what.tax
Keep more of what you earn through smart business structuring, tax optimization, and strategic savings.
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What they write about
US tax planning for business owners and high earners. Recurring subjects include entity structure and how it affects retirement contributions, year-end deadlines and which moves expire when, the order in which to fund investment accounts, and keeping retirement income in lower brackets.
- tax planning
- business structuring
- retirement accounts
- capital gains
- high earners
Recent examples: Open Enrollment Is Your Biggest Money Decision of the Year. Most People Just Click “Same as Last Year.” · How to Pick Your Benefits This Month and Save $3,000 Next Year
Written from what.tax’s own published post titles and openings in Sep 11, 2026. It describes the subjects the newsletter covers, not its views, and is not investment advice.
Growth history
Subscribers (thousands, nightly)
18K on Sep 10, 2026 → 18K on Oct 21, 2026
Followers (thousands, nightly)
Rank in Substack’s finance leaderboard: #69 today · #66 a week ago · #58 a month ago
Stats worth sharing
Tracked since Sep 10, 2026 — 62 daily snapshots so far. The card below is built from what we track and refreshes nightly.
- Percentile
- Top 14%
- Best rank seen
- #55
- Rank, 7 days
- −3 places
- Rank, 30 days
- −11 places
- Followers added
- −397
- Posts
- 10
- Reactions per post
- 12
- Reactions tracked
- 446
of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Sep 28, 2026
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 37 posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: How Long Until You Don’t Have to Work? The Calculation Most People Get Completely Wrong. — 35 reactions on Sep 16, 2026.
Recent posts
- Open Enrollment Is Your Biggest Money Decision of the Year. Most People Just Click “Same as Last Year.”
Every November, Americans make a five-figure financial decision in about the time it takes to order lunch. That isn’t exaggeration. The average employer-sponsored family health plan now costs $28,303 a year , according to KFF’s 2026 Employer Health Benefits Survey, and the worker’s share of that premium jumped 9% in a single year to $7,471. Layer on a deductible, coinsurance, an FSA election, a dependent care election, and the tax treatment of every one of those dollars, and open enrollment quietly allocates more money than most people put into their 401(k). Now look at how much attention it…
- How to Pick Your Benefits This Month and Save $3,000 Next Year
Open enrollment is the only tax deadline most people meet without realizing it’s a tax deadline. You click through a benefits portal in November, accept last year’s elections, and lock in a piece of your 2027 tax bill for twelve months. Under Section 125, most cafeteria plan elections are irrevocable for the plan year unless you have a qualifying life event like a marriage, a birth, or a change in your spouse’s coverage. Skip the dependent care FSA this month, and it stays unfunded until January 2028. The individual market opened today. If you buy your own coverage, HealthCare.gov open…
- The Self-Employment Tax Hit Most Freelancers Don’t See Coming (And How to Shrink It)
Every year, a wave of first-time freelancers sits down with their tax software in March, plugs in a respectable year of 1099 income, and watches the “amount you owe” number climb past anything they budgeted for. They usually blame income tax. They usually blame the wrong tax. The damaging line is buried on Schedule 2, line 4, carried over from a form most people never open: Schedule SE, the self-employment tax. It is a flat 15.3% levy that starts on nearly your first dollar of profit, ignores the standard deduction, ignores the QBI deduction, and ignores your retirement contributions. For a…
- Why Your Savings Account Is Quietly Losing You Money Every Year
Chase pays 0.01% APY on its standard savings account. So do Bank of America and Wells Fargo. On $100,000, that is $10 of interest a year , before tax. Over the twelve months ending in September 2026, consumer prices rose 3.7%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The same $100,000 now needs to be about $103,740 just to buy what it bought a year ago. So the account didn’t earn $10. It lost roughly $3,600 in purchasing power , and the statement still printed a positive number. That gap between what your bank shows you and what actually happened to your money is the whole story of this…
- How to Invest Your First $10,000 Without Handing a Chunk of It to the IRS
Most people agonize over what to buy with their first $10,000. S&P 500 or total market? Vanguard or Fidelity? Growth or dividends? Then they spend about five minutes deciding where to hold it, usually by clicking the first account type the brokerage app shows. That’s backwards. The account decides how much of your return you keep. The fund mostly decides how much return there is to keep, and between two cheap broad index funds that difference is a rounding error. Here’s the evidence that should change how you think about it. In 2025, according to State Street’s analysis of Morningstar data…
- The 401(k) Mistake That Can Cost You $100K Over a Career
Most 401(k) advice obsesses over the wrong moment. We argue about index funds versus target-date funds, Roth versus pre-tax, and whether a 1% fee is a crime. Those debates matter at the margin. The decision that actually wrecks retirement balances happens on your way out the door , usually in a ten-minute online form. You will face that decision more often than you think. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has tracked Americans born between 1957 and 1964 for more than four decades, and they held an average of 12.9 jobs between ages 18 and 58 . Median tenure with a current employer was 4.1 years…
- Why Getting Money Back in April Means You Lost Money All Year. [The Tax Refund Trap]
Every spring, the same story runs on the evening news. Refunds are up. Families are thrilled. The government is “putting money back in your pocket.” This year, that story had its best numbers yet. Through May 8, 2026, the IRS had issued 99.1 million refunds totaling $324.8 billion , with an average check of $3,276 . That average was up 11.5% from the same point last year, and total dollars refunded jumped 18.1%. Roughly seven out of every ten processed returns included a refund. Here is the part nobody puts in the segment. Every one of those dollars was yours before it was the government’s…
- How to Retire 5 Years Earlier Without a Six-Figure Salary
Most Americans already retire early. They just don’t plan it. Gallup’s April 2026 survey puts the average age at which retirees actually stopped working at 61 . Non-retirees expect to work until 66. That five-year gap has barely moved in two decades. EBRI’s 2026 Retirement Confidence Survey found that 46% of retirees left the workforce earlier than they planned , and Allianz Life’s 2026 study lists the reasons: health problems (30%), unexpected job loss (21%), and being financially ready sooner than expected (21%). Read that last number again. One in five early retirees left because the money…
- Sell Your Rental Property in 2026 and Keep More Than Half of What You Made
Most rental owners know their sale price to the dollar. Very few know the number that actually decides the outcome: how much cash lands in their account after the IRS and their state take their share. Those are different numbers, and the gap between them is where sellers get hurt. Here’s the core problem. Tax is computed on your gain, but you pay it out of your cash. Your gain is the sale price minus selling costs minus your adjusted basis, and that basis has shrunk every year you claimed depreciation. Your cash is the sale price, minus selling costs, minus whatever you still owe the bank. If…
- Nobody Gets Rich From a Paycheck Alone. Here’s What They Do Instead.
Warren Buffett drew a $100,000 salary from Berkshire Hathaway for more than four decades. No bonus. No stock awards. Berkshire’s 2026 proxy statement spells it out, and notes that the board’s compensation committee hasn’t proposed a raise since 2004 because he wanted his pay left unchanged. His successor, Greg Abel, received $22 million in salary for 2025. That’s 220 times what Buffett was paid. Abel could bank that salary for the next fifty years and still never come close to Buffett’s fortune. Buffett’s wealth was never in the paycheck. It was in shares he bought, held, and declined to sell…
- 100% Bonus Depreciation Is Permanent. Your 2026 Deduction Isn’t: How to Lock In $80K+ Before December
Every December, someone selling trucks or machinery tells business owners that bonus depreciation is about to vanish. For three years, they were right. The rate fell from 100% to 80% in 2023, to 60% in 2024, and to 40% on January 1, 2025, with zero scheduled for 2027. Then Congress rewrote Section 168(k). The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (P.L. 119-21, signed July 4, 2025) made 100% bonus depreciation permanent for qualified property acquired after January 19, 2025 . The statute has no sunset and no phase-down. So the rate is not what’s closing. Three other things are, and any one of them can…
- What Your Tax Return Reveals About the Health of Your Business Structure
Most owners read two numbers on a tax return: the refund or the balance due. Then the y file the PDF and put it in a folder. That wastes the most detailed financial document you sign all year. A return shows what you owe. It also shows, line by line, how well your entity structure fits the business you run today . You probably chose that structure once, on a Secretary of State website or in a lawyer’s office, when profit was a fraction of what it is now. Nobody has tested it since. Structures decay. Profit outgrows a sole proprietorship. A salary set in year one never moves. The law shifts…
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Data: Substack public leaderboards and publication archives, refreshed nightly, plus public beehiiv sitemaps and recommendation pages, refreshed weekly. Source for this page: what.tax. Subscriber counts are Substack’s own rounded public figures, so week-on-week changes move in steps. beehiiv audience sizes are self-reported by the publisher and are not verified. Last snapshot: Nov 10, 2026.