislation for our IRAs.
Self-directed IRAs are Individual Retirement Accounts, and if you invest correctly, the income from these accounts are Tax Free. These self-directed IRAs however, are under attack. The government wants to completely change the rules and detract from the purpose they serve, forcing people from Main Street to Wall Street.
What if you don’t have an IRA? Well, I guarantee you know someone who does or you do business with someone who does. Even if you are not directly affected, you have an indirect dog in the fight and you will feel the impact. This is going to hurt property investments, crowdfunding, partnerships, and more,
John Hyre is an excellent lawyer and really breaks down what's going on from the Tax Language to plain English so we can all really understand. He is doing the work to save us from this legislation, and now he’s urging you to go make some noise. He has set up great information and resources,
Watch and Learn:
Listen and learn:
What’s inside:
- What is a self-directed IRA?
- How do the new laws surrounding IRAs affect you?
- How to make noise to stop this legislation.
- The letter format to reach representatives.
- Tax Language vs English, IRAs explained.
Mentioned in this episode:
Transcription:
Download episode transcript in PDF format here…
Joe: Welcome. This is the real estate investing mastery podcast.
Joe: Hey, welcome, Joe here. This is the real estate investing mastery podcast, and this is one of the most important podcast episodes I've ever done. Why? Because the government wants to get their grimy little hands into your IRA, and you may not even have an IRA, but I bet you you do business. If you do deals, you do business with somebody who has an IRA. You have private investors who invest in their IRAs, you have buyers who buy properties. So like this is really important, and the government wants to get their grimy little hands into your IRA. And I've got a guest on. His name is John Hyre. Some of you already know him. He's well known in the real estate investing space, been around for a long, long time, and he's going to talk about this and he's going to talk about what we need to do today to get this problem fixed and taken care of. He's coming to us from Puerto Rico and I'm going to bring him on. I just want to jump right in. I don't want to waste any time. Let's get into this. And John Hyre, how are you, my man?
John: Good. You know, other than bad law, life's great. I got very little reason to complain. But being a lawyer, I'm good at it, so I still do.
Joe: What's a common greeting from Puerto Rico? How do they say it there? What do they say?
John: Usually, when they are a little bit more on the formal side, Buen Dia!
Joe: Buen Dia, OK, nice. OK, cool, you know you're from Ohio, is that right?
John: Yeah. I grew up in Youngstown, moved to Columbus, then down in Puerto Rico for about three years now.
Joe: Oh man, we should do a podcast all about Puerto Rico. There's so many cool things about being there, but we are here to talk about it. I don't want to waste much time in the intros and stuff like that because this is very, very serious. And let me just warn you all in advance. OK, if you are a left leaning socialist, while I love the government, I think we should have more government. I think we should tax more and spend more. You are in the wrong place, so you will be offended. I promise you, John is very good at that. OK. But we're going to be as nice as we can here because John, he's a friend of investors. He's an attorney. He understands taxes. He understands the IRAS. And he is one of the nation's premier experts. And this is an important issue. Listen, guys, don't tune out if you don't have an IRA or a self-directed IRA, OK, don't tune out. This is important that you understand what's going on here because you have friends that are and you need to share this podcast. You need to share this YouTube VIDEO Wherever you're watching this on Facebook and YouTube, you need to share this. And by the way, too, we're live right now in the YouTube's and the Facebook. So if you have any comments or questions for John, type them in and we'll get them up to John here in a minute. OK? Was that a good introduction? Was that fair, John?
John: That's great. Now, as usual, you're very polite and understated and soft spoken, so things haven't changed much. This is destruction of IRAs people. This is destruction of self-directed IRA, and it's just the beginning. You all have a dog in the fight to fight for freedom, whether it's economic freedom or otherwise. You have a direct dog in the fight. If you have IRAs or you use money from them, you have an indirect dog, If you'd like to see the economy continue to prosper. Because what this is is an attempt to ban most self-directed IRA investing and force you from wall from Main Street into Wall Street. That's what this really is, and it's just the beginning. You know how these people are. They will not stop. They have to stop them here, or we will be fighting them elsewhere. And it's not exaggerating. They're looking to eliminate self-directed IRA investing. Let me tell you how this came to be, and then we'll get into the details of it.
Joe: Talk about what what is a self-directed IRA? First of all, and then talk about how this all came to be.
John: So there are different types of retirement accounts, and the good side of them is that you invest in them. If you do it right, it can be almost entirely tax free. And this is especially good for people who all they're going to do is reinvest in their business anyway. In other words, once you have enough to live on, you might as well invest with the different types of retirement accounts because it compounds and grows tax free. And if it's a Roth style account, you get the money tax free, now if you compound that. I once did, I have to go find my old spreadsheet. I did an example of a person who flipped 10 properties once a year for 10 years and then invested at a 12 percent return for, I think it was another 10 years. And the difference doing a tax free versus taxable at the end of 20 years, one account was one million, one account was four million and the income from the four million account kept coming out tax free. So I don't know what the net present value of that is, but it's massive, optimal way to invest massive tool. And by the way, highly regulated. It's not like it is like any other. There areo really complex rules, prohibited transaction rules, Neubert tax, etc. that you have to follow to do this right. So it's not like it's the Wild West out there.
Joe: They're very, very heavy. And that's an important point to make here. Some people who don't understand what they are think that it is the Wild West, and you can just do whatever you want and get away with whatever you want. But that's not the case. There's already a ton of really strict rules and a lot of real strict penalties if you don't do it right? Correct.
John: Oh, yeah. Yeah, if you if you do what's called a prohibited transaction in your IRA, the IRA ceases to exist and you get taxed on everything that's in there, that's a disaster. So we're really careful about following those rules and it's a real bait and switch. I mean, this is all been in place for at least 30 years and people following the rules, building a retirement outside of Wall Street, investing in what they know and then who they know something that they feel safer with and by the way, typically do get better returns. There were some statistics out there that self-directed investors get way better returns than the average investor. So it's really a way to build wealth tax free, and now they're about to pull the rug out from under us.
Joe: And you know why they're doing this? We're getting great comments. Yeah, it's all about control. They don't trust us to know what we're doing. I mean, the government obviously knows better than we would.
John: As they demonstrated amply and recently constantly just how much smarter than they are than everybody else.
Joe: We'll leave COVID out of this because that's going to derail this.
John: How about Afghanistan? I mean, if you're going to leave, we can discuss whether we should leave. But if you're going to leave, maybe that wasn't the way to do it. Maybe, et cetera, et cetera. Here's how this happened. Real short story on how it happened. The IRS said two thousand nine. They want to ban self-directed IRA investment. This isn't right. The reason they wanted to ban it is it was just too much work, and you can tell it was too much work because they didn't catch Peter till he's the big excuse to go after accounts because you started with two thousand and a Roth IRA grew to five billion. And it was sketch right if I were the IRS auditor. Granted, I'm competent, but I will blue light saber instead of a red one. So I'm not an auditor that distinguishes me on several counts, but a competent IRS auditor could have pulled that apart without going into details. But that's the excuse. It's not a coincidence that the IRS leaked his data, among others, right when they wanted to pass this law. So we've got a power hungry organization that is very political and wants a lot more power. So what did they do? Are your staff talked to Ron Wyden and Communists senator from Oregon, who happens to be in charge of the Senate Finance Committee that does tax law? They talk to his staff and said, We don't like this. And why does people said lobbying a bunch of socialists? We don't like it either. It's not fair. It's just not fair. You don't like it's unfair. That's literally what they tell you when they call you in the office. I'm not kidding. And so they talk to the house staff and they stuck it in this 800 page bill, hoping nobody would touch it. Of course, most of the Congress critters, representatives and senators don't understand what's in there. And my goal is to help motivate people because it does make a difference with some people, like if you if you write to your commie senator, they probably are going to care. But the moderate Democrats that do have a lot of power right now, I think they do care. I think if they knew what was in this bill and how it hurt people in their districts. They would think twice about it. In fact, we're starting to get some responses from them, but we need to really fight and make some noise. And it's not that hard to do and we'll get into how to do that. But I suppose let's talk about what is this, what is so horrible about it?
Joe: And before we get on, I'm going to give this URL. All throughout this little podcast that we're doing here. But I want you guys, if you're fired up, which you should be, I want you to go right now to handsoffmyIRA.com, handsoffmyIRA.com. All right, we'll give you that link again here as we go through this. But what are you going to say, John? Sorry to interrupt.
John: Oh yes. First of all, it's all there. We explain what the bill is. We give you links to the bill so that you or your accountant can read it and decide for yourself if I'm full of it are accurate. And we give you action items, including simple letters to fax, email and send. We also give you a list of people to send it to, not just your representatives, though you certainly should communicate with them, but also with other key representatives. So we have to make a lot of noise. Here's the problem and those eight hundred pages. Congress is screwing a lot of people, and a lot of them are bigger and more powerful than us. So we're getting drowned out since there's so much noise from so many people squealing. We need to be heard. And for us, the only way to do it is sheer numbers. So even if it doesn't directly affect you, let's say you don't have a self-directed IRA. It indirectly affects you funding economic freedom, allowing for these kinds of dirty tricks. The overall economy people, you know, maybe, perhaps life that use these accounts either to raise money or to secure their retirement. It's just wrong. Forcing people from Main Street to Wall Street, especially coming from a bunch of people who say they hate billionaires. Well, whose hands are they forcing you into? So what are they doing? Let me talk about the part that's going to pass. And it's actually pretty rational. I don't completely disagree with it. Peter Thiel amassed five billion tax free in his Roth, and what he did was politely, but aggressive, I would say, flat out sketchy to stop that problem, they have put a cap of $10 million on defined contribution plans total per person. What does that mean in English? You add up the balance of your IRAs, 401Ks, your SEPs, your simple plans. You cannot have more than 10 million total and those accounts, though, adjusted for inflation. Now it's not the adjustment I would want. It's the CPI which undercounts inflation, but it's better than nothing. And if you put more than 10 million in there, they force you to distribute half of the excess. They force you to distribute half of the extra over 10 million. If you don't, there's a huge penalty. Let me give you an example. I have an $11 million combined account. By the way, this doesn't include defined benefit plans. Those are separate. I won't go into explaining what they are. It's just a footnote that's important to the financially literate. This does not include defined benefit plans. Those are separate. So they add up all your accounts other than defined benefit plans. You've got 11 million. The law says you have to distribute. Let's see what, 11 million minus 10. The excess is a million. Half of that is five hundred thousand. You have to distribute five hundred thousand. If you don't, the penalty is half of what you failed to distribute. So two hundred and fifty grand penalty, that's a pretty good motivator. And so I think that solves if you look mathematically, that solves ninety nine point nine eight percent of the Peter Theil. I mean, do the math. Ten million is two tenths of a percent of five billion. Two tenths of a percent of a billion. They solve ninety nine point nine eight percent of the problem. If all they were after was Peter Thiel, which is what their advertising is, they'd be done. The only thing they need to do that is going to pass some form. We might have a different limit. There might be some grandfathering that's going to pass. There's no, I would say there isn't sufficient political support to kill it. Now what's the bad part? There are two things they're doing just suddenly because they're too dishonest to do it directly, so they do it indirectly to suddenly destroy self-directed IRAs. First of all, IRAs are no longer going to be allowed to invest in any investment that inquires about your income, assets, professional licensing or status, educational status. What does that mean in English? So I laid out the tax language. What does that mean in English? If an investment you want to put your IRA into requires you to be an accredited investor if it requires you to be a sophisticated investor or if it's crowdfunding its debt, your IRA is not allowed to invest in any of that. So what are the pros and syndications that people like to invest in, especially if they're more passive or they're in their later years or they have a W-2 job? It's where we kind of wind down and go more passive, and those are a lot of things we like to invest in. That's better. And if your IRA does die, they kill your IRA. They force your assets out if you do the tax math. When they do that, it usually costs you about 40 to 60 percent of the assets. So if you had a million dollar IRA, you invest in something like that. You're basically going to lose four hundred to six hundred rands. The government, whatever's left is in your name and no longer a tax shelter.
Joe: Now, if this does pass, is it going forward or is it retroactive and any current existing self-directed IRA?
John: It's sort of retroactive. Here's how they did it. It starts. The rule goes into effect January one of twenty twenty two, but your existing investments are not grandfathered. If you have existing investments in crowdfunding or something that require your your IRA has an existing investment in something that's crowdfunding or required you to be an accredited or sophisticated investor. You have two years to exit. No exceptions. Two years and you have to exit or they destroy your account. Wow. Two years. That's it. So what's that mean? A lot of fire sales for projects that are longer than two years or people making heavily taxed distributions from their IRAs to get the investment out of their name. Now I've thought of some planning work arounds, but only some I can solve some of the problem, but not all of it. I don't want to get into that now, partly because I don't want the word's getting out. My my website done a lot of hits from Washington, D.C., so the staffers are looking at it. I don't want to give them ideas on how to improve the legislation. This is pretty serious. I mean, think about how many people do you know that raise a lot of money from IRA?
Joe: Well, a lot, you know, and good friends from bigger pockets, which is the largest kind of real estate investor, podcast and community. A lot of the investors in BiggerPockets raise a lot of private money for their deals. Brandon Turner has an incredible fund that he raises money for self from self-directed IRA, from other investors in big mobile home parks. There's a lot of people in the real estate investing community that either invest their own money or raise money for these big projects. And so this isn't just for the big billionaire investors like you're talking about every day, mom and pop investors.
John: That's who they're actually really targeting. I mean, the hypocrisy of saying they're going to for Peter Thiel, and it's not about raising revenue for the government because this only raises like a hundred and eighty million per year with an M. One hundred and eighty million in the context of the trillions we're spending. This is not about getting Peter Thiel. It's not about raising revenue. It's about control. They want you out of these investments and they want you in Wall Street and they don't care who they hurt on the way to. Aggressive stuff. I think the moderate Democrats that we're going to focus on communicating with is what the Republicans are all going to vote against us. You should still communicate with your rep, even if they're a Republican for a number of reasons, that's helpful. I won't spend a ton of time. You should you should contact your reps, no matter who they are. But we have a list on the website of moderate Democrats. You know what? I don't think they know how harmful this is. I don't think they understand, and I think they really do care. The best thing you can do with one of our template letters because we have two of them, one is effective and one is easy. The effective one means you got to take about an hour and then you can just delegate to an assistant emailing and snail mail. And please, please, please snail mail and email and fax. Do it all. Yeah, and tell your story. Listen, you tell the story from the standpoint that would be appealing to your audience. A moderate Democrat, I lend money in poor neighborhoods where banks won't let. I lend money to rehabbers, who make the neighborhoods better. I have rentals in these neighborhoods and I'm not a slumlord, by the way. I'm being responsible for my retirement. If you put these restrictions on me, I won't be able to invest in Main Street with people I know and things I understand. You're going to force me into the hands of billionaires on Wall Street. Why are you doing this to me? You're not raising revenue. We're already very heavily regulated. Why are you doing this to me? That would be a much more appealing message than, Hey, you commie bastard. That's that's going to be a problem. That's not.
Joe: Yeah. And if you know, John hired too, when you read these letters, you'll think, Oh, those are really actually nice and team. Good job, John.
John: You know, we want something. Yeah, yeah.
Joe: You don't want to come across as the jerk. And I like the referring it or using the reference of Main Street versus Wall Street because every blue collar Democrat out there is supposed to be for Main Street, right? They accuse the the right side of the aisle to be more about Wall Street, but this is now turning the argument on on its head to them because if they really, truly are interested in saving and working with and helping Main Street, this is important. This is really, really important. So what what are some of the other things, John, that this bill affects? I'm looking at your website right here. You have number one. This means you not really invest PPM's, private investment, crowdfunding stuff like that. What else?
John: So they get you from the other side. Your IRA is not allowed to own 10 percent or more of any organization. Corporation LLC Trust, Land Trust, Personal Property Trust, Partnership. Let me give you an example of a partnership that most people don't think of an entity, but as far as the IRS is concerned, it is. Joe, you want to make a deal. I got an IRA with money. You go out and do something, and I'm just making it up because I know that, you know, whatever it is we put together, I know you probably do a lot of rehabbing or what anymore. Let's just say you found a deal. I'm like, I'm going to put on the money. You do the sweat equity thing and we shake hands because we're gentlemen and we don't need an LLC or a contract. Now, as a lawyer, I always recommend that. But let's just say hypothetically, we shake hands on that deal. My IRA puts in the money. Joe does the work, or vice versa doesn't matter. That's a partnership my IRA owns. More than 10 percent of it dies. So Checkbook LLC, owning 10 percent or more of any organization is just done. So a lot of the JV deals you guys do or just using an LLC for asset protection. And let's say, for example, your IRA owns rental property, you can still own rental property. It just has to be in the name of the IRA. It can't have an LLC. It can't have asset protection if you're a hard money lender, no privacy, no asset protection, no LLC, no trust. Furthermore, the law also says that if you're an officer or director or the equivalent because the IRS looks at reality, they don't look at just what's on paper. They look at how much power do you have because people are like, Oh, I'll appoint my cousin or my financial friend as a director of this thing. But behind the scenes, I'll be the one pulling the strings. We IRS just looks right through that. So that's a straw man. The real power behind the scenes is you anything you have the power of an officer or director in your IRA cannot invest a dollar nothing or dies. And just like the other rule, you got two years to get out of these things. So no checkbook LLCs, no more personal property trusts, no more land trusts and a lot of the little JV deals that people like to do. They're gone. So what are they pushing you into? Let's do the math. If your IRA can only own nine percent, let's say, or less, you know, less than 10 percent, that's going to push you into deals that probably require you to be an accredited investor. Oh, but wait, you're not allowed to do that either. So they're really narrowing what you're allowed to do. And let's see how long that lasts. Now, I have had a few people email me kind of snide, which was really annoying. Well, I have, and I have an EQRP, which is just a brand name for a 401k that you're overpaying for or a solok or a solo401K or individual 401k whatever. And so this doesn't affect me. Well, there are other laws I'm not discussing. I'm talking about the really bad ones there are if you look on the websites of things that do affect 401Ks but let me ask you a question what do you think's next when you think you can just set it out because they're not? For you are they're not coming for me, so I don't have a dog in the fight. I don't need to even take the effort to write a letter. Who do you think is next? If you let them get away with this? So bottom line, how are they destroying self-directed IRA investing? No more accredited investors, sophisticated investor crowdfunding and no more ownership of more than 10 percent of anything. Plus no use to checkbook LLC's or trusts in the same role. So that leaves you a very narrow for now until they come back with more. A very narrow precipice upon which your IRA is allowed to invest. It is the indirect destruction of self-directed IRA investing. It will put a lot of custodians out of business. You'd better believe they're fighting it, not always in an inspired manner. They're doing better. Their emails are really boring and they just contact your rep. We can do way better than that. There's a lot more that can be done apart of which, by the way, thanks Joe, for spreading the word. I really appreciate just the opportunity present. I'm not in this. If you look at the website, there's no links to buy anything. I'm not selling anything. There's not so much of an Amazon ad on there. This is not about me. This is about stopping this abomination.
Joe: And time is of the essence, right? I mean, this isn't something that we're talking about a year or two away, is it? No.
John: The legislation is in process. The only reason we even have a little bit of time is because of the internal disarray within the Democratic Party. There are few moderates and they don't have that many moderates, but thank God, they also have tiny majorities. So right now, they're in disarray. And that's something else I want to mention. I'm not going to ask you to send a letter. I'm going to ask you to send a letter and a fax and a email to a lot of different people. Now that's easy on the emails and you can delegate the letters. It's like God gave us assistance and eventually to call. If you call for five minutes, your rep, they're very polite and they'll listen. We haven't. We have to put a script on there for calling. I've got everything else on there. I've just been so busy myself and I've asked you to do this repeatedly. We got to make noise, and so there have to be inflection points, for example. Right now, they're arguing over what's put in the bill. Then the bill is going to be up for amendments. That's an inflection point. Send a wave of letters, then they're going to vote. That's an inflection point. Send a wave of letters. If it makes it past that goes to the Senate, now we're going to target West Virginia and Arizona. And I'm going to ask you, for example, Joe, I'll ask you who on your list is in West Virginia and Arizona, man, we want to bombard them because the legislators, Manchin and Cinema in this case will listen. They'll listen somewhat to outside constituents. I have lobbyists say, don't bother and send stuff to people outside of district. They won't listen to it. Well, it does carry less weight, but when they get two thousand calls or letters or faxes or emails on the same topic. Trust me, it gets their attention. Yeah, for sure. But yeah, so what we can do is reach out to people in key districts and get them doing it over and over and over.
Joe: I'm looking at the letter right now. Oh, it does. And it's super important this letter is really good. Do you mind if I just kind of walk through the format of this letter? And again, what is good to go to handsoffmyIRA.com, handsoffmyIRA.com. There's a lot of things you can do. There are a lot of contact information of your local representatives, some of the more important representatives that are maybe not in your state, but maybe you can still send a letter to. And the good thing about this letter is you tell them kind of where to inject your own personal story, your own personal investments, you know, and it addresses the Peter Thiel problem, right? How he turned $2000 into $5 billion. But it also talks about here why. What I don't understand is why you were targeting every single person who uses self-directed IRAs. Why are you targeting me and my retirement funds? I'm not Peter Thiel, and then it talks about some code. So It doesn't write this letter and some fancy attorney language. But then it asks the question What what are you doing all of this for to raise revenue about one hundred and eighty million dollars a year. That's nothing in the shadow of the trillions that are actually in play, right? These self-directed IRA accounts are already very highly regulated. And I know because I had to learn the prohibited transaction rules, and anybody who's invested in IRAs understands the importance of prohibited transactions, right? We are already highly regulated. A lot of times, maybe some of these senators and congressmen don't understand that, but we already are. So this thing targets every single self-directed IRA investor. This doesn't solve the real problem at hand. Please use your influence to protect the non billionaires. Wall Street and its billionaires do not need my money. Main Street needs my money. Startups need my money. Housing providers need it. Local businesses need it. That and I want my retirement money to be invested where I can truly keep an eye on it. Working for me in investments that I understand and trust. Very simple, very simple letter. Yeah, cool. Anything, anything else, John, that you want to you want to say about this.
John: So we have a spot to sign up for updates. You will not be added to my list. You will not be sold anything. It's more to inform you what's the progress and when to send another batch of letters and faxes and emails. There is for those of you who insist on that, you can't even spend an hour. There is an easy button where it's pretty much an autofill thing. And you put in your name and emails to the various Congress. I hope you guys can spend an hour protecting yourselves and being decent citizens. I'll tell you what I'm going to ask for shortly. I have to update the website. I mean, I'm just the sole practitioner. I've been doing this personally, so it's been really time consuming. The next thing I'm going to do is focus on districts. I'm going to get a VA to figure out the zip codes for these moderate Democrats, and I'm going to ask people like Joe as well as hit my own list. Hey, who on your list is in this zip code? We need to get them sending in their stories directly to the Congress, but also to me because you know what I can do. I can get an appointment. Or I know people who can get a face to face appointment with a staff. And if we can come in with 40 pieces of paper with a story of, you know, I rehab houses, I make hard money loans, whatever it is you do, I invest in startups that make things better. I invest in tech that makes the economy pump. I'm being responsible. The more of those, we can deliver a stack of letters personally and physically on a representative's desk that makes an impact. We've already had that done to a few and we got good so far and we'll see what they do. Politicians, they'll say one thing who knows what they'll do, but they were actually shocked and taken aback. Several moderate Dems who were really like, We have no idea this was in there. We have no idea what a self-directed IRA is. And we had no idea how much damage it's going to cause in our district. So I will be looking for those stories from specific districts. Look for that on the updates because I'm going to ask for those stories so that we can take a sheet of papers and physically drop it on someone's desk. Well, we have a civilized, polite discussion with the same tone of the letter. Why are you doing this? Do you know what you're doing? You're hurting us.
Joe: Yeah, you know what you could even do. You could. Even if you know that zip codes of that district, right, you could find a list of the investors that own property in those zip codes and you could do a direct mail campaign to them. I know this cost money, but I'm just thinking out loud like we need to spread the word. Bottom line, right? We need to spread the word. And again, could you talk about the two states Arizona and West Virginia, right? Are these two moderate Democrat states and what are their specific areas or districts that those two senators are in?
John: The senators cover the whole state. So any stories I can get from West Virginia or Arizona are super extra special good. And then I'll get the zip codes from the moderate Dems that we have on the website. For the House, we asked for the House and that will be specific areas. For example, most of its suburban, almost all of it are suburbs that normally go Republican and last time around, or they're always purple kind of toss up districts where these guys actually have a chance of losing. But they're also, I really do think philosophically more moderate is so it's political imperative they want to win. But I also think most of the people we put on that list, I mean, we talked to several people that are much more knowledgeable than I am on the internal workings of. Of who to put on that list and really who to target. And you know what? Get your other people involved. Ask your mom and dad, ask your kids, ask your sisters, ask them to write letters, help them put it together. Just say, Look, I know someone. I'm related to someone. I have a family member who relies on self-directed IRAs for retirements or for raising money for their business. You are her team that you guys have networks. The only way we'll get her, given all the screaming and lobbying that's going on with this 800 page bill is sheer numbers and the personal appeal that we can bring to the table that large corporations cannot.
Joe: Very good handsoffmyIRA.com. HandsoffmyIRA.com. You got some comments here. Ralph Newton. They also are looking to eliminate capitalism. More on the socialism side now, really sucks.
John: Yeah this is a step in that direction. They want control. No, I wouldn't. Yeah. And if you're looking to actually persuade and be effective, so do I agree with you? Yes. Would I ever put that in a letter to someone I'm trying to persuade? Absolutely not.
Joe: James says. Here we all need to call out representatives and let them hear that we are not in favor of this new legislation. Absolutely right.
John: Repeatedly. And by the way, I will add as time permits again, it's been just me, which has been a problem. There are other things I don't like, but this is the worst. So I will put separate letters, for example, what they're doing with carried interests. There are other tax things, without going into the weeds because I understand what tax the people's eyes start to roll to the top of their head and then their head hits the keyboard. And that's not the goal. There are other things you'll see other letters, you know, for example, the IRS being able to monitor any bank account that has more than 600 dollars of activity. That's crazy. That's an insane breach of privacy, giving them 80 billion more dollars to just come and audit you more. That's lunacy.
Joe: Maybe I just missed what you said, or maybe it triggered something in my memory. I heard there's some kind of thing in this legislation, too that is giving the IRS permission. No, no, they're asking, the iRS wants to tell all banks in the United States to report any transaction over a certain amount of money I think it's $600.
John: And we have a procedure for that, right? Well, there's a procedure. Audit, do your job and audit, then you can get into the bank account, but to have automatic access to everyone's data. It's like the NSA itself, the IRS. That's insane.
Joe: Boy, is that is that particular thing I just talked about in this bill that's going with the same bill.
John: Oh yeah same bill. We'll add a letter for that.
Joe: Oh my gosh, the IRS wants to be able. They want to be notified. Every time you or your business has a transaction over $600, they want to know what you're spending the money on and where.
John: And then we'll add, 80 billion in audit addition, look, they'll raise more revenue, but not as much as they think. The numbers they're talking about in terms of the tax gap, people not paying their fair share, it exists. It's never going to be perfect. They're not going to raise anywhere nearly as much as they think. Here's what will happen way more audits and expense for you guys. Way more billable hours for guys like me, the only people who win are guys like me. That's it. And I like me, but I don't like me that much. You should vote against that.
Joe: Okay. If you guys go too, handsoffmyIRA.com. Send a couple of letters. At least there's also a place where you can put in your name and email and you're not going to be spam just to keep up to date on this information. That would be really, really good. Go to handsoffmyIRA.com. John, where else can people go if they want more information about you?
John: Taxreductionlawyer.com or taxreductionclass.com, tax reduction lawyer and tax reduction class .com. I do a lot of other things on the side. Appreciate the shout out in the mention. But first, I want you to go to HandsOffMyIRA.com
Joe: Yeah, OK. Very good, John. Thank you so much for being on the show. This has been shortened to the point, but I think this is one of the most important ones that the podcast one of the most important podcasts that we've ever done. Enjoy the beautiful weather there in Puerto Rico, John.
John: I hope everyone else does. All right. Take care.
Joe: We'll see you all later. Take care, everybody. Thank you. Bye bye.
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