How to Minimize Your Tax Exposure and Maximize Wealth with Dan Nicholson, CPA
Disclosure: Ryan Kolden is an investment advisor representative of RPG Family Wealth Advisory. Kolden Wealth is a DBA of RPG Family Wealth Advisory. The opinions expressed by the host and or guests in this podcast do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Kolden Wealth or RPG Family Wealth Advisory. No information on this podcast should be construed as as investment, legal, tax, or financial advice.
Ryan Kolden: Today on the show, we have Dan Nicholson, CPA. Dan is the founder of Nth Degree CPAs and has been recognized four times as a top 40 under 40 accountant globally. Dan is also the author of the bestselling book, Rigging the Game, How to Achieve Financial Certainty, Navigate Risk, and Make Money on Your Own Terms. Dan is also an accomplished entrepreneur and has established multiple successful business, including CertaintyU and Certainty News, which reach over 1 billion monthly users with cutting edge financial education and news, and is based out of Seattle. And his mission is to help purpose-driven entrepreneurs achieve financial certainty. Dan, welcome to the show. I'm glad to have you on.
Dan Nicholson: Yeah, thanks for having me on.
Ryan Kolden: Of course. So Dan, I want to know, how did you go from working for Warren Buffett to launching your own accounting firm?
Dan Nicholson: Yeah, it was a journey for sure. And just to give a little bit of context from the beginning. So I kind of ended up in the accounting finance space kind of by happenstance. I don't want to say by accident, but sort of to some extent, right place, right time. So grew up as the kid always scheming on business ideas. I went off to college originally as a marketing major. First person in my family to go to college, I was a commuter student, so I was living at home with my parents just to make the finances work. I was working just to date myself. I was working at Cop USA, which no longer exists, I don't think. And I got an email from the business school, my guidance counselor, like, hey, UPS, the shipping company, has these marketing internships, and here's all the scholarship money that they have available. So I had just taken a business communication class right at the end of my freshman year. So I had this fancy resume, put the suit on, printed everything off, go out to what I think is going to be this career fair where there's going to be marketing opportunities. get there, it's at one of the UPS hubs where they sort all the packages. I go sit down and way out of place because I got the suit on and everything. Everyone else is in like jorts and a tank top. And no disrespect to jorts and tank tops, but I was definitely on a relative basis dressed quite differently. And so they go through this whole video, the benefits of being a loader or unloader and how you can become a driver and all the tuition reimbursement, everything comes along with it. So I watch all that, raise my hand. I'm like, Hey, this sounds awesome, but I got this print off with these marketing internships. I think I might be in the wrong place. And they're like, well, we have no idea what you're talking about, but there is somebody from the finance department outside. So, you know, go talk, go talk to them. So I go out there, same thing, got this print off. Hey, I'm here for marketing internships. We don't know what that is, or we don't have anyone for marketing here. But after about an hour conversation, they're like, hey, we have this part-time finance role open, and finance supervisor role, where you'd be managing a team of about 20 auditors, and we think you might be a good fit. So I ended up at, again, 19 in a freshman year, getting this finance supervisor role, ultimately reporting up to the Northwest head of finance and the controller. And that sort of put me in this different direction where I got all this crazy experience. I thought, okay, well, accounting is the language of business. This was, might be the best skillset ultimately, ultimately to be an entrepreneur. But what I didn't know is that once you have the accounting degree, and then the things that I did after that, I did a fellowship with the board that writes all the accounting standards and worked for a big global firm. It's just like stink that you can't ever wash off because people are like, Oh, you're an accountant. Like, no, I'm a business person who knows about accounting. And so people kept hiring me and I kept changing jobs. So this is a Warren Buffett bag. Company backed by Warren Buffett was a company getting ready to go public. And I had the unfortunate task of trying to convince Warren Buffett and his team that we should change who's managing the investments for this company. But he owned the company that was managing those investments. So anyhow. that wasn't successful. So I kept moving around, people kept hiring me. And long story long, I finally realized about 15 years ago, there was an opportunity to do something different in the CPA space. And so that's where I ultimately leaned all the way in on my accounting skills and kind of combine that with the entrepreneurial desires.
Ryan Kolden: One of the things that I picked up on that you said was, unfortunately, people kept hiring me. So number one, people kept hiring you. So you probably weren't a bad employee. With that in mind, I guess with that said, why, why did you say, unfortunately, did you kind of know from an early age you were meant, you know, start your own company?
Dan Nicholson: Yeah, you picked up on, you picked up on, I guess, a subtlety. So I, I, I would get hired because I had this great resume. I did this fellowship. I had this finance role for a couple of years in college, which still doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, how I was managing all these people and was completely autonomous. So people would see the resume. They go, you must be smart and you must be, we'll take a shot at you. You know, you're moving from, internal accounting to now strategic finance, and you're moving from strategic finance to tax. You seem like a smart guy. We'll take a shot at you. In the back of my head, I was thinking, you probably shouldn't hire me because I'll be your best employee for like three to four months. And, uh, and then I'll probably just do the minimum from there and meet slightly exceed expectations, but I'll be bored because really I should be my own boss. And so that was like this subconscious or internal conversation I'm having with myself. But I wasn't, I was carrying these other false obligations with me about what I should be doing. And, and, uh, I'm making more than my parents ever had. And it's like, how ungrateful am I that my dad's working 70, 80 hours a week and I'm complaining about this job. But I was miserable because I was meant to be.
Ryan Kolden: Yeah. Um, one of the things that you didn't mention it, but I, you know, I picked up on it just when I was preparing for this interview for this podcast, but it, this quite frankly is, is for myself selfishly, but you said you have done maybe a stint in derivatives and hedging. What, what specifically, if you don't mind me asking, where are you doing? And it doesn't have to be detailed, just brief.
Dan Nicholson: Yeah. So at the end of my. Sometime during my last year of college, I got nominated for this fellowship at the board that writes all the U.S. accounting standards. So you probably heard of FASB, the Financial Accounting Standards Board. GASB is the governmental equivalent. So I got nominated for this fellowship and ultimately got accepted. So I moved out to your neck of the woods in Norwalk, Connecticut. And I didn't know kind of what to expect other than this is going to look really good on my resume. And it's sort of like graduating law school and clerking for the Supreme Court is sort of the equivalent. And so I get there and they're like, OK, we're going to assign you the derivatives and hedge accounting standard that we're working on. It's like, well, I don't know if you should do that because I don't know anything about that. I don't have any background in derivatives and hedging other than it was like one, maybe two questions on the CPA exam, and we maybe covered it for one class in a finance class I took in college. So they said, well, not only are you still going to be assigned to the derivatives and hedging accounting standard, but In the next six weeks, we need you to educate the entire board on derivatives and hedging activities because one out of seven board members have any idea what they are. Again, I don't know if I'm the right person to do this. I don't know either. I guess I don't have a choice. So for the next year of that fellowship, I was part of a team of two of us. There was a head project manager, myself, and we were tasked with educating the board, then educating all the constituents, going out to all the managing directors. mostly on Wall Street, many who didn't have a job four or five years later after the financial crash. So that then put my career on a different path where when I left the board and I moved to Deloitte, moved back to Seattle, I was basically in the capital markets group. And so any client that had a derivatives and hedge program in the Northwest was my client. And that was mostly Microsoft. They had $100 billion in investable assets. Now they have $200 plus billion in investable assets and a pretty significant hedging program around foreign currency risk. in particular. And so I wasn't buying and selling derivatives, but more the compliance side of things, the reporting, the systems processes, like how do we know that these are properly valued? And that's ultimately why I got this job at the company that was getting ready to go public. because of that background in derivative accounting.
Ryan Kolden: I can't imagine what it would have been like to be in your scenario where they're like, hey, you have a couple days, be ready to tell all these executives what they don't know about this complex topic. Now, the next part of the show I wanna move into really is taxes. So this show is mainly geared towards accredited investors, business owners, entrepreneurs, and taxes obviously is integral to everybody, not just those types of people, to everybody, but Just from like a high level view, one of the things that I don't think people understand is the difference between accounting, like filing taxes, bookkeeping versus tax planning or tax strategy. Could you briefly explain like what you think the difference is?
Dan Nicholson: Absolutely. I like kind of pre-wired ideas or analogies to try and explain things. So when I think about a traditional accountant or the bookkeeping role, those are like archaeologists. their job, and what does an archaeologist do? They dig up the past. So an accountant who's preparing a return or doing bookkeeping, when they say this month, they're talking about last month. Like, hey, I'm trying to close this month's books. It's like, well, you're talking about June. We're in July right now. Or when they say this year's taxes, they're talking about last year. So they're always kind of focused on the past and their role is on the compliance side. It's, it's checking off all those, those boxes and making sure that you stay in compliance. I kind of joke that most tax are like a double agent for the IRS. Like they're making sure that you pay the most amount of tax based off the rules they're keeping in. And then, so there's a role for that compliance. We don't want to have the fun police come knock on our door and get a bunch of trouble. But inherently, if you're always focused on the past, you are not helping somebody minimize their tax exposure or grow their net worth. That's really what a tax planner does. So when I started my firm in earnest 15 years ago, it was through that lens of I don't see really anyone targeting small to medium sized companies with tax planning and more strategic kind of what now is referred to as CFO level support. I don't see anyone really doing that. Certainly not at the level of what I was seeing at the big companies. And in order to do that work, you're more of an architect, which is being future focused, understanding where the tax code is now, but also understanding it's constantly evolving and really understanding your clients' goals, business practices, so that you can show them how to modify their behavior to take advantage of these incentives. Because certain deductions and credits, they're incentives. Accelerated depreciation, for an example, is an incentive to get people to buy more US assets. So does that by design, as I'm sure you know, and you can change your behavior as a business owner to go and access those deductions and credits. And so that's future focused. It's no different actually than anything else you might do in your life. You want to have better sales, got to change your behavior. You want to have. better relationships with people, better health and wellness. Got to change your behavior. Turns out the same is true with taxes. And that's the point.
Ryan Kolden: So I was actually going to ask you what you think the purpose of the tax code is, but you just nailed it right there, which you said it was incentives, incentivizing people. And the way that I like to think about it is that it's a playbook. And it's just a way that, again, Congress can, again, this opinion, but socially engineer outcomes. And along those same lines of like incentivizing people to do things and just common things that people get wrong with the IRS. I think one of the things that people get wrong are audits. They instantly think that I'm being audited, I'm going to prison. Can you briefly explain, just in your experience, the purpose of audits and why they aren't always necessarily a bad thing for people?
Dan Nicholson: So the IRS likes to perpetuate this notion that, this fear-based notion, that if you make a mistake, you're going to go to jail. So they'll highlight Wesley Snipes go into jail for, this was years ago, for tax crimes. And around April 15th, they'll often release, have a press release talking about how they just hired 100,000 agents. They don't talk about how 120,000 agents have left and that they're still further behind than where they were before. But part of enforcement, getting people to comply with the tax code, is maintaining a bit of fear. In practical terms, though, the IRS wants to get paid. So that's their job, as appointed by the Department of Treasury. They don't write the rules. A lot of people think the IRS writes the rules. Congress writes the rules. The IRS exists to enforce those rules. If you disagree with the IRS, you can go to court, tax court, and reach a conclusion. We love those people because that becomes public information and we can copy those strategies once they're public. But the IRS typically does not want you to go to prison because if you go to prison, it's really hard to pay back. that liability. So it's not in their best interest. It's sort of like, just think about it as a vendor. Somebody owes you money. Do you want to put them into bankruptcy or do you want to work something out where they're going to pay you back? Probably want to work out something where they can pay you back. Unless you're someone that they can make an example of, or you've done something so egregious, so intentional that There's no other option, but generally the IRS are people working at a job just like anyone else. They don't have to be your adversary unless you treat them like an adversary. I mean, most agents I've ever dealt with. Yeah, there's a few bad eggs in the bunch, but most just are trying to do their job. And if you can give them information that makes their job easier, it's a smooth process. If you come at them as an adversary, it's like most people, they're going to respond in an adversarial way. But they don't want you to go to prison.
Ryan Kolden: Now, when it comes to mistakes that you commonly see with business owners, entrepreneurs. What are maybe some like common themes that you see with people? Maybe either common themes or what do people continually get wrong when you're sitting with maybe clients for the first or second time?
Dan Nicholson: So the first thing they get wrong is a big assumption about what their role is that the accountant has been in their life up to this point. They think that the person they've hired to prepare their return has been strategically focused on making sure they pay the least amount. But again, that's not what a typical preparer was hired to do. They're just reporting and they're relying on the information that is provided by a client. The average CPA firm might have 400 to 600 returns per signer, sometimes more than that. And they're trying to get the majority of those done in a couple month period of time. So they don't typically have a whole lot of background information about you. They're just relying on the information that you provided. So the biggest mistake is thinking that tax preparer has actively worked to minimize your tax exposure. From there, oftentimes for the business owner, their books don't adequately reflect the actual activities of the business itself. So they've recorded transactions with a wrong description. So there's a difference sometimes between meals and entertainment and research or travel and research. And I can give you lots of examples of that, but properly coding transactions can make all the difference in terms of the deductibility and risk profile on your
Ryan Kolden: Sorry, were you going to say something?
Dan Nicholson: Yeah, I can stop there.
Ryan Kolden: Okay. The thing that I think, so I've worked with a lot of CPAs, you know, just in my line of work. And I think the thing that's absolutely unique about your approach that I've never heard any other CPA talk about before, and it's probably because they're preparers and not doing what you do, which is planning and strategy. But the thing that I've never heard them talk about before that you do is behavioral issues or behavior. Can you explain what your different wealth types are and maybe give a little background on them?
Dan Nicholson: Absolutely. Yeah. So when I first started down this road with tax planning and strategic advice, I had to unlearn a lot of what I learned in my previous life across business school, working at the board, working at these other companies, because for a closely held small business, their day-to-day decision-making can swing profitability considerably, swing their cash flow significantly. They don't have the same types of organizational structures in place that a Fortune 500 company has. And that's obvious, but you have to design a different set of tools to work with a small business owner. And it starts with the decision-making side of things and getting clear on their top couple of priorities. A big Fortune 500 company, they're going to maximize because that's their responsibility. They have to maximize shareholder value. They can't optimize for each shareholder's individual goals. That would be impossible. There's too many people. But a small business owner should use their business as a tool to optimize funding their goals. So I said all that to mention a couple of statistics. 82% of small business owners go out of business because of cash flow problems. 85% of a small business owner's net worth is tied up in their business, 85%. 98% of small business owners do not know the value of their company. Said another way, only 2% of small business owners know the value of their company. Of that 2%, the majority only know the value of their company because it's going out of business or they're in the process of selling. Well, most small business owners are basically doing the equivalent of this, putting all their money into their 401k, but they can't view statements. And so they have no idea what's in their account. They can't rebalance it whatsoever. That's how they're running their business. And that's problematic for me, because if I'm trying to show you how to minimize your taxes, the advanced strategies require cash. But if you don't have any cash, you get stuck in this zone where You're in the maximum tax rate, but you don't have any extra cash left over. So you're in this vicious cycle where you're always living like a year behind. So it requires a whole paradigm shift to really adequately serve small business owners to help them grow their net worth and actually access advanced strategies.
Ryan Kolden: And when it comes, it sounds like everything revolves around cashflow management to start with. If someone is in that situation where they're, you know, they have no excess cash each month, do you have any like general tools that you start with on helping them free up cashflow? Or is it as simple as just tracking, you know, what's going on in the business?
Dan Nicholson: Yeah, so there's a couple things. I'm sure you've heard of this. I've never actually read this book, but people tell me my approach is similar. Profit first, which is like separating your money into different bank accounts. And the reason why that works is not some magic about by virtue of having your money in different accounts, it just magically makes you more money. But the reason why it works is something called the mental accounting bias. And so if folks want to, listeners want to Google mental accounting bias, they'll find an explainer video from the Khan Academy and from someone from I think the Yale Department of psychology that breaks down how we violate economic principles based off how our money is bucketed. So you can make, you make better financial decisions by putting your money into different accounts because you can understand the risks differently just by visualizing it. So that's like a low hanging fruit thing that someone can do is separate their money into different risk categories. Like payroll is separate from operating expenses. You'll make better decisions right away. Similar to tracking your macros. It just doesn't by tracking, it causes you to pay more attention. And so you make more consistent decisions. The second piece is something I call cash flow engineering. And a quick backstory, if I may. A number of years ago, I was trying to figure out how I gained 10 pounds over the course of the year. How did I gain 10 pounds? And I was sort of self-reflecting on it. I've always been active, exercise, nutrition, paying attention, all that stuff. And I realized, well, we moved. And when we moved, I knew where my wife kept all the snacks. So the previous house is like, do not tell me where the snacks are. I don't want to know. is like, I'll just eat one cookie and not think about it again for three days. And I'm like, I'm going to have one cookie and then have the rest of them. Then, like, there's no gap.
Ryan Kolden: So yeah, me too.
Dan Nicholson: I was realizing that I had been eating sort of the equivalent of two Oreos a day for the last I mean not literally to but like I had added essentially the equivalent of two Oreos a day to my diet I ran the math. It was basically 13 pounds of additional calories from just adding two Oreos and Double stuff, of course because I'm I've got some level of state personal standards I Don't understand people did not doing double stuff, but that's for another another conversation and it sort of occurred to me. It's like compound interest We have all these little Oreos in our financial the software as service that just automatically renew that we're never, we don't even think about, but we're like, I don't have the time to deal with canceling this little expense. So I created this process. You take the last 12 months of your expenses by vendor, throw it into a spreadsheet. You label each expense as a core expense or non-core. Core is your business requires this thing to operate. Like I've got to have tax software. That's a core expense. Maybe this marketing initiative that I'm doing is not a core expense. It's not required to operate the business. So I label everything core and not core. Then I look at the non-core expenses and I put in what is my ROI on those non-core expenses. Now, most of the time, I can't come up with anything. I do this with clients. They're like, I don't know. It's like, well, let's see if we can get some data because we better be at least beating the S&P 500 at 10%. If you're not beating at least that, we're working too hard. You might as well just put this in an index fund. So we should be beating the market with all these bets that we're making. More times than not, we find as little as a couple thousand dollars a month to sometimes a couple hundred thousand dollars a month in expenses that have just been on auto-repeat, auto-renew, and they thought there was an ROI on it, but there wasn't. And we just recover those resources and reallocate them. So I just can't stop doing that. Recapture those and either take those now as distributions that can fund your tax strategies or reallocate them to bets that will get you a better return than what you're gonna get in S&P fund.
Ryan Kolden: You know what is, I guess I'm not surprised that you're talking about it since you're a tax planner and a tax strategist, but I would say 99% of people think about rate of return on investments. And they think exactly like that about, you know, what can I get in this fund or this fund or this investment? But they never stopped to think about, well, what happens if I can take my effective tax rate from 35% to 22%? It's the same type of rate of return, just on a different sum of money. It's just a different way to think about it. It's almost, it's just a significantly different way You never know what an investment will do, but you can more or less control definitively where your tax rate's gonna be with some planning. Yep, yep. Talking about tax strategy, when a client sits down with you, can you explain four different levels that you take them through?
Dan Nicholson: Yeah, my pleasure. So we created this methodology we call the four levels of tax planning. People can go Google it, they're just gonna end up back at me, because we made this up, essentially. And it's a progression. It's almost like if you're familiar with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you got like your basic needs and then you got at the top sort of enlightenment guru status. So we're trying to get to that with our tax planning. This is kind of enlightenment guru status. Level one are strategies, deductions and credits that you already qualify for. Someone just hasn't told you about it. Things like the Augusta loophole, maybe you're familiar with that, but ways that business can rent your home from you, business gets an expense, tax deduction, it's tax-free to you. Level two are expenses that aren't currently qualifying as a deduction or credit. How can we turn those into a valid deduction or credit? That could be examples like paying your kids. This is a more mainstream example. It might be finding out what certain hobbies that you already have that aren't a deduction. How can we connect it to the business and make it a valid deduction based off court cases and IRS audit manuals? Those level one and level two strategies are what I call low-hanging fruit. They're typically worth $50,000 to $100,000 in additional deductions. that we can just do year after year. They're evergreen strategies, meaning they've existed for a long time and expect them to continue to exist. And there's a lot of court cases and IRS audit manuals, so we know the exact blueprint on how to do it. Level three are the home run strategies. Those are things where we can reduce your tax bill by 30 to 100%. That might be utilizing all the accelerated depreciation rules. for real estate, it might make sense for someone to form a private foundation and both to be able to take deductions up to 30% of their income, but also maybe to access the Google Grants program, which is $120,000 a year in free ad spend, connect that between a foundation and their for-profit business. So those are the kind of home run strategies. And then level four at Enlightenment is structures and strategies where future income would be non-taxable. That might be something like private placement life insurance.
Ryan Kolden: Very cool.
Dan Nicholson: So we sort of take them through it. A level three and level four strategies that requires either cash primarily for level three strategies or level four, a lot of those require that you've increased your liquid net worth so that you're a qualified client or a qualified purchaser so you can access some of these more advanced structured investments.
Ryan Kolden: We're kind of about wrapping things up here and I just kind of want to end with a couple of non. non-tax questions, but what are you working on right now, whether it's with your work or whether it's outside of work that you're excited about or you can't stop thinking about?
Dan Nicholson: So I built something recently called the Five Wealth Types, and it's a free assessment. Anyone can go to wealthtype.com, answer these. questions, it takes about five minutes. And it tells you if you're a hustler, a gambler, a optimizer, a saver, or an outsourcer. Now, there's no right or wrong wealth type, but we've been told that we're either a saver or a spender. We've been given all these generalities, but from my experience, several thousand business owners, that it's more complicated than that. And understanding your tendency can inform making better decisions. So it's not to say you got to stop being a hustler, stop being a gambler. It's knowing that tendency. And then what are the, I think about it back to derivatives. How do I hedge the downside? So how do I make sure I don't keep blowing myself up and I can lean into the things that are more of my, my strengths. So super excited about that, both in terms of the practical application for individual, for their individual decision-making, but the ways that people have started to use it to understand their spouse better, understand their business partner better. It's like, oh, I'm a hustler, you're an outsourcer. That now makes sense why we have these disagreements. We're looking at things from a totally different end of the spectrum or ways in which it can be used for sales and marketing. So the way that a hustler buys where they tend to believe that effort is the primary factor that drives wealth creation. The way you sell someone who is motivated based off effort is different than how you sell someone who's a saver. So there's a bunch of practical applications around the sales and marketing side, personal relationships, et cetera. So having a bunch of fun with that and kind of eager to see where it goes.
Ryan Kolden: If you don't mind me asking, what wealth type are you? I'm a gambler. I never would have guessed that as being a CPA, but I guess that makes sense because you're an entrepreneur on your businesses, so you probably like risk.
Dan Nicholson: The default assumption would be that I'm either a saver or optimizer, just based off my certification. But as a gambler, I'm always looking for bets that have asymmetry to the upside. So when you hear gambler, it can be construed as a pejorative. But there are some really smart, sophisticated gamblers out there. I aspire to be one of those. I don't go to the casino type gambling, but it's sort of like derivatives. If I can eliminate all the downside, I only have upside.
Ryan Kolden: I was going to say that's your derivatives background talking.
null: 100%.
Dan Nicholson: Yep.
Ryan Kolden: Now, I'm sure throughout your time of working as a CPA, you've seen some crazy personal expenditures that you were just kind of amazed by or breathtaking. What is something in your personal life that maybe you spend too much time or spend too much on, but you personally believe it gives you an infinite return? And for something like For context, for me, that's surfing. So going on surf trips, buying new surfboards, new wetsuits, I could do that and I could spend too much on that. What about yourself?
Dan Nicholson: Surfing, but kind of similar realm, I guess, which is anything in kind of the health and wellness space. So I spend way too much on like supplements every other week. I'm probably like buying some new straps to hold the weights better at the gym or some like a pad to put it for Alexis. Um, if you're familiar with like squatting or hip thrust or something, it's like the pad at the gym is all sweaty from everyone else using it. Or you got to walk around. It's just like gross, like gym bag keeps getting more and more filled up with like all these different random things that I. in buying. So constantly kind of experimenting with it. I throw a bunch of stuff away. It irritates my wife's like more random supplements, more like, what is this thing? Like, I don't know. I'm just trying to look away.
Ryan Kolden: Well, you could be spending stuff on vices. So it's good thing that it's it's your health. That's a good thing to spend probably too much on now. Dan, we're going to start wrapping things up. Before we tell the audience where they can learn more about you, do you have any last words that you want to leave people with?
Dan Nicholson: Typically, my closing, where my head goes through on that is the biggest, so back to gambling and risk, derivatives hedging, the biggest risk in life is not living the life that you want. And many of us are kind of driving fairly blind there. Again, we don't know the value of our business, but we sure want it to fund the life that we want, but we're not entirely clear on what I call our solvable problem. Maybe we've done a vision board, but a vision board just gives us a bunch of dopamine. And then most people Peter out two, three, four weeks later, because it doesn't actually tell them. what is required, what are the resources necessary to have the six pack abs, be that amazing parent, have the second house. So biggest risk in life is not living the life that you want. So the sooner you get clear on what that life is, that solvable problem, the sooner you can start living it.
Ryan Kolden: Very cool. I think that is, I don't think I've had anyone yet say something like that on their last words is, uh, the risk of not living your life to its fullest potential. That's a good way to end. Now, Dan, where can people, if they want to learn more about you, get in touch with you, learn more about you?
Dan Nicholson: Probably the two best places would be to go to wealthtype.com. You can take that assessment. It also has links to my book and podcast and all those other things that I'm doing. Or if you're interested in what we're doing on the CPA side, nthdegreecpas.com would be the other place.
Ryan Kolden: Very cool. So I will go ahead and put Dan's website and all this contact information on the show notes. Dan, appreciate having you on. And that's a wrap. Take care. Hey, real quick before you go, thanks for listening. And please remember to hit follow on your podcast player. You won't miss any episodes and it helps support us bring you the show. Today's show notes and resources are available to you by clicking the link in the description. The opinions and views expressed here are for informational purposes only and is not tax, legal, financial, investment, or accounting advice. This material is educational in nature and should not be deemed as solicitation of any specific product or service. All investments involve risk and a potential for a loss of principal. Should you need such advice, please consult with a licensed financial, tax, or legal professional. Neither host nor guest can be held responsible for any direct or incidental loss incurred by applying any of the information offered.
