Catherine

So, we should all take pictures of our desks, as they are, and post them here. Rich started; I'll go second.

Oh, Judy, I am SO sorry to hear your sad news! I'm glad the older woman is going to be OK - but that is so terribly sad about the 39-year-old. We just lost a friend here, about a week ago. Four years younger than I am - died suddenly in his sleep. Apparently there is a family history of "widow-maker" heart attacks in men in their 50's, but this was an absolute shock. Yes, tell EVERYONE you love them. Hug them until they squirm to be let go. As uncertain as this life can be, you then at least have the consolation that they knew they were loved by you, without question. By the way - I love ALL of you, my friends here at the ATX Community. Consider yourselves hugged.

I have had several clients over the years who lived overseas extensively. No, you do NOT "need" to own a home. Most people who live overseas for a protracted period have a mail drop service (Florida has several; it also helps with relinquishing domicile in a high-tax state) that gets US mail, opens, scans, and securely sends it on. Not cheap, but far less than maintaining a house here that you don't live in, and will lose the gain exemption on. One man lives (still!) in the Philippines, and has been there a good ten or fifteen years. Another couple spent three years in Hong Kong. One lady lives mainly in Argentina but teaches in Europe and will bop over there for a semester now and then. All US citizens, NONE have a permanent US address other than the mail drop.

I'd like to thank the Academy --- oh, wait, wrong group. You guys all mean SO MUCH MORE to me than any hollyweird bozo ever could! Thank you! (I got a star, I got a star.... oh I am just tickled pink!)

I do that when I can but I've run into a couple of weird cases where I had to put something other than "various" or I got error messages that prevented efile.

And if it won't take "Various" take a good guess from the name of the fund or stock. For anything "Emerging Markets" Brazil or Thailand is a good guess. For a "Pacific Rim" fund Japan or Korea. Extrapolate from these.

One couple, each with a separate office in the same house, whose businesses started at different times. One person with a single home office, who moves during the year and the office sq ft percentages are different. I'm sure there are other instances as well.

This may be covered in Judy's PM, but you can pull up state acks with a report. Any errors will have a number that you can look up. Also, if you open a return and go to View mode, look at the state version of the 9325 (if there is no specific form, look for "state_EF" in the forms list, with "state" replaced with the two-letter USPS state abbreviation (MA, VA, NM, NY, whatever).

Without a baseball bat!

My guess is high-end phone plans, top-of-the-line cable TV service. Dinners at nice restaurants, buying lunch every day at work. Vacations that involve hotels and airfare. Eats up the money fast.

I think that will work. Attach an explanation pointing them to the "final" box, though.

My dad had a hand-crank one. The thing weighed a ton!

I *knew* the kid looked familiar! I certainly watched Lost In Space (where he was older), but I did not really watch the Twilight Zone. Thank you all!

for this client! I don't recognize the picture you included, but feel like I should. Who is it?

Limited to profit, and if they end the business without using it up it gets lost.

Yes. Yes, they do. My daughters term it "little old Italian lady" smell because ALL of the elderly aunts drench themselves in gag-me perfume. You should hear my girls' tales of getting buried in perfume when my grandmother died and they got tightly hugged by all the little old ladies there, nearly to the point of Rita-hugged! "Near-death by perfumed bosom" is one of their nicer terms for that ordeal.

Impresses the clients?

I'll chime in with something that came in just this morning. Long-time clients, married couple; they do online training of some kind. C-corporation for years and a couple of years ago made a (late) election for S-corp status. So now they need the corporate return done before they can do their personal. They were warned about this before they made the S-election. We do the corporate return only; they (he) do the personal returns themselves using Ttx. What they send in every year is a home-brew spreadsheet that comingles balance sheet and income statement items. They don't peel out their asset purchases (technology related, computers, telecon equipment, etc) but those have to be excavated from the charge card spreadsheet they also send. Their payroll gets done by a big bank (of amerca; shh I didn't say that) and always has to be checked for over-contributions to 401k's because the pr processor allows those to go through. Then they always want to see if there are any last-minute changes that can be made (additional company contributions, something). So late last night they send in an email. "Hi Catherine, Hope you are doing well. I wanted to alert you to the fact that we are applying for our daughter's middle school application this year and the schools we have applied to need a copy of our personal 2017 tax returns. That means we have to file our personal taxes by April 15. I believe our [company name] taxes impact our personal taxes so we would like to have everything in order prior to the April 15 deadline. I will work on sending you our [company name] financials over the next few days. Please let me know if you have any questions/concerns regarding this." March 1st. They'll send in info "soon" which traditionally means a week or three. Can we have it done and back immediately. Candidates for Rita-hugs!

@jklcpa don't we ALL do that from time to time? Mis-read, mis-understand, conflate with a similar-but-different situation we've seen before, and then post in accordance with what we think we understand? 'Salright. We all still love you.

First of all, get the Bursar's Office statement. What the 1098-T and the 1098-Q say do NOT match up. If a scholarship paid all but a couple hundred of "amounts billed" then why a gross distribution of $14,100? There is information missing here that is crucial. Does that "amounts billed" field only include costs NOT paid by the scholarship? Were education funds (529, Edu IRA, whatever) used to pay private housing instead of campus housing? Start there. Then we can help you figure out which payments qualify for what treatment, and if taking some of the 1098-Q money as taxable then makes the family eligible for credits.

I had a company that was almost a year late with the S-election form. It went through, no questions. Just some scolding of the client from me... not that it helped this particular group.

Legal fees are deductible when paid to protect sources of income. We don't know all the details of this case, but depending on what the other family member originally demanded, it could well be that these fees (or some part of them) protected the income source.

I scanned my signature and added it to Adobe as a "custom stamp" that I can put on any document, just like a watermark. And I can adjust the size to fit the space.

And lemme know if you need an MA insurer EIN. I have a list of just about all of them.

If it's a local (Salem Five, Belmont Savings, Rockland Trust, Winchester Savings... etc) it's a no-brainer. Ditto the nationals; none of the big ones (BoA, Wells Fargo, Citi) are MA-based. Else go to the home page of the bank in question and under "Contact Us" it always gives the headquarters. Some years ago I was surprised that Citizens is based in RI; there are so many branches and it acts local. I guess it is, but not MA-chartered. If it's so little interest and not instantly obvious, assume not.