Even if you have paid off your mortgage, you still have to keep on top of property taxes. Most people who have a mortgage don’t pay their property taxes directly. Instead, a little of each mortgage payment is put into an escrow account, and the lender pays the taxes from the funds in the account. Thus, when many older people pay off a mortgage, and begin having to pay property taxes directly, they aren’t used to
If you intend to leave your children equal shares of your estate, don’t forget to consider any money or property held jointly with a child. If you have recently added a child to a bank account, own property jointly with one of your children, or have set up a payable-on-death account with a child as the beneficiary, you might want to revise your will.
Taking care of an aging parent can be a full-time job. Adult children may have to give up paying jobs in order to provide care. Even if they don’t, they may still devote hundreds of hours of their time and make sacrifices in many other ways. Often, aging parents want to find ways to compensate their caregiver children. Unfortunately, this is more complicated than it seems, because many techniques have tax or other consequences that aren’t
So what’s all the fuss over the new financial reform law? The headline-grabbing law raised quite a furor on Wall Street, but what does it mean for you and me? Here is how the law will affect ordinary folk. The biggest change associated with the new law is the creation of a new federal agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The mandate of the Bureau is to create and enforce regulations that will protect consumers of
Consider the following strategy between now and the end of the year to restructure your investment portfolio in a tax-efficient manner. Taxpayers are allowed to offset capital gains (such as from the sale of stocks) with capital losses. If capital losses exceed capital gains for the year, up to $3,000 of losses can be deducted from other income, such as wages. Any loss greater than that can be carried forward to future years. It’s important to
The IRS and the Treasury are giving employers additional time to adjust payroll systems and procedures to meet the requirement to include the cost of employer-sponsored health coverage on employees’ W-2 forms. This reporting requirement was mandated in the 2010 health care reform legislation and was scheduled to take effect with the issuance of W-2 forms for 2011. Reporting the cost of coverage will be optional for Forms W-2 issued for 2011. Employers who fail to
This year a tax advantaged health account (such as a flexible spending account, health reimbursement account, health savings account, or medical savings account) can be used to purchase aspirin, flu medications, allergy pills, cold medicines, and other over-the-counter medications. Effective January 1, 2011, funds from these accounts can no longer be used to purchase over-the-counter drugs unless the taxpayer has a prescription for them. Insulin is an exception and will still be eligible for tax-free reimbursement
While there is no way to guarantee that nothing will go wrong in a nursing home, some careful research and planning can help reassure you or your loved ones that you’ve made a good choice. Here are some things to consider when looking for a facility: Location. No single factor is more important to the quality of care and quality of life of a nursing home resident than visits by family members. Care is often better
Long-term care insurance is expensive. One way that some people reduce the cost is to buy a policy that will cover care only for a limited period of time (such as three years), as opposed to a policy that covers care indefinitely. Last year, almost a third of individual buyers purchased a three-year policy, according to the American Association for Long-Term Care Insurance. But is that sufficient coverage? To answer that question, the Association recently published
If you’re over age 65 and you’re preparing to move to another state – or even to another county – you’ll need to make sure your Medicare plan will still be in effect after you move. Whether your policy will still be valid depends in part on whether you have original Medicare or Medicare Advantage. If you have original Medicare, moving shouldn’t affect your benefits. Your Medicare plan will still be valid when you move. However,
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