Over the past 35 years, our firm has helped many people retire and, despite what you hear from some mainstream media outlets, I rarely find people wishing they had worked longer. I also find that traditional retirement planning tends to confuse people into thinking they should work longer than necessary. There are several reasons why this occurs.
A common concern for pre-retirees is paying taxes on their retirement income. To understand how taxes work in retirement, it is first important to understand how different sources of retirement income will be taxed.
Our firm has worked with retirees for over 30 years, and it is a common practice to help our clients turn their nest eggs into a reliable retirement income stream.
Many wealthy individuals own one or more highly appreciated investments. How these highly appreciated investments are liquidated could save these investors thousands of dollars in taxes over a lifetime.
There are a variety of issues estate planning attorneys seek to mitigate when creating an estate plan for their clients. These issues may include unnecessary income and estate taxes, and the need to avoid probate.
With the national debt soaring to unprecedented levels, you may be concerned about protecting your investments from future tax rates.
Minimizing taxes, obtaining affordable health insurance, and having ample penalty-free income at a young age are all critical variables for early retirement.
Learn how you can reduce your expenses & taxes by owning stocks versus mutual funds or ETFs.
Before investing in emerging market stocks, it may be beneficial to understand one of the potential pitfalls associated with this type of investing: concentration risk.
The largest cause of missed tax opportunities that our firm sees from new clients can be attributed to inexperienced advisors analyzing incomplete data. This article articulates how to avoid this common mistake.
A frequent and costly tax mistake our firm witnesses can easily be avoided by repositioning an investor’s assets. This means shifting your retirement savings from tax-inefficient investments to tax-efficient investments. At our firm, we call this technique “The Two Pocket Exchange Strategy” as it requires shifting assets that investors already own from one pocket to another while receiving a potentially significant tax benefit. The tools to accomplish this are common and the concept is simple, yet it is rare that investors consistently exploit this strategy to its full capabilities.
Affordable health insurance is one of the biggest obstacles preventing people from early retirement.
One of the most common tax mistakes our wealth management firm consistently witnesses can be traced back to poor choices surrounding charitable giving. Many people will make out checks to their favorite charities and then report this information when it comes to tax time. Unfortunately, this simplistic approach can leave tax savings on the table.
Over the years, my firm has helped countless individuals and households determine an appropriate Social Security claiming strategy for their unique circumstances. As a result, I have been fortunate to observe how these strategies have affected clients’ retirement. However, it is through these observations that I have realized there is a significant amount of misinformation surrounding the best age to begin taking Social Security income. The choice that may be right for each person is highly dependent on a number of different factors.
Many stock mutual funds can quietly rob unsuspecting investors by creating unnecessary taxes. This primarily occurs when mutual funds are held outside a tax-favored work retirement plan, individual retirement account or Roth IRA. To help understand why this occurs, it is important to first learn about how stocks that are not owned within a mutual fund are taxed. For simplicity, this article will focus only on federal taxes and will not delve into potential state tax implications.
Over the past 35 years, our firm has worked with hundreds of people who have inherited investments from their parents. The decisions made with recently inherited assets can have significant permanent tax implications. Understanding the negative consequences and the different available opportunities can have positive benefits that can last years into the future. There are many strategies that can be beneficial to implement when inheriting assets. The following article is designed to share tax minimization techniques that can be implemented following the loss of a parent.
There are many variables that investors analyze when either buying or selling assets. One popular technique used to analyze stock mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) includes analyzing past performance and using this information as the catalyst to either buy or sell.
One problem that frequently stems from the inheritance process is fractured relationships between siblings. Unfortunately, the common denominator in many of these situations is the parents' estate plan.
The title of the 1985 song "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits is a reference to the rock stars of this group achieving a wealthy status for doing easy work by playing music for people. Some mutual funds and exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, also derive easy money through a process called securities lending.
In his 1973 book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, economist Burton Malkiel contended that higher cost, actively managed mutual funds were flawed and unlikely to beat low-cost, passively managed index funds. Following the publication of Malkiel's book, there were dozens of studies touting similar benefits associated with low-cost, passively managed index funds. Today, index funds are rising in popularity, and many investors blindly rely on them without truly understanding what differentiates one index fund from another.
