#28 | Small Businesses and Climate Change’s Effect on Investments feat. Deidre Woollard & Spencer Christian

Practical Tax with Steve Moskowitz

Deidre Woollard, a real estate writer at Motley Fool, talks the about building modular homes in San Francisco, while legendary meteorologist Spenser Christian from Good Morning America and ABC7 talks about the short and long term effects of climate change on business and quality of life. Episode Transcript Intro: Welcome to the Practical Tax podcast, with tax attorney Steve Moskowitz. The Practical Tax podcast is brought to you by Moskowitz, LLP, a tax law firm. Disclaimer: The information contained in this podcast is based upon information available as of date of recording and will not be updated for changes in law regulation. Any information is not to be considered tax advice or legal advice and does not form an attorney/client relationship. Further, this podcast may be construed as attorney advertising. You should see professional consultation for your individual tax and legal situation. Chip Franklin: Welcome everybody to practical tax I'm Chip Franklin and of course, Steve Moskowitz here. Steve, let's just dive right into this and talk a little bit about real estate. I know you know a lot about this. You've been in San Francisco forever and you've seen this incredible increase in property values. But it has been a tool to help people build wealth and because of the nature of investment in asset, it's transferability and tremendous effect on lowering income taxes. But the cost of ownership has begun to erode this opportunity, at least a lot of people think for many Americans. Is real estate still a go-to for financial wealth and for protecting your assets? Steve Moskowitz: Absolutely traditionally so much wealth has been built through real estate and also the Congress and their infinite wisdom so loves real estate investment. They've given all types of special deals to real estate. I could take our whole time just listing all these things. So the bottom line is there's so much here. And you talk about prices, but that's okay. You make money with OPM other people's money. So the bottom line is even if a property goes up in value, so what? You can borrow some money and you know what always happens. Like all businesses, the costs are passed along to the tenants or the other investors and there's so very much that you can do. Chip Franklin: Well, joining us right now is Deidre Woollard. She is a writer. You've seen her work on Motley Fool. She's also a researcher, an editor and she's obsessed with just about everything real estate from market investment trends, to the housing affordability issue and the latest techniques and something we're going to get to in modular construction. And she's so nice to join us right here on the show. Deidre hi, welcome to Practical Tax. Deidre Woollard: Thank you. Happy to be here. Steve Moskowitz: Thanks so much for joining us. We appreciate it. And our firm's mostly in tax. We represent individuals, entrepreneurs and small businesses looking to build wealth and generational wealth. And we've seen one of the most effective ways to accomplish this is through investing in real estate. This June, we were part of a real estate investing conference and I'm happy to see the strategy mythology and technology that's evolved, but there's definitely an air of anticipation with the current economic client. I'd love to get your take on the topic as it applies to real estate investors. Deidre Woollard: Yeah, I think there is a little bit of concern. We just got the existing home sales numbers from the NAR, those were down by about 8.6% year over year. So there's that concern about there being a bubble. I don't think that's going to happen, but we are seeing a little bit of resetting and a little bit of concern over what might be coming next. And certainly with interest rates getting to the point where we're getting close to that 6% mark and I think that is having an impact on how people are feeling about real estate in general right now. Steve Moskowitz: