If your 2025 Social Security wages from your employer were over $150,000, your 401k catch-up contributions now have to go in as Roth. For a Kansas household in the 24% bracket, that means about $91 less take-home pay every two weeks. This guide explains who the rule covers, why Box 3 of your W-2 decides it, whether paying the tax now works in your favor, and four things to check before the year ends.

A health savings account, or HSA, is the only account in the tax code that gives you a deduction going in, tax-free growth along the way, and tax-free withdrawals for medical costs. You can only fund one while you are covered by a qualifying high deductible health plan, and that qualification test is where most people get stopped.

Before 2026, qualifying meant meeting two federal tests: a deductible at or above a set minimum, and out-of-pocket exposure at or below a set maximum.

For most people, Medicare arrives at the same time as several other big financial decisions: retirement, Social Security, portfolio withdrawals, tax planning, and the transition away from employer benefits.

That is why we view Medicare as part of the retirement plan—not a separate insurance decision.

You do not need to become a Medicare expert. But before age 65, you should understand the major choices, the deadlines, and the places where a seemingly small decision can create an expensive surprise.

A couple retires at the end of 2025. Their income falls, but their 2026 Medicare premiums still reflect the salaries they earned in 2024. Their retirement budget includes an extra charge for being high earners, even though their working years are behind them.

This can happen because Medicare generally looks back two years when determining income-related surcharges. Retirement may give them a way to ask Social Security to use more recent income information. For a household paying these charges, that review belongs on the retirement checklist.

Imagine a donor who gives the same $6,000 to the same four charities in 2026 that she gave in 2025. Her income has not changed. The charities have not changed. Even the checks look the same.

Her tax deduction may not.

Three provisions of the 2025 tax law took effect on January 1, 2026, and together they change how charitable deductions work.

None of this means charitable giving has become unattractive. For many households, charitable contributions will continue to provide meaningful tax benefits. But when you give, what you give, and how you give it now matter more than they did before.

Federal law says an ESOP has to let you start diversifying at 55. The Burns & McDonnell plan lets you start at 50, and raises the limit again at 55 and 60. What the plan's filings say about diversification, vesting, payouts, and why NUA does not apply. In this guide:

• What the plans' public filings report

• How the ESOP contribution and annual share valuation work

• When you are first allowed to diversify, and how much

• Five decisions worth getting right before you retire

• Answers to the questions employee-owners ask most

For most of the last few years, the deduction known as bonus depreciation was shrinking on a set schedule, and by early 2025 it had dropped to 40 percent. The 2025 tax law reversed that. Bonus depreciation is back to 100 percent, and for the first time it is permanent, with no phase-out date sitting on the calendar.

What follows is an overview of how the deduction works, the timing rules that determine eligibility, and why the rules are more nuanced than they may first appear.

If a recent statement showed up under a name you didn't recognize, you're not alone. Proper Planning & Wealth Management is independently owned — no private equity, no parent company deciding what name goes on your statement. Here's why that's increasingly rare in Johnson County, and the three questions every client should ask their advisor.

Most people treat their Health Savings Account (HSA) like a glorified checking account. Money goes in, a copay or a prescription comes out, and the balance hovers near zero by December. That is a missed opportunity, because the HSA is the only account in the entire tax code that gives you a tax break on the way in, on the way through, and on the way out. Used deliberately, it can become one of the most efficient retirement assets you own.

Here is how it works, and how a little discipline can turn a modest health account into a meaningful tax-free nest egg. The Triple Tax Advantage…

Over the years I have sat across from a lot of capable, intelligent people who manage their own investments. They tend to be successful in their careers, disciplined with their money, and genuinely engaged in their financial lives. And yet many of them are making the same quiet mistake. It has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with the order in which they do things.

They build a portfolio first and look for a plan later. The better approach runs in exactly the opposite direction. There are 2 ways to build a portfolio:

I work with a number of Garmin employees in Olathe and the Kansas City area, and one thing comes up again and again: Garmin offers one of the strongest benefit packages I have seen, and a lot of people are not capturing everything available to them. The good news is that fixing this rarely requires earning more or saving dramatically more. It usually just requires understanding how the pieces fit together. Here is where I focus when a Garmin employee sits down with me for the first time.

If you own a target date fund in your 401k or an S&P 500 index fund in a brokerage account, you probably feel pretty diversified. You own 500 companies. That's the entire point of indexing.

But the S&P 500 of 2026 is not the S&P 500 most investors picture in their heads. A handful of names are doing most of the work, and the gap between what people think they own and what they actually own has rarely been wider.

Here is what is going on, why it matters, and how to think about your own portfolio in light of it.