Carson Bieber is Googins Advisors’ new full-time employee. He graduated from the UW Madison in May 2019 with a degree in Personal Finance and Financial Planning. As an intern here since late 2017, we asked him to join us.
July 2019
Welcome, Carson!
Carson Bieber is Googins Advisors’ new full-time employee. He graduated from the UW Madison in May 2019 with a degree in Personal Finance and Financial Planning. As an intern here since late 2017, we asked him to join us. Carson will assist Louise and Karl with clients, aspiring to becoming a Financial Advisor. He is the new distinct voice you are hearing on our telephone.
QCD’s – or, Qualified Charitable Deductions for those over 70.5.
For some years, it has been legal to give your Required Minimum Distribution (“RMD”) of $ 100,000 or less to qualified charities allowing you to avoid all income tax on the distribution. (No, sorry, it is not a way to give to family members.) Until the recent tax change that took effect on your 2018 income taxes, it was not clearly preferable to give to charities using this method.
It takes planning. You must request the custodian of your IRA distribute money to the charity before any of the RMD is distributed for any one year. The custodian will then send a check directly to the charity. Personally, I do this and have developed a list of the charities I wish to support and look at it each year; perhaps I add one or two or change the amount contributed. I move my annual RMD to a November date to give the custodian time to complete my requests.
On your taxes and currently on line 4a, the amount of the RMD will be listed. Then the phrase “QCD” is listed on line 4b and the net taxable amount is shown on the far right column. Thus, if you give the entire RMD to charities, you can see 100% has escaped income tax due to QCD laws. Just call us to make changes of payouts of required minimum distributions to charities.
New Secure/Encrypted E Mail Format
You will find Secure or Encrypt in the Subject line. If you use a common email program (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo, etc.), there will be no extra steps to access the message and if you respond to an encrypted e mail we sent, it will come back encrypted to us.
Annual Disclosures
Enclosed with this newsletter you will find our annual regulatory disclosures as well as consolidated account statements as of the end of June. To save paper, we’ve omitted the several pages of definitions and disclaimers that typically accompany the statements; if you’d like to see them, just let us know.
Now we have started the second half of the calendar year. The market continues to indicate it is “happy” about where it is trading – fearful of moving significantly upward due to the fear and negativity of the media while also seeing little reason to move down. More about the market in an upcoming newsletter.
Louise Googins, Author, Principal
Karl Kuelthau, Principal
Michael Googins, Administrator
Kim Rankin, Accountant
Carson Bieber, Associate
Logan Donovan, UW-Madison Intern
Mckayla Johnson, UW-Madison Intern