I was at a family Christmas Party this past weekend and I was asked, ‘When did this LDS UnPlugged thing happen?’.   My answer was… It came together from one day that I was thinking of ways to evade, or I guess the more political term would be to ‘reduce’ my tax liability of our ‘for-pofit’ business!

Earlier this year I was having lunch with my older brother and one of his good friends, both entrepreneurs and owners of business and the topic of paying self employment tax came up.   My brother’s friend told a story of a late night comedian who thought it would be fun to experiment on setting up a 501C3 non-profit and generate ‘tax-free’ income from it.   This comedian was successful in creating this non profit, generated revenue, and paid zero in taxes!

A few days later, I came up with this novel idea of setting up a non-profit myself.   I’ve always been passionate about being ‘unplugged’ and taking time away from distractions of the world.   I’ve also always enjoyed traveling as well.  So the idea of the week, create an organization that organizes 10 day excursions ‘unplugged’ from the world, temple themed in particular for youth 12-18.   I figured I could take a portion of the revenue from my business; ‘donate’ to LDSUnPlugged; have $$ to travel the world (imagine how many 10 day ‘temple’ themed excursions I could come up with); and in the end not have to worry about having such a large tax liability!

Unfortunately, when I shared my thoughts with my CPA, he advised that it would be most difficult and a major red flag to the IRS to ‘reduce’ my tax liability in this manner.   I was a little bummed, yet at the same time, the idea was there and I knew I would get a return on my investment.  I may not receive a temporal ROI, yet I can see the potential spiritual ROI!   So, Fall of 2015, LDSUnPlugged was born.   We’ll see where it goes from here!

Happy UnPlugging!