Our Top Tips for Finding & Vetting A Good CPA

In this episode, we continue our series of how to select and vet strong team members. This week we discuss the CPA. --- Transcript   Emil: Hey everyone. Welcome back for another episode of The Remote Real Estate Investor. My name is Emil Shour and I am joined by my co hosts,   Tom: Tom Schneider   Michael: and Michael Albaum.   Emil: And today we're going to be continuing this series we've been doing lately on building out your team. So how do you find and vet the different players on your quote unquote real estate investment team. In today's episode, we're going to be tackling the CPA, which stands for certified public accountant for anyone who's not familiar. So let's hop in.   Theme Song   Emil: All right, before we get into the meat of the episode, the meat and the potatoes, meat, potatoes, the salmon and, the salmon and couscous. Let's go with that. We have some people leaving us some awesome reviews I want to give a quick shout out to so recently real estate financial freedom wrote,   “The show has the feel like we are sitting around a table talking shop about real estate, they do a good job catering to beginner but also go into depth into more complicated real estate subjects. If you are thinking of investing out of state, this is the podcast for you. This podcast makes real estate feel very approachable.”   Emil: Thank you so much love the review, we'll try to give everyone a shout out if you leave us review was mentioned at the end of the episode. But please leave us reviews. We love them. And we'll give you a shout out in a future episode.   Michael: Thank you so much.   Emil: Alright guys. So we usually tackle three questions on each one of these episodes, which is when in the process? Should you look for this individual? How do you source them? And vetting questions to ask them to make sure you're choosing the right person? So let's start with the first one. When in the process of acquiring, let's call your first rental property, do you need to go out and find a CPA? What have you guys done   Michael: Now. Now .ow now now   Emil: All right, Mr. delay?   Michael: I think that first question, it really depends. I chat with someone in the academy a few weeks ago who does their own taxes, they prepare their own returns anyhow, using, you know, TurboTax, whatever. And so they said, Yeah, I already understand how taxes work, I understand tax works. And so adding one rental property to the mix is not a big deal whatsoever. So they've been doing their own. So if that's you great, but if you don't prepare your own taxes, or you want to go hire a professional to do it, I think it can be really great to have that conversation as soon earlier in the year as possible. Because as we all know, taxes are due in April for the year prior.   And you can't really do a whole lot of changes after the fact. And so chatting with a tax professional as you're getting started in owning real estate is going to set you up to have some really good habits and makes tax time so much easier for everybody involved. So I would say as soon as you're considering real estate, talk to a tax professional about how your personal situation might be affected by owning real estate, what some deductions look like and what your overall taxable basis might look like as a result of owning real estate and how that might change as if you previously didn't. So I don't think it's ever too early to start that conversation. Tom, what are your thoughts?     Tom: Yeah, my thought is just kind of on the first piece of this is something that you could file your own taxes and talking to people in Academy, asking about the stuff. My advice is always, you know, it's worth paying that money for a professional, there are a lot of tax benefits with real estate, you get the three DS depreciation deferral and deduction. And you really want to squeeze as much juice as you can out of those three. And it's difficult if you don't have that specific real estate experience.