Sunday Morning Coming Down -- January 9, 2022

Taxes:

• disclaimer: this is not financial advice or tax advice; I have no formal background in financial planning or taxes; I often misread things and misunderstand things. This is for my benefit only. The only benefit, I suppose, for readers, is to remind them that "things have changed."
  
• "too late" to do much about 2021, now
• one exception: grace period until April 1, 2022, for first time IRA RMDs
• looking forward, RMDs for 2022: IRS has published changes; tables and links explaining some of these changes for those who find the IRS publications difficult to interpret:

Link here.

The finalized rules go into effect on January 1, 2022. This rule change is in addition to the CARES Act waiving 2020 RMDs, the SECURE Act increasing the RMD age to 72, and new post-death distribution rules. RMD rules don't apply to Roth IRAs and any amounts in Health Savings Accounts (HSAs).

Other links:

• new rules, johnstonsunrise.net;
• updated tables, cpajournal.com;
• 2021 single life expectancy table;

Europe: energy crisis. Germany goverment addresses spiralling energy prices. Link to Reuters. Lots of talk, little action.

• half of German households heat with natural gas;
• one-fourth of German households heat with heating oil;
• when we lived on the economy in German back in the 1980s, we heated with heating oil; incredibly ridiculous then; more so now;

US: Covid-19 -- US distributes a whopping, unprecedented record-setting amount of vaccine doses. and then this:

Jargon: Lateral flow tests; what are they?

OPEC: reserves. Interesting how the same data is viewed by different folks. 

US energy dominance, 2022 theme, link here. Wow, wow, I'm glad I didn't write this ... just think, from the tweet below, "the US exported 18.6 billion bbls of oil per day....."