In case you weren’t already aware of how unsecure email can be, hopefully the well publicized and controversial hacks surrounding the 2016 election opened your eyes. We have been preaching to clients for years not to share confidential or identifying information in e-mails and have encouraged you to use our secure portal instead.
I just had the opportunity to spend two weeks in Tanzania and Zanzibar. As some of you may know, Ellen and I typically take a vacation with each of our kids and their families each summer. Our family is all very close and everyone is local, but this gives us a chance to spend dedicated time with each of them. We planned the Africa trip with our youngest daughter, Jessie, who also tacked on a 10 day fitness/safari retreat she was leading in Uganda after our trip. Here are some of the lessons I learned (or reinforced) in east Africa.
Summertime usually offers a reprieve from taxes for most of the country. We are a few months removed from the April tax filing deadline and a few months away from the October extended filing deadline. We aren’t worried about year-end tax planning like we will be in December and we aren’t assessing the impact of new tax laws like we seem to be every January. In short, we don’t usually anticipate major tax news to hit in the summer. Unfortunately, the never ending news stream appears to have affected the tax world just as it has every other aspect of our lives. There have been several developments in taxes this summer that we think you should be aware of, which we’ll outline below.
Amid a never ending sea of news topics, there is one that has come to define the 2018 news cycle, at least from an investment standpoint. In January most people people thought the primary theme of the year would be taxes after the major tax reform bill was passed at the end of last year. However, it didn't take long for a new topic to become the primary focus: tariffs.
This June I made my annual pilgrimage to the desert oasis known as Las Vegas for the AICPA ENGAGE conference. This "megaconference" was a merger of many smaller conferences that had historically been held separately throughout the year. The Advanced Financial Planning conference had always been our primary conference but by joining forces we now have the opportunity to attend sessions from other conferences like the Advanced Estate Planning conference and the High-Income Individuals Tax Strategies conferences. In short, the best minds in the accounting and financial planning professions were all there and I'm still trying to make sense of everything I learned.
Summer is here and if you're like me you could probably use some fresh reading material for your upcoming vacation. Rather than give you yet another book list I thought I'd provide a roundup of some of the best articles I've read recently. I recommend saving these to Pocket (my personal favorite) or Instapaper so you can read them from your tablet or phone wherever you might go on your travels this summer.