The Weekly Cinema Debacle & Group Buying - Bargaineering

The Weekly Cinema Debacle & Group Buying

Posted: 22 Nov 2010 09:11 AM PST

A lot of group buying sites like Groupon have been popping up all over the place. You have Groupon, LivingSocial, BuyWithMe, and a litany of others. You also have secondary markets for these vouchers too, a topic tackled by NYTimes Bucks blog. They’re all very similar in how they operate, basically leveraging group buying to get great deals, but I recently had an experience that changed how I perceived them.

Weekly Cinema was a service that let you buy discount movie ticket vouchers. The vouchers turned into coupon codes which you could use as at Fandango. The real gem of it all was that you could get movie tickets extremely cheaply relative to their box office price, basically $5 a ticket eligible for almost every movie (IMAX included). I first saw them on a group buying site called BuyWithMe and then I saw it on Groupon a few weeks later. I purchased the voucher on BuyWithMe, good for four tickets, and we used two of them before seeing it again on Groupon, where we purchased a pack of six. Since you could use the movie tickets anytime over the next six months, I figured it was a good purchase since we’d probably see four movies in six months especially with the upcoming cold weather.

Before we could use any of them, Weekly Cinema shut its doors. The vouchers were now worthless. Here’s where the group buying experience diverged.

Groupon immediately emailed me on November 12th, which I assume was basically as soon as they could. I learned of the closing through Groupon. They said that I’d be refunded the full purchase price regardless of how many vouchers I had used (none yet).

BuyWithMe emailed me on November 17th, five days later, and offered up a choice. In that time I’d emailed them twice about it, with absolutely no response. Refund of the unused vouchers (they could keep track) as credit plus 10% or refund of the unused vouchers to my credit card. I chose refund to my credit card. Five days doesn’t seem like a long time but they should’ve notified people as soon as they found it. I’ll probably use BuyWithMe if they have a compelling offer but this knocks them down a peg or two in my book.

I still think group buying sites are a dime a dozen but some of those dimes are better than others.

The Weekly Cinema Debacle & Group Buying from personal finance blog Bargaineering.com.

Estate Tax

Posted: 22 Nov 2010 04:05 AM PST

The estate tax has gotten a lot of press this year because, well, it doesn’t exist this year and Congress is set to discuss what they want to do with it, along with tax rates, in subsequent years.

However, before we get into that, let’s get back to basics – what is the estate tax? The estate tax is a tax imposed on the transfer of an estate. That is, it’s a tax on assets when someone dies and transfers those assets to others. It’s imposed by the federal government and oftentimes by the state government as well, which can refer to it as an estate tax or an inheritance tax. No matter what you call it, or how you feel about it in terms of fairness, it’s a tax that has been collected for years and is a source of revenue to federal and state governments.

Estate Tax Rates

As it stands, there is no estate tax for 2010 but in 2011 they will return to 2001 rates. Those rates were:

Gross Estate	Tax Rate
Up to $10,000	18%
$10,000 – $20,000	20%
$20,000 – $40,000	22%
$40,000 – $60,000	24%
$60,000 – $80,000	26%
$80,000 – $100,000	28%
$100,000 – $150,000	30%
$150,000 – $250,000	32%
$250,000 – $500,000	34%
$500,000 – $750,000	37%
$750,000 – $1,000,000	39%
$1,000,000 – $1,250,000	41%
$1,250,000 – $1,500,000	43%
$1,500,000 – $2,000,000	45%
$2,000,000 – $2,500,000	49%
$2,500,000 – $3,000,000	53%
$3,000,000 and greater	55%

Congress is going to be tackling this issue in the coming months and I’d expect these numbers to change.

Applicable Exclusion Amount

According to the chart above, every dollar in the estate is taxed. Fortunately, the IRS is not without heart as there is an “applicable exclusion amount.” That amount is deducted from the gross estate for taxation purposes. The amounts are and were:

2006-2008: $2,000,000
2009: $3,500,000
2010: No estate tax
2011: $1,000,000

For for 2011, the first $1,000,000 of an estate is not subject to an estate tax. Each dollar after the first million will be taxed at the schedule listed above.

That’s the estate tax in a nutshell, at least how it looks today, and it’s something that isn’t too tricky to understand once you get over the messiness that is death. It’s become a hot topic this year since anyone who dies this year will pass along their estate tax free. It’s a bit morbid reading news articles that talk about how “lucky” someone is for dying this year.