Stalking the Accountant: Tax Plan Now or Forever Hold Your Peace

A new tax guide arrived late last week: The Complete Analysis of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. It’s what I consider light reading on a Sunday afternoon.

Tax season is over, but tax planning is more important than ever with the new tax laws and changes. Consulting and planning with clients started May 1^st and continues strong. I’m booked out until mid-July. If you own a business or investment properties you need to consider consulting with a tax professional to take full advantage of the new Qualified Business Income deduction.

One problem from earlier in the year has probably corrected itself. Withholding tables were adjusted in early February to account for the elimination of exemptions and the new tax brackets. The new tax tables overcompensated by under withholding. This meant people would pay less tax while getting a smaller refund or even owing! It was a timing issue of when you would actually pay your tax liability.

Mid-April brought revised updated withholding tables correcting the issues. Preliminary analysis of client files show the new tables handle around 60% of withholding correctly. The reason for the 40% error rate is the elimination of exemptions. The good news is that the withholding tends to err on the conservative side, creating slightly higher refunds than the original withholding tables.

It might pay to review your tax situation this year. The last decade or so had modest annual changes to the tax code. This year is radically different. New deductions, expanded tax credits and extended tax brackets created opportunities to reduce your tax liability if you plan properly. This extra money funneled into an index fund or reducing debt should have long-term positive affects to your wealth creation. You have a window of opportunity to reach financial independence and early retirement funded by the tax reductions.

All is not rosy. The limits placed on state and local tax deductions (SALT) coupled with the elimination of itemized deductions, subject to 2%, means some taxpayers will see a tax increase.

Contact me if you are interested in a consultation. Be sure to review Working with the Wealthy Accountant before hitting send.

I’ll need a copy of your 2017 tax return and a list of questions prior to our meeting so I can adequately prepare. Sometimes I can do more than just cut taxes. Several clients were able to reduce their expected larger refund and funnel it into a Capital One 360 or similar savings account where the interest on the lowered withholding will exceed my fee. Each situation is different so I need your information to provide the best advice. Keep in mind I consult on Tuesdays and Thursdays each week only. I sometimes open another day, but I do have other obligations consuming my time.

Winner’s Circle

We have three winners since the last Stalking installment. Gretchen D of Birmingham, Terry C of Dallas and Cindy M of Rapid City, SD saw some Amazon gift card love slide their way.

What I’m Reading

Bill Gates contacted me the other day to share a book he found interesting. He is well aware of my love for good books and was excited to share another gem. The conversation went something like this:

Bill: Hey, Accountant guy! I have an awesome novel you must read.

Accountant Guy: Bill, you know I don’t read many novels anymore. It better be darn good to break me away from my regular science and financial planning books.

Bill: Trust me! You’re going to love this book.

So I dragged my feet for a year before I decided I needed a comfortable summer novel to disappear into. Enter Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves.

Seveneves starts with the moon blowing up. The book alludes that it might have been a micro black hole racing through our neck of the galaxy. Regardless, people didn’t know what caused the catastrophe. The event split the moon into several large pieces. A few days later the first two large pieces smashed as gravity brought the pieces back together, creating smaller pieces. Scientists realized the collisions would continue breaking the moon into smaller debris. It also meant a large amount of moon debris would eventually hit the Earth.

Mankind has two years to get to space if it wanted to survive. The International Space Station was the beginning building block of a larger space habitat. A few thousand people were brought to space to wait out the Hard Rain that would turn Earth into a boiling inferno where no life could survive. To keep the Ark manageable, DNA and DNA data were transported to the Ark.

Space is unforgiving. The Hard Rain came and the Earth was destroyed. A safe haven was finally achieved by the Ark with one problem: only eight women were left alive. One woman had reached menopause. The seven Eves were all that remained of the human race and its hope for a future. The human race was all but extinct. These seven women would use technology brought from Old Earth to bring humanity back from the abyss.

The novel picks up 5,000 years later when Earth is ready for life again. I don’t want to spoil it for you so I’ll stop here.

Seveneves is hard to put down. It isn’t light reading either, as I teased at the open of this section. It is classified as hard science fiction, something I do enjoy. If you want a solid novel to fill a few sunny afternoons or early evenings, consider Seveneves. It’s worth your time.

 

 

Wealth Building Resources

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A cost segregation study can save $100,000 for income property owners. Here is my review of how cost segregation studies work and how to get one yourself.

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