Today’s Social Security column addresses questions about how long you have to withdraw an application for benefits, applying online to switch from survivor’s benefits to retirement benefits and the earliest different benefits can begin. Larry Kotlikoff is a Professor of Economics at Boston University and the founder and president of Economic Security Planning, Inc. See
Taxes
It’s tax day folks and the process of preparing them can be difficult if not arduous, especially for more than 14 million taxpayers who paid for tax prep software that they could have gotten for free. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found roughly a billion dollars in revenue for TurboTax maker Intuit INTU
Just like Christmas, tax day comes but once a year. Unlike Christmas, however, tax day moves around a bit. This year, it falls on April 18, thanks to the celebration of Emancipation Day in the District of Columbia. The same will be true next year. Still, April 15 gets all the attention. Every year, the
Are gifts income the IRS can tax? Fortunately, no, but the line between what is income and what is a gift is sometimes fuzzy. Let’s say you do major favors for your employer and get a gift of $20,000, is that really a gift? You might try to document it that way, but it’s not
ProPublica recently reported on a “trove of IRS data” that showed “the incomes and tax rates of the 400 Americans with the highest incomes from 2013 to 2018.” “First, for scale, this is the typical American’s income compared to what it took to get into the top 5%, e.g., a primary care doctor’s salary, or