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    Tax

    Did the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act Eliminate the Social Security Tax Torpedo?

    The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act represents a relatively significant tax cut for most middle-income retirees, but the bill did nothing to change the interactions between different income sources in retirement, which means that retirees will need to pay close attention to which accounts they withdraw from at which points in time.
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    Marketing

    New resources added to Tax Clarity

    Our team cares about your business growth goals and we've been hard at work creating content and materials to help you along the way. With all the discussions about tax law in the news, we wanted to let you know about some new resources we've added to Tax Clarity. Top advisors use Tax Clarity to create a landscape view of tax for their clients. Tax Clarity instantly calculates your client’s effective marginal tax rate and lets you view alternates so that you can guide your clients to make the most tax-efficient retirement decisions.
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    Tax

    What will tax reform look like for the proactive advisor?

    Now is the time to build relationships with CPAs At this point, it seems safe to expect some form of tax reform will pass in the next several months. The House has already passed H.R. 1, the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” which includes a variety of changes to the personal income tax system and significant changes to corporate taxation. The Senate has released its proposal, which doesn’t reduce the number of brackets, but does smooth the progression with level steps between each new proposed bracket. Both bills increase standard deductions, eliminate some itemized deductions, eliminate personal exemptions, and provide some sort of child/dependent tax credit. Regardless of the compromises that emerge through the political process, it is clear that there will be a need for members of the general public to understand the changes and how those changes impact their personal situations. Financial advisors will be faced with a choice – either take proactive steps to first become educated on the new laws, and then identify specific opportunities for their clients, or risk losing clients to other proactive advisors who choose the first path.
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    In The News

    How New Tax Law Will Impact How You Help Clients

    By Joe Elsasser, CFP®, president of Covisum For all the talk about how the Trump tax plan, the House plan and the Senate plan change the current tax system, there has been little talk about just how similar they are to the current structure. For mass-affluent retirees and the advisors who serve them, the future is highly similar to the past — rich with opportunities to help clients The tax plans don’t change the fundamental concepts in the current tax system. Here, we break it down by those basic concepts and explain how the different tax reform proposals would impact — or not impact — each.
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    Tax

    Help Your Clients Avoid the "Tax Torpedo"

    Social Security Timing® subscribers have helped clients save for retirement and have given them coaching on when to start taking Social Security benefits. But do you understand the impact of other income on the taxability of Social Security benefits? Understanding how different sources of income interact is critical, according to Greg Geisler in the September, 2017 Journal of Financial Services Professionals. Because of how Social Security benefits are taxed relative to other income, it can have major impacts on your client’s effective marginal tax rate.
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    In The News

    The 5-Minute Triage: Learn Quickly if an IRA Deduction is Double Dipping

    For many middle income people approaching retirement, a common question is whether to contribute to a traditional IRA or to a Roth IRA. Often, the rationale for contributing to the Roth or forgoing an IRA contribution altogether is that the client’s tax bracket in retirement is likely to be the same or potentially higher than it is now. Unfortunately, this shortcut often misses the point. When planning a retirement investment strategy, the client should be concerned less with the tax bracket and more with his effective marginal rate, or EMR. The EMR is the actual amount lost to taxes on each additional dollar of income, or conversely, it is the actual amount saved by making a contribution to the deductible IRA.
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    In The News

    Follow the Tax Map to Find Clients Nontaxable Income

    Imagine showing a prospect how to harvest $11,000 IRA income with no tax. Or a client how to harvest $67,500 of capital gain with no tax. Our “Practical Uses for Tax Clarity” video shows how simple it is with a customize Tax Map.
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