Tax ideas for individuals and business owners As usual, you may want to utilize some tried-and-true tax strategies as the year winds down. However, there are several interesting twists and turns to year-end tax planning in 2008. Keeping that in mind, here are eight tax moves to consider late this year. [continue]

If you are like many long-time retirement savers, you may have several IRAs you started up in years gone by. This usually results in a flood of financial statements in your mailbox. But you can cut down on the paperwork—as well as simplify your life—by consolidating your IRAs in one place. Caution: Before we go any further, remember that all IRAs are not created equal. For instance, you cannot mix and match traditional IRAs with Roth IRAs. A traditional IRA may include tax-deductible contributions from the time when you were eligible for IRA deductions. The distributions from these IRAs are subject to tax at ordinary income rates. In contrast, contributions to a Roth IRA are never tax-deductible, but future distributions may be completely tax-free if the Roth IRA has been in existence for at least five years. [continue]

The new housing law—which includes the Housing Assistance Tax Act of 2008—features several important provisions for homeowners and lenders. For the most part, the benefits are favorable to the public, but the new law also cracks down on a tax-saving device for certain vacation homeowners. Here is a brief overview of several key changes in the new law. Home buyer’s tax credit: If you qualify as a first-time home buyer, you can claim a tax credit equal to $7,500 or 10% of the purchase price, whichever is less. A first-time homeowner is defined as someone who has not owned a principal residence for the last three years. The home must be purchased after April 8, 2008, and before July 1, 2009. [continue]

With a health savings account (HSA), you can deduct contributions made in conjunction with a qualifying high-deductible health insurance plan. Distributions from the HSA are tax-free to the extent they are used to pay for qualified medical expenses. [continue]

Typically, a business manager will sit down with his or her employees at the end of each year for a performance review. But is anything really being accomplished? Not if the manager is merely doing the review by rote. Consequently, whatever input the employees provide in these sessions is likely to fall on deaf ears. Better idea: Employee reviews may be meaningful to both sides if they are handled effectively. Of course, developing a better system of conducting reviews will take a little extra time and effort at first. But the “payoff” will be well worth it. And once you put these procedures in place, it should be easy to follow them each year. Here are a few suggestions for improving the process: [continue]

*Don’t Be Greedy—In a new case, a medical group arranged to sell their practice to a tax-exempt hospital. Prior to the acquisition, the physicians donated their stock to the hospital. They valued the deductions at $400 per share, even though the practice was folding. Result: The Tax Court set a value of only $37 a share. Plus, it imposed a 40% penalty for the overvaluation of the donations. [continue]