Comment Re:Easy to pay no taxes. (Score 3, Insightful) 229
Here is how you can do it. 1) Put 1/2 your money into a trust. Say $100 million. 2) Also make a series of say 10 long shot investments, $10 million each (another $100 million total). Think very risky tech companies. Expect most of them to become worthless, but a couple to become profitable, hopefully recovering your full $100 million, maybe making a profit. 3) Take loans out on the trust, with the trust as collateral. Say 1 million a year. Given you are a billionaire with significant collateral, you can get very low interest rates. 1%-5% is a good range. Lets say $50 grand a year. 4) Assume you make $6 million a year. Taxes could easily cost you $2 million a year, far more than than the $50 grand a year you pay in interest. But the interest builds each year. 5) Each year you take out $1 million to live on, pay your $50 grand of interest. After ten years, you are paying $500 grand a year, still less than $2 million each you would be paying. Your debt to the bank has grown to $10 million. 6) Remember those long shot investments? Sell two of the losers for practically nothing, say $2 million, for a lose of $18 million. Maybe also take another $8 million of gains from other investments. Net zero capital gains. But your $2 million from losses and your $8 million of capital gains (plus the original investment, whatever it was) pays off your Debt to the bank of $ 10 million. 7) Repeat the process.
The main things you need to do this is enough money so that paying $30 grand for lawyers to set up a trust and the loan initiation fees seems like chump change.
You missed a step between 6 and 7:
6.5) Pay yourself the $8 million, incur income taxes of $3.9 million and only then will you have $4.1 million to pay off your personal debt.
Taking on debt is a good tool because it allows you to retain your current investments rather than liquidating them, however, it cannot be used to avoid taxes - you can only pay off your personal debt with after-tax income.
You also have to take into account the interest expense of that debt vs the potential of your investments + taxes. Sure, you an reduce your income tax by taking off the interest, but that only reduces your taxable income by the interest amount, it's not a saving it's a still a loss - one that needs to be overcome by capital growth after taxes.