#QCD

You may donate money to charitable organizations throughout the year, for no other reason than your heart-felt desire to support causes that you care about. But if philanthropy is important to you, keep in mind that the associated tax breaks could potentially increase your ability to give. You might consider a more strategic approach to charitable giving, possibly as part of your year-end tax planning.

You can generally deduct charitable contributions, which reduces your taxable income, only if you itemize deductions on your federal income tax return. The deduction is currently limited to 60% of your adjusted gross income (AGI) for cash contributions to public charities. Otherwise, limits of 50%, 30%, or 20% of AGI may apply, depending on the type of property you give and the type of organization to which you contribute. (Excess amounts can be carried over for up to five years.

If you claim a charitable deduction for a contribution of cash, a check, or other monetary gift, you should maintain a record such as a cancelled check, a bank statement, or a receipt or letter from the charity showing the name of the charitable organization and the date and amount of the contribution. Donations of $250 or more must be substantiated with a contemporaneous written acknowledgment from the charity. Additional requirements apply to noncash contributions.

Here are some strategies that may help enhance your charitable impact as well as your tax savings.

Bunch or time gifts and deductions

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act roughly doubled the standard deduction beginning in 2018 and indexed it annually for inflation through 2025 ($12,950 for single taxpayers and $25,900 for joint filers in 2022). The result was a dramatic reduction in the number of taxpayers who itemize, now only about one out of ten.¹

If you find that the total of your itemized deductions for 2022 will be slightly below the level of the standard deduction, it could be worthwhile to combine or “bunch” 2022 and 2023 charitable contributions into one year, itemize on your 2022 tax return, and take the standard deduction on 2023 taxes.

Another option is to increase your charitable giving in years when you expect higher annual income. For example, charitable deductions could help offset the tax liability resulting from a business sale, capital gains, stock options, or a Roth IRA conversion.

Utilize a donor-advised fund

Another way to bunch contributions or generate a large charitable deduction for the current year — possibly before you know where you want the money to go — is to open a charitable account called a donor-advised fund (DAF). Donors who itemize deductions on their federal income tax returns can write off DAF contributions in the year they are made, then gift funds later to the charities they want to support. DAF contributions are irrevocable, which means the donor gives the sponsor legal control while retaining advisory privileges with respect to the distribution of funds and the investment of assets. DAFs have fees and expenses that donors giving directly to a charity would not face. (Note: BFSG can assist you with opening a DAF.)

Donate from an IRA

If you are an IRA owner who is 70½ or older, you can give to charity without itemizing and still get a tax break through a qualified charitable distribution (QCD). A QCD must be an otherwise taxable distribution from an IRA (generally, distributions from traditional IRAs are subject to federal income tax). QCDs are excluded from income and won’t affect your tax obligation. Moreover, once you reach age 72, a QCD can satisfy all or part of your required minimum distribution. To make a QCD, you would direct your IRA trustee to issue a check made out to a qualified public charity. You may contribute up to $100,000 from your IRA; if you’re married, your spouse may also contribute up to $100,000 from his or her IRA.

Consider a charitable trust

With a charitable remainder trust (CRT), you can donate money, securities, property, or other assets to the trust and designate a beneficiary — even yourself — to receive the income. Upon your death (or the death of your surviving spouse or designated beneficiary), the assets in the trust go to the charity.

Although the annual trust income is usually taxable, you may qualify for an income tax deduction based on the estimated present value of the remainder interest. Once assets are in the trust, the trustee may be able to sell them and reinvest the proceeds without incurring capital gains taxes.

Assets placed in a charitable lead trust (CLT) pay income to the designated charity until the trust ends (typically, upon your death). The remaining assets would then be returned to your heirs. This strategy might help reduce estate and gift taxes on appreciated assets that go to your heirs.

Both types of trusts are irrevocable, so assets cannot be removed from the trusts once they are donated. Not all charities are able to accept all possible gifts, so it would be prudent to check with your chosen organization in advance. Trusts incur upfront costs and often have ongoing administrative fees. The use of trusts involves a complex web of tax rules and regulations. You should consider the counsel of experienced estate planning, legal, and tax professionals before implementing trust strategies.

Strive for effective giving

With so many nonprofit organizations seeking financial support, you may want to direct your money where it can do the most good. Here’s how you can help ensure that your donations are well spent.

Give directly to the charity.

Individuals who call on the phone or knock on your door are likely to be paid fundraisers, which can cut into the organization’s proceeds. Even worse, they could be questionable groups posing as more reputable and well-known charities. When contacted by fundraisers, never give out personal information over the phone or in response to an email you didn’t initiate. There’s no rush — take time to vet the charity before you donate.

Check out the charity’s track record.

There are several well-known “watchdogs” — such as CharityNavigator.org, GuideStar.org, and CharityWatch.org — that rate and review nonprofits. These organizations provide information that can help you evaluate charities and make wise choices. Find out how your gift might be used by looking into the charity’s mission, plans, and financial status. Charities with higher-than-normal administrative costs may not be spending enough on programs and services — or they could be in financial trouble.

Take advantage of “leverage” opportunities.

A wealthy benefactor or corporation may offer to match private donations to a charity during a certain window of time, and some employers have charitable giving programs that match funds donated by employees to qualifying organizations.

Sources:

1.  Internal Revenue Service, 2022

Prepared by Broadridge. Edited by BFSG. Copyright 2022.

Disclosure: BFSG does not make any representations or warranties as to the accuracy, timeliness, suitability, completeness, or relevance of any information prepared by any unaffiliated third party, whether linked to BFSG’s website or blog or incorporated herein and takes no responsibility for any such content. All such information is provided solely for convenience purposes only and all users thereof should be guided accordingly. Please remember that different types of investments involve varying degrees of risk, and there can be no assurance that the future performance of any specific investment or investment strategy (including those undertaken or recommended by Company), will be profitable or equal any historical performance level(s). Please see important disclosure information here.

By:  Michael Allbee, CFP®, Senior Portfolio Manager

There are many tax strategies available for business owners, but it requires proper planning throughout the year. Here are some things to consider as we approach the year-end to minimize your tax liability.

Take advantage of the expiring “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” (TCJA) bonus depreciation

In 2017, the TCJA made it so business owners could deduct 100% of qualifying business property (i.e., new equipment, auto above 6,000 lbs., etc.) in the first year it was put to use. However, this regulation is expiring in 2022, and by 2023, owners will only be able to deduct 80% of qualifying properties within the first year of investment. Then, the percentage drops by 20% each following year. If you need to purchase business-related property, now is the time to do it.

Defer revenue and accelerate expenses (or vice versa)

Many small businesses use the cash method of accounting on their books and tax returns. Under the cash method, a company recognizes income when it’s received and expenses when paid — in other words, when cash actually changes hands. That creates some interesting tax planning strategies.

If you expect to be in a lower tax bracket next year, you might want to defer income to next year, when you’ll pay taxes at a lower rate. The same concept works with expenses. If you’re in a high tax bracket this year, you might want to accelerate expenses in 2022 to reduce your taxable income.

On the other hand, it might make more sense to accelerate income into this year — especially if you think tax rates will increase in the near future. In that case, you might want to send your invoice and try to collect payment from your client in 2022, so more income will be taxed at your current tax rate.

Here’s a handy guide for when to accelerate or defer income and expenses.

Consider the following strategies for executive compensation such as stock options

• Consider the timing of non-qualified stock option (NSO) exercises to fill lower marginal tax brackets.

• Consider qualifying disposition of incentive stock options (ISOs) for potential long-term capital gains treatment.

• Consider disqualifying disposition or tandem exercise of ISOs to avoid the alternative minimum tax (AMT).

Take advantage of the home office deduction (if you qualify)

If you have a home office, you may be eligible to deduct direct and indirect expenses for your home office. What can you deduct if you qualify? Read further here.

Use required minimum distributions (RMDs) to pay estimated taxes

Business owners typically pay quarterly taxes. For those that want to pay as late as possible, instead of quarterly taxes, you can have money withheld from IRA distributions to pay for taxes.

Take full advantage of tax-advantaged retirement accounts

Set-up or contribute to a retirement account. Deductible contributions to a retirement account such as an individual 401(k), SEP-IRA, or SIMPLE IRA can reduce your 2022 taxable income. Contributing to your retirement accounts may help you build retirement savings over time – without impacting your take-home pay as much as you may think.

Make charitable contributions

If you are charitably inclined, you should plan your donations in advance to ensure you maximize the tax benefits. The most common way to make a charitable gift is with cash. This works fine for smaller gifts (think one-time small charitable donations) but for larger charitable gifts there might be better alternatives to consider. Consider gifting appreciated assets or gifting from your IRA (Qualified Charitable Distributions).

If you’d like to learn more about tax planning strategies unique to your business, feel free to Talk With Us!

Disclosure: BFSG does not make any representations or warranties as to the accuracy, timeliness, suitability, completeness, or relevance of any information prepared by any unaffiliated third party, whether linked to BFSG’s website or blog or incorporated herein and takes no responsibility for any such content. All such information is provided solely for convenience purposes only and all users thereof should be guided accordingly. Please remember that different types of investments involve varying degrees of risk, and there can be no assurance that the future performance of any specific investment or investment strategy (including those undertaken or recommended by Company), will be profitable or equal any historical performance level(s). Please see important disclosure information here.

By:  Arash Navi, CFP®, CPA, Controller & Wealth Manager

Our goal is to help our clients build and grow their wealth and tax planning plays an important role in this process. We recommend that you mark your calendar to review your finances in the first week of October, annually. Take this time to review your income for the year from employment, businesses, investments, or any other sources. This will help you project your tax liability ahead of time and allow your financial advisor or tax accountant to find strategies to reduce your tax burden. Implementing this consistently and reducing your tax burden annually will have a compounding impact over the years and increase your retirement nest egg. Here are a few tax planning strategies to keep in mind:

IRAs and Retirement Plans

Take full advantage of tax-advantaged retirement accounts. By contributing to Traditional IRAs and employer-sponsored retirement plans such as 401(k) plans, you can reduce your taxable income and lower your taxes. For 2022, you can contribute up to $20,500 to a 401(k) plan ($27,000 if you’re age 50 or older) and up to $6,000 to a traditional IRA ($7,000 if you’re age 50 or older).

Roth Conversions

If you are in a lower tax bracket this year and expect your income tax rate to increase in the future, you may want to consider a Roth IRA conversion. You can convert all or part of your pre-tax retirement account into a Roth IRA and pay the taxes now at a lower rate. The funds in your Roth IRA will continue to grow tax free, and you will have more income flexibility in retirement.

Charitable Donation

If you are charitably inclined, you should plan your donations in advance to ensure you maximize the tax benefits. For those over age 70.5, you may want to consider Qualified Charitable Distribution (QCD), where you can transfer up to $100K from your IRA to a charity. This method not only reduces your Required Minimum Distribution (RMD), but the distribution is also excluded from your taxable income.

Tax Bracket Management

The IRS uses a progressive tax system which means as your income grows, it is subject to a higher tax rate. Therefore, it is important to know in which of the seven federal tax brackets you will fall into. In your high-income years, you may want to reduce your tax liability by increasing your retirement contribution or utilize a tax-loss harvesting strategy. On the other hand, in low-income years, you may want to consider Roth IRA conversions, accelerate income recognition, or postpone deductible expenses.

Tax planning should be part of every individual investor’s financial and retirement plan. There are many strategies available for individuals and business owners, but it requires proper planning throughout the year. If you’d like to learn more about tax planning strategies unique to your personal circumstances, feel free to Talk With Us!

Disclosure: BFSG does not make any representations or warranties as to the accuracy, timeliness, suitability, completeness, or relevance of any information prepared by any unaffiliated third party, whether linked to BFSG’s website or blog or incorporated herein and takes no responsibility for any such content. All such information is provided solely for convenience purposes only and all users thereof should be guided accordingly. Please remember that different types of investments involve varying degrees of risk, and there can be no assurance that the future performance of any specific investment or investment strategy (including those undertaken or recommended by Company), will be profitable or equal any historical performance level(s). Please see important disclosure information here.

By:  Henry VanBuskirk, CFP®, Wealth Manager

The current rule states that you must take your first Required Minimum Distribution (RMD) by April 1^st of the year after you reach 72 and annually thereafter by December 31^st of each year. When the SECURE Act became law on December 20, 2019, the RMD age was pushed back from age 70.5 to age 72. 

Plans affected by RMD rules are: 401(k) plans, 403(b) Plans, 457 Plans, Traditional IRAs, SEP IRAs, SIMPLE IRAs, Inherited IRAs and Inherited Roth IRAs. Defined Benefit and Cash Balance plans satisfy their RMDs by starting monthly benefit payments (or a lump sum distribution) at the participant’s required beginning date.

If you’re still employed by the plan sponsor of a 401(k) and are not considered to be a more than 5% owner, your plan may allow you to delay RMDs until you retire. The delay in starting RMDs does not extend to owners of traditional IRAs, Simplified Employee Pensions (SEPs), Savings Incentive Match Plans for Employees (SIMPLEs) and SARSEP IRA plans.

The RMD value is calculated based on the qualified investment account’s value on December 31^st of the prior year and is based on standardized IRS guidelines (i.e., the RMD for 2022 is based on the value of the account on 12/31/2021). The prior year’s year-end balance is divided by a life expectancy factor issued by the IRS.

 If you have more than one IRA, you must calculate the RMD for each IRA separately each year. However, you may aggregate your RMD amounts for all your IRAs and withdraw the total from one IRA or a portion from each of your IRAs. You do not have to take a separate RMD from each IRA. If you have more than one defined contribution plan, you must calculate and satisfy your RMDs separately for each plan and withdraw that amount from that plan (Exception: If you have more than one 403(b) tax-sheltered annuity account, you can total the RMDs and then take them from any one (or more) of the tax-sheltered annuities).

For inherited IRAs and inherited Roth IRAs, if the account was inherited before the SECURE Act was passed, you can take RMDs over your life expectancy. If you inherited the account after the SECURE Act was passed, there are no required annual distributions, but the account must be depleted within 10 years of the account owner’s death unless the beneficiary is a spouse, a disabled or chronically ill individual, or a minor child until they reach the age of majority. 

Now let’s take a look at the options available to you for your IRA, 401(k), or another qualified investment account subject to RMD rules.

Option 1 – Take your RMD.

This is the most straightforward option. You can take your RMD (or a greater amount if needed), withhold the appropriate federal and state taxes from the distribution, and use the net distribution as needed. If this is your first year taking your RMD, you can take two RMDs in the first required year. This is because the rules say by April 1^st following the year you turn 72. Therefore, you could take your 2022 RMD on February 15, 2023, and your 2023 RMD on June 30, 2023. Doing this would allow you to delay the first year’s RMD for tax purposes for only the first year and means that the 2022 RMD wouldn’t affect your 2022 tax return. However, Uncle Sam will eventually get his recompense and your 2023 tax return would reflect your 2022 RMD and 2023 RMD with this strategy. Note that RMDs are taxed at ordinary income rates.

Option 2 – Don’t take your RMD.

Please don’t go with this option. The IRS has a very steep penalty for those who don’t take their RMD.  The IRS penalty is 50% of the amount not taken on time.  In general, even if you don’t need the money.  You really should take it.  As you will see later, there are many options available to you even if you don’t need the money.

Option 3 – Take your RMD and invest those proceeds into a non-qualified investment account.

With this option, you would take the RMD as normal and withhold federal and state taxes and invest the net distribution into a non-qualified (taxable) investment account. The non-qualified account could be used for general savings to be used during your lifetime, an inheritance to gift to your beneficiaries after your death, or to help save for a future unexpected expense like a long-term care need.

Option 4 – Qualified Longevity Annuity Contract (QLAC).

A QLAC is a strategy where you put in the lesser of 25% of the total value of all your qualified investment accounts or $145,000. A QLAC allows you to fund an annuity contract as early as age 65 and delay income received from the annuity until age 85. The QLAC itself does not count towards the RMD calculation, but the income received from QLAC is treated as ordinary income. This sounds like the slam dunk option, right? Wrong. The answer is it depends on your unique situation (like most answers in financial planning). Yes, a QLAC would help lower the tax bill during the years you defer taking income from the QLAC, at the cost of less net money in your pocket during the early years of your retirement and annuity payments that do not generally have a cost-of-living adjustment tied to them that would increase your tax bill because you still have RMDs on top of the QLAC payments. A QLAC is generally also an irrevocable decision. We would be happy to discuss the pros and cons of purchasing a QLAC if you have further questions.

Option 5 – Qualified Charitable Distribution (QCD).

For the altruist (who also likes not paying taxes), a QCD is an option. If there is a charity (a 501(c)(3) organization) that you feel passionate about, you can donate up to $100,000 per year (as of tax year 2022) directly from your qualified investment account to that charity tax-free. This helps you avoid the distribution being included in your taxable income and is especially valuable for those who don’t typically itemize on their tax returns. The key word is “directly”, as if you physically take the RMD check and then turn around and write a check to that charity, that does not count. For those over age 70.5, QCDs can be used before you are required to take your RMD at age 72. We can work with you to make sure that your QCD is done correctly.

Option 6 – College Planning.

Maybe you have a sizable estate and are concerned about making sure your grandchildren can attend college. With this option, you can put the net RMD funds into a 529 Plan that would grow tax-free and withdrawals can be tax-free if the funds withdrawn from a 529 Plan are used for qualified educational expenses (i.e., tuition, books, room and board, etc.). Contributions to this investment account may even be tax-deductible in your state. Also, since this is considered a gift, you are lowering the size of your taxable estate, which could help your heirs at the time of your passing. Normally you are only allowed to gift $16,000 per year (or $32,000 per year if you elect gift splitting with your spouse) per beneficiary. But with a 529 plan, you can gift 5 years’ worth of gifts in only one year (“superfunding”).  This means that you could potentially gift $80,000 per beneficiary for a single tax filer or $160,000 per beneficiary for a married couple into the 529 plan and lower your taxable estate by that amount. There are a few moving parts in this example, including possibly filing a gift tax return, so we would need to work with you and possibly your accountant and estate planning attorney to make sure this would all go according to plan.

Now that we have an idea of the different options available to you, we would like to illustrate examples of how some of these options can be used in a real-world setting.

*If you have a QLAC, the calculations could differ, but the general idea of the flowchart would still be the same. 

The goal of this article was to illustrate that there are many different options available to you (including ones not illustrated in this article). Also, check out this 2-minute BFSG Short which gives a high-level overview of the most important things to know about RMDs. Our team is available to discuss these concepts with you in further depth if you have any other questions and to evaluate what option would be best for your unique situation.  

Disclosure: BFSG does not make any representations or warranties as to the accuracy, timeliness, suitability, completeness, or relevance of any information prepared by any unaffiliated third party, whether linked to BFSG’s website or blog or incorporated herein and takes no responsibility for any such content. All such information is provided solely for convenience purposes only and all users thereof should be guided accordingly. Please remember that different types of investments involve varying degrees of risk, and there can be no assurance that the future performance of any specific investment or investment strategy (including those undertaken or recommended by Company), will be profitable or equal any historical performance level(s). Please see important disclosure information here.