December, 2012
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Be Careful Of Fiscal Year Section 179 Issues!
Section 179 and bonus depreciation provisions are based upon a different set of dates for your asset purchases. Bonus depreciation on new equipment is based upon the date that you actually purchase and place in service the asset. For new assets bought between January 1, 2012 and December 31, 2012, you are entitled to use […]
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Farm Income Not Cash Rent!
Continuing our farm income averaging trend, we had a couple of readers ask if they could farm income average their cash rented ground. The short answer is no. In order to use farm income averaging, you must have “farm income” which is comprised primarily of the following items: Direct farm income from Schedule F, Flow-through […]
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Update on Farm Income Averaging
We did a post a few days ago on how farmers may not be affected by the increased tax rates for 2013 if they use farm income averaging. In that post, we used an example of spreading $1 million of farm income over four years, $250,000 in 2010-2013. An observant reader reminded us that a farmer […]
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One Week to Go Checklist
Since there is about one week to go in the year, we thought we would present a quick checklist for accounting and tax related items: Make sure that all checks for 2012 expenses are written and mailed by December 31 Make sure that any gifts made at year-end are deposited into the donee’s account before […]
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Merry Christmas!
Just want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas over the next couple of days. We are still hanging on the fiscal cliff and most likely nothing major will be accomplished before year-end. We will keep you posted, but for now Merry Christmas! Paul Neiffer CPA
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Farmers Might Delay Higher Tax Rates for Three Years?
With all the talk about the possible higher tax rates starting next year we sometimes forget that farmers might not feel much of the hit due to farm income averaging. This special method of figuring tax allows you to average your tax over four years (2010-2013). This means for 2013 you might be able to […]
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Annual Exclusion Update
I was talking with a reader from North Carolina today about our post from yesterday. He was not sure if the annual exclusion amount was or was not included in the lifetime. So, I have decided to do one more update on this subject. The first $13,000 ($14,000) of gifts that you give to everyone […]
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Annual Exclusion Does Not Eat Into Lifetime Exclusion.
We had a reader ask the following question: “Am I correct in that this accumulation of gifts during lifetime does not include those under the Annual Gift Tax Exclusion ($13,000)?” It seems like most of my posts lately deal with estate and gift taxes, but this is a very important subject and with the end […]
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What Does Unified Credit Mean?
We have gotten a few questions lately on how the lifetime gift and estate tax exclusion are tied together. In brief, transfers made during your lifetime are called gifts and reported on a gift tax return while transfers made at death are also a “gift”, but reported on an estate tax return. The gifts made during […]
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Another Nice Feature of a Living Trust
We have gotten some feedback on my previous post about revocable living trusts. One of the features of a living trust versus a will is that the trust can be set up to provide for “guardianship” of your affairs during your lifetime should you suddenly become disabled, etc. You can create other forms of documents that […]