Category: Financial Planning
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The new state health insurance mandates – why this is the most important financial planning issue today
So far three states – New Jersey, Massachusetts and Vermont – have passed laws that add a health insurance mandate with tax penalty for not having coverage. The new laws kick in when the federal insurance mandate law expires in 2019. Other states are considering similar laws. Some things are not clear yet: – what…
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What Does the Omnibus Spending Law Mean to Me?
It is not possible to analyze a massive 2,232 page $1.3 Trillion dollar federal law within a matter of hours after its passage. (This is a terrible way to handle major legislation, but that shame on Ryan and crew is a whole different topic). Yet this new federal spending bill is likely to have more…
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What the heck is a 501(k) plan?
The financial services industry has a long history of creating new marketing terms to help sell its products. Certainly this is a productive and useful part of consumer financial service communications. The latest term gathering attention is a “501(k) plan”. The increased use of this term coincides with marketing of an already existing alternate tool…
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Alternative Investments: Now More Than Ever
I’m convinced that most people don’t know about vast array of alternative investment options available to them including through tax-advantaged individual retirement accounts. Consider the broad environment of alternative investments that we face today: We’ve been brainwashed1 to think that alternative investments are not safe while investments in the US securities markets are safer. Financial…
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The Basics of Medicaid Planning
This blog post lists key issues in bullet format and is not intended as a complete discussion of any issue. A more thorough consideration is helpful for any aspect that may pertain to your family’s situation. Definition: “Medicaid planning” refers to the specialized field of financial planning that recognizes that it is possible to simultaneously keep financial assets while,…
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Product review: Trim
I’ve written often about the fast-paced evolution of consumer finance software. In summary, our best programmers and artificial intelligence resources are focusing on this field for a number of reasons and consumers stand to gain. he field is highly competitive and exected to continue to evolve so that the value of product reviews like this…
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Reviewing my Vision Statement for 2017
At the beginning of each month and year I write out a “Vision for ___”. I normally don’t make these public but a business adviser challenged m to review this with an accountability partner. I don’t have an accountability partner so I summarized the work here. (I’m sure that a new accountability partner should be…
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2018 tax rates for married filing jointly
While most taxpayers get a decrease in marginal tax rates some small group of ‘married filing jointly‘ taxpayers will face higher marginal tax rates. This means that a married taxpayer with taxable income of $237,951 to $315,000 will see slightly less of a tax cut as a percentage of income compared to married taxpayers in other…
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The three basic principles of individual tax reform
The tax reform bill, as passed, does three key things for individual taxpayers: Temporarily changes the way we calculate “taxable income”. No longer do we calculate personal exemptions. Most deductions are eliminated. The standard deduction is increased. To estimate the impact on your taxes subtract the total amount of your current deductions and personal exemptions…
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First five strategies to deal with the new tax law
My action plan for bringing actionable information to clients as soon as the tax bill becomes law. Update December 31, 2017: Major parts of the law become effective tomorrow. I’ve moved past most of the preliminary points in this article and am now focused on the actions that can make the most immediate impact on…