Rough Notes
Paul Truesdell dot Com
When a nation loses its people, it loses everything else shortly thereafter. This is not philosophy or political commentary. This is arithmetic. An economy requires workers to produce, consumers to purchase, and taxpayers to fund the infrastructure that makes commerce possible. Remove the people, and the entire system unravels like a cheap sweater.
History offers no shortage of examples, and they are worth examining because the patterns repeat with uncomfortable regularity.
Start with the American West. The ghost towns scattered across Nevada, California, Colorado, and Arizona tell the same story over and over again. Rhyolite, Nevada, exploded into existence in 1904 when gold was discovered nearby. Within three years, the population swelled to somewhere between five and ten thousand people. They built a train station, a stock exchange, an opera house, and a three-story bank made of concrete. By 1920, the population was fourteen. The gold played out, the miners left, and everything they built became a monument to impermanence. Bodie, California, followed a similar arc. At its peak in 1879, nearly ten thousand people lived there, making it one of the largest towns in California. Today it sits frozen in time, a state historic park where tourists wander through buildings that housed saloons, churches, and general stores. The people vanished because the economic engine that brought them there sputtered and died. Centralia, Pennsylvania, offers a more recent and peculiar example. A coal mine fire started in 1962 and never stopped burning. The underground fire made the town uninhabitable, and the government relocated nearly everyone. A town that once had over a thousand residents now has fewer than ten. The economic foundation literally went up in smoke, and so did the community.
Florida has its own collection of forgotten places. Marion County saw several small commercial centers rise and fall before modern development patterns took hold. Ocklawaha was once a busy steamboat landing on the Ocklawaha River, a genuine hub of commerce when waterways were the highways of their day. When the railroads came and the steamboats became obsolete, Ocklawaha faded into obscurity. Fort King, the original reason Ocala exists at all, was a military outpost that sparked settlement in the region. When the Seminole Wars ended, the fort closed, and the original settlement patterns shifted. Dunnellon provides an interesting case study in survival. The town boomed when phosphate was discovered in the 1880s, and for a brief moment it was one of the wealthiest small towns in America per capita. When the phosphate played out, Dunnellon could have become another ghost town. Instead, it stabilized at a modest size and maintained its city character. Today they celebrate Boomtown Days as a nod to that history. The town sits near the Withlacoochee and Rainbow Rivers, and while the surrounding area has grown considerably, Dunnellon itself never recaptured that original boom. It found equilibrium at a smaller scale, which is more than most boom towns manage.
The ancient world offers examples on a grander scale. The Aztec Empire collapsed not primarily because of Spanish military superiority but because European diseases decimated a population with no immunity. Smallpox, measles, and typhus killed millions. Some estimates suggest that ninety percent of the indigenous population of Mexico died within a century of contact. You cannot maintain an empire, collect taxes, field armies, or sustain an economy when ninety percent of your people are dead. The Spanish did not so much conquer the Aztecs as inherit the ruins of a civilization that disease had already destroyed.
The Roman Empire took centuries to decline, but population loss played a significant role. The Antonine Plague in the second century killed millions. The Plague of Cyprian in the third century killed millions more. Armies could not be recruited, farms could not be worked, and tax revenues collapsed. Rome did not fall in a single dramatic moment. It bled out slowly as its population dwindled and its economic capacity declined in parallel.
The Black Death that swept through Europe in the fourteenth century killed somewhere between thirty and sixty percent of the entire population. The economic consequences were staggering. Labor became so scarce that the feudal system began to collapse. Peasants who survived could demand higher wages because there simply were not enough workers to go around. Entire villages disappeared. Trade routes that had functioned for centuries were disrupted. The economic map of Europe was redrawn by a bacterium.
The United States experienced its own population shock with the influenza pandemic of 1918, which arrived on the heels of World War One. Estimates suggest somewhere between fifty and one hundred million people died worldwide, with about 675,000 deaths in America. The pandemic killed disproportionately among young, working-age adults, which made its economic impact more severe than the raw numbers might suggest. Cities shut down, businesses closed, and the economic disruption was substantial, though the nation recovered relatively quickly because the underlying demographic structure remained intact.
COVID-19 moved the needle but did not fundamentally alter the demographic trajectory of most nations. The deaths were tragic, concentrated among the elderly, and the economic disruption from lockdowns and behavioral changes was significant. But COVID did not produce the kind of civilizational population collapse that the Black Death or the diseases that destroyed the Aztecs caused.
China presents a different and more instructive case. The demographic crisis unfolding there is not the result of plague or war. It is the consequence of deliberate government policy. The one-child policy implemented under Deng Xiaoping and maintained for decades has produced a demographic time bomb. For forty years, the government told families they could have only one child, enforced through fines, job losses, and in many cases forced abortions and sterilizations. The policy worked. Birth rates collapsed. And now China faces the consequences.
The population is aging rapidly while the working-age population shrinks. The official numbers suggest China has about 1.4 billion people, but serious analysts question whether those figures are accurate. Local governments had incentives to inflate population counts because funding and political standing depended on those numbers. The actual population may be significantly lower. Meanwhile, the real estate sector, which has accounted for roughly thirty percent of Chinese economic activity, is imploding. Massive apartment towers sit empty in cities across the country. Developers have defaulted on hundreds of billions in debt. Young people who were supposed to buy those apartments and fill those cities are not being born in sufficient numbers.
When a nation finds itself short of people, history suggests there are limited options. You can try to encourage higher birth rates, but that takes a generation to produce results. You can import workers through immigration, but that requires a society willing to accept outsiders. Or you can take people from somewhere else.
Taiwan looks very different through this lens. The island is not merely a semiconductor manufacturing hub or a symbolic challenge to American power in the Pacific. Taiwan has twenty-three million people who speak the same language and share significant cultural heritage with mainland China. If demographic math is driving strategic calculations in Beijing, Taiwan represents a potential solution to a population problem that grows more acute every year.
This is not so different from the logic that drove conquest throughout human history. Genghis Khan did not conquer ...
Casual Cocktail Conversations and Client Coffee Quarterly at The Truesdell Companies
Wednesday, December 31, 2025 – Episode 526
Somewhere along the way, the financial services industry decided that the best way to talk to people about their money was to put them in a conference room with stale coffee, a PowerPoint presentation, and a sales pitch dressed up as education. You sit there for an hour, maybe two, nodding along while someone reads bullet points off a screen and wonders why you are not more excited about their proprietary mutual fund.
Well, that is not how we do things at Truesdell Wealth.
Starting in the first quarter of 2026, we are hosting a series of Casual Cocktail Conversations at the Stonewater Club in Stone Creek. These are not seminars. They are not sales presentations. TheyCasual Cocktail Conversations and Client Coffee Quarterly are exactly what the name suggests, conversations. You show up, grab a drink, sit down with people who are in the same chapter of life you are, and we talk about the things that actually matter when you are fifty-five or older and thinking seriously about retirement.
The format is simple. I pick a topic that deserves more than a thirty-second explanation, and we dig into it. Not with jargon. Not with complicated charts designed to make you feel stupid so you will hand over your money. Just plain talk about real issues.
On January 11th, we start with Buckets of Income with Clarity. This is the straightforward approach to retirement income that separates your fixed money from your flexible money. You will know exactly what is safe, what is moderate, what is growing, and what you can actually spend. No guessing. No hoping. No waking up at two in the morning wondering if the market just ate your grocery budget.
January 25th is Hidden Investment Costs, Fees, and Expenses in Plain View. Here is a number for you: ninety-five percent of investors have no idea what they are actually paying. The financial industry has gotten remarkably good at burying costs inside layers of fees, expense ratios, and trading costs that never show up on your statement. They do not hide these fees because they are proud of them. We are going to pull back the curtain and show you where the money goes. Awareness is not optional when your retirement depends on it.
February 8th covers Essential Florida Estate Documents and Much More. If you moved to Florida thinking a will from Ohio was good enough, you need to be in this room. We are talking about the must-have documents, the second marriage complications, the blended family landmines, and the probate surprises that catch retirees off guard every single day. This is not the glamorous side of planning, but it is the side that keeps your family out of court and your wishes intact.
February 22nd is The IRA Tax Bomb, Social Security Cliff, and Cost of War. That IRA you have been contributing to for thirty years? It is not your money. It is a delayed tax bill with your name on it. Social Security is under strain, and unless you have been living under a rock, you have noticed that global conflict tends to change economic assumptions in ways nobody predicts. We are going to talk about what all of this means for your income planning right now, not in some theoretical future.
March 8th brings The Truesdell Retirement Meltdown Calculator. I built this tool thirty-five years ago and have been updating it ever since. It shows your income, your spending, your risk, and your longevity under real-world conditions. Not best-case fantasy scenarios. Real conditions. I will demonstrate it live, and every client gets unlimited access to use it themselves.
Then on March 22nd, we wrap up the quarter with The Big Five Truesdell Investment Portfolios and More. This is how we build durable, disciplined portfolios, how allocations work, and how we manage risk in a world that seems determined to surprise us. We will cover blended equal weight indexing with fractional shares, and if that sounds confusing, that is precisely why you need to attend.
Now, for our existing clients and their invited guests, we have something different. On Wednesday, March 11th, we are holding the Client Quarterly, a private briefing over coffee where I walk through major economic, business, and investment developments. This is not a pep rally. This is a serious look at what is happening, using both quantitative and qualitative analysis and a few intelligence sources that do not show up in the morning headlines. I will explain why forecasting is disciplined mathematics while prediction is just guesswork with confidence, and how we incorporate the Rumsfeld framework of knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns into how we think about risks, realities, and opportunities.
If you are a client, you are invited. If you have friends or family who ought to hear this, bring them along.
These conversations are for people who want straight answers, not sales pitches. If that sounds like you, we will see you at Stonewater.
The Variable Annuity Money Pit
Tuesday, December 30, 2025 - Episode 525
Now let's talk about variable annuities, which might be the most cleverly disguised fee machine the financial services industry ever invented. And I say that with the kind of admiration you'd give a con artist who manages to pick your pocket while shaking your hand.
Here's how they work, and pay attention because the industry counts on you not understanding this. When you buy a variable annuity, your money goes into what they call separate accounts. Not mutual funds. Separate accounts. Why the fancy terminology? Because the law requires it. Insurance products can't technically hold mutual funds directly, so they create these separate accounts that are, for all practical purposes, mirror images of mutual funds. Same stocks. Same bonds. Same management. Same everything. Except the price tag. Think of it this way: you're buying a name-brand product repackaged in a fancier box, and someone's charging you a premium for the privilege of the new label.
The separate accounts inside your variable annuity hold the exact same investments you could buy in a regular mutual fund, but now you're paying extra layers of fees that would make a toll road operator blush.
Let's walk through the damage. First, there's the mortality and expense charge, which sounds like something from an undertaker's invoice. This typically runs about 1.4 percent annually. That's the insurance company's cut for providing the annuity wrapper and taking on some actuarial risk. Fair enough, you might think. Except we're just getting started.
Next come the riders. Income riders guarantee you a certain payout down the road. Death benefit riders promise your heirs won't lose money if you die while the market is down. These sound wonderful in the sales presentation, and they're not free. Each rider might cost you another half percent to one percent per year. Sometimes more. Stack a couple of these on top of your mortality charge, and suddenly you're looking at total annual expenses of three and a half to four percent.
Let me put that in plain English. If your variable annuity earns seven percent in a given year, and you're paying four percent in fees, you keep three percent. The insurance company keeps four. You did all the investing. You took all the risk. They took more than half the return. If that arrangement sounds fair to you, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to discuss.
But wait, as they say in those late-night commercials, there's more. Many variable annuities require you to keep a certain percentage of your money in bond funds. The sales pitch calls this risk management or asset allocation. Here's what it really means: when interest rates are low and bond returns are anemic, you're stuck in investments returning maybe four or five percent while paying three and a half percent in fees. Your net return might be one percent. In a good year. Meanwhile, inflation is eating your purchasing power for breakfast, and the insurance company is still collecting their cut like clockwork.
Consider this example. You put two hundred thousand dollars into a variable annuity. Over twenty years, assuming average market returns of eight percent but total fees of three and a half percent, you'd net about four and a half percent annually. Your account might grow to roughly four hundred eighty thousand dollars. Sounds decent until you realize that the same two hundred thousand in a low-cost index fund charging a quarter of one percent would have grown to approximately six hundred eighty thousand dollars. That's two hundred thousand dollars that evaporated into fee structures and rider charges. Two hundred thousand dollars you'll never see because someone convinced you that complexity equals sophistication.
Here's another way to look at it. If you're sixty years old and you live to ninety, those annual fees compound into a small fortune you're handing to the insurance company instead of your grandchildren. Over thirty years of retirement, a four percent annual fee drag on a five hundred thousand dollar portfolio amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost wealth. Not lost to bad investments. Lost to fees.
Variable annuities aren't inherently evil. For a small slice of the population with very specific needs, they might make sense. But for most folks, they're an expensive solution to a problem that could be solved more simply and cheaply. The question you should always ask is this: who benefits most from this complexity? If the answer isn't you, maybe it's time for a different approach.
The Cost Blindness Problem
Let me tell you something that might sting a little, but sometimes the truth does that. After thousands of conversations over the years, I can tell you with near certainty that about half the people I sit down with simply do not want to know what they are paying. Not cannot know. Will not know. There is a difference, and it matters.
I call it willful cost blindness, and it is one of the most expensive conditions you will never find in a medical textbook. These folks have spent decades building wealth, making sharp decisions, negotiating deals, and running households or businesses with precision. But when it comes to the fees their financial advisor or firm charges, they suddenly develop a remarkable ability to look the other way.
Here is the uncomfortable part. When you work with someone for years, you build a relationship. You know their kids' names. You have been to their office Christmas party. They sent flowers when your mother passed. And that is exactly how the game is designed to work. Because once you like someone, once you trust them, it becomes almost impossible to look them in the eye and say, "I appreciate the relationship, but I am not paying these kinds of fees anymore."
But there comes a point, and I have seen it happen again and again, when people just snap. Like that fellow in the movie Network who threw open the window and shouted that he was mad as hell and was not going to take it anymore. Something clicks. The loyalty finally costs more than the comfort is worth.
Let me give you three examples from real folks I have worked with. Names changed, of course, but the stories are true enough.
First, a married couple in their early sixties. Retired teachers, both of them. Good pensions, modest lifestyle, about four hundred thousand saved. They had been with the same broker for eighteen years. Nice guy. Sent birthday cards. The problem was they were paying one and a quarter percent annually on assets under management plus the hidden fees inside the mutual funds he recommended. When we sat down and ran the numbers, they discovered they had paid over seventy thousand dollars in fees over the past decade. For what? A portfolio that underperformed a basic index fund. The wife actually cried. Not from sadness, but from frustration. She kept saying, "We trusted him." They did. And that trust cost them a small car every year.
Second, a widow in her mid-seventies. Her husband handled everything before he passed. She inherited a relationship with an advisor she barely knew and a portfolio stuffed with products that paid the advisor handsomely whether the market went up or down. When I asked her what she was paying, she had no idea. None. When we pulled the statements apart, we found she was losing nearly fourteen thousand dollars a year in fees on a seven hundred thousand dollar account. She had been a widow for six years. Do the math. She looked at me and said, "My husband would have fired this man years ago." She was right. He would have.
Third, a retired business owner, seventy-one years old, sold his company for just under two million dollars. Sharp as a tack. Built something from nothing. But when it came to his investments, he handed the reins to a big-name firm and assumed the brand meant quality. It did not. He was paying advisory fees, platform fees, trading fees, and expense ratios that together added up to nearly two percent annually. On two million dollars, that is forty thousand dollars a year walking out the door. When I showed him, he got quiet. Then he said something I will never forget. "I would have fired any employee who wasted money like that."
The point is simple. Loyalty is a fine quality. But blind loyalty to someone who is bleeding your retirement dry is not loyalty at all. It is denial dressed up in good manners. At some point, you have to look at the numbers, set aside the relationship, and ask yourself a hard question: Am I paying for service, or am I paying for comfort?
The Bundled Financial Product Problem and How to Solve It
Let me tell you something most financial advisors would rather you not think about. When you invest your hard-earned money into what the industry calls bundled financial products, you are paying for layers of costs that are about as transparent as mud in a Mississippi river bottom. Some of these costs are disclosed, sure. But many of them are buried so deep in fine print that you would need a magnifying glass and a law degree to find them.
Now, bundled financial products are exactly what the name suggests. They take multiple investment components and wrap them together into one neat package. Mutual funds are the most common example. You buy one share and suddenly you own a piece of hundreds or even thousands of different stocks or bonds. Sounds convenient, and it is. But convenience has a price, and that price has been growing since this whole industry got started over a century ago.
The story begins in Boston back in 1924, when three businessmen established the Massachusetts Investors Trust. This was the first open-end mutual fund in America, and the company still exists today as MFS Investment Management. What started with fifty thousand dollars has grown into trillions across the industry. The idea was brilliant for its time. Regular folks could pool their money together, hire professional managers, and own a diversified portfolio without needing a fortune to do it. That innovation opened the door to investing for millions of everyday Americans.
Then came the Great Depression and all the regulatory reforms that followed. By 1940, Congress passed both the Investment Company Act and the Investment Advisers Act to bring some order to the chaos. The folks at Massachusetts Investors Trust actually helped draft that legislation, and the requirements written into law mirrored what they were already doing. The intention was solid. Protect investors. Require disclosure. Make sure the people managing your money have a legal obligation to look out for your interests.
But here is where things get interesting. The world has changed considerably since 1940, and not all of the changes have been in the investor's favor. The bundled product industry has become extraordinarily creative at layering fees on top of fees while technically staying within the disclosure rules. You see the expense ratio published right there in the prospectus. What you do not see quite so easily are all the other costs eating away at your returns.
Let us start with transaction costs. Every time a mutual fund manager buys or sells securities inside that fund, there are brokerage commissions involved. Research from UC Davis found that these transaction costs can actually exceed the stated expense ratio for some funds. Small cap growth funds averaged over three percent annually in transaction costs alone. That is money coming right out of your pocket, and it does not show up in that nice clean expense ratio number.
Then you have the bid-ask spread problem. When buying and selling bonds especially, there is a gap between what buyers will pay and what sellers will accept. That spread is essentially a hidden toll you pay every time securities change hands. For illiquid investments or bonds that do not trade frequently, these spreads can be substantial.
And speaking of transparency problems, let us talk about non-traded real estate investment trusts for a moment. The SEC itself issued a warning back in 2015 about these products, citing high fees, lack of liquidity, and poor transparency. Upfront fees can run anywhere from nine to fifteen percent of your investment. That means for every dollar you invest, only eighty-five to ninety-one cents actually goes to work for you. The rest goes to brokers and promoters before you earn a single penny in returns. Non-traded REITs often do not provide share valuations for eighteen months or more after your investment. You literally cannot determine what your investment is worth for extended periods. Meanwhile, distributions that look attractive might actually be coming from the money you invested rather than from actual earnings.
Private placements present similar challenges. These investments are frequently misunderstood, and the people selling them do not always make the risks crystal clear. When you cannot easily see what you are paying or understand what you own, that is not sophistication. That is confusion dressed up in a nice suit.
The alternative to all this complexity is unbundling. When you strip away the layers, avoid unnecessary platform fees, eliminate middlemen where they are not adding value, and invest directly where possible, the savings can be substantial. We are talking about potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars over a retirement that could span thirty years or more.
So when you are ready to understand exactly how this should be done, when you want someone to show you where your money is actually going and help you keep more of what you have earned, that is when you call us.
Truesdell Wealth. 352-612-1000.
Adverse Possession and Why Every Property Owner Should Understand It
Use It or Lose It Is Not Just a Saying
The Quiet Way Strangers Can Take Your Land
Most people have never heard the term adverse possession until someone tries to take a piece of their land using it. By then, it is usually too late to do much about it except hire a lawyer and hope for the best. That is not a position you want to find yourself in, especially after spending a lifetime building and protecting what you own.
Adverse possession is a legal doctrine that allows someone who occupies land they do not own to eventually gain legal title to that land if certain conditions are met over a specified period of time. It sounds almost un-American when you first hear it. How can someone take your property just by using it? But the doctrine has been part of English and American law for centuries, and it is alive and well in every state including Florida.
A recent Georgia Supreme Court case called Brownphil versus Cudjoe illustrates exactly how this works and why property owners need to pay attention.
The facts were straightforward. Two parties had competing claims to an undeveloped lot in Bibb County, Georgia. One party, Brownphil, had an unbroken chain of title going back through recorded deeds. The other party, Cudjoe, had a deed to the same property, but his chain of title had gaps. Cudjoe knew his deed was not supported by a continuous chain, so he asserted adverse possession instead, claiming he had been in possession of the property long enough under Georgia law to gain title regardless of the paperwork problems.
The case worked its way through the Georgia court system. The trial court sided with Cudjoe. The appellate court affirmed. Brownphil appealed to the Georgia Supreme Court, which finally vacated the lower court decisions and sent the case back for further proceedings.
The Supreme Court made an important distinction that every property owner should understand. Under Georgia law, someone can gain title by adverse possession through prescription after twenty years of continuous possession, or in as little as seven years if they possess the property under written evidence of title, even if that written evidence is defective. The phrase under color of title means the person has a document that looks like it conveys ownership but fails to do so because of some defect.
Here is the critical point. There can be no adverse possession without actual possession of the land. A recorded deed by itself, even one that looks valid, cannot establish adverse possession if the person claiming it was never actually on the property, using it, maintaining it, or treating it as their own. The Georgia Supreme Court found that the lower courts had not properly analyzed whether Cudjoe had actually possessed the land before concluding he had acquired title through adverse possession.
Now let me explain why this matters to you.
If you own property, particularly vacant land, rural acreage, or lots you do not visit regularly, someone else might be using it. They might be grazing cattle on it, storing equipment, building a fence that encroaches a few feet onto your side of the line, or simply treating it as their own while you pay the taxes and assume everything is fine.
Depending on your state, if they do this openly, continuously, and without your permission for a period of years, ranging typically from seven to twenty years depending on the circumstances and jurisdiction, they may be able to claim legal ownership. And if you have not been paying attention, you might not find out until they file a quiet title action and a process server shows up at your door.
The defenses against adverse possession are straightforward but require vigilance. First, know your property boundaries. Have them surveyed if there is any doubt. Second, inspect your property regularly, especially vacant land. Third, if you discover someone using your property without permission, act immediately. Send them written notice demanding they stop. Document everything. If necessary, file a trespassing complaint or seek an injunction. The clock stops running on adverse possession claims when the true owner takes action to assert their rights.
Do not assume that paying property taxes protects you. In most states, paying taxes is evidence of ownership but does not by itself defeat an adverse possession claim if the other elements are present.
There is another form of property taking that people often confuse with adverse possession, and that is eminent domain. These are not the same thing. Eminent domain is the government's power to take private property for public use, but the government must pay you just compensation. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution requires it. Adverse possession, by contrast, involves a private party taking your property through occupation and use over time, and they do not have to pay you anything if they succeed.
Both doctrines can result in you losing property. One requires compensation. The other does not. Understanding the difference is important.
For retirees especially, this is not an abstract legal concept. Many of you own property you do not use daily. Vacation homes. Hunting land. Lots you bought decades ago thinking you might build on them someday. Family farms that have been in the family for generations but nobody lives on anymore. These properties are prime candidates for adverse possession claims if you are not careful.
The lesson from cases like Brownphil versus Cudjoe is simple. Ownership requires attention. Paper title is important, but it is not everything. If you want to keep what is yours, you need to know what is happening on your land, and you need to act when someone else starts treating it as theirs.
On July 4, 2025, President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law. The name alone ought to tell you something about how Washington operates these days, but setting aside the salesmanship, this legislation does contain some genuinely significant changes for real estate and for people who own it, invest in it, or plan to pass it along to their heirs.
Let me walk you through the highlights in plain English, because if you wait for your accountant to explain it next April, you might miss some planning opportunities. And if you wait for a slick salesman to explain it, you might end up owning something you should have left alone.
First, the bill made permanent a number of tax provisions from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that were scheduled to expire. If you remember that legislation, you probably remember the promises that came with it and the debate about whether those promises were kept. Regardless of where you stood on that argument, several of those provisions are now here to stay.
For people who own or invest in commercial real estate used for manufacturing, production, or refining, there is now a one hundred percent first year depreciation allowance for what the tax code calls Qualified Production Property. In regular language, that means if you build or buy certain types of nonresidential real estate for production purposes after January 2025 and before 2029, you can deduct the entire cost in the first year instead of spreading it out over decades. That is a significant incentive to build in America rather than overseas.
The bill also restored the full one hundred percent bonus depreciation deduction for eligible property. This had been phasing down under the old law, dropping to forty percent in 2025 and scheduled to disappear entirely by 2027. Now it is back at full strength and permanent for property acquired after January 2015. This applies to tangible property with a recovery period of twenty years or less.
For small business owners, the Section 179 deduction that lets you immediately write off certain property improvements has been increased. The maximum deduction is now two and a half million dollars with a phaseout starting at four million. If you are running a business and need to upgrade your heating, air conditioning, fire protection, security systems, or roofing, this matters.
The Qualified Business Income deduction that allows a twenty percent deduction for pass-through entities like partnerships, S corporations, and sole proprietorships has been made permanent at the twenty percent level. The thresholds for when limitations kick in have been increased and will be indexed for inflation going forward.
The Qualified Opportunity Zone program, which was created in 2017 to stimulate investment in economically distressed communities, has been renewed and expanded. The rules have been modified with rolling ten-year designations starting in 2026. If you invested in a Qualified Opportunity Fund before January 2027, deferred capital gains will be recognized on December 31, 2026. For investments held at least ten years and up to thirty years, no tax is imposed on gains when the investment is sold.
Now here is where I want you to pay close attention and maybe pour yourself a second cup of coffee.
Every time Congress passes legislation like this, an entire industry springs up overnight to help you take advantage of it. Some of those people are legitimate professionals who will serve you well. Others are salesmen who will package complicated investment products, wrap them in the language of tax savings, and sell them to retirees who do not fully understand what they are buying.
Real Estate Investment Trusts are going to proliferate. You will see them marketed for rehabilitation projects, opportunity zone investments, low-income housing credits, and every other provision in this bill. Some will be sound investments. Many will not be.
The bill expanded and made permanent the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. It reformed the New Markets Tax Credit. It relaxed rules on taxable REIT subsidiaries. Every one of these provisions creates opportunities for Wall Street to package products and sell them to Main Street investors who think they are getting a tax break when what they are really getting is a complicated, illiquid investment with fees buried in the fine print.
I have been in this business for more than forty years. I have watched these cycles repeat. A new tax law passes, the product manufacturers gear up, the salesmen hit the road, and retirees end up owning things they cannot sell, do not understand, and never should have bought.
If someone approaches you with a real estate investment product tied to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, slow down. Ask questions. Demand to see the fee structure. Find out what happens if you need your money back in three years. Ask who benefits if the deal goes sideways.
On the estate planning side, the bill increased the federal estate, gift, and generation-skipping transfer tax exemption. For 2025, the exemption is approximately fourteen million dollars per individual, nearly twenty-eight million for married couples. In 2026, those amounts increase further. This may make it easier to pass wealth to the next generation without triggering major gift or estate taxes, but Congress has a habit of revisiting these provisions when budget deficits climb.
The bottom line is this. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains real benefits for real estate investors, business owners, and people engaged in estate planning. It also contains real opportunities for people to sell you products you do not need. Know the difference before you sign anything.
ARTICLE TWO: Adverse Possession and Why Every Property Owner Should Understand It
Use It or Lose It Is Not Just a Saying
The Quiet Way Strangers Can Take Your Land
Most people have never heard the term adverse possession until someone tries to take a piece of their land using it. By then, it is usually too late to do much about it except hire a lawyer and hope for the best. That is not a position you want to find yourself in, especially after spending a lifetime building and protecting what you own.
Adverse possession is a legal doctrine that allows someone who occupies land they do not own to eventually gain legal title to that land if certain conditions are met over a specified period of time. It sounds almost un-American when you first hear it. How can someone take your property just by using it? But the doctrine has been part of English and American law for centuries, and it is alive and well in every state including Florida.
A recent Georgia Supreme Court case called Brownphil versus Cudjoe illustrates exactly how this works and why property owners need to pay attention.
The facts were straightforward. Two parties had competing claims to an undeveloped lot in Bibb County, Georgia. One party, Brownphil, had an unbroken chain of title going back through recorded deeds. The other party, Cudjoe, had a deed to the same property, but his chain of title had gaps. Cudjoe knew his deed was not supported by a continuous chain, so he asserted adverse possession instead, claiming he had been in possession of the property long enough under Georgia law to gain title regardless of the paperwork problems.
The case worked its way through the Georgia court system. The trial court sided with Cudjoe. The appellate court affirmed. Brownphil appealed to the Georgia Supreme Court, which finally vacated the lower court decisions and sent the case back for further proceedings.
The Supreme Court made an important distinction that ever...
Keep Your Eye on the Ball This Christmas - Christmas Calm for Conservatives
Merry Christmas, friends. Part of celebrating this season means wishing for peace on earth and goodwill toward your fellow men and women. That spirit of goodwill ought to extend even into the sometimes messy world of conservative politics.
Now, if you've been paying attention to the news lately, you've probably seen the story about former Vice President Mike Pence's group hiring a bunch of folks away from the Heritage Foundation. There's talk of ideological fights, accusations of disloyalty flying around, and plenty of hand-wringing about the future of the conservative movement. Kevin Roberts over at Heritage put out a video that rubbed some people the wrong way, board members resigned, and now about fifteen staffers are heading over to Pence's outfit called Advancing American Freedom.
Here's the thing. This kind of shuffling happens all the time in politics. Groups come and go. Leaders rise and fall. Organizations that seemed permanent yesterday get reshuffled tomorrow. It's the nature of the beast.
Remember when Rush Limbaugh passed away? Some folks acted like conservative talk radio would disappear forever. It didn't. Remember when Ronald Reagan left the White House? People wondered if the movement he built could survive without him. Well, here we are decades later still having these same conversations about principles and policies and where the party ought to head next.
So when you read about Pence versus Heritage, or the arguments at conferences about isolationism versus engagement, or tariffs versus free trade, or who gets to define what conservatism even means anymore, don't get your underwear in a bind. And for heaven's sake, don't throw in the towel.
The conservative movement has survived plenty of internal squabbles before. It'll survive this one too. What matters is keeping your eye on the ball. The principles that built this movement didn't disappear because one organization had a bad week or one leader made a questionable decision. Limited government, individual liberty, strong national defense, free markets, and traditional values don't evaporate just because some staffers changed offices.
There's going to be jockeying for influence as President Trump's term winds down. That's natural. Different factions will push different visions. Some will win, some will lose, and somewhere in the middle the actual work of governing and advancing sound policy will continue.
So this Christmas, enjoy your family. Appreciate the blessings you have. And when it comes to all this political noise, take a deep breath. The republic has weathered worse storms than a disagreement between Mike Pence and Kevin Roberts.
Merry Christmas to all of you.
Medical inflation is picking your pocket while Congress holds the door open. Every year, the bills get bigger, the explanations get longer, and the solutions get further away. Employers are drowning. Employees are stretched thin. Retirees are watching their fixed incomes shrink against healthcare costs that never stop climbing. And the people we elected to fix this mess? They're too busy pointing fingers to pick up a wrench. Let's talk about it.
BREAK
Let me tell you something that ought to keep every employer, employee, and retiree awake at night, and probably does. Medical inflation is eating us alive. Not slowly, mind you, but with the kind of appetite that makes you wonder if anyone in Washington has bothered to look at the actual numbers.
Here's what the data tells us. According to the Workers Compensation Research Institute, medical payments per claim jumped roughly five percent annually from 2021 through 2024. The average claim size has ballooned by thirty-two percent since 2017. Thirty-two percent. That's not a rounding error. That's a fundamental shift in how much it costs to fix a broken arm, treat a back injury, or help someone recover from a workplace accident.
And what's driving this freight train? Three things, mostly. First, technological advancements. Now don't get me wrong, robotic surgeries and advanced imaging are wonderful when you need them. But wonderful comes with a price tag, and that price tag keeps climbing. Second, healthcare consolidation. As hospitals merge and systems swallow each other up, competition disappears. When competition disappears, leverage shifts. Suddenly the folks providing care can negotiate higher payment rates because, well, where else are you going to go? Studies show this consolidation has added anywhere from one to four and a half percent to medical payments per claim, depending on the state. Third, we have an aging workforce. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that workers seventy-five and older will grow by nearly ninety-seven percent by 2030. Older workers mean longer recovery times, more complex medical needs, and higher costs across the board.
So what do we have? A perfect storm of expensive technology, shrinking competition, and demographic reality all pushing costs in one direction. Up.
Now here's where I get a little hot under the collar. The government is absolutely crawling with bureaucrats. And look, I don't blame them for doing their jobs. That's what they get paid to do. They process paperwork, enforce regulations, and follow the rules somebody else wrote. You can't fault a person for showing up and doing what's asked of them.
But you can absolutely fault the people who wrote those rules in the first place. And that means Congress. These are the folks we elect to solve problems, to look at systems that aren't working and fix them. Instead, what do we get? Posturing. Finger-pointing. Endless hearings that produce nothing but soundbites for the evening news. The tax code is a disaster. Criminal laws are a patchwork quilt stitched together by people who apparently never talked to each other. Civil rules and regulations have become so byzantine that you need a team of lawyers just to understand what you're allowed to do in your own business.
I'm not talking about tearing up the Constitution. That document has served us well for nearly two hundred and fifty years and it'll serve us well for another two hundred and fifty if we let it. What I'm talking about is everything underneath it. The operational machinery of government that's supposed to make life work for ordinary people. That machinery is broken, and medical costs are just one symptom of a much larger disease.
At our firm, we operate by a simple principle. We call it MY TEAM, which stands for Minimize and Maximize Your Time, Effort, Aggravation, and Money. Notice the order. Time comes first because you can't make more of it. Every hour you spend fighting with an insurance company, untangling bureaucratic nonsense, or trying to figure out which regulation applies to your situation is an hour you'll never get back.
When medical inflation runs wild and nobody in charge seems interested in addressing the root causes, it costs you on all four fronts. It costs you time dealing with higher premiums and coverage disputes. It costs you effort navigating a system designed more for administrators than patients. It costs you aggravation by the truckload. And yes, it costs you money, real money, the kind that used to go toward retirement savings or your grandchildren's education.
The insurance carriers are doing what they can. Some are using artificial intelligence to manage costs. Others are investing in clinical expertise and holistic care management. Good for them. But they're bailing water while Congress sits in the wheelhouse arguing about who gets to hold the compass.
It's time for a reset. Not revolution. Reset. The kind of serious, adult conversation about how we actually want this country to operate. Because right now, we're paying the price for decades of neglect, and the bill just keeps getting bigger.