About | Founder
Ian Lacovara
Thirty years working for himself, twenty of them preparing other people's tax returns. He started Ninja Credit Consultants in 2010 because the people who could have explained this to him mostly wouldn't, and he got tired of paying for the privilege of being kept slightly confused.
A real photo of Ian. This is the one page where a founder photo does more than any graphic.
1200 x 750Why this company works the way it does
He learned the fundamentals because nobody would explain them
Early on, Ian ran into the thing most people building a business run into: an industry full of people who could have answered his questions and were reluctant to, because the answer was the product.
The conclusion he drew was that he'd have to learn the fundamentals himself. That's most of what this site is - the explanations he wanted and couldn't get, written down so the next person doesn't have to pay twice for them.
He tests things before advising anyone to do them. Books, courses, approaches, structures - run on his own situation first, and only then recommended. A fair amount gets discarded at that stage.
It's a slower way to build a body of advice, and it's why these pages say "this usually doesn't work" about as often as they say "do this." Plenty of popular strategies don't survive contact with an actual balance sheet.
Background
What's actually behind the advice
- Tax preparation
- Over twenty years preparing returns professionally, most recently for the 2025 filing year. He no longer does, and NCC does not offer tax preparation. That background is why the entity and tax classification material on this site gets into specifics rather than deflecting.
- Self-employment
- Thirty years working for himself, across several businesses. Long enough to have made most of the structural mistakes personally.
- Keeping current
- Follows changes to tax law, codes, and incentives on an ongoing basis. The BOI reporting guide on this site exists because the rule changed twice while most competitors left the old version up.
- How he works
- Good with numbers, inclined to look for the angle nobody else considered, and willing to say when the clever answer is worse than the obvious one. Which it frequently is. Clever is overrated in this field.
- Wearing many hats
- Three decades of self-employment means doing every job in a business at some point, badly at first, then working out how to hand it off. That's the skill behind the sequencing advice, which is most of what clients actually buy.
To be added
Ian completed a substantial tax training program early on and is tracking down the details. Once confirmed, the program name and credential will be listed here rather than described vaguely. Until then this page says what can be verified and nothing more.
In the business
What Ian handles
When you contact NCC about any of the above, Ian reads it and Ian replies. There's no layer in between.
A strategy he runs personally
Five years of borrowing from a policy instead of a bank
Ian has been running the infinite banking strategy for about five years, through a participating whole life policy with Guardian. It has funded business needs, personal ones, a car, and it is now part of the structure behind a family office being built out.
He repays every loan. Nothing forces him to; an unpaid balance would simply come off the death benefit eventually. He pays it back on a schedule anyway, because the capacity to borrow again is the entire point and a policy quietly filling up with accrued interest is a policy slowly losing the thing that made it useful.
He watches the seven-pay limit like a hawk. Cross it and the contract becomes a modified endowment contract permanently, and the borrowing that the whole strategy depends on turns into a taxable event with a penalty attached. It is the one mistake in this strategy you cannot undo.
The thing he would tell anyone looking at it: the policy that works for this is deliberately designed to pay the agent less, and it is not the version you get offered by default. Ask for it by name, ask what it does to the commission, and watch how the answer goes.
Naming the carrier here is a statement of fact about his own policy, not a recommendation. NCC sells no insurance, earns nothing on any of this, and has no relationship with Guardian. The full guide, including the arguments against it ->
The part still being written
"I learned some of this the expensive way"
Thirty years of self-employment produces a set of mistakes worth publishing. Structures set up wrong and fixed late. Decisions that looked sound right up until they didn't. Money spent learning things somebody could have told him over coffee.
Those are being written up from his actual experience rather than invented, which is slower and the only way it's worth doing. That page is in progress ->
Would rather just talk to him?
That's the fastest way to work out whether this is a fit. There's no screening layer to get through, and if the answer is that you don't need us, you'll hear that too.