Taxes, Tips | featured news

No one likes paying legal fees, but tax deductions can make them a lot less painful. With a 40% tax rate, $10,000 in deductible legal fees costs you only $6,000. But if your legal fees are to get divorced or because a family member sues you for slander, the legal fees are purely personal and non-deductible. See How To Make Divorce Less Taxing. Distinguish purely personal expenses from investment expenses.

The Internal Revenue Service has issued its annual “Dirty Dozen” tax scams list, reminding taxpayers to use caution during tax season to protect themselves against a wide range of schemes ranging from identity theft to return preparer fraud.

It’s easy to gripe about the rich manipulating the rules to lower their tax rates, but sometimes it’s better to simply borrow a few pages from their playbook. Although finagling a low tax rate on income — as Warren Buffett talks freely about — is difficult for regular salaried workers, there’s another area where modest taxpayers have something to learn from the wealthy: minimizing estate taxes.

Follows are nine tips that parents might want to keep in mind while toasting champagne glasses preparing for back to school.

Life Inc.: The tax code can be a riddle. If you're unemployed it can sometimes be a cruel one.

If you managed to claim every possible tax break that you deserved when you filed your 2009 return this spring, pat yourself on the back. But don’t stop there. Those tax-filing maneuvers are certainly valuable, but you may be able to rack up even bigger savings through thoughtful tax planning all year round. The following ideas could really pay off in the months ahead.

Tax time is annoying and pressure-filled enough when your return is 100% accurate. Make a few mistakes, however, and April can quickly devolve into a nightmarish ordeal.