Family Fun Day

Bring the kids out for a fun day at Richardson BikeMart, Richardson location only.  Sunday ~ August 3rd ~ 12:00 - 4:00 pm

SuperSale Is Here!

Stop in any of the 3 Richardson BikeMart’s from July 30th to August 4th.  Low prices, great service and the chance to work with the owner, Jimmy Hoyt who was Lance Armstrong’s 1st bike team sponsor!

Frisco Sunrise Rotary:

We meet at the Embassy Suites at 7:30am each Tuesday morning. Speaker: Courtenay T. Tanner, District Rotarian 

Downpayment Assistance Gone?

The talk on the street is that legislators will do away with a program that allowed a 3rd party company to provide down payment (DP) assistance to home buyers.  Let me go on the record to say hooray!  I always viewed this product as a form of money laundering.  It worked like this; A Mortgage Broker like me would send the client’s application to one of these DP companies, usually set up as a non profit.  They intern would ask the seller to contribute that cash amount that the buyer needed to their 503 and then the DP would return that money to the buyer as downpayment assistance, for a small, one time transaction fee.  Sorry, but good riddance if this is true.  Lets go back to the old days, if you need help with a down payment, call a parent or family friend.

I Can Talk, Paint, Caulk and Carry:

Over the weekend our cycling club, Frisco Cycling, was very busy.  On Saturday, 12 of our 65 members made it to the above photo shoot- more photos of each person on our site.  After that, several of us headed over to a Richardson Bike Mart sponsored event, the Frisco Family Fun Ride where we worked a booth.  As a club we had “share the road” bumper stickers and balloons with our logo printed up.  We rented a helium tank and lined the course with hundreds of balloons- it was a very cool sight!

 

Then, at the booth- we gave kids more balloons, lots of bicycle safety material, stickers and a Certificate we had made up.  The Certificate makes kids promise to wear their helmet and we made them nice enough that parents could even take them home and frame them as we write in the childs name on it- a huge hit!

 

Then Sunday it was off for a maintenance day at the Frisco Velodrome.  Our track is famous not just for the steep banks the riders get to pedal around, but also that you are riding on wood panels.  Very smooth ride (unless you crash) but wood wears over time so old boards need to be torn out, new boards need to be painted, cut, carried and then screwed onto the tracks metal frame and caulked to keep the smooth ride consistent.  Needles to say, I might need to invest in some vitamin I (ibuprofen) today to easy my aces and pains.  Hope you can make the next work day, though challenging work, it is truly rewarding. 

Tax Relief, Sans Itemizing

By Kenneth R. Harney
Saturday, July 26, 2008; F01

 

The giant federal housing and foreclosure relief legislation heading for enactment contains a little-noticed — but potentially far-reaching — change in real estate tax policy.

 

It would permit millions of homeowners who do not itemize on their federal tax filings to claim a deduction for at least a portion of their local property taxes — up to a maximum of $500 for single filers and $1,000 for married owners filing jointly.

 

Intended as a one-year economic-relief measure for people who do not itemize, the new write-off is highly likely to become a permanent part of the tax code, tax experts say. Currently, it would apply only to tax returns filed on 2008 incomes and cost the federal treasury an estimated $1.2 billion to $1.5 billion for the year. The concept originally surfaced in February in the Senate’s version of the national economic stimulus package but was left out of the final deal with the House.

 

According to an analysis of 2005 IRS data by the nonprofit Tax Foundation, only 35.6 percent of taxpayers — tenants as well as homeowners — itemize on their returns. In some states, it’s less than 20 percent, such as in West Virginia, where just 18 percent of taxpayers itemized in 2005. Only in Maryland, a relatively high-income state, did more than 50 percent of taxpayers itemize.

 

Among homeowners nationwide, an estimated one-half itemize, but one-third of homeowners have no mortgage debt against their property, and therefore do not claim mortgage interest as a deduction.

 

The new legislation would effectively add another tax preference for people who own houses while offering nothing to those who rent. The idea, supporters say, is to provide greater fairness for a group of owners — often seniors and lower- to moderate-income households — who opt for the standard deduction but also pay local and state property taxes.

 

Critics of the plan say it’s another example of the government’s ongoing inequitable approach to housing policy — overemphasizing the financial benefits for homeownership vs. renting. Some critics argue that heavy tax subsidies for ownership helped stimulate buyer mania during the boom years, along with zero-down and “stated-income” financing that put thousands of people into real estate they could not afford.

 

“We think [the new deduction] is terrible policy,” said James Arbury, senior vice president for government affairs of the National Multi Housing Council, the country’s principal trade group for rental property developers, owners and managers. “It actually makes things worse, rather than better” by sweetening the pot further for ownership while ignoring tenants — the vast majority of whom are also non-itemizers.

 

“Many renters are under the same economic duress as owners,” Arbury said. “But nobody is giving them new tax deductions.”

 

The National Multi Housing Council has fought a long, unsuccessful campaign to persuade Congress to take a more even-handed approach in supporting taxpayers’ housing choices.

 

“We understand why members [of Congress] would want to put more goodies in homeowners’ baskets” in political terms, Arbury said. Owners outnumber renters roughly 2 to 1 and have influential lobbies such as the National Association of Realtors and the National Association of Home Builders pushing their interests. But renters ultimately end up paying for part of the subsidies that flow to owners, and critics such as Arbury say that’s not fair.

 

The Senate version of the housing bill provided larger maximum deductions but also contained language clouding the use of the write-off in jurisdictions that raise property rates immediately after enactment of the legislation, through Dec. 31.

 

The House successfully demanded removal of those restrictions as the price of accepting the Senate’s higher limits. Although specific procedural details were not spelled out in the legislation, owners who opt for the standard deduction on their 2008 tax filings are expected to be eligible for the new write-off benefit.

Quotes

“Physically, the Ventoux is dreadful. Bald, it’s the spirit of Dry: Its climate (it is much more an essence of climate than a geographic place) makes it a damned terrain, a testing place for heroes, something like a higher hell.”  
 
Quote by: Roland Barthes

Will Christian Vande Velde Be In Yellow Soon?

Christian Vande Velde

Tour de France

Are you watching the 2008 Tour de France?  Have you picked a winner yet?

Le Tour de France:

The hope is you have been watching some of this years Tour.  Same old same old, riders getting tossed out for using performance enhancing drugs.  Hard to belive that a rider would take the risks, knowing ahead of time the advanced measures the doping controls will be at.  But alias, that has cast a shining light to a few “clean teams”.  One of them, Garmin/Chipotle and their lead rider Christian Vande Velde.  If you read this article from The Sunday Times, you might think, like I do, he could be in Yellow at the end of this years Tour!