2009 Federal Government Income Tax Rebate

The stimulus rebates that were granted by the federal government in 2008 may or may not be renewed in 2009. These rebates were based on a federal government income tax rebate to stimulate the economy by giving taxpayer’s more money to spend.

As the economy is even worse going into 2009 than in 2008, the federal government should and will consider extending a new income tax rebate for the 2009 tax year, but it is anyone’s guess whether that will be under the same system that was used before.

As an outsider, so far I see Barack Obama doing things very much the same way that George W Bush had done them before. It seems very likely to me that Mr. Obama and Congress will ask the IRS to once again issue stimulus checks as rebates from the federal income tax in 2009.

If not, another kind of tax cut is very likely in its place. But the IRS now has a year under its belt to figure out the most efficient ways of getting the money back to taxpayers to spend in the economy. Frankly, the IRS is the government’s biggest spending weapon in trying to get the economy going in. It is like the federal reserve in that it has so much it can do with so much money!

Regardless, be sure to follow the news and updates on what will become available in 2009. You may have more money coming back to you and sooner than you think! Don’t miss out on your federal government income tax rebate.

TurboTax Online is an excellent resource to track your tax information needs.

MIT experts on the future of health-care reform: Congress should still think big

From MIT News – web.mit.edu/newsoffice

The Future of medical insurance in the US.

Just over a week ago, passage of a landmark federal health-care bill seemed a dead certainty. But the flip of a single U.S. Senate seat has changed all that, leaving the Democratic Party highly uncertain about how – or whether – to proceed. Given the current flux in Washington, a panel of MIT health-care experts assembled yesterday to assess the situation, often hammering home the idea that political half-measures will yield little in tangible health-care results.

“You can’t break this bill apart and have it work,” said MIT economist Jonathan Gruber. “It’s all or nothing at this point. The Democrats, and essentially the president, have to decide if they’re willing to go for it all, or are willing to live with nothing.”

First, though, Gruber, a central architect of the Massachusetts health-care system that has served as the model for the congressional legislation, acknowledged his extreme chagrin over the political reversal that accompanied Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown’s victory last week in the special election to replace the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. “My kids are like, ‘Why are you so sad, daddy?’” said Gruber, speaking at The Stata Center. “I explained, ‘Imagine you worked on a term paper for a year, and you were about to hand it in, when someone turned off your computer and you lost all your work.’”

Brown’s victory has caused multiple fractures among Capitol Hill Democrats. Some legislators want to drop the health-care effort entirely; others say Congress should only pass popular portions of it, such as making it illegal to deny insurance based on pre-existing conditions; and still others want to reconcile the existing, separate health-care bills already passed by the House and Senate.

Gruber made it clear he favors the last position, telling the audience the healthcare plan is like “a three-legged stool,” and “doesn’t work unless you have all three legs.” Those three pieces are reform of insurance markets (including banning those denials of coverage based on pre-existing conditions), the existence of an individual mandate requiring everyone to have insurance, and subsidies to make insurance affordable for low-income people.

For instance, simply allowing people with pre-existing conditions to sign up for insurance, Gruber argued, would be ineffective by itself. In that scenario, more people with pre-existing conditions would have coverage, rates would rise and lead healthy people to drop out of the insurance markets, and to compensate for those healthy people dropping out, insurance companies rates would raise rates further.

A hidden benefit of health insurance: Innovation

Yet even if a large-scale health-care bill passes, cutting health-care costs remains the “$2 trillion question,” said panelist Joseph Doyle, an economist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Many observers have noted in the last year that regional disparities in health-care expenditures around the U.S. have nonetheless yielded similar patient-care results. But Doyle’s own research in Florida suggests otherwise. The city of Fort Lauderdale spends 30 percent more on heart patients than West Palm Beach, he stated, but has a mortality rate that is 30 percent lower. Instead, Doyle said, we would perhaps be better served by, among other things, incentives for hospitals to avoid care problems like re-hospitalization for the same illnesses: “Nobody likes to go back to the hospital.”

Still, as MIT economist Amy Finkelstein pointed out in her remarks, the value of universal health-care coverage goes beyond the medical services rendered. The introduction of Medicare in 1965, a subject she has studied in detail, produced “a dramatic decline in the share of the elderly with large out-of-the-pocket payments,” Finkelstein said, meaning that it left more senior citizens in better financial shape than they would have been without Medicare.

Moreover, Finkelstein argued, Medicare went hand-in-hand with an increase in technological innovation in the health-care sector (from procedures to devices to drugs), a scenario that could be repeated if a serious bill is passed by this Congress. “If you have insurance, the idea that whatever happens to people who are uninsured isn’t going to affect you is a very misleading notion,” Finkelstein explained. “When you increase the share of the population with insurance, you increase the market size for these technologies, and you almost surely increase the pace of development of these technologies in the future.”

But will any bill at all emerge from Congress? Political scientist Andrea Louise Campbell sounded a skeptical note. “The American political system is very status-quo-oriented,” she said, with a lot of “veto points,” such as the current Senate convention that the Democrats need 60 votes to pass the legislation.

Those 60 votes would not be necessary if Congress elected to use the reconciliation process, which would essentially mean that the House would pass the Senate bill, then have both branches of Congress modify it, which would require just 51 Senate votes in the end. Yet as Campbell noted, that would still be difficult: 47 Democratic House members represent districts that the Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain, carried in the 2008 presidential election, and may be unwilling to back any health-care bill at this point.

Alternately, Campbell suggested, those representatives might prefer to pass popular-sounding segments of the health-care bill, like lifting the pre-existing conditions blockage, even if the policy results seem dubious. “What might be feasible politically, might be disastrous economically,” Campbell said. “They might pick out certain features without the counterbalancing features that make the whole package work. That might end up accelerating the unraveling of the system.”

Wills With An Exceptional Twist

Your online will   is constructed to help your family sort out the disposal of your estate when you’ve expired. Whilst yours may be simple, here are a few with some quirks to them.

Make A Will Don’t Leave It to Chance
It seems prudent to make a will. Most of us understand this, but actually doing it seems such a inconvenience.  How much consideration went in these “wills with a difference”?

Even the legendary conjurer and escapologist, Harry Houdini, couldn’t escape death. Having perished from a ruptured appendix, one of his biggest shocks came with the reading of his will. His magic equipment went to his former partner Theodore, who was in addition his brother. His magical powers didn’t work on the next items – his considerable array of writings on magic and the occult. He left these to the American Society for Psychical Research, but only on the condition that their research officer J Malcolm Bird, who also was the editor of their journal, resigned. They declined the conditions the collection passed to the Library of Congress.

The trained rabbits that he employed in his performance vacated their hats and were given to the kids of friends. Continuing the odd theme, his left his wife 10 words, which were a secret code, with the avowal that he would use these words to reach her from the afterlife. Each year for 10 years, following his death, she dutifully held séances, but Houdini never made contact.

Kozmic Blues and rock singer Janis Joplin had a short but interesting career. She recorded several rock classics and four albums, including “To Love Somebody” and “Me and Bobby McGee”. After years of drugs and drink, she died from an overdose, aged twenty seven. Two days before her demise in 1970 her  free will      the figure of $2,500 to fund an all night wake at her favourite bar so that her friends could “get blasted after I’m gone.” It must have been some party – that was a sizable amount of cash back in 1970.

We’ve all heard of people that, unexpectedly, give all their money to the cats’ home, much to the anger of their relatives. Many family feuds start when a will is read. As long as there is no reason to doubt the clarity and freewill of the person when the will is made, there is often little that can be done to contest such a decision.

Eccentricities apart, if you die without leaving a will, those whom you would want to inherit will not always be the ones that do so. You could have a partner of many years, but if you’re not married or in a legal partnership, he or she won’t receive your estate, in spite of your designs and affirmations. This can be problematic when it’s not clearly understood and can cause terrible fiscal results.

The current method to get your will started is to go online and locate a online wills      . However basic your designs are, it’s advisable to have the professionals to write it for you and you can be confident that you’re leaving things exactly how you would wish them to be.

Sites and Fun in Washington DC

There is so much to see and do in our country’s capital, Washington, DC that it is kind of not possible to see them all in one visit. However, that did not stop my other half and kids from making an attempt to cover everything on our recent vacation. Here are only a few of the highlights we experienced on that vacation.

Our first challenge before we even left home was finding an affordable place to stay in the Washington, DC area. For the most part, hotels are pretty high priced in that area and make it difficult to locate a good place for a family of five to remain without totally blowing the old budget. We ended up selecting the American Hotel in Bethesda, MD and are very pleased with our choice. It is not the most glamorous hotel in the region but extraordinarily convenient, clean and affordable. So, we highly reccomend it when looking for Bethesda hotels.

Then, on to the traveller sites we enjoyed. Of course we started with the famous National Monuments and Memorials. These included the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial,the Washington Monument, and the Arlington Countrywide Graveyard . There were many more as Washington is a city of monuments and memorials. Many are found on the nation’s Mall but others are pretty spread out so that you will get a very good walk exercise if you intend to visit them all on foot as we did. (I admit I had to visit my Sacramento podiatrist when I got back home to deal with some foot pain from so much walking)

Next came our tour of the three different branches of official Executive buildings.When sightseeing in Washington, D.C, the regime, the Capitol and the high Court are key places to go to. Touring these galvanizing buildings will help you understand more about our government and its history. Plan ahead and learn about schedules and special events. The regime is the home and office of the President and is found at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW. To arrange a tour you must make a request through one of your members of Congress. Group tours are held Tuesday through Saturday from 7:30 a. m. through 11:30 a. m. and are lined up one month in advance.

At the east end of the National Mall stands the majestic U. S. Capitol Building. Due to heightened security, the Capitol is open to the public for steered tours only.

The one thing you will want to do for sure is take plenty of photographs as you have a tendency to remember everything as you are going to remember everything as you are so impressed at the time but believe me, your memories have a tendency to fade and it is always better to have some pictures to help bring those memories into sharp focus. I’m not a Commercial Photographer but wish I was to have better captured some of the beauty we saw on ths trip

Also, in addition to the typical tourist attractions discussed above, you may find the Washington, DC area has some of the best restaurants in the country. I suppose this may be due to all of the important politicians that live there as well as the many dignitaries that visit the area and need to go out to eat.

Well, that rather sums up our trip and I can only hope that you get the opportunity to visit the Washington, DC area.

Small Loans

Home-Based Business Owners Can Save Thousands on Their Taxes

Do You Qualify For Home-Based Tax Deductions? Recent tax law changes have made it easier than ever to claim Home Office Deductions and keep more of what you earn.

If your home is a place of business, many of your personal expenses can be deducted as business expenses resulting in lower taxes. Using online tax preparation software can help you take all the deductions you deserve. To find which program is best for you, read an online tax software review and compare the features you need.

You may be thinking, “I have an Accountant/CPA/Tax Preparer who knows all about tax deductions so I don’t have to know anything about them.”

There are several reasons why that thinking could be costing you thousands of tax dollars. Some of those reasons are:

 

 

 

 

1. Most Accountants/CPA’s/Tax Preparers do not “specialize” in Home-Based Businesses and do not keep up with the ever-changing laws pertaining to them.
2. You are ultimately responsible for knowing what you can and cannot deduct as business expenses. Why? YOU are accountable to the IRS for your deductions, not the tax preparer.
3. If you pay someone to do your taxes you still need to know what you can deduct so that you can gather all relevant paperwork.
4. The most compelling reason: Getting the greatest benefit from your deductions. In a TurboTax review, it was found that most people saved an average of 15% when using a tax software program and their own research.

To qualify for these deductions you must meet 2 conditions, which most, if not all, Internet Marketers meet:

Condition 1: Do you work as an Internet marketer out of your home (on your “home computer)? To qualify for deducting expenses related to using a workspace for business in your home, your home must:

 

 

• Be your “principal place of business ” or you must use the space only to earn your business income.
• Be used by you on a regular and ongoing basis to meet your clients, customers, or patients.

AND

Condition 2: Are you in business to make a profit? Whether you made a profit or not is immaterial. Even if you lost money but intended to make a profit these deductions are still available to you.

If you answered yes to both of these questions then you do own a Home-Based Business and as such you are qualified to deduct Business Assets, Direct and Indirect Expenses.

Business Assets include business equipment such as computer, fax machines, business furniture such as desk (your dining room table for instance), desk chair and filing cabinets. These are 100% deductible if they are used “exclusively” for business purposes. A tax software program can help you find all the deductions you deserve using an interview process. In a H&R Block TaxCut review, it was revealed that people using tax software with an interview process could often find 20% more deductions than their own CPA or accountant. After all, you know your business best.

If these assets are not used “exclusively’ for business the amount you can deduct is proportionally related to how much these things are used in your business. It is possible to deduct a portion of your living room, sofa, DVD player etc if you meet certain conditions.

Direct Expenses are those directly related to conducting your business. This would include office supplies, telephone service,, cellular phones, ISP service, hosting, advertising etc. Direct expenses are generally 100% deductible.

Indirect Expenses include such things as rent on your home, utilities including heating and air conditioning and general repairs such as replacing a roof or repainting the exterior of your home.

These are authorized legal deductions passed into law specifically for Home-Based Businesses by Congress.

If you use your home for business purposes, many of your personal expenses can legally be converted into deductible business expenses including utilities such as heat and electricity, cleaning materials, house insurance and property taxes.

Learn all you can about what you can deduct, find a good tax software program, and you will consistently save thousands on your income tax each year.