- Be Tax Wise With Your Charitable Contributions
- Donations to charities can be deducted as an itemized deduction on your tax return. This means that to achieve any tax benefit from your charitable donations, you cannot use the standard deduction and instead must itemize your deductions. However, if the total of all your itemized deductions does not exceed the standard deduction amount for the year, then you are better off taking the standard deduction, but in doing so, you will get no tax benefit from your charitable contributions.
- Defer Gains with Qualified Opportunity Funds
- If you have a large capital gain from the sale of a stock, asset, or business and would like to defer that gain with the possibility of excluding some of it from taxation, you may want to check out the new investment vehicle created by tax reform, called a qualified opportunity fund (QOF).
- How to Pay Your Federal Taxes
- If you aren’t one of those lucky Americans who gets a tax refund from the IRS, you might be wondering how you go about paying your balance due. Here are some electronic and manual payment options that you can use to pay your federal income tax:
- Are You Missing a W-2?
- Have you received all of your W-2s? These documents are essential for completing individual income tax returns, as they include the taxable amount of your wages and the amount withheld for federal and (if applicable) state income tax, along with pension plan and other information that is needed to prepare your return. Employers have until January 31st to provide or send you your W-2 earnings statement covering what you earned in the prior year, either electronically or in paper form. If you have not received your W-2 in a reasonable time frame (allowing for time for mail delivery) after the January 31 due date, follow these steps:
- It's Not Too Late to Make a 2018 Retirement-Plan Contribution
- Have you been ignoring your future retirement needs? This tends to happen when people are young; because retirement is far in the future, they believe that they have plenty of time to save for it. Some people even ignore the issue until late in life, which causes them to scramble to fund their retirement. Others even ignore the issue altogether, assuming that they will qualify for Social Security and that the resulting income will take care of their retirement needs.
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