Currently you could say the world is divided into the ‘haves’ the ‘have nots’ and the ‘have not paid for what they haves’. Today I’ll explain how to deal with debt when you run into problems, to do this I interviewed a few trusted sources who work as actual collectors. This is such a huge topic that I’ll break it down into two halves, this week we look at the early stages of arrears. Getting into financial trouble doesn’t always come with a bang, often you drift into it over time due to paycuts, higher taxes and spent savings. This is our first area, it’s called ‘pre-arrears’ and it gets very little little attention.
Thursday, December 13, 2012
The expression ‘at least Dick Turpin wore a mask’ is used to describe the times somebody robs you blind right to your face. This week I’m sure almost every person in the country could identify with that statement as they watched the twin forces of Michael Noonan and Brendan Howlin unleash cuts that hurt just about everybody, at least they didn’t discriminate. A few weeks ago I wrote about the way that politicians will hammer regular people always and without fail, a few of you wrote back saying it didn’t have to be like that, and my response was (and is) that it remains the fastest and easiest road to take, which is why people of every political ideology end up doing it.
Also filed in Accountancy, Capital Gains Tax, Deposit Interest Retention Tax, Income Tax, tax relief at source, Taxation, Wealth
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Tagged austerity, bludget, budget, budget 2013, irish budget
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Wednesday, December 12, 2012
On TV3 today we talked about property tax, how it is collected, what it means and some of the things to be aware of (such as not paying!)
The term ‘bludget’ is from a garbled sentence made by Marian Finucane when she went to say ‘budget’. That’s the fact of the term, what I prefer to think of it as (and in my head I rule supreme) is as a mash up of ‘bludgeon’ and ‘budget’ because it tends to be a good combination of the two, a budget with a financial beating thrown in. The budget will become virtually all of the financial news this week, the big changes for most of us will be the new property tax, and then dealing with whatever stealth method that is used to make us less well off while not ‘raising tax’. This charade is old and well versed, for instance, a few years ago the tax rates weren’t raised but the bands were lowered meaning you would start to pay the higher rate of tax earlier, that higher rate of tax now kicks in at €32,800 while the average industrial wage is about €35,000. So if you are ‘just average’ in earnings, for about 10% of that you are ‘above average’ in terms of the tax rate you’ll pay, which is where the rate more than doubles from 20% to 41%.
It was once thought that the black market was a big city problem and restricted to the kind of activities you see on the show Love/Hate, but now we are told that in Waterford city that 45% of all cigarettes consumed are illegal imports (smuggled and non-taxed). The Fine Gael TD Damien English made a […]
I give advice to couples regularly, those couples can be married, same sex, co-habiting or otherwise, but the common thread is that they are together and plan to stay together, and they want to make financial plans with common future for themselves. The issue can be that they are not married, in Ireland as many as one in ten people are co-habiting, which takes in people who are engaged but not married, couples who live together straight and gay alike who are not married, and separated people who form new relationships but are not yet divorced. While their love may be true, their treatment in the system is not the same as married people, it can also mean a lack of rights to the property of the other person, something which is legislated for if you are married or in a civil partnership.
Monday, November 26, 2012
I have mentioned in the past that it’s a real pity to have so much un-utilized talent as a result of unemployment, and for that reason it is worth asking whether or not the dole is the right solution for people when they lose a job
Thursday, November 22, 2012
The Irish Property Owners Association have called for loan interest to be given a 100% write off as a business expense for landlords the same as it is done for commercial property owners or for any other business that has a loan – currently landlords can only offset 75%.
Thursday, November 22, 2012
This week I had the pleasure of attending a fascinating talk hosted by the think-tank PublicPolicy.ie, the topic was on income inequality in Ireland from 2006-2010 and the researchers were from University College Cork. The research is the first of it’s kind in Ireland and is using a new dataset which was made available by the Revenue Commissioners, it splits a sample of 1,400,000 workers into five categories or ‘quintiles’ based on their earned income. The findings then look at how much inequality there is in earnings by analysing this information.
