Tuesday, April 05, 2005

The monkey on my back, and other observations

So I finally bit the bullet and did my taxes. This is a major feat for me. My Everest, if you will. I have come away with one thought: I thoroughly enjoy Turbo Tax. No, I don't mind endorsing them. Well worth the money (and the discount, to you fellow ETrade users). They ask all the right questions, with all the right pretty buttons to click. Good show. This year the government owes me a whopping $250 bucks. Ideally, I'd like to get rather close to the "0" mark - I owe them nothing (pretty easy to stomach) and they owe me nothing (I didn't loan them free money). Last year I got surprisingly close, only owing them $27. It actually cost me more to do my taxes (~$40) than I owed. Whatever. It's over and I'm happy.

And then I found myself reading on CNN about former power players in the US economy. Where are they now? One of the comments from a "retired" Fidelity Fund Manager made me smirk:

"When he retired from managing Fidelity's Magellan fund in 1990, people said he'd be back. In fact, he never left: Lynch still keeps an office at Fidelity's Boston headquarters, though his client list has shrunk to his family and foundation. He works only part-time. (He spent some 100 days traveling the world with his wife in the past five years.) 'My method for picking stocks has never changed,' Lynch says. 'When businesses go from crappy to semicrappy, there's money to be made.'"

That amuses me.

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