Year-End Checklist

As the year draws to an end we hope that you thoroughly enjoy the holidays. We certainly intend to have extra family time and we hope you can too.

But there are a few family "business" items that we should all attend to. Here is a checklist to help you not overlook something.

Annual Review Items

• Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) completed for this year
• Health insurance renewals
• Beneficiary reviews on all retirement accounts and insurance
• Estate planning documents up to date
• Insurance review (including life, casualty, etc.) for appropriate coverage
• Debt and cash flow review and projections
• Retirement cash flow plan review with projections

Contributions

• Employer-sponsored retirement plans
  • Sufficient participation to capture all employer matching
  • Sufficient participation to maximize annual contributions
• IRA contributions (Traditional and Roth) in addition to employer-sponsored plans

Gifting

• Charitable gifting
• Gifts to family taking advantage of the annual exclusion or trusts for family benefits
• Educational savings (e.g., 529 Plans) for children, grandchildren, yourself, others

Tax Timing Strategies

• Tax loss harvesting
• Estimated tax payments
• Tax advantaged use of RMDs if not needed for living expenses
• Roth IRA conversions
• Advanced distributions for future major expense to minimize taxes (e.g., tax bracket management)
• Business expenditures
• Exercise of stock options