Category Archives: Year-End Tax Planning

By David M. Kopyc, CRPC®

Integrating year-end investment planning into your retirement strategy is crucial for maximizing savings, minimizing tax liabilities and ensuring long-term financial security. The end of the year offers a critical window to review progress, make adjustments and use key tax-efficient strategies that align with your retirement goals.

Effective retirement planning is a continuous process, not a one-time event. The close of the calendar year provides a natural checkpoint to assess your financial health and determine if you are on track to meet your retirement objectives. This review should encompass your entire financial picture—from investment portfolios and savings rates to tax strategies and estate plans.

Maximize Retirement Plan Contributions: One of the most impactful year-end moves is maximizing contributions to tax-advantaged retirement accounts.

Employer plans (401(k), 403(b), etc.): Confirm you have contributed up to the annual limit. For 2025, this limit is $23,500, with an additional $7,500 catch-up contribution for individuals age 50 and older. If you haven’t reached the maximum, consider increasing contributions for the remaining pay periods of the year.

Individual Retirement Accounts: You can contribute to a traditional or Roth IRA until the tax filing deadline in April of the following year, but making the contribution by year-end can still be beneficial for planning purposes. The 2025 contribution limit is $7,000, with an extra $1,000 catch-up for those 50 and older.

Health Savings Accounts: If eligible, maximize your HSA contributions. HSAs offer a “triple tax advantage”—tax-deductible contributions, tax-free growth and tax-free withdrawals for qualified medical expenses—making them a powerful tool for covering healthcare costs in retirement.

Optimize Your Investment Portfolio:Year-end is the ideal time to ensure your investments are still aligned with your risk tolerance, time horizon and retirement goals.

By Kevin M. Hedley, MS, CPA, PFS

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), enacted in July 2025, represents a sweeping overhaul of U.S. business taxation, with significant implications for federal and state tax planning, and corporate investment strategy. This article is a brief summary of some of the key business tax law updates introduced by OBBBA, focusing on the most impactful provisions for corporations and their practical implications.

100% Bonus Depreciation Made Permanent

OBBBA permanently restores 100% bonus depreciation for qualified property. This allows businesses to immediately deduct the full cost of most tangible property placed in service after January 19, 2025. This provision, which had been scheduled to phase down under prior law, now provides a powerful incentive for capital investment by enabling immediate expensing rather than requiring depreciation over several years. The law also introduces a transitional 40% bonus depreciation rate for property placed in service in the first tax year ending after January 19, 2025, if the taxpayer elects this treatment.

New 100% Deduction for Qualified Production Property (QPP)

A major innovation is the creation of Section 168(n), which allows a 100% immediate deduction for certain nonresidential real property used in qualified production activities—primarily manufacturing, production, or refining of tangible personal property. This deduction is available for property placed in service after January 19, 2025, and before January 1, 2031. The provision is elective and subject to recapture if the property ceases to be used in a qualified production activity within 10 years. This is a significant departure from the traditional 39-year straight-line depreciation for nonresidential real property, and it is designed to spur domestic manufacturing investment.

By Susan Elise Campbell

Year-end may be a good time to consider restructuring a small business to shield personal assets from potential liabilities. 

The tax code allows for several options, according to Paul Dowen, CPA, and partner at Whittemore, Dowen & Ricciardelli, LLP, certified public accountants serving the North Country and Saratoga County. Dowen said the typical choice today is between a limited liability company (LLC) or a Subchapter S corporation (S corp), although there are other entities. 

Both provide some protection for the owner by limiting personal liability, just as a corporation does. If the company has debt or other financial obligations, owners are not personally responsible for satisfying them.

“In a retail store or restaurant with people coming in and out of the building, you might have product liability,” he said. “Both LLCs and S corps give you some protection.”

“The confusion is that an LLC can be organized as a sole proprietorship, a partnership, a C corp or an S corp,” he said. “If a client tells me their business has been set up by the attorney as an LLC, I know there is some liability protection, but that doesn’t tell me how the company is being taxed.”

By Eric Snell

As we enter the annual season of giving, you might be thinking of charities you wish to support. But you also might be wondering how to gain some tax benefits from your gifts.

It used to be pretty straightforward: You wrote a check to a charity and then deducted the amount of the gift, within limits, from your taxes. But a few years ago, as part of tax law changes, the standard deduction was raised significantly, so fewer people were able to itemize deductions. Consequently, there was less financial incentive to make charitable gifts. 

Of course, this didn’t entirely stop people from making them. And it’s still possible to gain some tax advantages, too. 

Here are a few tax-smart charitable giving strategies:

• Bunch your charitable gifts into one year. If you combine a few years’ worth of charitable gifts in a single year, you could surpass the standard deduction amount and then itemize deductions for that year. In the years following, you could revert to taking the standard deduction. 

• Make qualified charitable distributions. Once you turn 73 (or 75 if you were born in 1960 or later), you must start taking withdrawals from your traditional or inherited IRA. These withdrawals — technically called required minimum distributions, or RMDs — are taxable at your personal income tax rate, so, if the amounts are large enough, they could push you into a higher tax bracket or cause you to pay larger Medicare premiums. 

Christian Snyder of Saratoga Springs, J.D., CFA, has been appointed president of Fenimore Asset Management, an independent, Capital Region-based investment advisory firm and manager of the FAM Funds family of mutual funds.

He succeeds Debra Pollard who is retiring from Fenimore at the end of 2022 after a tenure of more than 30 years with the company, the last six as president.

Snyder will work closely with Fenimore founder and Executive Chairman Tom Putnam, Chief Executive Officer John Fox, and the management team to guide the 48-year-old firm into the future.

“Fenimore prides itself on attracting and retaining associates who share our strong values, distinctive investment philosophy, and dedication to service excellence. Deb and Christian exemplify these traits,” said Fox.

“Christian has nearly two decades of experience in the financial services industry along with a solid track record of leadership and integrity. We are excited to have him on the team and look forward to working together to further our mission of preserving and growing our investors’ capital over the long term.”

Snyder joins Fenimore after five years as chief operating officer of the Wealth Strategies Group at Goldman Sachs Ayco Personal Financial Management. Prior to that, he served three years as associate counsel and then deputy general counsel for the company. 

By Joanna Piscitella, CPA
The Internal Revenue Service has issued final regulations on the business expense deduction for meals and entertainment following changes made by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA).
The Treasury Department and the IRS did not receive any requests to speak at a public hearing on the proposed regulations but they had received written and electronic comments in response to the proposed regulations.
These written comments were incorporated into the new regulations.
As a reminder, the 2017 TCJA generally eliminated the deduction for any expenses related to activities generally considered entertainment, amusement or recreation. However, taxpayers may still deduct business expenses related to food and beverages if certain requirements are met (Typically limited to 50 percent of the expenditure).

BY Mickey Orta
The top two questions that financial professionals have been hearing from customers are: “What’s going to happen to my investments and financial plans depending on the results of the presidential election?” and “When will things get back to normal post-COVID?”
While these questions can’t be answered directly, that doesn’t mean we have to sit tight without taking any action.
It’s probably safe to say that 2020 has not unfolded in a way that any of us could have predicted. The COVID-19 pandemic upended everyone’s plans—financially, and in general—starting in March. A busy and heavily contested election season added to the feeling of heading into the unknown.
Whether you’re looking at financial planning for 2021 from the perspective of a business or as an individual, the pandemic isn’t going away and so uncertainty is likely to continue.
To help reduce some stress, take a look at what is in your control and focus on those elements. Financial planning has many components that are squarely within your control.