You must understand the mentality of the person demanding it. They don't have credit; they don't have a bank account; they don't trust the IRS or the Gov't for that matter and above all they needed it yesterday. So even if they have usurious interest rates they couldn't care less that they are paying $130 today to get $7000 tomorrow.

Never waste your time reading any tax proposals or even things passed by one side of Congress. Please do yourself a favor and just wait until it's signed into law.

David

I understand all too well the lure and attraction of RALs. Not only what you set forth, but also that the entire tax preparation fee, filing, nickel and dime etc are all also paid by the RAL so no money out of pocket.
Anyway, you are to be commended for your offer. I broke down years ago and switched to commercial tax prep software, doing the AMT all over again just was too much. Keep up the great and good work.

I like your new signature Charm.

Patty

The new housing tax reduction of up to $15k is for any home buyer, not just a new owner. So far, I dont think this has passed yet. Im crossing my fingers it does go thru, but not counting chickens before they are hatched.


http://money.cnn.com/2009/02/09/real_estate/tax_credit_near/index.htm?postversion=2009021007

From your link, "One major objection is that the credit is available to existing homeowners, who would essentially be selling house A to buy house B and thus have no stimulus impact on the economy. Baker called it a "house-flipping subsidy."

This overlooks the transaction from a realtor's viewpoint, what with a sales commission involved!

Im hoping it goes thru. I would love to sell my house this year. When 'flipping house A for house B' it still puts money into the ecomony. Always need new household items when moving. Also truck rental or movers, carpet cleaners, painters, etc are all hired (at least by me) when buying and selling a home. I dont want to get political, but personally I think it would be helpful to get the real estate market moving again.

Please avoid discussions on tax laws that aren't. You'll drive yourself crazy (earlier than necessary that is) and may confuse people into thinking that particular feature is already law. I get clients calling me all the time about "tax laws" that never made it out of conference. I have enough to keep up with what's already on the books!!

As soon as something passes and is signed into to law I'll try to post a bullet point summary.

David

To get things back on track tax wise, here is are two medical deduction tax question: The first is just hopeful and as far as I know only has a resounding "NO" as answer'
1. Any loopholes on getting around taking the 7.5% of income bite out of the deductions that appears on Schedule A?. Until I had cancer last year, that zeroed out any and all medical deductions. While my deductions this year will still easily exceed the 7.5%, it would be nice if I could recoup some of that amount also.
2. do you find Turbo Tax or Tax Cut better or about the same?
Sorry to have derailed earlier about the non existent credit.

I find Tax Act meets my prime criteria (free!) -- I haven't done them yet this year but it did a good job last year -- It won't let you save them after doing them, without a fee, just print them. The way I got around that was to install (free) PDF995, a application that emulates a printer but stuf sent to it becomes a PDF file, which can then be saved or printed.

https://www.taxactonline.com/index.asp

I used to use TurboTax, all the way back to the '80s I believe, but they started getting too expensive.

However, the program isn't as important as the operator's grasp of the tax system -- It's very complex, so it's easy to run the tax program incorrectly, especially for non-standard stuf.

I'm guessing that David uses proprietary tax-preparer software which have lots of features beyond the actual return preparation to keep track of hundreds of clients -- I only have one client, a cheapskate, and keeping track of him is easy, as long as I can keep the rats away from the paper files!

Charm,

Are you self employed or an employee? If an employee are you covered under a medical plan now? Easy answer to your 7.5% threshold problem is yes you can but I need more info.

Re the canned tax software, I wouldn't trust any of that stuff for anything other than the simplest of returns. Sad but true we even find errors in our expensive software that once pointed out early in the season is corrected quickly and the fix is downloaded. I download updates to my tax software 2 to 3 times A DAY as forms are constantly being approved by the IRS for E filing so how can a $19.95 disk that is produced in say August and hits the shelves in December be anything close to accurate?
As you know our tax laws are extremely complicated and interwoven where one small word change could impact 10's of code sections therefore resulting in changes to numerous forms. Even the IRS's computers are often not sophisticated enough to catch software errors which may or may not be harmful to the user.