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Showing posts from September, 2007

Income Tax Breaks for Students

If you, your spouse, or your children attended college in 2000, you may be able to take advantage of the Hope Scholarship Credit or the Lifetime Learning Credit on your 2000 federal income taxes. Since these are tax credits, rather than deductions, they reduce your income tax dollar for dollar. The Hope Scholarship Credit The Hope Scholarship Credit provides a tax credit for 100% of the first $1,000 and 50% of the second $1,000 of qualified tuition and expenses of each eligible student in your family who is enrolled at least half time in either the first or second year of post secondary education. This could be you, your spouse, or any of your children you can claim as dependants. For married taxpayers with adjusted gross income from $80,000 to $100,000, or single taxpayers with adjusted gross income from $40,000 to $50,000, the amount of the credit you will be able to take is reduced. The credit is not available for married taxpayers with adjusted gross income above $100,000 or single

Small Business Tax Issues for Self-Employed Individuals

The United States is a nation of entrepreneurs. There are literally tens of millions of self-employed individuals that enjoy pursuing their dream business. Of course, few of you enjoy the paperwork and confusing tax issues that arise from owning your own business Many self-employed individuals are considered "sole proprietors" or "independent contractors" for legal and tax purposes. This is true regardless of whether you are turning a hobby into a business, selling an indispensable widget or providing services to others. As a self-employed person, you report business revenue results on your personal income tax return. Following are a few guidelines and issues you should keep in mind if you are pursuing your entrepreneurial spirit. Schedule C - Form 1040. As a self-employed person, you are required to report your business profits or losses on Schedule C of Form 1040. The income earned through your business is taxable to you as an individual. This is true even if you

How To Save On Taxes

You just got done paying taxes or filing an extension and are grumpy. If you are smart, you will use this miserable event to teach yourself how to save on taxes next year. How To Save On Taxes For most people, preparing and filing taxes is the equivalent of sticking a pin in a body part. It simply is not fun. Heck, it is not even amusing. One of the reasons is you inevitably find some part of the process where you wonder how you could possible not have more deductions or credits. You fully realize you should tweak your finances to maximize certain expense areas and, by God, you are definitely going to figure out how to save on taxes next year. This admirable goal, much like a New Years Resolution, fades into antiquity after about a month. You should not let this happen! There is no better time than now to proactively plan how to save on taxes for next year. Having just completed your taxes, you inherently know where you got hurt. Even if you do not, you inevitably felt like you paid m

Rental Property Tax Advantages

Owning rental property is a great wealth building tool. Less well known is the fact there are also rental property tax advantages. Rental Property Tax Advantages For tax purposes, rental property is handled less like your primary residence and more like a business. Put another way, you are in business if you own rental property and are taxed like a regular business in many ways. For your rental property business, any rent payments you receive from tenants will be considered your gross revenues. In addition, revenues can include unreturned deposits, rent advancements and expenses paid by a tenant. If you have to sue a tenant to evict them, but recover a judgment for the remaining lease term, the judgment is considered taxable revenues. Tax deductions associated with a rental property run along the lines of any business. Any expense that is necessary to manage and maintain the property can be deducted. This can include interest on mortgage payments, insurance, cleaning, landscaping and s

Tax Freedom Day

They say death and taxes are the only two constants in life. Unlike death, however, tax freedom day represents a break from the cliché –at least temporarily! Tax Freedom Day Tax Freedom Day is a different sort of holiday. Although not actually celebrated, Tax Freedom Day is the first day of the year at which, theoretically at least, the nation as a whole has earned enough income to pay the sum of all its annual taxes. Calculated annually by the Tax Foundation, a Washington, D.C. based research company, Tax Freedom Day is the day when all money considered income by the US Government and every dollar considered an official tax by the US Government is finally equal. Federal, state, and local taxes are all considered in the equation. Tax Freedom Day was brought about and copyrighted by a Florida businessman named Dallas Hostetler in 1948. Over the next two decades, this businessman calculated Tax Freedom Day. Finally, in 1971, Dallas Hostetler retired and transferred the copyright to the a

Introduction to Tax

If you want to kill the mood at a gathering, just start talking about taxes. With this introduction to tax, hopefully you will see why it is not the beast it seems. Introduction to Tax Okay, I will admit it. I hate paying taxes just like you. Yes, it is just as frustrating and hard for me as it is for you. I groan. I get that pain in my sinuses. My eyes get dry and, yes, I occasionally create a new cuss word or two…or three. There is no escape for any of us. When writing an introduction to tax, one is tempted to just complain endlessly. After all, it was President Jimmy Carter who said the U.S. tax system is a crime against humanity. While I tend to agree, the notion of paying taxes is not the total thievery it seems. At a basic level, we need to pay taxes. In an ideal world, our taxes pay for things we need even if we don’t always recognize them. When you drive from here to there, you are driving on roads paid for by your taxes. Your toilet flushes because you pay taxes, and we all kn

How to Find The Best Car Accident Lawyer

How to find the best car accident lawyer is to first to locate a car accident lawyer proficient in expertise and legal experience in car accidents who can help unwind complicated legal problems and also to help you defend yourself if you were accused of a wreck that was not your fault. And you will need an aggressive car and truck accident attorney too. This is because you will face many adversaries while on your road to recovery. Even your own insurance company could try and short change you. If you don’t know insurance bad faith law, you will probably end up with much less than you are legally entitled to as an injured insured victim. Although you can’t prevent yourself from getting into an unpredictable fatal strike of car accidents, you certainly can do other things like defend yourself against predictable problems by getting professional support from these attorneys and lawyers. This is a fact of life. A car accident wreck can take place as a result of any party’s fault. If you do

Mesothelioma is an uncommon form of cancer,

Mesothelioma is an uncommon form of cancer, usually associated with previous exposure to asbestos. In this disease, malignant (cancerous) cells develop in the mesothelium, a protective lining that covers most of the body's internal organs. Most people who develop mesothelioma have worked on jobs where they inhaled asbestos particles, or have been exposed to asbestos dust and fibre in other ways, such as by washing the clothes of a family member who worked with asbestos, or by home renovation using asbestos cement products Tumor suppressor gene A tumor suppressor gene is a gene that reduces the probability that a cell in a multicellular organism will turn into a tumor cell. A mutation or deletion of such a gene will increase the probability of the formation of a tumor. Carcinogen In pathology, a carcinogen is any substance or agent that promotes cancer. Carcinogens are also often, but not necessarily, mutagens or teratogens. Carcinogens may cause cancer by altering cellular metaboli

mesothelioma

mesothelioma Background: Mesothelial cells normally line the body cavities, including the pleura, peritoneum, pericardium, and testis. Malignancies involving mesothelial cells in these body cavities are known as malignant mesothelioma, which may be localized or diffuse. Diagnosis is difficult because the results from fluid analysis of the effusion from the tumor are not usually diagnostic. Most, but not all, pleural malignant mesothelioma is associated with asbestos exposure. Of patients with pleural malignant mesothelioma, 77% have been exposed to asbestos in the past. Mesothelioma is more common in males than in females and it occurs in the fifth and seventh decade of life. Most of malignant mesothelioma occur in the pleura (90% of the time). Pathophysiology: The 3 major histological types of mesothelioma are sarcomatous, epithelial, and mixed. Pleural mesothelioma usually begins as discrete plaques and nodules that coalesce to produce a sheetlike neoplasm. Tumor growth usually begin

A Look Back At Forex Trading

Cable continued its climb today with solid movement. Last nights trading gives me an opportunity to discuss another key factor in our strategy. When we got up this morning we had already closed our smaller trade for 40 pips and had a mild pullback, we closed our second bigger trade at 1.7720 for only 35 pips at 8:00AM. Had we stayed in our trade we would have closed it for 85 Pips @ 1.7770. This looks like we lost out on 50 pips, but you can’t lose what you never had. We have strict rules about certain news, and those rules told us we had to close our trades before the release of the PPI and housing starts at 8:30 AM. The reason we have this rule is simple, in our years of trading experience we have seen 35 pip positive trade become a 40 negative stop loss in mere minutes. After witnessing this again and again, we decided it was much better to take the sure 35 pips off the table and bank them, and not risk them with the unpredictable move of a significant piece of. Last night netted us

Introduction and Overview of Forex Trading

Forex involves the trading of currencies. It is the largest financial market in the world and has an estimated daily turnover of 1.9 trillion dollars. This turnover is larger than all the worlds’ stock market on any given day. The forex market does not have a fixed exchange. The forex market is considered an over-the-counter (OTC) market. The forex market is completely electronic and trades are executed over the phone or on the Internet. Until 10 years ago the forex market was the preserve of large financial institutions. Now an ever-increasing amount of individual traders thanks to the advent of the Internet and an increasing amount of online forex brokers are trading forex. Currencies are always traded in pairs. A typical pair would be EUR/USD (Euro over US dollars). The first currency is the base. The second currency is the counter currency. The pair can be viewed, as the amount of the secondary currency that is needed to buy 1 unit of the first currency. If you were to buy the abov

Forex: Technical analysis vs fundamental analysis

The technical analysis is a method based on the study of charts which get attention to the price of the instruments, the volume of the trading and, when that is possible, open interest of the instruments. The fundamental analysis is a method founded on economic, political, environmental factors and any other factor. In practice, much of actors of the forex market use the technical analysis in conjunction with the fundamental analysis to determine their strategy in forex trading. One of the principal advantages of the technical analysis is that the experienced analysts can follow several instruments of market, whereas the fundamental analyst needs to know narrowly a market in particular. The Indicators used on Forex Trading Charts by Technical analysts The index of relative force (RSI): This index is the most popular indicator of the Forex Market. The RSI measures the report/ratio of the upward trends compared to downward trends and standardizes calculation so that the index is expresse

Forex and Futures: RSI signal, Relative Strenght Index

RSI is a popular indicator commonly used to confirm price movement and help identify turning points in the market. It was created by Welles Wilder Jr. In general RSI is used either as an indicator of overbought or oversold market conditions in consolidating markets or to identify divergences at trend exhaustion. The RSI is a price-following oscillator that ranges between 0 and 100. A popular method of analyzing the RSI is to look for a divergence in which the currency price is making a new high, but the RSI is failing to surpass its previous high. This divergence is an indication of an impending reversal. When the RSI then turns down and falls below its most recent trough, it is said to have completed a "failure swing." The failure swing is considered a confirmation of the impending reversal in the price of the currency. RSI levels of 70% and 30% (80% and 20%) are known as overbought/oversold levels. Buy signal generated when the market is oversold, sell signal generated when

The Secret to Becoming Rich

Napoleon Hill, the author of Think and Grow Rich, believes that a person does not have to be a genius to become rich. Any person can become wealthy if he thinks positively and has a deep desire to achieve his goal. Positive Thinking: You must see your financial dreams and know that you will be able to attain them. You must already own them. If you begin making up every rationalization under the sun why you can't succeed, pinch yourself. You have to discipline your body and mind to think positive thoughts. Teach yourself that those kind of thought patterns are unacceptable. You can obtain greatness, even if you are not the smartest, most talented, or best looking person in the world. Success is your if you'll just allow it to come into your life. Don't underestimate the power of your thoughts. Burning Desire: Hill tells a true tale of a man named Edwin Barnes who desired to become Thomas Edison's partner. Most of us would have scoffed at him had we lived back then. Edwin