If you were an investor, would you rather earn dividend income or capital gains income from your investments? Actually, that's a pretty complex question and has a variety of answers, most of them based on your own particular financial situation and lifestyle. If your motivation, however, is to lower your taxes, you might choose capital gains income, specifically, long-term capital gains income. Long-term capital gains income has a substantially lower tax rate than does short-term capital gains income or dividend income.

When you do your taxes this year, or have them done, keep this in mind when going through your tax paperwork.

Most Popular Topics |Latest Articles | Newsletter | Discuss in my Forum | Add to RSS Feed |Follow me on Twitter!

When you are trying to put together financing, or a capital structure, for your business firm, using debt financing should be one of your first considerations. Why? Debt is the cheapest form of financing, usually far cheaper than financing with equity or funds contributed by investors in your firm.

Even though debt financing raises the risk of your company, the risk of debt financing is offset by the benefit of using debt financing, at least up to a point. You should compare the amount of debt financing in your industry, in general, to the debt financing you want to use in your company. If you use too much debt financing, then you run the risk of bankruptcy.

A real benefit of financing your company's operations with debt is that the interest you pay on debt is tax-deductible, which contributes to the fact that debt is more inexpensive than equity. Check out this article!

Most Popular Topics |Latest Articles | Newsletter | Discuss in my Forum | Add to RSS Feed |Follow me on Twitter!

If your business does not keep good tax records, this is the time of year you are feeling the panic and pressure. But, hopefully, you do keep good tax records through your accounting information system or accounting software and you are in the process of gathering those records to file your 2011 income taxes now.

You want to be sure that you comply with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), but at the same time you want to take every deduction to which you are entitled. Good record keeping during your tax year will help you find all those deductions that will help you save money at years' end. Here are some tips on tax return record keeping that will help you comply with the law and at the same time find all the deductions to which you are entitled.

Most Popular Topics |Latest Articles | Newsletter | Discuss in my Forum | Add to RSS Feed |Follow me on Twitter!

Even the smallest of businesses have to know how much it costs them to obtain the money they need to operate. If a business wants to raise money externally, there are four components of capital -- debt, preferred stock, retained earnings, and new common stock. All of these components have a cost associated with them with debt usually having the lowest cost and new common stock having the highest cost. Preferred stock and retained earnings are somewhere in the middle.

You might ask why retained earnings, since they are money already earned by the firm, have any cost at all? Because retained earnings could be paid out as dividends instead of being retained for growth. As a result, there is an opportunity cost associated with retained earnings. Check out this article on how to calculate the cost of retained earnings as a part of the cost of capital of your business.

Most Popular Topics |Latest Articles | Newsletter | Discuss in my Forum | Add to RSS Feed |Follow me on Twitter!