Saturday, April 9, 2011

Little Bits Of Progress

I would just like to say that doing my taxes online on a tiny netbook is horrible. Next year I have got to have a better set up. My old desktop was much better. Nice big screen and plenty of room to work.

I was able to find my old stock info and I just need to double check my calculations. And so ends my 10 year stock experiment. What a miserable 10 years for stocks or at least the stocks I picked. Good news is that I won't be paying any taxes on capital gains because, well, the negatives cancelled out the positives. And I don't even know what to do with GM. I would have had to pay in order to sell it and I didn't need the losses anyway because I don't have any gains to offset.

In the afternoon I went to the rental house and finally finished putting the closet doors back on and taking my tools back home. It is all ready to rent now...except there is one closet door with a blue mark on it. If I remember I will bring some paint and a brush to see if I can touch it up.

It rained gently all day and was quite cold. It looks like I collected 50 gallons in both water tanks. The dogs tracked muddy footprints all over the floor. I cleaned it up once and it looked the same 2 hours later. The second time I just swept. I'll clean again when the ground is dry. No use wasting all those paper towels.

And Happy Birthday to my mom! I hope you had a wonderful birthday.

5 comments:

Susan said...

Hello Daizy,

If you don't want to keep your GM stock, I recommend you consider selling it so you can get a tax deduction for your loss (including the cost of selling it).

When your losses from selling stocks exceed your gains (i.e., you have a net loss), you can deduct up to $3000 of the net loss each year, which will reduce your taxable income. Any net loss in excess of $3000 can be carried over to future years and in each year thereafter you can use the carried over amount to offset any capital gains and/or deduct another $3000.

Example 1, if you sell your GM stock in 2011 for a $5000 loss, and have no capital gains in 2011 or 2012 to offset, then you can deduct $3000 on your 2011 tax return and the remaining $2000 on your 2012 tax return.

Example 2: same as above but you have a $500 capital gain in 2011. You can use $500 of your $5000 GM loss to offset the gain, plus deduct $3000. You carryover the remaining $1500 loss. In 2012 if you have no gain, you deduct the remaining $1500 loss.

Best of luck.

Dave said...

I was going to write the same thing Susan wrote, Daizy. She put it quite well including some example which illustrate well how to carry forward any excess losses from one year to the next.

Daizy said...

Wow, thank for the info. Does that only work if I itemize?

Dave said...

Daizy, a capital loss carryover has nothing to do with itemizing your deductions (Schedule A). The capital loss carryover can be found on Schedule D, Line 14, referencing a worksheet in the instructions.

For the 2010 return, you will determine the amount of the carryover for subsequent years. For the 2011 return, you will use the worksheet to see how much of it you can include then. The worksheet figures this out in a manner similar to how Susan described it. [There are some tweaks depending on whether the gains and offsetting losses are short-term versus long-term.]

KoBold said...

Most netbooks have an external monitor connector. If yours does too, you should be able to hook up the screen of the old desktop and work on two screens.