There are a lot of promising options when it comes to deferring tax, but with all the technicalities and complexities involved, one misstep could spell disaster. The CEO of Estate Planning Team, Robert Binkele, uses his experience as a former NFL player and years of being in the industry to educate you about different tax deferral strategies. He talks about his company’s services and explains how they can help you not only defer tax but also expand your knowledge as they work together with you. He states the reasons why utilizing the DST can be beneficial for you when investing in real estate. Learn and understand why it’s important to lead in your industry while also knowing when the right time to make an exit is.

—

Watch the episode here:

Listen to the podcast here:

The Proven Legal Path of Deferring Tax with Robert Binkele

I’m excited about this next guest. He is my mentor. He is my business partner. He is my friend. He manages, personally, my family’s wealth as our financial advisor. He is the first reason for me to start down this journey of capital gains tax deferral. In fact, I was sitting in an office in 2009 after the crash at Marcus & Millichap and our manager brought him in. His name is Robert Binkele. He spoke about the Deferred Sales Trust. He’s the Cofounder of the Deferred Sales Trust. He’s going to share with us his journey from starting this company, having to survive in the scrutiny from the IRS, blazing new trails, bringing in business partners, working through his journey over twenty-plus years. We’re seeing such tremendous growth with the Deferred Sales Trust.

If you ever want to get an inside peek into exactly where this started, I know you’ve heard my journey and my story but my journey backs up to Robert Binkele. He’s the true star. I like to call him the brain surgeon. Him and the tax offer are like the brain surgeons and I’m the nurse. You get a chance to learn from the brain surgeon himself, especially as it pertains to financial advising, the Deferred Sales Trust, the legality of investing. Enjoy and be sure to share it with somebody who is facing any capital gains tax deferral challenges on the sale of their primary home, business, or commercial real estate. Thanks so much.

—

Our next guest has experience with all of these and is in fact, what I like to call, the godfather of capital gains tax deferral. He’s my personal mentor and personal friend. He managed my money for me. Beyond all of that, he is the Cofounder of the Deferred Sales Trust, an independent financial advisor over twenty years, as well as on Forbes Council list. He’s seen and done just about every deal you can think of when it comes to capital gains tax deferral. He also happened to play for the 49ers. If you remember a gentleman named Jerry Rice and his rookie season was the same rookie season that our guest played with. He’s going to have a wealth of knowledge and information. He’s going to give you an inside peek into how all of this Deferred Sales Trust story got started. I’m excited to welcome our guest. Robert, welcome.

Thanks, Brett. Thanks for having me. This is great.

This is Robert Binkele, by the way. You can find him at MyEPT.com. You can also find him at DST Wealth Management as well. Robert, would you give our readers a little bit about your story and also share maybe your focus?

I started in the industry as a stockbroker, learning to manage money. I always wanted to focus on not being a typical stockbroker where you go out and call everybody every day trying to get assets under management. I was always looking for a competitive edge, a direction that I could help people in the masses. Learning the business over the years, I learned that there has to be a better way and then I learned that wealth transfer is coming and there will be a lot of people that would like to sell one day.

Years ago, we started this company called the Estate Planning Team. I founded it. I’m the sole stockholder of it. I decided that I was going to enter the arena of capital gains tax deferral. I met a tax lawyer that’s incredible and smart. He had some great insight into a lot of the capital gains market. He introduced me to the DST. We work together to form it to be what it is now. It’s been an incredible opportunity for us in the financial service arena with partnering professionals such as stockbrokers, real estate professionals, business brokers, insurance agents, trustees, other law firms, and CPAs. They’re all excited about what we brought to them to help their clients. This has been a service that we provided for a long time.

Before all of your success with the Deferred Sales Trust and being a wealth advisor for over twenty years and before we get into more of the nuts and bolts of the structure, I’m curious and I’m sure our readers are too, who was Robert growing up? What gifts were you given? In particular, we’re all given certain superpowers or certain gifts, they’re God-given gifts. We’re all given something. Maybe you can connect us with what gift you were given as a child or growing up. How does that help or how does that relate to how you help people?

Deferring Tax: Real estate and the stock market are great when you’re young and if you have plenty of time, but there’s a time to get out.

I have to give my mom a lot of credit because she dropped me on the football field and said, “You need to play football.” I said, “Really?” I was probably watching too much TV and she said, “You’ve got to get out and play football.” My mom dropped me and I started playing football. I started learning team sports and I was great at it. I was one of the biggest kids at a young age and did well. I played both ways. That was quite an honor to not only play both ways but it was also an honor to play both ways all the way up to high school and be moved up.

Sports taught me a lot of good things about teamwork, being on time, discipline, knowing how to win and lose. I took that all the way up to a professional level, which I never expected to even go to college on a scholarship but ended up getting a scholarship and playing for the University of Utah. I never even thought I would even have a shot at the NFL and there I was in the NFL at the number one team at the time. I came in the year we won the Super Bowl against Miami. That was my first year with Jerry Rice. It was quite an experience.

I was blessed because I worked hard. I have disciplined goals. I wanted to be successful and kept my nose to the grindstone. That’s what I learned in anything that I did. I had to make everything the best I could to do it. You have to know when it’s not working and you have to know to change and move. We did that in business as well. We’ve always focused on, number one, you’ve got to help people. If you do a good thing for people, it will always come back to you in a good way. That’s been my focus in life. I focused on athletics and that’s been the majority of my life and then getting into this business was a good directional change for me coming out of the NFL.

I played football growing up too, Bob. I know you played the center position. The center is the quarterback of the offensive line, but essentially, the center and quarterback, they’re running the whole offense. With that, I can’t help but think of some of the gifts and strengths that I’ve seen in you with building this massive organization with thousands of business professionals, as well as training and mentoring multiple financial advisors growing up. Training and mentoring me and bringing everyone together to all go towards this common goal of accomplishing what is best for the client, that I’ve seen over the years of knowing you. Maybe connect that too. How does the sports part of what you talked about, and in particular being a center on the offensive line, correlated to how you help bring everything together and keep the team moving forward?

When you’re a center, you’ve got to start the play. You’ve got to be the first person on the line and you’ve got to make sure that you get the ball to the quarterback. You’re the main person that has to know the play and you obviously have to know the count. I learned that. You have to be smart. I focused in my business to say, “I want to be a center of influence.” I couldn’t be afraid. What I was doing takes courage. I had to learn what our tax structure does, and does it work? There were a lot of people that were doubters and said, “It doesn’t work. It’s not legal.” We proved them all wrong. We’ve been through the IRS. We’ve never had an issue. We’re not years into this and not having the IRS look at us.

Something that I did was a big challenge. It took the fact that I stood up and went through a lot of adversity. A lot of the advisors that I met, I had to pave the way. I had to be the blocker to make the hole open for everybody to go through. As I did that, it became such a big organization that many advisors said, “He blasted a hole and did something that’s a whole new market that nobody’s ever discovered or didn’t even want to try to go after.” I don’t think anybody’s ever gone to the direction we’ve gone. It’s a direction a lot of people don’t know how to deal with and it’s delicate because it’s tax law and it’s important. Advisors don’t want to practice tax laws. We don’t. We used attorneys to do that. What we did was use all the tools that I could use available to me. I brought all that next to me when I was making that hole and it all worked together.

It’s about teamwork. It’s putting everybody together to create a plan that will work in the best interest of the American taxpayer. We did that and everybody became believers and said, “What you’re doing, Bob, makes sense to the American people.” We’ve had some big corrections in the stock market. We’ve also had a lot of concerns on this Coronavirus and lots of other things but mainly, that’s what is causing lots of volatility.

We would all agree that having liquidity and diversification in these markets are important. If you’re an asset that’s completely illiquid, why would you want to be an illiquid asset? You want to have liquidity especially in times when markets change for the worst. What we brought is the ability to give people tax deferral liquidity, potentially more money to top rate with. Our goal is we try to line up what’s in the best interest of people. It took a long time to gain a bunch of awareness and advisors are, “Let’s be cautious. I’m not sure about this.” Over time, they continue to see us doing this and they became believers. It’s amazing what’s gone on here.

It’s nice to be able to be rewarded by other professionals, patting you on the back, saying, “You did something here, which is great for the American people.” People themselves are faced with, “I can’t get out of my business. I don’t want to pay all this tax because the interest rate environment is low that I need every dollar I could possibly get to live on. Now I’ve got to pay so much money to the government that I can’t afford to sell this but I’ve got to still continue to work. It’s not exactly what I want to do.” Bringing that solution to people is rewarding for me, which is what I’m all about.

I can’t help but think about the center who’s starting a play. In a sense, he’s the most vulnerable. He’s where exactly where the ball is at. He has to focus on getting the person behind him going. He’s the first point of contact who’s leading this charge forward. Also, you’re setting up the advance for not only the quarterback but also the running back or time for the receiver to do things. All of that coming together and you’re the first point to get it going and you have to face that down. That’s exactly what you’ve been able to do over the years is to create new markets, new opportunities, or new ways to look at tax deferral despite how hard that is, how hard it is to create something that stands to scrutiny from the IRS. For the readers, thousands of closes, over 24 total years with the Deferred Sales Trust, including fourteen no change IRS audits. Bob, I’m curious, give us a story of getting comfortable and maybe share those first few audits that happened and/or maybe share the audit in regards to the formal audit that took place in Southern California.

Audits are a good test of what we’re doing because the IRS clearly wants to make sure that what’s being sent out to the general public is fair, balanced, and legal. You never know how legal it is until you test it. More importantly, almost every test that we’ve ever had was the fact of the lack of knowledge by the IRS. What we’re doing is installments and installments have been around for a long time. The benefit of the installment is of benefit to the government because the taxpayer carries paper with one individual asset on a traditional installment. It’s risky because you’re subjecting yourself to one asset that could fail and then your whole life is in the hands of somebody that borrowed your money. That is not what I call a good outcome. It’s not a good outcome from the IRS because then they never get their tax dollars because whatever they sold that they created the gain on, the IRS never gets paid their money and that becomes troublesome to the United States government and creates all sorts of problems.

The other thing is that a lot of people won’t sell real estate or sell a business because they don’t want to pay taxes. That is another problem for the American government because they never generate any tax revenue over the years. When you die, you get an unlimited step-up but most people don’t want to own their real estate until they die. Sometimes they do, but most of the time they want to sell it, make a profit, but then what influences them is the tax implications. The government never gets the money. Usually, they refinance, and then sometimes that refinance gets to a point where we go into a recession. After that, they can’t make their payment and then next thing you know, they get default and then they end up owing the taxes anyway.

What we bring to the table is a solution that gives them liquidity, no debt, diversification, and gives the government the ability for them to get their tax dollars. It’s a win-win proposition on the DST and what we bring to the table. It’s resonating well not only with the government because they see us as not a potential threat, they see us as a potential helper to help transact. You have to think about real estate professionals, business brokers, and different people that benefit because of this trust. When we create this trust, is it just about us? The answer is no. It’s that business broker agent that would like to sell and collect his or her commission because they’ve worked long and hard to find a buyer. They finally found one but then the client realizes that they have to pay so much in tax, they can’t afford to sell it nor can they raise the price to cover that tax.

Deferring Tax: If you want to stay on the sidelines until you can see a directional change in real estate, where cap rates move up, the DST could be your best friend.

We come in to save the day so that that agent can get their sale and their commission. The seller taxpayer, the ultimate seller, the business gets the benefit of a Deferred Sales Trust, which is liquidity, diversification, and tax deferral. The IRS benefits because they’re in line and start getting interest to come on the payment of principal. They’re getting their capital gains pro-rata. What a benefit for everybody. Everybody is winning in this scenario. The main thing is that the clients liked the fact that they can go forward with it. Professionals that are out there every day are looking for something that is a game-changer that helps the client that can put them in position so that they can get more business. We have to do this because if we don’t find ways to get the business moving, then we move into what we call stagflation. You’re getting both the buyers and sellers not coming together and it’s sitting there and nothing is happening. That doesn’t turn the world and doesn’t pay taxes and it leads to more problems.

We’re serving a good purpose to people. We bring a lot of value to people. Certainly, when they get older, it’s even better because they can see that this is a much better approach. Every financial company that we deal with, from the large wirehouses to the independent brokerage firms, see this as a valuable solution. Taxwise, we’re comfortable with what we’re doing. We know that the IRS has looked at us and flat out have told us that it’s legal. More importantly, we feel confident in what we can do for people.

That’s important because whatever tax deferral structure you’re looking at, you want to make sure that A, the IRS has looked at it, and B, whoever the proponents are or attorneys that have used it, have had their own clients get the audits and the IRS knows about it and there’s a long track record. You don’t want to be trying stuff that’s new that hasn’t been tested, that hasn’t gone through the IRS scrutiny. Also, you had scrutiny from FINRA. You’ve had national law firms look at the structure, big financial advising firms, and their legal teams before they roll it out to their financial advisors. It’s been a lot of eyes and ears on the Deferred Sales Trust over all of these years. One of the most compelling things for me to have confidence in the structure is there were all no change IRS audits and including two formal audits that are reviewed beyond any particular deal. Maybe you can tell us about the one that happened down in Southern California? Can you walk us through that story? Readers would love to know that.

The IRS is always watching the internet to see what goes on the internet and Deferred Sales Trust pops up a lot because a lot of advisors are out there educating clients with it and podcasts and trustees are out talking about it. In this case, in Southern California, the IRS did not know what the DST was and decided to call me in and our tax team to explain it and go through it. The good part is, having a 2008 audit with the IRS and going through that was a powerful helper for the 2019 audit because they didn’t know that we were audited. It’s the right hand and didn’t know what the left hand was doing or didn’t have any information but we brought it to their attention.

Prior to going into that meeting with the IRS, we gave them everything that we could to educate them because we wanted to make it an informative meeting but also give them plenty of time to look at everything and also give them our 2008 audit report as well. The good part is all of that concluded before we even got into the room because we had a tough time getting into the building. We had to go through a high level of security to get into the federal building and that’s because there are a lot of bomb threats to that building. It wasn’t exactly something I was comfortable going into a building that was under a lot of bomb threats, but I had to do it and I did.

What was interesting is we got in the elevator where it was directed through all of the security to get in and we got on the elevator with a gentleman that I had no idea who he was but he was the head attorney for the IRS. He took us up the elevator. He’s a nice man. He commented on our structure that he’d reviewed it and he knew it was legal. That started our whole meeting which set the tone. He already reviewed it, looked at everything and he said it was a little complicated but he was good with it, which was unbelievable starting out the meeting. It worked exactly what we thought it would work because it’s important. They need to know exactly what we do. We don’t deviate. We do it right.

I do want to segue to other companies like the monetized sale. There are companies out there that like to monetize. In monetize, we turn them down right from the beginning. They saw my company and they said, “Bob, you have some advisors, would you represent the structure?” I said, “I want to be open-minded. Let me have our tax team dig into your structure.” They found holes every which way and they said absolutely not to manufactured structure, there wasn’t any business purpose in it. We had a tough time. We turned them down. We started seeing a lot of agents. People out there, they’re trying to carbon copy what we did but not well. Agents would always call me and say, “I’m going to do the monetized deal.” I said, “Let me tell you why you shouldn’t.” Sure enough, there was a lot of litigation in the tax courts to go after the pro structure monetized sale. That wasn’t a good plan.

We have had some large cases that were going to go the direction of the monetized sale and then after sending them the attached court cases that are going against them. Also, what was interesting is we had an advisor for a big wirehouse that I can’t say, but a large company that our readers would know, a well-known New York stock exchange brokerage firm. It was going down the road of monetizing and we said, “Why don’t you look at all these tax-related sightings of all the cases that are going against it and you might want to make a decision?” They ended up calling Mr. Stan Crow. Get him to monetize. Mr. Crow got the phone and said, “We can see if we can get you an opinion from our tax lawyer in New York.” They went on to call the tax lawyer in New York to find out that the tax lawyer would not offer an opinion. It wasn’t good. At the end of the call, the advisor for the New York Stock Exchange brokerage firm told that he should not do this and that we are under audit and we will most likely not succeed in the audit, which was about what we expected.

The goal here is to do things that are right, do things that have solid ground, you’re on solid footing. There’s no tax team that stands behind the trust that monetized. You’re on your own, good luck. If you do get audited, you’re on your own. Our tax team stands behind the trust. They will indemnify you for their work in audit defense. If there’s ever an audit, they’re there at no charge. That’s their indemnification and that they’re handling it no charge, protecting you with no charge, state or federal, and with your permission, of course. That’s what they do. That’s an important factor that you have a law firm that’s doing that to make sure if there are ever questions. You could always get audited. Highly unlikely but if you do get audited, they’re there. You get randomly selected. Something might not be done on your tax return. That pops up an audit. You want to have a team there to handle that. That’s why many people have selected us over the other companies that are out there.

Deferring Tax: Debt is your friend in an upmarket and it is your worst enemy in a down market. You lose twice as fast.

That’s a good context for our readers to make sure you’re asking the tough questions and the right questions for whoever is going to be helping you with this huge decision and oftentimes the largest expense you’re facing when selling your egg and your business, primary home, investment real estate. Bob, this structure also works for some other sales. What are some more of the exotic or ones that maybe our readers aren’t thinking about as far as what the Deferred Sales Trust can work for when they go to sell?

We’ve worked with dental practices, veterinarian practices. We have optometrist companies that are out there that are selling, we’re doing that. We’ve sold highly appreciated buildings. We’re working with KPMG with a part of their division in Israel, which has lots of real estate in the United States. We’re working with a lot of different tax law firms that are across the country with clients. We’ve sold exotic cars. We’ve done Bitcoin. We’ve done privately held stock, LLCs, partnership interests, C corps, S corps, you name it.

We love to have people call us to explore the opportunity of what we can do. We usually can find good solutions for everybody. I’m also doing opportunity zones but our opportunity zone is unique. Most opportunity zones don’t start cashflow until 5, 6, 7 years. Our opportunity zone starts in the thirteenth month. It’s amazing. We don’t want to be plain Jane. We want to be cutting edge on everything we do from the management of the money.

These days have been scary for a lot of people. We have investments that we like about because we hedge all of our money. Most of all our money that’s invested, we try to hedge against bad markets. We do that with unique put options, the stuff that gets done out there. Our goal is to try to do our best to minimize losses and maximize gains. I call it account optimization. We try to do all the things that we can do to protect money and then we use large money managers to do that to protect these investment notes and stuff. My goal is to make this total turnkey, try to find everybody’s problem, and see if we can solve it. We do a lot of stuff.

As for protection, we have asset protection lawyers that do stuff for Californians. We do a lot of different planning strategies for life insurance planning, so many different things that we try to do to help the clients gain success. That’s been my focus as a planner. Investing money is one thing, but also, money saved is money earned. You want to look for ways that you can save money because a lot of people send you down the road to pay all the tax and then you’ve got to go out and invest that money to get it back. “It’s nice to have more money to work with and you can invest more conservatively.” That’s what I tell people. If you have more money to work with, you can be more conservative with your money because you don’t have to pay all that money to the government upfront, the different things that we try to do to approach differently. We are a wide selection of tax deferral on all sorts of different things and we can work with removing assets out of your taxable estate.

We have some high-profile clients that you would know that are on TV and Fortune 500 CEOs and different people that are clients of ours or trust fund babies that have a lot of wealth. We do have a lot of that. We also don’t want people that don’t have a lot of wealth to be afraid of this. If you owed $100,000 or more in taxes, we call it our $100,000 minimum club. If you owe less than $100,000 it’s not that we’re not going to talk to you and that we’re not going to try to advise you. We had one lady come in a $30,000 tax. In reality, she had many properties besides that, so we took her on. If somebody had $100,000, that makes sense for us to consider them a prospect to see how we can help them. Many people come in with $1 million gain, $8 million gain that they owe tax on it. It’s a life-changing situation for people. We encourage everybody to get a hold of us so that they can learn about this and see if this makes sense for their situation.

To that point, a lot of our readers are commercial real estate owners, operators, syndicators, developers, and investors. They have the idea that they want to maintain this control and maintain all of their funds. They may like the stock market but they love real estate or they may not like the stock market at all. They want to stay in real estate. It’s where they’ve made their wealth. For that type of client, what does that look like as far as maybe being able to partner with the trust to buy real estate and also have some in the stock market? Walk us through how that would work and maybe the real benefit too as far as the timing aspect versus the 1031 exchange?

I’ve been a big advocate of not doing 1031s. There was a time that 1031 makes sense. However, more and more people are shying away from 1031. I don’t know about you, Brett, but our parents taught us to buy low, sell high, and buy low again. In this environment, we’re finding that a lot of clients are smart. The real estate agents are smart. If I was your advisor, I should have got you out sooner. If I hadn’t, you’d be down 10% heading may be for a larger correction than we’re having. Nobody has that crystal ball. What you do with real estate, you do have this crystal ball that you know that prices are overly inflated, cap rates are low and money is certainly cheap. It’s been an all-time low with a ten-year treasury rate than below 1.3%. I would say, “Could we go to negative interest rates?” Sure. “Could we go inverted?” Yes. If we have to go into a recession, we do get there.

Real estate is great when you’re young and if you have plenty of time and the same with the stock market. There’s a time to get out. There’s a time get on the sidelines with any investment. Look at Warren Buffett. He’s $120 billion in cash because he can’t find any suitable investments for Berkshire Hathaway. We think that this is a good time to get money on the table, get liquid, get diversified, and protect your money. Not a lot of people want to pay the taxes to do that, so they’ll either keep the real estate and the real estate agent loses because they, obviously, worked hard. I know how hard they work and you know how hard that is as a profession. It’s competitive. Having a competitive advantage over every other real estate agent to know that you could get your client out at the rate that you believe truly is the best cap rate to get out. Put your client in the liquid cash and diversify rate safe investments. This is what we do.

Deferring Tax: Stay out of debt, protect yourself, and do smart things that are going to make meaningful decisions for your family.

Our goals are to protect clients based on their risks. More importantly, our goal is to give advisors the opportunity to manage more money and a whole new change in what they’ve ever looked at before because most advisors are going after 401(k) money and CD money. This is the motherload of all monies, their wealth, their businesses that are being sold, or real estate that is being sold. That’s where the motherload of money is. It’s the core holdings of people, it’s everything. We want to manage that money in a safe manner and that’s why we use big companies, third-party money managers that have been handpicked to manage this money. The big focus here, for us, is to provide a great service of being able to get people out. Back to the original thing, if they want to get back into real estate, can they do it later? The answer is yes.

Real estate is a good asset class, don’t get me wrong. I’m more of a debt guy than anything because I like debt. Meaning, I’d like to loan money on real estate but I don’t want to loan the full value of the real estate. I like to loan maybe 50% or 60% on it so that there’s plenty of cushions that if there’s a 40% or 50% drop in the market that I’m still covered and I’m getting good rates of return on my money. If there is a default, I would get real estate at a 40% to 50% discount. That all gets blended into this note, that all gets blended into this allocation as a way to invest money. A lot of times, people still see real estate deals. There are opportunistic situations. We have clients that are incredibly smart in real estate and no matter what kind of market it is, they make money. They’ve got the Midas touch. It’s like they’ve got X-ray vision on knowing what to buy and how to put it all together to manufacture a perfect sale. Most people don’t have that skill set to that degree. They’re good at what they do but they don’t have it to that degree.

What I would say is if you want to stay on the sidelines until you can see a directional change in real estate where cap rates move up, the DST could be your best friend. The trust wants to make money. Know that our goal or your goal is to make money because we’re profit-centered. We’re trying to make this opportunity for the trust and an opportunity for you guys to get liquidity and diversification. The trust can go back into real estate as another asset class to buy real estate. Real estate professionals like the idea of the trust being able to buy real estate or work with the note holder to buy real estate. There are some neat things that we show everybody how that can happen and good tax incentives to do that as well. You get a brand-new depreciation schedule when you buy a new piece of real estate.

Unfortunately, with a 1031 exchange, you don’t have that new exchange. You have to increase the data and increase the purchase to get any more depreciation, unlike what we do with a DST. Some neat things, you can get brand new depreciation, tax-efficient income, a lot of neat things that can be done by purchasing later. Have a timeline. With 1031, you only have 45 days to ID property and 180 days total to close it. Why don’t we take that off the table? No more 45-day rule. I can tell you that companies like IPX don’t like that. They don’t like that at all. They don’t like what we’re doing. The reason why is because we’re taking market share. I’m sorry, IPX. You’re the biggest giant out there in the world but your clients are not better served by going out and buying an overpriced valued real estate. You’re sending them down the road.

Take a look at what happened in 2006 all the way up to 2007 and then 2008. Is your client better by doing that? No. They not only lost their equity but they also had tax relief that they had a tax on litigation and problems all because of that 1031 exchange. My point is, getting out, getting liquid, getting diversified, and getting out of debt. Debt is your friend in an upmarket. It is your worst enemy in a down market. You lose twice as fast. My point is to stay out of debt and protect yourself and do smart things that are going to make meaningful decisions for your family. That’s what we want to bring to the table. We’re not pushy. We’re open-minded.

We want to give you all the options that you could possibly think about. We want to talk to your tax professional. We want to talk to your financial professional. We don’t alienate your financial professional at all. That person is important to you. That person is important to us to make sure that our trustees and our team knows you and knows what your risks are and making sure that what we’re putting together is suitable and right for your note and your security of getting paid back. All these things come into play, but real estate has a long-winded answer. I wanted everybody to know that we truly believe that there’s a time and a place to get out of the real estate and this is the time to do it. You can get on the sidelines and sit and wait and not have to pay your taxes. You could live in the installment world and then ultimately there’s time to get back into real estate. We want to make that happen as well.

That was well said Bob and so many good points there. Question on the performance because someone might say, “If I left real estate in ‘06, ‘07 and went to the DST and then went into the stock market, the stock market took a big hit too.” For those who don’t know about puts and options and ways to protect and hedge against the market, can you give a brief overview of how that works and how there are ways to be safe and conservative in the allocations and not have to take a bunch of risks because you’re in the stock market?

Your risk can always be quantified. The goal is to put money into safe investments that have protections built into it and put some calls or different ways that portfolio managers protect investments. What we like to show our clients is money management of historical with the understanding of past performance is no guarantee of future results. I can tell you that they’re consistent. The companies that we use are incredible. What we want to do is meet every client and certainly meet their financial advisor and show not only the client but their financial advisors.

A lot of the financial advisors learn about what we do and it’s different than what they are normally doing and it becomes a value proposition because they go, “This is incredible. I never knew this existed. I’ve never seen this. I’d like to be a part of you. How do I get involved with you?” It’s like a pat on my back. I try to be opportunistic. I like to be a competitive advantage and blowing the horn of protection of your investments and trying to lose less when markets go down. We can’t take complete uncertainty. We can’t take all the risk out of it because if you did that, you’d never have gained. We can minimize risk. That’s important. It’s not just putting your money into an annuity where a lot of advisors promote annuities, which are high commission oriented. I’m not anti-annuity. I’m all about trying to keep fees and giving clients liquidity and freedom of their money. I’m not opposed to new annuities. What I like is a predictable income. I also like to know that your money is hedged or protected as much as it could possibly be.

We focus on trying to help people understand all the options and then they can pick from that and work with their own advisor to select what they would approve. They’re the creditor of the trust. Like the bank, you can’t just go out and ask the bank for a loan and say, “Give me the money. I’ll let you know what we’re investing in later.” That doesn’t work like that. The bank wants a full-on loan application. Do you qualify? What are you investing in? We’re going to do the underwriting. Is this the right price? Are we paying too much for it? Is this a good price? All of that needs to be in the same context with us, you’re really the bank. Anything that’s being done and the capacity of the Deferred Sales Trust is we’re doing everything so that you as the banker will make the decision that this is exactly what I want and this is what I will get. This is close to being as predictable as we can but no guarantees. The stuff that we can show you is amazing. A lot of advisors are clamoring to what we’re doing.

Deferring Tax: Love what you do and be passionate about it. Every year, look forward to a new thing.

We’re going to finish with the lightning round and then we’re going to do the last question. A favorite book you’ve read in the past couple of years, it could be one of your all-time favorites, maybe the one that most influenced you and your growth as an entrepreneur, as a leader, as a financial advisor or as a wealth advisor?

The one that comes to light is an old book, way back, it was called Dove and it was interesting. I’m a boater, I like to be on boats and stuff. It was a young kid that sailed across the world by itself. That inspired me at an early age when I read it. It was amazing. It’s sad. You can go anywhere in the world and you have to depend on yourself. You’ve got to navigate. I felt like that. That was a good reflection of my life. I’ve always had to navigate on my own. You have to answer to yourself. You’re out in the open water and you have to make decisions for your life. That book came to light of what he did. That set the tone of my life early on. One that has always come up in my mind is always remembering it.

I can’t help but think of the correlation between that and being a center in football, going out on your own, and having to create something for other folks and then explore into new territory. I’m not surprised that that’s the book. I love to read that book too. Second question, maybe a favorite podcast or some inspirational leader that you learned from and such for yourself?

I watch many. There are politicians that I watch, and I’m interested in what’s going on there. I don’t want to get into politics because I’m open and neutral about it. I hope that the country is doing well for either the Republicans or the Democrats. I want a winning proposition. I’d like to see that. Unfortunately, it’s never perfect in that. People that I look up to, Bill Gates happens to be one. Not just because he’s one of the wealthiest men or has been the wealthiest man in the world. He’s an amazing man. I’m intrigued by him. He’s such a good person. He does a lot of giving back, him and his wife.

That’s a guy that could have anything he wants but he’s focused on helping curing world disease. It’s amazing what he’s done to be able to change things in different countries like Africa. He’s also driven. He’ll get in this boat and go off to a little private, little house and sit there and think about all the things he needs to do. He never stops. He comes in on time at work. He’s a multi-billionaire. That’s a guy that’s incredible. Same as with Warren Buffett. They’re giving all their wealth away.

Michael Douglas’ dad, Kirk Douglas, I met him years ago. He gave everything away to charity. He’s such a great person. He did well in the movie business. You don’t see that too often. Oprah does a lot of giving back too. I like seeing that. My goal is to do the same thing. My wife is driven towards charities and trying to give back and that’s what it’s all about. It is all about giving back to people and helping people. The more we can do. My wife’s good friend is involved in helping children in orphanages in Haiti. That’s a new thing. We’re trying to help them get dental and help them get involved in different things that have happened over there and many things. The world needs help. We all need to play our role and do things. Every senior citizen that has a need to live on more money, that’s what we do. We’re trying to help people live on more money and then obviously giving back to people that need our help. That’s our goal.

Here’s one of the tough questions, Utah Utes or the San Francisco 49ers?

I’m going to tell you that I’m a Utah Utes, all the way. The NFL is a business. I’m all about team sports. Going into the NFL, you could see that it was a business. I don’t want to say things bad about the NFL but it is a business. The moment you don’t perform or you get hurt, you’re just another number and they go to the computer and bring up somebody new and they’re in the next day, ready in pads, and ready to play. It’s a business. It’s a show. It’s like Gladiator. It’s hard on the players and this is all they have. I wish there was more for these players. It’s interesting because I’ve watched a lot of the football players that had $100 million and lose it all. For example, look at Mike Tyson and all the things he did wrong. He made so many mistakes and losing all his money. Many people have an entourage and don’t know how to manage money or have bad sports agents and things. There’s a lot of stuff that I could see out there.

What I love about Utah is it’s a great school, positive energy. Their kids are there, they’re going to school. There are so many things with the NCAA being able to pay players. I wish I had that back in that time to make some money after college. It’s changing. I love college football, over anything with NFL. I don’t watch the NFL that much anymore. I watch college football and Utah is doing well. They won the Pac-12 south. Unfortunately, we couldn’t beat Oregon. Oregon was a great team and they represented the Pac-12 well. I’m proud of them. It’s great for the whole Pac-12 network.

Last question, Bob. This is probably my favorite question and probably our readers’ favorite question. It’s centered around you and how you stay centered in your values and how you stay encouraged to grow the business and reach for new goals. The question is, how do you stay centered in your values? How do you keep encouraged to charge to new heights, new goals, or new accomplishments?

I’m driven. It’s genetics. I’ve always been trying to be an overachiever. It’s like sports. They don’t see the end of the season here. I keep playing. There’s no end of the season. I do take a rest every once in a while because my wife makes sure of that. I love what I do. I’m passionate about it. Every year I look forward to a new thing. We’re always faced with challenges in this world, what we’re going through with this whole Coronavirus. There was a lot of stuff that we went through with 2008, a lot of the recession and potentially depression and the stuff that went on. I’ve been in long enough. I’ve been through the ‘87 crash. I saw a lot of stuff. Back in ‘87 when Dow was 3,000, I was like, “3,000, it’s amazing.” Now we hit 29,000 and we backed off from there. Markets continue to go higher and people keep driving.

For me, I love what I do. I’m passionate about it. As time goes on, I’m getting to that age. I’m settling in too. I’ve done it. I’ve made it. I’ve been successful at it. I want to focus on taking this company to a whole other level. We’ve gone to an amazing story of success but I’m not done yet. We are a national company but I want people to recognize it everywhere in every firm, in every company. We are getting to that point where the big firms, the largest brokerage firms in the country are now allowing their advisors to work with us, which is a pat on the back. At some point in time, I’ll have to say, “I need to turn it over to the younger guys, gals to run this company because I’ve done what I needed to do and it’s now up to the next generation to do it.” I’m trying to get my son to do it.

My daughter is a lawyer and she works for the Pacific Legal Foundation. She went off to Georgetown Law and was successful there. She’s pursuing the government to make sure they stay and protect the consumer. I love that about her doing constitutional law and nonprofit. I want my kids to go down in the best direction. My son, maybe he’ll come in and want to take over the reins, but we’ll see. I’m happy about being this. I’m blessed that we’re helping people and it’s all good.

Dove

First of all, I thank you personally for all that you’ve instilled into me, encouraged me, and challenged me. I met Bob years ago at Marcus & Millichap. I was still new to the business. We were trying to navigate the 2008 crash. Bob came in and spoke about the Deferred Sales Trust. That moment in time is sealed, forever changing the trajectory of my career and has led to Capital Gains Tax Solutions. All in with Bob and what he’s doing and how he serves people, how he helps people and how he’s paved the way to open up this whole new frontier to help a lot of people with capital gains taxes and escape feeling trapped by capital gains taxes. As a reminder, you can learn more about Bob, MyEPT.com.

If you’re a professional out there who’s looking to join us and to be able to offer this value-add tool to your realtor, your commercial real estate broker, your financial advisor, business broker, reach out to us. We would love the opportunity to share more about how we can partner with you and how you can partner with us. If you’re looking to sell something, now is a great time to get a plan in place and be proactive with all of the knowledge that Bob has shared with you and with me.

Bob, thank you so much for being here. It’s a pleasure and an honor to be able to work with you on a day-to-day basis. With that, I want to thank our readers for tuning in at Capital Gains Tax Solutions. As always, we believe having a tax deferral plan that’s proven such as the Deferred Sales Trust is the best way for you to create and preserve more wealth. We look forward to having you next time. Share this with someone who needs help with capital gains tax deferral or who needs help with growing their business. We look forward to connecting with you all soon. Thank you so much.

—

Here are a few notes and a few thoughts on Robert Binkele and what he shared with us. It’s an honor to know him and work with him. I can’t recommend him enough to be, definitely, a financial advisor but also a team player, a servant leader, an amazing man and full of character, fun to work with. I’ve had such an honor to get to know him. He’s been my mentor, my teacher, my business partner, all of the above for years. We finally get to have him here. I get to share a little bit with all of the readers here about Robert Binkele known as Bob.

The neat story of the journey, his journey of being in sports to paving a new way, and a place that’s difficult to pave. The analogy of him being a center and taking the first blow or running the offense and helping to bring everyone together coupled with his favorite book Dove, being sailing new oceans, new places, and having to navigate on his own and go out there into new territory. The cool part is he’s not doing it for himself. He’s doing it for everybody else. He’s bringing everybody else in. He’s encouraging. He’s kind. He’s also competitive. All those things make him a wonderful person to work with.

I want to thank Bob again. I want to thank you for reading. I encourage you to share this, to read it again to catch any nuances there that you may have missed. As always, reach out to us at CapitalGainsTaxSolutions.com. We can set up a one-on-one consultation call with me and Bob to get to dive into your deal and find out how we can help you create a tax-deferred wealth plan and get you out of debt, defer the tax on the sale of your business, real estate, whatever it might be. Connect with us. We want to get to know you. Reach out to us at CapitalGainsTaxSolutions.com. Schedule that free consultation call, and we’ll go from there. Thank you so much.

Important Links:

• Deferred Sales Trust
• MyEPT.com
• DST Wealth Management
• Estate Planning Team
• Dove

About Robert Binkele

Robert Binkele is the founder and CEO of the Estate Planning Team, (EPT), established in 1999 which provides brokers, CPA’s, attorneys, real estate and insurance professionals lead generation websites, marketing, and administrative support services to implement estate planning and capital gains deferral strategies for their clients. EPT members have a proven record of securing substantial assets for management while helping their clients preserve their wealth.

With over 20 years in business, Estate Planning Team is the founder and creator of the Deferred Sales Trust™ and the ONLY firm that has been fully reviewed by the IRS. Robert is an independent financial advisor at DST Wealth Management, LLC. Mr. Binkele has been securities licensed for over 23 years with previous experience as a wealth manager for J.P. Turner & Company, LLC, Brookstreet Securities Corp, Raymond James & Financial Services Inc, and Spelman Securities. A San Luis Obispo, CA native, Robert earned his Bachelor of Science degree with a major in FCS Finance from the University of Utah and currently is President of the Palm Springs chapter University of Utah Alumni Association. In 1985-1986, he played professional football for the San Francisco 49ers.

Robert is a proud member of Forbes Finance Council, a two-time member of the Raymond James Financial Services President’s Counsel, seven-time member of J.P. Turner & Company’s Founders Club, Pacific Life Leadership Club, Pimco Funds Chairman’s Counsel, US Allianz Presidents Club, SunAmerica Platinum Advisor, Prudential Masters Council, two-time Exceptional Customer Service award winner from COLE, Transamerica Circle of Excellence. Robert splits his time between Dana Point, CA, and Indian Wells, CA. with his wife Kelly. They are the proud parents of two children, one son-in-law, and two adorable grandkids.

• Here’s How »

• capitalgainstaxsolutions.com
• Capital Gains Tax Solutions Facebook
• Capital Gains Tax Solutions Twitter

• Here’s How »

• capitalgainstaxsolutions.com
• Capital Gains Tax Solutions Facebook
• Capital Gains Tax Solutions Twitter