Announcer:
It’s time now on KROS for Financial Focus, brought to you by NelsonCorp Wealth Management. The opinions voiced in this show are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. Any indices mentioned are unmanaged and cannot be invested into directly. Registered representatives securities offered through Cambridge Investment Research. Inc., A broker/dealer, member FINRA, SIPC. Investment advisor representative, Cambridge Investment Research Advisors, Inc., a registered investment advisor. Cambridge and NelsonCorp Wealth Management are not affiliated. Cambridge does not offer tax advice. Now, here’s today’s Financial Focus program.
Nate Kreinbrink:
Good morning and welcome to this week’s Financial Focus brought to you each and every Wednesday morning right here on KROS. Well, this is Nate, I have Andy joining me today. May has five Wednesdays, so I could not go a whole month in all those shows without bringing Andy back on to talk taxes a little bit. But again-
Andy Fergurson:
You got to give the people what they want, Nate.
Nate Kreinbrink:
… That is right, we’ve got to give the people what they want. May is moving right along. It’s the last show in May. Area schools, if they haven’t already, are finishing up I think this week-
Andy Fergurson:
Yeah, I think they’re down to the-
Nate Kreinbrink:
… One of them may go next week, I believe.
Andy Fergurson:
… Yeah, I think they’re down to the nonsense days where they’re watching movies and playing outside and doing all the fun stuff.
Nate Kreinbrink:
The ones that teachers love.
Andy Fergurson:
Yeah.
Nate Kreinbrink:
The babysitting days almost.
Andy Fergurson:
Yeah.
Nate Kreinbrink:
But it is going by, and again, best of luck to all the area graduates as they close the door on one chapter and transition to whatever their next chapter and lives hold for them. I want to wish them the best of luck. A little cooler. Had a baseball game last night and we definitely were not in shorts and T-shirts.
Andy Fergurson:
Yeah, need a jacket last night?
Nate Kreinbrink:
There was a few blankets out too.
Andy Fergurson:
Wow, that’s my kind of spring/summer right there.
Nate Kreinbrink:
It was a football game.
Andy Fergurson:
Jacket weather, summer.
Nate Kreinbrink:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Basically a football game. But looks like it’s going to continue on and hopefully we get to June, Mother Nature realizes that it is summer and it’s time for warning up.
Andy Fergurson:
I only need that-
Nate Kreinbrink:
As long as the bugs don’t come.
Andy Fergurson:
… I only need about two weeks of hot weather and I’m good.
Nate Kreinbrink:
As long as those bugs don’t come in. That was the one nice thing about cool and windy last night was there was no bug spray needed.
Andy Fergurson:
Yeah. Okay.
Nate Kreinbrink:
Getting into today’s show, we had Mike Stegerwald on last week, and then we talked healthcare at retirement up to 65, and then different options of 65 and beyond with Medicare. Just the very basics as far as the two different routes to get coverage. Obviously with Andy on today, there’s a lot of tax ideas that we can hit that continuously, I think, impact a lot of people. We talk a lot of time on this show as far as planning, looking at it, being proactive rather than reactive. Looking, okay, what is the best bet? We accumulated these savings in our retirement accounts, but what’s the most efficient way to unwind them?
I think when you do that, again, it’s important to keep in mind, and then Andy’s going to go through a bunch of different scenarios today. But again, one decision is going to have a retaliation impacting taxes in a couple different ways. Whether it is insurance, whether it is bumping up to a higher tax bracket, whether it’s increasing your income for the premium tax credits for your insurance through the marketplace. Again, it’s important to understand that. While it may seem straightforward, there is some ripple effects with it and I think it’s important that people understand when you make these, you got to look at everything and not just have blinders on to what you’re looking at.
Andy Fergurson:
Yeah. A lot of tax strategy is related to understanding how income is realized on your tax return. Different income streams are treated differently. We talk all the time about IRAs and pensions and Social Security. Well, pensions and IRAs may be handled differently than Social security. We talk about how those things impact modified adjusted gross income. Well, modified adjusted gross income has an impact on your Medicare premiums. It has an impact on what tax bracket you’re in. It has an impact on what credits you may qualify for. You just need to know what your funding source is going to do to your adjusted gross income or your modified adjusted gross income.
For example, taking money from your IRA, or your receiving money from a pension or 401k, increases income. Whereas taking money from another source may not. Taking money out of your bank account does not increase your income. Taking money from a non-qualified account or a trust fund does not increase your income. It may have some small impact on income depending on what happens as your advisor has to free up cash by selling positions or liquidating stock to get that cash available. But generally, it’s going to have a much smaller impact on your income than taking money out of your IRA.
We get to this time of the year as people are planning, and there’s just some understanding levels of where those breaks are. A great example is the Medicare premiums. There’s a threshold of where that next premium kicks in. You go $1 over on your modified adjusted gross income, and now you’re paying a higher premium for a whole year. You and your spouse are both paying a higher premium for an entire year. That can translate to 3 or $5,000 depending on which bracket you’re jumping into. So you’d hate to take money from the wrong bucket of income and drive across that premium and cost yourself $5,000, when you had an option to do something different.
I ran a scenario for a family the other day where they were taking money from an IRA and they were using the IRA to pay the withholding. So they were taking X dollars and they were bumping that up to X plus Y to pay the withholding. Whereas if they had not taken the plus Y, and instead taken that money from another source, their checking account, or even from Social Security as withholding, or their pension as withholding, their income or their modified adjusted gross income would’ve stayed lower, they would’ve saved maybe 12 to $1,400 in tax and received the same amount of money. Because adding the income from the 401(k) increase the amount of taxable income. Increase the amount that they paid in tax. So it just matters where the money comes from.
Nate Kreinbrink:
Well, and I think too, you hit those parts, but I think you throw Social Security on top of this and it becomes a little bit more convoluted. I know you and I have sat in a number of meetings where we’ve done some tax planning and advising with some joint clients of ours, and that first time when you say, “Hey, one more dollar of income is going to make $2 taxable,” people give you that look to say, “Well, what do you mean?” It goes back to understanding that Social Security in and of itself is not taxable. On the tax return there’s a total amount of Social Security that you’ve been paid, and then there’s a taxable amount of Social Security that you’ve been paid.
So again, whether we do a Roth conversion or you take a distribution from an IRA account or whatever, we’re raising it by whatever that conversion or distribution is, but that is also potentially bringing over Social Security dollars that weren’t taxable ahead of time. So again, it’s understanding that and knowing that, yes, that conversion is technically in a lower tax bracket, but it’s now bringing $2 into that lower tax bracket, and you’re going to get through it a lot quicker.
Andy Fergurson:
Yeah. You may be in the 12% bracket, but that extra dollars actually going to cost you 19% because it’s bringing that extra money from Social Security over as well.
Another example of that is a qualified charitable distribution versus a charitable deduction on your Schedule A. A lot of people don’t worry about a qualified charitable distribution, which is a distribution from your IRA. If you qualify age 70 and a half or older and you make a qualified charitable distribution, or a QCD, it never lands on your income. It’s no part of your income. It’s taken out of your IRA. It’s a distribution, but it’s not taxable. So it doesn’t hit anywhere on your tax return. It’s completely exempt.
Versus taking that money out of your IRA, putting it into your bank account, and then funding the charitable contribution and taking the deduction on your Schedule A, well you may end up the same on your tax return, but one thing to consider there is if you do a qualified charitable distribution, you’re not impacting your modified adjusted gross income. Or it’s not being added into your modified adjusted gross income. If you’re somebody who’s on the threshold, again, of a Medicare premium or of a credit that you may have an opportunity for, that amount of money, even though you’re not necessarily changing the bottom line on your tax return, you may be changing some other factor that’s impacting what you’re paying out of your pocket.
Nate Kreinbrink:
Right. I think it all goes back to, and again, we’ve harped on it a lot as far as this time of year, the tax planning versus again, tax season, you think of more tax prep where you’re basically looking backwards. Tax planning, looking forward to do that. I think it’s a big deal with some of this because again, as your financial situation changes, a lot of times people forget about what they’re withholding from any previous thing that they’re doing. We’ve seen it where again, income maybe goes down, but their withholding amount stays the same because they don’t go in and change it. Well, now all of a sudden they’re withholding more than what they need to, which is making more taxable income than what they maybe necessarily need to have coming out of a distribution from a traditional IRA or traditional 401(k). So if we could lower that, it may lower the amount that we’re paying on Social Security tax and so on and so on and so on. So again, constantly looking at these things needs to happen.
Andy Fergurson:
Yeah, absolutely. The other thing that happens with the charitable contributions, you may have been given to your church for the last 50 years, well, this is the year you turn 70 and a half. If your broker or your tax accountant don’t know that that you’re giving that money to the church, there’s no way for them to counsel you and say, “Hey, you should do this a different way.” Doing that QCD, you can give the same amount of money to the church, you can just reduce the amount of money that goes to the government.
Nate Kreinbrink:
I haven’t met anybody that is against that.
Andy Fergurson:
I’ve yet to meet somebody that was like, “You know what? Let’s just keep paying the government extra.” There’s a lot of people that want to do their fair share, but nobody that wants to do more than their fair share.
Nate Kreinbrink:
That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. All great stuff. You’ve got questions, need to sit down, give us a call, give Andy a call. Him and Mike and TJ and his team do a fabulous job as far as going through this with people and getting them on the right foot. So give us a call, be happy to do that. Did want to mention real quick though, before we run out of time, that every Friday, NelsonCorp Wealth Management and NelsonCorp Tax Solutions are wearing jeans for charity. Money raised in the month of May will be donated to the Speak Out Against Suicide program.
Andy, as always, I appreciate you joining me this Wednesday morning. Nate and Andy with NelsonCorp Wealth Management, Nelson Corp Tax Solutions, bringing you this week’s Financial Focus. Thanks for tuning in and have a great rest of your week.
Announcer:
Financial Focus is a production of NelsonCorp Wealth Management in Clinton and Davenport. The opinions voiced in the show are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. Any indices mentioned are unmanaged and cannot be invested into directly. Registered representatives securities offered through Cambridge Investment Research, Inc. A broker/dealer, member FINRA, SIPC. Investment advisor representative Cambridge Investment Research Advisors, Inc., a registered investment advisor. Cambridge and NelsonCorp Wealth Management are not affiliated. Cambridge does not offer tax advice. For more information, visit our website at www.nelsoncorp.com.