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.
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.
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: 
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: 
Required minimum distributions (RMDs) are required distributions from qualified retirement plans. RMDs are commonly associated with traditional IRAs, but they also apply to 401(k)s and SEP IRAs.The tax code does not allowtaxpayers to keep funds in their qualified retirement plans indefinitely. Eventually, assets must be distributed, and taxes must be paid on those distributions. If a retirement plan owner takes no distributions, or if the distributions are not large enough, he or she may have to pay a 50% penalty on the amount that is not distributed. (Note that distributions are not required to be taken from Roth IRAs while the account owner is alive.)
Effective for 2022 and later years, Congress reduced the threshold for the Form 1099-K filing requirement from $20,000 to a mere $600. So, you might ask, what does that have to do with me? This change can impact taxpayers in several ways, some unexpected, so you may find yourself in for a surprise that can be unpleasant in some situations.
When Congress enacts tax laws, many times whether the law applies is based on the age of the taxpayer or a taxpayer’s dependent. Reaching a certain age sometimes provides a tax benefit, while in other cases there’s a tax “penalty” – meaning that a specific type of income becomes taxable, or a credit no longer applies. Most of these age-related tax rules concern dependent children or retirement plan contributions or distributions. If you or a member of your tax family is having one of these special birthdays this year, you may be interested in knowing how your taxes will be affected, so here are some birthdays (or half-birthdays in a couple of cases) that have tax significance, listed by the age as of the birthday:
Estimated tax payments are not just for the self-employed. They are for anyone whose withholding and tax credits are significantly less than their projected tax liability, and if used properly, can protect a taxpayer from underpayment penalties.