The first W2s are starting to come out this week. Just a reminder that there is a new kid on the block this year. Hopefully this will start to spell the end of the for-fee tax return filing in the US.
I think it depends on where in the US. In NYC, I pay around 32% of my gross income in federal and local taxes, social security, medicare, etc. That's almost 4 months of my salary.
On top of that, I have to pay for health insurance, deductibles, and retirement savings, which I assume my French counterpart wouldn't have to separately pay for.
Exactly. The first 25% I mentioned includes health insurance for your whole family with close to 0 deductibles (usually a few euros here and there), retirement plan and unemployment insurance (if you get fired, you can expect to get ~60% of your previous gross salary the first year, slowly decreasing after that) and at the very least 5 weeks of paid annual leave.
This is similar to the School Leaver programmes run by large accounting firms in the UK as well. You get paid a decent amount to get accredited whilst working for the firm. The programmes could take 6 years, but at the end of it, you would be a much more valuable employee than the person who drank away 3 years of their life! Plus you'd be a qualified accountant!
The downside is when all your mates are out having fun, you're being worked to the bone! Not really fun for an 18 year old.
The downside isn't just missing out on the 'fun', but also all the soft skills you get. I feel like academia is only 50% of the university story. The rest is expanding your interests, learning independence, making friends with a more diverse set of people than you'd previously been exposed to. To me it makes you a more well-rounded person (and subsequently, employment candidate) than someone who just stuck their head in books.
Shares are a form of equity. Owning the shares will give you a claim to the residual assets of the company after all the liabilities have been settled. So what you own is effectively the 'Net Assets' of the company. This is different from outright owning the actual underlying assets of the company.
To slightly complicate things, the total assets shown on the annual report of these companies are mostly on their cost basis. During an acquisition like this, they would be 'fair valued', which could result in significant write up or write off compared to the cost basis.
As a Brit, you should appreciate the level of infrastructure you get to enjoy. You are more than welcome to come live in the US with some of the most 'innovative' privately funded infrastructure.
I'd be happy to swap my overpriced RCN internet with TalkTalk or not have to get a new wheel on my bike every year thanks to the pot-holed roads of New York.
US telecom industry is not exactly the best example of non-regulated market. It's not like you can just come and put a new cable network in New York or San Francisco without asking anybody. In fact, Google - if ever there was a company with money and clout - couldn't pull it off in the capital of Silicon Valley, San Jose.
And if you do try to innovate, you get lots of vested interests attacking you on every corner and tons of regulations you have to comply with and some new ones that would be lobbied into law and introduced specially to suppress you. Look how much pushback companies like Airbnb or Uber are getting.
US is big and sparsely populated. Also, telecoms there are heavily regulated. Contrary to common claims, there isn't a huge difference between the European and American models (both are free markets with heavy state involvement in pretty much all industries).
Whilst what you say is true, it should, however, be noted that this is done mostly for liquidity considerations rather than beefing up any accounting ratios. Obviously it’s impossible to tell without seeing the actual legal documents, but the upcoming guidance on lease accounting will most likely require that this type of sale and leaseback transaction to be shown on the balance sheet. So any benefit of turning this into an off-balance sheet lease would only be for the next few years.
True - if not on the balance sheet, definitely in the footnotes.
I think there is something to be said for extracting the value of the illiquid asset. Retailers like Sears and Target were valued primarily based on their real estate until real estate went South and all that was lost.
