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Well, welcome back to ditch the suits.

Steve Campbell here with Travis Moss.

Folks, as we told you, this is a five part series, so this is going to be your last two episodes that have been a part of this series, talking about proposed tax policies that may be potentially coming down the pipeline.

Appreciate all of you that have been commenting on our YouTube videos through the series.

Throughout we see those, we're responding to those.

Those mean a lot to us.

So post questions, leave your thoughts.

But for those that are new to digital suits, my name is Steve Campbell.

I serve as the chief brand officer at Seed planning group.

Travis, the other guy on the screen, or if you're listening on the other voice you're going to hear, is our CEO at Seed.

Seed is a fee only financial planning firm.

We have a fiduciary obligation to put our clients best interests first, and ditch the suits is all about us bringing our collective consciousness, years of experience working with financial planning clients to bring to you what we've discovered and helping people really, hopefully get the most in their money in life.

Travis, current events we always like to mix up ditch the suits topics.

We've been talking about proposed potential tax law changes.

This is our last two episodes.

Kind of some grab bags we're going to be throwing out there.

But why don't you talk to us about the importance of kind of setting up this last two part conversation?

Yeah, so we think about financial health, and that's what we talk about all the time, getting more out of your money and out of your life.

And part of that is taxes.

So when we think about taxes, it's not just our taxes that we pay as individuals.

We gotta think about our property taxes, our sales taxes, income taxes, but we ought to be thinking about our errors, what kind of taxes they're gonna be paying.

Um, I think we need to be considerate of the taxes that other people have to pay, because as we're going to talk about today, and as we've talked about during some of the last couple of episodes, just because you don't pay the tax as a tax bill doesn't mean you don't pay for the tax through the cost of goods or the cost of services or loss earnings on your investments or things like that.

So it's really important not to have this kind of tunnel vision view about how taxes work and whether or not they impact us.

And hey, as long as it doesn't affect me, I don't care, because it does.

And it does trickle down to you.

And I think it does influence what you should or should not do, especially over the next two years.

While the current tax laws are sunsetting, there's some opportunities that may go away for people that they may never have again or they may not have for a long time, or there could be some enhancements to them.

And I think it's just important to understand how these things work.

The other thing is, I think it's important to be empowered to not be so worked up by the things that other entertainers are trying to tell you.

By other entertainers, I mean the general media, anybody who's trying to drum up viewership based on getting you revved up in one direction or the other, you should be able to get facts and have somebody explain the facts in a way that's plain English, but not have somebody necessarily tell you how you should think about them.

Right.

And so we'll talk about our perspective on this stuff.

Hopefully that gives people something to compare other things that they're hearing.

But, you know, in the last three episodes, we talked about what could happen if the government raises taxes on corporations.

We've talked about what could happen if the government starts taxing unrealized capital gains.

Those are some of the really big things that are being proposed right now.

Right.

And we're going to switch that a little bit and focus on, like what you said, a grab bag of increasing taxes, because as if those was, that wasn't enough of very interesting things that are going to cost people more money.

There's a whole bunch of additional taxes that are being proposed right now.

And the reason why we kind of leapfrogged in line this series of episodes versus what we were doing is because, you know, we're about to vote for our policymakers.

And it's important that you are informed when you're making those decisions, whichever way that you go, just be informed when you're making it and understand what you're, what you're supporting and what you're asking for.

I just think it's important to be informed.

That's all.

So one of the statements that's come out a lot is that we're not going to change.

And it's come out of the current administration.

It's come out of some of the people running.

It's not just the presidential people.

It's, you know, the, the senators and House of Representatives, like a lot of people, are saying this stuff.

So again, I don't want to zone in on any political party or any individual.

What I'm.

All I'm doing is responding to things that have been thrown out there publicly and things that people have brought up and maybe misunderstood or not understood how they could affect them.

But one of the statements that's been thrown out a lot is no change for americans making less than $400,000.

And so I want to talk about what that actually means today.

The other things I want to talk about is the significant number of proposed punitive, like taxes against high income earners.

So specifically targeting a small group of people, and we'll talk about who a high income earner actually is and who's kind of in this box of people that is really being targeted.

But the reason why I say punitive is because it's a lot of different taxes.

They're not talking about, Steve, I'm going to raise your taxes by 2%.

Right.

Okay, fine.

Raise my taxes by 2%.

They're talking about, Steve, I'm going to raise your taxes by, let's say, one and a half or 2% five different ways all at the same time.

So it's not just 2%, it's maybe 2% times five.

You know, that type of thing.

There's.

There's a compounding math here that when you put it in, totality becomes really crazy.

And one of the examples that we're going to use a lot is imagine I, you own a house and your property taxes are $5,000 a year.

And imagine I walked in and said, next year they're going to be 10,000.

Yep.

Because that's what we're talking about.

That's 100% increase on your property taxes.

Oh, it's only $5,000.

Yeah, but it's a 100% increase.

You could say, oh, it's only a 10% assessment on the house, but it's a hundred percent increase.

Yep.

So we're talking about your tax budget increasing by not one or 2%, but tens and even hundreds of percents depending on this.

Sounds kind of weird, but significant, significant jumps.

And then we're going to round that out with.

And I think that you and I were talking before this show, we're probably end up with two episodes here, so we'll probably cut it at some point because I'm going to probably be too long winded and we're going to have to shut me up and maybe split this over two episodes.

But we've got the potential loss of cap of cost basis step up at death.

And what that means.

That's a very significant issue for people who aren't making $400,000.

That is one that could impact you.

Situations where tax policies here that they're talking about could create double taxation.

So essentially you could be being taxed on the same money twice.

Yep.

Which is, which is an interesting phenomenon.

And then that could even happen even if you're under the $400,000 kind of threshold.

Some of these things that we're talking about.

And then depending on where you live, your actual real income tax levels could reach over 50%.

So just let that set in for a second.

When you're thinking about more people need to pay their fair share.

Think about what that is though, is 50% of every dollar you make fair.

And again, that's just some of the taxes we're talking about.

There's a whole bunch of other taxes that are getting introduced outside of those particular taxes that they're talking about.

And so that's what we're going to dig into.

Let's take a quick break to hear a word from your sponsor.

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Yeah, and if you're brand new to ditch the suits.

Travis and I try to be very sensitive to the fact that this is not a politically charged series as much as just bringing you information to understand, really, you're here to get the most of your money in life.

How could potentially policy changes from either side really impact you?

Your bottom line?

And we had somebody from our first few episodes who had commented, this isn't going to affect me.

I don't even have a pension.

What are you even talking about?

We have listeners from all ages and all backgrounds listening to the show.

So some of the information might apply to you in your current season.

But you got to remember, we're trying to help people of all different spectrums coming into this, really understand how this taxation could potentially affect them.

And we had laughed off in our series that this was kind of an emergency.

We inputted this series because of how important it is to stop the current series that we're in.

So Travis and I are always listening to what you guys need to know.

We're always paying attention to current events.

And for the hosts of this show, if there is something that is being potentially introduced that really could impact you, well, we want to get out in front of it to let you know what you need to know.

So you talked about grab bag going to be two episodes.

It's too long to give you so much information in a single car, drive back and forth.

So we're going to break this up.

But one of the first things you had talked about is kind of this notion being affloaded around that there will be no change for americans making less than $400,000.

Let's kind of break this down and help people understand.

Is that true or what are maybe some of the moving parts that could be involved in the.

That, you know, one thing that I do want to do, and it's just my combative nature.

It's my red personality.

Here we go, folks.

Before we dive into the $400,000 number, if you're not interested in something like this, if you don't care about how this works, and then you don't care to the point where you're going to go make comments and stuff online, my only advice would be, don't be so damn selfish, because this is really, these are, these are things that will affect you.

Whether you're paying the tax or not, they will affect you.

At the last episode, we made a point about having a pension or not.

Even if you don't have all of this trickles down, you can't disrupt the cycle of money the way money moves around the economy and not have a profound impact.

We learned that during COVID and I think that we've done a very, very good job on this show trying to establish, you know, that there is a system that we live in where money is moving from party to party.

And, you know, there's kind of rules to play.

If you change the rules midway and blow up a couple of players to benefit a couple of other players, you're going to have unintended consequences.

You're going to have people that stand up and flip the board over.

You're going to have people that, you know, there's just going to be consequences that you don't understand.

So if you're somebody who's saying, well, you know, I don't really care about taxes.

You should still listen because even if you don't care about taxes, taxes are going to impact you.

There is nobody in the United States immune to what happens with our tax laws.

They all come home to roost.

If you want to complain about inflation, if you want to say, I go to the grocery store and goods are too expensive, you need to be concerned about taxes because increasing taxes and fees will increase the cost of goods flat out.

Has to.

If you're concerned about cause of housing, you have to be concerned about government regulation and taxes because all of that stuff goes into the cost of housing.

Right?

Like, there's so much stuff that you, you can't just be, like, willfully ignorant on.

And what we try to do is boil it down so that, okay, at least I can get some tidbits of this and I can at least understand that those are important things.

And, you know, how do I know if this is something that's real or if it's something somebody's just trying to get me, you know, worked up about?

So I'm off my high horse a little bit.

I don't know if you want to interject before you go over to the 400k folks.

I've known Travis for about a decade.

That was the softest introduction I've had him give.

That was combative.

But it, but it's important, right?

Because when you're making content from our industry, helping people, you get people from all walks of life.

It's important for you to understand what really happening and understand truth.

What you do with that is completely up to you.

As a listener, we're going to present some facts to you.

How you interpret that is completely up to you.

But we'd rather ditch the suits.

Become a place where you can be empowered with knowledge that can help you really understand moving parts, who's in power games at play.

And when you hear things like this, no change for Americans making more, making less than $400,000.

On the surface, it sounds like, okay, great, this doesn't involve me.

But like you said, there's trickle down that happens with that.

So start to unwind that for us.

When we hear that, what does that really mean?

Yeah, and there's, there's a mouthful here.

I'm gonna try to keep it succinct and we'll kind of unpack more as we go.

But first of all, it's not, when they say nobody making less than 400,000, are they talking about a household or individuals?

Because most of the time they're talking about households.

And so, but they're not saying households.

They're saying nobody making under 400,000.

Well, most of the time that the way that the taxes are calculated is you go and you file your taxes and they're talking to families.

Here you go and you file your taxes and they aggregate your income up.

And in fact, when we go to the websites and we go out there and we try to figure out, okay, what are you saying?

I've seen the difference between $400,000 for single people, $400,000 for couples, and up to as much as $450,000 for couples.

So what we can take from that is we don't know.

But the highest proposed income, where nothing will change for you, as they're saying, is at $450,000 for a household.

Now, one of the things that they're talking about, and this is what, one of the frustrating things and one of the things that people should have, you know, you should be paying attention to, they're going to play a word game with terminology.

They're talking about income taxes.

Income taxes on your paycheck is all they're talking about right now.

They're not talking about money you make from investments.

They're not talking about capital gains.

When you, you know, sell your rental property or I, you know, when you, when you sell the lake house or when you, you know, make money from your coin collection or whatever else, we're not talking about that.

What they're specifically talking about is your job.

You go to work, you make money.

And some people might say, well, I'll never make more than $400,000.

I never do with everything else.

What happens, though, when, you know, you had that IBM stock when you were a kid and, you know, 60 years later you can sell it for a million dollars, that's going to come back into this equation with additional taxes that they're talking about on top of that.

And it actually could, depending on how they recharacterize, some things end up in that 400,000 bucket, too.

So it's not just when we think about, I'm not in that bucket.

All the other changes and stuff that they're making could actually drop you in that bucket.

Or they're talking about other things as well that would impact you.

And so it's window dressing.

It's like, don't worry.

And the reason why are they doing that?

The whole reason why they're doing that, I've got a stat here I'm going to get out of order for just a hot second.

Go ahead.

But something like if you were to take people that are over the $400,000 income threshold, you're only talking about depending on what stat you find, somewhere between like five and 12% of the american public or something, maybe that's millionaires.

So somewhere in here we're going to talk about this stat.

It is very easy to get 95% of the population to say, yeah, you know, I'm not going to be impacted.

So I don't really care what happens.

And what we're really saying here is, number one, they're not being very clear with it as far as who's going to be in that category, this box.

And then number two, that's only for one type of taxes, but they're proposing all these other kinds of taxes, too, which would, you would be subject to these higher taxes as they're saying, five.

To 12% found it for you.

Google how many Americans have more than one million dollars?

Five to twelve percent, depending on your search results.

Yeah.

So there you go.

They're kind of, they're getting a bunch of people to agree to do something for everybody else who don't have experience in everybody else's shoes.

It's a very, very interesting phenomenon that's happening.

I mean, if you've never had, if you've never paid a $50,000 income tax bill, you don't know what it's like to have a $50,000 income tax bill.

So it's easy to judge somebody else.

But I have never been in that situation.

But anyway, I digress.

So the first thing they're talking right off the top, they're saying, hey, let's, let's increase this top income tax rate.

So these are for the people who make big money, right?

We're going to increase them from 37% to 39.6%.

We're automatically just going to tax them more.

That's what we want to do.

And that's actually, that has nothing to do with 400,000.

I don't even know where they came up with that number.

It's a, if you're an individual, 609,000.

If you're a household, 731,000.

So if your incomes are over those thresholds, you're in the 37% bracket today and they're saying it's going to go to 39.6.

Well, that has nothing to do with the current policymakers.

That is happening because the current tax laws are sunsetting at the end of next year.

So that's going to happen anyway.

So when they come in and say we're going to tax the people making more than 400,000 more.

They're kind of doing that by inaction more than by action.

They're basically saying, like, you know, look at us, we're taxing people with money more.

We're champions of this.

But at the end of the day, that's kind of going to happen anyway unless Congress takes action.

And, you know, who knows what Congress is going to do?

But the way to think about this is it only sounds like a 2.6% increase.

Right?

And so you go, yeah, you know, 2.6%.

Who cares?

It's only 2.6%.

Well, if you do the math, is actually a 9.3% increase.

It's a 9.3% increase over where it's at.

We can say it's only a 2.6% increase from 37 to 39.6, but it's actually a 9.3% as a percentage increase from the base to the new rate.

So that would be.

So to give you an example of why this is important, to think like this.

That would be like me coming in and telling you I'm going to raise your property taxes by 9.3% this year.

Most people would not be comfortable with that.

Correct.

Most people would be freaked out with that.

What if I came in and I said, look, I'm going to increase your natural gas bill by 9.3% this year, your propane bill by 9.3% this year, your school tuition by 9.3% this year.

Right?

Your union dues by 9.3% this year.

You'd be like, hell, no, not me.

But that's right off the top.

That's in one, one class.

And, yeah, it's going to kind of happen anyway unless they act.

The only reason I point that out there is because it's happened in any way.

Right?

So it's like, you know, nobody's, nobody's actually making an effort to do that.

It's just a matter of whether or not Congress extends the current tax cuts and makes them more permanent.

But, and you'll hear that.

You'll hear that on the news, right?

It's the Trump tax cuts.

So, so unless that gets extended.

So you'll hear that no matter what station you list, who the Trump tax cuts are going to sunset, unless Congress does something.

So that's what you're referring to.

And the challenge, when you say, unless that happens.

Yeah.

And the challenge with the, with maybe a lack of transparency on it is, you know, let's face it, there's a group of people that don't like Trump's name on anything.

So even if they like the fact that people making under $400,000 of those tax cuts have a better tax situation than they had prior, they don't want to say that.

So what they're saying is we're going to change the rules and we're going to let people over 400 pay more taxes and people under 400, nothing will change.

What they're really saying is we're going to cherry pick some of the stuff we like, let some of the other stuff go sunset.

So they're talking about new legislation, but they're not also being honest about all these other things.

We're going to talk about that they're proposing separately that have nothing to do with that $400,000 number, but they have to do with other things.

But still to that $400,000 number, there's a thing called NIIT, or net income, net investment income tax.

And this is for people who have a certain amount of money or a certain amount of income off of, like, investments and stuff and have to pay an extra tax of 3.8% on it.

So this happens to people sometimes when they're retired.

Maybe they get a lot of company stock or maybe you sell a property or something like that, a lot of capital gains, you might fall into this category.

So what they're saying is, at $400,000, they want to apply that tax of 3.8%, but they want to increase it to 5%.

They actually want to make it bigger.

So the people, what they're saying is over 400,000, we want to raise your income from 37 to 39.6 or that top tax bracket.

But we also want to add this extra tax.

We want to go from 3.8% to 5%.

And again, you look at that and go, well, what's the big deal with that?

Well, first of all, this was a tax that was created in 2013 only to apply to high income earners.

So this was already a new tax, you know, a little bit over a decade ago.

On this group of people.

It's on capital gains, dividends, rental income, royalty income, passive investment income, and non qualified new income you're already paying taxes on.

It's an extra tax on top of the tax.

They're talking about increasing it.

Back to our word game.

It's not a 1.2% increase.

It is a 31.5% increase of the current rate I'm taking.

If your property taxes, I'm going to increase your property taxes.

Same example here.

31.5% is what they're saying.

That is a huge amount of increased taxes.

Yep.

And you might say, well, you know, they have the money to pay for it.

What would you, how would it feel to you if that happened?

And if it happened, what wouldn't you spend your money on?

Right now?

All of a sudden, you have to pay this bigger tax bill.

What aren't you doing?

You're not going out to eat as much.

Right?

There's things that you can't do because you no longer have the money.

So regardless of whether or not you think, well, people just have too much money to spend, the money stops circulating through the economy.

Right.

Your favorite diner doesn't get that customer as much anymore.

Right?

I mean, the people who do their landscaping don't get as many projects.

That money stops someplace, or the money doesn't get invested in the stock market.

And you could say, well, I don't care about that.

But if everybody stops investing in the stock market, guess who doesn't make any money in the stock market?

You.

Right?

The average Joe doesn't make any money if the guys with the money have to yank all their money out because they're paying more in taxes.

So when you look at this and they go, oh, it's, you know, it's only 2.6% for the higher income tax.

It's only 1.2% for the NIIT tax.

You actually have to add them together because it's the same group of people.

Right.

And again, we've got a laundry list of other taxes.

But so you're talking about huge increases of taxes.

One of the other things that they're talking about, kind of in the same group, they want to reverse what's called the salt deductions.

So the way that the current tax law works, if you remember back in the day, you could deduct all your mortgage interest and all your state income taxes, and they kept that, and they created a bunch of restrictions on it.

Who that hurt the most were wealthy people in high tax states.

So you're talking New York, California, Illinois, places like that, states with high income tax rates who are making a lot of money, paying a lot of state income taxes and able to deduct their state income taxes.

So somebody in Tennessee like us, no state income taxes.

We don't really care.

The state's not taking the money.

But up in New York, the state's taking all your money.

You want that federal deduction.

You don't want to send it to the fed.

You want to send it to the state instead.

So what they're saying is we're going to let that come back.

We're going to, we're going to make that a real thing again.

Think about what they're actually saying, though.

We're going to increase taxes on all the high earners across the country.

And then in a couple of these high tax bases, we're going to give them some huge tax deductions.

We're going to benefit those wealthy people in those high tax states again, which happened to be.

So it's a little bit of a political play there.

But the funny thing is, is they're vilifying wealthy people at the same time they're giving massive credits to certain wealthy people.

They're not credits, but deductions are allowing people to take deductions they otherwise can't take right now.

So it's a, it's a really kind of weird, kind of manipulated kind of process where they're like, we'll take more from those rich people over there and we're going to give more back to those rich people over there, or at least it'll make it a little bit more neutral for them.

So those ones over there on to pay more taxes, those ones over there, they're going to pretty much just be status quo.

Hey guys, Steve Campbell with digital suits.

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So let's get right back to the episode.

And thanks for listening to ditch the Suits podcast.

And sometimes it feels like the way that this is described is that we're going to tax the ultra high net worth and then almost send you as other Americans checks from the difference of what they're going to be spending in taxes.

Right?

So let's tax these people over here so you get more.

But that's not what's happening.

You had left off one of our episodes saying the real problem is the government not getting a handle on their spending.

So even if you did increase these taxes across the board, and let's say the government was able to have all this excess money, it's not that they're using it to spend down government debt that we still owe on.

So where is that money going?

So I think what you did a really nice job of, and again, there's a lot of numbers in this is when you hear 2% or 1.8%.

It doesn't sound that bad because it's not you that's the one paying it, but it does trickle down to you.

And you had talked about incorporations and some of those things, stock buybacks, dividends, things that are given out to you as an employee.

Understanding the importance of how this can actually work might be a little eye opening for people.

If there's anything else in that topic that you want to talk about, go ahead.

But then we also had thrown out as part of the grab bag, propose punitive, like taxes for high income earners.

So you can jump right into that if you got some talking points.

Yeah.

And I think we can cover this.

And then we'll.

We'll break for our next episode just to kind of watching the clock there.

But this is an interesting one.

So they're kind of targeting people over 400,000.

Our house was over 400,000.

They're not clear enough to understand exactly what they're talking about, but they're targeting a certain socioeconomic demographic for Americans making over $1 million per year.

So we would say that those are people who are doing pretty well.

Yep.

Now, you could make a million dollars in one year because you just had a good year, because you just sold a property or something.

Right.

So it doesn't necessarily mean that you make a million dollars every year.

And I think that that's one of the nuances here, that it's lost.

The top 1% of income earners in the US are not the same 1% every year.

You know, people, they have a lot of income because they sell a business or something like that, and then not a lot of income.

So a lot of times, the typical person who's done very well will have certain years where there was major, major income taxes, but there were certain wealth creation events that happened.

So imagine that I come in when those wealth creation events happen, and I really jack up the taxes on you.

Right.

Not only are the tax rates higher with the more money, but now I'm going to create a whole bunch of extra taxes because you know what?

Those darn people who make more than a million dollars, they have too much.

Right.

So it's a really significant concept to get our mind around, because more people could find themselves in these situations maybe once or twice in their life that now will give up a substantially larger portion of their net wealth then.

And they're only thinking, well, it's like, this is really just for the people who are always at a million dollars, you know, that make it all their lives.

And it's not this is that you could get caught in this and inadvertently, but for people making over a million dollars, what they're talking about doing is taxing investment earnings.

So it's like dividends, capital gains, that kind of stuff at the regular income rates rather than capital gains rates.

Capital gains rates are 00:15 and 20%.

And then subject to that NIIT tax that we talked about.

Now they're saying, hey, you know what, we should just tax that as regular income.

That 39 point whatever rate that we were talking about, 39.6 or whatever, they're saying that I've seen one place where they pegged it at 28%.

So I don't know if they're saying, hey, let's essentially change capital gains rate for people over a million to 28%, or if they're saying, let's go all the way up to that 39.6.

They don't seem to be clear on that.

But that's in addition to the NIIT tax increase.

And so what you're really talking about, if you take the top capital gains rate of 20% and not to get into how that's calculated, because that's a different conversation, but let's pretend that you were going to be in the 20% range anyway.

They're talking about increasing you about 8% if you go to 28%, or 19.6% if you, and this doesn't count the NIIT tax.

So that's a tax increase.

Back to our example about your property taxes going up of between 40 and 98%.

You're talking about basically doubling your personal, like, if you are in a state where you pay state income tax, imagine your state income tax doubling on you.

If you pay $1,000 a month in state income tax, imagine paying 2000 a month.

Are you going to start, like, you're going to start thinking, okay, what am I getting for this?

Right?

Like I was doing, all right, we had some extra money, went on vacations.

Where did it go?

It just, it's gone and you don't have a choice.

Well, Travis, one of the things that I was thinking about is I think it's very easy to vilify what we think the ultra net worth are.

But think about in your own hometown where you live.

If you had a small business owner that spent 35 years building a business and was able to sell their business to somebody that wanted to take it over, they've worked their entire life, maybe haven't been funding a retirement account because they've poured their blood, sweat and tears into a business.

And now somebody buys their business for $2 million in your hometown, you would be proud of that person for building the american dream.

But now we're saying, hey, you had a wealth creation event.

We're going to tax you almost half of the earnings that you've made because you've passed a threshold.

We'd go, whoa, whoa, whoa.

That's not fair.

That's before you even get to the state.

Yeah.

So I think it's very easy to draw a blank slate and say, of course, tax all these wealthy people when wealth creation events are happening every day in America from inheritance transfer, selling of businesses.

So it's not just these CEO's making multiple millions of dollars a year, which is what we think.

It's the everyday people that have been grinding for years that are now at the climax of their income earning years.

They could be potentially hit with some astronomical numbers that would be like, what is this all for?

So it's not to humanize, it's not to say one way or another other, but just be aware that this isn't just people in three piece suits off somewhere on yachts.

This is the guy next to you or the woman next to you that's worked really hard.

Building a business could be entering a wealth creation event that could cripple their family.

Trey and Juan, as we wrap up this particular episode, this half of this discussion, I mean, just think about it.

You worked your entire career and you got some stock options, and you saved those stock options up, and the company you worked for did very well.

Now you got three $4 million in stock options, and that's your retirement.

It's your kid's wedding.

It's, you know, vacation funds.

It's maybe you've got a special needs kid and it's going to fund their trust.

It's grandkids going to college.

It's like, it's all your hopes and dreams.

Because you worked really hard and you were in those stock options and they were going to be taxed with stock options a lot.

There's going to be taxes, income.

Let's assume that you were expecting tax acts, and now the tax is going to be, you know, 40% higher, you know, or 20% higher or 30% higher, you know, or even 10% higher.

Is that fair to you?

Or let's say that you had a situation where you had bought some stocks in your company, and it's sitting there and it's going to be taxes, capital gain someday.

And you're counting, okay, it's gonna be 15, 20%.

And now all of a sudden, it goes up to 39.6% plus your NIIT, which could be an extra 5% on top of that.

That's devastating.

You're talking hundreds.

You're going to write checks for hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

For what reason?

Just because I think to add context, because of what we do for a living, I think we have this assumption of what a millionaire looks like.

But we get people from all over the country that call in that work for a tech company, or, like you said, have been in a small business in the last three years or their highest earning years, so they get bonuses that are a part of it.

You start to talk to them about their income.

Not surprising that you have people making hundreds of thousands of dollars, younger people chasing the fire movement that have just saved their entire life.

They got company stock that has skyrocketed over time.

So it's not just always the big, the elons and the people that we think on tv.

It's the everyday people that live in your communities that may not be, you know, holding a sandwich board saying how much money they make, but there are more people because of these wealth creation events.

And I love the fact that that you talked about that are entering a new season of life that if proposed changes go through, could be pretty crippling.

So it's just, again, add some context for.