[00:00:00] Intro: Forget the civilized path. It’s time to break the chains of debt and dependency, take control of our financial lives, and live free. This is the Fiscally Savage Podcast.

[00:00:15] Dylan Bain: Hello and welcome to Fiscally Savage. I’m your host, Dylan Bain. And today, I want to tell you a story appropriate to what we are as a nation doing, which is taxes. So I just want you to imagine that it is 2013. I am sitting at a desk in this back of this tax office, and I am working my way through returns. See, I am a teacher and I don’t make enough money. But thankfully, I have a good Samaritan who has offered me a job working in his tax practice. And I am reviewing taxes and I’m going through and checking all the boxes and preparing returns and all that happy jazz when suddenly, my cellphone starts ringing. And I look down and I realize that this is somebody that I kind of knew but kind of didn’t, and so I answer and he starts explaining to me that he needs help. He knows I’m working in this tax office and he needs help. So I say, yeah, sure. Come on in because I have a deal with my new boss that I get to keep 50% of everything I can bring in the door. So I’m thinking this is gonna be a great way for me to make a little extra money. And he comes in and he sits down and he tells me, oh, thank God. I’m so happy you took this appointment. My taxes — they’re killing me. I’m gonna go bankrupt ’cause I’m paying all this money in taxes. And I start working the numbers. I pull open my computer. I do the whole tax interview with him. I talk about his income and I take a look at his W-2s and his 1099s and all the other documents that are there and I build up the entire model. And I realized very quickly that the problem this man is facing is not that he’s paying too much in taxes, although that is certainly debatable, but in terms of what is driving him into bankruptcy, it’s not the taxes. It’s his complete lack of stable income.

[00:02:06] Now, ladies and gentlemen, I tell that story because we all just went through Tax Day. And as a CPA, I have to start off this episode by saying this is hashtag not tax advice. I worked in a tax office when I was still teaching. It was one of the many jobs that I had in order to try to make ends meet, and I am grateful for that experience. I was able to try my hand at doing taxes and helping small businesses grow and thrive by being more of a financial advisor than I was just a tax guy. And that was great, but it was not something that I was going to build a career off of because at the end of the day, I wanted to be in the room where it happens, and audit was a better path for me to get to that room than tax was going to be. That is to say, I really wanted to do business planning and business operations rather than taxes and tax shields and tax strategies and things like that. The point of this story though is that when this gentleman comes into the practice, he is complaining about taxes. He’s laser-focused on the amount of money that TurboTax at that time had told him he was gonna have to pay. The problem that he faced though was that TurboTax was right and the major issue was he was focused on that loss. Remember from a psychological standpoint, human beings always hate giving up something more once it’s in their hands. This is one of the reasons why tax withholdings out of your paycheck — people don’t necessarily focus on that. But we are all very laser-focused if we get to the end of the year in tax season, particularly this year, if you had to cut a check. That is always gonna be more painful, and this is true with all sorts of different things, and there have been a lot of behavioral economists who have studied this exact thing where if we put it in your hands, even if it’s something that you have no use for, like a bonsai tree or a small plastic figurine, you will experience loss by having to give it up. Taxes work exactly the same way.

[00:03:58] So what this guy is doing is he’s saying taxes are killing me because I have to cut the check and I don’t have the income to cover it. The problem that was faced there is that while no one likes taxes, in his particular case, he had made some really bad choices. Number one, he had decided that he was gonna have no taxes withheld from his paycheck, and of course when you do that, that just means that you have to pay them all at the end of the year and that was what was really going on there. But the fact remained that the thing that was really killing him and the reason that he had the debt load that he did had little to do with the taxes and everything to do with the fact that he was not making enough money to support the lifestyle he was living in a small Arizona mountain town. And let’s be real. I’m not gonna defend taxes and I’m not going to attack taxes. Debt and taxes are just factors of life. I’m very much interested in how I can live a better, more fulfilling life that is satisfying and nurturing to me and satisfying and nurturing to the people around me that I’m fairly certain that being able to manage my taxes so that I can think about them as little as possible is probably a better way of going about it rather than dedicating a lot of time and energy to something that I, at the end of the day, can do very little about.

[00:05:10] And it’s worth noting. Like I said, no one likes paying taxes, myself included. Well-functioning societies, however, they all have some form of tax structure, and there’s lots of examples to look at. You can look at France around the same time of the American Revolution. Of course, the American Revolution — the tagline was no taxation without representation; the idea that Britain was doing to its American colonies what it did to all of its other colonies, which is strip-mine as much value out of those colonies and we rebelled. Well, France helped us in that. Well, then, France went to revolution not too long after that. So what happened there? Well, in the case of the French aristocracy, French society at that time was organized into three groups: the clergy, the aristocracy, and everybody else, also known as the Third Estate. And of course, the way that the French conceptualized their tax system is that you don’t tax the clergy because, well, I mean they’re the church. You don’t tax God. And at the time, ladies and gentlemen, the Catholic Church, which was what the predominant religion of France at the time was, was immensely wealthy, unbelievably wealthy, both in land and in gold. And then of course, you don’t tax the aristocracy because, well, if you tax the aristocracy, then they’ll stop administering their estates. And so all the taxes were paid by everyone else, the Third Estate. And if you had done something kind of foolhardy, maybe financed really expensive foreign wars, helping a colony rebel against, you know, their British overlords, and then you have to turn around and pay for that, chances are good, you’re gonna turn to the Third Estate. The Third Estate, which is everybody else, is gonna get angry and we all know where that went. It all ended up at the guillotine. Zip, thud, the end.

[00:06:47] In other tax structures, you also have countries like Russia that run a flat tax system. So they have an income tax. They have a flat tax rate. I don’t know what it is off the top of my head. And what that flat tax system does is that it ignores the fact that the incomes of people on the bottom half of the income distribution don’t function in the same way as the incomes on the upper end of the tax distribution. That is to say, 25% of income tax for somebody who is just barely making it by and lives on poverty wages is going to hit a hell of a lot harder than 25% of somebody who is making millions of dollars a year, and that’s because our expenses are discreet but wealth and income operate exponentially. And what that does is it encourages oligarchic control that is ruled by the few, in this particular case, the wealthy, and further concentrates wealth into the hands of people at the upper end of the income distribution. This is what happens with flat taxes, and it’s not politics. It’s just math. Yeah, and I bring that up simply because there’s a lot of people who propose a flat tax without understanding that the reason the tax code is convoluted has nothing to do with the tax rates and everything to do with all the tax loopholes that were purposely built in for, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You get the idea.

[00:08:03] Other states, there are some countries that would be considered developed countries in the world, that do not even have an income tax, but they all have one thing in common: they’re oil-rich Gulf states. That’s right. Some companies kind of take the Texas route where they fund themselves by taxing something that they are very rich in and they produce. There is, of course, a problem with those types of places. Number one: if you don’t have a whole bunch of oil, you’re kind of SOL. But also there is something called the oil curse where you’re able to fund your society with this oil revenue, so there is no income taxes. But because you’re a one-trick pony, the entire society becomes structured around that one resource, and if anything were to happen to that resource, the entire society would collapse. This is why Saudi Arabia is doing its damnedest right now to diversify as much as they possibly can in their economy because Saudi Aramco, which is the only company and the only taxpayer in the entire kingdom — well, if anything were to happen to their oil business, they would be into dire straits.

[00:09:07] Most developed countries use what’s called a progressive tax system. This is where you have to take the word “progressive” and, you know, separate the word’s meaning from the politics of the moment. This is not a political tax system, although all taxes are political. Let’s just be honest about that. But it is a mathematical tax system in which each level, as you move up the income distribution, pays a higher and higher percentage on those dollars earned in that tax bracket. And one thing to note here in the United States is that some people will make the argument, well, I turned down that promotion at that job because if I did, then I’d be in a different tax bracket. I’d be actually bringing home less money than I am now. Okay, so let’s just be clear. Those people are morons because that’s not at all how this works and if they took five minutes to just Google search it, they’d realize that they were wrong in this. What it means is that if you have — let’s just arbitrarily say that you pay 10% tax, so you pay one dime on every dollar that you earn from $0 to $10,000. And then, let’s say that after the next tax bracket is from 10,000 to 50,000, and we’re going to say that that’s gonna be a 15% tax bracket. So let’s say that you work you make exactly $10,000, and then suddenly, you are offered a raise where you can make $15,000, so you’re gonna move into the next tax bracket. The way it works is that you still pay only 10% on that first 10 grand, then you pay 15% on the next 40 grand after that. That is how a progressive tax system works. And so what’s happening is that every dollar that falls into that band, into that tax bracket, is taxed at that particular rate. It’s not that you actually have to have the same tax rate across your entire income. But it’s worth noting in the United States, because of all the different tax credits and tax deductions and blah, blah, blah that we have, the wealthiest people — so the top 400 income earners in the United States — actually pay a lower effective tax rate, that is the entire percentage of their income that they pay, and even including payroll taxes than literally the bottom of everyone else. So the top 400 pay a lower effective tax rate — that’s their all-in tax rate — than the bottom 400. Because in a progressive taxation system, you’re never — even if the top tax rate is 40% and you just barely cross into that, your effective tax rate is gonna be a blend of all the rates of all the bands for every dollar that you paid.

[00:11:30] So the question that you need to be asking yourself at this particular point in time is that if you didn’t know that, well, okay, that’s fair. And it’s not like our school systems do a good job teaching people how to pay their taxes or how taxes work. And as a former teacher who attempted to do that, I can tell you exactly why schools don’t do that. It’s because parents don’t want you to talk to their kid about money. Like honestly, it was — first off, my students absolutely hated the entire system of learning how do student loans work, how car loans worked, how to buy a car, how to get a job, how to interview, how to pay taxes. They hated that section. But more to the point, parents hated it even more. And so it became this huge bugaboo that it was so much easier for me to teach the quadratic formula because no parent was gonna verbally attack me for doing that. But when it came to explaining the progressive tax system, just like I just did, well, that was a different story. But okay. End of my side note.

[00:12:23] The question you need to ask yourself is whether or not you have an actual tax problem. So if you’re somebody who is really always worried about taxes and your tax situation, the question I have for you is: do you actually have a tax problem? Because remember the story at the beginning of the show, this gentleman had actually had a tax problem because he owed a ton of money right then and there because he decided that he was just not gonna pay anything in his paycheck. So he had not been putting money into the tax system as he went along and had opted to pay it all in one go. But the reason that he had done that was because he wasn’t earning enough money to support his lifestyle in a small mountain town in Arizona. The US tax system is what it is, and I’m not gonna debate whether it’s good or bad, although it should be pretty obvious that I have major issues with taxation in America. I personally think that is just absolutely convoluted with all the deductions, and I think there’s a much better way. I think we all know what that better way is at the end of the day, but people just aren’t willing to talk about it.

[00:13:25] Let’s talk about these tax numbers and what the actual picture looks like. Now, I’ve said on the show before that a lot of times I feel like this show is really Dylan reads things so that you don’t have to, and so I’ve read a lot from the Tax Foundation, which is a business-supported think tank, and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy that is considered more liberal-leaning. So that is where I’m getting a lot of these numbers from because they’ve done the big, broad-based studies I needed. So the question that I would ask is right off the bat is: are we, in terms of income taxes — because remember Americans all in are taxed more heavily when you consider all of our taxes in concert than almost any other nation on Earth. However, in terms of our income taxes, we’re actually quite low because a country like Denmark charges a 50% income tax. We don’t do that. So what is our income tax? Well, if you fall into the, you know, from 40% to 60% of taxpayers — and when I say 40 to 60%, I’m talking about their income levels — the effect of tax rate for those people is 11.3%. And you might, well, hold on a second. Like I thought that, you know, it was 40%. Well, there is a way to get to 40%. But remember in a progressive taxation system, you’re paying a blended tax rate based upon what dollars were earned in which buckets.

[00:14:42] And remember in the United States, the first thing you do when you’re calculating your income taxes is you take a deduction. It’s called the standard deduction. Everybody gets that. And so if you’re single, it’s about 13 grand, and if you’re married, it’s about 25 grand. Well, closer to 26 if we’re really gonna be honest. But what that does is lower your taxable income. So right off the bat, every dollar that falls into that standard deduction is tax-free. So even if we had a 10% tax, your effective tax rate will be lower than the 10% because if you’re single, you got 13 grand tax-free. And so this is what ends up happening is that people start adding in their deductions and their tax credits. So like if you have kids, you get tax credits for having children. If you have, you know, in my particular case for a lot of my marriage, my wife is going back to school. There are tax credits for that. There are tax credits for buying certain things like, well, you know, maybe an EV or something along those lines. There’s different ways in which you can lower your taxable income. And so if you’re right in the middle income earners in the United States, the effective tax rate on average is 11.3%. And if you included the payroll taxes, right, those are the ones for Social Security and Medicare, you’re paying about 19% all in. But let’s just even expand this out. Let’s say that you are in the bottom 80% of taxpayers in the United States. And so when I say taxpayers, I’m talking about people with income to actually tax. So the bottom 80% would be defined as if you’re making $155,000 a year and you’re single or if you’re married and your total income as a married couple is 310k or less, you are in the bottom 80% of income earners in the United States. And on average, the blended tax rate, the effective tax rate, that those individuals pay is 16.6%, and that number increases to 24.5% when you include the payroll tax.

[00:16:44] Now, what I am not doing here, ladies and gentlemen, is dismissing the idea that somehow 16% of your income is just vaporizing off into the machinations of the federal government is just a small thing. It’s not. It’s a huge amount of money. But one of the things that I really truly believe is that if we are going to build a life that is fulfilling and nurturing for us, we have to do that by looking at reality. So what we find is that the overheated rhetoric on income taxes in the United States is just that: overheated rhetoric that is taken so far out of context, it borders on outright lies. These are the numbers. This isn’t politics. It’s just math. And I’m not gonna get into the politics because that’s not my purpose here. But just understand how these tax rates are working. And it’s also important to understand that when I say, well, okay, on average, the bottom 80% has this effective tax rate, so that’s their all-in tax rate, it’s important to understand that not all income is created equal. In the United States, in my mind, one of the biggest travesties is how our tax system treats different types of income differently. For example, capital gains for long-term capital gains, so that’s income derived on investments that are have been invested in for longer than 12 months, that’s how you would get long-term capital gains — those dollars are taxed in a completely different section of the tax code that it operates in a completely different manner with a completely different set of assumptions than what is coming out of your paycheck. They pay significantly less. This is why Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary does. Somebody who’s working in investment banking where they’re making commissions and they can take advantage of things called the carried interest tax credit, they’re gonna be operating in the capital gains world, which means they may make multiples of what you do and end up paying far less both in a percentage and in total in taxes than you do. That is, our tax code values capital investment money more than the actual work of individual Americans. And for my money, that’s where I have issues because it’s those individual Americans that actually make America America. And if I were to actually ask who I thought was more valuable, the blue-collar folks who are building our homes, maintaining our roads, and keeping society functioning, or that one investment banker who made a fortune by just moving numbers from one side of a spreadsheet to another? Well, I’m gonna take the blue-collar people a hundred percent of the time.

[00:19:17] The other thing to note here is that self-employment income is taxed almost just completely unfairly, almost as if the tax code was designed to penalize people who are self-employed because that payroll tax — they have to pay both sides of it. And so if you are self-employed, you’re going to have a higher tax burden on your tax dollars because you’re paying both the employee side of the payroll tax and the company side of the payroll tax and when it really comes right down to it, I just don’t think that that’s really what we should be incentivizing in society. But if you’re a large corporation that wants to make sure that you don’t have competition from mom-and-pops, it’s a pretty good thing to have in the tax code, almost like it was assigned that way.

[00:20:01] Anyway, but all that said, taxes are a large burden on families. It is some of the most significant line items when we look at how much money is actually going out the door. The problem that I think that most people have with taxes is that the money is spent on things that they don’t value. Because just like budgets, taxes are basically statements of values. We want our tax dollars to go to things that we actually care about, but we don’t feel like we’re getting our money’s worth. And that’s a completely fair thing. And in some cases, that’s just because the value is really diffuse and hard to see. It’s really difficult to put an economic price tag for individual families on services that they may not use but they benefit from on a second- or third-tier level. That is to say that if we have a transit system that allows people to get around and those people can get around, so therefore there’s a lower unemployment measure, society is more vibrant. There’s gonna be smaller businesses. Blah, blah, blah, blah. You, the person who never uses that transit, may benefit greatly from it. That’s a diffuse value that’s harder to see.

[00:21:03] The other thing about it though is that I think we can all agree that when you look right at it and you see somebody like Warren Buffett paying so little in taxes when all he’s really doing is buying up companies and moving numbers around on a spreadsheet and not actually producing the value, so to speak, that, say, I think a union electrician might or that guy who’s running his construction company or Bob the plumber, well, I think that we start to be a little bit bitter about what we have to pay because we know that on some levels, we’re subsidizing his gains. Large box stores are famous for this where their employees’ salaries are subsidized by food stamps and they don’t offer healthcare because they pay them so little they all qualify for Medicaid. We also can agree that the tax system in the United States is just purposely confusing and stressful. I talked about this on Friday, but it was quite literally designed to be really difficult to navigate for the sake of keeping tax prep operations in the money. Not to mention the fact that there is some political drama that goes around and saying, if I make this as painful as possible, maybe these people will vote for me.

[00:22:06] And there is a belief that at least in Middle America, that if I just had the right tax strategy, then all my problems would be solved; that that’s the key to building wealth — is a good tax strategy. And there’s an entire fleet of people who want you to be convinced in the same way. Now, as somebody who’s worked in the financial coaching world and somebody who’s worked in finances and capital markets for the better part of a decade, well, well over a decade at this point, I can tell you that that’s not true. Tax strategies are part of an all-of-the-above strategy, but they don’t necessarily make or break the entire operation. That is to say that taxes are a consideration and they absolutely need to be. But your income and your expenses are first and second in terms of how are you doing financially in your life. Most people have an income or a spending issue, one or the other, and no tax strategy can fix that. If your income is too low and you’re paying a lot in taxes and it’s really starting to pinch, well, the bigger thing right here is that the tax system is what the tax system is. Trying to come up with some sort of convoluted strategy to try to get out from underneath that is gonna take a lot more time and be a lot less effective than just doubling down on what you’re good at, discovering what value you’re offering to the marketplace and increasing that, learning to sell yourself, learning to increase your value, learning to stand up and say, Hey, I would like a raise because here’s all these things I’m doing for you in my job. Those strategies are gonna be far more effective because as your income comes up, you’re going to notice the taxes less. And of course, there’s a curve. There’s a point in which you kind of forget that they’re even there, and then there’s a point where it all comes back depending on what you’re doing. And this goes back to the flat tax idea. 25% from somebody who’s below the federal poverty line is gonna hurt them a lot more than 25% from Warren Buffet.

[00:23:57] So all that is to say is that you probably don’t have a tax problem. You probably have an income or a spending issue if what you are is somebody who is a W-2 employee who is fixated on taxation. It’s very easy to fall into this because when you actually talk to people who are running businesses or a lot of self-help or get-rich-quick gurus, they’re all gonna talk about strategies. Well, why are they talking about those tax strategies? Well, because their income level and their lifestyle in terms of being a self-employed individual involves a lot of taxes, and it’s a major consideration for them, maybe not necessarily for you.

[00:24:36] But I don’t wanna end today without giving you at least some ideas of some effective tax strategies that you can employ. And remember this is hashtag not tax advice. I’m gonna tell you what I do and what has worked very well for me as I have grown my income because I’ve been on both sides of this equation. When I was a teacher on food stamps with two additional jobs, taxes at the end of the year, having to pay an extra $200 in taxes, meant that I just really had to think hard about whether or not I was going to eat or maybe I needed to start walking to my jobs instead of filling up my car all the way to where I’m at now, where I’m making multiples of that. And in fact, I make more in one quarter than I did all in at that period of my time in my life. And so I don’t like paying taxes any more than the next guy. So here’s strategies I’ve used. You need to do your own research and understanding and make your own decisions. Hashtag not tax advice. Okay, so what are some effective strategies that I’ve used?

[00:25:44] Well, number one: if you have a high deductible insurance plan, you can get what’s called a health savings account or HSA. This is different than an FSA. Now, an FSA is a flexible savings account, but that’s a use it or lose it type of thing. And HSA though is triple tax advantage because you get a tax deduction. So remember you always get the standard deduction, but if you’re on a family plan, you can put in $7800 into an HSA and thus lower your taxable income by another $7,800. On top of that, every dollar you put in there can be invested in the market and it can make all that money tax-free and then, if you withdraw it for a medical expense, either now or at any other point in the future, which is how you properly use them, you keep all your medical receipts and put the reimbursement way down in the future, you get to withdraw all that money tax-free. Triple tax advantage. The next thing you can do is you can invest in a 401(k), but the traditional. Not the Roth, the traditional. Again, every dollar you put into a traditional 401(k) or a traditional IRA is going to reduce your taxable income by $1. And into the 401(k), you can put upwards of $20,000 into it and into the IRA you can put in upwards of $6,000 into it. So all said and done, if you were to fully fund all three of those options, you could reduce your taxable income by almost $39,000.

[00:27:09] Now, the problem with all of those is the same: you need to have a certain income level in order to utilize them as a tax strategy. When I was a teacher, I couldn’t afford to put a single dollar into anything that wasn’t just trying to keep the wheels on in my life. And so this goes back to — I didn’t have a tax problem, I had an income problem and I had to solve that, and once I solved my income problem, well, now I’ve got these tools that I can use to reduce my taxable income and at the same time save and invest. It’s a good strategy and it works for the vast majority of middle income Americans.

[00:27:47] A second thing is you can start a corporation. My financial coaching business is in a corporation of which I am an employee of my own corporation. I have a lot of deductions and anything I do for that business is paid for by the business, which counts as basically a tax deduction to the revenue of the business. And if I have a loss at the end of the year, which I normally do because my corporation pays for a lot of things, even though my income as a financial coach is fairly strong, a big part of the reason I even have the corporation in the first place is so that it can do things like, you know, pay for my expenses to do things like this show. So what that means is that that then flows through and any loss from the corporation actually will reduce my taxable income. And we actually saw this because remember when Trump’s tax returns came out and everyone was like, oh my God, he paid so little in taxes? Well, I downloaded them and I took a look at them and all those tax returns really told me was that Trump is involved in real estate investing, which I think we all knew. And when you say, well, his companies are running at a loss, well, of course they are. Any good accountant’s gonna do that, which brings me to some of the issues with starting a corporation.

[00:28:57] Some people have this idea in their head that they just start a corporation and they can pay for expenses and it’s not a big deal. They probably read that in a book about dads of various income levels. And when I read that, the first thing I thought of was, man, that is a great way to get audited. And that’s right, ladies and gentlemen. That was actually terrible advice because you actually have to have a business case in order to have a corporation if the IRS were to come and talk to you about it. Having a bunch of expenses go through a corporation is a great way to get into a lot of trouble real fast. And if you’re going to take that strategy like, hey, more power to you. But go hire a professional to help you run it because if you have the income to be able to play that game, well, then you have the income to hire a professional.

[00:29:39] Which brings me to the last effective middle income tax strategy and the one that I think is the absolute most powerful: hire a tax CPA. Like I’ve said repeatedly in this episode, I am not a tax CPA. I operate in the audit space and I operate as a financial coach for personal finance. I’m not specialized in the taxes. You need me to tell you why your company is bleeding dollars out the eyes? Hey, man, I got that covered. You need me to help figure out what’s a strategy to restructure yourself so that you can make more money per unit? I’m your boy. You need me to go through and assess your operations to make sure that you are not running risks that you’re unaware of? Hey, man. I thought you’d never ask. But I’m not a tax guy. I’m a CPA but I’m not that kind of CPA and I hire a tax CPA. He does my taxes for me. Why? Because he’s better at it than me. And if he ever needed me to go through and look at his business operations, he wouldn’t do it himself. He would hire it out. And in fact, when I talked to my CPA, he was like, he laughed when I said, well, yeah, us CPAs has gotta stick together. And he said, yeah, I’ve got 10 other guys who are audit-focused CPAs just like you who hire me to do their taxes. It’s notable to say that my tax guy can’t fix a deficit. That is to say, he is worth every penny I pay him. But if my income wasn’t as high as it is, he wouldn’t be nearly as useful to me. And so that’s really what it comes down to. Yes, you can save a lot of money doing your taxes and, you know, platforms like TaxSlayer, FreeTaxes, VITA, TurboTax, etc. — they’re great systems, but they don’t replace somebody who can actually look at it and take the time to understand your situation. If you really feel you have a tax problem, then it’s time to hire an actual professional. And truth be told, it’s not that much money in comparison to what they could save you if you actually have a tax problem.

[00:31:37] So that’s my show for today’s, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you so much for listening. And I hope that you’ve taken one thing away. And I would ask if you got something out of this, please share with a friend. Stop what you’re doing. Leave me a rating and/or review at any place that you’re listening to podcasts. It goes such a long way to helping me grow the show, get the message out to more people. Or feel free to stop by Instagram @fiscallysavage. Leave me a comment, question, concern, or worry, and I’ll be happy to bring it on the show. Until next time, until Friday, go out there, take control of your financial life, and live free.

[00:32:18] Outro: Thanks for listening. If you like what we do here, please hit that subscribe button. Leave us a rating and review. And share the content with somebody who would benefit from the message. You can follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, all @fiscallysavage. And head over to fiscallysavage.com to get our free tools, suggested reading, and everything else you need to take control of your financial life and live free.