How ThriveRight Financial Helps Americans Decode Their "Big Beautiful Bill"
Nikki Ockenden, RFC, offers financial clarity around rising tax burdens and retirement liabilities through ThriveRight's signature bill analysis.
HOUSTON, June 6, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Across kitchen tables and retirement meetings nationwide, Americans are beginning to confront a hidden threat to their future: what ThriveRight Financial calls the "Big Beautiful Bill." It's the sum total of taxes, healthcare costs, and lost investment opportunity that often blindsides households in their most financially vulnerable years.
"We coined the term to illustrate what's coming for many Americans," said Nikki Ockenden, RFC and Principal of ThriveRight Financial. "It's beautiful in the sense that it reflects years of hard work and savings—but it's still a bill, and it can be enormous if you're not prepared."
To address this challenge, ThriveRight offers a proprietary analysis designed to forecast potential lifetime tax liability, Social Security timing effects, Medicare premium surcharges, and required minimum distributions (RMDs). The goal is to uncover hidden financial exposures before they become irreversible.
"We walk our clients through every component of their financial future—line by line," Ockenden said. "Then we help them make proactive decisions to lower or delay those costs where possible."
ThriveRight's Big Beautiful Bill Analysis has proven especially valuable to pre-retirees and high-income earners who are unaware of the compounding impact of tax deferral and future bracket creep.
"With today's fiscal policies, many people will pay more in taxes during retirement than they ever did while working," Ockenden noted. "Our job is to help reduce that bill through smart planning today."
Through strategies like Roth conversions, tax-efficient withdrawals, and investment realignment, ThriveRight empowers clients to take control of their financial outcomes. Importantly, each plan is personalized, with clear visuals and step-by-step recommendations.
"Our clients aren't just looking for answers—they want understanding," Ockenden added. "When they see their Big Beautiful Bill clearly, they finally feel empowered to do something about it."
To learn more about ThriveRight Financial's holistic planning services, visit ThriveRight.com or contact Nikki Ockenden and her team directly for a complimentary consultation.
Media Contact:
Sal Velazquez
213-347-9353
396365@email4pr.com
View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/how-thriveright-financial-helps-americans-decode-their-big-beautiful-bill-302475444.html
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The Hill
an hour ago
- The Hill
Republicans lay groundwork for ‘total tax cliff' at end of Trump's term
Congressional Republicans are laying the groundwork for a tax cliff at the end of President Trump's term in office. While the conference is pushing to make the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent, additional measures geared toward working-class Americans are being slated for expiration at the end of 2028. 'It means that's going to be an issue in the next presidential race,' House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris (R-Md.) said Tuesday. The major expiring tax breaks in the House-passed version of Republicans' domestic agenda bill are boosts in the standard deduction, the deduction for seniors, and the child tax credit, along with the cancellation of taxes on tips, overtime pay, and car loan interest. Budget hawks are saying this sets up a 'tax cliff' in the legislation similar to the one Republicans are now trying to surmount, since most of the 2017 Trump tax cuts expire at the end of this year. 'There's a total tax cliff in there. There's about $1.5 trillion worth of taxes that expire in four years, five years, which means what? In five years, they'll just keep them going. This is why we end up with the same problem,' Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said last week. 'It is 100 percent a gimmick to have tax cuts that you're putting in place for four or five years,' he added. The legislation is likely to undergo substantial changes in the Senate, including a change in the accounting baseline that will allow trillions of dollars worth of deficit additions coming from the extension of previous tax cuts to be ignored. But senators are sounding open to maintaining the split between making the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) permanent and allowing the additional cuts for workers, families, retirees and consumers to expire. 'The general feeling of Senate Finance is the TCJA — we need to make that permanent. We need to make the business provisions — the expensing, the R&D provisions — we need to make those permanent. The other things, I think we should discuss it,' Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), a member of the Senate Finance Committee, said last week. Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) stressed the objective of overall permanence while saying the additional cuts could be subject to change. 'Our intent is to make the tax cuts permanent. Now, something like the child tax credit, with a huge transfer payment aspect to it, I'd have to say that's something I'd have to check on. Other tax cuts and reductions, depending on score and how the votes come down, that could change,' he said last week. The expiring cuts are mostly ones that were proposed by President Trump while he was on the campaign trail. They appealed to various constituencies and came fast and furious in the run-up to the election. Seven different targeted tax proposals were floated in September and October, according to a tally by news agency Reuters. Trump proposed making auto loan interest fully deductible at a speech in October in Detroit, the capital of the U.S. auto industry. He pitched getting rid of taxes on tips in June in Las Vegas, Nev., a battleground state with an enormous hospitality sector. He proposed a tax credit for family caregivers at a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York, a state where more than 4 million people take care of loved ones. Many in the policy establishment — both left-leaning and right-leaning — view Trump's additional cuts as ancillary, if not altogether undesirable. 'I would prefer those things would be completely off the list,' Daniel Bunn, president of the Tax Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, told The Hill in November. 'It's not good policy. It does not move in the same direction that the 2017 reforms work.' William Gale, co-director of the more liberal Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, wrote in a commentary last year that canceling taxes on tips was a bad idea. 'The obvious problem is that the proposals are inconsistent with sound tax policy. The less obvious problem is that exempting tips would not even help the vast majority of low-income workers,' he wrote. While senators sound open to keeping the division between permanent and temporary tax cuts, they're also wary about creating another tax cliff that is likely to factor into political debates in the future. 'They're doing that for only four years, and all of a sudden that stops? I'm not real high on tax policy that expires,' Johnson said of the no-tax-on-tips provision. 'If it's good enough to include, let's make it permanent. Let's have that discussion.' The Senate has a lot more room to work with than the House since its budget baseline for the bill could allow about $5.5 trillion in expiring tax cuts to be left out of the accounting. However, conservatives in both chambers have expressed concerns about the potential deficit impact of the GOP bill, which has rattled financial markets and spurred a sell-off in the bond market. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated last week that the House's version of the plan would add $2.4 trillion to the nation's deficits over roughly the next decade. In a follow-up analysis requested by Democrats, Congress' official budget scorer estimated additional interest costs resulting from the plan would amount to $551 billion over a decade — a change that would 'increase the cumulative effect on the deficit to $3.0 trillion.' While top Republicans have sought to discredit the CBO's scoring of the measure, there has been distress in both chambers, as well as the White House, over the overall cost and the fact that it is projected to grow the economy by just 0.03 percent. The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) estimated that the bill would grow the economy from 1.83 percent to 1.86 percent over the long run, representing little change from the Federal Reserve's latest prediction of 1.8 percent made prior to the passage of the legislation in the House. 'The Democrat inspired and 'controlled' Congressional Budget Office (CBO) purposefully gave us an extremely low level of growth, 1.8 percent over 10 years — how ridiculous and unpatriotic is that!' Trump wrote on social media earlier this month. One of JCT's models shows the legislation reducing U.S. capital stock by 0.9 percent over the budget window, leading to an overall decrease in economic output. 'The first and second half effects result in a decrease of 0.1 percent on average over the entire budget window,' JCT found. Democrats have seized upon the expiring cuts that Trump proposed as evidence that the bill is skewed toward the wealthy — though lower income tax rates for lower earners will be made permanent as part of the bill. 'Why is this bill designed to take away some of the benefits that you claim people are going to have?' Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during a hearing Wednesday. 'The senior tax credit expires … No taxes on tips expires.' Despite locking in lower tax rates for lower earners, forecasts project the House-passed tax bill will benefit higher earners more and will redistribute wealth from the bottom to the top of the income spectrum. Half of the bill's passthrough deduction alone, which was worth more than $200 billion in 2022, went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers by adjusted gross income, according to the JCT.


USA Today
an hour ago
- USA Today
Rents remain far above pre-COVID levels. Use this tool to check prices in your area
Rents remain far above pre-COVID levels. Use this tool to check prices in your area Show Caption Hide Caption Father's Day: Projects you can do with your kids It's never too early to share home skills with your little ones. These simple projects make it fun for kids to learn. After seven years of work and more than $18 million invested, Harbor Village, a new affordable housing development in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, officially opened its doors in January. The 40-unit rental development came together thanks to Safe Harbour, a housing nonprofit based in Carlisle. By the time Safe Harbour started screening prospective tenants, there were over 400 applications, said Scott Shewell, the group's long-time president and CEO. 'And I still get calls every day,' he told USA TODAY. The median apartment rent in Carlisle was $1,259 in May. It was one of the fastest-growing areas for rent prices that month, up 6% from a year ago, according to a USA TODAY analysis of Apartment List data. Shewell wasn't surprised. The area, he said, has seen blockbuster growth over the past several years and even well-meaning local governments committed to affordable housing haven't been able to keep up with the demand. Population in Carlisle borough has gone up nearly 12% since 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In May, Manhattan, Kansas, led other metros as the fastest-growing market in rental prices. The metro saw a 14% increase in rent prices from the same month last year. It was followed by Abilene, Texas; Grand Forks, North Dakota-Minnesota and Shreveport-Bossier City, Louisiana. Recent data shows that the rental prices in most metro areas have leveled off, but for millions of renters, the typical rent still remains dramatically higher than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic began. The USA TODAY analysis of Apartment List data for 202 metro areas found that average monthly rent between January and May was significantly higher in 94% of the metros, compared with the same period in 2019. Excluding the handful that stayed about the same as pre-pandemic levels, the data showed that prices were up by an average of 31%. The pandemic supercharged the rental market, breaking old patterns of steady growth as the population shuffled, cities closed, and people started working from home. After a short drop in rental prices, prices rebounded aggressively, hitting record highs before flattening in the latter half of 2022. The impact has been felt across the board, from Manhattan in New York City to Manhattan in Kansas. The Apartment List data shows that the new level remained steady in May 2025, which, although a relief, does not do away with the rent burden the already high prices have put on families. According to census data, about 25% of renters in America are so rent-burdened that they spent more than half of their income on rent in 2023. That figure was 22% in 2019. A three-percentage point difference means millions more Americans are spending a substantial chunk of their paycheck in rent. When these high prices were accompanied by broader inflation in groceries, gas and energy, the strain was felt by families – charting up as a top issue in the 2024 presidential election, in which Americans elected President Donald Trump who centered his campaign on bringing down prices. Housing market experts say that the rental market might have settled on a new baseline, which means prices might not go back down to what they were in 2019. Read more: Work from home is reshaping the housing market 5 years after COVID Rob Warnock, a senior research associate at Apartment List, said a reversal to pre-pandemic prices is unlikely, as we're now at a level for how much housing costs. 'More realistic than rent prices coming down is rent prices stabilizing at a place where incomes can catch up,' Warnock said. For now, two trends in the market have emerged to keep the rental prices at a stable level: slowed rental demand and a recent construction frenzy. 'The past year has been really defined by a lot of new housing construction that was built over the previous three years, coupled with fairly low demand in the rental market,' Warnock said. 'As a result, what we see is that prices are largely flat, if not down.' A race to build There are only a handful of metros where rent prices have decreased over the past year. Notable among them is Bozeman, Montana, where people flocked during the pandemic for lower costs and outdoor spaces while working remotely. '(It) expedited everyone's decision-making to move to a town like Bozeman. There's a lot of fantasy around it,' said Casey Rose, an adviser at Sterling Commercial Real Estate Advisors. Amid the increased demand in the Montana mountain metro, developers started to build apartments. Many of the projects were delivered at the same time, which resulted in very low vacancy rates, Rose said. Compared with last year, rents in Bozeman are down roughly 10%, the second largest decline, according to the Apartment List data. But the actual prices, Rose said, can be masked by incentives like offering two months of free rent, or even a free iPad, TV, or ski pass. A similar pattern has played out in Austin, where rental prices are down 6.4% compared with a year ago. Stacey Auzanne, a property manager and a third-generation Austin resident, watched pandemic digital nomads flood into the city, while builders kept erecting new developments, creating a supply glut that kept rental prices suppressed. Auzanne, who manages dozens of properties, said the landlords she works with are holding rents steady, with one even dropping the price $50 a month. It's worth it to keep good tenants in place, she said – particularly in a market where there's more supply than demand. 'The market just kept accelerating and the bubble burst,' Auzanne said. 'This year, we're really feeling it.' Experts raised concerns that prices could go up because of the changing political landscape that has seen a stringent tariff policy and crackdown on immigrants who form a large part of the construction workforce. While housing inflation has dropped from its peak of over 8% in early 2023, costs have not fallen as quickly as overall inflation. According to consumer price index data released by the Labor Department on Wednesday, rent inflation was at 3.8% in May, the smallest annual increase since January 2022. This slowdown reflects lower rents for new leases finally filtering into rates for existing tenants. While the overall rise in consumer prices was modest in May, housing costs remained the largest contributor to inflation, accounting for 35% of all price increases. More: CPI report reveals inflation crept higher in May as tariff impact was tamer than expected


Boston Globe
an hour ago
- Boston Globe
Women are poised to inherit trillions in the coming decades. Will it give them more power, too?
Write to us at . To subscribe, . TODAY'S STARTING POINT The largest wealth transfer in history is happening in slow motion. About $124 trillion worth of earnings, property, and other financial assets will change hands in the US over the next 23 years, financial experts estimate, as older Americans die off. And as men bequeath money to their spouses and divvy up their wealth among their children, most of the beneficiaries will be women. The so-called great wealth transfer seems poised to change the American economy's relationship with gender. 'Wealth and personal finance especially has for generations or centuries been squarely the domain of men,' said Josie Cox, a financial journalist who wrote ' Money, valuable on its own, can also buy status. Yet it remains uncertain whether greater wealth will also give women greater power in American society. Here's how the great wealth transfer will happen and what it may mean. Advertisement Share the wealth Understanding the great wealth transfer means getting a little morbid. Here's how it will work: Through 2048, many of the remaining members of the baby boom generation (defined as Americans born between 1946 and 1964) will die. Women tend to live longer, so most men will leave their assets to female spouses. Advertisement 'Something like 95 percent of the spousal inheritance goes to women,' said Kay Hope, a research analyst at Bank of America who has Shifting cultural mores also help explain women's outsized share of the proceeds. Parents today are more likely to divide their assets relatively evenly between their male and female children than in the past, when inheritances flowed primarily to sons, Hope said. That will mean another $47 trillion going to younger women. An economy transformed? Greater wealth for women is poised to reshape the US economy. Some companies are already recognizing the shift, and Hope expects more to follow. That could mean more financial advisers catering to women, travel companies marketing overseas vacations to older single women, or a medical industry that focuses on osteoporosis and other conditions that disproportionately affect women into old age. 'Men today control about two thirds of global wealth,' Hope said. 'When those numbers are more 50-50, how hard is it to ignore?' The great wealth transfer could, in turn, grow the economy as a whole. Gender gaps in wages and labor force participation have narrowed in the US. If greater wealth helps more women enter or stay in the workforce, it could add trillions in value. 'It's not about pushing anyone aside,' Hope said, but 'about growing the whole pie.' Still, the shift may not be seamless. 'There is still a real cultural narrative that implies that the world of money and the world of investment is a world that is geared towards men,' said Cox, the financial journalist. Experiences in her own life have proven as much, from waiters bringing her husband the check to a financial adviser who refused to talk until her husband got on the phone. (According to some estimates, 70 percent of widows fire their financial advisers.) Advertisement The transfer may also reinforce inequality because it won't benefit those whose spouses or parents have little or nothing to pass on. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans hold Does money equal power? The transfer also may not radically reshape women's position in American society, at least not by itself. Women's wealth grew during the 20th century as more entered the workforce, went to college, and held political office. Those advances are real. But Cox doubts that money alone will enable enough women to climb the corporate ladder to reach gender parity, for example, because women still feel more pressure than men to leave the workforce to raise children. Changing that, she argues, would take policies like universal childcare, which the US doesn't have. Changes in gender relations can also invite backlash. Despite the broad benefits of women's economic participation, men often believe that gains by women mean losses for them. It happened after World War II, Cox said, when women who entered the workforce found themselves relegated back to homemaking when their husbands returned from overseas. A similar backlash may be brewing today. Polls show that the share of boys who think women should have the same job opportunities as men Advertisement Cox is hopeful that progress on gender equality will continue and that the great wealth transfer will be part of it. But it won't be enough, she said. 'I think this is more like a small step rather than a giant leap.' 🧩 1 Down: 86° POINTS OF INTEREST The Charles River under hazy skies due to Canadian wildfires in 2023. Craig F. 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