Don't File Your Taxes Too Soon

I'd like to remind everyone to not be too anxious to file your taxes. Many taxpayers rush to file their tax returns as quickly as possible. Ordinarily, that’s fine. But if you own mutual funds, don’t file your tax return before March 1.

In past years, revised 1099s were often issued, reclassifying distributions and/or their amounts. This was a huge headache for the investors who had already filed tax returns based on the original documentation. These hapless consumers found themselves forced to redo their returns and file amended tax returns, adjusting the amount they owed or were due in refunds - and paying their tax preparer additional fees to do the extra work.

It looks like 2010 may be the same. Therefore, if you own mutual funds, do not file your tax return before March 1. By then, any amended IRS forms are likely to arrive, potentially helping you avoid the hassle and costs of filing an amended return.

Kevin Kroskey, CFP, MBA

Diversification: Disciplinarian of Disciplinarians

Disciplined diversification works when you do and even when you don't want it to. Diversification in effect forces you to sell the thing that has been doing so well in your portfolio and to buy the thing that hasn't. While this makes rational sense, it is emotionally difficult to execute. Think back to the tail end of 2008--were you selling bonds and cash to buy stocks? Most likely you weren't unless your advisor or some sort of automatic trigger did it for you. Carl Richards of www.behaviorgap.com provided a good reminder of how diversification works in a recent NY Times blog post. The diversification he discusses here is more so related to equity asset-class diversification but also touches on the three basic building blocks--equities, bonds, and cash. He doesn't discuss alternative asset classes -- an asset class that doesn't fit neatly into the three basic categories -- being used to further diversification, but that's a detailed topic for another day. ...

Should We Go Back on the Gold Standard?

If you watched the Republican presidential debates, you might have noticed that a number of candidates yearn for a return to the gold standard—that is, that every dollar issued by the government would be backed by a comparable value in gold bars that were stashed away in a government vault. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas argued that the dollar should have a fixed value in gold, and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky added that printing money without backing in the precious metal destroys the value of our currency. Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, thinks that if not gold, then the dollar could be pegged to a basket of commodities. All are mostly concerned that printing money will cause runaway inflation. But there may be several problems with this return to the fiscal system of the late 1800s and early 1900s. One is that inflation has barely budged even as the Federal Reserve Board was piling one QE stimulus on top of another, and the government was adding records amoun...

Medals Per Million

By now, you've seen the final medal count at the London Olympics, and no doubt felt a stirring of national pride. American athletes took home 104 total gold, silver and bronze medals, comfortably ahead of China (87), Russia (82), Great Britain (65), Germany (44), Japan (38), Australia (35), France (34), South Korea (28) and Italy (28). Does that mean that we Americans--so often accused of being a nation of couch potatoes--are the most athletic people in the world? Total medal count is one way to measure, but it may not be the best. Another measurement would take into account the relative number of medals compared to a country's total population: Olympic medals per capita, or (to avoid many decimal places) the number of medals each nation took home per million people in its population. Medals per million gives us a very different ranking. By this measure, citizens of the Caribbean island of Granada are by far the most athletic, with 9.5 Ol...

Kevin Kroskey's Money & Mind

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