There were some changes made to the tax law regarding energy efficient improvements to your home, as a part of the ARRA of 2009. This credit is known as the Nonbusiness Energy Property Credit, and it increased some of the tax credits you could receive for making energy efficient home improvements. The credit is available [...]
Posts under ‘2009 tax year’
Charitable Contributions From Your IRA – 2010 and Beyond
We discussed the IRA Charitable Contribution option some time ago in the post “Last Chance for Charitable Contributions from Your IRA”, and it’s possible from that article that you got the impression that you are no longer able to make charitable contributions with money from your IRA. Nothing could be further from the truth! You [...]
Just Starting With Retirement Savings? Get All the Credit You’re Due!
It’s a known fact that setting up a systematic savings plan is critical to providing yourself with financial security in the future. There are tax benefits to simply making contributions to an IRA or a 401(k) – you’ll be able to deduct (or simply not include) those funds in your taxable income come tax time. [...]
7 Tips About the First-Time Homebuyer Credit
The First-Time Homebuyer Income Tax Credit has been really popular with lots of folks – and there is still time to take advantage of it. As you may be aware, the name of the credit is misleading – it’s been expanded to include folks who owned a house for a significant period of time and [...]
Social Security Eligibility
In order to be eligible to receive Social Security benefits – retirement, disability, or survivor benefits – a worker must earn eligibility to receive the benefits. The general rule of thumb is that for full benefits, the worker must earn at least 40 quarters of credit within the system. Social Security Credit Generally speaking, a [...]
First Time Homebuyers: No (eFile) Soup For You!
If you’re planning to take advantage of the First-Time Homebuyer’s tax credit or the more recently announced “long-time homeowner new purchaser” credit – you will not be eligible to eFile your tax return when you claim the credit. To find out more about these credits, see the article at this link. In a move to [...]
Review of 2009 Stats
Ed. Note: taking a breather from our normal business of posting retirement, tax and other personal financial planning topics to report on the blog itself and the statistics we’ve seen in this, the 6th year of publication for the blog. We’ll be back to our regular programming with the next entry. – jb Over the [...]
Should You Take or Postpone Your First RMD?
In the first year that you’re required to start taking Required Minimum Distributions (RMDs) from your IRAs and other retirement plans, you have a decision to make: Should you take the RMD during the first year, or should you delay it to the following year? The Rule This decision comes about because of the special [...]
11 Ways You Can Fund Your Roth IRA
With due regards to Natalie Choate for putting together this list initially, listed below are the currently-legal methods for funding a Roth IRA account: Contributions from compensation income. These are your regular annual contributions to the Roth IRA account. You are allowed (in 2009 and 2010) to contribute up to the lesser of your actual [...]
Health Savings Accounts – The Basics, Part 2
. In Part 1 of this two-part article, we introduced the concept of the Health Savings Account. In this portion, we’ll talk about some more of the specifics with regard to implementation of the plan, including contribution limits, setting up the plan, and taking distributions. Contribution Limits on the HSA The amount that you can [...]
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