How to Reduce Taxes Under New Tax Law (2018) Interest Income

Interest and dividend income are other areas of the tax code that punishes the ignorant. You have income on lines 8a, 8b, 9a and 9b? Why? Is there a strategic reason for earning this income in order to pay tax? If so, that's fine. Maybe you need the cash to help pay the bills, pay tuition, take a vacation, etc. However if you're receiving this income because of how your investments are designed without any strategic intent, I suggest you consider a different plan of action Let's start by looking at what types of income you have. If you have interest income, from bonds and/or CDs, this income is taxed at ordinary income rates. Worse yet, there is NOTHING you can do about it other than paying the tax on it...as ordinary income. Consider moving ANY holding you have that yields ordinary income(OI), into your Traditional IRA in order to defer those OI taxes as long as you possibly can. Remember your IRA is taxed as Ordinary Income anyway. So, having an IRA taxed at those rates PLUS having investment income taxed at the same means your paying too much in tax. If you have municipal bond income, i.e., 'tax exempt interest' consider scrapping those and instead moving into corporate and/or government bonds inside your IRA. Because municipals are tax free they offer a much lower interest rate than corporate and government bonds. So, for simplicity, say a municipal bonds yields 2.5% a corporate bond will pay more because it's income is taxed. A corporate bond with similar maturity date may pay 4%. This means it takes $320,000 in assets to yield $8,000 in income for the municipal bond but only $227,272 for the corporate bond AFTER taxes for someone in the 12% bracket! That is a significant difference in the allocation amount to corporate bonds over tax free bonds to receive the same after tax income. We don't municipal bonds, unless we're in the higher tax brackets, those above 22%. We don't want ANY bonds in our taxable account either. We want bonds in our Traditional IRA. Secondly, we want dividend paying stocks, the investments that give us income on lines 9a and 9b, in our ROTH IRA. DIvidends we don't need only cause higher taxes. Avoid that. Move your income-oriented stocks to your Roth. Lastly, we want your most aggressive holdings, ideally the ones with little to no dividends or capital gains in your taxable accounts. The unrealized appreciation on these investments cause you NO tax. Because these holdings are aggressive they should pay no dividends whatsoever. Lastly when it does come time to sell a position in order to generate cash, you can work the tax code to do it in the most tax-favored way possible. You can't do with other income you receive from your investments. Finally, at death, the growth of these aggressive accounts transfer TAX FREE to your heirs because of the step up basis rules. IRA accounts don't have that benefit. Roth IRA accounts don't have a step up in basis but they are tax free anyway, which is just as good. At the end of the day, it's up to YOU to understand the tax code to take advantage of it to your benefit. If your advisor isn't helping you with this, well, hate to sound brutal but seek a new advisor! ================================= If you like what you see, a thumbs up helps A LOT. So, give me a thumbs up, please! Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE by clicking here:    / @heritagewealthplanning   GET MY BOOK: Strategic Money Planning: 8 Easy Ways To Put Your House In Order It's FREE if you're a Kindle Unlimited Subscriber! https://amzn.to/2wKGi50 GET ALL MY LATEST BLOGPOSTS: http://heritagewealthplanning.com/blog/ PODCAST: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/j... LET'S SOCIALIZE! Facebook:   / heritagewealthplanning   Linkedin:   / joshscandlen   Quora: https://www.quora.com/profile/Josh-Sc... Google +: https://plus.google.com/u/1/108893802...