Tax season here. 7 changes for 2015 (and 9 of the weirdest deductions)

To help you fill out your 2014 returns and plan for 2015, here are few tax changes, big and small, for 2015 – and nine of the most peculiar deductions.

2. FSA limits

Travis Morisse/The Hutchinson News/AP/File
Alex Kreger, left, and his father Scott Kreger use machines to build up their endurance during a physical therapy session at the Hodgeman County Health Center in Jetmore, Kan.

If you use an employee-sponsored flexible spending account (FSA) for setting aside pretax money to pay for certain medical and care expenses (examples: eyeglasses, day-care for a child, certain forms of physical therapy), the maximum amount you could contribute in 2014 was $2,500. For the 2015 tax year, it has gone up $50 for a total $2,550. There’s also been a change in rollovers for FSAs. Beginning in 2013, over $500 of a previous year’s FSA could be rolled into the next year. But beginning in 2015, if you carry over $500 of an FSA into the next year, you are ineligible to participate in a general services Health Savings Account (HSA). These are slightly different from FSAs, so you would still be able to carry over money for specific expenses, like at-home care for a relative.

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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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