Are you sick of hearing about the Tax Reform Bill? Don't worry, we are sick of writing about it! We followed the bill from the initial one page plan that was released in April to the nine page "framework" released in October. We pored over the almost 500 page detailed report in November and the thousand plus pages of the Senate and House bills passed earlier this month. Now we finally have a final version of the bill passed by the Senate and the House and ready to be signed by the President!

The Senate tax reform proposal includes a provision that would require that the cost of any security sold, exchanged, or otherwise disposed of on or after January 1, 2018, be determined on a first-in first-out (FIFO) basis. Many observers have questioned whether opening separate brokerage accounts to hold the stock would avoid the application of these rules, but we do not think this would work as the rules would be applied across all accounts. It is important to note that this provision is not in the House version of the tax reform bill, so we still need to see if it survives the committee reconciliation process.

In the early morning hours of Saturday, December 2, the Senate passed a tax reform bill that would bring sweeping changes to our income tax system for individuals and corporations. The House of Representatives had already passed a similar bill earlier in November, and now the reconciliation process has begun. While significant differences between the two bills remain (see here for a good summary), there are enough similarities that we believe the odds are high that a compromised version of the bill will be signed into law before the end of the year.

For months we have been hearing about a massive tax reform bill that would be released by the GOP. Twice we were provided documents with outlines of the plan, but as I pointed out here and here, both of those releases were extremely short on details. Well, now we have a 492 page document so we can no longer complain about the lack of detail!

Author: Lyle Benson; The end of the year presents an excellent opportunity to step back and take a holistic look at your overall financial situation. While most year-end planning focuses on tax projections and potential changes to tax laws, there are many other areas of your finances you should be thinking about right now. Weaving together income and estate tax planning with retirement planning, risk management, investments and cash flow is an important aspect of the work we do for our clients. In this letter we’ll look at each of these various aspects of financial planning and address some of the questions you should be considering in the coming months.

Author: Chris Benson; Let’s go back to November 8, 2016, the day of the U.S. presidential election. Regardless of your party affiliation or who you supported in the general election, you were probably ready to put politics in the rearview mirror. Now imagine I had told you at the time every major news item that would happen over the next 11 months, from natural disasters to North Korean missile tests to Russian investigations and everything in between. Then I asked you to draw a chart of your prediction for the US stock market, as measured by the S&P 500, over those next 11 months.