Be Smart Pay Zero Taxes- Book 2 (4/5)

This is not a typical review. I can’t teach you what this book taught me.

There’s a good reason for that. Be Smart Pay Zero Taxes has a lot of information in it. The only real way to get it is to open the book yourself and read it.

I’m still new to writing book reviews, so bear with me while I get my flow down.

I’m giving it a 4 out of 5.

The book is written by Mark J. Quann. This is his fourth book. He used to be an Investment Advisor Representative and now writes about ways regular people can keep more of their money. The whole book is built around one main idea: the Buy, Borrow, Die strategy.

One of the biggest things it made me think about is a simple question: what is money?

Before you keep reading, stop for a second and answer that yourself. What have we been told money is our whole lives?

I used to think money was just the thing we use to buy stuff we want — shoes, a laptop, a car, whatever. This book flipped that. Money is basically a made-up number on a computer. It has no real value on its own. It’s been that way since we left the gold standard. We are the ones who give it value. The book shows how most of us never question that, and how the normal advice (just keep putting money in a 401k or IRA) keeps you inside the regular system.

The Buy, Borrow, Die part is pretty straightforward once you see it. You buy assets (stocks, real estate, certain life insurance policies, crypto, gold). You never sell them so you don’t trigger capital gains taxes. When you need money you borrow against those assets instead. Loans aren’t taxed. Then you hold everything until you die. That’s the basic idea the book keeps coming back to.

After reading it I changed my mind about automatically dumping money into a 401k. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. It just means there are other options the book walks through that a lot of regular people never hear about from a bank or a CPA.

The writing is simple and straight. Quann doesn’t try to sound smart. He just lays the strategies out. Some chapters feel a little repetitive because he keeps circling the same core idea, but the information itself is stuff most of us were never taught.

For around $25 (or less if you buy it used like I did) it’s worth it just for the knowledge. If you’ve ever felt like the normal money advice wasn’t the full picture, this one is worth reading once.