Is there a resource for knowing when Annual and Quarterly Reports are coming out?
https://www.google.com/search?q=quarterly+and+annual+financial+report+calendar&oq=quarterly+and+annual+financial+report+calendar&aqs=chrome..69i57.9351j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 The third result on Google is: https://www.bloomberg.com/markets/earnings-calendar/us The fourth result on Google is: https://finance.yahoo.com/calendar/earnings
If I remember correctly, once you're about to exceed the threshold you really don't have a choice and have to register for VAT. As DumbCoder mentions, the quarterly VAT returns isn't that much of a hassle, plus if you fall under a certain threshold, you can sign up for the annual accounting scheme for VAT, which means you'll have to only put in a single return, but HMRC takes more payments out over the course of the year. This is what I did when I ran my own limited company in the UK. "&gt; The 20 million people added to healthcare is a number they boast and brag about when they dont realize (from a study im having a hard time reproducing so take it with a grain of salt) roughly 65% of those people could afford health insurance prior to the aca just chose not to buy and because of the mandate were forced to.   Yes, *that* is one of the reasons I supported the ACA. The problem of rising health care costs, as one of the sources I linked to showed, is the ""free rider"" problem. Too many people walk into the emergency room uninsured, or *under*-insured. They get emergent care that they are not covered for, and the hospitals jack up the prices greatly in the hopes of getting a larger portion reimbursed by Medicare. Now, who pays for that Medicare reimbursement? You and I, of course. The taxpayers do. And we pay a heavily artificially inflated version of that price. This is the most jacked up form of universal health care, but that is what the GOP if fighting to reinstall.   &gt; I also know that for me health insurance prior to the ACA was significantly lower roughly 50% cheaper and that doesnt even begin to touch the hikes a lot of people i know saw.   I have no doubt this is true, and another reason that I support the ACA - not because it equates to higher prices for you, but because for the first time it made younger adults actually responsible for their medical bills. When the ACA was enacted, we had a guy in our company who was about 23 years old. He saw his insurance costs go up by 50%. We covered is insurance increases, because we supported him. However, what we found when we went back and compared the insurance that he had with the insurance that he has is that the first policy didn't cover anything but the most extreme circumstances. It was a junk policy, that left the taxpayer liable for a lot of stuff - ambulatory response, x-rays, medicine, etc. There was nothing in there for preventative care - which as the study I linked showed, greatly impacted health for the worse.   &gt; They have some of the lowest income tax rates in the world.  Again, Switzerland has *lower* tax rates than the US, but they don't even crack the [top 20 when it comes to countries with low taxes](http://www.businessinsider.com/wef-countries-with-the-lowest-tax-rates-in-the-world-2015-10/#2-qatar-113-qatar-edges-out-the-regions-other-oil-rich-state-to-come-in-second-place-but-still-loses-out-to-one-other-nation-17). Most of the countries in that list are relatively poor countries to the average citizen, with weak infrastructure. Many of those countries are monarchies in which the ruling family controls the number one source of income - oil - so there is no taxes, they just skim their money right off the top. These are not countries that we would want to live/retire in.   Switzerland succeeds with low taxes because they have a very efficient (universal) health care system, and they have almost no military to fund.   &gt; While i do not own my own company or have anything to do with R&amp;D i can for a fact disprove your theory  Again speaking in absolutes. This denotes that you can disprove every situation possible to show that government is worse than commercial. As I said, if you thought that before you entered my industry, you quickly see the flip side of that coin.   Your example is a perfect example of that. So you work in construction, an industry in which commercial is notorious for *underbidding* a contract (whether to government or to private), and then running into *unexpected* overages that cause the job to go over schedule, over budget. These companies succeed because there are a very small number of providers that can accomplish certain jobs, so they tend to stick around (just like the big banks) even though they aren't the best.   Its not like the government just sits around and takes it. I know of at least [one federal contractor who went to federal prison](https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/id/news/2012/sept/large09192012.html) for fraudulently winning contracts in my part of the country.   &gt; The private sector will always have a need to innovate and that need will always be filled with or without the government the only difference is the private sector wont keep throwing money at an unsustainable rate like the government does because if they dont see results its not worth funding.  And this is *why* the government can succeed in areas that commercial cannot. This is why government got the first people on the moon, not commercial. This is why we have already sent missions to mars, whereas Musk is going to make those trips more efficient. It is because government has tremendous resources that they can throw at a problem. Even the richest man in the world will run out of money before he can solve the big problems. As I told a poster earlier, JIEDDO spent over $1T working on the IED problem in Iraq / Afghanistan. This was the number one killer of our troops. There were *many* inventions that came out of this. There is no company in this world that had the resources to tackle this problem solely. What the government does a great job in is rallying the troops, and assembling resources to tackle a major task that would be unclimbable by the individual.   &gt; Id also like to add you are near the same age as my father who also served in the military and i thank you for your service.   Thank you. I just hope that the Navy got as much out of me, as I learned and earned from serving. It is the basis of our company." "Answers: 1: No, Sections 1291-1298 of the IRC were passed in the Reagan adminstration. 2: Not only can a foreign company like a chocolate company fall afoul of the definition of PFIC because of the ""asset test"", which you cite, but it can also be called a PFIC because of the ""income test"".  For example, I have shares in a development-stage Canadian biotech which is considered a PFIC because it has no income at all, except for a minor amount of bank interest on its working capital.  This company is by no means ""passive"" (it has run 31 clinical trials in over 1100 human research subjects, burning $250M of investor's money in the process) nor is it an ""investment company"", but the stupid IRS considers it to be a ""passive foreign investment company""!  The IRS looks at it and sees only the bank account, and assumes it is a foreign shell corporation set up to shield the bank interest from them. 3: Yes, a foreign mutual fund is EXACTLY what congress intended to be a PFIC when passed IRC 1291-1298.  (Biotechs, candy factories, ect got nailed as innocent bystanders.)  Note that if you hold a US mutual fund then every year you'll get a form 1099 in the mail.  The 1099 will report your share of the mutual fund's own income and capital gains, which you must report on your taxes.  (You can also have capital gains from selling your shares of the mutual fund, but that's a different thing.) Now suppose that there was no PFIC law.  Then the US investors in the mutual fund would do better if the mutual fund were in a foreign country, for two reasons: a) The fund would no longer distribute 1099's.  That means the shareholders wouldn't have to pay tax every year on their proportions of the fund's own income/gains.  The money that would have sooner gone to the IRS can sit around for years earning interest. b) The fund could return profits to shareholders exclusively through capital gains rather than dividends, thus ensuring that all of the investors' income on the fund would be taxed at <15%-20% rather than up to 39%.  The fund could do this by returning cash to shareholders exclusively through buybacks. However, the US mutual fund industry doesn't want to move the industry to Canada, and it only takes a few newspaper articles about a foreign loophole to make congress spring to action. 4) It depends.  If you have a PEDIGREED QEF election in place (as I do for my biotech shares) then form 8621 takes a few minutes by hand.  However, this requires both the company and the investor to fully cooperate with congress's vision for PFICs.  The company cooperates by providing a so-called ""PFIC annual information sheet"", which replaces the 1099 form for a US mutual fund.  The investor cooperates by having a ""QEF election"" in place for EACH AND EVERY TAX YEAR in which he held the stock and by reporting the numbers from the PFIC annual information sheet on his return.  (Note that the QEF election persists once made, until revoked.  There are subtleties here that I am glossing over, since ""deemed sale"" elections and other means may be used to modify a share's holding period to come into compliance.) Note that there is software coming out to handle PFICs, and that the software makers will already run their software to make your form 8621 for $75 or so.  I should also warn you that the blogs of tax accountants and tax lawyers all contradict each other on the basic issue of whether you can take capital losses on PFICs for which you have no form 8621 elections.  (See section 2.3 of my notes http://tinyurl.com/mh9vlnr for commentary on this mess.)  I do not know if the software people will tell you which elections are best made on form 8621, though, or advise you if it's time to simply dump your investment. The professional software is at 8621.com, and the individual 8621 preparation is at http://expattaxtools.com/?page_id=242. BTW, in case you're interested, I wrote up a very careful analysis of how to deal with the PFIC situation for the small biotech I invested in in certain cases. It is posted http://tinyurl.com/mh9vlnr.  (For tax reasons it was quite fortunate that the share price dipped to near an all-time low on Jan 1, 2015, making the (next) 2015 tax year ripe for a so-called ""deemed sale"" election.  This was only possible because the company provides the necessary ""PFIC annual information statements"", which your chocolate factory may or may not do.)" "The annualized method allows you to take a look at each quarter independently and pay the tax in the quarter that you earned it. -- According to Linda Durand, a certified public accountant with Drolet & Associates PLLC in Washington, D.C., from the Bankrate article ""Paying quarterly estimated taxes""  And after paying annualized quarterly estimates, you can still owe up to $1000 at tax time without penalty." In the related Should I have separate savings accounts for various savings goals? I discovered the open source Budgeter courtesy of Richard Donkin. Budgeter accomplishes my aim with a minimum of fuss, and I have found it to be quite usable despite the author's self deprecating comments to the contrary. The chart below was built in about 10 minutes, half the time it's taken to write this post. Budgeter doesn't feature handy abilities like CSV/OFX importing or scheduled transactions, which would mean a fair bit of work for bringing in historical data, and it's expressly not designed for accounting or bookkeeping. However for the focussed application of tracking savings across multiple bucket categories and accounts I think it well worth evaluating. "For US equities, Edgar Online is where companies post their government filings to the SEC. On Google Finance, you would look at the ""SEC filings"" link on the page, and then find their 10K and 10Q documents, where that information is listed and already calculated. Many companies also have these same documents posted on their Investor Relations web pages." "You may want, or at least be thinking of, the annualized method described in Pub 505 http://www.irs.gov/publications/p505/ch02.html#en_US_2015_publink1000194669 (also downloadable in PDF) and referred to in Why are estimated taxes due ""early"" for the 2nd and 3rd quarters only? . This doesn't prorate your payments as such; instead you use your income and deductions etc for each of the 3,2,3,4-month ""quarters"" to compute a prorated tax for the partial year, and pay the excess over the amount already paid. If your income etc amounts are (nearly) the same each month, then this computation will result in payments that are 3,2,3,4/12ths of 90% of your whole-year tax, but not if your amounts vary over the year. If you do use this method (and benefit from it) you MUST file form 2210 schedule AI with your return next filing season to demonstrate that your quarterly computations, and payments, met the requirements. You need to keep good per-period (or per-month) records of all tax-relevant amounts, and don't even try to do this form by hand, it'll drive you nuts; use software or a professional preparer (who also uses software), but I'd expect someone in your situation probably needs to do one of those anyway. But partnership puts a wrinkle on this. As a partner, your taxable income and expense is not necessarily the cash you receive or pay; it is your allocated share of the partnership's income and expenses, whether or not they are distributed to you. A partnership to operate a business (like lawyers, as opposed to an investment partnership) probably distributes the allocated amounts, at least approximately, rather than holding them in the partnership; I expect this is your year-end draw (technically a draw can be any allowed amount, not necessarily the allocated amount). In other words, your husband does earn this money during the year, he just receives it at the end. If the year-end distribution (or allocation if different) is significant (say more than 5% of your total income) and the partnership is not tracking and reporting these amounts (promptly!) for the IRS quarters -- and I suspect that's what they were telling you ""affects other partners"" -- you won't have the data to correctly compute your ""quarterly"" taxes, and may thus subject yourself to penalty for not timely paying enough. If the amount is reasonably predictable you can probably get away with using a conservative (high-side) guess to compute your payments, and then divide the actual full-year amounts on your K-1 over 12 months for 2210-AI; this won't be exactly correct, but unless the partnership business is highly seasonal or volatile it will be close enough the IRS won't waste its time on you. PS- the ""quarters"" are much closer to 13,9,13,17 weeks. But it's months that matter." Being pushed to produce quarterly numbers isn't always the best for a company's long-term strategies. Whether or not this will happen is the question, however. Private companies don't need to post immediate substantial profits, public companies are expected to.