Live Big® Digest – Housekeeping Edition

We hope your year is off to a good start and that you’re making good progress toward your goals for 2012 as we enter the third month of the year.  In the interest of progress and efficiency, we wanted to share a few housekeeping items with you related to taxes, security, and an upcoming event.

IMPORTANT: Date change for the Virginia Open House to March 29, 2012.  See new invitation below

The Tax Man Cometh
With April 15 looming (though, technically, the official deadline this year is April 17) we wanted to point out a few “tax facts” to help you get prepared.

• Your Schwab 1099 now includes cost basis information and is the only source for cost basis.  We will no longer be producing a year-end Realized Gain/Loss Report, although we will continue to produce these – along with Income Reports – on a quarterly basis for tax planning purposes.
• You will find a report of taxable IRA distributions for the preceding year under the Tax tab of your Client Private Page^®.
• You will also find a summary of advisory fees paid during the preceding year under the same Tax tab.  These may be deductible to the degree that your Miscellaneous Itemized Deductions exceed 2% of your Adjusted Gross Income.

Cloud Hygiene
With more and more of us using “cloud” based email services, such as Google’s Gmail, we’ve seen an increasing number of instances in which accounts get “hacked,” or taken over by malefactors intent on stealing from you and your friends. James Fallows wrote an interesting article on this topic in the November issue of The Atlantic (“Hacked”),  in which he relates the experience he and his wife had when her Gmail account was hacked.  Fallows ends the article with several pieces of advice received from engineers at Google, including a suggestion to use Gmail’s two-step verification process, whereby you’re required to enter a verification code that has been sent to your cell phone any time you try to access your account from a computer other than your own.  The idea being that a hacker might get your password, but is unlikely to have access to your cell phone (not least because most of these scams still originate out of Nigeria, according to one Google engineer).

As additional security, Yeske Buie has a policy of verifying by telephone any requests to distribute money received by email if the funds are being sent to a third party.

Upcoming Events

• March 29: Client Open House in the Vienna office.
• IMPORTANT, this is a new date! Please note that the Virginia Open House will be held on Thursday, March 29, NOT on March 22nd, as previously announced.
• June-July: Elissa and Dave one-month sabbatical.
• October 24: Client Open House in the San Francisco office.

Have a great week!

The Yeske Buie Team

Join us for our Client Open House on March 29!