Filing 2012 income taxes? Five changes to watch for.

Here are new income tax provisions to watch for as you work through your 1040 form:

2. Mortgage relief

Carlos Barria/Reuters/File
A foreclosure sale sign sits in front of a house in Miami Beach, Fla., in 2009. Some homeowners had some or all of their mortgage debt forgiven in 2012. And for that year only, taxpayers won't have to pay the IRS on that forgiveness.

Homeowners who had some of their mortgage debt forgiven in 2012 won't have to pay income tax on the debt forgiveness. That's a special tax break only available for 2012, says Rick Rodgers, a certified financial planner in Lancaster, Pa., and author of "The New Three-Legged Stool: A Tax Efficient Approach to Retirement Planning." "It will be taxable for 2013."

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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