Proactive Tax Advisors, Inc.

📌 Most high earning owners max a solo 401(k), see the contribution limit, and assume that is the ceiling on retirement based deductions.

For the right profile it is not close.

A defined benefit or cash balance design is driven by actuarial math, not a flat limit. Older owner, high stable income, small or no staff, and the deductible contribution can run several times what a 401(k) allows.

It is not right for everyone. It requires a real funding commitment. But if nobody has modeled it for you, you have not seen your options.

🔷 Share this with the high-earning owner who thinks the 401(k) limit is the end of the conversation.

Stay proactive.

📌 A cash balance plan is one of the largest deductions available to a profitable owner, and it is also the one with the longest runway.

An actuary designs it around your age, income and census. Plan documents get drafted and adopted. A funding schedule gets set. None of that is a same week turnaround.

Call in August and you are running a 2026 plan. Call the week before Christmas and, in most cases, you are designing something that first benefits 2027.

The deduction is real. The timeline is not negotiable.

🔷 Save this one. It is the strategy most people hear about a year too late.

Stay proactive.

Growing your business is only one part of building wealth. Keeping more of what you earn—through proactive, well-structured tax planning—is just as important. Many successful business owners discover opportunities only after evaluating their current entity structure, retirement planning, and long-term tax strategy.

If your annual federal tax liability exceeds $150,000, it may be time for a strategic review. Tax planning recommendations depend on your individual financial circumstances.

Schedule Your Confidential Tax Strategy Review: https://www.proactivetaxadvisors.com/

📌 September 15 is six weeks out.

Your third quarter estimated payment is the last one where a correction still lands inside the year with room to react. Q4 is due in January, after the year is closed and after every decision that mattered has been made.

If your income is running ahead of plan, this is the payment where you find out. If it is running behind, this is where you stop overpaying the government interest free.

Either way, someone should be running the numbers before the date, not after.

🔷 Save this so it resurfaces before you cut the check.

Stay proactive.

📌 Full bonus depreciation is back for qualifying property.

That single change resets the math on cost segregation. When the short-life assets you identify can be written off immediately instead of stretched across five to fifteen years, a study that was marginal two years ago becomes clearly worth running.

It also means the property has to be placed in service this year. Which means the acquisition, the improvements, and the study all have to happen on a schedule that starts well before December.

Worth modeling before you buy, not after.

🔷 Did anyone tell you this changed? Curious how many people find out from a post instead of their tax pro. Comment below.

Stay proactive.

📌 A cost segregation study is not a form you check off. It is an engineering based analysis.

📌 The engineer needs property access. The allocation has to be built and supported. The report has to be written and reviewed. Call it 6 to 10 weeks in a normal queue, longer in Q4 when everyone remembers at once.

Start in August and it is done with room to spare. Start in December and you are either extending or losing the year.

The property does not care what month you called. The calendar does.

🔷 Save this and look at it again on December 1, when it is too late to act on.

Stay proactive.

📌 There is a difference between your tax return and your tax plan, and most people have only ever paid for one of them.

Compliance reports what already happened. It is backward looking by design. Your preparer cannot change a transaction that closed in March.

Planning happens while the year is still open, while entities can be formed, elections can be made, and money can be moved.

If your only tax conversation happens after year end, you do not have a planner. You have a historian.

🔷 Which one have you been paying for? Answer honestly in the comments.**

Stay proactive.

📌 Every year the same thing happens. Business owners call in the second week of December ready to do tax planning, and by then most of what they wanted is already off the table.

Not because the strategies do not work. Because they need runway.

So for the next 31 days, I am posting one move a day that has to start now, and what happens to it when you wait.

🔷 Follow along if your bill was bigger than you expected last April. Save this post so you can come back to it.

Stay proactive.

🏆 Filed isn't the same as final.

Amended returns, missed elections, and overlooked credits are frequently recoverable — generally up to three years back. A second, strategic review of prior returns routinely surfaces real money: missed depreciation, unclaimed credits, mischaracterized income, elections that were never made.

If no one has ever looked back at your last few years with a planning lens, there's a good chance something's sitting there.

🔷 If you pay six figures in tax, book your free diagnostic. Link in bio.