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In 1917, the Salvation Army sent 250 volunteers called “Donut Lassies” to deliver donuts to soldiers serving on the front lines in France. They collected excess rations for the dough, used shell casings and wine bottles as makeshift rolling pins, and filled a soldier’s helmet to fry the first batches of crullers. In 1938, the organization sponsored the first Donut Day event in Chicago to commemorate those brave angels. And while Christmas comes just once a year, today there are two National Donut Days – one on the first Friday in June and the second on November 5.
Americans eat over 10 billion of the fried dough treats every year – a miles-long conveyor belt of deliciousness. They’ve come a long way from the simple olykoeks (oily cakes) that Dutch settlers brought to the New World. And while you may not think there’s much left to mine in donut R&D, clever confectioners are still testing new approaches. Most recently, in 2013, a Soho pastry chef named Dominique Ansel struck gold with the Cronut®, a nonbinary croissant-donut hybrid fried in grapeseed oil.
In honor of this year’s first homage to the tasty little cakes, this week, we’re serving up three bite-sized stories about donuts meeting the taxman.
The lesson, as is so often the case, is that every financial choice you make involves taxes – even when just weighing cream filling against jelly. Perhaps that’s why so many financial professionals are adopting a “taxes first, then math” approach to their clients’ affairs. Life is full of unpredictable choices. Will the market go up or down? Will bitcoin go down or way down? Will that fried Danish really taste as good as it looks? (Spoiler alert – of course it will!) Why would you give up the chance to control your taxes when you’ve got us here to help?