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I dropped $1100 for a new set of tires for my F150 back in December. Yep, they ain’t cheap.

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Our company thinks they are going to be an MVNO (ala Boost or Virgin) in 2 months..starting from scratch.

Just goes to show that the idiots in the board room have no tether to tech reality.

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[quote=flu][quote=Hobie]Note to self, pre retirement, buy out of state RE attractive to California tastes. Honey, pass the brochure on Reno land. ;)[/quote]

Oregon isn’t bad you know. If you don’t mind the rain.[/quote]

Oregon isn’t bad…except for the Oregonians. I know too many people from Portland who are exactly like this:

http://youtu.be/l2LBICPEK6w

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[quote=flu]I like Pacific Sales, and never had issues with them…

Costco…Well, they don’t usually have top of the line..So I wouldn’t go there…

For slightly less than top of the line….normal stuff, I’d say Sears is pretty good too.

Lastly, you could go to Fry’s for the $199 special 🙂 (just kidding about Fry’s)[/quote]

I’ve had some of the worst service ever at Pacific Sales. I’ve bought appliances in the past at Sears but would never use them now (they are probably a close second for customer complaints on Consumerist.com to Worst Buy).

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[quote=flu][quote=no_such_reality]Actually UCGal, you’re close. If he hasn’t, he needs to spend the $700 to incorporate out of state. Contract through the corporation and pay himself and meager but reasonable salary and have the corporation distribute the bulk of his earnings as dividends for the stock he holds in the corporation.

(Note, I’m not a tax attorney so you need to verify)

And I would suggest getting much more serious but deducting your business expenses and identiying them as such.[/quote]

I’m confused. If we’re talking about an s-corp, the dividend paid to shareholders, I believe still gets treated as ordinary income. (What it can do I believe is getting you out of paying self-employment taxes that you would pay receiving instead a salary), But then, even this, you have to pay yourself a reasonable rate.. Also, if you pay out a dividend, it goes to every shareholder.

Maybe I’m missing something.[/quote]

I don’t know about the dividend angle…

However what I do with my S-corp:

* Pay myself a modest salary to limit payroll taxes. I pay myself about what an Indian here on an h1b visa would be paid to do my work. Completely legit as far as I am concerned.
* Contribute the max of that modest salary to my 401k (Keogh).
* Have the company contribute the max to my 401k as a profit sharing bonus.

The second two allow me to divert over $30k annually for retirement, tax free. The first saves me about $7-10k in direct taxes.

Note that there is virtually no tax advantage to incorporating out of state if you live in CA. CA will still tax you even if you are incorporated in NV or DE. There may be other advantages but this isn’t one of them.

For the home office deduction…it’s virtually worthless. However you should have your S-corp purchase everything IN the office.

As to why the home office deduction isn’t really that big of a deal. I have an 1100 sq ft house. My office is 100 sq ft. Let’s round up and call that 10% of the square footage. Let’s say I have a $3000 mortgage so the most I could ‘write off’ a month is $300. However, most of that $3000 is interest which I’m already writing off and I can’t double dip. Say $500 is principle. That means I can write off $50 a month. The same math applies to utilities (cable, electricity): I can write off 10%.

I’ve added everything up and found that the total subject to write off, for me, is only a couple of thousand a year…with a real tax savings of only a couple hundred dollars. The risk of an audit is very high IMO and the bookkeeping/paperwork to support this isn’t worth the effort.

However, I do have my company pay the cell phone bill (and buy the phones) and it pays my medical insurance premiums.

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If it’s just income tax returns I used to use a guy named Jim Glanz in La Mesa. Really nice and very smart.

http://www.kudzu.com/m/Glanz-Professional-Services-1008570

If you need a full service accountant and tax professional I’ve been using Chris Cundari with Abbas, Jensen and Cundari since I incorporated (Glanz doesn’t do corporate returns).

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[quote=briansd1][quote=flu]

They’re going to go up anyway..[/quote]

It’s a revenue thing. Regardless of total consumption, the utilities need certain funding levels which go up year after year.[/quote]

This is exactly the same thing that happened at Miramar landfill when the city instituted mandatory recycling. The city gets paid tip fees from the trucks that collect trash. Because people were recycling there was less waste being collected and the tip fee revenue went down.

Now, you’d think that if they were burying less trash and handling fewer vehicle trips that they’d need less money to operate. Nope.

So they raised the tip rates and jacked up the fees for residents to use the dump by about 300%. It used to cost me about $12 to take a load of trash to the dump. Now it’s about $35.

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[quote=briansd1]Back to the Occupy Movement. I went with friend who is a university professor. We were joind by a husband and wife couple both of whom are PhDs in the bio industry. We stayed for about 3 hours.

snip…

But I believe that there is wide support from professionals who believe that, finally, American social consicience has awoken. This is an American phenomenon that has spread worldwide[/quote]

You, an outspoken liberal, went to what is mostly a liberal event with a bunch of college professors, who are most likely liberals.

I don’t call that ‘wide support’.

There is not a single person in my circle of friends, family or business acquaintances…except for the extremely liberal ones, who have anything positive to say about the occupy movements. Not one.

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As a holder of Bank stocks I say “raise the fees!”. As a consumer I just laugh…I’ve been with a credit union for almost 20 years.

This is the essence of capitalism: voting with your dollars…or your feet.

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FWIW, the outage nuked my Linksys router. When the power came back on my LAN would not come back up and I traced it to the router which was, for all intents and purposes, bricked.

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This the first time that I’ve heard you ever argue for not spending money.

Oh wait…you were just talking about the not drilling part weren’t you?

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I’ve gotten back into walking over the last few months (as well as buying a juicer which I am using regularly).

I typically do a 6 mile walk a couple of afternoons a week at Lake Murray and then fill that in with some 2-4 milers around my neighborhood every other day with a rest day thrown in occasionally.

I really need to start mixing in a few days a week in the gym.

BTW, I’d love to get back into running but this plantar fasciitis that I contracted back in April makes even the walking painful but I’ve found I just need to gut it out since I need the exercise.

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I’ve gotten back into walking over the last few months (as well as buying a juicer which I am using regularly).

I typically do a 6 mile walk a couple of afternoons a week at Lake Murray and then fill that in with some 2-4 milers around my neighborhood every other day with a rest day thrown in occasionally.

I really need to start mixing in a few days a week in the gym.

BTW, I’d love to get back into running but this plantar fasciitis that I contracted back in April makes even the walking painful but I’ve found I just need to gut it out since I need the exercise.

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I’ve gotten back into walking over the last few months (as well as buying a juicer which I am using regularly).

I typically do a 6 mile walk a couple of afternoons a week at Lake Murray and then fill that in with some 2-4 milers around my neighborhood every other day with a rest day thrown in occasionally.

I really need to start mixing in a few days a week in the gym.

BTW, I’d love to get back into running but this plantar fasciitis that I contracted back in April makes even the walking painful but I’ve found I just need to gut it out since I need the exercise.

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[quote=sdduuuude]I looked at a trip to England for the Olympics next Summer. CHA-CHING ! Was infeasible for our family of four.[/quote]

Sure, for the Olympics. They’re gonna be in LONDON!

You can travel cheaply in the UK or you can go to London. You can’t do both.

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