Work

I was reading about the taxation of nonmarital trusts today.

I know. Stimulating way to start a blog post.

And it said, "A key feature of the nonmarital trust is that it gives the decedent postmortem control over the property, as the surviving spouse generally has no control over final disposition of the trust property."

Postmortem control over the property.
So I guess they come back as a ghost and decides who gets what and how.
Wouldn't that be creepy.

And sometimes these trust documents contain a "sprinkling" or "spraying" clause which is suppose to be how income flows to beneficiaries, but all it really does is remind me of how cats pee.

In addition, Qualified Terminable Interest Property trusts remind me to clean my ears.
Because they're QTIPs.

Then I switched topics completely and began reading about farm income and expenses. This topic fascinates me because I like farms, and it reminds me of being home and the cotton fields and the garden and tractors and cows and sunshine.

Farmers can generally deduct prepaid farm expenses as long as they don't exceed 50% of every other farm expense. For example, if you buy a bag of feed, but haven't fed your livestock yet, you can deduct the whole cost of it. However, if the cost is over 50% of your other farm expenses, you can only deduct it as you use it.

But the government has beef with poultry farmers (so much pun intended). If prepaid poultry expenses exceed 50%, then they are deducted ratably over the lesser of their 12 months or useful life.

I wonder how long the "useful life" of a baby chick is.

Have you ever organized or cleaned something and then a day later regret that you ever messed with it?

In one of our staff meetings, we went over our e-mail retention policies and then people talked about how they had their e-mail organized into years and then client folders, and I was struck with awe at how organized and neat and useful that sounded.

So I spent some time going through mine doing the very same thing. At the end, I was so pleased at how consolidated and neat I was able to make everything.

The next day, I had to look for an e-mail.
Oh no.
I suddenly realized I had ruined everything.
Before now, whenever I had to search for an e-mail, it was in one of three places: inbox, sent, or trash.
I could search easily- by name, by time received- no cumbersome folders to open up and look through.
But that was all gone now.

My world no longer made sense.

It's like that time I cleaned up my desktop icons at home.
Looking for anything after that was like looking for a needle...in a stack of needles.
However, I was able to fix that problem by making a folder called, "That random folder that I miss so much" on my desktop and sticking everything that I would put on my desktop in there. That way, it looks cleaner (but it's really not).

And that's the true story of how I fixed something after I broke it after I tried to fix it.

Residuary clause,
TWS