Mr. Monopoly is doing the happy dance today!
The accounting firm sent back our 2009 tax filings and it appears manageable. (This is where you hear a massive, collective sigh from all of us at headquarters.)
By using Simplified Employee Pension accounts, mortgage interest deductions, and so-called “tax loss harvesting” techniques on our investments, we were able to drastically lower our taxable earnings.
It is a one-time, one-year reprieve, though, because the two new businesses are starting to pay off and I get the feeling we’re going to get a very, very large bill for the 2010 tax year. And that’s fine because, in the words one one famous author, “I aspire to a tax problem.” There are people who pay $100 million or $1 billion in taxes a year. I hope to someday be one of them. (I never understood people who are already rich going to prison to save a little bit more money by cheating on their taxes. The logic completely escapes me.)
This means that over the next year, we should have strengthened the balance sheet further. Mount Olympus Awards is already debt-free over than short-term accounts payable that are covered by current assets, and by Christmas, we hope to have everything in the businesses and personally paid off except for a small collection of loans that total roughly $336,000 and are at fixed rates of only 2.5% to 5.5% for the next 20 to 35 years and – you guessed it – are tax deductible!
Given that we generally dislike debt, why don’t we pay these off early?
There are a few reasons: (more…)
