I think the estate tax is justifiable. What is taxable is essentially unrealized taxable gaines. The transfer of wealth is what is taxed. As a side note 45% of the estate is not taxed. The first 2.5 million in assets is passed without any tax. A 3 million dollar estate would pay a marginal tax rate of only 7.5%.
I have one credit card with a 30K limit. I keep it in a secret compartment in my wallet :wink: It's for road emergencies and the like. My wife and I use debit cards for most purchases. Occasionally she will apply for a Kohl's or Stage, etc. card in order to take advantage of a 20% off special or something, but we immediately pay the balance in full and cut up the card when it comes in.
Sounds much like me. We have one card with a 25K limit that is collecting dust in my sock drawer. It only exists for the off chance that a huge emergency comes up that we can't pay for with our emergency savings. The credit issuer always tries to get me to uise the card. They will call and say would you be more inclined to use the card if we up your credit limit or lower your interest rate.
I've been down that road. I know how difficult it is to get by month to month on what you have coming in and a lot of people really have no choice but to stretch the budget with a credit card, but it's a treacherous road. Those things are the devil. I'll tell you what made me give them up. I had a Capital One card with a fairly large balance. I was paying a relatively low APR (9.5%). One month, I mailed the payment and it never got to them. I had never been so much as one day late before that. They immediately increased my APR to 21%. I checked the fine print and they did have the right to do that. I said F that took out a 401K loan to pay off every revolving account balance I had. It's like getting out of prison.
Just curious. I have a gas card, which we only use on trips. Other than that, I have not had any credit cards since college years. Other people annoy me concerning credit cards. Explaining to us that we'll never be able to get credit to buy things when we need to unless we have credit cards and use them regularly. I think they are just addicted to their debt or want to share their misery with others.
There is some truth in that. I have a buddy who has no credit score because he has never borrowed money. He pays extra on his auto insurance because of this. He also had to find a mortgage company to manually underwrite his loan. Hardly any of them do this anymore. Most everything is fico lending based.
It's his money and his granddaughter, he should be able to do whatever he wants with it imo. It's ridiculous for the government to say "she didn't make that money and she doesn't deserve it so we're gonna take it." I assure you, the spoiled vd spreading do nothing will pump it back into our economy just as quickly as big brother could. Those are the rules for 2008. 2009 has no estate tax and 2010 has 55% over 1 million or 36.66% effective rate under the scenario you outlined.
