#143: Advanced Depreciation Strategies

Welcome to The Accelerated Investor Podcast with Josh Cantwell, if you love entrepreneurship and investing in real estate then you are in the right place. Josh is the CEO of Freeland Ventures Real Estate Private Equity and has personally invested in well over 500 properties all across the country. He’s also made hundreds of private lender loans and owns over 1,000 units of apartments. Josh is an expert at raising private money for deals and he prides himself on never having had a boss in his entire adult life. Josh and his team also mentor investors and entrepreneurs from all over the world. He doesn’t dream about doing deals, he actually does them and so do his listeners and students. Now sit back, listen, learn, and accelerate your business, your life, and your investing with The Accelerated Investor Podcast.

Josh: So, hey, guys, welcome back to Accelerated Investor on this episode. I’m going to be interviewing Yonah Weiss. Yonah is a powerhouse for property owners, whether you own apartment buildings where their own single-family residences, whether you own duplexes, multifamily office commercial. He is the business director of a company called Madison Specs. They’re a national cost segregation leader. He’s been on over 100 various podcasts sharing his advice about how to save money through advanced depreciation strategies. In this particular interview, what you’re going to hear in just a second.

Josh:Yonah and I talk about what he’s working on right now and how he’s hosting weekly meet ups and he’s doing breakouts through using his Zoom technology, which you all have access to, and doing weekly meet ups, but also doing breakouts to get clients. We’ll talk about what cost segregation is and how properties have three separate buckets of kind of material within the property, three main categories and how they can each be written off on separate depreciation schedules. The main structure, the land improvements and the personal property.

Josh: We’ll also talk about my building and what benefit I would have to doing cost segregation on my own brand new 80-unit apartment building that I just purchased. And we’ll also talk a little bit more about some of Yonah’s clients and the amount of money that they saved as a passive investor when they were actually able to use the term real estate professional and actually use the deductions against their own personal tax returns. You’ll love this interview with Yonah Weiss. Take a listen.

Josh: So Yonah, listen, thank you so much for jumping on with me today on the Accelerated Investor podcast. Appreciate you taking some time. You are a busy man. We’re talking about cost segregation. I’ve seen you on a bunch of other podcasts. You’re definitely one of the industry experts. So Yonah, thanks so much for joining us. But tell us right now what is something that you’re working on right now? Today, we’re kind of winding down 2020. It’s been a wild year with COVID. But there’s a lot of positivity, positive things still happening in the marketplace. What’s one of the things that you’re working on that you’re most excited about?

Yonah: Oh, thank you, Josh. It’s really a pleasure. I tell you one thing that I’m working on that has really blown my mind is I started a virtual meetup, a real estate meetup virtually well, months ago. I really it started in the midst of, you know, back in April when we’re, like, all trapped at home. And it was like, you don’t have all these events planned for the rest of the year. And my local meet ups and all this stuff it and, you know networking is huge for me. I love to go to these events. I love to meet people. And it’s like, what can we do? I got on a call and I saw they had this really cool feature on Zoom that allows for breakout rooms, which you can actually, if you’re on a big zoom call with a lot of people, you can actually click a button and break that zoom call up into little groups of two, three, four, however many you want.

Yonah: And so I literally that day I’m like, OK, I’m doing this. I started a real estate, a weekly meetup. And so we meet every single Wednesday, usually about 50 to 100 people are coming get a guest speaker every week on a different topic, real estate related. And then we do these networking breakout rooms were meeting tons of people from all over the country. It’s really incredible. I’m really excited about that. And that’s yeah, that’s my favorite project I’ve been working on recently.

Josh: That is fantastic stuff. So let’s back up for a second. You are really out talking to a lot of groups, all your own groups, podcasts specifically about cost segregation. You’re an expert in it, your firm as an expert in it. Why don’t we jump in? For those of our audience, we’ve got about half of our audience is residential investors. The other half owns a lot of apartment buildings and commercial real estate. And I don’t know that many people are really familiar with what cost segregation is. That’s what your firm does. You’re one of the nation’s leading experts in it. And this is available to them in a way to basically have the government reduce your taxes in exchange for owning real estate. So what is cost segregation and why aren’t more people talking about it?

Yonah: Excellent questions. A great private preface to that. I think it’s just understanding. And I’ll answer your second question first, because why don’t people know about this. It’s really confusing. I mean, first of all, it’s a weird name. But second of all, taxes, when people think about taxes, like their brains kind of freeze. I like my shirt off and like I have an account, send it to my account. Well, the things about cost segregation, even though it’s an accounting method, it’s actually an engineering service.

Yonah:So accountants don’t do this. Which means that even though, you know, you think you’re relying on your accountant for everything tax related. Well, guess what? This thing here is not simply accountants do so. Therefore, you may be missing the boat because your accountant may not be prioritizing or just being proactive enough to tell you about something like this existed. So now that we know perhaps why you may not have even heard about it. Sure. Let’s just jump right in. What is it? Right. That is your first credit. What is cost? Segregation. It’s a weird name. And let’s just break down that name, which is the cost and the segregation. We’re taking the cost of the building and we’re segregating it. We’re basically splitting it up into different categories that depreciate at different rates.

Yonah: So essentially what we’re doing is an advanced form of depreciation. OK, so let’s take a step back maybe and understand, well hey, what’s depreciation? I mean, I know what it means, right? Like, something’s going down in value. Right. I don’t want my property to be going down in value. So why is this a good thing? It doesn’t sound good, right? Well, it is good. It’s actually the most valuable things in the world. Yeah, it’s incredible. It’s one of the most incredible things for me. I love it. But what people don’t understand is that when you talk about real estate, it’s always kind of lumped together all these benefits of real estate.

Yonah: The passive income or the equity, the wealth building etc. and tax benefits is always lumped in there. All right. What’s the tax benefits? I mean, the biggest one is depreciation. And cost segregation is just an advanced form of that. So let’s understand it. Depreciation means that something goes down in value as time goes on. But for real estate and for tax purposes, it’s just a borrowed term. OK, to borrow a term that means that the IRS gives you a tax deduction of your property, the entire value of your building. When you buy a new building from the day that you buy that, you now get to take that as a tax write off over a certain period of time.

Yonah:So twenty seven 1/2 years for residential. Thirty-nine years for commercial. So that’s what we’re doing. We’re taking income tax deductions, income tax write offs because we bought real estate. And essentially, that’s what depreciation is. And I say it’s a borrowed term because it’s not it’s not intrinsic to the property itself, because it starts that schedule, that amount you can actually write off as your property is going down, starts the deed by it means it may have been fully, quote unquote, depreciated. The value has been, quote unquote, gone down. On it. And now you buy it. It starts over.

Josh: Right. So one of the most beautiful things about real estate is we buy properties, let’s say, at a wholesale price, put in some CapEx, improve the building, whether it’s a residential building, whether it’s apartment building, whether it’s a medical office building, whatever it is. And we try to force the appreciation to these values, add improvements and increase the rent. So, you know, we’re into the building, let’s say, for 70 or 80 cents on the dollar. And it’s worth more because we put in the cap ex, we put in the value and it’s worth more.

Josh: And the building is valued at a higher price. We’ve already got some equity built in. That’s one of the kind of pillars of building wealth. The next piece, like you talked about, is the passive income that comes after expenses and debt service. You’ve got net free cash flow. That’s amazing. You’ve got the property appreciating in value as your rents go up or as time goes on, things naturally appreciate in value. You take care of them. But there’s this weird thing of depreciation that many people maybe don’t understand.

Josh: A lot of our real estate investor clients understand it where the government allows you to write off the cost of that over twenty-seven and a half years residential, 39 for commercial. It’s just weird just tax deduction, right, for owning real estate. Because the building’s really not going down in actual value. So I love to tell people you get to, the building appreciates in value, but they write it off on your taxes. So most accountants to your point will say, hey, we’re going to depreciate this on your taxes and you’re going to pay a little bit less in tax. So let’s just explain that for a second, and you know why accountants just generally say, well, here’s the schedule. Twenty-seven and a half years or thirty-nine years for commercial. And you get to write this off. That’s the normal depreciation schedule. Talk about that. And then what is the advanced method, the cost segregation method again, high level. Then we’ll get into the detail.

Yonah: Absolutely. So high level is we take that purchase price. Can you buy a building for a million dollars? We’ll do an example, you know, an actual case study later on, but say a million dollars. You have to subscribe to certain meant for land. Land does not depreciate. And the rest, whatever’s left over. Let’s say you take off 10, 15, 20 percent for land. Let’s say 20 percent just to keep round numbers. That eight hundred thousand dollars, that’s left at 80 percent. That’s your basis that we’re going to divide. Your accounting is going to just divide that eight hundred thousand by twenty-seven and a half. OK. So you’re going to be left with for a residential property, multi-family is considered residential for this as well.

Yonah: You’re going to be left with approximately thirty thousand dollars a year. OK. Maybe twenty-eight thousand dollars a year for your depreciation write off. That’s what that means. So what that means is you make your net operating income after all expenses after everything. Let’s say you made fifty thousand dollars in this movie to our property. Net operating income. Immediately you deduct thirty thousand from that. That’s your depreciation expense. And you’re only taxed on the remaining twenty thousand one in our example. OK. The whole thing. That’s that simple straight-line rate, regular depreciation that through your account is doing.

Yonah: What the IRS actually says is that there are, you know, everything in the building. Everything on a property really depreciates. Everything has a schedule, has a different, useful life. And that’s the word. They use it, quote unquote, useful life. And so there are many things in a property that actually have a much shorter, useful life, which means you can take the value of those as a tax write off over a much shorter period of time. So that’s what conservation is. An engineer is coming in and identifying what all those things are and how they apply to the tax code to have shorter, useful lives. 

Josh:So you wanna give us a couple of examples, like certain walls, certain windows, roof, certain things that weren’t useful lifes, so throw out a couple of examples. What’s the useful life of windows or a roof or whatever? Give our audience some examples of what that could be. Where instead of depreciating the whole commercial building over 39 years or the residential over twenty-seven and a half, you can segregate them out and say these other items we can depreciate much faster, which means get much larger tax deductions.

Yonah:Give us some examples there. So, yeah, so basically the examples are there’s three main categories and everything fits into these three categories, not everything. Ninety five percent of everything and any type of commercial property fits into these three categories. There’s the main structure of the building and structural components. That’s all what really depreciates on the twenty-seven and a half year. And then there’s two other categories which we’re gonna be segregating out. There’s what’s called the land improvements, which appreciate on a 15-year schedule. And some examples of that would be like landscaping pavement. If you’re a parking lot, right. Asphalt, curbing, fencing, signage, basically think about anything outside of the building that all has value to it. And when you identify the value, you can take that value as a tax write off over a 15-year period.

Yonah:So it’s much faster now or at least half the amount. The second category, the third category, I should say, is called personal property, which and this is really the main category. This gets segregated out from the building. And this includes anything that’s not structural. So let’s go back to the structural for an instructor. It’s like the roof, the walls, the floor, the windows, doors, main electric, main plumbing. All those things are considered structural integral to the property. And those are all on a twenty-seven-and-a-half-year schedule, which means once I can identify with the value of each one of those things are going to take the value of the structural things. Windows, doors, roof, etc.. On a 27 year schedule.

Yonah: The five-year property, the personal property actually depreciates on a five-year schedule. So think about furniture, appliances, OK, carpeting or vinyl flooring, even though it’s like floor, but it’s not the actual Florence on top of the floor and can be removed. So therefore, it’s a five-year schedule. There’s a lot of value in that wall coverings, certain types of outlets, you know, fixtures, electrical lighting, all that kind of stuff, even cabinets and countertops, which again, they’re not structural. These are add-ons. These are things that are that you can take in, take out and replace all of that as a five-year useful life, which means you can identify what that is.

Yonah: And we’re not even talking about new construction. We’re not talking about the, doing the value add the cap ex, like you said, what you’re putting in value into the building, replacing things just on the acquisition. You buy a building even though this stuff is not being replaced for 30 years. Yeah. You can now come in and say, no, this actually has a five year useful life and based on the purchase price, I’m going to allocate a certain percentage, maybe 20 percent of the value to all of this five year property and take that as a tax write off over the first five years.

Josh: Fantastic. So let’s do this. I’ve got a building that I am closing on next Friday. And by the time this is mutualize. Thank you. But I appreciate that. Love new acquisition stuff. So this will be released shortly after that. And so let’s talk about this building. So we’re buying an 80 unit apartment building. Purchase prices, three point seven four five million. Capital improvements, CapEx is three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

Josh: And most of that we’re turning 40 of the 80 units. We’re gonna turn 40 of them. We’re gonna invest about seven thousand dollars a unit in flooring, paint, carpet. But update the kitchen, update the bathrooms. Again a lot of these are one bed, one bath. So they’re only five hundred square feet. So seven thousand goes a long way. And then the other roughly seventy thousand dollars that’s remaining is going to go into improving some of the additional bathrooms. We’ve got some small point of sale violations from the local city building department. Not much, but maybe ten thousand dollars in concrete work. Stuff like that. The unit mix give you the unit mix. Well, quick.

Josh: It’s forty-one ones. It’s twenty-two ones and twenty-three ones. So it gives an idea of the unit mix in the size, but we’ll be all in for it for the three point seven million plus 350 plus some soft costs and stuff like that. About two hundred thousand dollars. So for attorney fees and closing cost, lender points etc. All in for, call it four point three, four point four roughly.

Josh: It pencil’s out. Based on the improved NOI, three hundred and eighty thousand dollars of NOI after it’s improved and the rents go up, and then based on a six point two five cap puts the value at six point one million. So those are all kind of rough numbers, general numbers just to keep this conversation moving along. So. You know, all in for four point three is. New value, six point one. Plan is to then refinance within about two years after we improve those 40 units. pay off the original loan and the cap ex return the investors equity and put a new loan on it. Obviously, interest rates being so low, it makes a lot of sense. New loan at about 4.5 million and we’ll be able to cash everybody out, have a permanent loan on it.

Josh: OK, so now I could depreciate that sucker from the time I bought it. OK. Over the next thirty-nine years. But we’ve got these three buckets, the main structure. We’ve got the land improvements and then the personal property. So help me and my audience understand what would we be looking at under a cost segregation study based on the existing building. And then this cap ex that we’re going to do. How might this be able to be divided up to give us these new tax benefits and accelerate that depreciation on this building?

Yonah: Excellent tax inquiry. So I’m going to I’m going to add in one more big point in this discussion before we before we get into breaking out your property. It sounds like an incredible business plan. Right. I’d love to understand how the tax benefit is going to play out here. But there’s one really important point that goes along with this, which is something called bonus depreciation. It’s actually a relatively new tax law that came about in 2018 with the tax reform, Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Yonah: And it says that once you do a cost segregation study, this is what the tax law says and you’re breaking out, you’re identifying with the things that depreciate at a faster rate, five-year, 15 year. Remember, I mentioned the personal property, the land improvements. You have the option to take all of that in the first year as a first-year tax deduction, which means you can lump it all together and take a huge tax deduction the first year. So I’m going to just throw that out there. And I’m going to use that to apply that as well. When we break down and understand this example. And I’m going to give you some high, high level numbers. This is not accurate.

Yonah: What we always do, actually, is our engineers, which is really the bulk of the work of the of the conservation is the engineers that understand the construction of the building break everything out. We’ll actually run a free estimate for anyone, which they’ll look at a lot of details in the property and just give based on the, you know, the 15,000 studies we’ve done and take that data and take the data. What’s in the property unit count that you mentioned there, the square footage, et cetera, and tell you based on a whole very detailed process they go through to tell you what your tax benefits will be.

Yonah:So what I’m going to do is going to be very high level. It’s going to be very estimated. But they’ll do a much more accurate estimates, you know, ahead of time, even before doing a country use than what you can potentially get from it.

Josh:So our audience understands we’re looking at the comparison between the normal depreciation schedule, which gives us a certain amount of write offs over twenty seven and a half years, resi. Thirty-nine years commercial versus doing this study, identifying the three buckets and then what can be depreciated much faster through costs segregation’s study.

Josh: And this accelerated depreciation. That’s the second option. Then you’ll also get to talk about what we call bonus depreciation, which was added to the tax code in twenty eighteen, which is a whole nother opportunity, which we’ll talk about again, high level. This would be really detailed in this free estimate, which I’m sure Yonah is going to give us some contact information. We can reach out to him throughout the podcast or at the end of the podcast. Reach out to him at his firm to get this done on your own building. So, yeah, high level. Tell me about my building. How would that go?

Yonah: OK, so let’s take a round number. You said about four million dollars all in including some soft costs. Not all the soft costs will be depreciated. But let’s just take the four million dollars just to keep it simple and actually let’s even not include the upgrades because the upgrades might not take place in 2020. You might take place in 2021. I’m not sure, but that’s actually separate. The acquisition costs, depreciation, the upgrades, the three hundred thousand that you’re putting in, three hundred and fifty thousand you’re putting into the property. That’s actually something separate. We’re going to get to that in a little bit. So let’s just take the original purchase price, right? You said three point seven four five.

Yonah: And we’re going to divide that by twenty-seven and a half because commercial, even though it’s a multifamily, it’s considered residential for tax purposes. And even though from a loan perspective we considered commercial. So you regulate depreciation would be approximately one hundred thirty six thousand dollars a year. OK, which means. Sounds great, right? You’re making you said only it’s going to be, you know, 380. Yeah, 380. So looks like immediately you’re gonna be knocking off from your three hundred eighty thousand dollars of net operating income about one hundred thirty six. Right. So you’re looking at only being taxed at about two hundred and twenty five thousand. Okay. Now that’s pretty good, right.

Josh: Absolutely. Saving us fifty to seventy-five thousand dollars a year in actual tax.

Yonah: Exactly. Just from the regular depreciation. So that’s the government’s incentive. So now with cost segregation, we’ll come in and take a look at all the interior. We’ll look at how much of the personal property is in there. Let’s say it’s about 20 percent. That’s pretty average, say about 20 percent. So 20 percent of three seven four five. Sorry. Excuse me. We always have to allocate a certain amount for land, which I didn’t do. I apologize. So let’s say 20 percent to land which is pretty average. So that’s we’re gonna do. We’re gonna be left with. So that’s going to even reduce your regular depreciation even more. So instead of a hundred thirty-six going gonna be more like a hundred and twenty. So 20 percent of that means you’re gonna be looking at about seven hundred thousand dollars, approximately extra depreciation that you’re going to take over the first five years.

Yonah: So how that looks is pretty cool. Seventy-two thousand dollars divided by five years means you’re gonna be looking at approximately one hundred forty thousand dollars. You’re going to be doubling your depreciation. A little more than doubling your depreciation expense in the first five years, but it’s still not going to get you to zero. You got three hundred eighty of income and about two hundred eighty now of depreciation. Or two sixty. So you’re going to be lowering your income tax liability tremendously and saving a whole boatload of taxes. However, let’s bring in this bonus that we talked about. So the first five years, you’re going to be essentially knocking down your income tax liability by 50 percent. Right. That’s just simply by doing regular cost segregation study.

Yonah: Take bonus depreciation. And what bonus depreciation says you can actually take that full amount. So that 20 percent and it could be even more. It could be 30 percent. I’m just giving a very conservative round number. Seven hundred thousand dollars you can take in the first year. So what would that look like? So if you take your regular depreciation of one hundred and twenty. And add seven hundred thousand to that, you’re gonna get eight hundred twenty thousand dollars of depreciation. Well if you only have three hundred and eighty of income so you have more deductions than you have income. Well what happens then? More deductions than incomes means first of all, you have zero tax liability. Pay zero income tax that year and whatever is left over. Two things can happen.

Yonah: Number one, the first thing that always happens is that it will carry anything left over, will carry forward. You can use next year. OK. Which means you use next year and whatever’s left over from that use the year after that. And so you’re looking at a much bigger tax deduction in the first couple of years to three years. How? It’s something really awesome that can happen if you are a real estate professional and many people don’t know this. A good friend of mine is named Brandon Hall, CPA, who runs a tax firm called the Real Estate CPA. He just published a brand new an e-book called The Real Estate Professional Guy. Essentially, what this is, there is there’s a tax status called the real estate professional.

Yonah: If you are this, which means you spend more than 50 percent of your time in real estate trading business, either you or your spouse get only one of you needs to qualify for this. Then you can use your depreciation deductions to offset any of your active W-2 income or any other income from any other source as well, which is huge. And this is really where cost segregation comes in as a game changer, because normally depreciation is considered a passive deduction and it normally only goes to offset passive income. Rental property income is considered passive income. If you have multiple properties, you can use depreciation from one so used to offset income from all your properties. It goes across the board.

Yonah: However, it’s limited to that. You can’t just use that deductions for anything unless you are a real estate professional. Once you get this golden card, you know, who is this? You know? A card carrying member. A card carrying member. Exactly. Now use your extra any extra depreciation to offset any other income you have. So in our example, let’s say in your property, you got this extra five hundred thousand dollars of tax deductions or tax losses this year. What are you going to do with all that. Either you can carry forward and use it next year or even better if you have any other income. Let’s say you made money from the stock market and you’re a real estate professional or your spouse has a W-2. You don’t income. You can now use that extra half a million dollars depreciation to offset their income as well and literally get to the point of paying little to no taxes whatsoever.

Josh: Fantastic stuff. Fantastic stuff. You know, listen, I’ve got this building will be closing on by the time this podcast gets published. We need to talk shortly after the purchase happens. And get that conversation going. We own over two thousand seven hundred units of apartments as a general partner with our with our other JV partners and things like that. So there’s quite a bit to discuss. Yonah, before I let you go and before we wrap up. Tell me about one of your favorite cost segregation stories for one of your clients.

Josh: Obviously, we don’t have to tell the client’s name, but in general, give an example of a recent maybe cost aggregation study that was done in a different type of way. Maybe a mall or maybe a large medical office building. And some of the savings that happen for the client and kind of the client’s reaction. Maybe if you are aware that when the client realized, holy smokes, I just saved hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in tax because I did this because the study’s going to cost some money. Right. So there’s an investment upfront. And then there’s the return on investment, which is all the tax savings. Tell us maybe about one of your other clients and what they’ve experienced.

Yonah: Sure. And it’s really rewarding because there’s so many stories that happen and so many people that are just like, literally their lives are changed by not paying taxes. I’ll share with one that I haven’t shared before. A woman, a client of mine who was in I.T. for many years. She worked for some of the biggest, you know, companies, tech companies, and she invested passively for many years in real estate syndications, in deals. And she was a co-GP as well. And for a couple of years, she started getting involved in that. She started seeing the returns. She was getting all these all these tax losses, all these, you know, negative K ones that she was getting. And she was like, well, they’re not even getting put to use because I’m not a real estate professional.

Yonah: So literally, she made the calculation. She was investing heavily for, you know, six, seven years. And she was basically taking all of her income from her high paying job and putting it into real estate. She literally made the calculation at a certain point that said, if I quit my job and I start making you spending more time and all the real estate, I will have more and more money coming in net from all of the tax deduction because she’s going to be not going pay any taxes. So literally, she went and I mean, I got such an incredible, you know, note from her saying that she was able to literally quit her job and pursue her passion, which was real estate full time, and obviously spent time with her family much more because it’s not that involved and paying. And she spent the last couple years, has not paid a dollar in income tax.And she’s making more money than her high paid I.T. job.

Josh: Yeah, I’ve got it. As soon as this podcast is released, we’ve got over two hundred passive investors that invest in our deals, our apartments, our private equity fund, they are going to want to hear that piece that you just told. Some of them are exactly that person you discussed, just described.

Josh: High paid doctors, attorneys, I.T. professionals, et cetera, making a large income, investing in a lot of syndications with us and other sponsors. And they’ll be excited to hear that there is a point where they may able to use those massive deductions against their W2 and against. And that and pay little or no tax and almost be all to slow down and retire because of tax benefits. It’s amazing, amazing story.

Josh: You know, listen, as we wrap up, I know there’s a big section of our audience going to want to learn more about this, maybe talk to you directly about their buildings, future buildings they’re going to purchase. What are some ways they can get in touch with you and your firm?

Yonah: Best way to find me is actually on LinkedIn. I’m very active on LinkedIn every day. You can find me there. You can also go to YonahWeiss.com and find out more about what what’s going on with me. My podcast, the Weiss Advice podcast, is over there as well. And you can check out our company again, Madison Specs. We’re the largest national company that does this. We work in all 50 states. And feel free to reach out. My email me you can put that in the show notes as well is YWeiss@madisonspecs.com. So happy to speak to anyone. And like I said, the free analysis is like a no brainer.

Josh: Fantastic. Yonah, thanks so much for joining us today on Accelerated Investor. Had a blast with this interview.

Yonah: My pleasure. Josh, thank you so much for having me.

Josh:So there you have it, guys. I’m so excited to have interviewed Jonah for the Accelerated Investor podcast. If you enjoyed that interview, please go to I tomb’s right now. Leave us a five star rating and a review. And when you do, send us a screenshot of your review and we will send you a free Accelerated Investor T-shirt. Thanks so much for doing that. Also share this episode on social media, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook. Share it with your community so that we can have other people learn from the Accelerated Investor podcast, the solo cast and the interviews that we’ve done.

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When we talk about the benefits of owning real estate, we often lump everything together: the passive income, the equity, the wealth building, and the tax benefits. But really, what are the tax benefits? Yonah Weiss is a powerhouse for property owners because he helps them learn how to save money using advanced depreciation strategies.

The normal depreciation schedule says you can write some off the taxes for 27 ½ years for residential and 39 years for commercial. Most accountants will figure this out and apply it to your property. But segregating out the cost of the buildings using the three different depreciating schedules gives you an entirely different methodology.

Engineers through Yonah’s firm Madison Specs, which operates across the country, place a property into three different buckets as part of their depreciation schedule:

  • The main structure
  • The land improvements
  • Personal property

I’ve just purchased a new 80 unit apartment building, and I have to admit that I interviewed Yonah today so that I could talk to him about a better deprecation strategy for my new property. He walks me through some rough estimates so that I can see how much he can save me on my taxes. His methods are exciting, and promise to save me (and investors like you) thousands and thousands of dollars. Who doesn’t want to pay less taxes?

There are even strategies that passive investors can take advantage where they use K-1 forms to offset their W-2 income. If you want to apply these advanced tax strategies to your own portfolio, you can email Yonah at YWeiss@madisonspecs.com.

What’s Inside:

  • What is cost segregation and why does it matter?
  • Yonah takes on my real life example and gives me some real world advice.
  • How to use real estate tax deductions to offset W-2 income.

Mentioned in this episode​

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