Obama has spent the latter half of his first term with a more populist tone. Some believe that Tea Party pressure as well as the Occupy Wall Street movement have brought the country’s attention to the reported 1%, the country’s wealthiest people. As Obama tries to appeal to the other 99%, he has taken on the idea of the Buffett Tax.

Warren Buffett, in a now well known New York Times Op Ed Piece believes that he and other high net worth people like him, should pay more tax than current laws require. He says that his 15% tax rate is lower than his secretary’s tax rate.

At the 2012 State of the Union address President Obama invited Buffett’s secretary to the speech where he again mentioned the Buffett rule which he now calls the Millionaire Tax. He laid out some bold plans for making the nation’s wealthiest Americans pay more in taxes.

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You know about the Dollar and the Euro. You may even know about the Peso, the Yuan, and the Pound but you have probably never heard of the Bay Bucks or Ithaca Hours. These two strange sounding names are examples of the local currencies that some communities are printing in order to revitalize their local economies.

Most local currencies are based on service. Just like traditional dollars, you can earn local currency by performing a service or selling goods in your local community. By setting up a type of bartering system, a local currency serves as a type of trade barrier. This not only allows for compensation to those who may have otherwise not had a traditional job, it also keeps more local economic activity in the community since the currency is worthless outside of the local area. Still don’t understand? Here are a few of the local currencies in circulation right now.

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With the United States Postal Service hemorrhaging money, it’s easy to get confused as to the current price of a postage stamp.

The current price is 45 cents.

This is the price of a first-class letter weighing no more than 1 ounce. If the weight is no more than 2 ounces, the price is 65 cents. No more than 3 ounces and we’re talking eight five cents. Postcards cost 32 cents. If you purchased a First Class Forever stamp, you don’t have to worry about the current stamp price because that will always cover letters weighing no more than 1 ounce.

The last postage rate increase was on January 22nd, 2012.

(Photo: queen_of_subtle)

One of the issues that has been coming up lately in the world of finances is that of consumers who are “unbanked.” The unbanked are those who do not use banking services. They don’t keep their money at regular financial institutions, and they may not be interested in getting an account for various reasons, ranging from being unable to maintain a high minimum to all of the fees.

However, it becomes necessary for many to interact with some sort of financial services provider, since many of the unbanked still have paychecks to cash. Some of the options available to the unbanked, though, are not very palatable.

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Did you decide that this year you would start saving more and making your money work for you? That’s a great resolution but in order to do that, you’re going to have to go outside of your normal bank account and become an investor. Often, that means investing in stocks but before you put your money to work in the stock market there’s a lot to learn. Losing money in the markets is a lot easier than making money so let’s go in armed with knowledge.

Although not a hard and fast rule, it’s best to save $5,000 or more before putting it in the stock market. This allows you to diversify your portfolio without the broker commissions eating away a large portion of your gains. If you don’t have that much money ready to deploy, keep reading but start saving. We aren’t going to head to the market just yet, there are a few more steps to take before putting real money to work.
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Did you put in any wagers on the big game last night? I didn’t but my friend did and he cleaned up. Remember the safety to open the game? Tom Brady steps back, throws it down the middle with no one within twenty yards of the ball? Intentional grounding, safety, two points for the New York Football Giants? Well, as it turns out, the payout on a $20 bet that the first score of the game would be a Giants’ safety was $1500. I knew this because my friend, who was sitting next to me, had won it.

This was right after winning a few bucks that Kelly Clarkson’s singing of the national anthem lasted a hair under one minute and thirty five seconds. Oh, he rolled that over into a bet that the final scoring touchdown would be made by Ahmad Bradshaw (I bet the little hesitation made him nervous… but at that point he was playing with house money). So while I didn’t make a single bet… sitting by him, and winning vicariously, was awesome. Oh… and he is a Giants fan, so his team also won the Super Bowl. Not a shabby Sunday!

So now the real question remains… does he owe taxes on those gambling winnings? Yep.

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Even reality TV doesn’t give justice to the real world and the funny, eye popping, or jaw dropping events that happen every day that very few people hear about. If your job involves working with the general public in any capacity you probably have stories that all of us would love to hear but since it’s tax season, I scoured the internet to find what I thought were some of the most “unique” (how’s that for politically correct) tax stories worth telling.

And before you start laughing, remember that given what our tax rates our, it’s no surprise people are trying to reduce their liability – but claiming one of these ridiculous tax writeoffs is the wrong way to go about that!

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Technology is getting the upper hand on car thieves. Thanks to GPS and sophisticated anti theft systems, car thefts have been on the decline for most of the 21^st century but they still happen and if you’re one of the 1.1 million people who become a victim of auto theft, you’ll need to know what to do next.

Your role in the recovery effort will be to deal primarily with your auto insurance company. How you handle each step of the process determines how much of a financial impact you’ll take from the theft. Here’s what you need to do to gain the best result.

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This is a guest post by Jon Xu, who is co-founder at FutureAdvisor, a web service that provides unbiased analysis & recommendations to save money on your investment portfolio. Jon is a friend of mine from high school and as someone who has taken a look at FutureAdvisor, I’m excited to see what they have in store for the future. I don’t spend a lot of time on investing but anything that’ll help me reduce fees and optimize my investing is always something I’m interested in reading more about.

We’ve all seen the intuitive value of having a well-diversified portfolio. This is proven to lower risk and allow you to customize exposure to asset classes that match your investment time horizon. Much less glorified is the value of periodically rebalancing assets in a portfolio. This is equally crucial to maintaining a portfolio that matches your risk profile over time. Moreover, it ensures a much smoother ride that matches the risk level of your initial investment.

The concept is simple: as asset values fluctuate, your portfolio diversification changes and you need to divest/invest periodically to keep your diversification on target. Since the mechanics of rebalancing typically call for sell/buys within your portfolio it leads to buying assets that are on the way down and selling those on the way up.

In short: you are buying low and selling high.
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A few years ago, it became really popular to start writing about adjusting your withholding so you didn’t get an enormous refund after you filed your tax return. It’s good advice and the main argument against over-withholding was that you were giving the IRS, technically the Treasury Department, an interest free loan. One thing I didn’t know was that in the event that the IRS underpays you, as a result of their error, they will actually pay interest you interest based on the same rates as what they charge taxpayers for underpayment. This is all governed by Section 6621 of the Internal Revenue Code.

The cases of underpayment by the IRS are rare. The IRS has forty-five days to process a tax return and will pay interest on your refund if it takes longer than forty-five days to process your return. If you are due a refund and you don’t file a return, the IRS won’t pay interest whenever you do. If you file a return, make a mistake that results in a greater refund, you might be paid interest. In those cases, it usually has to be an error that the IRS could’ve caught, like reporting of an expense that you failed to claim.

Finally, if you get examined or audited and the results show that you were owed a refund, they will pay interest on that as well.