TaxMamas TaxQuips

When things in your life seem almost too much to handle, when 24 hours in a day are not enough, remember the mayonnaise jar and the 2 glasses of sparkling cider theory…

A professor stood before his philosophy class with some items on his desk in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly, he picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls.

He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.

The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.

The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with a unanimous “YES”.

The professor then produced two glasses of sparkling cider from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar, effectively filling the empty space between the sand. The students laughed.

“Now”, said the professor, as the laughter subsided, “I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the important things; your family, your children, your health, your friends, and your favorite passions; things that if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full.”

“The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house, and your car. The sand is everything else; the small stuff.”

“If you put the sand into the jar first”, he continued, “there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls. The same goes for life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the good things that are important to you.”

“Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your children. Take time to get medical checkups. Take your partner out to dinner. Play another 18 holes. Do one more run down the ski slope. There will always be time to clean the house and fix the disposal. Take care of the golf balls first; the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand.”

One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the wine represented.

The professor smiled. “I’m glad you asked. It just goes to show you that no matter how full your life may seem, there’s always room for a couple of glasses of sparkling cider with a friend.”

Courtesy of Bob Whitaker, creator of the Tax MiniMiser

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Bob Whitaker

Creator of the Tax MiniMiser

A 92-year-old, petite, well-poised and proud man, who is fully dressed each morning by eight o’clock, with his hair fashionably combed and shaved perfectly, even though he is legally blind, moved to a nursing home today. His wife of 70 years recently passed away, making the move necessary. After many hours of waiting patiently in the lobby of the nursing home, he smiled sweetly when told his room was ready.

As he maneuvered his walker to the elevator, I provided a visual description of his tiny room, including the eyelet curtains that had been hung on his window.

‘I love it,’ he stated with the enthusiasm of an eight-year-old having just been presented with a new puppy.

’ Mr. Jones , you haven’t seen the room. Just wait.’

‘That doesn’t have anything to do with it,’ he replied.

‘Happiness is something you decide on ahead of time. Whether I like my room or not doesn’t depend on how the furniture is arranged. It’s how I arrange my mind. I already decided to love it. It’s a decision I make every morning when I wake up.

I have a choice. I can spend the day in bed recounting the difficulty I have with the parts of my body that no longer work. Or I can get out of bed and be thankful for the ones that do.

Courtesy of Steven Swartz of www.sizzlepr.com

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Steven Swartz

Sizzle PR

Your business doesn’t have to fail, or even struggle. This is a great time for a business to shine. But you will have to face some hard truths about yourself and your circumstances. And you’re going to need to be brutally honest with yourself, your workers, your family and your vendors.

1) If you can’t pay for a product or service –

• a)Don’t buy it!
  
• b)Tell them up front and see if you can work out terms.
  
• c)Offer a trade in products or services you have.
  
• d)Look for a barter club
  When you engage in barter, it’s still taxable. Be sure you book all the trades.
  

2) It’s time to re-evaluate employees – when you have staff

• a)Are your family employees bringing the company down? Do they do a sloppy job that other workers have to clean up or get blamed for? Dump the family members and keep morale high.
  
• b)Do you have ‘pity employees’? Do you have employees you don’t have the heart to fire because they are members of your community – but they do such a bad job you have to spend extra time fixing their work? If they aren’t responsible enough or focused on your business enough to get it right after all this time, it’s time to give yourself a break. Let them go.
  
• c)Are you re-doing the work of employees? Even in large corporations, I have met managers who kept staff on who were incompetent. They’d stay nights to review the person’s work and then re-do it before morning. Are you doing something that stupid? Dump the jerk! Get some sleep.
  
• d)If you must cut back staff – consider job-sharing. You have terrific employees who all do a good job. But you can’t afford to keep them all. Don’t lay-off by seniority. Hold a meeting and see if your staff is willing to job-share – or if one or two of them might easily be able to get new work quickly. Include them in the decision – and they might come back when business gets better.
  
• e)Offer everyone a pay cut – in exchange for one paid day a month off – or more flexible scheduling. Sometimes, getting to keep your job, even at lower pay – and getting a personal day or two can be a real stress-reliever.
  
• f)Cut employment costs. Have you put in a cafeteria plan – medical/child-care expenses pre-tax? It will cost a bit to administer. But the savings in payroll taxes will way more than offset admin costs. Raise for employees and cost-cutting for boss. Most payroll services can help you set this up.
  

3) Costs – you already know how to cut costs, right? Or do you?

• a)Evaluate/change suppliers – based on service and cost. For instance, we just dumped out fulfillment house for www.homebusinesstaxcuts.com. Among other problems, they could not get it through their heads that we weren’t going to pay variable UPS or FedEx rates ($15.00 – $30.00) to ship to different parts of the country, when the USPS offers a flat rate of about $10.00. (Besides, in this economy, who says, “our way or the highway!” – figuratively speaking, of course?) The great news is, not only did we just find 3 excellent fulfillment houses that would work with us – their services ALL cost about 50% less!
  
• b)Do you really need to buy that? Can you substitute something less costly – with similar quality. Quite often, especially today, you can find used equipment, furniture or tools or… things that are practically new. Shop around and ask your suppliers. Many offer refurbished goods with warranties. Shop at office supply houses like Quill.com who always have great deals. (We needed to get the HP fax – original cost $700 about 10 years ago – machine serviced. Our repair fellow seems to have gone out of business. We found a $100 HP copier/fax/printer/scanner on sale at Quill. With coupons and free shipping, it cost less than $30. OK…so the extra toner and other supplies we needed anyway brought the total order up to $137 – but…they included a tin of Mrs. Fields cookies!)
  

4) Advertising/PR:

• a)Share costs – do joint/piggyback advertising with a related business – For instance, Tom Buck, CPA recorded a set of CDs to help business-people deal with their tax issues. It’s quite a good resource. So, I did a custom version of my 100% Home Business Tax Cuts, re-arranging my topics to match the order of his CD. We’ve packaged them together. And we’ll be marketing them together. (You’ll be getting information about that shortly – or just drop by Tom Buck’s website to order the set.
  
• b)Do trade agreements with the local radio/tv station. I used to do billing for one of the hottest radio stations in Southern California. You’d be surprised to learn that many major advertisers never pay a dime. Instead, Winchells brought us donuts every week – and made some available for on-air prizes. A major florist filled each office with flowers every Friday – and made some available for on-air prizes. You’re getting the idea.
  
• c)Get a fundraiser started locally for a charity that helps folks who are out of work or need fundamental things like food and shelter. Not only will you help your community, you’ll also get a lot of free press. And it’s amazing how much fun this can be – and how much it builds morale around the office.

5) Increase sales

• a)find out what your clients/customers really need right now that you can provide. This is a good time to dump product/service lines no one really wants – and enhance lines they do. Who knows, you might find that you can build a whole new business line or direction by listening to your clients’ needs.
  
• b)provide terms for them – or offer them trades if they can’t pay. (See barter notes in Tip 1.) Just as you may need help paying your bills, it’s time to cut your clients some slack too. Some will stiff you. It’s true. There are some jerks out there – and you’ll know who not to work with again. MOST of your clients/customers will bend over backwards to make you whole, even if they ultimately file bankruptcy – and even if it takes them decades. Over the decades, in times of trouble, I’ve adopted this policy. Most people came through – and are still friends and clients. Some…well, you knew even at the beginning they had no ethics. So what can you expect? Help the honorable folks. And let your conscience guide you on the dishonorable folks.
  
• c)See if you can help your clients/customers increase their sales or save their accounts receivable. You have your own set of perspectives, contacts, and experiences. Sometimes, bringing fresh eyes to look at your customers’ businesses can generate wonderful ideas on how to increase their sales or – how to collect them.
  
• d)Accept credit cards – PayPal is easy to set up and very low cost. With everyone low on cash, you really should be accepting credit cards. Your customers/clients are more apt to pay you now, knowing they can pay the card over time. In fact, PayPal is much cheaper than your traditional merchant account. If you set up the minimum service, there are no monthly fees. And they collect a small percentage of each sale. Also better than a merchant account, the charge is directly associated with each sale. There are no mystery charges. AND if you refund someone’s money, you don’t get ANY charges – not a percentage of the original purchase – or a percentage of the refund – and there are no additional transaction fees. (Have you ever tried to reconcile a merchant account statement with a couple of hundred charges? Do you even know if you’re being overcharged by the banks?)

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We all have so much to appreciate, every day. These are the things that brightened up your life:

From Jean Sullivan in Texas

I am most thankful for the health of my family! If you have this you are lucky, because the stock market, job loss, and the other problems of the world pale in comparison to ill health.

We have made it thru another year will no big surprises. The best thing that has happened to me personally this year is a brand new hip. I was hit by a car at the age of 9 & now at 57, have a better hip than I have had in many years!

Steve Williams tells us

If you’re talking about financial situations, here’s one:

I got an opportunity to buy a house that my wife really loved at a greatly reduced rate back in May and needed the money quick. I took $145,000 out of mutual funds, knowing I had 60 days to roll it over.
I was planning to put it back in the same mutual funds but decided instead to go with a simple IRA at the credit union paying about 3.5%.

The remaining $7,600 I left in the mutual funds is now worth $4,000 while the $145,000 I rolled over into the IRA is earning about $500 a month. I can only imagine how folks are feeling as they watch their
retirement funds dwindle.

I was fortunate to sell my house at approximately the same time (also at a greatly reduced rate) so I’m giving thanks for my financial stroke of luck X 2.

If you’re not talking financial, I give thanks for my family.

Katyna McGill life is filled with blessing this year:

I’m grateful for many things this year. God has done some things for me this year that I never thought would be.

I’m thankful for my place of worship and the leaders there. They are my family and friends. They have helped me get up, stand up, and get moving with my life.

My 4-yr old had a botched circumcision at birth. The surgery was successfully corrected this spring.

I went on a business trip to Dallas which worked out for me to see a cousin that I’ve been e-mailing for years. On that same trip I saw my dad and sisters. I was able to see my oldest sister for the very first time-she’s 39.

Despite the negativity all around concerning the housing market, I bought my first home in September 2008.

I’m 36 today and my stepfather who raised us had been trying to reach me. I thought that was strange since he left without warning when I was 14. I spoke to him a few weeks ago and he asked to see his grandchildren and plans to spend Thanksgiving with us.

I hadn’t seen or heard from my middle brother since 2001. My husband ran into him and we’ve been in touch ever since.

God has truly been good to me in 2008.

Michelle Dail in Virginia has had an awesome year!

Of course I am very grateful for my wonderful family and the many blessings that comes with it. I am also very grateful that at least at the moment my husband is still employed. (He works for a GM dealership!) But most of all,

I PASSED ALL THREE PARTS OF THE EA EXAM!!!!!!!

Stephen P. Arkulary in Minnesota has true naches (joy and generated by your children or grandchildren)

I was mentioning to my wife the other night that I cherish the holiday season more and more as long as we may enjoy our children.

My son is 500 miles away from home in Council Bluffs Iowa, just finished up with working day and night getting our new president elected. When things got really tough in order to deliver the one Democratic Electoral vote from Omaha Nebraska, that has not been done since 1964. I would remind him that he was right in the middle of a defining moment in the history of our country, our Constitution that has stood stronger and longer than any other democracy need a lot of new wisdom. His hard work on the campaign may give us the opportunity to restore the constitution back to the more pure form that it originally served.

I am also very proud of my daughter who is(embroiled) right in the middle of the recount going on in the U.S. Senate race here in Minnesota. How could an election come out so close .03 of 1%. My daughter was in charge of the get out to vote rally for the entire University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. She was totally exhausted after the election, meeting with Constitutional lawyers for hours on end because of rules that may have favored one candidate over the other. We’ll see how her candidate comes out. A victory has a thousand parents and a loss is but an orphan in history.

I am so thankful that these two kids have the desire and willingness to stand up on their own based on their beliefs. I hope everybody has their children taking a place on their heroes list!

Mary Fran McCluskey, EA in California lives on a positive note – always

I feel good about my husband and I getting along so well together.
About my beautiful daughter passing her diplome this year and having a going music career in Europe.
About her and her girlfriend Clara spending part of our Clearlake vacation together this year.
About the wonderful family reunion my side of the family had in Switzerland for Molly’s concert.
About my son Ted’s new career in EMT and his having so many friends.
About having such great friends, old and new.
About my new little guinea pig girls Gingerpuff and Miss Muffet (Puffy and Muffy).
About being good enough in Spanish to do taxes. (I’m giving a talk in Spanish about taxes in foreclosure for Catholic Charities!)
About finally getting my EA.
About my great tax buddies in CSTC and CSATP. (I’ll be singing at the Christmas party).
About my holiday job delivering packages for UPS (just call me “Buff”).
About setting up shop this tax season in San Rafael year round.
About the fact that the self-employed can never be laid off.

Lucie Sample, EA in San Diego, who’s been my friend since high school has perspective

This happened to me 21 years ago but I’m still grateful.

I liked my job. I worked in a CPA office that specialized in personal service corporations (doctors, lawyers, etc.) and tax. I had worked there for several years, and I thought I’d remain there for several more years. Boy, was I wrong! One fine Fall day the boss decided to fire me.

At first I was devastated. After all, I was the sole support of my family, and jobs weren’t that easy to come by. I went home and talked it over with my husband, who was extremely supportive. We decided that I should open my own tax and bookkeeping practice, doing the same things I had been doing for the CPA. Only this time, I’d be the boss.

So I took the EA exam, passed, and printed business cards. Then I wrote letters announcing my new business and sent them out to everyone I knew. I bought a computer (this was 1987, after all!) and converted the spare bedroom into an office. Well, the practice grew, and soon I was making as much money as before but only working half the time.

If my boss hadn’t fired me, I never would’ve had the gumption to strike out on my own. So, this Thanksgiving, 21 years after my boss gave me that swift kick in the pants, I can truly say to him, “Thank you. Thank you for letting me go. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

One door closes, and another opens. We just have to be ready to walk through it.

You also have good and special things that have happened in your life this year. Or have come to appreciate that something you thought was a disaster has turned into such a blessing. Feel free to share.

Love

Eva

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By Jim Blasingame

The first Plantagenet king of England, Henry II, is important to contemporary small business owners because he’s considered the founder of a legal system to which entrepreneurs owe their freedom to be.

Ambitious and highly intelligent, Henry’s attempts to consolidate all of the 12th century British Isles under his rule created the need for order. And while the subsequent reforms were intended more for his own political expediency than to empower the people, they actually gave birth to the English Common Law, which replaced elements of the feudal system that included such enlightened practices as trial by ordeal.

Six centuries after Henry’s death, the tide of personal freedoms and property rights that evolved from his reforms were washing up on the other side of the Atlantic. In the colonies, a group of malcontents, now called America’s Founders, envisioned, created and fought for a new interpretation of Henry’s legacy, which is to say, sans kings.

In “The Fortune of the Republic,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “We began with freedom. America was opened after the feudal mischief was spent. No inquisitions here, no kings, no dominant church.”

In “Origins Of The Bill Of Rights,” Leonard W. Levy wrote, “Freedom was mainly a product of New World conditions.”

Those conditions, as Thomas Jefferson so artfully wrote in the Declaration of Independence, were, ”...life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

These were 18th century words for freedom and embryonic conditions for which the 56 signers of Jefferson’s document put their lives and liberties at risk on July 4, 1776. But America’s founding documents weren’t perfected until they perpetuated rights that were, as John Dickinson declared a decade earlier in 1766, ”...born with us, exists with us and cannot be taken from us by any human power without taking our lives.”

By definition entrepreneurs take risks. But only freedom to enjoy success can make those risks acceptable. Thank you, Henry II.

Research shows that there is a direct connection between the rate of new business start-ups and economic growth. And the American experiment has demonstrated that a healthy entrepreneurial environment fosters national economic well-being. Thank you, Founders.

Without their vision, courage, passion and sacrifice, it’s doubtful that entrepreneurship as we know it would exist today. And if capitalism is the economic lever of democracy, entrepreneurship is the force that renews the strength and reliability of that lever for each generation.

We began with freedom: freedom to dream and to try; to succeed and to fail; to own and to enjoy; to accumulate and to pass on to the next generation.

We began with freedom, and entrepreneurship was born. We began with freedom and capitalism was made to flourish.

Write this on a rock… We began with freedom, and the world is the better for it.

©2008 All Rights Reserved

JIM BLASINGAME is the creator and award-winning host of The Small Business Advocate® Show, a syndicated columnist and author of Small Business Is Like A Bunch Of Bananas and Three Minutes To Success.. His websites are www.SmallBusinessAdvocate.com and www.AskJim.biz . IBM, Administaff, Aflac and Palo Alto Software are Jim’s sponsors.

This article originally appeared in The Small Business Advocate Newsletter.

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