Fourth Quarter 2021|Jim Williams| Over the years, and much more recently, I've had a lot of conversations with folks about the transition from accumulation to decumulation, from work to retirement. These conversations have ranged from coaching and counseling on very simple and straightforward issues to extremely complex ones; from formal and professional to informal and casual.
How do you invest your money over the long-term? If you've read much of our work, you've probably noticed we embrace evidence-based investing. But what does that mean?
In our last two pieces, we covered some tools of the tax-planning trade, as well as how to deploy them for tax-efficient investing. Tax planning isn’t just for your investments. Life happens. Often, we cannot predict its next moves. But we can weave each event into the tax-planning fabric of your financial life.
Third Quarter 2021|Jim Williams| This is a brief revisit of some basics of personal finance. Consider this cash flow paradigm: Income, less taxes, less consumption equals investment. A different statement of the formula is that money from income can only go one of three places: taxes, consumption, or savings/investment. This is not higher math. It is arithmetic. Let's examine the elements of the formula.
In our last piece, we introduced some of the tools of the tax-planning trade. These include tax-sheltered accounts for saving toward retirement, healthcare, and education, as well as tax-efficient tools for charitable giving, emergency spending, and estate planning. It’s one thing to have the tools. It’s another to make best use of them. After all, the same paintbrush can create a valuable work of art, or a clashing mess on canvas. It all depends on how you use the brush.
Whether you’re saving, investing, spending, bequeathing, or receiving wealth, there’s scarcely a move you can make without considering how taxes might influence the outcome. No wonder people get nervous when there’s lots of talk about higher taxes, but little certainty on what may come of it, and who it might affect. How do we plan when we cannot know?