The Survive and Thrive Boomer Guide

How to improve your finances during Financial Literacy Month

It’s a good time during April’s Financial Literacy Month to take a look at how you handle your finances.

What is financial literacy? It’s knowing how to manage your personal finances.

How are Americans doing with financial literacy? In a survey of 1,500 people, respondents estimated that lacking knowledge about personal finances cost them an average of $1,230 in 2018, according to a study by the National Financial Educators Council.

What can you do to improve your financial literacy?

Take a look at your finances.

If you don’t have one, you need a budget. It’s a financial plan that will help you reach your goals. To develop a budget, you’ll need to keep track of your spending. Write down what your fixed monthly expenses are such as car payments and rent or mortgage payments. Determine what your periodic expenses are. They include items such as vacations and tax payments. Then you’ll need to track your variable expenses – food, clothing, transportation, and entertainment, costs that probably change every month.

Happy Tax Day

I’m happy I got my taxes mailed in Saturday. I’m not so happy my refund has gone down substantially. I hope you were able to get your taxes done on time or file for an extension.

I used TurboTax again, which turned out O.K., unlike H&R Block, which wouldn’t give me an estimate on how much it would to do my taxes until they were done.

For free items to get on Tax Day, see Dealnews.com’s The Best Tax Day Freebies to Get Today.

For information on the tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations included in the Trump-GOP 2017 tax law that should be amended or repealed see Americans for Tax Fairness’ report “Fair Taxes Now: Revenue Options for a Fair Tax System.” It recommends:

How is Trump’s tax act affecting you?

On Saturday afternoon, I mailed in my income taxes for 2018. Instead of getting a refund of around $1,000 like I do most years, my refund was $170.

The TurboTax representative I spoke to said deductions that were helpful to me in the past, such as for my small business and charitable donations, have been eliminated.

So while Trump’s tax revisions are helping the rich, they have no benefit for me. That huge corporations pay little or nothing in income taxes and I’m paying more is discouraging. I don’t mind paying my fair share of taxes. I support good schools, roads, and bridges. But Trump’s tax law is making the rich even richer.

Top 14 consumer stories of 2018

All in all, it’s been another bad year for consumers. President Trump and his administration’s generate so much chaos that they get all the media attention. Meanwhile in the background, federal agencies are moving forward on the administration’s conservative regulatory priorities, which are harmful to consumers. One bright spot is the Democrats taking control of the U.S. House of Representatives. That will help curb President Trump's excesses.

Here are the top 14 consumer stories for 2018:

1. The Trump administration continues decimated consumer protections.

President Trump appointed Mick Mulvaney, his budget director, as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Under Mulvaney's leadership, the bureau reversed prior actions and programs of the agency. It has delayed rules to protect consumers from payday lenders, dropped lawsuits, stripped enforcements of fair-lending protections, and reduced the number of fines issued.

President George H.W. Bush: Not a consumer champion

As President George H.W. Bush is being positively eulogized, it’s important to remember that Bush, as often is the case with most Republican, was more interested in helping business interests than consumers.

Here are some examples of how the Bush administration, and the Republican Party, have failed consumers:

But by and large, [George H.W.] Bush was an establishment president. This meant that he did not fundamentally try to fix the inequities wrought by the American model. He escalated, for instance, Reagan’s War on Drugs – leading to the mass incarceration of African-Americans, a blight that still ails the country to this day. The New Statesman

President Bush signed the biggest rewrite of U.S. bankruptcy law in a quarter century, making it harder for debt-ridden Americans to wipe out their obligations. NBC News

Will you be going into debt for holiday spending?

The 2018 holiday shopping season, like many before it, will be paid for largely by credit card debt.

After spending more than $1 trillion from November 2017 to January 2018, U.S. consumers began the new year owing more than $1 trillion to credit card companies for the first time. And even though credit card debt levels are going down a little each year, this holiday shopping season could change that.

What are consumers saying about their holiday shopping plans?  Thirty-five percent of people plan to spend more than $500 this year, according to WalletHub’s “2018 Holiday Shopping Survey.” In 2017, 33 percent said they spent that much.

Manafort, guilty – Cohen, guilty: What’s next?

Paul Manafort                        Michael Cohen

Photo: Voice of America        Photo: IowaPolitics.com

If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you know that I’ve written dozens of articles about how the Trump administration is slashing environmental and consumer laws and regulations as fast as it can.

To me, yesterday was a great day in terms of beginning to get some answers about the crimes being committed by members of Trump’s inner circle and, perhaps, the president himself.

Paul Manafort, 69, Trump's former campaign chairman, was found guilty Tuesday by a jury on eight counts of financial crimes. The eight counts included five tax fraud charges, one charge of hiding foreign bank accounts, and two counts of bank fraud.

Michael Cohen, 51, former longtime Trump attorney, pleaded guilty Tuesday to eight felony charges of tax fraud, bank fraud, and campaign finance violations. Cohen said he coordinated with Trump to illegally payoff two women to keep them quiet about alleged affairs with Trump.

At last, we’re beginning to get some answers on what officials in the Trump administration were up to. Cohen pointing to Trump about a campaign violation is particularly illuminating.

What’s next?

Finally: U.S. shuts down massive IRS phone scam

Twenty-one members of a massive India-based fraud and money laundering conspiracy that defrauded thousands of U.S. residents of hundreds of millions of dollars were sentenced in a Houston court last week to terms of up to 20 years. Three other conspirators were sentenced earlier this year for laundering proceeds for the conspiracy, which was operated out of India-based call centers that targeted U.S. residents in telephone fraud schemes.

“The stiff sentences imposed this week represent the culmination of the first-ever large scale, multi-jurisdiction prosecution targeting the India call center scam industry,” said Attorney General Jeff Sessions. “This case represents one of the most significant victories to date in our continuing efforts to combat elder fraud and the victimization of the most vulnerable members of the U.S. public.”

Miteshkumar Patel, 42, of Illinois, was sentenced to serve 240 months in prison on the charge of money laundering conspiracy. Patel served as the manager of a Chicago-based crew of “runners” that laundered fraud proceeds generated by callers at India-based call centers. Those callers used scripts and lead lists to target victims throughout the United States with telefraud schemes where the callers impersonated U.S. government employees from the IRS and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Are you ready for back-to-school shopping?

It’s hard to believe, but August is almost here, and soon kids will be headed back to school.

To help parents save money, WalletHub, a personal-finance website, has released the results of its “2018 Back-to-School Shopping Survey” and “Sales-Tax Holiday Calendar” to help parents save hundreds.

Highlights of the reports include:

Have you started your income taxes yet?

My income taxes are almost finished. All I have to do is print out the forms and write out the check. It’s a relief. Since I have a writing business that involves keeping track of my expenses and mileage, it takes a long time to prepare my taxes.

For the past two years, I’ve used TurboTax. I used it several years ago, and I didn’t like it. The categories were different than how I added things up, and I found some parts of it confusing. However, last year, I figured I could call TurboTax for help when I got stuck.

In 2016, I had a bad experience with H&R Block. I couldn’t get an estimate from the receptionist on how much it might cost to get my income taxes prepared, nor could I get an estimate when I took my draft forms in and showed them to a tax preparer.