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Introduction to Tax Strategy

Tax strategy is a concept that goes beyond mere savings on taxes. It encompasses how we manage, utilize, and move our money. This blog delves into the intricacies of tax strategy, focusing on its importance in personal finance and business. By understanding these principles, we can make informed decisions that positively impact our financial future.

The Foundation of Tax Strategy

At its core, tax strategy is about how we utilize our time and money. Every dollar earned represents time spent working. Therefore, how we choose to spend that money will shape our future and influence our financial growth.

The Two Paths of Income Generation

In America, there are primarily two ways to earn income, each with distinct tax implications:

• W2 Employment

• 1099 Independent Contracting

W2 Employment Explained

As a W2 employee, you enter into a partnership with your employer. You provide your time and skills in exchange for a regular paycheck. This model prioritizes security for the employee while generating profits for the company.

1099 Independent Contracting

In contrast, a 1099 worker or independent contractor operates their own business. This model allows for greater control over one’s tax liabilities and financial decisions. Unlike W2 employees, contractors have the ability to manage their business expenses and maximize deductions.

Combining Employment and Entrepreneurship

It is possible to engage in both W2 employment and independent contracting simultaneously. Many individuals utilize their W2 income to cover personal expenses while building a business or blog to create additional revenue streams.

Leveraging Multiple Income Streams

For instance, while working at Secure Pacific, you can also run a blog. This dual approach allows you to capture various forms of income, thereby diversifying your financial portfolio.

Understanding the Role of Assets

When considering tax strategy, it's essential to understand the concept of assets. Assets can appreciate over time, and how we manage them affects our overall financial health.

Creating and Managing Assets

In a business context, assets can include:

• Real estate

• Business equipment

• Intellectual property

As you build your blog, it becomes an asset that you can leverage for future opportunities. The goal is to own your time and the assets that generate income.

Tax Strategy: A Dynamic Approach

Tax strategy is not static; it evolves with changes in tax laws and personal circumstances. It's crucial to adapt and plan your financial decisions based on the current legal framework.

Strategic Decision Making

Effective tax strategy involves making informed decisions that align with your long-term goals. This means understanding how to navigate the tax system to your advantage.

Owning Your Time and Future

Ultimately, the essence of a successful tax strategy lies in owning your time. You must decide how to allocate your resources to create the life you envision.

The Importance of Intentions

Rather than setting rigid goals, focus on establishing intentions for your life. These intentions should reflect the decisions you want to make as you progress through your journey.

Dealing with Uncertainty

Life is unpredictable, and the fear of the unknown can be daunting. However, embracing uncertainty allows for growth and new opportunities.

Embracing Change

Successful individuals often adapt their mindsets and strategies as circumstances change. This flexibility is crucial for navigating life's challenges and seizing new opportunities.

Conclusion: Your Journey Ahead

As you embark on your journey to understanding tax strategy, remember that it is about more than just numbers. It's about how you manage your time and resources to create a fulfilling life.

By embracing a dynamic approach to tax strategy, you can empower yourself to make informed decisions that align with your goals. Life is a journey, and together, we can strive to create meaningful changes in our society.

Daily Podcast:

Daily Video Journal:

Daily Journal Transcript:

Life is a journey and we are all in it together. On this journey, our goal is to support and protect as many people as we can. If you believe we can be the change that we need in society, I invite you to follow the life with Justin, Stephen, Joe as we live life to do that change.

Good morning. Good morning. Good morning.

It is July 31, 2024. It is a Wednesday morning. I am in the beautiful Seattle area.

I am waiting for. I'm running sales calls with one of the other secure Pacific salespeople today. So he's on his way to pick me up at the hotel so we can go out and get on some appointments and see how all it goes, which should be a ton of fun.

As I'm waiting, though, I've been thinking a lot about how do I explain my tax strategy? And so this is what I'm specifically doing this video to explain to my parents how I look at tax strategy. So first and foremost, tax strategy is how you use and move your money. It's not about saving money in taxes.

So when you spend your money, because time can never be relived. So when you go out and work, you make money, which is the physical representation of time. So you collect time, and then how you use the time, you collect the money you collect.

Right. Determines what you do in the future, determines your growth. So if you collected time and money and go buy a house, well, that house becomes an asset that ideally appreciates over time.

Or you go hire someone. Ideally they. Journal entry the best way to support my work is by following, liking and sharing the content I create on a regular basis.

I appreciate you being on this journey. Realize on this whole journey, the next thing I realized is as a human being, there are only really two ways to make money. There is as, at least in America, and this is a gross generalization based on taxes.

Okay, purely based on taxes. The first way is as a w two employee, which is what most of us, me included, do. So as a w two employee, you're able to go in and you get paid either salary or commission or hourly or whatever it looks like, and you're committing to the company.

Hey, I'm going to be here long term and I want paid on a regular basis. I'm adding the value of my time to your company so that ideally, the company makes more money than it pays me to keep me safe while I go through time. So it's a partnership between the employee and the company, and it's all around security for the employee and profit for the company.

So that's what w two employee looks like? The other side of the spectrum is 1099. It's running your own business. It's being a sole proprietor.

All of that falls under the umbrella of you managing your own tax liability. So w two employees, they manage their personal tax liability, they don't get the benefits of running the company. So most tax strategy happens inside of a company, not at the individual level.

So how you sell your time becomes incredibly important when it comes to how you're creating your future. So I look at my life and you can do both. There's not one mutually exclusive way to do it, and there's not only one way you can do it, and you can do both at the same time.

So if I look at my tax world, my w two job, or I where I make most of my money to provide for my family, to pay for food and rent and all the other necessities, comes from secure Pacific. That is my core focus. That will be my core focus over the next ten years because I want to be a part of a secure team that's going to take care of me while I chase my dreams through time.

I understand I'm planning to make them way more money than they will ever pay me, and I'm okay with that because of the security that comes with it. So that's one way I'm selling my time. The other way is through my blog.

So if you look at Justin Stevens, who is me in the real world, works for secure Pacific. In the virtual world, I run my blog. So in the virtual world, that blog is how I sell my time, through the program I've created with America's holding company.

Right? So I'm always working in the real world, doing something. Whatever I'm doing in the real world is what I create content around. It's how I believe I can make an impact.

And then what I do in the virtual world is I take my real world experiences, duplicate them online in order to drive prospects, drive revenue back to real world. Justin. At the same time, it builds up the asset of my blog.

And as that asset is built up, this is where people can buy. So w two employees rent out their time. I am renting my time to secure Pacific.

They can fire me at any moment. I can leave at any moment. That is the way the at work laws work.

Right? I can also sell ownership in my time through my blog. So both are capturing the value of my time. One is renting it, one is buying ownership in it.

I'm always going to be in control of my time. I'm always going to be the one who I put on the glasses, I push the on button, I push the record button. No one else can ever do that for me.

I'm the one who takes the videos. I upload them, turn them into content. Anyone in the world can do what I'm doing.

I am not unique, I'm not special. I'm not doing anything that's not been done before. I'm just doing it in a different way from a different mindset.

And so that's what I believe it takes to be successful in something new, is you look at it from a different mindset, you look at it from a new perspective, rather than the same old, same old, day after day. It's how is this working? How are we getting to where we want to go? And so that's my opinion on tax strategy, is how you use and move your money. So my w two income, the goal is to have it pay for my personal expenses, my food, clothing, stuff like that.

My holding company, because I document everything, because of how I run everything. The goal is to have them cover rent, cover utilities, cover the Internet, cover phone, because all of those are tools I use each and every day to make money for that blog. I look at myself as production of the blog.

The company, America's holding company, owns the blog. It owns the phones, it owns my computers, it owns all the assets I collect I'm putting into America's holding company. America's holding company eventually will hire me to run and maintain all of that.

And so that's part of how I see tax strategy, is it is this way to plan out and strategically look at your life from a tax perspective. And as the tax laws change through times, you change what you do and how you do it. Tax strategy is not at all about making the rules.

It's about following the rules. It's about how do we do what we're planning on doing, how do we accomplish our mission based on the framework that we exist in today, based on the society we live in today, not based on trying to change the society to what we think it should be. Now, the goal is to change society.

But if you want to collapse time, you don't try to change it. You try to use it. You try to learn the strategies, you try to implement those strategies as you're going through time.

So that is, in a nutshell, what I believe tax strategy is. It's how we do what we do. It's how we make decisions each and every day, and it's how we control and manage our time throughout our life, because today is today.

I'm renting my time to secure pacific today and tomorrow, and my goal is for the next ten years. But if that changes, I still plan on living ten years. If that changes, then none of it matters anyway.

But I plan on living at least ten more years. So the goal is to say, hey, secure Pacific. You own today.

Anything you ask of me, anything you want me to do, I'll do it. My goal is to be the best teammate possible, but I own all my tomorrows, and it's your option to fire me. But I'm always going to own my tomorrows.

You cannot fire me from owning my tomorrow. And my tomorrow is how I make decisions. It's how I think, it's how I process.

It is what I believe in, and that should change throughout time. I believe one of the things successful people do is they change their minds, they change their opinions, and my goal is to change my mind and my opinion as fast as I can. And so far, the only thing I found that really ties it all together is time.

That's why I talk about time. That is the fundamental belief I have on how all of this works. So that is just my thought process.

Spam calls. I get a lot of spam calls. That is my thought process on how I make decisions and why I make the decisions I make.

I try to operate from a place of no fear because I know if I get let go today, it's gonna hurt, but it won't hurt forever. It may hurt for a day or two, maybe a week, maybe a month, but I still have the rest of my life that I have to figure it out. And so I don't fear what is to come, because I know today is one day on an 80 year journey, and it's one day on the 37th year of that 80 year journey.

So I have 37 years of experience making decisions and living my life the way I believe I should. And that, to me, is what tax strategy is. It is owning who you are as an individual.

It's owning your time, and it's setting your life up in a way that you don't fear decisions, because no matter what happens, you will deal with it. No matter what happens in my life, I know I'll deal with it, and I know I'll deal with it with a smile on my face and a good attitude, because it beats the heck out of the alternative. And so that's my philosophy on tax strategy.

I don't believe we've ever done tax strategy as a nation. We've only taxed people. And that's why I do what I do.

It's why I do these silly daily journals is because my time is the differentiator between me and every other salesperson on this planet. I've put hours and hours into building my block, and that is an asset that I bring to any company that decides to hire me as a w two employee, regardless of who they are. I just change my branding on the assets.

They're my assets. I've owned them for years. And if someone comes and I sues me for them, I'll give it to them.

You know why? Because I'm the asset. I'm the driver of the blog. I'm the one building the relationship with the people.

And if they want, some company wants to take the blog and say, oh, we're going to do it this way, great, I'll give it to you. You cannot take something that's not freely given. I'll give it to you and I'll start over from scratch, because I've started over from scratch thousands of times, and I am not afraid of it.

I think it's a great thing. It's a blank slate where you can get to work and design your life from the ground up. I feel like with my move and everything going on in my life right now, I'm starting from scratch.

I'm starting from a completely blank slate. And to me, that's a blessing. That's an opportunity.

It's an opportunity to create the life I want to live. It's not something to be afraid of. It's not something to be worried about, because the time's going to pass anyway.

No matter how bad it gets, the time just passes. So don't worry about it. Keep moving forward, keep looking at what are the next steps.

How do the next steps work? How do you create the life of your dreams and work towards it? Because you're the only one who dreams your dreams. No one else will. No one else can.

You can want them to all you want, but they just can't. They dream their own dreams, and you fit into their dreams just like they fit into your dreams. And it's your choice if you understand their dreams.

And it's their choice if they understand your dreams. That's how life works. We don't share one giant brain.

We are all independent human beings, and it is our choice how we live that life. So I want to empower you guys today. Design your life.

Design the outcome you're walking towards. Don't set goals about it. Yes, you need goals, but you want to set an intention.

An intention that is years out, decades out of how you as an individual will make decisions to live your life to the fullest because it is your choice. So I hope that is as empowering to you as it is to me. Because we are all in this together.

And together we are going to make this thing called life amazing for no other reason than we can. Alright, we'll talk to y'all soon.