Good morning. If your mailbox has been nothing but 1099s and insurance statements this week, you’re not alone.
In this issue:
- The tax form most seniors miss (and why it matters)
- Worth Knowing: a tech guide with respect, withholding fixes, and heart health
- From the Archives: the menopause article nobody expected to need
- Slice of Life: a late January observation
Tax forms should be arriving now. SSA-1099 from Social Security. 1099-R from retirement accounts. 1099-INT from your bank. 1095-B from your health coverage. If you’re stacking them in a pile on the kitchen counter, you’re doing fine. But there’s one form that catches people off guard every year.
The 1099-SA. If you took money out of a Health Savings Account (that’s an HSA — the tax-advantaged account many people set up through an employer), this form reports those distributions. Here’s the thing: if the money went toward qualified medical expenses, it’s not taxed. But you still have to report it on your return. Skip it, and the IRS assumes the full amount is taxable income.
Two other commonly missed forms: 1099-DIV, which reports dividends from investments — even ones that were automatically reinvested — and 1099-B, which covers stock or fund sales, including trades your financial advisor made inside a managed account. You may not have pressed “sell,” but the IRS still wants to hear about it.
The takeaway: Don’t file until you have everything. The IRS matches your return against the forms they’ve received. A missing form means a letter — and possibly a penalty.
Here’s a good habit: make a checklist of every form you received last year. This year’s list should look similar, plus or minus any account changes.
Free filing resources worth knowing: IRS Free File if your income is under $84,000, AARP Tax-Aide (free, in-person, at 5,000+ sites nationwide), and VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance) for income under $67,000.
Find free AARP Tax-Aide near you at aarpfoundation.org/taxaide →
📱 A tech guide that doesn’t talk down to you.
Most tech guides for seniors are written like you’ve never touched a computer. This one assumes you’re smart — you just want clear directions. I wrote it to cover the basics that actually matter: smartphones, online shopping, streaming, staying safe online, and why Apple vs. Android is a real choice worth thinking about. No jargon. No eye-rolling.
💰 Check your withholding — now.
If you owed more than $500 last April, your withholding might be off. You can adjust Social Security tax withholding with Form W-4V and retirement account withholding with Form W-4P. Or use the IRS withholding estimator at irs.gov/W4App. The takeaway: Fix it now so you’re not surprised next April.
🏥 February is American Heart Month.
Heart disease is the #1 killer of Americans 65 and older. Three things you can do this week: (1) Check your blood pressure at home or at a pharmacy — it’s free. (2) Schedule your Annual Wellness Visit if you haven’t yet in 2026. (3) Ask your doctor about a lipid panel. Medicare covers it every 5 years, more often if you have risk factors.
What No One Told Me About Menopause — by Eleanor Hayes
This is one of our most honest articles. Whether you went through this yourself or you’re supporting someone who did, it’s worth the read.
Eleanor is a wellness counselor in Asheville who has spent decades sitting with women through menopause’s physical, emotional, and spiritual shifts. She doesn’t sugarcoat it — she writes about the 3 AM night sweats, the grief of a changing body, and the silence most of us inherited from mothers who never talked about it. She also walks through the current evidence on hormone therapy, cutting through the fear that’s persisted since that 2002 study.
One line I keep coming back to: “I spent thirty-five years serving my hormones. Now I get to find out who I am without them.” That was from a woman in one of Eleanor’s circles. She was sixty-three and grinning.
Late January is the part of winter where you stop pretending you enjoy it and start counting. Forty-something days until the clocks spring forward. Eight weeks, give or take, until you can sit on a porch without a blanket. But there’s a small pleasure in this stretch too — the weight of a warm blanket at night, a cup of something hot in the morning, the way the house smells when you’ve had the oven on all afternoon. Winter is long. But the small comforts are real.
Until next Tuesday,
Nino
P.S. If someone you know is about to file their taxes, forward this their way — the 1099-SA tip alone could save them a headache. And if you’ve got a tax story or a question, hit reply. I read every one.
