Archive for January, 2010

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Estimated Taxes Due Tomorrow, January 15th.

It’s that time yet again! If you pay estimated taxes like I do, your Federal and State payments are due tomorrow, January 15th. I have been paying estimated taxes for many years now, and while I find it kind of a pain in the you-know-what, I truly enjoy working for myself on my own time. It’s definitely a trade-off to make sure I always put away enough money to pay the taxes every 3 months! I have a special “Taxes” account over at ING Direct that I put 30% of every dollar I make into, as I made the mistake 2 years ago of not setting enough aside – and boy did that hurt come April 15th. So I cannot recommend enough that you open an account just for your estimated taxes and fund it as well as possible.

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taxes
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Could You Buy Life Insurance For Those You Love…With You As The Beneficiary?

Is that even legal? Ethical? Moral? I mean, the person you would be buying the life insurance for would know you were doing it, so what would be wrong with it? I imagine it would take some heavy lifting mathematically to figure out your investment in the policy and your payout should the person die versus just investing the money yourself in the market or some other vessel, but still…I wonder if it would work. I wonder if it is being done by anyone. Whether paying the “client” under the table on a monthly basis or paying the policy outright, the idea fascinates me.

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insurance
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How To Employ A Balanced Investment Approach.

This guest post is brought to you by The Digerati Life.

When we hear of the terms “Short Term” and “Long Term” in the investing world, these terms refer to an investment period. Traditionally for tax purposes, the Short Term is defined as any investment holding time period less than one year while Long Term is any time period greater than one year. One technical difference between the two is how you record your Capital Gains and Losses on the IRS Schedule D. It has been suggested that small investors should not invest in the short term due to high commission charges. But with the advent of online stock trading, and lowered commissions offered by many discount brokers, that advice has less relevance.

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investments
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Free Money…If You Can Find It.

Did you know that treasury departments around the country contain about $33 BILLION (Money Mag, Dec ’09) in unclaimed money? Me neither – and some of it may be yours. Of course, I ran a check under my name and nothing came up. But when I get a chance I will run the names of everyone in my family and let them know what I find. The easiest way to search is by using the website for the National Association of Unclaimed Property Adminstrators (NAUPA) at unclaimed.org, where you can search the treasuries of all the states that you have lived in. Happy hunting!

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making money
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How I Saved $150 On My Hotel Stays With A Phone Call.

As most of you know, I have been away for the last 3 weeks visiting friends and family around the U.S. – by car. I drove from Colorado to Massachusetts to Florida and back, putting over 5,600 miles on my car and spending my fair share of time in random hotels alongside highways in the middle of nowhere. See, when I travel by car long distances I don’t make reservations in advance; I just drive until I am tired and then find a place to stay. And if I just pulled into a random hotel and got a room, chances are that I would be paying way too much for what I could be getting for much less, especially in the middle of nowhere. So that’s why before I go into any hotel, I call from the parking lot outside…and make sure they offer free breakfast with the room rate.

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Frugal
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