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Stephen L. Nelson, CPA Profile and Articles
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1). Determining How Much Life Insurance You Need
When considering life insurance, you’re planning and preparing for an event most of us would rather not think about. But life insurance represents a critical step in managing your personal finances and ensuring your family’s well-being.
The Two Approaches to Life Insurance
You can use one of two approaches to estimate how much life insurance you should buy: the needs approach or the replacement-income approach.
2). Eight Rules for Saving Money When You Buy Insurance
By following the eight rules explained here, you can save money, and just as important, you can save yourself from making serious mistakes when you shop for and acquire insurance policies.
Rule 1: Buy Insurance Only for Financial Risks You Can’t Afford to Bear on Your Own
The purpose of insurance is to cover catastrophes that would devastate you or your family.
3). How to Avoid Dumb Investment Mistakes
Smart people sometimes make dumb mistakes when it comes to investing. Part of the reason for this, I guess, is that most people don’t have the time to learn what they need to know to make good decisions. Another reason is that oftentimes when you make a dumb mistake, somebody else—an investment salesperson, for example—makes money. Fortunately, you can save yourself lots of money and a bunch of headaches by not making bad investment decisions.
4). How to Save Money on Credit Cards: 8 Easy Tips
Holiday shopping overloaded your credit cards? Worried about the finance charges you’ll soon start paying? Fortunately, you can use a bunch of different tactics to save money on credit cards. Some suggestions follow:
Leave Home without It
If you’re like most people, you spend more money if you carry a credit card around. Some studies show that credit card holders spend 23 percent more on average even if they don’t carry a balance on the credit cards.
5). When IRAs, 401(k)s, and Other Tax-sheltered Investments Don’t Make Sense
Every year about this time, people start talking about and considering things like IRA contributions. Most of the time, tax-sheltered investments make great sense. The federal and state governments have designed their tax laws to encourage such savings. However, that said, there are three situations in which it may be a poor idea to use tax-sheltered.
6). Heath Savings Accounts (HSAs) Mean Big Tax Savings
Concerned about the high cost of healthcare? Worried that your insurance doesn’t cover all your costs? Fortunately, a partial solution may be just around the corner. Since January 2004, taxpayers have had a tax savings tool called Health Savings Accounts, or HSAs. These HSAs may solve many of your healthcare cost problems.
How an HSA Works
In a nutshell, HSAs work like this.
7). Read This If You Can’t Possibly Save Enough for Retirement
It’s relatively easy to save for retirement when you’re still young. Five thousand dollars set aside for a new baby grows to an amount that generates over a $100,000 a year in current-day dollars if the money earns 12 percent annually and inflation runs at 3 percent.
NOTE The data is a little sketchy, but small-company stocks probably deliver average returns of around 12 to 13 percent over long periods of time.
8). Free Money for Your Retirement?
It can be more than a little discouraging to start making retirement planning calculations. You’ll usually find that to achieve the annual retirement income you want, you need to be saving a lot more than is practical.
Suppose, for example, that you use a program like Quicken or Microsoft Money to determine that your retirement savings should equal to $5,200 a year—which is the same as $450 a month.
9). Choosing and Using Credit Cards
Credit cards are convenient, but they’re also dangerous. A lot of people ruin their financial lives by turning the phrase “charge it” into a reflex. It’s a real problem, but this article explains how to make good use of credit cards and how to choose a good credit card. This information, by the way, applies both to using a credit card for personal expenses and to using a credit card for business expenses.
10). How to Save Thousands with an S Corporation
How to Save Taxes with an S Corporation
Ever wondered why so many small businesses—more than 3,000,000 at last count—operate as an S corporation? Simple. An S corporation saves business owners big taxes in three separate ways:
First, as compared to regular corporations (sometimes called C corporations), S corporation owners can use the business’s losses incurred during the early lean years on the owner’s personal returns as deductions.
11). A CPA Talks About Buying Life Insurance
Not everyone needs life insurance. The first thing to do is make sure you need it. Life insurance is really meant for your family members or other dependents who rely on your earnings.
Why You Buy Life Insurance
You buy life insurance so that, if you die, your dependents can live the same kind of life they live now. Strictly speaking, then, life insurance is only a means of replacing your earnings in your absence.
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