Tax Planning
It’s said that only two things are certain in life: Death…and Taxes! And while there’s not much you can do to avoid the former, with prudent planning and foresight, there’s a lot you can do to minimize the later.
Our tax planning philosophy is not centered on how to save you the most taxes today, rather how to save you the most taxes over your lifetime and legacy. This forward-looking approach brings intentionality to the decisions we make today.
What We Can Do for You
While we believe in paying every cent that you owe, there are legitimate planning strategies that can significantly reduce taxes over your lifetime and legacy. Here’s how we help:
- Coordinate with Tax Preparer: we want to make you and your tax preparer’s life easier. Each January, we send a tax letter explaining what tax documents you’ll receive from your investment accounts and any other pertinent notes. This is important because there’s no benefit from tax planning if it doesn’t get reported correctly.
- Review Tax Return: you may feel like you need to be a CPA to understand your taxes. The IRS doesn’t make it easy with so many forms and legislation written in pencil. We create a Tax Snapshot that summarizes the key information clearly.
- Adjust Tax Withholding: Don’t want to be surprised with a large tax bill each year? We can project your tax situation and help you adjust your tax withholding to more accurately reflect your tax liability.
- Year-end Tax Planning: We review your income and projected income for the year to determine if there are any time sensitive strategies we need to pursue such as tax loss harvesting, tax gain harvesting, distributions, contributions, Roth conversions, etc.
- Maximize Tax Benefit of Charitable Giving: If you’re charitable inclined, there are ways to maximize the tax benefit you receive either through Qualified Charitable Distributions, donating appreciated stock, or stacking multiple years of giving into one taxable year to alternate between taking itemized deductions one year and the standard deduction the next.
Avoid Common Mistakes – We help you avoid common mistakes like paying penalties from not taking your Required Minimum Distribution, underpaying taxes, or early retirement withdrawals. We also help you avoid overpaying taxes that can happen from tax basis information missing on a taxable asset that was sold or a non-deductible IRA that was converted to Roth.
