Support Release Notes...

Release Notes for Version 10.02 Build 384.01, released February 28, 2008

In this release we made it easier to enter income and expenses on the lawyer tab, gave the flexibility to protect any number of years in reports, and made a number of small fixes and enhancements.

General Changes

Lawyer tab, Income & Expenses.  Now, all items of income and expense may be entered on the Lawyer tab, in the Income & Expense section, including investment income, rental income, and other income associated with assets. 

Years to show in the reports.  You may now specify any number of years between one and 30 to project in the program’s reports. 

Marginal tax brackets.  We have added the marginal tax bracket to tax reports, and fixed and error in the alimony PV calculation, where the software was not using the correct marginal bracket when it was the top bracket. 

New "new file" dialog.  Now, when you create a new client file, it is easy to specify that it will go in a different folder than the previous file.  Just click the new "Change Folder" button in the dialog box that asks for the name of the file. 

Get files.  If you have selected Files tab is > Get File > Download, and no files are selected, and there is only one file waiting, then we will download it.  Previously, we required that the file \be selected, even if there was only one file waiting. 

More “Get files.”  We Improved the Client File Download and "Send to Professional," resulting in less need to run "Set up Services."

Using "Age" on the horizontal axis.  We fixed the problem where the "age" setting was not working on graphs, and also made ages consistent on all graphs (some were as of end of year, some were as of beginning of year).  (To have the horizontal axis show age, rather than calendar year, click the link on the Reports screen for report options, then select Graphs > Labels for Projections > Age.)

Mandatory retirement contributions.  Mandatory retirement contributions now reduce wages for federal income tax purposes.  They do not reduce wages for purposes of FICA or Medicare taxes.

Rate of return.  A bug in the software was occasionally converting the rate of return on Accumulated Savings on the Assumptions screen for some assets to be "-999."  The symptom was a large negative number for net income in year two.  This has been fixed.

Software Updates.  When you click to Update Software from within the software, the software itself will now close immediately.  This should reduce confusion that may have occurred during the updating process.

Child support guidelines that use Mandatory Retirement deductions were incorrectly including voluntary deductions as well.  This affected Connecticut and Illinois, and perhaps other states as well.

Alimony Calculator Expanded Report: We now show a line for child support as “% of gross income,” instead of “% of net income.”

IRA contributions.  IRA contributions now end at the earlier of retirement or the age specified for IRA distributions.  And the number of years for IRA contributions may now be specified directly.

Pension With Lump Sum Distributions.  If person is retiring at early retirement age and distributing the pension as a lump sum, we were continuing the pension asset value to the regular retirement age, thus double-counting the pension value.  We are not doing that now.

More Pension With Lump Sum Distributions: If you have used an outside valuation, and the person is retiring and distributing the pension as a lump sum, we were continuing the pension asset value through all years, even though it had been distributed.  We are not doing that now.

Accumulated Savings.  In the previous release, we converted Accumulated Savings to being calculated on a pre-tax basis.  But, on liquidation, we were not taxing the capital gains on accumulated savings.  We are now doing that.

Updates for state taxes for 2008.  Several states have income tax rates that are indexed with inflation.  We updated those rates that are available now for the 2008 tax year.  A couple of other states have had recent rate changes, and we incorporated those as well.

State Specific Changes

Pennsylvania child support guideline.  We have added the ability to specify a child support guideline mortgage adjustment for the payer, as well as for the payee.

New York and New Jersey Living expenses.  Special living expense lists for New York and New Jersey are now available in the Planner tab.

Texas child support guideline.  We updated the maximum income from $6,000 to $7,500 per month, and we updated the help text from the statute, for 2008.

New York Net Worth Statement.  We made many small changes to make this more comprehensive and easier to use.  For example, we modified the layout for family data, making it easier to enter the birthdates of the parties and children.  Also, totals now recalculate when Ctrl-U (or other special edits) are used.

Maryland child support guidelines.  We added the option to extrapolate the child support calculation to have the table apply at higher incomes.

Colorado child support.  If there were no children, this would trigger the $50 minimum child support amount.  This was fixed.

Connecticut and Rhode Island affidavits.  The footnotes for assets on the attachment pages were not displaying correctly (sometimes a single character would be displayed on many lines).  This has been fixed.

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