With your 2022 taxes filed, you may be wondering why you owed money to the IRS or why you got a refund. Waymark can help by reviewing your filed return with you to break down your taxes in a way that makes it easier to understand. Watch this video as Brendan shows how this complimentary service works for Waymark clients.
Topics Discussed:
Tax Return Review
An example client walkthrough
Helping you understand your taxes
Transcript:
Hi and welcome to another edition of what can Waymark do for you this month and this month is April 2023. So as most of you have, I hope, started doing is getting your tax documents together, communicating with your tax accountant or opening up your TurboTax, or a self-preparing in whatever way that you want to do it, and filing your tax returns. So what Waymark can do for you in 2023 in April is to help you review what the accountant has done for you.
So many people, simply - and I've said this to a lot of you - they simply send all their tax documentation off to their accountant, their accountant works on it and sometimes even sits in front of them and actually does it in right in front of them, and then gives them back something that pretty much says either you owe something or you're getting a tax refund. And that's about the extent of what is said with I'd say probably about 90% of my clients and they really don't have any idea what's going on or why they owe the tax that they owe or why they need to do estimated tax payments or any of that. And so what we've done in the last 12 months is invest in a software that allows us to actually have a follow-up conversation. After your taxes are done, we will upload your tax return as long as you send it to us electronically, and then go through it with you for 15 to 30 minutes and just try to explain this arcane science that is tax preparation.
So let me give you an example. So let me start sharing my screen. So we have a demo client here. And this demo client is Peter and Paula Smith. And what we can do after we've uploaded their tax documents is go through this first step, which pretty much just simply takes all their data and puts it into this nice user-friendly format. And so you can see you know, where their income came from - ordinary versus capital gain and qualified dividend - you can kind of see where it's all coming from - wages, taxable interest, ordinary dividends, so on and so forth. We then will take a look at the taxable part of that income. So in this case, they had their adjusted gross income was 226, they subtracted out their deductions, and they got 193. And that was a func- that was a combination of the standard deduction and qualified business income deduction. We then calculate the tax and in this case, their ordinary income generated this amount of tax here, then they had some capital gain income at 15%, here to give them a total of 37,000. And then this is another breakdown here. They made payments along the way of $33,000, along with some credits that they had, and their tax owed is pretty much and this is the summary here, where they have their income and expense- income and wages, their adjusted gross income, their taxable income, total tax credits, payments and what's left over here.
And then after we go through this and give you kind of a broad overview of what happened with your tax return, we then can get into the weeds a little bit here. And so this is where we actually have the breakdown. So what your total income was. the deductions. total tax, your marginal tax rate, your average tax rate and a safe harbor. We could talk about what Safe Harbor is all about here. And then we can talk about, you know, your qualified dividends, your ordinary dividends, so on and so forth. Down here, we talk about the marginal tax brackets, we talk about the income tax threshold that you're in for capital gains tax exposure. We have some gross income tiers were in this person's case, they are phased out of some things, but also they're under the threshold of certain things. We can talk about the capital gains and losses. If you are on Medicare, we can talk about what your Medicare premiums will look like in 2024, based on your tax return in 2022. And then we get into some observations that we have here.
So I would you know, again, this is sometimes when I've gone through this with clients, this is the most they've ever talked about their taxes with anyone. Hopefully you have an accountant that actually does, you know, spend some time and try to explain it. But if you don't, this is something that we can bring to the table in April 2023. If you're paying a financial planning fee, this is no extra cost to you. This is all just a value add that we're offering to clients in 2023 and moving forward.
So hopefully this will be helpful to you again, once you get that tax return submitted or once we get that tax return filed, you can do one of two things. Either, if you have an electronic copy, you can, we can, you can send it to us through a secure box.com connection that that Hanifa can open up for you. So you can just upload that and we can securely download it. Or alternatively, just simply send an email to your tax accountant and say - and CC us and say, you know, please send an electronic copy of our tax return to Waymark and we can take a look at it.
So that's what's happening in April. You know, definitely take advantage of this because I do feel like this is a good opportunity in April. Obviously, we can't do anything for tax year 2022. That's in the past. But moving forward in 2023 and moving forward, we may be able to actually help you to save some money or at least ask some pretty good questions to your accountant to see if there's any opportunity for you to save some money on your taxes. So hopefully this was helpful, and we'll see you next time. Thanks.
Brendan is the Managing Director for Waymark Wealth Management. He has extensive experience in comprehensive wealth management. His focus includes retirement planning, behavioral finance, investment portfolio construction, education funding, insurance & risk management, taxes, charitable giving, and estate planning. Brendan has an ability to take clients' complex visions and distill them down to simple action plans, helping them move from where they are today to where they want to be tomorrow.
This information is not intended to be a substitute for specific individualized tax advice. We suggest that you discuss your specific tax issues with a qualified tax advisor.
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