A common question, such as this one I received today:

We have an old mini van that the company owns. We want to get rid of it. Would you suggest donating it or selling it? The Kelley Blue Book value is $5,000. Personally I think it will be a hard sell.

My response, with handy links added:

From a pure dollars & cents approach, you’re better off selling it for as much as you can get for it.

Even though the theoretical Blue Book may be $5,000, you would technically be limited to a deduction for what it would actually sell for in the real world. IRS is cracking down hard on these kinds of donations; even checking with the charity to see how much they got for it and penalizing people for claiming inflated Blue Book values.

IRS Interest Rates Drop for the Third Quarter of 2004 – It will drop back down to four percent as of July 1, 2004 for at least three months. I have already updated this info on my Quick Reference page.

Few In GOP Defy Bush On Tax Cuts – And of course, those RINOs receive all of the free publicity from the mainstream media, who never miss an opportunity to bash Bush.

The ‘working poor’ scam – As the old saying goes, “statistics don’t lie, but liars love to use statistics.”

Abolish the Penny – This is an idea that has comes up a lot over the years. With fewer transactions being handled with cold hard cash, it wouldn’t affect as many as a few years ago. For those who use cash, everything would have to rounded up to the nearest five cent mark.

When Is Day Trading A Business? – Good look by Roth & Co. at the results of a recent court case denying a stock trader the right to claim that as his fully deductible business. It points out once again the idiocy of the ridiculous $3,000 per year limit on deducting capital losses.

How to balance the federal budget in less than an hour