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

Florida officials fear new property tax chop – As always, any time a tax reduction is proposed – even one as measly as this increased property tax exemption – the bureaucrats start screaming that the world will stop spinning and all life sustaining services will be shut down so that everyone will die a terrible and excruciating death. This chicken Little gloom and doom approach is all too familiar. It happened in 1978 in California when Proposition 13 was up for a vote, and it’s happened here in Arkansas the past few years, as we’ve tried to rein in skyrocketing property and sales taxes. How dare the common people fight to hold onto $500 that rightfully belongs to the royal bureaucrats. Also, how dare the citizens try to tackle this problem on their own via an initiative rather than allow their rulers in Tallahassee to do what’s best for them. The class warfare angle, claiming it to be a tax on renters to benefit homeowners, is another classic technique of tax loving officials. Of course, this is Florida we’re talking about here, the land of voters too stupid to punch the right chad on their ballots; so it may be more effective than in parts of the country that are blessed with more common sense. Thanks to Ben Cunningham for passing this along.

Even the most skilled financial planners have one huge problem when trying to decide how much a person needs to save for retirement; a crucial variable that is unknown for almost everyone; life expectancy.

Democrats pass flurry of bills targeting businesses – The Left are still firmly in control of the PRC. Let’s see if Governor Arnold can fulfill his promise to make things more attractive to businesses and veto these latest attempts to handcuff capitalism.

Retirement prosperity or dependency in the balance – A good update from Jack Kemp on the Social Security mess that few of our rulers want to address and his new organization, Alliance for Retirement Prosperity, to balance out the Big Government welfare agenda of the AARP.