Thanks. Is there a way to know if the 1040 did arrive to their facilities as opposed to being lost in the mail?
How did you send it? I regularly send them paper documents (I have a seasonal side business doing tax prep). Everything I send to the IRS, I send certified. I sent in two 1040Xs last year. They were both “delivered” according to the USPS. One showed up in their system fairly quickly and was processed quickly. The other never showed up in their system for over a year, then one day my client got his refund. I think he tried calling once and they said they couldn’t confirm anything that wasn’t already publicly available on the website. If you sent yours certified, I wouldn’t worry. Figure it will get processed by February.
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I sent it around June 15 but didn’t use certified. My bad. How bad could it be if I were to resend the same 1040 but this time certified?
You’re not supposed to do that, but I doubt it would actually hurt. Maybe wait a few weeks since your extension runs until 10/15. I would bet they received your first one and they are just slow, but you never know.
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I mailed mine in April before the original deadline and their website didn’t indicate that it was “received” until September. So you probably need to wait another 3 months. I sent certified, which provided some peace of mind. I considered resending (expecting a big refund due to overpayment), but the website specifically says to not do that. Also lots of posts on reddit about the delays.
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The politics of envy, not surprising from the House crew. These IRA rules are aimed at under 500 successful investors.
More than $279 billion sits in mega-IRAs, individual retirement accounts with at least $5 million each, according to Congress’s nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation. Despite rules designed to limit IRA contributions by the wealthy, almost 29,000 Americans hold these giant accounts, and nearly 500 of them somehow managed to get $25 million or more into their IRAs.
I disagree with the characterization of $5M as a “mega IRA”. I ran through one of those retirement calculators what you end up with if you contribute the $15k limit (now $18k) to your 401k plan each year from age 30 til 65 when you might retire. Without any inflation adjustment or matching, this results in a retirement account balance in the mid $2M’s if you average 7% returns and mid $4M if you average 10%. The actual average stock market return over the long term has been around 10%.
My point is that with a good job and a mentality of savings, if you throw in a little investment luck / skill to get slightly over 10% returns, or some friendly employer matching, or a lifestyle that didn’t immediately start spending it down rapidly (and hence it could continue to appreciate for a few years after retirement), you could quite plausibly end up with $5M in your IRA after you leave your job and retired.
Said another way, if you decide, having retired at 65 with a “mega” $5M IRA, that you’ll invest very conservatively now that this is all you’ve got and you might live another 20-30 years, your risk free return going forward is zero. So basically you just divide that $5M by your lifetime and hence you could only withdraw $150-250k/year for spending (possibly fully taxable if it was Traditional) depending on how long a lifetime you’re budgeting for. Hardly the range of the opulent rich who Biden and company are promising not to target under their tax pledges.
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As for the real “mega IRAs”, as you might well characterize those with $25M+, let’s just remember this is under 500 people in country of 250M adults. If you have enough Apes YOLO’ing it on GameStop calls, some Kitty is gonna get lucky and make $40M off an initial amount that was entirely within the range of some plausible retirement account balance.
They’re “mega” if you exclude any 401k rollovers. Seems like the authors missed or fibbed that possibility. Or maybe they’re “mega” because so few people can get there.
$19.5K
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Yeah, it’s not a very good article.
Thank you meed18 and scripta. Next time I’ll know to send it certified.
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Full text of the bad proposal from the House
Traders or even investors will not welcome a wash sale rule change (pg 630) that appears to extend the period covered from ±30 days to up to 2 years after your sale at a loss(!).
Now if you took a loss and the next year decide to buy the stock again, you have to back and amend your return for every such trade? Or if a related party does a trade, you have to know and do the same thing, and also, they don’t even get the basis for the your loss.
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That’s insane. But also really f’n stupid if they don’t also fix the meaning of “substantially identical” to mean that VTI is “substantially identical” to SCHB, for example.
But even if they fix the definition, there are new, custom and personalized index-fund-like products in the works, and they could make it trivial to avoid the wash sale rule.
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Not if anyone related to you starts using the same product! Also, who has losses on VTI these days? Stocks only go up if you print enough dollars.
That’s the ballpark each of our 403b are heading (at the same rate of returns as over the last 20 years, each of our 403b will pass the $5M mark at age 61) after maxxing out contributions since first year of employment including catchup contributions above 50 and including the company match. Average annual returns have been slightly above that 10% mark so all these assumption are pretty realistic. Not to mention, if a spouse dies early and you roll their 401k/IRAs into yours, a single account could easily get north of $10-15M from passive investing in index funds over 35-40 years. Or maybe saving aggressively and living below your means get you into the evil rich category these days.
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Not if the product is personalized for you alone.
Only the rich can afford to save aggressively and live below their means 
I just hope their overly ambitious ambitions will implode on themselves.
SALT deduction restoration under consideration in the upcoming Democrat giveaways, over half of which would go to the top 1% to the tune of over $30k per member of the Evil Rich.
Seems to me like a lot of these are very much uncertain. For example, the House Ways and Means Committee did not include Biden’s proposals for SALT cap removal or nixing the step-up basis on death. If these were dropped even before it gets to the Senate, I don’t know how likely they are to make it into the final bill.
Engineering a promotion to partner, via a stint at the IRS.
For six years, Audrey Ellis and Adam Feuerstein worked together at PwC, the giant accounting firm, helping the world’s biggest companies avoid taxes.
In mid-2018, one of Mr. Feuerstein’s clients, an influential association of real estate companies, was trying to persuade government officials that its members should qualify for a new federal tax break. Mr. Feuerstein knew just the person to turn to for help. Ms. Ellis had recently joined the Treasury Department, and she was drafting the rules for this very deduction.
That summer, Ms. Ellis met with Mr. Feuerstein and his client’s lobbyists. The next week, the Treasury granted their wish — a decision potentially worth billions of dollars to PwC’s clients.
About a year later, Ms. Ellis returned to PwC, where she was immediately promoted to partner. She and Mr. Feuerstein now work together advising large companies on how to exploit wrinkles in the tax regulations that Ms. Ellis helped write.
I think of it like cybersecurity as evidenced by events like the Black Hat convention. There’s not much difference in expertise between some hackers and cybersecurity experts working for the government or private companies. Two sides of the same coin.
So I’m not sure how you’d go about avoiding the same at the IRS. You want to hire tax experts. But once they leave the IRS, these guys are very much expert at exploiting the tax laws too. And if you instituted strict limitations on where they could work after working at the IRS, you’d have lots of trouble finding people willing to take the hit to their career.