2016 tax season: 10 important changes and tips + 10 wacky deductions

To help you get the most out of your returns, here are a few important changes for the 2016 tax year.

4. Are you in a different tax bracket this year?

Frank Augstein/AP
Porsche AG CEO Matthias Mueller steers the new Porsche 918 Spyder during a preview by the Volkswagen Group prior to the 65th Frankfurt Auto Show in Frankfurt, Germany, Monday.

Tax brackets determine how much tax you owe based on your income. They are regularly adjusted for inflation, or the increase in the cost of goods and services. This year the brackets have shifted. That's good news for married couples filing jointly with a combined 2016 income of up to $75,300: They've have moved into the 15 percent tax bracket, down from the 25 percent bracket in 2015. To see the adjusted 2016 brackets, go to the IRS website, or here to see how the brackets changed between 2015 and 2016.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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