Tax Opportunities Before Year-End Every year, U.S. taxpayers face a number of year-end deadlines which, if ignored, can be costly and even punitive. In the latter category, consider people over age 70 1/2 who forget to take the full required minimum distribution from their IRA or 401(k). If they get the calculation wrong, or […]
Savings Bonds Redux Remember savings bonds? Ask anybody who was around during or in the years right after World War II, and they’ll have fond memories of buying a savings bond for $25 for a child or grandchild, and five years later the bond would be worth $50. For people of a certain age, it […]
Charitable Contribution Rules: 10 Years in the Making Ten years ago, the Internal Revenue Service proposed regulations that would define how to value (and prove the actual value) of non-cash donations to charity. The regs involved things like artwork, jewelry and other possessions whose value is often in the eye of the beholder. Now, a […]
Crypto-Crash Chances are, if you remember the dot-com crash, it is not fondly. The Nasdaq Composite Index fell a total of 78% peak-to-trough, as companies like Pets.com cratered into oblivion. Today’s cryptocurrency investors are experiencing similar pain, and there’s no clear end in sight. Bitcoin is down 55% this year, and the decline is now […]
Reclaiming Charitable Deductions You may remember that when the new tax law was debated, there was a lot of chatter around the possibility that Congress would totally eliminate the deduction for charitable contributions. That Republican-backed proposal never made it into the final Tax Cuts + Jobs Act, but in other ways the tax changes may […]
Tax Simplification That Really Is One of the the biggest misnomers coming out of Washington is the idea of “tax simplification,” where Congress purportedly makes it easier for all of us to fill out our tax returns by adding several thousand pages of new rules, rates and lists of things we can and cannot deduct […]
Healthy Earnings – For Now Professional investors are constantly trying to figure out whether the U.S. economy is healthy or sliding toward a recession. The most important tea leaves they read are actual corporate earnings vs. the earnings estimates provided by Wall Street analysts. Surprises on the upside are generally considered to be positive signs, […]
Mega Cash Returns There wasn’t a lot of fanfare when Apple Computer announced that it would commit $100 billion of the excess cash it had laying around to buying back its own shares. This may be because, as you can see from the chart, the company has made a quarterly habit of committing enormous sums […]
The Long Reach of the IRS You probably don’t spend a lot of time feeling sorry for a U.S. citizen named Meghan Markle, who is about to tie the proverbial knot with Prince Harry of England. But an article in the Wall Street Journal notes that Ms. Markle, and other American citizens who marry foreigners, […]
