Clean Up Your Homeowner’s Insurance Policy for Spring By Linda Rey Are you as ready for winter to be over as I am? The first signs of spring send me into spring cleaning mode. As you’re cleaning out your closets, take some time to think about everything that remains and how you can give a [...]
Strategies to Ensure You Get Credit for Your Charitable Deductions By Eva Rosenberg, EA In one of my EA Exam Review Course sessions, we learn about the Tax Court. I build a class around the Tax Court’s recent decisions. One such case was Daniel and Ruth M. Gomez v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue. This case [...]
Let’s start with the experts. Every month for six months a panel of 111 leading housing economists, real estate experts, and investment and market strategists assembled by Robert Shiller, the man who called it right on the housing bubble, has grown more pessimistic. In March, their consensus hit a new low. They see only a [...]
Let’s Stop Denying It: We Need to Buy Earthquake and Flood Insurance—Now! Guest Blogger: Loretta Worters, Insurance Information Institute The tragic March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan is a harsh reminder that the United States is also vulnerable to natural disasters. Yet Americans continue to deny this, and it shows by our lack of [...]
Itemized Deduction, AMT, and Other Tax Nightmares The itemized deduction has several levels of complexity; increases in standard deductions can generate no tax change at all because the alternative minimum tax overrides all your deductions; and a variety of tax benefits disappear as your income increases. This overview shows how some of these things affect [...]
Save Money on Your Insurance Premiums by Changing Your Deductible By Linda Rey During these tough times, people are looking for different ways to reduce the increasing cost of insurance. One of the first places to look is the deductible. A deductible is the amount of money the insured pays before the insurance company pays [...]
Do I Get a Deduction for My Gifts? Or Do I Get Punished for Being Generous? We all love to get gifts, don’t we? One thing I learned much later than I should have is if someone asks you what you want, tell them. Being too shy to ask for something you dearly want simply [...]
Spring Housing Market: 8 Tips For A Successful FSBO If you’re like me, Spring just can’t get here soon enough. We started counting the days until Spring January first, and it’s finally here. Although the Spring housing market typically starts January 2nd, the years since the housing market crash have been a little different. This [...]
4 Questions My Insurance Clients Never Ask—But Should By Linda Rey Wouldn’t it be nice to have a crystal ball to predict when an emergency will strike, so we could buy just the right amount of insurance at the exact moment it’s needed? Alas, it’s not possible. My clients don’t always want to face their [...]
Estate Tax Tips: A Choice for 2010 Finally, Dec. 17, 2010, we got the estate tax law we all expected to see in the first quarter of 2010. The 2010 Tax Relief Act establishes an exclusion from estate taxes for $5 million dollars per person, effective for all of 2010 through December 31, 2012. Wait—2010, [...]
