Let's talk all about gifting, gift taxes, gift tax returns, and more in this, the 194th episode of the Retirement Planning Education Podcast.

Welcome to the Retirement Planning Education Podcast, where you can learn all about IRAs and Roth IRAs, employer retirement plans, taxes, Social Security, Medicare, portfolio

withdrawal strategies, annuities, estate planning, and much more. And now here's your host, Andy Panco.

Hello, everyone. Today's episode is my gift to you. Is that funny? Is it not funny? I don't know.

This episode is all about making gifts and gifting in gift taxes and gift tax returns that the dreaded IRS form 709, otherwise known as a gift tax return. I'll cut right to it for the vast majority of people. Anytime you make a gift, even if it's a really large gift to someone, millions of dollars, one, two, three million dollars even.

You almost certainly, very likely, do not have to pay gift tax on it.

Furthermore, the person who receives the gift never has to pay tax.

Gifts receivers never pay tax on the receipt of the gift.

What they do with the gift afterward and what it does, they may owe tax on that money, but the simple receipt of the gift is not a taxable event to the receiver.

Anyway, so that's a super quick summary, but I will elaborate on all that before we do.

Let's see what kind of jokes we got here.

I used to be indecisive. Now I'm not so sure. not so sure. And my big, goofy smile moment of the week is super nerdy,

but I found out from a client that he ended up having a $5 federal tax refund when he did his taxes this year for 2025.

So I did the tax planning tax projections as part of the service. And it just makes me smile to see it comes so close, all

said and done in the actual tax return. Because what we typically shoot, not typically,

but what we do shoot for with people when we do projections and income planning throughout the year is to get them to a point where they have small

refunds. You know, ideally zero, but we don't want to cut it too close, especially since the more

unknowns there are, like if someone has a sizable brokerage account with a lot of dividends

and things that throw up dividends or interest, for example, like we'll know by October, November, we'll have a really good guesstimate of what the year is going to look like. But for example, fourth quarter dividends from ETFs and stuff, you don't know for sure until they announce and then ultimately pay like mid-December thereabouts. So if you want to wait until really late in the year, do the projection, like, yeah,

wait until December 28th, then you know for sure what your dividends are going to be,

but we don't cut it that close.

So I always leave slack on the bone for fourth quarter dividends.

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