Category: Uncategorized

Provisions of the Affordable Care Act dramatically changed the tax treatment of employer paid health benefits for employees. Some of the most popular traditional health plans of the recent past now extract an extreme tax of up to $36,500 per employee per year. This blog post addresses the strategies available to small business employers who have…

Health plan terminology can be confusing. So confusing, in fact, that we have state laws restricting the public use of some terminology that can be used to describe and sell health plans. I’m not convinced that even this legislation helps us keep misleading terminology from creeping into the industry. Normally “health plan” is used to describe…

What does onlineadviser@live.com believe? If you use any type of adviser – an accountant, banker, manager, coach or consultant – then the advice you receive is colored by that adviser’s core beliefs. It may or may not be important that those beliefs are in alignment with your own. In fact quite often it makes sense…

A funny story about the unflattering side of running a small business: I operate a small rural marina with a very small staff. I was having a telephone consultation with a high level political strategy consultant this week and the call went over an hour. We were discussing some lofty ideas that would involve millions of…

The Affordable Care Act changed the tax treatment of small business health plans by adding reporting requirements and excise taxes for some of the most common types of employee health care coverage arrangements. This post is a “short list” compiled from a more detailed checklist that I published last year. Tax advisors may wish to be…

A few months ago the Wall Street Journal wrote “Women are falling far behind men in financial literacy. The even worse news: Men apparently don’t know much about the topic in the first place.” the article went on to explain that the underlying test was a measure of the most basic understanding of concepts that…

The topic of whether consumers are affected by the choice of a mutual life insurance company vs. a stock life insurance company has been a touchy issue for almost two decades. A number of high profile life insurance companies have demutualized since the year 2000 with great results. Today there are less than 100 mutual…

On October 1 2015 an important change occurs that tips the balance or risk in the payment system that places  almost all small business owners at greater financial risk. There are three simple steps that small businesses can take to protect themselves and reduce this new payment risk. In the past credit card companies were responsible for…

The Wall Street Journal reports that “the portion of small businesses reporting that the U.S. economy was improving fell to its lowest level since the government shutdown of 2013”. I suspect that the primary driver is the perception of a coming interest rate increase. This poll was apparently taken before the China stock market drop…

I last blogged about browser issues in March. The basis point was that no single browser can do it all for me. Since then Microsoft Edge has made its way through beta testing and several updates and now appears to tip the scales for me. I don’t mean to rewrite any of the good reviews already published (like…