Tax Rules When Selling Your Home – How the gains from the sale of a primary residence are taxed has changed in recent years. If you have recently sold your home, or are considering doing so, you may want to be aware of these new rules. HOME SALE If you owned and lived in your home […]
Taxes Up (but not so much as you might think…) If you think taxes are higher than their historical rates, well, it depends on how far back in history you’re comparing them to. Take a look at the accompanying chart, which shows tax revenue as a percent of total national income for four countries—France, Sweden, […]
Chances are, you know how much you pay in taxes. But how much are taxes costing you in time and preparation fees? According to a Tax Foundation report, using statistics from the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, tax compliance will cost the U.S. economy $409 billion this year. […]
By now most Americans who are saving and investing to pay for college costs have probably heard that so-called 529 college savings plans allow tax-free distributions for qualified education expenses, potentially making them even more attractive and effective than in the past, when they were only tax deferred. Add that tax benefit to other benefits […]
Most people have seen bogus emails purported to be from the executors of the estate of Nigerian princes or other obscure foreign notables who want to give them millions of dollars, and sometimes they get bogus calls telling them they can win a lottery sweepstakes or receive debt relief. But apparently one of the most […]
You may have read that Facebook founder, chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced plans to gift substantially all of his Facebook stock to a philanthropic entity called the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, named after himself and his wife Priscilla Chan. The gift would be worth $45 billion, instantly becoming one of the largest philanthropic pools […]
Filling out your tax return is like compiling the index of a book — the book is complete, but you have to rummage (sometimes painfully) through your work again, assuring accuracy and factual content, in order to make the book easier for someone else to read. If you’re a mutual fund investor trying to determine […]
Every January, people wait for their W-2s and other tax forms to arrive in the mail so that they can get their information in order before the April filing deadline. While some people have plenty of tax taken out of each paycheck to cover what they owe the government, others are self-employed or don’t have […]
Few Cost of Living Adjustments for Retirement and Health Plans for 2016 – The IRS has released the cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) affecting dollar limitations for Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs), defined contribution and other retirement-related items for tax year 2016. In general, most limits will remain unchanged for 2016 because the increase in the cost-of-living index did […]
Even though April 15 now seems a distant deadline for filing your 2015 tax returns, in order to take advantage of some of the biggest tax reduction strategies, you have to act before the end of this year. Without further ado, here are Three Year-end Tax Reduction Tips that you may want to execute by […]
