Understanding Business Tax Write Offs

A tax write off is the same thing as a tax deduction, and if you don’t know what expenses are legitimate deductions on your tax return, you won’t know what you can legitimately write off either. In the case of tax write offs, what you don’t know can be very painful indeed.

Tax write offs are taken by business owners and are items which in normal circumstances might not be allowable deductions but become so when the situation of a business changes.

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Because the amount of taxes a business pays are based on the income it gets, a debt which not been paid, or receivables which never show up can be categorized as bad debts and written off. You have to declare any bad debts but do not have to include them when you calculate your income for your annual return.

Loans: If you have loaned your personal funds to help support your business, you can write them off, even though you may have referred to them as income in order to raise the net worth of your business for borrowing purposes. But they remains loans, not income, and cannot be subjected to tax. And if you’ve taken a business loan from a third party lender, you may be able to get a tax write off on the interest payments.

Pension Plans: If your business has less than a hundred employees and you are providing them with pension benefits, you can get a tax credit and it will be deducted not from your business’ gross income, but directly from the amount of money you owe in taxes. This may not be called a tax write off in the IRS literature, but for all intents and purposes it is.

The government is concerned that social security will not be adequate to fund the retirements of millions of Americans, so it does what it can to encourage businesses to look out for their employees. You’ll help your workers, and the tax credit/tax write off will help your business’ bottom line.

You can also take a tax write off on any state and municipal taxes which your business pays. This write off includes both state and municipal income taxes and state and municipal sales taxes, deducting them from your total taxable income.

Travel Expenses: While the IRS regulations are somewhat vague on the matter, you can claim a tax write off on trips during which you spend more time devoted to business than to pleasure. You can keep records of your transportation costs, like cab fare, air fare, and rental car expenses. If you drive your own vehicle, you can take a write off for the mileage.

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Demystifying Mutual Funds

Mutual funds are an essential part of your personal finances. They are the fuel of your retirement plan, can help you buy a house and the easiest way to take advantage of the stock market. If you don’t have any money saved, you can still start investing in mutual funds immediately. With over 12,000 mutual funds in the marketplace, they can definitely be overwhelming!

A mutual fund is a group of stocks or bonds (and sometimes both). When you buy shares in a mutual fund, you are buying equity in all of its holdings. The rule of thumb is that if you have less than $75,000 to invest, you should stick to mutual funds to be properly diversified. For a small management fee (more on this later), you get a qualified money manager to manage your money. Mutual funds are much easier than individual stocks and bonds to monitor and determine how your investments are performing. Plus, if you don't have a lot of money, you can start investing in mutual funds for as little as $50 per month!

Because there are so many mutual funds out there, it can be overwhelming on where to begin and how to select a mutual fund that is right for you. The first place to start is to determine what your needs are. Do you want the investment for the short-term (less than 3 years) or mid-term (5-7 years) or long-term (10 years or longer) – like retirement? This will help you decide what kinds of mutual funds you should buy. You want to make sure you are properly diversified which means you are spreading your risk among different types of mutual funds.

If you are investing for the short-term, you should stick with relatively safer Money-Market Funds. For the Mid-Term and Long-Term, you want to build a portfolio with a combination of Large-Cap Growth, Large-Cap Value, Small or Mid-Cap, International and Bonds. The percentage you want in each of these categories depends on your age, time horizon and risk level. If you don't have any investments and only a small amount to invest, a great mutual fund to choose is a Balanced Fund (also called a Domestic Hybrid or Moderate Allocation). This is one mutual fund that combines stocks and bonds. There is also the Target or Lifestyle Mutual Funds. You pick the mutual fund according to the date that you want to retire (ex: 2030) and it will combine all the investments you need for a diversified portfolio. I call it One-Stop Shopping.

You have three main choices from where to buy a mutual fund. You can go to a mutual fund company, such as Vanguard or T. Rowe Price and pick five mutual fund styles such as: Large-Cap Growth, Large-Cap Value, Small or Mid-Cap, International and Bonds. Or, you can go to a mutual fund supermarket such as Fidelity or Schwab. There is a lot to pick from here, which can also be overwhelming. Lastly, you can go through a broker. The broker usually suggests which mutual fund to buy. Just be careful because this is the most expensive route and the broker might be "pushing" a certain fund based on the commission he or she gets paid.

If you don’t have the minimum needed for a mutual fund (which is usually $2,500), some of these mutual fund companies will let you invest $50 a month as long as you make it automatic and link it to your checking account.

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Pension Management - Can We Do It Better?

Everybody wants to be able to afford to retire happily and securely in some wonderful place where great hobbies are available, with a nice respectable community of like-minded residents.

Managing Pension Plans: A Comprehensive Guide to Improving Plan Performance by Dennis E. Logue,Jack S. Rader Managing Pension Plans is essential for anyone who wants to know about pension fund management. Logue and Rader have distilled an complex subject into a comprehensible work. Their excellent book fills a void, providing an accessible, yet complete guide for finance professionals, students, and anyone involved in the pension plan decision.

The unfortunate drawback to this entire plan is, of course, the money. Such luxuries are expensive and if you imagine you have always spent a small fortune each month trying to keep your lifestyle going along a pleasant track, then think what you are going to have to allow for when every day is fundamentally a holiday.

Some people think that retirement is some sort of holding stage just slightly short of actual death, and it therefore might seem silly to stash away a huge amount of money to fund this stage along life’s rich path. Well, they could not be more mistaken.

Many people spend twenty or even thirty years in retirement. Could you fund your living expenses for the next thirty years without working another day? I know I could not. Many pension schemes and life management companies base their policies on standard scenarios, where the man is four or five years older than the woman, both working, expected to retire at the appropriate time, with no contingencies allowed for, such as sudden death of the man and the woman being considerably younger.

My own parents staged their retirement in the worst possible way. My mother was more than ten years younger than my father and he died with a very small pension payable, as he was still working and expected to continue doing so. My mother was unexpectedly left with a tiny pension yet enormous financial commitments and no other source of income. Her final years were spent worrying about bills.

Friends of mine got themselves into a huge problem by deciding to divorce in their later years. Of course their pension covered only a joint payment based on the assumption they would always be together. In an age where divorce is almost more commonplace than successful marriage, that is a startling assumption to make. Not that I have a solution to the problem. As always I prefer to highlight the difficulties and let someone else find the solution to them, it is what I do best!

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