Black Friday App Watch: Use Your iPhone to Shop And Save

Next month is one of the biggest shopping days of the year: Black Friday. Years ago retailers focused mostly on newspaper advertisements or mailers, however, in today’s interactive consumers regularly seek out deals online. Therefore it seems only natural that retailers are going to use iPhone Apps to help connect with customers.

Wallet Pop.com put together some of the best Black Friday apps. You can find a section of their article below, or check out the full list here.

Find the lowest prices in the shortest amount of time with the Red Laser app. Simply scan a barcode and Red Laser will find you the best deal by searching both online and in stores near your location. When scanning food products, the free application even provides nutritional information. The quick scanner will help users shop efficiently on Black Friday. Plus, the no-touch scan works perfectly for customers already juggling armfuls of deals.

Rather than searching by barcode, the 99-cent application Save Benjis hunts bargains using key words and categories. This search approach helps customers find low prices before they hit the stores. When you find the best price, purchase items right from the app. Save Benjis even features specials and coupons on many products.

Groupon enthusiasts: Download the Groupon app to save on printer ink, paper and time. The free application allows users to purchase the deals right from their iPhones. It also lets customers to find ones nearby using the iPhones' map and locator. The best part is that users can redeem Groupons directly from an iPhone, eliminating the hassle of printing the deals, or forgetting the proof at home.

For last minute buyers, find local savings nearby by using BeThere Deals. The app finds deals on everything from entertainment to apparel. The discovered deals often save customers up to 50% off original prices. BeThere Deals also finds the cheapest happy hour and restaurant prices for when shoppers work up an appetite. Currently, the free app is only available in a few cities including New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego, but BeThere Deals promises to add more cities soon.

Continue reading at Wallet Pop.com…

iPhone as a Tax Gadget?

One of my favorite bloggers, the Tax Guru, published a great blog the other day on how many people are beginning to use iPhone apps in order to prepare for tax season. Most of us are used to using programs like QuickBooks to monitor expenses, but as mobile applications become more and more advanced the idea of managing your finances with your cell phone is becoming a reality. Check out the following blog entry from the Tax Guru, or click here to see Mint.com’s list of the top 10 finance iPhone apps.

I don't have an iPhone and have no plans to get one; but as a life-long gadget freak, I have been intrigued by the growing list of applications being developed for it. In the latest Intuit newsletter, I just saw an ad for this app called Tap2Track Mileage that is supposed to use the iPhone's GPS capability to keep a log of vehicle trips that can produce an Excel spreadsheet that will be very useful at tax time.

This reminded me of a much more complicated gadget that was available in the mid 1980s for logging vehicle miles. That contraption required installing magnets onto the vehicle's drive shaft to record mileage on a device inside the vehicle, producing a paper listing of miles driven for business, medical and charitable purposes. If I remember correctly, that product sold for around $500; much more than the $3.99 this new app sells for.

Apple Announces New iPhone; IRS to Let Your Employer Give You One Tax-Free

Yesterday after I blogged about financial issues early adopters of the new iPhone will encounter, I came across this entry from The Tax Professor Blog on another tax related iPhone issue. Check out the article below.

Apple yesterday announced its new iPhone 3G S. Also yesterday, the IRS announced that it was considering new rules that would allow your employer to give you one on a tax-free basis.

I previously blogged the draconian rule of § 280F that employers must include in an employee's W-2 income the value of employer-provided cell phones unless the employee satisfies onerous substantiation rules. Over the past few years, the IRS has increasingly raised this issue on audit, with the result that many employers, including universities, responded by no longer providing cell phones to employees (including professors).

In Notice 2009-46, the IRS requested comments on three alternative methods to simplify the substantiation rules for employer-provided cell phones:

Minimal Personal Use Method

• The entire amount of an employee’s use of an employer-provided cell phone would be deemed to be for business purposes if the employee can account to his or her employer with sufficient records to establish that the employee maintains and uses a personal (non-employer-provided) cell phone for personal purposes during the employee’s work hours.

• Alternatively, the second proposal would define a specified amount or type of “minimal” personal use that would be disregarded in determining the amount of personal use of an employer-provided cell phone. For example, “minimal” could be defined by reference to a particular number of minutes of use or for certain personal purposes.

Safe Harbor Substantiation Method

The IRS and Treasury Department are considering a safe harbor method under which an employer would treat a certain percentage of each employee’s use of an employer-provided cell phone as business usage. The remaining percentage of use would be deemed to be for personal purposes. For this proposal, the IRS and Treasury Department propose a business use percentage of 75 percent.

Statistical Sampling Method

The IRS and Treasury Department are considering a proposal that would allow employers to use statistical sampling techniques to measure an employee’s personal use of an employer-provided cell phone. In general, an employer could use an approved statistical sampling methodology similar to that provided in Rev. Proc. 2004–29, 2004–1 C.B. 918, to determine the percentage of personal use of employer-provided cell phones. The employer would multiply that percentage times the value of each employee’s total usage to determine the value of personal usage. The remaining portion of the employee’s usage would be deemed to be for business purposes.

Some Early iPhone 3G S Adopters Subject To $200 "Apple Tax"

From Cnet.com:

Since last year's announcement of the iPhone 3G, customers have grown accustomed to a price tag heavily subsidized by AT&T. Similarly, the just-announced iPhone 3G S will be offered in a 16GB model for $199 and a 32GB model for $299--but only if you are adding a line to your AT&T service or you are a new AT&T subscriber. Early iPhone 3G adopters seeking to upgrade will face serious sticker shock.

If you purchased an iPhone 3G on or after July 11, 2008, you will not be able to purchase an iPhone 3G S at a reduced price until you reach your one-year anniversary. (We've determined this cutoff by checking a sampling of existing AT&T accounts via AT&T's myWireless Account Web site.) If you want the new iPhone 3G S early, you will have to pay an additional $200 for the hardware, raising the cost of a new iPhone to $399 and $499 respectively. The only alternative to this price increase is to wait for your first iPhone anniversary before buying. On top of the price increase, you will--as expected--have to sign another two-year service agreement.

The pricing history of the iPhone has been tumultuous from the beginning, hitting its pinnacle quickly: $599 for an original 8GB iPhone. Apple and AT&T significantly reduced its price shortly thereafter, angering enough iPhone buyers that Apple gave away $100 rebates to the angry hordes.

Is Apple and AT&T trying to take advantage of loyal customers by releasing the new iPhone 3G S nearly a month before existing customers--many who are loyal and anxious to upgrade--are eligible for reduced pricing?

The Tax Code on your iPhone

Earlier today, I came across this useful iPhone application and I wanted to share it with all of my readers. It was created by LawToGo and it is basically the full IRS tax code displayed in an easy to use iPhone application. Check out the following review of the app from iPhone JD.

The app's website says that this app is up to date as of December 31, 2008, and says that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 will be included in the next (free) update. Nevertheless, from what I can tell, the app seems quite solid. You can use the app many different ways. First, you can just browse through sections, tapping to drill down to a specific section.

Additionally, you can search for a particular section. You can search for words, including AND search, OR search, and /n (within a certain number of words) search. Search terms are clearly highlighted in yellow in the search results.

If you know the particular section that you are looking for, you can also use the Search by Section Number feature. For example, like many Americans, I've recently been thinking quite a bit about my dwindling 401K. If I want to read Section 401(k) itself while I drown my sorrows, I can jump right to Section 401 and then scroll down to (k).

The app includes lots of additional features. You can use the arrows to browse back and forth through sections. You can e-mail a section of the tax code, you can add a section that you use frequently to your Bookmarks, and you can turn your iPhone screen on its side to view everything a little bit larger in landscape mode.

If you want to see this app in action before you buy it, there is a video overview on the LawToGo website. The developer has done a nice job with this app. I am sure that any tax attorney would find it very useful, and for the rest of us, it may serve as a useful sleep aid.