2018 Income Taxes

I mailed in my 2018 US and NJ income tax returns last Friday, a whole 3 days before the Monday deadline. They had been more or less done for several weeks but because I owed money this year I didn't feel any great urgency to complete the process.  However on the preceding Tuesday my phone and internet went out with Verizon giving a repair estimate of the following Tuesday.  The lack of internet left me with time on my hands which I used to get the returns done a little early.  It also meant I couldn't submit them electronically and had to mail them but I am inclined to do that anyway when I owe money because I am a little nervous about allowing them to pull money from my bank account.

I owed money primarily because I had a large involuntary capital gain (from CVS buying Aetna) last year and I hadn't increased my estimated taxes by quite enough to cover the additional capital gains tax.  The lower federal withholding rates also contributed but the new law did provide me a tax cut.  I ran my 2018 income though the 2017 program and discovered my federal tax was about 6.5% less because of the new law.  Similarly running my 2017 income through the 2018 program showed my 2017 federal tax would have been about 9% less if the new law had taken effect a year earlier.  In both cases the general pattern was the same, my ordinary income tax and the net investment income (or Obama care) tax went up because of the new limit on deducting state and local taxes but I still saved money because I no longer had to pay the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT).  The AMT doesn't allow deductions for state and local taxes so I hadn't been benefiting from those deductions for some time.

I didn't have any particular issues with Turbo Tax Deluxe which I used again this year perhaps because I am getting use to its annoying features.  It still tries sell you upgrades but they aren't really needed.  

Norm Thompson RIP

Norm Thompson is a mail order clothing brand which is being discontinued.  Apparently their parent company Bluestem Group announced this back on January 31, 2019 but I didn't get the word until a few days ago when I received in the mail their "Final Sale" catalog.  I was a bit sad to learn they were closing because I have been wearing their "Shikari" shirts for many years.  Judging by old photos my mother started giving them to me in 2003. I like shirts with front pockets to help hold some of the junk I carry around and the Shikari shirts have two so they quickly became my favorite shirt.  Although I continued wearing other shirts for some time as my mother was only giving me a few shirts a year.  In fact I was a little surprised to find a photo of me wearing a different shirt as late as 2013.  However in recently years I have worn the Shikari shirts almost exclusively.      

Norm Thompson mostly sold women's clothing but they did have a small men's section in their catalogs. Some of their offerings are being picked up by Appleseed's, a Bluestem brand which sells women's clothing exclusively.  Perhaps another Bluestem brand which sells men's clothes (such as Blair or Haband) will pick up the Shikari shirts.  If not I do have about 40 of them at this point which is enough to last me for some time.

The photo was taken July 2007 in a sleeper compartment on an Amtrak train in Florida.  Around the time the train ran into a flatbed truck someone had managed to get hung up on the rails at a grade crossing.  Fortunately no one was seriously injured but we had to finish our trip by bus.  It shows me wearing a short sleeved (there is also a long sleeved version) Shikari shirt.

Phishing

I sometimes receive emails pretending to be from a legitimate business such as a bank trying to get me to divulge sensitive information such as account numbers or passwords.  This fraudulent practice is called "phishing".  Such emails are easy to recognize when they purport to be from a business that you do not have a relationship with.  However if you are sending out millions of such emails you don't need a high response rate.  You just need to get lucky a few times with recipients who for one reason or another find the email plausible enough to get past their guard.

This happened to me.  I have a corporate credit card with American Express which I rarely use but had recently used on a business trip.  I had also recently filled out an online form with a financial institution which has moved to a mandatory 2-factor authentication system.  So when I received an email purportedly from American Express (similar to this) asking me to update my authentication information I accepted it as genuine without much thought. 

It is a well known psychological phenomenon that people prefer to incorporate new information into an existing world view rather than rather than use it to overturn previous beliefs.  So once I had accepted the email as genuine I didn't revisit this question as I filled out the attached form despite some in hindsight red flags.  Even when the form asked for my email password (which I refused to provide) I didn't question that the email was genuine believing instead that American Express was being unreasonably nosy.  It wasn't until I was driving to work the next day that the penny dropped and I realized I should consider the possibility that the email was fake.  Still I was a little reluctant to abandon my preexisting belief even as I added up the considerable evidence favoring fake.

Fortunately my mistake will apparently have no serious consequences.  I am not sure any of the information I provided actually got back to the sender as I didn't complete the form and submit it (whereupon according to the link above I would have been redirected to a genuine American Express page).  In any case I notified American Express that evening who told me they hadn't been any recent activity on my card and that I wasn't responsible for fraudulent charges.  All in all they didn't seem very concerned but did give me an email address to forward the fake email to.  I did so and received an acknowledgement so I think I am covered.

I was a little concerned that the email might have ill intentions besides eliciting sensitive information (like for example encrypting my hard drive and requesting ransom to decrypt it) but the link above seems to discount any such possibilities.