MSR Consulting » Serendipity

When you hear hooves…

Stan Reeser — Thu, 26 Jun 2014 08:51:10 +0000

So I just spent 3 hours troubleshooting something I thought I had inadvertently fouled up, in the process of trying to hack something into working. I had messed with some DNS settings and had even created a new DNS server, then I was having issues logging into the domain. I was sure that what ever I had set up had interfered with the internal DNS connection to the Domain Controller (DC). I walked back every step I had made, I flushed the DNS I tried deleting and re-adding the Network Interface Cards (NICs). Nothing. I found that it wasn’t just on logging in, but I couldn’t access the domain through the user manager or anywhere else. Then I tried accessing the domain from something I hadn’t even touched. Now we were getting somewhere… EVERYTHING was broken! I felt so much better, because I knew that it wasn’t what I did. Now I could go on and solve the bigger problem.

When I finally got around to looking at the DC, the problem was obvious, some process had gone haywire and it was out of memory, but a quick reboot and it was fixed. After kicking myself for wasting so much time, I realized that there was a lesson here:

Sometimes when something goes wrong after you make a change, it was going to go wrong anyway. So don’t always be sure that you are the one that is in the wrong. AND… Some times those hooves really are zebra.

Photo Credit: (c)Tomo.Yun (www.yunphoto.net/en/)

Extend your SEP contribution deadline 6 months.

Stan Reeser — Tue, 15 Apr 2014 18:57:04 +0000

Just a note of something that I learned a few years ago. If you are self employed and have a SEP-IRA, solo 401k or a SIMPLE IRA, and you file an extension (now valid for 6 months), you have until the extension deadline (now 10/15) to contribute to your SEP. From irs.gov:

http://www.irs.gov/Retirement-Plans/Retirement-Plans-FAQs-regarding-SEPs-Contributions

Depositing and deducting contributions

When must I deposit the contributions into the SEP-IRAs?

You must deposit contributions for a year by the due date (including extensions) for filing your federal income tax return for the year. If you obtain an extension for filing your tax return, you have until the end of that extension period to deposit the contribution, regardless of when you actually file the return.

If you did not request an extension to file your tax return and did not deposit the SEP plan contributions by the filing due date for that return, you are not allowed to deduct any SEP plan contributions on that year’s return. The contributions may be deducted on the following year’s return.

If you improperly deducted SEP plan contributions on your return, you must file an amended tax return as soon as possible.

This means if you don’t have the cash on April 15, you can just file 4868 and have an extra 6 months to fund the account. Be mindful that the account needs to be established in the tax year you are taking the deduction, so if you haven’t set it up yet, do it now for 2014 and you can have until Oct, 15 1015 to fund it! Roth and traditional IRA contributions do NOT get this special treatment.

Relaunch. Revive. Renew.

Stan Reeser — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 07:04:06 +0000

My purpose for this site is to share information that you can immediately put to use. I am going to be writing at least three times a week in hopes to help you with business and personal strategies that hopefully have a slightly different approach. A lot of my posts will be technical in nature, but I will also share social media and marketing information and the ubiquitous general life lessons that I have learned and think are helpful sprinkled in.

I certainly want you to be successful; and given my Myers-Briggs personality type of ENTP, I will always be looking for more effective, efficient, and economical approaches. But also true to ENTP, I won’t tolerate boredom, I refuse to keep doing the same old things, I’ll take different perspectives for kicks and giggles, and I will hopefully keep throwing metaphorical (and metadata) monkeywrenches into the mix. I will be setting up the ability to do office hours online, where I can post my availability and help as I can via Google Hangouts. I hope to convert this into a video series, because if one person asks a question, probably 10 are thinking it. So through this I hope that together we can solve some of your bigger problems. Please sign up to my email list (coming soon), and email me or tweet @StanReeser your issues, I will respond to as many as I can! I will also be starting a newsletter in the upcoming weeks so signing up to my list will get that in your inbox as well.

Finally,I also hope to share a bit with you about how I harness serendipity and why it is such a key factor in my life. I foresee it being a recurring theme in my posts.

Oh, and by the way, introduce yourself!