My brother John Novak, a well established 401(k) expert, shared some calculations that he made for his own clients illustrating the impact of the SECURE act tax credit for small businesses that want to start a 401(k) plan. This is the first analysis of this type that I’ve seen using “real life” 401(k) plan fees […]
Ted Benna, called “the father of 401(k)s” was one of my first business mentors when I left Wall Street in 1997 and started my own firm serving small businesses in the Doylestown, Pennsylvania area. His comments today in ThinkAdviser on the impact of the new SECURE Act are ‘spot on’: • “Hopefully the operating efficiencies a […]
Tony Novak, CPA financial planner
A big part of the tax and financial planning conversation I’m having lately with local upper middle class people my age and older is questioning the wisdom of keeping multiple houses especially those big vacation places at the Jersey shore. (Some have houses and condos elsewhere but shore houses seem to dominate life for many […]
A wave of recent media reports indicates that a large number of taxpayers are angry this filing season. Some people point out that the public reaction is illogical because the total amount of income taxes actually is actually lower for most people. Yet there may be good underlying reason for that anger. Originally we read […]
Background Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) are a common topic of focus in personal financial planning. This is nothing new. I first published this blog post titled “IRAs and the Retirement Income Myth” based on 2005 and 2006 data. The underlying big picture issue is the split in needs between the “haves” and “have-nots”: Relatively few […]
A friend asked me to review the tax return of a single retired relative living in Florida. The simple question was why were here taxes so much more in 2017 than in 2016? She offered to pay for the review but I insisted on doing it as a no fee/no obligation courtesy. I might have […]
Our tax laws provide more opportunity to some people than others. I find that some people can save tens of thousands of dollars with little effort through active tax planning while others might save only a thousand dollars or so. Obviously these high impact people are the ones that tax planners like me want to […]
Most of the changes included in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act are already effective for 2018. These are mostly good news for seniors. Retirees will be less affected by the tax law changes than other Americans since the changes do not affect the way Social Security and investment income are taxed.However, changes that become effective […]
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 […]