Financial Planning Guide

Tax Shelter

Our guide to taxes takes aim at helping you to better understand your federal and state income taxes. By helping you to better understanding how your taxes are calculated, our hope is that you can make better investment decisions such as whether or not to take a long term capital gain on your investments or if a retirement tax shelter such as 401k plan, IRA account and 403b plan are right for you.

We'll cover the fundamentals such as reading tax brackets and tax tables. We'll give you hints to help you figure out if you need to fill out a 1040EZ, 1040A or if the long form is your best choice. Finally, we'll even cover topics in more detail - ranging from inheritance tax to tax credits and deductions.

Income Tax Return Preparation

This first set of articles we consider our income tax preparation help section. Here you'll find information on filing electronically with eFile and where you can go to tax forms. We'll tell you how to find websites and software that allow you to file your taxes for free.

The IRS really tries to make filing your taxes simple. In fact, they offer several ways for filers to get help, including written explanations, audio explanations via the phone and even live telephone support. If you're having trouble preparing your tax return, this should be your first stop:

Tax Planning

It's never too late or too early to start planning out your tax saving strategies. This next series of articles help you to minimize your overall income taxes by discussing a series of income tax objectives and tactics you may want to adopt.

Tax Deductions, Shelters and Credits

If you think you might have enough tax deductions to beat the standard deduction this year, then this next set of publications can help. Itemized deductions are pretty straightforward, especially for homeowners paying a mortgage and property taxes.

Here we provide you with an explanation for each type of deduction and tax credit offered:

Special Tax Topics

In this section of our tax publications, we take a quick look at some special tax topics. Presently this includes inheritance tax, alternative minimum taxes and capital gains. We'll revisit this topic from time to time and continue to add more of these specialty tax articles:

Sales and Income Tax Basics

Next up are some articles that contain some basic, but useful tax information. If you've been wondering what all those tax items are on you paycheck, take a look at our payroll taxes article. We've even got federal tax bracket tables as well as information for all 50 states.

And if you're planning on visiting another state we can even tell you what to expect when it comes to state sales tax:

Real Estate Taxes

Here are several tax articles that deal specifically with real estate. We explain why property taxes are so essential to your county and town. In fact, in our tax lien article, we even explain what can happen if you decide to stop paying your property taxes:

Natural Disasters and Taxes

If you or a friend has been a victim of a natural disaster, then you might want to take a look at our tax relief articles. They spell out exactly the kinds of help you can expect to get - or not get - when disaster strikes:

2004 Tax Information

Many times you're looking for some tax information from prior years. In this section of our publication we'll be archiving some of the past articles we've run dealing with income taxes: