Seniors and Uncle Sam
Book designed to help financial advisers point out tax traps for older clients.
If seniors aren't the bulk of your clients already, they might soon be. More and more baby boomers reaching retirement age will seek financial advice. And "Advising the 60+ Investor: Tax and Financial Planning Strategies," by Darlene Smith, Dale Pulliam and Holland Tolles, can help you address seniors' common needs.
Written by two CPAs and a finance professor, the book covers realities in growing older - dealing with pension and annuity income, Social Security issues, business succession and estate planning. The text is heavy on the tax ramifications of financial decisions and cites relevant tax law sections.
The chapter on the complicated area of distributions from annuities and retirement accounts is particularly helpful. Using hypothetical examples, the authors detail how certain distribution decisions result in different tax bites.
Several of the sections contain worksheets you can use to plug in a client's numbers for computing estate taxes or gift taxes, for example. And there's a special chapter on remarriage for widowers whose benefits and taxes might change if they take a new spouse.
"Advising the 60+ Investor" (ISBN 0471333530) is published by John Wiley & Sons. It costs $49.95 at bookstores and online.
