Four parts, sixteen chapters. It runs in the order a working life does — what you pay now, the machinery available to you, what changes when the money stops arriving as a paycheck, and how to keep what you built.
Every chapter ends with one. They are the part readers actually keep — a page you fill in once and refer back to for years.
Your tax position — gross income, AGI, taxable income, total tax, and the two rates that come out of them.
Your true marginal rate: federal band, payroll tax, state, and any phase-out you are sitting inside.
Your account inventory — what you hold, what the 2026 limits are, and whether the employer match is fully collected.
Your estimated-tax page, filled in each January from last year’s return.
Your threshold map — the income lines that cost a whole year’s money to cross by a dollar.
The transfer audit — every beneficiary form, and the date it was last changed.
The paperback is the edition built for these — room to write, and it stays open on the desk. The ebook and bundle include the same worksheets, formatted to print.
It is educational. It explains how the United States federal tax system operates and where the law provides room to reduce what you owe. Every incentive it describes exists because Congress wrote it to influence behaviour; claiming one is the intended response.
It is not personalised advice. It cannot be — it does not know your circumstances. Where a figure in these pages governs a decision you are about to make, confirm it against the current year, and where a decision is large, have a qualified professional look at it.
Tax planning is lawful. Tax evasion is a crime. Everything in the book belongs to the first category. Where a strategy has conditions that must be met for it to be lawful, those conditions are stated plainly rather than glossed over.
State and local tax is not covered in detail, worked examples are simplified deliberately, and federal figures are adjusted annually.