Monday, February 9, 2009

Slightly Less Taxing

Tax preparation time is here and if you sold any securities in 2008, you will need the basis—the price you paid for them, to determine if you made or lost money on the sale. This may be easy to locate if you purchased them fairly recently, but what if you bought them years ago? Decades ago? How can you find out what you paid for a stock, fund, etc back in, say, 1982?

An effortless way to find out what the closing price was for a security on any given day is to go to http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/ or http://www.marketwatch.com/ . There you can enter the symbol for the security, the day it was purchased and then find the closing price on that date.

This is helpful information you’ll need when it comes to filling out those Schedule D forms.