.6 Strategies to Protect Income From Taxes

By Barbara A. Friedberg Updated Jan 29, 2020

These tips can help you preserve the income you earn

Earned income gets taxed in many ways: at the federal and state levels, and by Social Security and Medicare, to name a few. Taxes are difficult to avoid, but there are many strategies to help ward them off. Here are six ways to protect your income from taxes.

Key Takeaways

Contributing to qualified accounts with pretax dollars can defer or exempt some income from taxation.

Business ownership includes several work-related tax breaks, as does owning a home or being a student.

Tax-sheltered income from eligible municipal bonds can also help taxpayers save.

1. Invest in Municipal Bonds

Buying a municipal bond essentially means lending money to a state or local entity for a set number of interest payments over a predetermined period. Once the bond reaches its maturity date, the full amount of the original investment is repaid to the buyer.

.The Best Money Advice I’ve Ever Gotten

By Cameron Huddleston May 29, 2019|In Budgeting, Financial Planning

I have been writing about personal finance for a long time – more than 17 years. As you can probably imagine, I’ve had the opportunity to interview countless financial experts, lots of ordinary folks who’ve shared their money journeys with me and even some big names in the world of business and finance – such as Tony Robbins and David Bach. I feel fortunate that I’ve had the opportunity to learn a lot about personal finance from these interviews.

You can imagine, though, that it might be tough to pinpoint the best money advice I’ve ever gotten in the nearly two decades I’ve spent as a financial journalist. But that’s what my friend Shannon McLay asked me to do when she recently was interviewing me for her podcast, Martinis and Your Money.

.How to Get Better at Anticipating Your Financial Needs

By Trent Hamm

Getting Started

Home » How To Get Better At Anticipating Your Financial Needs

One of the most valuable tools for keeping your financial life as stable as possible is to improve your ability to anticipate your future expenses and financial needs.

This enables you to take some steps to prepare now for those expenses and thus reduce their impact in the future.

For people who aren’t naturally familiar with planning ahead, this can feel like a major shift in thinking. Many people simply buy groceries as needed by visiting the grocery store and wandering through the aisles to grab items needed for their next few days worth of meals. Many people respond with chagrin when they find an unexpected bill in the mail.

.Ten Rules for Asset Protection Planning

By Jay Adkisson

Start early, keep it simple, and don’t try to hide stuff from your creditors.

There’s a gambling saying that goes something like, “If you want to be a winner, you have to walk away from the table a winner.” One time-honored method of reaching this result is to systematically take your chips off the table as you win them, so that your potential for losses stays small.

Asset protection planning is all about taking chips off the table in good times, so that you still can walk away from the table a winner no matter what happens in bad times.

Those who worry the most about asset protection are those who are the most likely to get sued; think obstetricians and, more recently, real estate investors here.

But average folks often get caught up in difficult situations, and thus if you have something to protect then the topic of asset protection should at least cross your mind. ...

.How To Protect Assets and Avoid Taxes

Get Lauded As A Philanthropist Like Mark Zuckerberg

By Jeff Berwick

Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook posted a “Letter To Our Daughter” stating that he would give 99% of his Facebook shares to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative “to advance human potential and promote equality for all children in the next generation.”

The New York Times, perhaps the most economically ignorant tabloid in the world, headlined, “Mark Zuckerberg Vows to Donate 99% of His Facebook Shares for Charity.”

Countless people across the webisphere lauded Zuckerberg as a caring philanthropist who was just giving 99% of his wealth away.

In many ways what he did was philanthropic but not for the reasons that the great majority of people think.

.The Best Financial Advice I Ever Received
Sheiresa Ngo

Bad financial advice can ruin your long-term plans and potentially rob you of the future you had hoped for. However, good financial advice (when applied) blossoms and continues to flourish in all areas of your life, even improving the lives of others along the way.

The Cheat Sheet took some time to speak with top experts in the field of personal finance about the impact of good and bad financial advice. We spoke with Certified Financial Planner Jeff Rose of the blog Good Financial Cents, The Money Coach Lynnette Khalfani-Cox, and CreditCards.com’s Matt Schulz. We asked them to share the best piece of personal finance advice they ever received. Here’s what they had to say.

.7 Important Money Moves to Make in the New Year, According to Financial Advisors

By Holly Johnson on 7 January 2020

It's easy to think you'll get your finances together "next year" or when you finally get the promotion you've been after. Unfortunately, time keeps on ticking away, making it easy to spend years dreaming of financial security without making progress toward your goals.

Now that 2020 has arrived, it may be the perfect time to stop making excuses and start making moves. After all, it's more than a new year — we're in a brand-new decade.

But which moves have the potential for the most impact? We interviewed several financial advisors to find out which steps they think nearly everyone could benefit from in 2020 and beyond, and here's what they said.