Preparing for Tax Season

For high-income families, tax season involves more than meeting filing requirements. It’s a moment when the many moving pieces of your financial life come into focus at once. That makes it a natural pause point, not just to file, but to recalibrate.

As the April 15 tax deadline approaches, here are three considerations worth discussing with your advisors.

• Look beyond the individual return. For families with the ability to gift assets, it can be helpful to consider tax exposure at the family level rather than in isolation. In certain situations, transferring appreciated assets to children or heirs in lower tax brackets can help influence long-term outcomes. Moreover, for people turning 73 and navigating required minimum distributions for the first time, understanding options like Qualified Charitable Distributions can also help connect tax decisions with philanthropic priorities.

• Treat tax season as a broader planning checkpoint. Income complexity can often increases over time. Bonuses, equity compensation, business income, deferred compensation, and changing cash flows can help reshape your tax picture. At this stage, it’s worth revisiting whether your tax withholding, estimated payments, and liquidity planning still reflect how income actually arrives today, not how it did in prior years.

• Embrace coordination across your advisory team. Many affluent families work with experienced CPAs, whose technical subject-matter experience is essential. Still, tax returns are inherently backward-looking. That makes it especially important to view the larger picture and confirm that tax, estate, charitable, and investment decisions are being evaluated together as part of a cohesive plan.

At Planning Alternatives, we take a holistic view across all advisory disciplines. We coordinate with CPAs, attorneys, and other advisors to keep strategies aligned and to help prevent decisions in one area from creating unintended issues in another. In complex situations, a proactive conversation and a second set of eyes can bring greater clarity, continuity, and confidence.

If you haven’t already, consider reaching out to a Planning Alternatives advisor sooner rather than later. An earlier conversation can help reinforce a unified approach across your planning decisions and minimize the need for last-minute decisions as tax filing deadlines draw closer.