Individuals and small businesses should start the year off on the right foot by considering these easy ways to minimize taxes in 2025.
Essential Ways to Minimize Taxes in 2025
Make W-4 Updates
If you are employed, your employers uses the information on your IRS Form W-4 compared against the IRS’s withholding tables. This allows the IRS to determine the amount of income tax to withhold from your wages in each payroll period.
If your 2024 refund/balance due isn’t what you expect, you may want to consider adjusting your W-4. You can change your withholding based on your projected tax for 2025. If you need assistance, please call this office.
Ensure You’ve Collected / or Issued W-9s
Operating a business? You are required to issue a Form 1099-NEC to each service provider to which you have paid at least $600 during a given year. It is a good practice to collect a completed W-9 form from every service provider you use. (Even if you are paying them less than $600). Why? Because you may use that provider again later that year and could have difficulty obtaining their W-9. Especially if you use providers that do not plan to report all of their income for the year.
Estimated Tax Payments
If you are self-employed, then you should be prepaying quarterly estimated payments each year. You should be doing this, by making electronic payments, or sending in 1040-ES payment vouchers. In 2025, the first three payments are due April 15, June 16, and September 15, 202. While the final estimated tax payment is due on January 15. 2026. Generally, these payments are based on the prior year’s taxable income. So if you expect any significant changes in either income or deductions relative to the previous year, this could change. Please contact this office for help in adjusting your estimated tax payments accordingly.
Additional ways to Minimize Taxes in 2025
Charitable Contributions
If you marginally itemize your deductions, then you can employ the bunching strategy. This involves taking the standard deduction one year but itemizing your deductions in the next. However, you must make this decision early in the year so that you can make two years’ worth of charitable contributions in the bunching year.
Required Minimum Distributions
Each year, if you are 73 or older, you must take a required minimum distribution from each of your retirement accounts or face a substantial penalty. By taking this distribution early in the year, you can ensure that you do not forget and accidentally subject yourself to penalties.
Gifting
If you are looking to reduce your estate-tax exposure or if you just want to give some money to family members, know that each year, you can gift up to an inflation-adjusted amount, which for 2025 is $19,000, to each of an unlimited number of beneficiaries without affecting your lifetime estate-tax exclusion amount or paying a gift tax.
Consider These Ideas to Minimize Taxes in 2025
Retirement Plan Contributions
Review your retirement-plan contributions to determine whether you can afford to increase your contribution amounts and to make sure that you are taking full advantage of your employer’s contributions to the plan.
Beneficiaries
Marriages, divorces, births, deaths, and even family clashes all affect whom you include as a beneficiary. It is good practice to periodically review not just your will or trust but also your retirement plans, insurance policies, property holdings, bank accounts, and other investments to be sure that your beneficiary designations are up to date.
Reasonable Compensation
With the advent a few years ago of the 20% pass-through deduction, which is available to most businesses other than C corporations, the issue of reasonable compensation took on new importance, particularly for shareholders of S corporations.
This has been a contentious issue in the past, as it has allowed shareholders who are not just investors but who are actually working in the business to take a minimum salary (or no salary at all) so that all their income passed through the K-1 as investment income. This strategy allows such shareholders and the S corporation to avoid payroll taxes on income that should be treated as W-2 compensation.
A number of issues factor into a discussion of reasonable compensation, including comparisons to others working in similar businesses and to employees within the same business, as well as the cost of living in the business’s locale. This is a subjective amount, and it generally must be determined by a firm that specializes in making such determinations.
Business-Vehicle Mileage
Generally, vehicles with business use also have some amount of nondeductible personal use in a given year. It is always a good practice to record a vehicle’s mileage at the beginning and at the end of each year so as to determine its total mileage for that year. The total mileage figure is then used when prorating the personal- and business-use expenses related to that vehicle. Check out the 2025 Standard Mileage Rates.
College Tuition Plans
Contribute to your child’s Section 529 plan as soon as possible; the funds begin accumulating earnings as soon as they are in the account, which is important because the student will likely begin using that money at age 18 or 19.
Record Keeping
Only a few of the tax-related actions that you take during a year will benefit yourself or others. The most important of these actions is keeping timely and accurate tax records; for businesses in particular, this is of the utmost importance. Those who have well-documented income and expense records generally come out on top when the IRS challenges them.
If you have any questions related to your taxes or if would like an appointment for tax projections or tax planning, please contact this office.
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