The following list comes to you from the folks over at eHealthInsurance.com: New this year! Take a one-time opportunity to reduce your self-employment taxes – In addition to the standard ‘above the line’ deduction described below, self-employed persons can also deduct the cost of their health insurance premiums from their self-employment taxes on Schedule SE. This is a one-time-only opportunity available for 2010 taxes, so if you’re self-employed be sure to take advantage of it. Image via Wikipedia Deduct health insurance premiums as a business expense – If you had self-employment income, you may also be able to deduct health insurance premiums you paid for yourself and your dependents as an ‘above the line’ business expense (that is, without itemizing) on your federal tax return. Be aware, however, that you may not deduct premiums paid for any month in which you were eligible to participate in an employer-sponsored health insurance […]
March, 2011:
A Restriction on the Home Buyer Credit
Here is a case where, even though the IRS documentation did not state it directly, the real rule of the law makes an explicit statement, and therefore the Code is where the final rules are taken from. In this particular case, there is a situation where the home buyer credit is not available: if the home is purchased from a parent or another close relative (and vice versa). And the taxpayer who relied only on an IRS publication found out the hard way that the Internal Revenue Code is the final word on the subject. There was a recent Tax Court case (Nievinski, TC Summary Opinion 2011-10) that challenged the limitation, and the Tax Court ruled in favor of the Service. The argument was that, in a particular document, IRS Publication 4819 “Important Information About the First-Time Homebuyer Credit”, there was no express explanation of this limitation. Image via The […]
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Book Review: The Last Economic Superpower
Have you found yourself wondering over the past couple of years just how the Great Recession came about? What sorts of things led up to this meltdown, and how far in advance did it all start? What might we do in the future to keep something similar from happening again? In his book, The Last Economic Superpower, Joseph P. Quinlan does a wonderful job of answering those questions and many, many, more. While the text does get long on statistics and therefore a bit technical to comprehend, I think Quinlan has done an excellent job overall of walking the reader through the precursors to the crisis, the crisis itself, and what our present situation looks like as a result. The first section of the book covers all the events leading up to the late-2008 global economic crisis, tracing issues back to the very roots of the rise of globalization after […]
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Proposed Social Security Wage Base Increases
October 19, 2011 update: the expected wage base increase has been confirmed as $110,100 for 2012. For more information, see this article. The Social Security Administration has released the proposed figures for the increase in the wage base for taxation for 2012 and projected some figures for the years up to 2015. This is the limited amount of income against which Social Security withholding tax is applied. For 2009 through 2011, the wage base has been static – at $106,800 for each year. The amount did not increase for these years since the average wage index (AWI) actually decreased from 2008 to 2009, and the modest increase in the index from 2009 to 2010 did not make up for the decrease in the prior year. For 2011, the AWI is expected to increase once again, by 3.08%. This sets the projected wage base for 2012 at $110,100, up a total of […]
Sterling Raskie, MSFS, CFP®, ChFC®
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And if you’ve come here to learn about queuing waterfowl, I apologize for the confusion. You may want to discuss your question with Lester, my loyal watchduck and self-proclaimed “advisor’s advisor”.