What’s the secret to building financial resilience as an entrepreneur—and how do you make sure you’re never caught off guard by life’s curveballs? In this episode of The Angel Next Door Podcast, host Marcia Dawood sits down with financial strategist Leah Williams to tackle these questions head-on, exploring how proactive financial planning and tax strategies can empower you to take control of your wealth journey. Leah Williams brings her story of personal financial transformation—after weathering divorce and witnessing the power of good planning through family loss—to offer practical advice that goes beyond the basics. Her firm, Savvy Financial, is built on a mission to help people, especially women, become confident in their financial decisions, teaching them about insurance, investments, and the hidden levers of tax efficiency. From leveraged charitable deductions to accelerated depreciation and creative ways to involve family in your business, this episode is loaded with real, immediately useful strategies that anyone can apply. If you want to make smarter choices about your financial future and get inspired along the way, this is the episode for you.
What’s the secret to building financial resilience as an entrepreneur—and how do you make sure you’re never caught off guard by life’s curveballs? In this episode of The Angel Next Door Podcast, host Marcia Dawood sits down with financial strategist Leah Williams to tackle these questions head-on, exploring how proactive financial planning and tax strategies can empower you to take control of your wealth journey.
Leah Williams brings her story of personal financial transformation—after weathering divorce and witnessing the power of good planning through family loss—to offer practical advice that goes beyond the basics. Her firm, Savvy Financial, is built on a mission to help people, especially women, become confident in their financial decisions, teaching them about insurance, investments, and the hidden levers of tax efficiency.
From leveraged charitable deductions to accelerated depreciation and creative ways to involve family in your business, this episode is loaded with real, immediately useful strategies that anyone can apply. If you want to make smarter choices about your financial future and get inspired along the way, this is the episode for you.
To get the latest from Leah Williams, you can follow her below!
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https://www.savvyfinancialllc.com/
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Marcia Dawood: Well, Leah, welcome to the Angel Next Door podcast.
Leah Williams: Thank you so much for having me, Marcia. It's such a pleasure to be here with you.
Marcia Dawood: Well, I'm so excited to talk everything tax strategies. One of our top episodes is about tax strategy and then there's a couple others that we've done too that are in like the top five. So very exciting topic. I know some people think taxes snooze, but no, no, this is a very important and very timely topic as we're coming up toward the new so let's start off. Tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into being such an expert in this field.
Leah Williams: Absolutely. Well, it's been quite an evolution over the last 10ish years. That's how long I've been in the financial services industry as a whole. I had big life changes happen over 10 years ago that really catapulted me into a completely different industry. And the short of it is I found myself completely unprepared financially, going through terrible divorce, awful situation and finding myself with all these newfound responsibilities and not a lot of financial education to back up the new responsibilities. During that same time frame, I saw my sister in law go through similar thing but for a different reason. My brother passed away unexpectedly, leaving her and five little girls.
Marcia Dawood: My goodness. Wow.
Leah Williams: Difference between those situations was Matthew planned well and so the girls, my sister in law, Elizabeth, they've financially they've been fine all these years and it's amazing to see all my nieces go to college and financially they've been okay. And then there was me who was starting with in the negative zone and I became obsessed with learning money, how it worked, planning, because selfishly I never wanted to rely on anyone ever again. And now I'm married to a wonderful husband and we have a three year old and I'm so grateful. But I think women especially need that security to know that no matter what happens, I get divorced, my husband passes away, I never get married and I'm single or we just outlive our spouses. You know that women live longer than men. We want to know that we're always going to be financially stable. So that's what, that's where the fire came from over 10 years ago. This obsession with I will never rely on anyone.
Leah Williams: I'm going to learn everything that I can. So I studied insurance investments and just have compounded on the licensing and designations and ventured into the tax efficiency realm because I realized, okay, what are all the barriers to building wealth? What are all the hurdles when it's the bad deeds, the death, disability, divorce, all of those. But then what are other things that hold us back as we're working really hard to build and taxes is one of the challenges. You start doing well in life and you feel like you get punished because your tax bill just grows, getting bigger. Yeah, yeah. So while a lot of people say, oh well, you're making so much money, you deserve to pay that much in tax, so many people, and at least most people I work with are self made. They have gotten themselves there. And if there are things that are in the tax code that we can leverage, people should know about them and it shouldn't just be safe.
Leah Williams: We're just the 1 percenters. So that's where the evolution and the interest and research and really changing my path to really specialize in tax efficiency. How do you build wealth, tax efficiently, reduce taxable income and then build tax free assets? That's where it all came from is what could stop me from doing this, what could stop other people from building and taxes is one of the things.
Marcia Dawood: Yeah. Okay, so wait, I do have to stop and ask again about your brother and your sister in law. Did he know ahead of time that something was wrong and so he went and planned it or was he just like really good at this from the beginning and he knew to plan in.
Leah Williams: Case a little bit of both. My brother was self made. He worked for a technology company, DA Data storage. And he just, he always did the right thing by people. So he had a lot of respect from the CEO of the company. So one of the things that I would say he had that maybe others wouldn't have is when he was diagnosed with cancer. He worked as long as he could, but it got to a point where he couldn't work work. And the CEO kept him on payroll for the last few months.
Leah Williams: Even though technically, because one of the things people don't think about is you might lose your benefit if you can't balance everything. Yeah, yeah, you might be able to go on disability for a little bit, but it might not carry you the whole time. And so he still needed medical insurance. And so that was one thing that was just that a lot of people might not have that he was given. But as far as insurance, the estate planning, all of those things, he had put most of that in place. And then I believe he was diagnosed in February and then he passed away that December. They had a baby in between there. It was their fifth little girl.
Leah Williams: So whenever you have a life event through work, as long as you're still there on payroll, all of those things. You can change your benefits up your insurance. So he had done so much good planning before, but when Cora was born, that gave an opportunity to increase the insurance because of course when you have cancer, you can't just go out and get it.
Marcia Dawood: Right. Right.
Leah Williams: But I would say the majority of the planning happened was in place. And then he had really good friends who became advisors to my sister in law who helped her with how do you navigate this and how do you use all the resources that are here for you? How do you make that last?
Marcia Dawood: Right. Well, I love that we're talking about this today because I'm such an advocate of the fact that we don't need to have an emergency happen in order to get our financial situation in order. Right. We should be thinking about this long before it's a crisis. But too often we hear these stories about people who just waited too long or something catastrophic happened suddenly or something like that. And it could be a death, but it could also be a divorce, it could be any type of job loss, an unexpected medical bill. So many things can happen will just thr people into a total loop for financially talking about it now. Getting a strategy now is awesome.
Marcia Dawood: So tell us a couple things. Since we're talking taxes, let's start there that are common things that people don't really know and would be like, hey, here's a good place to start.
Leah Williams: Well, there's two different sectors of people and it's based on how you're paid. So if you are the W2 employee, we know that there's a lot of more limitations on what you can write off. And you really have to create either a side gig or 1099 income or something else where there's profit, but it's in the form of a 1099 that you can start racking up deductions for. And a lot of times I'll ask people like, do you have any hobbies? Can any of these hobbies we turn into a real business where you can make profit from it? And so that's part of the conversation. But there are also some things that where we create entities, businesses. And I know I mentioned to you I work with the tax strategist. I always give people the disclaimer, I, I love taxes, I feel them pretty well. But I'm certainly not the cpa.
Leah Williams: So I work hand in hand with another tax strategist. And so we'll work on creating an entity that will create a negative K1 that can go towards your W2 income. And because it's showing a loss. There's something called a leveraged charitable contribution that can go towards W2 income. So there are things that the regular employee, maybe mid to high income earner that's starting to feel that tax ban can do. They're just not as robust as say someone who's self employed or then we're getting into strategies through your business and it just opens up a lot more things that we can do.
Marcia Dawood: So what's a leveraged charitable?
Leah Williams: So we think of giving to our church, giving to organizations that we love. I give a dollar. If I'm itemizing, I get a dollar deduction. We love that a leveraged contribution turns your dollar into four to five in terms of deduction. So it's not credit, right? It's not. I give $50,000, I get a $250,000 credit. It's a deduction in income. So I give 50.
Leah Williams: I might be able to turn that into deducting 250,000 of income. And that can go towards W2, which is really big for, I mean this is really impactful for especially W2 high income earners. Or if you've sold a piece of property or you just have a big taxable event, you got a huge bonus, private equity position, whatever it is, you have a big tax bill. That's one of the things that you can.
Marcia Dawood: And how do you leverage it? How's that work?
Leah Williams: There are specific charities that you have to work with. I wish it could be, oh, here's my favorite charity, I want to give them money. And we turn a dint of a five times multiple of that. And it has to do with real value that you were giving a charity. And there's a couple different ways to do it. Some tax strategists will use land preservation charity will buy the land and then they'll say, well, what's the highest and best use of this property? And it's so much more than the actual purchase price. And you get the highest and best use value. So you might give 50, but if it's really worth 200, that's where that higher valuation and deduction is coming from.
Leah Williams: And there's a couple other forms of that, but they all have that common denominator and that the actual value of the gift is bigger than the dollars you spent on it.
Marcia Dawood: That's where the leverage thing, I did.
Leah Williams: Not know that works very well for reducing income.
Marcia Dawood: All right, so then you've got the 1099 employee or the person who has her own business. Now we've got A lot. A little bit more fluidity on what we can do.
Leah Williams: So for this person, of course depends on where you're at after deductions. If it's a newer business, you might be at that break even point or maybe you're showing a loss and maybe that loss can go towards your spouse's W2. But if you're doing really well, business is profitable. Everybody talks about an S election. Instead of having all of the income flow through LLC and paying state, federal and the F word fica tax, you've got that opportunity to make an S election, pay yourself a salary and reduce the FICA tax that you pay. So that's very simple. I love paying your children, of course. I'm an entrepreneur at heart.
Leah Williams: I had my first in house restaurant to earn money to buy a pair of jeans that I wanted when I was I believe 11 years old. So I have been entrepreneur for a long time. I believe in teaching children that you don't.
Marcia Dawood: Wait, wait, we got to hear that story. You got to tell us about. You wanted a pair of jeans.
Leah Williams: Mud jeans was the thing when I was younger.
Marcia Dawood: Yes.
Leah Williams: I don't remember anymore.
Marcia Dawood: Yeah.
Leah Williams: But I'm the youngest of six children and when you're the youngest, you get all the hand me downs. Okay. So there weren't a lot of new clothes circulating. So if I wanted something new or that I thought was awesome or trendy or that I saw a friend of mine get, I had to come up with money to do it. So I told my parents like, I gotta earn money. I think these jeans are about 60 bucks. And so I got a little bit of help. My, my dad was the dishwasher.
Leah Williams: He helped me cook. I sent out invitations to all of our neighbors, gave them the menu. And I had a whole p L for cost of food. My dad did. I love this.
Marcia Dawood: Amazing.
Leah Williams: I did not pay him a salary to help me in the kitchen. I had that advantage going for me. But with tips and profit, I have it written down somewhere. I think I made 70 plus dollars I was able to get them. And teaching kids that you can, I think society teaches them it's too risky. You can't do it. You don't have what it takes. You're going to be made fun of if you go and ask people.
Leah Williams: There's just so much that children have that they are born with. And then we and society kind of takes away some of their confidence. So I love paying kids through business, teaching them business, showing them how to create and build. And of course we love custodial Roths and them funding it early. And I didn't know to do that at the time. I didn't know to start funding a Roth. But to me that's a great opportunity is to pay your children through your business, set up a bank account for your child and maybe your child's now paying for their own soccer or there's so much that we as parents spend on children and, or it could just be savings for their future that they get a head start on.
Marcia Dawood: Right. As a disclaimer, just always follow the child labor laws.
Leah Williams: And that's the thing you, if you're an S, an S corp, there's another step that you have to take. You have to have family management companies set up that then pays the child because corporations pay children. Always check with your accountant. CPA certainly don't want people to take this as oh, I, all these things apply to me, but some of them might. And so you should ask about them and see what's available to you. I love when appropriate people are on the board, either there's ownership in company between spouses, or you've got board members. And I'm talking about doing it the legitimate way. But say you have a best friend and you brainstorm on business and growth and development and what would the consumer want and you put them on your board and maybe you travel to the beach together to have that board meeting and maybe three days you ride off and then you tack on a couple extra days for vacation.
Leah Williams: But your flight there and back, you had to get there incorporating things that you might already be doing. But when you can tie in a business element and it has to be legitimate, you have to have a paper trail. And that's where some people go wrong, is they don't track anything. So if they got audited, they have no proof. So all those things, when you do them and you stack them together, they become impactful and they start to lower that taxable income. And then when you continue to climb tax brackets, then you add on the more complex things. And there's a lot of cool ways to leverage big beautiful bill bonus depreciation. Outside of just buying short term rentals yourself.
Leah Williams: There's some other things that you can do when you have really high income over 5, 600,000 in taxable income.
Marcia Dawood: Okay, so tell us about some of the things that will change because of the big beautiful bill.
Leah Williams: Well, for the last couple of years, each year we have gone down in the amount that we can accelerate the depreciation on assets that we buy that are related to Business. So the most common thing that people have used this accelerated depreciation rule for is real estate. So because a short term rental is, in the eyes of the irs, considered a business, it's a legitimate business that you have to spend a hundred plus material hours of participation in every single year and they give you some tax benefits because it is a business. We were just talking about this before we got on. It's a lot of work to have a rental, right? Short term rental, which by definition is the average day, seven days or less, you can have a cost segregation study done on the house. And we think of a house as just one asset, but really it's combination of assets that make up the one. You have a cost segregation study done to value the appliance, everything that's in the house. And instead of using a 27 or 29 year schedule to depreciate a little bit per year, you can accelerate that in year one and have a pretty significant amount that you can write off.
Leah Williams: Now you can't depreciate land. Sometimes when I'm talking to people, I say, okay, ask your realtor, we're looking for low value land, high value property, so that we can depreciate more. But that's the most common way that people have used this rule. And last year we were at 40% depreciation. Well, because of the big beautiful bill, it went back up to a hundred. When you have a cost segregation study done using real estate as the example, you can now on some of the components of this asset, accelerate by a hundred percent, potentially run off 100% of the value in that first year that you buy it. So that becomes impactful and that can apply to other assets. You buy a laptop for you, for your business, 100%, depreciate it.
Leah Williams: You're an artist, you buy an easel or just whatever is appropriate for your business. A lot of the tangible assets that you would need, you can now write off quite a bit of them. And I always say, check that there's a section 179, there's multiple components of the tax code, and your accountant will help you figure out which one to leverage. Because there's some other rules that you have to factor in that will tell you which rule you should use based on the kind of asset that you're trying to depreciate. But ultimately it opened up this door for people to buy things. Now don't go buying 100 vehicles if you don't need them. But if you need a car and you're Going to use it primarily for business. It's a great way to get a pretty sizable write off.
Leah Williams: Once again, everyone's situation's unique and I am all for saving. If you don't need the thing, don't just buy, buy it for tax deduction. It's okay to make a profit. We want to show that we're making money in profit. But that's what the rule did. It just opened up a lot of opportunity to accelerate what was once stretched out over many years to bring it all into year one and get that larger write off.
Marcia Dawood: Interesting. All right, Other things in the big beautiful bell that will be changing for 20, 26 and beyond.
Leah Williams: Well, there's things like additional standard deductions. When you're over age 65, you get additional deductions on top of the standard, which is really helpful for someone in retirement that is trying to pay less in tax, which means they don't have to withdraw as much from retirement accounts. But you've got to stay under certain income thresholds like 150,000. So that's their rules like that. The state and local tax, we were capped at 10,000 and now it's 40. But there's a phase out when your income's around 500. So.
Marcia Dawood: Right.
Leah Williams: It's all connected. The more we can push on paper taxable income down, the more we can leverage some of these things because you start to phase out of some of these beneficial new rules that, that we have that we can leverage. But if you make too much, it doesn't apply. So that's another reason why encourage people, let's lower taxable income today, but let's also think about the future. If you can create some tax free assets that when you withdraw them, they're not taxable in retirement, then you know, we can stay under these thresholds and leverage some of these deductions down the road instead of only focusing on today and saving today and forgetting about 20 years from now.
Marcia Dawood: Amazing. So tell us more about Savvy Financial.
Leah Williams: Well, savvy is what I like to think of as the more outside of the box way of planning. Half of my time in the industry, I was in Management for Fortune 100. So my role was training the newbie advisor who just got their licenses to working with the more tenured advisors and showing them some newer strategies that they could implement in their plans. And what I saw in that wide range was a lot of good that was being done, but a lot that was missing in the traditional financial realm. And we've talked about this before. Too the mainstream feeds you some good information and some with some good principles that you should apply to your financial world. But there's a lot that's not talked about. And going through these financial hardships myself, 10, 11 years ago, seeing other people have life things happen that derail them financially.
Leah Williams: To me, I thought your average person does not have a perfect life. Right. It's messy.
Marcia Dawood: Yeah.
Leah Williams: Right. Everyone. So everyone has to be as efficient as possible with every single dollar that they have. So when I designed Savvy, from the process to the strategies it was to include, what does traditional finance tell you that's good and that we should apply, but what else is available to people that they need to know about? It's not my job to tell someone, you shouldn't be spending money there. You shouldn't be going out to dinner there. That's not my job. I will show people how money can be maximized and how they can keep more of it and then how they can grow it faster. But I believe people, once they have education on what is on the other side of their choices, and it is now up to them to take ownership of the choice.
Leah Williams: And my job is to educate and I'll recommend. Right. I'll show them. If you do these four things, look at how much better the plan can be. But it's their decision. So I want to empower people to understand and then confidently make decisions, but also know their plan doesn't have to look like their neighbors or their sisters. There's no one right way to plan. I want people to look at money differently.
Leah Williams: Instead of being afraid of it, having a really bad relationship with it, be excited about it, feel like they're more in control and they're making the calls and they're dictating what it does and how hard it works for them now that they know more than they did before. So that's really the essence of Savvy is let's think outside of the box. Of course, I do lean into how women think a little bit more. Just coming from the perspective of being a woman, knowing how intimidating it can be because still predominantly male, a lot of men in the industry and nothing wrong with that. But men and women do think differently. So how we perceive information, it. I saw a gap in how information was being shared and how it was being understood by women. And that's why a lot of women weren't planning, because they didn't understand it.
Leah Williams: They're made to feel pretty stupid. And I don't want to work with someone that's going to make me feel dumb. So I do lean into how women think and catering the process to something that a woman would enjoy going through.
Marcia Dawood: Yeah, well, you bring up a good point. I feel like we're at this pivotal time, especially when it comes to financial planners in general, because there is going to be and is already happening this great wealth transfer that everybody's talking about. Money will be passed down to the next generation, and in a lot of cases, that's going to be to the children. And in a lot of cases, those children are women, regardless of age. Could be older people, obviously. And I am hearing more and more that the people who are inheriting this wealth are really not that interested in working with the traditional planner that they had in the past. And some people think, well, I'm intimidated by the financial planning process, so I don't even want to deal with it. That's not necessarily a good answer either, depending on your circumstance.
Marcia Dawood: I think obviously we've talked about everybody's circumstance a little different, but I think that now what you have built with SAVV and the direction that you're going and helping people think about their money in general and how wealth in general is going to work. And when we say wealth, we mean all kinds of wealth. I'm wealth, health, wealth, relationship, wealth, all of those things. So you are putting together like a complete package for people as opposed to just saying, hey, we're going to invest in this stock or this mutual fund or whatever. And I feel like that the place we're at right now is that pivotal moment where we really do need more savvy financial out there so that people will be able to feel good and know that their money's working for them in the right way.
Leah Williams: Well, I understand that I am different in the planning space, and there's a lot of different methodologies around planning and money, and I would say most of them are more in that traditional box. And sometimes that's what people are looking for because it's comfort, it's known. And I always enter conversations with people excited to share with them what else is available, but also knowing that two really big boxes have to be checked in order for them to work with someone. And that's they feel that the person has the skill, the knowledge, the strategies that they believe will help them, and they just have to generally enjoy working with them. I have to like you as a person.
Marcia Dawood: Right.
Leah Williams: And if you can't check both those boxes, then it means it's not a good fit. So for something as personal as money and Your future. I think that if people are open minded and willing to seek out and find someone that check both of those boxes, that they can make huge strides in their planning. But it means that people are willing to be a little vulnerable. I've even compared it to feeling like you're getting naked in front of somebody because you're showing them all the things, the pretty things, the things that you're proud of that you've done and then the mistakes that you've made and we have to know them in order to help them, but it can, they can feel scary. So that's where finding someone that you feel like has this skill but that you feel comfortable with because it's. It's like a therapist. I'm going to tell you all my things that nobody else knows but feel really comfortable with you.
Marcia Dawood: That's right.
Leah Williams: Yeah, I. There's a lot of good people in the industry. Of course I like my lane. I like the approach that I take. But that's why there's so many people. You've got to find your person and who.
Marcia Dawood: That's right. I totally agree. All right, Leah, before we let you go, we need to hear another crazy story because you have some good stories about what people are doing with their money or.
Leah Williams: Yeah.
Marcia Dawood: That you were trying to get jeans by having your own restaurant at 11.
Leah Williams: It was a hustler. Whether it was watering plants for people watching their dog. I think this desire and belief that many people have either lost or especially for women, that has been taken away. We women many times believe this story that I'm just a spender, I'm a consumer and I'm not good with money. And while your spouse or your significant other, maybe they are a little bit better at managing the money doesn't mean that you can't learn or that there aren't principles of money that can't become exciting to you. What I would share with people, especially women, is that it doesn't matter where you're at. I even on podcast that I have, the headliner of one of the episodes was I was sleeping on my sister's couch after I got a divorce. There was nothing technically you could say I was homeless.
Leah Williams: So you and I, wherever you start from, if you have the belief in yourself, if you are willing to change, if you're willing to open up your mindset and it requires some work on you, I've had to change my relationship with money. I was repelling it how I treated it and believed money, its role. I had to flip that story as fast as I could. So women have to be willing to do that and realize that what's on the other side of being open minded, changing your mindset on money is massive opportunity. What you share with individuals on angel investing, I mean, there is so much that you can do. So I would encourage people think about Leah, Homeless. Right. Sleeping on my sister's couch, and realize that it doesn't matter what has happened.
Leah Williams: There is always a new beginning. There's always something that can be done. And it might not change next week, but it will change. And the other piece is you've got to surround yourself with the right people. I've told people many times you will find yourself having to do life surgery where you just have to cut people off that are not breathing life into you and encouraging you. That will hold you back. That is one of the biggest things that you can get caught up in is just not the right people in your circle that are holding you back. So there's a lot of things that I have overcome, but what that tells me is that one, we've all been through hard things.
Leah Williams: I'm not unique in that. But it does mean that it can give hope to others if they've gone through something hard. That's not the end of the story. It's just a piece. It's just a chapter. And there's so much more good to come.
Marcia Dawood: That's right. It's all okay in the end. And if it's not okay, it's not the end.
Leah Williams: Exactly. And you have a choice. It's. It helps us take ownership of our lives instead of falling into the victim phase. And I've done it plenty of times. Poor me. Can't believe this happened. Can't believe that person did that to me.
Leah Williams: But we do get to make choices and there is a lot of opportunity to take advantage of. Yeah, more people need to listen to you. More people need to just change, change the narrative of their life and they'll see the impact of it.
Marcia Dawood: Yeah, I like what you said about you were actually repelling money. Because I do believe that if we put the right mindset together, you will actually start to attract the things that you need in your life. The people, the money, the wealth, the time wealth, the health wealth, the relationship wealth, all the things. So, Leah, thank you so much for being on the podcast with us today and sharing all these amazing strategies with us.
Leah Williams: Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you for the invitation. It is such a joy to spend time with you. I appreciate it.