Happy New Year!
January always has us looking in two directions – back over the year just past, and ahead at the year to come. Over the next few weeks, American taxpayers will begin to receive the annual flurry of forms regarding their financial life in 2016. This would be a good time to prepare a folder to gather that information together (if you haven’t already), to help make it harder to lose any of those documents before you prepare your return. Because April 15th is on the weekend again this year, we all have until the 18th to get the forms together and filed … about 100 days from now.
While we aren’t tax experts ourselves, we know how much of an impact the financial planning and investment management recommendations we make can have on your tax situation. As in the last few years, in order to help get accurate information out into the world, we’ve been able to make available a couple of “Key Financial Data” documents.
The 2016 document (free PDF download here) has a lot of information about last year’s tax brackets and rates, as well as some of the more frequently used deductions, exemptions, and credits. The second page contains information about retirement plans, Social Security, and Medicare. We hope that this data will help get you ready for the tax filing process – whether you do that yourself, or hire a professional. And we hope that you’ll take a moment to review your retirement plan contributions for 2016, to make sure that you’ve made the maximum allowable contributions before the deadline.
The 2017 document (free PDF download here) has all the same sort of information, which could be useful in planning for the year to come. The changes it incorporates are relatively small, so far … but, as we noted a few weeks ago, the Trump Administration has made a lot of proposals for significant changes to the tax code. If and when significant changes are made that impact the current year’s tax planning, this document will be updated, and we’ll post an announcement about that here.
If you’re planning to work with a tax advisor this year, we hope you’ll share these Key Financial Data documents with them – so that they know who we are, and can work with us throughout the coming year. After all, the more closely your financial professionals can coordinate with one another, the better the job we can all do on your behalf. And we would love it if you’d share this with everyone you know who’s dreading the tax prep process this year, or worried about the changes for the coming year; maybe it can help make the process a little easier for them, too.
If you have specific questions about your particular situation, or general comments or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We’re happy to help however we can!
