Video: Paul Mayfield on FIG

"Money is not the end, money is not the point, money is a means to an end. The whole point of going through stabilization, accumulation is to get to the point where you can use that as a tool to have an impact."

"Value is how good an idea is times how many people use it."

My name is Paul Mayfield, I am one of the Fourplex Investment Group investors. Professionally, I work at Microsoft, doing product development. I have software engineers that I manage and I present at technical conferences.

I think we've discovered some fun stuff between us and some of the folks at FIG on how to accelerate charitable giving. We thought we'd share some of those things here.

For the past, I would say 15 years, my wife has spent maybe 20-30 hours a week coaching violin to her daughters. Allison got a violin performance degree as her education. If you're familiar with that, it's 8-10 hours of practicing every day. It's been a real value that our kids learn that discipline.

I am the father that is constantly talking to the kids about investing in planning your future and money. That opportunity came up because my daughter was working as a hostess at the Macaroni Grill, was planning to quit, and came up with a plan which was to tell the owner "Hey, I'll play violin for free during the Christmas season." They said go for it. She showed up with a tip jar and her sister and they played for a couple of hours.

They thought this would be a one-time thing until they saw the online reviews which said the service is terrible, but the violins are good. At that point said Kate said well maybe you want me to come back for a couple of hours a week and you can pay us and so play it forward.

Now she and her sister are making 30 bucks an hour each between the tips and the pay from the Macaroni Grill as a teenage job.

The swelling pride of a father seeing the entrepreneurial instinct happen in his daughter cannot be described I'm sure the selling price for the violin is good too, of course, but and, and so that was a lot of fun.

Kate and Claire are now gonna go play it Down East clothing because now every time Kate goes to any business, she offers to come and play the violin there and she gets like a 1% hit rate. But that's fine, right?

All of the brainwashing I attempted on my son has worked because he's just declared his major in computer science. He is working part-time. And living in a house that I bought is in my portfolio, it's the only one I manage, and he has three roommates. And he runs that thing like a Nazi...best property manager ever.

Oh, by the way, his rents are paid out of the 529, which is kind of a cool trick too. But he is I remember sitting down with him when he was eight years old, mowing the lawn, talking to him about planning for college talking about how to save and grow, invest. And he's going to make it through with a master's degree on track without any debt whatsoever actually ends up a little bit in the positive from all this he's got some scholarship money as part-time work, starting to learn some of the investing.

So super happy about that. That's just to give you the sense of what a Nazi I am with my kids about thinking about investing. And I have not shown them this chart yet. But at some point, they'll see it.

I think Sam's getting to the point where this could be good. Maybe Kate as well. I think the journey they could take through their financial life if it's a progression can start with negative cash flow and college right, get to the point where they're living paycheck to paycheck, get to the point where they start to have three months covered, six months covered. Now they start to feel more confident, grow to the point they get five years covered 20 years, and then hopefully reach a point where all of their expenses can be covered.

I do talk to them about wealth in terms of the time that they can survive without income, you know, not $1 amount or something like that. So they can accelerate this journey or decelerate based on the lifestyle they want to live. They have to think about their expenses as well as the money that they are in saving. And I talked to them about the kinds of investments that don't make where they, they need to focus on preserving their money to build up the reserves to then have some liquidity, depending on if they're gonna start their own business, or if they'll go into the workforce, you know, they'll they may start the active growth or passive growth first. But eventually, try and get to the point where they can go into some fun investments that are opportunistic, and that is kind of fun.

So, but the real point here is that this is a journey that goes from stabilizing yourself financially, to getting accumulation to doing a shift. And really the most important and I'm not kidding about this part of this. And that I try to, you know, relate to them is really this impact.

Money is not the end, money is not the point, money is a means to an end, the whole point of going through stabilization, accumulation is to get to the point where you can use that as a tool to have an impact.

Lessons I Learned From Bill Gates

I had a couple of role models in my life, that have inspired me to think this way about money myself. And here's the first one I happen to work for at this company. As I mentioned, when I was, I think seven or eight years out of college, I had my first chance to talk to Bill Gates while he was still at the company.

Actually, the technology that my team was building was being used by the IT department at Microsoft to protect access to Bill's email. And one day, one of the folks in the department had said something to the effect that the technology was a pain in the ass. So Bill wanted to have a conversation about that. And the way that we wrote that was every week, we had this event called think week where we'd submit papers. Bill would read them.

And there were I mean, it was a lot of pages of paper coming from the company. And then he gives feedback and responds to him. And we explained sort of what was going on with the technology, how it was being used in a unique way by the IT department. Bill said, well, let's come have a chat about that. So he walked him through the whole thing in the meeting, I was sitting probably, you know, across the table, not much wider than this. And he liked the idea, actually. And he was looking around to the executive staff. And he was about to say, let's go support this, let's go drive it forward. And he paused himself. And he looked at me, and this is what he said. He said, how many people are using the technology that you're doing right now?

We said, no one, just Microsoft, it says, Oh, great, you know, I've seen a lot of good ideas come through this, this room. The value is how good that idea is times how many people use it. So your value is zero.

You know, and as the seven, you know, year out of college kid, I was pretty intimidated by that statement. And it did stick with me as a result, but he was right. And what is not defined in value in that statement was the dollars of revenue, you know, that sort of thing it was the impact was going to have on the world. I think, you know, you think about Bill taking a transition from, you know, being in the prime of building a large successful company and deciding to dedicate his life to humanitarian causes. If you're, if you're as we call it, the high order bit, if your primary motivation is to have an impact and make a difference, it makes total sense to do that transition, right. And I think that when our company's been at its best, it has had an impact as the motivation. And when it's not, it's had other motivations.

I think you can look at a lot of different organizations and think that so I am proud about working at this company, in part because they have this philanthropic value, and they have this impact value. Just to give you some ideas, I pulled this off of one of the public Microsoft sites that gives an overview of the company is actually the employees from the company have donated $1.6 billion to charitable causes. Through the company's matching program over the course of 20 or so years. every October, we have this massive event, we come together and we you know, raise money, the company will match. You know, I think 12 or $15,000 a year against the charitable donations, they'll match $25 an hour for the volunteer hours we put into organizations. So I just really like the focus that the company has, in our new CEO, Satya, also a really impressive and also very philanthropic person. He has a real cause of my for accessibility, trying to use technology to make sure that opportunity is accessible to everyone. And so you'll see actually the Superbowl commercial that Microsoft will run this weekend.

That'll be a theme of the commercial. And you'll also see what I'll do I'll show you this kind of cool. This is a new feature coming didn't come here to a product demo, but it's still kind of fun. If I turn this new checkbox on in PowerPoint and wait a second. Now what will happen is speech recognition is going to you know, in real-time, translate what I'm saying and provide subtitles to extremely useful if you're speaking to someone with English as a second language, or that has a hearing impairment or any of those sorts of things, and so it's a pretty cool feature, right? But I'll tell you, this kind of feature gets highly prioritized because of the value of the CEO. I mean, I've seen that in a company. So it's pretty cool to see. Alright, but so as not to be distracted. I'll turn that off. So here's my second role model.

Moving on from Microsoft, this is a little more personal me this, my Uncle Jim. He hiked Kilimanjaro at, age 63, a retired political science professor and his specialty was Middle Eastern government, and spent the better years of his 40s 50s, and 60s in Jordan, Syria. Actually, when the second gulf war happened, and the rebuilding effort occurred in Iraq, his colleagues in Iraq requested that he be involved and the State Department recruited him to be in charge of the southeast portion of the country, he lived in Baghdad had his life threatened many times, I mean, very interesting guy. But over the course of, of those years, he was, you know, face to face with real poverty, and was really moved by it had a partner and they decided to create this humanitarian group. And so here are some pictures I took from an outing with that organization.

The basic approach they have is, is a total grind. They will hire people in a country to reach out for a year and just start making relationships with a village with a community in a very remote area where there are not services available from the government or other nonprofits and things like that. After a year of doing that, if the community says, Hey, we want to be a part of doing a self-development program for us, then they institute a program where every year villagers show up, they bring, you know, in this case, I think was like 10 pesos or 50 pesos or something like that. They put it in bags, and they put it you can see, I don't know if my pointer works. Oh, yeah. That is a lock or sorry, that's a lockbox. That is a toolbox with a padlock, where everyone puts their money sits in the middle of the village. They actually do this for like 20 years, I've never had one stolen. And they have elected someone who's going to be president, someone who's going to be a secretary.

The Secretary, I think might be out of the frame here, but has a little green notebook with a ledger recording everything that happens, nothing else happens for a year other than everyone comes together participates in a savings program, they want to continue that little base of capitals and use to do microfinance loans to start businesses and to develop projects where they start building systems and things like that within the village. But the point of the organization is that they're there to sort of help train on the programs, but the villagers implement the program. So there's some ownership there. And so they'll spend five years, every single day just sort of in the training, doing these programs. And then hopefully graduate, I think in Mexico, the graduation rate, meaning if they left the programs would continue on the road is somewhere around 60%. So not 100%, but better than 0%. This one, this is Maria, she had used the microfinance loan from the community box to contribute her part of a government program that allowed her to purchase this tortilla machine.

She went she like 100x her tortilla population or production from that program, she actually grows the corn outside of the cinderblock room you see here and cooks it in a wood fire every single day to create the meal then goes through here and hand presses the tortillas. So it is pretty cool when it can work. This is the local group down here from Mexico. That's the organization just for the How we doing on time, by the way. 30 minutes, okay. So, you know, the choice had been doing that for about 30 years, or sorry for about 20 years. And then they started this pilot program in Nepal, where they tried to implement their program at 180 villages all at the same time, reaching 60,000 people, they raised about a million dollars to do this.

The three-year goal was to show that there was an impact. And so my uncle, the Ph.D. oversaw this academic, Lee rigorous process of doing random samplings of populations and control groups and doing surveys before middle and after and that sort of thing. But when they were done, here's the director in Nepal, being recognized by the Prime Minister for the work they've done. This is a little chart. And by the way, all the data that I'll show you here was hand-collected by Napoli's people that were working for choice with the villages, and then we're submitting it sort of in Excel spreadsheets. But the money raised you can see from 20 1415 was amplified from partnerships with the government with not other nonprofits. Even labor and supplies coming from the villages themselves.

They, they have a measure and index that they use, and I'll show you actually, this might be a good point to just show you really fast. This is the this is a sort of paper version of the thing, go back up here that come up big enough, hopefully. Okay. So here's the survey instrument they were using. They would ask for information about the families. I won't I won't belabor this, you know, the quality of the lead the life, how happy do they consider themselves? How do they feel about their opportunities? You know, do they have income, that sort of thing a little bit later? Asking questions about, you know, basic services, access to water, latrines, that sort of thing? Is the kitchen free of smoke is a big one, actually, that number eight. Anyway, this will go on for about 150 questions, questions about nutrition, how often they're able to get access to certain different kinds of foods.

So it takes a good hour to administer this one especially have to be careful on how you parse the answers that come back, lots of people are, are motivated to give to think they're supposed to give a good answer. And, and then you have to kind of probe a little bit, some economic information. So they, you know, based on that, they felt like the extreme poverty, which is, can only live in a certain circumstance, we were coping with poverty, you have to spend your hours of the day traveling to get water, that sort of thing, had a dramatic decline amongst that population. And so they've, we've, we felt pretty good at the organization that this was working.

Just in case, it's interesting, here are some of the different projects that were happening, you can see goalkeeping was one of the biggest ones and produce both income and access to protein and that sort of thing. So when I joined the organization, I've always admired the work my uncle was doing, but have a chance to kind of get personally involved. Because of this, I mentioned in the Nepal project, all the collection of the data was being done pretty manually. And so over the past several months, Sam has actually been helping quite a lot. We've built out a mobile app where the in-country personnel can record those survey questions or record, we just build a system or we just build a train. And then all that data, real-time goes up to the cloud. And then we can produce reports and things like that. So we're hoping that the next round of this kind of project ends up being much more automated in real-time, we don't have some big data collection normalization effort to try and build the spreadsheets into graphs, right.

So if by the way, I'm going to come back to this, if folks are interested in this room, this is the one shameless plug I'll make during this presentation. If you're interested in having a pretty amazing life-changing experience, choose as this way that they will put you in the village for a week, working, help volunteering hours on the projects that the community themselves are planning to do. They actually don't need your labor. But in fact, they pushed me out of the way when I tried to mix them in. But that they but it's a booth, it matters to them that someone would care to show up. But the opportunity also to experience real poverty and have your children experience poverty.

The number of stories and testimonies this organization has from building the First World Third World connection is pretty amazing. So if you'd be interested go to Nepal, Bolivia, Ecuador, Kenya, and those places and trying this out, you know, see me after and I can, I can hook you up. And if you're otherwise interested in getting involved, let me know too. there's a lunch that we do has a fundraiser every spring and then there's a big black-tie party every fall. And those are two of the major fundraisers and there's even usually a big golf tournament that happens as well. So if any listeners are interested, just let me know. So then, as Steve mentioned, I was invited to The Fourplex Investment Group's charity auction, which was for the Children's Miracle Network. And I was bidding on a couple of items that I wanted.

And then this item came up for bid, which was you could go to the Red Sox, Yankees 2019 baseball came in a luxury suite in the new New York Stadium with Lou Pinella as your host, and sounds awesome, right? I'm not a sports fan. I don't even know who Lupin l was, I had to look it up looked like he had some pretty good sports credentials, you know. But what an up happening was the bid came out at 30 $500 to start someone did it. I had the thought in my mind. Well, it must be worth more than 30 $500 which is probably the sort of thought many of you have had many times during real estate investing. I see value there. I don't know what I'm gonna do with it, right. So I bid 36. And I thought if nothing else, I'll just try and bid it up and help you know, raise money for Miracle Network that way, and then I wanted a 36 because, to my surprise, no one else outbid me from there.

My first reaction was, oh, shoot, you know, now I got to cut 3,500 bucks. But as I thought about it, you know, I was having the next week an auction with choice. And I thought, Oh, this might be an interesting way to sort of seeing if choice might have access to a Yankees fan in the audience, or even a Red Sox fan in the audience, maybe we could, maybe we could try and use the return that way. So here's kind of how the entire thing worked. And I have to take a step back and say, two years before the auction, I had bought two shares of a total market index, they cost 877 at the time, then that appreciate it for two years, just for 323. Not a lot so far. Then once the auction and one that bid, so I had to figure out what the retail portion was, I had to email back and forth for about four weeks to figure that out. And so they price 20 $400 to retail portion, and then 1200 over and above that was sort of the donation that I made. So now what happens is I paid 30 $600 out of pocket, but 323 of that was kind of the growth that had happened on that index, right.

So then I was able to write off the nonretail portion. So I'm just assuming a 40% tax rate here. And so what happens is the IRS is now putting in 480 of that, because that's going to come back to me on taxes, right? Then work, you know, I use my company match also for the retail portion. So now, Microsoft in the game and the miracle networks up to 40 $800. So far, so good. Any question? Okay. So then the next week, donated that choice that package to the choice auction, and wrote off the remaining retail portion because now it was the thing. So $960 comes back to me, growth is the same IRS, isn't it more Microsoft in the same amount.

Now there's 40 $800 for the Miracle Network 20 $400 for choice, then when matching the retail portion, because now it was donated. So now Microsoft's into it for 36. And you can see the rest of them. There's 40 100 for each. And then it's sold for $10,000 at choice auctions. So it worked, there was a fan. And so the total number across all of this was, you know, little over $17,000 went to the Miracle Network and a choice. And it might cost out of pocket was essentially 1837. Right. So felt pretty great. And honestly, I sort of fell into it. Because I saw the value, I thought there's got to be someone's going to bid this up. So I jumped in. And I know folks here can relate to that kind of feeling. I feel like my real estate investing, side hustle has taught me to think that way. But this is the pie chart of where the money came from. At the end of the day, you can see my contribution there. And then the Yankees had their initial contribution, the arbitrage brought more.

Now, I didn't make all those contributions, obviously. Right, they came from a number of different sources. But I think you know, the thought I have here is that there's no reason when we go and think about our charitable giving and the impact that we're giving, we can't use a lot of the skills that we've learned as investors to pull together syndication of the sort, right. If we recruit people to participate with us, we can juice the return to the charities, right. I mean, I have so much respect for the four Plex investment guys, for donating the proceeds from this conference to the underground railway. Right. Yeah, I mean, what a fantastic way to take advantage of a situation where so many of us are here, to learn something for our professional benefit, but to leverage that into a charitable gift, right. And so, you know, it was nice, I had the match. If I wasn't working full-time, I wouldn't have that match. But I have access to people I have access to the network, I there are ways to get the match outside of your employer match. Right. So this was the this was kind of the cool thing that came out of that. And then I have another thought.

This is a smooth curve of the highest tax rate since it started at 7% in 1938 when the income tax rate was created. And you can see the sort of in our era, it's lower than it was, say 40s 50s, and 60s, right. And the 1929 crash came here. And of course, we had a couple of wars, and it shot up the largest marginal tax rate. And it sort of makes sense why that happens, right? Because they're, you know, both from the unemployment and the lack of revenue that happens as a part of the crash. And also from the extra government expenditures from getting involved in two world wars. There's a lot of bond creation, a lot of debt that the government goes into, and there are interest payments due on that. And, you know, the money to pay that at some point has to come through the system they've created to create that revenue. And so we see the spike than the 80s that kind of comes down, right. Then here's the 2008 crash.

Then the second draft to kind of look at here is Okay, so here's the national debt as a percentage of GDP. Which I'll take maybe GDP, think of it as our economy's income. And here's our economy's debt. So this is almost like the debt to income or the debt service coverage ratio graph over time, right? You can see early on, yeah, we have a lot more debt than we had productivity in the economy. You know, after the world after the World Wars, our income started coming up a lot, and our debt started coming down. And that kind of brings us to 1980. And then the amount of debt we take on because those income taxes were lowered at that time, productivity increased, so income was increasing during this time, but that was increasing even more. And then of course, you overlay the 2008 crash, and it's been jumping through if it's still going up after that as a percentage, right. So if you're looking at sort of the creditworthiness of our economy over time, this is the picture I think of.

Here is the time when the largest rate was 70. And here's a time when the largest rate was 3540. So I don't know where this goes. But the fact that this line goes so steeply similar to this line leads me to think at some point taxes go up, regardless of politics, you know, I mean, it's just there's a physics thing that certainly that happens at some certain point. In fact, I'm reading this great book by Ray Dalio, I don't know if folks have read his big debt crises book, but he's the Bridgewater founder, the largest hedge fund in the US, and he has this, you know, it, the base of the book is that our economy follows very mechanical predictable rules.

There's a 75-year debt cycle that fuels a lot of everything that happens. And if you look at where we are in 2018, or 2019, it's very similar to where we were in 1937, because we just come off a big recession, where interest rates raised went to zero. And a lot of money printing happened after and a lot of leverage, and so forth. So his prediction is what happens after 1937, which isn't always pretty, but even talks about the rise of populism as being something that is a result of all this, because, in the times when debt is being taken on in the economy, it means that asset prices are being inflated the wealthy own assets, the working class doesn't.

Then the gap between the wealthy and the working class gets larger, which creates tension and creates populism, when there's a backlash against that, right. And we start to see that happening, things like Brexit as well. So a very interesting book, but does make me think, okay, taxes are probably going up at some point don't know when, and they're relatively on sale right now. Right. And as a result, if you think about what a 70% tax rate would have done to the syndication pie chart we had before, it actually puts the IRS in for a bigger slice than it would have put me on leave everything else pretty much the same. And I think that's kind of an interesting insight as well. Because if we're thinking about our lives, over a 30, year, 50-year span, or something like that, there's going to a better time to get better leverage, you know, on your charitable giving, assuming that remains a tax deduction, right.

I think there are interesting ways to kind of think about how to play that. And then I'm starting to myself, think about that. Kind of the last parting thought here. You know, at the point, when you have, you know, 10s, or hundreds of millions of dollars, I think, the typical thing to do is create your own private foundation and start to manage it. And there are all sorts of reasons for that, there's sort of a lighter-weight version of this, I think, which is, you can go to, you know, fidelity, Charles Schwab or any of them and open up what's called a donor-advised fund. So in the case of fidelity, it's called fidelity, charitable comm.org, or something like that, or fidelity charity. So what it actually is, is, it's, uh, it itself is a nonprofit organization.

If you have a piece of real estate or appreciated stocks or securities or something, you can donate that to fidelity charity.org, right. And at that point, it becomes a write-off to you, and they can sell it and avoid the capital gains, I think you'll if it was, if it was real estate, I think you'll have to pay the depreciation recapture at that point. But you can avoid a lot of what would otherwise be a tax consequence by putting into the fund, then they'll invest the proceeds from the fund into, you know, I think you can even advise them on where the investments go, but it's market-based securities at the end of the day.

From there, you can advise the fund that they should be giving a grant to charity, X, Y, and Z. So you can kind of have this bank account that sits there and grows at five or 7%, or whatever. And year over year, you want to go to the next charity auction and get your leverage up. It can be coming from the growth of this account, you can even make this a little bit of an endowment right? and use that on an ongoing basis to sort of fund your philanthropic needs as I understood it.

But then you might say, well, if I've got an appreciated property, and I want to put it into the donor-advised fund, what if I want to put half of it in or what if I get my basis back out and put the problem or something like that. And I think, and let me just also give the disclaimer, all of what I'm showing you right now is how I'm thinking about things moving forward, there's probably someone in the audience that knows a technicality that they'd love, feel free to correct us here in the room.

I think the way to do that is to insert a charitable remainder trust. So the charitable remainder trust, if folks aren't familiar is, is the idea behind it is, oh, I'll give the property to a trust. The trust will be qualified as a nonprofit trust, if you will, and will sell the property and give the proceeds out. But if I was hoping, you know, I had a million-dollar property, I want to get half a million dollars back out and only donate 500,000 things, I'll structure the trust to be able to say there's an income or an interest portion of this donation, and then there's a charitable portion.

The IRS has rules for how to calculate the charitable portion, which is called the remainder, right. So when you donate to the charitable remainder trust, you'll calculate what the remainder should be, you'll take a tax write-off for the remainder. And then the portion that is the interesting part gets paid out to you. And you can even have it paid out in installments over time, you could say 7% of the value of the trust gets paid out annually to me until determines you defined the term as well. And then when the term of the trust ends, then the proceeds are sent to the donor-advised fund. And then you can use that to go out to the charities as well. So I am thinking of a structure kind of like this for some of my future giving as well, when I get some of this property, I'm, you know, under five years in real estate right now, but 1520 years down the road, when I have some properties I want to send this way. I'm thinking of sending through this kind of structure.

Oh, this is an I'll take a slight diversion and come back. This is sort of you can go to websites and punch in the numbers for how charitable remainder trusts work. But this is one where if you had a property that you bought for a million that appreciated a one and a half million conservatively over 15 years, you donate to the trust, you set it up for a 7% draw rate for 20 years, you assume a 40% tax rate, then ultimately a million dollars will go to the charity 1,000,024 will come back to you. And you'll save a whole bunch of gains on taxes. So that's kind of the concept put into numbers. But it's so complicated. You really have to use an app to figure it out.

Then ultimately goes to the charity after that. Yeah, yeah, you can set them up to be like an annuity that lives with you for life, or you can set them up for a specific term. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So if the orientation is, oh, I'm, I want to basically put the asset into the trust, and I want to bleed off income from it. And if anything's leftover that goes to charity, then you set it up for sort of a lifetime thing. If the orientation is I'm trying to maximize the impact of the charitable giving, I'm not really trying to keep you know, much more than than the property, then you can set up for a shorter term and take the distributions out and then have it roll in faster to the, to the donor fun. So this is what apologize, but green is hard to read on this background. But this is sort of how I think I would do the auction.

Now with all of the above next round, 20 years from now, which is, you know, first before we even go to the auction, buy a property, wait for it, depreciate, send it through the charter, remainder trust, take all the tax deductions, then get paid out the income and have the rest, go to the donor-advised fund, at this point, then you can go to the auction, have the donor advised fund, buy the shares of the index, have continued to appreciate when the auction bid, pay the retail portion out of distributions from the charitable remainder trust, if you want, and then have the remainder be paid from the donor-advised fund, because it's all that's earmarked for charity, then you can write off the taxable parts that may have been taxable from the distributions from the charity remainder trust that way. And then, you know, match the retail portion, either from an employer or from the donor fund or by recruiting other partners in the process. And the rest of it kind of plays out like that.

Right? So this is the one where I really need Neal from yesterday to tell me how the math works on it because I don't know, there's enough, there are enough variables here. That's hard to say exactly how, how the pie changed, for sure, but it's pretty clear that there's a whole lot of deduction that happened several years before even took to the auction, and then you're using funds that are growing tax-free to pay this thing down the road.

So I think your ability to sort of getting that, you know, one to 10 leverage is gonna be going up to you know, one to 15 or something like that by being playful about it and rolling it out for several years. And so with that, really time to wrap it up. You know, I think the interesting the real kind of takeaways from all this for me, and I hope I can resonate with you all is you know, some point, we're all here to learn to make money and make deals and grow. But at some point, we want to think about not just accumulating wealth, but also how we can use that as a means to an end to having an impact, right?

The skills that we learn, being entrepreneurs, being investors, you know, networking can be used to maximize the impact as well as maximizing the wealth that we're here to learn about. So think about the how to approach you're impacting your charitable giving them that way, the next time you're going to charitable event the next time you're giving a charitable contribution, you know, how could you use the skills that use in real estate investing to make that more, right? So and then also just being thoughtful about the tax code, how that play? If there might be opportunities right now to do things post-tax that will make better sense to do pre-tax as tax rates go up over time.