Yesterday in the gym the director of the YMCA asked me how people are handling the changes to charitable deductions. I had to share my despair. "I feel like I'm kicking them in the gut."  This is going to be catastrophic to charities, and none-to-good for the humans who are my clients ( Read more... )

In an email to a client: "What's worrying me is there's no such thing as a "reconciliation discrepency" of $4391.22.  That's called "not having your bookkeeping done ( Read more... )

Draft of letter to the editor - first pass (call it morning pages ( Read more... )

Just a heads up: it takes a minimum of $2K/month per person to live in retirement.  If you do not have that amount of income, you're going to have to draw down savings to fund it.  Perhaps you can get by with less than $48K if you're married and sharing household expenses, but if you're single you aren't going to be okay if you can't fund $24K ( ( Read more... )

I recently saw a Stone Soup cartoon that caught my eye from both directions, as an employer and as an employee. I'd love to make their choice, to just sit back and ignore that pile of paper some nameless/faceless person thinks I'm doing for them.  Work is hard and annoying, and I far prefer drinking coffee with a friend.

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Cato Institute is harping again on how we should privatize social security to increase its effectiveness ( Read more... )

On Sunday, September 22 a client in a suburb of Dallas mailed me something important via snail mail.  On Saturday, Oct. 6, two weeks later, it became time critical that I have that piece of mail.  (It wasn't before that.) Yet it had not arrived.  Much drama ensued and the client stopped payment on the check that was in the envelope and reported the ( Read more... )

A local judge has ruled that taxpayers must fund the sex change operation of a convicted murderer because she suffers from gender identity disorder and the 8th amendment requires that we provide her with all necessary medical care, and her doctors say she needs to have a complicated operation to turn her penis inside out to form a vagina.   (I have ( Read more... )

I'm too beat and too dumb to work on someone else's return tonight, so I put myself on extension.  Someone else asked about this, so I'm going to tell you all how to safely do an extension ( Read more... )

Someone was throwing around a picture suggesting that Jesus would be in favor of healing the poor.  Sounds good, doesn't it?

Yet, here's what Jesus actually did:  he healed the poor reluctantly when guilt-tripped into it, begged them not to tell anyone, and then hid from the throngs that came after him trying to get him to spend all his time healing ( Read more... )