Tax & estate planning: archive
Every Tax & estate planning story in Advisors, newest first. 189 stories
1 story
Coastal 360 and Sovereign Financial use projections to show wealthy retirees they can spend
Alicia Fuller and Charles Failla walk clients through cash-flow projections before spending; one preceded a $150,000 world trip.
4 stories
Prudential survey: only 14% of retirees and pre-retirees feel at ease spending savings
Financial planning improved spending confidence, the study found, while 61% of respondents with more than $500,000 in investable assets reported discomfort about discretionary spending.
IRS guidance sets boundaries for 351 exchanges used in ETFs
Kitces reports the deferral strategy remains viable for clients with large embedded gains; the agency flags rapid turnover, mismatched seed baskets and pre-arranged contributions.
Colorado voters choose between a 4.4% flat tax and an 8.4% top rate
Amendment 87 would authorize a graduated-rate income tax, with initial statutory rates of 7.4, 7.9 and 8.4 percent above $500,000, $750,000 and $1 million.
Goldman Sachs retirement survey: 37% of respondents earning over $500,000 live paycheck to paycheck
The poll of 5,106 workers and retirees aged 45 to 75 also finds annuity demand rising, a T. Rowe Price executive said in the same briefing.
3 stories
SEC staff statement details Trump Account auto-enrollment and names BNY as trustee
Eligible children will have Auto Accounts established on or about Oct. 1, 2026, under IRA rules that end the year the beneficiary turns 17.
SEC proposes exam route to accredited investor status
The Sept. 30 rulemaking would also loosen interval-fund redemptions and cap performance fees, which would change how advisors size a private credit sleeve.
TIAA survey: 53% of adults fear outliving savings more than underspending
The 2026 Retirement in the Age of AI and GLP-1s Survey of 1,000 U.S. adults ages 18 to 65 also found Generation Z the most concerned that AI will threaten careers and savings.
3 stories
IRS plans guidance on trades used to harvest losses against ordinary income
Currency bets and equity-swap-and-futures combinations are among the structures the IRS named in Monday's notice, which bars no trade yet.
Butler researchers pitch a flexible 3% rule as a 4% withdrawal alternative
The Butler paper pairs a fixed, inflation-adjusted baseline with performance-based withdrawals, while advisors say taxes, RMDs and client behavior still shape the plan.
A 0.5%-of-AGI charitable deduction floor takes effect in 2026, and bunching offsets it
Kitces explains how a donor-advised fund lets clients pay the floor once instead of annually, and when the 2/37ths reduction applies.
2 stories
California billionaire-tax measure goes to voters in November with legal risk unresolved
A Tax Foundation panel calls the measure a first-in-a-nation state wealth tax and leaves valuation, constitutional challenge and whether California would ever collect unresolved.
2025 SEP funding and two IRA corrections share an October 15 deadline
Advisors have until October 15 to fund 2025 SEP IRAs for extended business returns, remove excess 2025 contributions, and recharacterize contributions clients have changed their minds about.
1 story
Lodging carries the per diem increase; meals stay put
The new substantiation rates pay more for the room and nothing extra for the plate, reshuffling which per-diem clients actually come out ahead.
3 stories
Entity structure has become an exit decision, not a formation one
The July 2025 law made 199A permanent and widened the QSBS exclusion, putting a structure the owner picked years ago back on the agenda with the bill arriving at the sale.
The 85-year-old's Roth conversion is a beneficiary question
Disability status, automatic for SSDI recipients, decides whether an inherited Roth pays out over ten years or a lifetime — which makes it conversion-planning input.
The succession gap is a price nobody wrote down
Founders who never put a number on the internal buyout do not avoid the sale; they hand the terms to whichever outside buyer drafts them first.
4 stories
Stevens's bill would add a claiming age advisors must price
The bill names no eligible occupations and no reduction for filing at 60, leaving advisors to gather the paper and price the trade-off before the list exists.
The hospital question is the cheapest test of an aging book
Noticing decline is the easy half; a power of attorney the custodian will actually accept is what keeps a client's account out of guardianship.
The wealth transfer's 6% retention number is a segmentation problem
A survey of 1,008 future inheritors finds the children already have advisers, which makes next-generation engagement a matter of adding households before the estate settles, not after.
The NUA trade is won on cost basis, not tax rates
Specific identification can shrink the ordinary-income piece of an appreciated employer-stock position, provided per-share purchase records survive.
3 stories
The $15 million exemption is the wrong number for multi-state clients
State estate taxes start far below the federal exemption, and the domicile test that decides them rewards advisors who document intent while the client is still moving.
The IRS says the tribal tax credit does not exist
Promoters are selling credits with no basis in federal law, and the clients most likely to be shown the pitch are the ones whose tax bills are large enough to make it credible.
Young clients reordered their goals. Advisors should reorder the plan.
A U.S. Bank survey finds 63% to 74% of young wealth builders would fund retirement before a down payment, making the order of a client's first dollars an advisory decision rather than a default.
3 stories
Montana-plate tax savings now carry a California audit risk
A California bill awaiting Governor Newsom's signature would treat certain out-of-state shell companies as state residents, putting collector-car title structures back on the planning table.
Family-first estate planning runs into the industry's pay structure
A new series on African American estate planning puts discovery before documents; the obstacle is how advisors are paid.
The college no-man's-land is a retirement problem in disguise
Families too rich for aid and too stretched to write the check need a funding order, not another savings pitch, and the advisor who pays tuition out of the retirement portfolio trades the client's income floor for a diploma.
5 stories
The retirement agency gap is a floor-and-reserve sale
Edelman's inaugural confidence report finds 84% of pre-retirees want an active role and 60% cannot say how their savings are invested, which argues for income floor and reserve planning ahead of any education effort.
Bonus depreciation is a timing trade worth pricing, not a windfall
The Tax Foundation's three corrections give advisors the arithmetic for a year-end purchase conversation, and a reason to stop calling the writeoff a permanent cut.
Clients asking for a simple estate plan want control, not fewer documents
The advisor's real deliverable is a plan the family can run, with a written record that the tradeoffs were chosen rather than discovered.
The beneficiary's clock sets inherited-IRA RMDs
A Slott Report mailbag answer ties the inherited-IRA divisor to the beneficiary's age and the Roth five-year rule to the owner's original contribution date.
The October decisions that set the withdrawal rate
Three dated checkpoints — an excess 2025 IRA contribution, a federal healthcare subsidy that needs a stress case, and a fraud deduction the House voted to restore — show why the fall calendar moves the spending plan more than an allocation call does.
2 stories
A fraud tax fix that lands at the decumulation desk
The House's 408-17 vote restores a deduction fraud victims lost in 2018; the penalty waiver and one-year repayment window are the pieces advisors can plan around.
The last penalty-free exit for 2025 IRA contributions closes Oct. 15
Unwind the 2025 IRA contribution by October 15, or the 6% penalty repeats annually for as long as the excess remains in the account.
3 stories
Retirement income's 8% adoption rate hides a reserve fund problem
Vanguard's decumulation survey shows where the income conversation should start: with the reserve fund clients already think they are running.
The windfall that needs the most hours is often the smallest
The smallest windfall is often the one that needs the most hours; practices that schedule by asset size spend their scarcest resource on the client who needs it least.
Protect the retirement floor before writing the tuition check
Tuition's inflation-adjusted climb is real but far flatter since 2010, and parents' retirement is the only side of the tradeoff with no way back.
1 story
The Roth conversion screen should start with taxable assets
Slott's negative list reorders the conversion conversation: three of the five disqualifiers are answered with a balance sheet, not a projection.
1 story
Luminary's $22 million round is a bet on the estate-document layer
The raise is small against a claimed $500 billion in client assets supported; the real wager is whether advisors come to treat Luminary as the place those documents live.
1 story
OZ 2.0 is a scheduling problem dressed as a tax break
The 2027 rolling deferral hands advisors a quarter to build the exit plan before the entry gets sold.