Tax Tips To Beat The IRS By Age (Legally!)

However, tax avoidance, legal tax avoidance is very smart.

And it's actually encouraged by our current tax code. And so excited because the day we're talking about strategies to help you pay less in taxes. And this looks different depending on your stage of life. So in true money guy fashion, we're going to break it down by age. With that, let's dive right in.

All right, Brian, so let's talk about how to beat the IRS, specifically at the beginning of your financial journey in your 20s.

“And I think the first one, I think this is counterintuitive to a lot of folks at this stage.”

Don't overcomplicate it. Well, yeah, look, I mean, a lot of things have changed just in my time that I've been dealing with taxes is that now the majority of us are just going to take the standard deduction. Matter of fact, 91% of taxpayers choose to take the standard deduction. And in 2022 is the most recent data that we have from the tax policy center.

And that makes sense because the standard deduction after recent legislation a few years back has actually made it where the numbers are high enough that it captures most people. Yeah, while you could go out and itemize and you could go try to find those deductions. For most young people, it's going to be really hard to get over the standard thresholds. If you're just looking at 2026 numbers, the standard deduction for a single file or $16,100.

For a married filing jointly file or over $32,000. So rather than trying to spin your wheels and track all these expenses and figure out what you're going to do from a deduction standpoint for a lot of folks keep it simple. Just take the standard deduction.

“You're likely going to be exactly where you need to be.”

And this next tip get your employer match. Look, this is step two of the financial order of operations. It's a two for because we absolutely loved the three money that your employers loading you up with.

But here's the thing a lot of times these employers are going to require you to do.

They're going to a 50 cents on the dollar or a dollar for dollar match. When you put that money into the system, you actually, there's some tax benefits that actually come from those contributions as well. Yeah, so not always at free money. There are tax advantages as well. And then once you've gotten that free employer match, we want you to prioritize your tax free account.

So these are things like your Roth IRA, your Roth 401k, your health things account. These are wonderful mechanisms because even though you don't get a tax deduction today, unless you're doing the HSA, those dollars grow tax deferred. And then assuming you make qualified withdrawals, you can actually take that money out completely tax free. It is literally a way to legally hide money from the government forever.

So if you're not prioritizing the tax free accounts, there's a good chance that you're missing out on a bunch of huge tax savings. Now look, there's going to be people say, yeah, but you're paying the taxes now versus like, and that's that's part of, that's a feature. That's not actually a thing that's working against you because for a lot of you, you have literally decades of growth. We want to lean towards

compounding growth and seeing all that compounding growth tax free, super exciting and super

powerful for you. And then another reality when it comes to taxes for a lot of folks in their

20s is that we know a lot of 20 somethings have student loans that they're currently working on knocking out. Well, don't forget, for certain tax payers, you can actually deduct your student loan interest. You can deduct up to $2,500 of interest paid on qualified loans during the year or whatever you pay to those loans, whichever's lower, assuming you meet certain income thresholds or our incomes at once you crawl over those you cannot deduct. So if you're someone paying student loans

and your income qualifies, make sure that finds its way on your tax exchange. And this doesn't require you to optimize. This is something that you get to do whether, you know, whether you're out of miles, whether you take the standard deduction. This is outside of that, so make sure you take advantage of the opportunity. So the theme in your 20s is don't over complicated. But now as we move into our 30s, things do become to get a little more out of our set complicated,

but they do get a little bit more nuanced. So how do you think about in your 30s,

“lowering your tax bill and beating the IRS? Well, I think the first thing is you have to be”

intentional. And specifically, we want you to be intentional with your three tax buckets. Yeah, if you're not familiar, and by the way, we build a lot of this into the financial order of operations. The three tax buckets are your three different tax accounts. You have tax free, which are your Roth accounts. You think about your Roth 401k, your Roth IRAs. And we even put the health savings account in this because you have to have access to a high deductible health insurance

plan that's its own choice, but still tax free growth is an opportunity. And then we have our tax

traditional IRA that you're making pre-tax, they go in tax deferred. And then that third bucket

“is after tax. And that's going to be your taxable brokerage accounts. Those bridge accounts”

that hopefully after you build up all the tax free, the tax deferred, you're probably going to start dumping money into those after tax because that's going to be the easy access accounts if you are part of that retire early community. Now, a lot of people say, guys, does this, does this really matter? I mean, I hear you talk about the three buckets, but in practical terms, is this even a significant thing to think about? I want to show you that when you're in your

third, is want you to begin with the end in mind. I want you to think about the future. And that's why the three tax buckets matter. So let's think about two tax payers. Let's say that we have inefficient Ivan and Mania, the mute that have both made it to financial independence. And in their financial independence, they're going to live off of $200,000 of retirement income. Now, inefficient Ivan, he just put his entire career maxing out the 401k, which is great. He just put

money's 401k in saved on a pre-tax basis, but never really worried about the three tax buckets.

Mania, on the other hand, followed the financial order of operation. So he had his pre-tax bucket and his tax defer or his pre-tax is after tax and his tax free bucket. So when they get to retirement, and when they go to begin living off of their assets, inefficient Ivan, even when he starts collecting social security, is going to pay ordinary income on all of his income. Every dollar he pulls out of that pre-tax account is going to be tax-ordinary income. Mania, the mute is different. He pays

ordinary income on his pre-tax withdrawals. He pays ordinary income on his social security, but the after-tax account, the bridge account, the brokerage account, has favorable tax rates. And obviously, the Roth and HSA are going to be completely tax-free. So if we think about what their actual tax returns would look like. Ivan is going to be in the 22% marginal bracket, and because we work in a progressive tax system, his effective rate is going to be just under 13%.

That means that on his $200,000 of retirement income, he's paying a touch over $25,000 in taxes, which means he has about $174,000 to spend. Compare that to Mania, who is literally living off of the exact same income, he's only in the 12% marginal tax bracket. Again, we're going to work through a progressive tax system. His effective tax rate is only 2%, which means because he focused on the three buckets, he only pays $4,000 in taxes, which means he has $196,000 to spend

in retirement. Almost $20,000 more than Ivan simply because he built his accounts and his account

“structure. Superfession. This is why it's so important. We always say, look, we can give you tons”

of free advices because you can have the desire to keep your financial life super simple in the

beginning. But tax policy, tax planning is definitely going to complicate your life. And we always

talk about this. It's a choose your own adventure. If you do this right, if you maximize the financial order of operations, if you're paying attention to where the intersection is on what the marginal tax rates you're paying, what the savings opportunities are. If you structure it right, you can actually legally manipulate the tax code at the end of your retirement because you get to choose which accounts them up pulling from, how am I pulling from? Because by the way, we didn't even

mention on here a lot of our clients will also have health savings accounts with a lot of reimbursements that they've never taken. So if they need to keep tax rates low so they can get zero capital gains on those after tax accounts, guess what? They have a pot to go pull that money out of to help fund that retirement. The maximize all the planning because when you're in the workforce, you just don't have that much ability. Your earned income is high enough that it's driving you up into

those high tax brackets. But when you retire, you get a lot more flexibility and you get to choose how you want to do your taxes and still stay on the right side of the law. Another thing that happens for a lot of folks in their 30s is this is where we begin to grow families and start to have children. And so one of the things when it comes to tax policy, we want to make sure that you're not forgetting is that there are certain related, there are certain child related tax breaks that

“you ought to be aware of and that you should be taking advantage of in a lot of them have changed”

touch over the past couple of years. Well, let's talk about the big one. Child tax credit. Guys, by the way, you heard me say credit. I didn't say deduction. I said credit. What I love about credits is they are a dollar for dollar reduction in the tax. That's right. So for instance, the new one-big beautiful bill that came out the last year and updated the child tax credit to where now it's $2,200 per qualifying child beginning in 2025. So take for example,

credits, they have two qualifying children and right away their tax bill has dropped by $40,000.

“Do you see how powerful it is? So make sure you understand what you qualify by just having”

children. That's just a tip of the iceberg on this thing. Because that's your child tax credit. But there's also the pending care flexible spending account. Yeah, this is basically a pre-tax account that you can use to go pay for child care while you work. So up to $5,000 per household, you can elect at the beginning of the year. I want to fund this account, $5,000 pre-tax. And I'm going to use that to go provide care for my child. It can be used for things like daycare,

preschool, before or after school care, or even sometimes like summer day camps. If you're out, if you need someone to have child care while you're out working, but it's usually a user or loser, meaning you don't want to put more into the account than you think you will use by the end of the year. But it is one of those unique FSAs that even if you're taking advantage of this, you can still be someone that takes advantage of a HSA, a health savings account.

“Because oftentimes when you participate in a flexible spending account, you can't do an HSA,”

dependent care FSAs don't work that way. So if you're someone who has to pay for child care and your employer offers it's benefit, it's a great way to save on taxes for an expenditure going to incur anyways. You know, I've already earlier gone through the child tax credit. I'm going to give you another credit. This is one back when the 16 years that I was actually

personally preparing taxes for clients. This one was a sleeper. Because always, if I knew somebody

was working or I knew they were a full-time student, I knew they had children. I was the first question I'd ask them because they always overlooked this. I was like, what were your dependent care expenses? Because if you can tell me what your expenses are, we very likely you're going to qualify for this child and dependent care credit where we can get 50% credits up to $3,000 for one qualifying child, $6,000 for two or more, this is a powerful credit that if you're paying for

all these child care expenses so you can go work so you can go back to school, make sure you're taking advantage of the tax credits that are available to help you offset that. But even if you're not dual-income dual-working household, perhaps you have a spouse that stays at home and does not work outside the home. Another thing that you ought to be thinking about in your 30s, it a lot of people don't recognize is that you can actually fund a spousal array. Just because your spouse doesn't

work and does not have any earned income on their own does not mean that they can't fund an array. So we have a lot of clients that even if the spouse is home, we still want to max out Roth IRAs, or we still want to fund the non-deductible additional new back doors. Don't forget that non-working spouses can still have assets accumulate in their name and, at least in my experience,

it's a wonderful thing for them to get to see all the networks they've never used to see that we're

actually putting money in accounts in their name even though they're not working outside the house. Another one that's really powerful, if you have a high deductible health insurance plan, you ought to really consider the health savings account. And why we love these is because look, they get all the benefits of tax-free growth, just like your Roth accounts, but they're actually even better. They can be triple tax advantage because when I say triple tax advantage,

what I mean is you get a deduction on your contribution. You also, they grow completely tax-deferred. And if you use it for qualified medical expenses, you get to pull the money out completely tax-free. That is unheard of that you get the deduction on the front end and you get to pull it out on the back end completely tax-free. Now, I like to think for people in your 30s because maybe this is a buy age, how do you maximize this? In your 20s, you're probably using this as a

clearing account. You put the money in, you take the tax deduction, you pull it right back out to reimburse yourself. By the time you get in your 30s, you might be in the financial situation now where you can start making the contributions, taking the deduction, but then paying for the health care expenses out of pocket. And you say, "Why would you do that? Why would I just use this as a reimbursement or clearing account?" It's because we are sharing with you is that if you actually

load up these health savings accounts, you can go invest those dollars, let them grow over time. And then at any point in the future, you can pay yourself back for those expenses. So these things are very powerful on maximizing what compound and growth can do for you. Still taking reimbursement years in the future, as long as you're keeping the good records and you know, this is something

that I think always tell people, it's a sleeper. And if you're trying to build up, you know that

in retirement. Health care expenses are going to be super expensive. It's going to be multiple, of course, a multiple six figures at this point. This is a great resource. It's going to be there

“for you. Now, we thrown a ton of credits and deductions and accounts. If you want to know more,”

if you want to do a deep dive, we actually have a tax guide that we update every single year. If you

legislation changes. And it's a quick one-stop reference. If you have a tax question, you want to know

“where a limit is, you want to know where credits apply. It is available for free for you out there”

at moneyguide.com/resources. All right, Brown, we're going by age talking about how do we decrease our tax bill and beat the IRS. So now, let's move to the 40s. This is kind of that next stage. This is sort of that fork in the road. You know, 20s was all about simplicity. 30s was about maybe being a little more intentional. Now, 40s is about really doing the hard work. If we're giving it, if we're just giving a short tag on max out. I mean, that really is what you ought to be.

You hopefully you're at the point because we all know peak earning years or in those 40s and even

early 50s. But it's really in the 40s are loaded up. These are some peak earning years.

You ought to be trying to really catch up and max out those tax advantage account. But now, it can be difficult to do because when you think about the limits across all of the accounts that we have to fund at our disposal, the numbers get kind of big. And if we're just thinking about 2026 numbers, if you're participating in an employer-sponsored retirement plan, like a 401k, 403b, 457, and maybe you're a federal employee that participates in the thrift savings plan,

you can defer up to $24,500 of your salary. If you're saving in an IRA, you can do $7,500. If you're self-employed and you want to fund a set IRA, you can do $72,000. Assuming you have income to justify that. If you participate in a simple, you can save $17,000 in $2026. Or if you're someone who's funding a health savings account on the individual level, the limit is $4,400. But on the family level, it's 8750. You can see very quickly that some of these numbers are

pretty high. If you begin stacking some of these, in order to be able to max all these out, it does require a pretty significant income. Yeah, this is one of those things where we won't you because it's not going to be an either-or. A lot of times it can be an hand. Because you can fund your employer plan, but you can and also fund your Roth IRAs. So we like it when people stack things, but we feel like we need a case study or at least an example to show what does it look

like when Mani the Mutant does max out. Yeah, so if Mani was going to max out, he's 401k, 24/5, and he was going to max out his Roth IRA, either directly or via the back door that be another $7,500. Then if he's taking advantage of an HSA on the individual level that be $4,400, that's a total of $36,400 of tax incentivized savings that Mani could do. Well, if we just want to think about a 25% savings rate, that means that Mani would have to making $145,000 an order to max

all these out. So even if your income is not at that level and even if you're not able to max out, that's okay. It's why we designed, probably the thing if we still got it. It's why we designed the

“financial order of operations so that you could know exactly what you should be doing with your”

next dollar in the most tax efficient. Yeah, I want to make sure people don't get frustrated. You can still make it to step seven and eight, even if you don't make $145,000, you just need to pay attention to your 25%, that's what we want you to be. The 25% gross income savings rate, you're going to get beyond maxing out, but once you get through doing the Roth IRA contributions and then you adding that as a percentage to seeing what your retirement with your employer is, then yeah, you can actually

move on to step seven and even step eight without hitting those annual contribution limits. It's more about are you doing the 25%? What I worry about is because I don't, I don't worry about a person making $100,000 saving 25%. They're going to be a okay because social security is going to cover a lot of retirement and other things. What I really worry about are you financial mutants that are getting out there and maybe your income is getting closer to $200,000 and you've locked it

in when you're making $100,000, $120,000. You've got to keep going up because the further you are

“from the social safety net, the more retirement falls on your shoulders. So you need to take”

advantage of what all these tax benefits and savings opportunities are, so you don't get left behind in the future. Hey, boat, you remember what it was like in those early days when we started the company and we were trying to do everything ourselves. Man, we were wearing like 28 different hats. You start the day thinking you're going to work on things like revenue and strategy and by the end of the day, you're working on payroll forms and onboarding documents. Yeah, and if we're

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at Gusto.com/moneygott. One more time, Gusto.com/moneygott. So a lot of what we're talking about today is how do I save taxes today? How do I save taxes this year? But this next one is less about how much you pay in tax this year and more about how much you pay in tax over the lifetime of your financial plan because a lot of folks in their 40s, depending on the situation they're in, it might make sense to strategically begin converting some of your pre-tax assets. Some of the

assets that you accumulated in a higher tax scenario into Roth so that you can get those dollars

“growing tax-free for the long term. Yeah, like I already said, because it's funny how these”

decades start getting married to each other. Like sorry, said, peak earning years during your 40s or 50s. Well, I also think it's your 40s or 50s where you have the one-off life stuff or even early retirement that allows you to do these Roth conversion strategies. And that's the exact type of thing because we're looking to have arbitrage situations with the tax code to take advantage of unique things that we spot. We had a great example of this. We did a

making a millionaire. And but walk them through how did this case study work? And we say literally millions of dollars by just structuring our taxes in a certain way. Yeah, carry and robber we're in this wonderful situation where they were retiring a little bit early and then wanted to think about, okay, well, how should we structure our accounts and what should we be thinking

about? So we said, okay, based on where you guys are, we laid out here's what we anticipate

your tax situation looking like for the rest of your life. And if you're out there listening to the podcast, what you can see on the screen is that every year is an individual tax year. There was one year around age 62 where there was an inherited IRA that was going to pay out. But pretty much they were in a really, really, really low tax bracket until required minimum distribution started at age 75 because a lot of their assets were in pre-tax assets. They had

this quote unquote tax bomb that was going to hit them later in life. They didn't need to pull the money out, but they were being forced to pull the money out because of the way that the tax code is written. So we said, all right, what if instead of waiting for that tax bomb to hit, what if we started doing some strategic Rothkin versions now? And what if we just said, there's a little bit of room left in the 12% tax bracket? What if we just max out the 12% tax bracket every single year

via Rothkin versions until we get to RMD age? Well, by doing that, we were able to decrease in theory the total taxes they would pay over their lifetime by about $600,000. Not only do we decrease that tax bill, but by having those dollars now grow tax free? When we look at the terminal portfolio

value that they would have ended up with, it was a million and a half dollars higher than it

would have been had they not begun on this Rothkin version strategy. So this is one, I won't everybody to think about your tax situation because it's weird from a tax plan to say, wait, I'm going to take on more income now that that seems why would I want to accelerate my income? Well, let us explain, look, when you're in these low tax brackets, 12% is pretty low. I mean, if you think about all, you know, where we are as a country and all the obligations and stuff,

when you're paying 12%, that's a pretty low tax bracket and you might be, I mean, leaving just tons of

“money on the table that especially if you have a 7-figure retirement account, you need to kind of”

perk up in your chair a little bit when we say, look, all those dollars that are 12% you're not maximizing, you might be leaving something in the future behind on this and so much so that you think 12% is great. We've even had a client so we said, well, look, 12% is definitely historically a really good low tax rate, but it because we think you have such a big tax bomb and definitely Terry and Kerry can't fall into this standpoint. We're like, you might even want to go into the

next tier and actually 22% bring that forward so that you're not paying 35% in the future, because that's when taxes can get really expensive and we try to get proactive. But I understand it's a delicate balance, but I'll let you go through the case study some more because nobody likes to pay taxes, but we are trying to think we're thinking long term and we're beginning with

do you much taxes do you pay now versus wait for it to grow and develop into this bomb? That's

“what we do is financial planners try to help you stick the landing so you don't have regrets later.”

Yeah, with Kirin Robert, we said, hey, if you guys don't just max out the 12% bracket, but if we just max out the 22% bracket up until the time that you're inherited IRA pays out, by doing that, we're going to be able to make sure that none of your RMDs later in life fall into that 32% bracket. We're going to be able to keep everything in the 24% well, when we did that, if we consider the base case of them doing nothing, we were able to decrease their cumulative lifetime tax bill

by about $1.3 million. And in saving that $1.3 million in taxes and allowing those dollars to

grow tax free, they actually ended up with almost $3.5 million more at the end of their plan. Now, in reality, this is not prescriptive. This isn't exactly the way that financial plans lay out, but this shows if you can be strategic by thinking about shifting these dollars earlier on in your financial journey, it can have huge six and seven figure impacts later on here. Well, I even think it goes beyond just the taxes because the taxes are one a huge part of it.

Another is, what's the legacy that gets passed on to your loved ones? Believe me, a lot of you have huge seven figure retirement accounts? You're all as somebody's going to pay the taxes on that. And it's still a blessing when you, it makes a bad situation. Nobody wants to lose a loved one, but at least when inheritance has come, somebody's got to pay the taxes on that.

And I always think about, from when I'm doing legacy planning, I love Roth accounts.

Because you know that not only are they when they pull them out tax free, you even have the opportunity

“potentially to let it grow, continue for another 10 years before you have to pull the money out.”

If we do the right strategic tax planning, not only are we going to minimize the long-term impact on you on those required minimum distributions, but we're also going to go out more, if you're beneficiaries to inherit assets that have more Roth assets, so it's not more of a tax bomb for them. It's more of these assets that are going to be able to use for the future and for their own legacy too. Another thing that's likely happened in your 40s is your accounts have gotten larger in size.

And what may have not been an opportunity available to you in your 20s and 30s might begin to look attractive in your 40s. And one of those is when we have bouts of volatility, when we see the market or begin to have some cracks in the wall or worry and have some downturns, you might be someone at this stage of your financial journey that can take advantage of tax loss harvesting, where essentially you sell a loss position, you lock in those losses, you go redeploy those

dollars into a similar, but not identical type investment. You maintain the same investment posture, but now you have this huge tax benefit that you get to carry on in the future.

Yeah, always this is one of those found the silver lining in a bad situation, Bo, whenever

there's volatile periods, we're definitely turning lemons into that lemonade that can help you from a tax pointing standpoint. And I don't know, if you go on the other side of the coin, because that was, you know, consider tax loss harvesting. Another one we like to talk about is accelerate your gains. And you're like, what do you mean? You guys are telling me there's actually some benefits to taking gains before I need the money, we're saying absolutely, you know,

our tax policy has some unique quirks in it. Is it y'all realize that there's actually, if your income's below a certain threshold, there's actually what's called a zero percent capital gains tax. That's right. If you can go ahead and take, if your income is below for married couples, I believe it's right around 97,000 dollars, you can take, you don't pay taxes on your capital gains. So you can imagine, if you're one of these people that you leave the work

force early or you have a year that maybe you're unemployed or one of your spouse's stayed home with the kids and you look at your income and you go, holy cow, we qualify for the zero percent

“capital gains. You should not sleep on that. We could reset your basis higher by going ahead and taking”

advantage of this quirk of the tax code. Yeah, if we think about this in a practical case study sense, again, let's take Mani the Mutant. Let's say that Mani had a $20,000 investment that it performed really well and now it's turned into $50,000 and Mani's trying to figure out, okay, what's the right time? How do I think about divesting out of this position? Well, let's say that something happens, job change, single income household and he is in a situation where the taxable

income for his household is $65,000. He could then sell this entire position, recognize that $30,000 capital gain and it's still going to fall inside that 0% capital gain rate, meaning the tax due on the sell of this holding is going to be zero. But if, however, he were to wait and

kick in and the taxable income now goes to $100,000 and he decides he wants to then sell this

investment. Well, now all $30,000 of that long-term capital gain is subject to the 15% capital gains tax rate where he could have sold it a year before and paid no taxes this year he has to pay $4,500 in taxes. The timing of when you sell your investment, and when you take advantage of these unique opportunities can have thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars of savings available to you. So you can start to see the quirks of the tax code is because this isn't

something you want to find out when you go get your taxes and go, man, I could have done more.

“This is why you need to be proactive and this is the part why he say life gets complicated”

as you start figuring out how do I actually get access to all this money I've been building up in the background. That's where we kind of come in and help people navigate these situations. So that, though, that wraps up the 40s. One other thing I just want to throw this because we get this question all the time. What if I don't want to sell the investment? What if I don't want to get rid of it? One of the things is why it makes sense. You hear all the time we talk about loss

harvesting. There's the idea called the wash rule. I can't sell something at a loss and then go buy back. That does not apply to gain. So one of the things you can do is even if Mandy were to sell this holding, he could go back today and buy the exact same holding at $50,000, resetting his cost basis for the future. So this isn't just something that you should consider, you should think about if you were in a low income tax year, it makes sense to review every position of your portfolio

to see if this is something you could take advantage of because there's a really good chance that your future self will thank you for that planning. Yeah, what a great planning opportunity that creates. All right, Brian. Now, let's talk about the next stage. We've talked about 20s, 30s, 40s. Let's talk about the 50s and how do we go about beating the IRS and our 50s? Well, this is one of those things where hopefully at this point you're getting to the stage where, yes, you're going

to have money for financial independence, but you're also thinking more of legacy of what

are there organizations I want to support? And the first thing we know that being charitable is

definitely rewarding. And we want you to be generous. So bunching charitable contributions is the first

“thing you can consider. Remember how earlier I said that the majority of Americans are taking standard”

deductions. Well, that's because if you add up the deductions for most people, they just don't add up to enough to do itemized deductions. Well, if you're charitable minded, there's a good chance that maybe you can bunch your charitable contributions, cross into that itemized in a key year and then spread out how you give to those charities in the future, there's nothing wrong with you taking advantage of them. That's a great tool that you can use if you're bunching or maybe

you're not bunching, you're just giving annually. You can think about using a donor advice fund, where not only can you use it as a mechanism to bunch your contributions, where, okay, I'm going to put $25,000 into the chair will give fund this year and get the deduction, but I'm going to give $5,000 to an organization, each of the next five years, but I can also now gift highly appreciated securities. Maybe I have that $20,000 investment that turned into $50,000 and rather than having

“to sell it and recognize that capital gain, I can just donate that to my charitable giving account,”

get the full tax deduction on the full market value of that holding and all those capital gains

disappear forever. Earlier, I was talking about always looking for those silver lining moments where

you've earned a negative into a positive or a limits in the lemonade. This next one is definitely one of those. It's take advantage of catch up contributions. Look, it stinks. I'm in this, once you get to a certain age, like, man, I'm getting old. I wish the birthdays would keep quick coming, but when you cross into 50, you'll lease now the government says, hey, you're old enough that you're probably thinking about retirement. So you're thinking about enough that you're

even having regrets that I should have saved even more in the past. The government gives you that opportunity by giving you access to additional catch-up contributions. Yeah, and even it depends on the account and even unique to this year depends on your age. If you're in a 401K 403B 407, the catch-up amount for those over 50 and 2026 is $8,000, but there's even a super catch-up for those that are aged 60 to 63, which is $11,250. For a simple 401K, the catch-up is $4,000. The super

catch-up is $5,250. And then if you're someone contribute to an IRA and you're over 50. In addition to the normal, the normal contribution you can do, you can do a catch-up of $1,100. And if you're participating in HSA and you're over the age of 55, you can do $1,000 as a catch-up contribution to a health service account. All right, we're talking about 50s and beyond. This is also the culmination where people actually you're transitioning from saver to now consumer or starting to

spend down your resources. You've got to optimize your retirement with your all strategy. You know,

all the different ways. You need to fund your retirement. This is the moment where it really

“kind of, this is game time. You know, it's probably the biggest thing is because now if you can pull”

in the right optimized strategy, it really is that choose your own adventure where you get to in a creative, very legal way kind of work through how much in taxes you will pay and how much of a headwind it's going to be on your retirement. Yeah, we have the financial order of operations and it's a great mechanism for helping you figure out, how do I accumulate, how do I build, how do I save superficially? Well, it gets all the time, guys, why don't you do a financial

order of operations for withdrawal, for distribution and that's because it gets so nuanced and it's so specific and it is not a one size fits all. When you retire, when you get to financial independence, when you start living off of your assets, the way that you do it is going to be very unique to your situation, your risk tolerance, your time horizon, your accounts, structure, your goals, you want to make sure that you think through it well, because the decision

you make early on in retirement can have huge implications later on. Well, if you can see, I'm just going ahead and throw out some terms as you go start here and a lot. Required minimum distribution, quote, if you're chair to believe mine, it qualified chair to build distributions, QCDs, there's also Irma, if you think about Medicare, if you think about the taxability of your

“social security, do you see how all this stuff kind of starts coming to ahead? And that's why I”

always tell people, look, this is why we can love on you, give you all the free advice in the world,

and even tell you go to money.com/resources, we're going to accelerate your path to creating success, and what we really don't ask anything of you. Matter of fact, we have some big plans that we're even going to turn some things that are behind paywalls, turn those even in free resources for you soon, more to come on that. But a lot of this, no matter how much we love and give you, you're going to see the fruit of our system is the success, which leads to the complication. And

as you, I think you get here on doing an entire show on taxes by age, you guys represent and you resemble a lot of these things and you're probably going to say, and look, I don't know what I don't know. I don't know where my blind spots are. I've only got one retirement, I wish I had somebody who's done this hundreds if not thousands of times. That's where we'll leave the porch light on for you. We'd love for you to consider becoming a client. Let us help you live your best financial life.

Exactly what Bo said. We have a financial order of operations to help you through all those things as your building assets. There's not one for retirement because everybody is so personalized. So we had a studio tour just come through and they were asking about a specific financial

product. And I was like, the reason I've never done content on that is because there's just

too many variables that I have to see your taxes. I have to see your age. I have to see your risk profile. I couldn't do a good job with doing that, but I can do that for specific clients. And we will write that plan for you. We will make sure it represents and let you live your best life. Because money is nothing more than a tool. We just want to make sure that we maximize that

“very important element. So you live your best life. I'm your host, Brian. Do you want to have a”

Mr. Bo money guy team out. The money guy show is host about Brian Preston and Bo Hanson. Brian and Bo are partners with a bound wealth management. A bound wealth management is a registered investment advisory firm regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission in accordance in the plot to the Securities Laws and Regulations. A bound wealth management does not render or offer to render personalized investment or tax advice through the money guy show.

The information provided is for informational purposes only. May not be suitable for all investors, and does not constitute financial tax investment or legal advice. All investments in volatile grievous including the risk of loss. By Amazon, more than 50% of the population with less population relief in the PAP, or even more than one of the most delicious food. If you are still in the PAP, you can see the DINEN 9 COP for RARMIT, and the PAP, the HERSHELLAS, which is based on Amazon PAP,

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