Korene's Blog

. . .YOU WILL GET WHAT YOU PURCHASE

Many of the things that has allowed America to become a world power, to become the champion of freedom, to be where you can have what you work to achieve without regard to who and what your family or parents had . . .  Those things have CHANGED.  From March, 2008 until November, 2008, Mr. Obama promised he would bring change to America.  Well America, you got what you asked for.  He has kept his promises.   You will pass along a debt load to your children and your grandchildren and their children that is unheard of in the civilized world.  We have Czars.  You will work more than 60% of the time to pay taxes and interest on the debt that just keeps climbing. 

The Largest Tax Hikes in History

In less than six months, the largest tax hikes in the history of America will take effect. They will hit families and small businesses in three great waves on January 1, 2011:

First Wave: Expiration of 2001 and 2003 Tax Relief

In 2001 and 2003, the GOP Congress enacted several tax cuts for investors, small business owners, and families. These will all expire on January 1, 2011:

Personal income tax rates will rise. The top income tax rate will rise from 35 to 39.6 percent (this is also the rate at which two-thirds of small business profits are taxed). The lowest rate will rise from 10 to 15 percent. All the rates in between will also rise. Itemized deductions and personal exemptions will again phase out, which has the same mathematical effect as higher marginal tax rates. The full list of marginal rate hikes is below:

- The 10% bracket rises to an expanded 15%
- The 25% bracket rises to 28%
- The 28% bracket rises to 31%
- The 33% bracket rises to 36%
- The 35% bracket rises to 39.6%

Higher taxes on marriage and family. The “marriage penalty” (narrower tax brackets for married couples) will return from the first dollar of income. The child tax credit will be cut in half from $1000 to $500 per child. The standard deduction will no longer be doubled for married couples relative to the single level. The dependent care and adoption tax credits will be cut.

The return of the Death Tax. This year, there is no death tax. For those dying on or after January 1 2011, there is a 55 percent top death tax rate on estates over $1 million. A person leaving behind two homes and a retirement account could easily pass along a death tax bill to their loved ones.

Higher tax rates on savers and investors. The capital gains tax will rise from 15 percent this year to 20 percent in 2011. The dividends tax will rise from 15 percent this year to 39.6 percent in 2011. These rates will rise another 3.8 percent in 2013.

Second Wave: Obamacare

There are over twenty new or higher taxes in Obamacare. Several will first go into effect on January 1, 2011. They include:

The Tanning Tax. This went into effect on July 1st of this year. It imposes a new, 10% excise tax on getting a tan at a tanning salon. There is no exemption for tanners making less than $250,000 per year.

The “Medicine Cabinet Tax” Thanks to Obamacare, Americans will no longer be able to use health savings account (HSA), flexible spending account (FSA), or health reimbursement (HRA) pre-tax dollars to purchase non-prescription, over-the-counter medicines (except insulin).

The HSA Withdrawal Tax Hike. This provision of Obamacare increases the additional tax on non-medical early withdrawals from an HSA from 10 to 20 percent, disadvantaging them relative to IRAs and other tax-advantaged accounts, which remain at 10 percent.

Brand Name Drug Tax. Starting next year, there will be a multi-billion dollar tax assessment imposed on name-brand drug manufacturers. This tax, like all excise taxes, will raise the price of medicine, hurting everyone.

Economic Substance Doctrine. The IRS is now empowered to disallow perfectly-legal tax deductions and maneuvers merely because it judges that the deduction or action lacks “economic substance.” This is obviously an arbitrary empowerment of IRS agents.

Employer Reporting of Health Insurance Costs on a W-2. This will start for W-2s in the 2011 tax year. While not a tax increase in itself, it makes it very easy for Congress to tax employer-provided healthcare benefits later.

Third Wave: The Alternative Minimum Tax and Employer Tax Hikes

When Americans prepare to file their tax returns in January of 2011, they’ll be in for a nasty surprise—the AMT won’t be held harmless, and many tax relief provisions will have expired. These major items include:

The AMT will ensnare over 28 million families, up from 4 million last year. According to the left-leaning Tax Policy Center, Congress’ failure to index the AMT will lead to an explosion of AMT taxpaying families—rising from 4 million last year to 28.5 million. These families will have to calculate their tax burdens twice, and pay taxes at the higher level. The AMT was created in 1969 to ensnare a handful of taxpayers.

Small business expensing will be slashed and 50% expensing will disappear. Small businesses can normally expense (rather than slowly-deduct, or “depreciate”) equipment purchases up to $250,000. This will be cut all the way down to $25,000. Larger businesses can expense half of their purchases of equipment. In January of 2011, all of it will have to be “depreciated.”

Taxes will be raised on all types of businesses. There are literally scores of tax hikes on business that will take place. The biggest is the loss of the “research and experimentation tax credit,” but there are many, many others. Combining high marginal tax rates with the loss of this tax relief will cost jobs.

Tax Benefits for Education and Teaching Reduced. The deduction for tuition and fees will not be available. Tax credits for education will be limited. Teachers will no longer be able to deduct classroom expenses. Coverdell Education Savings Accounts will be cut. Employer-provided educational assistance is curtailed. The student loan interest deduction will be disallowed for hundreds of thousands of families.

Charitable Contributions from IRAs no longer allowed. Under current law, a retired person with an IRA can contribute up to $100,000 per year directly to a charity from their IRA. This contribution also counts toward an annual “required minimum distribution.” This ability will no longer be there.

You can read more at:

 http://atr.org/six-months-untilbr-largest-tax-hikes-a5171##ixzz0uiycomod

You can work to correct the "changes" that are destroying Armerica at the polls this summer and this fall by finding "citizen servants" to serve America and Americans.

Preparing your first résumé can be a daunting task: You have got little work history to share and you are unsure about what else you need to include. Ultimately, it is important to convey your skills and eagerness to land your first job to employers, say experts. Most employers will not expect you to be an expert and are just looking for a concisely written one-page sheet that accurately shows off your skills and potential.

Putting together a résumé can take longer than you think. Make sure to gather appropriate materials.  It may take several days or weeks to think about the message you are trying to convey. "Résumé writing is so much more than just a listing of information," says Wendy Enelow, author of "College Grad Résumés to Land $75,000+ Jobs."

Here are seven things to keep in mind before putting together your first résumé:

1. Try an info-gathering activity
Before writing your résumé, boil down each of your previous job experiences or school projects to a few keywords, suggests Sherry Mirshahi, president of Interview Roadmap and career expert. Use these keywords to help you summarize your skills at the beginning of your résumé. Grads "should pick up to 10 keywords to feature under after their first section of their résumé - typically, this will be the Education section for new grads," she says. Understanding your skills can also help you sell yourself better during an interview.

2. Focus on accomplishments
Describing your previous work or internship responsibilities is useful, but employers are more interested in understanding what you've been able to accomplish at each job. Instead of writing "File documents for office manager" mention that you were "able to do this in half the time typically required for this type of task," Mirshahi says. "New graduates must learn to add in more details and explain the context in which they completed their tasks to show how they added value." 

3. List info about related coursework
While your Writing 101 course isn't something that will help your résumé standout, adding in information about special coursework or long-term projects that are related to your field can help you impress employers.

"If they had to write a major paper that is in some way related to the job they want, they can give a summary of it," Mirshahi suggests.

4. Avoid a one-size-fits-all résumé
Instead of creating only one résumé to send out to employers, make sure that you can tailor the experience portion to specific positions and plan to write a few versions. "A certain job may place great emphasis on requiring past volunteer experience. Ordinarily, one wouldn't list this type of experience near the top part of the résumé," Mirshahi says. "A new graduate would want to highlight it by including it as one of the bullet points after the Objective or Career Summary section."

5. Make it relevant
While you're thinking about what you'd like to share in your résumé, it's important to narrow down the aspects of your professional life that can truly help you land a job. "No one cares about middle school," Enelow says.

6. Understand the goal
"The true purpose of a résumé...is marketing - pure and simple," Enelow says. "Job seekers have a product to sell - themselves - and they have to effectively package, position and merchandise that product to attract the right buying audience." As you think about each part of your résumé, it's important to see how it fits into the larger message that you're looking to send to employers.

7. Think about contact information
While many résumés list an e-mail, phone number and address, it's important not to overload the hiring manager with too many alternate phone numbers and to keep your identity safe if you're applying for jobs online. "I generally recommend that students omit their mailing addresses since so much of their search will be online and they want to avoid any potential identity theft," Enelow says. "Only time to leave an address on is if you want to stay local so that people can see you're already there and relocation will not be an issue."

Good hunting and Good Look!

WOW big news, OUTLOOK for BLACKBERRY this is what I have been looking for.

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Do you have an effective way to process and organize your e-mail so that you can get to an empty Inbox on a routine basis? If you have lots of e-mail in your Inbox—I receive as many as 7,000 to 15,000 messages daily depending on the calendar and events on going—you might want to rethink your processing methods. Really, it is possible to empty your Inbox. I use this method and empty my inbox almost every day.  The key is to evaluate how you are processing and organizing your e-mail and make some changes.

No doubt you have opened an e-mail and thought, "Hmmm, not sure what to do with this. I'll deal with it later!"—and promptly closed the message. If you do this over and over again, it doesn't take long to end up with several hundred (or thousand) messages in your Inbox.

Developing a new approach to processing your Inbox will help you to gain more control, improve your response time, and keep up with critical actions and due dates.

This article will cover 4 key factors that will help you process your e-mail more efficiently.

1. Set up a simple and effective e-mail reference system

The first step toward an organized Inbox is understanding the difference between reference information and action information.

• Reference information is information that is not required to complete an action; it is information that you want to keep in case you need it later.

• Action information is information you must have to complete an action.

Most people receive a considerable amount of reference information through e-mail. Sometimes as much as one-third of your e-mail is reference information. So it is essential to have a system that makes it easy to transfer messages from your Inbox into your e-mail reference system. An E-mail Reference System is a series of e-mail file folders where you store reference information to ensure you have easy access to it later. Learn more about setting up an E-mail Reference System. Once you take care of filing your reference information, you can use the next three steps to handle e-mail you have to do something with, your action information.

2. Schedule uninterrupted time to process and organize e-mail

How many interruptions do you get every each day? It's nearly impossible to complete anything when you allow constant interruptions from the phone, people stopping by your office, and instant messaging. So it's critical that you set aside uninterrupted time to process and organize your e-mail.

Many e-mail messages require you to make a decision. Good decisions require focus, and focus requires uninterrupted attention. You need to establish a regular time each day to process your e-mail so that you can empty your Inbox. Of course, you can scan your e-mail during the day for urgent messages or requests from your boss.

Book yourself a recurring appointment for an hour a day to process e-mail, and mark it as "busy." During this time don't answer the phone or take interruptions, and work only on processing your Inbox.

At first, keeping these appointments will take discipline, but over time the discipline becomes habit. And once you get to zero e-mail in your Inbox, you'll see the value of this one hour a day and you'll stick to it like glue.

3. Process one item at a time, starting at the top

When you sit down to process your e-mail, the first step is to sort it by the order in which you want to process it. For example, you can filter by date, subject, or who the e-mail is from. In Outlook, click the Arranged By: box at the top of your Inbox and click how you want to arrange your e-mail.

Filter your e-mail by a number of different options.

Tip:  If you use Outlook, enable the preview pane so that you can view your messages without having to open them. To enable the preview pane, on the View menu, click AutoPreview.

Resist the temptation to jump around in your Inbox in no particular order. Begin processing the message at the top of your Inbox and only move to the second one after you've handled the first. This can be hard at first when you might have thousands of messages in your Inbox. But as you reduce the number of messages over a few sessions, eventually you'll get to the point where you can process the 60-100 messages you get every day and get your Inbox down to zero every day.

4. Use the "Four D's for Decision Making" model

The "Four D's for Decision Making" model (4 D's) is a valuable tool for processing e-mail, helping you to quickly decide what action to take with each item and how to remove it from the Inbox.

Decide what to do with each and every message

How many times have you opened, reviewed, and closed the same e-mail message over and over? Some of those messages are getting lots of attention but very little action. It is better to handle each e-mail message only once before taking action—which means you have to make a decision as to what to do with it and where to put it. Under the 4 D's model, you have four choices:

1. Delete it

2. Do it

3. Delegate it

4. Defer it

DELETE IT

Generally you can delete about half of all the e-mail you get. But some of you shudder when you hear "delete." You're hesitant to delete messages for fear you might need them at some point. That's understandable, but ask yourself honestly: What percentage of information that you keep do you actually use?

If you do use a large percentage of what you keep, then what you're doing is working. But many of you are keeping a lot more than you use. Here are some questions to ask yourself to help you decide what to delete:

1. Does the message relate to a meaningful objective you're currently working on? If not, you can probably delete it. Why hang on to information that doesn't relate to your main focus?

2. Does the message contain information you can find elsewhere? If so, delete it.

3. Does the message contain information that you will refer to within the next six months? If not, delete it.

4. Does the message contain information that you're required to keep? If not, delete it.

DO IT (in less than two minutes)

If you can't DELETE IT, then decide, "What specific action do I need to take?" and "Can I DO IT in less than two minutes?" If you can, just DO IT.

There is no point in filing an e-mail or closing an e-mail if you can complete it in less than 2 minutes. Try it out?see how much mail you can process in less than 2 minutes. I think you will be extremely surprised and happy with the results. You could file the message, you could respond to the message, or you could make a phone call. You can probably handle about one third of your e-mail messages in less than two minutes.

DELEGATE IT

If you cannot DELETE IT or DO IT in two minutes or less, can you DELEGATE IT?

If you can delegate it, do it right away. You should be able to compose and send the delegating message in about two minutes. Once you delegate the action, delete the original message or move it into your e-mail reference system.

DEFER IT

If you cannot DELETE IT, DO IT in less than two minutes, or DELEGATE IT, then the action required is something that only you can accomplish and that will take more than two minutes. Because this is your dedicated e-mail processing time, you need to DEFER IT and deal with it after you are done processing your e-mail. You’ll probably find that about 10 percent of your e-mail messages have to be deferred.

There are two things you can do to defer a message: turn it into an actionable task or turn it into an appointment. When you're using Outlook, you can DEFER e-mails with actions by dragging the message onto your Task List to turn it into a task. Name the task to clearly state what action is required so that you don't have to reopen the e-mail message. The result is a clearly defined list of actions in your task list that you can prioritize and schedule to complete on your Calendar. Or you can turn the message into a meeting request by dragging it onto your Calendar.

Do it daily

Using the 4 D's model on a daily basis makes it easier to handle a large quantity of e-mail. Our experience shows that on average, people can process about 100 e-mail messages an hour. If you receive 40 to 100 messages per day, all you need is one hour of uninterrupted e-mail processing time to get through your Inbox. Our statistics show that of the e-mail you receive:

• 65 percent can be deleted or filed

• 20 percent can be delegated or completed in less than 2 minutes

• 15 percent can be deferred to your Task List or Calendar to complete later

Of course, if you have a backlog of hundreds of messages, it will take time to get to the point where your daily routine keeps you up to date. It's important to get that backlog down, so I would suggest setting chunks of time aside to work through it. Then you can really enjoy processing your messages every day using the 4 D's.

2010 is to be known as the year of the short sale stated by many in the know and is a great way to save you from foreclosure but be very aware of so called short sale investors who claim to be your friend. Many times they are just looking out for there best interests to make some $$$ on your property.

Here is how the scam works: You list your property with a realtor (friend of the investor) who says he has a investor who will buy your property for a low price after all the foreclosure act of 2007 says you can write off the amount the lender losses. WRONG! Please check with YOUR CPA or attorney. There are a lot of circumstances were this debt will noy be forgiven and you will owe taxes on the amount the lender lost.

In other words lets say you owe $250,000 on a property and you take a offer on your home from a investor for 150,000 and the lender takes 100,000 loss you could be taxed 100,000 as earned income in the right (wrong) circumstances.

If you sold the property to a regular client for 200,000k and the bank only lost 50,000 then you would be taxed on 50,0000 as earned income.

Many of these so called Real Estate Investors are broke, broke, broke did a mention they are broke!! They use a lenders money for 1 day called transactional funding and pay usually 1 or 2 points to the lender for the use of that money for a few hours to sell your home by doing what they call a A to B closing then B to C closing on the same day to a end investor ( a flip) usually putting large profits in there pocket and meanwhile leaving you with a large Tax Bill from uncle Sam.

That's not to say that all real estate investors are bad if your house needs a lot of repairs and the investor purchases it and does some work then sells it a few weeks or month later and makes a profit nothing wrong with that just be careful of the same day flips as you may find a hefty tax bill that you could have cut in half as many times another realtor is bringing that end buyer to your property .There are a lot of advantages to doing a short sale and always list your home with a quality realtor who can sell your home to the end investor without using one of these so called Real Estate Investors if your home is in great condition.

We are experts in mortgage banking and mortgages, short sales and there are many new procedures that came out in April dealing with short sales. If you or a friend is thinking about doing a short sale on your home contact us and we can help you with your decision by referring you to the best experts for your situation.