If you’re like most people, your taxes represent one of your largest annual expenses, yet often little or no planning is done to minimize your tax bill. During tax-season, tax-preparers rarely have time to explore planning opportunities and they may not be aware of their clients' entire financial picture.
Therefore, we collaborate with our clients' tax-preparer to identify and seize tax reduction opportunities.
Significant opportunities to lower your tax bill involve the management of your investments. A study citing research from Morningstar and Ernst & Young noted that tax optimization strategies incorporated across model portfolios can generate up to 1.83% per year in improved after-tax outcomes. Over an investor’s lifetime, that can translate into an improvement in outcomes as high as 33%.
Overall, you might be able to save on taxes by:
- Restructuring your investment portfolio to produce a higher after-tax return
- Establishing a tax-savvy estate and legacy plan
- Optimizing lifetime charitable contributions
- Maximizing qualified plan and IRA contributions and distributions
- Utilizing the alphabet-soup of tax-advantaged accounts (e.g. 529, SEP, Roth, 403(b), IRA, 401(k), HSA)