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Werner Renberg is a writer and author based in Chappaqua, N.Y. He is the author of four books, including All About Bond Funds: A Complete Guide for Today’s Investors. The opinions expressed are his own.

If you and your spouse are middle-income retirees making less than $250,000 a year from regular sources of income – such as Social Security, interest, dividends, pensions, IRAs and 401(k) distributions – you could soon wind up in an income tax bracket intended for the rich.

A bump up to the 36 percent or 39.6 percent tax bracket is possible if Congress passes President Barack Obama’s proposed budget for the 2011 fiscal year and makes no provision to reduce the risk of unintended consequences.

How?

If your adjusted gross income (AGI) rises above $250,000 in 2011, thanks to large long-term capital gains triggered by the sale of assets bought long ago at lower prices. Those assets could include real estate, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, along with capital gains distributions from mutual funds in taxable accounts.

The impact of large capital gains could cause you to be “wealthy” in the eyes of the administration because it chose a $250,000 AGI, a measure of total cash flows from income and asset sales, as the point at which it divides the universe of joint return filers into “the wealthy” and everybody else. That $250,000 AGI hurdle for married individuals filing joint returns also applies to surviving spouses. For single individuals, it’s $200,000.

Why should you care?

Dan Greenshields is president of ShareBuilder. The opinions expressed here are his own.

Millions of children are getting ready to head back to school. Their parents have a long to-do list before them as well. My wife and I have had to purchase school supplies and new clothes, schedule haircuts, and make sure the kids have finished off their summer reading lists.

Unfortunately, this flurry of activities causes many parents to lose sight of another critical component of any back-to-school checklist: financial planning for our children’s future.

College is one of the best ways to increase a child’s chances for success. But it’s getting more expensive every year. In 2009, private school tuition rose 4.4 percent, to an average of $26,273, according to the College Board. While public school is less expensive, its cost is rising even faster – last year, the average tuition at a public, in-state university rose 6.5 percent, to $7,020.

Planning ahead for this expense will ensure that it doesn’t sneak up on you. Whether you live in Seattle or San Antonio – and whether you expect your child to go to a big state school or a tiny liberal arts college – such planning begins with an assessment of your present situation.

The first questions are easy: How old is your child? And have you started to save?

In the blink of an eye, this year’s fifth graders will be headed off to college. So the sooner you begin saving, the better.  I speak from experience.  My son is 11 and my daughter is 9. College and the costs – times two – that come with it are just around the corner.

Rick Ashburn (pictured below) is a certified financial planner and managing partner of Creekside Partners, based in Lafayette, Calif. The opinions expressed are his own.

For many state and local governments, the new fiscal year has already begun. Yet they are operating without an adopted budget. The news will likely get worse before it gets better.

After several decades of endless revenue increases, the governmental sector is at long last faced with a titanic clash of demands on its traditional largesse. Voters want schools and nice roads and parks and such, along with low taxes. And they vote. Employee unions want pay and pensions and health benefits. And they vote – in a large block. We do not know which group will get what they want.

But our job is to manage investments for our clients. Our clients own a lot of municipal bonds, so we turn our attention from the political to the pragmatic. Municipal bonds represent promises. As we know, our various state and local governments have made a lot of promises, and some of those promises are going to get broken. Our task is to ensure that we don’t own any broken promises.

I have worked in the muni bond world for 25 years, as a consultant, investment banker and financial adviser. I’ve been on both the “sell side” and the “buy side.” I learned a few key lessons early on. Most importantly, I learned that there exists an astonishing variety of bonds called “municipal.” A vast quantity of them has almost nothing to do with what we generally consider municipal functions and services. The bond might be issued by a municipal entity and carry its name in the title, but the revenue stream might be derived from a private business enterprise.

An example is a bond issued at the height of the housing bubble in 2006 by something called the Independent Cities Lease Finance Authority. This entity is a California joint powers authority whose nominal members include nine cities in south Los Angeles County, but which doesn’t actually have any staff and does not conduct regular public meetings. Its address is a post office box in Palmdale, Calif.,  in north Los Angeles County – nowhere near either the project or the member cities.

This column was written by William R. Bischoff, a certified public accountant in Colorado Springs, Colorado for PPC, which is part of the tax and accounting business at Thomson Reuters. The opinions expressed here are his own.

The so-called Bush tax cuts (from legislation enacted in 2001 and 2003) are scheduled to expire at the end of this year. But you may not understand the full extent of what is in store if Congress simply sits back and allows the expirations to occur without making any changes.

Here are some highlights:

Higher income tax rates

Some of you may believe that only individuals in the top two federal income tax brackets will face higher rates when the Bush cuts go bye-bye. Not true! Unless Congress takes action and President Obama goes along, rates will automatically go up for everyone who pays taxes — not just “the rich.”

Specifically, the existing 10 percent bracket will go away, and the lowest “new” bracket will be 15 percent. The existing 25 percent bracket will be replaced by the “new” 28 percent bracket; the existing 28 percent bracket will be replaced by the “new” 31 percent bracket; the existing 33 percent bracket will be replaced by the “new” 36 percent bracket; and the existing 35 percent bracket will be replaced by the “new” 39.6 percent bracket.

My take: The Administration has pledged to keep the three lowest brackets (the 10 percent, 15 percent, and 25 percent brackets) in place. The 28 percent bracket would be expanded to accommodate unmarried taxpayers with income (whatever that is determined to mean) below $200,000 and joint filers with income below $250,000. Only taxpayers with income above those levels would be affected by the new 36 percent and 39.6 percent rates. However, Congress must make changes, and the president must go along for these things to happen.

The following is a guest post by Tim Kochis, the chairman and former CEO of Aspiriant. Barron’s ranked him fifth in its inaugural listing of the “Top 100 Independent Advisors” in the U.S. in 2007.

As the SEC prepares to begin its six month evaluation of the current rules governing registered investment advisors and brokerage firms, I hope that it takes a nuanced view of reality. Given the array of services, business models and client relationships that need to exist, I strongly believe that imposing a strict fiduciary standard on every firm and individual, in all circumstances, would be a big mistake.

It is important to distinguish sales efforts, the execution of transactions and the brokering of trades from the giving of advice. Imposing a fiduciary duty (putting the client’s interest first) is unrealistic in the sales environment or when brokering an investment between two customers, one a buyer and one a seller. Where both parties are clients, which client’s interest must the financial institution put first?

A non-fiduciary sales environment exists in all economic realms. We rely on consumers’ natural skepticism, access to alternatives, broadly available factual information, and a increasing flood of internet-based opinion to discipline price and quality in virtually everything else we might buy. Why can’t we simply apply caveat emptor to all financial services?

What makes many financial services unique is the industry’s rapid pace of innovation and the unavoidable uncertainty about the future outcomes its services are designed to address, combined with the low level of financial sophistication that afflicts many consumers.

A variable rate, interest-only mortgage, for example, can be a wonderful device for a client with a long horizon on ownership of the property, the discipline to invest (not spend) the cash flow savings, and the financial depth to withstand occasional interest rate spikes. That same device can spell disaster for a client with thin resources, no investment plan, and who must or chooses to sell the property early in the term. The solution, in this example, is certainly not to ban this form of mortgage, or to make any discussion of it be fiduciary in nature, but to make sure that advice about a specific client actually using it be rendered in a fiduciary context.

Disclosure of potential conflicts and “suitability” requirements already exist. Criminal laws and civil remedies for fraud or deceit are already in place. Having to tell the truth is already the law. But, legislating a new regime where all financial services are fiduciary would be impossible to put into practice.

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