There are a lot of people that decide in preparing their taxes right now and one topic that came up was how people can save money by creating an incorporated company to enable themselves to write off a lot of expenses while receiving more tax breaks.

I actually had an unrelated conversation with a person recently about setting up an incorporated company as I wondered why he didn’t register his company that way instead. His answer was a pretty common one where he thought it was only for large companies that generate say millions of dollars a month while costing thousands to do so.

While you should consult with a professional, creating an incorporated business can be a very straight forward process. Some examples of people incorporating themselves even though they are the only person are photographers or even say actors.

The money then earned goes to this corporation that you created and can be retained with tax benefits. Afterwards, you can either pay yourself a wage or say dividends. People usually only do this if they have an excess amount of funds to handle as the paper work and accounting can get a little redundant if you don’t exactly save a lot of money.

Everyone’s situation is different though, so you should definitely research thoroughly beforehand.

Today I received a telephone bill which had all the usual service fees on it. A few months ago though there was a service that I enrolled into that was not initiated properly from the vendor’s end and as a result I am suppose to be credited for it. It’s been about two months and I have yet to receive this credit which was well over $200.

Part of me is thinking that I should raise some commotion just to speed the process up as it’s almost like giving an interest free loan to a company at this point. I have actually seen certain companies do that before too where they try to delay in giving out refunds so that they can say earn interest on it first.

Of course, most of the time it is simply due to a processing delay.

I was just reading this interesting article that talked about China’s implementation of a one child policy at around the early 80’s in order to control the growth of its population. The main topic was how being an only child in a family increases the likelihood of the child being spoiled and growing up with a mentality that things should be handed to them.

It went on to talk about how this has created a new generation of thinkers where things like a marriage is viewed more like a tool where one finds the right mate to achieve wealth and power as oppose to focusing in developing a nurturing relationship. Of course, it then dived into how so many people now see a divorce as simply a process to go through if one finds a more lucrative scenario to be in whereas before it was viewed as a disgraceful act.

Some of the comments I read were kind of amazing such as a person saying how it makes no sense to do so much work and planning in life financially when she could simply marry the right person and be worry free. I see this with people even if they are not the only child though. For example, it could even be a family having a lot of girls and so they tend to spoil the only boy in the family who then turns out to be the one who is always financially dependent on others.

Sometimes I would say the most important point to learning good financial management skills is to start from square one and to learn to appreciate the things that you already have while learning to genuinely respect others. That might sound cornball for a lot of people, but that attitude goes such a long way when it comes to money.

Today I was told about an incident where there was a person who did not pay his credit card bill on time and as a result he received a lot of interest penalty on it. The person then phoned in and questioned why it worked this way.

The representative then explained how he has to pay the bill on or before the due date listed on his statement to avoid interest charges. His answer was that he thought the credit card expiry date was when one has to pay their bills and so he pleaded to the company to erase his current debt because of it.

The representative never heard of this before in his life and so he gave the person the benefit of doubt and credited their account for the interest charges. Of course, he still had to pay what he charged on the card. I was just thinking is that really possible for a person to not know that or was the person just really creative in getting sympathy? Interesting story nonetheless.

Today I was looking at the phone bill for a business line and there was a long distance fee charged on it. This was odd as no one ever uses it for long distance calls. Upon investigating, this was apparently some kind of monthly fee to make the rates cheaper. Of course, it makes no sense to pay for it if you don’t use it, so I proceeded to phone in to get it straighten out.

From what I gather, it seems like it was added on as they assumed that I would save more money that way. As an example, without it a long distance charge would be at least 40 cents a minute and with the plan it would be just over about 6 cents a minute. Of course, that was kind of the angle that was used to hopefully try and keep me on the plan.

A lot of times it does sound like a smart thing to do as the potential savings sound like a lot if you do use it for even that small amount of time. I can only imagine how many people just don’t bother canceling such plans as a result even if they don’t use.