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Fiscal cliff looming? Ten tax moves to make now.

Americans are facing an unprecedented tax increase of nearly $500 billion on Jan. 1, 2013, from the so-called "fiscal cliff." Are you ready? Here are 10 year-end tax strategies I recommend:

10. Consult a tax professional

Ann Hermes/The Christian Science Monitor/File
A poster hangs in the halls of the US Internal Revenue Service building in Washington, D.C., in this March file photo. Here are 10 tax strategies to protect yourself from the tax increases that make up part of the 'fiscal cliff.'

You should consider strategies that reduce income taxes but not at the expense of greater earnings or diminishing your lifestyle.Tax planning can be tricky. The wisest choice is to hire a tax professional or wealth manager who will consider your individual circumstances and counsel you on the best way to take advantage of current tax laws.

A common mistake is to wait and see what happens. Congress has been known to make significant changes to the tax code late in December, leaving taxpayers little time to react. I advise a diversified approach to tax planning. Make a partial Roth conversion and harvest some capital gains. Don’t wait until it’s too late to do anything about rising taxes. A proactive approach to tax planning this year can cushion any fall from the fiscal cliff.

– Rick Rodgers is a certified financial planner, president of Rodgers & Associates in Lancaster, Pa., and author of “The New Three-Legged Stool: A Tax Efficient Approach to Retirement Planning.”

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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