Charitable Giving Charitable giving can play an important role in many estate plans. Philanthropy cannot only give you great personal satisfaction, it can also give you a current income tax deduction, let you avoid capital gains tax, and reduce the amount of taxes your estate may owe when you die. There are many ways to [...]
What If You Get Audited? Tip: The chance of being audited rises with income level. In 2014, only 0.6% of those with incomes under $200,000 were audited; 3.6% of those with incomes between $500,000 and $1 million were audited; and 16.2% of those with incomes over $10 million were audited. Source: Internal Revenue Service, 2015“Audit” is [...]
The Markets (as of market close March 25, 2016) After five consecutive weeks of gains, stocks cooled as each of the major indexes listed here slid into negative territory by the close of last week. With the latest downturn, only the Dow is ahead of its 2015 year-end closing value. Several of the markets were [...]
Six Most Overlooked Tax Deductions Who among us wants to pay the IRS more taxes than we have to?¹ While few may raise their hands, Americans regularly overpay because they fail to take tax deductions for which they are eligible. Let’s take a quick look at the six most overlooked opportunities to manage your tax [...]
The Markets (as of market close March 18, 2016) After a fifth consecutive week of gains, both the S&P 500 and the Dow have finally surpassed their 2015 year-end closing values. The Dow gained 389 points to close up 2.26%, while the S&P 500 increased 1.35% over the prior week. In fact, each of the [...]
Four Really Good Reasons to Invest Over half of Americans do not own any stocks, or stock-related investments, such as mutual funds, according to Bankrate’s Money Pulse survey.¹ Individuals may cite different reasons for not investing, but with important long-term financial goals, such as retirement, in the balance, the reasons may not be good enough. [...]
How Income Taxes Work The Internal Revenue Service estimates that taxpayers and businesses spend 6.1 billion hours a year complying with tax-filing requirements. To put this into perspective, if all this work were done by a single company, it would need about three million full-time employees and be one of the largest industries in the [...]
Roth 401(k) vs. Traditional 401(k)
