What’s new with taxes? Due to the recent COVID-19 outbreak, the IRS has made the decision to extend the 2019 tax filing deadline from April 15th 2020 to July 15th 2020. This move gives all taxpayers, regardless of their status or if they owe money, three months longer to file. Tax payments that were due on April 15th 2020 can also be deferred to July 15th 2020 without incurring interest or penalty. Keep in mind that the extension applies to Federal tax filing/payments. When it comes to filing or paying your state taxes, they might have a different deadline. There is some good news for those who live in New York; state officials have said the deadline will be extended to match the Federal deadline of July 15th. Who does this apply to? This applies to any individuals, trusts, associations, companies, estates, or corporations that file within the U.S. Should you wait to file? The answer...

The Governor of New York has issued a state-wide mandate that 100% of non-essential employees work from home, effective Sunday evening. As you may know, most of our staff has been working remotely since Monday, and any remaining employees will begin working at home starting March 23rd at 8:30am. We expect no interruption in our ability to service our clients, with very few exceptions noted below. We will continue to operate as we have all this week.  Our various modes of contact are listed below and we encourage our clients to reach out to us as they normally would. On an indefinite basis, the following exceptions will apply to our normal operations: Both our Hamburg and Amherst offices will be closed. No in-person meetings will be held.  Zoom (web conferencing) and phone meetings are always available. Clients should not drop off items to our offices.  We encourage our clients to mail or...

The stock market has continued to tumble as investors flee to safety over concerns about the impact on the economy from COVID-19.  Rightfully so, there is an expectation of an economic slowdown as a result of people staying inside to try and limit the spread of the virus.  Does this mean investors should expect stocks to continue to decline for months? First, the stock market has already priced in a recession, that is why the market is down over 30% already.  The stock market is a forward-looking machine and it always has been.  This applies to recoveries as well, and we fully expect the market to recover before the economic data actually shows a recovery.  This is why selling stocks and “waiting until things look better” is a bad investment strategy.  By the time things look better, the market will already have started to recover. Case in point, this chart shows the...

What should nervous investors do with their 401k's during the coronavirus pandemic?  Level's Chief Investment Officer and Partner, Steven Elwell, CFP­® discusses options for investors on WBEN.  Click Here To Listen  ...

Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA) announced they are cutting costs on seventy-seven of their mutual funds beginning February 28th.  This represents an average management fee reduction of 8% on their funds, which are already considered low cost when compared to their industry peers. Any reduction in the cost of the mutual funds we use means that you, the investor, get to keep more of the returns earned by the fund.  We have long advocated for using low cost, tax efficient funds to implement our portfolios.  Morningstar, an independent mutual fund rating firm, has concluded in their own study that the cost of a mutual fund is one of the best predictors of the fund’s ability to perform well relative to its peers. Naturally, we ran a quick calculation to try and estimate how much we expect the annual savings will be for our portfolios.  We determined that the average cost of our 60%...