Thanks to L. K. Benson for sharing this blog about taxes and more financial news.

It’s Almost Tax Time

We are hard at work preparing for another busy tax filing season. If you are a tax client, you will be receiving an email from us soon. It will outline our normal processes and procedures.

New Retirement Savings Bill

We first told you about a new retirement savings bill that had overwhelming bipartisan support back in July 2021. It took Congress far too long, but they finally passed the legislation, dubbed the SECURE Act 2.0, in late December. It might not have the same level of impact as the original SECURE Act, but there are a significant number of changes. these include another delay to the RMD start date, increased Roth options, and much more. Chris has a summary of some of the major changes here.

Q4 Market Commentary: Surprises

The last few years have been full of surprises in the investment markets. In 2020, we had a global pandemic that shut down the entire world. This sent markets into a massive drawdown for about a month. We then saw markets skyrocket back to new highs despite the ongoing pandemic. In 2021, speculative investments like cryptocurrencies, meme stocks, and SPACs all shot through the roof. Also, the overall market posted exceptional returns with very little volatility. Then 2022 came around, and the market euphoria since April 2020 came to a grinding halt. What should we take away from these surprises? Chris explains why we should heed the words of Daniel Kahneman in his Q4 market commentary.

The trends that will affect CPAs in 2023

While we don’t believe in trying to predict the future, that doesn’t mean we can’t look at the world around us to try to see what trends might impact the future. Along those lines, Chris was recently asked for his thoughts on what trends in personal financial planning might affect CPAs in 2023. His thoughts were included in this article in the Journal of Accountancy.

IRS delays tax reporting change for 1099-K

We warned you last year about a reporting change for online transactions through services such as Paypal and Venmo that would have created massive headaches for many taxpayers. The American Rescue Plan of 2021 dropped the threshold to report transactions from $20,000 to $600, and was set to go into effect for 2022. The IRS recently delayed the implementation of this rule by a year. It’s possible Congress could change that threshold before it is fully implemented.

Nobody Can Predict the Markets

Every January, the news is full of “expert” market predictions, and every year we give you reasons why you should ignore those predictions. In case you need further proof of the futility of these predictions, we have a few articles for you to read:

• In “Tune Out The Noise”, John Yeigh looks back at the 2022 market predictions from 24 highly regarded stock market pundits. You can probably guess how they did.
• Bob Seawright’s annual “Forecasting Follies” is always worth a read as well as he looks back on a number of predictions that didn’t exactly come true.
• Jason Zweig invites you to make your own predictions to see if you could do better than all those “experts”. He also looks back on how some of his readers did last year when he invited them to do the same.

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