what.tax
Keep more of what you earn through smart business structuring, tax optimization, and strategic savings.
- Top in Finance
- #65
- Subscribers
- 18K
- Paid subscribers
- 10+ paid
- Followers
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- Recommends
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What they write about
US tax planning for business owners and high earners. Recurring subjects include entity structure and how it affects retirement contributions, year-end deadlines and which moves expire when, the order in which to fund investment accounts, and keeping retirement income in lower brackets.
- tax planning
- business structuring
- retirement accounts
- capital gains
- high earners
Recent examples: How to Retire 5 Years Earlier Without a Six-Figure Salary · Sell Your Rental Property in 2026 and Keep More Than Half of What You Made
Written from what.tax’s own published post titles and openings in Sep 11, 2026. It describes the subjects the newsletter covers, not its views, and is not investment advice.
Growth history
Subscribers (thousands, nightly)
18K on Sep 10, 2026 → 18K on Oct 21, 2026
Followers (thousands, nightly)
Rank in Substack’s finance leaderboard: #65 today · #60 a week ago · #56 a month ago
Stats worth sharing
Tracked since Sep 10, 2026 — 42 daily snapshots so far. The card below is built from what we track and refreshes nightly.
- Percentile
- Top 13%
- Best rank seen
- #55
- Rank, 7 days
- −5 places
- Rank, 30 days
- −9 places
- Followers added
- −234
- Posts
- 12
- Reactions per post
- 13
- Reactions tracked
- 395
of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Sep 28, 2026
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 30 posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: How Long Until You Don’t Have to Work? The Calculation Most People Get Completely Wrong. — 35 reactions on Sep 16, 2026.
Recent posts
- How to Retire 5 Years Earlier Without a Six-Figure Salary
Most Americans already retire early. They just don’t plan it. Gallup’s April 2026 survey puts the average age at which retirees actually stopped working at 61 . Non-retirees expect to work until 66. That five-year gap has barely moved in two decades. EBRI’s 2026 Retirement Confidence Survey found that 46% of retirees left the workforce earlier than they planned , and Allianz Life’s 2026 study lists the reasons: health problems (30%), unexpected job loss (21%), and being financially ready sooner than expected (21%). Read that last number again. One in five early retirees left because the money…
- Sell Your Rental Property in 2026 and Keep More Than Half of What You Made
Most rental owners know their sale price to the dollar. Very few know the number that actually decides the outcome: how much cash lands in their account after the IRS and their state take their share. Those are different numbers, and the gap between them is where sellers get hurt. Here’s the core problem. Tax is computed on your gain, but you pay it out of your cash. Your gain is the sale price minus selling costs minus your adjusted basis, and that basis has shrunk every year you claimed depreciation. Your cash is the sale price, minus selling costs, minus whatever you still owe the bank. If…
- Nobody Gets Rich From a Paycheck Alone. Here’s What They Do Instead.
Warren Buffett drew a $100,000 salary from Berkshire Hathaway for more than four decades. No bonus. No stock awards. Berkshire’s 2026 proxy statement spells it out, and notes that the board’s compensation committee hasn’t proposed a raise since 2004 because he wanted his pay left unchanged. His successor, Greg Abel, received $22 million in salary for 2025. That’s 220 times what Buffett was paid. Abel could bank that salary for the next fifty years and still never come close to Buffett’s fortune. Buffett’s wealth was never in the paycheck. It was in shares he bought, held, and declined to sell…
- 100% Bonus Depreciation Is Permanent. Your 2026 Deduction Isn’t: How to Lock In $80K+ Before December
Every December, someone selling trucks or machinery tells business owners that bonus depreciation is about to vanish. For three years, they were right. The rate fell from 100% to 80% in 2023, to 60% in 2024, and to 40% on January 1, 2025, with zero scheduled for 2027. Then Congress rewrote Section 168(k). The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (P.L. 119-21, signed July 4, 2025) made 100% bonus depreciation permanent for qualified property acquired after January 19, 2025 . The statute has no sunset and no phase-down. So the rate is not what’s closing. Three other things are, and any one of them can…
- What Your Tax Return Reveals About the Health of Your Business Structure
Most owners read two numbers on a tax return: the refund or the balance due. Then the y file the PDF and put it in a folder. That wastes the most detailed financial document you sign all year. A return shows what you owe. It also shows, line by line, how well your entity structure fits the business you run today . You probably chose that structure once, on a Secretary of State website or in a lawyer’s office, when profit was a fraction of what it is now. Nobody has tested it since. Structures decay. Profit outgrows a sole proprietorship. A salary set in year one never moves. The law shifts…
- The Financial Decision Most People Regret Not Making Before They Turn 50
Researchers at RAND and the Munich Center for the Economics of Aging asked Americans aged 60 to 79 one question: if you could live your financial life over, would you save differently? 58.5% said they wish they had saved more. About 40% would change nothing. Only 1.7% wished they had saved less. That is the regret people can name. For anyone reading this newsletter, I think it’s the wrong one. The same study found that wealthier respondents were less likely to report it. If you own a business and have been filling a SEP-IRA or a 401(k) for a decade, under-saving won't hurt you. What will hurt…
- How to Legally Pay Yourself Without Paying the IRS First
In 2017 and 2018, Joe and Jill Biden earned roughly $13.3 million from book deals and speaking fees. They taxed almost none of it as self-employment income. It flowed into two S corporations, CelticCapri Corp. and Giacoppa Corp., which paid the couple less than $800,000 in salary and passed the rest through as profit. The Wall Street Journal calculated that the arrangement spared them as much as $500,000 in Medicare tax . Tax professionals call this the Gingrich-Edwards loophole, after Newt Gingrich and John Edwards, who routed their own income through S corporations years earlier. Two…
- The One Structural Change That Saves Most $100K+ Earners $15,000 a Year
If you run a profitable business as a sole proprietor or a single-member LLC, you are paying the most expensive tax most entrepreneurs never look at directly. It isn’t income tax. It’s self-employment tax : 15.3% on the first $184,500 of net earnings in 2026, plus 2.9% on everything above that, plus another 0.9% once you cross $200,000 single or $250,000 joint. It hits 92.35% of your net profit before you take a single deduction, and it doesn’t care that you already paid income tax on the same dollars. At $200,000 of profit, that bill is $28,234 . Every year. For a solo owner with no…
- Rich People Don’t Budget. They Design.
A budget is a report card on decisions you already made. By the time a spreadsheet tells you that you overspent on software in March, the money is gone, the quarter is closed, and the only thing left to manage is guilt. That is the core flaw of budgeting as a wealth strategy. It works on the smallest lever you have , the discretionary spending at the bottom of your cash flow, and it ignores the big levers sitting at the top: how your income is characterized, where it lands first, which accounts it passes through, and how much of it the IRS touches before you ever see it. People who build real…
- The Three Accounts That Determine How Fast You Reach Financial Independence
Every financial independence calculator asks the same two questions: how much you spend and how much you save. Plug them in, and it hands you a date. For most entrepreneurs, that date is wrong, because the calculator treats every saved dollar as the same dollar. A dollar in your Solo 401(k), a dollar in your Roth IRA, and a dollar in your brokerage account carry three different tax bills and three different dates on which you’re legally allowed to spend them. You can hit your number at 46 and still be locked out of most of it until 59½. You can also hit it at 46 with the right mix and pay…
- The Tax Drag That’s Adding 7 Years to Your Path to Financial Independence
Most entrepreneurs know the effective tax rate on their business income to the decimal. Almost none can tell you the tax rate on their portfolio’s return. That second number is the one quietly deciding when you get to stop working. Tax drag is the gap between what your investments earn and what you keep after the IRS takes its share each year. It never appears as a single line on your return. It hides in the 1099-INT from the bank holding your operating reserve, in the capital gains distribution from a fund you never sold, in bond interest taxed at 40.8% while inflation takes most of what’s…
- The IRS Is Catching Up to AI Income Faster Than Most People Realize
The popular take on the IRS in 2026 is that it has been gutted, and that anyone earning money on the side can relax. Half of that is true. The agency has lost thousands of examiners. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that the IRS lost about 27% of its examination and collection workforce from fiscal 2024 to fiscal 2025, and the decline continued: staffing fell to 19,612 by the end of fiscal 2025 and to 17,517 as of January 10, 2026. The other half is what gets people in trouble. The IRS did not stop enforcing. It changed how it enforces. It is replacing human…
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Data: Substack public leaderboards and publication archives, refreshed nightly, plus public beehiiv sitemaps and recommendation pages, refreshed weekly. Source for this page: what.tax. Subscriber counts are Substack’s own rounded public figures, so week-on-week changes move in steps. beehiiv audience sizes are self-reported by the publisher and are not verified. Last snapshot: Oct 21, 2026.