Preview:

What if you could get a tax refund from 2022, using a move you make in 2025? In this episode, Ryan sits down with one of the biggest names in tax strategy: Ed Lyon. You may have seen him on CNN, Fox News, CNBC, or MSNBC, or read one of his books. Dubbed “America’s Funniest Tax Guy,” Ed has trained thousands of CPAs and advisors to help clients legally pay less, and now he’s revealing a little-known solar tax strategy that many pilots could benefit from, but only if they act before the window closes.

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More About This Episode:

Ed explains how this strategy lets you start a solar leasing business (no tools or tech knowledge required), apply for a 2025 tax credit, and carry that credit back up to three years, resulting in real refunds from taxes you’ve already paid. You’ll also hear how this tie into the bonus depreciation extension in the Big Beautiful Bill and why now is the best time to take advantage of this overlooked opportunity. Are you a pilot looking for ways to reduce your lifetime tax burden? Tune in to discover smarter strategies to help you keep more of what you’ve earned. 

Here’s what we cover in this episode:

⚡️ Solar Hack = Instant Refunds?

💰 Tax Credits from Thin Air?

🕵️‍♂️ 2025’s Legal Loophole Revealed

✈️ Why Pilots Have the Edge

🔥 Act Before This Window Slams Shut

0:00 – Meet Ed Lyon

1:13 – CPA vs. Tax Strategist: A Different Philosophy

3:16 – Tax Strategies with the Big Beautiful Bill

4:37 – Depreciation of Equipment & Tax Credits

8:24 – No Withdrawals Required

14:19 – Exit Strategies & What’s Next After 2027

15:38 – Next Steps

If you want to follow up with Ed, you can email him directly here: edwardalyon@gmail.com

Learn more about what he does here:

https://edwardalyon.com/

The Tax Master Network

Resources:

Retire Pilots – https://retirepilots.com

Get your FREE Retirement Toolkit – https://bit.ly/3ZmZsaX

Pilot Tax – https://pilot-tax.com/

The Pilot’s Advisor Podcast is also on video. Watch & Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3EIEBW2

Connect with Pilot-Tax: https://pilot-tax.com/

Episode Transcription:

(Note, this is an automated transcription. Please forgive any errors.)

Walter Storholt  00:00

Welcome back to the pilot’s advisor podcast. On today’s episode, the pilot’s advisor Ryan Fleming, is going to interview a big deal in the tax strategy world. His name is Ed Lyon. Ed is the founder of the tax master network, and he’s the chief strategist for financial gravity companies. He’s authored nearly a dozen books on tax planning writes two weekly tax columns read by over 100,000 tax professionals, and has appeared in more than 500 broadcasts, including CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and CNBC, just to name a few, known by CNN as America’s Funniest tax guy. He’s also trained over 3000 CPAs and advisors to use strategic, legally sound tax strategies that help clients pay less, ethically and proactively manage their tax situations. So without further ado, let me grab Ryan Fleming and he’ll interview Ed Lyon on today’s episode.

Ryan Fleming  00:59

So Mr. Ed line, I appreciate you being on the pilots advisor podcast today. I know you’re a very, very busy man, so thank you for joining us. I

Ed Lyon 01:07

always appreciate time with you and with the pilots that you’ve introduced me to.

Ryan Fleming  01:13

Well, absolutely. And I know we did a big intro on how big of a deal you are, but I mean, you’re very well known. You’ve been on CNBC, you’ve been on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, how did you get so good at what you do? And what would you actually say that that you are? Because I know I would say, Oh, he’s my tax guy that knows everything about taxes. Well, I’m not exactly a CPA. I’m an attorney. Like, what are you? Tell us what

Ed Lyon 01:37

you are. So most people in the tax business. Tell you how much you owe, I tell you how to pay less. That’s one easy way to say. It pretty, pretty fundamental difference, yeah, I’m not a CPA. So CPAs, when you hear the word accounting, you think of numbers, right? You hear CPA, you think of numbers, but CPA, the accounting is arithmetic. It’s not even mathematics. And CPAs go to school. They learn how to follow the rules. It’s all about the rules, the the debits have to match the credits, the balance sheets have to balance so they spend four years learning how to follow the rules. Then they get out in the real world and get their first job, and they’re low man on the totem pole. And what do they do? They follow the rules. So I have an attorney background at law school, we learn the rules, but we don’t learn the rules just to follow them. We learn the rules to get the best results for our clients. So that’s the fundamental difference, is the approach, and I’ve been doing that for 30 years, not just looking at how to calculate how much you owe on a tax form, but how to arrange your affairs ahead of time, so that when you do sit down to fill out the tax form, the numbers are in your

Ryan Fleming  02:53

favor. And I gotta admit, I think the first time I ever I heard you speak at a couple financial advisor conferences years and years ago, and it’s probably the only tax person I’ve ever sat through, and I was laughing the whole time, and you had a amazing ability to control the crowd and talk about what you do and and I was always impressed by that. And it wasn’t till years later, I find myself really reaching out to you because I needed tax help. I want better tax strategies for for my clients, and we have a lot of pilot clients that are dying to probably hear some of the strategies that you have, but specifically, I guess, with the big, beautiful builders. But some things have changed, and we think there’s a strategy that might work for our all our airline pilots and military pilots. You want to talk about

Ed Lyon 03:36

that? Yeah, so pilots do need tax planning help. The typical pilot who I work with has most of their retirement savings in IRAs and 401 ks that have not yet been taxed. So if you have a million dollars in your account, you don’t really have a million dollars, because there’s a 300,000 or $400,000 tax bill waiting for the government when you when you pull that money out. So I’ve spent a lot of years helping clients move those assets out of those taxable accounts and get them someplace where they’re tax free. So it does affect the clients that you work with. The big, beautiful Bill mostly extended the current rules that we’ve been working under the the seven tax brackets going up to 37% but not 39.6% and the higher standard deductions, the eliminated personal exemptions, all that sort of stuff. But the big, beautiful Bill has one particular opportunity that is low hanging fruit for anyone who’s got a significant six figure income, whether it comes from their own business or whether it comes from a w2 from an airline, and that has to do with depreciation of equipment. So. So depreciation is the process of writing off the cost of something, a crane, a jet, an office building, over a period of time, and usually the idea is you want to match the cash flow with the deduction. So if you’re driving a truck for your side business, and you’re paying the truck over five years, and you deduct every payment as you take it, that’s that’s matching it, or if you lease it, that’s matching it. But let’s say you can get that depreciation upfront, instead of having to wait five years, you can take it all at once. Well, that’s playing timing games with money. You get a tax deduction today for money that you’re not going to spend until maybe four or five years down the road. That’s opportunity, and that’s where clever tax planners like me have big smiles on their face, because we’re trying to figure out ways that we can take advantage of the gap between what you’ve paid and the deduction you’re getting so far so good.

Ryan Fleming  06:17

Well, absolutely, because I know time is money, and the more money I keep in my pocket, then I can invest it and make it into more money, and then keep making payments later. Absolutely

Ed Lyon 06:27

and $1 of tax deduction today is worth more than $1 of tax deduction five years down the road. We’re in an inflationary environment right now, but there were a couple of years during the Biden presidency where if you had to wait a couple of years for your dollar of tax deduction, that dollar was worth 15 cents less. So time, time is money. It’s a cliche, but it’s a cliche because it’s true. So there is an opportunity using the rules for depreciation and tax credits for solar equipment. Now a lot of people will say, but Ed didn’t the big, beautiful Bill eliminate the tax breaks for solar equipment? Well, it eliminated some of those bills, some of those breaks. So the credit for buying an electric vehicle expires September 30, 2025 the credit for putting a solar collector on your roof expires December 31 2025 but the rules for large scale commercial solar programs don’t start phasing out until the end of 2027 so you can invest in a solar leasing business. You’re buying a collector and battery units, and they’re going to be part of a solar farm. You’re not putting them on your house. And the way it works is you’ll get to claim a credit for 30% 40% or 50% of the amount that you invest in the business. A credit is $1 for dollar reduction in your tax so it’s not deduct $1 save 37 cents. It’s get $1 credit. One for one, yeah, one for one. Put that dollar back in your pocket, and

Ryan Fleming  08:24

not just to set you up, but I’m going to try to set you up, because so many of these tax strategies that I’ve learned over the years are amazing, but they take a lot of liquidity. You have to have capital to make them work, or I have to go pull from investments, or have some sort of liquidity to make this happen. And there’s something that is amazing about this,

Ed Lyon 08:43

that is amazing. And what’s amazing is you’re not pulling from your retirement plan. You’re not pulling from your income from flying the particular rules for this credit let you carry it back up to three years. So we’re recording this conversation at the end of July, 2025, I have clients who are taking advantage of this opportunity to invest in a solar energy in a box business and carry the credit back to their 2022, taxes. So what if, instead of pulling from your retirement account or your savings account, or your HELOC, what if you were pulling from the taxes you paid over the last three years? So you contract with the vendor. The vendor puts your solar equipment in service for no money down. You then file a two page form with the IRS Form 1045, and you carry the credit back, and the IRS sends you back the taxes you paid as far back as 2022, you then turn over those refunds to the solar vendor, and that is your down payment. Now, so far, you’ve not put. Anything in your pocket. So where does this turn into tax savings for you? Let’s say you buy one solar unit for a couple $100,000 the vendor is going to want $100,000 down, and they will finance the other $100,000 you contract with them, and you get the $100,000 down payment from your old taxes, you now have a $200,000 investment due to the intersection between the tax credit rules and the depreciation rules. You’re not going to be able to depreciate the full 200,000 but you’re going to depreciate about 150,000 and here’s where the big, beautiful bill comes in. If you did this earlier in the year, you did it expecting that you’d be able to get a 40% bonus depreciation this year, but with the big, beautiful bill, you’re going to get 100% bonus depreciation. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to contract with the vendor, you’re going to buy the solar unit. You’re going to a refund of all those taxes you previously paid, you’re going to get a depreciation deduction this year for 150% of the taxes that you got back, and for most taxpayers, that’s going to be the rough equivalent of getting back half of your last three years tax bills. We’re looking at four tax years, 2223 24 and 25 so you’re gonna, you’re gonna cut that bill by up to half. And there are some technical limitations. If you have mostly w2 income, there may be $1 amount that you can claim this year, but if you go over, you just carry it forward to future years. It

Ryan Fleming  11:45

almost sounds too good to be true, but we’re pulling money from money that we’ve already paid the government. We’re actually getting to get some of that money back, and then it’s going to have future tax benefits,

Ed Lyon 11:55

right? And it’s it happened. It because the government decided that it wanted to encourage investment in solar energy. Now the big, beautiful Bill has backtracked on some of that. We’re looking at a philosophical difference between two different administrations. So you have the Biden administration, which made decarbonization a priority. Now you have the Trump administration, which has an all of the above approach towards energy. They say, Yes, solar is great, wind is great, but we’re not going to create an unfair advantage for them when we also need coal, we also need oil, we also need natural gas. We’re in a weird intersection between some old Biden administration policies and some new Trump administration policies, and that’s what we do as tax planners. We look for those opportunities and we take them. Another thing to keep in mind, this is not part of a security. You’re not buying into a mutual fund or a partnership or anything like that. You are buying your own solar leasing business in a box. So a lot of the restrictions that pilots would face investing in common vehicles like mutual funds and partnerships aren’t going to apply

Walter Storholt  13:16

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Ryan Fleming  14:19

it look for in your mind, as you’ve watched many of these opportunities? These opportunities happen when it starts phasing out four or five years from now, is there an exit strategy there, or will there be another opportunity? After the fact,

Ed Lyon 14:32

there will be another opportunity? Because it’s a matter of structuring the program so the solar incentives do phase out starting January 1, 2028, but most of the cost of the unit that you’re buying is actually the batteries. So what we’re doing here, fundamentally is we are, I want to be careful how I say this. We are exploiting the gap between one. When we put something in service and when we actually pay for it. That was the the advantage of getting $1 of depreciation deduction now, even though you’re not paying for the equipment until four or five years down the road. So this is the sort of thing that planners have been doing for years, and they do it within the rules. Congress passed the rules to encourage businesses to invest in equipment. Congress wants businesses to buy cranes. Congress wants businesses to build factories. Congress wants businesses to buy jet airplanes, because that keeps the American economy going. It supports jobs. There’s nothing illegitimate about taking advantage of a tax advantage that Congress creates for us? Well,

Ryan Fleming  15:46

you know, I’m not a very smart guy. I’m just a dumb pilot. And this sounds all too crazy and complicated for me, but I’m interested if this is something that one of our, you know, clients or a pilot was interested in doing. And yes, they have their w2 income how do they go about learning more about this opportunity? How do they go about making sure that they file the right tax forms? Who do they talk to? Who can they contact? What they are, they’re

Ed Lyon 16:11

welcome to contact me, and the contact information is in the show notes, so they can reach out to me, and I have people who can help walk them through the details. The process will start with a conversation, call it a discovery call, where we’ll figure out if they are an appropriate candidate for the program. If they are, we’ll get us a proposal specifically customized for them using their past tax payments history, and then we will walk them through the paperwork all the way up to the point where they’re deciding what they want to do with their refund. We’re not going to help you decide what to do with your savings. Our job is just to get it there. It’s your job to figure out, but don’t spend it all in one place. Well, it

Ryan Fleming  16:57

sounds like an awesome opportunity. I appreciate you wanting to talk about this, and we can get it in front of front of our pilot clients to see if it’s an opportunity they want to take advantage of. And I encourage you, Ed, I appreciate all the time anytime that we get to talk. But if there’s any other tax strategies that pop up, whether it’s this big, beautiful bill or anytime in the future, I think it’s valuable to at least get it in front of people. I mean, it might not be the right fit for them right now, but any strategy that can help, where we can legally pay less, I think, is valuable.

Ed Lyon 17:30

Yeah, there’s no strategy that’s going to be the right fit for everyone, but the more information you have about the environment, the better off you’re going to be. You would not file a flight plan the Denver Airport if you didn’t know what the weather’s going to be like in Denver. So if you’re fi, if you’re trying, I mean, what is financial planning? It is filing a flight plan for your money through your retirement and through the rest of your life. So why not look at the tax environment as well as the economic and market environment.

Ryan Fleming  18:04

Well, it’s really no different. I mean, we look at and make decisions based off of taxes or strategic tax planning for how things are going to look in that distribution phase, and no different than strategies that we use with an insurance policy or anything else. This is no different. It’s just strategic tax planning?

Ed Lyon 18:21

No, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s strategic tax planning. But it’s not just tax planning. It is financial planning. I would say it’s downstream of financial planning. But you know, as an advisor, there are a lot of headwinds that are fighting your clients efforts to get to their to reach their financial goals, whether it’s retirement or supporting their church or putting their grandchildren through college, whatever it is. So market volatility is one of those headwinds. So one of the things that you do is you use insurance products which aren’t correlated to the market. Don’t face that headwind. Another headwind that they face is taxes. And the good news is we can control taxes a lot more than we can control market volatility. So you really have to look at all of all of these factors, including taxes. It’s not enough just to say, I’m going to build myself the biggest 401, K I can before retirement, because then you’re going to transition into a new phase of your life and your financial plan. Getting rich and staying rich are two very different skills, and negotiating the transition from getting rich to staying rich, that is its own skill, and if you don’t have the right advice, it can be really expensive. You know, we, most of us, only retire once. And my question for you is, if you’re only going to retire once, when’s the last time you did something really important for the very first time and you nailed it? If you retire twice, it’s usually because something went wrong the first time.

Ryan Fleming  19:56

It’s not, not normally a good thing. It reminds me a lot of getting. Hired at an airline most of the time, people stay at that airline for the rest of their career, unless something goes drastically wrong. Also, the more and more I’ve learned about these tax strategies or or even from a financial planning standpoint, the things that wealthy individuals do, it’s so much more about just not knowing, not knowing what you don’t know, you know and and so I appreciate you getting in front of people and talking to them about this opportunity. We’ll have all your details in the show notes. I’ll encourage my clients to watch the podcast, see if it’s the right fit for them. Reach out to you, and we’d love to have you on the show for for other planning strategies, because I know you and I have some some in depth conversations offline, and I’d love to have some of those conversations in front of my clients and prospects as well. Happy to do that always. Well, Ed, thank you for your time. As always, it’s very valuable. I’ll make sure we have all that information the show notes. Once again, everybody, thank you for listening to the pilots advisor podcast and the fact that we have Mr. Ed Lyon on today, what a treat it is and hopefully we can find some good tax opportunities for you guys.

Ed Lyon 21:04

Thanks so much.

Speaker 2  21:10

Information is for illustrative purposes only and does not constitute tax investment or legal advice. Always consult with a qualified investment legal or tax professional before taking any action in.