EP #11: Unlocking Retirement Savings for Business Owners With Matt Ruttenberg
In this episode of the Healthy Wealth podcast, Chris Hall interviews Matt Ruttenberg, co-owner of Life Inc. Retirement Services, about how businesses can optimize their retirement plans. They discuss the role of third-party administrators (TPAs), the importance of custom 401k plans, and advanced strategies for maximizing contributions. Matt emphasizes the need for business owners to have a financial team, including CPAs and financial advisors, to navigate the complexities of retirement planning. The conversation also covers executive benefits and non-qualified plans, highlighting how business owners can target key employees without impacting the entire workforce. The episode concludes with a call to action for business owners to reach out for personalized retirement planning advice.
To listen to more episodes, hop over to https://reddingfinancialadvisors.com/podcast/
To find out more about Matt Ruttenberg, visit https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattruttenberg
Transcription:
Chris Hall (00:02.162)
Hello, this is Chris Hall with the Healthy Wealth podcast. And today I have a very special guest, Matt Ruttenberg. And he is going to tell us all about how businesses can do a better job of saving for their retirement while incentivizing their employees to stick there with them. And I think you’re really going to enjoy the idea that he has some things that maybe you’re not doing in your 401k plan that you probably should be doing in your 401k plan.
So without further ado, let me go ahead and say thank you so much for being here, Matt. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Matt Ruttenberg (00:36.704)
Yeah, thanks for having me on Chris. I really appreciate it. Yeah, my name is Matt Ruttenberg. I am a co-owner of Life Inc. Retirement Services. We are a custom 401k administration company. So all we do is build 401ks and something we call a retirement plan stack. So the retirement plan stack is basically an upside down three tiered wedding cake for everyone who’s listening. And if you’re watching, think of it as an upside down pyramid kind of situation where
you the 401k, you’re stacking one plan on top of the other and being able to add those layers as your business becomes more and more profitable just enhances your contribution limits.
Chris Hall (01:18.258)
OK, so for those that don’t understand, what is a TPA or a third party administrator? Because people, when they think of like, they have a 401k, it’s with Vanguard, it’s with John Hancock, it’s with someone like that, they don’t really maybe understand what the TPA’s role is. So could you give us an idea more on what that looks like?
Matt Ruttenberg (01:34.392)
Yeah.
Yeah, the 401k world is vast. The retirement plan world is vast. There’s so many different types of plan options. then inside of the 401k, there’s so many variables and wheels turning at the same time. So kind of let’s a good idea. Let’s take a step back. And there’s basically three roles to every 401k plan. So one is the TPA, the administrator.
The administrator is our primary role and we are the ones who are building the plan document, which is kind of like the legal document, if you will, that you file with the IRS stating this is the design I’m going to go with and we’re the ones who keep you compliant. We’re the ones who do all your filings, your 5,500s. We’re the ones who do your annual testing behind the scenes and then being able to pivot as your business evolves. allow your…
your plan to evolve as well. The other layer is the investment fiduciary, the financial advisor, the other role there. And they’re the ones who are managing and monitoring the investment lineup, the menu of funds, if you will, for you and your employees. And then the third category is the custodian or the record keeper, as we call it, which is a little bit more of an advanced version. But this is where the money’s being held. This is where the login is for your employees to see what
what the balance looks like. This is where the statements are produced. And all three of those layers are involved at all times. And just sometimes different people use those different roles. And sometimes they’re put together to make it look like one company. In reality, there’s actually a lot more things going on behind the scenes.
Chris Hall (03:16.506)
Okay. Yeah. I feel like, you know, as a financial advisor, you know, my job is to quarterback the deal and to like, make sure that all the right parts are in place. and then I know specifically from doing this for over nine years now, that if you don’t have a good TPA, like you’re gonna, you’re gonna pay the price, one way or the other, you’re gonna pay the price in the form of like, you’re gonna pay more in taxes than you should.
Or one of the things I noticed was like distributions. Like a lot of TPAs, when it comes time to take distributions out of the plan, man, it’s like sometimes pulling teeth to get them act. There was a business here locally, a great business that was pulled, that was basically bought out by a big company. And so the big company’s rolling everybody into the new plan. So of course, everybody had the option that they could pull out of the plan if they wanted to.
Matt Ruttenberg (03:59.202)
Mm-hmm.
Chris Hall (04:06.946)
And so we had several, you know, I’d say half a dozen clients who wanted to come over and, you know, do private, you know, retirement plans to roll out of their 401ks. And I remember like two or three of them, it took us three months to get a distribution. And I was just like, that’s too long. And I actually ended up saying, like, I think you’re violating some legal things here because, yeah, because like, you know, these people are asking for their money and you’re holding it. And that did not go over well, by the way.
Matt Ruttenberg (04:22.551)
Yeah.
Matt Ruttenberg (04:28.27)
some regulations there.
Chris Hall (04:36.476)
People don’t really like it when you call them out. So tell me a little bit more about your background and how you got into this.
Matt Ruttenberg (04:43.182)
Yeah, actually, I’m a third generation financial professional. My grandfather, my dad, and I first started out straight out of college going, working in more of financial advisor role. I was a financial advisor for 15 years. And as you explained it, you’re the quarterback, You’re the one who is bringing all of the specialists in. And I wanted to be one of the specialists.
So I did that for 15 years and then I was dabbling, was doing 401Ks as part of my practice, but I was also working a lot with the, you know, I call it B2C, right? So we were working with a lot of retirees at the time and I really wanted to get more in touch with my colleagues, which is entrepreneurs. I owned my own practice. I owned my own book of business and ultimately I ended up selling that and then merging my
my 401k business with where, you know, now I’m a co-owner of Life Inc. Retirement Services. So we expanded into and merged our companies together. And then we’ve expanded ever since then. This company’s been in, gosh, in place for 10 years, I think it is now. I’ve been with them for maybe seven years. But overall, I’ve been in the business for over 20 years in finance in general and working with entrepreneurs, but retirees for the first portion of that.
and I decided that I wanted to work with the people that I really connected with because I own my own business. I love the tax strategies. I love talking about business formations and things like that and how it all is put together. And I wanted to be, I wanted to sit on the same side of the table as every other financial professional. So financial advisors, the accountants, the CPA, the tax strategists, the attorneys, to where we’re all on the same team.
because every business owner needs to have a team. Yes, you have to DIY it a little bit in the beginning phases so you can reinvest back in the business, but having a team is where you really start to shine, so I wanted to be a part of that team and be brought in and sit on the same side of the table as everybody.
Chris Hall (06:58.704)
Yeah, one of my favorite books of all time, still to this day, I read it probably 30 years ago, is Rich Dad Poor Dad. And one of the things that stuck in my mind from that book, there were several things, but one of the things that’s really stuck in my mind was like pay for experience, pay for someone to do the things that you’re not good at. And so like as a financial advisor, you know, I always find like, you know,
Matt Ruttenberg (07:06.816)
yeah.
Chris Hall (07:25.746)
Could people do what I do? Absolutely. If they spend enough time and energy on it, they could definitely do it. In fact, I have some clients who, you know, they might spend more time watching the S &P 500 than I do. you know, having that long-term focus, having a planning mindset, a coaching mindset, you know, there’s a lot that goes into that. And I feel like that’s where my expertise is. And that’s why people lean on me, especially like recently the market’s been so crazy. And so, you know, if you’re in your own plan and you’re doing your own thing and you don’t have someone like me,
Matt Ruttenberg (07:36.782)
absolutely. Yeah.
Matt Ruttenberg (07:51.116)
Yeah.
Chris Hall (07:55.727)
It’s a real nice place to make some huge mistakes. So lots of times that’s what I do. So like in your business, that’s another thing that you’re doing it, but you’re setting the table in advance for your folks to not make those mistakes. So can you kind of tell us a little bit about what a basic TPA plan document has? then just give people, because I’m assuming that
Most people listening, if they’re a business owner and they 401k, they have the basic parts. So they’re thinking, I have this. I’m not resonating with this. So if you could just spend a couple of minutes on that, and then I’d like to dig a little deeper after that into what are the things that people aren’t doing that they should be doing. So let’s start with what does a simple plan document look like for most people?
Matt Ruttenberg (08:42.466)
Yeah.
Matt Ruttenberg (08:47.188)
And this is probably the biggest misconception out there in general. Business owners, lot of CPAs and tax professionals, and honestly a lot of financial advisors too, don’t realize that not all 401ks are created equal. They are absolutely not created equal. Think about it this way. There’s really two kinds. There’s a prototype and non-prototype, or the actual verbiage out there in the 401k space.
Prototype is like boilerplate. Okay, so think about going to legal zoom and downloading your trust or downloading any legal document and then just fill in the blanks with your name and your information What that is is that’s the prototype? That’s the they actually file it only one time that the company who’s offering it is filing it one time and then they just wash rinse repeat and that’s all they have to do and you just fill in your name there’s some customization there, but very very little
On the other side of it is the custom or non-prototype. This is like you’re hiring the actual attorney to create a custom legal document for your exact situation. And that’s considered the non-prototype. So two completely different models, because there’s so much gray area in the 401k space. Like I said, everyone thinks 401ks are all created equal. A 401k is a 401k, you can do this.
No, there’s so much more to it as far as like eligibility, plan design, the type of profit sharing that you’re doing. do we isolate these employees? Do we isolate these employees? Are you non-high? There’s so much more to it. And going back to that upside down three tiered wedding cake I mentioned earlier, every layer is designed a very specific way to maximize the layer above it. And if you’re not, you’re literally throwing thousands of dollars away, whether it’s in the form of improper, you
plan design, like you’re giving too much to your employees than you had to, or tax savings. Those are two biggest things that I’ve seen, and almost 90 % of the time I see a enforced 401k plan, or profit sharing, or defined benefit. There’s a tweak that we need to make because it’s not purely efficient enough. Your business evolves daily. Daily, every business evolves. You wake up as a business owner, everyone knows this.
Chris Hall (10:47.698)
Right.
Chris Hall (11:03.164)
right.
Matt Ruttenberg (11:10.446)
You wake up and you’re like, I don’t know what today’s going to look like. And it’s stressful. Your highs are high and your lows are really low. So if you need to be able to pivot and evolve on your plan document, that’s what you need to do. You need to be able to make an amendment. You need to be able to say, hey, I need this new key employee in today, even though I have a one year eligibility requirement. I need to be able to have a special enrollment period. Versus if you do the boilerplate version, you’re stuck with what everyone else is doing at the same time.
Chris Hall (11:24.71)
Mm-hmm.
Matt Ruttenberg (11:39.778)
to something, for the most part, and you can’t think outside the box. And the most, the biggest reason why that is the case is these companies who have these prototype boilerplate versions are, they only want to stay inside their protocol, inside their process, because most of their staff who are working, who are connecting with their client, they only know so much. They’re not 20-year veterans.
They’re not 30-year veterans. They know their role, and they don’t want them to think outside the box. They want to keep it streamlined so they can scale as fast as possible. So if you’re really, really wanting something beyond that, non-prototype custom is the way to go.
Chris Hall (12:21.922)
Right. And I think, again, like just from my interactions with people is they don’t they don’t know what they don’t know. And, you know, whereas and I would say that the not always, but, you know, the TPA is in general, they’re kind of getting paid the same amount of money, whether they’ve like done the boilerplate or whether they’ve taken the time to customize it. And it feels like the majority of people, TPA wise, are just kind of like.
You know, they’re just kind of like, this is what we do. We do it all day long. It’s like, you know, it’s a can of corn. Put it in the shopping cart. Let’s push it through. And I just feel like there’s so much more to it. just again, kind of going into like the simple plan, like the one that we’re talking about, the boilerplate stuff, how much money can a like a business owner put away? I mean, I know these answers, by the way, but I’m asking you for the people out there. But how much money can a business owner put away in a typical boilerplate 401k plan for themselves?
Matt Ruttenberg (13:06.926)
Mm-hmm.
Matt Ruttenberg (13:21.004)
Yeah, I mean, on the low end, have it not to get into how the sausage is made here because there’s a lot to that question. But, you know, twenty three thousand five hundred is the that’s the entry point. Right. mean, I don’t want say that’s what you have to have and want to save to get into it. There’s other reasons why we go into how much you know, what which plan design are we going with? But
It all comes down to how much do they want to save? And let me rephrase that actually a little bit to where when we’re speaking with the business owner, we always ask two questions and they’re multiple choice. It’s actually really simple. First one is, what is the purpose? Like, why are you communicating? Why are you talking to us? Why are we having this conversation? Is it one, is this for you as the business owner? You want to stockpile or save money on taxes?
That’s A. B, is this for your employees because one, the state is telling you to do it. There’s a lot of mandates going on right now. Or your employees are bugging you. Or is it both? Is it all of the above? Okay, so that’s answer. That’s question one. Question two is, now how much do you as the business owner want to save? Now, this could come down to maybe what you as the financial advisor has said, I think you need to save this much for retirement. Or is it more of,
I’m getting crushed on taxes and I need to save as much as humanly possible and we need to do whatever I can to make, to save as much taxes as I can. So when you put those two questions together, it narrows it down to what is the ultimate plan design. And if the second question, the answer is, I don’t wanna do anything, this is only for my employees, then maybe the 401k isn’t even the option, maybe a simple IRA, maybe a SEP IRA. Or if someone says, I don’t have any employees,
I only want to save maybe five grand a year, do an IRA. Do an IRA. You don’t have to go all in on the 401k side. It’s all dependent on what those answers are because going back to your original questions, how much can we save? You can go anywhere between $1,000 a year all the way up to we have plans that we designed. They’re putting in over 600 grand per year pre-tax. And you can imagine the tax savings on that.
Chris Hall (15:40.019)
So I want to interject right there. That’s kind of what I was talking about. think that if you were to ask the average business owner how much money can I put in my 401k, the answer would be $23,500. Or if they’re over 50, they get to do a little bit of upswing and a little bit of increased catch up. But I know that the rules are much better than that. And I think what’s the new number for total confidence?
total is like 63,000 or something. Is it 63,000?
Matt Ruttenberg (16:10.862)
Yeah, the 415 limit is what they call that. that’s this it’s $70,000 for 2025. And I think I think most people think it’s 23.5 because maybe they’ve come from a day job if you were working for somebody else. And that’s how much as an employee they could put in. But they’re not considering the employer contributions, which is a is a combination of the match and profit sharing.
Chris Hall (16:18.448)
Right. Right.
Matt Ruttenberg (16:41.338)
and you are an employee of your own company. You are an employee of your own company, so you get to have both. And I always say this, the 401k task code, or I should probably back up and say 401A, because that kind of covers a lot more, is built for the business owner. You just have to take care of your employees to a minimal amount. So every time we design something, that’s why that first question is, this for you or is this for your employees? Are you protecting your cash flow and your assets?
where we say we need to go all in on your money and let’s figure out what we have to give to them first and then you can go in.
Chris Hall (17:19.25)
Yeah. So the whole idea of like 23,000, how do get to 70,000 from there? How do you get to $70,000 from 20 for 23,500?
Matt Ruttenberg (17:30.286)
Yeah, a lot of this has to do with your, like how your entity is built. let’s just say S Corp, S Corporation, you’re filing as an S Corporation. So what you’re allowed to do, so the first 23.5 is you as an employee of your own company. That’s gonna come out of your payroll, out of your salary that you pay yourself. Okay, so if you pay yourself 100,000, then you’re gonna have the net difference of, what is that, 76.5, right? Then,
The rest of it, which is the employer contribution, is 25 % of your salary. Everything is based, especially for an S corporation, as an example, everything is based on your salary. If you’re an S corporation, you don’t pay yourself a salary, first, you’re not allowed to do that, but second, everything is based on that salary. So if you’re paying yourself $100,000 as a salary, and the rest is coming out as distributions, it’s 25 % of…
the hundred thousand that is stacked on top of the 23,500. So 23,500 as an employee and then another 25,000 on top of that as an employer. So you can do that all the way up to $70,000. I see, I think it’s around, what is that? 184 grand, believe it is to get you to that number for 2025 is what you’d have to pay yourself as a salary.
Chris Hall (18:53.99)
Okay. And then you could put 25 % of it away through profit sharing. So that’s the businesses that making money on top of the 185 that you can pull that out.
Matt Ruttenberg (19:02.796)
Yeah, and that does not need, yeah, that’s going to come out of your, your profit. Basically that’s not coming through your payroll. That’s coming out of your, your profit. Yeah.
Chris Hall (19:11.548)
So when it comes to the $70,000 and the 25%, do you guys help people with the, I mean, assuming you probably get their CPA involved and stuff like that, but do you help people with the design as far as like, hey, listen, you need to pay yourself X number of dollars to maximize your benefit? Because I think that the average business owner, including myself,
We want to pay the least amount of taxes. And so can you speak to the idea of like me paying myself a low salary so I don’t have to pay taxes on it through the S corp or versus like I pay myself a greater salary, but I’m putting money away. Can you kind of like do some, some easier math on that? I mean, it’s really not easy math for sure.
Matt Ruttenberg (19:44.268)
Yeah.
Matt Ruttenberg (19:50.358)
increased contributions in.
Honestly, you have to get your accountant involved. And I think this goes back to what you were saying earlier, is most TPAs, third party administrators, are order takers. They say, okay, what do you want? Here’s your menu of options. There’s no really consultation going on there. Right now, we are building out a couple models right now with their current salary.
what they’ve been paying themselves and then we’re modeling what the maximum is. Okay, so we’re going to calculate how much do you need to pay yourself as a salary in order to maximize your contributions and that is an ongoing annual conversation that we have with clients. We like to have what I call an income planning meeting towards November, December at the end of the year for these business owners who are trying to maximize their contributions.
And that is a conversation of back and forth. Hopefully we just get on the phone call with our CPA and say, hey, what do we have? But a lot of times, you know, the business owner is the middleman there and it’s, and it’s more about what do you, what do you need? How was your year? How’s your year ending up? And do we need to increase your salary before the end of the year in order to do some more maximizing of these calculations? And, and then we have the business owner do a special payroll run, basically.
at the end of the year, we have business owners who put all 23.5 in on December 30th every year because they’re like, I’m not going to pay myself a salary. I just give myself distribution throughout the year. They have to ante up to FICA. It’s a conversation. Everything in business is about the net, right? Everything is about the net. It’s what is your net tax savings if you increase your salary, but when you increase your salary, you’re increasing your FICA taxes too.
Matt Ruttenberg (21:46.454)
and then, but you’re able to put in more into the retirement plan stack, what is the net difference on your tax savings? And this is exactly why having a team of people who communicate is really, really important because there’s a lot of variables going on. There’s a lot of wheels turning at the same time and you are running your business. You’re good at what you do. And then you lean on the team that you trust to do what they do and tell you what is the best.
Chris Hall (22:16.183)
Do you feel that most CPAs are capable of doing those kinds of analysis?
Matt Ruttenberg (22:21.486)
I think they’re capable. I don’t know if they’re always doing it.
Chris Hall (22:26.77)
What’s a good question to ask your CPA that would make them, like, just to let people, business owners know, hey, I’m looking for this kind of a CPA. Is this something you do?
Matt Ruttenberg (22:37.411)
Yeah.
So a lot of time, that’s a really good question. honestly, I see, we talk to a lot of business owners and most of them are unhappy with their CPAs right now. And there’s a big, and the reason is, because, this is a pretty big conversation to be honest with you. I’ve had these conversations with CPAs because there’s a few reasons why they ask this. One, they want proactive advice.
Business owners need and want proactive advice. But most CPAs and accountants are simply, they’re doing your taxes. You give them the numbers you had for the year and they’re calculating your taxes. They’re not tax planners. They’re preparers. And there’s a big difference between a preparer and a tax strategist. And sometimes they’re not the same people. They’re not. I I have conversations with business owners all the time like,
Chris Hall (23:24.924)
Preparation versus planning.
Matt Ruttenberg (23:40.342)
Okay, need the 401k, but I’m also, you know, this is for somebody who’s got a million dollar profit or more. We have these conversations all the time. They’re saying, okay, the 401k, what can I get? Great. What other strategies that I have? And their CPA or their accountant is not giving them these answers. And yeah, buy a new truck. Step up.
Chris Hall (24:00.005)
He’s like buy a new truck. That’s like that’s not good advice buy it buy deteriorate an asset. What a terrible terrible piece of advice
Matt Ruttenberg (24:06.358)
A SEP IRA is like the default plan design for all CPAs for some reason. And this goes back before Secure 1.0, Secure 1.0 prior to, let’s see, 2019, when the SEP IRA was the only option after your filing date, or after December 31st. I think it’s, the conversation to have with your CPA is, you know,
Do you have the bandwidth to do planning meetings or proactive advice for me? Or is that something you do? And if not, I need to go find another person to plug in to that team because it’s really hard to find one that does both. It’s really hard. And the reason is, one, they don’t have the bandwidth because the amount of time it takes to do tax prep, or I guess tax prep.
Is a lot you need to have a lot of people And then so you don’t have the bandwidth to put in more hours and a lot of them don’t like to ask for more money It’s more expensive to do tax planning than it is to do tax prep. So I’ve seen fifteen thousand dollar annual bills for tax planning I’ve seen it less than that, of course, but that’s like a there it can be expensive but this is when you’re really needing like You know hundreds of thousands of dollars of tax help
Chris Hall (25:16.69)
Right. Right.
Matt Ruttenberg (25:35.724)
because you have a high profit.
Chris Hall (25:38.151)
Right? I have a client who is a doctor, and she works as a W-2 wage earner. But she also has two where she’s like the head of clinic here, and she’s like the head of assisted living here, and things like that. Basically, she has 1099 income as well. And so one of her things was like, how do I maximize the amount of money that I don’t have to pay in taxes? And so.
Matt Ruttenberg (25:58.701)
Mm-hmm.
Chris Hall (26:05.426)
once again, like, you know, I have people that I recommend as CPAs, but again, preparers, right? So we reached out to someone here locally, which was nice. And, you know, they’re going to sit down and talk about structures of LLCs and, you know, all the things we’re talking about. But, you know, like, I think a CPA, you know, around town here, and again, it’s different everywhere, but I think a CPA around here is going to charge between $400 and $900 for a return.
Matt Ruttenberg (26:34.222)
Mm-hmm.
Chris Hall (26:34.546)
And we’re talking about this is tax planning. And I want to say it’s probably closer to $5,000. And then that may not be one time, too. That might be, like you’re saying, might be year round. Because you might be like, hey, we need to check in and make sure we’re bonusing ourselves enough money to pay the least amount of taxes. So I think there’s a lot goes into it. But I mean, there’s just a lot of business owners who are like, I’m not paying $5,000. It’s like, OK, well, it would be so great if you could like.
Matt Ruttenberg (26:42.455)
Yeah.
Chris Hall (27:03.78)
make a deal with a CPA or a tax planner, and you say, OK, listen, I want to make back $4 for every dollar I give to you. So in other words, you could charge me $5,000, but I better save $20,000 in taxes, or something to that effect. That’s the real catch, think, sometimes. It’s like you’re putting the money out front, and you’re hoping that they’re going to do what they say they’re going to do. I think that’s real disconnect for a lot of business owners, is they don’t want to fork out the money.
Matt Ruttenberg (27:07.214)
Mm-hmm.
Matt Ruttenberg (27:17.249)
Sure.
Chris Hall (27:31.62)
and then go, that’s not what I wanted.
Matt Ruttenberg (27:33.934)
Yeah, you know, that’s going back to what I said. Everything’s about net. Everything is in business is about the net. So sometimes you have to pay a consultant, which is basically a tax drive. This is kind of a consultant. Sometimes they’re not they’re not even CPAs. They’re just
Chris Hall (27:39.302)
Yeah.
Matt Ruttenberg (27:52.014)
EAs, sometimes they’re just business owners I’ve seen that know what they’re doing and they’re the ones implementing it. Again, it’s part of the team, it’s a consultant, it’s a net. You’re going to save money on taxes, but I get it. Sometimes it’s, if you don’t find anything?
Chris Hall (28:12.546)
One of my first one of my first guests on the podcast was Mark Lewis with his it’s Mark’s money matters and You can find him on Instagram. He’s got a really good social media presence on pretty much all of them but you know, like he was a composer in Hollywood and he has no background in Accounting or anything like that, but he got kind of like put together and if you haven’t seen the episode its episode I believe it’s episode 2. It’s Mark Lewis
Matt Ruttenberg (28:18.574)
.
Chris Hall (28:42.034)
But he has got into a group of people who like literally wanted to like try to abolish the Fed and become sovereign nation. And it’s like a very interesting story. But because of it, he learned how to use all these corporations and trusts and stuff like that to sort of kind of like, you know, eliminate, not eliminate, but really lower your taxes. And so that now he makes his living by giving that advice to other people. So it is.
Matt Ruttenberg (29:07.564)
Yeah, that’s a great, yeah.
Chris Hall (29:10.32)
It’s something that’s super necessary. again, like you mentioned that because you had said, you don’t have to be a CPA. Just Google tax strategists. In fact, in my personal life, that’s one of the things I’ve been sort of, obviously I have my full time practice, which is extremely busy and puts a lot of work on me. But I try to carve out time to learn more about tax strategies so that I can be of more value to my clients as well. But I mean, I’m really passionate about it because.
Matt Ruttenberg (29:34.862)
Thank you.
Chris Hall (29:39.475)
I’m in the same boat as a lot of my clients. I don’t want to pay taxes if I don’t have to. And Mark had said something I thought was really cool, which he said the tax code’s like 6,000 pages or something like that, some ridiculous number. And he said all but 30 of it is on how to save taxes. So the code is actually built for us to save taxes. But we’re not going to read 5,970 pages. You know what mean? So that’s kind of like the.
Matt Ruttenberg (29:50.69)
Yeah.
Chris Hall (30:09.212)
the space where there’s a lot of room for movement. People think, I need to pay my fair share. Cool, do it. Pay your fair share. But if they wrote 5,970 pages for me to pay less in taxes, I believe the government wants me to pay less in taxes.
Matt Ruttenberg (30:24.27)
Yeah, they give you those loopholes. They give them to you and they’re not closed for a reason. If they need them closed, they’ll close them. I tell you, exactly. That’s exactly true. 401k or 401a, that’s one tax code out of the 5,000 pages or so. everything is, mass majority of tax codes are built for business owners.
Chris Hall (30:33.008)
Mostly because Congress still needs him.
Matt Ruttenberg (30:53.55)
It really is. And as long as you’re taking care of your employees, you’re fine. But this is one. I’m a specialist in one. And we have to bring in other people to help understand how it all connects. And I think the ones that I see who take advantage of it the most are the ones that they’ll have a separate tax strategist, the tax strategist, or they’ve done the research, honestly, too, is say, hey,
What is this? And they talk to their accountant and say, can I do this? Does this make sense? And the tax preparer says, yes, it fits into your puzzle. And then boom, that’s it. And then you implement. that’s like, know, cost segregation, opportunity zones, all these different types. So many out there, you have to be able to have a team around you to connect it all together.
Chris Hall (31:44.125)
Yeah, yeah. So we talked a little bit about how to get to 70,000, roughly. going to bring in our CPA. We’re going to figure out our payroll. We’re going to do the different things structure-wise. How does somebody go from $70,000 putting away $70,000 to, like you had mentioned earlier, how do they go from that to $600,000?
Matt Ruttenberg (32:03.969)
Yeah. So this is really customizable. This is where every business is different, every plan is different. So the third layer, right? So what we’re doing, so far what you’ve talked about is the layer one and layer two. So that gets you to the $70,000. Now we’re gonna introduce level three, which is a defined benefit plan. Okay, so it’s a different category of plan that you’re stacking on top of it. The bottom two layers are considered defined contribution.
You’re defining your contribution limit and that changes every year. It goes up like we were talking at 70,000 for 2025. It was 69,000 for 2024. So now we’re going on a defined benefit because it’s a basically a defined benefit plan is a pension, is a pension plan. You’re defining your future benefit. All right. And all the numbers are based on your age, your salary, your…
the actuary comes in and starts calculating all these things. What does your employee pool look like? And they say, this is what you need to put in so you can have this future defined benefit in the future. those contribution limits per person go over $300,000 per year, per person. So here’s a good example. I’m gonna give you two examples on this exactly. So one is a husband and wife team. They have no employees.
Basically, he’s a consultant and he hires her in for some admin work is what this situation was. And they make maybe $1.2 million profit. No overhead. It’s a consultation firm. Sit at your home office and there’s almost no write-offs. So we were able to do all three layers and put between the two of them $675,000, I think it was. It was contributions. Maybe it $645,000.
But the result was $275,000 in tax savings every single year because we’ve implemented all three of those. Part of that is inside of that defined benefit plan is where we’ll start doing different kinds of investments to bump that number up a little bit. basically when you increase that stack up to three layers, it’s age-based.
Matt Ruttenberg (34:28.75)
a 25 year old is not going to be able to put in the same amount. Even though if they have the same profit as a 60 year old, the 60 year old is going to be able to put in more contributions in a given year than the 25 year old, simply because it’s age based. It’s calculated like an old school pension, although you have the liquidity. So what it’s doing is saying, all right, a 25 year old has a lot longer than a 60 year old.
Chris Hall (34:43.634)
Mm-hmm.
Matt Ruttenberg (34:57.39)
to save for retirement, so we’re gonna give the benefit to the 60 year old.
Chris Hall (35:01.29)
Mm Right. So are we talking about so this is the part of the cake, right? So we’ve got the first layer, which is like the 401k itself. And then like the second layer is like profit sharing. And then the third layer would be defined contribution. Define benefit, excuse me, defined. But yeah, okay, good. Okay, great. Yeah, I think that’s one of the things that I have noticed. So before I was a financial advisor before I started doing this over nine years ago, the two
Matt Ruttenberg (35:08.11)
Yep.
Exactly. Yeah, define benefit plan. Excuse me. Yep, exactly. Yep.
Chris Hall (35:29.582)
of the jobs that I had was one, was a pharmaceutical rep. I used to tell people that did drug, I sold drugs and my mom was real proud. And, and so that was what I did for like 10 years. And then I also did dental equipment and supplies for about three years total. Before I got into this, and this is exactly what I’ve always wanted to do. So was an easy transition for me. But with that being said, was I called on dentists and doctors all the time. And I feel like
Most dentists and doctors should kind of fall under that third tier of the cake, right? Especially dentists like Most of dentists in this town are probably pulling in afterpay and all their wages and stuff They’re still probably pulling in for 500 to 800 thousand dollars in income for themselves So mean that to me is a person who should be in a defined benefit plan How do you sort of convince business owners? It’s like to take that next step because it
As much as people don’t know about 401k’s, they know even less about defined benefit. So can you speak to that a little bit, how that works?
Matt Ruttenberg (36:32.15)
Yeah. Yeah. I think this, the third layer unlocks, if you will, is I want to say if you have like $250,000 of profit or higher, and that is also a moving target, depending on how many employees you have. So, you know, for example, I have, we had a business that, that we designed a plan for.
and there’s 18 employees and two owners and we were able to put a million dollars into a plan. 930 of it went to the employee or only 70 had to go to the employees. So that’s a 93 % efficiency rating. So it’s running the numbers. It’s simply what is the numbers and this is your net benefit. No, no, we do. No, we do not charge to run numbers. It’s basically we ask for a census report, which we have a template.
Chris Hall (37:17.628)
Does that cost money for you guys to run those numbers for them?
Matt Ruttenberg (37:28.638)
which is just showing us the numbers. We don’t need names, we don’t need social networks, just basic information. And then if you already have a plan in place and we ask for your plan document, like you mentioned earlier in the conversation. those will give us, and then we run scenarios. We run multiple scenarios. The goal for us is to always get more of the money in the business owner’s hands. And dentists, great example, because we work with a lot of dentists.
I was on a podcast a while back and had a dentist reach out to me saying, hey, my 401k is only doing the 23.5 that we talked about. I want to max out to the 70. Okay. So in that situation, we ran all the numbers. The goal is to get the money in the business owner’s hands, not necessarily give them to the employees. In the most basic form, there’s a lot of profit sharing options out there.
The most basic form is pro rata. Whatever you give yourself, you have to give your employees. We don’t ever run pro rata, ever, ever, ever, because the pro rata means that you’re giving it, whatever you give yourself, if you give yourself 25%, you’re gonna give everybody else 25%. We don’t do that. So the efficiency rating climbs even greater, because a lot of people will run the profit sharing numbers, and they say, it’s not worth it. I’m gonna go put my money elsewhere. I understand that because you’re,
contributions max is $70,000. The efficiency rating is going to be less if you have employees. Now, if you have no employees, it’s 100 % efficiency rating, of course. once you bump up those contribution limits to upwards of 300 grand, you’re not giving 300 grand to your employees. You’re giving like 1,000, 1,200, 1,400 to your employees each. the greater success of efficiency is when you add that third layer, to be honest with you.
Chris Hall (39:06.162)
Sure.
Chris Hall (39:25.862)
Right. So it’s the defined benefit where you can usually maximize the efficiency ratings. Is you’re saying? OK.
Matt Ruttenberg (39:31.092)
Absolutely. Yeah, you’re you’re shooting for over 80 90 percent when you get to that. Yeah.
Chris Hall (39:37.854)
So realistically speaking, if you’re a decently productive dentist, you’re doing good production, and you’ve got, let’s say, 12 or less employees, and you’ve got a 401k, step two is immediately let’s go to defined benefit.
Matt Ruttenberg (39:54.408)
You’re gonna, we use the profit sharing as a tool, right? So every layer is designed a certain way, okay? So you actually will be using some profit sharing in when you go, you don’t jump to step three, you do include the profit sharing, but we minimize it. We minimize it to only about 6 % of your profit, or excuse me, of your salary. And then, because the mass majority we want in the defined benefit plan and it’s…
Chris Hall (40:12.284)
Right.
Matt Ruttenberg (40:23.468)
The version we use a lot is called the cash balance plan. And the cash balance plan, we use that because of the flexibility of it. It’s calculated like an old school Ford GM pension plan, but we’re not giving you a future salary. It’s a balance. It’s a cash balance. There’s a lot more flexibility to it, meaning, you know, if you have a bad year, we can pause it, we can freeze it, or we can minimize the amount that you put into it.
and then when you’re done with it, you roll it into your 401k. You shut it down and roll it into your 401k. The average lifespan is like maybe five, seven years. So it’s not a long-term thing.
Chris Hall (40:56.7)
Wow.
I mean, and use the example they used before, which again was just the husband-wife combination, but that was where you were able to put away $645,000. I mean, realistically, they’re in the highest tax brackets. We’re talking about people who are paying 50 % plus in taxes, correct?
Matt Ruttenberg (41:05.304)
Mm-hmm.
Matt Ruttenberg (41:14.506)
Absolutely. Yeah, so everything you put in there is coming off the top. Yep.
Chris Hall (41:19.6)
Is the defined benefit at all tied to their salary? Or is it kind of like, does it come out of the corporate, corporate proceeds?
Matt Ruttenberg (41:23.352)
Very much. It comes out of, it’s considered an employer contribution. So it’s not coming out of your salary. But again, if you are an S-Corp or even a C-Corp, everything is based on your salary. So we will run the efficiency ratings based on bumping up the salary to, we’re doing one where they were doing a hundred grand a year. We’re doing, as we speak today, a hundred thousand dollar salary.
I think their profit was close to 900 and we ran the efficiency ratings on 100, but we also did 280. So we bumped it up to the maximum and there’s going to be a massive, you know, difference there on how much they can put into it and how much you have to give to your employees. There’s, again, this is how the sausage is made, to go too far into it, but there’s a reason why you bring an actuary in. It’s because there’s a lot of tool, a lot of things going on and
Chris Hall (41:59.389)
Mm-hmm.
Chris Hall (42:14.47)
Yeah. Right.
Matt Ruttenberg (42:19.64)
how long have they been with the company and how old is each employee and how much you paying each employee and how much and if you’re using a order taker mentality on your administrator and actuaries, they’re not going to give you advice. You need to have a consultative approach to it because we took on one from, there’s a monster administrator out there that all the big boys use and I won’t mention their name but
They were giving $50,000 just in contributions, too much, to their employees because the 401k was improperly designed. The first layer was improperly designed. And then they were given $50,000 because they paid very well. It was an IT company, everyone was getting paid very well. And there’s so many more things you can do to it.
Chris Hall (42:59.794)
Wow.
Chris Hall (43:04.082)
Wow.
Matt Ruttenberg (43:17.42)
Just be in the design is one part of it. And since your employee pool changes all the time, people are hired, people leave, they become eligible. You have to be able to pivot on the end, on the back end. And the interesting thing is, we talked about employer contributions versus employee. Everything is done, there’s profit sharing.
and defined benefit is all done after the end of the year. We need the numbers of the end of the year. Okay. So those aren’t due until the day you file, including extension. We’re still working on 2024. People, if you file an extension for 2024, we’re still running numbers and doing implementing plans for 20. You have all the way up until if you’re an escort September. So huge.
Chris Hall (44:06.482)
Yeah, I think that’s really important for people to understand is that if they’re listening to this right now and you have filed your extension, like you should absolutely get a hold of Matt and see if there’s a way that you can save more money. Because again, again, if you’re making what do you think the low profit margin is before you can become like super helpful? Is it like $200,000 in profit, $100,000 in profit? Excuse me.
Matt Ruttenberg (44:34.764)
You know, it’s, it’s, I like to say a hundred thousand in profit. there’s an, we don’t have minimums because they’re the customization part of it is really key that. And so, but I’d say, you know, when you start hitting a hundred thousand dollars, it’s, like, you’re to use TurboTax. You’re going to use an actual accountant. It’s the CPA who knows your situation. Same thing there. So at some point,
you need to upgrade your plan. So about 100,000, I think. Yeah.
Chris Hall (45:05.318)
Right? Turbo tax. Yeah, if you’re making $100,000 in profit, you should probably get off of turbo tax. Yeah. That’s good advice.
Matt Ruttenberg (45:11.818)
I agree. There are robo 401k’s out there. There’s a lot of them. The ones you see the most of are robos. And they tout integration as the most important part of a 401k plan. And that is so far from the truth. It’s not.
Chris Hall (45:18.194)
Yeah.
Chris Hall (45:27.89)
So you’re referring to, I’m correct, you’re referring to these payroll people who come in and they set up your payroll, but they also set up your 401k. And is that kind of what we’re talking about? It’s all integrated, so it’s like ease of use. But then after they set it all up, you never hear from them again?
Matt Ruttenberg (45:39.096)
Yeah.
Matt Ruttenberg (45:45.198)
100%, yeah, so the payroll companies will offer 401k plans. But you’ll also see kind of the newer age payroll providers are out there, they’re cheap, they’re online. The integration is between payroll and 401k, and they don’t have to be the same company. It’s just as long, most companies integrate. Even those big boy payroll companies that I think you and I both know what we’re talking about, they integrate with all the other companies.
They integrate. the story that they’re telling is integration is because the small business owner is wearing too many hats and we’re going to help you because it connects. I understand that. That is important, but it’s also doable outside of that payroll company. The integration, and this is where people have this misconception. So one, what I said was everyone thinks all foreign case are created equal. might as well go with the, make sure the integration is set up properly.
I totally understand that. That makes sense. However, the other part of it is…
401k is a tool for the business owner and the business. It’s not just an employee benefit. It is not just employee benefit. It is a tax tool. is a retention tool. And it is a diversification tool because are you going to reinvest in? Most of our clients are the ones who are looking down for 20 years, growing their business and working their rear ends off to reinvest back in their company. They look up and they’re like,
I got a profit at some years old, 45 years old, and they’re like, I don’t have a plan at all, and I need to save taxes. Those are the ones that we help a lot because they’ve been looking down for 20 years, for 10 years, and all of they look up and like, wait a minute, I don’t have a team. I don’t have a financial advisor. I don’t have the proper CPA strategist or tax strategist. I definitely don’t have a TPA. So that’s our
Chris Hall (47:44.817)
Right.
Matt Ruttenberg (47:53.102)
biggest two things on this, message here is not all foreign case are created equal and you need to use it as a tool, not just an employee benefit.
Chris Hall (48:03.526)
That’s awesome. So I just really enjoy this. I could super geek out on this for a long time. This is really, to me, I feel like this is part of the value that I provide as a financial advisor is connecting people with those, you know, correct people, correct tools, et cetera. And I do feel like, you know, a lot of financial advisors are kind of like the one size fits all method of 401ks, right? We’re just going to integrate it. It’s going to be fine. We’re going to go. It’s like, well, what, I mean, what about me? I’m a, I’m a human. So
Matt Ruttenberg (48:09.186)
You
Matt Ruttenberg (48:30.146)
The easy button.
Chris Hall (48:32.892)
Like I have my own things and my own goals and I always tell people that like the most important thing to me is to find out what’s most important to them because I really want their goals to be ahead of whatever I think I might be doing for them. And you know, I think you’re basically in the exact same vein, right? It’s not about like just putting together a plan and then administrating the plan. It’s about putting together a plan so they can maximize efficiencies. And again, we’re not against paying taxes. We want roads and fire departments and things like that, but like…
Matt Ruttenberg (48:44.888)
Mm-hmm.
Chris Hall (49:01.99)
The code is set up so that we can minimize our taxes and we want to use it to full advantage. So what’s the right? What’s what’s what’s what I mean? I’d love to help you out. Is there any sort of thing that’s sort of like an ideal client for you? Like that’s like you’re like this is the guy this is like you have an avatar for the perfect client for you.
Matt Ruttenberg (49:07.19)
Yeah, yeah, the IRS is not doing webinars. The IRS is not doing webinars on these strategies. It’s up to the team to interpret it.
Matt Ruttenberg (49:28.204)
You know, we, we, again, we don’t work with, we don’t have minimums. And the reason is, is we want to grow with the client. We want to add a layer when we need to add a layer, if you will, on top of that upside down wedding cake. but at the end of the day, you know, a hundred thousand profit, whether it’s you by yourself or if it’s with no employees or if it’s you with
you know, hundreds of employees, the profit is important to understand because that’s where you have more room to implement strategies to save money on your taxes. So a hundred thousand is where you kind of really need to start looking at. And, know, we work with people, companies with thousands of employees, but you can’t get that creative with them. You know, you’re not, it’s important to work with them. And, and, and we work with companies that are
$10 million companies, but there’s only 15 employees. So then you implement certain types of plans. We didn’t get into that, a fourth layer on top of that where you’re getting the executive benefits, but where you can target people, not the whole company, target individuals even further. And I’d say 100,000. Sure.
Chris Hall (50:45.065)
Let’s can we dig into that a little bit? We dig in the because I think you know, one of the things you had said, like with defined benefit is I think people think that they open a defined benefit plan that they’re going to have to give the same things their employees as they do for themselves. They feel the same way about profit sharing. Hey, if I’m doing 25 % profit sharing, I got to do it for everybody. And now you’ve got executive benefits. And I really do feel like the average person thinks that whatever they do for themselves, they’re going to have to do for the other person.
So because of that, they’re like, well, am I even saving any money? If I have to give every employee a 25 % profit sharing bonus, why don’t I just pay the taxes and then I don’t have to hassle with it? Or maybe they’re even paying more than they would if they paid in taxes. Or once again, the accountant jumps in and says, we’ll just go buy a new truck. So that’s the mentality I think is out there. So if you could speak to the executive benefits as well as kind of like
Matt Ruttenberg (51:23.425)
Yeah.
Matt Ruttenberg (51:30.914)
Yeah.
Chris Hall (51:39.827)
just drilling down the idea of why can they do this? Is it legal for them to give themselves more than anybody else gets? Because I feel like people think it’s not gonna be legal. That’s gonna be like you’re somehow like, wink, wink, nod, nod, we’re not really gonna give them what we’re getting. And I’d just like you speak to that if you could.
Matt Ruttenberg (51:58.537)
Yeah. Yeah. So the answer is never. Have I mean, we never use that’s called pro rata. And that is where those boilerplate plan designs go for they use pro rata. If you give yourself 25%, you’re going to give your employees 25 % of their salary as well. So if you pay your if you pay your employees a higher salary than yourself, in some growth methods that they do that, then you’re gonna give them more than you gave yourself.
That’s not how you do it. That is possibly the worst way to do it. And I don’t remember the last time we did that. Let’s talk about, use that one example. 18 employees, two owners. So 20 people total. We gave $930 of a million dollars to the two owners and then 70 to the employees. So that was a 400.
in $50,000 tax savings, minus the 70, right? So they net a 380 grand in that tax strategy, in that strategy there. So you win. Are you in the red or you in the black? Great.
Chris Hall (53:15.762)
That just sounds like I think that just sounds like monopoly money, you know, like I have three hundred and eighty thousand dollars of money that I didn’t put in my pocket. It’s like, no, you did put in your pocket. You put it in your pocket, your pants. It’s I always put it to the idea of like when you go and grab a jacket out of the closet, you put your hands in, you’re like, oh, my gosh, it’s like a fifty dollar bill in here. That’s kind how I feel like when you put money away for retirement is that you’ve you’ve preloaded all your jackets so that when you go to grab them later on, they’ve got money in them.
Matt Ruttenberg (53:33.067)
Yeah.
Matt Ruttenberg (53:40.334)
You got money in it. That’s a really, really good analogy. I love that. It’s really, it’s all about running. It’s, are you, again, in business, everything’s the net. Are you in the red or are in the black? And how far can we get you into the black to increase that efficiency rating? And that’s all there is to it. It’s that simple. But we run the numbers and there’s more, there’s multiple equations that we use in scenarios. We go back and forth. We’re like, no, that one didn’t work.
Nope, this one we can tweet. What if we target this individual versus this individual because they’re younger and they make less money, so it’s not gonna make any difference, but we target that person so we can get more in this pocket. That’s what we’re doing. We’re doing all those scenarios for you because everything we do is open-ended and we need to be able to pivot because your employee’s pool changes every single year. It changes whether they’re eligible or not. Someone’s gonna become eligible or someone leaves or you hire somebody, but.
Let’s say the numbers don’t work out. Let’s just say it doesn’t work, right? And you have a team, they’re leaders or executives that you’re like, I need to still take care of these people. They’re higher paid and I won’t go into, this goes into it a little bit more, like the IRS looks at these highly compensated employees like they’re an owner. So they’re going to test it like an owner, but you wanna take care of them.
and you implement an executive plan. An executive plan is where you can target just those people. Okay? So what I mean by that is, let’s say you have, let’s go back to that 20 employee company, right? Two of them are owners and 18 employees. Let’s say five of those 18 are your leadership team executives and they all make 200 grand a year and they are mission critical to your business. If they leave, it’s going to be a nightmare to replace them.
So you say, I need to do something above and beyond a 4 % match on the 4K to give them something, but I don’t want to give it to everybody else. Everything we talked about up until this point, those bottom three layers are considered qualified plans. Qualified plans mean fairness rules, annual testing. You have to give something to them. It’s minimal, but you have to give them something. But if the numbers don’t work, then we pivot over to the fourth layer on top and say,
Matt Ruttenberg (56:07.022)
let’s go with an executive benefit. It’s considered a non-qualified plan and you can target them. So you’ll say, all right, I wanna give an extra 10 % bonus to these four or five people. I can’t remember the number I said, I think I said five. I wanna give them an extra 10 % of their salary every year, but they can’t touch it for 10 years. So this is like an elongated investing schedule and you only give it to them and there’s multiple ways to do that all the way from.
Chris Hall (56:29.01)
Mm-hmm.
Matt Ruttenberg (56:34.318)
Maybe a lot of people have heard of deferred compensation. Okay, that’s one version that’s on the high end all the way down to something called an L-tip long-term incentive plan where it’s just like hey if you’re with me five years I’ll give you 50 % of your salary if you’re with me for 10 years I’ll give you another 50 % and you save it and you just save it on your balance sheet and keep it on your ledger or however you want to do it depends on the business and there’s a lot of stuff in between there but that’s if you say I only want to target these people
And that’s it. And that’s an executive benefit.
Chris Hall (57:04.53)
Alright. Okay. Yeah, I think I have, is a rabbi trust in that same.
Matt Ruttenberg (57:10.894)
That’s part of it. There’s part of it. It’s a lot of it has to do with like how are we going to bonus it to them? When is it getting, when is it being pushed over? So the ones are like section 162 bonus plan, executive bonus plan, LTIP, deferred compensation, phantom stock is another one, which is a really neat strategy. That’s for maybe $10 million of profit, of revenue and higher.
is where those make sense because they’re expensive to implement. But those are really interesting models and they’re really good for, I’d say, I don’t want to say a million dollars in profit and up, but it’s pushing that, right? Because you need to have to, you need to be able to afford that 10 % extra bonus on top of everything else you’re giving them. Yeah, 10 % is kind of like the,
Chris Hall (58:04.198)
Right, right, okay. So there’s like five layers to the cake now, is that what hearing? That’s great.
Matt Ruttenberg (58:10.046)
you can you can keep going. You can keep going. There’s a lot of layers. The fourth layer, the third and fourth layer is complex. The third, the defined benefit plan. We didn’t talk about this before, but there’s something called a split funded defined benefit plan where you can invest in the life insurance inside of that, where you get pre-tax contributions and then you get a tax-free death benefit on top of it. So it increases your contribution limits even further. So there’s a lot of fun, a lot of fun with these.
Chris Hall (58:18.236)
Yeah
Chris Hall (58:36.05)
I love it. Well, how do you do you how do you choose for people like is it the census that kind of helps you like direct traffic because I mean like how do you choose like who gets that and who doesn’t?
Matt Ruttenberg (58:45.394)
yeah. Well, so those two questions help us a lot in beginning. said that, you know, it’s one, what, why you here, why are you talking to us? And two, how much do you want to contribute? And usually if they say, I got enough, I got, I got plenty of room to deal with here. that’s, that’s there, but, and then the census does help because, you know, those two answers help us with the concept.
And then the census and running the numbers are how we refine it, the concept. And because the concept is one, like, okay, we know we need to add one, two, three, four layers based on those two answers. But now how do we implement those layers is where the census and the numbers drop. Like, how do we get these three layers to become more efficient? Efficiency is the key.
Chris Hall (59:37.395)
Right. OK. Yeah, that’s, mean, I think if you’re a business owner and you listen to this, you should probably listen to it one more time. Or you just need to get a hold of me or Matt and let us quarterback this for you. Because like, that’s the thing. You’re a busy business owner. You don’t want to do this stuff. You want us to quarterback it for you. So with that being said, I want to definitely be respectful of your time, Matt. And I thank you so much for being here. Is there anything else that you want to talk about before we?
Matt Ruttenberg (59:48.556)
Yeah.
Matt Ruttenberg (01:00:07.886)
I don’t think, the only thing I, like you just said, I’ll double up on that is just, you know, reach out to you, reach out to have, if you’re a business owner, reach out to Chris, he’ll connect you with me. It’s all about just having a conversation because we didn’t talk about deadlines. We did a little bit, but not much. It’s every, every conversation is a little bit different and understanding it might not be this year, it not be next year. It could be three years to where you’re like, I just, now I know what I’m going to implement.
Chris Hall (01:00:07.964)
Sign off.
Matt Ruttenberg (01:00:37.826)
But I need to know because if you try to research this, a lot of the stuff we talked about is not out there because most of the stuff out there is being shot out to the masses. If you’re a highly successful business owner, you need a professional to really show you the roads and then say, does this make sense? Then you can do the research on those strategies on that. So it’s a combination of…
hearing the strategy and then also researching on your own.
Chris Hall (01:01:10.866)
Awesome. Awesome. Well, I will definitely put the link to your website in the description so people can click on it and go right to your page and get a hold of you. And I just want to say thanks again for your time. It’s been extremely interesting for me. I just enjoy this stuff so much. I really took away, as a business owner, took away things like, hey, man, I need to do this for myself. I need to get to the point where, again,
Matt Ruttenberg (01:01:35.918)
Thank
Chris Hall (01:01:40.849)
Maybe I’m not ready to implement a plan, but I would be definitely ready to talk about a plan and maybe at end of this year implement, maybe beginning of next year. But I love the idea of getting that out in the open. So you say, when I reach this much profitability or I get this much employees or whatever, I’m going to do these things. I enjoyed it very much. I hope the people who are listening to it enjoyed it. If you know a business owner,
Matt Ruttenberg (01:01:49.666)
Yeah.
Matt Ruttenberg (01:02:00.984)
Mm-hmm.
Chris Hall (01:02:08.518)
that’s doing really good business, making good money, please shoot them this podcast and open their eyes to the world of major, major tax savings. So once again, Matt, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate you. And we’ll have to have you back on and see if we can talk about more fun stuff like this down the road. So all right. Thanks, Matt. Appreciate you.
Matt Ruttenberg (01:02:27.66)
Yeah, sounds good. Thanks, Chris. Appreciate it.