Tax season here. 7 changes for 2015 (and 9 of the weirdest deductions)

To help you fill out your 2014 returns and plan for 2015, here are few tax changes, big and small, for 2015 – and nine of the most peculiar deductions.

16. Deduction: weight-loss programs

Denis Balibouse/Reuters/File
The Gnome weighs in on a scale in the Control Room of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva.

Some people who enrolled in weight-loss programs last year can deduct the money they paid in fees, according to the IRS. But not everyone qualifies: to be eligible, taxpayers must have enrolled to treat specific conditions diagnosed by doctors. Even when recommended by a health care professional, the cost of dance lessons, swim lessons, and health-club dues are not deductible, according to the IRS.

Except in very limited cases, diet foods are also non-deductible.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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