Tax news and guidance for individual taxpayers — filing tips, deductions, refunds, and everything else that hits your personal return.
These days, selling real estate doesn’t seem to make anyone happy. If there’s a loss (which is more often than not the case as of late), there’s a lot of grumbling. If there’s a gain, there’s a lot of complaining about the taxes due (especially if there was significant depreciation). It all feels so black…
My husband grew up in the Philadelphia area. Me? I paid nonresident tuition throughout law school because I was planning on going back to North Carolina afterwards (only I didn’t because Philadelphia rocks – Travel and Leisure magazine agrees). Despite the fact that I’m not really from *here* I have been chosen nearly every year…
I remember the first phone call that I received about insolvency exceptions. A taxpayer called to ask me how to protect his daughter who had just been foreclosed upon – she was told to expect a tax bill as a result of the foreclosure. I remember thinking, “Wow, foreclosure? But how?” These were not folks…
I’m not rich. I don’t own a mansion. I don’t have a maid (that would be me). I don’t have a chauffeur (that’s me), a gardener (still me), or a chef (also me). But I’ve had household employees. Chances are, you have, too. You see, household employees are something that we associate with the rich…
I know. This sounds like something that Michael Kors might be putting out. Unfortunately, golden parachute payments have nothing to do with the world of fashion – but don’t stop reading yet! This is some interesting stuff… A golden parachute payment is an amount of money agreed upon in advance – and written into a…
In 1970, Congress passed the Bank Secrecy Act which was pretty much the first law on the books in the US to require banks and other financial institutions to reveal personal financial information to the government. Yep, this was long before the Patriot Act and was originally meant to assist law enforcement agencies in the…
Nothing lasts forever. Things you buy age, they wear down and sometimes, they become obsolete. That’s more or less the essence of depreciation. For federal income tax purposes, depreciation is a deduction that allows you to recover the cost or other basis of certain property. Depreciable property includes most tangible property (I like to think…
Retirement plans can be great vehicles for tax deferrals – but they can also be giant headaches when it comes to reporting for tax reasons. This is because there are so many technical rules that the potential for making a mistake is fairly high if you don’t know what you’re doing (taxgirl PSA: your plan…
Section 162 allows taxpayers to deduct expenses incurred in the course of a trade or business that are deemed “ordinary and necessary.” One of the most common of these expenses is the cost of operating a car, van, pickup truck or panel truck. When it comes to deducting those costs, taxpayers have a couple of…
The IRS has announced that there is $1.1 billion (yes, with a b) waiting for nearly 1.1 million people who did not file a federal income tax return for 2007. The last day to file and receive a refund for 2007 is April 18, 2011 – otherwise, that money goes back to the U.S. Treasury….