July 9, 2026 – Future Voices Collective Geoff Curtis and Tax Alpha Solutions Matthew Chancey

Intro 1 0:04
Broadcasting from AM and FM stations around the country.

Jim Beach 0:07
I need to go ahead and interrupt, because we have that big of a show that full, and we need to get started. We have got two great guests today. First, we have Jeff Curtis, who is going to talk about Purgatory. Oh, that sounds like fun. And Matt Chauncey, who is going to talk about taxes. Oh, wait, we’re doing the same thing twice. Let’s get started. Very excited to introduce another great guest. Please welcome Jeff Curtis to the show. He is the co-founder of the Future Voices Collective and author of a new book called Embracing Your own purgatory. He had a very successful career in corporate affairs communications. He was at great companies like Abbott and Edelman, and eventually he will tell the story. It would be the first question I asked him. Something happened, which led him into purgatory, I think Jeff, welcome to the show. How you doing?

Geoff Curtis 1:03
I’m doing great, thanks for having me.

Jim Beach 1:05
So, did I set up this scenario correctly? Great, amazing career, unexpected challenge out of hell.

Geoff Curtis 1:12
Yeah, I think so. I think so. I mean, it was 30 years, 30 year career in the communications and public relations industry. In 2023 my company was acquired, job became redundant, and then I started a journey on to finding out what’s next for me, and describe that experience in the book.

Jim Beach 1:36
Okay, but you didn’t just have a successful exit, right? So you’re not broke and destitute, correct.

Geoff Curtis 1:42
No, I mean, I did have a success, successful exit, and had the ability to take a little bit more time to kind of understand what I’m doing and where I’m going, and, and finding myself based on a new identity, so to speak.

Jim Beach 2:02
Okay, did you have enough money that you could never work

Geoff Curtis 2:07
again? I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t say that. I think it’s one of those situations where, again, it did afford me some time, so I’m taking that time to kind of talk through my experiences through the book with others, as well as figuring out if there may be a different path for me that’s actually more meaningful and I can make much more of an impact.

Jim Beach 2:27
Okay, that’s purgatory.

Geoff Curtis 2:32
Well, I mean, I’ll tell you a little bit about the book. It’s so I describe the state that I’m in as purgatory because it’s I wanted the people to people to feel that it’s okay to be unfinished, unfinished in a journey, and so if you do ever encounter, whether it’s a layoff, whether it’s a loss of loss of a loved one, whether it’s some sort of transition, and you lose the thing that either you identified with or was meaningful to you, I want to describe that feeling, and so I’ve been kind of navigating myself through purgatory for the last two years, and what that means is that I’m just taking time to do the work on myself to understand past patterns, to understand past career transitions, all of those things, and what they actually meant, so that I can be better informed, and I can better inform my whatever my next step may be, and so again I think purgatory is a little bit more unfinished than I think people are used to, and I always felt that some of the tidy transitions, or we celebrate all of the tidy transitions for people, and the redemption, I wanted people to feel like what it was like to be unfinished.

Jim Beach 3:46
Well, so I had to look up the word purgatory, because I just wasn’t comfortable with it in the title, you know. I was thinking of damnation and hell and heaven, the waiting place, and all of those stories, and I’m not sure that any of them are actually true. Have never really studied this word, but the, the definition across many different definitions, averages basically to having the quality of cleansing or purifying, which is in no way a negative word.

Geoff Curtis 4:20
No, it’s not. It’s not that I didn’t totally

Jim Beach 4:23
negative connotation like denotation, which one denotation, purgatory.

Geoff Curtis 4:30
Yeah, and I think I don’t know that everybody has a negative perception. I think they just have a religious perception, and again, I’m also not a very religious person, but I use that word because it was purgatory. Is a time of transition in basic terms, no matter how you look at it. It’s a time of transition. It is a time of cleansing, that’s how it’s used. It’s an uncomfortable place, but it’s also a place where you can learn a lot about yourself. And so that’s why I chose that term again. I didn’t want. To be the typical I’m in transition, I wanted it to evoke more emotion and more feeling for people, as it did you, I mean, in a negative connotation, but again, I think it sparks some interest in people from just learning about, okay, what does that feeling feel like, as I’m describing in the book, and so I really used it as a, as a time to learn about yourself and learn about the more about your experiences around you.

Jim Beach 5:28
All right, did you figure this out halfway through your purgatory period, or did you go into purgatory saying I’m going into purgatory now to spend the next six months studying myself?

Geoff Curtis 5:38
No, I did not. I mean, because after I left my corporate career, I immediately jumped into a fellowship at a university, and that was designed to help me define what my impact is going to be moving forward all through the lens on of society. So, using my experience to enhance my social impact, it was that journey, and then a journey after that, where I actually started consulting a little bit more, where I just became unbelievably depressed, Jen, to be perfectly honest with you, and I figured out that I just needed to slow down and stop and figure out where I was going and what I was doing and what I needed to do to find purpose in the rest of my life, rest of career, whatever that may be, and so to answer your question, no, I didn’t know that I was entering purgatory. I kind of found out more about myself and more about how to define the term and use that term as I started writing the book and kind of looking back on the 30 years of my career, I

Jim Beach 6:44
sold a business at the age of 31 and all of a sudden went from working 80 hours of work a week to working zero hours a week and having nothing to do, and I 100% lost my identity, for so many men, we define ourselves as our job title, our job, absolutely. You know, what are you? Yeah, I’m a CEO, you know, or whatever the case may be. Do you find this as well, that men define themselves by their most recent title? And how do we get away from that? Is that a good state or a bad state? Eight questions there. Go

Geoff Curtis 7:24
well. I don’t think it’s good or bad, but I think it can be unhealthy, and so I agree with you. Yes, I think men, and as well as many high-achieving women who are in this, in similar C-level positions, I think define themselves by their career, I assure it, and identity is their career, and I went through that entire cycle throughout my entire 30 years. What I will say is that in, in order to understand how to kind of remove yourself, you, you have to ask yourself who you are without the job, and I think that’s a very difficult question to ask for people, as well as to find the answer for, because I think the purpose, your purpose, and who you are gets so intertwined with the career that it’s often hard to separate, and I think people can say yes, family or I have a hobby, but I don’t know if that really answers who you truly are without the job, because that can become a little bit of just a distraction versus who you really are. What I will say that’s interesting is that I’m getting a majority of feedback about my book from men, and I don’t know that’s if that’s indicative of men don’t like to talk about this stuff. Men are more likely to have their identity fused with their job, or if there is belief that, okay, somebody is taking this step to be a little bit more vulnerable, and I feel that I need to be more vulnerable to and talk about this more.

Jim Beach 9:03
All right, How’d you get out of your depression?

Geoff Curtis 9:10
I wrote, I mean, it was really the book. The book had the book was a big vehicle in getting me out of the depression, because I was able to really reflect back on what my career looked like, how I suppressed the motion, how I wasn’t, how I was so intertwined with my with my job that I was able to do some of that work through writing to kind of separate myself and really get to a point where I could appreciate that I did have another identity outside of work, so the writing and maybe a little bit of therapy was the cherry on top there, but more so the writing,

Jim Beach 9:58
I have had that exact same experience. Periods, Jeff. I have had bad periods of depression, and writing has always helped, even if I’m writing about something else, you know. It’s just a way to get your brain off of the bad stuff that you, you know, tend to focus on and give your brain somewhere else to go, and if it’s pretend or you’re writing fiction or whatever, or if you’re writing an autobiographical fiction to get it out of your system to go through your purgatory with writing, I guess. Well, and I

Geoff Curtis 10:33
think, too, it’s also surprising too to what the, as you just mentioned, the positives that do come out of it. You think that you’re just writing about, okay, I’m going to write about this negative time in my life, or what I just went through, but there is.. it was actually surprising to me when I was going through the process that I found out more positive traits that I had that were.. I was had been ignoring over time, and was able to be a little bit more attentive to those.

Jim Beach 11:00
Well, I think you’re a great guy, Jeff. So,

Geoff Curtis 11:03
I appreciate that,

Jim Beach 11:05
with no flaws whatsoever.

Geoff Curtis 11:07
Right, right, right.

Jim Beach 11:11
Tell me about the new organization that you’re working on. This sounds very interesting. Future Voices Collective, explain, please.

Geoff Curtis 11:22
Yeah, so it’s a nonprofit that I began with my wife, with we just launched a week and a half ago, focused on first-generation college students, so those students whose parents do not have a four-year degree and are majoring in public relations, communications, strategic communications. We offer a two year fellowship for these students. We selected students from six different universities: Elon, University of Alabama, Suffolk University, American University DePaul, and University of Illinois Chicago. First inaugural cohort is 23 students, and the idea is I’m a first generation college graduate myself, and so I experienced obstacles throughout my entire career in life, just based on having that as a starting point, but more importantly, we want to amplify the first generation skill set and the skill set that these students have, because that skill set is in demand right now for employers, so want to amplify the skill set through the curriculum that we’re offering them again for two years, and hopefully that leads them to more durable, meaningful careers in industry, and so that’s what we’re after. I felt that it was important to use my experience not only in the communications field, but also my experience as a first generation college graduate to pay it forward and look at the next generation of communicators and really help them jump start their their careers as best as we can,

Jim Beach 12:58
so it’s a pre depression purgatory.

Geoff Curtis 13:03
Sure, I guess. I don’t know exactly what

Jim Beach 13:08
it’s a plan to purgatory to think actively about where you are, where you’re going in your career. Sounds like,

Geoff Curtis 13:15
yeah, yes, it’s, it’s really,

Jim Beach 13:18
really personal to you. It is.

Geoff Curtis 13:21
It’s very personal to me, and it, it’s, it’s something I love to build. And in my last job iteration, I built a team from one to 54 people in eight years, and this was another thing to, to build. So excited about that, but again I feel that it’s, it’s one of those things where there’s a significant amount of alignment between personal passion, not only from industry but from experience, and my desire to really impact these students in a different and hopefully meaningful way,

Jim Beach 14:01
so this is in addition to their college curriculum, correct,

Geoff Curtis 14:04
correct. Yes, so I built a two year curriculum to complement their major curriculum, so this will be delivered in modules, focuses on things from a lot of self awareness, social emotional learning type of things to how to better navigate within career within industry helps students widen their aperture a bit to see what opportunities exist within industry, so it’s a mix of a lot of different things that aren’t necessarily taught at the course level at their current university, and giving them a little bit of a jump start on kind of looking at what it, what it will mean to navigate the industry that they’re going into.

Jim Beach 14:50
Let’s talk about that industry. How is it doing? Is it going to be challenged by AI, where an executive can. And create a crisis situation action plan, instead of hiring a firm to do that, and you know, foster the communications in a better way. It seems like this is fraught for disruption right now.

Geoff Curtis 15:18
Yeah, I think it just like any industry, I think there will be an impact. However, I think there’s one thing that PR and comms – you always need human input, because it’s even in your example of a crisis situation. Sure, AI could develop a framework structure and a plan, but I don’t know that AI is going to necessarily understand the exact crisis in the exact moment. Who’s impacted internally and externally, all of those things, and so that’s where you’re definitely going to still need critical thinking, problem solving, really good writing to influence that. So, yes, there will be some some tactical things that I think AI will can take care of. You can always have AI do a good first draft of a press release. It’s not going to be the best first draft, but it’s going to be a draft. You’re still going to need that human writing input and critical thinking to move that over the finish line. So, again, I think those, the students who are going to be best prepared, are going to be those who are equal parts understanding how to use AI for efficiency, and then also know how to problem solve, critical think, and write. There are many universities out there that are embracing AI from that writing standpoint. One university I know in particular one of their classes is doing two different assignments, one where the student writes it, and then one where they have AI write it. You’re graded on both, and the only way that you’re going to have AI write a very good draft of whatever the assignment is is if you’ve written the other assignment first, because then you know how to prompt AI, and I think that’s still going to be critical moving forward.

Jim Beach 17:08
That sounds like a great project. I would love to see the outcome of that. Absolutely fascinating. So,

Geoff Curtis 17:14
yeah, it is. It is, and I think again, universities that are really kind of taking the bull by the horns, so to speak, and embracing it, embracing it, how it relates to field that you’re going into. I think those students are going to be much further ahead than other students who are at universities that may be rejecting the use of AI or not seeing the benefit again. I always talk to people about the old liberal arts mindset of how you’re they build critical thinkers, good writers, good problem solvers, because you have so much input from different disciplines in a liberal arts setting that I think that’s almost the future proofing in a way, because those students are going to be much better equipped to use AI to dare to make it their jobs efficient versus

Jim Beach 18:00
replacements. Yes, I have completely embraced it, and I find that it’s helping me in some really unexpected ways, especially in writing. I love to take something that I’ve written, a chapter, and put it in and say, how can I make this better, just doing that repetitively until it says this is good enough, you know, we can’t really make this much better,

Geoff Curtis 18:31
right?

Jim Beach 18:32
So,

Geoff Curtis 18:32
no, and I think that’s always, that’s always a good use case, I mean, it really is, because then you really, if you’re a writer by trade, then you know what good looks like. I think those who aren’t writers or don’t have that background aren’t going to necessarily know what good looks like, and I think that is still a critical component that we need to need to be aware of. I mean, you, for example, obviously know what good looks like. You’ve written several books, so it’s when putting that chapter in, it’s either going to sound crappy or you’re going to get another idea on how you would rewrite it anyway.

Jim Beach 19:13
I had a really interesting experience with my first book, was with McGraw Hill, and they scheduled a time for us to go over all the edits on a group phone call, and you could tell that they were just racing for a huge fight or some sort of contentious call or something. It just didn’t seem they said they seemed very nervous about it, and so we got on the call, and the editor came and said, “You know, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, and you know, I’ve been doing this for a lot of time, and these are only suggestions, and we can go page by page, and you can reject any changes you don’t like, and yada yada yada. And they started, and I was like, “You know, I accept all of your changes undiscussed, you know, I’m done, I don’t need to talk. Walk through this, you’re better at this than I am. I’m not dumb, you know. Well, I am dumb, but I’m not dumb enough to reject help, you know. So we’re done, and they were shocked, like that had never happened before to me. Maybe why argue all of that stuff? I don’t. I’m not that much of a writer, so that I’m in love with my own words. They can’t be changed, Jeff.

Geoff Curtis 20:23
Right, right, right. Well, sometimes I get a little bit too in love with my words, but then that happened through my editing process. But we figured it out.

Jim Beach 20:33
What are sort of the trends overall in comms these days? Is there any new patterns or voices or just trends that we need to be aware of, things that are happening that only someone in the industry would know.

Geoff Curtis 20:51
Yeah, again, I, in my view, not a lot, other than what we’ve already discussed, as it relates to AI. I think AI is on top of everybody’s mind, the the other thing that is, I would say, ebbs and flows from a momentum standpoint is the importance of the communications function on the corporate side. It’s always an interesting conversation to see how much value companies put into the actual communications function, whether that be a chief communications officer, chief corporate affairs officer, whatever it may be, there has been a lot of discussion more and more about the value, and I think the value that the comms function can provide, but again it kind of ebbs and flows. It was a big discussion, I would say, in the last 12 months, but it’s kind of losing a little bit of steam just because often external environment really dictates value and the need for the comms function, so it’s, but for me it’s always interesting to watch that those are the two things that stand out, the the third thing I’ll say is that we’re still trying to close the gap or bridge the gap better between college and career, and what students still need to do to be prepared to get into industry, and that’s part of what Future Voices Collective is trying to solve specific to first gen students, but think it’s needed overall. Is that how do you better prepare students for entering into industry, and the things that people keep pointing out is the problem solving and the critical thinking, and so how do we bridge that gap a lot better for entry level people coming into career.

Jim Beach 22:41
Well, I think school does a horrible job of preparing you for any career, whether you’re a doctor, a dentist, a CPA, a lawyer, an account manager, or director of comms. None of them have enough classes on the real life that I’ve seen.

Geoff Curtis 22:58
Yeah, why do you, why do you think that is? I’m just curious, because I’m, I’m on the, I’m on the board of trustees at my alma mater, and I don’t disagree with you, and I’ll just give you my opinion, but I would love to hear yours, only because it’s, it’s something that I could talk about quite a bit, and to me is that there aren’t enough industry or former industry people, either adjuncting or being professors of practice at specific universities to give the real inside look of what an industry is and what you need, but that’s that’s my opinion.

Jim Beach 23:37
I am 100% I It against the college system that we have now. I think it’s absolutely horrible and a scam. I taught at Georgia State University for nine years, and the things that I saw there just boggled the mind. A professor, fully tenured, who you see in the hall, and he just.. I am so busy, I can’t begin to describe how busy I am. Well, what do you have coming up? Well, I have class on Tuesday that I have to teach, and I have a paper due in seven months, and I’m so busy, and I’m like, dude, you’re just so unaware of what the real life is like. When I left, I was replaced by a PhD in entrepreneurship who had never run a business before. He got his PhD, wrote his dissertation on the idea that a young entrepreneur needs more help and connections and networking, but as you advance in your career as an entrepreneur, those things aren’t as important, and I was like, “Wow, you spent seven years studying that, you idiot. You know, I mean, just.. I have such a low impression of the system, and the people who participate in it, they are truly hiding from life. That’s my two cents.

Geoff Curtis 24:57
Yes. Okay. No, I can.. I can see that. I can see that

Jim Beach 25:02
you know, I think that if you wanted to teach comms, you should have, you know, a class visit every single class from someone in the industry doing every single job, not the CEO, but you know, the copywriter one week, and then the next week the graphic designer, and yeah, you know, I mean, I, I, yeah, but I depressed with theory, perhaps,

Geoff Curtis 25:25
yeah, no, and I think we’re on this, we’re on the same page there. I think it’s a little bit more to, in a lot of cases, too much theory and not enough practicality, and I think to your point that you just made, is yes, I think you do need somebody every week to show you the different possibilities that exist within the industry, but in order to do that, you need a professor or a leader who has actually experienced a lot of that in order to identify the right people, and so that’s where I think there should be some systemic change in how you move a little bit, move away from some of the theory, and insert a little bit more practicality, particularly at the liberal arts level.

Jim Beach 26:10
Jeff Curtis, the book is Embracing Your Own Purgatory. How do we find out more? Get in touch, follow online, all that, please. The

Geoff Curtis 26:18
book is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble Online, all the places where books are sold, and I am very active on LinkedIn. So, Jeff Curtis on LinkedIn is the best place to find me. Fantastic,

Jim Beach 26:30
Jeff. Thank you so much for being with us, and we’d love to have you back. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Bye. We are back, and again, thank you so very much for being with us. You know, our biggest dream is to be called a high net worth investor, right? And you’re going to get there, we’re all going to get there, and someone who’s going to help us is our next guest. Please welcome Matt Chancey to the show. He is a certified financial planner, tax strategist, and founder of Tax Alpha Companies, where he helps high individuals, high net worth individuals become more tax efficient. He has had over 15 years of experience in this space. Prior to that, he was in construction and real estate, where he learned that everything influences taxes. He has been on all of the big stations: Bloomberg, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, and he has a new book out I’m excited to talk about, called Alpha, I’m sorry, Tax Alpha Solutions, Effective Tax Management Strategy. strategies for high net worth investors. Matt, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Matthew Chancey 27:48
I’m awesome, Jim. Thanks so much for having me, and you make me sound way fancier than I really am.

Jim Beach 27:53
Well, from your picture, you look all fancy, your hair all nice and everything

Matthew Chancey 27:57
understood. I appreciate that.

Jim Beach 28:01
All right, are taxes getting easier or harder, or or difficult? Where are we in a spectrum here?

Matthew Chancey 28:12
Well, I guess that’s an interesting question. It depends on how you look at it, right? You know, there’s there’s clearly been a shift. You know, having this conversation a few years ago would have sounded different than having this conversation today, but you know, AI has become this, you know, this vernacular that gets discussed all day, every day, and what is, you know, agents and all that stuff, and how does that apply to the tax business? Well, I don’t know per se yet that it really, there’s a lot of people talking about how AI applies to the tax business, but you know, I think you know there’s been, you know, there’s always been the big companies out there, like the Turbo Tax and the other stuff, trying to win direct to client relationships to get people to use the software, but I don’t think everybody’s tech savvy, and a lot of people don’t want to do it, and I think there’s a fear of what if I get it wrong by using the software, you know, what the IRS can do to you is somewhat punitive, and it’s kind of scares people when they go, “I want a chaperone, I want somebody to hold my hand, and that’s why people, I think, for the most part, hire CPAs to, you know, make sure they get all the right numbers and all the right boxes on all the right forms. So, I guess the question of is it getting easier and harder, I would say, you know, really comes down to how you feel about technology versus, you know, being able, being a do-it-yourselfer, versus finding a relationship with a tax partner that you trust, because you have a complicated financial life. If you found the right piece that works for you in the way you go about it, I think there’s a lot more avenues today to get your taxes taken care of or solved for, so you know, maybe you have more choice. Are the choices what you want, per se? Not everybody, like I am not the biggest technology fan in the world, personally. You know, if I go to a company or go to a store and they’re like, “Hey, sign up and download our app and join on our website, the last thing I want to do is download another app. Can register on another website for anything, I’m sick of that stuff. So, for me, like, maybe that’s not the best solution, and I got to figure there’s other people out there like me that like an old school human relationship in the way that I solve problems. So, is it getting easier or harder? I think it depends on how you look at technology today, and understanding how to use and access those tools is probably the answer.

Jim Beach 30:21
Can an individual entrepreneur, a person who owns some stuff, a business, some properties, just, you know, a million dollars of some sort of asset, can they do their taxes by themselves, or should they definitely hire a professional?

Matthew Chancey 30:34
Well, look, when you get into somebody, so who should, right? Because you’re talking about business owner, I think that’s the right question. Your financial life gets more complex, you know. Most business owners probably start out with somebody that works for them, that they trust to manage their finances, and that might be somebody that you know arbitrarily creating an avatar, I might call them Betty the bookkeeper, right? She gets it organized, they pay the bills. Is that person the same person that’s doing their taxes? Is that person really capable as that business grows and scales to fundamentally be like a comptroller for that level of business? Is that person fundamentally keeping them compliant, or is that person leaning into tax planning as a conversation that they should be doing with a small business owner? So, I think the question really comes down to, you know, is it easier, is it harder? Well, a business owner could do it, but like the more complex things that we do in life, do we want to do those things on our own? Do we want to have to figure them out? I mean, I mean, they got Web and D, Web MD out there. If I got sick today and I wanted to diagnose and treat myself, WebMD gives me a leg up and doing that, but do I really want to be treating myself medically, or do I want that to do that in collaboration with a trained medical professional? I would say that a business owner could do it, but just because you could do something doesn’t mean you could do something. Your highest and best use of time and the value you deploy in the business is probably deployed as a better skill, pulling some other lever in the business to drive value and trying to figure out how to do the taxes for the business, if that makes sense.

Jim Beach 32:07
Oh, it does. Any big changes in the last year or two, did the great big bill change any of the tax situations we need to be aware of as business owners?

Matthew Chancey 32:19
Well, see, that’s one of the things about every time you hear there’s a legislative change, like, or this new bill that was written, it changes stuff, you know, a lot of people joke, and the tax code is 80,000 pages. Well, the first 10% of it is things that show you how to pay your tax, and the next 90% of the code are things that show you, you might not legally have to pay the taxes if you, if you fit this fact pattern of rules, right. So, about figuring out some of those really nuanced parts of the rules and how they might be applicable to your specific set of facts and circumstances. It’s like I said, it’s very facts and circumstances driven. What applies for one person might not apply for another person, so every time the code changes, there are opportunities that open up in the code that might not even be fully realized yet, like the way it’s written legislatively, those things are complex, sort of to figure out the codes in there, to figure out who it benefits, to figure out how to use it exactly, that sometimes takes time and adoption for it, but we do know that things get changed and get shut off. So, for example, I can give you one of the things that has been shut off in the iteration of the last bill. Well, a couple of things one way or the other, right? So, bonus depreciation got extended and became permanent for business owners under section 168 day at 100% so I can write off my capital equipment that I buy, if it’s for business uses, up to, you know, up to the full value of it in the year that I purchase it. So that’s a good thing for business owners. One of the things that kind of went away or changing is some of the tax credits associated with renewable energy type programs. A lot of those changes got revamped and got changed. There are some tax incentives that shifted over to kind of the battery storage components of it, but wind and solar are sun setting and are not being treated the work the way that they were for like the past eight years. So, some of those things are going to be different going forward. So, every time you hear them talk about it legislatively, there’s an evolution. Things are changing, new opportunities are open up, and new obstacles or things are shutting down that have existed in the past. It always happens that way.

Jim Beach 34:29
What about these exotic techniques that you can use to buy conservation land, and then announce that you’re going to develop it, but then not develop it, and instead giving the tax benefits to a nonprofit, and then taking the full deduction of the developed property, even though you didn’t develop it. You know, all of these schemes out there, you hear a lot of schemes, are they getting more and more prosecuted, or less and less prosecuted?

Matthew Chancey 34:59
Well. Look, I don’t know that I would call it a scheme. I mean, let me tell you why. Right, so first of all, what you’re talking about falls under Internal Revenue Code 170 and there’s a bunch of different variations of Ode 170 which is a charitable giving code that allows somebody to deduct it. They could, you know, some iterations you take 50% off your adjusted income. There’s some fact patterns where it can reduce your adjusted income by 60% sometimes it’s 30% just depends on other facts, but the point is, is so saving green space has been something that’s been in the code for a long time, it was historically used with very wealthy clients that bought massive tracts of land that said I don’t want this to be developed, and based on the value of the land, we’re going to donate it to charity, and it’ll be a perpetual green space. Um, so it started off from a really pure, like, reason to do it, to preserve the green space, and that’s that’s a good thing. Everything doesn’t need to be developed the highest and best use. Well, what happened? How did it get, you know turned into maybe a scene like you’re talking about, right? How did something that was meant to do a good thing get turned into a scene? Well, it starts to move down market, you know, people want to start to access it at the level of I’m not a billionaire, but I’m a millionaire and or multi millionaire, and I would like to use this type program, so then eventually it gets syndicated, it gets sliced into fractional pieces, so it’s not one guy buying, you know, 1000s of acres of land that he wants to conserve for green spaces, it’s individual investors buying, you know, a fractional pool of that real estate, so you know, their economic interest in it isn’t the same, they own a fractional interest, it wasn’t their land in the first place, they were fundamentally buying into this partnership to get some kind of a deduction, but where those things really got challenged was, you know, there’s enough land out there that it made sense to do this at one level, but when you start mass producing this type of product for a tax deduction, you started to have people get fast and loose with the appraisals, and what you needed was a delta in the appraisal value. In other words, if I pay x for the land, I need the value of the highest and best use for that land. If I do zoning and entitlement and development permitting, and I’m going to build this other structure, this other asset on the land, I need a pretty big arbitrage between, you know, the cost of what I paid for the land and the value of what is invest use would actually be, and so when people started, you know, taking land that had no future development value because it wasn’t adjacent to anything, and going, well, this could be an apartment complex, or this could be a development for for a public, so what, whatever they thought that they could build there from a highest and best use perspective. Well, these ladies, this real estate wasn’t being developed for those, because it wasn’t anywhere near people, there wasn’t an economic engine that would drive value to it to justify building an apartment complex or something of a exponentially greater value, so the issue really became the appraisals, and it was because you had people that had a financial interest in manufacturing a complex tax product that they could sell for less sophisticated investors that they could profit from, that those less sophisticated investors would not know the difference between the value that was paid for the real estate and the potential appraised value of its potential highest and best use, and deducting the delta between the two by doing some permanent conservation, the education, as you come down market, the education, the level of education for those less sophisticated investors, albeit they might be millionaires, but they’re not billionaires, and they don’t have the tax and legal and valuation teams that a billionaire or a cent a millionaire or a deck a millionaire family might have access to. So they were taking the word of the of the promoter that put together the program. Yeah, this absolutely works.

Matthew Chancey 39:00
It makes a ton of sense. We’re going to donate it. You’re going to get a charitable deduction. They wouldn’t have known or had a team around them that would have known to challenge or look at the valuation of those things, which is ultimately where the IRS has challenged most of those programs, and then ultimately tried to create penalties and interests to the people that participated in those programs, because of the, you know, big gap in valuation that is really hard to substantiate, no matter who would do an appraisal on that real estate.

Jim Beach 39:32
Yes, big, big mess. One of my good friends was caught up in all of this, and I don’t understand it. All I know is he ended up in jail for 28 months, and so,

Matthew Chancey 39:41
oh yeah, oh, not good. I mean, look, I get asked almost every week about some of those programs. I’m sure I get asked every week about some of those programs, and I just have to explain it to people. I go, the people that are telling you about it don’t understand it enough, and you don’t understand it enough. To be sophisticated enough to want to participate in this, I’m not telling you it’s real or not real. There’s a right way and a wrong way to do everything. Unfortunately, that program has been so abused that today the IRS has put it on what they call their dirty dozen list. It’s considered a listed transaction that if somebody like myself were to promote it to a client, I have to literally notify the IRS that I promoted that program to a high net worth client to use for a tax deduction, and I have to file what’s called a material advisor form, and if I don’t submit a material advisor form, they punish me with fines and penalties for not notifying the IRS that I promoted to a client something that the IRS deems like that gets abused, we have to raise our hand. So, when somebody understands that, why in your right mind would I want to raise my hand and have the client raise their hand to the IRS, saying, “I did something that you asked us not to do. Would you please come take a look at it? Why would you do that?

Jim Beach 41:00
Anything else, any other situations that you can think of that are sort of like this that would get us in trouble as well, that we need to be aware of? Does this call off guard? I’d heard about it for a long time now. All of a sudden, people are getting convicted,

Matthew Chancey 41:16
you know. To be fair, I haven’t heard about the situation where somebody got jail time around participating in just that transaction, you know, we have clients that have participated in those things with other, you know, people that now are our clients. We used to do those programs more than a decade ago when the IRS didn’t frown upon it, like I have done those transactions before, but it was well over a decade ago, and then you could kind of start to see the writing on the wall. The IRS started liking it less and less, and started putting out notices, and everything else. And you know, if you pay attention, you know, we were able to pay attention and go, okay, if the IRS doesn’t like it, we’re not going to do it, because it wasn’t the only tax strategy that a high net worth client should know about. There are firms out there that sold those programs, and only those programs, and they had no other place to burn, and their livelihood and their revenue was contingent upon getting somebody to buy a program that, at that particular time, nobody should have probably bought, so they were still trying to sell those very aggressively to their clients, I haven’t personally experienced anybody that got jail time from it. I seen plenty of requests from the IRS saying, here’s your settlement offer of the interest that you own in the partnership, and here’s the penalties we want you to pay, and here’s the interest we want you to pay, and here’s the back taxes we want you to pay, and do you want to settle, and all those other things, and there’s firms out there that represent, you know, tax controversy attorneys that specifically work in that space to help people work through conservation programs they got caught up in that the IRS is trying to negotiate. There’s firms that specialize in that, but I personally hadn’t seen anybody that’s gotten jail time over participating in one of those programs, so I’m not either your friend got very unlucky, or maybe there’s a little bit more to the story that I don’t know. I don’t have a little bit of the context.

Jim Beach 43:11
There were, it was five or six CPAs in the Atlanta area that had sold the product, and the head guy that had put the syndication together, got 25 years in jail, and all the CPAs got like three years each. So, anyway, well, a lot. Tell us about the book, Tax Alpha Solutions: Effective Tax Management Strategies for High Wealth. What do you consider high wealth? First of all, Matt,

Matthew Chancey 43:38
look, I think it’s a subjective term, right, like you know it’s all relevant to how you feel, but you know there’s some statutory definitions that the government lays out. One of them being an accredited investor, right? An accredited investor, somebody that’s got a million dollars of investable net worth that’s outside the value of their primary residence, so checking savings, money market, retirement accounts, value of investment, real estate, business interests, you aggregate all that together. If you’re worth a million dollars or more, the IRS says that you know this says you’re sophisticated, you’re an accredited investor. You can also not have assets that have income, and if you make $200,000 a year, every single year, or as a single person, or $300,000 a year more as a married couple, and you do that every single year consistently, then the IRS says you’re an accredited investor because you make high income and or you have assets and you’re sophisticated. Now, the issue I have with that is this is that those rules around accredited investor status were created decades ago, and at the time where those rules were created, only 2% of the population at the time was considered by definition an accredited investor, and today about 20% of the US population is considered an accredited investor, because they have not inflation-adjusted the qualifiers in the decades that that’s been around. So today, what happens is you certainly have clients or probably. Specs, depending upon how you view them, that want to participate in some of these programs that financially, on paper, look like they’re sophisticated based on the definition, but having a conversation with them, they’re the farthest thing from financially sophisticated, and these programs are otherwise terrifying, because they’re, they just really been a very modest earner, but maybe a fantastic saver, and a fantastic saver over a long enough period of time could easily accumulate a million dollars worth of wealth, but that doesn’t mean that they are sophisticated enough to want to participate in some of these tax advantage partnerships, because they’re not really going to understand the complexity of it.

Jim Beach 45:41
Yes, and if I’m raising money for my business, say I want to bring in a million dollars for my business, do I really need to pay attention to that, or can I just get my uncle’s money?

Matthew Chancey 45:52
Well, look, going to go get like a family, and everybody that’s ever.. I’ve had this conversation so many times throughout my career, it’s so funny, you should always raise money from your friends and family network first, right? Like, if you’re trying to do something first, you do it with your own capital, right? And it’s.. and if you can make money on it with your own capital, great. The next step, before you put together a fund and go to the internet and start doing videos and try to raise capital, is you go to friends and family, you go to the people that already know you and trust you to some extent, and see if you can execute on the same business model with other people’s money. What many people find is that, you know, it’s funny, I can turn $1 into $2 when I’m using my money, but as soon as I put investors’ capital in there, like, it doesn’t, the math doesn’t math that well anymore, you know, and it complicates the issue. So, if you can’t raise investors capital through friends and family, and then you can’t execute with friends and family money and return capital to them, then you should not be building a program where you go out to strangers and raise money from complete strangers by putting, putting together offering documents, a private placement memorandum, subscription agreements, like, and then going out and trying to raise capital in a private partnership. You should not do that if you haven’t already done it with friends and family money, and you can’t return capital to those people and make it work with other people’s money. And investors should know to ask that if they’re on the internet and they’re looking around at different investments, because today the internet is just booming, you start clicking on investments and the algorithm just starts feeding you these types of things in its little algorithm, you’ll get tons of stuff put in your inbox, so if the person that you’re that is offering you a deal that with AI has an amazing pitch check, and their documents look fantastic, and their story sounds great. Well, great. Have you ever done this with your own money? And did you, did you get a return on capital? Did you do this with friends and family money, and return capital to friends and family? And if they haven’t done those things, thinking that they’re going to do it with some independent third party’s money that they don’t really know, and don’t have a, you know the connection with like friends and family that is something I’m definitely weary of. I don’t know the statistics on this, but I’ll give you an interesting piece of information. The head of the SEC will tell you that there’s a few 1000 partnership programs to get launched every year, you know, four to 5000 programs every year is kind of the last time I remember hearing the statistics, so almost 20 new programs per day get launched. We’re trying to raise investor capital. The SEC themselves will tell you that probably 10% of those programs are investable, and 90% of those programs are speculative in nature. And one of the biggest risks an investor ever takes is not understanding the difference between what’s a speculation and what’s an investment. It doesn’t mean there’s not dollars that couldn’t be allocated to either one of those, but investing, you’re expecting a return because it has the track record and the strategy makes sense, and it’s got criminal and financial background checks, and it’s got audited financial statements, and there’s other risk controls in there that would ultimately make it investable versus just something that’s an idea and somebody’s going to wing it and see what they can do, making it speculative in nature. That is one of the biggest mistakes that most investors make, is not knowing the difference between what’s an investment and what’s a speculation.

Jim Beach 49:17
How much trouble can you get if you do that, if you have an unauthorized investor.

Matthew Chancey 49:24
Well, an unauthorized investor would mean that I let an investor into my fund that didn’t qualify based on the accredited investor status, right? But, but if I don’t, if I have a speculative type of investment, and if I’m an accredited investor and I’m legally allowed to be in that type of an investment, and it was solicited the correct way, there’s rules 506 C, 506 B, regulatory stuff that determines exactly how you have to communicate with your investors and what you kind of have to disclose, but if you do it the right way in all your disclosure documents to disclose. Shows your documents are fundamentally risk factors, right? If you completely disclose all the risks, and you go into this speculative investment, and you really try to do it in a good faith way, even if you lose all of the investors’ money in that deal, if you disclose all of the risks very clearly and very transparently as a sponsor of the program, there is, you may not necessarily get in trouble if you clearly said, “Here’s what we’re trying to do, we’ve never done it before, it may not work, I could lose all of your money, but here’s what I’m trying to do. The problem is, that’s not how those, those investments are normally positioned, they’re normally positioned as investable things, and clients feel like they’re going to get a really good return on their money, that it’s not more speculative than it is investable, and the clients don’t truly understand that, and when you’re dealing directly with a sponsor, and the sponsor is the person that puts together a program, the sponsor doesn’t have any system of checks and balances, other than making sure it’s an accredited investor. They can ask for all of your money from the investment. They don’t have a legal requirement to say, hey, maybe you should only put in a little bit of money, maybe you should diversify, and that’s one of the things that, in our business, not to be a shameless plug for how we do things, is you know, we have all the financial licenses, we stand in between investors and the sponsors that build the programs, and say, “Listen, this is a solid idea. I’m not saying you shouldn’t participate, but it shouldn’t have all your money in it. Maybe we should put a little bit of money here in this program and diversify into some other programs, because nobody’s ever said diversification is a bad thing, and it helps us hedge and manage our risks, whether we’re in the public markets, buying stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs, whatever, or we’re from the private markets buying into private partnerships for tax advantages. It never hurts to diversify. Very

Jim Beach 51:53
well said, Matt. Great information, and congratulations on the book. I just saw that it was published by Forbes. You don’t really get more prestigious than that, and you have over 175 star reviews on Amazon, which is very impressive for a nonfiction book. Very impressive. How do we get in touch while you online get a copy of the very impressive book?

Matthew Chancey 52:18
Yeah, look, we’re pretty easy to find these days, so the book is called The Tax Alpha Solution. It’s, it’s on Amazon, so you know, just pretty simple. You know, type it in, put it on Amazon, you know, buy a copy, there’s the audible copies and everything else. Leave us a review, say good stuff about it. Now, look, remember, it’s not, it’s not meant to be a technical manual to teach people all of these technical ways to do these complex things, it’s, it’s, it’s written in layman’s terms, so that wealthy clients that aren’t financially and tax sophisticated can understand that these programs exist, and how to do them kind of the right way versus the wrong way, but not how to necessarily manufacture and recreate these things. So, find the book online, that’s a great tool. The name of our company is Tax Alpha Companies Company website. All that information is out there, pretty easy to find. And my name, you mentioned at the beginning, it’s Matt Chancey. And you know, happen to be a certified financial planner, that’s not necessarily the, you know, a lot of people view, you know, comprehensive financial planning and all the other stuff. We definitely look at it through that lens, but we focus on helping small business owners, more complex tax partnerships for higher income clients is kind of our area of expertise. So, any of those ways will end up landing us. We have all the typical socials that you would have, LinkedIn profile and company website, lots of white papers and other stuff for download, so tons of entry points for somebody that’s intellectually curious.

Jim Beach 53:44
Fantastic, Matt. Thank you so much for being with us, and we’d love to have you back. Thanks a lot.

Matthew Chancey 53:48
Awesome, thank you, Jim. Really appreciate the time.

Jim Beach 53:51
Well, we are out of that time, but back tomorrow. Be safe, take care, and go make a million dollars by now.