Browsing Category Other Financial Topics

After keeping the nation on its toes for a week, President Trump signed a new stimulus bill into law on December 27, 2020. The stimulus bill was actually only a small part of the 5,000+ page Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 that funds the government until September. In addition to the stimulus bill, there were also some tax law changes tacked on to it as well. While you probably already know about the stimulus checks it authorized (and the political ...

We’ve made it to the end of 2020. For the last blog post of every year, I provide a list of the top ten posts that have received the most views during the year. It gives you a chance to catch up on anything important that you may have missed during the year and it gives me the chance to slack off and write an easy post over the holidays. It’s a win-win, don’t you think? Combined, these posts have been ...

Back when people were still allowed to get together, I was at an event for professionals and business owners where we discussed generosity. We watched a video testimony of a woman who God had asked to make some specific changes in her life to set her free. She was a doctor, and she felt led to “work like a doctor and live like a nurse” to free up her income to be more generous. She also felt that God was ...

If you pay any attention to the news (and I don’t blame you if you don’t), you’ve probably heard that Congress is suddenly eager to pass another coronavirus stimulus bill after months without progress. Why the sudden rush? I doubt it’s to get on Santa’s good list this year. It’s much more likely that they’re feeling pressure because a number of key provisions of the original CARES Act are set to expire at the end of this month.  The CARES Act ...

You need help with your finances. This blog just isn’t quite enough. You want advice from someone who knows more than you do but you don’t want to end up with Bernie Madoff. What do you do? There are around 350,000 people in the US who call themselves financial advisors. Some of them are amazing and would make your life infinitely better. And some just want to make money and don’t really care about you. How do you separate the wheat ...

When is the last time you saw anything positive on the news? Even social media seems to have devolved into a giant whining match between the “stay home and live” and “live free or die” camps. We’re not going to get into that today. We’re going to take the Pollyanna approach. What good has come of this coronavirus crisis? For me personally, I enjoy having my husband home an extra day each week. I’m really enjoying that my son’s karate has ...

Here we are again, wrapping up another year. I’ve made a tradition of using the last post of the year to look back and see which articles were the most popular so that you can go back and read them if you missed them. (Just click the title to read each article.) This year’s articles ranged the spectrum from side hustles to taxes and, of course, the housing allowance. Ranked according to the number of views over the past year, these ...

Do you remember back in 2017 when credit reporting agency Equifax had a data breach that compromised the personal information of over 147 million Americans? Yes, an organization that collects our Social Security numbers and our financial information without our consent got hacked and lost half of America’s information. Here is an article from when it happened if you want to read more about it. As you may suppose, people weren’t very happy about it. A lot of people never even ...

Last week we discussed the value of an accountable reimbursement plan for churches now that pastors can no longer deduct their unreimbursed business expenses. Today, I will tell you how to actually set one up. What Makes A Reimbursement Plan Accountable The confusing thing about accountable plans is that you don’t need to file any forms or get any kind of permission from the IRS. We’re used to needing authorization for things, like Form 4361, so we get nervous when we don’t ...

If you’re like a lot of clergy members, you had an unpleasant surprise this tax season when you learned that you can no longer deduct unreimbursed church business expenses with your itemized deductions. You’re probably used to covering a lot of church expenses yourself, knowing that you’ll get some kind of reward for it come tax time. Except this year it didn’t come. Why not? What Happened To The Unreimbursed Business Expense Deduction Part of the 2017 Tax Cuts & Jobs Act was ...