We’re Tax Planners at Heart
Our firm offers annual tax planning as part of our comprehensive financial planning service. While often overlooked, robust tax planning is one of the most valuable pieces of a complete financial plan, and we are excited to offer it to you.
What is Tax Planning?
Tax planning involves a comprehensive review of your tax return to identify current and future planning opportunities that can help minimize your lifetime tax liability. Unlike tax preparation, typically handled by a tax preparer, tax planning is a proactive strategy aimed at improving your financial outcomes over the long term.
Why is Tax Planning important?
Taxes touch every part of your financial life. Your tax return is a financial fingerprint; it's completely unique to you, complete with valuable clues and information, all of which is buried in dozens of pages and hundreds of numbers. Understanding your return equips us to have more valuable and actionable conversations with you. Additionally, we can demystify the world of income taxes and help you understand this important piece of your financial picture.
Who is Tax Planning for?
Everyone! Regardless of your income sources or filing status, nearly anyone who pays income taxes can benefit from having a professional review of your tax return to identify relevant planning opportunities. At worst, we'll review your return and conclude you are currently maximizing every available tax saving opportunity. That's great "peace of mind" news. Alternatively - and more frequently - we'll identify a handful of tax saving opportunities, both in the current year and in future years.
What kind of opportunities might be identified?
We will evaluate a number of opportunities during tax planning, including topics like most tax efficient retirement vehicles, charitable giving strategies, realizing capital gains, Roth IRA conversions, tax credit eligibility, and more.
Additionally, we specialize in tax planning for equity compensation, such as Incentive Stock Options (ISOs) and Restricted Stock Units (RSUs). These unique compensation types can present both opportunities and challenges when it comes to tax planning. For example:
Incentive Stock Options (ISOs): We evaluate how the timing of exercising ISOs can impact your tax bracket and long-term gains, ensuring you optimize tax treatment and avoid unnecessary tax pitfalls.
Restricted Stock Units (RSUs): RSUs can have a significant tax impact upon vesting. We help strategize how to manage RSUs in a way that minimizes taxes, whether through careful timing of vesting or through tax-efficient investment strategies post-vesting.
We can run projections to see how potential changes (e.g., filing status, dependents, the sale of a business, stock option exercises, etc.) may impact your upcoming tax liability.
What do we need from you?
An electronic pdf copy of your most recent tax return. That’s it. Get us a copy of that most recent tax return, and we will take it from there.
What Don’t We Provide?
At J.F. Williams Co., Inc. we do not prepare tax returns. We believe that tax preparation is a full-time job that requires competent tax professionals that maintain a high level of expertise. Whether it’s the mechanics of reporting tax attributes on various federal and state forms or maintaining a high level of knowledge about the statutory and regulatory scheme for Federal, state and local taxes, they are able to keep up with an ever changing environment.
We urge our clients to retain professional tax guidance for the preparation of tax returns and for the evaluation of most tax planning matters. Having a professional tax preparer focused on specific issues raises the prospect of thoroughness and reduces the likelihood of missing something significant.
Additionally, we do not calculate retirement plan contribution amounts for business-related tax deferral accounts. We leave the responsibility for tracking the applicable tax year for these contributions to the taxpayers themselves and their tax professionals. We’re happy to refer you to professionals who offer these services.