January 2023

  Well, now that the holiday season's over, we're already looking at filing tax returns once again. We're going to talk today about how do we minimize the pain and mitigate the suffering that goes along with filing your taxes each year. At Avion Wealth, our focus is mitigating your taxes and maximizing your cash flow, and part of that is helping the client with their taxes. In fact, throughout the year, we're looking at tax strategies. One of the issues that we get at this time of year is that the CPAs want documents as early as possible, but you don't have them. And if you send a document every time you get it, the CPAs are likely going to charge you every single time they get a communication from you, because they have to open the file and file that document. It's very inefficient for them. It can…

  So, in the last couple of videos we've talked about the Secure Act 2.0. Today, we're going to talk about an intergenerational gift from Washington DC that's buried into this act and it's the 529 to Roth sleight of hand. Effective 2024, these new rules, which are slightly complicated, suggest that if you have kiddos and you don't have a 529, get one and put a dollar in and you'll see why. Because now $35,000 of unused funds in a 529 can now be rolled over into a Roth IRA for the beneficiary. In the past, the concern has been what do we do if we overfund? Will there be a withdrawal penalty? That concern has now flipped to, "Oh, wouldn't it be nice to have too much money, up to $35,000, and be able to roll it into a Roth IRA for the kid?" Now, there's a lot…

  Secure Act 2.0. This is the second in the series of videos talking about all the goodies in the latest Secure Act with regards to IRAs and other retirement accounts. The big conversation for today is how are the new required minimum distributions going to affect you and your family? The good news is, we already had the required minimum distribution age bump up from 70 and a half to 72. Now, in 2023, if you haven't already started required distributions, that age increases to 73. If you've already started distributions, you have to follow the current schedule that you're on, but 73 is nice. The good news is, those who are under 63 will be able to use the 2033 rule, where you don't even start required minimum distributions until you're 75 years old. So those who are just barely reaching Social Security age or younger, you're looking…

  Today we're going to talk briefly about some of the bright spots on the horizon for 2023, recap some of the highlights of last year, and finally talk about the new Secure Act and all the goodies that are embedded in that law. So as we know, 2022 was one of the worst year for portfolios, in fact since 1937 by some measures. And that's because not only was it a bear market in stocks, but also bonds were down 17%. In fact, it was the worst performance in the history of the Morningstar Core Bond Index. That's pretty bad.  Some of the accompanying charts show the pain quite graphically. We have, however, seen the pendulum swing from growth to value. My Partner, Sarah, wrote a white paper titled "The History and Future of Value Investing".  You'll find the link to the document HERE. Whether or not the value…