A 23-year-old Learns About Retirement Accounts (and their tax benefits)

So I didn’t really know about this, but apparently opening a retirement account and putting money into it instead of savings is a really nice way to get higher tax return (or owe less taxes) and a much better interest rate as well.

Contributions to traditional IRA still count for the previous tax year if you make them before April 15.

You can quickly see how much of a difference it would make by using this tax estimator (under the retirement button): http://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tools/calculators/taxcaster/

So basically you can open an IRA (I did through betterment.com cause it’s cheap and quick), move some money from savings, and put the retirement contribution on your tax return.

The only drawback is you cant withdraw it without a 10% penalty until you’re 59 years old, unless it’s for education, buying/building first home, or medical expenses – which are some of the primary uses of my savings anyway.

Office 365 SMTP Settings

  1. Login in to the Microsoft Online Services Portal.
  2. Click on Outlook.
  3. Click on the question mark icon in the upper right corner of the page.
  4. Click on About.
  5. There will be a section titled External SMTP setting that will contain the server name, encryption type and port. You will be able to use those along with your username and password to send email from devices/programs.

 

Change Office 365 Password Expiration Period

If 90 days seems too short of a period before your Office 365 users’ passwords expire, you can change it via a powershell cmdlet.

Set-MsolPasswordPolicy -ValidityPeriod <days> -NotificationDays <days> -DomainName contoso.com

Validity Period: time before expiration

Notification Days: how many days prior to expiration that the user begins to receive notification pop-up

Make sure you use Powershell to connect to MS online service first: http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/office365-enterprises/hh124998.aspx