Are you keeping money secrets from your spouse?
“I can’t figure out where all the money is going, and he refuses to tell me or keep records to show me where the spending is going. Why can’t he just tell me?”
Every year, millions of couples across the nation sit down with counselors to sort through issues, because let’s face it—we all have some issues. Broken trust and poor communication about money top the list of pressures that put a wedge between a husband and wife. Time and time again, one spouse will try to hide an out-of-control spending habit or try to fix it on their own, convincing themselves that the problem isn’t as big as it is. Anyone can give in to impulsive spending from time to time, but it’s often hard to realize or admit when it’s out of control.
Living in a lie is a trap that hurts you and those you love most. If you or your spouse have been hiding spending or debt, you can work through it. Just start now, work hard as a team and keep your head up. Taking responsibility for your actions is half the battle! Owning up to your mistakes with courage, humility and transparency will be a major step in the right direction. Decide ahead of time not to leave out any details or to try to make things sound better than they are.
Set a time to sit down with your spouse, and ask him or her not to respond until you are finished making your confession. Explain what has happened as honestly as you can. This is a good time to ask sincerely and humbly for forgiveness. Be prayerfully prepared for any potential response, because this may be quite a shock to your spouse. If you are the unsuspecting spouse getting news like this, respond with compassion and forgiveness, giving your spouse a safe place to share openly.
Often, when you are falling into addictive, destructive behavior, it’s about something deeper. Compulsive spending may have its roots in trying to escape from something, cope with deeper issues, or “medicate” another problem. Take a good hard look at what that could be and seek help in dealing with it.
When the crisis is over and wounds have healed, continue to seek your spouse’s counsel and be open with each other. Couples all too often make big financial decisions without talking first. It’s important to agree about major purchases, even when budgeting together, to build trust.
Working through any issue can be tough. Encourage each other, stay connected to people who lift you up, and keep your eye on the healing that’s taking place and the brighter future to come.
Discrete Information And Due Diligence For Business
Privately acquired information, considered privately, used without attribution to best ends… is an art form. This reality is vastly different from popular conceptions about “what is” intelligence.
By its nature intelligence does not grace the media in a readily discernable way, but rather reclines and observes what may be the symptoms of, or misconceptions concerning, the truth sought – and then acts discretely.
There are few who understand the value of those discrete and lawful means used to acquire raw data and human reporting. Concealed truth, misrepresented “facts”, as well as what may be the deciding factors of the perceptions, dispositions, and probable aims of those on whom you rely – are essential to diligence. Intelligence can be used in any period of assessment, decision-making, or to measure the affects of decisions made.
The pace, intensity, risks and rewards of globalization require a new level of diligence, and by default a refined means to acquire knowledge. Decision-maker dependence on the vast amount of (often contradictory) publically available information and desktop analysis by those living in a distant culture many times derail the decision making process from the start – by isolating the process from the realties of those you need to understand. What is missing is a private and direct line to the front line – where the realities of the people you must trust actually reside.
Publically available information is many-times misread, misunderstood, or patently false. The derailed processes about which we speak, the commercial failures, and other unfortunate events almost always stem from a lack of knowledge concerning what is “true” to the people important to you. True knowledge does not conceal the opportunities you seek – it reveals them. Knowledge is simply the alchemy between risk… and opportunity and – opportunity and risk.
Knowledge passed from local lips to local ears in a distant country will convey THE realities you need to hear, consider, and fashion to the benefit of all concerned. Knowledge is always vital to success.
If your aspirations, your assets and your liabilities lay outside of North America, you may wish to consider contacting. silentium.tene@gmail.com
Critical Information and Relationships
Every hour of every day countless men and women become involved in mutual courtship that is transnational and trans-cultural. Courting, or being courted by someone from and in a distant land and culture, can indeed hold the same promise, the same excitement, the same joys, and the same potential benefits as any marriage. It is obvious the Internet has made both the beauty and benefits of international courtship and marriage more available than in the past. A successful marriage, more precisely a successful International marriage, can provide blessings that are well beyond those envisioned.
It is commonplace however, for time, distance, and cultural differences to obscure both the knowledge and understandings that are fundamental to successful courtship. Sadly, it is not uncommon for critical information to be neglected, withheld, or even concealed, during courtship. Court systems globally are rife with litigation resulting from marriages which failed simply because not enough was actually “known” independently early on in the courtship.
Learning that the truth has been neglected, that you have been misled, or that you have been lied to after a time-consuming and expensive courtship can ruin your marriage, complicate your life, and have serious effects on your reputation, your work, your assets and all else that you hold dear. The effects can be devastating to a human life, your life.
With police calls for service, otherwise known as “911” calls, dominated by family disturbances, with restraining orders, criminal courts and civil litigation always available and always traumatic and costly; it pays to confirm or refute, or to somehow better understand the person who you may wish to marry – and to acquire this understanding discreetly, and independently. The stakes are high, very high. If, as a result of your relationship and our work you find the person you are courting, or being courted by, is everything you ever wanted in a man or woman – OUTSTANDING – you can now move forward more confidence than before.
For decades marriageinvestigations.com have worked globally in law enforcement, intelligence and business. It is not as if they have “visited” those countries in which they accept work – as in most cases they have worked in the country intensely, and or have lived there for years. marriageinvestigations.com works internationally every day, and have done so successfully for decades. In most matters they have all the requisite knowledge and associations to help you ensure your future. If not, they may still be able to fill your needs ASAP.
If your interest in speaking with them is sincere please revert to them via email at: management@marriageinvestigations.com, providing your name, address, and telephone number. They can then set a time to speak on the telephone. For those with significant interest, we welcome but do not require enquiries from legal counsel.
See the complete Youtube video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0kASY6Rl-E
Why You Should Keep Investing
Emotions can wreak havoc on an investor’s ability to build long-term wealth. This phenomenon is illustrated in the chart above. Over the period from 1988-2007, the average stock fund returned 11.6% annually, while the average stock fund investor earned only 4.5%.
Why did investors sacrifice nearly two-thirds of their potential return? Driven by emotions like fear and greed, they engaged in such negative behaviors as chasing the hot manager or asset class, avoiding areas of the market that were out of favor, attempting to time the market, or otherwise abandoning their investment plan.
Great investors throughout history have understood that building long-term wealth requires the ability to control one’s emotions and avoid self-destructive investor behavior.
History has taught that investors in stocks will always encounter crises and uncertainty, yet the market has continued to grow over the long term. The chart below highlights the myriad crises that faced investors over the past four decades, along with the performance of the S&P 500 Index over the same time period. Investors in the 1970s were faced with stagflation, rising energy prices and a stock market that plummeted 44% in two years.
Investors in the 1980s dealt with the collapse of the major Wall Street investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert and Black Monday, when the market crashed over 22% in one day. In the 1990s, investors had to weather the S&L Crisis, the failure and ultimate bailout of hedge fund Long Term Capital Management and the Asian financial crises.
Investors in the beginning of the 2000s experienced the bursting of the technology and telecom bubble, 9/11 and the advent of two wars. Today, investors are faced with the collapse of residential real estate prices, economic uncertainty and a turmoil in the financial services industry. Through all these crises, the long-term upward progress of the stock market has not been derailed.
Investors who bear in mind that the market has grown despite crises and uncertainty may be less likely to overreact when faced with these events, more likely to avoid making drastic changes to their investment plans and better positioned to benefit from the long-term growth potential of equities.
Is Microwork in Your Future??
The idea of breaking up a job into small pieces and then using the Internet to find workers to do those tasks was pioneered by LiveOps about a decade ago and Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk in 2005. LiveOps lets call-center workers sign on for shifts in 30-minute increments and then uses the Web to route calls to them. Mechanical Turk pays per task—often less than 50 cents—for quick jobs like checking Web pages for errors or transcribing audio recordings.
The trend, which goes by many names—crowdsourcing, the human cloud, microwork—uses the Internet to access workers around the world for short-term projects that pay a few bucks to hundreds of dollars per hour. The tasks might require a few minutes or a few days to complete. Benefits to companies include finding large numbers of workers to complete projects quickly, finding niche expertise, saving money, and making better use of in-house resources. It also lets Western workers, in places with a high cost of living, compete directly with those in developing markets. For many freelancers, microwork gives them unprecedented flexibility to work almost anywhere at any time.
Some microwork sites such as Tongal attract mostly U.S. workers while others such as Freelancer.com and Elance cater to a global audience. About $100 million worth of work was posted on Elance last year. Of the $24.5 million that online freelancers made on Elance in the third quarter of 2010, those from India had the biggest cumulative total, followed by workers in the U.S., Ukraine, Pakistan, and Russia. Freelancer.com primarily connects Western-world small businesses with labor in the developing world, says Chief Executive Officer Matt Barrie. A business can have a developer in an emerging market write an iPhone app for $650, compared with upwards of $20,000 from a developer in the U.S.
For some U.S. freelancers, microwork has required them to specialize in skills that aren’t easily commoditized. When Kelly Parkinson began her company Copylicious about four years ago, she looked at Elance but never used it, realizing it wasn’t where she’d make the most money. Parkinson, who worked as an executive assistant for three years to save money to start her business, developed a niche in copywriting for business-to-business companies that have trouble describing what they do in one sentence. The 34-year-old, who uses Mavenlink to collaborate on projects, says she was very busy during the recession. Last year she handled 100 projects for clients and her fees worked out to about $150 an hour.
Stocks??? Great New App You Need!!!
StockTouch is a powerful new way to monitor and understand the stock market for both casual and professional investors. After recently using StockTouch on the iphone 4s, the only comment that needs to be made is…”GET THIS APP NOW”. If you are an ipad or iphone user, and have any interest whatsoever in the stockmarket, business, or financial industry, you need this app now.
StockTouch uses up-to-the-minute market data to create 9,800 dynamic charts, all of them available at your fingertips. You can customize your view of the market to view price or volume, and rearrange the layout to sort by market cap, winners, activity and alphabetical.
StockTouch has a search function, offering two different ways to find any publicly-traded stock. You can use StockTouch to see the top 900 stocks in the U.S. market, as well as the top 900 global stocks, categorized across nine industry sectors. With StockTouch, you can go back in time, using the slider to see results from as far back as five years ago to as recent as five minutes ago. With live information, StockTouch allows you to see 1400 companies at any one time, supported by over 16,000 news articles. Future versions of StockTouch will include new visualizations, watch lists, portfolios, more analytics, international markets, and social features.
StockTouch uses an extremely friendly visual method to view the markets from a global perspective, yet allows the user to drill down to individual stocks and stock information. If you need broad market data at times and specific stock data at others, this app is for you. StockTouch is a series of color-coded heat maps that gives you the pulse and direction of the market by price, volume, in the context of the S&P 500, well as by performance within a given sector.
StockTouch is for everyone, not just traders– college students deciding on careers, jobseekers looking for new opportunities, salespeople calling on clients, retired people, entrepreneurs starting new businesses. StockTouch’s touch and zoom-based navigation makes rapidly flying through a large data set very natural and intuitive.
The StockTouch app is super simple to learn and use, everything you want in an ipad or iphone app. Quick visual market information for on the go… complex market data for times when you need indepth research. The ultimate business research tool at the your finger tips.
What to Do When Spouses Don’t Agree on Money…
How do I get my spouse on board with the money?” If you’re having this problem, then you’re not alone. It’s a situation that a lot of husbands and wives face. To answer this question, let’s start by pointing out one thing that you should not do.
Never nag and whine to your spouse about his or her lack of participation.
So what are you supposed to do? First, just be honest and upfront. Your spouse isn’t a mind reader. Simply explain that you are excited about working together to get out of debt and build wealth. That will hopefully get them fired up and wanting to join your crusade as well.
If that doesn’t move you toward some good conversations, then you may have to work a little harder. Write down some of the points that concern you—and explain why you think they are an issue. Sometimes, the written word is the most effective way to communicate.
If you are trying to get your husband’s attention, try posing the financial situation as a battle or an adventure. Your guy might like this approach. Sit down with him, take his hands, and tell him that you would think it’s romantic for him to join you in this battle. Even the most thick-skulled guys will get the hint.
If you are trying to get your wife on board, remember that most women are wired for relationships and security. Talk about how spending time together on a budget helps improve communication. and creates intimacy and unity. Be genuine. You probably won’t need to say much more.
Husbands and wives must work together in order to win with money. Two horses working together can pull a huge wagon up a hill. But if they pull in different directions, they will simply turn the wagon into firewood. Bottom line: If you aren’t working together, it’s almost impossible to win.
These are just some suggestions. You know how your husband or wife is wired, so find a way to talk to them in a language or manner that they understand. Don’t beat them over the head, but make it absolutely clear how important this is for your marriage and your future. Make 2012 the year that you and your other half take control, and be on your way to a lifestyle that will make both of you smile!
How Risky Is Entrepreneurship?
There are two views on entrepreneurship in America: the first (largely feigned), that it is a pure virtue like freedom of speech or religion, and the second (real) attitude that it is largely a game for the naïve. Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Michael Dell make fine fodder for commencement speeches, but when parents and career counselors thrust graduates into the job market, the default isn’t entrepreneurship, it’s corporate serfdom. Entrepreneurship is a deviation, an occupation for heroes, heroic for the reasons it can’t be recommended: it’s just too unsafe. But the conventional position is nonsense; building new companies is far more sensible than the practical will admit.
First, entrepreneurship is not riskier than working at a big bank or law firm, a fact vividly underscored by the de facto nationalization of the banking sector and mass layoffs of the last few years. An especially pungent comparison exists between the classically “safe” job of lawyering versus starting a new enterprise. What could be safer than a career at a century-old white shoe firm (aside from the fact that less than a third make partner)? Lots of things, actually. Few law students even get the chance to buy the losing lottery ticket: the government estimates that 215,417 jobs for attorneys will open between 2008 and 2018 and in the same decade, there will be over 430,000 new legal graduates so only half will get to practice in their chosen field (at substantial opportunity and tuition costs). By contrast, of 5,000 businesses started in 2004, almost 56% were still in business in 2010, despite suffering through a brutal economic downturn. Even as venture capitalists predisposed to have faith in new ventures, we were somewhat surprised that entrepreneurship has such favorable odds (the traditional rule of thumb in venture is that 4 out of 5 companies will flounder, although VC-backed tech companies may be somewhat riskier than the entire universe of new companies).
Another consideration: you can actually make real money with new companies. The actual money entailed in entrepreneurship can dwarf the outcomes from legitimate toil at established businesses. A quarter of first-time venture-backed firms are acquired for at least $50 million or file for an IPO. That’s not a guarantee that every early worker makes a fortune, but it suggests the odds are better than we would intuit. And in a world that has structurally shifted to bimodal outcomes, why not shoot for the mode that allows you to build wealth? Facebook, like Google and others before it, will make an army of millionaires. They won’t be the last to do so.
Maybe the most important point about entrepreneurship is that people who start or join new companies tend to actually like what they are doing. (“Outcome-independent decision making”, in consulting parlance). In addition to the psychic merits of working on the personally meaningful, in an economy where low-wage, high-skill overseas workers and no-wage machines encroach ever more rapidly, it is essential to compete both in input and output. Workers motivated by financial incentives alone struggle to perform at the level of the true believer. Caring about one’s job isn’t a hippie luxury; it is a necessity in a ruthlessly competitive world.
Not everyone is suited to join a new company. But as a society we can’t discourage those who are so inclined from joining, especially in a persistently stalled economy. We need to reconcile the realities and the rhetoric: entrepreneurship is everything we hope it to be.
Invest for a Tax Shelter??
It’s amazing what some people will do just to reduce what they pay to Uncle Sam. That includes blindly investing money to save on taxes.
Yes, there are investments such as the traditional IRA (pre-tax savings) as well as the Roth IRA and Roth 401(k), which both grow tax free. They are great for growing your money in mutual funds, and they should be used. The point is that you should not invest just for the tax savings. If you chase investments solely for the purpose of not having to pay Washington, you’ll put money into something that doesn’t maximize the potential to grow your money.
For example, let’s say you buy a local municipal bond. The interest generated by it is tax-free. If you’ve already maxed out your tax-free Roth IRA and want to keep stocking money away safe from taxes, you might think a municipal bond is a good place to invest further. But that’s not the case. Since the 1920s, municipal bonds have generated average annual returns of around 4%. A regular mutual fund, which you would pay taxes on, averages about 9% after taxes. Over time, that difference is huge.
Putting $2,000 a year ($166 a month) into a 4% investment will turn it into $196,000 after 40 years. Putting that money into a 9% investment (again, that’s your after-tax number) will grow it to $777,000! There’s no comparison once you run the numbers. On top of that, there are some investments that border on being (or actually are) scams. They will heavily promote tax savings to distract you from how bad the investment actually is. If someone pitches a complicated investment that promises big tax savings and big returns, then back away and stay away.
The whole point is to remember to be smart with your money when you are trying to grow it. If you get a tax break along the way, that’s great. But don’t let the break be the basis for where your investment money goes.
For the best investing advice, you need to work with a professional. Find a local professional you can trust and seek their advice for your situation.
The IRS Audit
The IRS defines an audit as “a review-examination” of a return “to verify the amount if tax reported is accurate.” If you are selected for one, the agency has on its website a video guide to the process. In 2011, the IRS audited nearly 1.6 million individual returns, slightly more than 1% of the total filed. About three-quarters were done by correspondence, the rest through field examinations done in person by an IRS agent.
Only 1% of people with incomes under $200,000 had their returns audited; the audit rate for those with incomes of $1 million and higher was about 12.5%. IRS spokesman Terry Lemons said the vast majority of taxpayers fill out their returns accurately and have nothing to be concerned about. “We have a variety of screening processes to make sure we catch the people who are cutting corners,” he said.
So how does the IRS select which returns to audit?”There’s no magic equation,” said Mark Steber, chief tax officer for Jackson Hewitt Tax Services. Some returns are selected for audit through computer screening. An IRS computer “basically compares data from your return to average numbers from people in similar situations and they look for variances,” said Jeff Schnepper, author of How to Pay Zero Taxes (McGraw-Hill, 2011). “They look for big changes, things that shouldn’t be there,” he said.
What’s reviewed are things like charitable contributions, interest income, and whether there are variations from averages in your income bracket or zip code. “Every time there’s a major variance, the computer is going to click,” he said.
Others are selected randomly, and still another group is selected by document matching to see if forms like the W-2 match what was reported on your income tax return.
There’s yet another category — “related examinations,” the IRS calls it. “Returns may be selected for audit when they involve issues or transactions with other taxpayers, such as business partners or investors, whose returns were selected for audit. ”
The agency will notify taxpayers of an impending audit by telephone or mail. E-mail is not used, the agency said. “Just because your return has been selected for an audit doesn’t suggest you made an error or you’re dishonest,” the IRS says in its video guide. “It might surprise you to know that audits can result in acceptance of the tax return without change or even a refund.”
The IRS has a Declaration of Taxpayer Rights that sets forth what you can expect from an audit, ranging from privacy and confidentiality to professional and courteous service. Taxpayers have the right to representation at an audit or to have someone else represent them, and to make an audio recording of the session. They may appeal the judgment, either to the Appeals Office or to a court, and can request that penalties and interest be waived.
Accuracy is the best defense in an audit — and having the records to confirm it. Lemons said using tax preparation software and filing electronically can help catch some common mistakes. “It’s important that you do things accurately, and you think through those items reported by third parties and make sure those are going to match up,” said Greg Rosica, tax partner at Ernst & Young accounting firm.
He advises paying attention to the simple things — like correctly reporting your Social Security number or the number of dependents. “If you’ve gone through and you have a well-organized file, there’s not so much to be worried about,” he said. Steber said that claiming deductions for a home office likely will attract IRS scrutiny.
As for charitable contributions, he said there’s no particular amount likely to catch the IRS’ attention. “Don’t shortchange yourself,” he said. Find out what donated items sell for, at a thrift store, for example, or check valuation tools on the Internet. “It’s all in the documentation,” he said. Schnepper said the IRS sometimes focuses on taxpayers with cash earnings, like waiters and waitresses. “The IRS is looking for unreported income,” he said.
It’s important to keep the records you’ve used to file your returns for at least three years. Generally that’s the time frame in which the IRS can conduct an audit. “The name of the game with the IRS is paper,” Schnepper said. “Keep your records. Keep your receipts. If you have your receipts, you win.”