The Woodward Financial Advisors Blog

The challenge is that instead of you running the numbers, the numbers are now running you. So how can we get back in charge?

Folks are sometimes surprised to find out that Social Security benefits are taxable, like how salary is taxed as ordinary income at your highest marginal rate. But not all the benefit is taxable: depending on your other income, you may be taxed on as much as 85% of your Social Security benefit, or as little as 0%.

After a few decades, you were done – you had reached the top of the proverbial mountain. You climbed your Mount Everest. And from this new vantage point, things look pretty different. But here’s the thing – you still have to climb down the mountain.

We recently had the opportunity to know exactly where to hit the machine when a client recently approached us with a goal of making a significant charitable contribution in 2020, with the hope and expectation of making the same contribution for as long as they are able in subsequent years. After determining that they could do this without jeopardizing their other spending goals, we set about figuring out the best way to make their gift this year.

These days, reading a newspaper feels like looking into some alternate reality where things make very little sense. When you take rising COVID-19 cases with a level of social unrest we haven’t seen for half a century, and top if off with shockingly bad economic news, you get a pretty universally ugly picture. Although we’ve never had an economic and public health crisis exactly like this, it doesn’t mean we can’t look to history to help us answer a few key questions.

To be clear, we don’t expect folks to react indifferently to the political and ideological roller coaster that is an election year. We simply caution letting those viewpoints infiltrate your investment decision-making process. Time has shown this to be a losing strategy.