Yeske Buie Live Big® Digest

The beginning of each new year demands of us a dual focus, requiring that we devote ourselves to wrapping up the details of the old year even as we begin to plan for the year to come.  Things are no different here at Yeske Buie and I wanted to alert you to two particular initiatives we’ve been engaged in, one forward-looking and one retrospective.

Tax reporting. In the category of “wrapping up the old,” year-end tax reports have now been posted to your Client Private Page and can be found (unsurprisingly) under Tax Reports on the far right-hand side of your CPP menu bar.  There are two groups of reports here, one marked “Annual” and one “Quarterly” and it is the annual report that you’ll want to provide to your tax preparer (unless you know that we’ve done it for you).  We’ve included the legend “GIVE TO YOUR TAX PREPARER” in the title of this report, just to avoid any possibility of confusion.  If you don’t find a report associated with this link, it’s not an error, it simply means that you had no realized capital gains in 2010 for that particular account.

Rebalancing. On the forward-looking front, you’re also going to be seeing some trade confirmations coming your way as we busily go about the business of rebalancing portfolios (Yusuf and Elissa have been very focused on this of late, but Kaitlin, Jennifer, and Dave are now getting into the act).

We deferred most rebalancing during the latter part of 2010 while waiting to see what Congress and the Whitehouse were going to do about expiring Bush tax cuts.  If the cuts were slated to expire, capital gains rates would rise significantly and we would have harvested the embedded capital gains in your portfolio to take advantage of the expiring lower rates.  In the end, the old tax rates were continued for another two years, so we deferred our rebalancing into the new year. We’re now carrying out that deferred rebalancing in order to restore your portfolio to its target allocation.

Surprising Sentiments
As we roll into the weekend, we wanted to leave you with an unusual poem of sorts.  You may find the message challenging at first, but please stick with it to the end in order to get the full effect.

And have a great weekend!

The Yeske Buie Team