Almost at 20 grand saved! Don’t know what I am going to do with all this extra money…probably put it in savings…which is odd cause I really hated doing this (Economy…basically putting 6 months worth of all bills in savings for a rainy day)
How do you advise the actuarial department of a large health insurance company?
with positive expected value.
ROFL
time for my semi-annual rant on what to do with your savings when you become fully employed-- i think its been about 6 months.
–as soon as you start working, see if your employer offers any sort of match on contribution toward your thrift fund/401k, and take advantage of that free money. compound interest is magical, and only gets better if your employer throws money at you too.
–build up 3-9 months worth of living expenses tucked away into a liquid account (yes yes, high yield internet savings accounts have gone to crap).
–after your emergency fund is set up, feel free to start researching investment opportunities. if you dont think you can beat the market, suck up the overhead/transaction fees and take a stab at mutual funds. its a good direction thats been re-iterated on this thread recently.
when a company says they will do a background check… what do they check exactly?
your criminal record… and what else? work history too or just criminal record?
and is it bad if you have worked at a job for let say a year and a half and not tell them… is that bad?
Criminal, Credit, Education, Work
Probably a few other things, I know my current job actually checked to make sure I had my degree from my University.
With regards to work history they’re not going to get more than the start and end dates of jobs that you tell them about. If you worked a job that didn’t go well, you don’t have to say anything about it, though they may ask you questions that seem like it. Be prepared with clever answers about challenges you had at your last job.
I set up a savings account yesterday. The road to debt elimination begins.
Kills me everything I put a huge chunk of change into savings. 1300 for the month is now in savings…hurts my heart
This might belong in some thread about doing your taxes but since that one won’t appear for a few weeks let me ask it here. This year I gave a large amount of money to charity (to my church) and was wondering how that will effect my taxes for this year. I’m in the 25% tax bracket and all the things I’ve read have left me asking more questions. A lot of stuff says that I’ll need to itemize my deductions but that opens another can of worms.
A little help?
So there are questions you have to know to get the most money back.
Like do you have dependents ect.
So as rule if you can claim more on itemized deduction than a standard deduction you should.
2009 standard deductions.
Single: $5,700
Head of Household: $8,350
Married Filing Joint: $11,400
Married Filing Separately: $5,700
If you gave your church more than $5,700 and you are filing single look into Itemized.
I would look into what you can claim on itemized because you can claim tons of stuff you might not know.
Ask around to your friends and find a tax professional who will do your taxes for a cheap price.
They also got really good software out there now that will walk you though everything for super cheap.
With the software you can even see what your return would be with standard vs Itemized.
Thanks a lot for that advice. I did give a lot more than $5700 this year so that’s going to be great. And I will start to look into what else I can deduct since every little thing helps.
Damn, I wrote a huge post but I got timed out. But just to add to Rakae…
Typically the itemized deductions are state taxes paid (look at your W2 to see how much has been withheld, including disability), property taxes, dmv license fees, (certain) medical expenditures, charity, and misc stuff (i.e. gambling losses, margin interest).
You’d put your cash and non-cash donations on Schedule A. If you donated non-cash items more than $500 you fill out Form 8283.
Probably the most important thing is that you need a receipt for cash contributions of $250 or more to a single charity - canceled checks will not count if audited! The letter should have the amount donated and not be dated later than the filing date (including extension). Your church should have pre-written letters for donors (IRS requires special wording). So yeah, napkins signed by clergy don’t count.
You do not need to mail the receipts with the return, just keep in case of an audit.
That said, you can itemize w/o receipts, but if you are ever audited, they can reject your deductions and make you pay interest and penalties on the taxes you didn’t pay.
Oh…Rakae, dependents refers to exemptions, not standard deductions.
Thank you as well for you advice on this matter. Just to explain my situation further I live in Texas so there’s no state tax I pay on my income. Also, the churches I gave money to are very small so I don’t know if they’ll give me a letter back (hopefully they do). But I do have copies of the checks after they were deposited. Do you think that will suffice?
Yeah I guess I said that wrong thanks for looking out.
Unfortunately, canceled checks aren’t honored anymore. The letter is really just a precaution in case of audit and the IRS’ technical way of rejecting really big donations of wealthy tax payers. That said, audits are supposedly unlikely for taxpayers making less than $200,000. I don’t want to say that article is legit, but it does reflect what I’ve seen / heard encountered at my firm.
So if you don’t think you’ll be audited, I wouldn’t sweat not having the letter. If you are close with your clergy and they aren’t super strict, I’d ask my church to make up a letter and date it pre-filing date (cuz the letter was supposed to be contemporaneous) if the audit did ever happen.
Oh I forgot to mention mortgage interest is also an itemized deduction.
King9999: who you with?
Two accounts from two separate institutions: good or bad thing?
Pretty sure you would have straightened this all out by now, but the shit advice i can give you is you need to contact the third party that handles the actual transaction. In some instances, the merchant will not be at risk of chargebacks. This happens when your bank that you use for the transactions is an “agent with risk” and most banks don’t accept this sort of risk for obvious reasons. It’s hard with merchant processing to tell you exactly how you can handle this because there are several different setups that could be going on that spread around chargeback risk.
-ninj
Try going to a bank that is a big time Small Business Administration (SBA) lender. They have several programs for this type of thing. You will NOT get the best rate going for typical business loans, but they will qualify you (most likely 
) as the bank will be able to turn around and get the SBA to put up a guarantee for a large portion of the loan. Typically, the most popular program is the SBA 504 program for small businesses. Give this a try or get back to me as I can find a bank that is a large SBA lender in your area no problem.
-ninj
Well I’m a contracted advisor. I go in, look at their formulas, compare their findings with comparable academic data to see if their values are correct etc. I can’t say too much because of NDA’s but I think you get the idea. The nice thing about being a professor is I teach 3 hours a day, I have 2 office hours (which no one comes to, they should, but they don’t…) so I have to do something during that time. So I get paid to do math, its a good arrangement.
Background checks are going to be everything that was said. Criminal, work, education verification, they will find it strange if you work somewhere for 18 months and not say something, if they find out. Most companies if they do their own search will only check what you give them. If they have a professional third party do it, they’ll find out, and then they’ll wonder why you didn’t talk about 18 months of your life… of course they may ask that anyway when on your resume there’s a big 18 month gap…
Also, solid tax advice going on over here! Nice work guys!
Sharebuilder has some nice promotions running. $50 bonus on new accounts, and IRAs get free trades for all of 2010. The free money offers are legit, I’ve racked up $350 in free money from them to date.