Your Family Is a Tax Strategy. Most CPAs Never Run the Numbers.

Family tax planning means using the people in your household — legally and with documentation — to lower the total tax your family pays. The pieces are well known individually: put your kids on payroll, fund a 529, claim the right childcare benefit. What most families never get is someone running all of them together with actual dollar figures attached.

That sequencing matters because the strategies interact. Wages paid to your child create earned income that can fund a Roth IRA. A dependent care FSA changes the math on the childcare credit. A divorce changes who claims the child tax credit. Done in isolation, each move leaves money on the table or creates a compliance problem in another part of the return.

Below is how we approach each piece. For the deep-dive mechanics, we maintain dedicated guides — this page covers how they fit together into a plan, and what working with us looks like.

If you own a business, paying your children reasonable wages for real work converts income taxed at your rate into income taxed at theirs — which is often zero.

A child with no other income can earn up to the standard deduction (roughly $16,100 for a single filer in 2026) and owe no federal income tax on it. Your business deducts every dollar of those wages.

• Written job description with age-appropriate duties
• Time logs and proof of work (tasks, outputs, photos)
• Real payroll — W-2 at year end, not casual transfers
• Pay deposited into an account in the child’s name
• A wage rate you could defend against what you’d pay a stranger

Entity type changes the payroll-tax math, and the documentation standard is where most DIY attempts fall apart. Our full guide covers the mechanics: Hiring Your Kids — the complete strategy guide.

A 529 plan grows tax-free and comes out tax-free for qualified education costs. The planning questions are about cadence and contingencies: how much, how fast, in which state's plan, and what happens if your child gets a scholarship or skips college.

Superfunding is the accelerator. The tax code lets you elect to treat a single large 529 contribution as if it were spread over five years of annual gift exclusions. At a $19,000 annual exclusion, that means one parent can contribute $95,000 at once — $190,000 for a married couple, per child — without touching lifetime gift exemption. The earlier the money is in, the more tax-free compounding it earns.

Overfunding fear is the most common reason families under-save — and it's mostly solvable. Beneficiaries can be changed within the family, funds can wait for graduate school, scholarship amounts can be withdrawn with tax only on earnings, and current rules permit limited lifetime rollovers from a long-held 529 into the beneficiary's Roth IRA, subject to the annual IRA limits and a 15-year account requirement.

The full mechanics, including the gift-tax election on Form 709, are in our dedicated guide: 529 Superfunding strategy guide.

Credits reduce tax dollar-for-dollar, which makes them the most efficient line items on a family return. They are also the ones most often claimed wrong, because eligibility and phase-outs shift with income and the benefits interact with employer plans.

The child tax credit is worth up to $2,200 per qualifying child under 17, phasing out at higher incomes (beginning around $400,000 of modified AGI for joint filers). For high earners near the threshold, timing income — a Roth conversion, an equity sale, a bonus deferral — can decide whether the credit survives.

Childcare is a sequencing problem. You generally choose between a dependent care FSA through your employer (up to $7,500 of pre-tax dollars under current rules) and the child and dependent care credit (calculated on up to $3,000 of expenses for one child, $6,000 for two or more). You can't double-count the same dollars, and the better answer depends on your marginal rate and your employer's plan. We run both paths before open enrollment, not at filing time.

Just had a baby? The first-year checklist — credits, withholding, FSA elections, and the social security number timing issue — is here: New Parent Tax Guide.

Your marital status on the last day of the year sets your filing status for the entire year. That single fact drives most of the planning in a transition year — and most of the expensive surprises.

For newlyweds, the questions are concrete: does combining incomes push you into a marriage penalty or bonus? Should withholding change immediately? Do two standard deductions become one itemized return? Does one spouse's student loan repayment plan argue for filing separately? None of these have a universal answer; all of them have a calculable one.

Divorce planning is mostly about what's decided in the agreement, because the tax consequences are locked in there. Under current law, alimony from agreements executed after 2018 is neither deductible by the payer nor taxable to the recipient. Dependency claims, head-of-household eligibility, the house (and its eventual sale exclusion), and retirement account splits via QDRO all get negotiated once — with tax consequences that run for years.

We keep dedicated guides for both transitions: Getting Married Tax Guide and the filing-status sections of our planning library.

• Proactive planning is the product. We build quantified, written strategy engagements — dollar estimates per move, deadlines, and an implementation checklist — not a springtime form-filling exercise.
• CPA-led with real credentials. Taxstra is led by Bryan Martin, CPA, MBA, and licensed real estate broker — useful when family planning intersects with the family home or rental property.
• Established and nationwide. Roughly 1,500 clients across all 50 states, fully remote. Family employment, multi-state moves, and state 529 deduction rules are everyday work, not edge cases.
• Genuine multi-state expertise. If a marriage, divorce, or job change moves your household across state lines, we handle the sourcing and residency questions that follow.
• Tech-forward delivery. Secure client portal (TaxDome), modern tooling, and fast turnaround — documentation for strategies like hiring your kids lives in one organized place.

The engagement starts with a free 30-minute call. We look at your return, your business, and your family situation, and tell you honestly whether there's enough opportunity to justify a planning engagement.