Eric

That makes sense. The chimney is for the furnace. But the confusing part for me is still determining what is a whole-house repair (expense), and what is a whole house improvement (depreciable).

General repairs are also listed as indirect expenses and Deductible based on the percentage of your home used for business. I have receipts and totals for specific jobs, like the chimney, and materials and labor broken down by project.

Alright, this is the last newbie tax question from me, I know you folks are busy. This year, we spent a small fortune doing work to our 150-year-old home. I have a home office, it meets all of the requirements, and it's 13% of our house's square footage. It seems to me that the bulk of the money we spent on the house isn't going to help out our tax situation, since things like a new roof, siding, insulation, plumbing, electrical, etc are considered home improvements, and not repairs. And as I understand it, "improvements" add to the basis, which is basically worthless, while "repairs" are expenses. What if we replaced an old water softener? What if the brick chimney was rebuilt from the roof up, and then a stainless liner was added? What if the electrical service wasn't to code, and we moved it to the front of the house from the back? What if the stairs were all wonky and we shimmed them all to make them level and consistent in height? In some rooms we patched and painted existing drywall. Sounds like a repair. In other rooms we gutted down to the studs and put up new drywall. Sounds like an improvement. Are any of these repairs, or are they all improvements? Is it just me and my non-tax-person-noodle-brain, or is this whole thing incredibly wishy-washy and open to interpretation? That's how it feels, and I don't like it. Numbers are supposed to be easy, not nebulous and fluffy. It's a perversion of mathematics. Screw this, I'm doing shots.

There was a link from that page: https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/repay-loans/forgiveness-cancellation/teacher That's where the $5000 came from, and she met all of the requirements (had to, in order to get the money to begin with). So based on that, plus Bart's suggestion that it's not taxable, and the fact that there is no tax information related to it on the lender's site... I'm going with that, and it'll be one of the few times I am pleasantly surprised while I do my return. Thank you both!

Please forgive my non-tax-person tax question. My wife had $5000 knocked off her student loans in 2015, but we never received any tax information related to it. I had assumed that it was taxable income, but even logging into the Navient site didn't produce any documents other than the usual 1098-E. So I started looking around, and have found this chunk of text often copied and re-posted on different sites: That seems awfully vague to me, but alright. It was a teacher loan forgiveness program, and she is a teacher. She has been a teacher since she graduated more than 10 years ago. One of the stipulations for the program was that she had to have been teaching for 5 years or more. Should I do anything with this $5000 on our tax return?

Also, my apologies to Rita. I believe I deleted her post from the thread earlier. You can still see it quoted in mine though! (sorry) I'm terrible at multi tasking. Nobody this scattered should have this much control over a website. Good thing I don't run a cloud storage service.

My password data (a single encrypted file, in my case) is part of my backups. In the unlikely event that the software breaks and ruins the data file, I can pull it from a backup and open it with a previous version off the software... or a new version after the bug has been corrected. But to extend your question further, theoretically, an update to your tax software could destroy all of your tax data. An update to Windows could destroy everything on your computer. It'd really suck if it happened, but it's not very likely.

Every time some high profile website gets their (unencrypted, tsk tsk) user/pass/account database hacked/stolen, it's interesting to see just how bad the passwords are. http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/09/new-stats-show-ashley-madison-passwords-are-just-as-weak-as-all-the-rest/

Those email addresses are always great to see on a resume

There are two types of passwords I recommend that all of my clients use for the admin panel for their website. A hand full of random common words separated by underscores/hyphens/special characters. See this XKCD comic for an explanation. These are the default passwords I create for new accounts. They're somewhat possible to remember, they're perfectly secure, and fun to come up with. Like rambunctious-jellyfish_pineapple-eater! or travelmug-handicapped-platypus-ransom An 18 character string of gibberish, random numbers, special characters, and mixed case letters. I recommend an encrypted password database for anyone going this route, because they're impossible to remember. Lots of good applications out there to help you manage your secure passwords, varying in price and features (autofill browser extensions, multi-device sync, etc) Keepass 1Password Dashlane LastPass I've got more than 300 unique passwords to keep track of, I can't imagine trying to keep them straight without some kind of software to organize and remember them for me.

I think it's still considered somewhat experimental, and only officially supported on their Nexus line of phones, as far as I know. I think that's why you have to request an invite, because it's still kind of in "beta".

I bought a Nexus 6 the day they went on sale, and would really like to give Project Fi a try, but I live in the middle of nowhere, with almost no TMobile service and zero Sprint service. And the latency on my home internet is terrible. I wish I could have the internet connectivity that comes along with being near civilization, but without all of the people. Nexus phones are an Android line of cell phones that runs plain vanilla Android without any carrier or manufacturer garbage on them, and are supported by Google. Google partners with different manufacturers to make a new phone or two every year. Project Fi is a cell phone service and a Google initiative that allows your phone to switch seamlessly between T-Mobile and Sprint networks as well as Wifi. The price is decent too... Unfortunately where I live, if you want reliable service, Verizon Wireless is the only option. https://fi.google.com https://store.google.com/category/phones

Are you a fellow Nexus fan? Edit: I only ask because after some brief stalking, it looks like you're a Project Fi user. I'm envious.

I think this has more to do with the announcements Microsoft made at CES about the work they've done to improve efficiency and performance with new generations of Intel processors. It sounds to me that they're saying that they won't back port those advancements to Windows 7 from Windows 10, but that shouldn't be a surprise. My guess is that Windows 7 will continue to work on the new chipsets, but you won't get all of the fancy optimization that come baked into the latest version. Intel provides the drivers for their chipsets, and it's up to Intel which operating systems they want to support, not Microsoft.

If your computer is sporadically rebooting, chances are you're getting a blue screen. Here's how to keep your computer from automatically rebooting, so that you can write down the information in the error, and then google it, hopefully pointing you toward a possible solution http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/help-troubleshoot-the-blue-screen-of-death-by-preventing-automatic-reboot/

Double check that the post you think you made is actually there in that original thread. If you typed out a reply but then didn't post it, the forum sometimes attempts to remember what you had been typing so it doesn't get lost in the case that you navigate away from the page without posting. Once you verify that the post is there, go ahead and make your new thread in the main forum. Nothing you do at that point will affect an unrelated reply to a different thread. If I misunderstood the problem, let me know.

To go further out on that tangent... it depends somewhat on the display technology used for the panel. On an OLED / AMOLED / Super AMOLED display, every pixel generates its own light. Black pixels aren't lit at all, which saves a little bit of battery power. On LCD screens, the entire screen is always backlit, and black pixels must block the backlight from coming through. Some fancier LED backlit LCD TVs/Monitors have a matrix of LEDs for the backlight, and can individually darken/lighten regions (not pixels) of the screen making them somewhat more power efficient when large areas of the screen are dark. Contrast ratio does suffer within those darkened areas, however, since if a region's backlight is darkened, it can't display as bright a pixel in that region. Apple uses LCD (IPS) only. Samsung is the biggest innovator when it comes to AMOLED technology, and uses them almost exclusively in their phones/tablets. Other manufacturers have their own preferences, and some mix it up from device to device.

Disclaimer: I didn't design this site, I just manage the software that is purchased from a vendor. Most of the colors you see are the defaults, although I can tweak (and have tweaked) the style sheets to make minor changes. On this site, post text is all nearly black on white... it's not black, but it's very very dark. There are other bits of data that aren't as dark, which I assume are what you're referring to. The reason is that the forum is very information dense, and while none of the content is unimportant, some of of the it is definitely MORE important than the rest. Less important information like how long ago a post was made or a signature line for example is lighter in color so that it doesn't compete visually with the more important text. Deciding what is important and giving it the appropriate visual weight is a basic design principle. If everything stood out, then you would be left with a lot of noise and overall readability (and usability) would suffer. In Web Accessibility terms, the WCAG 2.0 specification (Level AA) says that a contrast ratio (foreground to background) of 4.5:1 is required to pass. Some of the lighter greys fall just shy of that ratio here, so I'll darken them up a bit. If after darkening the light grey text (I'll get to it in a few minutes) you still have trouble seeing it, I might recommend either calibrating your monitor, or using your browser's built in accessibility features to help out, such as magnifying the page. (CTRL + (plus) to zoom in, CTRL - (minus) to zoom out.

Something is wrong when a software vendor can't make their web-based software work in browsers that have the best standards compliance.

I don't think there is a distinction. Password protection without encryption would be too easily circumvented.

A strong password that is unique to the account is incredibly effective. Be careful to not provide it to some look-alike site at www.outlook.fakesite.com for example. If you use an email client like Outlook or Mail or Thunderbird and your ISP / email provider supports SSL, then configure your client to use it. Other than that, it's up to your provider to keep their systems secure. Encryption is important, which is why every single online retailer in the world utilizes it when they take your credit card information, and why many sites use it when taking your username and password. With the latest round of donations, I'm going to buy a 3 year SSL certificate for atxommunity.com. Yes, I did check the email headers to see where they came from. The actual addresses were registered to this forum. They get into the account and send emails to everyone in the contact list. The same thing happened to my mom a few years ago, and once they were done extracting everything they wanted from the account, they deleted every email and contact so she couldn't easily warn everyone of the intrusion.

I won't name names, but It's happened to members of this forum--I've received phishing emails from their hacked accounts. Granted, it was most likely due to a weak password or a phishing scam. The attack vector is irrelevant though; once they have your password, they have your emails and attachments. I believe that depends on the version of Acrobat used to protect the file. Acrobat version 9+ uses 256 bit AES encryption, which is plenty secure, but Acrobat 9 has a weakness in password handling. Anything Acrobat X and above is quite secure as far as I know.

I didn't see a notification, but as soon as I closed the tab, I promptly forgot about it, haha. I do believe that it should work without the tab open, though, and it should work in Chrome on Desktop and Android devices. I imagine Firefox's implementation is similar.

I was wondering the same thing. I'm going to close my forum tab... feel free to mention me and I'll let you know if I get it. I definitely wouldn't enable it on many websites, because I can definitely see how it could get obnoxious.