The investment..speculation, out right gambling thread

<p>Walk along the Charles River and look at what runners have on their feet. Nike came out with these waffle shoes last year that have ultra-bright colors, one color on top and one color on the bottom. These shoes use a newer technology that makes them cheaper to manufacture and they sell for $100+. If you figure a runner changing their shoes every 200 to 400 miles, that’s a lot of shoes.</p>

<p>I always buy New Balance. They have wide and high-arch shoes and they fit me the best. I usually pay $25-$30 per pair at the Factory Outlet. Nike is absolutely a premium brand and people pay a lot of money for their products.</p>

<p>New TurboTax update today. I’m working on backing out my stuff for the corrected Fidelity form. Backing out Interest and Dividends was easy. The hard part is going through my transactions and deleting the ones related to this one account. The sales are sorted by the name of the investment and I do make similar investments in different brokerage accounts so this is going to be a pain.</p>

<p>It might be easier to delete all of my brokerage stuff and re-import them all again.</p>

<p>I think that I’m going to have to go that route, it would take me longer to fish through my transactions. Taxes are soooo much fun. BTW, I think that I’m going to consolidate the tax stuff in this thread. I hate having to fish out the tax thread when I want to post something.</p>

<p>Also, Intuit is raising prices for TurboTax on March 25 so buy it now if you need it. I need to buy the NH package. I’d rather spend money than time at this point. I can do it by hand but computing the interest and penalties (didn’t withhold enough), is a major pain in the neck.</p>

<p>The last pair of new balance shoes I bought cost
$50 at Big 5. I can walk there. I would prefer to pay $25 to $30. The shoes are great.</p>

<p>NB makes a lot of their shoes in the US too. I posted a YouTube video of their Lawrence factory making shoes in another thread several weeks ago.</p>

<p>I don’t get why you have to delete transactions.</p>

<p>I have a feeling next year is going to be a nightmare with my Schwab account. This year it will be just a bad dream. </p>

<p>I am waiting for k1s. I think it is going to be a long wait. Definitely filing an extension.</p>

<p>I had to take over my parents tax returns. I have to give my mom credit. She has everything very organized. She writes everything down in a book with check numbers and her entries are sorted well.</p>

<p>When you import from Fidelity, it grabs Interest, Dividends, Stock Sales and Misc income all at the same time. So you get duplicates. I’m going to see if there’s a way to just import Interest and Dividends as the correction was only for dividends. I already deleted interest and dividends without thinking. I suppose that it might be easier to just delete the duplicate transactions but some have had additional work on them and I’d have to identify those.</p>

<p>I am pretty sure that I don’t have any K1s this year.</p>

<p>I have all of my tax stuff on my laptop in an electronic notebook. If it’s an electronic statement, then I just drag it in. If it’s a paper statement, I take a picture and put it in. It is very productive to have everything on your computer. In the past, I would have to be at my desk at home to work on my taxes because it was all paper-based.</p>

<p>These brokerage firms do not make filing taxes easy.</p>

<p>It’s an overall mess. If they didn’t do the corrections, then it would be nice to get everything in one shot but it makes corrections harder. The tax software companies have lots of updates too but I think that’s because the IRS interpretations, forms, etc. is a moving target through the tax season. I imagine the IRS will let a lot of stuff go this year given that so much stuff has changed or been late from the IRS. They could do computerized-audits automatically for taxpayers but I don’t think that they have the resources to do that. Tax changes should be frozen by Congress well in advance of the IRS producing final forms but we’ve gotten into this last-minute mode.</p>

<p>Okay, I was wrong. I can import them separately. So I did I & D without B. I didn’t do Misc either because I didn’t delete the Misc stuff. Okay, so not so bad but still a moderate amount of work because of all of the foreign dividends.</p>

<p>Yeah… </p>

<p>Last year I spent something like 40 hours redoing the pnl on my Schwab trades because they were wrong.</p>

<p>In 2012, I traded less and Schwab was more accurate with the profit and loss so it only took me 2 to 3 hours. Except Schwab just mailed me a revised 1099 and the profits and sales prices are different. So now I have to go thru everything again. More time wasted. </p>

<p>I don’t like the way Schwab handles wash sale rules because they list trades as wash sales when they aren’t. The tax accounting for options is not quite right. </p>

<p>I sold naked options with the same strike price at 1.90 and 0.30 the same day. It was expiration. A good chance the options were going to zero. An hour to go before the close, those options were trading at .40. I bought 1 back. The other option expired worthless.
So… Which sale is Schwab going to use against my .40 purchase? 1.90 or .30? If they use
.30, I have a wash sale though I made money in this strike. Then the tax accounting is going to be screwed up. I think doct is having these issues .</p>

<p>Ok post 6069… That sounds better.</p>

<p>Done. It wasn’t as bad as I thought but that’s only because I remembered how to do the foreign tax credit (it took me a while to figure that one out when I did it before because the tax credit form isn’t attached to dividends in TurboTax.</p>

<br>

<br>

<p>Yeah, sometimes it’s just better to wait until April even though I like to clear this stuff out early.</p>

<br>

<br>

<p>Fidelity does the same thing. If you buy it and sell it and buy it again, and sell it before the end of the year, the second buy is treated as a wash sale even though you don’t own the position at the end of the year and don’t buy it the following January. It makes no sense but it probably makes the programming easier. It was pretty confusing when I first saw it and I determined that I could ignore it. Of course if they screwed up, it could make a huge difference in taxes.</p>

<p>So this is resolved. Now I just have to do my NH return and finish my son’s MA return. For my son’s return, I have to apportion non-resident and part-year resident and put in all of his health insurance information.</p>

<p>Yes - as I mentioned, I would put in an order, they were executed at slightly different times and when I sold them all at the same time, they were executed at slightly different times. This generated wash sale rules. The net result was the same - but they sure like to waste a lot of paper.</p>

<p>I have turned off paper tax forms and statements. Electronic is so much more convenient.</p>

<p>One thing that I have to deal with is foreign tax credit carryovers. I guess there’s a limit on how much you can claim in a year and so I guess I have a carryover for next year. I hope TurboTax automagically takes care of it for me. My foreign dividends are going to go way up for 2013 so I might have to carryover these credits for a while until I change my investing approach back to growth or go more with domestic companies.</p>

<p>So the funny thing is that the effort in doing taxes discourages investing in foreign companies. Of course the returns from foreign companies relative to risk is very nice.</p>

<p>So BCEagle91, the effect right now is you paying double taxation?</p>

<p>Doct, my numbers were slightly off I’m 2012 because of the wash sales.</p>

<br>

<br>

<p>It could be.</p>

<p>I should check my return from last year to make sure I don’t have a carryover. If I get too many of these things, I should just not make foreign investments for a year to claim the carryovers.</p>

<p>I just realized that I did the interest stuff wrong for Australia. It’s in Federal taxes withheld instead of foreign taxes paid. If that’s capped, and it looks like it is, then it means more taxes paid this year but I should get it back eventually.</p>

<p>One way to get around it is to claim it on Schedule A but credits are worth far more than deductions. Especially if you claim the standard deduction.</p>

<p>So I went through the Australian stuff. Then I looked at carryovers. I do have a foreign tax AMT carryover from 2011 and now a foreign tax (regular and AMT) carryover for 2012 that’s quite a bit more than 2011. The carryover for 2012 is about 15% of income which is substantial. Australian interest rates have been declining and inflation is still a problem there so the Australian side may fix itself for next year but my Canadian income will double for 2013 if I maintain existing investments.</p>

<p>BTW, in the overall picture, these taxes are just a minor bother. I like to be efficient on investments but I may wind up doing nothing this year and just worry about it in 2014.</p>

<p>TurboTax State is $40. I thought that it was $20. Was willing to pay $30. I guess I’ll just do it manually.</p>

<p>Sometimes I’m cheap. Sometimes I don’t care.</p>

<p>I was thinking of buying a new house - there’s construction near my office. Found out that it’s apartments though. It would be nice to walk to work.</p>

<p>Foreign interest sounds like a tax pain. </p>

<p>A CPA may be cheaper than limiting investments.</p>

<p>Is there a condo complex near work that u would like to live in?</p>

<p>Foreign interest is a pain but the profits far outweigh the negatives when interest rates were above 5%. They are now around 3% which is still worthwhile but we’ll see what the rates are in the future.</p>

<p>The amounts of taxes are relatively small here so it’s not on my priority list. Actually, my priority list won’t have anything on it after I file my return as I don’t really care for a while after finishing my taxes. I’ll start thinking about taxes in the summer. This is the worst time of the year for me as it’s taxes and cleaning the house and some other stuff all at the same time.</p>

<p>I don’t know that a CPA could do a lot for me without getting into more complicated investments and I like simple.</p>

<p>There’s a condo on a golf course next to the office but the quality of construction isn’t great and they are really expensive. I have a friend that owns one (unoccupied) and he wants to sell it but he’d lose about $200K on the sale right now. There are a ton of apartments in the area (I run through the neighborhoods) and lots of McMansions (which I don’t care for). I guess I’ll just have to run through more neighborhoods when it gets a little warmer.</p>

<p>I need a housing crash.</p>