Do it right: Your 15-point tax checklist

Get your tax refund now — for a hefty price – Legal loan sharking. People who use this service are idiots on at least two counts. First, they intentionally give the Feds an interest free loan of their money during the year, and then they pay through the nose to get their own money back faster. Adjusting their W-4s to have less tax held out would be a much wiser move, and it’s free.

Five ways to beat the AMT – One of the best ways I have seen is to move as many deductions from Schedule A to business schedules (C, E & F) – just another big tax benefit of being self employed instead of a W-2 wage slave.

The Virginia Republican tax divide

Tax-free Internet days numbered

After stars leave town, some of their pay stays – It’s a politician’s wet dream – being able to tax wealthy athletes and entertainers who can’t vote in their jurisdiction.

Recent Cases Confirm That Bad Tax Planning = Bad Tax Results – People who go out and set up corporations and LLCs without proper professional guidance before and during their operation are asking for big trouble.

Hill GOP exploring deeper spending cuts than Bush proposed – It’s ironic that members of Bush’s own party have to act as a counterweight to his reckless spending. That’s usually the job of the opposition party.

Offshore finance – Some info on how offshore banking and finance works.

Bush Criticizes Democrats Over Tax Cuts – He is absolutely right that, if our rulers in DC don’t get off their butts and make the tax cuts permanent, there will be the biggest tax increases in history when the different provisions expire. Doing nothing to make them permanent is exactly the same as supporting higher and more punitive and confiscatory tax rates, which are, coincidentally, an integral part of the core platform of the JackAss Party.

Servicing the Spendaholics

Borrowing to Pay Debt – There are both opportunities and potential pitfalls when borrowing against a home’s equity in order to pay off credit card debt.

Old bond could bring new riches – Patience has always been a more reliable means of achieving investment growth than gambling on overnight riches. However, this is an extreme case of that. One hundred dollars invested in a bond in 1871 is now worth an estimated $300,000. I’ve seen plenty of people investing for their kids’ and grandkids’ futures; but this is more for the great-great-great…. grandkids’ benefit.

Granholm’s solution: Raise cigarette taxes – Michigan nicotine addicts are in the cross-hairs once again.

$2.5 billion in tax refunds unclaimed – One of the most unfair double standards in the tax law is the fact that if you owe taxes, that debt will stay with you forever and beyond (your heirs). However, if you have a refund coming, you forfeit it if you don’t file a tax return within three years. I have seen literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in such refunds forfeited by clients who were in no big hurry to file their tax returns. The fair thing would be to allow people to at least get their own money back without any interest on it. However, I long ago learned that the concepts of “taxes” and “fairness” are as alien to each other as are “politicians” and “honesty.”

Where’s Our Wartime Tax Increase? Liberals wrap their love of spending in patriotic garb.

Bush seeks $1 trillion debt boost – What is conveniently overlooked by the leftist media is the fact that the amount of the Federal government’s debt never went down, even with the huge imaginary Clinton surpluses that they accuse Bush of squandering.

For the past few years, we have been trying to cope with the growing onslaught of spam popping into our email accounts by checking them via the free Mail2Web service before downloading them into our main Eudora email program. With almost 1,000 messages per day, this was taking us hours every day. With the huge virus worm that started zipping around the Internet last week, we started receiving almost triple that level of incoming mail, most of which had virus attachments. It was taking forever to clean things up via Mail2Web.

I noticed some people in the Lucianne.com discussions mention the MailWasher program for dealing with this. After doing some checking around the net to ensure that it was in fact reliable and not going to create more problems, as many such utilities do, I downloaded the program and tried it out. I was hooked immediately on how much more efficiently it allows us to review what tins are in our email accounts and to remove them before they ever make it to our computers.

I actually noticed that I had downloaded a copy of MailWasher back in March 2002, but had never installed it. I wonder why not. (can anyone say Tax Season?)

The program is free. However, I went ahead and sent them the $30 registration fee, which I always do for programs that I appreciate using. People, especially small one person operations, who design useful computer programs, deserve to be rewarded and encouraged. MailWasher has already saved me many times that amount by allowing me to clean up and stay on top of our email accounts in a fraction of the time it was taking with Mail2Web.

Any doubt who will end up with the short end of the stick?

There are still plenty of people who believe it is unpatriotic to arrange things so as to minimize one’s taxes. Those people are free to pay as much in taxes as possible and bask in the warm patriotic feeling of allowing our rulers to spend their money for them.

It does take a special type of personality to be attracted to our profession; which is why there will always be too few of us to handle the ever increasing volume of work.

Not all oldies are goodies – Many people do try to claim Kelly Blue Book values for vehicles donated to charity when nobody in their right mind would pay that much for their clunkers.

A Primer on Bush’s New Savings Accounts – These are still figments of Bush’s imagination and not real yet; so don’t be in a hurry to sign up for any of these new accounts.