Book Introduction

By Jason Watson, CPA
Posted Saturday, August 3, 2024

Conversational Tone

This book is written in a conversational tone. If you like perfect prose and editorial exactness that you would expect in a book on brain surgery, then we will be disappointing. We make jokes, some of which are only funny to ourselves. We don’t have the best punctuation. We might even have a missing word or a misspelling. We are nerdy accountants who did everything possible to avoid English literature and writing classes. Yuck!

Duplicate Content

You’ll see about 15 pages of duplicate content. We did this since everyone jumps into a book at different places, especially with our online Knowledge Base version. Time is all you have on earth to sell, and it cannot be inventoried nor is it refundable; just do a Bob Seger and turn the page if you’ve seen it before.

How Did We Get Here?

As mentioned, we found success and professional pleasure with our first book, Taxpayer’s Comprehensive Guide to LLCs and S Corps, which is aimed mostly at small business owners looking for sound business advice and tax reduction strategies. Specifically, the book expands on basic topics such as entity structures, liability protection, benefits and downsides to S corporations, how to elect S Corp status, shareholder payroll, reasonable salary determination, retirement planning and tax planning.

Ok, now what? We recognized a hole in the real estate investor and rental property taxation landscape. Several amazing articles are out there. Several wonderful books on how rentals work and what makes a good rental property are available. However, there is not a lot of concentrated information on taxation of rental properties and real estate investments.

To be certain, and a point that we aim to drive home repeatedly, your job as a real estate investor is not to save taxes. Your primary objective is to build wealth. Yes, saving and at times, deferring taxes, can help build wealth. Far too often we see people chasing the tax buck versus the wealth vision. You can do both, and you can even do them concurrently, but the primary objective remains building wealth. No one sits around at the bingo parlor bragging up how much they saved in taxes through the years.

I Just Got A Rental, What Do I Do?, however, is not a book about determining the efficacy of a real estate investment or rental property purchase. While we have several opinions and professional recommendations on deal structures and lending combinations, we do not present them in our book. It will also not specifically guide you on running your rental, choosing your tenants or guests, or finding success in the short-term rental space.

Rather, this book is about the tax effects of real estate investing and owning rental properties, and is written with the general taxpayer in mind. Too many resources simply regurgitate complex tax code without explanation. While in some cases tax code and court opinions are duplicated verbatim because of precision of the words, this book strives to explain many technical concepts in layperson terms with some added humor and cheeky opinions. We believe you will find this book educational as well as amusing.

Enjoy! And please send us all comments, hang-ups and static. This book is as much yours as it is ours, except the tiny royalty part- that’s ours. Stop by and we’ll buy you a beer with the pennies.

WCG CPAs & Advisors
2393 Flying Horse Club Drive, Colorado Springs CO 80921

719-387-9800 office

support@wcginc.com