Do you want to pay more than your fair share of taxes? If not, there are ways to reduce your tax burden that aren't fattening, immoral, or illegal.

Meeting with us in the near future gives us the opportunity to do creative planning for you and your business before the end of the year. Some business and personal strategies are:

• Look at current business situation and decide whether accelerating either income or expenses is to your benefit or not.
• Review year-end financial transactions that could have negative tax consequences and decide on how to properly handle and time them.
• Proper planning can free up cash by deferring your tax liability.
• Shifting of income to family members.
• Bunching personal itemized deductions in one year to have enough to qualify for deductions that may be "lost" otherwise.
• Itemized deductions are very important in cases where there is a large increase in income -- consider charitable giving, possibly of appreciated assets.
• Make sure you are contributing the maximum allowable amount to your retirement plan.
• Significant capital gains this year? Review portfolio for possible losses to offset. You must determine if it is best to offset or hold the stock.
• If contemplating sales of real estate or investment property, a like-kind exchange to defer gain may be possible.
• Business equipment purchases -- take advantage of annual expensing election (currently $102,000 for 2004 and $105,000 for 2005).

Regular planning keeps your tax strategies up to date and is one of the keys to a successful investment strategy. If you are in business, tax planning (or the lack of it) can make or break your business. Please contact us to discuss how we can help you in your goals to build net worth and keep taxes to a minimum.

If you would like other tax planning tips, we would be glad to include you on our newsletter mailing list. Just send e-mail message with your request to pmiller@millerpc.com

The goal of this page and its links is to provide timely financial and tax information. Since space limitations require generalizations, we encourage you to obtain specific personal advice before implementing any ideas presented herein.

For more information on any of our services, please e-mail us at pmiller@millerpc.com or call (734) 971-3900.