Linda The Bra Lady files for Chapter 11 reorganization

Linda The Bra Lady files for Chapter 11 reorganization

New York Post, 8-Feb-2018

By Lisa Fickenscher

A longtime intimates fixture — Linda The Bra Lady — has filed for bankruptcy court reorganization.

Founder Linda Becker operates two stores, one on Manhattan’s East Side and another in southern New Jersey.

Becker has been fitting women for every bra type — 250 sizes — for 30 years, even appearing on “Good Morning America.” But her business has been struggling with debt issues since Hurricane Sandy when it took a government-backed disaster relief loan. It has been struggling since then to repay the loan.

“Their budget shows a basically break-even business,” said Adam Stein-Sapir, a bankruptcy expert at Pioneer Funding Group.

Carl Manni, CEO of Linda the Bra Lady, said the company “will be using the Chapter 11 process to re-organize our balance sheet.”

“During the reorganization, our stores and online business will continue to operate as they always have – with first-class products, great in-store experience, and of course, expert bra fitting service.”

The company “fully expects” to emerge from Chapter 11 stronger than when it went it, said Manni, who said he hopes to serve its customer base “for the next 30 years and beyond.”

To Get Into the 1%, You Need Adjusted Gross Income of $480,930

To Get Into the 1%, You Need Adjusted Gross Income of $480,930

Bloomberg, 22-Feb-2018

By Joe Mysak

What does it take to get into the 1 percent? The price of admission is an adjusted gross income -- basically, what you make before deductions -- of $480,930. That’s according to the latest Winter 2018 edition of the Internal Revenue Service’s Statistics of Income Bulletin, which shows that the number of that elite group hit about 1.4 million in 2015, continuing its steady growth since 2009. Back then, you could have gotten into this bunch with an AGI of $350,000, its Great Recession low, but it’s been climbing ever since.

And that’s just the minimum. The average AGI of the 1% in 2015 was $1,483,596, according to the IRS.

By comparison, to make it into the top 0.001%, your AGI must be at least $59,380,503. It’s an extremely exclusive club: just 1,412 American households made that much.

It’s a pretty safe bet that all those in the rarefied strata hold at least some municipal bonds. To see the actual numbers, you have to go back to the Spring 2017 edition of the IRS’s bulletin. In 2015, Americans received $57 billion of tax-fee interest, according to the IRS. Just about half of that interest went to 1.2 million filers who earned $250,000 and more, which is how the IRS slices it.

What’s disturbing about the data is that the number of investors claiming tax-exempt interest -- the municipal market’s constituency, if you will, is falling, after reaching a peak of almost 6.5 million in 2008. With corners of Congress perennially threatening to chip away at bondholders’ tax break, munis are asset class in need of a champion. Maybe it’ll be one of those one percenters.