TAXES
I sold my house for close to 15 times more than I paid for it 35 years ago. I expected to pay an enormous sum in capital gains taxes and have been waiting for the ax to fall. I was being guided by the tax woman who does my taxes every year. What helped was that when Kathe died five years ago I apparently inherited her half of the house. Luckily it and inadvertantly it was in both of our names. Unluckily the value of the house at the time was calculated on the amount that Buncombe County assessed it at without every looking at it, which was way less than we could have sold it for at the time. So the amount that I inherited was worth less than half its real value. But all of the repairs and improvements we had made on the house—new roof, new deck, redone kitchen, redone bathroom—were 1/2 deducted as being Kathe’s share. But unfortunately we had kept no records of what we had paid for all those improvements, so I had to guess at the amounts. Luckily, my daughter in law, Kathy, has a much better business sense than I have aquired as I have floated through life and so she came up with estimates of the cost of all our repairs and will help me come up with proof of spending if the IRS audits me, which everyone thinks is unlikely. The IRS has been decimated by DOGE and I am too small a fish to be worth catching which is the case with most a everyone who suddenly got a windfall when they sold their house.
So the weight of Uncle Sam was lifted from my shoulders today and I feel relieved.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 