Cinder Wealth Advisors

10/08/2026

A $100,000 truck write-off doesn’t mean you saved $100,000.

You spent real money to reduce your taxes by a smaller amount. If the business needs the truck, the deduction can help. If you’re buying it just because December is coming, ask whether the purchase makes sense on its own.

Business use, documentation, and vehicle classification still matter. Talk with your CPA before you buy.

Educational only, not tax advice.

10/06/2026

Its October. For a lot of contractors, the next time anyone looks hard at the tax side of the business is March, when the return gets prepared.

By then your CPA is documenting history.

Thats what they were hired to do, and it matters. They file an accurate return and keep you compliant.

But some of the most valuable options close before anybody sits down with last years numbers.

A retirement plan has to be designed and adopted in time.

The salary you pay yourself shapes what that plan can do.

What you buy, and in which year, matters too.

The pattern I see most is a business that went from $150,000 in profit to $500,000 without changing a thing about how it was set up.

The profit grew.

The planning around it never did.

Theres a real difference between preparing a return and planning for one.

If nobody is doing the second, it doesnt get done.

I wrote up the five places I keep finding money for trade and construction owners.

Read the full article here https://cinderwealth.com/tax-planning-for-contractors-georgia/

Educational only, not tax advice.

10/05/2026

Putting income-producing assets into an irrevocable trust doesn’t automatically eliminate income taxes. Depending on its structure, that income may still be taxable to you, the trust, or its beneficiaries.

This clip explains where the online advice goes wrong and when an irrevocable trust may serve a real estate planning or asset protection goal. Coordinate with your estate attorney and CPA before making changes.

Educational only. Not personalized tax or legal advice.

10/02/2026

Paying your kids to work in your business can be a legitimate tax strategy. But the payroll tax exemption you hear about online doesn’t apply to S corps.

In this video, I explain why your business structure matters, which businesses qualify for the under-18 Social Security and Medicare exemption, and why deducting wages is different from avoiding payroll taxes.

Educational only. Not personalized tax advice.

09/30/2026

A business owner told me recently that he could write off just about anything, as long as he paid for it out of the business account.

He wasn't being reckless. He'd heard it somewhere and it sounded plausible. Nobody had told him otherwise.

What makes something deductible is what it was for, not which account it came out of.

That one is easy. The four strategies owners send me most often are harder, because they're real. They're in the tax code. What gets cut between the tax code and the 30-second video is always the same thing, and it's the conditions.

One. Put everything in an irrevocable trust. Real, powerful planning in the right situation. Moving an asset into a trust does not make its income disappear.

Two. Buy a $100,000 vehicle and write off the whole thing. The large first-year deduction can be real. Business use is a requirement, not a formality.

Three. Rent your home to your business. Legitimate, and misused more than any other strategy on the list. It usually fails because somebody treated a documented rental like a note in a spreadsheet.

Four. Put your kids on payroll. My favorite, because the legitimate version is genuinely good. The internet version has one detail wrong, and it matters enormously for most profitable owners.

I walk through all four in about ten minutes, including when I'd actually use each one.

Watch the full video https://youtu.be/Q5QFBGJMIpk?si=uvZ3zMCvygYHn6E_

09/28/2026

The retirement plan that made sense when you had four employees may no longer fit your business.

I explain why profitable trade and construction owners should revisit an older retirement plan, and how a properly designed 401(k) with profit sharing may allow more of the plan’s contributions to go toward the owner, subject to required testing.

The design matters.

A plan set up years ago deserves another look as your business grows.

09/24/2026

Your equipment gets serviced on a schedule. Your insurance gets reviewed at renewal.

When was the last time someone reviewed whether your tax structure still fits your business?

For profitable trade and construction owners, the business can grow considerably while the compensation, retirement plan, and tax strategy stay exactly where they were.

Nobody necessarily made a mistake. The planning simply hasn’t kept pace.

Part of my job is to review those decisions together and make sure everyone advising you is working from the same picture.

If your business looks different than it did a few years ago, it may be time for that conversation.

09/22/2026

A contractor can go from making $150,000 a year to making $500,000 a year without changing a single thing about how the business is set up.

Same entity. Same paycheck structure. Same retirement plan, or no retirement plan at all. Same conversation with the same CPA in the same week of March.

The profit grew. The planning around it never did.

And by the time somebody notices, it usually looks like a tax bill nobody saw coming.

I work with profitable trade and construction owners, and there are five places where I keep finding money left on the table.

Not exotic strategies. Not loopholes.

Five ordinary places where the structure stopped matching the business a few years ago and nobody went back to check.

One. The structure was built for a smaller business.

Entity structure is not a one-time decision. It is a decision that has a shelf life.

Nothing went wrong. The business outgrew a decision that was correct when it was made.

Two. The compensation number.

If you elected S corp treatment, the instinct is to set the wage as low as you can defend.

When an owner tells me they got their salary down as low as possible, my first question is not whether that was smart.

It is what it cost them somewhere else.

Three. The retirement plan.

This is the one I see most often and the one with the most money attached to it.

Most plans get set up off a template and never touched again.

Four. Buying the truck before year end.

Spending a dollar to save a fraction of a dollar is not a strategy.

It is a purchase with a discount attached to it.

Five. The timing.

There is a real difference between preparing a return and planning for one.

If nobody is doing the second thing, it does not get done.

I walk through all five in about ten minutes here:

Same entity. Same paycheck structure. Same conversation with the sa...

09/16/2026

What does your life actually cost now that the business isn’t paying for a portion of it?

That number is almost always different than owners expect, in both directions.

Before we choose investments, I want to understand what you’re buying in the next few years and whether you plan to put money into another business or real estate.

Those decisions affect how much needs to stay available.

Until we know what the money has to do, we can’t decide what it should be invested in.

09/15/2026

Before I recommend a cash balance plan to a business owner, I want to know whether the business can support it through a disappointing year.

The deduction on the illustration won’t answer that.

A cash balance plan is a defined benefit pension plan. An actuary calculates the funding requirements. Employees factor into the cost. Your business carries the investment risk, and a slower year doesn’t automatically erase the funding obligation.

You’re making a commitment that should fit your business for years.

For a consistently profitable company that’s already maximizing its 401(k), that can be a powerful way to build retirement wealth outside the business.

But I also want owners to understand when a simpler plan would serve them just as well.

Before moving forward, I want to look at your employee census, your salary, several years of business cash flow, and what a future sale could mean for the plan.

A large deduction is worth considering. It isn’t enough to make the decision.

I wrote a guide walking through what business owners should evaluate before adopting a cash balance plan.

Read the full guide here https://cinderwealth.com/cash-balance-plans-cumming-ga/

Educational only, not tax advice. Evaluate any plan with your CPA and qualified plan professionals before adopting it.