Tax Planning

Want to reduce your taxable income? Here is how you rearrange your investments so you pay less in taxes.

A little planning ahead can go a long way to keeping your taxes as low as possible in retirement. In order to plan ahead properly, you'll need to understand how your retirement income will be taxed. Based on that, you can choose the right strategies to keep your tax bill as low as possible.

Use a capital loss to minimize tax on future gains. By exchanging funds, you can realize a capital loss for tax reasons without necessarily incurring a long term investment loss.

Learn ways to bundle expenses into a single calendar year to maximize itemized tax deductions.

To implement effective tax planning strategies, use these ideas to look at your expected taxable income each year, and figure out how to shift income to a lower tax bracket.

Year-end tax planning helps you discover planning opportunities. Perhaps you can withdraw money from an IRA this year and pay no tax, or withdraw slightly less from your IRA, and thus your social security will not be taxable, or convert a portion of your regular IRA to a ROTH IRA and pay tax at only the 15% rate. You will never discover these opportunities without year-end tax planning.

Taxation of employee stock options is tricky. Tax planning and working with an experienced tax advisor in this area is important.