Attention campers! Your 2008 federal income tax return is due April 15, 2009. Start making your last minute preparations now!!! Think I’m a bit premature in this warning? I think not. Although your return may not be due for another five months, your window for making last minute moves to manage your tax burden for the [...]
I posted previously about my decision to protest my property tax assessment, and my time to present my case to the appraisal district finally came this past week. Being the obsessive-compulsive accountant type, I diligently put together my protest and evidence for my meeting with the appraiser. My protest for a lower appraisal was based [...]
Everything’s bigger in Texas! Especially property taxes! While many tout this state’s lack of a state income tax, the flip side of this is that our property taxes are ridiculous. I guess the government is going to get its money one way or another. Last year I paid property tax at the rate of 2.53% [...]
Even though the payments haven’t quite made it to taxpayers yet, several companies are already jockeying to make sure that you spend the money with them. Several companies have already announced plans to allow customers to cash their stimulus check at their stores in exchange for discounted gift cards. Sears, KMart, Albertson’s, and Radio Shack [...]
I finally got our income tax return done! Yippee! Thankfully this year we are getting about a $4,200 refund, as opposed to paying about $5,000 last year. Here are a few highlights of the return: We were able to substantially reduce our taxes this year by bunching deductions in before year-end for items we normally [...]
While most Americans have not even filed their tax returns for 2007 yet, our friends at the blood-sucking IRS have released the federal income tax brackets for 2008. Without further ado, here are the brackets for married filing jointly. For other filing status brackets, see the IRS bulletin here. TABLE 1 — Section 1(a). — [...]
Here’s a useful tool for those of you who itemize your taxes and donated household goods to charity last year. The fine folks over at SlickDeals found a link to a download of H&R Block’s DeductionPro 2007 software that is free of charge. Just click on the link below and you’ll have the software in [...]
Happy New Year, fellow cheap bastards! Everyone looks at the beginning of a new year as a new beginning of sorts, and it seems like everyone likes to put together their list of resolutions. I’ve never really liked the practice or the term, mainly because most people come up with stuff like “I want to [...]
Head’s up folks – your 2007 Federal Income Tax return is due April 15, 2007, a little more than 9 months from now! Get ready now! So how many of you think I’m nuts to tell you to start preparing now for your 2007 return? It may seem nuts to think about taxes now considering [...]
One of the big things you hear a lot about in investing is diversification of assets. Like the old advice, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”, the idea here is to spread your investment money among enough different assets so that if one loses money, you can still fall back on the others. [...]