If you pay attention and plan your tax outcomes proactively, there are many things you can do to reduce your tax bill. But the planning and the resulting activities that you need to engage in to achieve those outcomes are all year-round actions you must take, not just things to do the week before you file. Start by opening your calendar and marking a day each month to spend an hour on your taxes. That’s 12 hours a year. If when you file your taxes those year-round activities saved you $1500, then you were “paid” $125.00 an hour, which is worthwhile! If you saved $10,000.00 in taxes, that would be $833 per hour. Sign me up for that job! Start

When planning ahead, or just engaging in their day to day operations, most business owners at least occasionally think about tax deductions. A business dinner that can be partially deductible, or a new machine that can be depreciated. However, they often don’t think about or plan how to acquire other tax credits, which can often be much more valuable. Tax credits are often transitory, with the benefits increased or reduced from year to year, or sometimes eliminated altogether, only to be brought back again several years later. Over the last few decades we have seen some popular credits renewed or in some cases even made a permanent part of the tax code. Small business owners seem to often not be

It’s hard to be logical all the time about everything. The most financially successful tax clients we serve at least attempt to force themselves to be logical, for their own benefit. For instance, our parents, as well as a subset of the economy including some popular radio show based advisors like Dave Ramsey, say you should pay off your home and have a “free and clear” deed as a goal (they are wrong in most cases by the way). That kind of thinking is emotional thinking, mixed perhaps with some presumptive attitude about what the general populous is capable of. “Well, we know we can’t get people to do what would really be best for them based on pure math and

Many times business owners have come into our office and with our help have found that they were doing things incorrectly regarding their bookkeeping and taxes. Occasionally, the errors add to the tax burdens that they have been under-reporting. That never feels good, but it is always better to fix those issues prior to any audit. Often, errors discovered “pre-audit” can be fixed by simply amending the return, and no IRS issues follow, and everyone just moves on. But quite often, the errors made were not in their own favor. In those case, we help them file amended returns that net them large additional refunds for up to three years back, and that always feels great! So, how do these

When people are contemplating selling an asset like a house, an investment property, stock or a business asset, it’s usually to make a profit or to raise cash. Sometimes, a house is sold in order to buy bigger (or smaller), to move to a different town to take a new job. In the case of stocks, it might be for the taking of profits, stopping further loses, or again to raise cash.  One common thread among all of these decisions is that people generally think about them for some time before they act, as usually these are among the largest assets they have. What we see often in the tax planning world is that people sell the asset, and then