One person suffered minor injuries and was treated at the scene after accidentally inhaling chemicals from a fire extinguisher, fire officials said.

Still, all redesigned-for-2021 Pacifica vans scored the highest possible ratings in nearly every instrumented crash test performed by the IIHS. Overall, the vans have top-notch crash-avoidance tech, including automatic emergency braking, at least when detecting and braking for other vehicles. A few tweaks made during October 2021 production improved the automatic emergency braking system’s ability to detect and apply the brakes for pedestrians and cyclists.

Read: Why is this modest car such a magnet for thieves?

Additionally, the IIHS says the standard LED headlights were improved beginning in April 2021, which saw a reduction in headlight glare and resulted in a shift from “Poor” to “Acceptable” ratings.

The Pacifica was revamped for 2021, though its predecessor was also rated a Top Safety Pick. That model missed out on the “+” rating due to its “Poor”-rated standard halogen headlights. The closely related 2021 Chrysler Voyager, sold only to fleet buyers, is equipped with those “Poor” headlights.

Also see: These are the cars that cost the most and least to insure

The IIHS has not said whether the Top Safety Pick+ rating will carry over into 2022, though the Pacifica sees only minor updates for the new model year. 

This story originally ran on Autotrader.com.

Knowing the cost of operating your business is vital. Engaging business experts and practicing due diligence can stop you from being blindsided by industry-specific costs such as customs broker services, music streaming licenses and more.

Also read: 4 essential concepts for managing business success

Commonly overlooked expenses

Rent, utilities and equipment are well-known business startup costs, but there are less obvious expenses that can be overlooked.

Licenses and permits

You may have to register your business in the state and city where it’s located. The fees you pay can vary and may depend on whether you plan to operate as a partnership, corporation, nonprofit or limited liability company.

For example, in New Jersey, a for-profit LLC will pay a fee of $125 to register, Tennessee requires a filing fee of $300 and San Diego charges all businesses operating within the city limits $34 for a Business Tax Certificate.

Additional licenses and permits may also be required based on business activities. For example, a business selling alcoholic beverages must meet the requirements of the Treasury Department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau along with state and local regulations, and a business operating an oversized vehicle will often need a state permit.

Business insurance

Most businesses will need multiple types of business insurance, such as general liability, professional liability, commercial auto and commercial property. Some coverage can be bundled into a business owner’s policy to save money.

When you run a business from your residence, a home-based business insurance rider may be needed to supplement your homeowners insurance policy. If you have employees, don’t overlook workers’ compensation insurance, which is required in most states.

Business software

You will typically pay a monthly fee for accounting, payroll and other business software. If you select a point-of-sale system to take customer payments, expect to pay a processing fee for each debit and credit card transaction. This expense can be significant if your business has a large volume of card transactions.

Social Security and Medicare taxes

When you work for yourself, you pay a self-employment tax rate of 15.3% on your net earnings. That’s 12.4% for Social Security and 2.9% for Medicare. If you have employees, that cost is split between the employee and employer. As the employer, you contribute 6.2% of employee wages for Social Security and 1.45% for Medicare. Federal and state unemployment taxes are other costs you may need to include in your budget.

Also see: Got a side gig? Turn it into a real business: Here’s how

Uncovering additional costs

Every business is unique and the expense of operating it can depend on the industry, location, size, sales channel and other factors. To learn about the specific costs associated with starting a business, you may have to rely on the experience of others and your own research.

Talk with an expert

The SBA is a great resource. You can get free business counseling through partner agencies — Small Business Development Centers, Women’s Business Centers and Veterans Business Outreach Centers. The business advisors at these centers can help identify lesser-known costs of starting a business, such as grand opening expenses, training for employees and certifications for managers.

“If you’ve never run a business before, you have a huge learning curve,” says Richard Sifuentes, director of the University of Texas at San Antonio Small Business Development Center. If a person lacks industry knowledge, Sifuentes suggests hiring someone as a manager or staff member with experience in the area or taking a job in the field for a short period of time.

“One of the biggest mistakes people make is not budgeting three to six months of working capital,” Sifuentes says. This reserve of funds can be used the first few months of operation before the revenue from sales is enough to cover costs. An additional amount could be added to this reserve to cover any unexpected expenses, Sifuentes says.

Read next: This is what both Suze Orman and Ramit Sethi say you should do if you’re worried about inflation

Due diligence

If you’re purchasing a business, acquiring existing inventory or accepting the transfer of a liquor license, you don’t want to be surprised by back taxes, liens or other liabilities. Thoroughly research a company before moving forward. Information can be found by a title company if real estate is involved or through online searches and public records.

“You don’t want to get in a position where you are purchasing a business and now you are responsible for something the previous owner neglected,” says Marlo Richardson, founder of Business Bullish, a free online resource for people interested in starting a business.

“Be patient. Don’t rush through the process,” she adds. “It’s a very exciting experience, but it can also be a loss of a lot of money. Just take your time and make sure you go through everything.”

More From NerdWallet

Lisa Anthony writes for NerdWallet. Email: lanthony@nerdwallet.com.

So, Next Avenue has spoken with a few sharp financial advisers and charitable experts for their best advice on giving wisely in 2021. (Since Next Avenue is a nonprofit, we’re asking people who value our journalism service to kindly make a contribution to help sustain our work.)

First, a tax tip: Even if you won’t itemize deductions on your 2021 tax return, you’ll be allowed to write off up to $300 in cash donations to charities you make before Jan. 1, 2022. Married couples filing jointly can claim up to $600, a new tax break. 

The generosity of Americans in the pandemic

Despite the challenges of the pandemic, Americans have continued to give — a clear sign that generosity is part of the fabric of American society.

According to the Giving USA 2021 Report, individuals donated roughly $324 billion, their highest total dollar amount to date. And the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University predicts a 6% increase in charitable giving by individuals in 2021.

It turns out that when Americans plan out their finances, they give more. According to a new online survey of over 2,000 U.S. adults conducted by The Harris Poll for Vanguard Charitable, Americans who actively budget their charitable giving give up to seven times more than those who don’t. This survey also found that nearly three in four Americans gave money to charities in the past 12 months, often inspired by personal experiences, current events or news stories.

And older adults tend to be more generous than younger ones, favoring local and national charities over global ones, according to a new international study during the pandemic published in Nature Aging.

When deciding where you might give to charity this year, you’ll likely think about organizations that have been a part of your life. That’s great. But what about charities you’ve never assisted?

To find those, including nonprofits working on causes you’d like to support, it helps to do a little homework. You can vet charities at the websites of the leading rating services: Charity Navigator, Candid (formerly GuideStar) and CharityWatch.

CharityWatch provides statistics on the financial performance of more than 600 major American charities. And Charity Navigator recently launched a Giving Basket online tool that lets you support multiple nonprofits through one checkout experience, while controlling how much of your personal information can be shared with each organization.

Making tax-smart charitable donations

Charity Navigator suggests you reach out directly to nonprofits and ask them questions such as these: What progress is your organization making toward its goals? And what resources are available to increase my confidence in your work?

Now, a few words about making tax-smart charitable donations.

With the stock market at near all-time highs, some financial advisers are helping clients facilitate gifts of stocks they bought long ago that would otherwise stick them with lots of capital-gains taxes if sold now.

Read: Selling losing stocks now is a smart tax move. Buying them back before January is even smarter.

“When you donate stock to a charity, you can sell it and pay no taxes. It’s a win-win,” said Juan C. Ros, a financial adviser at Forum Financial Management in Thousand Oaks, Calif. and former professional fundraiser at the ALS Association.

You can also donate so-called complex assets such as business interests, real estate, even digital assets like bitcoin, added Ros. “Think beyond cash when planning your charitable giving,” he advised.

One popular way to get a tax break now and continue your charitable giving into the future is by using a donor-advised fund.

Donor-advised funds for charity

You get a tax deduction for the amount given to the fund in the year contributed and the assets are available for you to donate to specific charitable organizations at any time.

The three largest donor-advised funds, which are public charities, are run by the financial services firms Fidelity, Schwab
SCHW,
+1.78%
and Vanguard; they received between 8.3% and 25.3% more in contributions in 2020 than in 2019, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Donations of appreciated assets, such as stock or real estate, can be given to the donor-advised fund without paying capital-gains taxes. Any further growth of assets in fund is not taxable to you.

Don’t miss: MacKenzie Scott, billionaire philanthropist, won’t reveal who got money in her latest round of giving

Another tax strategy to consider when making charitable contributions, said Jeremy Keil, a financial planner with Keil Financial Partners and host of the Retirement Revealed podcast and blog in New Berlin, Wis., is bunching deductions.

This technique is useful because the standard deduction has gone up so much that it’s now hard to have enough deductible expenses to exceed the standard deduction threshold and itemize. (The standard deduction for 2021 is $12,500 for single people or $13,850 if you’re 65 or older; it’s $25,100 for married couples filing jointly.)

A smart tax-saving strategy for giving

With bunching, you take the standard deduction one year (when you don’t have much in deductions) and itemize the next (when you do).

Keil cited bunching advice he recently gave a suburban Milwaukee couple who are clients. They’re in the 32% federal tax bracket and typically gave $15,000 a year to a variety of organizations, including their local church.

“To increase the impact of their giving, while further reducing the impact of federal taxes, I suggested that they employ a bunching strategy and consider giving more this year so they could itemize these deductions on their taxes,” said Keil.

The clients “decided to up their charitable game” and make a $30,000 contribution to a donor-advised fund which can fund future philanthropic requests, said Keil.

The bottom line: Keil said his clients saw a roughly $6,000 tax benefit from this bunching strategy this year.

Also see: Jeff Bezos giving nearly $100 million to groups serving homeless families

Taxes, charity and retirement

When you turn 72, you must take Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) from your retirement accounts, other than Roth IRAs, and pay Uncle Sam taxes on all those years of gains, based on an actuarial formula.

But here’s a tax-saving charity wrinkle about RMDs: Donors taking the standard deduction can make what’s known as a qualified charitable distribution (QCD). That’s a direct transfer from your IRA to a charity. The amount of a QCD is then excluded from your taxable income and counts toward your annual required minimum distribution.

Ros noted that taxpayers can give up to $100,000 a year using QCDs, although that amount may be limited if you contributed to your IRA past age 70½.

QCDs can also help reduce your taxable income because they’ll mean your Adjusted Gross Income will go down.

“This reduction can positively impact both the taxes your pay on Social Security benefits and also may keep you from having to pay a Medicare income-related adjustment, where your Medicare Part B premium increases due to higher income levels,” explained Ros.

Factoring charities into your legacy

Regardless of your age, you may be in the fortunate position to want to make charitable contributions this year as part of your legacy.

“In my experience working with wealthy donors, their primary concern is to make a difference, not to reduce their tax bill,” said David Foster, a financial adviser at Gateway Wealth Management in St. Louis. “They obviously, don’t want to eschew any tax breaks available to them, but people want to make an impact and leave a legacy — be it to their kids, family, community, or favorite cause.”

Often, Foster said, this creates an opportunity to develop a charitable mission statement for the family and clarify causes or organizations to give to now, rather than after death through a will.

“It’s important to gain clarity on the kind of legacy you want to leave—hopefully while you are still alive,” said Julie Hall, a wealth adviser and certified financial therapist at Vision Capital Partners in Ann Arbor, Mich.

You might like: The millions you save for retirement aren’t worth much if you’re not healthy enough to enjoy it

According to Hall, one way to bring focus to your good works is to write a charitable-giving vision statement.

“Once confident about their financial independence, I walk clients through a series of discussions that help identify the causes or organizations they really care about,” she noted. “A vision statement helps you define why you are giving and what inspires you to give. It also helps clarify where and when you would like to give.”

One last tax tip for your generosity: If you want to make a gift to an individual who’s been going through a rough time — perhaps after a COVID-19 job loss or someone having a medical emergency—the IRS lets you gift up to $15,000 this year ($30,000 from a married couple) without owing gift taxes.

David Conti is a New-Hampshire based writer, editor and content marketing specialist. He was an editor at Fidelity Investments and now writes about personal finance, retirement, aging and wealth for several national publications. Contact him on LinkedIn. 

This article is reprinted by permission from NextAvenue.org, © 2021 Twin Cities Public Television, Inc. All rights reserved.

More from Next Avenue:

The Stoxx Europe 600 index
SXXP,
+0.24%
rose 0.3% to 470.92, following a 0.8% decline, which marked the fifth straight loss, the longest such streak since March 2020 when the index fell for six consecutive sessions. The German DAX
DAX,
+0.25%
rose 0.3% and the French CAC 40
PX1,
+0.49%
rose 0.5%.

The FTSE 100 index
UKX,
-0.49%
fell 0.4% against the backdrop of a stronger pound
GBPUSD,
+0.20%,
up 0.3% to $1.3273, following the strongest rise in U.K. annual inflation in more than a decade. Driven by supply-chain woes and higher energy costs, prices rose a stronger-than-forecast 5.1% in November.

The data could weigh heavily in favor of some tightening of policy from the Bank of England’s policy-setting committee meeting on Thursday. In a bigger spotlight, the Fed’s will give the outcome of its two-day meeting on Wednesday, in which the central bank is due to announce the start of tapering and lay out plans for future interest-rate rises.

Technology stocks have been under pressure, with Nasdaq-100 futures
NQ00,
-0.24%
down again, amid the threat of higher interest rates, which can discount the current value of future earnings. As for stocks in focus, shares of ASML Holding
ASML,
-1.32%
climbed 2%, SAP
SAP,
-1.70%

SAP,
+0.95%
and Infineon shares
IFX,
+0.84%
gained more than 1%.

Markets have also been weighing up the potential hit to global growth from the omicron coronavirus variant, as countries beef up measures to combat surging cases. A study out of Hong Kong on Tuesday showed the Sinopec COVID-19 vaccine, used widely in China and the developing world, wasn’t effective in neutralizing the new coronavirus variant.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Wednesday that the contagious omicron strain would be the dominant variant in the region by January.

China economic data showed factory production climbing at a faster pace in November, but consumption and investment decelerated, which weighed on base metals prices and related stocks. Shares of miners Rio Tinto
RIO,
-2.56%

RIO,
+0.76%,
BHP
BHP,
+0.78%
and Glencore
GLEN,
-2.45%
were down by 1% or more.

Apparel makers were also contributing to gains, though that was focused on luxury-goods makers, such as LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton
LVMH,
+1.77%
rose 1.6%, Hermès International
RMS,
+2.15%
climbed 2%.

On the downside, shares of retailing giants Hennes & Mauritz
HM.B,
-2.89%
of Sweden and Spain’s Inditex
ITX,
-2.94%
fell more than 2% as both reported results. H&M reported fourth-quarter fiscal revenue in line with expectations, though a team of analysts at Jefferies led by James Grzinic noted uncertainties likely to follow due to the current markdown-boosted autumn and winter seasons.

Inditex saw solid top-line sales in the third quarter ending October, but gross margin fell short, due to industrywide supply-chain issues and the inflationary trend, said analyst Cédric Rossi at Bryan, Garnier & Co., in a note to clients.

In a webinar held by the American Council for Capital Formation, he likened monetary policy to trying to adjust the water temperature of a shower in an old hotel, due to the lag in how the economy responds. That’s why, he said, the Fed has frequently caused recessions when it reacts to stamp out inflation.

“There have been moments when the Fed acted mildly and preemptively, 1995 for example, to create what we might call a pause that refreshes with respect to an expansion, but that was when it was activng with a doctrine of looking ahead, not the current doctrine of no action until inflation is absolutely established.”

“I think the difficulty of engineering a soft landing in which inflation comes down but we don’t see a real problem is, I think, very challenging,” he said.

Another risk: Summers warns of a spontaneous deflating of financial assets, ticking off crypto, meme stocks, technology stocks, and SPACs. “Super-excited retail is usually a sign of trouble to come,” he said.

Already, the Nasdaq Composite
COMP,
-1.14%
has retreated 5% from its record high.

Summers said he was glad to see that Fed Chair Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen are retiring the word “transitory” from their vocabulary. He said the Fed should immediately stop purchasing mortgage-backed bonds, and phase out government bond purchases by the end of the first quarter, which will allow for multiple rate hikes.

“I find the idea that very gradual increases of rates will be sufficient to contain inflation to be somewhat implausible, given what is happening in the labor market,” Summers said.

Summers explained why he was against the size of the $1.9 trillion stimulus plan signed into law by President Joe Biden. He said he foresaw a GDP gap of about 3%, but the stimulus provided aid equivalent to 14% of GDP. Another way to look at it was that labor income was running about $25 billion per month below trend, to which $200 billion per month of aid was provided.

Summers also said the significance of the omicron variant is that it’s a much more dramatic mutation than what was seen previously, which implies another major mutation could also come. Employing a baseball analogy, he said it’s possible that the coronavirus situation is in the fifth inning, rather than the seventh.