Growth & Grace

Wesley Knight 0:00
This is a KU n b Studio's original program. The following program is underwritten by Crawford management group and Chris glow and does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 Jaz and Moore the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education

Music 0:18
even better than I was the last time, baby. We back and

Music 0:35
we back and we back and we back and we back and we back. And I was the last do

Julian Rosado 0:44
good more, you guys. This is listen to growth and grace. I am Julian Rosato, and this is my uncle, host, Leo Crawford, how you doing today? Leo?

Leaha Crawford 0:59
Hi. How Are You Good job. Good job starting the show. Hey. How you? How'd that feel? Doing that?

Julian Rosado 1:05
Um, actually felt. It actually felt empowering.

Leaha Crawford 1:10
All right, guys. So what I'm so, what we're doing here is we are learning, you know, we're at UNLV, we're at where to college, and we are helping Julian become more comfortable being on the radio, right? Yeah, all right, so that was good. You wanna try it again. Do it again. Say good morning. Good

Julian Rosado 1:25
morning, good morning. How are you guys? This is Julian Rosado, and we're on growth and grace. And now we're here with our co host, Leah Crawford, Hey,

Leaha Crawford 1:36
see, that was much better. And as you do it more, you'll become more comfortable, okay? And what I love about this is just want to give you a chance to be comfortable, because sometimes I won't be here and you'll have to do that on your own. Oh, no, man, yeah, you will, you will. You got this? Because that was good, yeah. So what did you do this weekend? What did I do this weekend? I had my family in town last week. Well, our family in town, not my family, our family in town, and it was good. My sister Fatima went to the um Beyonce show. Oh my god. Had a ball. She is she in town? Yeah, she has seen Beyonce in multiple cities now, and she is, oh yeah, she's a Beyonce fan. So, so

Julian Rosado 2:15
did she party when she saw my Oh, my God, oh yes, this is the next song. So

Leaha Crawford 2:18
she's been following Beyonce since Destiny's Child, and whenever she is anywhere close to Philadelphia, Fatima is trying to find a way to get to see Beyonce. She is a true fan, so it was good to have her. Did you go? No, I did not. I did. I stayed home with my mom, so it's your auntie. I stayed home with her, and we just sat around the house and we laughed and we joke talked about old time. So it was good. It was good to have them in town for the weekend, you know. But today, you're interviewing me, yeah. All right, so let's go.

Julian Rosado 2:49
All right, so who you? Who are

Leaha Crawford 2:53
you? Who am I? Who am I? So I am Leah Crawford. I have been in Vegas now for about 20 years, college graduate, you know, have bachelor's degree, master's degree, small business owner, entrepreneur. I also am an avid volunteer. Did you go to UNLV? No, I did not go to UNLV. Where'd you go? Did not I went to Howard University in Washington, DC. Did you like it? I enjoyed it. Loved, loved living in DC, coming from Philadelphia and that like, well, it's different, right? Because it's at 18 years old, and you're going to college, you don't know what to expect. Everyone's telling you to go. You know you have to go. And didn't go far because DC is only a two hour drive. Yeah, it was different because I didn't know what to expect. So at first, now I look back on it, it was like extended overnight camp, right? And but it was extended overnight camp with a whole bunch of activities with grades attached to it that cost a whole lot of money, and it was good, because you meet people. You meet students at Howard, from all over the world, not just the country, because there are students there from all over the country, from all over this country and from different countries, and we are all there to get an education. So when you first move into the dorm, so you got this dorm room, and you might meet your roommate for the first time, and you're living together for a whole year with this person, yeah, so it was, it was definitely different. It was an amazing experience. And I'm glad that my parents, well, my family, not just my parents, pushed me to go, but even to go away to have that experience. You know, my mother told me this weekend that I cried. I said I wanted to come home. I don't remember that, but she said I cried and said I wanted to come home. And she told me, No, you had to finish it. And I remember my daughter when she first went to Howard, saying, Mom, I want to come home. And I was like, No, you got to finish it. But

Julian Rosado 4:59
none of the. Sure established you ever think about going back, becoming a speaker or anything?

Leaha Crawford 5:04
Well, well, that's, I don't know, haven't thought about, haven't thought that far, but I'd have gone back because she did. My daughter did graduate from Howard as well. She got her bachelor's, fine arts in dance, and now you have to go back. JD, nourish, well, she got that years ago, and she got her JD MBA from Howard as well. So she's a lawyer, so I went back for both graduations. Oh my gosh, but I and it was two graduations because she got her JD MBA at the same time, which was huge for her. And now she's practicing in Washington, DC. She's practicing law in Washington, DC. So for me, who am I? I am I am just I'm a spirit having a human experience. That's how I look at life, and trying to be the best version of me every day.

Julian Rosado 5:52
What made you get into taxes? I

Leaha Crawford 5:56
started doing taxes actually in the 90s, at a small company in Washington, DC. And it was funny, because I was taking a tax class at Howard, and I was working at the company, and, you know, taking a tax class, you have to do a tax return. So because I was working at the firm, we put the tax return in the software. And when I handed in my project, my professors like, how did you do this? I said I entered it in the software and got and figured out how you know how to do it. Because back then, we were doing them by hand, manually. My gosh, well, no, well, actually, I can still do them by hand. Well, because it helped us to understand the tax code, where stuff goes, how the flow, how the forms are supposed to flow. And because I had that knowledge, when I'm looking at returns and entering in information, I understand if a number is not in the right place and where numbers are supposed to go. And, you know, old school we did, we did the old fashioned way. You did it by hand. Did it by hand, and softwares and stuff make it a little bit more proficient, and you can show other people where things go. But, you know, every line has a purpose. Learned that early on, you know, when I was learning how to do taxes. But I've been doing taxes now. I want to say since the early 90s, oh, my god, early 90s actually even went to h, R blocks tax class in like 9495 to even get better at doing personal returns, just to understand the reasoning behind so you've

Julian Rosado 7:37
been doing by the numbers, when the bulls were hot, yes,

Leaha Crawford 7:40
and when the bulls were hot, I was doing, yeah. I've been doing Yeah. I was thinking about that. I've been doing taxes for very long. I actually enjoy it because younger I like doing puzzles. And tax returns to me, are like a puzzles, like people. Situations might be similar, but there's always something different. There's, you know, they might have no might have similar situations going on, like someone might, you know, want at one point in your life, you're single, then you get married, then you have children. You may or may not get a divorce, then the children go to college. You might start a business. So I watch over the years as people's tax returns change. You know, you might have started off making, you know, maybe under, you know, start your first job, you're making 35,000 you know, a couple of years later, you're making six figures, watching, just watching your growth on your tax

Julian Rosado 8:33
return. I bet when you have customers, they probably open up to you. They do. They do. And taxes is is very personal.

Leaha Crawford 8:43
It's very it's very personal because we do have a lot of personal data, and what we try to do is, so you have a therapist on staff. Me Right? We have tissues on a desk for that reason, and we put them there early on because I noticed that people, especially if they were having tax issues, normally, what led up to the issue is emotional for them and non judgmental. When you come into the office, we sit there, we listen, and then we let you, we let I call it, we let you unpack, unpack it all so that we can figure out, where do we go from here? Because I used to get early on we just did taxes, but when we started doing resolution and resolving people's issues, what I found was people were having health conditions related to the stress of the text, and that was concerning for me, where I'm not, I'm not an MD, and the stress of the letters coming, because when the IRS sends a letter, they don't just send one, they send three, yeah, and then they come back to back, and then sometimes the threatening language and all those other things. And I. We have people

Julian Rosado 10:01
may be wrong, but on when you get a letter from like a hospital, something you that's you can't file bankruptcy. I

Leaha Crawford 10:11
don't know about I'm not an attorney, so I can't speak to that. I won't speak to that. But you there has nothing to do with what we do. Okay? So we don't really, we don't get into what happens with a hospital bill, and because that's because that's legal, okay? But what we do is, what we find is, is that when we start to handle the tax issues, some of them are relieved, and they feel like the burden has been lifted. And that's amazing. You know, absolutely, it's different. Well, it's different, right? Because it's a plan. And with the IRS, what we found over the years is they start sending threatening letters when you're not communicating with them, when you're not talking to them, talk to them, write a letter back. You know, it's like a speak and respond. You know, they send you a letter they're speaking to you. They expect you to read the letter and respond, right? And they give you a due date, and you just want to respond. And if you don't know, you know you need to find out. I know, with this year, what we've done is we've reached out to a lot of our clients, because the new tax bill is coming out, and trying to help people get prepared for the tax bill.

Julian Rosado 11:19
So I heard it's already it's already out, like it's

Leaha Crawford 11:23
out. It's been signed. It's been signed, it's been signed. So it's already

Julian Rosado 11:25
in the law well,

Leaha Crawford 11:26
but it's in a law for effect for 2025 what does that mean? It doesn't go it doesn't impact us until the next tax season. A lot of people don't know that, right? It impacts us the next tax season, and some items impact the season after that. So what I'm doing now is before I start speaking to it is becoming abreast of the things that we need to do for our clients based off of what they're doing this year. Simple things like, well, basic things like, I know when Lamont and Keith were here, they were talking about businesses having their documentation in order. Yeah, so we serve as in Nevada, we can serve as Resident agents, because we are a doc prep service. And what we do is we have a list, and every month, we look through the list to see which one of our clients, which which one of their secretary of states are about to expire, and we start sending them out notices, because if they are still doing business, we want them to have their business license for the state of Nevada. And with that, what we found is, know, a lot of people, Oh, I forgot, thank you for the reminder. Because if you don't file it, because it's due every year, if you don't file it, there's a penalty for not filing it, and you have to pay that penalty when you go to renew if you don't renew in a timely manner. The other thing that we do in our office, like I said, we do resolution. We work with people. We meet you where you are, to help you to get to where you're going, and having the conversation like now asking our clients, especially the ones that are small business owners, if you're paying someone that's not an employee, do you have their w9 so that we can file 299 at the end of the year, so that we're not chasing you in January trying to get the information so that we can file these forms, making sure that their secretary of state's are current, making sure they have their business licenses are current, just making sure that they're able to do business here in Nevada. The other thing that we're doing is telling them to do a year a mid year check in, so that we can see if they should be paying estimated taxes for the first half of the year. You know, how much income did they make? How much did they expense? What is the income? How is that income depending on their structure, impacting their tax return and if we need to make an estimated payment. So just having those conversations on a regular basis with people in a healthy way so that they can be prepared for it. And, you know, just just being here to listen when they have changes or they have stuff going on.

Julian Rosado 13:56
So right now, you're listening to growth and grace. This is Julian Rosato. Hey, I'm Leah Crawford, and this is actually a very important discussion. This is how small this is we're talking right now. How does small businesses will be impacted, or how you can actually take into effect the current tax bill. So go on what what do you think is it? Would this be a positive or a negative effect small business?

Leaha Crawford 14:26
Well, thing about it is, I'm learning more about it because it did just go into law, and as they're dropping information for us, I know that there were some changes, especially to the standard deduction, and it's assault and salt is state and local taxes where there was a cap at $10,000 on a schedule A if you if you were itemizing, and that cap just went up to 40,000 the other things I haven't read about that caught my eye, because I have some clients back east that were not happy with a $10,000 cap when it was time for them to itemize, because they were. Paying so much in their property taxes back East. Other than that, I'm waiting to get a better understanding on what other changes that are being made. I'm taking classes right now so I can see who gives you that understanding. So I'll wait for the AICPA to put out, to talk about it and to have different classes. What is the AICPA America Institute of Certified Public Accountant? Okay, so I'll wait for them to and they've had some webinars on it just but I want to get a clear understanding, and then I'll take some continuing education on all of the tax bill changes for 2024 that as preparers, we need to be aware of and when I start my continuing education for this year, I will also just learn more as I go so I can make sure that I am giving my clients the best tax service.

Julian Rosado 15:53
So you think businesses that take in like under a million dollars, you think this is going to be a positive for

Leaha Crawford 16:02
them? I don't know. I keep telling you I don't know, and you keep on asking me the same question a different way. I don't I can't answer that. I can't answer that. I can't answer it until I really get the information to see how it is going to impact us. Yeah, yeah. So I with the with the bill that's out, I haven't had the time to really look at it and look into it, just to see exactly what, how it is going to truly impact the small business owner.

Julian Rosado 16:25
Yeah. So why don't you give your phone number? People want to find out. Well, if you contact us, 702-382-5737,

Leaha Crawford 16:34
again, 702-382-5737, we are located downtown Las Vegas on the corner of sixth and Clark. It's such a cool office too. Yes, on the corner of sixth and Clark, we've been there for, I can't, we've been, we've been there for 15 years. My gosh, yeah, we've been there for 15 years and doing the same thing.

Julian Rosado 16:55
Everybody there is crazy nice, yeah? Super friendly. It almost feels like you're in Texas.

Leaha Crawford 17:01
No, yeah, no. Super nice, very friendly, very what I love is, you know, if you contact our office, Jen Norman, general Brendan, normally will answer the phone. And they are because what they we want to provide a service that is, you know, we're not perfect, but just excellent. Want to be able to give you the fee, a researched answer. So we're not just guessing on what you need to do, but we like to research it and then have some backup to back up what what we're saying to you. Okay, you know because the name of the company is, well, the DBA is Crawford management group, but the name of company is kiss, and kiss means, I know you didn't keep it, keep it seriously simple. And how do we take complex issues and break them down into simple terms so that our clients can understand and that's what we do, a resolution and like when clients first come in, they want something fast. You know, everybody's microwave and everybody wants to move fast. Resolution takes time. When we're resolving tax issues, it takes time, you know, the longest I've seen us work with a client, was about six years, six years to resolve all of the issues. It took us six years. Wow, it took us six years, and it was a lot of going back and forth with the IRS. It was making sure that we had certain documents in place. On average, it's about maybe two, but the longest I've seen is six. I've even had situations where with one. This is the first time I've ever had this happen. Though, there was a return, a corporate return, that was filed. The return was accepted by the IRS, but it wasn't processed by the IRS. And first time I had ever heard of that, and I had, at the time, I had at the time, I had been doing taxes for 30 years, yeah? And I'm like, Well, if you accepted it, that means is, I thought that was, I mean, because now you're telling me that I need to make sure that the return was actually processed, yeah, instead of, you know, you accepted it, so what was wrong with it? And they couldn't give me an answer. So we had to go and do some other things in order to get the return process, or let it, or just tell us what, you know, read into the code to figure out what were our next steps. So we have, what I love now is our follow up. And then, not only do we follow up, we follow through. So it's several, you know, contacting the IRS, staying on top of them. Sometimes it's a wait and see game, because we have some clients where it is, you know, we're we send a we send a letter, or the IRS sends them a letter. We send something back. We wait for them to respond. They send us another letter. We send something back when we're doing correspondence, when we're working with the agent sometimes, and no, that's a little bit faster, because then you're working with someone directly, and you can get a lot more stuff resolved quicker.

Julian Rosado 19:42
So let's say, if I come in to do do some taxes, right? How long would this actually take? I mean, if, well,

Leaha Crawford 19:54
that's different, because if you're coming in just to do a tax return, a tax return, depending on how simple or complex it is, I. Let's say I'm doing I have. It depends on how simple or complex it

Julian Rosado 20:03
is. Let's say, if I work at, you know, Walmart,

Leaha Crawford 20:09
our No, it is, if you just, if you're just a w2 waged employee, you make an appointment, you or you get us, we get you, and we get you out in less than an hour. That's perfect. Less than an hour. Yeah? If that long depending on who's doing your return. Yeah, you know there are some backup documentation we need, like, we do need your driver a current ID, not necessarily driver's license, but a current ID. If you have dependents, we are asking for the social security cards and some other documentation to show that they are your dependent. So whether you have joint custody, whether there's a school record, medical record. We are asking for the supporting documentation, because we are required to what I love about our office again, the follow up, and then the follow through, to make sure that we have all the documents that we need in order to do your return. Most of our clients are not as simple as just a w2 most of them are entrepreneurs. So then it's a little bit more complicated, because we need bank statements. We're doing 1090 nines. We're doing K ones. So we're doing stuff that's required to be done before we do their personal return, depending on what their business setup is. So I love our office because we're versed in so many types of returns, and we can speak to at least, if I see your setup and I know what you did, we have a better idea on number one, what your financial statements should look like. Number two, how do we, you know, how do we classify things on your return? And then we always ask, you know, with all of the technology out here now, you know, you should have receipts for almost everything, because everybody sends it electronically, you can receive stuff electronically. And because the day is almost gone, of somebody just handing you a paper receipt, normally you have something digitally. And so we're we encourage our clients to keep digital records, especially with meals, because that's what I find the challenges, you know, really with meals, oh yeah, oh yeah, with the meal deduction. So we encourage them, you know, if you took someone out to eat, write down who you took, you know, write down who you want to eat with and what was the purpose of the meeting. Because that is how we justify if the return is ever challenged, we try to build our return so that if it is ever challenged, you don't have to worry about it. You send me the letter, I can go ahead and speak to what numbers we actually put on your return. Another thing is mileage, so just making sure you had a documentation for your mileage. So those simple things require us to have more conversations and to teach people different ways to keep records of what they're doing throughout the year, right? Like Uber drivers, a good example Uber drivers. Uber is very good at keeping your mileage, because they send you a statement as a year how many miles you drove for them. Yeah, yeah. I guess Lyft does the same thing. I have had many Lyft drivers, but Uber I have, and they are very good at keeping track of the number of miles that you drove while you were on working. So we can use that number for mileage truck drivers. Truck drivers have to keep a mileage log for the number of miles that they actually drove. So industries that drive a lot, especially those two very easy to get. The one we find the most challenge with real estate agents. They drive a lot, right? But they don't necessarily keep a mileage log. But what we've encouraged them to do when you're making appointments to go show houses, put that in your calendar, because then, if I we can calendar, yeah, right. We can look at your calendar and we can guesstimate, well, if you drove from here to here, you pull up Google Maps, you can see they drove from here to here, yeah, you know. And then they'll have some correspondence with the client saying, I'm going to show you a, b, c, x, y and z. So we try to back. We try to back what we do not try to we back all of our numbers up with documentation, and sometimes we go even further, essentially amazing, and get the IRS code. Yeah, we go back and find a code that goes with while we're taking this

Julian Rosado 24:02
deduction, that's so, like relieving for Uber driver, or because the city has actually grown a lot with Uber and everything.

Leaha Crawford 24:11
Yeah, yeah. So what we try, I mean, like I said, we try to give an excellent return, and better, even one step further, we sit down and explain the return to you and clients the first year, Oh, I understand. I understand, okay, we say, Okay. And then by year three, they're asking, well, Leah, what does this mean, and what does that mean, and, and when I explain this, oh, yeah, that's what that means. That's what that means, because we want you to be educated about the returns. Because, number one, when we file them, they're legal documents, okay, okay. Number two, not only are they legal documents, but say you want to purchase a home, guess what you're going to use, if you're not paying cash for it, outright, tax returns? Yeah, right, unless you get a product that you don't have to, because there are some products out there where you don't have to, but they're going, they're going to ask you for those tax returns. And with those tax returns, underwriter might have questions, and if they have questions, we can justify why we put a number on that return. Okay, so, but that's why, but we started doing that years ago. And our when, well, when I first started working, the guy was working for shout out to Mr. Cobb, Jimmy Cobb, he got on me like that. He was like, Well, why is this? Why is that? Why'd you do this? Why'd you do that? And I was like, Look, he's like, if you if you did the work first, and that way, when I asked you the questions, all you gotta do is pull out the document. Said, This is why, this is that. This is why, this is no so he was on me. I had one on one training with an amazing accountant and amazing CPAs back east, and they would ask me hard questions, and when I couldn't answer me, had to go back and figure it out. Had to go back and figure it out. And they were not and they it was, it was, I couldn't say. I could say, let me look into it. But if I put a number on a return, I don't know, wasn't, wasn't the answer. No, I don't, oh no. I couldn't say, oh, oh, if I told him I don't know, he turned colors, he would, what do you mean? How would you mean? You don't know what number, what? Okay, so where'd you pull this from? And he would say some other things to me, but it was probably the most brutal, but a good training ground, because he said, Look, these are legal documents. And he stressed it to me, these are legal documents, yeah, and we can't take the chance of, you know, if something comes back that's on us, that's on us, and I'm like, Huh? He was like, that's on us, you know, if we can't back it up, then we shouldn't put it on a return. Yeah,

Julian Rosado 26:33
yeah. I think it's great for like, first time homebuyers and and even people that are just buying a home that they they, it's an easy process, that they can have it, um, backed up. Well,

Leaha Crawford 26:45
yeah, well, Gail, yes, yeah, yeah. Well, first time home buyers. Also, because we work, we have a few of those. A few of our clients came in as renters, and I want to say most of them, by year five, were homeowners. And one thing I found is it was, it was a process becoming a first time home buyer. A lot of them grew up in rentals, and they wanted something different. Okay, so what does that different look like? And we talked about them being a first time home buyer. Well, there are several things you need to do, you know, you need to have the credit, you need to have the income and different things like that. And with going through the different classes, they go through all of that, the things that you need to know, the things you need to do, and a lot of no getting their credit in order you know they come in with a lower score, and understanding that it was just past habits. How do you budget? How do you not only budget, but follow the budget, right? Yeah. And how do you take care of your money and build the life that you want to live? So we had those conversations. And even going through the home buying process is very stressful, very stressful, especially for I mean, the more you do it, I guess you get back like repetition. So first house you buy might be stressful. By the third or fourth house, you know the process, yeah, but that first house stressful because, you know, finding the house, no, well, qualifying for the house, then buying the house, making sure that you qualify, you know that you can afford the house that you qualified for. Make sure you gave them good documents when they did the qualification. That's the other thing, because you don't want to, you don't want to, you don't want to be house poor, but those things and having those conversations with our clients, like your first house might not be your dream house, but that's okay, yeah, because it's your first house, you can always move. You're not a tree, you know, but let's get you in a home ownership position and build equity. And it was so funny, because we had one client came in, she bought three houses in two years. Geez, yeah, she she actually had, she purchased her first house. It's like she got the bug, and she just, I want rental properties. And okay, and three years she had three, she had three properties, and it was just what, that's what she wanted to do, and had the income to support it.

Julian Rosado 29:01
So that will be the end of our show. If you guys want to get your taxes done, please see leave for our 702-382-5737

Leaha Crawford 29:14
again, 702-382-5737, thank you. Mr. Rosado, that was amazing.

Julian Rosado 29:21
You are listening to growth and Grace again. This is Julian Rosato, and I'm Leah Crawford. Have a nice day. Bye. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai