Tax Refund Challenge: When Things Don’t Go As Planned
Tax season opens today. If you received a tax refund check, how would you spend it? Here’s my answer.
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IRS Offers Break For Early Filers Affected By Obamacare Error
Sometimes it pays to file early. Remember that embarrassing admission a few days ago that up to 800,000 taxpayers who purchased health insurance through the Marketplace (healthcare.gov) had received botched tax statements? Forms 1095-A, used primarily to determine health care credits, were mailed out using the wrong numbers for the 2014 tax year. About 50,000…
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Are You Insured? Obamacare Deadline Quickly Approaching
Are you insured? If not, this weekend marks your last opportunity to enroll in health insurance for 2015 through the Marketplace. The deadline is February 15. If you miss that date, you may not be able to get coverage until 2016. Even if you don’t think you need coverage for health care purposes, you may…
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Back To School 2014: Health Insurance Premiums As Benefits And Deductions
(UPDATE: The giveaway is now closed. We have our winners! See the comments for more info.) As a small business owner, my family pays for our own health insurance. It is, after housing, the single biggest check that we write each month (if you don’t count consolidated student loans – more on that later this…
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Back To School: Taxes, Health Insurance & Dependents
It’s Back To School Week on the blog! All week long, I’ll be answering your questions about school and tax – complete with fun giveaways. Next up: how do you handle health care costs for dependents? At what age must benefits stop? And most importantly, how does the Affordable Care Act affect all of this?
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IRS Releases Proposed Regs for Health Care Law: Who’s Covered, Who’s Exempt, and What Happens If You Don’t Pay?
The IRS has finally released proposed regulations relating to the requirement to maintain minimum health care insurance coverage under the terms of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010, as amended (“ACA”). Under the terms of ACA, there is a “shared responsibility to reform and…
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11 Tax Myths Debunked
And just like that, summer is nearly over and it’s back to work. This week, I’ve been sorting through the “Ask the Taxgirl” mailbag and I’m seeing a number of questions that are similar in nature. Many of them are related to the same, tired arguments that taxpayers make over and over. Just because your…
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Is Ryan’s Medicare Proposal The Right Kind Of Change?
It was one of those jaw dropping, rubbing your eyes, cleaning out your ears moments. Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich, thought by many to be a frontrunner for the GOP nomination, went out on a limb and criticized his own party’s plans for Medicare reform. Speaking on Meet the Press, Gingrich said about the Republican plan:…
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IRS Asks For Input On Health Care Law
For as long as I’ve been banging away on the keyboard about tax and tax policy, I don’t believe I’ve seen anything more polarizing than the “new” health care act which was signed into law last year. From the so-called Cadillac plans to the increased 1099 reporting requirements, no single piece of legislation has generated…
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Medicare & Self-Employed Taxpayers
See folks, this is why you should always read the comments in the blog. We’ve been having a discussion about whether Medicare Part B is deductible as a self employed health insurance premium in the comments at this post: The A, B, C and Ds of Medicare. The old Pub 535 said no. And the…