Ogden Nash, the bard of light verse, once wrote:
Indoors or out, no one relaxes
In March, that month of wind and taxes,
The wind will presently disappear,
The taxes last us all the year.
Of course, that whimsical, bittersweet quatrain was composed before Tax Day was changed from March 15 to April 15 – possibly to remove from it the stigma of Shakespeare’s murderous “Ides of March,” but just as likely in order to give harried accountants an extra 30 days to decipher the latest cryptic volumes of the tax code. But March or April, the filing date matters little to most of us. What’s aggravating is the process and the realization that once we’ve waded through a full year’s paperwork, we’ll have significantly less money than when we licked our pencils to begin.
One positive note about this year’s tax season is that other events in the world have knocked the tax-bashers off the front pages and the evening news. Not that I disagree with them, mind you. But, I find it doubly depressing to have them point out gleefully how your tax dollars and mine are being spent on experiments about why hamsters like to turn wheels, on commissions to taste different genres of hot chocolate and on studies of why bowler hats went out of style.
As Benjamin Franklin so famously put it, “in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.” He might have added “and political speeches at the Oscars.” But, in Franklin’s time, neither movies nor actors with inflated opinions of their own worldviews had yet been invented.
Nonetheless, I’m not here to launch a diatribe against taxes. When all’s said and done, you can’t run a country without them, much as we’d all like to try. What I am here to do is to suggest that if you’ve been thinking about making a major move in residential real estate, now’s about as good a time as you’ll find to do it – and Mark Goldsmith is the best available to shepherd your transaction from listing to successful conclusion with a lot less irritation than you’ll find in the average Form 1040.
That’s because in Bel Air, the very best is none other than me. I am the expert in multi-million dollar deals with a reputation for excellence and over more than two decades of leadership in this profession.
When you become a Mark Goldsmith client, you don’t get a junior associate or assistant whose biggest deal to date was closing a mobile home in El Monte. You get me. So, put aside your Forms 6198, 4562, 2555 and all the rest; lay down your Schedules C, D, E and their alphabet kin. Pick up your telephone and call me today at (310) 777-6291.
I’ll turn your taxing April into a relaxing…“May.”
