#33 | International Investing and Real Estate Taxes and Law feat. Cole Shepard & DonnaMarie Baldwin

Practical Tax with Steve Moskowitz

Cole Shephard joins us from Columbia to speak to international investments and DonnaMarie Baldwin discusses the ever changing opportunities in real estate investmenting Episode Transcript Intro: Welcome to the Practical Tax podcast, with tax attorney Steve Moskowitz. The Practical Tax podcast is brought to you by Moskowitz, LLP, a tax law firm. Disclaimer: The information contained in this podcast is based upon information available as of date of recording and will not be updated for changes in law regulation. Any information is not to be considered tax advice or legal advice and does not form an attorney/client relationship. Further, this podcast may be construed as attorney advertising. You should see professional consultation for your individual tax and legal situation. Chip Franklin: Hi, welcome to Practical Tax with tax attorney, Steve Moskowitz. I'm Chip Franklin. Today, our first guest is Cole Shephard from the Legacy Group. Cole, thanks for being here. You represent a group of investors, international investors, essentially. Right? Cole Shepard: That's right. Typically, we invest in early stage companies, or we found early stage companies here in Columbia. We focus on impact-focused investments, impact-focused companies. Our biggest company that anyone would've heard of is called the Green Coffee Company, which is a company that we founded about five years ago. Which, in the past two weeks, has become the largest coffee producer in the country. Chip Franklin: Wow. Steve Moskowitz: Very nice. And as Cole, I'm sure knows, there's all kinds of special benefits, economic, financial, and tax, by investing outside of the country. That makes this extra interesting. Chip Franklin: Is that right? Do most people know what you just told me? Steve Moskowitz: No, they don't. What's a sad and a shame, I had been a professor for 10 years and I'm always trying to help people, and I've dedicated my life to this. So I want to say, "Hey, let me tell you some things." Most people are walking through an orchard full of wonderful tax fruit, but they never look up into the tree. They're too busy looking at the ground for something that may have dropped on there. And there's so much available. Chip, no, most people don't know. When I tell them about it, usually their first question, "Is that new?" And I say, "No, it's been around for years." "Well, how come my last guy didn't tell me?" I say, "Well, that's why you're here." Chip Franklin: Let's talk about agricultural investing. Cole, what does that encompass? Cole Shepard: Sure. So biggest project, like I said, was Green Coffee Company. What you're seeing is a lot of especially high net worth individuals in the US worried about inflation, worried about what's happening with US government just printing capital in Washington, and they're looking to get their money diversified out of the US dollar into other countries. So what we've seen is a huge uptick in high net worth individuals going after farmland. Right? Certain high net worth guys will go out and buy five, 10 million of farmland, and then they'll hire an operator to run it. And it'll be similar to what you'd see in a multi-family deal or something in commercial real estate. What we do a bit differently is we structure in a corporate structure. So we're actually buying ... when you invest with us, you're investing in a whole enterprise, or a company, an international conglomerate. And then we structured basically to do one of two things for investors upon an exit. One is a private company sellout, which a logical acquire for someone like us will be someone like JAB Holdings, Nestle, Starbucks. Or we put it on a dual track to be able to IPO on a US market. Steve Moskowitz: And, Chip, something else. Especially now in the time of inflation, you have a situation where the dollar today may not be worth what it is tomorrow. But a company, physically, the physical asset,