Thank You, TAX COURT

Thank You, TAX COURT
First, a simple question: How much would you pay for
property worth $100,000, if you must spend $25,000 (to fix
it, commissions, special taxes or whatever) prior to
collecting your $100,000? Certainly not more than $75,000
or less, if you wanted to make a profit.

Yet, over the years the IRS and the courts just didn't
understand basic economics in the real world, (and how to
answer the above question).

Now they do. Here's the story.

Second, let's set up the scenario that is repeated almost
every time business owners want to sell their businesses.
If you are a potential buyer, generally you are willing to
pay more for the individual assets owned by the corporation
than the corporation's stock. Why?... You do this for two
reasons: (1) to obtain a higher tax basis for the low-basis
assets owned by the corporation and (2) to avoid hidden and
contingent corporate liabilities. Now, let's look at the
seller's side of the coin: After the acquired company sells
its assets, it will owe corporate income tax (remember,
corporations do not enjoy the luxury of low capital gains
rates) on any gain. On the other hand, if the shareholders
sell their stock, they will pay less tax (bless those low
15% capital gains rates). But the low-tax basis of the
assets stays with the corporation. Sorry, when the buyer
(really your acquired corporation) sells these assets, the
corporation will be socked with those high corporate tax
rates on the gain.

Despite this reality, up until now the IRS and the courts
have never allowed a reduction in the value of corporate
stock for potential taxes due on a future asset sale or
corporate liquidation. Sound the victory bell -- two 1998
cases allowed such a discount for the first time. Best of
all, the well-reasoned decisions are still the law today.

Case #1. Estate of Artemus Davis, (110 TC 530-1998).
Davis, one of the founders of the Winn-Dixie grocery chain
created a holding company to own some of his publicly
traded Winn-Dixie shares. Davis gave about a 26 percent
interest in the holding company to each of his two sons. At
the time of the gift, the holding company owned $70 million
of Winn-Dixie stock and $10 million of other assets.

You'll love this part. Davis claimed three discounts on his
gift tax returns to report the transfers: (1) lack of
marketability, (2) minority interest; and (3) for the
corporate taxes due if the Winn-Dixie stock were to be
sold. The total of these discounts reduced the value of the
gifted stock by more than 60 percent when compared to the
real dollar value of the holding company's assets.

The IRS rejected the valuation and assessed additional gift
taxes of $5.2 million. Ouch! Davis fought the IRS and when
he died, his estate continued the fight. Thumbs up, the Tax
Court held that a discount for taxes must be allowed. The
court saw no way the holding company could avoid the taxes
and allowed discounts totaling 50 percent of the value of
the assets.

Post this article on the wall. When you want to transfer
your business for tax purposes, reread it. Hey, that's
about $500,000 off of every $1 million your business is
worth. (A little side note to blow our CPA's firm horn, the
valuation department of our office has been successfully
taking advantage of the same three-discount strategy for 20
years.)

Case #2 Irene Eisenberg, (155 F3d 50 1998). In this case,
the corporation owned real estate that it rented to third
parties. The Second Circuit concluded that a similar
discount (like the Davis case) for taxes was appropriate in
valuing stock of a holding company.

And here's two more reasons to keep this article handy: (1)
We often use a family limited partnership (FLIP) "to beat
up the IRS legally" when a client owns real estate and/or
marketable securities and wants to transfer (taking
discount in the 35% to 40% range) them during life as a
gift or for estate tax purposes. So if you have a
significant amount of investment property, look into a FLIP.

(2) When a client owns a family business and wants to
transfer it to younger family members, a powerful tax
strategy we use is to combine a valuation discount with an
intentionally defective trust (IDT). The little-known tax
result of an IDT is that the owner of the family business
(usually Dad) can pass the business tax-free (no income,
gift or estate tax). Yes, it's true... No tax to Dad... No
tax to the kids who wind up owning the business.

Bonus: Dad maintains absolute control of the business for
as long as he lives.

----------------------------------------------------
Irv Blackman is both an experienced CPA and lawyer. He
founded Blackman & Kallick, the largest independent CPA
firm in Illinois, and is the founding Chairman of the Board
of New Century Bank of Chicago, Illinois. His website is:
http://www.taxsecretsofthewealthy.com . He is the author of
8 books, and is published in 59 trade magazines in the US.
If you want to contact Irv, please visit the website or
call 888-278-3623.

Don't make the same newsletter mistakes I did! Part 2: Technical

Don't make the same newsletter mistakes I did! Part 2: Technical
The technical components of creating and emailing a
newsletter (or ezine) are extremely important, and should
be studied before embarking on your newsletter journey. At
the risk of frightening you, if you make too many mistakes,
your website could be blacklisted!

I strongly recommend using a web-based service to send out
your newsletters - you can save many hours and prevent many
problems this way. For example, your ISP probably has
strict restrictions on how many emails you are permitted to
send and may not allow you to use their service for
marketing your business. When I first started my
newsletter, I used Yahoo to send it out - about 5 years
ago. At that time, they allowed only 50 emails sent per
hour, so it took several hours each time I sent out a
newsletter, just to mail it out!

The first determination to make is whether you are only
planning to keep in touch with clients and prospects, or if
you plan to grow your list substantially in order to sell
products or otherwise increase passive income in the future.

If you only plan to keep in touch, especially if you are
not very computer literate, you want to select a service
based on good customer service and available training.
Whether you are more or less technology savvy, the software
should be easy to use. Many services offer a free 30-day
trial.

If you just plan to keep in touch with clients and
prospects, a single opt-in service will probably work fine.
This means either you or the subscriber can sign up and
they are on the list. They can opt out at any time.

If you plan to grow your list over time, and plan to use it
to sell products or other passive income, I strongly
suggest you use a double opt-in service right from the
start. This means you or the subscriber signs them up,
then the subscriber receives an email asking them to verify
or confirm the subscription. They can, of course,
unsubscribe any time.

If you build your list and then move to a double opt-in
service later, many, and I mean MANY, of your subscribers
will not follow you to the new service. (This happened to
me, sadly.)

As we all know, spam is a huge, out-of-control issue. All
ISPs and other internet services have added regulations and
policies to combat spam. Unfortunately, some policies and
restrictions harm legitimate business people like us,
affecting deliverability. ISPs often market their services
by talking about how strict their spam filters are. Many
individuals and businesses set their filters very high,
filtering out our newsletters. These filters often look
for attachments (Note: don't use attachments at all, ever,
in your newsletters) and certain words.

Subscribe to some other newsletters from businesses similar
to yours to see what they do. When you see words like
fr*ee and mon*ey with an odd character in the middle of the
word, or obvious misspellings, this is done to fool the
spam filters.

If you are interested in learning more about successful
newsletter publishers' personal experiences and the
services they have used, I suggest you ask newsletter
owners for their input. Many newsletter publishers would be
happy to share their advice and experiences with you. Good
luck with your newsletter!

----------------------------------------------------
Audrey Burton, Small Business Coach, is "The Tigress". Get
her FREE Special Report, "Closing the Sale is Not
Complicated!" and her FREE monthly email newsletter at
http://www.TigressCoaching.com .

NLP: 3 Qualities and Traits Every Business Leader Should Have.

NLP: 3 Qualities and Traits Every Business Leader Should Have.
While there are several definitions NLP or other philosophy
would give to the word "leader", you need to ask yourself
the following questions if you want to become a good
leader: What makes a leader a good leader? What qualifies
a person to lead? What enables a person to exercise
persuasion and influence with others? If a company wants
leaders who lead from the company vision, what will be the
prerequisites of leadership?

Write down these questions and the possible answers you can
come up with. I'd like to suggest 3 qualities that you need
to have to create win-win situations, lead from the heart
and influence people with integrity.

1. Authenticity: This is the degree to which you are true
to your own personality, spirit, or character, in spite of
the pressures. It is acting and being from one's true self
without any masks or personas. So two simple questions to
ask yourself: first, "Do I wear any mask when I'm at work?"
People wear masks for 2 main reasons: to protect themselves
or to become someone they are not in a day-to-day life.
People wear masks all the time: at church, in the car, in
social meetings. If you think you wear masks, ask yourself:
what am I afraid of? The next question is "On a scale from
1 to 10, 1 being the lowest, how true am I when I deal with
people I work with?"

2. Integrity: When you act with integrity, you act
consistently through principles. You act and react
according to your own criteria, or principles, and not
according to your emotions alone. You can say you have
integrity when everything you do and believe is based on
the same core set of values. While those values may change,
it is their consistency with each other and with your
actions that determine your integrity. Simply put, it is
being as good as your word, impeccably honest and
fair-minded. The next question is "On a scale from 1 to 10,
1 being the lowest, how honest am I when I deal with people
I work with?"

3. Congruency: Congruency is perceived by others as
sincerity or certainty. When you are congruent, internally
and externally, you say what you mean, you walk your talk.
An alternative definition of congruence in the work of
Virginia Satir, family therapist and one of the sources of
NLP, is the balance between self, other and the context
you're in. In other words, congruency is applying your
principles to yourself so that you can say that you walk
the talk.

Authenticity, integrity and congruency are essential
qualities of a good leader. The next question is "On a
scale from 1 to 10, 1 being the lowest, how true, honest
and congruent am I when I deal with people I work with?"
and act accordingly.

----------------------------------------------------
And now, I would like to offer you a Free Special Report
entitled True Leadership: Leadership From The Heart that
will teach you how you can become a whole, stress-free and
healthy leader today at http://www.heartslead.com/

Invoice Processing Software - Major Business Benefits

Invoice Processing Software - Major Business Benefits
The Age-Old Problem: Cost Control

According to IBM, Gartner and Aberdeen Group, between
75-80% of invoices in any business or organisation, are
still processed manually - despite the advent of Electronic
Data Interchange (EDI). These days, sophisticated invoice
processing solutions are available to cut a swathe through
the time and costs involved in handling supplier payments
and to enhance business workflow.

Invoice Processing: The Real Costs

With a manual system, hundreds - often thousands - of
invoices must be reviewed and entered onto an accounting
system, at massive cost in terms of labour, time and
potential error.

Byline Group's research into Accounts Payable processing
has shown that 90% of Accounts payable invoice processing
involves keying data from paper; that the average time
taken to process and Accounts Payable invoice is 12 days,
and that 25% of all invoices are paid late.

Also according to Byline's research an accounts payable
clerk handles just 70 invoices per day on average. Thus it
is easy to put a labour cost on the front end processing.
But the repercussions are felt further down the line too.

Invoice Processing Solutions: Key Benefits

Invoice processing solutions comprise software to allow
invoice processing to be speeded up massively. This has a
great impact on reducing accounts admin costs associated
with invoice processing and also enables companies to make
best use of any time critical payment times which may
attract supplier discounts.

Automated invoice processing solutions allow a wide variety
of typical invoices to be scanned at the same time and for
them to be automatically reconciled against the original
purchase order with minimal user intervention or data entry.

In essence, an invoice processing system uses sophisticated
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and data matching
techniques

Invoice Processing Solutions:

The Basic Principal - The best invoice processing solutions
will automatically scan, extract and validate invoice data
and feed directly to an accounting system. Invoices come in
a multitude of formats, layouts and styles from a wide
variety of different suppliers. They can be machine printed
or part handwritten, single or multi-page, coloured or
white paper, and come from home or abroad.

However, all of these can be handled simply by scanning in
a seed invoice and selecting the items of information that
you want to capture. This is done by defining a target zone
for each of them; the system will automatically distinguish
between the field label e.g. VAT amount and the associated
value. If you now select the supplier name as a unique
attribute of all such invoices, every invoice from this
supplier can automatically be recognised and processed and
the captured data sent straight to the accounting system.

Sophisticated Functionality

The challenges of identifying columns and lines of
information, knowing where one item description ends and
another begins, handwritten information, validation against
almost any criteria or data values - all these are the
remit of sophisticated invoice processing systems today.

Managing digitised invoices through the entire workflow
approval process offers the potential for even greater
efficiency and cost savings, and so it pays to check out
software providers who can offer an interface with
purchase-to-pay (P2P), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP),
Electronic Content management (ECM) and Document Management
(DM) to offer integrated workflow solutions.

Invoice Processing: Summary Benefits

1. Removes the need to handle and store large volumes of
paper
2. Increases staff productivity and reduce processing costs
3. Faster invoice processing improves supplier relationships
4. More up-to-date position of the business/organisation's
financial position
5. Reporting on all financial transactions assists with
compliance to appropriate Accounting Standards

----------------------------------------------------
Jimi St. Pierre writes for several Office IT Equipment
suppliers in the UK, including document management systems
supplier Principal. The Principal Office IT Systems website
can be found at => http://www.principalcorp.co.uk/

Don't Let your Business FALL Through the Cracks: 3 Tips to Get your Legal Affairs in Order This Fall

Don't Let your Business FALL Through the Cracks: 3 Tips to Get your Legal Affairs in Order This Fall
With fall just around the corner, it is time to think about
your business documentation and make sure you don't let
your business fall through the cracks. Ensuring solid
legal documentation for your business and your business
decisions doesn't have to be the chore you think it is.

Keep your focus this fall on these three areas, and your
business will be safely and accurately documented:

1. Review your Company Documentation. You should have each
of the following:
a. Operating Agreement or Partnership Agreement
b. Articles of Incorporation for INC; Articles of
Organization for LLC; Certificate of Limited Partnership
for Partnership (filed with the Corporation Commission or
Secretary of State, depending on your state requirements
c. A Copy of the Publication of your Company
d. Initial Minutes
e. Company Minute Book
f. Stock Certificates (which have been properly issued)
g. Company Seal

2. Review your Minute Books. Check for each of the
following:
a. You should have a set of Annual Minutes for each year
you have been in business. If you are missing a year, get
those minutes done.
b. Check your schedules of percentage interests or stock
holdings. It is common for companies to re-allocate
membership interests, but many fail to capture that change
in the Schedules or on the Stock Certificates and Ledger.
This is crucial. Your books should reflect the most current
changes. This includes transfers of membership interests to
a Living Trust. (This is one of the most frequently
overlooked changes in a Company Minutes Book for small
business owners.)
c. If your state requires it, Annual Reports must be filed
for each year your company was in business. If you failed
to do this, you may be charged a penalty fee. To find out
if you need to file, check with your state's Secretary of
State or Corporation Commission. They can provide all the
information you need.

3. Review Your Monthly Documentation. Do you have Monthly
Resolutions for each month of the year? You need to get
into the habit of keeping track of all business actions
each month. You can keep a running list of items to
include in the Annual Meeting at the end of the year (or
when due for your company). If you are signed up for a
Monthly Resolutions and Annual Minutes service, you will
just need to send a list to the provider. Keeping monthly
resolutions or some kind of running list of actions can
save hours when preparing for your Annual Meeting. It can
also ensure that you don't forget or miss any important
actions or decisions in your Annual Meeting.

A regular review of these three areas each fall will help
you keep your business documentation on track and current.
It will save you hours of research and document preparation
for your Annual Meeting, and you can relax in the
confidence that your business is properly documented and
protected.

----------------------------------------------------
For over ten years, Kari VanNoy and Juli Walsh, both
paralegals, have been building their mission to educate and
protect small business owners. They created Just A Minute,
LLC to assist busy small business owners with their
corporate and company minutes and resolutions to keep their
company assets safe, secure and protected. To learn more
about how they help busy executives stop playing catch-up
and start getting ahead with their company paperwork, visit
http://www.justaminutellc.com .

Oxfordshire Venues

Oxfordshire Venues
Business conferences should have a professional feel and
all the amenities that businessmen expect and enjoy. For
businesses looking to hold a conference in the near future,
finding the right B2B venue is absolutely important. There
are certain things to look for, so businesses have to
consider B2B venue finders in order to make sure that all
the bases are covered. Whether a business is looking for a
Christmas party venue, or a venue in a B2B venue in a
specific location, finding the appropriate location is
essential to the success of any given business.

The fantastic thing about the UK is that there are so many
choices when considering which B2B venue to choose.
Depending upon where your business is located and where the
customer base is primarily located, you could choose to use
any number of different places. For example, one of the
latest hot spots is Oxfordshire venue, where good geography
has been one of the primary considerations. When choosing
a location for an all important business conference,
location is one of the many things that a business must
consider.

Businesses must think about where a place is located if
they want to have a successful business conference. In
order to have a great experience at a conference, employees
and customers won't want to travel a long way just to get
there. Though it would probably be all right to have
customers arriving by airplane, it is always more cost
effective if these people can come in their cars or on a
train. This not only costs less money for everyone
involved, but it also makes the situation easier. When the
location is relatively close to your business base, you
won't have to worry about people losing their luggage or
losing their plane tickets. They should be able to
concentrate on being productive at the conference and
enjoying their off time.

Great B2B venue finders also want to keep in mind what is
going on in a given city. There is no use in booking your
business conference in a place that doesn't have anything
to do. Since the best B2B venue finders make sure that
their people have things do besides working on business,
chosen locations must be accommodating to this fact. At
the end of a long day of conferences, business men and
clients alike will want to take a step back and relax for a
little while. Finding a venue with a golf course somewhere
nearby is a must, but that is usually relatively easy
considering that the UK is filled with golf courses.
Besides that, there must be lots of restaurants and night
spots for people to enjoy when they aren't working.

Smart B2B venue finders will also consider the exact
details presented by each resort that they are considering.
With so many hotels out there that are willing to provide
comfortable accommodations and also great service, there is
no reason to settle for anything less than the best.
Business people work hard during their conferences, so they
should be treated well at all times. A good resort will
have catering services for meals and will be able to
provide comfort at all times. There should always be
enough room to operate and not feel cramped. Make sure
that the resort offers the newest technology available, so
that the conference can run smoothly. If any of these
things are in question, then you will be better off finding
a new venue. There are too many options to choose from,
instead of letting your entire company struggle. If your
people feel comfortable, then they will work harder and the
bottom line will eventually benefit.

Cost is also something to consider for the smart business
planner. When you are booking a hotel for a huge number of
people, you will want to find a good deal. Shop around a
number of different resorts and venues in order to find one
that will give you a good deal on their space. Hotels run
based upon the business that they receive from business
conferences. They will be looking to gain your business,
so you will have plenty of business leverage. Don't
sacrifice quality for a low price, though. Booking a
quality venue for your business conference is more
important than saving a few pounds from the bottom line.

Successful B2B venue finders have to take into account all
the things mentioned above. To have the perfect
conference, all sorts of considerations and needs must be
taken into account. By doing some research and planning
ahead in order to book a great venue, businesses can help
themselves and ensure that their employees have a great
time. No one factor is more important than another, so
getting a good balance of each is a plan that should be
successful.

----------------------------------------------------
Free Venue Finding Service UK & Worldwide
visit http://www.jigsawconferences.co.uk/VenueFinder.aspx
+ 44 (0)8700 490000 FREE call back service
Free Hotel Accommodation Booking Service UK & Worldwide
visit http://www.jigsawconferences.co.uk/Accommodation.aspx
+ 44 (0)8707 520433 FREE call back service