Tag: Benefits

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Credit Tips

Credit Repair Programs: Benefits of Choosing the Right Company and Raising Your Credit Score

There are many benefits of joining credit repair programs, as long as you stick with the ones that are legitimate. Cleaning up your credit report and maintaining a high score will allow you to keep more money in your pockets since your interest rates will be lower and you won’t have to worry about getting sued. You’ll be more likely to get more credit if and when you need it, and it will be easier to get an apartment. Application processes will be faster, if not instantaneous. Also, a higher credit score means you have more bargaining power when it comes to negotiating with retailers, banks, and credit card companies. Need a new car all of a sudden? A high credit score will make that easy to get.

No matter how or why you ended up with bad credit, whether it was poor money management on your part or you experienced an emergency that cost a lot of money, there still might be some things about it that can be fixed. Negative items could potentially be removed. You could contact the credit bureaus yourself and try to have them removed, but that could take some time and your chances of being successful aren’t very high. It’s better to compare some credit repair programs and contact the one that seems to fit your needs the best.

Use Only Legitimate Credit Repair Programs

You absolutely must familiarize yourself with the Credit Repair Organizations Act so that you’ll know how to avoid scams. You do have legal rights when trying to get your credit report fixed. Before spending any money, you should be provided with a free consultation and a detailed guide explaining the services the company will perform. There should also be some sort of money back guarantee just in case you are not happy with how things are going.

Since there is absolutely no way of knowing 100% sure how the creditors and credit bureaus are going to deal with every single negative item on your report, stay away from any company that claims that it is going to provide you with specific results in a certain amount of time.

None of these programs will be able to do everything for you. You will still be responsible for making your payments on time. What they will do is help you get some of your previous credit problems resolved.

Check and see which credit repair programs are available in your area. If Lexington Law offers services in your state, you’ll definitely want to consider it, as it is a highly-rated and reputable organization.

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Day Trading

What Is Swing Trading and What Are Its Benefits

The process of swing trading has become a very popular stock trading strategy used by many traders across the market. This style of trading has proven to be very successful for many committed stocks and Forex traders. Traditionally swing trading has been defined as a more speculative strategy as the positions are traditionally bought and held for the traders predetermined timeframe. These time frames could range anywhere from two days to a few months. The goal of the swing trader is to identify the trend either up or down and place their trades in the most advantageous position. From there the trader will ride the trend to what they determine as the exhaustion point and sell for a profit. Often times swing traders will utilize many different technical indicators that will allow them to have a more advantageous probability when making their trades. Shorter-term traders do not necessarily tend to swing trade as they prefer holding positions throughout the day and exercising them prior to the close of the market. Swing trading strategy utilizes time and it is this time that is the deterrent factor for many day traders. Often times there is too much risk involved with the close of the market and that a trader will not be willing to accept this risk.

The distinction of swing trading is a broad topic in that it has many different influences from a multitude of different trading strategies. All of these trading strategies are unique and have their respective risk profiles. Swing trading can be an excellent way for a market participant to further enhance their technical analysis skills while giving them an opportunity to pay more attention to the fundamental side of trading. Many successful swing traders have been known to use a bollinger band strategy as a tool to assist them in entering and exiting positions. Of course, for a swing trader to be successful at the strategy, they will need to have a high aptitude for determining the current market trend and placing their positions in accordance with that trend. It does a swing trader note good to place a short position with the plan of holding for an extended period of time in a market that is clearly trending upwards. The overall theme here is that the goal of the traders should be to increase their probability of success while limiting or eliminating risk completely. The swing trader’s worst enemy is that of a sideways or in active market. Sideways price action will stop a swing trader cold in his or her tracks as there is no prevailing trend to key off of.

When used correctly swing trading is an excellent strategy used by many traders across various different markets. It is not only used in the Forex market but it is a key tool in futures and equity markets. Swing traders take the skills that they learn through technical analysis and can even parlay these skills into various options strategies. The short-term nature of swing trading sets it apart from that of the traditional investor. Investors tend to have a longer-term time horizon and are not traditionally affected by short-term price fluctuations. As always, one must remember that swing trading is only one strategy and should be utilized only when appropriately understood. Like any trading strategies swing trading can be risky and conservative strategies can turn into day trading strategies quite quickly. If you plan to employ a swing trading strategy, ensure that you fully understand the risks and develop a strategy that will be able to allow you to generate maximum percentage returns on your positions.

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Budgeting

5 Benefits of Creating a Personal Budget

A personal budget is like your own spending plan. It allows you to know where your money is spent on and how much you have to work with. Creating you own budget is not easy. But, a budget can bring you many tremendous benefits.

Here are 5 great benefits you can get from creating a personal budget.

1. A budget helps to makes it easy to save and have more extra money. By simply tracking your expenses and income and controlling how much you spend on variable expenses, you will likely find that you have more money than you thought you needed. So, with the extra money, you can either save it or set aside just a little bit of that extra money to do something fun – like take a vacation or go to that five star restaurant you’ve always wanted to try.

2. A budget saves you time. How long does it take you to collect information at the end of the year for taxes? As you know, gathering all of those financial documents can take days and can be extremely stressful. With a budget, all of your expenses and income, including your taxes, are documented. This is particularly the case if you use a spreadsheet program or accounting software to help to keep record.

3. A budget allows you to easily track and control your spending and reduce stress. It gives you freedom from the stress of not knowing you have enough money to cover certain expenses. You are more in control of your finances. Besides, a family budget creates an environment of teamwork and communication in the family rather than one of stress and blame. It also get family members to be accountable for the spending decisions made and the financial goals you’re striving towards.

4. A solid budget makes it easy for you to make spending and investment decisions with confidence. With a solid budget in place, you know exactly where you stand financially and your investment decisions can be made with the right information at your fingertips.

5. Budgets can help you to plan for the future with ease and confidence. You will be able to plan how much to save for retirement and whether your budget allows you to get a new car soon. A budget gives you the ability and the confidence to plan for the future because you know exactly how much money you have to work with right now.

There really is no downside to budgeting. It reduces one of the most significant causes of stress and it puts you in control of your money and your future.

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Budgeting

Financial Management and the Benefits of Budgeting Your Income

I have had the pleasure of listening to successful people who have positively impacted the world in terms of financial management. It still perplexes me how they achieve such feat and become millionaires, most of them from very humble beginnings. But recently, I got curious and decided to investigate by reading some of these peoples’ biographies and autobiographies. One thing that these individuals had in common was that they always had a vision.

The next time you look and admire at the financial management achievement of an individual, realize that he/she went to great lengths to map his/her life. Therefore, if you want to attain financial independence you must start planning your finances now since tomorrow may be too late.

Do a monthly breakdown of what you need by putting it down on paper before you set out to go and purchase anything. This will help prevent impulse buying. In addition, it assists you monitor your actual expenditure against your income or earning. Constantly, keep finding ways of amending and cutting down on your expenditure.

If you happen to be in employment and are thinking of going into business, avoid financial interruptions. This can be achieved by making sure you have in place a good financial transition plan. Reason being that sometimes businesses take time before they can start recording profits. It would be advisable to have a back up plan or waiting until your business picks up before you quitting your job.

The important aspect of budgeting is setting realistic goals that are achievable. Over expectation is the biggest killer of financial planning. This is because whenever you fail to achieve a set goal it discourages you to carry on with the financial management plan. However, reaching your set targets motivates you to adhere to your budget.

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Budgeting

3 Benefits of Preparing Budgets

All large companies believed in budgeting. It is a busy affair for companies every year. No matter how good or accurate a budget is, it will not benefit a company if the employees do not support it.

Some experts defined budget as formal business plan. It is a financial target that what a company aims to achieve in the near future. It consists of series of plans and actions expressed in financial numbers and terms. A company can measure its successes and performances during the financial period easily by comparing the results with the budgets.

The process of preparing budgets can bring various benefits to a company. Some of the benefits than can derived from it are:

1. All managers involved will be made to think ahead and plan their targets and how to achieve them.

2. Top management will be compelled to review previous performances identify weaknesses. New action plans are also drawn up to remedy the weaknesses and identify new opportunities for further growth.

3. All departments are required to coordinate their efforts during the preparation phrase. This will enhance teamwork and further improve organization skills.

In order to ensure that a company enjoy the full benefits of budgeting, the top management must support it fully. Most of the lower level employees are influenced by the attitude of the top management. If they see that the top management is committed, they will automatically follows.

Once you have the support of the top management and other employees, your job of preparing budgets would be easier and half done.

Once the budget is completed, it does not mean that the company will automatically achieve its targets when the financial period ends. The budget is only the first step. The company has to ensure that all actions plans in the budgets are followed closely and all interim targets are achieved.

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Taxes

Lease Out a Car With Novated Lease Benefits

Novated lease benefits is a type of vehicular leasing agreement common in many parts of the western world that allows a business house to lease out a vehicle through executing a leasing deed. This leasing deed is executed by the business houses on behalf of its employees who cannot afford a car though a down payment. Many business houses are using novated lease benefits as an aspect to boost its employee’s morale. Under this scheme, the responsibility to pay the EMIs of leasing deed rests upon the employee and the amount of EMI will be deducted from the employee’s pre- tax income.

Under certain agreements, the employer takes on the responsibility of making the payment of lease agreement on behalf of the employee and then employer deducts the amount from the employee’s pre-tax income. The novated lease benefits is a mutually beneficiary scheme to both employer and employee as this will improve the employee morale(from the employer point of view) and also benefits the employee as this reduces the tax liability of the employee.

Moreover, a monthly payment is always desirable over a down payment as this will reduce the cost burden of both employer and employee. And the savings on tax liability is one more reason due to which both the corporate houses and the employees opt for novated lease benefit. Further, the flexibility attached to this benefit i.e., the employee can add few more features to the vehicle and can opt for a new or used car depending on his repayment ability and monthly surplus. All these features are collectively leading to novated leasing by many employers and employees.

Besides above benefits, there are certain value additions that make an employee go for a novated leasing over buying out a vehicle is its transferability from one employer to another. If in case you move from one company to another during the leasing period you can transfer your lease from old employer to new employer. The novated lease benefits also called as salary packaging/ salary sacrificing and are viewed as a part of employee’s earnings agreed to pay for the benefit of a vehicle. Under this agreement, the employee can include any of the benefits such as Vehicle finance, Comprehensive insurance (or you can arrange your own), Registration, Fuel, Maintenance such as servicing, tires, battery replacement and repairs, roadside assistance as elements of leasing without fail by employees.

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Taxes

UK Patent = 17% Tax Saving, But Any Other Benefits?

We are all now well aware of the company tax savings afforded to UK incorporated companies using the Patent Box scheme introduced early 2013 by the UK Government. This will provide up to a 17% company tax saving on income received on patented product. As a further benefit, the tax saving can be applied to income received from overseas sales on that UK patented product. And it gets better: any part of the product that is UK patented, or process used to produce it, can be used to apply for the very beneficial tax relief on the whole item.

So, all of this is very beneficial for UK registered companies, but are there any additional benefits? Well, an obvious benefit is potentially being able to accelerate a counterpart overseas patent application. Okay, so let me clarify this for you. In order to apply for the Patent Box tax relief scheme mentioned above, the British patent application must first be granted. Usually, in the UK, a patent application can take up to four and a half years to grant. Obviously, this is too long if you want to be claiming your tax relief annually. Therefore, when you file your British patent application, we should accelerate the prosecution by combining the search and examination steps along with accelerating publication. By doing this, grant can be achieved in the UK in around 8 months or less. Ideal for the tax relief Patent Box scheme.

Your overseas patent applications are typically filed around the first anniversary of your British patent application and back dated. It therefore now becomes convenient to utilize another process, implemented between patent offices in various territories on a reciprocal basis. This process is called the Patent Prosecution Highway, also known as PPH.

The USA is a huge market for most companies in the UK and Europe. However, there is no simple acceleration request for quickly and, importantly, more cost-effectively, obtaining grant of a US patent. However, if you have received a positive confirmation of patentability of your UK patent application, in other words a positive examination report or better still grant of your UK patent, then the Patent Prosecution Highway scheme can be used to fast track the examination of the counterpart US patent application.

As a further benefit, there is no official fee for the Patent Prosecution Highway. Although there is some preparatory work required in the request, the downstream cost savings, particularly in high cost territories, such as the USA, Japan and Korea, for the latter two being predominantly translation costs, could very well be significant.

In summary, if you are accelerating the examination procedure of your UK patent application in order to obtain grant quickly to achieve make use of the available UK company tax savings, then consider using the Patent Prosecution Highway if subsequently filing overseas, and particularly in the USA . This beneficial scheme could reduce these typically substantial overseas examination costs, but is only applicable if your UK patent is granted or has an acknowledged patentable aspect.

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Taxes

Key Benefits of Hiring a Professional Tax Service

The mere mention of taxes often inspires fear in the minds of taxpayers. Whether you’re an individual or a small business owner, filing a tax return is something you simply can’t avoid. The old days when anyone could fill out a simple return are fast disappearing. This is especially true if you have a complicated return, multiple streams of income or plan to take several deductions. Tax help for business owners is a critical necessity to make sure quarterly and end of the year taxes are files accurately. Familiarizing yourself with the benefits of professional tax preparation will help you decide if it’s the right choice for you.

Using a tax preparation service initially costs more than filing yourself. However, professional accountants can also save you a lot of time and money down the road. Instead of spending hours reviewing tax minutiae and crunching numbers, you get the convenience of having someone else do it for you. Likewise, the best services only use Certified Public Accountants or Enrolled Agents – the most competent tax specialists available. This means your tax return is guaranteed to be as accurate as possible. In contrast, doing your own taxes your opens the door to errors. A simple math mistake or missed deduction can mess up your entire return or even cause you to be audited.

When times are financially tough, every dollar counts. As such, spending money on a tax specialist may seem inconceivable, even if you see the benefit in doing so. However, you may be surprised to learn that the cost of hiring a professional may be tax deductible. The mileage expended to drive to and from your agent, postage for mailing tax forms to him or her, as well as, the cost of the preparation itself can all be deducted if your expenses total 2 percent or more of your adjusted gross income. These types of deductions are considered miscellaneous and should be reported on Schedule A of IRS Tax Form 1040. Be sure to have your accountant itemize your deductions if you want to take advantage of this tax break. Not only that, but accounting professionals generally know about deductions you might not be aware of so they can get increase your deductions, thereby lowering your taxable income.

Auditing support is one of the most important benefits of using a professional tax service. In addition to lowering your chances of being audited, having a CPA or Enrolled Agent in your corner can give you the support and tax expertise you need to successfully pass an IRS audit if one comes up. When facing an audit, it is essential to have someone you trust to help you through the process. Likewise, in the unlikely event that an error is made by your tax professional it can easily be resolved. In contrast, going it alone can often result in pricey litigation. Unfortunately, not all tax professionals are alike so choosing the right person from the start makes all the difference. In addition, the IRS has begun to crack down on many less than scrupulous tax preparation companies so be sure to get references and verify credentials before trusting someone with your most sensitive information.

Ultimately, the decision of how to prepare your taxes is one you must make based on your own needs and circumstances. However, understanding the benefits of working with a professional can make the decision a lot less complicated and even ease much of the apprehension you may have about facing the coming tax season.

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Taxes

How Taxes Might Be Affected By Long Term Care Benefits

Long term care insurance policies offer a great deal of benefits that are exempted from federal taxation and most state income taxes. Premiums paid on the policies are treated like health insurance premiums, so they qualify for federal income tax deductions. However, there are limits based on age.

The federal government’s tax deductible limits are based on total annual premiums paid and the age of the policyholder. For people age 40 and under, the maximum annual deduction on long term care insurance is $360 for 2013. Those aged 41 through 50 have a maximum annual deduction of $680 while people from age 51 through 60 have a maximum deduction of $1,360. The deduction for people from age 61 through 70 is $3,640 while those over age 70 have a current maximum deduction of $4,550.

The tax-exempt status on premiums paid for long term care policies is different from those paid for life insurance plans. Life insurance premiums often times only are tax exempt when the benefits paid out from them qualify for income taxation. If a life insurance plan qualifies for tax exempt status when paying premiums, the benefits typically are taxed by the federal government and some state governments as income.

To qualify for federal income tax breaks and most state income tax breaks, a long term care insurance policy must be guaranteed renewable and not grow cash value over time. Such policies are underwritten by life insurance companies. The federal government currently does not tax benefits paying no more than $320 per day. Amounts above $320 might be taxed as income, but the amount is adjusted each year to account for inflation.

Generally, daily benefits that exceed the current $320 federal limit but do not exceed the daily cost of extended care will not be taxed due to the fact they are spent on care instead of amounting to additional income. Total insurance benefits are reported to the federal government by life insurers, who issue 1099 tax forms to policyholders. Policyholders then must claim any taxable amounts on a federal Form 8853.

The benefits can be exhausted quickly when looking at the average cost of care. A semi-private nursing home charged an average rate of more than $220 per day in 2012, which is equal to more than $80,000 per year and easily could exceed even the best year of earnings for most people during their working careers. An assisted-living facility is more affordable at about $44,000 per year in costs with other services costing more. Home health care costs ran about $21 per hour in 2012, making in-home care the most affordable of long term care services.

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Taxes

The Social Benefits of Tax Exemption in India

There is a compassionate part hidden among all of us. And, the thought of getting out there and doing something for the society also must have crossed our minds many times. But, how often have we actually gone ahead and done it? We get so caught up in our daily humdrum that our benevolence takes a backseat. But, as they say, ‘where there is a will, there is a way.’ So, one of the many ways that can provide you a platform to actively participate in social causes is to engage with a charity. Every charity works towards benefitting, uplifting, and sustaining the society by encompassing factors related to social, legal, environment, ecology, health, economy, education, welfare, and the like. The cause of each non-governmental organisation directly or indirectly reflects the broader perspectives of global organisations such as the UN, UNESCO, WHO, ILO etc. Since charities work at the ground zero level of the society; their involvement with a cause brings about a more sustainable outcome. Hence, when you get involved with a non-governmental organisation it provides you an avenue to constructively participate in a cause.

In view of the significant role of charities and to encourage participation of individuals and businesses in various causes, the Government of India has made the provision of tax exemption in India for all charitable donations. Yes, as per Section 80G of the Income Tax Act, contributing donations to a registered charitable trust can avail the donor 100% or 50% exemption on the donated amount based upon the type of charitable trust and the clauses of the Income Tax Act. The exemption is applicable for both online donation and offline donation. However, due to ease and convenience, many donors have started taking the online mode of contributing charity. And, since non-governmental organisations understand the worth of each penny, the donor can be rest assured that their money is being utilised in the right way. Hence, considering this form of tax exemption is quite a noble way to contribute towards the society.

Let’s take a couple of instances, if a donor identifies with an environmental cause such as afforestation and contributes towards Save Green, then his taxable income will be utilised towards increasing green cover and initiating several environment-friendly programmes. Similarly, if a donor identifies with child education and nutrition, then contributes towards TAPF, a non-governmental organisation in India. So, essentially you are contributing towards a healthier and educated society. And, you are also being a catalyst in nation-building.

Well, as you can decipher from the above-mentioned instances, your taxable income has the potential to transform the society in many different ways. Hence, don’t you think making an online donations or offline donations to charities can make the most of the tax exemption in India to upkeep your benevolence, save your hard-earned money while also partaking to uplift the society?