JoeTaxpayer

This was a tough week for Blackberry users. My employer provides a Blackberry for me, as much for the cell phone calls as the email server feature. For much of this week the email service was very poor, messages taking hours to get through.

Sometime last year you converted some funds from your pretax IRA account to a Roth. Now, the market is down (The S&P index down about 5% year to date) and you are thinking that paying the tax on the higher value when you first converted isn’t the greatest idea.

Or, you make have realized when you filed your return that the extra taxable income put you into a higher tax bracket. Why pay 25% on that conversion when your regular rate is running at just 15%? In hindsight, it’s easy to look at your return’s ‘taxable income’ line and see where you fall. You can recharacterize just enough to keep you in your original bracket. Don’t forget, you had the option to spread the income over two years, 2011 and 2012 or to take it as income in 2010. If so, you need to look closely at how your 2011 income is doing along with how your investments in the Roth have fared.

It’s nearing the deadline, 6 months after that April 15th Tax Day, or October 17th as October 15th is a Saturday. The clock is ticking!

As I mentioned earlier this week, last weekend was the first Financial Bloggers Conference, held in Chicago. I did have a little explaining to do to my wife and daughter when they asked if I learned anything on investing, market timing, estate planning, etc. It wasn’t a finance conference, it was a gathering of writers. Together to learn about our craft. This past week, many of my fellow bloggers wrote about their experience, and this week will be a roundup of those articles.

At Give Me Back My Five Bucks, Recap: 2011 Financial Blogger Conference, Krystal  recapped a few of the speakers that caught her attention and online friends she got to meet.

Andrea at So Over Debt offered her thoughts on FINCON11 and Steve Jobs, an interesting twist on doing what you love, which really should be a goal for all of us.

At Free From Broke, Financial Blogger Conference 2011 – Meeting the PF Blogger World and More.  Glen recalls those he met and the charity event many of us participated in. His regret is how many he didn’t have a chance to say hello to, only so much free time at meals or breaks. This was run like a business conference, a full, tight schedule.

Dr Dean, whom I met, is author of The Millionaire Nurse Blog, and also made the connection with Steve Jobs in an article titled Financial Follies: What Steve Jobs and Fincon11 Have In Common Edition! No surprise, the punchline is “Passion.”

For a spouse’s view, My favorite part about #FINCON11! was written by Jeff Rose‘ wife who attended and befriended two other wives that weekend. She thinks bloggers are cool people. I think so too, and glad to see she agrees.

It was great to meet Kay Bell, who writes Don’t Mess With Taxes. She recapped Fincon with her article What a wonderful financial weekend. Yes, it was!

I think I’ll call it quits with this list. Over 250 attendees, and nearly all offered an article this week about the adventure. If nothing else, it goes to show how passionate people are about this endeavor. One brief story – I’m at the ticket counter at the airport before I flew out, and the agent is asking what I’m up to. Just making conversation. So I tell her it’s a financial bloggers conference. “Oh, blogging”, she responds, “my brother is a blogger. He writes about fonts.” So I offer her this joke to pass along. Helvetica walks into a bar, and the bartender shouts, “Hey, we don’t serve your type here.” It’s ok, she didn’t laugh either.

I know that Apple products are just things. They are not a cure for cancer and do not (yet) create world peace. Yet, my computer and iPad have become a part of my daily life, and I am grateful to own them. It might not have hit me as hard if Steve had first retired, grew old and died, I think much of the sadness for any of us is that he died too young. By coincidence, my wife’s uncle passed the day before Steve. He was 96, and while his death was sad, it wasn’t tragic.

People have a tough time understanding the connection that one can feel with a product. Me, I’ve never loved my car, but I know some guys do, they wash it, they wax it, etc. It’s my Mac that I’ve always said I loved. And even though a google search implies otherwise, I’ve never actually heard anyone utter the words, “I love my PC.”

Rest in Peace, Mr. Jobs. I’ll always wonder what marvels you might have brought us had your time here been longer.