A Suze Orman exclusive

Financially speaking, I can't make any sense out of garage sales. You have to invest a lot of time to hold one, when you could simply take all your unwanted stuff down to the local charity (or even ask them to come cart it away for you) and claim the donation as a tax deduction. Do you really want to spend a weekend holding a garage sale-with no guarantee you will clear out everything you don't want-when you can spend an hour or two gathering up your stuff and making a donation whose tax value will likely exceed the value of your garage sale's proceeds?

Kidding Around: A Capital Gains Idea

When you sell an investment for a gain, after having held the investment for at least one year, most of us will typically pay a 15 percent capital gains rate. Only individuals whose income tax rate falls in the lowest two brackets (10 percent and 15 percent) qualify for the 5 percent capital gains tax rate. But there just might be someone in your household who falls in that lower income tax bracket: Your child. And if you “gift” the investment to your child, he or she will assume your cost basis and can then turn around and sell the investment at the lower 5 percent rate. Each parent can gift up to $11,000 a year to each child without running into the gift tax.

In fact, you might even be able to get the rate to zero with a bit of patience. A little-known fact is that the 5 percent long-term capital gains tax rate will drop to zero in 2008. Yep, you read that right. If your income is low enough to be in the 10 percent or 15 percent income tax bracket, your capital gains tax for any long-term investment you sell in 2008 will be zero. So if you give the stock to a kid, and then have your kid hold on to the stock until 2008 (assuming you still believe the stock is a solid investment worth keeping), you are potentially looking at a tax bill of zilch.

Those are some of my top picks for easy ways to save money by simply paying attention to the details. Put them to work and I know you will be surprised at how much money you will save, practically without changing your lifestyle one iota. Now that’s smart money management.