One of the great things about being an attorney, especially one of about 20 years of experience, is just getting to know other lawyers. At that point, 20 years in or more, you just get humble and you realize you don’t have all the answers. And I don’t know, it just feels like you have a better, more sincere perspective trying to help people as best you can.
That’s what the BoomX Show, Laws of Money podcast is about. I’ve interviewed a great attorney in Minnesota. He’s also licensed in New York. His name is Andrew Ayers. Don’t worry about any of the resources mentioned, because the links to everything that Andrew mentioned are in the show notes. You can just go to the show notes, click and it’ll take you right to the great resources that he mentioned.
We talked about a few things. First, we give you great tips on what to look for when you are hiring an attorney in your state, in your community, like that hidden secrets of picking a good lawyer from the perspective of two lawyers who have no dog in that fight, really.
Another thing that we talk about Andrew is more of a, he’s about 50/50, business planning and personal planning. And so we talk about rental properties and LLCs, even if you do not have rental property but just trying to figure out should I bother with forming my business as a limited liability company and making that all important tax selection for S-Corp.
For the pros, what are the cons? Is it worth it? Even if you are not into business planning or do not own a business, just listen in to old salts talk about law, talk about the weather, and yuk it up. I hope you liked the episode. Let’s get going.
Yeah. Cool. How you been? Good. It’s cold up here. It’s probably a lot nicer where you are and it’s gonna get a lot colder here. Oh yeah. It’s 82 to degrees today. Not a cloud in the sky. Yeah, a little bit different up here in Minnesota. Yeah, I’m curious, what is weather? We are at nine degrees right now, and we’re about to get an Arctic blast where it’s gonna be like 30 and 40 below in few years. . Andrew, what are you doing, man?
You like that? No, it’s not me, it’s my wife. She likes it up here. Okay. It’s true. I lived in the Northwest for a while and I’m not gonna compare the weather to the extremes that you experience, but you do. You get used to it, and then when you’re away from it, you miss it.
Oh, what, what else is going on, things going well in your practice? Yeah, I actually, I’m fixing to have my best year ever by the time this year is done. So that’s good. And we’re just, getting stuff planned for 2023. That’s awesome. Do you have support staff? I don’t, I use virtual assistants, so I have, oh, nice.
Virtual for my phone and then I have paralegal for certain things that I just use on a per project basis. One of the things that’s been bugging me for a while now is in the area of elder law in particular. There are one or two outfits that offer coaching, quote unquote coaching services, but one offers like everything and they teach these elder law attorneys to commoditize legal services.
Mm-hmm. And the first thing they do is they tell them to, they outsource the job of quote unquote CEO and CFO to the firm. Mm-hmm. . And so the decision making of the law firm is at risk. My perception is it’s no longer with the attorney, it’s with a third party that are not legally trained people, but they’re very good at business and marketing.
And then they begin to run the playbook. The first page of the playbook is hire a salesperson who is the person that’s doing the consultations to, to quote unquote close the client. And then from there it’s just adding support staff so that customer service is really great and whatnot.
The problem that I see with it is the face time, oh, first of all, the overhead increases quite a bit, right?
Mm-hmm. , and therefore the price goes up, or you have to bring in more clients. And that’s a misscaled volume practice, and that means that the face time between the client and the attorney goes down, right? Mm-hmm. And one of the tips that I was thinking about, like writing an article or giving people a tip, maybe on YouTube or this podcast.
We could even include this in this podcast episode. But, I wanna make sure my thinking on it is sound, and I’m just not being petty and jealous because anytime you criticize another business model, you’d run the risk of seeming like you are being petty and negative and what does it matter?
But the problem is, I can think of one firm in particular where the legal services are not being provided by the attorney. It’s being provided by, I think this firm has 11 employees and just one of whom is a bar certified attorney who boasts about spending very little time in the office.
Mm-hmm. and have you encountered anything like that? Do you have any observations about it? Do you think it’s best just to leave it alone? Because you and I are still practitioners. We spend a lot of time with our clients you know, it’s a different model. Yeah. And I’ve heard that there’s kind of two models in that, there’s either the model like that person has where it’s the one attorney and a ton of non-legal support, or it’s the lawyer heavy side where you don’t have a lot of paralegals.
You just have a lot of young associates and you churn through them. And for me, I’ve been like you, I use, so I was approached by a company that says we got virtual assistants. I said, that’s lovely. What do they do? And they said we’ll do whatever you want. And I said I just want somebody for my YouTube channel.
Like, yeah, they can do that. I said, and then I may need someone to help me with WealthCounsel. Yeah, they’ll do that too. I said, and I might, but they were like, whoever we assigned you will be able to do whatever you ask. And I said, that’s not really what I want. I’d rather have three virtuals each who specialize in what I need than just this one generalized person who was gonna supposed, and again, speaking to overhead, it was gonna be 2,500 to 3000 a month for like a real generalist.
And they said, listen, this is the way we’re running your business. We’ll turn this around for you. Your ad spend will go through the roof. But I was like, I’d rather have the person who really knows that one little bid than have to take on someone who’s general cause I’m gonna have to train them. Cause there’s no way that somebody who’s a specialist in YouTube also understands how to do estate plans with WealthCounsel, right?
Yeah. And my concern is just, I’ve seen and talked to people who, one is a person I know pretty well, and she’s not very competent, never has been. Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. And you see her around Facebook and social media and she’s boasting about her Christmas party with 15 employees and whatnot. And I just cringe about the work product that’s being pumped out where at least I take a lot of pride in the time that, it just, to me, it seems like in order to do a really good job, you have to spend quite a bit of time with the client.
I mean, I do. My approach is they have a link to my calendar and they can schedule as many meetings as they want to. What I’ve found is very few, none of them, them have abused it. And then only in one case in my entire career did I feel like, perhaps client was using estate planning as recreation in retirement.
Mm-hmm. If anything, clients are a little reluctant to spend face time with the attorney, I don’t know why it doesn’t cost anymore and you get to have all these questions answered. I don’t know. I guess I’m need to think it through a little bit more. If I had to tip for you know, it’s hard to hire an attorney because you don’t know anything about that profession, and unless it’s a referral or recommendation from somebody, you really don’t know the questions to ask to determine a good one or a bad one. I guess one of the tips I would have is look at the staff, if they, like before you set the appointment, ask how many employees are there in this law firm and how many are attorneys?
And what is their number of years of experience and what can I expect in terms of attorney client face time as compared to interface in time and consultation even with a non-attorney? I think that’s a critical question. Yeah. And I think it’s also what they’re comfortable with because I have friends who run firms where it’s very light on the attorneys.
So like the one you’re talking about, it’s one guy running it. He’s got a couple of associates. People will call up and say, I’ve gotta meet with him. And he’s like, no, you don’t have to meet with me. I have a set of attorneys that can meet with you depending upon what part of the elder law journey you’re in.
Cuz he has one who specializes in benefits, one who does estate planning. That’s the way he’s broken it up that way. And he runs into that concern of people who, you know, they want to go to him because they see his name on the wall and he’s gotta be the one to meet with versus, I think some other firms do a good job of being pleasant, you’re getting the experience in the firm.
Generally, as you said, the staff, everyone will treat you well. It doesn’t have to be Attorney X who shows up for those meetings. But then there’s other people who, I think you’re right, when it comes from a referral, we’ll say, listen, I want to meet with Darol. I want that face time with Darol.
That’s what I’m signing up for. That’s what I want. And I think when you’re doing your marketing or working with these clients, you have to figure out which type they’re gonna be because you know that first type who wants just, the only wants Darol, and nobody else is not gonna be happy if you’ve got that other firm that’s set up to be run by everyone else, but the figurehead.
Right. Do you ever have regrets about, how long have you been in practice? It’ll be 20 years in February, 11 and a half on my own. So that’s legit. Mm-hmm. . Yep. I’m not saying that five years into practice, it’s not legit, but to me it’s not legit. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It takes at least or I think right around five years is where I started seeing some things, but do you ever have a moment of, if I could go back and do one thing differently, what would it be?
Yeah, I do, all the time. I think I would’ve studied more about business and how to run a business. These days I find that running the business excites me as much as working on the legal work. And I’m constantly like, what’s that right balance to keep me happy and what gives me the most engagement with my day-to-day?
I’m not saying that I don’t like estate planning or working with businesses, but a lot of times it’s the marketing, it’s the other business things we’re doing that. Those are the thoughts bouncing through my head because you can do enough estate plans and after a while, you’re doing another trust, you’re doing another estate plan for a young couple with one kid.
You’re setting up a new LLC for somebody’s rental property. You do that enough, but I feel like somewhere in there is the right balance and I haven’t found it yet. I’m happy with where it is, but I feel like, I would learn more about the biz because I’ve really spent the last probably three to four years focusing a lot more on the business of running the practice and stopped thinking to have myself as a lawyer who runs a business and more as a business person who runs a law firm.
The law firm is the business, not who I am as much. Right. Yeah. But that was a little general. I’m gonna push back a little bit. Is there like one business mistake you made that if you, if I could just take that mistake back. Mm-hmm. I’m not sure if I have an answer by the way. So don’t think that, I’m just thinking about the advice I would give young attorneys, like you and I are old salts, right? Mm-hmm. Well, the biggest mistake I made straight out is I signed up for a big, old stupid Lexus contract when I opened my firm. And the first year was great. It was like 75 bucks a month or some insane number.
But by the end of the three years, I wasn’t using Lexus and I was paying so much money for it. And I remember that’s always been my advice to young attorneys who I’ve met with, who were looking, starting their firm. And I said, just don’t go for all the shiny bells and whistles.
And they’ll say, well, I was at a firm before and we used Lexus and I clearly need it. And I said what? Google Scholar gets you a lot of what you need. We get fast case out here in Minnesota through the Bar Association. There’s a lot of options out there that don’t have to be a three year contract.
That’s just gonna be breaking your overhead on the back end of it. Yeah. Yeah. That’s exactly right. And do you remember that TV show? It was a comedy sitcom called Will and Grace. Yep. So Will was an attorney and I just started watching season one, episode one on Hulu. And when you go into his office, it’s lined with law books.
Remember that when, mm-hmm, I had a full set of reporters, I was like, I had to have the image. Yep. The truth is in the modern age, the Bar Association provides case research software for free and even Google, just straight, straight Google can do a lot for you. Mm-hmm. .
But I think that one silver lining of covid, if there’s anything that good that you can say that came from it would be even clients over the age of 65 believe and understand that they can conduct business and a meeting without face-to-face meetings, like Zoom is good. Mm-hmm. And it’s bizarre because like people who have the big law firm model, well, okay, so I didn’t mean to segue into this, but some law firms are choosing to go back to the brick and mortar approach, I think you said you are.
I’ve been in person the entire time cause I’m in a very small office suite, so when things are bad, we all close our doors and wear masks. When things are good, the doors are open and we’re more social. So for me it’s always been here. When the kids were home from school, I’d spend more time working from home just cuz we needed to balance them.
But once they started going back into the classroom, I started spending a little more time in my office. Oh, I see. Okay. Well I had this online digital academy that is, it started out as a project, then it became a passion, and now it’s an obsession, really. And every Friday we have office hours. It’s a really great way for people to learn about the law and implement their own plan, pennies on the dollar and get a lot more out of it.
And so these are a group of people who fully embrace the virtual only approach to having meetings, right? Mm-hmm. I thought of you because one of the questions that came in the last office hours on Friday was about rental properties, and you and I hadn’t talked about that. And so this is what he said, and I kind of struggle with the answer, so I’m curious what your answer would be.
And here’s what he asked. He goes, yeah, Darol, I’ve got a rental property. And I was talking to my accountant, I said, everyone’s saying I should get an LLC, transfer the rental property into the LLC, and what do you think? And apparently the accountant surprisingly said, nah, just say if you have general insurance, a liability insurance should be good.
And for an entrepreneur, maybe not so much a law firm, but like a business that does podcasting, for example, I advise those folks to get an LLC and the first thing they think of is asset protection, like to insulate your personal assets from your business assets, in the event that you’re sued, your business is sued, right?
Mm-hmm. Well, podcasters have like virtually no chance of being sued, you know? Mm-hmm. And so that’s not a very compelling reason. Now you and I, we know what the reason is and has to do with self-employment tax, but how does that really break down with the rental property?
Do you have any experience in that? Any kind of tips and insight about like, how would you answer that Office Hours question? The first thing that I mean, and I ran into this last week, is that if you’ve already owned the property in your own name, you’ve gotta call your lender because the lenders are really being tough on who they’re even letting to move the property into an LLC.
There’s a few federal backed loans that just won’t even let you do it so similar to that, I guess advice from the accountant. It’s not the way I would go, but for those who can’t move the property into an LLC, then my recommendation is get to your insurance agent and make sure you’ve got the right level of insurance.
But for those who can do it, the LLC can just streamline the process for you. As you said, there’s a lot of financial advantages. There’s tax advantages for your rental property. It makes that separation of home, life and the rental property so much clearer so that you don’t want there to be a problem down the road, but if there is, you can show that clear line to whoever’s trying to make it a problem for you.
I look at like even a law firm, so if we form an LLC and check the box as corporation taxation, then we can bifurcate income from profit and only pay self-employment tax on the income. And not pay self-employment tax on the profit, the dividends, capital gains dividends which is very smart.
You can, mm-hmm, get yourself into a little bit of trouble because it, if you are allocate. It has to be reasonable income, first of all for it to be lawful. And that’s a reasonable test between you and the Internal Revenue Service, right?
I suppose you made $200,000 net revenue, net income and you said that you made $35,000 as a full-time attorney with 25 years of experience. Obviously, that’s not gonna fly. That’s not reasonable compensation, but let’s just say a hundred k, like that seems reasonable to me.
A hundred K out of 200. Mm-hmm. Now, so you’re paying self-employment tax on the hundred. And the second hundred is profit. And so that’s taxed differently. You’re saving that self-employment tax. Now, the problem is when you go to get a refinance your home, for example, for some reason lenders have just a difficult time wrapping their brain around the difference between income and profit as a business owner.
I don’t see why they do, but it can create problems in terms of credit. Would you agree? I would, and that’s why when I talk about whether it’s an insurance agent, in this case, it’s a lender as opposed to just going to the big bank on the corner of your town, I’m in groups with a few lenders who work at, or few folks who work at actual, like smaller lenders who look into that.
So one of the guys I know, he specializes in self-employed individuals who need mortgages for their property. Who need any other kind of lending, because, just to that point of yours, he’s not at a big bank where they’re just checking boxes. They’re able to look at it and say, okay, we understand when you’re running your business, these documents are gonna look a little different and we can get to the bottom of what that really looks like when it comes to lending to our clients.
I don’t know the answer to this question. I think if you own the rental property outright, then I think what you’re doing is reporting rent. The 1040 has a spot on it. Am I correct? Rents and royalties? I believe so. So you’re pushing into the accounting stuff, and this is where I always say, you need the best accountant you can find.
Yeah. You can be conservative with your expenses. You can be very aggressive with it. And it’s really a matter of having that right person who can back it up if the IRS disagrees with you. We should Google that, or we should get an accountant on that can explain that to me.
Is there a tax advantage of some sort to run the rental property through an LLC, one disadvantage would be in Washington state, do you have a corporate income tax in Minessota? Yes we do, I believe. Yeah. So that kind of sucks because now, your corporation is paying an income tax that I don’t think that you would have to pay if you were just running it and reporting it on your 1040.
Yeah. And Minnesota is a higher tax state generally. I think we’re one of the top five in the nation, so they find a lot of ways to tax you when they can. Yeah. So yeah, I think there’s a lot of advantages for the rental property. One of them just even being your expenses.
When you’re hiring that super, you’re hiring that guy to fix the toilet. It’s not coming outta your pocket anymore. It can come out of the businesses. Yeah. And you can get the S-corp election that you can’t do if you’re just putting it in your own name. So yeah, my advice to anybody who’s even dipping their toe in the LLC field is speak to an accountant and if you want an accountant in your podcast, I’ve got a great one who has his own podcast. I’ve been on with him a few times, and he’s a great interview and he could definitely talk to you about these kind of things. Yeah. Maybe, yeah, I’d appreciate that referral because okay, so I moved to Puerto Rico.
Another bad thing Andrew about having podcast interviews this time of day, the roosters in Puerto Rico are all fired up. So I don’t know if you can hear the one that’s outside of my house pissed off about something, but, mm-hmm, in Puerto Rico, there are incredible tax incentives that have attracted a lot of Americans here. And one tax incentive is called Act 60.
However, what it does is if there is a Puerto Rican based corporation, and you can show that the owner moved from the United States and relocated here, if they meet certain other requirements. Number one being, you have to buy your own home here within two years, and you have to spend at least six months out of the year physically located on the island.
If you do that, then no capital gains tax and reduce property tax until the year 2035. They actually give you a decree, which is a guarantee that, that’s how you will be taxed. So it’s attracted 15,000 Americans and they, these 15,000 Americans have generated 23,000 jobs for Puerto Ricans on the island. So it’s working, right?
Mm-hmm. However, when I look at it, there’s a 4% corporate income tax. And if you live in the state with no corporate income tax, I think the top state would be Alaska, it’s like the most favorable tax jurisdiction, Wyoming, South Dakota, and then Florida. New York is like the worst, you’re licensed in New York, aren’t you?
Yeah. Yeah. So bad news. You knew this. You didn’t wanna mention it, that’s why you didn’t bring it up. But New York is the worst according to tax foundation, the worst state tax wise to be in. I should Google Minnesota and see how bad they are. I’m gonna do that, but, 9.8%. I was googling as you were talking,
That’s brutal, man, because like an S-Corp is passed through taxation, so there’s no taxation on the corporation. So right there you had staying in the United States, right? Mm-hmm. And I don’t know what the tipping point would be, but I gotta believe it would be north of 250 to $300,000 before it even pencils out.
So these are high income producing people that can enjoy some tax savings. But for a lot of people, it’s just hard to make a 400,000 bucks a year, right? Mm-hmm. Maybe I’m babbling it. It’s just that’s the mindset that people should go through I think. Like you have to look at, you could file under 1040 and just itemize deductions, or you could file two income tax returns. A form 1120s, which is the S corporation form, which is notoriously long-winded. And then they pump out a schedule and then you report that on your 1040. That seems like a pain in the butt to me. It is a pain in the butt cuz I’ve done it. And I had to rethink it here for Puerto Rico, but on the rental property side, can you think of any I guess we need, I guess you already answered the question.
We need to get the accounting guy in to talk about the tax thing. Right. It’s funny. Do you think, I was gonna say actually over the weekend I saw a video about a guy who was saying, look at that 4% rate in Puerto Rico because he knew somebody running a business based outta Florida and he was flying back and forth from Florida every week so that he could be located in Puerto Rico, but still run a business out of Florida.
And he was questioning, he said, listen, you’re saving your tax rate down to 4%, but what are you spending every month in flying back and forth to Florida at least four times a month back and forth plus you have to have housing or somewhere to stay when you’re in Florida. And was it, what were you eating up all of that tax saving advantage?
So it’s interesting to hear you talk about that, just cause I’d seen that over the weekend as well, and that I really, there probably is a tipping point and you have to work at the right people to get that right number, but, how far do you go to get to that 4%?
Yeah. Another thing I don’t really fully understand is, it is like the difference between Puerto Rican sourced income and US sourced income. There’s rules about, complicated rules about that. And if your corporation is located in Puerto Rico and it’s generating and its customers are in the United States, I’m not sure.
I think you have to report it as Puerto Rican income. Did you know that there’s a tax treaty between the United States and Puerto Rico? I didn’t, and I’m learning a lot about Puerto Rican tax law today. There’s a lot more research to do. Well, okay so I guess I’m on a tangent, but rental property is different because the business is the rental property.
It’s dirt, it’s physically located in a state but what happens when, I suppose you had like the infinite banking guys. A lot of those guys use infinite banking for real estate, mm-hmm, and they live in one state, but they have rental properties in two or three different states.
And the business is always gonna be located in the state where the rental property is, I think. Can you think of, could you have an LLC that’s reporting income for rental property that’s in Minnesota when the LLC is in Florida?
I haven’t seen it, but I wouldn’t say it couldn’t happen. I’ve had clients approached me who wanna set up a Minnesota LLC to own, I think they had an Idaho property. And I think we haven’t moved forward on that, but they’re gonna look into whether or not the Idaho property could be placed into a Minnesota LLC and run it all that way.
Yeah, of course we already determined that Minnesota was a bad tax jurisdiction. Right. Well, thought it’s actually not that much better. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Okay, so yes or no should, what do I tell my office hours guy? I already gave him my answer, but I wanna see if your answers is different.
Yes or no? Should he transfer his rental property into an LLC? And this is a, would be a Washington State. So Washington State does not have a corporate income tax. Income tax is unconstitutional under our state constitution. What the state does to get around that is they call it an excise tax, which is based on income, and so there is a Washington State income tax for a business.
Now, I think that would apply to rental property even if it was not, I don’t think the Department of Revenue cares. I don’t think you can escape the business classification and paying the occupation tax, the excise tax, just because you didn’t transfer it into an LLC. It’s been well established that if you made money doing anything, you have to pay taxes on it.
Mm-hmm. You don’t get to say, oh no I’m not an LLC. Remember Al Capone? Oh yeah, he wasn’t incorporated. Nope. he was not. So even illegal activity, you gotta pay the tax on it. So now that I think about it, I think you gotta pay the income tax anyway, so you’re not gonna get away from being an obligation to pay B & O tax or income tax just because you haven’t incorporated.
That sounds logical to me and then it seems also to me, you’re always gonna say self-employment tax if you do an LLC, which means to me the answer’s a resounding yes. You should transfer your rental property into the LLC. With that nice little primer on Washington Law, I couldn’t disagree at all. I think my advice would’ve been to transfer as well, assuming they’ll let you do it. Don’t create that LLC and then find out it’s gonna accelerate your mortgage and you owe, a few hundred thousand dollars to somebody.
But assuming you can do it, absolutely. Because also down the road, when you wanna, if you don’t want that property anymore, it’s easier to transfer LLC ownership than it is to have to keep selling the property and go through the whole real estate. I don’t know how Washington’s real estate transactions are, but like I know in New York, you sit there in a room, there’s an attorney for the one bank, attorney for another bank, there’s an attorney for the buyer, an attorney for the seller.
You got a notary. There’s so many people stuck in a room just for a pretty simple sale transaction that you could avoid with having that property in that LLC. Yeah. Do you do a lot of business law? I do. It’s probably, it bounces out pretty well with the estate planning.
It’s about 50/50 these days. Hmm. Wow. Okay. And are you helping people with like their lease agreements? When we need ’em. A lot of people, again, if we’re going back to this rental property, found something on the internet and they’ve signed some really informal lease.
And so the moving the property to the LLC is usually a good inflection point for them to also clean up their lease document and get everything in order. I personally think the lease agreement, this lease agreements I’ve seen, sometimes they’re not even in a lease agreement. Mm-hmm, and I’m like, stop worrying about LLC as much, start working on your lease agreement.
Absolutely, yeah. There’s a lot of exposure there if you haven’t got the right agreement or if you have no agreement at all. One day I was getting ready for work and I looked at, it was a snowy day actually, and there were three fire trucks in front of our house, which is never a good sign, right?
Mm-hmm. And then all of a sudden this TV van showed up, King 5 TV from Seattle. The TV van was doing a expose on the firehouse that was half a block away that was closing after a hundred years of operation, budget cut backs. Mm-hmm. And so the fire trucks that showed up because the rental property across the street from my home caught on fire.
Oh boy. They had to come from a completely different firehouse, like in the middle of town, right? . Mm-hmm. And the fire truck or the TV van just happened to be there, and I’m not kidding you, Andrew. A couple with their young baby came running out of the small field house. And I’m like, because all of these guys say, oh, I’ve got a million dollar liability insurance.
I always think about a couple running out of their home with their baby in their arm. I misspoke, a million dollar policy. A million dollars is not gonna cut it. Nope. Not if there’s another kid left behind, absolutely not. Yeah, not even close. And you and I both have we know plaintiff’s attorney, like trial attorneys.
Mm-hmm. Those guys are amazing, like the good ones. Yep. They don’t think like you and I do. It was a 1927, all the neighborhood, all the homes in my neighborhood are like 1920s construction so it’s all knob and tube wiring. Your neighborhood’s probably older, just cuz it’s Eastern, west coast homes are newer just cuz we’re new to civilization.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. When we were in Brooklyn, we had some of the really old homes that we lived in. And because we lived in an old brownstone for a few years, I mean, right now yeah. Our home, we’re in a suburbs, so it’s like 1950s, not too old. Yeah. Gotcha. Right. But you can’t contract yourself out of a negligence lawsuit.
That’s the law want, allow that. But there are some things that you can do to avoid trouble. It’s amazing to me how many people blow deposits, security and damage deposits, which are governed by state law usually, right? At least in Washington, they are. You gotta follow these procedures, you gotta give it back and do all this stuff.
The rental property owners seem to think it’s just like free money. Sometimes they don’t set it aside, they just mingle it with their own business assets. You can show that they spent it. Yep. Right. Yeah. Landlords have an interesting history of that. I think, for every place I rented back in the day in New York, I don’t know if I ever got a full deposit back from one landlord, but the rest of ’em, there’s always some kind of ding on the way out.
And I always wondered had they spent part of it or was it just, that’s what they had on hand, cause they give you a long letter of why, that somebody had to paint the wall and that was $500. And it’s like, I could have painted that for about 10 bucks, but, right. Yeah I think there’s a lot of landlords who don’t necessarily, well, it depends what your market is.
So we have a family house at the Jersey Shore that’s in a pretty popular rental town. All summer long, these are rented out and you work with the realtors there. You get all the documents from them. They don’t mess around. They’ve got the escrow bank accounts you can use for the security deposits, then you transfer it to yourself at the end.
So I think, it’s the savvier landlords know what they’re doing, but a lot of the first timers who maybe just had a rental property as a side thing for a while, don’t always get that provision. Once again, we’re the advantage of working with someone like you or me can save you a lot of money because you understand, hey, if you’re starting this rental property with an LLC, we gotta make sure we’re protecting your renter’s funds.
If they destroy the place, you get to keep it, but if they leave it in great shape, you’re gonna have to have that money on hand to get back to. Yeah, let’s talk about resources. I know you have a YouTube channel. How’s that going? It’s going good. I think last I checked, I have about 130 videos. We, wow, chat through things on estate planning and business law a little bit.
So I started my career in family law, so there’s a little dipping into like prenuptial agreements. I don’t do contested family law anymore, but we do a little work on prenups and planning for your pets, things like that but the YouTube channel’s going well, I’m hoping 2023.
We’re gonna make a few changes and maybe enhance it a bit but it’s been fun. If nothing else, I find it fun to hop on and do shoot a video and clients reach out to me who’ve seen the videos. And, we talked a little bit about the pandemic and some of the upsides of the last couple of years, and one of them is, people will contact me and say, I watched the video and even though we’re talking on the phone, I can picture you talking to me and I know what your voice sounds like and I know you’ve got that weird inflection between a Brooklyn accent and a Minnesota accent, and nobody can necessarily figure out which accent we’re slipping into.
Do they say that, really? Yeah. Yeah. Some people, cause I don’t quite have the Minnesota accent yet.
Yeah, I used to, so in our office, every now and then we have a fill-in receptionist. And I always joke with her that if my clients call in, she has to answer in a Brooklyn accent. And she gets very nervous until we explain no, you don’t actually have my phones. Don’t worry about it. You don’t have to try to do that.
That’s funny. What is a Minnesota accent? Can you do one? I can’t. I tried, so I, yeah, I would just be time to do an accent. I’d blow it. When I first moved here many moons ago, we had moved from Connecticut and I didn’t think people from Connecticut had an accent, but apparently we did.
So I got, endlessly mocked for my sophomore year of high school because we were on the soccer field and apparently instead of me, I said May, and so I’d say pass May the ball or how, whatever it sounded like. So I got a lot of, I got harassed a bit in soccer when I first got out here, but apparently it all smoothed out in the end.
Yeah. Yeah, listeners don’t have to worry about finding Andrew’s YouTube page because there’s gonna be a link to it in the show notes, so you can just click on it and check out. Do you, you don’t have a podcast, do you? I don’t, I’ve done some interview series. I’ve thought about a podcast, but lovely folks like you keep having me on for others podcasts so we do, welcome.
You do, yeah. You do all the work. I get to show up and tell stories a little while. Yeah. I gotcha. Do you have any other resources or articles that you’re proud of that I can link? Yeah, we have a variety of ’em. I think it depends what you’re looking for. We have recently we have reports on estate planning strategies.
We have some business law strategies for people. If you’re into the world of creating content for social media, I’ve got a website, LLCsforcreators.com, and that’ll take you over to a landing page that has some more information about that. Nice. My website has a variety of free offers in the estate planning and business all worlds.
For the non-legal part of it, I do a quarterly email giveaway for people on my list. So what happens is in February, May, August and November, we just did November’s. We send out an email on a Thursday and the first 10 people to respond, get a free copy of the book. You can send it to somebody else’s a gift if you’d like, but I don’t do gift wrapping.
So we just did fly girls, which, I had 10 people respond faster than ever because my mother picked the book out. So I may have her be my new curator for books cuz she’s a retired librarian. So she reads a lot as well as I do. So we have a quarterly book given way that’s free. You don’t have to be a client.
We have mailed newsletter that aren’t just boring, here’s an update to the law stuff. It’s a little bit about me and some other content that you may find interesting. There’s monthly emails, so we have a variety of ways of connecting. And you can generally find me on social medias at Ayers Law, which is A Y E R S L A W, ayerslawtv.com, will take you to the YouTube channel.
So there’s a variety of things out there, and if there’s something out there that I don’t have for you, by all means just reach out, cuz I also try to make sure that I connect folks with the right people. So a lot of times I get, as you probably do as well, Daro, I get calls from people who just need other legal help and it’s not something I do.
And I’ve got a pretty strong network both locally in Minnesota and New York and also nationwide that we could try to get you to the right place.
Awesome. Man, that was better than I thought it was gonna be. Thank you. So, all this will be linked in the show notes, so if you’re listening and want to get in contact with Andrew, you wanna get on the list to get the free book
That’s actually a good idea. What’s your favorite book? My favorite British book is A Gentleman in Moscow by Amer Towles. Hmm. And I, yep. Last name’s T O W L E S. They’re gonna make it on Netflix show, apparently. Couple years ago when it came out, everyone in my family read it. It’s just a beautiful book.
It takes place right after the Russian Revolution. I don’t wanna give away too much spoilers, but it’s somebody from the prior regime rather than going to prison, he gets sentenced to live the rest of his life in and so it’s an interesting turn on things and we all loved it and we all were taking bets on who would play the count.
Who’s the main count? Rostov is the main character in the book. We all thought it’d be a George Clooney, but apparently it’s somebody else in the Netflix show. But we’re all very much in my family looking forward to that Netflix show when it gets made. That’s awesome. My favorite book is The Kill Mockingbird.
Okay. The second favorite is Education of Little Tree. Okay. Nice. That’s it. Yeah, a little. I like the classics. I think so my goal every year is to read 52 books. Whoa. And so, yep. I plow through a lot of books on a yearly basis. But every now and then I try to get back and to read some classics too.
I think I’m gonna try to redo the Lord of the Ring Series in 2023. So it’s been a few years since I’ve read that one. Okay. Now, I’m impressed. Actually the first time I read it I was in law school in New York and I had this massive book. It was a paperback that was all of the books in one cause it was, coming up with the movie releases.
Yeah. And I would take that on the subway every morning on my way to law school cause it was a nice way to not think about law and the tests or whatever was coming up that day. So I actually really looked forward to my subway ride and I actually started a habit I’ve had since then of whenever I was on the subway, I was always reading.
I was never the one to just kinda zone out and just put in music or, you try to not figure out whatever drama’s going on the train. Just instead stick your head in a book and just enjoy the ride. Yeah, exactly right. Well, Andrew, I have got to roll. I’ve gotta go see what my neighbor he’s got a mechanic coming over to look up my boat.
They don’t give you any advanced warning. They just stand outside your house and yell your name and then you have to, go see what’s going on. It was a pleasure. Thank you so much for taking your time today with us. Yep. Thank you for having me. I had a great time. I can’t believe we’ve gone this long.
I thought it started about three or four minutes ago and I’m looking at my clock going, wow, we’ve been talking for a while now. We have been absolutely a good conversation.
That’s it for this episode of the BoomX Show, Laws of Money podcast. We’ll have Andrew back and he is going to definitely send me that referral for the accountant so we can get to the bottom of this question.
I’m not sure we did that good a job of answering, so now I’m curious. Absolutely, it’ll be a great connection for you. Okay. That’s it. Thank you, Andrew. I’ll talk to you later. Yeah. Thanks Darol. Okay, bye.
