All Forum Posts by: Cliff Benner

Two random comments but I'll mention because it seems sort of relevant that I used to teach the Choice of Entity class to CPAs and attorneys in the masters in taxation program at the country's big graduate tax school. That class was basically a semester-long discussion of S corporations, LLCs and trusts.

But back to the two random comments:

1. Simplicity is scalable and complexity really isn't. Thus you really want to not overcomplicate. Or do strutural stuff you don't understand well. You do not for example want to end up with a dozen partnership returns to deal with unless you first know how much work that entails. (Also a related comment: In a business where you need to watch costs--which is basically any business but especially leveraged businesses in a sluggish economy--you want to watch out for the costs of the managing the complexity too.)

2. I personally think a "mothership" LLC that owns single-member LLCs that hold individual properties is pretty scalable. The mothership LLC is a partnership with you and your partners as its owners. At that level, you can do special allocations (so not guaranteed payments) to reflect your extra work.) The single member LLCs are all disregarded entities so don't need their own federal returns though they may need state-level returns.

I'd love to learn about buying businesses. I don't know anything about that right now and I'm not sure if that's something I want to add to my portfolio down the line or just stick with real estate, but I'd love to know how that process works, what it takes to buy a business, etc.

Anybody know of other resources out there that are specific to small business investing? Books, blogs/vlogs (something similar to BP maybe?), podcasts, etc.

thanks!

 Yes, I was!