After eight months, the IRS finally clarified how the new small business deduction works for LLCs and S-Corporations. Given its complexity, it’s no great surprise it took 184 pages to explain.

Here’s why it’s so important to understand.

If you happen to have lots of kids or pay high property taxes or pay big state income taxes or took out a mortgage that funded something other than home improvements, you’ve likely lost a lot of tax deductions and exemptions. When all is said and done, the new law effectively subjects more of your income to taxation.

However, if you are fortunate enough to own your own business, Congress found a way to make it up to you. You may now qualify for the very large 20% small business income deduction under Section 199A.

Here’s how it works. But, remember, it only applies to pass-through businesses; LLCs or S-Corps. C-Corps got their own tax break, so don’t feel bad for them!

Section 199A’s very first eligibility test is based on your taxable income. If your taxable income is less than $315,000 as a married person (or $157,500, if filing single), you’ll get the tax break.

Importantly, below these income levels, you don’t need to have any employees to qualify for the deduction. And, despite what you may have read, this tax break applies to “service” businesses too. Below these income thresholds, it’s not just for “non-service” businesses. The IRS’ recent guidance made it clear that many service business owners will qualify for the 20% small business tax deduction.

Now, if you make more than $315,000 (or, again, more than half that level, if you’re single), the tax break fades away fast. To be clearer, it fades away fast for service businesses only.

Service businesses are defined as fields that look like paper-pushing, such as investment advisors, accountants, attorneys or catch-all “consultants”, as well as businesses providing health services, like physicians.

For these service businesses, as you make more than the taxable income limit, the deduction begins to decline. Once you reach $415,000, it totally disappears.

Interestingly, no matter how much the business owner makes, this big tax break is never gone for “non-service” businesses. Bizarrely, it also sticks around for certain carved-out paper-pushers; engineers, architects or real estate agents!

For “non-service” business owners, there’s a two-pronged test to determine the level of the small business deduction you’ll get. The tax deduction you’ll get is the smaller of two distinct calculations.

The first calculation is equal to 20% of your business income. The second calculation is the larger of (a) 50% of your employees’ total wages or (b) a combination of 25% of employee wages plus a factor of how much money you invested in your business.

Only Congress, in its infinite wisdom, would think all of this represents tax code simplification. They deserve stacks of love letters from CPAs across the country thanking them for their continued job security!

Speaking of the new tax rules, we’ll be discussing the possible benefits of Donor-Advised Funds at this season’s kick-off Money Series presentation on Wed., Sep. 26 at 3:30pm at the Traverse City Senior Center. Front Street Foundation is a local non-profit whose mission is to provide open-access to financial education, for all. To register, visit www.MoneySeries.org or call (231) 714-6459.

Q: I’ve heard a lot about index fund investing. The funny thing is, I don’t really even know what an index fund is! Can you explain the difference between index funds and regular mutual funds?

It’s always a smart plan to do some learning before committing money! That advice applies to index fund investing too, despite its massive popularity. Since the start of this current bull market, low-cost index fund investing has become much more than just an investment philosophy. It’s almost become an investment religion.

To begin, index funds are types of mutual funds, just like apples and oranges are types of fruit. However, unlike a mutual fund managed by people doing financial research, an index fund’s only goal is to mimic the market.

The index could be designed to track the many hundreds of separate stocks that make up the S&P 500 or it could be made to track the performance of a short list of speculative marijuana companies. In the end, an index fund is nothing more than a low-cost, take-what-the-market-gives-you investment, for better or for worse. You just pick the index to track and the result is essentially written in the stars.

And, since the bull market began almost a decade ago, taking what the market gave you has been a fine result. My consistent advice, however, is for you to periodically assess your risk capacity and to rebalance your portfolio as necessary. There’s always another turn in the cycle.

Q: With interest rates going up, I’ve read that bonds won’t be the place to have my money. What do interest rates rising have to do with how badly or how well bonds will perform?

It always surprises me that investors feel they understand stocks much better than they do bonds. I suppose, like most things, it’s just a matter of familiarity and exposure.

For the record, though, bonds are much simpler than stocks. With stocks, you are a part-owner of a business and you only get what’s leftover after paying everybody else. On the other hand, with bonds, you are simply a lender of money and all that matters is whether or not your interest is paid on time and your principal is paid in full upon maturity.

Now, to visualize the effect that interest rates have on bonds, imagine a teeter-totter. On one side sits a man with a t-shirt labeled “Interest Rates.” On the other side is a woman wearing a shirt that says “Price.” When interest rates go up, the price of bonds swing down.

As it is with teeter-tottering, to lessen the risk of a jarring crash in bond prices if interest rates suddenly rise, the proactive move is to inch your bottom toward the middle! The closer you sit to the center of the teeter-totter – that is, you choose shorter-term bonds over longer-term bonds – the less you’ll experience the up and down swings in your bond portfolio as interest rates rise and fall.

Jason P. Tank, CFA is the owner of Front Street Wealth Management, a fee-only wealth advisory firm located in Traverse City. He encourages questions and comments about future columns. Contact him at (231) 947-3775, by email at [email protected] and at www.FrontStreet.com

As an investment advisor of nearly 20 years, my intuition increasingly acts as an analytical shortcut. While that’s to be expected as experience accumulates, it is always comforting to see that intuition validated. This recently happened after I reviewed an academic study on retirement and the amazing value of working longer.

The math at work behind the retirement decision really isn’t that complex. There are only a small number of levers to pull. First is your savings rate. Second is your investment return on those savings. Third is the proportion of your retirement lifestyle that your savings won’t need to cover after factoring in your Social Security and – if you are lucky – your pension income. And, the final lever to factor into the retirement equation is, of course, your life expectancy.

This final lever is a bit perverse. Strive to live longer and your retirement hurdle grows higher. Choose the opposite and your retirement challenge becomes a cake walk. In the end, however, this is nothing but a Hobson’s choice for most of us. As humans, we don’t really control this lever as our will for a long and healthy life is quite inherent.

Each of the controllable retirement levers have built in sensitivities. A way to measure these sensitivities is to see how much a slight tweak on each lever might affect the level of available financial resources in retirement.

For example, you could choose to save a little more and your sustainable retirement income will obviously go up. Or, you could work to lower the cost of your investment program – which directly boosts the investment returns you get to keep – and, naturally, your retirement resources would rise.

In fact, this academic study showed that a small boost of your annual savings rate by 1% more starting at age 36 might produce a 4% boost in your annual income during your retirement years. The longer you wait to increase your savings rate, the smaller your bang is for the buck. Like the classic advice on voting, you should save early and often!

Now, what happens if you could also get better returns on your savings? The study showed that if you were able to boost your investment returns by 0.5% per year during your working years, your sustainable retirement income might also increase by as similar 4% per year.

Doing both things – as easy as walking and chewing gum at the same time – could boost your retirement lifestyle by closer to 8% per year. Since percentages aren’t all that easy to visualize, let’s just say this would translate into a lot of nice experiences over your retirement years!

Importantly, these basic planning moves – moderately boosting your savings rate and your investment returns – are both time-tested and largely controllable.

But, what about simply working longer? How much longer would you need to keep working to equal the impact of saving 1% more of your income for your entire career and squeezing out 0.5% more return on your investments each and every year? Drumroll, please! The answer is you wouldn’t need to delay your retirement for even one full year!

So, here’s some truly intuitive advice. Be sure to save early and save often, and then, find work you enjoy, with people you enjoy, and keep at it for as long as you can.

Jason P. Tank, CFA is the owner of Front Street Wealth Management, a fee-only wealth advisory firm located in Traverse City. Contact him at (231) 947-3775, by email at [email protected] and at www.FrontStreet.com

A trillion dollars is not what it used to be! That impressive figure has revealed itself in two different ways over the past few weeks.

In the first case, it marks a measure of business success that is truly unparalleled in history. In the second case, it highlights a deep and growing concern about official economic policy.

Apple released their latest quarterly report and its stock rose to levels that helped the company pierce the trillion dollar mark.

Investors for many years have been doubting the resilience of Apple. The littered path of hardware makers is both long and storied. Just think of names such as Gateway, Blackberry or Nokia. The primary concern with hardware companies is the intense pace of change they face in both customer tastes, required successful innovation and the inevitability of commoditization. Few have ever navigated it successfully for too long.

Yet, the doubts have begun to fade into the background as Apple has shown itself to have two additional assets that pure hardware makers don’t usually possess.

With an installed base of iPhones and iPads of over 1 billion in use today, the business model of “planned obsolescence” has created a very predictable device upgrade cycle for Apple. Once you get hooked into the Apple-based user experience, few switch to an alternative. As a result, almost like clockwork, a new iPhone finds itself in your palm every two to three years.

And, with almost 25% of its revenues coming from services such as the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay and iCloud, Apple is building an enviable level of consumer stickiness; creating a virtuous cycle for future device upgrades. It’s little wonder Apple now sails in the unchartered waters of a trillion dollar company.

While not as celebratory as Apple’s, yet another trillion dollar milestone will soon be reached.

Despite entering our tenth year of an economic expansion, the latest projections from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office show soon-to-be $1 trillion deficits for as far as the eye can see. Not surprisingly, the surge in deficit projections has been fueled by a combination of large tax cuts and continued unconstrained federal spending.

What’s sparks my concern is the talk of a new wave of tax cuts to come. The most recent chatter focuses on making the cuts “permanent” and using inflation adjustments as a way to lower taxes on capital gains.

The stated goal, of course, for this unconventional policy – that is, boosting fiscal stimulus deep into an already long-in-the-tooth expansion – is to grow the economic pie. As the old business saying goes, I guess we’re going to try to make it up on volume!

Still, if one wanted to charge that this political agenda imprudently throws caution to the wind while unabashedly favoring the wealthiest among us, it wouldn’t be a totally unfair charge.

We do live in a time of economic and political wonder. All I can say with certainty is a trillion dollars just isn’t what it used to be!

Jason P. Tank, CFA is the owner of Front Street Wealth Management, a fee-only wealth advisory firm located in Traverse City. He encourages questions and comments about future columns. Contact him at (231) 947-3775, by email at [email protected] and at www.FrontStreet.com

With all that’s happening in our trade spat with China, the old saying, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”, rings ever louder in my ears with each and every tweet.

To this point, the ongoing US – China trade dispute has not yet escalated to dangerous levels. With only $50 billion of mutual tariffs now in place, just a fraction of our hundreds of billions of dollars of trade with China are affected.

Still, from the standpoint of investors and business leaders, the threat of escalation into a full-blown trade war looms too large. Very few economists – operating outside the White House, that is – are proponents of tariffs. The well-established consensus view on tariffs is they work to raise prices on consumers and ultimately cost us jobs. Using tariffs to resolve disputes is almost indisputably seen as poor economic policy.

That isn’t to say that China is blameless. It’s clear that Chinese authorities do not properly protect the intellectual property of foreign companies. The lure of access to China’s massive market and our addiction to cheap imports literally blinds us to this uncomfortable fact. And, up until now, our response has basically been to turn the other cheek.

I’ve always found it odd that US companies wanting to gain access to China’s market are forced to enter into joint ventures with a domestic Chinese company. Through these mandatory arrangements, foreign companies willfully hand over their trade secrets and industry know-how to China with no legitimate recourse for protection. The short-term profit motive is apparently just too enticing.

In contrast, the US offers nearly unfettered access and full protections to our foreign counterparts. Given the surge in populist politics that propelled Trump into office, it comes as little surprise that his administration is pushing back hard against China. It should also come as little surprise that China will push back equally as hard.

Of course, China has been highly strategic in its responses to Trump’s aggressive statements, threats and trade actions. To begin, China has been extraordinarily careful to never be viewed as the party that initiates or escalates matters. It’s also smartly positioning itself with our major trading partners, such as the European Union, and working to fill the vacuum left behind in Asia by our abrupt withdrawal from negotiations of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. These are calculated and subtle countermoves by China in their long-term aim to gain greater global economic influence.

Not so subtle retaliations by China are possible if a legitimate trade war heats up. It’s always important to recognize that China, as a direct result of their large trade imbalance with the US, is our biggest lender. Selling their US Treasury holdings with indelicate speed could act as a shot across our bow. In other words, tariffs are not the only arrow in their quiver.

Since nobody wins in a brutal, tit-for-tat trade war, my hope is our leaders in Washington and Beijing are reminded of the wise words of Martin Luther King, “An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind!”

Jason P. Tank, CFA is the owner of Front Street Wealth Management, a fee-only wealth advisory firm located in Traverse City. He encourages questions and comments about future columns. Contact him at (231) 947-3775, by email at [email protected] and at www.FrontStreet.com