Ritu Jha-
Small and medium business owners and individuals attended a day-long Wealth Summit to learn about financial growth and tax savings, wealth accumulation, and asset protection held on Dec 10 in Newark, California.
The Wealth Summit 2023 was hosted by Sanjiv Gupta[Sanjiv Gupta], a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) who owns a full-service accounting firm that has been providing services such as tax preparation, bookkeeping, payroll, and financial consulting to businesses and individuals in the Bay Area for over 25 years. He has offices in Fremont, Sunnyvale, and Pleasanton.
“We started the wealth summit in 2012,” Gupta told indica. “We started with 100 to 150 people, and now the 2023 Summit was attended by 520 people.”
A Chartered Accountant from India, Gupta practiced in his home country for 10 years before coming to the US with his wife, a software engineer. During his stay in the US, he metamorphosed into something more than a CPA and fulfilled the American Dream.
Gupta says choosing the right professional is important for tax planning, and saving. “If something goes wrong, I can ask that person to take responsibility,” Gupta said. “I’m trying to create an environment where people, instead of going online and getting more confused, can contact an expert that can help them.”
The Wealth Summit is one such platform.
“When we started, the participants were mostly on H1 visas and they were making maybe $200,000, or $300,000 annually. Now we see fewer H1 visa holders and more green card holders and US citizens. Most of them have grown to an income of a million plus in the last year. We have seen a jump in entrepreneurial activities,” Gupta said.
He said business owners now account for nearly 30 percent of Wealth Summit participants, including Limited Liability Companies (LLCs) such as gas stations, restaurants, hotels, 7-Eleven stores, franchise businesses, service businesses like IT consulting, product development, professional services, realtors, architects, doctors, and real estate professionals.
“To save taxes, you just can’t keep working in one direction. You have to not only save taxes, but also improve your creditworthiness, and provide a safety cover in case somebody gets laid off.”
Embarking on an entrepreneurial journey, however, is fraught with challenges and dangers that are accentuated by ignorance and lack of preparedness.
“When a person starts a business, the first challenge is working capital. When people visualize a new business venture, they do not consider how much capital they will need and once they begin, they start expecting returns immediately. That does not happen. You need to look at your cash flow before you think about venturing into a business cycle. How much cash flow do you have and can you risk your cash flow if something goes wrong? If you feel you’re not comfortable with losing money or the cash flow is tight, then that business is not meant for you.”
Though Gupta and his colleagues offer advice and assistance to aspiring entrepreneurs, the biggest challenge that tackle is when people who approach them have already made some mistakes and less-informed choices.
The problem is accentuated by half-baked information acquired from the internet. “Our community is over-educated. They keep checking on the internet to read blogs and try to learn strategies. They think that information is correct, but they are wrong. They also get influenced by their friends’ success stories. But the friends’ situations might be different and their experiences might not be replicable and emulating them might result in losses.”
Gupta’s firm has 25 employees, and almost all are women. He explains, “I feel women are more dedicated
towards work and they want to take it as their own as compared to men. They are very enterprising in that context. I’m fortunate to have them in my team.”
Through the Wealth Summit, Gupta is making it possible for others to come forward, talk to community people, and consult experts. “We give opportunities to the participants to talk to any of the experts. It presents an opportunity to establish connections and network with experts and people in the industry. In the future, if they want to open a company, are looking for medical insurance, or contact a realtor to buy real estate, they can consult the right person who’s vetted by my team,” said Gupta.Rajiv Awasthi, a broker associate with Intero Real Estate Services talking with an attendees in the Bay Area, told indica, “We’re expecting four to five rate cuts in 2024. At the Wealth Summit, I saw a lot of vendors and partners, tax attorneys, and financial advisors. It is a fact that you create wealth streams by investing in real estate, or save on taxes if you have a primary residence. I want to tell people to look at real estate as a great investment that will reap rewards down the line,” Awasthi added.
Bapi Reddy, a software engineer at Salesforce, was at the summit to learn how he can transfer his rental properties to an LLC to better protect them. “We always learn a lot from Sanjivji. It’s just that we need to take time and implement the learnings, not forget them,” Reddy said.
Gopi Gollapudi, an attorney in the Gopinath Law offices, said, “I have a background in engineering, an MBA from Wharton Finance, and an LLM in taxation law. So, owners of small businesses, entrepreneurs, and startups come to me because they want somebody to look at it in a multidimensional way. I look at the queries holistically and that helps me to understand my clients and provide them with solutions in the most efficient and fast manner.”
Like Gupta, Gollapudi also feels that the biggest mistake of entrepreneurs try to wing it by themselves. “A lot of entrepreneurs either don’t have the time, initiative, or encouragement to do it. Often, they also don’t know anybody who will help them in this aspect. So, they do something and then later on regret it. Then they’ll call the attorney who will help them sanitize, and clean up the problem. “My advice to them is to go with an attorney from the get-go so that they can help all the way through. As an attorney, our main goal is to anticipate problems, avoid litigation, and provide solutions,” Gollapudi said.
Lily Shu, a financial broker said that she and four other colleagues attended the summit to learn from Gupta. “We really enjoyed the event and learned quite a bit about the tax saving. We appreciate this effort. Gupta gave us tips about donations and tax write-offs. We’re thinking about implementing that in some suitable situations, especially for some of our clients who are in the W-2 high-income category.”
Shu’s colleague, Yamini Parthasarathy, another financial broker who attended the summit, said: “We’re trying to see how exactly we can reduce the tax liability or what are the ways to reduce tax liability legally and reduce the tax burden so that either today or later in the years how it can benefit our clients.”
She added, “A lot of people miss certain important factors like they think that only if you have bank accounts you have to report, but even if you have any insurance, whether it’s cash value insurance or whether it is any mutual funds, you do have to report those as well. That is something that Gupta highlighted very well in the Wealth Summit. We have a huge Indian clientele who have a lot of ancestral property and usually, when they turn it around, they
put the money into mutual funds or insurance products.”