Imagine you live alone on an island. Everything you have to eat, everything you wear, every tool you have, etc. you have to make or get yourself. Your total wealth is the sum of all your efforts. If you have a partner on the island, your combined wealth is the sum of what you both produce. Add a third person, a fourth, and ultimately a billionth, and this doesn’t change!
There are a lot of questions about President Biden’s Build Back Better plan and potential tax law changes, including an adjustment to capital gains taxes. One of the proposals Congress is considering sets the top rate for taxing capital gains at 25%, up from 20% under current law. Another would raise the capital gains tax rate to 39.6% for taxpayers earning $1 million or more. Still another would make the change to capital gains tax retroactive, with a start date of April 2021.1,2
Open enrollment (the annual period when you can enroll in major medical health insurance plans), begins November 1, 2021, and will remain open until January 15, 2022. You will need to enroll by December 15, 2021 for coverage that begins January 1, 2022. For someone looking to change or add coverage, this offers a short window of time to decide on and select your health insurance plan. Before rushing a decision to meet this deadline, take some time now to review and prepare. Below we’ve rounded up our top tips for choosing the right health insurance plan for you and your family’s needs.
The discomfort in talking about plans after death or incapacitation may cause certain myths and misconceptions to circulate. Many people plan their estates diligently, with input from legal, tax and financial professionals. Others plan earnestly but make mistakes that can potentially affect the transfer of their estate. You may have heard some of these assumptions surrounding estate planning, but we’re here to help debunk a few popular myths.
This past week we heard a steady stream of politicians and pundits in Washington drag out the “default” bogie in the discussions about raising the nation’s debt ceiling. There was much posturing on both sides of the aisle as members of both parties and their minions sought to gain the most political points from the situation. Headlines in many papers and many broadcast stories talked about the threat of default, and after the compromise reached last week just as many stories talked about how default was “averted”. “We’ll leave the political scoring to the chattering classes, but what of the threat of default?
From 1975 through 1982, inflation was the single most addressed topic in the Wall Street Journal (and I’m sure in virtually all other business media at that time). We have now gone over a generation barely mentioning it until this year. The resurgence of inflation numbers this spring has caused much angst. Is it a temporary phenomenon, as some believe, due to COVID, reflecting jammed up supply chains as the economy reopens? If this is the case, the “inflation” is not really inflation! Or, is it the beginning of a more persistent threat due to massive government spending and Fed accommodation, as others say? We’ll leave that question until another day. In the meantime, just what do the inflation numbers (up 5.4% in July, for example) mean?