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I view investing as a method of purchasing assets to gain profit in the form of reasonably predictable income (dividends, interest, or rentals) and /or appreciation over the long term.
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Burton G. Malkiel (A Random Walk Down Wall Street)
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Wisdom is really the key to wealth. With great wisdom, comes great wealth and success. Rather than pursuing wealth, pursue wisdom. The aggressive pursuit of wealth can lead to disappointment.
Wisdom is defined as the quality of having experience, and being able to discern or judge what is true, right, or lasting. Wisdom is basically the practical application of knowledge.
Rich people have small TVs and big libraries, and poor people have small libraries and big TVs.
Become completely focused on one subject and study the subject for a long period of time. Don't skip around from one subject to the next.
The problem is generally not money. Jesus taught that the problem was attachment to possessions and dependence on money rather than dependence on God.
Those who love people, acquire wealth so they can give generously. After all, money feeds, shelters, and clothes people.
They key is to work extremely hard for a short period of time (1-5 years), create abundant wealth, and then make money work hard for you through wise investments that yield a passive income for life.
Don't let the opinions of the average man sway you. Dream, and he thinks you're crazy. Succeed, and he thinks you're lucky. Acquire wealth, and he thinks you're greedy. Pay no attention. He simply doesn't understand.
Failure is success if we learn from it. Continuing failure eventually leads to success. Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly.
Whenever you pursue a goal, it should be with complete focus. This means no interruptions.
Only when one loves his career and is skilled at it can he truly succeed.
Never rush into an investment without prior research and deliberation.
With preferred shares, investors are guaranteed a dividend forever, while common stocks have variable dividends.
Some regions with very low or no income taxes include the following: Nevada, Texas, Wyoming, Delaware, South Dakota, Cyprus, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Panama, San Marino, Seychelles, Isle of Man, Channel Islands, Curaçao, Bahamas, British Virgin Islands, Brunei, Monaco, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Bermuda, Kuwait, Oman, Andorra, Cayman Islands, Belize, Vanuatu, and Campione d'Italia.
There is only one God who is infinite and supreme above all things. Do not replace that infinite one with finite idols. As frustrated as you may feel due to your life circumstances, do not vent it by cursing God or unnecessarily uttering his name.
Greed leads to poverty. Greed inclines people to act impulsively in hopes of gaining more.
The benefit of giving to the poor is so great that a beggar is actually doing the giver a favor by allowing the person to give. The more I give away, the more that comes back.
Earn as much as you can. Save as much as you can. Invest as much as you can. Give as much as you can.
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H.W. Charles (The Money Code: Become a Millionaire With the Ancient Jewish Code)
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Reliability investing requires finding companies trading below their inherent worth--stocks with strong fundamentals including earnings, dividends, book value, and cash flow selling at bargain prices give their quality.
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Ini-Amah Lambert (Cracking the Stock Market Code: How to Make Money in Shares)
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The rental income served as a dividend, so to speak, but even at an early age, I focused more on the home appreciation. I came to understand the tax advantages of home ownership, implications of depreciation, and the opportunity to use the homes as leverage in borrowing money.
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Donald J. Trump (Trump: The Best Real Estate Advice I Ever Received: 100 Top Experts Share Their Strategies)
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It turns out that addressing the most urgent problems of our time is, well, hard. But what is maddening about this debate is not how difficult fair-tax implementation would be but how utterly easy it is to find enough money to defeat poverty by closing nonsensical tax loopholes. If you don’t like the changes I suggested above, I can propose twenty smaller reforms, or fifty tinier ones, or a hundred even more innocuous nudges to get us there. We could raise $25 billion by winding down the mortgage interest deduction, which disproportionately benefits high-income families and does nothing to promote homeownership. We could find $64.7 billion by increasing the maximum taxable amount of earnings for Social Security so that high- and low-income workers are taxed at the same rate. We could scratch out another $37.3 billion if we treated capital gains and dividends for wealthy Americans the same way we treat income for tax purposes.
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Matthew Desmond (Poverty, by America)
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This fundamental inequality, which I will write as r > g (where r stands for the average annual rate of return on capital, including profits, dividends, interest, rents, and other income from capital, expressed as a percentage of its total value, and g stands for the rate of growth of the economy, that is, the annual increase in income or output), will play a crucial role in this book. In a sense, it sums up the overall logic of my conclusions.
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Thomas Piketty (Capital in the Twenty-First Century)
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Yet it's precisely because we're richer than ever that it is now within our means to take the next step in the history of progress: to give each and every person the security of basic income. It's what capitalism ought to have been striving for all along. See it as a dividend on progress, made possible by the blood, sweat, and tears of past generations. In the end, only a fraction of our prosperity is due to our own exertions. We, the inhabitants of the Land of Plenty, are rich thanks to the institutions, the knowledge, and the social capital amassed for us by our forebears. This wealth belongs to us all. And a basic income allows all of us to share it.
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Rutger Bregman (Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World)
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...a UBI is not a salve for a world of technological unemployment, or a powerful antipoverty measure, or a form of social dividend, or a way to boost the earnings of the working poor. Rather, it is all those things and more: a paradigmatic shift that would free people from having to do more work that they did not want to do at all. A UBI would, in essence, lop off the bottom of the psychologist Abraham Maslow's 'hierarchy of needs', where air, food, water, and shelter reside, with self-transcendence up at the other end. A UBI would give people the economic bandwidth to do what they wanted with their lives... Let the robots do the dirty work. Let the people do what they want.
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Annie Lowrey (Give People Money: The Simple Idea to Solve Inequality and Revolutionise Our Lives)
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While there are reasons to be sceptical about the predicted technological dystopia that has prompted many high-tech plutocrats to come out in support of basic income, this may nevertheless be a strong factor in mobilizing public pressure and political action. Whether jobs are going to dry up or not, the march of the robots is undoubtedly accentuating insecurity and inequality. A basic income or social dividend system would provide at least a partial antidote to that, as more commentators now recognize.6 For example, Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum and author of The Fourth Industrial Revolution, has described basic income as a ‘plausible’ response to labour market disruption.7
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Guy Standing (Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen)
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We lack space here to discuss in detail the pros and cons of market forecasting. A great deal of brain power goes into this field, and undoubtedly some people can make money by being good stock-market analysts. But it is absurd to think that the general public can ever make money out of market forecasts. For who will buy when the general public, at a given signal, rushes to sell out at a profit? If you, the reader, expect to get rich over the years by following some system or leadership in market forecasting, you must be expecting to try to do what countless others are aiming at, and to be able to do it better than your numerous competitors in the market. There is no basis either in logic or in experience for assuming that any typical or average investor can anticipate market movements more successfully than the general public, of which he is himself a part. There is one aspect of the “timing” philosophy which seems to have escaped everyone’s notice. Timing is of great psychological importance to the speculator because he wants to make his profit in a hurry. The idea of waiting a year before his stock moves up is repugnant to him. But a waiting period, as such, is of no consequence to the investor. What advantage is there to him in having his money uninvested until he receives some (presumably) trustworthy signal that the time has come to buy? He enjoys an advantage only if by waiting he succeeds in buying later at a sufficiently lower price to offset his loss of dividend income. What this means is that timing is of no real value to the investor unless it coincides with pricing—that is, unless it enables him to repurchase his shares at substantially under his previous selling price.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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The current crisis has led to renewed discussions about a universal basic income, whereby all citizens receive an equal regular payment from the government, regardless of whether they work. The idea behind this policy is a good one, but the narrative would be problematic. Since a universal basic income is seen as a handout, it perpetuates the false notion that the private sector is the sole creator, not a co-creator, of wealth in the economy and that the public sector is merely a toll collector, siphoning off profits and distributing them as charity.
A better alternative is a citizen’s dividend. Under this policy, the government takes a percentage of the wealth created with government investments, puts that money in a fund, and then shares the proceeds with the people. The idea is to directly reward citizens with a share of the wealth they have created. Alaska, for example, has distributed oil revenues to residents through an annual dividend from its Permanent Fund since 1982.
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Mariana Mazzucato
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Recognizing how most great fortunes had been built up in predatory ways, through usury, war lending and political insider dealings to grab the Commons and carve out burdensome monopoly privileges led to a popular view of financial magnates, landlords and hereditary ruling elite as parasitic by the 19th century, epitomized by the French anarchist Proudhon’s slogan “Property as theft.” Instead of creating a mutually beneficial symbiosis with the economy of production and consumption, today’s financial parasitism siphons off income needed to invest and grow. Bankers and bondholders desiccate the host economy by extracting revenue to pay interest and dividends. Repaying a loan – amortizing or “killing” it – shrinks the host. Like the word amortization, mortgage (“dead hand” of past claims for payment) contains the root mort, “death.” A financialized economy becomes a mortuary when the host economy becomes a meal for the financial free luncher that takes interest, fees and other charges without contributing to production.
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Michael Hudson (Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy)
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Statisticians say that stocks with healthy dividends slightly outperform the market averages, especially on a risk-adjusted basis. On average, high-yielding stocks have lower price/earnings ratios and skew toward relatively stable industries. Stripping out these factors, generous dividends alone don’t seem to help performance. So, if you need or like income, I’d say go for it. Invest in a company that pays high dividends. Just be sure that you are favoring stocks with low P/Es in stable industries. For good measure, look for earnings in excess of dividends, ample free cash flow, and stable proportions of debt and equity. Also look for companies in which the number of shares outstanding isn’t rising rapidly. To put a finer point on income stocks to skip, reverse those criteria. I wouldn’t buy a stock for its dividend if the payout wasn’t well covered by earnings and free cash flow. Real estate investment trusts, master limited partnerships, and royalty trusts often trade on their yield rather than their asset value. In some of those cases, analysts disagree about the economic meaning of depreciation and depletion—in particular, whether those items are akin to earnings or not. Without looking at the specific situation, I couldn’t judge whether the per share asset base was shrinking over time or whether generally accepted accounting principles accounting was too conservative. If I see a high-yielder with swiftly rising share counts and debt levels, I assume the worst.
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Joel Tillinghast (Big Money Thinks Small: Biases, Blind Spots, and Smarter Investing (Columbia Business School Publishing))
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The importance of ethical governance, exemplified by the Norwegian Pension Fund, is highlighted by a deplorable UK government proposal in 2016 to set up a Shale Wealth Fund.38 The fund would receive up to 10 per cent of the revenue generated by fracking (hydraulic fracturing) for shale gas, which could amount to as much as £1 billion over twenty-five years. This would be paid out to communities hosting fracking sites, which could decide to use the money for local projects or distribute it to households in cash. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is a bribe to secure local approval of environmentally threatening fracking operations, to which there has been considerable public opposition. Beyond that, there are many equity questions. Why should only people who happen to live in areas with shale gas be beneficiaries? How would the recipient community be defined? Would the payments go only to those living in the designated community at the time the fracking started? Would they be paid as lump sums or on a regular basis, and how long would they last? What about future generations? Can cash payments compensate for the risk of harm to the air, water, landscape and livelihoods? All these questions cast doubt on the equity and ethics of any selective scheme. They underline the need for the principles of wealth funds and dividends from them to be established before they are implemented, and for a governance structure that is independent from government and business. But
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Guy Standing (Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen)
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Ultimately, the World Top Incomes Database (WTID), which is based on the joint work of some thirty researchers around the world, is the largest historical database available concerning the evolution of income inequality; it is the primary source of data for this book.24 The book’s second most important source of data, on which I will actually draw first, concerns wealth, including both the distribution of wealth and its relation to income. Wealth also generates income and is therefore important on the income study side of things as well. Indeed, income consists of two components: income from labor (wages, salaries, bonuses, earnings from nonwage labor, and other remuneration statutorily classified as labor related) and income from capital (rent, dividends, interest, profits, capital gains, royalties, and other income derived from the mere fact of owning capital in the form of land, real estate, financial instruments, industrial equipment, etc., again regardless of its precise legal classification). The WTID contains a great deal of information about the evolution of income from capital over the course of the twentieth century. It is nevertheless essential to complete this information by looking at sources directly concerned with wealth. Here I rely on three distinct types of historical data and methodology, each of which is complementary to the others.25 In the first place, just as income tax returns allow us to study changes in income inequality, estate tax returns enable us to study changes in the inequality of wealth.26 This
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Thomas Piketty (Capital in the Twenty-First Century)
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The dividend received is exempt from income tax in India provided the Dividend Distribution Tax (DDT) has been paid by the company distributing dividend. If the DDT has not been paid, the dividend income would be taxable.
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Jigar Patel (NRI Investments and Taxation: A Small Guide for Big Gains)
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In the early years, top incomes were derived from capital, and the richest people were what Piketty and Saez call “coupon clippers,” who received most of their incomes from dividends and interest. The fortunes underlying these receipts were eroded over the century by increasingly progressive income and estate taxes. Those who used to live off their (or their ancestors’) fortunes have been replaced at the top by earners, people like CEOs of large firms, Wall Street bankers, and hedge fund managers, who receive their incomes as salaries, bonuses, and stock options. Entrepreneurial
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Angus Deaton (The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality)
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In an innovative proposal linked to basic income that has attracted interest across the European Union, Philippe van Parijs has suggested that every EU resident (presumably, legal resident) would receive a Euro-Dividend averaging €200 per month, paid for by a 20 per cent value added tax.11 This would amount to about 10 per cent of EU GDP.
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Guy Standing (Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen)
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Leaving aside instrumental reasons for supporting a basic income, the thrill lies in the potential to advance full freedom and social justice, and the values of work and leisure over the dictates of labour and consumption. The times they are a-changin’, sang Bob Dylan. And times do change the chances of success. As Thomas Paine so memorably put it in the introduction to his epochal Common Sense of 1776, ‘Time makes more Converts than Reason.’ For basic income or social dividends, the time is now.
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Guy Standing (Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen)
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Specialist mortgage brokers for the self employed and company directors, contractors and CIS workers. We understand how the self employed are paid so we are able to place you with the right lender for your company set up. We can use retained profits and net profits so you don't need to use taxed dividends as income. Use your gross day rate for contract workers or CIS (construction industry scheme) workers.
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Jones and Young
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Don’t increase your lifestyle until your passive income surpasses your active income. You’ll know you can and should buy that luxury item when the cost of keeping it is totally covered by your passive income. The
things you own (such as dividend-paying stocks, oil partnerships, and real estate investment trusts) should pay for the things you enjoy and consume.
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Christopher Manske (Outsmart the Money Magicians: Maximize Your Net Worth by Seeing Through the Most Powerful Illusions Performed by Wall Street and the IRS)
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Well, you know that interest is taxed as regular income, so if you put the bond ETF into the investment account, you’ll get taxed on that as if it were salary. But if you put it in the 401(k) and the Roth IRA instead, you get that interest tax-free. Meanwhile, you know that you can make up to $78,750 per married couple in qualified dividends without paying taxes. So if you put that in the regular investment account, you’ll be able to earn those dividends tax-free.
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Kristy Shen (Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required)
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You would report 2 percent of the $500,000 (or $10,000) equity ETF in dividend income on your tax return, and not report anything in interest since those bond ETFs are in tax-sheltered and tax-deferred accounts where investment gains are tax-free. Your total tax bill comes out to $0.
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Kristy Shen (Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required)
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Eliminate from the P Group income statement, the dividend received from the associate (as this will be replaced by the share of its profits after tax) and reduce the carry value of the investment in the associate in the SoFP (by the dividend amount).
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Astranti (CIMA F2 Financial Management: Study Text)
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The five major sources of income which are exempt for NRIs are: Proceeds from Life Insurance Policy - provided the policy complies with the exemption criteria/conditions Dividend from a domestic company or mutual fund scheme - provided the company or mutual fund scheme has paid the Dividend Distribution Tax (DDT), if applicable Interest on an NRE account – provided the NRE account is maintained as per the FEMA rules Interest on FCNR or RFC accounts – provided the account owner is a non-resident or RBNOR under the Income Tax Act Long Term Capital Gain on equity and equity based mutual fund – provided the Security Transaction Tax (STT) has been paid
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Jigar Patel (NRI Investments and Taxation: A Small Guide for Big Gains)
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If, if we get our heads straight about money, I predict that by ad 2000, or sooner, no one will pay taxes, no one will carry cash, utilities will be free, and everyone will carry a general credit card. This card will be valid up to each individual’s share in a guaranteed basic income or national dividend, issued free, beyond which he may still earn anything more that he desires by an art or craft, profession or trade that has not been displaced by automation. (For detailed information on the mechanics of such an economy, the reader should refer to Robert Theobald’s Challenge of Abundance and Free Men and Free Markets, and also to a series of essays that he has edited, The Guaranteed Income. Theobald is an avant–garde economist on the faculty of Columbia University.)
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Alan W. Watts (Does It Matter? Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality)
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If you're planning to invest stocks to generate income, you must look for stocks that offer dividends. Usually, corporations pay dividends to recorded stockholders quarterly.
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Zachary D. West (Stocks: Investing and Trading Stocks in the Market - A Beginner's Guide to the Basics of Stock Trading and Making Money in the Market)
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Countries competing against one another in the same array of products and services is not covered by Ricardian trade theory. Offshoring doesn’t fit the Ricardian or the competitive idea of free trade. In fact, offshoring is not trade. Offshoring is the practice of a firm relocating its production of goods or services for its home market to a foreign country. When an American firm moves production offshore, US GDP declines by the amount of the offshored production, and foreign GDP increases by that amount. Employment and consumer income decline in the US and rise abroad. The US tax base shrinks, resulting in reductions in public services or in higher taxes or a switch from tax finance to bond finance and higher debt service cost. When the offshored production comes back to the US to be marketed, the US trade deficit increases dollar for dollar. The trade deficit is financed by turning over to foreigners US assets and their future income streams. Profits, dividends, interest, capital gains, rents, and tolls from leased toll roads now flow from American pockets to foreign pockets, thus worsening the current account deficit as well. Who benefits from these income losses suffered by Americans? Clearly, the beneficiary is the foreign country to which the production is moved. The other prominent beneficiaries are the shareholders and the executives of the companies that offshore production. The lower labor costs raise profits, the share price, and the “performance bonuses” of corporate management. Offshoring’s proponents claim that the lost incomes from job losses are offset by benefits to consumers from lower prices. Allegedly, the harm done to those who lose their jobs is more than offset by the benefit consumers in general get from the alleged lower prices. Yet, proponents are unable to cite studies that support this claim. The claim is based on the unexamined assumption that offshoring is free trade and, thereby, mutually beneficial. Proponents of jobs offshoring also claim that the Americans who are left unemployed soon find equal or better jobs. This claim is based on the assumption that the demand for labor ensures full employment, and that people whose jobs have been moved abroad can be retrained for new jobs that are equal to or better than the jobs that were lost. This claim is false.
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Paul Craig Roberts (The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West)
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blame. Consider the 449 companies in the S&P 500 index that were publicly listed from 2003 through 2012. During that period those companies used 54% of their earnings—a total of $2.4 trillion—to buy back their own stock, almost all through purchases on the open market. Dividends absorbed an additional 37% of their earnings. That left very little for investments in productive capabilities or higher incomes for employees.
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Anonymous
“
In India, dividend income is exempt from income tax for investors, provided the dividend distribution tax (DDT) is paid by the company or the mutual fund schemes declaring the dividend. While
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Jigar Patel (NRI Investments and Taxation: A Small Guide for Big Gains)
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Equity mutual funds, require regular income Dividend option
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Jigar Patel (NRI Investments and Taxation: A Small Guide for Big Gains)
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Income from a mutual fund is either dividend or capital gains. The capital gain can be short term or long term based on the period of holding and whether STT is applicable or not.
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Jigar Patel (NRI Investments and Taxation: A Small Guide for Big Gains)
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We want more money in real terms after taking inflation into account. Here, I would like to emphasize that whether you consider yourself a stock, gold, private business, or real estate investor, or if you only invest for income such as dividends or rental income, all investors in all asset classes have to obey the same laws and principles of investing. There is no exception! Sometimes,
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David Schneider (The 80/20 Investor: How to Simplify Investing with a Powerful Principle to Achieve Superior Returns)
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Those cuts had lowered the top income tax rate from 39.6 percent to 35 percent. With bipartisan support, Bush had also slashed taxes on unearned income, most of which went to the rich. Taxes on dividends, for instance, were reduced dramatically from 39.6 percent to 15 percent. Taxes on capital gains, the overwhelming bulk of which were reaped by the wealthy, fell from 20 percent to 15 percent. As a result, many of the richest Americans were taxed at lower rates than middle- and working-class wage earners. A
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Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right)
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The financing option favoured by this writer would be to fund a basic income from the construction of sovereign wealth funds, along the lines of the Alaska Permanent Fund or the Norwegian Pension Fund. This option, which draws on the work of Nobel Prize winner James Meade in his book Agathatopia, would allow a country to build up the fund over the years and raise the amount paid out as basic income, or social dividend, as the fund developed.32 Viewed as a rightful share of income flowing from our collective wealth, the social dividend approach is politically attractive since it would not require either dismantling existing welfare systems or raising taxes on earned income.
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Guy Standing (Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen)
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Clearly, the “peace dividend” that dominated Washington rhetoric after the end of the Cold War—taking the money spent on the military and moving it to projects at home—is long gone. (Thanks to Afghanistan and Iraq, the dividend never paid out.) The money we hoped to spend on improving the climate, or education, or ending income inequality will get sucked into bolstering our forces in Europe, even as we “pivot” to concentrate more firepower in the Pacific.
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David E. Sanger (New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West)
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The only thing worse than a job you don't like is one that pays well enough and keep you stuck.
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Ini-Amah Lambert (How to Live Off Dividends All Year: The Passive Income Playbook For Busy Professionals)
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The only thing worse than a job you don't like is one that pays well enough to drown you in money illusion.
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Ini-Amah Lambert (How to Live Off Dividends All Year: The Passive Income Playbook For Busy Professionals)
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Employment income and interest income are taxed at the worst rates, while qualified dividends and capital gains are taxed much more favorably.
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Kristy Shen (Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required)
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Another peculiarity in the general position of preferred stocks deserves mention. They have a much better tax status for corporation buyers than for individual investors. Corporations pay income tax on only 15% of the income they receive in dividends, but on the full amount of their ordinary interest income. Since the 1972 corporate rate is 48%, this means that $100 received as preferred-stock dividends is taxed only $7.20, whereas $100 received as bond interest is taxed $48. On the other hand, individual investors pay exactly the same tax on preferred-stock investments as on bond interest, except for a recent minor exemption.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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No intelligent investor, no matter how starved for yield, would ever buy a stock for its dividend income alone; the company and its businesses must be solid, and its stock price must be reasonable.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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I helped him pick out some solid utility and infrastructure stocks and funds that pay him dividends in the 6% to 7% range.
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Steven Bavaria (The Income Factory: An Investor's Guide to Consistent Lifetime Returns)
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But whether or not economic value gets monetised through the market does matter a good deal to finance, to business and to government. Financiers only make a return—by extracting interest, rent or dividends—on economic value that has a market value. Business can only capture value as revenue and profit when that value has been monetised in sales. And governments find it far easier to levy taxes for public revenue on economic value that is exchanged through the market. All three of these—finance, business and government—are structured to expect and depend upon a growing monetary income: if GDP is no longer set to grow even though total economic value may well continue to do so, then those expectations need to change profoundly.
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Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist)
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if you were to stop working, your employment income would drop to $0. And if you were to structure your portfolio such that it earned money as dividends and capital gains, you could end up never paying taxes again.
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Kristy Shen (Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required)
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Connecticut’s Solidarity Dividend was almost immediate. In the first legislative cycles after public financing, the more diverse (by measures of race, gender, and class) legislature passed a raft of popular public-interest bills, including a guarantee of paid sick days for workers, a minimum wage increase, a state Earned Income Tax Credit, in-state tuition for undocumented students, and a change to an obscure law championed by beverage distributor lobbyists that resulted in $24 million returning to the state—money that could contribute to funding the public financing law. Despite regular efforts to curtail it, Connecticut’s Citizens’ Election Program has endured for over a decade, highly popular with both Connecticut residents and candidates, 73 percent of whom opted into the system in 2014.
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Heather McGhee (The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World Essentials))
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Gather six to 12 months of checking, savings, and credit card statements, and break your income and expenses down into categories and then line items. I have suggested some here, but add your own as needed. Check to see if your bank or credit card company provides reporting that categorizes charges or lets you assign categories—your work may already be almost done for you: •Income—paychecks, interest, dividends, rents, royalties, business income, pension, social security, child support, spousal support •Housing—mortgage/rent, property taxes, HOA dues, insurance •Utilities—gas, electric, propane, phone, TV/Internet, trash, water/sewer •Food—groceries, dining out •Auto—car payments, gasoline, repairs, insurance •Medical—health insurance, doctor/dentist visits, prescriptions, physical therapy •Entertainment—travel, concerts/shows, sports •Clothing—personal purchases, dry cleaning, uniforms •Personal care—hair/nails, gym/yoga, vitamins/supplements •Miscellaneous—gifts, pets, donations •Children—education, activities, school lunches, childcare You can use a spreadsheet or pen and paper to take note of income and expenses as you go through statements, then calculate a monthly average for each item.
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Debra Doak (High-Conflict Divorce for Women: Your Guide to Coping Skills and Legal Strategies for All Stages of Divorce)
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THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A TAX SHELTER AND TAX DEFERMENT The first lesson I learned was simple: not every tax break is scuzzy. Leona Helmsley, also known as the “Queen of Mean,” may have been sentenced to sixteen years in prison for tax evasion (ah, sweet justice), but there’s a big difference between legal and illegal tax avoidance. When I first started out, I didn’t have nearly as many tax-avoidance strategies as the rich did, but there are a few available to anyone, and taking advantage of every opportunity is absolutely critical. Tax sheltering means putting your money someplace where taxes no longer apply. Think of taxes as gravity in The Matrix, or logic in the Transformers movies. Even if it technically exists, it doesn’t apply to you. For example, if you invest in an index ETF and it goes up, it’s not reported on your tax return. If you earn interest on that account, ditto. Once your money is inside a tax shelter, you never get taxed on it again. This is because the money that goes into a tax-sheltering account has already been taxed. Tax deferment, on the other hand, is the process of taking a chunk of your income and choosing not to pay income taxes on it that year. Here’s how it works: You contribute a portion of your income to a tax-deferred account. The amount you contribute reduces your taxable income for that year, and accountants would call this contribution “deductible.” So, if you made $50,000 one year, and you chose to defer $10,000, then that year you would only be taxed as if you earned $40,000. That $10,000 you deferred gets put into a special account where it can grow tax-free, but if you withdraw it, it will be added on to your taxable income and you’ll pay taxes on it then. This is because money going into tax deferral hasn’t been taxed yet. To recap . . . Tax Shelter Tax Deferral Contributions are . . . Not deductible Deductible Growth/interest/dividends are . . . Tax-free Tax-free Withdrawals are . . . Tax-free Taxed as income
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Kristy Shen (Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required)
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Property is the worst, since you’re taxed every year whether your house goes up or down in value. Employment income and interest are slightly better, because they’re taxed only when you make money. Qualified dividends and capital gains are the best.
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Kristy Shen (Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required)
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These refugees from a score of lands, including the sweet land of liberty overseas, talked politics and war incessantly, but when you listened you discovered that what they were thinking about was their own comfort, the preservation of the system which made their own lives so easy. What was going to happen to the “market”?—by which they meant the stocks and bonds from which their incomes were derived. If the Nazis won—and nine people out of ten were sure they had already won—what sort of government would they set up in France and how soon would it be before things got back to normal?—by which was meant labor getting back to work and dividends flowing in. Thank God, there would be no more unions and strikes, no more front populaire and Red newspapers!
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Upton Sinclair (A World to Win (The Lanny Budd Novels))