Looking for Work? Some Tax Deductions (irs.gov)

Six Tax Benefits for Job Seekers


Did you know that you may be able to deduct some of your job search expenses on your tax return?

Many taxpayers spend time during the summer months updating their résumé and attending career fairs. If you are searching for a job this summer, you may be able to deduct some of your expenses on your tax return. Here are six things the IRS wants you to know about deducting costs related to your job search.

To qualify for a deduction, the expenses must be spent on a job search in your current occupation. You may not deduct expenses incurred while looking for a job in a new occupation.


You can deduct employment and outplacement agency fees you pay while looking for a job in your present occupation. If your employer pays you back in a later year for employment agency fees, you must include the amount you receive in your gross income up to the amount of your tax benefit in the earlier year.


You can deduct amounts you spend for preparing and mailing copies of your résumé to prospective employers as long as you are looking for a new job in your present occupation.


If you travel to an area to look for a new job in your present occupation, you may be able to deduct travel expenses to and from the area. You can only deduct the travel expenses if the trip is primarily to look for a new job. The amount of time you spend on personal activity compared to the amount of time you spend looking for work is important in determining whether the trip is primarily personal or is primarily to look for a new job.


You cannot deduct job search expenses if there was a substantial break between the end of your last job and the time you begin looking for a new one.


You cannot deduct job search expenses if you are looking for a job for the first time.

For more information about job search expenses, see IRS Publication 529, Miscellaneous Deductions. This publication is available on IRS.gov or by calling 800-TAX-FORM (800-829-3676).

THE TAX CENTER TO ASSIST THE UNEMPLOYED

Which States are in the Worst Shape (FDIC)

FDIC State Profiles are a quarterly data sheet summation of banking and economic conditions in each state.

http://www.fdic.gov/bank/analytical/stateprofile/index.html

What to Look for in A Disability Policy (Ken Dolan)

The Importance of a Disability Insurance Policy
by Ken Dolan October 6, 2009 10:34 AM
Posted in: Insurance


You bought life insurance to take care of your family should something happen to you. That's great. But is your family protected if you become disabled and can't work? Could you and your family still pay the bills if you didn't get a paycheck for a few weeks, months or even years? It's a question we all have to face, because between the ages of 35 and 65 we have a far greater chance of becoming disabled than dying.
Ask your employer's benefits officer if you have a disability plan at work. If you do have disability insurance through work, ask your employer how long your company will continue paying your regular paycheck if you become disabled, what percentage of your salary your disability plan pays while you're laid up, and how long you have to wait for the benefits to start. Using this information, you can decide if your employer's policy is adequate, or if you need to buy additional coverage.

First, add your sick pay and any other income (spouse's salary, investment income, etc.) to your emergency savings, then divide that total by the amount of your monthly expenses. This will tell you how long you can wait for your employer's disability benefits to kick in.

Our hope is that you have enough "rainy day" money tucked away that you can get through this waiting period on your own. If you don't have emergency savings and think it will take you some time to build up enough funds to get through a waiting period, consider buying a disability policy to bridge the gap.

If you already have disability insurance through work, the only other reason you may need additional coverage is to make up for an income shortfall. For example, if your employer's plan pays 60% of your current salary and you can't get by on that, you could make up some of that missing income with your own policy. Keep in mind, however, that the most income you'll be able to replace through all sources of disability income combined is 80% of your salary. So, if you have disability insurance through your employer that pays you 60% of your current salary, you could only cover another 20% of your salary through an individual policy.

If you don't have disability insurance through your employer, you should consider buying a policy of your own. You can buy an individual policy from any top insurance company. You should also check with any professional organizations you belong to - they may offer quite a savings on policies.

Top Features of a Good Disability Policy

Here are the key features of a top-notch disability policy that will protect you and your family without draining your wallet:

1. A waiting period that works for you. The waiting period is the amount of time you must be disabled before you can begin to collect benefits. Waiting periods range from 30 days to one year. The longer you can wait, the lower your premiums. For example, you can cut your premiums by about 20% if you can wait two months for your policy to kick in...90 days is even better!

2. A benefit period to age 65. The benefit period is the length of time that you'll receive benefits. You can save up to 75% with a policy with benefits to age 65 instead of lifetime coverage.

3. Re-insurability. The insurance company should not be able to cancel your policy for any reason except failure to pay the premium.

4. Waiver of premium. After a certain period of disability, say 90 days, you should be excused from paying the premium. This waiver is standard in most policies.

5. Coverage for a disability caused by accident OR illness.

6. Residual disability protection. This rider lets you receive partial benefits if you are partially disabled. Be sure your policy would pay you a percentage of your benefits based on the amount of income you have lost.

7. Coverage if you can't return to your chosen job. A good insurance policy will include this coverage at no extra cost. An "any occupation" policy means your insurance company can refuse to pay you any benefits if you're still capable of performing any job. For example, if you're a nurse, and then have an accident, your insurance company may refuse to pay you benefits because you could still get a job flipping burgers.

8. Recurrence: If the same disability recurs within a certain period of time, such as 6 months, you shouldn't have to go through a waiting period again before benefits start. As you grow older and your assets grow, your needs will change, so reassess your disability needs every few years.

Successful Career Change Advice (from Investors.com)

Investors.com - Lessons From Job Shifts

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Lessons From Job Shifts

By Adelia Cellini Linecker
Posted 06/03/2009 05:05 PM ET


Gone are the days when you spent your entire career with one company. Today's work force expects and seeks career changes. The lure of opportunities pushes people to accept challenges and turn them into learning experiences.
Career changes offer chances to land skills, says Kathryn Hall, whose career took her from lawyer to ambassador to winemaker.

Here's what you can learn:

• Assets count. "There are skills that you learn in one venue and they help you in the next setting," Hall told IBD.

Drawing from her experience as a lawyer, Hall tweaked her negotiating skills to suit her needs as U.S. ambassador to Austria. "I had a personal role, a business management role and a policy role," she said of her 1997-2001 tenure in Vienna. "A good negotiator understands the person you negotiate with. You need to know where they are coming from and know their culture."

• Challenges spur growth. New positions mean adjustments. Hall moved from a private law practice to the public arena when she ran for assistant city attorney in Berkeley, Calif., in the early 1970s.

The campaign taught her resilience. "Running for office is really like having psychoanalysis in front of millions of people," Hall said. "The challenge was learning to adapt to criticism and to recognize that it's not personal."

• Dreams change. Most people are destined for various work, says Pamela Skillings, author of "Escape From Corporate America."

"If you're like most people, you have a complex collection of interests, talents and priorities," she wrote. "At the same time, as you grow and evolve and your life circumstances change, your criteria for what makes a true calling may also change."

Changing jobs makes you more flexible to explore new areas.

• Confidence builds. While the first transition might cause anxiety, subsequent changes get easier.

"Have confidence that the most important skills for your new job are skills you have likely developed in your prior career, such as discipline, judgment, time management and interpersonal skills," Hall said.

• Open minds thrive. Don't let experience block growth. A career change can teach you to accept different ways of doing things.

"Be ready to learn new skills, and don't be hesitant to admit what you don't understand," Hall said.

• Research is key. Be smart about where you make the leap. Changing careers into a dead end will prove costly and demoralizing. "Look to growing industries like green products and services or health care," Hall said. "Don't wait for the business world to go back to normal. It won't. We are facing a widespread recalibration throughout the private sector. Look for new normals."

• Passion is a guide. This is a tough time to make career changes, Hall says. If you do something you love, you'll be so much better at it and you'll be a happier person.

Pick a career that you love or a job that leads to that career because "that's where your talents are," said Hall, owner of Hall Wines and who returned to the family business of running vineyards in Mendocino, Calif. "I always knew that someday I'd return to the business of winemaking, because it has been a part of my life ever since I can remember."



© 2009 Investor's Business Daily, Inc. All rights reserved. Investor's Business Daily, IBD and CAN SLIM and their corresponding logos are registered

Websites for Job Hunters - from WSJ

WALL STREET JOURNAL
TECHNOLOGY NOVEMBER 25, 2008, 8:44 A.M. ET

For the Jobless, Web Sites Offer More Options

By PUI-WING TAM

Unemployment in the U.S. has hit a 14-year high as companies cut back. That has sent masses of laid-off workers flocking to the Web in search of opportunities -- and job sites have been stepping up to meet the challenge.
New job sites with names like MarketVendorJobs.com have sprung up to take advantage of growing user interest amid the economic downturn. Established sites, such as CareerBuilder.com, have also started rolling out new features to improve the relevance of job listings for candidates and make their résumés stand out, among other things. And some sites, such as Vault.com, are providing career counseling and other new services.

Business-networking site LinkedIn last month began offering online outplacement services to companies so that laid-off workers can more easily find their next gigs. It also has introduced technology that better matches its members with appropriate jobs. Using an algorithm, the site searches words within a job posting and then matches up members who list skills that fit the job. In January, the company plans to debut a feature that makes it easier for users to notify members in their online network that they're searching for a job.
Meanwhile, Glassdoor.com, a salary-review and employee-review Web site, this month retooled its home page so that jobs listed near the users' hometown and relevant job categories immediately pop up when an individual logs on. Vault.com has created a $999 service for job seekers to get two 45-minute career-coaching sessions over the phone to help them land a new job.
But some consumers may be overwhelmed by the number of job-search sites and all their new features. Scores of career sites are competing for clicks, so users must master multiple search tools -- only to discover that sometimes there is redundancy in the listings. Career counselors advise job seekers to learn advanced search strategies on several sites so that only relevant results are displayed. They're also told to find niche sites that focus on an industry or region to further narrow their search.
Alice Ziroli, 46, began looking for new jobs online earlier this year when the pharmaceutical company she worked for shut down its local sales division. But when she trolled sites such as Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com, she says she found their offerings too vast.
"I didn't find them user-friendly," says Ms. Ziroli. She eventually found a job-search engine called Indeed.com, which has a simple Google-like home page and allowed her to narrowly specify her job-search criteria. Last month, Ms. Ziroli started a new $65,000-a-year job -- slightly more than what she made before -- as a sales representative for a hospice-and-health-care company just 18 miles from her Diamond Bar, Calif., home.

Adding New Features

A CareerBuilder.com spokesman says that, in this environment, the more features that a site offers the better for a job candidate. Monster says it is rolling out improvements to its site early next year with features that will make it easier to upload résumés and apply for a job online.

CareerBuilder.com and other sites are adding features to improve the relevance of online job searches.
Still, job-search sites are experiencing a dramatic spike in usage. The total number of minutes that Internet users spent on such Web sites jumped 13% in October from a year earlier, while the total number of job-site pages viewed rose 20% in the same period, according to comScore Inc., a market-research company based in Reston, Va. Overall, the number of unique visitors to job-search sites is up 12% in the past year, more than the 5% increase for the Internet as a whole.
"Engagement with these job sites is a lot higher now," says Andrew Lipsman, a comScore spokesman. "It's not just how many people are on these sites but how much time overall they're spending on them."
Job-oriented sites are capitalizing -- literally -- on the newfound interest. Glassdoor.com late last month got $6.5 million in new venture-capital funding, just four months after its June launch. LinkedIn also announced last month that it had received $22.7 million in new funding from strategic investors such as Goldman Sachs Inc. and McGraw-Hill Co.
Niche Job Sites
Some job-search sites cater to certain industries. Dice.com, for instance, is targeted at technology professionals. Its sister Web site, eFinancialCareers.com, is tailored for finance-industry workers -- an area that has been particularly hard hit. In September, eFinancialCareers.com launched an emergency toolkit that bundles tips and articles on how finance workers can network, customize their résumés and interview better in order to land a new job.
Other sites try to stand out by providing more career-improvement data and features apart from just job listings. With numbers submitted by users, Glassdoor.com offers salary data for positions at numerous companies. So based on nine submissions, individuals searching for engineering-manager positions at Google Inc. would see that total compensation for such a job might add up to $241,000, including salary and bonuses.
And some sites are now emulating features found on social-networking sites: CareerBuilder.com in February launched BrightFuse.com, where professionals can network and interact with one another. A CareerBuilder.com spokesman says BrightFuse.com will add new features next year to highlight each member's skills, such as allowing writers to upload samples of their work.
One thing career sites haven't been able to perk up for job seekers is the total number of job listings. As of earlier this month, the number of job listings on Dice.com was down 9% for the year so far, compared with the same period in 2007, says a spokeswoman, who declined to reveal underlying numbers. At Indeed.com, the number of open positions has stayed flat at about five million jobs over the past year, says Indeed.com Chief Executive Paul Forster.

'A Mixed Picture'

"It's very much a mixed picture" out there jobwise, says Mr. Forster. "There's a lot of weakness in certain areas, such as in the mortgage, retail, financial, construction and hospitality industries. But some areas like defense and health care are strong."
Marc Hirsch, who started looking for a new job six months ago, says many features on the job sites helped him. The Roanoke, Va., resident, who has a background as a chemist, used LinkedIn, CareerBuilder.com and Indeed.com to get job alerts sent to him and liked how many of the listings came with salary information and estimates. "There was a lot of garbage that came back" through the online searches "but some quality opportunities too," says the 52-year-old.
Ultimately, though, the job sites proved to be just a starting point for him. Through one job listing he found on a career Web site earlier this year, Mr. Hirsch got his résumé sent to General Electric Co. While the company didn't have anything suitable at the time, GE kept his name on file.
When a position as an applications engineer came open, GE contacted him and he got the post, he says.
Write to Pui-Wing Tam at pui-wing.tam@wsj.com
Copyright 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

from Marketwatch - Think Twice About Compromising Your Nest Egg

ROBERT POWELL
Better think twice
Don't make these critical mistakes with your nest egg, even if times are tough
By Robert Powell, MarketWatch
Last update: 7:31 p.m. EDT July 2, 2008BOSTON (MarketWatch) -- Recession or not, these are fast becoming hard times, and hard times can lead to bad decisions.
Recently, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority warned investors to think twice before taking steps that might compromise their nest eggs, such as taking out a reverse mortgage, getting a 401(k) debit card, or cashing in life insurance policies to weather tough financial times.
"Each of these should be considered strategies of last resort," Mary Schapiro, chief executive of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority said last week in a speech.
"They may raise cash quickly, but each also carries long-term consequences that can undermine financial security in retirement and pose the potential for losing a significant, and sometimes irreplaceable, asset," Schapiro said. FINRA is a nongovernmental organization that oversees U.S. security firms.


According to FINRA, Americans are faced with the perfect financial storm. Rising costs of fuel and food, declines and volatility in the housing and financial markets, and an ever-tightening credit crunch have gathered to form a storm that could lead some Americans to make poor financial decisions. "But tough financial times don't necessarily justify resorting to risky ways to make ends meet," Schapiro said.
Investors could be risking their most valuable assets when they use reverse mortgages, life settlements and 401(k) debit cards to tap much-needed cash.
Retirement accounts
Don't cut back on or stop contributing your 401(k) and, even more importantly, don't cash in all or part of your 401(k). To be sure, plan providers do allow hardship withdrawals in certain situations -- if you face eviction from or foreclosure on your primary residence, for instance, or some other financial calamity. But if you are under age 59-1/2 and there is no hardship, you'll have to pay ordinary income tax on the withdrawal plus a 10% penalty tax. What's more, many employers will withhold 20% of the amount being withdrawn, so it's possible that a $20,000 withdrawal works out to less than $14,000 when all is said and done.
FINRA also warns that such withdrawals come with another cost - opportunity cost. If you're 40 years old with $40,000 in your 401(k) and it's growing at 6% percent year, excluding additional contributions that money would be worth $107,710 in 17 years. But if that same person withdraws $20,000, that remaining $20,000 would be worth just $53,855 in 17 years. In other words, a withdrawal of $20,000 now costs about $54,000 in future growth.
Worse yet, FINRA warns, creditors have access to any money taken out of a 401(k), be it a loan or hardship withdrawal, in ways they wouldn't if you left the money in a retirement account. Under the Bankruptcy Abuse Protection and Consumer Protection Act of 2005, creditors cannot touch your 401(k) balance or similar retirement savings account -- even if, as a last resort, you file for bankruptcy protection, FINRA said. Of note, balances in IRAs (Roth and traditional) are protected up to a limit of $1 million from creditors.
There are other benefits to maintaining contributions to your 401(k). Contributions reduce taxable income and lower your tax bill. Plus, 401(k) contributions often come with free money: Employers typically match a percentage of your contribution.
That said, if you really need the money from your 401(k), FINRA suggests taking out a loan rather than a withdrawal. You might be able to borrow money at a lower interest rate than a bank would offer. Plus, you won't have to pay taxes on the loan as you would with a withdrawal. Also, if your employer offers one, avoid using a 401(k) debit card, FINRA said.
Life settlements
Don't cash in your life insurance policy using something called a life settlement, FINRA warns. With a life settlement, a third party will buy your life insurance policy from you, typically for more than the cash value but less than the death benefit. According to FINRA, life settlements can be a valuable source of liquidity if you would otherwise surrender your life insurance policy or allow it to lapse, or if your life insurance needs have changed. But life settlements are not for everyone, FINRA said.
For instance, life settlements can have high transaction costs and unintended consequences. You might be unable to buy a new insurance policy, plus you could lose state or federal benefits, such as Medicaid. Also, you will have to pay taxes on the life settlement.
If you really need the money from your life insurance and you still need the coverage, FINRA suggests you borrow against your policy, or check whether you are eligible for accelerated death benefits. If you have a long-term, catastrophic, or terminal illness you might be able get a reduced benefit prior to dying.
Reverse mortgages
If you are over age 62 and have equity in your house, a reverse mortgage might sound intriguing. With a reverse mortgage, you get to convert the equity in your house to cash, plus you get to age in place, in your home. What's more, you don't have to make any interest or principal payments during the life of the loan.
But as with all things that sound too good to be true, especially something that sounds too good to be true for what could be your single largest asset and a future source of retirement income, there's a catch with reverse mortgages. For one thing, the loan costs can be steep. Also, interest is added to the principal, making reverse mortgages "rising debt" loans.
"The bottom line is that reverse mortgages are an expensive option that may prematurely deplete your home equity," FINRA said. "A reverse mortgage is a very serious decision."
Consider, for instance, some of the disadvantages FINRA outlined:
The income or lump sum you receive could impact you or your spouse's eligibility for various state and federal benefits, including Medicaid.
Depending on the laws of your state, a reverse mortgage may not enjoy the same home-equity protection that would otherwise apply against creditors, or if you have a health emergency and your spouse must liquidate assets to pay for nursing home care.
A reverse mortgage is not the right choice if you want to leave your house to your heirs.
A reverse mortgage may be right for you. But you need to evaluate a number of factors, including your health, your spouse's health, other sources of income, the reason you're tapping your home equity, when to do it, and how wisely you use your loan proceeds - before deciding whether a reverse mortgage is right or not.
What are some alternatives to a reverse mortgage? According to FINRA, you could sell your house and then downsize or rent, or take out a home equity loan, or get help from your children or local government assistance program. Any of those tactics could unlock the equity in your home without the cost of a reverse mortgage.