The Economy

They’ll float him out on a boat and burn it, Viking style. With a beer in one hand and a fishing pole in the other.

 

Maybe for the affluent but not for much of the middle class. My father's nursing home cost 6K a month. Medicaid kicked in after my parents had spent through there IRA. All that was left was the house.

 

I have $14,000. What do I do with it?

 

The problem with all these dollar stores is they're freaking everywhere, even in wide-open rural areas alongside a highway. A saturation point had to be reached.

 

My mother received about 75,000/year in retirement. Dupont pension, railroad retirement, and dividends. In her last five years, she slowly lost her ability to walk, and dementia was closing in. We felt lucky she was paying for herself in care. Her last two years of care were close to $85,000/yr. I don't know what my point was here, but $75,ooo/yr for doing nothing seems like a good deal.

 

A good primer on the Corporate Transparency Act, which went into effect on Jan. 1, and its major issues.
The CTA is a law passed in 2021 that requires any company, from major conglomerates down to mom and pop businesses, to disclose information about its ownership to the federal government's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. It was designed to combat money laundering by creating a federal database for business information, rather than state by state as it's done now.
Apparently it's a law not many small businesses seem to be aware of, and the penalties for non-compliance are pretty stiff — fines in the hundreds of dollars per day. It's a law that's hard to comply with because it requires a lot of paperwork and diligence. Even small changes to an address or personal information can thrown an owner into non-compliance.
It also gives the business owner only 30 days to comply, including for new businesses. Any business that incorporated on Jan. 1, 2024 already needs to be in compliance. So if you have a small business owner who is unaware of the new law, who then racks up several thousand dollars in fines in a short time and has the weight of the federal government coming down on them, it's not hard to see what it could do to them.

A federal judge in Alabama ruled it unconstitutional last week, in a case brought by the National Small Business Administration, and ordered an injunction. That ruling only applies to the 65,000 or so members of that organization, though, so it's still on the books.
The upshot of all of this is that is a potential ticking time bomb that could decimate small businesses.

Navigating The Corporate Transparency Act

 

No kids. Only child. If my wife dies before me, I won't give a crap.

 

I am not sure when your mother died but even in 2024 dollars 75K is a good retirement. But I think your mother is an something of an outlier. She was receiving the benefits of pensions from two private employers, a railroad and Dupont. How many private sector employee pension plans still exist? IN the absence of those pensions how much of her savings would be eaten up by nursing home care at 6k a month?

 

Hey! I'm going to get like $13 a month from my last newspaper gig, because I vested literally the day before they froze the pension! So I've got that going for me ...

 

I grant you affluent is a vague term. In today's market the house in Aurora is worth 500k.

But know I am getting into arcane of Medicare and Medicaid. here and that is complicated. But Medicaid pays for nursing homes. They required my parents to spend through their liquid assets before they started paying for the nursing home. My parents got to keep 3k, the house and one car before Medicaid kicked in. They had to sell off a very modest lake cottage that they had inherited from my grandmother for 65k and deplete their IRA.

My understanding is that if my mother had gone to a nursing home -she died at home) Medicaid would have paid for her care but that they would have attached a lien on the home.