Women, Wealth & Entrepreneurship Podcast · Ariel Shaw MBA

The Perfect Symphony for Businesses To Thrive In 2024 with Yvette D. Best

April 9, 2024·27 min·2 clips

Yvette DeVest explains why 942,000 people have until May 17th to claim $1.6 billion in unclaimed 2020 tax refunds.

Arielle starts with business and generational wealth in view. She frames 2024 as a year of reinvention and domination, then brings in Yvette as an IRS problem solver with years of accounting work behind her. The tone is warm, but the advice stays practical. Yvette is introduced as an enrolled agent, certified tax coach, and four-time bestselling author, and the conversation quickly moves into taxes, debt, and choices that show up every month. The mortgage payoff is the part that gives the episode its bite. Yvette says leaving a full-time job with a mortgage still hanging over her was not acceptable, so she changed the way she paid it. Biweekly payments went straight to principal. Later, she added chunks of business revenue on top of the regular payments. That is useful for entrepreneurs because it turns business income into something visible and measurable, not just another deposit that disappears. She says the house was bought in 2012. By December 2017, after a five-year push built around principal reduction, the mortgage was paid off. Arielle lingers there and asks how the lender reacted to payments that cut into expected interest. Yvette says the person who wrote the loan called after seeing the large payments and started offering home equity options. Then she adds the detail that keeps the story from sounding punishing. Paying off the house did not mean she stopped living. She went to Dubai in 2014 and Egypt in 2016, and travel stayed in the plan. The change was more selective spending. She paused things she liked, including red bottom shoes, while protecting the things she truly loved. That gives the episode its practical feel: financial freedom here is not a poster phrase. It is a run of repeated choices you can trace. The conversation ends with Arielle pointing listeners back to Yvette on social platforms, which fits the episode's hands-on mood.

As heard by us

A grounded tax-and-cash-flow conversation anchored by a five-year mortgage payoff story.

Taxes set the frame, but the conversation stays with women in business, wealth-building, and the money choices that support both. Arielle Shaw brings Yvette DeVest, identified here as an IRS enrolled agent, certified tax coach, and accounting professional since 1989, into a…

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Want tax talk that helps you keep more of what you make and build wealth with it?

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