Congress Passes the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act

What will the near-term impact be?

On December 20, Congress passed the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act, sending the final version of the GOP tax reform bill to President Trump’s desk today. The legislation alters the Internal Revenue Code to a degree unseen since the 1980s, altering income tax brackets, marginal tax rates, key deductions and exemptions, and the taxation of corporations and pass-through businesses. These are just some of the adjustments.1

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Coming Tax Code Changes – How Do You Plan?

Every election that we can remember there are promises of change to Taxation, most of the time for less tax but always Big Reform is one of the topics that seems to attach itself to every political candidate. Then after the new blood gets into the “Big Chair”, or the old guard settles back down, the budget gets opened and the talks begin, and usually, taxes are added or deductions get eliminated. Many people expected the corporate tax rates to already be 15% from the election rhetoric of late but, no surprise, the changes to cut tax are always way harder to implement than changes to increase tax.
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Now that Tax Season is Over…

With tax season behind us, we have started to reflect on the amount of people that we saw in our office and
some of the stark realities that we discovered while serving the public. Estate planning is not a sexy topic. But that’s why, as we’ve been preparing people’s tax returns this year, we came to realize that because it’s not a sexy topic, it’s almost completely non-existent in our community. How do we know that from doing tax returns? Because estate planning is all about titling. There are many, many options for estate planning, but generally speaking, there are three basic options that most people fall under.

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Panicked About Your Filing Deadlines? Relax!

With tax season under full swing and documents from broker/dealers and other investment companies coming out later and later, you can definitely smell the tax “angst” in the air. The amount of pressure that tax offices and their clients seem to be under is palpable.

Why is this all happening and what about this is important to you?

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Tips for people who are in a hurry to file that have no or little record keeping

Tax Season is just starting, but the folks that are coming into our offices remind me to remind everyone of a few good housekeeping tips that will make the season easy to deal with from the taxpayer’s perspective, and successful in not overpaying income tax due to lack of having proper documentation of legal deductions.

What do we mean? We often feel a pressure during tax season–an angst if you will–to get taxes done quickly once we’ve decided that it’s time to deal with them. Like when you were a kid and you would hold your breath and eat all your broccoli in two quick bites as a strategy, doing taxes quickly is almost always a bad idea. Hopefully, these tips will make it easy for you to feel calm, cool, and collected, as well as process driven, in how you’ll document your deductions if you haven’t kept great books all year long.

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3 Tax Tips to follow before the holidays are in full swing!

Tip #1

For those people with capital gains from sales of stock or from mutual fund distributions, many know that they can offset those gains with a loss, but few actually sit down and do the annual exercise. It is a good idea to meet with a Tax Planner to look at your losses or winnings. By selling those losing assets, you can offset your other investment gains and end up with an equivalent of no capital gains. Many people would rather not sell their under performing assets, because they believe they’re about to “come back” and wouldn’t dare wait the 31-day waiting period to repurchase the same asset as an allowable purchase but there are many legal “workarounds” to that rule. The Market has been and is forecasted to continue to be volatile, you should be meeting and discussing a plan that can be executed on a set number during a Dip or Peak.

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