How to Manage Lawyers and Accountants in Your Land Business (LA 1778)
How to Manage Lawyers and Accountants in Your Land Business (LA 1778)
Transcript:
Steven Butala:
Steven and Jill here.
Jill K DeWit:
Hello.
Steven Butala:
Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.
Jill K DeWit:
And I’m Jill Dewitt, broadcasting from the Valley of the Sun.
Steven Butala:
Today Jill and I talk about how to manage lawyers, and accountants, and other professionals in your land business. Like many, many topics this thing came up-
Jill K DeWit:
Where did this come from?
Steven Butala:
Because of Discord.
Jill K DeWit:
But, why would you possibly come up with this?
Steven Butala:
So what happened-
Jill K DeWit:
This is not fun. Let’s talk about taxes or something, like no one gets excited about that.
Steven Butala:
Well-
Jill K DeWit:
You’re talking about lawyers and accountants.
Steven Butala:
People need to know. I don’t like lawyers and accountants either. I’m am a recovering accountant.
Jill K DeWit:
I know that’s I’m like-
Steven Butala:
This is the last thing I want to talk about today.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s what I was going to say. I’m like, why are we doing this today? Why are we subjecting a, are we going to talk about raising young children after this?
Steven Butala:
No.
Jill K DeWit:
Okay.
Steven Butala:
Yeah, I don’t talk about that either, having a baby.
Jill K DeWit:
Okay, good. Here we go.
Steven Butala:
Before we get into it, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on landinvestors.com, online community is free. And I hope you know by now, Jill and I instruct, every quarter or so, a session called career path. If this is your career buying and selling land, or you want it to be, let us know, maybe you might be a good candidate for a career path.
Jill K DeWit:
It’s a 10 week intense, taught by us program. That is really for, like he said, for you, if you really want to hit this home and make this big, that’s what this is, so cool.
Steven Butala:
There’s a big, long string in Discord that started with a guy named Graham who sent a bunch of letters out.
Jill K DeWit:
Is it H. Graham?
Steven Butala:
Yeah.
Jill K DeWit:
Okay, got it.
Steven Butala:
Sent a bunch of letters out to a state, like we always do, a county, and there were a bunch of several people or one, let’s just say one person that lived in Iowa but owned property in different state. And it sparked a big issue because Iowa is a non, I’ll tell you about it in a minute. Anyway, it sparked a long session in Discord about how to deal with lawyers. And it, we have lawyers in our group, and it just, it was funny to see what happened.
Jill K DeWit:
Some people get well to upset. I understand getting, there’s a time to get upset about things when there’s malicious intent or something like that.
Steven Butala:
Yes.
Jill K DeWit:
But then there’s-
Steven Butala:
That’s what I said in Discord, actually.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. When there’s not-
Steven Butala:
That’s good.
Jill K DeWit:
That malicious intent, cause I’ve learned that phrase from you, when there’s not malicious intent. And it was an, just an accident. You’re not taking anything from somebody he’s just like throw my letter away. I don’t know why people get all upset about that.
Steven Butala:
When I started buying and selling land, I went to meet with a lawyer long, long time ago in the mid-nineties, early nineties, and said, can I get in trouble for this? And so we sat down and I said, can I buy and sell land? Well, not really.
Jill K DeWit:
Oh, that’s funny.
Steven Butala:
And so I asked all these questions, what do I need to do? Nope, nope. His answer was no to everything’s. At the end I said some version of this, “So, should I get out of bed tomorrow morning”? And he looked at me and said, “There’s a lot of risk in that”.
Jill K DeWit:
Yep.
Steven Butala:
And so, this is Josiah. It’s not-
Jill K DeWit:
His commentary.
Steven Butala:
Necessarily a question, yeah.
Jill K DeWit:
So down the string, this is what one of our members wrote. Josiah said, “You know if it were up to my attorney, I would’ve never, number one, rented out the bedrooms in my first house. Number two, bought rental property for long term lease and hold, number three, bought property to operate as short term slash vacation rentals. Because by the way, parentheses vacationers will flush golf balls down your toilet, slip and fall and sue you, et cetera. Again, number four, things I should never do, I have done, repaired guitars out of my backyard shop because there’s a big liability there, apparently. I can only imagine all the problems he would’ve had with the land business”. So that was his funny thing, which is, you’re right. If you asked an attorney, should I do these things? No. Should I drive the car? No. Yeah.
Steven Butala:
Let’s get this out of the way, and we’ll talk about the topic.
Jill K DeWit:
Okay.
Steven Butala:
Today’s topic, how to manage lawyers and accountants in your and other professionals in your land business. This is the meat of the show. Are all lawyers bad? No.
Jill K DeWit:
No.
Steven Butala:
In fact that we have a great lawyer. I’ve had, he’s a personal friend, Joe and I have been friends with them as long as I can remember. As long as I’ve lived in Arizona. So no, they’re not all bad. You just, they need to be managed. Same thing with accountants that, this comes up in Discord a lot too. There are accountants that, I think I look at as an accountant like this, get me out of paying taxes within the limits of the law.
Jill K DeWit:
Right.
Steven Butala:
That’s, get, and I look at a lawyer like that. Let’s do this legally, but I want push it right to the bitter, like to the edge of legal.
Jill K DeWit:
I don’t want to do that. I just want to do, I don’t want anybody to walk away doing the right thing. That’s what I want.
Steven Butala:
That’s what I mean.-
Jill K DeWit:
I want-
Steven Butala:
So-
Jill K DeWit:
I would like you, with your help, help everybody do the right thing here, because apparently not everyone’s doing the right thing.
Steven Butala:
But I think there are a lot of lawyers that are standing on a soapbox with some type of intent, or some type of agenda, might even be political agenda to represent somebody who’s been wronged. And so that’s where I step away from that.
Jill K DeWit:
Right.
Steven Butala:
I understand advocacy. This is what happened. And in Discord, somebody said, “We need an advocacy group for land so that we don’t get pushed around”.
Jill K DeWit:
Oh.
Steven Butala:
That’s our job every day, to not to get pushed around.
Jill K DeWit:
Right.
Steven Butala:
That’s up to the individual, up to us as investors-
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Butala:
And individual, we’re all entrepreneurs.
Jill K DeWit:
Do you know what the-
Steven Butala:
We didn’t become an entrepreneur with a ton of money rolling in, because people pushed us around.
Jill K DeWit:
You know why I don’t want that though? It’s like, even if we had a group that was totally, technically on our side to hear, to defend us, they’d have their own list of rules too. That they’d say, “Here’s the deal. I’m going to defend you, but you can never do this, this, this, this, this, and this and this”. And be like, now I got more rules I got to remember.
Steven Butala:
Rules.
Jill K DeWit:
I don’t want a lot of rules.
Steven Butala:
You nailed it.
Jill K DeWit:
I don’t like that.
Steven Butala:
Less rules are better.
Jill K DeWit:
Well, how many, I wonder about this. Think about these big firms in, you’ve seen them on TV and whatever. How many times are people doing what they’re told? They work for a big firm, and that firm might be telling them, I hate to say, “Drag it out”, but bill what you can.
Steven Butala:
That’s why-
Jill K DeWit:
I bet that there’s attorneys, I hate to say it, that they walk in going, “Yipikayay, I just got this case, it’s going to be two years of billing, and I can overlap it on this one, and this one, and this one, I’m like, it’s not necessarily the right thing. But-
Steven Butala:
That, I mean, I absolutely know that’s true. And in accountants too.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Butala:
And again, I can say this stuff. I was an accountant. I live this.
Jill K DeWit:
We know, because I can say this too, and now I think about it, who we are, and how we operate our business, and how we teach people to operate as our business is not the same way as every other investor out there. And it’s hard sometimes because I’m the guy running around doing the right thing. And sometimes there’s not guys doing the right thing and I go, I’m like, they’re giving us a bad name. It’s not right.
Steven Butala:
Sure.
Jill K DeWit:
So I get it, but that’s not me. And I have to convince people a little bit. It’s kind of like traveling abroad. You know what I mean? Traveling abroad, when you say you’re in America and they all go, “Oh no, you American”. You’re going to ask for ketchup with everything. You don’t understand this, you don’t like that, you’re going to complain, you don’t know how we operate, you’re going to make all these mistakes”. But I’m always want to go, No, I promise-
Steven Butala:
Every time.
Jill K DeWit:
I’m do my best to embrace your culture and not be that guy.
Steven Butala:
That’s right, Jill.
Jill K DeWit:
I will not be that guy.
Steven Butala:
I totally agree with that. Every time I’m out of the country, usually now these days it’s Mexico, I go overboard to not be, to not fill that stereotype.
Jill K DeWit:
That guy. Yeah, I love it. I know I’m doing it right when I don’t even talk. If you don’t speak, they don’t hear my accent. They’re not sure where I’m from.
Steven Butala:
Yep.
Jill K DeWit:
I could even be from Spain or something. They have no idea. So, yeah.
Steven Butala:
So my point here in this topic that Jill is so incredibly bored by is you can’t throw a bunch of papers at an accountant or a lawyer’s desk, or any really vendor or professional that you’re working with. And just say, “Please do this”. They will end up handling and managing you, and you don’t want. They need to be managed. And there’s a very, very, very good possibility that the accountant that you pick is not going to be conducive with where you want to go.
Jill K DeWit:
Right.
Steven Butala:
We talked about this at the last live event. We buy and sell property in a lot of states. There are many, many tax accountants out there that believe that wherever you buy and sell property, that state, you need to file a state tax return there. I don’t personally believe that, and neither does my accountant. It may be, I don’t know. It might come back to bite us. And if it does, then we’ll pay it.
Jill K DeWit:
Pay it. Yeah, okay fine.
Steven Butala:
We’ll address that when it happens, but-
Jill K DeWit:
We weren’t gone that long.
Steven Butala:
It’s not my-
Jill K DeWit:
Seriously.
Steven Butala:
It’s not my opinion that-
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Butala:
You know, that needs to happen. There are many accountants that believe that needs to happen. Why? Because they’re running around scared.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Butala:
They’re scared that somebody’s going to say you suck at this.
Jill K DeWit:
I would, I don’t know if I could do that job because you know what, both of those positions, they have layers upon layers, upon layers of regulation. And they don’t necessarily go, “Let’s take that one out. Delete it”. No, they just add another layer on top of it. So you have to, it’s kind of like the chain of title. You got to go back through the beginning of time and start fresh and go here was the rule herein, and here’s where it changed, and here’s where the dick got bent, and here’s a new little nuance to it. I couldn’t do it.
Steven Butala:
I mean, I say all this knowing full well that there are people that are listening to this that can’t turn this off fast enough because you just don’t agree. But what it comes down to is respect. I have a healthy, rational, normal respect for the law. But I’m not going to, I don’t run around just kowtowing to the legal system.
Jill K DeWit:
Right, is this okay? Is this okay?
Steven Butala:
Yeah. That asking-
Jill K DeWit:
Is that okay?
Steven Butala:
For permission. There are some people that, some lawyers, many lawyers that I’ve met, many believe that they’re put in this position to change rules and create laws, and put bills through, they try to, they believe that the solution that they’re really helping society in humanity by creating more rules in laws. And I just don’t, I don’t have any respect for that at all.
Jill K DeWit:
I understand. I know we’re not nuts when I say this sentence, and you’ll know this is true. You get four attorneys or you get four accountants, and you give them the same scenario, you’re going to get four different answers.
Steven Butala:
Right. And so that Jill, that’s exactly right. So your job, our job as entrepreneurs and land people are to pick that one out of those groups of four that works best for you.
Jill K DeWit:
Correct. There you go. Happy to save you, and happy to join us today.
Steven Butala:
Happy to save you?
Jill K DeWit:
I hope so.
Steven Butala:
I don’t think we’re saving anybody.
Jill K DeWit:
No, I hope we’re saving someone by their going great. Because I hated that accountant.
Steven Butala:
Yip.
Jill K DeWit:
I thought he was nuts. Now I’m going to call another accountant. Yeah, you should do that. Dead serious. Happy you could join us today. Five days a week, you can find us here on the Land Academy Show.
Steven Butala:
So, the episode on the Land Academy Show is called working with your spouse in your land business. You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill K DeWit:
Why do I feel you’ve been saving this up.
Steven Butala:
You know what happened?
Jill K DeWit:
Oh, oh.
Steven Butala:
I looked back. We’ve been doing this show for what, seven years now? It’s episode number 1800ish. I looked back at episodes that people really liked and got a lot of downloads and-
Jill K DeWit:
They like this.
Steven Butala:
Yeah.
Jill K DeWit:
Oh no.
Steven Butala:
They want to know, is it okay?
Jill K DeWit:
Are you still together?
Steven Butala:
And it’s not okay.
Jill K DeWit:
This is good.
Steven Butala:
I’ll tell you spoiler alert.
Jill K DeWit:
This is great.
Steven Butala:
Don’t work with your spouse.
Jill K DeWit:
This is funny. Here we go. Thank you for tuning in. Hey, by the way, in case you hadn’t known, we have a brand new product that we launched this year. It’s Land Academy 3.0 Catching up with Land Academy. So we spent months, as you can imagine, updating, making the latest and greatest content, how we pull data now, how you troll for new areas, it’s awesome. So check it out, go to landacademy.com or you can always reach out to our team at support@landacademy.com.
Steven Butala:
We are Jack and Jill.
Jill K DeWit:
Information.
Steven Butala:
Inspiration.
Jill K DeWit:
To buy undervalued property.
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