I’ve made strides in the last two years of keeping better records. I keep these records mostly for the benefit of my taxes which have gotten increasingly complex in the last couple years. I used to only claim the standard deduction up through tax year 2002 when I purchased my condo. Slowly but surely I’ve added to complexity.

  • Mortgage Deduction
  • Rental Income Deduction
  • Stock Transactions - I trade alot more than I should these days
  • Small Business Income/Loss (Askdong.com) - I don’t really consider AskDong much of business in truth but since I receive some ad revenue, I should at least account for it.
  • More Charitable Giving

The last one ended up biting me in the ass a bit.  One of the charitable contributions that I gave was in the form stock shares. These were “orphaned” shares I had accumulated via spin-offs.  I knew if ever wanted to account for the tax basis it was going to be complicated since I had not kept the best records.  The nice thing about gifting stocks is that you can take the full deduction of the value of the shares at the time of gifting without actually selling. Given that I owned small lots of these shares, the commission cost of selling would’ve been almost 10% the value of the shares.  Gifting the shares cost me nothing, required less accurate records, and was a good thing to do.

While I recorded the date of the gift, and have the acknowledgement of the receipt of the shares, I didn’t take the extra step of actually recording what the price of the shares at the time.  I figured that I would be able to look up the historical price later - something I’ve done many times in the past.  However, when I went to do this yesterday I had the dardnest time. Avaya, some of the shares I gifted, was taken private by TPG Capital in Oct 2007. As a result it’s ticker is no longer in circulation. I wasn’t able to get quote at Yahoo, BigCharts, SmartMoney, or even Google.  I finally found salvation at MSN who allowed me acutally get details on AV up through the time stock was delisted.   Lesson to be learned here is that I need to keep better records. I’ve gotten better, but I still have a lot of progress to make.