Unlock Tax Secrets: From Firefighter to High-Earning Tax Strategist

Dylan Silver (00:01.422)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. I’m your host, Dylan Silver. And today on the show I have Rondi Lambeth in the greater Boise, Idaho area for the past 20 years has helped people all over the US to maximize their credit and minimize their taxes, multiplying their assets. Rondi, welcome to the show.

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (00:24.504)
Thank you for having me on. It’s great to be alive.

Dylan Silver (00:27.578)
another day, right? I always like to start off at the top of the show by asking folks how they got into the real estate space or real estate services space, in your case, helping folks along that journey.

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (00:29.998)
Every day I wake up.

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (00:42.2)
I’d just gotten off a 24 hour shift as a fireman. was on the fireman for Denver, Colorado, the busiest rescue in Denver, turned on my phone and had a dozen plus messages from my mother. My mother I hadn’t really talked to in 20 years. And she was leaving me these frantic messages and come to find out my little brother who was 21 at the time was also a firefighter in Oregon, had had some medical problems or some

Financial problems, a little bit of credit cards, a little bit of collections and had a tax problem. Not much, just a little bit, a couple thousand dollars. And him and his girlfriend got in a fight at a party in front of all of his friends and peers. She said he was a loser. She hated him and dumped him. And his response was he went out in the truck, got the rifle and shot and killed himself. 21 years old, over a couple thousand dollars of…

debt. And that’s what launched my nonprofit where the last almost 20 years now, I’ve shown people how to maximize their credit, minimize their taxes, multiply their assets because when you have bad credit, everything in life costs more, everything. And if you don’t manage your business properly, the biggest expense in your business is taxes. And so I show people how to maximize their credit.

by eliminating 100 % of their personal income tax and taking that savings and then showing them how to get into real estate, whether it’s short-term rentals, long-term rentals, apartment complex. I’m personally, have 2,000 doors. So I moved into multifamily and I’m not a real estate agent. I have a real estate license, but I just simply take these clients, thousands and thousands of them every year. We’ve helped over 100,000 people now become homeowners with.

bad credit that we’re told they couldn’t buy. And we’ve showed them all how to eliminate their income taxes so they were able to start becoming real estate investors. And then I just refer that out to the network, whether it’s a mortgage broker or a real estate broker. So that’s how I got started in it.

Dylan Silver (02:51.48)
You know, Rondi, my perspective as someone who’s been a lifelong W-2 employee and now realtor, wholesaler, and I have this podcast and one of the co-hosts here has been, I was paying a lot in taxes all those years when I was working those W-2 jobs, right? And I look back now as someone who I’ve had tax strategists on, I’ve had people who do like mini cost seg analysis on their home. And I think, man, I could have probably

saved myself so much in taxes over all those years and I never even once thought about it. In fact, I remember thinking back then, like, I mean, I’m going to have to pay taxes if I’m a business owner, not knowing that I was probably overpaying in many cases.

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (03:37.774)
Forbes magazine, or Forbes did a study and found that 96 % of all business owners in America pay more than legally required in taxes by approximately $50,000. So yesterday I sat down with a client, owed $2 million, I mean he netted $2 million, he was gonna owe $880,000 in taxes and I took it to zero. And that’s $880,000 then I sent him over to a real estate developer and now he’s gonna take that 800 grand

and put it into an apartment complex and the apartment complex is going to pay him 12 % interest per year. So at the end of five years, he’ll have almost $1.7 million in the IRS paid for it essentially. So yes, taxes are a largest expense and people think that even if you’re W-2, there’s nothing you can do and that’s simply not true. If you get a short term rental, you can wipe out all of your W-2 tax. If you use

Dylan Silver (04:27.705)
Yeah.

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (04:36.706)
the tax strategies of short-term rentals and manage it yourself.

Dylan Silver (04:41.08)
I think I definitely fell into this category and many people probably are listening to this thinking, well yeah, but I’m not a real estate guy or gal. And my perspective is, is there’s maybe some ways where people don’t have to be super heavily involved, where they can still take advantage. I mean, I don’t, I’m not a tax strategist, so I may be speaking out of pocket here, but things like, you know, having a business, making your home, your office type of thing. And therefore,

That is now something that you can write off against the taxes that you’ve already paid into. I don’t know how valid that is, but I’ve heard of this as a strategy before.

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (05:16.11)
That’s fairly basic, fairly basic at my level, what I teach, but it’s extremely advanced for most people. And really, I call it this, it’s turning your passions into profit. The IRS code, what people don’t realize, the United States system is the only country in the world that does this way. It’s a voluntary tax system. It doesn’t mean that it’s voluntary to file taxes or pay taxes. It’s voluntary on how much you pay.

Dylan Silver (05:23.706)
Yeah.

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (05:44.462)
because the 40,000 pages of the tax code, 99 % of it is how to legally reduce your taxes. In fact, of the 40,000 pages, only 40 of those pages has to do with taxing you. So if you simply do what the government wants you to do, and which is creating a maker instead of a taker, there’ll be two people take paychecks, entrepreneurs, business owners create paychecks. So if you become a creator or maker,

you can legally not pay income tax. And so if you can turn your passion into a profit, everything’s tax deductible. One of the things that I hate is when the CPAs on social media, they’ll do stuff like I saw one the other day, a million followers, and he takes his sunglasses off and he’s like, are my sunglasses tax deductible? No. Well, if you had a side business, because your passion was glasses and sunglasses, then they could be tax deductible. In fact,

drug dealers file tax returns because if they don’t file a tax return and they get caught, they will go to prison for much longer for tax evasion than for selling drugs. So many drug dealers actually file tax returns and they get to write off the drugs that they buy from the cartels. I know that sounds crazy. So anything and everything can be a tax deduction if it’s reasonable.

and necessary for your business to make money.

Dylan Silver (07:15.322)
So and maybe you can help provide some background and some color to this. Are most of the people that are coming to you, are these higher level real estate, you know, entrepreneurs who maybe have this large tax bill or is it a lot of folks who maybe, know, W-2 people and are looking at how can I get maybe into real estate and you know, I know nothing about it and I’m also over here with my W-2 job and don’t have a lot of time.

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (07:39.928)
You know, I told you earlier that one of my weaknesses is saying yes, you know, not saying no to people. And so the answer to question is both. I love helping people. I think I truly believe that if I would have known about my brother’s problems, he’d still be here today with kids. You know, I’ve had literally over the 20 years, I’ve had over thousand people text me or message me on Instagram, you saved my life, you saved my marriage, you saved my business.

So everything in between, many of my clients, I would say most of my clients are struggling to pay their credit cards. We fix that credit card debt because we re-contract it so we can eliminate 100 % of your credit card debt, then increase your credit score, then show you this is how you get started in real estate. And you don’t have to do it all by yourself. I have a real estate fund if they want to just get involved with my Section 8 rentals.

they can be investor. And then on the other side, I do a lot of work with doctors and attorneys and high net worth business owners because I can take any tax return that taxes are owed and cut it by 50 % regardless of what your CPA has done. So you get the best CPA in America. And if you owe taxes, guaranteed, I can cut it in half.

every time.

Dylan Silver (09:04.706)
So, you know…

I’ve had now so many different avatars of real estate operator on this show. One of the things that I’ve seen from this, Rondi, is that simply having more money doesn’t mean you have more money.

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (09:20.843)
Yeah, you see.

Dylan Silver (09:22.242)
And what I mean by that is, you could have some of these high-powered people who maybe outside looking in say, well, they must be rolling in the dough. They’re also rolling in expenses. And so oftentimes it’s these kind of people and it’s shocking to people because you would think, well, multiple degrees doing this, you know, they’ve got this title. But I’ve I’ve heard these stories on the show enough times that I’m thinking, you know, you really don’t know how many people are in a similar position to the point where I now think like.

The people who maybe, you know, don’t have lots of resources are sometimes in just a similar predicament as the people who have lots and lots of resources. Because it’s like now they’ve got this issue, but now at scale.

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (10:03.406)
Yeah, you know my first mentor at 17 years old Pulled me aside and said How much money you make is not as important how much money you keep you know I I grew up really poor no running water. No electricity We got our food out of a dumpster. I left home at 15 bounced around in foster care

And so when this person taught me that, he didn’t see that I was ever gonna become a successful entrepreneur. But what he was telling me is, like, whatever you do, you need to learn the tax code. See, what most people do is they focus on offense. And when a team, a football team, any team, focuses just on offense, they almost always lose. And that’s what most business owners do and most employees do is offense. How much money can I make? They don’t…

focus on the playing field, the rules of the game, and they don’t focus on defense, which is paying less interest and paying less taxes. So I could drop names like you would never believe, people that make millions and millions of dollars, and at the end of the day, they have nothing. I was having a phone, I’m very good friends with Ed Milet, and I was talking with him last night, and he was telling me he has a friend that just sold his company for over a billion dollars.

Dylan Silver (11:03.588)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (11:10.361)
Yeah.

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (11:18.06)
It’s a big exit. And the guy walked away with less than 50 million because of debt and dilution of bringing in investors. A billion dollar exit, 50 million dollar net after taxes and everything else. So when you see these people, a lot of them on social media and the jets and the planes, all that stuff’s rented usually. There’s a place in Vegas now that’s got a cutout of a jet. You can go sit in there and pretend you’re in a jet, private jet.

Dylan Silver (11:40.312)
Yeah, yep, yep.

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (11:46.764)
and it’s in the middle of a casino. So you can’t believe what you see online. And just because they’re making a million dollars a year does not mean that they are keeping a million dollars. They’re probably keeping a couple hundred thousand if they’re lucky.

Dylan Silver (11:57.112)
No, not at all.

Dylan Silver (12:01.186)
And I think what is probably the case for the majority of people who come into a lot of money is you don’t think about managing the money until you’ve spent most of the money that you just came into. we’re not even talking about tax strategy here. We’re talking we’re talking about like, hey, how do I pace this out? And then there’s like, yeah, you got to pay taxes on that. Hopefully you can bounce back and you can do it again. But if not, now you’re in the hole and now you’re getting into situation where

I’ve had many people on this show who do something similar, probably different, haven’t filed taxes in years and years, and that’s kind of their client base is people who haven’t filed taxes in a while. And it’s amazing because again, you would think that it would be limited to, well, maybe people who aren’t making a lot of money, but that’s not the case at all to the point where now I’m thinking as someone who’s an aspiring real estate entrepreneur.

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (12:41.175)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (12:55.662)
You know, a lot of these strategies, these tax strategies, which aren’t relevant to me now, I kind of might as well learn them now, ahead of time.

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (13:05.078)
Yeah, you’re absolutely right on that. Most people, I see it all the time. They made a million dollars last year, they’re ballin’, and they spend it all on vacations and girls and yachts, and now they owe the IRS 450 grand. And now what? And so they just don’t file at all. And that is illegal. See, I said the tax system’s voluntary.

Dylan Silver (13:23.033)
Now what?

at all.

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (13:31.69)
It’s not voluntary whether you filed or not. It’s voluntary on how much you’re gonna end up paying. Because if you apply the proper structure, and that’s how I can take anyone’s tax return and cut it, or tax due and cut it in half, is by changing their structure. And I’m not talking about doing an S-selection, and I’m not talking about the worst, the worst possible idea of putting everything you own into trust. And I see these social media people talking about it all the time.

big real estate names. And they say my business is owned by my trust. It’s the highest tax rate and it has no asset protection. It’s like the absolute worst thing you could do is put everything into a trust. So by changing your structure the right way and understanding corporate law and applying internal revenue code together, you can cut your taxes by 50%. And you’re right, most people

Dylan Silver (14:14.488)
Yeah.

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (14:27.726)
They think that gravy train is gonna last forever and they just forget about the tax thing. And the tax do, it’s never gonna go away on its own.

Dylan Silver (14:30.136)
ever.

Dylan Silver (14:38.85)
It’s one of these things where that’s kind of like where the rubber hits the road, right? So you see these situations happen and ultimately if things kind of are spiraling out of control, the taxman’s gonna come, right? And so when people might be kind of just getting by or they might have lots of money and they might not be the best shepherd of their resources, so to speak.

ultimately someone’s gonna come knocking and that’s kind of the fear and the kind of the fear creates more fear creates more procrastination to where you’re just it’s this it’s this it’s this cycle but on the on the opposite side I grew up in New Jersey I’m in Texas now there was never any there was like zero tax education so it’s also not shocking that this happens it’s not like anyone ever once said this is how you follow your taxes I went through the first 18 years of life just thinking like that’s something that

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (15:13.952)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (15:35.126)
other people have to do for me and then I turn 18 years old on my first semester in college I’m like wait I have to file taxes?

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (15:42.252)
Yeah. You know, that’s the system is set up that way. I have I own a company called Fortress University. It’s a financial education company. And that’s what we teach is, you know, credit and taxes and investments. And I’ve offered to give this for free to high schools. And every single time I’ve ever offered it, they say no, they like the idea and the board always shuts it down.

And I sell it in universities nationwide. I’ve spoken now three times at Harvard, Penn State twice, University of Florida. And so I sell this course for thousands of dollars at universities, yet I can’t give it away at high schools. And I think the biggest fraud perpetrated on the American people is brainwashing Americans into thinking that the CPA works for them.

Dylan Silver (16:06.958)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (16:20.142)
Weird.

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (16:32.972)
The CPA does not work for you. The CPA is regulated by the IRS. They are an agent of the Internal Revenue System. And the CPA by law, if they find out you make a mistake on your credit, on your tax return, by law, they have to turn you in. Otherwise they will go to jail if the IRS finds out that you made a mistake. On top of that, people think that CPAs are tax professionals and tax strategists.

They’re not, they don’t go to four years of college for taxes. They go for accounting. They are software specialists. They know how to type numbers in. And also, by law, they’re not legally allowed to tell you tax strategies and create tax strategies. A CPA is like a referee at a football game. When Mahomes was getting his butt kicked at the Super Bowl, he didn’t call time out, run over to the referee.

Dylan Silver (17:01.86)
They’re not.

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (17:30.956)
and ask what play to run. But that’s what most entrepreneurs do is they run to their CPA. The CPA’s job is to make sure you follow the rules and the paperwork gets filed. So I think that’s the biggest fraud perpetrated on American people is thinking that your CPA is there to help you save money. No, they’re there to help you file and that’s it.

Dylan Silver (17:51.746)
And so you mentioned something, Rondi, there. The CPA is not there or even really able to provide you tax strategy.

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (18:03.086)
They can’t, they’re not legally allowed to. It’s certified public accountant. If you want a true tax professional, somebody trained in taxes, not accounting, you get an enrolled agent or a tax attorney. Those are the two. Or a tax strategist like myself that spends time and has been trained in tax law and tax strategies. A CPA, all they can legally tell you is,

If you owe money at the end of the year, you can buy a new car, buy a new truck, buy a new tractor. You can put money in your 401k, your HSA, your IRA, or your kids’ 529. That’s their limit. They can’t tell you, for example, you now as a business owner, 1099, I’m assuming with the podcast, and as the real estate investor. The CPA, if you ask them if you can write off your home office, you brought that up earlier. It’s a $1,500 deduction.

Dylan Silver (18:59.183)
Yeah.

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (19:03.854)
Do know you can write up to $750,000 for your home office? $52,000 a day for 14 days a year? The CPA is not gonna tell you how to do that. This is not a loophole. This is not a gray area. This is black and white. IRS code 280A says that you can write off your house for your business 14 days a year up to the reasonable amount. And the most expensive house rental in America is an Aspen.

and it’s $52,000 per day. So that’s the cap. Anything from zero. So you as a business owner, instead of doing that silly little $1,500 deduction that your CPA can tell you about, you can go up to 750 grand. Now it depends on your house and market rates and et cetera. But most of my clients are doing about $8,000 or 120 grand a year at the home office expense. That’s tax free. No self-employment tax, no unemployment insurance.

Dylan Silver (19:58.926)
Yeah.

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (20:01.696)
No state income tax and no federal tax. In fact, the IRS code 280A says, do not report this on the tax return at all. And yet most people are not doing this.

And it’s sad, really sad.

Dylan Silver (20:19.133)
I just think about all the taxes that I paid from age, you know 19 until 29 not even I just thought all of and I think probably most people are like this So I don’t fault myself in a way. I just think I would have been further ahead, you know is this

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (20:31.31)
Yeah. I paid $356 last year with over $10 million in revenue. $356.

Dylan Silver (20:38.466)
Is this something that government employees, military, police officers, firefighters, can they take advantage of these strategies too?

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (20:50.318)
100%, so IRS code 280 says any US resident is able to rent their domicile, which is where you live, where there’s a boat. If you live on a boat, you can do it. If you live in a condo or house, you don’t even have to own it. So I’ll give an example. My daughter, who’s a trauma nurse in Las Vegas, she pays $2,200 a month in rent. During the Super Bowl, we rented her house out and brought in over $25,000 because

Hotel rooms were $1,500 to $2,000 if you could get one. So we rented her four-bedroom house out. She just came out to Boise, rented her house out, made 25 grand as a W2 employee and does not have to report any income tax on that. And it paid a year’s worth of rent so anyone can do this.

Now, if you don’t want strangers coming to your house, then you can rent it to your own business. You just have to have the paperwork together. It has to be reasonable and necessary. And you got to actually do business. can’t just willy nilly transfer $575,000 out of your bank account or your business account, put it in your personal. And this is what I do as a strategist is I’ll do a 75 to 80 page report showing all of the comps. And then we create the contracts and we create the…

Dylan Silver (21:37.986)
Mine long.

Dylan Silver (21:58.306)
Yeah.

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (22:05.664)
management agreement and the lease agreement and then we show them how to transfer the money and then there’s a letter that you send to the IRS before you file. So when they get your taxes and they see this 500 grand gone, it tells them why so then you don’t get audited and it checks a box that you did the Augusta 280A and that’s why you don’t have this X amount of income showing up on your personal tax return.

Dylan Silver (22:34.042)
Well, Rondi, we are coming up on time here. Where can folks go to get a hold of you?

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (22:41.942)
Anywhere on social media, rondilambeth, so R-O-N-D-I-L-A-M-B-E-T-H, also at rondilambeth.com. So whatever’s easiest for you. If you do go on social media, I will tell you, make sure it’s the verified, the blue check mark. I don’t do that as an ego thing. I mean, it’s 14 bucks a month, big deal. I do that to protect people because there’s lots of scammers pretending to be me that sell Bitcoin and crypto stuff. That’s not me. I don’t sell crypto courses.

So anywhere at Rondi Lambeth on social or rondilambeth.com.

Dylan Silver (23:15.49)
Rondi, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.

Rondi Lambeth – Tax Strategist (23:19.074)
Great to be here.