How Wealthy Real Estate Pros Close One Year (and Set Up the Next)

0:01Welcome to the Be Wealthy Podcast, where we bring entrepreneurs the strategies and tactics to grow your business and unlock new opportunities. Once you've achieved success, we'll teach you how to think about your money. Because wealth is about more than just cash flow. It's about freedom. Now, our host, Brett Tanner. Welcome back to the Be Wealthy Podcast. I'm Brett Tanner and this is the show where we show you the strategies, tactics, and mindsets that create wealth and abundance in your life. Today's episode, we're going to talk about the end of the year checklist and the start of the year checklist and how do you build financial strategies into a checklist that are easy to execute so your wealth plan is right in front of you. Your advisors, your bankable, you've got everything tied together in a cohesive system that helps you build wealth easier. With that, my co-host and I dive into all of our tools. There's links in the show notes. You can do all of this yourself, and that's our goal. I'd love to have you watch this, take

1:03notes, and let's jump in to today's episode on building out the checklist front of the year, end of the year, and get you the results you want from your wealth. Let's jump into today's episode. Katelyn's laughing because I was just warming up my voice for this episode. This is going to drop Christmas Eve, which it's a Christmas gift from myself, Katelyn, the entire B wealthy staff to all of you listeners. This is our Christmas gift to you. Uh, in all seriousness though, I'm joined by Katelyn Mitchell, my co-host. Katelyn, it's great to see you again. I never I know we just don't spend that much time together, so it's so great to see you.
It's great to see you. Always a joy to spend time together, Brett.
So, this episode is going to be a checklist that you can use to start your year and end your year from a wealth planning standpoint. And Katelyn, everything we teach at Be Wealthy, our entire curriculum, the idea is not that we're going to go do something one time and never do it again, right? That's a

2:05lot of work. And when you go through this podcast and you go through our entire curriculum, there's so much to do to be ridiculously wealthy. Why is there so much to do? Because if it was easy, everybody' be wealthy. Uh, and you've got to go put the things in place. However, what's really easy to do, Katelyn, is take one tactic or strategy, get it into a spreadsheet, a checklist of sorts, and put that in play where it's on autopilot every year. Then the next year, you might grab a couple strategies. So, as we go through the next hour together, um, don't get overwhelmed. Don't think you have to do it all today. Pick the things that matter most, build a system out of it, and we're going to continue to create your checklist over time. That's kind of the table stakes for today. Katelyn, anything you want to add before we jump in and and show our listeners how they can plan and think differently about their money?
A lot of our podcasts and and a lot of the interviews you've done, Brett, are super great to listen to while you're driving or listen to on 2x speed um in order to be able to to capture and

3:09everything that you speak about. However, I would encourage anyone who is listening to this, listen to it on your drive, absolutely, but go back and watch it where you can actually see the checklist and a lot of the tools that Brett's sharing with you. As he mentioned, some of these tools are going to be updating resources or exercises that we've taught before. Um, you'll be able to grab in the show notes the actual exercises and if you don't have them built out yet, it's something you could build. But the exercise or excuse me, the checklist that he's about to go through is going to be a compilation of at the end of each year and beginning of each year how you continue to update and manage the resources that we teach here at Beealthy. So, I'm very excited. This is one of my favorite things. And the greatest part about it, Brett, is we are recording this a few weeks prior to it launching. These are the exercises we're doing right now in our business. In fact, 48 hours ago, you sent me an email

4:12on quite a few of these. I'm guessing it triggered because it was your end of November of we need to do these things inside of the businesses as part of our end ofear checklist. So, it couldn't be more timely um as we are implementing them in our businesses as well. So, let's jump right in. All right, Katelyn, stop though. Stop. We got to stop. If you're listening to this right now, go to the top screen and subscribe so you get our episodes as they come out. Do it. It I promise you this season is jam-packed. There's going to be so many things you could use in your life, and you don't want to miss a single episode. So, go up there. If you're on Apple, you're on Spotify, you're out there on some really cool service I don't even know about, go to the top and click subscribe. And one more. If this has added value to you, if you would leave us a review, it helps exponentially because our goal here is to give and share this with more people. I can tell you that we're putting my life's work on the internet for free and my it's my gift to you if it's impacted you in any way. Please, please, please uh leave us a review, share it with something else,

5:14leave a clip, tag us in it. We will comment on it if you tag us on any of the social media platforms that exist. So, with that, Katelyn, I'm going to share my screen and you made a great point. listen to this wherever you are, but I would highly recommend you go back and to your point, let's um go through, go back and watch the some of this will be visual and you will need to see part of that there. Uh all right, let's talk about in the year, Katelyn. Several things we need to do. Uh number one, we need to review if as we go build our companies, we're likely adding LLC's. We bought a house. We've got an operating business. And we're adding LLC's for protection throughout the year. But often it's really easy, Katelyn, for our LLC's, if we form them ourselves, um, to not be mindful of the things that really matter. And so, it's the point of the year where you go through which entities am I using? Which ones? Maybe you shut a business down or you sold a house that was in an LLC and that's not that thing's not in play anymore. You may want to wind that down and and shut it down. So, it's we're

6:16reviewing entity structure for accuracy and updating changes. There's a specific way we do that. Uh, next we're going to talk about updating your wealth plan for changes throughout the year. We're going to go through the fair market value of your investments. We're talk about how do you evaluate your investments. Then, we're going to look at debt and let's look at each asset that's performing below a standard. We'll talk about we'll go into how do you optimize for retirement accounts whether that's Roth, Coverdale, HSA, anything like that. And then we're going to have a 135, a business planning tool for your wealth and your investments. Okay, so that's really some of the things we're going to walk through at the end of the year checklist. So let's break those down. You know, the first thing on the screen right now is a flowchart that looks a lot like my world. Uh we've removed, you know, the names of these LLC's. Uh but everyone should have a flowchart like this and you need it for a variety of reasons. Um namely, one goal is to be bankable. One goal is when you go to your adviserss to just get better advice, right? If you go to your advisors and you, hey, I got a bunch of

7:17LLC's and I do some stuff in business and I own three rentals and my P&Ls are outdated. Um, but I'd like to save some money on some taxes. Katelyn, that's a really tough conversation. And yet, I think a lot of people show up to their tax professional with a shoe box full of crap and they want to get better better financial advice and it would be really impossible to do it. So the more organized you are, the more you can save in taxes. And organization u is a skill that I did not have and had to develop. I am I have literally if you do the disc test, I have no organizational skills, but it became a requirement for me to ultimately be successful.
So this exercise is two parts, right? This is something that we teach at Be Wealthy. But if people are are catching up and they haven't seen this before, you're creating a diagram or a flowchart with circles and lines and colorcoordinated that shows
it shows how your world flows from an

8:23entity perspective. So you may have a section that's you as the human and then you're going to have sections that are the entities that you own. Those could be LLC's, your PC, your retirement accounts, and you're going to have those structured in a way that can show anyone at a bank. It could show your tax attorney, like Brett mentioned. It could be as simple as showing your spouse how your world flows such that when you know my husband logs into the bank account and he sees 14 different or excuse me logs onto our our bank website and sees 14 bank accounts, he now knows where those all lie and what they mean in our businesses that Brett and I run and then also my individual businesses that I might have with with my husband. And so it it's a way for your whole family internally as well as your um tax attorneys, banks, everyone to see your entity structures. Now I will share this

9:27with you. The end of year updating it consistently may sound crazy when you first start building your wealth. It may be like, "Hey, we nothing changed. It's just me and my PC." Perhaps you're you're a real estate agent in Arizona. you've got yourself and and your PC, but as you start adding your Roth account, as your world gets more complicated, it may be only one or two things you're adding each year. But fast forward, you're living your life with incredible purpose and you turn into Brett and his family, you're going to have 46 bubbles on there very quickly. And so, because you have the 46 bubbles, you've organized it every single year to make sure that it's updated is really important. Also, when you go in March to go get a loan for something, it's super easy. Your whole world's already updated. So, this may seem, if you're at the very beginning of your wealth journey, super simple. Don't skip this step. Go in and create this diagram that you see here. And then I think we also have the uh a sample that we'll be

10:31showing you as well that's going to be the actual word document that goes alongside it that really discusses all of the components that you'll use that are is going to be married with this document. Um I'll share this story. My dad lived a really big life and had a huge business. And when he passed away, he had left us a diagram just like this that allowed my mom and myself and and her family office of advisors to really see where everything was between their family trust and as it separated into two different trusts of a revocable and irrevocable. It created such simplicity of a very complex situation because he had this. So do this not just for your wealth as you're growing it, but it's a a way for you to be able to communicate with your family and share with them what their wealth currently looks like today.
That's so good. That's so good, Katelyn. I I love the way you broke that down. And so on the screen, if you're looking, um there's three different colors,

11:33right? We've got green. I coded those for retirement accounts that I'm going to manage. All of my accounts are self-directed.
Green, the company we What's that? Green.
Uh,
yeah. And it's also green because if you do it right, you're not going to pay taxes now or ever. So, that's also exciting. Um, and if you're looking for the the place that we self-direct those, we'll leave that in the show notes, a link to them. Blue is a trust or really something that holds assets in my world, something that holds a piece of real estate, a commercial building, something like that. And then the way I think about red, it's just operating businesses that have different risks. So each LLC has its own asset inside of it. Um, one of the things here came on as it comes to assets that own hard or LLC's that own hard assets. Think about if you go to an attorney and say, "Hey, should I get a separate LLC for every rental that I purchase?" And the attorney will tell you yes, that is the best from a risk standpoint. I could tell you as someone that had over 100 single family rentals at one point, if I had a 100 different LLC's, Katelyn, 100 different tax returns, 100 different P&Ls, that would be 100 different bank accounts,

12:37um, that would be very difficult to manage. And so when I look at assets, if it's a big building that just one asset will go in an LLC. If it's smaller houses, I look at equity. How much equity is exposed at each LLC and what am I comfortable with? And that's a great conversation with you and your estate attorney or your uh real estate attorney around how much risk you want in each LLC. But ideally, you're separating risk. You're separating asset type. So, you shouldn't own a business. For example, Katelyn, you shouldn't own a vacation rental business that's got also a bunch of other assets. Or your real estate business shouldn't have a bunch of houses and other stuff in there. We want to separate risks. And the more organized you get here with LLC's, we also want to be very mindful of privacy. You know, today one of the biggest threats we all have is just privacy. You know, it's very easy to go on the internet and find someone's home address in 5 seconds. If you set up your your LLC's correctly, you organize it right, you could have total privacy, you can reduce your risk, you can also

13:41reduce your taxes by thinking about how these LLC's fit together from a tax standpoint. Whether you're looking to maximize 199A throughout your organizational structure or other things, it all starts with getting organized. It goes back to where we started, Katelyn. If I don't organize it, it's really hard to manage it. It's really hard to get good advice from others if I'm disorganized. So start to Katelyn's point, it might start with you. Everyone should have a basic will or a revocable trust. From there, it gets more complicated. Separate out your operational businesses from your hard assets and start to build your flowchart um right now before your world gets complicated.
So two things. If I'm listening to this podcast, I'm going to take two action steps right now. Number one is I'm going to create or update my current flowchart. Whether it's right or wrong or the 96 things that Brett just mentioned to optimize them. If you have that done or not, cool. Don't let it stop you. Sit down, grab a

14:44simple PowerPoint. You can build it in Canva, whatever. build out your current flowchart or update the one that you have and go to this entity structure document he has listed here and write in the answers to these questions. Then take those documents next year. So the update was the requirement. That's what you need to do for the checklist next year. Now, we're going to take those and we're going to go to and we'll put, you know, who Brett utilizes in the show notes below as our our Rolodex partner that helps to run our family offices. You're going to go to them and show them what you have and ask those questions. Brett just went over. Number one, are my operating businesses separate from my holding entities? Am I combining risk based upon having equity of a property in with an operating business that has incredible risk? Am I compromising the integrity of my equity? Second, do I

15:48have any privacy? Does this make any sense? And then third, is my estate plan, meaning my will and my trust and all this, is this all set up right? Does this make sense? But first, the goal of today, put it down on paper. So when you have that appointment, it's not a colossal waste of time. It's something you can take incredible action on. It will be so much easier. So step one for the checklist, update or create these two documents and do not get paralyzed if you believe deep down they're wrong. Just put them on paper so we have somewhere to start from here.
100%. And if you don't know the answers to the questions on the document in front of you, which is what is the entity type? What's the legal structure? What's the entity purpose? What percentage of ownership? By the way, you may think your things are owned and organized a certain way, Katelyn, only to have an attorney go to the, you know, the Arizona Corporation website and look at the floor and go, "Hey, Katelyn, I love what you way you've drawn these, but that's not what it says because you did this eight years ago and you didn't

16:49fill out the form, right?" And you named yourself, not your, you know, I could tell you how I founded the Department of Real Estate. I had it owned by my trust. Can't do that. It's got to be known by an individual. So, there's certain entities you have a certain way. But imagine, Katelyn, when you go to someone and you've got, hey, here's all the entities I have. Here's and and by the way, if you go to your tax person if you don't know these answers, but fill this out, it allows you to get really good information from your professionals, right? And they've got tax considerations, entity ownership flow, like who owns what, current asset value inside of it. So, just take the time to organize your world. save it in a way where ultimately when you go to get a loan, you could share just share this link that's going to have all of your items organized, right? So, the more organized you get, better advice you get, better advice you get, more money you save, faster you go.
This exercise,
I'm sorry. I was just going to say this exercise took my procrastination away. No offense. I know you and and Sabrina at our family office thinks this stuff is fun. Most of us want to procrastinate it. We don't want to do it. It stinks.

17:53we just want to go make money or, you know, go hustle and and get out on the streets and make stuff happen. But doing this simple exercise got the ball rolling for me. I filled it out. I didn't know half the stuff. I then, because I had filled it out and realized it, I then booked the call and I worked with our Rolodex partner. He got me completely organized, got our will, our trust, everything set up in a simple call. And then now I'm just updating it once once a year and now it's done. It's super easy moving forward. Anytime I'm buying a new asset, I check in with him. Hey, which one which company should I put this under or what should this process look like? And it created a much more seamless. So if you're procrastinating this like yours truly, just get in there and start because once you finish this, you're going to go, "Oh, I better make the actual appointment." you're going to make the appointment and then for years to come it's done. It's organized. It's set. So just start this process on the checklist.

18:55
Uh you know one of the comments I always make when we're teaching something about legacy which is what this is right everyone leaves a legacy and you could leave a nightmare for someone or you could leave you know uh a really good road map and a path forward and it's all choice. But if you want to live a big life start by organizing it. Get these documents. Get to a trust attorney. Get to your attorney and make sure all of this makes sense. Next, Katelyn, end of the year. So, we've updated our entities. Now, I want you to go to your investments and update your wealth plan on any changes, right? Eval. And then what we're doing here, Katelyn, evaluate. We own these assets on our balance sheet, right? We're tracking our net worth every single month. If you're not tracking your net worth every single month on the same day every single month, as my mentor said to me, respectfully, you're not in the game and you'll never be wealthy. Now, it's what he said. I didn't say it. I do agree with it. Um, and it's aggressive, but Katelyn, if we're not updating our balance sheet, how can we possibly expect to grow something that we're not even measuring on where it's growing, right? It's the definition of insanity. Like, I want more. What do you mean? Like, well, just more and more, but more against

19:57what measurement tool? If I know where I'm going and I don't know where I'm at, well then go wherever the hell you want to go? Any road works. But if you are on the road to I want to land at a destination that's going to give me the life I want and you want to get free and you want freedom, you're going to have to have a check-in point along the road to your destination to know that you're on or off track.
So for those who are listening to this podcast who may not have built their wealth plan, this is a super cool tool. Brett has an entire exercise for us that he put the infrastructure of building a 30-year plan and he challenges us that we need to build a plan to be worth $50 million in 30 years. So, a lot of this us built this in a few different ways. You could have single family residentials as your investment. You could have some stocks and you're able to utilize all different assets over a landscape or or a timeline of 30 years. You can shorter. you can do it longer to reach a specific goal. Now, you go and you update your personal

21:02balance sheet, like he said, on the first of every month, which used to be my least favorite thing to do. And now I look forward to it and almost want to cheat and do it the day earlier. But it's really fun. You go, it is really fun. I know people are going to be laughing at that and say, "What a dork." Yeah, I am. I'm a nerd. There's no question about it. But it also is really fun because you're measuring your success to achieve your goal. So when you obsate your personal balance sheet on the first of every single month, you're listing all of your assets, every penny in every bank account, and all of your liabilities. Again, every penny on every credit card, right? So all of your assets, all of your liabilities, and it gives you a number at the very bottom, which is your net worth. You then are able to look at your wealth plan and know what your net worth should be at the end of every single year if you were doing your plan. You're also able to look up that column and see what you had set out to accomplish that year. So it may be that you wanted to purchase

22:05two single family residential homes putting 20% down and then renting them out and getting a 6% rate of return. Let's say that was the argument, right? I then can look at this endofear plan and say did I achieve my net worth goal at the bottom and did I do the activities that I had anticipated in order to achieve that goal? If it's a green light, awesome. Let's look at the next year and say, "Great. In 2026, 2027, 2028, am I still, is that the plan I want to continue to execute?" If it is, cool. Brett's going to get to actually building the business plan for that. If it's not and you're behind track, now we have the measuring stick to say red light. The decisions you made this year did not yield the result that you needed to achieve your goal. So rather than waiting 30 years and not having achieved your goal, you're able to make those microcorrections

23:08right now to ensure you always achieve that specific goal. So, I love this end ofear ritual of update your balance sheet that one last time that December where did we land? What is my net worth? I like to go back because I'm a little bit gluttonous and self uh I love the self gluttony of going back to the previous years seeing the growth. So, I go through those tabs. I look at 2024, 2023. I'd love to go back to 2019. How much have we grown? Let's look at the gain, right? And then let's move forward and say, are we on track or off track to reach that wealth plan goal that Brett helped us to uh lay out in front of us? You say the comment a lot and and it's we don't miss our you don't you don't miss your goals because you were tracking you you miss your goals because you weren't tracking them in shorter increments, right? when when you don't measure it and you say it so eloquently

24:10and I'm I'm stumbling through it.
Well, the way it is is so I say it you people don't miss goals because they didn't have a great plan. Everyone started with a great business plan. What happened? People missed their goals because they got off track for very extended periods of time and there was no check-in. So they spent 15 years not looking at their net worth only to oh I didn't go anywhere. However, had they been plotting you know you're if you're looking in November one where do I need to be January one Katelyn? I could tell if I'm on or off track. And then next year in February of 2026, if I know where I need to be in January of 2027, I know that if I'm on or on track to hit that goal, to hit my plan to be massively wealthy, and everyone listening to this over 30 years could absolutely be worth $50 million or more. There's there's no question about that. The question is, will they build go build a plan? Will all of you go build the plan and measure it so that you get what you want? And I'm glad Katelyn you took the time to break that down because it's such a big deal. Uh my net worth started growing exponentially when I took it more serious. And instead of spending if you gave me 10 hours to go plan I mean 10

25:15hours to go grow my net worth I would spend all like nine and a half hours focusing on the plan and building it out. Spend a half hour getting going on like what are the things I'm actually going to do because the plan matters so much, right? and getting organized. It's just what it actually takes. And I think people if you realize that wealth's a process, it's just a different skill. Katelyn, if you go out and you're successful, like there's three different major skills in life, right? The first one is I've got to go to optimize myself. How do I make more money in my business? We've talked about that on a different podcast. The second one, Katelyn, is how do I go optimize? I want to grow a business. How do I manage and lead people? It's a totally different skill. The third skill is how do I go manage my money and how do I grow my wealth? Sadly, the truth of life, Katelyn, those skills are three separate skills that have no correlation with each other, right? You could be a rockstar salesperson, a crap manager, and an incredible wealth generator. Those things could all be true, right? But you got to go build those skills. And the skill we're talking about here is you got to go build the plan, calibrate, and then check in and see

26:18what's working and what's not working.
You know, it's funny. People come to you all the time. You know, I travel with you and hear you speak on the road. You know, you we have our private clients and our mastermind group and I feel like everyone's always looking for the ultimate edge. How do I shortcut this? How do I hack it? Right? It's a getrichqu like Brett, give me the secret. And sure, we have some great tax strategies to help catapult you. We have different ways to help you to optimize your income so you have more money to go invest. But at the end of the day, when you actually look at a wealth plan and you really look at, and I love the way that you built our templates out that people can utilize, guys, it is a slow and steady game of constant measurement and consistent execution. There's no one sexy all of a sudden boom, it's over. The magic happens with the compounding effect of your habits, your skills, and your disciplines over time. And so it's really really cool to see our mastermind

27:21members, our private clients or the people who are constantly measuring this over a five, seven, 10year span where they thought these numbers were insane or astronomical because of their consistency. They're able to achieve it and they recalibrate each year. We've had some of our mastermind members be really honest and say, you know, hey, red light, yellow light, green light, guys, I'm a red light. I did not achieve my plan last year. And you've been able to come alongside them and say, let's recalibrate for the next year. You've also had some people that say, Brett, I was like a screaming green light. I'm three years ahead. I'm five years ahead. You have a private client based out of Cleveland who's like seven years ahead of his wealth plan. And so your recalibration with him is perfect. Now our foundation is even stronger. Our, you know, our nest egg is even stronger. our net worth is even stronger. How do we optimize again? How do you jump and recalibrate? So, good or bad, almost everyone needs to recalibrate at the end

28:25of each year. So, this is a great part of the checklist.
I love it. So, now Katelyn, we've we've got our plan, we've updated our entities, we've looked at our investments, and now we need to update the fair market value. And so I only change when I look at my net worth uh whatever the assets were, I don't change them over month over month. Uh now as I'm paying down the mortgages, right, I update those because I like to see principal payown. You know, it's one of the other ways you grow your net worth, you grow your assets, you reduce your liabilities. Both those things matter. Uh but you need to go in there and update the fair market value for all your investments. And using uh a template we have here called our rental tracker. Uh hold on, it says I signed out. Uh we'll include that link in the show notes. Hold on.
So just to clarify for the just to clarify for the audience, two different tools. One tool that we have is going to be your personal balance sheet and wealth plan. That's something you're going to update your personal balance sheet every single month. And that's where you're going to update the payown on your mortgages, right? Some is going

29:29to principal, some is going to interest, but we want to log in and see remaining principal on those. And that's going to be every single month on your personal balance sheet. What Brett's pulling up here, this is going to be our long-term hold or or our rental tracker. This is a tool that you go can go into much like the wealth plan or or much like your entity diagram. This is one of the tools we provide here at Beealthy where you'll put your owner owning entity, all of the property data. So, in here you're going to say the address, city, state, zip code, when you purchase the dang thing, what you purchased it for, all of the hardcore data, they're in light gray. That will never really change. Then you're going to go in and you're going to input all of your debt data. This may change over time. You may refinance, but this is what you'll update or where you'll start some of the updates every single year. So, debt data, you only update that upon purchase. And then anytime you

30:32refinance, going to the next section, this is the equity guys. If you see right below equity in the subtext, what does it say? Read it out loud for the group.
It says outstanding mortgage balance as of January 1, 2025. And the value as of January 1, and that'll move to 2026 when we update it on January 1, 2026. So, under equity, it says this is what you update annually on January 1. So, at the end of your year, you're going to go in and you're going to update the outstanding balance of the mortgage here, the value of the property, and then by default, it'll tell you the appro approximate equity that you have in the property. And Brett's going to get us to it at the end in just a minute, what all the calculations are. So that's the only portion that you have to update once a year. Otherwise, it's just as you buy properties, you put them in here. So you're going to put in some lease information, your rent on income and expenses, and then at the very end of this rental tracker

31:37will calculate your tax management will calculate all of your ROIs. So, as you're updating your outstanding balance and as you're updating your current market value of your property, these numbers under the ROI analysis are going to change. So, I'm a dork. I love these numbers. But Brett, this is something you've worked so aggressively with your private clients on when it comes to their rental portfolios. So they update this and then they send this over to you. And what is what is the exercise that you're taking them through?
So number one, right, I want them to organize their information because most people's financial lives are like shoe boxes, right? I've got a little bit of rental stuff in this folder. I've got a little bit of my property over here. Oh, I don't know if this is financed, right? I've got things everywhere in 19 different, you know, I've got something in Dropbox, something in Drive. This is in a file cabinet. And so number one, we have to get all the information. I believe you can make really, you know,

32:38someone say, "What should I do with this rental?" I'm like, "Well, send me your rental tracker." Well, I bought it for I'm like, "I I can't do that because I don't have the data." And so, the most important thing, the most important single driver if I can only look at one number on rental properties would be expense load. It's something no one talks about because Katelyn, I got to, you know, when you own a bunch of rentals, you're like, "Well, can I rent something for more than the market?" Not really, right? I could I can try to rent a $2,000 a month single family rental for $3,000. And I think what you're going to find is it doesn't work, right? So if if market rents 2,000, I've got to be there. So then what can I control? Expenses. Most hard asset management is all an expense game. Most business is actually expense management. So what I want to look is what percentage are the expenses? Taxes management, HOA, annual repairs, uh anything else. the tax taxes, insurance, um, vacancy, repairs, HOA, and management. All of those, no debt into this calculation divided by the rent,

33:40Katelyn, and I'm looking for a percentage. So, the fixed expenses, non-debt divided by the rent. What is that? Now, the old rule, and you were try I was trying to get to a 35% precoid, I would try to get to a 35% expense ratio. Prices have gone up, tax have gone up, insurance is a nightmare, and so now it's 45%. And so when you look at rentals, overwhelmingly we do this exercise, Katelyn, uh you find that people are doing really well on their cap rate off purchase. Cap rate is just the capitalization rate. If you bought something all cash, the rents for uh $1,000 a month on a $100,000 purchase, that's $12,000 a year in income. That's going to be a 12% cap rate, which would be a dream, right? that rented for um I mean think rented for $500 a month that's going to be a 6% cap rate and so we're looking at what percentage are expenses as a percentage of rent so first I want to start there okay then I want to look at your cap rate off when you bought it okay so cap rate off purchase what is that then I want to look at the cap rate off today's value

34:44right so the property appreciated another another way to say that is return on equity I want to know my cash on cash returns if I put leverage on it how much is that increasing returns. What's my actual cash flow monthly and annually? And what's the net operating income? So, Katelyn, once I've got this data, I could now take my rentals and you could see we could sort it. If I had 50 in here, I could go sort my entire ren rental rental portfolio by expense ratio, which is going to tell me basically the opportunity. The best rentals are going to have the lowest expense ratio. If you've got a small little condo in in Phoenix, Arizona, for whatever reason, we've got some really small crappy condos that have super high HOAs. Well, Katelyn, that's a what I like to call a death ball for an investment. If you have low rent and high expenses, there's no way to make that calculation work that makes any money. And yet, people hold stuff like that in their portfolio and they don't really have the opportunity to make any actual money. And so starting by getting your data together and looking at the numbers and just as the question, what do I believe is my best rental property,

35:46my best investment, and then is the data actually support that? Because when I did this, Katelyn, the first time, I was like, "Oh, these are my top five." None of those are my best five, the ones I thought. Right. It's the thing that you're like, "Oh, look at this one." You know, I've got a property over not far from here, Katelyn. It's about a It's a 790 foot single family house, two-bedroom, one bath. And you think, Brett, who on earth would want to buy something like this? Uh, it's my best performing asset and one as a single family rental. One of the reasons I tiled it, you know, to the window to the wall when I first bought it, right? So, I've only got 700 ft. There's not a lot that can go wrong in 790 ft. I first bought it, I put in that the roof, I put in a new roof, a new AC unit, and that was 15 years ago, and I haven't heard about it since. And it rents for almost as much as a three-bedroom, two bath I own around the corner, even though it's half the size. So, it's interesting that our best investments, Katelyn, may not be the ones they think they are. And without the data, we can make emotional decisions that we try to justify with logic as opposed to using the data to

36:49help us make better decisions. So, this is a critical part of what we teach. It's about organizing your information, then making does it mean you should go sell your entire rental portfolio when you're done with this? No. Take a moment, review the numbers, and take a step back. And so some a couple items I want to point out, Katelyn, if you if it's your first year you own something, I would estimate your estimated repairs throughout the year at one and a half times the monthly rent amount. It's going to be very hard to live up to that. But so if your rent's a,000 a month, your estimated repairs throughout the year on that property, I would estimate them at $1,500. Vacancy, I assume it's vacant one month every year. The rest of it should be the actual property taxes, the actual insurance. Also, Katelyn, if you're managing it yourself, cool. Put in 8% management because that's what you're likely to pay. And one of life's greatest lies is it doesn't take any of my time. We want to actually know because when you go on a hundred of these, you've got to have management built in. And if you just make extra money, that's cool. But we want to run it like a true business

37:52where you're not actually doing all the things. You're hiring professionals to do it. Because the reason we got into single family rentals or other hard assets was to create passive income. Katelyn, if it takes your entire life to generate a passive income, by definition, it's absolutely not passive. Anything else, Katelyn, before we switch gears,
so the the takeaway here, Brett, as the part of the checklist is number one, if you have not built out this rental tracker, what a great time of year to take a Saturday morning or some extra time that you have when it's a little bit slower and let's build out that rental tracker. If you have built it out, great. All you're doing is updating that one area of I think it was three or four rows with the fair market value and the outstanding principle left on the mortgage such that we can scroll to the left or excuse me, scroll to the right and see the actual results. And once we see the results, I think where you're about to go is how do we make the

38:54decisions to optimize our investments from here?
Totally. So now we've got we've got the data. So we're going to look at cap rate, cash on cash, and debt loads. We've got a calculator here. We'll calculate a lot of this for you. If you use a spreadsheet, it'll do it. You could use our Be Wealthy calculator as another option. Um, and so you go through, we want to figure out what's working, what's not. So let's say we got something Katelyn, we look at our portfolio, we get it going, and it's performing below our standard, right? We're not generating hardly any cash on today's value, right? So if you're making no money on investment today and you don't see some magical blue sky in the future, why do you want to hold an underperforming asset? I don't know. But people tend to do it. So if it's underperforming, Kein, there are some levers we can pull. Number one, do we just have a too high of a debt cost? Maybe you got debt a year and a half, two years ago at the peak and you could refinance and get a lower debt cost. Maybe you've got a bunch of cash on something else paid off and you got a seven or a half or eight% interest rate on investment property. might be a place

39:56where you just go pay that down or pay it off, Katelyn, to create an eight percent return indefinitely. You could also look, is there any could I do anything to change the rent? I can I add a yard, a garage? Is there anything I value I can add to get rent up? Or is there anything on the expense management side? Am I overpaying for something or I've got carpet in my rental and every time I turn it, I'm replacing 2500 ft of carpet. Maybe I think about putting in LVP or title throughout the rental so that my future turn cost goes down which improves my expense management. Lastly, if we can't improve expenses, rent or restructure through debt, Katelyn, it may be time to look at selling it. And when I look at selling anything, my first choice, by far my first choice would be to sell it with seller finance it. So, if I own a rental property, I want to sell it and I want to become the bank. So, I want to take a huge down payment, 20% minimum from the borrower, and then I want to carry that paper. Usually, I'm writing it at 9.9% fixed for 30 years. Now, mind you,

40:59Katelyn, I bought that property. Let's say I bought it for 150,000 in the value into 300,000. So, when I take that 20% down payment, I'm getting 60,000 down towards my, you know, my 150. I'm only into this thing $90,000. And I likely had a lot of it paid down before. So what most of our clients do is Katelyn that that down payment ends the ability for them to wipe out their mortgage and now they've got an income stream that could be 30 years it could be some period of time. It typically triples the cash flow is the math we usually see and create and by the way now you've got out of all the headache
serviced with a third party. Mind you that property is not yours anymore. You're just the bank right? So taxes, management, repairs, all the pain in the ass is now not on you. you're in the check collecting mailbox money business or a uh business and you're there. If that doesn't work, we can't do it. We sell it. I would move it to uh a different market. You go to a tertiary market. I don't know if that's spelled right or not because I can't spell. Um but you could move it to a different

42:01market. I moved my uh good news, Katelyn, you don't have to be brilliant to be ridiculously wealthy. You don't have to be. Thank goodness. Um but I sold a lot of my properties in Phoenix, moved them to Alabama. I moved those up to Texas and then I sold those and rolled those up again. Right. You might also Katelyn, we all think that there's a we've done an amazing podcast. We'll link in the show notes on 1031 exchanges. Uh go check that out because you could take a property and sell it. You could also move it into alternative assets like I've sold some properties and moved them into natural gas royalties. So part of understanding this is a plan. There are lots of options, but if you've got something below standard, use this checklist to go through what are my options to improve my cash flow, to improve my wealth plan, and to get me to my destination faster and more efficiently. And that's why we got to do this part, Caleb.
I love it.
All right, we're going to we're going to move on. That was what we do with hard assets. Now, we're going to look at retirement accounts. Uh, I am the biggest believer in one type of retirement account and I Katelyn I

43:04absolutely hate the other kind. So standard traditional retirement accounts where you give money to some overpaid financial advisor to put you in what's literally could be an ETF like the Vanguard Total Market Index I think sucks. And I think Katelyn proudly I've helped more people get rid of their financial adviser and realize that there's better ways to do it. I'm not slamming the uh financial advisor industry. I could just tell you that they're paid based on mostly on the assets under management, which is actually how you don't want them paid based on what they tell you to buy. You want them paid based on results. And so I love using a fiduciary, someone you're paying for the per hour, but they're not there to sell you anything. Mostly, Katelyn, I love self-directed retirement accounts. I'm the biggest believer. And we got five on the screen right now. So, people will tell me, "Everyone, and I rarely make blanket statements, Katelyn, everyone needs to figure out how to evaluate and optimize for a self-directed Roth account. Doesn't matter how much money you make, everyone

44:05can have one. There's a strategy called the backdoor Roth. You can throw that in Google and get all the information in the world on that, but you need to figure out your self-directed Roth, right? You might have some sort, depending on the size of your business, you may have a SE IRA, a 401k. Ideally, just figure out a way to have it self-directed. And I also believe you want to have a Roth so you don't pay tax later. You could go run the math and figure out different investment horizons and how much the tax would be today if you had to convert your old 401k to Roth today as opposed to it grows and then you pay the tax later. I could tell you the math by far and away skews toward having a Roth. The number one account Katelyn no one talks about. The single best account you could have is self-directed. it by a million miles is a health savings account. And the reason why it's the only account that gives you three different wins. You get a write- off when you put the money in there. You grow it taxree. You pull it out taxree on all the growth. Right? Any other account only gives you like a Roth, I

45:08pay the tax today, I grow it, I pay no tax, I grow it, I pay no tax, I pull it out, but I got to put the money after tax today. A health savings account, I get a write off today. I can grow it and then I could use it for all the medical things that I actually believe in and not what's force-fed to us by the government and medicine today. You can actually use the health savings account for things you actually believe in like PRP or stem cell massage, all kinds of modalities that actually solve the problem and don't cause you to just take more pills and stuff you don't need. A health savings account allows you to do that and it's a huge account. The last one that people don't know about, Katelyn, it's called a Coverdale. It's like the 529 that people can use for education. I don't love the 529 because it locks me into the stock market in a vehicle that I don't love. And so a Coverdale, you could put $2,000 away per kid. And there are income requirements. So you may need to have a family member help you out with that or someone who's retired. But that money can be self-directed, which means you can invest in the things you believe in,

46:10which I mine's real estate, mortgages, and things like real estate. Um, and so I'm a huge believer in that. I have accounts for my I have a covered over my kids. I've got a health savings account. I've got a a Roth account for myself, my wife, the three kids. Uh, and we self-direct all of them in the things that I'm investing in already. And so figuring out your income, Katelyn, and where does that fit in your net worth plan, which accounts do I want to optimize and really build as I think about my wealth plan? And so that was a long-winded rant, Katelyn, but those are you've got to be thinking about it. I don't think people are thinking about their retirement accounts the right way uh with the right tools all the way through.
I think too the reason we put this is the end of year is guys it's the last moment that you have the opportunity to do it to pull the trigger and the great news is there's tax advantages on a lot of these to do them right now in this year. There's also limits with a rock you only have so much per year that you can put in. So, if you haven't invested

47:12into your Roth this year, guys, you've got a few more days to get it done. Reach out to our partners below and you can get it started almost immediately. Um, but the really cool part of having this is the end of year is it's did I optimize it? Did I get everything in that I need to? I've got a few more days that I can make sure that I max it out for this year.
Well, that's what I think people realize, Katelyn. I mean, we'll just use the health savings account since I'm so passionate about it. But I'm trying to get the limits here in a different window for 2025 and it's coming up right now. So the way that would work, Katelyn, you would take your business, which I know the name of it. I won't share it here. Baller Enterprises LLC and that right you would
Yeah. You would write a check though from K. This would be a Roth. This is just your regular day-to-day business. Writes a check to your health savings account, which is a separate bank account. It must be all savings account. There are some requirements around the health insurance you have to have. you have to have a high deductible policy, which is the vast majority of them. But so, okay, then you'd write a check. Uh, as an individual, you can write $4,300

48:16in 2025. As a family, you can write $8,550 into your health savings account. Your business gets a write off and you do not pay any tax on it. Then you could grow that money over time and then use it for the medical things you can believe in. I can tell you as my dad is 84 years old uh and I'm deeply involved in his his medical um the bills are Katelyn it's a lot I'm going to say medical bills and our future are a lot for people and I know there's the current political environment is trying to lower medical costs but this is a huge expense Kay something we can write off today and build a tool that we absolutely need in the future it's a complete no-brainer $8550 for a family if you're over 55 you could put $1,000 more whether you're an individual or a family, go take action right now on this uh and make that happen. It's a huge huge part of um planning. All right, Katelyn is now we need to go create our plan for next year with our wealth. The best tool I've ever seen is this 135, which stands for one

49:18goal, three strategies, five priorities. And so, or three priorities, I'm sorry, five strategies for each priority. So, one goal, your goal as it relates to your wealth plan, in my opinion, should always be the passive income you want to have in total at the end of the next 12 months. So, let's just say Katelyn, I'm I'm I'm listening to this and I've got currently $5,000 a month in passive income. And at the end of this year, at the end of next year, so I'm doing this for 2026. So, the end of 2026, if I want to have $10,000 in passive income, okay, that's the one goal. All right, what are the three priorities I'm going to use to get there? Uh, I'm going to buy two more rentals. I'm going to create three notes. I'm going to invest in natural gas royalties. I'm going to buy this building. I'm going to put this in this dividend stock. Whatever your vehicles are, come up with the three main ways and then the five strategies for each of those priorities. Why I love about this tool is Katelyn, it creates clarity of thought. So often if we go out, we want to create $10,000 in passive income, our mind goes in 10,000 different directions. And if we again go back to, you know, where kind of we talk about

50:22here, it's focus. it's priority. And so, what are the three main priorities to creating that additional $5,000 in passive income? Breaking that down and then getting a strategy. Okay, how much capital do I need to accomplish that goal? Well, then you go to your business and you set your business goals based on what you need personally and what your wealth plan needs. And it's the business's job to go out and perform at a level that allows you to hit your wealth goals and your personal goals. And so you're you're very very successful that way. What some people don't do is they go build their business goals, they crush their business goals, and they're absolutely angry at the end of the year, Katelyn, because it wasn't the right amount of money to accomplish their personal goals and their wealth goals. So they achieved over here, but there was no connectivity between their personal life, their wealth plan, and their business. So your business is there to serve you, the human being, and get you what you wanted. And so if you just think about it in that context, I set all my personal goals first. Then I go to my business and set those goals and I have to have enough cash from the

51:24business to accomplish what I want. And this 135 is the best tool I've seen to organize thoughts and really get clear on the strategy to execute your goal for the next 12 months.
You know, I'm going to mention something for people who might be a little bit early in their investment journey or their wealth journey. If you're listening to some of this podcast and you're going, "Oh my gosh, I need to build my wealth plan. I need to do my balance sheet. I need to do these components. Um, and then my wealth plan is maybe to buy a property next year or to create a short-term investment opportunity next year." What I'd encourage you to do is just like Brett said, come up with the main goal at the top that's going to be passive cash flow. Your answer today may be zero, but it does not need meaning you have passive cash flow of zero dollars today. But in 12 months, it can look very different. On the smallest scale of that, it could be that you took a certain amount of additional cash flow that your business produced or your job produced and you put it in T bills.

52:27Guess what, guys? T- bills pay a return. You've got a number up there. So, there's no excuse not to have at least a number. Now, most of you have several rentals, have some passive cash flow, or a few years into your wealth plan. So, that number is going to be really specific, and you know what it is based on your wealth plan. But here's the challenge that I have for you. For some of you who may, no matter if you're worth $100,000 or you're worth $40 million, you may have some holes in your education and you may have some holes in your systems. For example, a lot of people when they first start private coaching with Brett and I'm taking them through their initial onboarding, they don't have something like the rental tracker we shared with you. So, a great place to put this rather than getting overwhelmed and not starting is in one of these columns to do education or systems. And you can put very specifically what that looks like. So, in education and systems, one of those could be I need to do get my entity and trust structures

53:30and my um retirement accounts, my tax advantage retirement accounts put together. Awesome. That's going to be on your wealth plan. You're going to create the diagram, set the appointments, and move that forward. That is an important part of your wealth plan. So, I do think supporting the actual investments with the right education and the right systems for it on this plan will help you to achieve them such that when you're listening to this podcast next year, you say, "Rat, Katelyn, don't even worry about it. All I have to do is update these two or three simple things." But you could be in a totally different position if you plan accordingly in just 12 months.
Uh, 1,000%. If you don't have a plan, Katelyn, I know exactly where you're going to land. probably about where you are.
Yeah, you're going to just be I mean it's one of the things of being successful, right? If you do exactly what you've always done, you'll get the results you've always got. And the definition of success, right, is doing the thing that you don't want to do when you don't want to do it, right? So maybe the thing you don't want to do is come

54:31create your 30-year plan. It's going to take some work. Being wealthy is going to involve a plan and a little bit of work. But I got to tell you, on the other side of the slight bit of work up front, it's massively enjoyable, right? It creates all the things that you wanted. It's not complicated. You just got to start. And so, go fill this out and go back through this episode. Watch it again and again and complete all the items we're walking you through at the end of the year. It will make a massive difference. All right, so let's go through the checklist, Katelyn. Next part, we're going to finalize our 12-month calendar. We filmed a whole podcast about your calendar, how to think about a year. Uh, make sure you go back, listen to that podcast. Right. So, you've usually air right after this one, Brett. So,
if you don't know what that is, for next week.
So, now what you got to do, Keith, stop. Go subscribe right now because next week you're going to actually have the checklist of how to go live 12 months in advance. Next, you go through, you should be reviewing all of your business financials yearto date. I do this. I print the entire year, the detail where

55:35I've got every single expense for every business. I print paper, not because I'm looking to kill trees, but I need to highlight and write stuff in there. And it's like this thick. We go in there and I want to go line by line. I want to look at all expenses. Profit is made in your business by managing the expenses on the revenue you already have. So many people, Katelyn, are worried about running out and creating new revenue uh in a business that's got a 4% margin. It doesn't matter how much revenue you have. You have an expense problem. And until you fix that, there's no need to go grow an incredible massive business who doesn't make any money today. Right? The biggest lie in most real estate based businesses is as I get bigger, Katelyn, there's this magic thing that's going to happen and the economies of scale are going to kick in and I'm going to print cash. And what typically happens, Katelyn, the margin actually gets smaller as you grow in real estate because there's very few economies of scale. And the bigger the organization, the more layers of management it's going to require. the further you step out of that business. It's a beautiful business. There's lots of ways to make

56:37tons of money in real estate. But Katelyn, if the margin doesn't work today, we got to fix that. The way to do it, going through and reviewing the business financials. Is it missionritical? Is it great and but not necessary? And is it something we need to cut, find a better tool? How could we do it? Next, my one of my favorite tax strategies is to think about expenses that I will have next year. Can I prepay some of those today? Examples or technology. Katelyn, forever until just recently, we moved in 15 years, I'd moved CRM one time, but prior to that, I kind of always knew I'm going to have that CRM next year, right? So, me prepaying 6 months or eight months. Now, you need to have the cash to do that, right? But prepaying that expense allows me to take that expense this year, lowering my taxable obligation this year. You know, you could think about another another example. Well, Katelyn, you're a part of this. A lot of our people are compensated by the profits the companies generate. Well, if you think about it on an annualized basis, we figure out the profits and we do all the accounting and we're going to

57:40cut that check in probably February or March. Well, but that money was really earned in 2025. So, what do I do? I've got a rough guess. I'm going to cut a estimated amount, probably 90% of what that check's going to be and pay it out before year end so I can expense it. It's also proper accounting because it was occurred in 2025 and I want to reflect it that way. But there's all kinds of other things. And so anything you're doing here, you want to look at can I prepay it. Now the second part is when I go to my CRM before I'd say, hey, if I'm going to prepay a year, can I get a discount? Can I get a 20% discount? Instead of paying you 12 grand throughout the year, could I give you 10,000 now? Okay. Most people will say yes. So not only do I get the tax write off, I'm also saving money. It's one of the best places to invest capital. And I don't think people get that, Katelyn. Like when you go to the when we go invest money at our family office. I will run through walls to get a 15 a 10 to 15% return. Like like literally we'll do almost anything. And here you've got an opportunity to make a 20%

58:42return in a discount plus you get, you know, potentially a 37% write off an ordinary income. There's no financial vehicle that will offer you that level of return. And yet people are so busy running in their business that they're not like cooking their head up to go look that there might be other opportunities. You know, one of my mentors said, "Brett, spending 20% of your time focused on the expenses on the dollar you already have is a really good use of your time." So 20% of your time focused on the expenses on the things you already have. And honestly, Katelyn, that might not be enough. But 20, if you're not spending 20%, I would argue you're not in the gate. So now we've talked about pulling expenses in. Now, we're going to talk about how can we push income out. I'll give you the easiest example, and there's different ways to think about it. Whether you might have some commissions that were due or some things that are coming in that that could get kicked out, but here's a really easy example. I had my a couple years ago, I had my biggest flip of my career uh in terms of profit. I was making like $340,000. And the offer came in, Katelyn, and the

59:45they offered to close. It was cash and they wanted to close on December 30th, which I don't from a tax strategy, Katelyn, when you just dump an extra $340,000 on your income on the last business day of the year, there's not a lot you can do to kind of massage that down. And so, what do you think my counter was?
January.
How about we go January January 3rd or whatever 5th? I just want to roll it to next year. What does that do for me? It gives me 12. Number one, it kicks the tax account out a year, right? Three-day difference. I got 12 more months to pay it. So, I got an interest free loan from the government just to kick that out three days. But I also now could go to other planning and there's things I could do and I could get with my tax attorney, my tax strategist, and come up with ways to think about that because I now have time. And so, we've got to start thinking differently. And again, it goes back to this whole idea. The further we think in the future, the easier it is to win the game, right? So just then you're going back, you're establishing a 135, a business plan for every business you have and then one for

1:00:48your wealth. Then based on those 135s, we're going to go and we'll film an episode this season on how do we actually business plan. We'll go through that process. But we take those 135s for the businesses. Now we're going to break those down into flash reports, which are just KPIs or key performance indicators, the things that we want to track on every single business. So, as we're running throughout the year, we had our initial business plan, and now I'm just looking at a dashboard of numbers that are reported weekly by the leader in that business to make decisions on what we should do based on the lead indicators, the effort we're putting in. Is it equaling the result? And if it's not, we can make changes as we go throughout the year. And so, this is where your business, you've got to start planning. We start this process really end of October, early November, K, as we're as we're going into the next year. Don't wait. And I'll see people, they're in February, they're like, "Oh, I'm working on my business plan." I'm like, "For what year? This one or the next one?" Like, "What year are you working on this for?" Cuz you're already out. I mean, 26 is over. I mean, you you can't start in

1:01:51February and roll it out in July. So, we've got to get earlier and get better plans. We talked about this calendar, which will be next week. So, we won't cover that here. We got to plan further in advance when you're working, when you're gone. Now, Katelyn, we're going to go start of the year. We're going to move over the next section. What are the things we we we went through? How to optimize. Now, we're going to fund all these accounts. I'm going to fund my self-directed Roth. I'm going to fund my Coverdale. I'm going to fund my health savings account. Now, Katelyn, because I'm a crazy person, why do I want to fund at the first business day?
It's just going to be
I want to get it going because I want to get the returns throughout the whole year, right? I want to cheat time. I put it at the end of the year. Uh, still great doing January one. I can quickly put that into an investment and I can get the 10% return throughout the year. So I wanted as early those dollars and they're earning tax-free dollars as early as I can possibly get them.
So our end of year Brett that was guys did we optimize all these? Do you have them? Did you optimize them? If you haven't throw some money in them and by

1:02:54throw I mean invest invest some money in them at the very end of this year. Let's make sure they're maximized. Optimized was the term in our checklist. Now calendar rolls, boom, 24 hours later, we're at the beginning of the year, you're sitting down first few days of January, you're funding all of them right away. So someone's listening to this and they don't have their Roth set up yet. You could reach out to our partners, set up your Roth, fund your max amount for this year that we're sitting in, and then arguably a week later, you could fund the second portion for the next year, right? Then, which allows you now to have a bigger bolus or or a bigger amount to go ahead and get started with uh self-directing it and creating those greater returns. So, I think it's I always like to look at how can we game the system. This is a perfect way to use a system to our advantage to say, "Let's get going even faster. Don't feel like you're behind. You can catch up in literally a matter

1:03:55of two weeks."
You you could double it up. It's a great point. So there, Katelyn, you know, it's the next year. I'm going to as quickly as the financials come in, start of the year, I'm going to start getting those over to my CPA, you know, and we're always trying. I'm I'm never going to be able to file just due to the partnerships and things I have by the April 15th deadline, but I want to start getting them over because some businesses we can start filing, right? So, as soon as that business returns done, get it over there and start getting that in front of your CPA for the things you can do. Next, I'm going to set up my kids compensation. I pay my kids. They work in a company. Um, so they do actual real work. The beauty of them being there, Katelyn, is I I pay them. They've chosen to take some of those dollars and invest in a self-directed Roth account that they invest with dad in different things. And it's been this incredible thing. I make my kids read the statements. They have to know their returns. I'm like, if you can't if you don't know the returns, you can't get the money. Um, and so they're out they're they're a part of it and they're in this game. And you and I have shown this before. it you set up the biggest gift you could ever give your

1:04:57kids would be a self-directed Roth account provided they understood the value and funded it themselves after whatever horizon that you fund for them it is a vehicle Katelyn that your parents my parents they should have done that probably just you know that the communication or the the education wasn't as available back then um but it's something I'm doing for my kids that's going to make a massive different in their life now it's start of the year I want to go back I go shop all of my insurance every year actually came it's really easy to do now because we actually own an insurance business. Um, and so we go through, we shop all of our policies, go through, is there a better carrier? Is there a better way to do it? And I'm looking to can I get more coverage at a lower cost?
Well, not only is it to reduce cost, that's the important part what you just said. I don't you said it so fast, I'm just afraid people might miss it. So, I want to anchor it really quickly. It's not just to go how do I get a better rate and do a reshop with your current carrier. That's not it. It is also about making sure you have the right coverages based upon your asset values and the the cost of construction should you need to

1:06:02rebuild today. So we just did the rental tracker, right? That now we know what our current asset value is, fair market value. You also you're in this industry, you know it costs, you know, x amount per square foot to build. Should that property, should your home get, you know, annihilated by a tornado, do you have the right coverage in order to rebuild it? Is your dwelling protection the right way? So, it's looking at best rates. We love to save money, but let's make sure we have the right coverages as well. And reook at our actual deductibles. You and I talked about this literally yesterday, Brett. We were talking about deductibles, rain and hail and wind versus fire versus go and look at them once a year and make sure you've got them exactly where your you and your family are comfortable for your coverages and then get those coverages at the best possible rate. And I'm glad you made such a good point

1:07:03there. I don't think most people also talk to your real estate or your insurance agent. They should explain to you why you have certain coverages and be educating you because the biggest risk or threat a lot of us have today is something's going to happen, right? There's going to be an insurance claim. The question is, does your insurance do what you think it does, right? Do you have the right coverage? Is or do you have a a million-doll building and you've got replacement cost of 400,000 and so it burns to the ground and you actually couldn't replace what you have. And you know, I've got a story that I've told a family friend where they had an underinsured cabin in the mountains and it burned to the ground and it was a disaster. This legacy beautiful compound became a disaster financially all due to not having the correct insurance. And so it's a having insurance, the correct coverage, the right rates is important and you got to be reviewing that every single year. Next, I look at my, you know, my annual retirement contributions. So I'm I'm funding it like where do I want that amount to be? And part of my I say annual retirement. I also look at my life insurance contribution. I'm a huge believer in whole life only whole life insurance not

1:08:07any other universal index variable blah blah blah. It's whole life. It's a guarantee. It's a tool I use for my family use at our family office. Um but I determine how much money am I going to put into my policy. Right? So there's the premium amount and then we build policies in a way where you could put extra funds in there. because that's something I do uh there as well. So again, it's a checklist. This all happens like so the year January 1, 2026, Sabrina starts firing on all this and all this just starts happening um right out of the gates and we get it going.
I got to say once I got to say once you do this I'm I'm sitting here looking at it. If you do the start of year checklist for your investment or excuse me the end of your checklist for your investments, go through update all those exercises or complete them, do the end ofear checklist for your businesses and then this start of your checklist. If that's all you did for the whole year and then just executed those plans, you would be crushing it. This is really the

1:09:10anchor or the main component that can change the trajectory of your entire world in these like little checklists. The the wealth, no pun intended, the wealth of of information here. When you actually go through and do the research and and understanding and execution behind them, this is all you need. It's pretty impressive.
Katelyn, you it it will not take that much time. Take the checklist. And by the way, build these yourself, right? Start with what we've given you and then add things in your world. You may have different financial things. But the whole point of this entire podcast is make it a system, make it something that's easy to execute and then as you grow your world or you have employees, they can help you execute this. Well, at this point, I'm not really involved in any of the execution of this. I built the system and the team is out executing it uh based on the wealth plan we set up. So, Katelyn, we also we've got an incredible newsletter. You could scan the the QR code on the screen here. You can go to bwealthy.com and sign up. Uh we send out an email newsletter once a

1:10:13week jam-packed with wealth tips, strategies, and our get free move of the week. Please go check that out. And Katelyn, before we wrap and tie out of the year checklist, end of the year, I wanted to give a shout out to one of our listeners uh who left us a fivestar rating and a review. Katelyn, I'm going to read the review from JPAT Realtor. It was a couple weeks ago. said, "Brett Tanner is the real deal. I run multiple companies and a big real estate organization. Every time I listen, I walk away with something I can immediately use." He's not talking theory. He's actually building businesses, leading people, and solving the same problems the rest of us are facing. What I love most is how simple he makes complicated things. Profit, leadership, systems, growth. He breaks it all down in a way that just clicks. If you're serious about growing your business, your leaders, getting your leadership dialed in and thinking bigger, this podcast needs to be in your rotation. He's helped me on a personal level and professionally, and I think he'll do the same for everyone who listens. I highly recommend. I don't know who it is, but JPAT Realtor, we

1:11:15love you. We appreciate it. For any of the rest of you, our listeners that have got value, please leave us a fivestar rating. Leave us a review. Tell us what you think. We want we we are extremely dedicated to season two and we want to share it with more people like you so you get more out of your life and get what you want. Katelyn, any party thoughts before we wrap this up?
I'm so excited to wrap up a killer 2025 and roll into 2026. Thanks, Brad.
All of the We're going to have a detailed show notes. You're going to have links to all those tools we referenced. All that will be in the show notes. Go out and have a massive week. I'm Brett Tanner. That's Katelyn Mitchell. Be wealthy and we'll see her next week. Bye guys.