Retirement and Tax Planning in Murrysville, PA
If you live in Murrysville, you pay a higher local earned income tax than almost anyone else in the Pittsburgh suburbs — and most people here have never been told why.
A rate that moved, and a direction of travel
Municipal council raised Murrysville’s share of the earned income tax from 0.5% to 0.7%, the first municipal tax increase since 2007. The Franklin Regional School District share stayed at 0.5%, because changing a school district’s share requires a voter referendum. That puts the combined resident rate at roughly 1.2%, against 1.0% in Cranberry Township, Peters Township and most of the surrounding area. Franklin Regional separately approved a four-mill property tax increase for the 2025–26 school year.
On its own, two tenths of a percent is not a crisis. The point is the direction of travel, and the fact that you do not control it. Your municipality can move its share. Your school district can move millage. Harrisburg can move the state rate. Washington can move the federal brackets. Every one of those decisions is made by somebody else, and every one of them lands on the same pile of money.
Why this matters more than the number itself
Most financial plans are built as though today’s tax treatment will hold. They load income into accounts that are taxed on the way out — the traditional 401(k), the traditional IRA — which is a bet that your bracket in retirement will be kinder than your bracket now. For a Murrysville household watching its local rate move in one direction, that is a bet worth examining rather than assuming.
An income architecture built for shifting brackets
We build what we call the Financial Machine around a different premise. Four components, each doing a job the others cannot:
- A high-yield cash account — operational liquidity that earns while it waits, and funds everything else.
- Indexed universal life — participation in index gains with protection on the downside under Internal Revenue Code section 7702, plus living benefits you can reach during a critical, chronic or terminal illness.
- A managed liquid investment account — not an IRA. Taxable on paper, but loss harvesting and a securities-backed line of credit keep the money reachable, with full allocation flexibility.
- Alternative investments — business ownership, real estate held for income rather than appreciation, commodities, and private markets.
The organising idea is that this is not a system for building wealth. It is a system for magnifying and protecting wealth you are already generating. Your income is the engine. The structure is what keeps more of it.
Who we tend to work with here
Franklin Regional families in their peak earning years, people with equity compensation or concentrated employer stock, and business owners along the Route 22 corridor — including owners of construction, HVAC, electrical and plumbing businesses, who often earn well and have never been shown what to do with it.
Worth a conversation?
A short consultation, no obligation, to see whether your current structure is built for the tax picture you actually face.
Tax rates change. Confirm current figures with the Municipality of Murrysville and the Franklin Regional School District before acting on them. Nothing here is tax or legal advice.