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Would you like to buy a monkey?
Apr. 1st, 2004 02:44 pmWorking from home today, but so far have been completely involved in th' ol' personal financial fecal consolidation.
Discovered that I have been unwittingly making contributions to a 401(k)-like plan at work for some time. (Harvard's a non-profit institution, so it doesn't use a 401(k) proper, but it's close enough.) This is good (and explains why my W-2 gross income figures were smaller than I expected) but also dumb, since all that money is currently being invested in a feeble monkey market, ook ook. Have been hitting the Fool again for advice, and as always, their DO THIS, DUMMY-style advice is quite welcome. So I'll prolly shunt everything into long-term equity index thingies. Fidelity seems to have a nice Web interface for managing this stuff, so am happy.
Have been farting around with my TurboTax return. It doesn't look like I can dodge that fat self-employment tax... since my royalities come on a 1099-C, they have to be attached to something, and TT specifically mentions writing as an example of (taxable) self-employment.
So now I'm wondering about interesting deductions I can claim. Does the calendar for this go Jan1-Jan1, or Apr15-Apr15 (as it does with IRA-based figurings)? The actual question I'm asking is: Do I have 2 weeks left to find out if I can magically turn a new G5 into a write-off *write-off hand gesture*? (And if I can't do it for 2003, how about for 2004? Very interesting indeed.)
I phoned my parents to see if they knew the difference between a Roth IRA and, er, the other kind of IRA. They didn't, but my mom dug in to tell me of their latest financial scheme: they're seriously thinking about converting the Fairfield apartment house into condos, and then offering to sell me a unit, to teach me the ropes of property management (which, as I've said, I've felt no pull toward, but they really really want to get me into). The idea being that I'd let someone else rent it, while I'd manage it from afar, with my parents acting as local agents. They estimate its value at $70,000. (Ha ha, Maine. Good lord. The same space would cost at least three times as much, where I live.)
I admit (and admitted to them) that the idea has immediate attractiveness to me; it's Something New and Interesting, and Mom was big on selling the idea of Property as Writeoff Machine. But they need to make lots of decisions and then perhaps shuffle a lot of papers before any of that can happen, so it's only something for me to ruminate on, for today.
So now I'm wondering about interesting deductions I can claim. Does the calendar for this go Jan1-Jan1, or Apr15-Apr15 (as it does with IRA-based figurings)? The actual question I'm asking is: Do I have 2 weeks left to find out if I can magically turn a new G5 into a write-off *write-off hand gesture*? (And if I can't do it for 2003, how about for 2004? Very interesting indeed.)
I admit (and admitted to them) that the idea has immediate attractiveness to me; it's Something New and Interesting, and Mom was big on selling the idea of Property as Writeoff Machine. But they need to make lots of decisions and then perhaps shuffle a lot of papers before any of that can happen, so it's only something for me to ruminate on, for today.