Year-End Tax Planning
2025 is coming to a close and December 31st will be here before you know it. That means it’s a good time to make sure all your year-end tax items are in order.
Our good friend Sean Mullaney, the FI Tax Guy, put out an updated '2025 Year-End Tax Planning' article with all the deadlines and considerations you need to be aware of for both 12/31 and future deadlines for tax year 2025.
There’s some new info in there this year due to some recent tax updates (Bronze ACA plans are all eligible for HSA contributions starting in 2026 for example), so be sure to take a look at this article to familiarize yourself with the updates.
Everything in the article won’t be applicable to you, but I got great value out of scanning the article to make sure I had everything covered while I still had time to make changes.
Updating Beneficiaries on Your Accounts
Due to some of the changes going on in my life, I just went through and updated all the beneficiaries on my accounts at Vanguard, Fidelity and Schwab.
This was something I was worried about being difficult, and my tendency towards procrastination was setting in, but I doubled down and got to work and each of the brokerages made it remarkably easy to update.
Instructions:
At all three brokerages, in the top navigation bar of your account, you’ll click ‘Profile’ (Vanguard calls it ‘Profile & Account Settings).
On that main Profile page on all three there’s a link for ‘Beneficiaries.’ Click that link and you can update them account by account.
I noticed that Vanguard and Fidelity made it really easy to copy over beneficiaries from another account, so if you plan to have the same beneficiaries, it’s really easy to enter once and then copy over.
I suspect Schwab does the same, but I didn’t have multiple accounts there to test.
Why name beneficiaries:
Really simply, it takes only a few minutes and it ensures that your assets are distributed to the people you want after your death.
This is really important.