Meet Melissa!

Melissa is an Accounting Manager with the Sunderland Group and assists our clients with their accounting needs - full-service bookkeeping, QuickBooks consulting and payroll processing. She is a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor giving her a thorough knowledge of the software to assist our clients.

Melissa earned her B.S. in Business Administration with a focus on Personnel/Human Resource Management from the University of Colorado. She has worked in various industries, including legal, non-profit, self-improvement, real estate, investment and manufacturing.    

Melissa has lived in Colorado for 20 years, after moving to Boulder from Oklahoma City. She enjoys the beautiful Colorado outdoors, including running, snowboarding and hiking. She also enjoys spending time with her two young children and her husband and high school sweetheart of 20 years, Olan.

Job Seekers 

With the economy continuing to struggle, and unemployment levels not coming down, we want to remind folks that some of the expenses incurred to seek a new job may be deductible on your taxes.  To qualify, they must be spent on a job search in the taxpayer's current occupation - job search expenses cannot be deducted if incurred while looking for a job in a new occupation (or if there is a substantial break between the end of the former job and the time the taxpayer begins looking for a new one).  Some examples of deductible expenses include employment/placement agency fees; costs of preparing and mailing resumes; travel expenses going to/from a prospective employer. 

Note: If you are incurring expenses to begin a career in a new occupation and you may be self-employed in this new occupation, then these (and many other) expenses may be considered Start Up or Organizational Costs, and thus deductible as business expenses (subject to certain rules).

IRS Audits are Up!  Read these Recordkeeping Tips

With the technological advancements we've seen over the past couple of decades, the ability to store mass amounts of information fairly effortlessly allows us the ability to maintain very good documentation in the event we become the unfortunate many that are being subject to an IRS (or state) audit.  But what, and how long, should we keep?

Normally, tax records should be kept for at least three years, but I like to instruct folks to keep them for at least four years due to the differing dates that the statute of limitations may begin.  Some documents - such as records related to your home, rental properties, stock transactions, and IRA accounts (especially contributions) - should be kept longer.  In my opinion, these should be kept as long as possible.

Records that should be kept include bills, receipts from debit card/credit card transactions, invoices, mileage logs, charitable donation details, proofs of payment (i.e cancelled checks or substitutes such as bank statements that show the check copies), and any other records to help support deductions or credits claimed on the tax returns.

Beneficiary Designations

I know we've addressed this in previous issues, but we continue to see more crazy court cases where changes to beneficiaries are not made properly or timely and the wrong folks end up with the money!  And from talking to some of you this year about this subject, I know reviewing all of your beneficiary designations is something that we know we need to do but tends to get put to the bottom of our to-do lists.  However, another recent U.S. Supreme Court decision reminds us that sometimes "whenever" never gets here and the results can sometime be tragic.  To summarize, man divorced ex-wife after 20 years of marriage and the ex-wife waived her rights in his employer-sponsored retirement account that he now intended to only be left to his children when he passed.  However, the Court ruled that the retirement plan documents trumped the divorce decree and since he never changed the beneficiaries with the plan, the ex-wife received the $400k when he died.

This same situation can occur even if a will states conflicting beneficiaries!  So the moral of the story is that you need to take some time to verify that all of your beneficiary designations are current and then also make sure you've also designated secondary beneficiaries where appropriate.  This is especially important with assets such as IRAs. 

We have a checklist of the various types of accounts that may need to be reviewed that can be used to keep track of the beneficiaries you have assigned.  Here is a high-level summary, but please contact us for more details: 

• Life Insurance
• Employer-Sponsored Benefit Plans
• IRAs, SEPs, etc.

Debt Forgiveness - Taxable?