The Lowry Letter®

Happy New Year! We hope the holidays have been good to you and your loved ones. We have previously mentioned a new SECURE Act and provisions of that legislation were signed into law by President Biden on December 29, 2022 as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023.

For those of you who celebrate Christmas, we hope you have a peaceful and happy holiday. As the Lowry Letter® will be on vacation next week, we also wish you a Happy New Year!

First, some housekeeping: Joe Jr. will be out of the office from December 19^th until January 3^rd for an extended family adventure. Joe Sr will be available during that time, as will Cale and the rest of the team.

The November market update is out and available here. For some forward- looking commentary, this post has good information.

2022 is in the homestretch. Now is the time to handle any remaining charitable contributions, required retirement account distributions, and other tax and calendar-related adjustments. From our standpoint, this means some tax-loss harvesting where appropriate, so some of you will see investment activity reflecting that.

Please also plan to adjust your contributions to your 401k and other retirement accounts, as higher withdrawal limits come into effect in January.

We hope that you had a pleasant Thanksgiving holiday. We enjoyed the time with family and some excellent food. Pellet grill users may enjoy trying this turkey recipe, which we made for the second time for our family dinner.

One housekeeping note: many of you are aware that we are now using QuickBooks exclusively for billing our financial planning clients. Please let us know if you receive an invoice and have any questions about it.

This week’s letter is a short one. We love Thanksgiving and are looking forward to reflecting on the many things that bless our lives.

Last week, we attended Commonwealth’s annual national conference, held in-person for the first time since 2019. Our relationship with Commonwealth continues to be very important to our firm and the way we serve you, our valued clients.

Commonwealth provides the infrastructure that we use for investment research and management. They also ensure that we obey securities rules and regulations. They work only with independent advisory firms, like ours, and we are free to run our business as we see fit.

The late-season emergence of Tropical Storm Nicole is a great example of the kind of unexpected challenges that we often face in life. We hope that you and your families will avoid harm from this storm. We don’t anticipate interruptions to service, but in the event the storm requires office closure, we will be working remotely and will be able to review phone messages and email and respond to your needs.

If we lose power or internet access locally, urgent requests can be directed to Commonwealth by calling their Service Center at 800-251-0080 and selecting option 2. Even if working remotely, we will have access to all necessary information and documents so that we can continue to provide a high level of service.

We thought it would be good to make sure you are aware of updates to retirement plan contribution limits. We shared them last week and will include the same graphic at the bottom of this week’s letter.. 

Tax adjustments are live for 2023. Tax brackets have moved up by 7%, meaning that you can earn more money before your income pushes into a higher bracket. The percentages applied to each bracket remain the same.

Contribution limits have also increased for retirement plans (see Ask the Joes®).