This year, more Americans and businesses may be asking: Where’s my tax refund? That’s because cash-strapped states such as North Carolina, Alabama and Hawaii have been forced to slow down issuing income tax refunds to individuals and businesses because of a lack of funds in their budget. Kansas has hinted that a delay might be [...]
While most people tip at restaurants, many people are confused about how much they should shell out for other services — or whether they should tip at all. Tipping, and determining how much to tip, depends on several factors including the quality, frequency and nature of the service rendered. According to Anna Post of the [...]
Follow These Tips to Spend Less and Pocket the Money You Save If cheap is chic, then saving is suddenly sexy. America Saves Week (February 21-28) takes on new meaning when the U.S. savings rate, which had dipped into negative territory, headed up to 4.6% last year. The savings rate could climb as high as [...]
Proses akuisisi dan merger dalam kasus Bank Century dipersalahkan semua fraksi dalam Pansus hak angket, sedangkan proses FPJP dan bailout dipersalahkan oleh 7 fraksi dari 9 fraksi yang ada. Sebagaimana diketahui, dalam proses penyelidikan oleh Pansus hak angket, Bank Indonesia dinilai memberikan berbagai kemudahan, bahkan lebih vulgar lagi “memelihara bank bobrok sejak lahirâ€. Sulit dipercaya, [...]
NEW YORK/WASHINGTONÂ – The only time the U.S. dollar ever took a serious shellacking in the marketplace, the wounds were almost entirely self-inflicted. Facing mounting inflation and the escalating cost of the Vietnam War, President Richard Nixon, on August 15, 1971, took the United States off the gold standard, which had been in place since [...]
Warren Buffett is widely regarded as one of the most successful investors of all time. Yet, as Buffett is willing to admit, even the best investors make mistakes. Buffett’s legendary annual letters to his Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A) shareholders tell the tales of his biggest investing mistakes. There is much to be learned from Buffett’s decades [...]
Credit cardholders, listen up: On Monday, new federal regulations will take effect, changing the relationship between you and your card issuer. The changes are part of the Credit Card Act of 2009, signed into law last May. Congress approved the legislation to end what consumer groups have called unfair and deceptive business practices. But critics [...]
Hopes for an economic upswing may rekindle ideas of a blissful retirement, but when will you really be ready? Nearly a third of working people aged 55 or older have less than $10,000 saved for retirement, according to a 2009 Retirement Confidence Survey. But even if you’ve saved more than that, deciding when to retire [...]
AUSTIN, Texas – A software engineer furious with the Internal Revenue Service launched a suicide attack on the agency Thursday by crashing his small plane into an office building containing nearly 200 IRS employees, setting off a raging fire that sent workers fleeing for their lives. At least one person in the building was missing. The FBI tentatively identified [...]
Although the tax code permits a wide range of deductions for taxpayers in various situations, thousands of filers routinely claim deductions for various types of expenses that are in fact non-deductible. Here is a list of some of the more common non-deductible expenses that show up on tax returns each year. Spousal and Child Support [...]
When Michelle Bisutti, a 41-year-old family practitioner in Columbus, Ohio, finished medical school in 2003, her student-loan debt amounted to roughly $250,000. Since then, it has ballooned to $555,000. It is the result of her deferring loan payments while she completed her residency, default charges and relentlessly compounding interest rates. Among the charges: a single [...]
They’re back in fashion, with good reason: An hour spent cutting and clipping can yield about $100 in savings. Clipping coupons hardly sounds like the subject of high finance — or even medium finance. Save a dollar on cat food, some detergent or a couple of boxes of cereal. Who can be bothered? Who has [...]
APR Shocks Many, but Issuer Says They Are Pricing for the Risk If you have bad credit in the new era of credit card regulation, be prepared to pay — dearly — for the privilege of using credit. That’s the message underlying recent credit card offers that feature jaw-dropping interest rates of up to 79.9 [...]
If history is any indicator, less than 1% of Americans will be audited by the Internal Revenue Service in the coming year. And while some of these audits are totally random, and there’s nothing that the individual taxpayer can do about them, many audits are actually instigated by the taxpayers themselves. To that end, below [...]
THE tins of seasoning on top of Zach Motl’s refrigerator — Old Bay, Hungarian paprika, Madras curry powder — are for show only, chosen for their graphic punch and nifty typefaces. Living in a room that’s only 178 square feet, you don’t want to cook much, Mr. Motl said; it’s just too odoriferous. He once [...]
When it comes to opening an individual retirement account, should you go with a traditional IRA or a Roth? Traditional IRAs and Roth IRAs have their own unique benefits, but new rules in 2010 allow some investors who had been locked out of Roth IRAs the option to take advantage of Roth’s tax-free withdrawals. Whether [...]
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