Whether you filed your taxes on time or you filed an exemption, tax season is a great time to run a diagnostic review on where you’ve been in the last couple of years and what your tax situation looks like going forward.
In that spirit, I want to give you a few steps to zero in on your tax burden and help you find ways to be more efficient.
Early in your career, doing your taxes can seem like a fairly simple process. Pick your favorite software, plug in a few numbers, and that’s it.
But even as a young professional, being tax-efficient is an important step to achieving your overall financial goals. Here are five things you need to consider before doing the bare minimum each April.
As the holiday season approaches, generosity often tends to take center stage, and for good reasons. Giving back not only supports the causes you care about, but it can also provide potential tax advantages before the year wraps up. Whether you give regularly or are considering a larger year-end contribution, here are a few strategies that can help make your charitable dollars go further.
Is there something I should be doing today to prepare for paying on Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) in retirement?
Tax efficiency is a popular topic in retirement planning. While I embrace the idea of paying as little in taxes as possible, these “tips” are often rooted in the assumption that you’re going to be in a lower tax bracket in your retirement.
I’ve shared tax filing tips before, but this year, I want to focus on one item in particular: IRA contributions.
What is an IRA?
An IRA (Individual Retirement Account) is a tax-advantaged retirement account that you fund independently of an employer-sponsored plan like a 401(k).
If you’ve been following our team for a while, you know that we talk a lot about what you can do to work toward financial freedom. Today I want to switch gears and look at what might be holding you back from that goal.
There’s a saying in our industry that Americans spend more time planning their summer vacation than they do their retirement.
Now most people probably hear that and think it’s a bad thing. But I look at it differently: You’ve got better things to do with your time today than worry about your financial picture. That’s where I come in.
Just as important as tidying up your home is taking a closer look at your finances. We’re between the rush of the holidays and the excitement of summer break, so now is the perfect time to make sure your money is doing its job in those hard-to-reach places.
At FFP, we take a bulk of that work off of our clients, prepping and sending documents directly to them and their CPA. We take a very coordinated approach to this — we don’t want the client to have to be the middleman. It’s simple for me to jump on a conference call with a CPA and make sure everybody’s on the same page and we have an open line of communication.
As expected, the first few days of the year started with everyone selling off the stocks that did so well last year — large-cap tech. We did the exact same thing in our own investment accounts. The reason is simple — any gains from the start of January don’t have to have taxes paid on them until April 2025, and some of these stocks went up 50% or more in 2023.
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