The following is an excerpt from the 2009 ABA Connection, authored by Sam Braunstein. The full article is available as a PDF file here.
As if the other drawbacks of aging weren’t already bad enough, doing income taxes gets harder, too. The intuitive conclusion would seem to go in the other direction—that computing taxes should be less complicated for an individual or a couple easing into retirement. But it doesn’t always work that way, at least
in the context of federal income taxes.Instead, older taxpayers must grapple with unfamiliar rules and formulas that kick in as they begin collecting Social Security benefits, sell houses, withdraw money from savings vehicles and fine-tune estate plans.