A recent Wall Street Journal article presented the stories of a number of professional and volunteer tax preparers who are still going strong well into their 80s, 90s, and beyond. In my seven years supporting AARP’s TaxAide program I’ve worked with dozens of volunteer preparers in their 60s, 70s, and 80s who are extremely knowledgeable and quite sharp. I would trust them with my tax return.
The article could have been greatly improved by interviewing some HumbleDollar’s tax experts,

https://www.wsj.com/articles/beware-of-e-filing-your-tax-return-legal-trouble-for-error-privacy-risk-cyberattack-96d31111?mod=e2tw
I am not advocating for either method of filing your taxes but everyone who files their own taxes should be aware of the information contained in the above referenced article.

TWO THINGS HEAVILY influenced my financial life. The first was my short stint after college as an internal revenue agent with the IRS. The second was getting married and having five children.
Result: I’ve spent most of my adult life as a tax-averse junky using retirement accounts to get my high, so much so that there’s a risk our retirement-account withdrawals will put us in a much higher tax bracket than when we made our contributions.

Recently the IRS has begun offering everyone the opportunity to sign up for an account. It let’s you make payments, including payment plans to cover those taxes you expect to pay in the future not covered by with-holding.
 
I signed up right away to prevent a scammer from creating an account using my SS# and potentially filing a fake return.  I’m certain my # is available on the Dark Web (like the other 95% of Americans) so the easiest protection I could think of was opening the account and locking it down with 2-factor.

The United States is 26 thousand billion dollars in debt. The United States spends two thousand billion dollars a year more than its revenue. 
If we generate any real, sustainable, savings many people are calling for them to be spent … on seniors and veterans. Congress is trying to cut taxes and limit the increase in the deficit to only a few more trillion dollars over the next ten years. 
The Social Security Trust is heading for insolvency as is the Medicare Part A Trust.

Following is a link to an article that I saw on CNN this evening. I don’t want to get political but it raises some interesting concerns.
I filed our taxes a couple of weeks ago and found out today that our refund has been approved by the IRS. I’ll be happy to see it in our account.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/18/economy/doge-irs-data-tax-filers-risk

ONE OF MY FIRST employers allowed me to buy savings bonds through withholding from my weekly salary. It seemed like magic. Ever since, automatic payroll deductions have been an important part of my financial life.
My payroll deductions expanded to include my health insurance and my 401(k) contributions. It just felt good to me, kind of like the practice of regularly giving 10% of your income to the church.
On the other hand, payroll deductions are also how we pay taxes,

I get frustrated sometimes. Okay pretty often, even oftener these days. 
The root cause of much of my frustration is reading the nonsense posted on social media and readily passed along as 100% fact and apparently driving a great deal of public opinion. Today’s political climate is making things much worse.
Social Security is a favorite target. 
What people claim, for example – Congress stole the trust money, actuaries didn’t consider some people die before collecting,

In late 2021 and early 2022, I sold our core bond holdings in our taxable account and invested the proceeds in I-Bonds as part of a strategy to build an income bridge to allow me to defer taking my SS.  This provided the stability of a known inflation-adjusted income stream that had yielded an average of 6.6% per year until we began redemptions this past year.   Given what occurred with bond funds in 2022 (and almost double-digit I-Bond interest for a brief time),

If I save on an after-tax basis in a 401k, (plan permitting) the earnings, upon distribution, are taxed as ordinary income and subject to RMDs. However, withdrawing my after-tax contributions only count toward the RMD until they are exhausted. If I save after-tax in a Roth account, the earnings are tax-free with no required withdrawals.
There are earnings limits on contributing to a Roth, but no income or account balance limits on Roth conversions. 
Roth distributions are excluded from MAGI and thus substantial income may not count toward IRMAA premiums,

TED BENNA IS OFTEN called the “father of the 401(k).” In 1980, he implemented the first 401(k) plan based on his somewhat bold interpretation of the Revenue Act of 1978. He certainly couldn’t have envisioned the $11.4 trillion in “defined contribution” 401(k) and 403(b) accounts that we have today.
Individual retirement accounts also took off in the early 1980s, and traditional IRAs now hold an additional $11.3 trillion. Combined, that’s an impressive $23 trillion in tax-deferred retirement assets.

It’s that time of year – time to gather your records and prepare your 2024 tax return.  Many HD contributers are involved the IRS’ Voluntary income Tax Assistance (VITA) program,  helping to prepare free tax returns for qualifying individuals. This is an excellent program for lower income tax payers. The linked website has a tool for finding a local site. If you have family, friends, or neighbors who might benefit from this excellent program, please think about letting them know.

It would be nice, quite a windfall.
However, we didn’t pay for our benefits. In the aggregate, beneficiaries pay for about 15% of all benefits received, hence maximum 85% of benefits being taxable. I checked my records a found that within six years of starting, I collected benefits (including spousal benefit) equal to all the taxes I and employers paid since 1959. 
The law says the benefits are taxable income, but given the standard deduction, a lower income retiree may pay very little or no actual taxes on the benefits received. 

IN WASHINGTON, 2025 is beginning to look a lot like 2017. Republicans again control the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives. But a key difference between then and now is that today the Republican majority in the House is far narrower.
This means more negotiation will be required, and agreement on a new tax bill may take months. In the meantime, here are some key areas that investors will want to keep an eye on.

I am not an economist and even they often don’t agree, but shouldn’t we be concerned about the Country’s deficit and debt?  
Nobody I know likes taxes, but does debt and growing interest payments present a greater risk? Federal interest payments are over one trillion dollars a year – that is a million, million by the way. 
I sometimes think, can we get to the point where nobody, not even another country wants to invest in the US?