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Mitigating Your Taxes Through Trusts With Dr. Gina Gaudio-Grace

 

How can you get iron-clad asset protection, tax mitigation, and pass your wealth down for generations without judgment liens or levies? Business coach Dr. Gina Gaudio-Grace calls this the trifecta package, and it’s achievable through a trust structure that she shares with us today. Dr. Gina is an Asset Protection and Tax Mitigation Specialist and the Founder of Abundance Group Trust. Tune in to learn more about this multi-generational trust that lets us keep the wealth in the trust to do more good in the world with.

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Mitigating Your Taxes Through Trusts With Dr. Gina Gaudio-Grace

Real Estate Investing For Women

In this episode, I am so excited to welcome to the show my friend, business coach, and personal mentor, Dr. Gina Gaudio-Grace. She is a retired attorney and a 1991 graduate of Notre Dame Law School, where she was the lead note editor for the Notre Dame Law Review. Dr. Gina holds a PhD in entrepreneurship and business strategy, and she’s a Certified Wealth Management Specialist and a Licensed Document Preparer. Dr. Gina is also the Founder of Abundance Group Trust and the Cofounder of the Abundance for All Foundation. Her personal mission is to touch the lives of every person on this planet in a meaningful way.

Gina, welcome to this show. I’m so excited to have you here.

I am so glad to be here, Moneeka. As you know, I love every opportunity to get to talk to you, and now, I get to talk to your audience as well.

I know. I’m so excited to share you with them. I read Gina’s bio but I want to give you a little background on why we are talking. Gina has been my business coach for several years. She understands my heart and that my heart is about serving you. I do this show in service to you so that I can expand your possibilities and help you to live a blissful life.

What’s also interesting is the reason that I chose Gina as my coach is because her heart is the same. We were talking before the show in the green room that our relationships are different, our businesses are different, and our doggies are different like everything in our life is. We march to the beat of our own drummer. We’re very individualistic women but the other thing that makes us very similar like two peas in a pod, she says, is our heart to help the world.

She’s that person, so it made sense when she was my coach because she understood my heart. I never will work with a coach that someone that doesn’t understand bliss and my heart. I’ve been through many coaches but Gina was one that I stuck with for years because she understood those things. When we had conversations, I didn’t have to re-explain my priorities or my values because she had these very similar ones.

I feel so blessed to have her in my life. Now so long ago, we’ve been talking about trusts. I’ve had people on the show before that have talked about trust. I’ve pursued and built trust myself and have not been very happy with the outcomes. Not because the companies weren’t amazing in what they did. They were. The trust that I have performs what they were supposed to do but they’re not giving me the full spectrum of what I need.

When I was talking to Gina about this once, we were on the call as friends having a conversation. She was like, “Moneeka, I need to tell you about this trust that I built.” She has been working with other people in the industry who are very well-known for the trust that they build. She, herself, as a retired attorney took what other people are doing and added her own specialty to them based on her education as a lawyer in Trust Law.

She’s got this amazing trust. Interestingly, she and I were having a hard time recording. I never record on Saturdays. That’s my day off but the only day I could get Gina on the phone to record was on a Saturday. I had this niggling instinct that somebody out there needed to know this. As I say, I’m here in service to you ladies.” I’ve had this happen before where I recorded a show.

I was going to release it in 3 months and I push it up to 2 weeks because I feel inside that someone out there is needing to know it as I get this intuitive sense. Anyways, I had this intuitive sense and I texted Gina. I was like, “We’ve got to do this before the end of 2022. Someone out there needs to know this.” For any of you that are thinking, “Moneeka, that was for me.” I’m saying here I am recording for you. I love you.

That’s why I pushed it to a Saturday. When you told me that you had that instinct and I know your instincts, I’m like, “I’m wiping whatever I got. I can do it on Saturday,” so here we are.

We’re doing this for you guys on a day that neither one of us would ever record. We love hanging out with each other, so that makes it a lot nicer.

We do.

After that very long intro, here is Gina and we’re going to talk about trust. I’m totally excited. The other thing is that I am in the process of creating this trust myself. I have been hearing about this trust from Gina. I am very conservative, you know this. I have 10,000 questions. I’ve listened to all of our conversations many times so that it sinks into my brain because this is not something that I understand. It’s not intuitive and you can do that too.

That’s the nice thing about a recording is you can listen to it. If the 1st time it doesn’t make any sense, the 2nd time you’ll pick up a little bit more. Listen to it ten times because this isn’t stuff that normally we talk about. You can listen to it over and over again. You don’t have to feel dumb about it asking questions.

For those of you that want to talk to Gina personally, we’re going to be doing a webinar on the 20th of October 2022 from 1:00 to 2:30 PM Pacific Time so you can come and talk to her live and read to this a few times before that. If you are coming in later and you miss that date, the webinar is going to be recorded. There’s a lot of information, but Gina, we’re going to turn it over to you. Tell us about this amazing trust.

Before I do, let me say the whole reason I went to law school in the first place. Teaching is not what I do. It’s who I am. In the third grade, I went and researched to find out how could I be a high-paid teacher. I saw all my teachers who had second jobs sometimes as garbage men. I’m like, “That’s not for me but I got to be a teacher.” That’s why I went to law school.

Law school professors made more money than any other teacher. Had I known that being a coach and mentor and having a business like the one that I have now with Trust, where I teach all day, every day, would pay as well as it does and serve people as well as it does? I probably never would’ve gone to law school in the first place.

I don’t that you would’ve created this trust if you hadn’t been to law school. I think that in life, every step of the way turns us into who we are now.

It does and it pulls all of me together. I also have a PhD in Business and Entrepreneurship. That came into play with the trusts as well. Everything I have done for probably the last 40 years, all got pulled together with the trusts. I wish I could say this is something that even I learned in law school but it’s not.

Before we launch into this because I want to hear that story, could we start by saying what this trust does, so ladies know if they’re even interested in reading this?

How about we start with what is trust then I’ll answer that specific question.

That sounds perfect then we can come back.

What is trust in the first place? A trust is set up for usually avoiding state taxes and probate taxes. It’s a way of taking the legal parts of ownership. There’s equitable title, beneficial interest, and dividing them among multiple people and because it’s divided among multiple people, that’s why it’s able to offer benefits.

A trust is usually set up to avoid state taxes and probate taxes. It's a way of taking the legal parts of ownership and dividing them among multiple people. And because it's divided among multiple people, that's why it's able to offer benefits. Share on X

Trust got started way back in 1600 in England with one of the Kings who wanted to protect his wealth. That’s when we got spend full of trust and trust in general. Fast forward a few hundred years, the early 1800 are old money families like the Kennedys, the Carnegies, the Gettys, and the Rockefellers. They all started amassing the fortunes that their families have now and they wanted protection. What did they do? They set up trusts.

Now back in 1800, we didn’t have an Internal Revenue Service and Internal Revenue Code. That came back around 1913 and 1914. Fast forward a hundred years and those families now have big money and lots of assets in their trusts and they’re being fully protected. Now, the government needs a treasury, so they’re setting up the internal revenue service and the Internal Revenue Code. These families didn’t want their trusts taxed to death.

Lucky for them, they had friends and family in high places in Washington that were part of writing the very first Internal Revenue Code. Since the inception of the tax code in early 1900, there has been a provision that gives tax mitigation benefits to our trust. I doubt it’s ever going to be taken out of the tax code because there are too many big high-powered people that make use of it with their trusts. With this trust, it’s a very novel trust structure.

For most people who have even heard of a trust, their context is usually a living trust. A living trust is what’s called a Grantor Trust. It’s typically something governed by state statute. State statute prescribes what it needs to do and how it needs to work and it provides one benefit, you get to avoid probate taxes when you die. That’s about all it does. In a grantor trust, which is what that trust is. You give assets to the trust but it doesn’t protect the assets at all. For families that have lots of wealth or are growing their wealth actively, you need something more than the living trust.

I was first introduced to a similar trust structure, although still a little different, back in 2004. Back then, my business was coaching, mentoring, and joint venture brokering. The woman that introduced me to it has since retired. She had something she called an Intellectual Property Trust. It made any income derived from intellectual property 100% tax deferred. I’m like, “You can do that?” I took 2.5 years of trust law in law school. That’s two years longer than any other required course of action in law school. You’d think I would’ve known that but I didn’t.

When you go out to trust lawyers, they each specialize. A lot of times they’ve heard some of this other stuff. What I found as I’ve been doing research is you go to a trust lawyer and they’re like, “We haven’t heard about this or you can’t do this.” Until they do more research. That’s so relevant because you haven’t heard about it. A lot of people won’t have heard about it.

For years, I’ve been researching and studying trust, and let me tell you. On this particular trust structure, conservatively I have something in excess of 6,000 hours worth of research. It’s not a small amount of research. I don’t expect any of my clients to go out and do even six hours of research. That’s why they have me. When I found this trust in 2004, it worked phenomenally well until 2010 when the person that introduced me to it decided to retire.

It was structured in a way that was required to renew annually with a new fee. When she retired, she didn’t give us a way to continue renewing. All my back taxes that had been deferred came due instantaneously. It was horrible. I went on a mission in 2010 to find another trust that could continue. My tax defer all the way that I had had it. I had not been able to find it until about a few years ago. When I found similar trust but not intellectual property trusts, every time I looked at them, I found another issue.

Down the rabbit hole, I’d go doing more research, which is what led me to the unique structure that we have now. It combines 7 or 8 different kinds of trust into a singular trust so that it can provide ironclad asset protection. When I say ironclad, I mean ironclad. No judgments, liens, levies, and often, even divorce are going to reach assets held in this type of trust. I’m not going to explain why now but we’ll get into it a little later.

The second big benefit is tax mitigation for real estate investors. First, under Section 643 of the Tax Code, any capital gains income, the capital gains taxes are completely and totally eliminated, not deferred. Second, any passive income, which for real estate investors, is rent and lease income. It is 100% tax-deferred in perpetuity. Now, if we have entrepreneurs who have active business income, which you would have from a brick-and-mortar business whether you’re a dentist, a chiropractor, a doctor, a carwash, or whatever, you usually have active business income.

Using a multiple trust structure that I like to call the trifecta package, we can even find ways of getting rid of the taxes on the active business income completely legally. Tax mitigation is the second large benefit. The third one, and to me, the singular most important one, is helping to pass wealth down for generations. This is not a trust that dies when you die or when you and your spouse die.

This is a multigenerational trust. It is going to be here from one generation to the next generation and so on. We don’t have crystal balls so I can’t tell you how many years that is. Until 21 years after the death of the last heir to the last beneficiary, the trust continues to exist. At the time that it terminates, everyone has been gone for 21 years.

At that time, whatever remained in the trust, usually the IRS seizes it, sells it, and uses it to satisfy all the back taxes for all those years. For people like us who want to make a difference in the world, what we’re able to do because of this unique structure is gigantic because we’re keeping the wealth in the trust so that we’ve got that much more to do good with.

 

You even structure that in the trifecta as part of the way that you do things because you do a family foundation in there too. Ladies, I’m jumping ahead but that was part of what excited me so much. In her trifecta, she’s got the personal trust, the business trust, and a personal foundation to help do more good in the world.

It is a private family foundation and is a 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization. Using those three trusts together, I know it sounds like I’m bragging but it blows my mind all that it can do for both you and your family and the heir that you haven’t even met because they’re not even born yet. Even the whole world, given the foundation, is a part of the mix. I’m very blessed. This was something that you’ll be okay with me saying was divinely guided. This is not something that I figured out. The universe and energy led me to this. I cannot take credit for it myself. It would be so wrong to do that.

Gina, there was a story you were going to tell before we talked about the benefits but I want to recap the three big benefits in a couple of sentences. What are the three big benefits?

The first one is the Ironclad Asset Protection. No creditors are going to reach this through judgment, liens, and levies. I even have two clients that were able to protect properties from an imminent domain. One in Arkansas and one in Louisiana. The second big benefit is the Massive Tax Mitigation. With the trifecta package especially, we can sit down at the beginning of the year, have a conversation and I can ask, “How much do you want to pay on taxes this year?” Regardless of what the answer is, the strategy using the three trusts together, we can come up to that exact number.

The tax mitigation is like capital gains, passive income, and active income for all three of these.

You’ll never have to do a 1031 exchange ever again.

I was about to slip up and say that. What was the third benefit?

The third big benefit is Transferring Wealth To Future Generations and doing good in the world.

I wanted to let you know that those are the top three things that we’re talking about. If this is interesting to you, please stay tuned. Who’s not interested in it? Isn’t it cool? I wanted to make sure the ladies got to read that, Gina. You were heading into a story. Do you want to do that?

Back in school, I didn’t learn about any of this at all. In law school, you take one semester of Trust Law, that’s it. I was very interested in trust, especially for businesses. I took two extra years of Trust Law but I didn’t get to learn about it then either. Had the woman not brought this to me in 2004 with Intellectual Property Trust, I don’t know that I would’ve ended up here now. The more I learn about trust, the more excited it gets me.

Every year, Notre Dame is different. This is the 49th year in 2022. In October 2022, they put a symposium on and it’s the Trust and Taxation symposium. I’ve known about that years ago when I was in law school. Even in that symposium, they didn’t talk about what you can do with this trust structure. They did finally, for the first time, in 2021 in the 48th Annual Trust and Taxation Symposium. Guys, don’t be like, “Why didn’t I hear about this?” I’m telling you, even lawyers aren’t going to have heard about this. It came from this unique journey that I have been on for so many years.

Gina, my question as you tell this story is you can’t make up a trust, can you? How does that even happen that you can create this individual unique trust out of your learnings? I thought that a trust was a thing that was created by the IRS. There’s structure and all of this other stuff around it. How do you create it?

There are two kinds of trusts. There are Statutory Trusts and Contractual Trusts. What we’re talking about is a contractual trust, not a statutory trust. In a contractual trust, it has to follow the rules of contract law. Where do we get the Rules of Contract Law? The Uniform Commercial Code. That’s been adopted in all 50 states. When I first started down the path of writing this trust and creating it, I started by looking at the uniform commercial code to make sure we were going to meet all of the contract law requirements.

I took what’s been done in the past through other contractual trusts. I combined 7 or 8 of them into one instrument. The rules are governed by things like the Uniform Trust Code. We have one. It’s been adopted in almost every state. We also have something called the Uniform Principal and Income Act. It’s been adopted in better than 40 states. Uniform Principal and Income Act governs accounting principles for what’s called a Complex Trust. It’s called Fiduciary Accounting.

This is in the Tax Code in the IRS, yes?

This is not in the Tax Code. This is separate from the Tax Code but in the Tax Code, it says, “When it comes to what’s called a complex trust, it is governed for tax purposes by a combination of the trust instrument itself.” That’s first and foremost. Second is a local law, which is the Uniform Principal and Income Act. Third, by the tax code, which is very strange. Who would’ve thought that something other than the tax code would control federal taxes?

A complex trust is governed for tax purposes by a combination of the trust instrument itself, the local law, and the tax code. Who would have thought that something other than the tax code would control federal taxes? Share on X

I am here to tell you if you want to look it up, go find it on the IRS website the 1041 Tax Return Form. That’s the form that a Complex Trust would file. Scroll to page two. On page two, it starts with schedule A. The middle is Schedule B. Read line eight. Line eight says, “Enter accounting income for the tax year as dictated by the trust instrument and local law,” right on a federal tax form. As I realized all of these things, I’m like, “Oh my goodness.” I have a contract that has to follow contract law that, for other principles, has to follow the trust instrument and local law. Pulling it all together was not as difficult as you might think because I’ve been writing contracts for many years.

It’s all supported. I know when you and I started talking about it, you sent me the whole IRS code regarding trust.

I sure did.

It’s all supported in the whole trust. All of this is completely legal according to the IRS, right?

My partner is a practicing attorney out of Burbank, California. He’s an estate planning attorney. I would go to him when I had questions about estate planning stuff to make sure that we were complying with all the rules there. It works in all 50 states. The way this trust is structured, it is treated as a common law trust. What that means is it works in any country whose legal system follows the common law like the UK and many countries in Europe and South America. It’s all over the world. More than 70% of our legal systems are based on common law. This trust gives you flexibility even if you want to be living abroad because of that where a living trust wouldn’t work out, just so you know.

That’s an American thing. One of the questions that I asked you back then is when you’re looking at the IRS Code, the laws are so old. It’s all written in 1980 or 1972. It’s way back then. My concern is what if it changes? Am I going to get caught in this whirlwind or trapped by the IRS when they changed the rules?

As I said when I told you the story about our old money families here in America, Section 643 of the Tax Code is what gives us the tax mitigation power that the trust has. It has been in place since the very first tax code was written. Now, fast forward to 2021 when Vice President Harris and President Biden took office in April 2022, they have to disclose their tax returns for the first time once they take office.

Also, at the same time, Dr. Fauci came on to head the COVID task force and had to do the same thing. All newcomers to Washington have to do it. If you look at their publicly available tax returns, you will see that they received income from their tax advantage trusts that take advantage of 643 of the Internal Revenue Code. Many people in Washington are making use of trusts that use this part of the tax code. I can’t imagine any of them being willing to make changes to it because it’s going to hurt them, not just hurt us.

In the current administration, they’re doing that but this is true for almost every single administration, would you say?

I haven’t gone back to the mid-1990s. I haven’t gone any further back than that but every administration since the mid-1990s, it is 100% true for.

It’s not just the current. It’s the way that they do business in Washington.

There is something that governs how tax attorneys practice law and what they have to do in front of the tax bar. It’s governed by something called Circular 230. It’s put out by the IRS. In Circular 230, there is a section that says, “Members of the tax bar, tax attorneys, are allowed to write written opinion letters that their tax paying clients can rely on.” Now, it’s got a very prescribed format that has to be followed and has to include certain details.

 

If a taxpayer, meaning all of us, were to rely on a written opinion letter from a member of the tax bar, the IRS later came back and said, “That letter is wrong. They are not allowed to assess penalties at all.” For my clients, we have a team of tax attorneys who are all separate practitioners in their own practice. They can’t be part of Abundance Group Trust but we can make introductions to them for you. If you want the best protection I could give you from something happening down the road, we’ll set up a time for you to talk to one of the tax attorneys so you can get a written opinion letter. I don’t want to say it this way but it’s like a get-out-of-jail-free card in Monopoly because it will protect you.

There’s one other piece with those partners I want you to mention.

Every one of the attorneys that work with our clients not only has the normal malpractice insurance. They also have errors and omissions coverage. The reason being, and that’s $1 million per occurrence. Each one of them is required to carry that or they’re not working with our clients. That way, God forbid, something did happen and the IRS says, “No, the letter is wrong. Now you owe back taxes plus interest.” It might not be the equivalent of malpractice. You can’t recover against the attorney’s malpractice insurance but the errors and omissions policy would certainly cover you for up to $1 million per occurrence. That is good peace of mind.

We got all of that stuff that I’m like, “These are the things that make me nervous.”

If you heard about that, you weren’t even willing to have a more in-depth conversation with me.

That’s true. Ladies, you need to know that. Gina is a close friend of mine. I trust her. I’ve trusted her with my business. I’ve trusted her with my life in so many cases and vice versa but I was not willing to continue any conversation about a trust unless I knew it was fully legal and I was fully protected in case something came up.

I didn’t push you. I knew at some point when the time was right, we would have that conversation. I’m so excited that we finally did.

Me too. Now that we’ve gotten all out of the way so people can open up, let’s talk about trust.

My favorite. Let me talk about it this way first. I promise to tell you what a complex trust was. You’re going to laugh but there are two kinds of trust. A Simple Trust and a Complex Trust. It doesn’t mean that it’s complicated. It’s a legal term. The legal definition of a complex trust is any trust that is not a simple trust.

I hate lawyers who do that, but what is a simple trust? A simple trust is a trust that must distribute 100% of its income at least annually. A living trust is a great example of simple trust. For those who understand LLCs that are single-member LLCs, it’s a pass-through entity. You don’t have to file a separate tax return for a single-member LLC. It’s taxed on your 1040 return. A simple trust works the exact same way.

It’s a pass-through trust because it’s distributing 100% of its income at least annually. That income gets taxed on whoever received the money called the Beneficiary whoever that person is on their 1040 return. In a complex trust, the trust is not required to distribute ever until it terminates. With a complex trust, especially with ours, it has income.

The income gets added to the corpus of the trust. Corpus is Latin for the body. All that means is income comes in, it gets put in an account in the name of the trust. Now that it’s in the name of the trust, it’s not required to get distributed. Instead, it can be invested. It can be used to pay for lots of things. The list of what it can’t pay for is shorter than the list of what it can pay for.

There are only three things it cannot pay for and that is food, fun, and fashion, meaning clothing. It can pay for health, so medical expenses. It can pay for educational expenses. I went from Gina Gaudio-Grace to Dr. Gina Gaudio-Grace, when I set up my trust and realized, “I can use tax-deferred dollars to go back to school and get my PhD,” so I did. That was so much fun.

Education, it can also pay for maintenance and support. For your children, it can pay for food and clothing until they turn 21. It can pay for their education from preschool up through graduate school and post-graduate school. Now, the other cool thing about it is because the trust is not required to distribute ever until termination, it becomes an exempt asset for purposes of financial aid forms. If your children are going to private school, you do not tell any of the financial aid forms about the income or assets held in this trust.

It is the only trust that is totally exempt from financial aid. Let me tell you what that does before I tell you in other ways it’s an exempt asset. On a financial aid form, when you don’t report it, you’re going to look like a popper on paper. I have one family. It was one of the first ones I experienced this with. It was so incredible. Their son wanted to go to my alma mater in Notre Dame. They had about a $20 million net worth.

Notre Dame’s tuition that year was about $74,000. We set up the trust. Now it’s time to file for financial aid forms and they’ve got practically nothing and practically no income. Notre Dame reduced his tuition from $74,000 to $15,000 and he got need-based money, not student loans that had to be repaid but grants to cover the $15,000, plus room and board, and books. That’s what happens when everything is in the trust and there’s no income and assets to report outside of the trust.

When everything's in the trust, there's no income and no assets to report outside of the trust. Share on X

It’s also an exempt asset when it comes to Medicare and Medicaid. You set this up and everything gets sold to the trust, not gifted to the trust. Once it’s in the trust, if you ever needed long-term care, you go into long-term care and you instantly qualify for Medicaid because it is an exempt asset with no look-back period. In so many ways, this is incredible from what it can do for helping with educational expenses for your children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren to what it can do with things like long-term care.

That’s awesome, especially for me, I’m a sandwich generation. I’m taking care of elderly parents and then there’s also kids going to college and that thing. That’s amazing on both of those sides but what happens to me in the middle? What can I use it for in my own life?

Pretty much everything just not for food, fun, and fashion. If we set up that trifecta package we talked about with the personal trust, the business trust, and the foundation, your foundation is so incredible. It’s because as a founder and trustee within the foundation, the foundation can pay for fringe benefits. One of the fun things that the trust cannot pay for is vacations. The foundation can pay for family retreats to solidify the family unit up to once per quarter.

If you want to do more vacations than that, like Moneeka who loves to travel all over the place as often as she can, then in between family retreats, you can go on what is called site visits. Maybe Moneeka decides she wants to go to Bali. She goes to Bali. She goes and looks for some good work that her foundation can do while she’s there. That is a legitimate use of the foundation’s money and therefore, a foundation can pay for the whole trip.

I do that. I go to Bali and look at what we can do to help.

When we combine them together, the list of what you can’t pay for is way shorter than the list of what you can’t pay for, pretty much anything. It’s going to own all of your assets through a sale to the trust. Let’s say you’ve got your primary residence. You’re going to sell that to the trust. If the trust doesn’t have money when you do it, it’s going to give you a specialized form of promissory note called the Demand Note.

That demand note’s going to have a small interest rate based on the AFR tables that the IRS sets. It’s 3.5% now. If we took the value of all of the assets at basis that you sell to the trust and put that all into a promissory note, anytime you need money to cover food, fun, or fashion, you take it out by reducing the value of that note. 3.5% is the tax rate for the interest, so 3.5% is what’s going to get attributed to interest income on a 1099 INT. The balance of it is all repayment of principle on your note.

You don’t get taxed on that.

No, not at all because it’s repayment of principle. It’s incredible what the trust can do. You literally live your life and run your business out of the trust or the foundation.

Isn’t that hard, like more paperwork and complication?

You would think that because we didn’t learn about this stuff in school. I am here to tell you, 30 to 45 days after you set it up, you’re going to wake up one morning and feel like you just had the biggest a-ha moment of your life. It’s a paradigm shift. From that moment forward, you’re going to realize it’s easier than what it is outside of the trust. Everything is simpler. You don’t have to scrounge for deductions to get your tax bill down at the end of the year.

It’s all going to have tax deferral or elimination of taxes, so you don’t have to worry about it. I think it keeps people more honest on their tax returns, but believe it or not, you don’t have to scrounge for those deductions. It doesn’t need to be deducted because it’s tax-deferred or tax eliminated, which is awesome. In the beginning, it will feel hard but hang in there. Get through the training that we provide and the handholding that comes with it. It will simplify everything, especially business.

Talk to us a little bit about the training because that’s valuable. This is one of those things that I have to confess with the trust that I personally have built already. They committed to lots of training and I pay $50 a month for all of this stuff. I feel like I never got trained and I don’t have access to people. I’m still paying for that. Those are a couple of things. Are there maintenance fees? Talk to us a little bit about the training.

I’m going to start with a second question first. Remember, how I started this was business because of what happened to me in 2010 when I lost my tax deferral. You don’t ever have to pay after the initial investment if you choose not to. The Trust is yours. It won’t ever get invalidated. You continue to use it for generations to come with my blessings. No extra payments on it at all. It needs a tax return but any entity you set up is going to need a tax return every year anyway but that’s it.

For training, every Trust has a training podcast anywhere from 6 to 8 hours in length. It’s given to you in video, audio, and written format. Whatever style you have for learning best, you’ve got it right there for you. Each lesson will come with assignments. At each step, you listen to the training, go off and do the homework, and come back and do the next step. We also include things like we have calls three days a week. There are Q&A calls. On Wednesdays and Fridays at noon Eastern, it deals with the Personal Trust. On Mondays, one Monday is the Business Trust, the next Monday is the foundation.

My commitment to you folks is every one of those calls will be me leading it. I don’t ever leave that up to other people on my team. In addition to all of that, those are all kept in podcasts too, written, video, and audio format for all of those calls. We also include a Trust advisor. I have seventeen Trust advisors on my team. All of them started out as Trust clients and then became Trust advisors. These are not people who learned about the Trust and I’m paying them to do something. They came to me wanting to work with clients because they love the trust so much in their own lives.

That changed everything for me. I’m so blessed to have had that happen. You get your own Trust advisor. That Trust advisor is there to help you in any way, shape, or form that you might need over the course of the next twelve months. If that’s not enough, you get a tax advisor. We include the investment, the first year’s tax return, and consulting with the tax advisor throughout the next twelve months. Now, at the end of the year, if you want to continue receiving all of those different pieces of support, it’s $2,000 a year for the personal trust, $1,500 for the business trust and the foundation, that’s a gift for me to you.

We are here to support our clients. My mission is to touch the life of every person on this planet in a meaningful way. I can’t do it on my own. It’s by working with my clients, helping them to more meaningfully touch the lives that they come into contact with. Together, that can be our reality. I am here to support you as much or as little as you would like.

Thank you for that. What happens if they don’t pay the extra $2,000, $1,500, or whatever then something comes up with a trust? if something maybe goes wrong or there are questions, what happens then? Do they get any support?

They still have access to the support desk where they can ask a question. If the answer something went wrong and the Trust is getting sued for some reason. We may need to come in and help oversee it. If it’s something that would jeopardize the trust itself, we’re going to do that without having you pay us a bunch of money to do it.

If it’s something else that you need support on, we can either do something on an hourly basis or that should come back into support packages later on. Whatever serves you best. I am always accessible through email and text. Every client has both my email address and my text. I have an entire succession plan in place. At some point in time, not any time soon, I’m going to either pass away or decide to retire or who knows what.

My nephew, Ben, who I helped raise, I have no children, is 32 years old now in 2022. He is our fulfillment director and he will be taking over for me when I am gone. In addition to Ben, we have an endowment that we’ve created at the University of Notre Dame that will be paying for three scholarships each year. One for a law student, one for an MBA student, and one for either a Master’s of Accounting or a Master’s of Finance.

Those students who receive the scholarship will be required to work with us for one summer throughout their education. It’s a way for us to get to know them and them to get to know us. Ben will be pulling in one from each discipline when he takes over. When all of them decide to retire, they will pull in three more to take over so that your heirs will have the same level of support that you had.

I would not be doing my job of serving our clients had we not found that solution to make that happen. We even have trainings already ready in a podcast for successors. None of our clients have passed away, so their successors haven’t had to take over but successors are welcome to come into the live calls now. They can go through trainings now, whatever serves you best. When you are gone, the training is ready for them.

I’ve got so many questions, Gina, as always, and we’re out of time.

I know. That’s why I said let’s do a webinar together.

Let’s do that. Ladies, if this is intriguing to you, there are a couple of things that we have that I want to offer you for more information. As I said, I’ve been talking to Gina about this probably for many months. I’m very slow like nothing happens until you take action but here I am, a year and a half later.

It’s because you take your commitment to your readers so seriously, Moneeka. I can say that honestly as your business coach and mentor. Until you have 100% comfort with something, you’re not going to bring it to your people. I commend you for that and encourage it.

As a business coach and mentor, until you have 100% comfort with something, you're not going to bring it to your people. Share on X

Thank you. My heart for my ladies is like the thing that drives me, and in my own business. Ladies, I know that you feel this too. You don’t want to bring something to your family that you don’t feel confident about. I didn’t want to bring this to my husband until I felt like I could talk about it. It’s like driving a car.

I don’t need to know all the mechanics about how a car works to drive it but I need to know enough to take good care of it and make a sales pitch to my husband about why I want this particular car like my Tesla, for instance. I need to know enough and for me, I think I need to know a little bit more. I’m a little bit of not a brainiac as in smart but a brainiac as in I need a lot of information before I make decisions like this.

If you want more information, the first thing that I would recommend is please read this show a few times. Maybe you feel like you got everything out of it. I always get a little extra when I listen to a show over and over again. If you can stand it, I would read this one a few times. When I say open up, I don’t mean like I have any interest at all in influencing you but for me, getting a lot of that initial stuff out of the way allowed me to move forward to get more information.

If that’s what you are needing or wanting, that’s an opportunity. Read the show a few more times. We’ve also got some other things and opportunities that we want to present to you. You’ve heard how much time she’s spending on the trust and the training, so she doesn’t have a lot of extra time. On that other extra time, she’s talking to clients. All you guys that call, she’s going to be talking to you.

She has a lot of appointments. Her time is very valuable as is all of our time but she is very graciously offered to do a webinar for us. This is just for my community. She holds friends and family to webinars where she’s held one. It’s now in the can and that’s for all of the people that she’s affiliated with. Because she and I have a special relationship, she’s offering an opportunity for my ladies, which I feel so grateful for. Thank you for that.

You are so welcome.

We’ve got a date where we’re going to get together and talk to you ladies on October 20th, 2022 which is a Thursday, from 1:00 to 2:30 PM Pacific Time. Check your time zone and you can adjust for that. Anyway, that’s going to be a time. I will say this about Gina and myself, we will stay on as long as the questions go. I know she’s had webinars that have lasted two hours but we want to make sure that your questions are answered. This is an important topic for wealth building, wealth sustainability and legacies.

I consider myself wealthy. I’m very grateful to have what I’ve had, to have the success that I’ve had, and to be able to grow my own wealth, but we don’t hear about this stuff. In another one of Gina’s webinars, she said she has a billionaire client who had never heard about this stuff but this is how the educated wealthy.

I’m not talking educated like in college. I’m talking about the wealthy that get educated on their money. This is the thing that they do to continue to build their wealth and to pass wealth down to organizations and causes that they believe in, their families, and so forth. You’re getting a very special education here and something that certainly people in the middle class don’t hear about.

Think about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Jeff Bezos and his foundation, and Warren Buffet’s Foundation. Their foundations go hand in hand with their trusts and how did they get to the point that they’re at? The trusts were the secret sauce.

The more money that you’re able to hold onto, the loft of compounding, the more that that can grow, which gives you more opportunity to do good in the world and your family. Family first then do good in the world. It makes it easier. You don’t have to struggle so hard to keep making that money because you’re not giving as much of it away. I know that there are a lot of emotional reactions to this by people that don’t understand the way that it works. That’s why I’m here to educate on that. I want to give you an opportunity to know if that’s something that you’re not going to learn anywhere else. I didn’t know about it.

 

Most of the people that I know about it don’t know about it. Most of the lawyers that I talked to trust lawyers don’t know about it. It’s a gift that Gina brought this to me and I wanted to make sure that I give you, ladies, the opportunities. Take advantage of it if it feels right and good to you. Please come join us for our live webinar. You can ask Gina questions. That, again, is on October 20th, 2022 from 1:00 to 2:30 PM Pacific Time.

If you’re coming in later, you’re reading this in a replay. That is also going to have a replay. You can go to BlissfulInvestor.com/TrustWebinar. When you go there, there are going to be a few things that you get to see. I was introduced to this whole concept by a podcast that Gina did with somebody else named Cassie. She had a huge stock capital gain that she was dealing with and was searching for some answers and she had a huge amount of experience with trust. She was able to ask good questions. The webinar or that particular podcast was to die for. It was good.

It’s 47 minutes but watch it. It’s amazing.

It’s good. It’s audio only. Anyway, when you go to this URL, on that page, it’s going to ask you to log in so they know who you are. With the Thank You page, you’re going to have a couple of things. You’re going to have Cassie’s podcast, Cassie’s Q&A webinar, so you’re going to get all of that information, and then you’ll get either the login information for our webinar that’s coming up or if you’re coming in later, you’ll get the replay of our webinar. You’ll also get information on how to contact Gina so you can move forward. Those are the things that you’re going to get if you go to BlissfulInvestor.com/TrustWebinar (https://abundancegroup.com/moneeka-trust-webinar/)  We’re trying to give you as much information as possible.

Don’t feel rushed. Take your time. Give yourself the time to listen and learn and ask questions in your own mind then see if you can find those answers and the information that we’re giving you. When you’re ready, set up some time with Gina. This has taken me a while. Don’t worry if it takes you a while. However, I will say there are some of you out there who are coming out of our stores end of the year. You have had huge capital gains in 2022 and you’re trying to figure out what to do.

That’s why I had Gina on now so that those of you that need her can take advantage of her services before the end of 2022. A lot of this stuff, for the mitigation of taxes, you have to do it in the year that you’re finally the taxes for. You can’t do this by April 15th, 2023. Did you want to comment a little more on that, Gina?

Especially with the foundation being a part of this, you have until the end of 2022 to donate money to your foundation. You can donate up to 30% of your adjusted gross income. For most clients, that means a reduction of their tax bracket. It can make as much as a 35% to 37% reduction of what you pay in taxes but only if you do it before the end of 2022. It’s crucial to Moneeka and I that we get this information into your hands ASAP so that if you need that help, you’ll have it and you won’t have to worry about it from now on.

That’s why we’re recording on a Saturday, ladies. We wanted to get this out to you while you could still think about it. It’s October and I don’t want you dealing with this during the holidays necessarily unless that’s your choice. At least, I’m giving you the information a little bit sooner so that you can take advantage of it. That’s what we’ve got going on. Gina, thank you so much for your time. I love hanging out with you.

Thank you, Moneeka, for having me. I am so looking forward to continuing the conversation and working with your ladies. As you know, you and I have had our hearts joined in helping these women for so long now. It will be wonderful to interact with them directly.

I’m looking forward to that too and to the ladies getting to meet you and me getting to share you. It’s going to be fun. For those of you that have missed, like you’re in January or February you’re reading this, it’s not the end of the world. You’ve got many more years ahead of you over earnings, taxes, and all of those things.

Still, go get the information and get the seeds in your mind so that you can move forward. It’s something whether you take advantage of it or not, ladies. Part of what wealthy people do is learn. We’re in constant learning because there are things that come up in life and you think, “I know about that because. I heard this once.” You know where your resources are to go back and find that information.

I’m trying to train you, ladies, into becoming those wealthy women, the independence, but also the mindset. Much of our mindset isn’t uplifting which we have to do. Part of bliss is having the resources inside of you and the knowledge or the constant learning that helps you to grow your life in the way that you want. Does that make sense?

It sure does.

I hope, ladies, this was super helpful for you. I’m looking forward to seeing those of you that can join us on the 20th. Remember to go to BlissfulInvestor.com/TrustWebinar (https://abundancegroup.com/moneeka-trust-webinar/)  and I will see you then. I’ll see you in the next episode. I appreciate you, ladies. Remember, goals without action are dreams, so get out there, take action and create the life your heart deeply desires. Love you. Bye.

 

Important Links

• Abundance Group Trust
• Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
• BlissfulInvestor.com/TrustWebinar

 

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