Posted April 3, 2012 at 3:40 am
by Vincent King
You’re tired of wearing concrete boots to a job you hate. And just as you’re cursing the boss in your mind, your little one runs into the room waving a Junior Achievement magnet from a class visitor today. JA is a volunteer organization that teaches kids how to be workforce ready, to be entrepreneurs, and to be financially literate.
If you want your child to BE the boss, not work for him. It’s time to get started teaching your kids about money.
You took Econ 101 in high school, but it taught you exactly nothing about personal finance or business. And while it’s important to know the interconnectedness of the government and global economies, it’s more practical to teach them how to run their own businesses first.
The excuse that “my parents never taught me about money” is tired. This is your chance to get the younger gen’s in your life excited about earning their own money, possibly owning their own businesses, and definitely building the life you never built, long before they feel like they’re too behind to catch up.
Dig into the Junior Achievement site and you will find pixelated gold.
It isn’t just for parents. If you’re a grandparent, aunt, uncle, or anyone with a young one in their life, you could make a world of difference in theirs by [continue]…
Filed Under: Lifestyle Design
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Posted April 2, 2012 at 3:45 am
by Andrea Coombes
An unexpected letter from the Internal Revenue Service can make your stomach drop, but you can take steps to reduce your audit risk.
Taxpayers overall face a low audit risk: The IRS audited 1.1% of all individual tax returns filed in 2010, or 1.6 million returns of 141 million filed.
The vast majority of those audits—1.2 million—were done by mail. Just 392,000 involved an in-person meeting with the IRS. That’s not necessarily good news. Taxpayers often are confused by IRS correspondence, and with such audits they don’t have the benefit of working with one single agent, the National Taxpayer Advocate says.
But the risk of an audit skyrockets for some. Fully 12.5% of taxpayers whose income topped $1 million faced an audit. And self-employed people who filed a Schedule C with gross receipts of $100,000 or more faced an audit rate of about 4%—four times higher than average taxpayers.
Here are seven red flags:
Sole proprietors filing a Schedule C can reduce their audit risk by sticking to the facts—or at least making sure their expenses and income are not dramatically different from similar businesses.
For example, one Chicago-based hot-dog-stand owner said his [continue]….
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Posted April 1, 2012 at 4:27 am
by Brian Mahany, Esq.
Each day we lose more and more of our fundamental rights. Many of these rights were given up in the name of “national security.” It’s a very slippery slope. Scholars have debated the erosion of civil rights caused by the passage of the Patriot Act. A recent unanimous amendment to a Senate transportation bill may have just cost us the right to travel.
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada was successful in amending a Senate highway funding bill to now allow the IRS to revoke or limit the passports of U.S. taxpayers who are seriously delinquent in their tax obligations.
Under the measure, if one owes more than $50,000 and the debt is at the levy or lien stage, the IRS can request the State Department revoke the taxpayer’s passport. America abolished debtor’s prisons in 1833 but the new measure is pretty similar – your freedom and liberty can be curtailed until the taxman is paid.
With final passage of the Senate amendment, the U.S. will join the United Arab Emirates and China in allowing such punishment for civil debts. That’s not very good company, until 2010, China tax protesters faced the death penalty.
Willful failure to pay one’s taxes has long been a crime in the U.S. but that requires a finding by the court that the taxpayer has the ability to pay yet simply refuses. The new law doesn’t require willfulness – if you don’t pay, you can’t leave.
We see many taxpayers with tax problems caused by illness, injury and often layoffs. It’s one thing to punish intentional tax cheats but Reid’s amendment could hurt tens of thousands of honest Americans who simply can’t find work.
The popular Eagles song Hotel California released in 1977 has a line that says, “You can check out anytime you like but you can never leave.” Thirty-five years later that song is becoming a reality.
Tax collection is no laughing matter. Ignore the IRS and you could find yourself with no bank account, no house and bad credit. Procrastinate too long and you might even find yourself with criminal charges. There are things you can do, however.
As paralyzing as an audit or levy notice can be, there are offers in compromise, penalty abatements, taxpayer due process hearings and other tools to fight back. Because penalties can escalate and compound quickly, don’t wait before seeking professional help.
About the author. Brian Mahany is a tax and fraud lawyer concentrating in offshore tax reporting. In addition to his law practice, he has written for numerous accounting publications and publishes a blog, Due Diligence. His firm is the CPAmerica organization’s preferred legal services provider for foreign tax compliance. Brian welcomes comments and questions and can be reached at (414) 704-6731 (direct) or by email at brian@mahanyertl.com. All communications are kept in strict confidence.
Filed Under: Lifestyle Design
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Posted March 29, 2012 at 3:35 am
by Sean Ogle
In the months leading up to the day where I left my job, I was terrified. I didn’t know what I was going to do, I was fearing the uncertainty of it all, and I didn’t have much of a plan together.
I knew deep down that I wanted to travel and be running my own business, but I realized that simply knowing that wasn’t going to get me very far when it came to making one of the most difficult decisions of my life.
I spent the better part of a year in this job purgatory where I didn’t know what I truly wanted, and what the best course of action would be.
However in the summer of 2009 I started putting together the pieces that would allow me to make one of the best decisions of my life: leaving my job to become a full time entrepreneur.
So how do you go from clueless to confident when it comes to your career trajectory and employement situation? Well for starters, you have to ask yourself some difficult questions. You need to have detailed answers to them, so that you can move forward knowing that you made the right decision for you.
Today we’re going to talk about 6 questions that cannot be compromised on [continue]…
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Posted March 29, 2012 at 1:29 am
by Claire Martin and Greg Melville
Travel should transform. Choose your destination wisely, and then the voyage itself, the people you meet, the foods you sample, and the experiences you have will mean you’ve arrived in a whole new place—physically, spiritually, philosophically.
This kind of travel isn’t exactly relaxing, but is mere relaxation ever really that satisfying?
Our purpose here—on these pages, on this planet—is to squeeze the maximum amount of joy, hilarity, challenge, and accomplishment out of our allotted time.
What better way to do that than to travel to places that won’t just be a change of scene, but rather, can provoke a change in you?
We accumulated 20 such transformative travel experiences.
Maybe it’s time to get lost, and find yourself [continue]…
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Posted March 27, 2012 at 3:45 am
by Abby Rogers
In Michigan, $1.5 million buys a custom-built log house, complete with perks such as a heated floor and Jacuzzi.
And in Arizona, that same amount buys a house that comes with its own mountain.
But it’s a tighter squeeze in New York, where $1.5 million buys a two-bedroom apartment. At least it’s within walking distance of Central Park.
Our friends at Zillow helped us figure out what a home buyer can get for around $1.5 million in real estate markets across the country [continue]…
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Posted March 27, 2012 at 2:59 am
by Mark Svoboda
Imagine traveling to a new country alone, where you don’t know anyone at all… What do you do?
Well, as I mentioned in my last report from Africa, one option is the CouchSurfing Project. The idea behind CouchSurfing is incredibly simple. When someone travels from one place to another and has no friends or relatives at that new place, his options – until recently – were pretty much limited to a hotel, hostel, or sleeping in a park (but I wouldn’t recommend that third option to anyone!)
But in 1999, Casey Fenton, a Californian, came up with another option: staying at the house of a local who lives in the destination city, with no monetary exchange taking place. Picture it as visiting your friend. You might buy dinner or some drinks, but you wouldn’t pay your friend for the privilege of staying with him.
The idea arose after Fenton found an inexpensive flight from Boston to Iceland. He then randomly e-mailed 1,500 students from the University of Iceland, asking if he could stay with them. Astoundingly, he received more than 50 offers. On the return flight to Boston, he began to develop the ideas that would underpin the CouchSurfing Project.
Since then, the organization has grown so fast that today it has almost four million members (myself included), in 251 countries, speaking 365 different languages. The most common language by far is English (almost three million speakers), followed by French, Spanish and German.
Why CouchSurfing? [continue]….
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Posted March 26, 2012 at 2:27 am
by Marc Hack
Life is actually pretty simple, but we insist on making it complicated. Here are a few easy ways to uncomplicate it:
#1) Learn from the past, and then get the heck out of there! – Past mistakes should teach you to create a wonderful future; not cause you to be afraid of it. Don’t carry your mistakes around with you. Instead, place them under your feet and use them as stepping stones. Never regret. If it’s good, it’s wonderful. If it’s bad, it’s experience. Success is not about where you are standing at any given point in time; it’s about how much you’ve learned and how far you’ve come to get there.
#2) Focus on what’s truly important. – Identify what’s most important to you. Eliminate as much as you possibly can of everything else. No wasted time, no fluff, no regrets.
#3) Focus on being productive, not being busy. – Don’t just get things done; get the right things done. Results are always more important than the time it takes to achieve them. Stop and ask yourself if what you’re working on is worth the effort. Is it bringing you in the same direction as your goals? Don’t get caught up in odd jobs, even those that seem urgent, unless they are also important. Read The 4-Hour Workweek.
#4) Give what you want to receive. – You get the best out of others, and every situation, when you give the best of yourself. Start practicing the golden rule. If you want love, give love. If you want friends, be friendly. If you want money, provide value. It works. It really is this simple.
#5) Stop trying to be everything to everyone. – Don’t try to be friends with everyone. Cultivate closer relationships with fewer people. Start focusing on [continue]…
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Posted March 25, 2012 at 5:42 pm
An excerpt from this article, by Mike Shedlock:
That’s a start but I have to ask, why should businesses own their homes free and clear without being subject to onerous taxation but not individual homeowners?
It’s Our Home Not Theirs!
Please consider the following video Robert Hale Co-Author of Property Tax Revolution who says “It’s Our Home Not Theirs!”
“The essence of freedom is property rights. It always has been. Yet, if you don’t pay the government the tithe that they request, you lose your property.”
Indeed!
You Never Own Your Own Home
Property taxes are an insidious form of taxation. They mean you never really own your home. Taxes even go up at the whim of local school boards and teachers unions who perpetually want more money, not for the kids, but for the school boards and teachers’ unions.
Property taxes are particularly hard on senior citizens who can literally be taxed out of their own homes.
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Posted February 21, 2012 at 1:48 am
by Marla Brill
Karin Prangley, a 33-year-old Chicago estate planning attorney, attempted to guess her father-in-law’s password to gain access to his business computer after he suffered a debilitating stroke several years ago at age 62. None of them worked.
“At the time he owned a building supply company, and he ran most of the business through his Yahoo e-mail account,” Prangley says. “But he hadn’t left his password with anyone, so the family had no way of accessing the contents. We didn’t know which orders had been filled, what was coming in, who the business owed money to, or who to bill.”
Yahoo would only provide the password with a court order. “As an attorney, I knew that takes at least a month,” Prangley says. “The business couldn’t wait that long.” With important records sealed off, the business lost a significant amount of money and eventually closed.
Computer passwords, increasingly the portals to our financial and personal lives, can be sealed in [continue]…
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