Stage 01 of 03 · The Odyssey Method
Save. Position before you grow.
The tax position designed at the front, not discovered at filing.
When you acquire depreciable property or a credit-eligible asset, most of its tax treatment is fixed at acquisition. This stage models that treatment before you commit, not at filing.
In depth
What save actually involves.
Depreciable property and credit-eligible assets carry the largest documented first-year consequences in the Internal Revenue Code. Those consequences turn on classification, placed-in-service dates, ownership, and participation, and most are settled the day the asset is acquired.
OSA does not currently provide investment advice or evaluate investment merits. What you own, including any investment sponsored by an OSA affiliate, is your decision, made with your own investment professionals under that investment's offering documents. Our work is the tax analysis: what treatment is actually available, what the documentation has to show, and whether the result reaches your liability.
That last test is the one most often skipped. The excess business loss limitation, the at-risk rules, the passive activity rules, and the character of your income decide whether a deduction or credit is usable this year, later, or not at all. An asset should make sense before its tax treatment is considered, and we say so when it does not.
The standard we work to
No position is justified by its tax treatment alone. The analysis is documented at acquisition, tested against the limitation rules, and in the preparer's hands before the return is due.
Capabilities
What happens in save.
Composable. Activated against your facts, not bundled by default.
- Credit interaction
- Where more than one statutory program could apply to the same asset, confirming whether they genuinely coexist, and how basis reductions and recapture interact. Most of the work here is elimination.
- Depreciation and classification
- How an asset is classified determines its first-year treatment. Movable and shorter-life property is treated very differently from real property, and the classification is established with documentation at acquisition, not argued for afterwards.
- Usability testing
- Whether a deduction or credit reaches your actual liability depends on the excess business loss limitation, the at-risk rules, material participation, and the character of your income. We model this before anything is recommended.
- Income and event mapping
- Every income stream, vesting schedule, distribution, and anticipated liquidity event laid out on one timeline, because the size of the position that makes sense is set by the shape of your income across several years, not one.
- Entity and election design
- The entity, classification, and elections that determine how income is characterized, decided in advance and documented at the time rather than reconstructed later.
- Coordination with your preparer
- We set the strategy, hand the preparer a documented position, and confirm treatment before anything is implemented. That preparer is your existing CPA, or ours where preparation is included in your engagement.
Skipping this stage
The common failure. An asset is acquired first and its tax treatment is discovered at filing, after classification, documentation, and usability have already been settled by default.
Start of the sequence
Save is where every engagement begins.
Next · Stage 02
Protect
The tax consequences of how you hold what you own.
ContinueBegin
Find out where save fits for you.
Thirty confidential minutes with a principal.
Engagements typically begin at $2M+ of annual income, or a comparable taxable event.