Not much in the way of hard news this week, but that gave us an opportunity to add other material you may find interesting or useful.
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Featured articles
We kept busy this week:
- Investment risk. We kicked off a new series of articles with a piece called Understanding Investment Risk — 1.
- Tax rates. A new article on Income Tax Rates offers specifics about how these rates would change in 2011 under the Obama budget proposal, with side-by-side comparison with two alternatives: current law (which calls for repeal of the Bush tax cuts) and full extension of the Bush tax cuts. This page was added to our permanent collection as a place to track developments on that issue.
- How income affects Part B. Also added to our permanent collection is a page describing how your level of income affects your Medicare Part B premium.
- Roth conversions and Part B. With that background, we added to our series on Roth conversion planning with an article about how Medicare Part B might affect your Roth conversion strategy.
@Congress
With regulation of the financial system sucking up all the air, we saw little movement on tax issues. The war funding bill that now includes new restrictions on GRATs, which we reported on last week, did not move forward. Senators pushing a compromise approach to estate tax indicated they would try to attach it to the small business tax bill, but as far as we can tell the compromise approach doesn’t have enough support from Democrats to become law. Also this week, Congress held a hearing on the effects of letting Bush tax cuts expire, with no surprises in the opinions expressed by the participants.
@IRS
We noted that the IRS is holding special help sessions at various locations in the Gulf Coast area to help people affected by the oil spill.
@Fairmark
We were pleased to see that Money Magazine recommended our book That Thing Rich People Do for college graduates looking to learn the principles of investing. Also, we noted a financial blogging website where you can read a review of the book and possibly win a free copy.
Tags: wrapup
