Financial Planning

Planning to minimize taxes is an essential piece of the overall financial plan, but tax laws can be complex.  Our planners pay critical attention to taxes during every step of your financial planning process.

Tax Diversification

There are several ways to develop a tax efficient investment strategy in order to create more flexibility in managing your taxes now and in the future. Your money can be held in three different types of accounts and they are all taxed differently. Our team can diversify your assets into these three accounts in order to create the highest after-tax net income.

Roth Conversion Strategies

Most individuals have the majority of their retirement assets in tax-deferred accounts that are subject to ordinary income tax. We may recommend strategies to shift assets from the tax-deferred accounts to tax free accounts using Roth conversions so that you can have more control over taxes in retirement. With a Roth conversion, you simply “prepay” the taxes on the amount you convert, which allows you to capture all future growth and income as tax free. Our financial planners and CPA’s use meticulous strategies to project how much money you should convert to a Roth IRA over a period of time in order to control your tax bracket long-term and get the most value from your investments.

Tax-Loss Harvesting

Tax-Loss Harvesting is a strategy we use to turn money lost from an investment into a profitable opportunity. We use the capital losses that inevitably occur to reduce your tax bill to the extent possible. You don’t truly have a gain or a loss on any asset until you sell it. When the asset is sold we are able to use that capital loss to offset your capital gains and income tax. The investment can then be replaced with a similar investment in order to maintain proper balance and diversification within your portfolio.

Additional Comprehensive Strategies

Our firm utilizes comprehensive tax planning strategies when creating all financial plans and we ensure that our investment strategies are tax-efficient. Some additional strategies include asset location, donor-advised funds, defined contribution and defined benefit plans, tax-efficient portfolio rebalancing, charitable gifting and like-kind exchanges for reducing taxes on real estate transactions.