As the year 2008 comes to an end, it is once again time to optimize for next year’s tax return. Here is an article I saw on dumblittleman that gives 9 year end tax tips.
Personally I do the following:
- clean out unwanted clothes for donation. One thing to note, however, is that the rules for tax write off have changed. Previously one can donate up to $250 worth of clothing and file on their tax returns without receipt. However, the rules have been changed that you must have a receipt to write off any donated clothes.
- Contribute to 401k, Roth IRA and IRA. Even though each one is different they can each work toward saving taxes. 401k is offered by an employer and the contribution is taxed differed until money is withdrawn. IRA is similar to 401k with two exceptions: everyone can contribute to IRA and tax benefit of an IRA decreases when your income increases. Personally I like Roth IRA the most. It allows you to contribute after tax dollars but the earnings will not be taxed when you start withdrawing from the accounts. (though it won’t save you taxes currently).
- Selling losing stocks to offset capital gains. In a normal year everyone will have winning stocks and losing stocks in their porfolio if they diversified correctly. 2008 is one of the worse years in stock market history, but you will still need to sell your stocks in order to write off. Personally I will write off $3000 worth of losses to met the limit allowed by the tax code.
- If you are planning on giving your love ones some money over the holiday, please note the limit for gift is currently $12,000 per year. Anything above $12,000 will be deducted from your life time limit of 1,000,000.
I recently came across a blog by momscashblog regarding how to optimize keywords for Adsense in order to receive higher payout. (The post states she received information from another blog called Adsense Addict)
Here is a quick summary:
- Use the Google Adwords keyword tool to find a list of similar keywords. You want those keywords with high advertiser competition.
I played around with it a little bit, and it seems like most of the payouts are fairly low. However, there are areas where the payouts is higher than others such as credit cards, web hosting solutions. (Note: These generally offers large amount of kick backs for affiliate marketing traffics too).
It is definitely an article that is worth reading.
I saw this video through one of the RSS feed that I read regularly. It shows some times in order to accomplish a task in will take the utter most amount of concentration. I particularly liked when he mentioned how he hated the process but enjoyed it once the sculpture is complete. As they say, “The end justifies the mean”. Pretty cool video.
Earlier this week Google opened up their Adsense for Domain program to anyone who has a registered domain. (Previously it was only available to large publishers) Adsense for domain is an domain parking program in which Google takes over your page and display their ads with relevant ads. (Which means the title of your domain should contain keywords.) There are a lot of domain parking websites out there but most of them serves googles ads. As a result, they act as the middle man and take an extract cut. Check it out if you bought some domains previously but currently don’t have the time to develop them into the blogs/sites you would like.
As a test, I signed up for three domains and configured them for adsense for domain. I will report back after a few months to whether this will be a good way to park the domains you are currently not using.
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