Tax-Free Wealth: How to Build Massive Wealth by Permanently Lowering Your Taxes

Book Preface

When I was a boy, I loved to argue. It didn’t matter whether it was on the tennis court or playing Monopoly®. It wasn’t simply that I felt I was right; it was the joy of the debate. I discovered that the more I learned about a subject, the more likely I was to win an argument. And what’s the point of arguing if you don’t plan on winning, right?

I also found that the more vague the question, the easier it was to argue. I grew to love studying about anything that didn’t have a fixed answer. When I turned 19, I went to Paris, France, on my mission for the Mormon Church. Everybody knows how the French love to argue. And they have the right language for it. Arguing in French is one of the most enjoyable things I’ve ever done. It’s such a beautiful language. And the French love a good argument. Unlike Americans, they don’t take it personally. So you can argue with them for hours on end without anybody getting their feelings hurt. I’m convinced that the French invented the seven-course meal so that they would have plenty of time to argue without their food getting cold. (I remember more than one meal lasting over four hours.)

Maybe it was my love of a good argument that drew me to law in the first place. Although I never earned my law degree (I didn’t want to hang out with lawyers—ugh), I loved the thought of practicing law.

I also enjoyed learning about money, earning money, and spending money. So when I went to college I took accounting courses and specialized in tax accounting. Being a tax accountant, I could work in the law and with money at the same time.

During my first 13 years out of college, I worked as an employee for some Big Four accounting firms and a Fortune 1000 company. I was very successful as an employee. Promotions came easily and steadily. In my first firm, Ernst & Young, they gave me the opportunity to work in the National Tax Department–a great honor for a young CPA. I did equally well at the Fortune 1000 company, making great strides in reducing their sales and property taxes. When I left them, I went back into public accounting with a different international accounting firm. One day, only seven months after I started working there, I went into my office, only to find a note on my desk from my boss that I was to come down the hall to see him as soon as I got in.

This was a little odd, as I worked in the Phoenix office and my boss worked out of the Los Angeles office and my boss had not told me previously he was coming to town. I immediately went down to the office he was in and he invited me to come in. The first thing he said to me was to please close the door. Something was up. I couldn’t tell right then whether it was good or bad. Then he told me to please sit down. That couldn’t be good. He proceeded to tell me that he had decided to let me go. “So you are firing me?” I asked? He nodded.

This was quite the shock for someone who had always excelled in school and work. I headed home. As I walked in the door, my wife, Rosie, said, “It’s a little early for you to be home, isn’t it? What’s going on?” I told her what had happened. She had a few choice words for my then former boss (Rosie never pulls a punch). Then we started planning our future. Rosie suggested that I had always wanted to start my own business and perhaps this was the opportunity to do so. Quite a leap of faith when you consider that we were a single-income household with two young boys and that I was the sole provider.

I started with two clients. For the next nine months, I worked tirelessly to build my business, speaking to everyone I knew and even making cold calls. I was so successful that after nine months I doubled my business. That’s right—I went from two to four clients. That wasn’t going to pay the bills. Then one day a friend of mine, also a CPA, called me to tell me that there was an accounting firm for sale located not far from me. It turned out that I knew the CPA who was selling the firm.

The only challenge was that not only did I have no money, I was $40,000 in debt. I asked my friend for advice and he offered to lend me some of the money. The seller agreed to finance about 50% of the sales price and my parents loaned me the rest of the money. My first no-money down deal. Within a year, I was so busy I had to add a partner.

About five years later, I met Robert Kiyosaki and began studying money and business under his tutelage. I learned a completely different way to look at money and business—and education. I’d never seen teaching like Robert’s before I met him and started attending his conferences.

Here I am now, writing a book in the Rich Dad Advisor series. Without Robert, I would never have written this book. In fact, I couldn’t have written this book. Much of the big-picture thought process about taxes and wealth contained in this book comes from my many meetings and seminars with him.

When Robert first approached me about writing this book, he told me that it had to be about how entrepreneurs and investors could reduce their taxes. And it had to be international in scope. I did some checking in the bookstores and libraries and I couldn’t find a single book on taxes with an international perspective. This presented a great challenge to me.

How could I write a book on taxes that applied to every entrepreneur and investor in every country? I know the U.S. tax law very well. I’ve been studying it for 30 years. But like everyone else, I thought that the tax laws of other countries would be quite different than the U.S. laws.

My research revealed something entirely different. It turns out that the tax laws in all developed countries are similar. They are so similar, in fact, that a book could be written that applies to entrepreneurs and investors around the world. This is that book.

To be sure, the details of the tax laws are different in each country. And we will look at specific tax strategies you can use in your country at the end of each chapter. But unless you are a tax professional, you, the entrepreneur and/or investor, don’t need to know all of the details. You can leave those to your tax advisor. You have to know the concepts. And the concepts are the same regardless of your country of origin or the country in which you do business.

This book is about tax planning concepts. It’s about how to use your country’s tax laws to your benefit. In this book, I tell you how the tax laws work. And how they are designed to reduce your taxes, not to increase your taxes. Once you understand this basic principle, you no longer have to be afraid of the tax laws. They are there to help you and your business, not to hinder you.

Once you understand the basic principles of tax reduction, you can begin immediately reducing your taxes. Eventually, you may even be able to legally eliminate your income taxes and drastically reduce your other taxes. Once you do that, you can live a life of tax-free wealth.

So let’s get started.