Name: How to Manage Your Finances Before Tax Cuts Expire
Uploaded: 2023-10-12T20:58:00Z
Duration: 7 min 20 s
Description: Trump-era tax cuts are scheduled to expire in 2025. Wall Street Journal contributor Bailey McCann joins host J.R. Whalen to discuss moves experts suggest people can make now to prepare. Illustration: Alex Nabaum

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Trump-era tax cuts are scheduled to expire in 2025. Wall Street Journal contributor Bailey McCann joins host J.R. Whalen to discuss moves experts suggest people can make now to prepare. Illustration: Alex Nabaum

https://m.wsj.net/video/20231012/e9e1c272-aa0e-4bb4-98b3-8ba35e928743/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

How to Manage Your Finances Before Tax Cuts Expire

J.R.: Here's "Your Money Briefing" for Thursday, October 12th. I'm J.R. Whalen for the "Wall Street Journal". Trump era tax cuts are set to expire in 2025. Financial experts say making certain moves now can protect your finances and ease your tax liability. "Wall Street Journal" contributor Bailey McCann joins me. So first of all, Bailey, what are some of the prominent features of the tax cuts that went into effect in 2017 that are set to expire?

Bailey: So the tax cuts did a lot of things. Everybody had their tax rates lowered and the standard deduction was also almost doubled, which can help with your income tax and you can get a bit of a higher rebate there. It also raised the state tax exemption so that you can have a bigger estate before you reach the threshold of taxes.

J.R.: If the tax cuts aren't renewed, what'll happen to income tax brackets?

Bailey: So those are gonna revert to where they were in 2016, which is higher. The highest tax bracket right now is 37%. The reversion would bring it to 39.6%.

J.R.: Who would be the most impacted by that? And what can they do now to get ahead of those changes?

Bailey: So anybody who has larger account balances, wealthier people, but also people at or near retirement who have been saving, those bigger accounts are going to be impacted by tax increase.

J.R.: Now you mentioned people with large amounts of savings. What about the rest of us?

Bailey: Everybody's probably going to see their tax rate go up a little bit and then how that impacts you is gonna depend on how you do your standard deductions, whether or not you give to charity, how much is going into your retirement savings. So there is a little bit of an individualized component to it.

J.R.: What can people with retirement savings do to sort of get ahead of the game here and put themselves in a good position?

Bailey: The main thing to do is consider what your entire financial picture looks like. A lot of people don't realize that they are actually worth more than they might intuitively feel like, because we've had inflation, we have higher interest rates, that means certain accounts are gonna be appreciating at a higher rate, certain assets are gonna be appreciating at a higher rate. So it's really worth it to take some time and look at what your total net worth slash financial picture is right now. And then you can start making some decisions about how to optimize that, whether that's through doing charitable donations, gift giving, maybe you're doing a Roth IRA conversion. There are different things that you can do to sort of make sure that you're not paying more than you need to.

J.R.: Refresh us for a moment, what does a Roth IRA allow savers to do?

Bailey: So if you convert some of your retirement savings or all of it to a Roth IRA, what you're doing is sort of prepaying the taxes in a lump sum. And if you're doing that now when the tax rate is lower, you're going to be paying less than if you wait and do it either in little chunks over your retirement or just in a bigger chunk but when the tax rate is higher.

J.R.: If people do convert some of their retirement savings to a Roth IRA, how should they work that into their retirement timeline?

Bailey: There's a few caveats about how that works. So when you convert it, there's a rule that limits your ability to access that money for five years. And if you are on a tight timeline or you're gonna need it for whatever reason and sooner than that, it might not make sense to do that conversion. Sometimes people only convert a portion of their retirement because they know they're not gonna need it for that five years and they have another pot of money that they can use in the interim. So if you're working with financial advisor to kind of figure that out, that's probably gonna be your best bet.

J.R.: As you mentioned a moment ago, people often try to lessen their tax burden by making donations to charity. How do financial experts say they should approach charitable giving given this expiration of the tax cuts that's on the horizon?

Bailey: So with charitable giving, there are a couple of things to consider. You can do it through financial gifts, you can do it through asset donation, you can do it through large cash donations. It kind of depends on what your individual goals are and what you're trying to do with respect to managing the size of your estate. But you need to be very strategic about how you approach it because you might be subject to gift tax, you might be subject to a front end tax or some other payment that you need to make and you need to make sure that, you know, paying that now still makes more sense than paying it down the line, working again with a financial advisor can help you identify the best options

J.R.: And the idea of giving away money and assets as gifts. How do the numbers potentially change if these tax cuts expire? How does that part of the equation change?

Bailey: The tax law increase the annual deduction limit for cash contributions to public charities to 60% of your adjusted gross income, that's up from 50%. So if that reverts, it's gonna go back down to 50. So if you're doing the donation now obviously, you have that higher rate deduction limit and that can be helpful in bringing down your overall estate size. And then the other thing is, is if you do end up having to pay a gift tax on a step-up basis, if you, for example, are donating something like property or expensive high value assets, doing that now at the lower rate is probably going to be better for you than waiting and doing it later at a higher rate.

J.R.: People in higher income brackets often have to watch out for estate taxes. How could those change and what moves can people make now?

Bailey: Under the current IRS rules, married couples can transfer a little bit over $25 million and individuals can transfer just under $13 million to beneficiaries without triggering federal estate taxes. Any amount over those limits would be subject to federal estate taxes, which can range from 18% to 40%. So when the tax law expires, the size of the exemption will be cut roughly in half. That means the taxable estate that's worth more than approximately $7 million for an individual or $13 million for a couple would be subject to federal estate taxes if you don't plan ahead.

J.R.: And as we mentioned, these tax cuts are scheduled to expire in 2025. Are they likely to be extended or allowed to expire?

Bailey: One key thing to note is that pretty much everybody in Congress would be subject to higher taxes if things are allowed to expire. So there is a little bit of impetus for people to get on the stick about it in Congress. 2025 is not that long of a timeline, legislatively, if we are gonna be making those changes. But there's also some history here previously when tax changes expire or set to expire and then extended, we were already in the expiration period before all of that played out, and that creates kind of an accounting scramble for individual people. So the best bet is to plan for them expiring and then you already have something in place versus trying to like handicap what's gonna happen either way.

J.R.: Expect the best and prepare for the worst.

Bailey: Exactly.

J.R.: That's "Wall Street Journal" contributor Bailey McCann and that's it for "Your Money Briefing". Today's show was produced by Ariana Aspuru and Zoe Kuhlkin, with supervising producer Melony Roy and deputy editor Chris Zinsli. I'm J.R Whalen for the "Wall Street Journal." We'll be back tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening.

WSJ's Your Money Briefing podcast is your personal-finance and career checklist. Finance reporters and experts break down complicated money questions every weekday to help you make better decisions about managing your money. 