Catherine

Oh, Rita -- prayers for a full and speedy recovery for your sister! IGNORE the clients; they'll still be there next week. If you do any return, finish up your own. Heck, send it as complete as it currently is and amend later if you need to.

Rules are on the market as available, or actually rented, the whole year, not that it has to be rented out a minimum of X days.

My Florida clients (six miles inland) were fine but their in-laws in NC are out of power. And the wife's dad (in NC) passed away just a day or two before the storm hit. So they are heading north to the no-power area to the ONE room in the ONE hotel that still had space, to help the family and try to arrange a funeral. At least the f-i-l did not die due to the storm. But good grief, NOT an easy time for them. They still owe me some tax docs and called while packing the car for NC to say they'll overnight them. I told them "family first!" and we'll just file the return late if need be. They typically get a refund anyway.

The ways of God and computers are strange and not for mortal mankind to understand. Plus we can't "hug" computers. Unfortunately.

Oh, *I* have seen penalties assessed. Big fat hairy ones with fangs. Non-filing, late-filing, plus interest. One client is a contractor (who really NEEDS to bring his records here so we can do accounting for him but he doesn't) is late- very, very late - EVERY year. I charge him triple my usual price as my own penalty (so in all, FOUR times normal fee). I am STILL waiting for info for the 2015 1099's. But the IRS sends him penalty bills, every year. He hasn't wised up yet.

I have friends, clients, and client-interests in the area and am praying for them all. Plus everyone else, of course!

Absolutely NOT! Their shoes are clueless (and probably have Athlete's Foot). What we have to do is understand what it's like to stand in those shoes. But I ain't puttin' 'em on. No way, no how!

If you want wacky, offbeat, and FUN, have you watched Undercover Blues with Dennis Quaid and Kathleen Turner? Or Real Genius with Val Kilmer?

What a little cuteness she is!!

Already?!?! wow! Congratulations Grandma, Mama, Dada, and babykins!

I had one from a small set of utilities (no longer around, doggone it) called Desktop Dozen. If you use Adobe Acrobat, the Tic, Tic, and Calculate plug-in (from cPaperless) does paper tape calculators right there in your pdf and saves them on the page for you.

Don't we all have our humor/horror stories of the sluggards who suddenly get frantic but still dribble paperwork in at a slow trickle. If they stopped sending emails begging for updates and got the missing info to us instead, they'd be done way faster. Sigh.

I do, and I have posted the no-client version a couple of times but would be happy to do so again. I use it just for tax prep, but it certainly could be configured with whatever metric you want to track. What it does not do is warn you of deadlines looming.

Remember to tell them to blame their legis-vermin - not you - for the delay, aggravation, and cost.

@michaelmars I do believe so but am not on the right computer at the moment. Catherine

There is a stand-alone called "FileInTime" that is low cost and may be useful to you.

Not only -- they work on the scared, too. The very success of these scams is a testimony of the mean-spirited and over-eager tactics the IRS has used in the decades of its existence. If they were not ham-handed and holding a well-deserved reputation of unreasonableness, these scams would NOT work. (That does not mean crooks would not find another way to scam people; they would. But it would take more effort on their part to succeed in stealing.)

Any idea how this is handled in the ACA clawback rules that are phasing in? Where the estate is tapped to recover Medicare costs in the last years of life? Is the value considered to be pre-reverse-mortgage or post-reverse-mortgage? That could push the heirs from "we need cash to payoff this loan" to "we need cash to payoff the loan AND pay back medicare for dad's last two years of medical costs - crap, we're in deep doo-doo!"

I wonder if it would have been different had the calendar been contemporaneous. After all, mapquest or google maps miles do NOT change (very much, unless a major road washes out) from year to year to the same destination. Heck, I have printed out contemporaneous maps that are unusable a day or two later if the trip happens to be on a wet or snowy day and the stupid map gets dropped in a puddle.

At least one office supply company still sells it; I bought a new package of 100 sheets just a couple of months ago. We use it in our pistol matches to make two copies of the score sheet at once.

Then you get to get up close and personal with Form 3115. Assuming you actually want these clients...

Any time spent wasting their time is time they can't be stealing from some poor terrified elderly person!

@jklcpa I will tell my husband this evening!

So my husband often says that this would be a GREAT science fair project; Just HOW happy ARE clams? And how can one tell? They make jokes about engineers, too. ;-)