Tuesday, August 19, 2008

After All, It IS Your Money, Right

Category: Finance.

Most people trying to make a crust online( or offline for that matter) are so focused on doing just that, they ignore taking simple steps to ensure that they hang on to just as much of it as they can.



Either: Its a good thing, a sure sign of a civilised society. Instead, they hand over large lumps of their hard- earned money in tax, usually in one of two mistaken beliefs. Or, If they dont, the Feds will get them, expropriating their assets, fining them, maybe even jailing them. Visiting penal sanctions on citizens because they decline to hand over their money to you could hardly be regarded as the mark of a civilised society. Id respectfully suggest that those two reasons are mutually exclusive. In fact it might more properly be regarded as the mark of a criminal one!


Most e- mails I receive regarding business opportunities trumpet the benefits of being an entrepreneur. So how does this situation arise, and how can the thinking man or woman avoid it? Now the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines entrepreneur as follows: A person who undertakes or controls a business and bears the risk of profit or loss. All things that people with their own businesses regard as being as inevitable as night following day. Yes, profit and loss, thats risk. Interestingly, the SOED contains no definition of rentseeker. Now lets just talk this one through: They want to be paid.


Still, key the term in to Google and youll discover that it refers to people who want to be paid to take your money for a service that you would not yourself choose to pay for. In practice, they dont just wish to be paid, but to enjoy substantial pension rights. In return for these payments, they undertake to extract further sums of taxpayers money to provide what they describe as services. All of this is funded by the taxpayer. Critically, either as individuals, taxpayers would not or collectively, freely choose to pay for these services. The money is therefore taken by coercion. If they did, they would do so, in the marketplace.


They lack any concept whatever of risk( at least to themselves) or of profit( to taxpayers) . Now, in any other context, this process is known as robbery, or, more subtly, fraud. Loss, on the other hand, is guaranteed to each and every taxpayer. After all, it IS your money, right? Governments seem to think that theyve generally got a whole lot better set of ideas about what to do with your money than you might have yourself( despite all the evidence to the contrary in front of everyones eyes) . Well not according to Uncle Sam, or, depending where youre based, your nearest friendly local equivalent. What theyve particularly got, is a set, however of excellent ideas for using your income to pay their own salaries and pensions( final salary, index- linked, performance- irrelevant) .


The legendary investor, writing in the, Jim Rogers Foreword to Financial Reckoning Day, by Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin, had this to say: In America, if you have a job, you pay taxes. And these people are known as rentseekers. If you save some money, you pay taxes on the interest. If you have a capital gain, you pay taxes again. If you buy a stock and get paid a dividend, you pay taxes. And when you die, your estate pays taxes. Remember: you paid taxes on all this money when you earned it originally and yet they tax it again and again.


If you live long enough to get social security, they tax your social security income. Now wouldnt it just be nice to avoid all of that? In other words, you set yourself up a company, and a business, a bank account address somewhere no predatory taxman stalks! Because its the simplest thing on earth, particularly if your earnings are being generated in that weird nether land called cyberspace, to use a set of perfectly legal arrangements to process your money FREE OF TAX. That is, OFFSHORE. I kinda think that tells you a lot. There are quite a large number of these jurisdictions, and there is not a single Fortune 500 company that doesnt use them.


Once its all in place it works just like any other company arrangement you just dont pay any tax! But, assuming that youre already generating even reasonable income, it just has to make sense to look into this. Now no- ones suggesting that it costs nothing to set up these arrangements, and its true its not going to figure high in your priorities if youve got a marketing budget of$ 10 and are wondering how to pay the rent. After all, even if youre not interested in saving yourself a whole lot of money, theres another reason you might wish to avoid all of this. They have had enough of audits, year in and year out, of having their banking and accounting records picked over and questioned. Ill leave you with another quote, this time from Charles Adams, in For Good And Evil: The Impact Of Taxes On Modern Civilisation: Tax haven refugees report that they are tired of fighting the taxman.


They are tired of having their privacy totally destroyed by inquisitional tax agents. Many complain that the soak- the- rich philosophy of their homelands was not as intolerable as the harassment and scorn they receive from revenue bureaucrats. They are tired of appeals, big fees for tax professionals, and endless tax litigation.

Read more...

If You Have Someone Special In Your Life, Then It Might Be Time To Add An Additional Cardholder To Your Account - Finance Articles:

If you have someone special in your life, then it might be time to add an additional cardholder to your account. If you are unsure about how to add an additional cardholder to your credit card account, then here are some tips to get you started.

The Government Keeps Amending The Tax And Home Loans Law - Finance Articles:

Home Loans and their high rate of interest dig a hole in the pocket of homeowners. Maintaining a comfortable finance graph without going into further debt is a concern that worries all prospective homeowners making them wary of Home Loans.

Consumer Spending, Increased Investment And A Hot Housing Market Have Led The UK Economy To Beat First Quarter Predictions - Finance Articles:

Consumer spending, increased investment and a hot housing market have led the UK economy to beat first quarter predictions. Fuelling the economy has been an growing housing market, where housing values continue to climb, despite recent rate hikes that the Bank of England had hoped would cool things off a bit.

No comments: