Ed Icionsub

Seriously wish one of the candidates for President would promise to get rid of the IRS. I would vote for that man regardless of his position on other subjects. I absolutely hate doing taxes and yet I firmly believe that every citizen should be able to complete their forms on there own and file them without fear of an audit or questioning by the IRS because they could not understand the complicated tax forms and tax law.

Thankfully, we citizens do have the ability to get help with our taxes. There are people who are trained and licensed to help us prepare taxes, and they have to stand behind their work. If someone other than the taxpayer prepares the tax forms, that person has to sign the form along with the taxpayer. If you were smart and hired an enrolled agent to help you prepare your taxes, the enrolled agent can appear before the IRS if you get audited, and they can even negotiate with the IRS on your behalf.

Becoming an enrolled agent requires formal training, which is available online now. You have a variety of courses that you have to take, such as the enrolled agent ethics course and about 50 hours of study on a list of required courses.

A lot of people like to file their taxes as soon as they receive their W-2s in the mail, around the end of January. These are usually the people who are expecting a refund. However, a lot of other people wait until the first or second week of April to even look at a tax form and try to figure out whether they will get a refund or have to pay in. I know that I need to get busy organizing my home filing system and get the receipts sorted so that when my W-2 comes in the mail I can do a rough estimate and find out if I need to start saving up to pay in, or if I can expect some money back for a change.

Tags: agent, estimate, mail, negotiate, trained

Even though the housing market is in a slump and the foreclosed houses are making it hard for people to get full value on the equity of their homes when they need to sell, people still need affordable housing in Chicago and other areas.

There are challenges for a lot of reasons. Some people are getting married and need a starter home. Other people are retiring and need to downsize from a large home that requires a lot of maintenance and high utility bills to something much smaller and easier to manage. Others have to move because of employment, like my friend, Wes.

Wes is a DJ and if you know about the entertainment industry, DJs tend to change jobs frequently. They are subjected to ratings changes, format changes, and flaky management at the corporate radio stations of today. Wes was let go from a large market radio station changing format and he found a job in middle Illinois. He needs to find affordable housing in Rockford and if he can’t find what he needs available now, he will have to find temporary housing and build his own house.

Wes already knows about manufactured homes in Chicago from living and working in the Windy City the past 6 years. Now that he is moving to Rockford, he doesn’t have a lot of money from the sale of his house. Six years is not usually long enough to build up any equity at all, and with the depressed real estate market, many people are underwater with their mortgages instead of having the equity they were expecting.

This year I have to ship several packages of Christmas gifts and I am very concerned with the expense of using either the post office or UPS. I know the post office has been losing money, but they have a lot more issues than that. For example, there are exceptions to the express mail and priority mail deliveries that mean you might pay extra for next day delivery, but in reality that package can take anywhere from 3 to 5 days to arrive at its destination. Those kinds of problems chase away customers.

So many online retailers are offering free shipping that it is much cheaper to buy the items online and have them shipped for free by the retailer directly to the recipient, instead of shipping the items to my house for wrapping and then me taking the items to the post office to pay a small fortune for shipping charges.

As a rule of thumb, for every pound your package weighs, it will cost you about $4 to ship it. So a 4 pound package will cost about $16 to ship, unless it is books, which can go at a reduced book rate.

Some people have web sites that are well designed, attractive, and have enough visitors to make considering joining am affiliate program worthwhile. But I am sure that a lot of people do not really understand what an affiliate program is all about or how it works. That is when I tell people to check out Blue Global Media and learn about their affiliate programs.

They work with you as partners in finding leads for advertisers. It is as simple as that. There are different ways to find those leads, from running banner ads on the sidebar of your blog, to dedicating your entire web site to being a catalogue of products for rent or sale.

This is easy to get started. All you need is an established web site and an idea of what type of products will be attractive to the people who visit your web site. Then search the top affiliate networks to find out who is making money and who is successful.

A popular affiliate concept is the cash advance affiliate program . This industry is relatively new and using a variety of advertising methods. Some people respond well to an online transaction, for convenience and privacy. Other people prefer to use the internet for research before they make a decision. Either way, if they click though as a result of something they found on your website, then it is your lead and you will get paid for a portion of the business that results from their click through.

Looking for a new job in today’s bad economy is really tough. My wife has been looking for a new job for over a year. Of course, she is looking for a professional position, not just a job. She was thinking about changing her career path a searching non profit jobs as an alternative to the corporate world.

About 10 years ago we both got involved with a charity here. We served as volunteers on the Board of Directors and she also worked on the fund raising committee. I believe that fund raising is a critical part of most paid nonprofit jobs, like Executive Director positions.

We enjoyed the volunteer work for the most part. There were a lot of different personalities involved in the Board. It was challenging to try to make your feelings known to the rest of the group without any formal credentials. For example, the Treasurer was a stock broker at a big established brokerage. The brokerage requires all their brokers to do some community service work. But I happen to know quite a bit about stocks and mutual funds and I had some valid points to make about the non-profit’s investments. However, since I am not a stockbroker, the rest of the board pretty much ignored what I had to say. And, sadly, hat I had said proved to be 100% correct less than two years after my motion was overturned in favor of the stock broker’s recommendations.

If I was to consider a nonprofit career for myself, I would be very picky about interviewing the paid staff and also the Board members to make sure everyone was dedicated to the cause of the charity and not just there in a self serving interest. And that is what I talked about with my wife tonight.