When you sell stocks, mutual funds or other capital assets you will still report the gains or losses on Form Schedule D when you prepare your 2011 tax return. But this year you must first show the sales activity on a new form—Form 8949 .

Hopefully, you followed some of the suggestions we outlined last year to organize your records. If you did, great! This will make filing your tax returns a lot easier this year. It also means that you and your tax advisor can spend more time on tax and financial planning issues for 2011 vs. looking back to 2010.