101 Tax Loopholes for the Middle Class: A Tax Accountant's Guide to Hidden Tax-Saving Strategies

Book Description

The most common complaint of middle-income taxpayers is that the tax system favors the rich. Sean M. Smith, an experienced tax accountant, knows better. In this easy-to-use handbook, he presents everything taxpayers need to know to get the tax breaks they have earned.

In a clear, clutter-free format organized by tax-savings goals and including examples, planning pointers, and checklists, 101 Tax Loopholes for the Middle Class outlines specific, legal tax avoidance and deferral strategies, spelling out loopholes for a variety of tax circumstances. Smith offers valuable tips for every stage of life, from withholding and estimated tax loopholes to maximize a paycheck, to retirement plan and estate planning loopholes to maximize future returns. Homeowners and investors, wage earners and the self-employed, small-business owners and part-time staffers can all pocket a profit with these little-known techniques. Smith even includes tricks of the trade for surviving an IRS audit.

Up-to-date, with 1997 tax law changes, 101 Tax Loopholes for the Middle Class won't make paying taxes fun, but it can literally make the experience more rewarding.

Customer Reviews:

Change your point of view.......1999-01-05

The value of this books lies in the author's frequent assertion that you are not 'avoiding taxes' or 'cheating the IRS'... because there are PLENTY of tax breaks written into the tax code that are legal and only have to be asked for; so ask! Many are best used by small businesses which are incorporated, but others apply to everyone. He has many travel deduction strategies which make most of a trip deductible.

Fun, wicked book about how to legally reduce your taxes!.......1998-02-06

I read the parts of this book that related to me...mutual funds,etc. Then I browsed through other parts. The examples make each point clear and are often humorous. There are lots of ways to keep taxes much lower through planning ahead of time. This book makes it fun to make those plans.

Amazon.com

Some 10 million Americans use full-commission stockbrokers today--and most of them are overpaying for under performance, writes analyst John G. Wells in Kiss Your Stockbroker Goodbye: A Guide to Independent Investing. However, Wells argues, a series of widely accessible alternatives now makes it easier to forego this always costly and often ineffectual investment route. He outlines the steps needed, and the resources available, to all investors who would rather serve as their own brokers.

Book Description

It's a personal-finance mutiny: record numbers of individual investors are taking their portfolios into their own hands. Now that ordinary citizens can easily access investment information and trade shares, the magic wisdom of a broker is becoming an outdated myth. In this brilliant call to arms, John G. Wells exposes the truth: most brokers don't even match the average return of the stock market.

Wells's clear, accessible advice takes the mystery out of buying stocks and provides a detailed plan of action. For beginning and experienced investors alike, Wells simplifies the process and introduces all the tools needed to execute your own investment activities with tips such as:How to find and work with discount brokers Where to find the most reliable information, including hundreds of print and electronic sources Who to ask when you need advice, how much they'll charge, and why their advice will be less biased than a broker's A detailed directory of financial products and services A sound, easy-to-implement system for selecting stocks, bonds, and mutual funds Kiss Your Stockbroker Goodbye finally puts your finances in the hands of the one person who has a totally vested interest in your success: you.

Kiss Your Stockbroker Goodbye: A Guide to Independent Investing

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Kiss Your Stockbroker Goodbye: A Guide to Independent Investing
Wells John G.
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OT9QC0

Book Description

Almost everyone with a little extra income makes an occasional donation. Yet, most people know little about effective giving. This informal guide by an expert on the subject helps the reader make intelligent decisions on spending one's charitable dollars effectively.

Customer Reviews:

An excellent, informal guide to financial decision making........2000-09-07

In Giving Away Your Money: A Guide To Effective Philanthropy, Raquel Newman draws upon her many years of experience with non-profit organizations as a funding solicitor and as a dispenser of grants and awards to provide the reader with a quick and accessible orientation to philanthropy in the United states. This highly recommended and informal guide to making intelligent financial decisions about donating to non-profit organizations will insure that anyone having a little extra money to give to a worthy cause or charity will be able to do so with confidence and an enhanced sense of fulfillment that accompanies sound philanthropy and charitable giving.

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GIVING YOUR MONEY AWAY
DANNY SIEGEL
Manufacturer: THE TOWNHOUSE PRESS
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 0940653516

Product Description

PAPERBACK IN V GOOD COND W/ BKSTORE STAMP ON FIRST PAGE-- SHIPPED WITH CONF TRACKING 469

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How To Be Happy Giving Your Money Away
E. M. Clark
Manufacturer: Privately Printed
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000O395RW

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How to Be Happy Giving Your Money Away

ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000IAPGCE

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How to be Happy Giving Your Money Away
E.M. Clark
Manufacturer: self Published
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000K0FFEG

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How to be Happy Giving Your Money Away
E. M. Clark
Manufacturer: Unknown
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000RHZC5E

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How to be happy giving your money away
E. M Clark
Manufacturer: Clark
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000U2I0O6

Book Description

How To Buy Used And Bruised Houses For Fast Profits! provides detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to find, inspect, negotiate, buy, fix and resell single-family houses for maximum profit. You also get all of the ready-to-use checklists, forms, letters and sample agreements that you need in order to be a profitable investor. In this to-the-point book, you get the exact lowdown on how you can profit from dirty, neglected, run-down used and bruised houses that you can find right in your own backyard!

In How To Buy Used And Bruised Houses For Fast Profits!, you'll learn:

1. Why you should avoid buying most so-called handyman specials and fixer-upper properties that are advertised in the Sunday newspaper.
2. The critical difference between a used and bruised house and a handyman special.
3. How to give a house an industrial cleaning and cosmetic facelift to maximize its curb appeal and resale value.
4. What you must look for when doing a pre-buy property inspection so that you don't get snookered into buying a money-pit.
5. Why it's best to avoid real estate agents and instead buy directly from motivated sellers looking for a fast sale.
6. How to use the delayed closing technique to control a house for up to seventy days without having to make a loan payment.
7. The buyer protection clauses that you must include in your purchase agreements to protect your interests during the transaction.
8. Why you must only buy used and bruised houses from motivated sellers who want to sell worse than you want to buy.
9. How to find motivated sellers who are willing to sell on buyer-friendly terms with seller financed loans.
10. How To perform a pre-buy property analysis so that you never overpay for property.

How To Buy Used And Bruised Houses For Fast Profits!, comes complete with the following ready-to-use worksheets, letters, checklists and agreements:

1. Fourteen Property Inspection Checklists.

2. Real Estate Purchase Agreement.

3. Real Estate Sales Agreement.

4. House Locator Worksheet.

5. Letter Of Proposal To Purchase Real Estate.

6. Seller Disclosure Statement.

7. Real Estate Agent Sales Agreement.

8. Comparable House Worksheet.

9. Buyers Call Worksheet.

10. Proposal And Contract For Repairs.

11. Touch-Up Expense Worksheet.

12. Request For Mortgage Payoff Discount Letter.

Customer Reviews:

cuts to the chase.......2007-03-09

Lucier is a no nonsense get down to business and a breath of fresh air in this book category.

How to Buy Used and Bruised Houses for Fast Profits

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How to Buy Used and Bruised Houses for Fast Profits

Manufacturer: Real Estate Pubns
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Investments | Real Estate | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0961810300

Amazon.com

When he was 16, Stan Getz was touring with Jack Teagarden. He won his first Down Beat reader's poll when he was 23. In the early 1960s, he helped inaugurate the bossa nova craze with his recordings of "Desafinado" and &quotThe Girl from Ipanema." But there were times when he was nearly as well known for his messy personal life as his beautiful musicianship. A long-time abuser of drugs and alcohol, he was a notorious philanderer who beat his wife. Somehow, he managed to age gracefully. "The thing I will always be proud of is this," he told the New York Times not long before he died of cancer in 1991, "toward the end of my life, I became what I always should have been--a decent gentleman."

Book Description

Stan Getz's prodigiously prolific musical career encompassed the tumultuous eras of big band, swing, be-bop, and free jazz. Though he is most famous for "The Girl from Ipanema," Getz's extraordinary talent established him in the pantheon of jazz greats. His legendary career is all the more impressive given the excesses of his personal life: He was a heroin addict until age twenty-seven; later, a violent alcoholic. Furiously self-destructive, Getz wasn't expected to outlive the 1950s, yet he continued to create beautiful music for forty more years, achieving sobriety five years before succumbing to cancer in 1991. With rich portraits of both the master and those he influenced--such giants as Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis--Stan Getz: A Life in Jazz masterfully captures a dynamic era in music, with the artistic genius, triumphs, and tragedies of Stan Getz at its center.

Customer Reviews:

warts and all.......2004-09-21

Am two thirds into this heavy tome... Why am I reading it? Because Getz was some kind of sax playing genius, in my opinion...and we always wonder what our favorite artists were like away from the stage. Well, sadly (& maybe not so sadly, depends how you look at it), you get it here.

The trick is, once you have put the book away, to forget the negative and return to the music, appreciate the artist's art. Not always easy to do--but we do it. His art endures. You just wish he and his first wife (both junkies at one time) had been better parents to their kids, etc.

So then, was Getz a total lost cause? Of course not. He had his decent side--although when messed up on booze and/or drugs he was not pleasant to be around, to put it mildly.

Guy had demons, to be sure. Am talking about suicide attempts and depression. But then, how many of us haven't gone through a thing or two? It happens.

Don't know if this can be called the definitive bio on Stan the Man, but it is certainly worth reading.

Be warned, though, the last third is a heartbreaker. Just finished reading the entire thing. I'd like to give this tome 4 stars, instead of the three shown above, but (for some reason) amazon doesn't make it possible to change the rating.

I'm glad this biography was written.

read it for getz's life, not his art........2001-08-16

I read this a few years back, and it was brutal to get through, black clouds of depression lurking on every page. This is actually by way of saying that Maggin did his job well, although it couldn't have been much fun. There is account after account of a phenonenomally gifted yet self-absorbed monster who lived in a world of rationalization and evidently felt his talent justified doing unspeakable things to people (which, of course only means doing the same to oneself). You find yourself, as reader, torn: On one hand, one feels sympathy for one of the great musicians of our time who literally grew up on the road with no parental discipline (he started out, for example, at 15 with Jack Teagarden, a great player and undoubtedly a father figure to Getz, but also a notorious lush)who had to grow up fast and couldn't quite handle it. On the other, there's the aforementioned devil that the substances either created or, more likely, merely brought out. By the time Getz sincerely tried to mend his ways (a terminal illness will do it every time)the train had long left the station leaving much emotional wreckage in its wake.

But as with Charlie Parker, also widely reported to be a less-than-admirable person, we care about the art, and want to remember that. Sadly, this is where Maggin fails. He really means well, but his musical insights and prose style on the subject are, frankly, clumsy and less than helpful. He gropes for, but does not find Getz the musician or why he is so beloved. It's really simple: Getz was a fountain of melodic beauty, even as he swung his tail off. Improvising melodically sounds easy, but is one of the hardest things to do. Plus, his sound was a miracle--a force of nature. This is what puts Getz in the rarified category of accessible musical genius that includes very few others, Parker, Armstrong, Baker, Farmer and Davis among them. Maggin also even gets musicians' names wrong, a definite no-no.

Fortunately, Getz's music speaks for itself loud and clear. Perhaps someone will write the critical work Getz's enormous corpus of work deserves. Hopefully it will be a musician (we have a bad rap for being inarticulate and illiterate for some weird reason) However, Maggin deserves credit for his unflinching portrait of a complicated, at times loathsome man who nonetheless was chosen to be a conduit for some of the most rapturous and beautiful music this world has known.

I would like to translate it to Swedish.......1999-02-20

Being a recognized translator and a Stan Getz fan, I would like to translate the book to Swedish. At the same time I am aware of the fact that certain aspects concerns an important family in Sweden, i.e. Silfverskiold. Anyway, Maggins book is of too great importance to be ignored and Stan Getz is a legend...

Lester gave him the banner and he ran with it.......1998-02-23

As far back as I can recall, Stan Getz had always been my personal favorite jazz musician of all time. Blessed with an incredible musical memory - you just have to listen to the amount of quotes he would use during the course of a solo - he was able to render some of the most obscure lines from popular music to jazz lines to Jewish anthems. His personal sound was readily identifiable, pure,wholesome and wondrously beautiful and never filtered with sentimentality. When you heard a Getz solo there was never any mistake who was playing. Lester Young flowed through him and initially set the mold to this master jazz musician. Stan Getz carried the banner from Lester and ran with it.This book covers much of Stan Getz and his musical as well as personal life. Behind his playing was a torturous life hampered by drugs, alcohol, severe depression and anger. You would never have known this about the man after spending years of following and listening to the progressions of his performing art. Unlike the Chet Baker book this book chronologically follows his music as well as the events in his personal life. I found it inspiring to read about various recording sessions and all that was happening in his life at the time. All this while following it, by listening to the particular recording mentioned. He was a perfectionist and achieved it most of the time. If he felt his playing not to be at par this depressed him and would sadly result in dissonance for him and his family. He thought he needed to be stoned to play better. The irony is that he was throughout much of his life. Maggin mentions the many times when Stan would be inspired, either by another musician or a piece of music, that his playing would suddenly ignite and reach incredible levels of Art. I, for one, have on many occasions,witnessed such performances by him.This again brings up the question that has bothered me as a very devoted jazz follower: In order for the music to become a pure art, must it have flowed through the artist through suffering and artificially altering his senses with drugs and alcohol? Further, are the jazz musicians of today too antiseptic to ever achieve pure estheticism? These are troubling thoughts and often lends me to think that it may be impossible to truly create in a totally sober environment. True, the music can be technically brilliant, intricate and interesting, but would it be Getz,Parker, Monk, Baker, Davis or Coltrane?The book is very well written by Maggin and covers the career of Stan Getz thoroughly. Maggin has struck a delicate balance between the music, life and times of Getz. The nurturing, friendships and relationships of the musicians who began playing, developing and expanding with his various musical groups are clarified throughout the book. This book is an indispensable guide for anyone that has followed any of the aspects of Stan Getz the musician and the man.

Hard to put down........1998-02-13

I am so fed up with jazz biographies and histories loaded with racial politics. Maggin's book is such a breath of fresh air in that regard. Through this fascinating biography, you learn how collaborative jazz has long been between the races as Getz comfortably performed with white and black musicians. It definitely needs a discography. But given the amount of work Maggin put into detailing Getz's life, he was probably too worn out to tackle a discography. Great book.

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Stan Getz a Life in Jazz
Donald L. Maggin
Manufacturer: Quill
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000LCNQF8

Customer Reviews:

Reads like an Older, Comical James Bond! Must Read........2005-11-23

This book is a thrilling journey into the life of a volunteer spy into the Mossad. You almost have to read pages twice after reading what happens because it's crazy and funny. Howard Schack lends a very comical tone throughtout especially during the times he gets into scrapes. For example when he gets caught in Saudi Arabia for snapping photos of a military equipment. Mr. Schack, because of his real life construction company, manages to get info into one very big place towards the end. This reads like a real life Alias show with 2 layers of ordinary mundane (Son: Dad, why did you grow a beard? Schack: Because I'm a spy for Israel. Son: Riiight, Dad!) to flying in vintage airplanes w/Arab leaders over military sites. A definite must read!

I Can't Believe He Hasn't Been Assassinated!.......2001-09-26

This was one of the most interesting books I ever read. Even though he has changed the names of everyone, certainly all the people mentioned would recognize themselves and what fools have been made of them. I would think that they, and their governments, would all be out for revenge. This is really a tell-all book of spy methods. I am surprised that it isn't classified, and I would think that it might seriously compromise our own spies in the area of national security, unless spy methods have really changed a lot since that time, and all these methods have become obsolete. But I don't think so, as they mostly involve people skills. Nevertheless, I am thinking about writing a novel,a nd a lot of the information I was searching for was found here. An amazing, exciting book. Hard to put down. As it is out of print, I ordered it used through one of the used booksellers in Amazon.com. I recommend you do the smae. The book I received was in excellent condition, and I'm glad I read it.

An intelligent memoir about hitherto unrevealed intelligence.......1998-01-17

Espionage is commonly defined as "that part of the total intelligence designed for the surreptitious inspection of the activities of foreign countries to ascertain their strength and movements and to communicate such intelligence to the proper authorities. "If only for security purposes, all nations feel the need to discover, by their own concealed methods, the guarded secrets of others. Or as Winston Churchill once wittily remarked: "Sometimes liberty requires a bodyguard of lies." To establish the personality traits of the "ideal" spy central to the anatomy of espionage is obviously far from simple. A fine study of intelligence gathering catalogs, for example, some 10 traits the "good" intelligence agent must necessarily posess, in order to qualify for his precarious , oftimes life-threatening, assignment. Notable among them, an intelligence agent should be "discreet, have a passion for anonymity, and know how to keep his mouth shut, and preserve a secret. The most effective spy, Mr. Schack shows us is neither freak nor pschopath. He is rather, the 'citizenspy' who acts upon the incentive of enlightened patriotism and to whom deceit and intrigue are only temporary expedients that he knows how to keep under strict control. One such "citizen intelligence agent" was Howard Schack, a highly sucessful American engineer and with a worldwide reputation as a master builder of military installations around the globe. In his fascinating memoir, A Spy in Canaan, Mr. Schack explains his stake in the survival of Israel while serving for fifteen years with Israel's CIA, the Mossad.

A Spy in Canaan: My Secret Life As a Jewish-American Businessman Spying for Israel in Arab Lands

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A Spy in Canaan: My Secret Life As a Jewish-American Businessman Spying for Israel in Arab Lands
Howard H. Schack , and H. P. Jeffers
Manufacturer: Thorndike Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Intelligence & Espionage | Military | History | Subjects | Books

Jewish | Ethnic & National | Biographies & Memoirs | Subjects | Books

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