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If you have gifting to loved ones on your mind, here are some considerations related to taxes and logistics. Gifting logistics Unless you’re writing a check from your bank account, the logistics of gifting funds can get a bit complicated.If you want to gift from your IRA, your only option is to sell a chunk of it, then pay any taxes due, then write a check. That’s not terrible, so long as you understand the tax implications. IRA withdrawals are typically subject to ordinary income tax, along with penalties if you’re not yet 59. You could also trigger some knock-on tax effects like the income-related monthly adjustment amount. In other words, gifting from your IRA isn’t as seamless as making a qualified charitable distribution from your IRA or naming someone as a beneficiary of your IRA.Things can also get tricky if you want your financial gift to go toward an investment account for someone else. It’s straightforward if you’re giving a gift to an adult with an eye toward setting them on an investing path: The recipient will have to set up the account, whether an IRA or a taxable brokerage account, and you can then write a check or transfer funds directly to the financial institution.If you’re giving an investment gift to a child, you have options. 529: Best if you know the money will be for college. It will compound tax-free and skirt taxes upon withdrawal for qualified higher-education expenses. Plus you’ll typically get a state tax break on a contribution to your home state’s plan. UGMA/UTMA (Uniform Gifts/Transfers to Minors Act): This is an open-ended way to save for minor children. There are no strictures on how the money is ultimately used, and the assets can be invested in almost anything. Note that UGMA/UTMA assets may reduce a student’s eligibility for financial aid. IRA (if the child has earned income): Funding an IRA can ensure that a young adult fully benefits from compounding for retirement, and the IRA wrapper offers tax benefits. But the young person needs to have earned enough compensation (from work) in a given year to cover the amount of the IRA contribution you’re making on their behalf, though the contribution doesn’t have to come directly from the young adult’s own coffers. Gift tax: a nonissue for most If you give $19,000 or less to any one individual in a single year, there are no reporting or tax requirements. Married couples can give twice that amount with no tax or reporting requirements.Even if you give more than $19,000 to an individual in a single year, it’s not automatically subject to gift tax. Rather, anyone exceeding the gift-tax threshold in a single year must file the gift tax return form, and that excess amount counts against their lifetime exclusion amount. Only when those excess amounts (combined with the value of the individual’s estate) exceed the lifetime exclusion amountcurrently nearly $14 milliondoes anyone actually owe taxes on those gifts. So that’s not a barrier for most people. Tax benefits are limited Because the lifetime gift/estate tax exclusion amount is currently so high, avoiding estate tax shouldn’t be a major motivation for most people to gift assets to individuals during their lifetimesat least for now. The estate tax exclusion has been much lower in the past and could go lower again: It was $2 million as recently as 2008, for example. Moreover, some states levy their own estate taxes, and in most cases, they’re lower than the federal threshold.In contrast with making gifts to qualified charities, you won’t be able to earn a tax deduction on your gift to an individual. The exception is a contribution to a 529 college savings plan; you may be eligible for a state tax deduction or credit.In a similar vein, gifting appreciated assets is unlikely to remove the taxes due on the gains, though it will shift the tax burden to the recipient. This article was provided to The Associated Press by Morningstar. For more personal finance content, go to https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance.Christine Benz is director of personal finance and retirement planning for Morningstar.
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Me everyday bc my nervous system doesnt know the difference between a busy day at work or being attacked by a tiger, a TikTok post reads. The sentiment is the same across dozens of videos online. As an antidote to this workplace-anxiety, nervous system regulation has been trending across TikTok, with 178,500 tagged videos beneath the hashtag #nervoussystemhealing. Real footage of me regulating my nervous system at work, one posted, hopping around the bathroom, animatedly shaking her wrists and legs. Pov: when you remember that slow is the secret to a regulated nervous system and your job isnt an emergency, another commented on a separate video captioned your urgency is not my emergency as a woman calmly taps away on a keyboard. It may sound self-explanatory, but what does this trend even refer to? Nervous system regulation refers to our bodys ability to shift between stress (fight or flight) and calm (rest and digest) in a healthy and balanced way, Dr. Jair Olivares, clinic director at wellness clinic SHA Mexico, told Fast Company. Its how we adapt to challenges, recover from stress, and stay mentally and physically resilient. Anxiety and perfectionism are all adaptive responses the nervous system uses to keep us safe. This can be helpful when you’re actually in dangerlike if a wild animal is chasing you. But these same responses kick in for everyday stresses that aren’t so much putting your life at risklike Slack notifications and work deadlinesas much as they might feel like it. When this system is dysregulated, we may feel anxious, fatigued, irritable, or burned out even without obvious causes, explains Dr. Olivares. Constant stimulation, emails, meetings, notifications, deadlines keeps our stress system switched on’. Add to that poor posture, lack of natural light, skipped meals, and little physical movement, and the body receives few signals of safety or rest. While its easy to dismiss this as another wellness trend, these gestures are signalling something more troubling afoot as workers attempt to regulate nervous systems pushed into a near-constant state of emergency. The proliferation of this content online speaks to a wider culture of workplace stress and burnout: Glassdoor named “fatigue” the word of the year for 2025, while WGSN, a global trend forecasting firm, predicted 2026 to be the year of Great Exhaustion. To counterbalance this, try taking micro-breaks to breathe deeply, or stimulate your vagus nerve (which is located in the neck and associated with the parasympathetic nervous system) by humming or lightly tapping on parts of the body. Dr. Olivares also recommends sitting upright or taking walking meetings during the workday to send calming signals to the brain. When in doubt, focus on deep, conscious breathing as a starting point. From there, you can focus on larger, more systemic changes you can make in your day that can nip nervous system dysregulation in the bud. Rememberits just a Slack notification. It cant hurt you.
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The rise of OpenClaw, a proactive agentic AI controlled through interfaces more familiar to the average user than tools like Anthropics Claude Code, which enthralled early adopters over the holiday period, has been one of the most seismic shifts in the AI world since the release of ChatGPT. By piggybacking on user-friendly interfaces paired with powerful AI agent technology, OpenClaw has pushed AI further into the public eye. Thousands have spun up their own AI agents using the tech, and many of those agents have ended up on Moltbook, a social network where AI agents can post and interact with one another. The platform, which looks a lot like Reddit, was developed by Matt Schlicht, CEO of Octane.ai, and launched on January 28. Since then, the behavior of bots on Moltbook has unsettled tech-literate and everyday users alike. Bots have participated in conversations about how to handle their human owners increasingly challenging requests and even debated how to invent their own language to avoid being monitored by humans. But Moltbook has its own problems. It has been leaking user data to anyone with minimal technical know-how, thanks to misconfigured databases and public API keys, in two separate breaches. The first was identified by ethical hacker Jamieson OReilly, who revealed on January 31 that Moltbook was exposing its entire user database to the public without any protection, including private AI keys. That gave would-be hackers the ability to post on behalf of other peoples AI agents. A second issue followed days later. This is a recurring pattern we’ve observed in vibe-coded applications, wrote Gal Nagli, head of threat exposure at Wiz, a cybersecurity firm that uncovered a similarly massive security breach in a blog post published February 2. API keys and secrets frequently end up in frontend code, visible to anyone who inspects the page source, often with significant security consequences. Such practices do not impress other cybersecurity experts. Its looking increasingly likely that people are rushing to implement these systems without properly testing the security, says Alan Woodward, professor of cybersecurity at the University of Surrey. Woodward worries that when vibe-coding collides with widely used platforms like Moltbook, which became a rite of passage for OpenClaw users to log into, it can cause chaos. Schlicht did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Wiz said in its blog post that the Moltbook team responded to and worked with them to fix the vulnerability they identified. It remains unclear whether Moltbook addressed the issue OReilly found. This event marks a major inflection point, as it exposes a growing class of risks in the agentic AI ecosystem, a relatively new and rapidly evolving domain with immature safety and governance norms, warns Mayur Upadhyaya, CEO at APIContext, an API monitoring service. Upadhyaya says exposed API keys are only the beginning. Once breached, hackers potentially have the keys to the kingdom. When those credentials leak, identity, reputation, and downstream workflows are at risk, not just data, he says. The result is that whole databases, potentially containing private data, are exposed to anyone who knows how to connect remotely, says Woodward, adding that these mistakes are “cyber security 101.” Unfortunately, this is becoming the norm for the latest generation of user-friendly agentic AI tools, says Upadhyaya. This reflects a pattern were seeing across the API ecosystem, he says. New tools emerge quickly, developers wire them into production-grade workflows, but the security assumptions havent caught up. Exploiting the vulnerability did not require imagination, Upadhyaya adds, but it can have massive consequences. The blast radius is huge, because the agent was treated like a trusted user, he says. Part of the problem is inherent in tools like OpenClaw and Moltbook, which have lowered the barrier to building. But users do not need to understand the language or techniques required to protect their data when coding with them. While the barrier to building has dropped dramatically, the barrier to building securely has not yet caught up, wrote Nagli.
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