Farm Industry Trends
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Some Major Tax “Goodies” in Senate Bill For Farmers!
The Senate in the early morning hours of January 1, 2013 passed a bill to avert the “Fiscal Cliff”. This bill is now headed to the House and it may be passed, not passed or amended and passed back to the Senate for further agreement. Assuming that the Bill is passed as is, there are […]
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Be Careful Of Fiscal Year Section 179 Issues!
Section 179 and bonus depreciation provisions are based upon a different set of dates for your asset purchases. Bonus depreciation on new equipment is based upon the date that you actually purchase and place in service the asset. For new assets bought between January 1, 2012 and December 31, 2012, you are entitled to use […]
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Farm Income Not Cash Rent!
Continuing our farm income averaging trend, we had a couple of readers ask if they could farm income average their cash rented ground. The short answer is no. In order to use farm income averaging, you must have “farm income” which is comprised primarily of the following items: Direct farm income from Schedule F, Flow-through […]
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Update on Farm Income Averaging
We did a post a few days ago on how farmers may not be affected by the increased tax rates for 2013 if they use farm income averaging. In that post, we used an example of spreading $1 million of farm income over four years, $250,000 in 2010-2013. An observant reader reminded us that a farmer […]
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One Week to Go Checklist
Since there is about one week to go in the year, we thought we would present a quick checklist for accounting and tax related items: Make sure that all checks for 2012 expenses are written and mailed by December 31 Make sure that any gifts made at year-end are deposited into the donee’s account before […]
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Farmers Might Delay Higher Tax Rates for Three Years?
With all the talk about the possible higher tax rates starting next year we sometimes forget that farmers might not feel much of the hit due to farm income averaging. This special method of figuring tax allows you to average your tax over four years (2010-2013). This means for 2013 you might be able to […]
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Annual Exclusion Update
I was talking with a reader from North Carolina today about our post from yesterday. He was not sure if the annual exclusion amount was or was not included in the lifetime. So, I have decided to do one more update on this subject. The first $13,000 ($14,000) of gifts that you give to everyone […]
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Annual Exclusion Does Not Eat Into Lifetime Exclusion.
We had a reader ask the following question: “Am I correct in that this accumulation of gifts during lifetime does not include those under the Annual Gift Tax Exclusion ($13,000)?” It seems like most of my posts lately deal with estate and gift taxes, but this is a very important subject and with the end […]
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Another Nice Feature of a Living Trust
We have gotten some feedback on my previous post about revocable living trusts. One of the features of a living trust versus a will is that the trust can be set up to provide for “guardianship” of your affairs during your lifetime should you suddenly become disabled, etc. You can create other forms of documents that […]
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Revocable Living Trusts – Do They Save Estate Taxes?
Nick Houle, one of our Estate Planning partners in our Minneapolis office, gave an one hour presentation on estate tax planning at the South Dakota Soybean Association annual meeting in Sioux Falls, SD yesterday. I attended the event with Nick and talked to many farmers about succession and estate planning. One of the questions that […]