Category Archives: Taxes

• TurboTax Made Me Do It

  Posted on 08/23/2017 in Taxes

  One of the highlights of living in our technologically-advanced age is the ability to buy tools to do almost anything. If your kid fractures his arm playing baseball, you can hop on over to Amazon and order an orthopedic bone saw for less than the cost of a tank of gas. Then you can (probably) head over to YouTube and watch a video explaining how to smooth off the rough edges and set it for best results. You might not want to do that all yourself. But the tools are there if you want them. Here in the tax business, there’s no shortage of similar tools you can use to help satisfy your obligations with your friends at the IRS. TurboTax, TaxCut, and similar programs give you much the same power as professional tax-prep systems. If your circumstances are simple enough, and you’re familiar with the process, you might be able to do a perfectly serviceable job of preparing your own return. You might not want to write off an entire weekend wrestling with the various questions, forms, and procedures — but the tool is there if you want to. But sometimes, doing it yourself really isn’t the best idea….

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• Oops!

  Posted on 08/15/2017 in Planning, Taxes

  Mark Twain once said, “Never put off till tomorrow what may be done the day after tomorrow just as well.” But Twain’s advice doesn’t always pay when it comes to taxes. The calendar watchers at the IRS charge a 5% per month failure to file penalty, up to 25% of the amount due, along with a ½% per month failure to pay penalty, also up to 25% of the total amount due. And the IRS isn’t the only tax man to pay attention to deadlines, even if they don’t loom as large in our minds as April 15. Presidio Terrace is a private block-long oval of a street in San Francisco’s pricey Presidio Heights neighborhood, lined with 35 multimillion-dollar mansions. Residents have included Senator Dianne Feinstein, Representative Nancy Pelosi, and former San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto. There’s a stone-gate entrance to the street, a rent-a-cop stationed at the gate to keep out snoopy mcsnoopfaces, and a manicured island inside the oval for residents to enjoy. The street and sidewalks are owned by a homeowners association made up of surrounding residents. Because it’s private, the association pays tax on the property — in this case, a whopping $14 per year. Now,…

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• Bottoms Up!

  Posted on 08/08/2017 in Planning, Taxes

  What were you doing at the end of your day on Friday, August 4? Were you knocking back a bottle of suds at your favorite happy-hour bar? Enjoying vacation time with a cold one overlooking a beach or a harbor? Maybe feeling ripped off paying $14 for a tallboy of St Louis’s finest at your local ballpark? Well, hopefully you were doing something like that, because the first Friday in August is International Beer Day! Beer is the world’s oldest alcoholic beverage — chemical tests of ancient pottery jars reveal that brewers produced beer as long as 7,000 years ago in ancient Iran. It’s the third most popular beverage overall, behind water and tea. (Sorry, Starbucks, it’s the rare coffee drinker who chugs more than one of your lattes in a day.) As Ben Franklin once famously said, “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” It’s almost as easy to make as it is to drink, and you can do it with as few as three ingredients: water, hops, and barley. So . . . would it surprise you to learn that taxes are actually the priciest ingredient? Taxes are more expensive than labor…

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• Making More By Paying Less

  Posted on 08/01/2017 in Planning, Taxes

  When affluent clients want to pay less tax, they turn to accountants, attorneys, and financial advisors, among other advisors. And we can make a nice living helping clients accomplish that goal. (At the risk of sounding self-serving, it’s because we’re worth it.) But you won’t find any tax professionals populating the Forbes 400, or your hometown paper’s list of richest local residents. Having said that, there are a few people who have made legitimate fortunes helping people pay less tax. They just aren’t working where you think they are. Most of us don’t give much thought to tariffs, simply because we don’t directly pay them. When we do pay them any mind, we typically think of international trade policy and raw materials like steel. But governments impose import taxes on consumer goods, too, including luxury favorites like perfume and cologne, watches and jewelry, high-end spirits, and the like. And while those duties don’t add up like income taxes, buyers don’t want to pay any more of them than they have to. Robert Miller grew up in Massachusetts and attended Cornell University’s prestigious School of Hotel Administration. But he took a different direction than most of his classmates, and five years…

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• Celebrities Behaving Badly

  Posted on 07/25/2017 in Planning, Taxes

  One day back in March, 2002, Us Weekly editor Bonnie Fuller spotted a photo of actress Drew Barrymore bending over to pick a coin off the ground. A light bulb flipped on over her head, and on April 1, her magazine debuted a brand-new photo feature that changed the paparazzi game forever. We’re talking, of course, about “Stars — They’re Just Like Us.” (Of course, they’re still not quite just like us . . . how many photographers are fighting to catch pictures of us picking up our dry cleaning, filling up our gas tanks, or trying to pick the ripest avocado at Whole Foods?) Here’s something else the stars share with us. They don’t want to waste money on taxes they don’t have to pay. And since they tend to make more money than we do, they tend to owe more taxes. So that pain over unnecessary tax is greater for them than it is for us! (Who says money solves all your problems?) But sometimes they go a little too far to pay less. And that’s when they discover our friends at the IRS lying in wait. Here’s the problem: the IRS doesn’t have nearly enough money to…

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• Caliente

  Posted on 07/18/2017 in Taxes

  Summer is here, and in most of the country, it’s hot! The All-Star game has come and gone, dog days are right around the corner, and if your air conditioner makes a funny noise, the hair stands up on the back of your neck. Now, we can’t help you if your air conditioner breaks, but we can try and put a smile on your face with a few tax quotes to start your day. Try and spot the summer references hidden inside — they might not be quite as easy to find as you think! “A dog who thinks he is man’s best friend is a dog who has obviously never met a tax lawyer.” Fran Lebowitz “The United States will get a value added tax when conservatives realize that it is regressive, and liberals realize that it is a money machine.” Lawrence Summers “Baseball is a skilled game. It’s America’s game — it, and high taxes.” Will Rogers “Taxes are paid in the sweat of every man who labors. If those taxes are excessive, they are reflected in idle factories, tax-sold farms and in hordes of hungry people, tramping the streets and seeking jobs in vain.” Franklin D. Roosevelt…

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