If you own rental property, you need to pay attention to the passive-loss rules. This court case helps clarify two rules that can enable deductions for rental property losses.

The newly enacted tax cut creates a new 2011 and 2012 estate tax. The new rules are taxpayer friendly in two respects. First, they are easy to understand. Second, they contain a $5 million exclusion (portable, if properly elected, for husband and wife, giving a married couple an exclusion of $10 million).

The new tax law contains some real surprises when it comes to deducting vehicles. In some cases, you can deduct the full cost in the year you place the vehicle in service. In other cases, the luxury auto limits might stretch your depreciation deductions over 30 or more years.

New guidance from the IRS on the new health care law says the owner of a business (proprietorship, corporation, LLC, etc.) may not claim the 35 percent tax credit on the health insurance premiums paid to cover his or her spouse.

The new health care law changes the requirements for deducting vitamins in your Section 105 medical reimbursement plan.

The Small Business Jobs Act of 2010 spends $12 billion on small businesses, hoping to add a little stimulus to this economy. Make sure you are getting your fair share of this stimulation.

The IRS just clarified the Section 105 medical reimbursement plan rules for deducting over-the-counter drugs in 2011. Read this article to get updated. Then, download a sample Section 105 medical reimbursement plan document that your business can use to comply with both 2010 and 2011 requirements.

The new health care law grants a nice tax credit to business owners who cover their employees. How about the owners themselves? Lawmakers did them no favors, but one group of proprietors might catch a break.

Most of this issue explains how you pocket money from the new health care tax credits. That’s nice. But you have to ask, who is paying for my tax credits?

The IRS has a procedure in place where you can ask “not to be audited” this year for the same items for which you were audited last year.

This new law gives you 30 percent uncapped and unlimited tax credits for installing qualified solar, wind, or geothermal energy improvements in your home, vacation home, or other residence.

Higher inflation could be good for that home you buy today—and if you buy today, you will have today’s low interest rate. That’s a pretty good combination. Then add the 2009 tax credit and get the government to pay you $8,000 for taking the chance. Sounds like you hit the trifecta doesn’t it?

The official name of the new stimulus is the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). Like last year’s version, the 2009 stimulus contains three big deals for business: (1) fifty percent bonus depreciation; (2) Section 179 expensing of up to $250,000; and (3) an increase in first-year luxury car depreciation on new (not used) cars.

The very first thing you need to do once you make the decision to buy the new asset and replace the old asset is to calculate your taxable gain or deductible loss on the old asset (as if you were going to sell it right now). The result—gain or loss—determines the strategy you should follow.

Take advantage of the government stimulus package in 2008. You need to buy and place in service a business vehicle, business equipment, or a business-related building before the end of the year. Generate fifty percent bonus depreciation, up to $250,000 Section 179 expensing, or an $8,000 increase in first-year luxury car depreciation.

After buying stock with incentive options, many choose to gamble with the capital gains treatment. By holding on to the stock for one year, one can save money with the AMT. But, when the dot-com bubble burst, many people lost a lot of money with this gamble. Read about this, and how the government is now bailing them out!

The big $700 billion bailout is right in your face, but there’s more. There are also billions of dollars in side bailouts, including the preferred stock bailout, which helps out owners of preferred Fannie and Freddie stock. Only some financial institutions benefit though, you don’t.

Over 1.6 million businesses collectively owe the IRS more than $58 billion. Who to blame: cheating government contractors, a lenient IRS, irresponsible lawmakers, dishonest businesses. What to do, and how to protect yourself against a dishonest payroll service.

Extenders delay the expiration of a tax law for one year, effectively hiding huge amounts of government spending. Currently, the government is hiding almost $100 billion of spending with extenders. Learn about how they effect small business, and what you can do to stop this type of spending.

NY Congressman Charles Rangel failed to report foreign earnings. Rangel is the chief tax legislator in the country. He should know better.

Lawmakers finally let the IRS deal with deducting charitable mileage! The IRS annually updates its deduction rates for mileage, but lawmakers haven’t updated their charitable mileage rate since 1997. Read how a new law applies the IRS rates for charitable mileage, and how this affects you.

Before this new housing rescue law, the savvy taxpayer could convert his old rental or vacation home into a principal residence, live in it for two years, and then sell it to take advantage of the $250,000 and $500,000 exclusion of gain rules. Now, you need to make revisions to that old tax plan to cope with this new law.

The new housing rescue law (1) creates a $7,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers; (2) creates up to a $500 property tax deduction for the taxpayer who does not itemize deductions; (3) destroys some or all of the $250,000 tax-free exclusion for sales of vacation homes and rentals converted to principal residences; and establishes 1099-style reporting to the IRS of gross income from credit card receipts.

Help this new bill pass into a law. H.R. 6601 proposes reasonable reform on home office use, cell phones, and business meals and entertainment.

In testimony before the Senate on January 29, 2008, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said: “Under any plausible scenario, the federal budget is on an imprudent and unsustainable path. This budget imbalance will necessarily result in tax increases and spending cuts. (And all this is before Treasury Secretary Paulson’s first $700 billion bank bailout.)

In what is becoming an every year outrageous event, lawmakers patched the alternative minimum tax (AMT), adding $50 billion to the federal deficit.

To pay for the “Heroes Earnings Assistance and Relief Tax Act of 2007,” lawmakers increased the minimum penalties for failing to file a tax return.

A new law makes tax preparers subject to higher penalties for errors, and establishes high standards for claims made on tax returns. The moral: if your tax advisor examines your issue and tells you that you can claim that deduction, you have a very solid claim.

The $25,000 SUV expensing might disappear in 2008. We won’t speculate on what might happen next year, but the current rules still apply until the end of 2007.

Be alert to, and beware of, government studies. The result of a tax study is almost always bad news for you. In this case, we foresaw the problems with the 1986 tax “reform.” What’s on the radar next: the new social security study group and the AMT.

Be alert to, and beware of, government studies. The result of a tax study is almost always bad news for you. In this case, we foresaw the problems with the 1986 tax “reform.” What’s on the radar next: the new social security study group and the AMT.

Extenders delay the expiration of a specific tax law, which hides budget costs and allows lawmakers to shirk their responsibility to make good law. We summarize the current extenders to inform you of where you stand with the tax law.

In the latest installment of gimmicky extenders, lawmakers have created a one-year tax benefit window for deducting mortgage insurance. What are the lawmakers thinking? Presumably, they hope the mortgage insurance deduction will boost the housing market in 2007. If this works, look for an extension to 2008.

You may Section 179 expense up to $25,000 of your business cost when you buy a more than 6,000 pound gross vehicle weight rated (GVWR) new or used crossover vehicle or SUV built not on a truck chassis, but on a unibody frame in a manner that qualifies the vehicle as a truck for purposes of the gas guzzler tax.

By using outside collection firms instead of IRS personal, the government is going to lose $8.6 billion a year in revenue.

Government whacks 157 estate tax lawyers at a cost to taxpayers of $2.6 million a day.

Lawmakers enacted a special two-year sales tax deduction to benefit taxpayers who live in states with no income tax. According to the Treasury Inspector General, over 700,000 taxpayers failed to claim the deduction.

This new law requires that you look at your retirement plans through new eyes. Caution is one watchword here. You have much to consider, including how to obtain a strong rate of return on your retirement assets and factors outside your control like the pension bailout of the airline industry. With the new rules, the 401(k) looks better and better, especially if you have employees.

Public Law 109-280 makes tax deductions for donations to charity far more difficult. Here is one example of the changes: dropping $5 in the collection basket at Church on Sunday is no longer deductible. Now you need a cancelled check or a receipt to claim that deduction.

The AMT taxes the deductions you claim on your regular tax return. For example, the AMT taxes the deductions you claim for state income and sales taxes. Further, the AMT taxes the personal exemptions you claim for yourself, your spouse, and your dependent children. This is not a typo. It’s true. The AMT is the most unfair tax since direct confiscation of assets.

Tax law continues to favor the heavy SUV over the typical passenger automobile. The heavy SUV qualifies for additional first-year expensing of up to $25,000 and it’s exempt from the gas guzzler tax.

For most self-employed taxpayers, Public Law 109-222 requires no major shifts in tax planning for their businesses. This new law extended tax breaks, such as the lower rates for capital gains. The increase in the kiddie tax age group is probably the biggest impact of this new law on the one-owner and husband-and-wife owned business—and that age expansion has little or nothing to do with most business deductions.

The AMT can trigger additional taxes on your capital gains despite the fact that the capital gains tax rate for both regular and AMT purposes is identical. Your status as single or married and the amount and nature of your income determine the extra AMT hit. In general, the middle income can suffer the worst AMT impact.

In 1935, the self-employment tax topped out at $60. In 2006, the first part of the self-employment tax tops out at $14,413, but the 2.9 percent Medicare part continues after that without limits. Good tax planning for the self-employment tax is like an annuity. It gives you monetary returns—year after year—every year you are in business. So, plan now and consider everything from choice of entity to hiring your children.

Tax reform always sounds great. For example, the 1986 Tax Reform Act dropped the top tax rate from 50 percent to 28 percent. That sounded great. But this tax reform also reduced the after-tax rate of return on a real estate investment by 60 percent. If you were making a 20 percent return on your rental before the reform, you were making 8 percent afterwards. Students of this tax law sold their properties before the nonstudents heard about this cut in profits.

Current law deletes the federal estate tax in 2010 and then reinstates it at higher rates in 2011. The year 2010, when there is no estate tax, contains its own unique planning requirements. If you are concerned about taking care of your loved ones and protecting what you have worked so hard to build, free your mind of a major worry by getting your federal estate plan in order.