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:

3. Replace taxable bonds with tax-free bonds

Pat Wellenbach/AP/File
In this April 2012 photo, Maine Gov. Paul LePage takes a sip out of a coffee mug where a 'no new taxes' message is displayed on the bottom of the cup at his office at the State House in Augusta, Maine.

Because it’s tax-free, a municipal bond paying 3 percent is equal to a taxable bond paying 4.6 percent in the 35 percent bracket. It will be equal to 5 percent in a 39.6 percent bracket.

Taxpayers in higher brackets should move to municipals in their nonqualified (taxable) accounts.

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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.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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