| Volume 141 Number 88 |
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The People’s Lawyer’s Tip of the Day
Funding has been restored and the Federal Trade Commission's systems are live again. The FTC wants you to report fraud to their Consumer Sentinel. They're anxious to know what scams you’ve been seeing so far in 2019. Click here for more.
8 Tax Deductions You Can Still Claim on Your 2018 Taxes
Tax deductions are a great way to lower (or in some cases, eliminate) your taxable income, which can help keep more money in your pocket at tax time. With the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, a number of popular tax deductions were either eliminated or limited. But don't worry. The standard deduction nearly doubled to $12,000 if you are single and $24,000 if married filing jointly. Plus, there are still some tax deductions and credits you can take. Here is a breakdown of the deductions taxpayers can still take, the ones that went away and what you can do to make up for the ones that disappeared this year. Click here for more.
Your Money
One in five Americans don’t know how much money they will need in retirement and, consequently, most under-save by nearly 20 percent, according to a new Merrill Lynch report. The wealth management and financial services company says Americans need more funding for longer retirements, however many may be overlooking one key aspect of financially preparing for retirement. Click here for more.
For the Lawyers
Surprise, surprise—consumers don’t understand contracts to which they are required to agree. Uri Benoliel and Shmuel I. Becher have written The Duty to Read the Unreadable. Here's part of the abstract: Numerous scholars have suggested that consumer contracts are indeed written in a way that dissuades consumers from reading them. This Article aims to empirically test whether this concern is justified. The Article focuses on the readability of an important and prevalent type of consumer agreements: the sign-in-wrap contract. Such contracts, which have already been the focal point of many legal battles, are routinely accepted by consumers when signing up for popular websites such as Facebook, Amazon, Uber, and Airbnb. The Article applies well-established linguistic readability tests to the 500 most popular websites in the U.S. that use sign-in-wrap agreements. We find, among other things, that effectively reading these agreements requires, on average, more than 14.5 years of education. This result is troubling, given that the majority of U.S. adults read at an 8th-grade level. These empirical findings hence have significant implications for the design of consumer contract law. Click here for more.