How many Taxes you pay

Do you know how many Taxes you pay?

How many taxes do you think you pay? - Income tax, Capital Gain and Gift tax. But this is now true as there is a list of taxes you pay like Entertainment tax, Education cess, Clean Energy cess, National calamity continent tax etc. These are some of the Surcharges and tax that you owe to Government. Let us have a brief introduction about all the taxes that you owe to government.

Service Tax 

Every time you avail of a service from an insurer or enjoying a lunch at a hotel, Service tax is included in the bill. It is the responsibility of the service provider to pay this tax, but he simply passes it to customers.

Gift Tax 

Whenever a person receives a gift (in form of Shares, Jewellery, Property, Artifacts or cash) worth of 50K INR from a friend, he has to pay tax on it. But remember if the gift are received from inheritance or on marriage through specified relatives are not taxable.

Entertainment Tax

Because of this tax, your movie tickets become expensive. It is levied by state government and varies from 15% to 40%. It is also applicable to large commercial shows.

Luxury Tax

This tax is to be paid by Hotelier when you book a room in a hotel, but he simply passes it to the Customer.

Education cess

The Government feels everybody like to do a charity so levies an education cess of 2 %( on most of the taxes) of the total tax payable.

Secondary & Higher Education cess

Another surcharge like education cess, it is collected to make a better education system in the country. It is also charged at rate of 1% on the tax payable.

Wealth Tax

Too much wealth also attracts a tax of 1%. It is only payable by those persons who have a net value of 30 lakh INR in the form of cash, jewellery, cars or second property.

Excise Duty on Fuel

Known as Road cess, Additional duty of excise that is levied on petrol and diesel at 2 INR per liter. This is collected for Rural development and state road projects. Some part of this duty is shared by National Highways Authority of India and Railways.

Clean energy cess

This tax is imposed on all producers of coal, lignite and peat @50 INR per ton. This cess filters down to manufacturer of products in which it is used and they pass it to the Consumer of the product.

National calamity continent tax

Whenever you buy a two-wheeler, car or SUV, 1% of the price you pay goes to this tax. May be possible in coming year it will be applied to mobile also.

Dividend distribution tax

When you receive dividend on shares or mutual funds, you need not to pay tax on it. They are tax free, But the Companies and debt/debt-oriented mutual funds have to pay the tax known as dividend distribution tax and they usually deduct this from the dividend they pay.

Securities transaction tax

Whenever you buy or sell shares on a stock exchange a small part of money is deducted as STT.

These all are the taxes, which a common man has to pay apart from the Income tax. If you compare the whole year amount you have given to these taxes, May be possible it exceeds the Income tax you are going to pay. But Irony is that this money is enjoyed by Politicians only. 

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Migrating to JBoss Enterprise Middleware

From a small application server to an Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss touched new heights in providing solutions to Business, SOA, portals and Data service after accepting their challenges. In today's world where service providers like Oracle owned BEA Weblogic server and IBM Webshere licenses costs nearly half of your IT Budget, JBoss offers a Open Source solution which is better in performance and more flexible. Also Jboss provides support at a very lower cost to any IT organization.

JBoss Features and Components

Jboss Enterprise Middleware platform comes along with many components and various features. A few of them are briefly described below:

Component	Description
JBoss Enterprise Application Platform	Platform that provides Java Enterprise Edition container having capabilities to host large scale Java application deployment, including Clustering, JBoss Messaging and JBoss Cache. Web application framework like Seam and ORM tool Hibernate are also integrated in a single distribution with the application server
JBoss Developer Studio	It is a rich application Eclipse-based Web 2.0 tool with preconfigured Jboss Enterprise Application platform.
JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform	An ESB (Enterprise Service Bus)-based platform that enables message delivery, transformation, and content based routing, orchestration and service registration. It is also integrated with the JBoss jBPM and Rules Frameworks in a single distribution.
JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform	Provides resource management and simple application integration.
JBoss Seam Framework	Seam is a powerful web application framework for building Web 2.0 applications. Seam integrated many technologies into a single framework like Java Server Faces (JSF), Java Portlets, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML - AJAX, Enterprise Java Beans (EJB3) and Business Process Management.
JBoss Hibernate Framework	One of the leading ORM tool used by many IT organization for development, used to interact with database.
JBoss jBPM Framework	Designed to create business processes that coordinate people, applications, and services by automating a wide set of business problems.

Migration Planning

Planning is the first step to a successful migration. Before you start migration first take a complete inventory of the current running systems to understand the application environment, its dependencies and all baseline requirements that must be replicated to the new environment. Doing this homework will provide a help in migrating components into the new platform and also in selecting appropriate hardware to support the application with optimal performance. In order to create a solid foundation for understanding the full scope of the migration effort, you have to plan steps. These steps promote proper transparency and allow proper expectations to be set with the business and IT stakeholders. Migration steps are as follows:

 1. Hardware Configuration

• Currently running Operating system and version along with updates applied.
• Number and type of processors
• Memory capacity
• Size and type of physical disks/storage

 2. Software specifications:

• JVM and JRE versions with applied patches info.
• Application server and version with applied patch information.
• Additional application server components like portal, ESB, or business process mapping tools.
• Any Third party, vendor-specific and open source components or libraries used.
• Clustering configurations used.
• Integrated applications

3. Review complete application to identify any code or configuration incompatibilities that will be  required to be changed code during the migration.

4. Review all build and deployment processes to identify any that have direct coupling with the current server environment.

5. Review all monitoring and administration procedures and tools in place to identify any that will be required to modified or replaced to work with the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

Introduction to the Financial Markets

Introduction

Just in short the term 'financial markets' refers to the group of markets where participants buy and sell financial assets. Like in India example - National Stock Exchange( nseindia.com) and Bombay stock exchange(bseindia.com).

Financial Markets Participants

Participants in the financial markets are the entities who lend or borrow money for investment or consumption. These could be Personals , households, companies, governments etc. Participants borrow and lend money through financial intermediaries on a particular interest rate. Financial intermediaries gather capital from those who have surplus of it in an economy (lenders/ investors) and distribute these savings to those who want it for investment or consumption (borrowers/ spenders). They could be banks, insurance companies, pension funds, mutual funds (unit trusts), etc.

Lenders advantage

The lender get financial assets in return of investment he had done. Financial assets are claims for future financial payments. These assets could be of various types ranging from bank deposit,mutual fund or equity. The rate of return could be in the form of interest, dividend, capital appreciation of the financial assets etc. It would depend on the claim the financial assets represent. It could be fixed or variable as well. 

A financial asset with a fixed claim is known as a debt instrument. The most popular debt instrument is a bond. A bond is a document stating the terms on which the money borrowed will be paid back. For example, it may be a 5-year bond, with interest payments of 9.5% in annual installments. Therefore, the company (or government) that issued the bond will pay a fixed rate of interest of 9.5% in a year to the holder of the bond.

A financial asset with a varying claim is an equity. Money is raised through the sale of shares in a company (equity). The holder of an equity claim (shareholder) may receive income in the form of a dividend. The payment of dividends depends on the earnings of the company as well as on its reinvestment plans. Shareholders will also receive capital gains (or losses) if the value of the share increases (decreases) by the time they sell the shares.

Equity generally takes the form of common stock or preferred stock. Common stock represents ownership in a corporation, whereas preferred stock does not. Instead, preferred stock pays a specified dividend to the stockholder and ranks ahead of common stockholders in the event of liquidation. Note that while preferred stock is generally classified as equity, its claim could be regarded as 'fixed', although management may elect not to pay a preferred stock dividend in any given year.

Common stock is referred to as ordinary shares and preferred stock as preference shares.

Segments in the Financial Markets 

Money markets 

The money market is the market for the purchase, sale, lending and borrowing of short-term financial assets (financial assets with maturities of less than one year). Examples of such financial assets include: 

• Treasury bills - these are securities issued and guaranteed by a government, at a discount from face value, with a maturity of one year or less.
• Euro currencies - these are foreign currencies deposited with a bank account outside the country in which these currencies are used for legal tender.

Capital markets 

The capital market is the market for the purchase, sale, lending and borrowing of medium-term and long-term financial assets (maturities greater than one year). Examples include equity and bonds. 

Derivatives markets 

Derivatives are instruments that derive most of their value from the value of another product. These are: 

• Futures 
• Options 
• Forwards 
• Forward rate agreements 
• Swaps 

Players in Financial Markets 

• Investors/ Lenders (individuals/ companies)
• Consumers/ Borrowers (individuals/ companies)
• Financial intermediaries (banks/ brokers)
• Market Makers or Brokers, Dealers

Market makers act as intermediaries between users of financial markets. Brokers provide a service bringing buyers and sellers together. Their profits are earned through the Commission/Brokerage they charge. Their main function is to 'make a market'.  This means that they give two way quotes ( bid & offer rates) for the financial securities. To this end, they hold an inventory of securities and are ready to buy and sell particular securities at a stated price. Dealers make profits from the spread they receive, the difference between the purchase price and the sale price of the same security.

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