My Season at the Tax Mill
Saturday, January 12
Someone recently asked in the forums about using one of the nationwide tax preparation chains. Disparaging remarks about that chain from some of our resident tax experts followed. I had worked for that chain for a season, so I thought I would give a detailed account of it for anyone who is intere...
Put Some 'Preparation' in Your Tax Preparation
Tuesday, January 23
Tax Preparation might be one of the least appropriately named services I know of. The definition of ‘preparation' is the action or process of making ready for an event or undertaking. In the case of tax preparation this should mean the process of making ready to pay your taxes. Unfortunately, tha...
Pride Comes Before a Fall
Sunday, December 31
My father-in-law figured out the benefits of real estate investing decades before there was a Bigger Pockets. Working as an architect in the 1960s and 70s he started a side gig purchasing single and multi-family properties around his home town of Pittsburgh. When I married his daughter in 1992 h...
We Should Be Asking Better Questions
Sunday, December 10
Should my brother travel by train?That is a very simple question, but you can’t answer it. Not in any meaningful way. It’s a yes/no question, so you could just guess, but even if you’re right we’d all know it was just a guess. If you wanted to answer that question credibly, reasonably, or authori...
Playing Chicken with the IRS
Wednesday, November 29
Sorry for the title of this post. I can't resist a good pun. (Or even a bad one!)Charles and Laura M. own a poultry farm in Texas, where they raise chickens for the third largest poultry producer in the US, Sanderson Farms. In 2005 the M’s formed an LLC (CL Farms) and elected to be taxed as an S-...
The IRS Solution - Tax it All!
Tuesday, November 21
Sometimes I learn multiple lessons from reading a single Tax Court opinion. Such was the case recently when I read the opinion from Judge Nega regarding real estate investors Steven and Stacy E (SSE). The IRS and SSE disagreed on several issues and Judge Nega had to settle these matters in Tax C...