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4 Year End Tax Planning Strategies to Know

SGH Wealth Management

To maximize efficiency in your personal finances, it’s important to know your tax deadlines to ensure nothing falls through the cracks. Certain items like IRAs and Health Savings Accounts (HSA) give you until the tax deadline of April 15th the following year to make your contributions, while many others call for a December 31st calendar year deadline. Before this year flies by, here are items to investigate before December 31st to make sure No Stone Is Left Unturned:

  1. Roth Conversions – A Taxable Distribution between a Pre-Tax Retirement account directly into a Roth IRA in the efforts of locking in a lower tax rate, reducing future RMDs and tax-free withdrawals from the NEW Roth IRA in the future.
  2. Tax Loss Harvesting – Selling investments to realize a loss in the efforts of offsetting realized gains of other investments, thus lowering your taxes owed.
  3. Qualified Charitable Contributions (QCD) – Considered one of the most efficient ways to give to charities, making your charitable contributions directly from your retirement accounts receives the highly sought-after Trifecta of Tax Benefits: deduction, tax deferred growth and tax free distribution.
  4. Required Minimum Distributions (RMD) – if of age, this distribution must be taken beforeDecember 31st to avoid a hefty 50% tax rate.

And there’s even more… having a proactive wealth manager who doesn’t wait to work until you call makes sure no future opportunities fall through the cracks.