5 Paths To Lower Investment Taxes

When it comes to investing, there are numerous elements beyond your control: geopolitical conflict, currency fluctuations, and government policy - just to name a few. Rather than worrying about these external factors, focus your energy on those things you can control, such as proper diversification, financial planning, low fees, and reducing your taxes as much as possible. With that in mind, here are five ways you can lower your investment tax burden today:

Dividend Portfolio Rebalancing

Rebalancing is a painless way to push yourself to be a contrarian - a typical trait among the most prosperous investors. You do this by selling your best performing investments, using the proceeds to purchase more of your worst performing ones. In other words, if your initial portfolio has a stock allocation of 40%, and through superior equity performance it rockets to 50%, you should sell stock to return to your original allocation of 40%. A more tax-efficient rebalancing method is to use earnings generated by your portfolio to purchase more of the poorly performing investments. This way, you’ll rarely need to sell any investments to rebalance your portfolio, and fewer sales equals lower tax liability.

Minimize Turnover With Index Investing

According to The Motley Fool, managed mutual funds carry an average annual turnover rate of around 85%. At this rate, funds turn over practically their entire portfolio once per year. Why is this a problem? Turnover equals transactions, and transactions are taxable. Unlike managed funds, index funds only shake up their investment mix when the companies comprising their indexes change. This rarely happens, which is why the S&P 500 has an average turnover of around 4% per year. This ridiculously low turnover equates to virtually zero capital gains taxes. Taxes on dividends, of course, are unaffected by turnover.

Tax-Loss Harvesting

Selling an investment that represents a significant loss and replacing it with a highly correlated - but distinct - investment allows you to maintain similar risk and return characteristics to those of your original portfolio. These sales generate losses that allow you to reduce your current taxes. You are almost always better off postponing the settling of taxes, because the tax savings produced by tax loss harvesting can be reinvested and compounded over time. Looking for losses to harvest throughout the year provides significantly higher after-tax benefits than harvesting at year-end. Unfortunately, the complexity of these calculations makes it nearly impossible to execute tax-loss harvesting more than once per year, without the help of custom software.

Direct Indexing

Combine these last two strategies - indexing and tax-loss harvesting - by completing a tax-loss harvest within an index. By directly purchasing all of the stocks within an index, such as the S&P 500, you can harvest the losses generated by individual stocks when they miss earnings and trade down. Direct indexing provides value to investors not offered by index funds and ETFs, since distribution of tax losses to their shareholders is disallowed.

Tax-Efficient Investing

Tax efficiency is key to increasing your investment returns, and the greater your marginal rate, the more important this concept becomes. To maximize your benefits, you’ll want to place less efficient investments in tax-deferred accounts, and tax-efficient investments in taxable accounts. Generally, Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), junk bonds, and preferred stocks are highly tax-inefficient, since they all have relatively high dividends or bond yields that are taxed as ordinary income. On the other hand, long-term common stock investments are very tax-efficient, since they are taxed at the long-term capital gains rate when held for over one year. Municipal bonds are the most tax-efficient of all, due to their federal income tax exemption.

Maximizing your investment tax savings requires a comprehensive financial analysis by investment professionals (Estate Tax and Estate Planning). At Werba Rubin, we’re committed to helping you achieve your goals by making the most of your financial resources, and lowering your investment tax burden.

How To Make A Super Protein Shake Recipe!

Protein shakes provide one of the best means of building lean muscle. With the ability to mix whole foods together, shakes provide one of the most delicious ways to get top-shelf nutrition.
Most people, however, get lost when trying to figure out how to make the best protein shake possible. The following should provide some guidance on how to construct one of the world's finest super-foods.
Use a high-quality protein powder
This is the most essential part of any protein shake recipe. You must -- absolutely must -- use a high-quality protein powder. A good protein powder provides much of the nutrition of the shake, but most importantly, it provides the bulk of the taste of the shake. Is it a chocolate-infused shake? Then a high-quality chocolate protein powder will provide the rich chocolate taste you're looking for, but with excellent nutrition. Does your shake need a light vanilla flavor? You better believe you're going to need a great vanilla protein powder.
This isn't a matter of using just any protein powder, though. Using cheap protein powders provide poor digestibility, poor nutrition, and most importantly, poor taste! When you buy the cheapest stuff you can find at some bottom-of-the-barrel web site, then you're going to be making shakes that are going to give you gas and give you dry heaves from their bitter taste.
The base of any good protein shake is the protein powder used! I cannot stress this enough.
Use whole foods in your shake
Most people don't realize that they can toss whole foods into their shake. Throwing peanut butter, cream, almonds, even eggs into shakes completely transforms them. Your protein shakes should not be made up of just weird powders and supplements. Consider your shake a condensed "super-recipe" full of nutritious foods.
Use frozen vegetables
I don't ever want to see anyone put ice into a protein shake recipe! This may sound crazy, but putting frozen broccoli into a shake instead of ice results in the exact same flavor, but tons more nutrition! Broccoli's taste is masked by its being frozen. Just make sure you blend the shake a little longer, to grind everything up.
Use water instead of milk
If you use a high-quality protein powder, as well as filling whole food sources, then you will not need milk in your protein shake. Most of the population is at least slightly lactose intolerant, and milk provides a huge insulin rush in the body, meaning it helps you pack on extra fat if eaten at the wrong time. Mixed with the right protein powder, and the healthiest and tastiest whole foods, making your protein shake with water will be fine.
Use a fiber supplement
A fiber supplement, like psyllium husks, provides a little extra texture and no extra taste. Its biggest benefit though is that it will give your digestive system a BIG help, plus it slows down the speed with which your shake is digested, meaning less fat gain!
The bottom line on how to make a protein shake
Many of my shakes contain whole peanut butter, whole eggs, whole broccoli, whole oats -- are you getting the picture? My protein shakes are really just whole foods, blended together with a great-tasting and high-quality protein powder, which results in a "super-food blend" of sorts. Not only are my protein shakes sweet, rich treats, but they've helped me build the body of my dreams.
How else are you going to get a few servings of the best vegetables, a complete dose of high-quality protein, and fats and carbs from the best food sources, all at once?
Now go experiment with some protein shake recipes!

Richard Sordrak is a recreational bodybuilder who helped mold his physique using the best nutrition available in the world, all through protein shakes! Check out his Protein Shake Recipes site for more recipes and more tips, as well as the best ingredients for your protein shakes.

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6 Must Do Steps For Increasing Productivity

Increasing productivity is very essential if you want to accomplish your daily laid down tasks, remain competitive in your industry since your productivity determines how successful you become. You can improve your level of productivity and increase the amount of work you accomplish every day. If you need to increase how productive you are, here are some exceptional tips that will help you improve your productivity and achieve the goals you desire.
1 - Make a daily plan.
To be productive throughout the day, you need to have a daily plan that guides all your daily activities. This is an important tool in increasing productivity. The daily plan will help you know the activities you are supposed to do each day, their order of importance and when they are to be done such that by the time the day ends, you will have completed each of them. Create your daily plan the night before so that when morning comes you begin implementing it. This is the most important tool in increasing productivity.
2 - Split big tasks into small bits that are easy to complete.
Big tasks are always hard to work on and often people don't know how to start doing them. For you to increase productivity, you need to split big tasks into small bits that are manageable and decide what part must be done first, next and the ones to follow then start working on the more important parts. Splitting big tasks is important in increasing productivity as you will be able to work on several parts of a task in bits without it overwhelming you.
3 - Deliberately prioritize.
Rank all the work you intend to do according to their importance with the most important task getting the first priority. This is very important in increasing productivity so that the most important things that cannot wait are done first and should you not be able to carry out the tasks at the bottom of the list, you will have done the important ones.
4 - Block all forms of distraction.
To achieve the most in a day, one must choose to focus without which you will fail. Increasing productivity requires one to block all the things that cause distraction. This can include signing out of your mail, turning off your phone or put it on voicemail and even turning off your IM to enable you complete the task you are working on. You can also use a "do not disturb" poster or tag so that people don't distract you.
5 - Time each task you are doing to avoid interrupting your work stretches.
By setting a timer on specific tasks, you will be able to focus your energy and time on that task knowing that you have only set specific time to accomplish it. Try this by setting your timer for just thirty minutes or one hour and see how much you will be able to accomplish within that time. Increasing productivity requires that once you set time for a specific task; you stick to that activity until that time lapses.
6 - Retain a positive attitude.
A positive attitude is essential in increasing productivity so you must always be positive and keep looking at the bright side no matter how many times you fail to achieve your goals. With a positive attitude, you will be able to think clearly, identify solutions that will work for you and be able to get things done. These are some of the working tips for anyone interested in increasing productivity.

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