Posts by Paul Campbell
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I think that rather than writing this in rhymes this should be written completely in pun, the sort of really bad atrocious puns that your Dad used to make - the goal is to work through the sniggers, push past the groans until we reach that nirvana where they are seem so funny but no one knows why .... or not
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I hope not - as I've pointed out elsewhere in the US the special lower CGT rate (25%) is only available to people who invest long term (2 years minimum) - house flippers, day traders, currency speculators etc need not apply
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I most foreign CGT regimes a capital improvement is not included as part of the capital gain on the asset.
When I sold my California house I was able to to write off: the new roof we'd just put on, the money we spent painting it to tart it up for sale, and a depreciated cost of the new foundation and reshingling we'd done when we moved in ten years before - this brought the CG below the threshold for taxation under the new Bush era CGT rules for sale of the family home and as a result I got a nice tax refund
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Or just DOS his car by continually setting off the alarm ....
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Truly excellent
Also for Friday: robodump - because every workplace prank should, um, make fun of someone in authority ....
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I bet it was that whole "it's been raining for months and I have no shadow" thing
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Hard News: A Capital Idea?, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
In the UK you can claim losses forward in the same way as you can with business losses. It’s mostly ringfenced to other gains (so if you sold a house one year at a $100k loss, then next year sold another at $100k profit, you’d have no tax to pay, but you can’t take capital losses against unrelated income).
Same in the US, you can carry forward CG losses and trade them off against CG profits in future years (I think there's a time limit though)
(The simplest way to collect would be to require that, when selling a house, a tax clearance certificate was produced before the title could be transferred. You'd have to declare if you wanted to claim it as a family home, etc. and meet the tax payment. Charging for the certificates would make the whole thing self funding).
Something like this happens in the US, I'm not quite sure how (I'd guess it comes from the title transfer company, probably gets spit out by the computer that prints out the final settlement documents) - your job as a tax payer is to file against this showing your basis (what it cost) and the cost of improvements done while you owned it, that's also where you claim your house as a primary home/etc - from memory it's a 1 page form (I got a $40,000 tax refund last time I filled it out - after selling my house and leaving the country)
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Hard News: A Capital Idea?, in reply to Martin Lindberg,
I liked the Sydney Morning Herald's journalist interviwed on Morning Report this morning at about 7.30 (sorry, can't produce link from my iPhone). He pointed out that Australia does not have CGT as such - just an income tax. However, there's no such thing as unearned income (with some exceptions).
This is kind of the point I tried to make at the start - in many places all income is taxed equally - there a "Capital Gains Tax" is a special lower rate you can claim for some useful (as defined by the govt) investment - in the US it's available at 25% for long term capital investments (2+ years you have to register your interest when you buy stuff) and at 0% for the family home - so for everyone else but NZ a CGT means LOWER taxes, not higher ones
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As I mentioned up-thread in the US you carry forward any capital gains in the family home as you traded up, so no payments, just some behind the scenes tax accounting - and they used to allow you a once-in-a-lifetime exemption near retirement (when the kids had moved out and you traded down) up to a fixed ceiling - so people do have CGT in theory on the family home except in only that one transaction - the exemption is a special deal you have to request by filing a special tax form rather than an as=of-right sort of thing)
(Bush et al changed it recently, I guess to help fellow elephant lovers cash out of the bubble - at the moment it's something like $500k every 5 years which I think is plain wrong)
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Yeah what Bart says - it's a political compromise - it means that most ordinary people don't need to deal with CGT or planning for it during their lifetime - unless they make investments that pay of through capital gains.