Despite the ubiquity of recent mentions of inflation in the press our generation has relatively little experience with it. Our current public policy makers who are mostly in their 50’s and 60’s were teenagers at the oldest when the last serious bouts of inflation were dealt with in the early 80’s have no personal experience dealing with inflation as policy makers.
There are plenty of scary and negative headlines referencing multiple economic and geopolitical challenges around the globe and at home.
I don’t know about you but it sure seems the world’s inhabitants are living through an almost endless cycle of “bad stuff” - since March of 2020 when Covid-19 first changed things. It’s way too reminiscent of the movie Groundhog Day where Bill Murray played a newspaper reporter covering Punxsutawney Phil’s annual ascent from his hole – in an endless loop of repeating days. In the words of my favorite accidental philosopher (Yogi Berra) – “it’s like deja-vu all over again”.
I was about twelve when my father purchased a used pickup truck for the purpose of “helping you boys go to college”. That pickup became the means for the Johnson brothers to put three boys through a combined twenty years of undergraduate and graduate degrees of college (combined 3 undergraduate and 3 graduate degrees).
Last January I wrote a column after an exceptionally difficult and divisive 2020 and a very rough start to 2021. Unfortunately, as I look back on the completion of 2021 it does not appear that the fraying of our social fabric has improved any in the completed year.
Before you put a bow in this year’s finances here’s a list of things you can do between now and the end of the year to either reduce taxes or put yourself in a better position financially going into 2022: