My wife got on some sort of home business list, and we have started to get phone calls saying she requested information about starting a home business. Someone also mailed her a magazine titled Home Business Connection. It’s the May 2007 issue, and apparently retails for $5.95.
I was intrigued. I started to look through it, and had to laugh. It was cover to cover get-rich easy schemes! There are tons of ads, and even the articles are basically ads.
Here are some of the “business opportunities”:
Gumball/candy machines
Weight loss patches
Candle making (with MLM twist)
Stuffing envelopes
Virtual travel agnecy
Herbs and supplements
Medical coding specialist
Surveilance cameras
Weight loss drugs
Gas saving capsules
Mailing lists
No money down real estate
Flipping property
Brokering notes
Some of the ads really dont tell you what the deal is. They just have big flashing pictures, and text like “Got cash to burn?” “Did you make $4,297 today?” “100 millionaires in the next 5 years”, etc, etc
It’s just hilarious! But I can also see thousands of desparate people wasting their money signing up for some of these get rich schemes. The people getting rich are the people who run these things.
I have been a customer of BuyAndHold.com for a couple years now. Overall I have been pretty happy with them. They charge me about $7 a month for my account, and I get two free window trades a month. Trades after that are only $2.99 each. But having the two free window trades every month encourages me to invest at least something since they are a use them or lose them thing. I alos opened a Roth IRA with them.
But in the last day, they have been ticking me off a little bit. I want to but some more ILF (a Latin America index fund). Yesterday I logged on to their website, but when I went to do anything, it kept making me log in again. I called them, and was told that they had had a power outage, and that it would be up sometime after 3pm. So I figured out quickly that I would be able to enter a window trade for the 3-4pm window. I was able to log on last night. And I was able to log on earlier this morning. But a little while ago I went to log on to look at setting up the window trade to buy the ILF, and found the site was down. I called them and was told they had a power outage this morning. WHAT? Again? How many power outages are they having? Don’t they have backup power? The company I work for has generators, and power filters, etc. And they have two of everything for redundancy!
It makes me a little nervous that I can’t access my account. I will have to watch the situation. If this crap keeps up, I will move my account someplace else!
We only got our tax return back from our CPA yesterday (Sunday). We didn’t owe any Federal taxes, in fact we are getting a refund. But we do owe New York state income tax. But we were headed to Niagara Falls on the Canada side to celebrate our 13th wedding anniversary later that day. Our accountant always recommends that we mail our tax returns via certified mail with return receipt requested. We could have mailed it Yesterday at one of the automated postal centers, but we couldn’t done it certified or with return receipt requested. At least I don’t think we could.
So today we woke up in our Canadian hotel. We got dressed, and got out car from the valet. I had intended to lookup up the nearest post office on the American side on the internet. But seeing that our hotel charges $20 a day for wi-fi, I decided not to use it. I knew of a used book store over in Niagara Falls, NY called Book Center. My wife and drove there, and looked for books. This is one of my favorite used book stores, but I didn’t find a lot today. I did buy one book. I asked the guy if he knew of a nearby post office. It turned out the nearest post office was right out their back door.
We walked over to the USPS office. There were no other customers. This close to the deadline to mail taxes I was expecting lines, and a long wait. I grabbed a certified mail slip, and a return receipt slip, and filled them out. We were in and out after mail our tax return. How painless! It was kind of funny crossing back into Canada again. When the guy asked us why we were in the US, and I answered to mail our taxes. He waved us right through. I was relatively painless!
My wife and I drove up, and got our tax return from our CPA. This was the first time my wife actually met our accountant. He is working today (Sunday), because tax day is in a couple days.
We don’t have to pay any federal taxes this year, in fact we get a refund. And we wont have to pay any estimated federal taxes this year either. They are such a pain in the butt!
We do have to pay New York State taxes though. But that is only about $280. And we found out that we don’t have to pay any NY state estimated taxes this year either! It will be nice not having to remember to pay them, and come up with an extra $1000 every three months!
Now paying the state taxes is going to be tricky. We are going to Canada later today. Just across the border in Niagara Falls. We could mail the taxes today via one of the automated postal machines. And we could get a delivery confirmation. But normally what our CPA suggests is to mail the tax payment certified mail, with return receipt requested. So probably tomorrow we will need to drive back across the border into the US, mail our tax payment, and then drive back to Canada. Such fun! Hopefully the border crossing wont be too busy.
I talked with our accountant this morning. He is still working on my return. But it looks like we are going to get an $1100 refund from the Feds! But we will have to pay around $250 to NY state. So we wont have to be makeing estimtated tax payments to the feds this year. But our estimated taxes to the state will increase a little bit. This is the first time in many years that I have gotten a refund! WOW! I thought I was going to have to pay taxes.
He is still working on them, and doing the estimated taxes and stuff. We are going over to pick them up Sunday morning. He will do efile. But we will still have to mail the stuff on Monday or Tuesday. That will be interesting as we are going to be in Canada. We will probably have to drive back to the USA to mail off our NY State tax return, and then drive back to Canada. We could probably mail the NYS tax stuff from one of those automated postal machines, but then it wouldn’t be certified with return reciept requested.
Oh well. I hope crossing the border isn’t too much of a pain.