Do you need a seasoned tax attorney? It’s almost tax season!

Shopping for a tax attorney is almost like shopping for shoes. You have to try on a few pairs before you decide on what looks good and what does not. There are different kinds of tax attorneys. So you really need to do your homework.

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Get Your Taxes Started

First, you must decide on whether you are having your personal taxes prepared, your business taxes prepared, or both. Then, you look around to see who is nice and cordial, and who is not. You also look around to see who the expert is and what you need to have done, so there will not be any mistakes.

A couple of useful keywords come to mind when shopping for an attorney: compassion, empathy and honesty. At taxattorney.com they seem to take these into serious consideration when dealing with you and your tax sensitivities.

Sure, you could go to your nearest tax office and get your taxes prepared there, but why not do your taxes online to save your money on gas, time and energy? It takes time to browse around online, but your searching online will be greatly reduced because you will not be wasting time sitting at stop lights or waiting behind slow drivers because the speed limit is only 35mph on the streets.

Back Taxes Owed

What if you need special tax help, like an IRS tax audit or unpaid taxes from years ago that you are now ready to pay? Shopping online at taxattorney.com can help you find that specialist to help you get over the financial slump, as a local tax shop may not be able to handle a larger issue.

The taxattorney.com website has a very convenient tool called the “Back Taxes Owed” area where you can select the amount of back taxes owed from a drop-down list. After making your monetary selection of the amount of taxes owed, you would then enter your name, phone number, the best time to call, your email address and any comments you might care to put in.

Website Overview: Tax Attorney dot com

I like the fact that taxattorney.com has a wealth of informational links right on its home page. You can easily find what you are looking for without having to click on several pages down just to get to where you want to go.

The main information is easily visible. This website also tells you up front what types of services it offers, it tells you that they give expert legal advice, and finally, that they have a strict price guarantee. At taxattorney.com the price that they quote you is the price that they will charge you.

If you need additional services from a tax attorney, they will only charge you for those additional services quoted. They will not try to sell you anything else such as tax problems related to the IRS or tax debt. They will only charge you what you came there for.

Another great thing I like about this website is that it reveals untrue myths regarding tax issues, such as do you believe that you don’t earn enough to have to pay tax, or do you think that if you need to apply for your tax refund that the IRS will audit your returns? These are just a couple of myths that many people believe, but are not true. Visit the website to see more untrue myths.

One of the special features of taxattorney.com is that they offer assistance from an IRS lawyer. Sometimes we cannot foresee unexpected pitfalls, curve balls and hidden challenges that lie in tax problems, but a very trained and knowledgeable IRS attorney will be familiar with surprising issues and will know how to handle them.

It might be wise to tell your tax attorney everything. That way you will have complete peace of mind knowing that everything will be resolved because you have told them everything and you have chosen the right attorney. Go with taxattorney.com. You may have a great night’s sleep awaiting you.

That’s $900 off! Twisting Language in the Stores of America

Have you ever looked at advertisements carefully? Next time you do… look carefully at the wording, and how they twist common words and phrases that play with your ideas. Amazon is by no means unique in this respect. Let’s take a classic example:

save money on lcd tv

You’ll notice in the ad how we are encouraged to ‘save money’. That’s a great idea! But how? By buying their product! We’ll save over $900.00 (that’s 31%) of the total. That’s impressive.

 

Now let’s look at the meaning of the words “Save” or “Save $900”! But for the savvy shopper, these are warning signs about how companies play with common meanings of words to highlight their own products, appeal to our emotions and encourage us to open our wallets…

There are a number of meanings that we need to note:

Meaning #1: to put aside as a store or reserve

Naturally, this indicates that we are putting money away somewhere, somehow in a store. In the modern world, stores would include a bank, a broker (perhaps), ETFs… any of a hundred ways. The actual meaning of the word ‘reserve’ means to keep something for a particular purpose or for future need.

Money is defined by Merriam Webster’s as “…a medium of exchange, a measure of value, or a means of payment”. So the term saving money means “putting away something of value for another reason or for future use”.

There are lots of typical examples of ‘saving money’: a single man saves money for his new car, a couple save money for a deposit on a house, an older woman saves money for retirement, … whatever. The idea is that when you save money you are delaying gratification of your purchase of items that would be bring you present comfort, joy and possession. Such gratification may be increased later by purchasing a new car or retiring in comfort to Tuscany.

Meaning #2: to save money on a deal or special offer

Like the advertisement said, you could buy and save at the same time. How? You buy a brand new LCD TV for your living room AND you would save an extra $900 on the purchase price. Let’s forget about price competition, product rotation, and such like…

The term “save money” here simply means to spend less money than previously or than elsewhere. We’re all accustomed to this idea of saving money!

If you buy this LCD TV, are you really saving money?

No, of course not. You are simply spending less than you would otherwise have had to spend.

  • For some people, this may be an added bonus (unlikely) since they may well simply spend the extra $900 on a bigger screen size, a more expensive buy-and-save offer, or lots of extra cables and doo-dahs.
  • For others, this means that they would buy this model rather than a smaller one because the extra $900 brings the TV inside their budget.
  • Still others would simply finance the whole deal, forget about the $900 and worry about how to make the monthly minimum payments on a loan purchase agreement, consolidated loan or credit card. They would likely end up spending more than $250-500 over two years in additional interest payments (based on 13% and 21% financing).

What each of them would likely fail to take into account is that in saving money on the purchase price, they are still spending a whole bunch of money that could be otherwise saved and put in a future store. Of course, the advertisement wants you to spend your money on that item. That’s good for the company selling the item and the company that makes the item. It may not necessarily be good for you.

 

By playing with the language, these companies will try to confuse you by encouraging you to spend while saving despite the fact that it is impossible. You may delight yourself in this fantasy for a while, but when you open your credit card statement, you WILL know the truth: that LCD TV still cost nearly $2,000; and that money must come from SOMEWHERE.

But is it legal?

This is not the only instance where companies will play with language to confuse, befuddle or intimidate the customer. Some of the tricks that they use are legal, some may be gray, and some will be illegal. Whatever the nature of the legality, it is always in your interest to put your interests first, because the advertisers CERTAINLY won’t. Whatever they claim in their commercials or advertisements.

save money on amazon

Such tricks may include: time-limited offers, only x in stock, best value in town or the difference back, seasonal sales, … the list goes on and on. Whatever: we live in a world of abundance, and esp. in tech items, the next generation will ALWAYS be more powerful, less expensive, smaller, lighter and more desirable. In less technologically related areas, you will always be able to buy more towels at great prices, or shoes at 50%… why? Because next season there’s another sale. There’s always going to be another sale.

With sales revenue down in most stores, more people trading down, and customers leaning towards more economical purchasing, stores are going to become more aggressive in their sales tactics, pricing strategies and marketing campaigns. Since wallets are tighter with increasing mortgage payments, skyrocketing fuel and food costs, and increasing weakness in the economy, shoppers may increasingly find themselves vulnerable to smarter strategies in the markets, supermarkets, malls and department stores of America.

Have you seen advertisements that tempt customers to spend by creating confusing slogans? I always remember the “buy now! pay later” ads that were common when I was growing up in the UK. Who cares when you have to pay, YOU STILL have to pay?…

My own sales pitch – Two for the price of one!

So, share some of the more egregious examples here! Come on, you know you want to… oh, and for each comment on this blog, I’ll comment in this thread and follow you to your blog and comment there, too! And that’s a promise! What are you waiting for? Comment today, comment tomorrow, but COMMENT!

Not your typical Costco – or is it?

Costco TaiwanA surefire way for me to break the monthly budget is to go to Costco! Taiwan is now blessed (or cursed) with five branches, including a newly opened one in TaiChung County.

I’ve been a member for a few years now, and an advocate since I discovered their hotdogs a few years earlier! Of course, having a car makes shopping there much easier, and more expensive.

Today, somehow we managed to drop nearly NT$5500 on stuff for the home and the business. Such necessities included 12 bagels, 24 tubes of glue, several books, 2 picture frames (for my old calendar), 2 large bags of Coffee (unavailable at such good prices anywhere else), gluesticks, and a bunch of other nicknacks.

During the course of shopping, I decided to photograph some things you couldn’t find in your typical Costco in Main Street, USA. So here they are! Can you identify them?

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No prizes for guessing correctly what they are! Does your neighborhood Costco stock these products or brands? Apologies for the photography!