patrick.net

"If you save it" also has a tax on the interest earned.

Patrick says

You can avoid the gift tax unless you're getting a fuck ton of money.

If you exceed the annual exclusion and have to notify the IRS, you still might not have to pay any taxes unless you have also gone beyond the additional lifetime gift tax exclusion. The 2023 lifetime gift limit is $12.92 million.

https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/taxes/gift-tax-rate

We're doing this with our build. My mom is going to assume or just pay off our current mortgage balance. Give us market value above what we owe as a gift and move in 4 blocks away instead of being an hour away from my sister and I. She'll have to file paperwork for it, but she shouldn't be taxed. Probably will be $150k. She has $1M plus, but she has an $80k pension as a widow with teacher healthcare in retirement now. So I'll never get the $12M+ gift, too bad.

I'm trying to get her property taxes as low as possible too. Even if she pays below market to me and we report it AND she has a senior exception, they'll go higher. They'll not huge either way for IL. I just want her financially secure. Here only debt is a Toyota RAV 4 electric hybrid and she pays under $50/mo in gas.

Either way there are creative ways to get around taxes. But I do agree we need less regulation and taxes.

WookieMan says

Give us market value above what we owe as a gift and move in 4 blocks away instead of being an hour away from my sister and I. She'll have to file paperwork for it, but she shouldn't be taxed. Probably will be $150k.

@WookieMan

Are you saying your mom is going to pay off your $150K mortgage and not have to pay the gift tax on that? I thought that gift tax applies to gifts over $10K.

Patrick says

Are you saying your mom is going to pay off your $150K mortgage and not have to pay the gift tax on that?

I was looking to buy a condo and let my 23-year-old daughter live in it rent free. However, I found out that if the sum of the market rents exceeds $17k per year, she is subject to a gift tax.

I guess the point of this thread has a name:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/minarchism

Belief in the desirability and practicality of minimum government.

HeadSet says

Patrick says

Are you saying your mom is going to pay off your $150K mortgage and not have to pay the gift tax on that?

I was looking to buy a condo and let my 23-year-old daughter live in it rent free. However, I found out that if the sum of the market rents exceeds $17k per year, she is subject to a gift tax.

It's the GIVER that has to file a form once it gets over $17k. It doesn't necessarily mean the GIVER pays taxes though on the gifted money. Unless you gave her $12M+ already. My understanding (not tax advice) is that your daughter never pays a dime, it would be you. But you wouldn't have to pay anything until you hit that ridiculously high amount of $12M lifetime. Basically the $17k or under is just so you don't have to tell the tax man. Kind of like the $10k cash withdrawal from a bank needing to be reported.

Also, if your daughter is living there rent free how would anyone find out? You just have a condo, right? We have friends that have condos that don't live there in Chicago, so it's vacant on paper really. They occasionally use it. Just because you have an asset, it's pretty much impossible to know if it is occupied or not by anyone. And it's your choice who occupies it. I personally wouldn't worry about it. Hell, do section 8 tenants pay a tax in a high COLA where rents are high? Nope.

My overall point is there are ways to avoid a lot of the taxes on the list. Even sales tax. I would set our builders up that were building in Enterprise Zones if they were in one and ALL taxable material used to build, no sales taxes. It's saved about $10k-15k per build since Chicago sales taxes are basically 10%. It's a bit of a pain, but for 10 hours of work over a 6-8 month build it's money you don't have to pay.

I want less taxes for sure, but the government does have way to play their game and pay less. It's harder for your average Joe with a W-2 job, but something as simple as appealing your property taxes annually can save you a bunch. My taxes would be $5,500 annually if I didn't appeal them when we bought, so we only pay $3,200. I've saved $20k in after tax income since owning my home by appealing them. Consider effective tax rate for myself that like $25k back in my pocket. Just to go to the county and drop off paperwork. Maybe 2 hours of my time. Pretty good hourly payback, right?

And I'm not defending taxes. At some point though infrastructure needs to be built and maintained and we need a military. If we could knock it down to basically that, it would be amazing. 20-30% of the workforce would get laid off though. That's why there's never less taxes. I hate to be pessimistic, but this won't ever change in any of our lifetimes. Only some token tax cut like Trump made. Once something is created, it's very difficult to undo it. It sucks, but it's the system we live in. Figure out how you can legal cheat it. Look into programs and ways to cut the tax burden. 90% of people won't.

WookieMan says

It's the GIVER that has to file a form once it gets over $17k.

You are correct.



WookieMan says

Basically the $17k or under is just so you don't have to tell the tax man.

Correct again. I thought there was both an annual limit and a lifetime limit, based on a Forbes article I read.

Thanks!

Wookie,

My other option was to try the Schedule E, where I could lease her the condo at a good rate and then take depreciation and local tax deductions. However, as I understand it, anything below market rent is considered "personal use" and thus must be Schedule A which means no depreciation. In my case, Schedule A is useless anyway since I have no mortgage on my residence and would be better taking the standard deduction. Any thoughts?

Patrick says

Ah. You can appreciate irony now. There's two sides, and it's not left and right, it's up and down.

HeadSet says

Patrick says

Are you saying your mom is going to pay off your $150K mortgage and not have to pay the gift tax on that?

I was looking to buy a condo and let my 23-year-old daughter live in it rent free. However, I found out that if the sum of the market rents exceeds $17k per year, she is subject to a gift tax.

How would the govt find out she lives at your place rent-free?

RWSGFY says

How would the govt find out she lives at your place rent-free?

Moot point, as Wookieman pointed out that that $17k is just a reporting figure, no actual gift tax until the gifts exceed $12 million.

https://ashmedai.substack.com/p/a-survey-of-my-religious-community

I used to regard the government as extremely inept/incompetent, fairly corrupt, and facing incentives that pushed agencies/officials to be generally inept & corrupt.

Now, I regard the government as fundamentally evil on par with any other classical murderous sociopathic regime -- something that the pandemic exposed. (To be absolutely clear, this is not a Nazi comparison, they were far beyond a 'classical' evil murderous regime.)

1. The US government went out of their way to suppress, sabotage, and destroy every effective covid treatment, which by itself caused hundreds of thousands of deaths if not millions around the world (the US agencies are extremely influential for the rest of the world). Unfortunately, there were a few prominent doctors who were actively complicit in this, including one who lied under oath in an affidavit submitted on behalf of his hospital in a lawsuit brought by a covid patient’s family to allow them to give Ivermectin to the patient. Among other things, this doctor claimed that there had been NO clinically discernible improvement after the first round of Ivermectin was administered to the patient, which was patently false as was described in an affidavit by an outside physician who detailed the specific clinical improvements that were documented in the patient’s medical records from that hospital. I personally know the physician who wrote this affidavit & can attest that he is not a liar. The patient ultimately died amidst the court wrangling.

2. Furthermore, the other covid policies - lockdowns, facemasks, etc - were some of the most evil & pernicious policies ever implemented by a society that considers itself to be ethical - the death toll from the lockdowns itself exceeds the genuine death toll from covid disease (which itself was only significant because of the suppression & denial of treatment as stated above). These society-upending policies lacked any supportive evidence before they were implemented. It is now well-documented that cloth/surgical facemasks do not reduce the spread of covid at all, and even the various types of N-95 masks are utterly useless in the hands of the general population.

Key gov officials including Fauci actually admitted that they never took into account the myriad harms that such policies would inflict on society, which is not an ‘oversight’ – the least horrible possibility is that they had no regard for carnage caused by their policies, which is genuinely evil.

3. The covid vaccines - funded, marketed, mandated by the govt - were barely effective for maybe a few months at most, but caused a significant amount of death & severe life-altering injuries. (I am a medical researcher who has done a lot of prolific work in this area, including compiling 3300+ case report studies documenting various covid vaccine injuries/deaths in the formal academic literature, and analyzing mortality data from ~million death certificates which we obtained from several states containing all their deaths from 2015-present). The govt is STILL denying that there were any deaths associated with the mRNA vaccines at all (!!!). The government tried to dehumanize unvaccinated people, and largely succeeded according to polling showing that a significant % of people if not outright majorities held a variety of shocking views about unvaccinated people including that they were selfish, stupid, a danger to society, should be forcibly confined to their homes, have their children taken away, be relocated to “quarantine facilities” (granted which usually has many severe deficiencies in methodology & integrity to be sure). This sort of demagoguery is historically exactly how a society is groomed to accept genocide of a minority group or faction within society.

The death toll from the covid vaccines in just the US is probably somewhere between 100,000 - 300,000 deaths, and maybe more (this is based on excess mortality analyses, federal govt FRED economic databases, insurance data, & survey study data). Because of the shockingly poor quality of US data & studies, it is very difficult to sort out the various causes of excess death (covid disease, covid policies, covid vaccines) or to get a firm idea of how much excess death there is (there are numerous Simpson's Paradoxes in play, and calculating pull-forward effects involves a lot of modelling assumptions that are by definition assumptions about a variety of epidemiological possibilities/scenarios)

4. The government prosecuted the most significant & consequential censorship regime in the history of any Western country, which besides for the widespread carnage it caused (this isn't just because of people being deprived of medical information such as treatment possibilities or how to procure different drugs like Ivermectin or HCQ, but encompasses all sorts of things that you wouldn't think of, such as suicides by people suffering from various conditions who were disconnected from their support groups when Facebook deleted the group & the personal accounts of its members), it also demonstrates that the govt has no regard for the rule of law or legal norms whatsoever, and believes in a radical “ends justifies the means” with no clear limitation.

5. The US govt is now acting like a dictatorial regime to define the positions of its political opposition as a "terrorist threat" (e.g. parents protesting school boards, religious Catholics, Latin mass adherents, advocates for gun rights, parental rights, etc., opponents of covid & other governmental policies, people who are skeptical of the official "man-made climate change" orthodoxy, et al).

6. The US govt is furthermore persecuting political dissent (if you pay attention to the actual Jan 6 criminal prosecutions, the vast majority of defendants did not do anything remotely violent or even illegal, but were held without bail for years in unique prison conditions among a bevy of clear violations of basic legal rights).

7. The US govt is not only endorsing, marketing, and using its considerable power to impose the barbaric ideology of a litany of sexual deviancies that are nihilistic & depraved even beyond what was ever attributed to Sodom -- the US govt is forcing institutions to implement demented wicked barbarism like the psychological, physical & hormonal mutilation of children as "gender affirming" care by withholding some types of federal funding for even schools or hospitals that refuse to allow men in the women's bathrooms (or provide said 'medical care' if relevant). This is quite literally a modern-day incarnation of Moloch.

8. Furthermore, the US govt is now deliberately & willfully trying to impoverish its own citizens & deprive them of many products that have become staple amenities in society (such as air conditioning, gas stoves, cars, etc etc etc etc). To properly flesh this out and demonstrate the 'willful/deliberate' nature of this would require a lengthy analysis of numerous decisions, statements, & actions of the relevant people/agencies that is beyond the scope of this "comment". I mention this here only because it is one of the standout egregious dimensions of the cold-blooded wickedness that is the weltanschauung of the govt today.

9. The govt as a general entity is a pathological liar that if it were an actual person they would lack any shred of credibility. (Most people unfortunately have a very delusional idea of how politics “works” – they have no idea about what goes on behind the scenes, how “deals” are made, how various “groups” or “nonprofits” influence govt policy or decision, and so on.)

In a general sense, the govt is a diabolical evil institution that is more concerned with pushing twisted ideologies, mutilating children & persecuting political dissent; but the govt is willing to kill millions in pursuit of whatever political or other objectives they are trying to achieve.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformation

“This huge machinery was built around the war on terror,” the official said. “A massive infrastructure that includes the intelligence world, all the elements of DoD, including the combatant commands, CIA and FBI and all the other agencies. And then there are all the private contractors and the demand in think tanks. I mean, there are billions and billions of dollars at stake.”

The seamless transition from the war on terror to the war on disinformation was thus, in large measure, simply a matter of professional self-preservation. But it was not enough to sustain the previous system; to survive, it needed to continually raise the threat level. ...

After 9/11, the threat of terrorism was used to justify measures like the Patriot Act that suspended constitutional rights and placed millions of Americans under a shadow of mass surveillance. Those policies were once controversial but have come to be accepted as the natural prerogatives of state power. ...

The war on terror was a dismal failure that ended with the Taliban returning to power in Afghanistan. It also became deeply unpopular with the public. Why, then, would Americans choose to empower the leaders and sages of that war to be the stewards of an even more expansive war against disinformation? It is possible to venture a guess: Americans did not choose them. Americans are no longer presumed to have the right to choose their own leaders or to question decisions made in the name of national security. Anyone who says otherwise can be labeled a domestic extremist.

https://notthebee.com/article/florida-man-charged-after-trying-to-cross-the-atlantic-in-hamster-wheel-hydro-pod

Yeah dude, this guy tried to cross the Atlantic Ocean — from Florida to England — in what can only be described as a giant hamster wheel of a Hydro Pod.

Let's take a look at this bad boy before we go any further. Here she is in action during one of Reza Baluchi's previous trips (along with some information on the vessel):

Just a thing of beauty, isn't she?

The…vessel is a giant metal drum, with inflatable buoys on each side and paddles that are powered by a runner inside. ...

"Based on the condition of the vessel - which was afloat as a result of wiring and buoys - USCG officers determined Baluchi was conducting a manifestly unsafe voyage," the criminal complaint says…

Baluchi was unable to provide officials with the required registration for his water vehicle and informed officials that he was running in his hamster wheel all the way to London, England.

"Any government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have"

Patrick says

https://notthebee.com/article/florida-man-charged-after-trying-to-cross-the-atlantic-in-hamster-wheel-hydro-pod

There is no possibility he would have made it. I think it took about 3 months to cross the Atlantic in the last sailing ships.