Talk with Your Partner about Taxes

Last week my team put together another great tax advice video. This time hosts Edward Lester and James Owen sat down together to discuss the importance of talking with your partner about taxes and financial issues. You can watch the embedded video below or visit my YouTube channel for more great tax videos.

Money Makeover: Married Couple, Separate Finances

Earlier today, I came across this interesting article from CNN Money.com on Michelle Spranger and Scott Zuckerberg. The article discusses the story of a couple that has been married for eight years, but maintain separate finances. According to the article, they finally decide to merge their finances to make their lives a little easier.

Scott, 43, has a full-service broker, variable annuities, and a union pension, while Michelle, 42, uses a discount brokerage account and IRAs. Neither knows what the other is doing.

"The only thing we have together is a checking account," Michelle says. "We need to merge and have a common goal."

Troy, Mich., planner Warren McIntyre agrees. For starters, the couple isn’t even sure how much they're saving annually. Both are self-employed: Michelle is a freelance producer, meeting planner, and writer earning $90,000 to $115,000 a year; Scott makes $60,000 to $75,000 as a lighting and rigging technician for films.

With fluctuating incomes, they must be really diligent about saving. McIntyre's advice: Sock away at least 15% of their pay. That, plus Scott's pension and their real estate, should get them to a comfortable retirement.

Continue reading at CNN.com…

Questions for the Tax Lady: June 28th, 2010

Check out the following new Questions for the Tax Lady answers and feel free to ask me questions through one of the links below. You can send me an email, direct message or @ reply, and I will do my best to get an answer for you!

Question #1: I am getting married this week, do I need to notify the IRS?

Congratulations on your upcoming wedding! If you are planning to change your last name, you will have to do so at your local Social Security Administration office. Once your name has been legally changed you should inform your employer and local Post Office—once all this is said and done, you will notify the IRS of your marriage and name change the next time you file a tax return by indicating that you are either filing “married filing separately” or “married filing jointly”.

Be sure to change your withholdings to reflect the change in your life circumstances.

Question #2: I want to make a donation to the oil spill cleanup efforts, but I am not sure what organizations are taking donations. Are there any of those easy text to donate numbers setup?

Yes. listed below are instructions for two organizations that are assisting with the clean up efforts. You can also make a donation online at NWF.org.

• Text GULFAID 10 to 27138 to donate $10 to Gulf Aid. Note you can replace the ‘10′ with any dollar amount you’d like to donate. Just be careful not to add an extra zero by accident.
• Text WILDLIFE to 20222 to donate $10 to help protect the wildlife in proximity to the oil spill. Donations go to the National Wildlife Foundation.

Why Are Weddings So Expensive? Historians Find the Answer

From WalletPop.com:

The modern American couple starts life with a heavy financial burden: In a big city like Chicago, the average wedding costs between $22,500 and $37,500. Yet in the 1930s, it was cheap, costing around $400. There's no question that wedding prices are out of control. What went wrong?

I went to the Chicago History Museum, where historians have figured out how it happened.

Timothy Long is the costume curator of the museum, which (surprisingly) is thought to have the second-largest fashion collection in the world. Decades of wealth have found a repository in the museum's stacks, including the paperwork from the legendary Marshall Field's department store, which dates to the mid-19th century and was the king of the world's department stores for generations.

While poring through the museum's holdings, Long realized something important about the modern wedding: It became a massive, ostentatious production around the time the retail pioneers at Marshall Field's decided to turn the ceremony into a consumer event for Chicago's high society.

If you want to blame someone for how much weddings cost in our society, the paperwork points to Marshall Field & Company. For example, it was the first store to implement a gift registry for brides, which encouraged friends and family to make expensive public purchases on the couple's behalf. It created low-cost knockoffs of high-fashion garments so women of every income could imitate the rich. Also, in the name of luxury and convenience, it also designed a system that took couples under its wing to sell them a range of other expensive accouterments that proved their place in society, including flatware, linens, and catering.