Tag: Taxes
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Don’t mess with Texas. They’re perfectly capable of messing things up for themselves.
I’ve noticed that Republicans, who seem to live primarily in southern latitudes, are happy to dish out criticism of us “libtards”, you know, those of us in blue states. They don’t get much bluer than where I live in Massachusetts. Yes, here the property taxes are high. Our $559,000 house was recently reassessed and our…
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Real estate investing is exacerbating income inequality
Have you met Kevin? Kevin, i.e. Kevin Paffrath, has a YouTube channel, says he’s a millionaire and will help you get started in real estate investing so you can be a millionaire too. He’s handsome, reasonably young and looks overly caffeinated. The same is true of Graham Stephan who while being a millionaire still lives…
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Raise our taxes!
Merry Christmas everyone! And it’s a merry one here as we had actual snow for Christmas, about five inches locally. So yes, we have a white Christmas, which was a rarity but now that I live in New England maybe not so much. It still seems kind of magical. Can it be a downer to…
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Where there’s a will, there’s a way (and probably a trust)
Republicans are known to loathe paying taxes and don’t like subsidizing anyone’s freight. There is of course one prominent exception: family. Republicans believe that you can’t be too generous with your blood relations. Which is why they want to repeal the federal estate tax. They really resent the idea that some of their wealth should…
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Give us a real retirement (or the 401K/IRA trap)
There are some proposals afloat (from progressives naturally) to increase social security payments. Social security used to be enough to marginally live on with Medicare helping by reducing health care cost spikes. Social security is supposedly indexed for inflation but it’s clear that the index doesn’t measure the true cost of living. If you depend…
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Affording retirement and running the numbers
I’m a bit anal about money. It probably comes from being a child of someone who lived through the Great Depression. So our retiring last year was a leap of faith. Of course being anal about money, I spent some time with our financial adviser basically to hear him tell me we could actually afford…
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Some taxing mistakes
The tax code giveth and the tax code taketh. In 2014, the tax code tooketh, to the tune of about $3000 in checks I did not expect to write to the U.S. Treasury and Virginia Department of Taxation. Ouch! No one likes paying taxes and I don’t like paying mine anymore than anyone else, but…
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Why is my tax rate higher than Mitt Romney’s?
Mitt Romney, the likely GOP nominee for president, is not sure but he thinks his tax rate was fifteen percent last year. We may or may not know in April when he may or may not release his tax returns for 2011. While we may or may not know his 2011 income and taxes, he…
Occam's Razor 