Car values.I ENJOYED YOUR SEPTEMBER 2003 ARTICLE "Budgeting For A Future." However, I was disappointed to see that DeShawn James' net worth Net Worth The amount by which a company or individual's assets exceed their liabilities.Notes: For a company, this is known as shareholder's (or owner's) equity and is determined by subtracting liabilities on the balance sheet from assets. For example, if a company has $45 million worth of liabilities and $65m worth of assets the company's net worth (shareholder's equity) would be $20m ($65m - $45m). of $91,565 was overstated. James' assets included a 1998 El Dorado at $15,000 and a 1998 Ford Contour at $8,000. According to Kelley's Blue Book 1. (publication) Blue Book - Informal name for one of the four standard references on the page-layout and graphics-control language PostScript. The other three official guides are known as the Green Book, the Red Book, and the White Book.["PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook", Adobe Systems, Addison-Wesley 1985, (ISBN 0-201-10179-3)]. 2. (publication) Blue Book - Informal name for one of the three standard references on Smalltalk. (www.kbb.com), the El Dorado is valued at approximately $10,000 and the Ford Contour is valued at approximately $2,400 (assuming 80,000 miles and "good" condition). As a certified public accountant, I appreciate the value of net worth, which is the excess of the "fair market value fair market value n. the amount for which property would sell on the open market if put up for sale. This is distinguished from "replacement value," which is the cost of duplicating the property. Real estate appraisers will use "comparable" sales of similar property in the area to determine market value, adding or deducting amounts based on differences in quality and size of the property. (See: market value, appraiser)" of one's assets minus all liabilities. With this in mind, the vehicle values are not realistic because James' would not be able to get $23,000 from selling them or trading them in. As a result, James' net worth is overstated by approximately $10,600 (excess of the inflated values over those according to Kelley's Blue Book). This adjustment would bring her revised net worth to approximately $81,000 (from approximately $91,600). Respectfully, I would suggest that you use Kelley's Blue Book or some other authoritative source for gathering information on vehicle fair market value, especially since vehicles are highly depreciable assets. Gresford Gray Ashburn, VA gresford_gray@hotmail.com Editor's Note: Both Kelley's Blue Book and www.edmunds.com are widely used sources of car valuation information. While we usually use one or both of these resources, in this case, we failed to do a reality check against the valuations provided by James. Obviously, we'll be more careful going forward. |
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