This article was originally posted on Smart Money by an author unaffiliated with Capital Investment Advisors.  

If you've reached 70-1/2, you can make cash donations to Internal Revenue Service-approved charities directly out of your traditional IRA. This can be a tax-smart opportunity, but it will expire at the end of this year unless Congress acts. Here's what you need to know.  

Qualified Charitable Distribution Basics  

So-called qualified charitable distributions (QCDs) come out of your traditional IRA free of any federal income hit. In contrast, other IRA distributions are taxable. Unlike garden-variety cash donations to charities, you can't claim itemized deductions for QCDs. That's OK, because the tax-free treatment of QCDs equates to a 100% deduction (because you will never be taxed on those amounts) without having to worry about restrictions that apply to itemized charitable write-offs.

This article was originally posted on Smart Money by an author unaffiliated with Capital Investment Advisors.

When stock prices slide and gains evaporate, investors are usually left with the meager consolation of smaller tax bills. If a long stock decline were to hit now, however, investors could easily be required to pay more.    

The problem is that the stock market has become an important source of consumer stimulus and government revenues, and bullish assumptions about stock returns have been built into state pension math. A prolonged market downturn could thus set off a chain of effects that would end with sharply higher income taxes.      

First, consider the background. Federal debt held by the public has swelled 81% in three years to $9.8 trillion as of Monday. In March, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the U.S. will run deficits of (and therefore have to borrow) about $7 trillion between 2012 and 2021. Tuesday's signing of the Budget Control Act of 2011 will ultimately reduce this amount by at least $2.1 trillion, the CBO estimates. That leaves nearly $5 trillion in looming deficits to deal with. However strong the case for spending cuts, tax hikes seem inevitable, because federal revenues are low by historical standards -- 15% of gross domestic product, versus an average since 1970 of 18%.

This article was originally posted on Forbes by an author unaffiliated with Capital Investment Advisors.

You have to give scammers credit. They do no give up.

There’s another set of IRS phishing emails making the rounds this week. I’ve seen two versions, one purporting to be from “info This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ” and another from “support This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .” Both have headers announcing “IRS notification.” To be clear, both are scams and should be ignored, deleted or forwarded along to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Do not reply and do not open the attachments.