I worked from home today again due to the weather. My phone kept beeping during the TIGR call. Turns out it hadn’t sat on the cradle correctly and was running out of charge. I ended up putting it in the base and listening on the speaker phone.
I did my taxes tonight. Yippee! Refunds on the way. That ESPP section in Turbo Tax sucks. Well, it’s the combination of that and the information that IBM doesn’t provide in terms of per share data. Very annoying. I remember going through this same thing last year.
I’m going to try and hold on to my accumulating shares for two years this time to avoid the ordinary income that you have to include if you sell them before two years. Plus that’ll make all the gains long term. The risk, of course, is that the IBM stock price will be in the toilet by that time. On the other hand, it could split. It’s all a crap shoot. The good news is that I have other cash that I can get to (my “middle tier” money) if I need something quickly. (Thanks to Nathan for that.)
Now that I see what my refunds are going to be, and with variable pay coming in March (or will it be May?), I’m going to go ahead and make another $3000 contribution into my Roth IRA. Nathan will love that. 🙂
I handled a few TCW things this evening, like collecting loose end agenda items that need to go on the agenda for next week’s meeting.
I also had to uninstall and reinstall Quicken 2002 because of the Turbo Tax install. Once again “advertising” in these damn products is getting out of hand. It looked like a free upgrade to Quicken 2004 to me, so I said, “sure.” It installed the whole thing, and then when I clicked on it to use it, it said, go to www.intuit.com and pay for it. That totally sucks. And it was $59.95. I uninstalled it, and fortunately, was able to find my Quicken 2002 CD to reinstall that. Pain in the ass.