BY PETE YOUNGS   A.K.A MR. REHAB

Part 1 : Yearly tasks to cut maintenance costs on your investment and personal property

New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer last week announced that his office had filed a lawsuit alleging that a group of real estate industry insiders, including mortgage brokers, attorneys, and appraisers, pursued a fraudulent real estate flipping scheme targeting minority neighborhoods in Brooklyn, NY. In addition, Spitzer’s office announced that it has entered into consent decrees with some of the defendants that will provide substantial monetary relief to victims and stringent oversight of future real estate activities by the settling defendants.
According to the lawsuit, defendants Isaac Katz and Yoel Silberstein devised a scheme in which they purchased distressed properties in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant, East Flatbush, East New York and Bushwick, and then enlisted the services of a front-man, mortgage brokers, and real estate lawyers to dupe purchasers and lending institutions in order to obtain significant resale profits.

Doing your Own Taxes?
Let me give you my prospectus on this issue and see if we can make sense of this.  I am all for persons learning about money, how it works, and how money is to work for you.  I am all for persons taking charge of their financial situations including reporting requirements to the Internal Revenue Service.  If you have a simple tax return to file and by simple I mean one or five W-2 forms maybe some interest in Banks and some dividends from investments you have made I would recommend you preparing your own taxes to learn a little more about your money at this stage in your financial life.  There are many of my colleagues that would cringe that I am recommending this due to the fact that is business that is being "lost".  Unfortunately for them I do not feel this way, however I do not recommend using a tax program for this, if your going to do this do it by hand, and write neatly.