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Healthy Choices
New Orleans Barbecue Shrimp
Prep: 5 min. Cook: 20 min. Other: 2 hrs.
Spicy, buttery, and decidedly hands-on, this dish is a New Orleans classic.
Serve with a green salad and corn on the cob for a complete meal.
Ingredients...
4 pounds unpeeled, large fresh shrimp or 6 pounds shrimp with heads on ½ cup butter ½ cup olive oil ¼ cup chili sauce ¼ cup Worcestershire sauce 2 lemons, sliced 4 garlic cloves, chopped 2 tablespoons Creole seasoning 2 tablespoons lemon juice 1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley 1 teaspoon paprika 1 teaspoon dried oregano 1 teaspoon ground red pepper ½ teaspoon hot sauce
Directions...
Spread shrimp in a shallow, aluminum foil-lined broiler pan.
Combine butter and remaining ingredients in a medium saucepan over low heat, stirring until butter melts; pour over shrimp.
Cover and chill 2 hours, turning shrimp every 30 minutes.
Bake, uncovered, at 400° for 20 minutes, turning shrimp once. Serve with French bread.
Yield: 8 servings. Per serving: Calories 396 (56% from fat); Fat 24.7g (sat 14.9g, mono 6.2g, poly 1.6g); Protein 36.5g; Carb 6.3g; Fiber 0.3g; Chol 396mg; Iron 6mg; Sodium 2254mg; Calc 91mg
Creamy Potato-Garlic Spread
Prep: 5 min. Cook: 15 min.
Baked pita chips, raw veggies, or low-fat crackers make healthy dippers.
Ingredients...
1 pound baking potatoes, peeled and cut into 2-inch cubes 3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice 1 tablespoon olive oil 1 teaspoon bottled minced roasted garlic ½ to 1 teaspoon grated lemon rind ½ teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon freshly ground pepper 1 green onion, chopped (optional)
Directions...
Cook potato in boiling water to cover in a Dutch oven 15 minutes or until tender.
Drain. Process potato, juice, and next 5 ingredients in a food processor until smooth, stopping to scrape down sides.
Transfer mixture to a serving dish, and sprinkle with green onion, if desired.
Yield: 6 servings. Per ¼ cup: Calories 76 (28% from fat); Fat 2.4g (sat 0.3g, mono 1.8g, poly 0.2g); Protein 1.2g; Carb 13g; Fiber 1g; Chol 0mg; Iron 0.2mg; Sodium 197mg; Calc 5mg Note:
To make your own pita chips, cut 2 (6-inch) pita rounds into wedges; split in half at seams.
Place on a baking sheet coated with vegetable cooking spray; coat wedges with cooking spray.
Bake at 450º for 4 to 5 minutes or until crisp.
Bacon-and-Egg Quesadillas
Prep: 20 min. Cook: 23 min.
Instead of using the egg mixture to make quesadillas, you can also spoon it into warmed tortillas to make wraps.
Ingredients...
6 large eggs 2 tablespoons minced onion 2 tablespoons finely chopped green bell pepper 6 pickled jalapeño pepper slices, finely chopped ½ teaspoon seasoned salt ½ teaspoon seasoned pepper ½ cup Ranch dressing ½ cup salsa 1 (8-ounce) package shredded Mexican four-cheese blend 4 (10-inch) flour tortillas 4 bacon slices, cooked and crumbled ½ cup diced ham Vegetable cooking spray
Directions...
Whisk together first 6 ingredients. Cook in a lightly greased large skillet over medium heat, without stirring, until eggs begin to set on bottom. M
Draw a spatula across bottom of skillet to form large curds. Continue cooking until eggs are thickened but still moist. (Do not stir constantly.)
Remove egg mixture from skillet, and set aside. Wipe skillet clean. Stir together Ranch dressing and salsa; set salsa mixture aside.
Sprinkle ¼ cup cheese evenly onto half of each tortilla; top evenly with one-fourth of egg mixture, bacon, and ham.
Top each half with ¼ cup more cheese. Fold tortilla in half over filling, pressing gently to seal.
Heat skillet coated with cooking spray over medium-high heat.
Add quesadillas, in 2 batches, and cook 3 to 4 minutes on each side or until golden brown. Serve with salsa mixture.
Yield: 4 servings. Per serving: Calories 796 (58% from fat); Fat 51.7g (sat 19.8g, mono 16.5g, poly 11.9g); Protein 35.7g; Carb 45.7g; Fiber 3.1g; Chol 395mg; Iron 4.5mg; Sodium 2180mg; Calc 561mg
IRS Tax Deadlines You Need to Know for 2023
Knowing key dates can help you avoid penalties and get your refund faster
By
John Waggoner,
AARP
January 13, 2023
As we start 2023, we can mark significant dates on our calendars: birthdays, anniversaries and, of course, the deadlines the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) sets for filing and paying federal income taxes.
Bear in mind that we are filing taxes for income earned in 2022, even though we file those forms in 2023. To keep confusion to a minimum, tax experts refer to 2022 as the tax year and 2023 as the filing year. Most, but not all, of the deadlines in 2023 refer to tax year 2022.
When is Tax Day? It’s complicated
The deadline for filing 2022 federal income tax returns for most taxpayers is April 18. Taxpayers haven’t had to file on the traditional date, April 15, since the 2019 filing season.
2023 IRS KEY TAX DATES
Jan. 13: IRS Free File service opens to prepare tax year 2022 returns
Jan. 17: Final estimated tax payment for 2022 due
Jan. 17: Free MilTax service for military opens to prepare 2022 returns
Jan. 23: IRS begins processing 2022 tax returns
April 18: First estimated tax payment for tax year 2023 due
April 18: Filing deadline for tax year 2022
June 15: Second estimated tax payment for 2023 due
Sept. 15: Third estimated tax payment for 2023 due
Oct. 16: Extended deadline to file 2022 tax return
Jan. 16, 2024: Fourth estimated tax payment for 2023 due
In 2020 and 2021, the April 15 deadline got pushed back by the COVID-19 pandemic. And in some non-pandemic years, the deadline sometimes gets pushed back to the next business day because April 15 falls on a weekend.
The filing deadline this year is Tuesday, April 18, because April 15 is a Saturday and the filing date never occurs on a weekend. Washington, D.C., observes Emancipation Day on Monday, April 17. By law, the IRS is required to treat D.C. holidays as if they were national holidays for tax-filing purposes. Emancipation Day commemorates the day in 1862 when President Abraham Lincoln signed into law a measure to free enslaved people in D.C. (Adding to the complexity, the actual date of Emancipation Day is April 16, but since it falls on a Sunday this year the holiday is celebrated one day later.)
Some taxpayers affected by recent natural disasters get extra time to file. For example, California storm victims have until May 15, 2023 to file their income taxes.
Filing late?
Don’t blow the deadline. The penalty for late filing is 5 percent of the amount due each month, and the penalty for failure to pay is 0.5 percent a month, and maxes out at 25 percent a year. (When both penalties are levied in the same month, the total penalty is 5 percent a month: 4.5 percent for failure to file and 0.5 percent for failure to pay.) Interest also accrues, at a current rate of 3 percent.
If you must file late, you can get an automatic extension by filing IRS Form 4868. The automatic extension typically gives you until Oct. 15 to file your return, but since Oct. 15 falls on a Sunday this year, the extended deadline is actually Oct. 16. However, an extension to file doesn’t grant an extension to pay. You must still pay any taxes owed by April 18 or face penalties for late payment. If you’re owed a refund and file late, the IRS won’t levy a penalty, but you won’t get your refund until you file. If you don’t claim a refund within three years, you’ll lose the money.
When does tax season start?
The IRS takes a few weeks to get ready to process the millions of returns it receives during tax season. Last year, taxpayers sent more than 168 million individual returns to the IRS. However, IRS and Treasury officials say some returns have yet to be processed due to delays stemming from the pandemic.
The IRS will begin accepting and processing new returns on Jan. 23. The IRS says most taxpayers will get their refunds within 21 days of when they file electronically, barring any issues with processing their tax returns. Electronic filing, when linked with direct deposit, is the fastest way to get a refund. Last year’s average tax refund was more than $3,200.
Paying estimated taxes
The self-employed must pay estimated taxes every quarter. The last payment for the 2022 tax year is due on Jan. 17. The first payment for the 2023 tax year is due April 18, with other payments due June 15, Sept. 15 and Jan. 16, 2024.
John Waggoner covers all things financial for AARP, from budgeting and taxes to retirement planning and Social Security. Previously he was a reporter for Kiplinger's Personal Finance and USA Today.
6 Money Habits to Break in 2023
Get off to a good start by stopping some common (bad) practices
By
Karen Hube,
AARP
December 12, 2022
You may not be able to do anything about big problems afflicting the economy and the stock market, but little changes to your everyday activities can help shore up your financial security. Consider the following six routines — and why you should ditch them in 2023.
1. Constantly checking your portfolio’s value
During rocky times in the market, it’s natural to want to know how your investments are holding up. But the more often you check, the wider you open the door to counterproductive emotions. Exuberance can fuel overconfidence and unwise risk-taking, while fear of loss can drive you to yank money out of stocks and miss out on future returns, says Chris Orestis, president of Retirement Genius, a financial planning website. Either way, you impair your portfolio’s long-term growth potential.
HOW TO BREAK THE HABIT
Keep in mind that short-term ups and downs are a package deal when you invest in stocks, but over time the stock market has recovered from declines and resumed climbing. In the past 42 years through 2021, the S&P 500 had intra-year declines in every year averaging negative 14 percent, with dips of 10 percent or more in 23 years, according to Fidelity. But the index ended in positive territory in 35 years, and the average annual return has been around 14 percent.
2. Downplaying the risk of cybercrime
You might think cybertheft will never happen to you, but the older you are, the more likely you are to be a target. Cybercriminals stole nearly $3 billion from people 50 and older in 2021 — more than all younger age groups combined — according to the FBI. The most common tactic is to entice people into providing personal data by phone or email, or into clicking on seemingly innocent links that let criminals access information on a target’s computer. Paul Tracey, CEO of Innovative Technologies, a cybersecurity company, says scammers have been getting increasingly sophisticated. They commonly pose as employees of familiar companies and drop personal details about you that make them seem legitimate, such as your birthday or where you live (often easily found in an online search).
HOW TO BREAK THE HABIT
“Anytime you get a request for an account number or personal information, or anytime you are invited to click on a link, you should be skeptical,” says Tracey. Use different complex passwords for each of your sensitive accounts and change them quarterly. That way, if a password for one account is revealed in a security breach, hackers can’t use it to access your other accounts.
3. Making minimum payments on your credit card
A fast way to eat up cash is to keep a large balance on your credit card. One major reason why: The average annualized interest rate on credit card debt was 18.9 percent in early October, reports Bankrate. Let’s say an issuer makes carrying a balance easy by setting a minimum payment of just 1 percent of the balance or $25, whichever is larger; if you rack up $1,000 in charges in a month and then pay only the minimum, you’d need more than nine years and pay nearly $2,000 to close out the balance. Credit card debt surged 13 percent in the second quarter of 2022 compared to a year earlier — the largest annual hike in at least two decades, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
HOW TO BREAK THE HABIT
Get tactical to erase your high-interest debt. “Transfer your balance to a zero-interest card,” says Ted Rossman, a senior industry analyst at Bankrate. This autumn, he notes, Wells Fargo Reflect Visa and Citi Diamond Preferred Mastercard were offering zero interest for 18 and 21 months, respectively. If you don’t qualify for zero interest, you can call your credit card company and ask for a lower interest rate. Some credit card companies will work with you. Alternatively, debt counseling nonprofits that are members of the Financial Counseling Association of America or the National Foundation for Credit Counseling can help set up a debt management plan for you. “Paying off a card with an 18 percent interest rate is like getting a guaranteed risk-free, tax-free return,” Rossman says. “You’re not going to get that on your investments.”
4. Procrastinating on your taxes
Racing to prepare your tax return to meet the April 15 filing deadline can cause errors and even trigger IRS scrutiny and delay a refund, potentially by months.
The IRS is working its way through millions of unprocessed tax returns, a backlog that was caused in part by tax law changes during the 2021 filing season. Error-free tax returns filed electronically and on time are often processed more quickly than paper returns, says Janet Holtzblatt, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center. But returns with math errors — there was an upsurge of them in 2021 — are often set aside to await review.
HOW TO BREAK THE HABIT
Get started as early as February 1. By then, you should have received the tax documents you need, such as a Form W-2 from your employer or a Form 1098 from your mortgage lender. This will give you time to avoid errors and learn how to file electronically, if you’ve never done so before. If you file electronically and opt for direct deposit, any refund should land in your bank account within several weeks. For help with tax preparation or filing electronically, turn to the free AARP Foundation Tax-Aide service at aarp.org/taxaide.
5. Putting expenses on autopilot
When was the last time you shopped for cheaper auto or home insurance? Or canceled subscriptions and memberships you don’t use? Or simply combed through your monthly expenses to identify charges you can eliminate? You could be needlessly spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars every year, says Jason Noble, a financial adviser at Prime Capital Investment Advisors in Charleston, South Carolina.
HOW TO BREAK THE HABIT
Noble recommends you call your insurers every year or two for a full diagnosis of your policies. You can save on some auto policies by designating your car for non-commuter use, signing up for auto-pay, going paperless or dropping your policy’s roadside assistance if you’re a member of AAA.
On a quarterly basis, advises Noble, sit down with your bank and credit card statements, putting an E next to all of your essential expenses and a D next to the discretionary ones. “Review those with a D for discretionary,” he says. “Can you eliminate those or whittle them down?”
6. Postponing joy
After working and saving diligently for decades, many people find it hard to turn off the scrimp-and-save mentality, says Freddie Rappina, founder of Opta Financial, a Fairfax, Virginia, advisory firm. “I ask them, ‘What are you waiting for?’ ”
HOW TO BREAK THE HABIT
Review your bucket list and choose a few realistic goals. An island getaway? An Alaska cruise? As long as your income needs are covered and you have an emergency fund, aim to build your dreams into your short-term financial plan, Rappina says. “This is your time to live the life you want.”
Pulses: An Overlooked Food In A Plant Based Diet For Cancer Prevention
by Karen Collins
Karen Collins, MS, RDN, CDN, FAND is AICR’s Nutrition Advisor. Karen is a speaker, writer and consultant who specializes in helping people make sense of nutrition news. You can follow her on Twitter @KarenCollinsRD and Facebook @KarenCollinsNutrition.
Surveys suggest there’s a food that you’re probably overlooking among your choices for a diet that reduces cancer risk: Pulses. You may know them as dry beans, peas, and lentils… or as part of the legume family. But chances are that when you think about foods to include based on the AICR Cancer Prevention Recommendations your first thought is vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. Yet pulses have lots to offer, too, as part of the recommended plant-focused diet.
The Food with an Identity Crisis
Many people are unfamiliar with, or maybe confused by, what pulses are.
Confusing Terminology: You’re more likely to call them “dry beans and peas” or “lentils,” for example. Nutrition recommendations often talk about pulses or legumes, which are broader terms.
Legume is the umbrella term and refers to a plant that grows in pods. All the following are types of legumes:
Recommendations in the U.S. and around the world categorize pulses in different food groups, depending on the nutritional concerns of highest priority. For example, the USDA MyPlate website notes that if you get most of your protein from plant sources, you should probably consider pulses as part of the protein foods group. But if you eat poultry, seafood, meat, eggs, and nuts daily in amounts that cover your protein needs, you can consider pulses among the variety of vegetables you eat. Of course, if you have diabetes or pre-diabetes, talk with your registered dietitian or diabetes educator about how to keep track of them as carbohydrate foods (such as whole grains, starchy vegetables, and fruits).
Pulses’ Unique Role in Your Diet
Pulses contribute to a diet for lower cancer risk and better overall health in several ways.
Boost fiber: When you look at amounts of fiber per serving, dry beans, dry peas, lentils, and chickpeas are at the head of the class. You can build a high-fiber diet to help reduce risk of colorectal cancer by including vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and nuts throughout the day. And the 6 to 10 grams of dietary fiber in just a half-cup of pulses can leapfrog your fiber consumption closer to the recommended target of 30 grams or more per day. The fiber in pulses helps move waste through the digestive tract more quickly.
Support a healthy gut microbiome: Pulses provide several forms of prebiotic fiber. This fermentable type of fiber supports types of bacteria in the gut associated with good health. More research is needed, but so far, studies in mice and limited human studies suggest that butyrate and other short-chain fatty acids that gut microbes produce from these prebiotic compounds seem to help reduce inflammation, inhibit conversion of bile acids in the gut to forms that can create cell damage that leads to cancer, and influence cell signaling pathways in healthy directions.
Improve diet quality: Besides their protein and fiber, pulses are also good sources of several nutrients that are often below recommended targets in U.S. diets. They’re high in magnesium and potassium, which work together to promote a healthy blood pressure. They’re also an excellent source of folate, a B vitamin that research suggests may help lower cancer risk by maintaining healthy DNA and keeping cancer-promoting genes “turned off.” And pulses provide polyphenol phytochemicals that support antioxidant defenses. Much of the evidence for how pulses’ phytochemicals may help reduce inflammation and inhibit pathways involved in the development of cancer comes from laboratory studies. But limited human intervention trials increasing pulse consumption show reduction in markers of inflammation, as well as the well-documented decreases in LDL cholesterol and blood pressure.
A recent expert panel report on “carbohydrate quality” identified several key metrics – the ratio of fiber to total carbohydrate, the proportion of carbohydrate as sugar, content of sodium and potassium, and whole grain content (where applicable). Together, these highlight foods that contribute to nutrient-rich diets that meet dietary recommendations for health. Pulses are among the top-scoring foods.
Are Beans Misunderstood in the US?
Despite nutrition recommendations sharing research on how pulses contribute to lower cancer risk and better overall health, many adults still eat pulses only occasionally.
Legume consumption is cultural. Different types of legumes are essential elements in many traditional diets around the world. But as diets become more Westernized, people often leave beans behind.
For the ultimate way to use dry beans, dry peas, chickpeas and lentils to create a healthier diet, here are two key strategies.
aren Hube is a veteran financial writer and a contributing editor for Barron’s
More Than 300 Words Were Just Added to Dictionary.com
Jessica Kaplan Reader’s Digest (Updated: Mar. 02, 2023)
Rage farming, petfluencer, hellscape and self-coup are just a few of the many modern words Dictionary.com is helping us define.
Trauma dumping, digital nomad, nearlywed, petfluencer and antifragile. On paper, these words seemingly have nothing in common. However, they’re all part of the 313 words newly added to Dictionary.com.
Dictionary.com commonly helps users navigate the ins and outs of modern terms. Typically, the online dictionary semi-annually releases hundreds of new words and revisions of words that reflect “the pace with which language adapts” to change.
Now, this past week, the platform has added 313 new words along with more than 1,100 revised definitions of words to their online dictionary. And some of them may be surprising!
How are new words chosen to be added to Dictionary.com?
According to Dictionary.com, there are four areas of criteria that are taken into consideration when adding a new word to the dictionary.
Simply put, they break it down into these four requirements:
1. It’s a word that’s used by a lot of people.
2. It’s used by those people in largely the same way.
3. The word is likely to stick around.
4. It’s useful for a general audience.
What are some of the new words added to Dictionary.com this year?
So, what are some of the words that made the cut this year? Here’s a list of some of our favorites from the roundup of new words:
Cakeage: A fee charged by a restaurant for serving a cake brought in from outside.
Hellscape: A place or time that is hopeless, unbearable or irredeemable.
Antifragile: Becoming more robust when exposed to stressors, uncertainty or risk.
Liminal space: A state or place characterized by being transitional or intermediate in some way
Rage farming: The tactic of intentionally provoking political opponents, typically by posting inflammatory content on social media, in order to elicit angry responses and thus high engagement or widespread exposure for the original poster.
Trauma dumping: Unsolicited, one-sided sharing of traumatic or intensely negative experiences or emotions in an inappropriate setting or with people who are unprepared for the interaction.
New Orleans Barbecue Shrimp
Prep: 5 min. Cook: 20 min. Other: 2 hrs.
Spicy, buttery, and decidedly hands-on, this dish is a New Orleans classic.
Serve with a green salad and corn on the cob for a complete meal.
Ingredients...
4 pounds unpeeled, large fresh shrimp or 6 pounds shrimp with heads on ½ cup butter ½ cup olive oil ¼ cup chili sauce ¼ cup Worcestershire sauce 2 lemons, sliced 4 garlic cloves, chopped 2 tablespoons Creole seasoning 2 tablespoons lemon juice 1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley 1 teaspoon paprika 1 teaspoon dried oregano 1 teaspoon ground red pepper ½ teaspoon hot sauce
Directions...
Spread shrimp in a shallow, aluminum foil-lined broiler pan.
Combine butter and remaining ingredients in a medium saucepan over low heat, stirring until butter melts; pour over shrimp.
Cover and chill 2 hours, turning shrimp every 30 minutes.
Bake, uncovered, at 400° for 20 minutes, turning shrimp once. Serve with French bread.
Yield: 8 servings. Per serving: Calories 396 (56% from fat); Fat 24.7g (sat 14.9g, mono 6.2g, poly 1.6g); Protein 36.5g; Carb 6.3g; Fiber 0.3g; Chol 396mg; Iron 6mg; Sodium 2254mg; Calc 91mg
Creamy Potato-Garlic Spread
Prep: 5 min. Cook: 15 min.
Baked pita chips, raw veggies, or low-fat crackers make healthy dippers.
Ingredients...
1 pound baking potatoes, peeled and cut into 2-inch cubes 3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice 1 tablespoon olive oil 1 teaspoon bottled minced roasted garlic ½ to 1 teaspoon grated lemon rind ½ teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon freshly ground pepper 1 green onion, chopped (optional)
Directions...
Cook potato in boiling water to cover in a Dutch oven 15 minutes or until tender.
Drain. Process potato, juice, and next 5 ingredients in a food processor until smooth, stopping to scrape down sides.
Transfer mixture to a serving dish, and sprinkle with green onion, if desired.
Yield: 6 servings. Per ¼ cup: Calories 76 (28% from fat); Fat 2.4g (sat 0.3g, mono 1.8g, poly 0.2g); Protein 1.2g; Carb 13g; Fiber 1g; Chol 0mg; Iron 0.2mg; Sodium 197mg; Calc 5mg Note:
To make your own pita chips, cut 2 (6-inch) pita rounds into wedges; split in half at seams.
Place on a baking sheet coated with vegetable cooking spray; coat wedges with cooking spray.
Bake at 450º for 4 to 5 minutes or until crisp.
Bacon-and-Egg Quesadillas
Prep: 20 min. Cook: 23 min.
Instead of using the egg mixture to make quesadillas, you can also spoon it into warmed tortillas to make wraps.
Ingredients...
6 large eggs 2 tablespoons minced onion 2 tablespoons finely chopped green bell pepper 6 pickled jalapeño pepper slices, finely chopped ½ teaspoon seasoned salt ½ teaspoon seasoned pepper ½ cup Ranch dressing ½ cup salsa 1 (8-ounce) package shredded Mexican four-cheese blend 4 (10-inch) flour tortillas 4 bacon slices, cooked and crumbled ½ cup diced ham Vegetable cooking spray
Directions...
Whisk together first 6 ingredients. Cook in a lightly greased large skillet over medium heat, without stirring, until eggs begin to set on bottom. M
Draw a spatula across bottom of skillet to form large curds. Continue cooking until eggs are thickened but still moist. (Do not stir constantly.)
Remove egg mixture from skillet, and set aside. Wipe skillet clean. Stir together Ranch dressing and salsa; set salsa mixture aside.
Sprinkle ¼ cup cheese evenly onto half of each tortilla; top evenly with one-fourth of egg mixture, bacon, and ham.
Top each half with ¼ cup more cheese. Fold tortilla in half over filling, pressing gently to seal.
Heat skillet coated with cooking spray over medium-high heat.
Add quesadillas, in 2 batches, and cook 3 to 4 minutes on each side or until golden brown. Serve with salsa mixture.
Yield: 4 servings. Per serving: Calories 796 (58% from fat); Fat 51.7g (sat 19.8g, mono 16.5g, poly 11.9g); Protein 35.7g; Carb 45.7g; Fiber 3.1g; Chol 395mg; Iron 4.5mg; Sodium 2180mg; Calc 561mg
IRS Tax Deadlines You Need to Know for 2023
Knowing key dates can help you avoid penalties and get your refund faster
By
John Waggoner,
AARP
January 13, 2023
As we start 2023, we can mark significant dates on our calendars: birthdays, anniversaries and, of course, the deadlines the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) sets for filing and paying federal income taxes.
Bear in mind that we are filing taxes for income earned in 2022, even though we file those forms in 2023. To keep confusion to a minimum, tax experts refer to 2022 as the tax year and 2023 as the filing year. Most, but not all, of the deadlines in 2023 refer to tax year 2022.
When is Tax Day? It’s complicated
The deadline for filing 2022 federal income tax returns for most taxpayers is April 18. Taxpayers haven’t had to file on the traditional date, April 15, since the 2019 filing season.
2023 IRS KEY TAX DATES
Jan. 13: IRS Free File service opens to prepare tax year 2022 returns
Jan. 17: Final estimated tax payment for 2022 due
Jan. 17: Free MilTax service for military opens to prepare 2022 returns
Jan. 23: IRS begins processing 2022 tax returns
April 18: First estimated tax payment for tax year 2023 due
April 18: Filing deadline for tax year 2022
June 15: Second estimated tax payment for 2023 due
Sept. 15: Third estimated tax payment for 2023 due
Oct. 16: Extended deadline to file 2022 tax return
Jan. 16, 2024: Fourth estimated tax payment for 2023 due
In 2020 and 2021, the April 15 deadline got pushed back by the COVID-19 pandemic. And in some non-pandemic years, the deadline sometimes gets pushed back to the next business day because April 15 falls on a weekend.
The filing deadline this year is Tuesday, April 18, because April 15 is a Saturday and the filing date never occurs on a weekend. Washington, D.C., observes Emancipation Day on Monday, April 17. By law, the IRS is required to treat D.C. holidays as if they were national holidays for tax-filing purposes. Emancipation Day commemorates the day in 1862 when President Abraham Lincoln signed into law a measure to free enslaved people in D.C. (Adding to the complexity, the actual date of Emancipation Day is April 16, but since it falls on a Sunday this year the holiday is celebrated one day later.)
Some taxpayers affected by recent natural disasters get extra time to file. For example, California storm victims have until May 15, 2023 to file their income taxes.
Filing late?
Don’t blow the deadline. The penalty for late filing is 5 percent of the amount due each month, and the penalty for failure to pay is 0.5 percent a month, and maxes out at 25 percent a year. (When both penalties are levied in the same month, the total penalty is 5 percent a month: 4.5 percent for failure to file and 0.5 percent for failure to pay.) Interest also accrues, at a current rate of 3 percent.
If you must file late, you can get an automatic extension by filing IRS Form 4868. The automatic extension typically gives you until Oct. 15 to file your return, but since Oct. 15 falls on a Sunday this year, the extended deadline is actually Oct. 16. However, an extension to file doesn’t grant an extension to pay. You must still pay any taxes owed by April 18 or face penalties for late payment. If you’re owed a refund and file late, the IRS won’t levy a penalty, but you won’t get your refund until you file. If you don’t claim a refund within three years, you’ll lose the money.
When does tax season start?
The IRS takes a few weeks to get ready to process the millions of returns it receives during tax season. Last year, taxpayers sent more than 168 million individual returns to the IRS. However, IRS and Treasury officials say some returns have yet to be processed due to delays stemming from the pandemic.
The IRS will begin accepting and processing new returns on Jan. 23. The IRS says most taxpayers will get their refunds within 21 days of when they file electronically, barring any issues with processing their tax returns. Electronic filing, when linked with direct deposit, is the fastest way to get a refund. Last year’s average tax refund was more than $3,200.
Paying estimated taxes
The self-employed must pay estimated taxes every quarter. The last payment for the 2022 tax year is due on Jan. 17. The first payment for the 2023 tax year is due April 18, with other payments due June 15, Sept. 15 and Jan. 16, 2024.
John Waggoner covers all things financial for AARP, from budgeting and taxes to retirement planning and Social Security. Previously he was a reporter for Kiplinger's Personal Finance and USA Today.
6 Money Habits to Break in 2023
Get off to a good start by stopping some common (bad) practices
By
Karen Hube,
AARP
December 12, 2022
You may not be able to do anything about big problems afflicting the economy and the stock market, but little changes to your everyday activities can help shore up your financial security. Consider the following six routines — and why you should ditch them in 2023.
1. Constantly checking your portfolio’s value
During rocky times in the market, it’s natural to want to know how your investments are holding up. But the more often you check, the wider you open the door to counterproductive emotions. Exuberance can fuel overconfidence and unwise risk-taking, while fear of loss can drive you to yank money out of stocks and miss out on future returns, says Chris Orestis, president of Retirement Genius, a financial planning website. Either way, you impair your portfolio’s long-term growth potential.
HOW TO BREAK THE HABIT
Keep in mind that short-term ups and downs are a package deal when you invest in stocks, but over time the stock market has recovered from declines and resumed climbing. In the past 42 years through 2021, the S&P 500 had intra-year declines in every year averaging negative 14 percent, with dips of 10 percent or more in 23 years, according to Fidelity. But the index ended in positive territory in 35 years, and the average annual return has been around 14 percent.
2. Downplaying the risk of cybercrime
You might think cybertheft will never happen to you, but the older you are, the more likely you are to be a target. Cybercriminals stole nearly $3 billion from people 50 and older in 2021 — more than all younger age groups combined — according to the FBI. The most common tactic is to entice people into providing personal data by phone or email, or into clicking on seemingly innocent links that let criminals access information on a target’s computer. Paul Tracey, CEO of Innovative Technologies, a cybersecurity company, says scammers have been getting increasingly sophisticated. They commonly pose as employees of familiar companies and drop personal details about you that make them seem legitimate, such as your birthday or where you live (often easily found in an online search).
HOW TO BREAK THE HABIT
“Anytime you get a request for an account number or personal information, or anytime you are invited to click on a link, you should be skeptical,” says Tracey. Use different complex passwords for each of your sensitive accounts and change them quarterly. That way, if a password for one account is revealed in a security breach, hackers can’t use it to access your other accounts.
3. Making minimum payments on your credit card
A fast way to eat up cash is to keep a large balance on your credit card. One major reason why: The average annualized interest rate on credit card debt was 18.9 percent in early October, reports Bankrate. Let’s say an issuer makes carrying a balance easy by setting a minimum payment of just 1 percent of the balance or $25, whichever is larger; if you rack up $1,000 in charges in a month and then pay only the minimum, you’d need more than nine years and pay nearly $2,000 to close out the balance. Credit card debt surged 13 percent in the second quarter of 2022 compared to a year earlier — the largest annual hike in at least two decades, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
HOW TO BREAK THE HABIT
Get tactical to erase your high-interest debt. “Transfer your balance to a zero-interest card,” says Ted Rossman, a senior industry analyst at Bankrate. This autumn, he notes, Wells Fargo Reflect Visa and Citi Diamond Preferred Mastercard were offering zero interest for 18 and 21 months, respectively. If you don’t qualify for zero interest, you can call your credit card company and ask for a lower interest rate. Some credit card companies will work with you. Alternatively, debt counseling nonprofits that are members of the Financial Counseling Association of America or the National Foundation for Credit Counseling can help set up a debt management plan for you. “Paying off a card with an 18 percent interest rate is like getting a guaranteed risk-free, tax-free return,” Rossman says. “You’re not going to get that on your investments.”
4. Procrastinating on your taxes
Racing to prepare your tax return to meet the April 15 filing deadline can cause errors and even trigger IRS scrutiny and delay a refund, potentially by months.
The IRS is working its way through millions of unprocessed tax returns, a backlog that was caused in part by tax law changes during the 2021 filing season. Error-free tax returns filed electronically and on time are often processed more quickly than paper returns, says Janet Holtzblatt, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center. But returns with math errors — there was an upsurge of them in 2021 — are often set aside to await review.
HOW TO BREAK THE HABIT
Get started as early as February 1. By then, you should have received the tax documents you need, such as a Form W-2 from your employer or a Form 1098 from your mortgage lender. This will give you time to avoid errors and learn how to file electronically, if you’ve never done so before. If you file electronically and opt for direct deposit, any refund should land in your bank account within several weeks. For help with tax preparation or filing electronically, turn to the free AARP Foundation Tax-Aide service at aarp.org/taxaide.
5. Putting expenses on autopilot
When was the last time you shopped for cheaper auto or home insurance? Or canceled subscriptions and memberships you don’t use? Or simply combed through your monthly expenses to identify charges you can eliminate? You could be needlessly spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars every year, says Jason Noble, a financial adviser at Prime Capital Investment Advisors in Charleston, South Carolina.
HOW TO BREAK THE HABIT
Noble recommends you call your insurers every year or two for a full diagnosis of your policies. You can save on some auto policies by designating your car for non-commuter use, signing up for auto-pay, going paperless or dropping your policy’s roadside assistance if you’re a member of AAA.
On a quarterly basis, advises Noble, sit down with your bank and credit card statements, putting an E next to all of your essential expenses and a D next to the discretionary ones. “Review those with a D for discretionary,” he says. “Can you eliminate those or whittle them down?”
6. Postponing joy
After working and saving diligently for decades, many people find it hard to turn off the scrimp-and-save mentality, says Freddie Rappina, founder of Opta Financial, a Fairfax, Virginia, advisory firm. “I ask them, ‘What are you waiting for?’ ”
HOW TO BREAK THE HABIT
Review your bucket list and choose a few realistic goals. An island getaway? An Alaska cruise? As long as your income needs are covered and you have an emergency fund, aim to build your dreams into your short-term financial plan, Rappina says. “This is your time to live the life you want.”
Pulses: An Overlooked Food In A Plant Based Diet For Cancer Prevention
by Karen Collins
Karen Collins, MS, RDN, CDN, FAND is AICR’s Nutrition Advisor. Karen is a speaker, writer and consultant who specializes in helping people make sense of nutrition news. You can follow her on Twitter @KarenCollinsRD and Facebook @KarenCollinsNutrition.
Surveys suggest there’s a food that you’re probably overlooking among your choices for a diet that reduces cancer risk: Pulses. You may know them as dry beans, peas, and lentils… or as part of the legume family. But chances are that when you think about foods to include based on the AICR Cancer Prevention Recommendations your first thought is vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. Yet pulses have lots to offer, too, as part of the recommended plant-focused diet.
The Food with an Identity Crisis
Many people are unfamiliar with, or maybe confused by, what pulses are.
Confusing Terminology: You’re more likely to call them “dry beans and peas” or “lentils,” for example. Nutrition recommendations often talk about pulses or legumes, which are broader terms.
Legume is the umbrella term and refers to a plant that grows in pods. All the following are types of legumes:
- Pulses are dry edible seeds within the pods. They are high in protein and fiber, and low in fat. Pulses include:
- Dry Beans, such as kidney beans, black beans, Cannellini beans, navy beans, and pinto beans
- Chickpeas, the pulses used to make hummus dip
- Dry peas, green or yellow, you may find them as the split peas commonly used in soup, or whole dry peas, including black-eyed peas
- Lentils, which you may see most often, are labeled as green, but they often look brown. Lentils also come in red and black.
- Oilseed legumes include soybeans and peanuts. Although they also grow in pods, they are sources of healthy unsaturated fat as well as protein.
- Fresh legumes (beans and peas) are not dried, and they don’t provide as much protein or fiber in the same size serving.
- Green peas and green lima beans are grouped nutritionally with other starchy vegetables.
- Green (string) and yellow beans are grouped with other vegetables that are even lower in calories.
Recommendations in the U.S. and around the world categorize pulses in different food groups, depending on the nutritional concerns of highest priority. For example, the USDA MyPlate website notes that if you get most of your protein from plant sources, you should probably consider pulses as part of the protein foods group. But if you eat poultry, seafood, meat, eggs, and nuts daily in amounts that cover your protein needs, you can consider pulses among the variety of vegetables you eat. Of course, if you have diabetes or pre-diabetes, talk with your registered dietitian or diabetes educator about how to keep track of them as carbohydrate foods (such as whole grains, starchy vegetables, and fruits).
Pulses’ Unique Role in Your Diet
Pulses contribute to a diet for lower cancer risk and better overall health in several ways.
Boost fiber: When you look at amounts of fiber per serving, dry beans, dry peas, lentils, and chickpeas are at the head of the class. You can build a high-fiber diet to help reduce risk of colorectal cancer by including vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and nuts throughout the day. And the 6 to 10 grams of dietary fiber in just a half-cup of pulses can leapfrog your fiber consumption closer to the recommended target of 30 grams or more per day. The fiber in pulses helps move waste through the digestive tract more quickly.
Support a healthy gut microbiome: Pulses provide several forms of prebiotic fiber. This fermentable type of fiber supports types of bacteria in the gut associated with good health. More research is needed, but so far, studies in mice and limited human studies suggest that butyrate and other short-chain fatty acids that gut microbes produce from these prebiotic compounds seem to help reduce inflammation, inhibit conversion of bile acids in the gut to forms that can create cell damage that leads to cancer, and influence cell signaling pathways in healthy directions.
Improve diet quality: Besides their protein and fiber, pulses are also good sources of several nutrients that are often below recommended targets in U.S. diets. They’re high in magnesium and potassium, which work together to promote a healthy blood pressure. They’re also an excellent source of folate, a B vitamin that research suggests may help lower cancer risk by maintaining healthy DNA and keeping cancer-promoting genes “turned off.” And pulses provide polyphenol phytochemicals that support antioxidant defenses. Much of the evidence for how pulses’ phytochemicals may help reduce inflammation and inhibit pathways involved in the development of cancer comes from laboratory studies. But limited human intervention trials increasing pulse consumption show reduction in markers of inflammation, as well as the well-documented decreases in LDL cholesterol and blood pressure.
A recent expert panel report on “carbohydrate quality” identified several key metrics – the ratio of fiber to total carbohydrate, the proportion of carbohydrate as sugar, content of sodium and potassium, and whole grain content (where applicable). Together, these highlight foods that contribute to nutrient-rich diets that meet dietary recommendations for health. Pulses are among the top-scoring foods.
Are Beans Misunderstood in the US?
Despite nutrition recommendations sharing research on how pulses contribute to lower cancer risk and better overall health, many adults still eat pulses only occasionally.
Legume consumption is cultural. Different types of legumes are essential elements in many traditional diets around the world. But as diets become more Westernized, people often leave beans behind.
- People in some areas of the U.S., especially the Southeast, eat more legumes than in other areas.
- Consumption is also reportedly higher among people with more education and in Asian or Hispanic ethnic groups.
- Surprisingly, despite legumes’ value as a low-cost source of protein, consumption seems higher among people with higher incomes rather than in those with low incomes.
- Weight fears: To some people, beans have an image as “fattening.” Actually, they are categorized as low in “calorie density”, a system that compares calorie content in similar amounts of food. In In randomized controlled human intervention trials, one serving of pulses daily led to modest weight loss and reduced body fat, even when diets didn’t intentionally reduce calories.
- Fears of “anti-nutrients”: People may see worrisome click-bait headlines about compounds called lectins in pulses. These results are often from laboratory studies using raw beans or isolated lectin compounds that claim to link lectins to chronic inflammation and damage to the gut. But these warnings leave out the vital information that lectins are neutralized in cooking. And, since they are water-soluble, they are largely removed by cooking or canning in water. Emerging research even suggests that modest amounts of lectins may play a role in supporting the immune system and is evaluating a potential role in cancer treatment.
- Worries about intestinal gas: As gut bacteria convert prebiotic compounds in pulses to protective substances, they do produce gas. However, dietitians often note that when people increase these foods gradually and include them often – rather than just occasionally – tolerance often builds up. It’s interesting that cultural cuisines that have traditionally included an abundance of pulses, often use seasonings like ginger, fennel, and cumin seeds that are reputed to reduce gas production. If you cook pulses at home from their dried form, throw out the soaking water and cook the pulses in a fresh pot of water. If you use canned beans, make sure to drain and rinse them in a sieve or colander to remove the canning liquid. (Side benefit: you’ll reduce sodium content, too.)
- Swaps and Companions for Including Pulses in a Cancer Prevention Diet
For the ultimate way to use dry beans, dry peas, chickpeas and lentils to create a healthier diet, here are two key strategies.
- Swap pulses to help reduce foods you want to limit.
- Use dry beans and peas, chickpeas, or lentils to replace some or all the meat in chili, stew, and casseroles.
- Cut back on chips and other high-calorie snack foods that are low in nutrients and fiber. Instead, use hummus and other bean-based dips to make eating more vegetables a tasty choice for snacks and meals. For example, try roasted chickpeas as a snack or as part of a vegetable salad.
- Amplify the benefits of pulses by their companion foods.
- Although pulses are high in iron, this iron is in a form that is less well-absorbed than the iron from meat. Counteract that by including foods rich in vitamin C – which increases iron absorption – in meals with pulses. Tomatoes, peppers, and leafy green vegetables are just a few examples of vegetables that are natural companions for pulses in many dishes.
- You often see chickpeas or kidney beans on salad bars. Bring the idea home and add them to make homemade salads filling and tasty.
aren Hube is a veteran financial writer and a contributing editor for Barron’s
More Than 300 Words Were Just Added to Dictionary.com
Jessica Kaplan Reader’s Digest (Updated: Mar. 02, 2023)
Rage farming, petfluencer, hellscape and self-coup are just a few of the many modern words Dictionary.com is helping us define.
Trauma dumping, digital nomad, nearlywed, petfluencer and antifragile. On paper, these words seemingly have nothing in common. However, they’re all part of the 313 words newly added to Dictionary.com.
Dictionary.com commonly helps users navigate the ins and outs of modern terms. Typically, the online dictionary semi-annually releases hundreds of new words and revisions of words that reflect “the pace with which language adapts” to change.
Now, this past week, the platform has added 313 new words along with more than 1,100 revised definitions of words to their online dictionary. And some of them may be surprising!
How are new words chosen to be added to Dictionary.com?
According to Dictionary.com, there are four areas of criteria that are taken into consideration when adding a new word to the dictionary.
Simply put, they break it down into these four requirements:
1. It’s a word that’s used by a lot of people.
2. It’s used by those people in largely the same way.
3. The word is likely to stick around.
4. It’s useful for a general audience.
What are some of the new words added to Dictionary.com this year?
So, what are some of the words that made the cut this year? Here’s a list of some of our favorites from the roundup of new words:
Cakeage: A fee charged by a restaurant for serving a cake brought in from outside.
- Digital nomad: A person who works remotely while traveling for leisure, especially when having no fixed, permanent address
Hellscape: A place or time that is hopeless, unbearable or irredeemable.
Antifragile: Becoming more robust when exposed to stressors, uncertainty or risk.
Liminal space: A state or place characterized by being transitional or intermediate in some way
Rage farming: The tactic of intentionally provoking political opponents, typically by posting inflammatory content on social media, in order to elicit angry responses and thus high engagement or widespread exposure for the original poster.
Trauma dumping: Unsolicited, one-sided sharing of traumatic or intensely negative experiences or emotions in an inappropriate setting or with people who are unprepared for the interaction.
- Native language: A language that a person acquires fully through extensive exposure in childhood.
- Petfluencer: A person who gains a large following on social media by posting entertaining images or videos of their cat, dog or other pet.
- Bedwetting: Exhibition of emotional overreaction, as anxiety or alarm, to events, especially major decisions or outcomes.
- Cakeism: The false belief that one can enjoy the benefits of two choices that are in fact mutually exclusive, or have it both ways.Subvariant: A genetically distinct form of a virus, bacteria, or another microorganism which arises when a variant of the original strain mutates.
- Southern Ocean: The waters surrounding Antarctica, comprising the southernmost waters of the World Ocean.
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