Year-End Gift Giving with Tax Benefits
The holiday season is customarily a time of giving gifts, whether to your favorite charity, family members or others. Some gifts even provide a variety of tax benefits.
But be wary; during the holiday season, you may receive phone calls, texts, emails, snail mail, or appeals on social networking sites for donations for various causes. However, some of these appeals may come from fraudsters and not legitimate charities. Unfortunately, this happens every holiday season.
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Year-end is rapidly approaching as are the holidays. So before you become distracted with the seasonal celebrations, it may be in your best interest to consider year-end tax moves that can benefit you for both 2022 and 2023.
It’s been a rough Fall for the stock market. So much so that you should probably carefully review your portfolio and other capital transactions to minimize gain or maximize losses for the year. Remember, capital gains and losses are not just limited to stock transactions. For example, stock losses can offset the gain from the sale of a rental. So you may want to consider other capital transactions you’ve already made this year or could make before the end of the year that would result in a gain that can be offset with stock losses. There can be any number of scenarios that might benefit from year-end planning.
The Social Security Administration recently announced that Social Security beneficiaries will get an 8.7% increase to their benefits in 2023. Thanks to the current high inflation this is the highest increase in 40 years, and the second year in a row that there’s been a substantial increase, 5.9% in 2022 and now 8.7% for 2023. The table below reflects the COLA benefits going back to 1976. As you will note, the COLA increases have been relatively stable in recent years except for 2008.
Now that your taxes are complete and filed for the year, you are probably wondering what old tax records can be discarded. If you are like most taxpayers, you have records from years ago that you are afraid to throw away. To determine how to proceed, it is helpful to understand why the records needed to be kept in the first place.
The Inflation Reduction Act signed into law by President Biden on August 16, 2022, gives new life to the federal tax credit for the purchase and installation costs of residential solar-power systems and provides guidelines allowing batteries to also qualify for the credit.
With the recent passage of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, the electric vehicle credit has undergone some major changes. Although most of the changes take effect in 2023, to qualify for the current credit, vehicles purchased after August 15, 2022, are required to meet the final assembly requirement of the new law.
Throughout your life there will be certain significant occasions that will impact not only your day-to-day living but also your taxes. Here are a few of those events: 
Military members benefit from a variety of special tax benefits. These include certain non-taxable allowances, non-taxable combat pay, and a variety of other special tax provisions. Here is a rundown on the most prominent of the tax benefits. 
A frequent question that arises when borrowing money is whether or not the interest will be tax deductible. That can be a complicated question, and unfortunately not all interest an individual pays is deductible. The rules for deducting interest vary, depending on whether the loan proceeds are used for personal, investment, or business activities. Interest expense can fall into any of the following categories: