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Top 3: A Tax-less Decade, Four-Legged Leadership, & Auto-Pay's Hidden Dangers Thumbnail

Top 3: A Tax-less Decade, Four-Legged Leadership, & Auto-Pay's Hidden Dangers

Saving Business Taxes IRC Top 3 Emotional Wealthness

In case you missed it, here are three things you should know this week...

  1. 1.) A Tax-less Decade: What Happens When You Blow Off the IRS

    1. Even if you don’t go to jail, blowing off the Internal Revenue Service is a really bad idea.

    2. Larry Cecil Cabelka of Megargel, Texas knows this first-hand. After failing to submit tax returns for 12 years during the 1990s and 2000s, according to a March 26 ruling in a civil case by a U.S. appeals court, Mr. Cabelka owes the U.S. more than $26 million.

    3. Mr. Cabelka’s biggest mistake though, in addition to not paying his taxes, is that he allowed interest and penalties to pile up because he didn’t file his returns.

    4. "IRS debts grow faster than other debts because of daily compounding of interest on the tax and penalties," says Bryan Skarlatos, a criminal tax lawyer in New York.

    5. To read the full article, visit The Wall Street Journal.



  2. 2.) Four-Legged Leadership Lessons

    1. Animals have valuable lessons to teach humans about leading other humans. Just ask Kristen de Marco, founder of WorkHorse, a company that hosts team-building workshops for business groups.

    2. Since founding the company seven years ago, Ms. de Marco has learned that just as you have equipment to ride horses, business leaders also have their steering equipment– performance reviews and bonuses.

    3. These tools will motivate workers to a point, but they seldom inspire brilliance. To truly elevate people, leaders need to find ways to replace "have to" with "want to." And, if the team-building exercises are any indicator, the best way to do this is to stop pushing.

    4. In the pasture, behavior that’s often perceived as “strong leadership” in business becomes useless. Managing horses requires a more cooperative approach to teamwork. “You have to be vulnerable, humble and accountable,” says Ms. de Marco.

    5. This concept aligns nicely with recent studies of human workers, which suggest they’re more likely to thrive on teams with supportive, collaborative managers.

    6. The leader the horses trust in the pasture isn’t always the dominant titleholder in the office. It’s usually a quiet, hardworking, unassuming person with a collaborative streak— which sounds a lot like the kind of manager most employees want to work for.

    7. To read the full article, visit The Wall Street Journal.



  3. 3.) Out of Sight, Out of Mind: The Hidden Dangers of Auto-Pay

    1. Technology has made paying all sorts of bills so easy that we don’t even have to think about it. And that’s the problem: By making personal finance so much easier to do, technology also has made it so much easier to ignore. It has severed the connection between the things we buy and the act of paying for those things.

    3. It’s that connection, though, that can keep our financial lives on track— making sure we save enough, and spend on the things that really matter.

    4. Think about how people used to spend money: first, at the cash register, then when a bill came in the mail and finally when they wrote a check to cover it. In each step, they were presented with the decision to buy something and forced to assess the wisdom and impact of that purchase.

    5. While each checkpoint is technically still there, automation has given people a chance to skip the two steps happening after the initial card swipe. We know it’s happening in the background, but it’s so far out of view that it might as well not be there.

    6. One financial professional says the biggest concern with this, is that it fosters a basic financial ignorance. If you don’t constantly think about where your money goes, you won’t think about whether you’re spending it wisely.

    7. We need to feel the connection between the value of our purchases and the effort it takes to make them. This doesn't mean sacrificing the ease technology introduces into our lives, but taking advantage of the other tools these apps offer and reevaluating your financial process to make sure you're not missing out on important steps reviewing transactions and budgeting wisely.

    8. To read the full article, visit The Wall Street Journal.