Posts filed under './live shiny'
A and I have talked about becoming registered domestic partners off and on the past year. We have this sense that it would be a “Good Thing” ™ to get our financial and estate planning together before registering.
Mosshead is definitely not a money blog, but it’s tax season, so naturally I wonder what the financial implications of registering will be. Below are some notes from my research.
UPDATE: the ACLU in Seattle sponsored a great informational session with a financial planner and estate planner so I’ve added answers to my questions below.
Financial Planning
We have some common short term goals as well as the usual long term goals.
- build up emergency savings and place it into a higher yield account (other than our shared savings account)
- must we track who contributes what?
- yes! … gift tax, which might as well be called “gay tax” when you consider IRS’ arguments against lifting it for domestic partnerships … if either of us were audited, we’d need to prove that no gift tax as owed. So we do need to ensure that we’re contributing somewhat equal amounts to any shared accounts. The annual exclusion is $12,000.
- Essentially, on a shared account, we both own 50% of the account regardless of how much $ each contributed. That means if A deposits $1000, she’s gifted me with $500. If I deposit $1000 2 weeks later, I’ve gifted her with $500. That’s how I understand it anyway.
- Gift tax is especially insidious from a taxes perspective … it’s taxed at about 45% … the government figures if you’ve got enough money to give away they should get a good cut.
- on shared interest-bearing accounts can we decide who claims interest on taxes?
- Actually, we need some advice in general about how we manage our money - at the moment, we get paid at different times and we shift money back and forth as needed. I suppose you could call the “shifting” interest-free loans.
- gift tax again is an issue
- pay off our unsecured credit card debt
- will domestic partnership make us liable for each other’s debt?
- As of June 12, registered domestic partners in WA will join the wonderful world of community property that married couples enjoy … but since the federal government (esp. IRS) does not recognize domestic partnerships …. we are once again vulnerable to that 45% gift tax. From the Second Substitute House Bill sec VI it appears the debt preceding the registration does not become community property (the wording kind of beats around the bush, so that should be verified by a bona fide lawyer).
- Since we don’t own a house, our situation is easier to manage - but community property means we each own 50% of assets. If one of us were to get pregnant and only work part-time … we’d need to work closely with a financial planner to avoid getting screwed at tax time.
- if one partner pays over $12,000 of the other’s debt, will it incur the gift tax penalty?
- What if we just put all our money into a common pot and pay what needs to be paid out of it? (yep, that’s what we do now and so do a lot of unmarried couples.)
- bad idea until the IRS starts treating gay households fairly.
- fully fund our IRAs each year and make matching contributions to a retirement fund
- again, we run into risking that $12,000 gift tax penalty if not careful.
- the retirement fund … we do own a business together and the business will provide a retirement fund with a matching plan. This is probably the safest way for us to build retirement
- we’ll need a new car in the next 5 years
- it will cost about $24,000 for the truck we want.
- I don’t think that tracking amount of money contributed to this purchase is really important unless we plan to divorce, or only 1 person’s name is on the loan.
- we want to buy a house in 2-3 years.
- We have a lot of saving to do. Again, we’ll have to watch the gift tax penalty closely and be smart about shifting income between us.
- We have to meet with a financial planner before embarking on the house journey.
- we especially need retirement security - if one of us dies before the other, we don’t qualify for social security benefits as long as the federal government will not recognize gay households.
- we’ll need a long term investment plan and profile designed by a CFP who understands financial bias against gay/lesbian households in the tax code.
- Again, we want tax efficiency in our investment profile as well
So, the thing that pisses me off the most about the whole gift tax/gay tax thing? Every bill that’s been introduced to make an exception for unmarried households has been shot down because of the terrible loss of income it would represent to the federal government.
So … you tax the shit out of queer households, most of which are low to middle income, to fund services that we don’t have access to (social security, military service and benefits). Hm.
Estate Planning
it’s hard to separate this out from financial planning since it’s so closely related.
house: we don’t own one yet, but it doesn’t hurt to be informed beforehand so we can focus on the house when we buy it. According to this account of California domestic partner , even though domestic partnerships got inheritance rights, the law is fuzzy on whether the property undergoes a change of ownership (when a married survivor receives the house they own, it is not considered a change of ownership). The problem is whether the property value must be re-evaluated … which will greatly increase inheritance tax if they didn’t do any estate planning to avoid inheritance tax.
How should we manage our short term and long term financial plans?
Does anything change with the estate planning we need to do? (my suspicion is “no”)
Will we become responsible for each other’s debt? (yes)
How can we make our investments and cash more tax efficient without incurring gift tax penalties? (work with a financial planner to design a tax strategy)
I’m a strong proponent of doing things myself. But my NOLO books and forms apply to straight married households not to me. Tax and estate laws so strongly disadvantage gay households that I believe it’s absolutely necessary to work with a planner who is familiar with queer issues.
maybe I’ll write more about this later …
This was a good article over at GFN
April 23rd, 2008
Tufte is near and dear to my little science-geek heart for bringing the concept of displaying statistical information in creative and meaningful ways… a statistician who takes inspiration from art.
Chris Jordan is an artist taking inspiration from statistics with a new series entitled “Running the Numbers: an American Self Portrait”.
This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics tend to feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or a trillion dollars spent on the Iraq war. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed photographic prints assembled from tens-of-thousands of smaller images. The series is still in its early stages, and new images will be posted as they are completed, so please stay tuned.
This would definitely be more awe inspiring in person - take a look at the dimensions when looking at each piece.
February 1st, 2007
Glee launched today and is one of 4 gay and lesbian social networks that’s launching in the next month or so. So, I signed up … I’m so early I even got my very common name as my glee url.
I’ve been looking forward to Glee more than the other gay social networks. It seems more authentically a social network than a commercial marketing venture like Olivia and Showtime.
Olivia Connect will also lauch soon - it seems fuddy to me, as does Olivia in general so that’s no surprise. Off the bat, Olivia Connect is somewhat unusable for me because it requires the most recent version of Flash which isn’t easily available for my desktop. I’ve never really understood the whole Olivia cruise thing anyway so it’s unlikely that their marketing campaign thinly disguised as a social network will entice me.
The other soon-to-launch gay social network is the L Word offshoot Our Chart … when I first heard the name it elicited a vision of lesbian beanie baby collectors. I wouldn’t analyze that too much though. Maybe it’s because I think the L Word is a little creepy with too many long-taloned grimacing straight women actors in it. BUT, it’s creepy in an entertaining planet-of-LA “monkey/alien” sort of way.
A 3rd social network that will launch eventually is Social Butter which looks like it could be pretty cool, but it’s under development by a single developer and no real ETA.
Anyway, so then we have Glee which doesn’t appear to be a marketing campaign for any particular corporate conglomerate - they’re running ads from the Girl Scouts and the Navy Reserve (?!does “don’t ask, don’t tell” apply to web statistics?). My initial reaction is that in terms of look and feel it’ not as nice as Bebo but way better than MySpace (which friends have been forcing me to use lately instead of email. aaiiieee).
On Glee, when filling out my profile I was surprised to be limited to a single item text input. I suppose that handily prevents people from blathering endlessly like I chose to do on my MySpace account (which, lazy me, I was trying to copy and paste). I couldn’t edit an input if I’d made a typo, rather I had to delete it and retype it. I couldn’t order my interests which surprised me. Basically the interface looks similar enough to Basecamp that I expected Basecamp-like functionality. I’m sure they’re planning it since 37 Signals built all those whiz bang features into Rails .
Anyway, there are a few minor glitches, but it is the first day of launch and I’m sure they’ll get them all sorted out.
Things I like:
- The page editing tools are cool - the profile is broken up into modules and you can drag them around the page to order them or not display them as you wish. There is also a tab for editing your background and style. I’m a little confused because really I just want to write my own html/css. A help file would be good here.
- The HTML editor for the “personal message” is GREAT! Just about anything you can do with html and css is allowed. I have no idea if html/css will only apply to the “personal message” or to the entire page though. Is this where you customize your design?
- I like the professional networking tool. It’ll be interesting to see how that grows. It seems to me that gay social networks seem to become quickly dominated by sex sex sex. Maybe there will be a strange synergistic balance between gay men seeking husbands and married lesbians seeking escape from lesbian bed-death. I’ll especially be interested to see how this compares with LinkedIn.
Things I don’t like so much:
- The twirling banner ad at the top that makes it hard to read content on the page
- I wanna preview stuff as soon as I edit it. MySpace does a good job of making it easy to edit, preview, edit some more.
- When entering schools, you must select a school from their database, there is no free text input. According to their database, the Washington state capitol has no schools. .
Overall, I’m looking forward to seeing how GLEE develops. I’m sure they’ll iron out the obvious issues. Their network model is different from MySpace, the pathways are more tunneled and I’m not sure what I think about that. But I like it that I can see who’s viewed my profile, which for some inane reason, MySpace forbids.
[added] Obviously, the site is put together well enough that my complaints are all fairly trivial.
January 30th, 2007
As the web becomes more important to businesses, domain names are nearly as important as the business name and often interchangeable depending upon your most common mode of communication (email, IM, etc).
This is an issue I’ve belabored internally for years now … my own attempt at naming my business resulted in an obtuse name that no one can spell because the names I wanted were unavailable as domains. I suspect, however that the below domains were readily available for a reason… or maybe they’re Freudian slips.
- A site called ‘Who Represents‘ where you can find the name of the agent that represents a celebrity. Their domain name… wait for it… is
www.whorepresents.com
- Experts Exchange, a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views. Admittedly, I’ve landed on this site numerous times and never noticed the url is
www.expertsexchange.com
- Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at
www.penisland.net
- Need a therapist? Try Therapist Finder at
www.therapistfinder.com
- Then of course, there’s the Italian Power Generator company…
www.powergenitalia.com
- And now, we have the Mole Station Native Nursery, based in New South Wales:
www.molestationnursery.com
- If you’re looking for computer software, there’s always
www.ipanywhere.com
(I had to say this outloud and consider the context of this list before I got it… IP is IP right? Either I don’t have the mind of a 10 year old, or I just take it for granted that most guys do and I thought we were no longer commenting upon that as a society.)
- Welcome to the First Cumming Methodist Church. While already challenged in the naming department, they apparently embraced their challenges … their website is
www.cummingfirst.com
- Then, of course, there are these designers and what could have been a bad branding initiative but somehow I think it works. They should keep it
www.speedofart.com
- Want to holiday in Lake Tahoe? Try their brochure website at
www.gotahoe.com
Being the only state with legalized prostitution, one does wonder how on purpose that was.
courtesy of independentsources and grupthink
It seems that since this list came out that most of them have changed their urls.
January 30th, 2007
Finally, a trophy room to be truly proud of.
January 28th, 2007
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