Planning for Retirement: Working Numbers Backwards (LA 752)

Transcript:

Jill DeWit:                            Jill and Steven here.

Steven Butala:                   Take it away, Jill.

Jill DeWit:                            Jill and Steven here.

Steven Butala:                   Hi.

Jill DeWit:                            Welcome to The Land Academy show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Jill DeWit with ...

Steven Butala:                   I'm Steven Jack Butala broadcasting from Lake Tahoe, Nevada.

Jill DeWit:                            Yay. Today, Steven and I talk about Planning for Retirement: Working the Numbers Backwards.

Steven Butala:                   Exactly, Jill.

Jill DeWit:                            This is show want 752. Amazing.

Steven Butala:                   Spoiler alert. We're going to talk about math. We're going to say things like this, "Well, I need five million bucks to retire, so I don't have to work anymore." We're going to divide by 12. $166,000 a month, and then divide by ... No, it's a math situation.

Jill DeWit:                            Am I going to need a notepad and a calculator for this?

Steven Butala:                   No.

Jill DeWit:                            Okay.

Steven Butala:                   This is 35,000 foot discussion. This is the fun stuff.

Jill DeWit:                            Okay. Great.

Steven Butala:                   There's no hard work here.

Jill DeWit:                            All right. Well, this is all part of this whole topic this week, which is: Your Real Estate Investment Career. Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the LandAcademy.com online community. It's free.

Steven Butala:                   Luke asks, "Have any of you used a property tax reduction service? If so, which one would you recommend?" This is a great question, Luke. Probably Luke Smith, right?

Jill DeWit:                            I'm guessing.

Steven Butala:                   Here's the deal. All over the country ... and there's different laws in every state, and sometimes there's municipal laws, where you are allowed to and usually encouraged by the people at the county to contest your property tax bill. It doesn't happen too much for the rural vacant land, because literally the property taxes are $10 a year or 20, or even a couple thousand, which is really no big deal. I'll tell you, on a primary residence, let's say in California, you can actually go before a judge and say, "Look, I just don't think that this increase in my property taxes is justified, and here's why." The numbers are staggeringly in your favor. My parents, my mother specifically, did this every single year from like 1980 on. She got to know the judge literally, because there was a real small community in a suburb in Michigan. She won every single time. They became friends.

Jill DeWit:                            Well, let's be honest. They often don't know, and I think you're right, I think that they encourage and appreciate you coming to them and you have do your homework, have to have comps in the area, really showing that, "Here's why I think my house is only worth X. This one two doors down sold for this. This one across the street sold for that. This is why I would really like you to please revisit the assessment value here, and let's get these numbers back in line." If you have some good comps, there's nothing they can say.

Steven Butala:                   Right.

Jill DeWit:                            It's funny how many people, A, don't know you can do that.

Steven Butala:                   Exactly.