You are given the following information concerning Around Town Tours: Debt: 8,500, 8 percent coupon bonds outstanding, with 15 years to maturity, face value of 1000, and price at 1026. These bonds pay interest semiannually. Common stock: 260,000 shares of common stock selling for $76 per share. The stock has a beta of 0.92. Preferred stock: 7,500 shares of 5 percent preferred stock with face value of $100, selling at $88 per share. Market: A 13.2 percent expected return, a 4.5 percent risk-free rate, and a 34 percent tax rate. Questions: 1) what is the value, weight and cost of debt? 2) what is the value, weight and cost of equity? 3) What is the value weight and cost of preferred? 4) What is the weighted average cost of capital (WACC)?

When Saul Garlick was a young boy, he traveled with his family to Delani, a rural community in Mpumalanga, South Africa, and was shocked by the antiquated conditions and lack of schools in which the residents of the small village lived. He pledged to do something to help. When he was 18, Garlick launched a nonprofit organization, Student Movement for Real Change (SMRC), and raised $10,000 to build a school in Delani. Over the next few years, Garlick’s vision for the nonprofit expanded, and SMRC began to focus on sending college students to live with local families in South Africa and build entrepreneurial ventures with them. While attending graduate school at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Garlick took 18 undergraduate students on a five-week trip to Mpumalanga. He was dismayed when he saw that the school he had built years before was shuttered and in total disrepair.

It was then that Garlick realized that simply throwing money at a problem would not fix it.

He committed himself to finding a scalable, sustainable solution based on a social entrepreneurship model. Garlick began to reimagine SMRC. What if, he thought, he could take bright, enthusiastic college students from around the world to Africa and have them work with local people to develop new ideas and solutions to the most pressing local problems? He changed SMRC’s name to ThinkImpact and began raising money to fund its mission. By 2009, Garlick was raising $400,000 annually to support ThinkImpact; unfortunately, costs were running higher. Like leaders of most other nonprofit organizations, he was frustrated because raising money is an ongoing process that demands a great deal of time and takes away from the time they spend on achieving their mission. Still, he was encouraged because ThinkImpact had gained traction and was beginning to make a difference in local communities in South Africa and Kenya. After missing a couple of payrolls for ThinkImpact’s small staff, however, Garlick began to consider other ways that he could accomplish the organization’s mission.

After attending a workshop with other social entrepreneurs, Garlick identified three options:

• Option 1. Remain a nonprofit organization. ThinkImpact has contracts with two universities that generate $50,000 annually. In addition, Garlick expects that grants and donations will bring in up to $100,000 per year. However, if Garlick wants to realize ThinkImpact’s mission, he estimates that he will need an additional $200,000 to $250,000. As he has learned, raising money for a nonprofit is never-ending and takes valuable time away from achieving the organization’s mission.

• Option 2: Shut down the nonprofit and start a for-profit company. Under this scenario, the for-profit company would purchase ThinkImpact’s assets and pay off its debts, essentially giving Garlick and his employees a fresh start. To finance the new company, he could borrow money and approach family members and friends who have indicated that they would invest in a for-profit company if there is a chance of earning a return on their money. The for-profit business would generate revenue by charging colleges and universities a fee to provide students with meaningful, immersive international experiences that focus on social enterprise. Garlick estimates that the for-profit company would hit its breakeven point in three years. His primary concern is whether colleges and universities would be as open to working with a for-profit company as they are with a nonprofit such as ThinkImpact.

• Option 3: Keep the nonprofit organization but start a for-profit business as a subsidiary.This hybrid model incorporates the advantages of the first two options. The nonprofit could still pursue grants and donations, and the for-profit operation could utilize traditional sources of financing, including debt, which would make ThinkImpact less dependent on somewhat unpredictable grants and donations. One concern that Garlick has is the potential for a conflict of interest if he is a stockholder in the for-profit subsidiary and the executive director of the nonprofit parent company.

2. If Garlick chooses to create a for-profit entity, either to replace the current nonprofit organization or as a subsidiary, what potential sources of funding might he be able to tap?

After reading the message below please provide your personal opinion in detail of what you learned.

I was sitting in one of those fluorescent corporate cafeterias eavesdropping on the women at the next lunch table. One had vacationed in Thailand. The other had returned from a group tour of Vietnam.

"Over there, it was nothing to see two generations of family crammed into a house no bigger than my living room," said the Vietnam traveler. "Makes you appreciate what we have here, in America."

I will probably never see that American woman’s living room. But I'm willing to bet that it's larger—and certainly more weather-proof—than my childhood home in Ireland. And as for that multi-generational-living thing? Yup, we managed to cram two parents, five kids, two grandparents, and the family dog into a thatch-roof house with three tiny bedrooms.

But, sitting there in that air-conditioned cafeteria, did I interrupt my lunch neighbors to say: “Whoa! Wait. You have no clue how it really is. You have no clue about what I learned from my live-in grandparents, or that poverty and cultural exotica are a lot more than the sum of our non-commodities, of what we don’t possess?"

Nope. I just kept munching on my salad. Ten minutes earlier, I had ordered and paid for that salad in my best expat-American patois.

These days (I have since switched jobs), I work as the communications director for a nonprofit. In my own office, among my own colleagues, I say nothing about my rural, hardscrabble beginnings. Equally, I don’t stand at the office photocopier belting out a Gaelic-language song, just as I don’t brag about how, once, I used to design and knit fisherman-knit sweaters. You'll never see me pulling up a boardroom chair to re-tell one of my live-in grandfather’s fireside stories, like that one about how, as a little boy, his mother (my great-grandmother) took him to town where he saw a huge ship sitting way, way out in the harbor. His mother said that the ship was on a stopover between England and America. It was called the Titanic.

So as an expatriate in America, am I in a perpetual state of what my late mother called “putting dogs on windows” (a.k.a., pretending or trying to be someone I’m not)?

Today In: Leadership

No. And yes.

In my private, non-working life, among my American friends, everything is fair game. Actually, I’m often the one quizzing them about their childhoods. But in the workplace, I’m quite content to “pass” as American.

PROMOTED

I was 24 years old when I landed from Ireland at JFK Airport. It was a freezing December afternoon. I had an overstuffed backpack and a borrowed $200 and a set of directions for how and where to catch a Trailways bus.

In my early American years, I worked as a waitress in an Irish-American pub in a jazzy college town. This was the swingin’ ’80s, and that cash ’n’ carry restaurant life was one eye-popping culture shock. Also, in any country or culture, waiting tables is a safari of human behavior: the good, the bad, and the downright weird (especially after midnight).

In that Irish-American pub, for the first time in my life, I had to become—well, Irish. I discovered this “all-Irish” meal called corned beef (yuck) and cabbage. My bar customers ordered this “Irish” beer drink called a Black and Tan. By the way, if you had ever offered my history-buff father any food or beverage of that name, he would have laughed in your face or spat at your feet. (The “black and tans” were a band of temporary British constabularies sent to fight the IRA during the Irish War of Independence. Mostly comprised of World War I vets, the “tans” were famous for their civilian attacks.)

The first week on the job, I learned that the way I spoke was called a “brogue.” And my “brogue” brought a string of questions: Oh, what brought you here? Don’t you miss your family? Aren’t all you Irish chicks named “Colleen?”

Of course, I was grateful for this job and this all-American chance to reinvent myself from my heretofore life as a parochial school teacher in a rural Irish village. So, bit by bit, I began to assume this packaged, offshore brand of Irishness.

Three years after arrival day, I quit that pub gig to start an evening graduate-school program and to work a string of day jobs, most of them in offices. I’m not proud to admit this, but as I interviewed for and started each new job, I wasn’t above laying on the brogue and the Maureen O’Hara charm.

What I didn’t yet know was this: Playing to a set of Hollywood stereotypes, to a set of broad-brush cultural assumptions, is “putting dogs on windows." And worse, it will deplete our sense of self and self-esteem.

I finished that graduate degree and landed better-paid jobs, including my first gig in business writing and communications.

In one position, I had to deliver a short, monthly overview of the organization's public information policies as part of the new-hire orientation. As an ex-teacher, preparing content and delivering a short, lively presentation was a snap. So I assumed that my participant evaluations would be glowing.

They were.

Then I scrolled down to those add-on, narrative comments: “I liked the communications woman’s accent.” “Love that accent!” “She’s really cute!”

Gulp. What about my carefully prepared content?

Outside of work, I was also building a career as a creative writer. My publications and bylines landed me on some book-discussion panels and public presentations.

More than once, an audience member would approach the podium to say: “Heck, with that accent, you could stand there and read the phone book, and I’d sit here and listen.”

But here’s the thing: I didn't want to read any phone books. I didn't want to have crossed an ocean and navigated a whole new country just to achieve “cute.”

Then came our 21st-century recession. And with it came a lot less room, a much narrower tolerance, for blather or swagger. In a 2008, 8-10% unemployment America, in an America where both the communications and the publishing industries were changing and dipping faster than the NASDAQ, it took real, hard-core skills to snag a new job. And, in a perpetually merging and downsized workplace, keeping that job means being trained, ready, and willing to produce the goods.

I find this delightful. I find it really freeing. Without the cultural distractions, I’m just another middle-aged woman with a skill base that's continually challenged and updated. I'm a woman valued for what I know and what I can do, not for where I came from.

Still, since that day in the lunchtime cafeteria, I have imagined myself turning to those women and regaling them with enough hardscrabble childhood stories to put them off their sandwiches. Like how I remember reaching for the family sugar bowl to sweeten my morning porridge only to discover that the mice had (again) decided to deposit their—ahem—food additives in there. Or how, without indoor plumbing or central heating, a kid needs both skill and stamina to snag herself a Saturday-night bath. Or how infuriating it was to finish all my third-grade homework only to get up in the morning and find it (again) stained with brown rain leaked through the thatch roof.

We weren't a poor family. Thanks to my father’s double life as a weekday truck driver and a weekend farmer, we were actually quite well off—at least by 1970s rural Ireland standards, and at least by how we viewed ourselves or, indeed, where we ranked in our village's socio-economic pyramid. Based on what I overhead at that lunchtime table, our set-up probably didn't match how those women grew up, but in our village primary school, most of my classmates had live-in grandparents. The lucky among us had a pair of good shoes just for Sunday, plus a warm winter coat. If it had once been a sister’s or a cousin’s coat, what difference?

But in that imaginary lunch speech, the glossary becomes longer than the actual content. There are more cultural footnotes, more lost-in-translation asides than any of us would have time for.

And anyway, from our company dress codes to our bullet-pointed, buzzwordy chatter, today’s workplaces breed a certain homogenization. We assume that most or all of us watched after-school TV and used the microwave on the kitchen shelf and went to U.S. colleges where Dad delivered us for freshman orientation and Mom kitted out our dormitory with a mini-fridge.

There are those of us who didn’t. There are those of us who get up in the morning and stand under the shower belting out a foreign-language song. We go home at night to dream in another language. But in our fluorescent, white-walled workplaces, we abandon all that in the downstairs lobby. Why? Because, as I learned the hard way, the socio-economic dissonance and the cultural quirks can eclipse what’s really there, what we can really do.

I can improve America. There. For 20-plus years now, I’ve been longing to just come out and say that. In my own small way, in my creative and working life, I believe that I can be the softly spoken (ha!) but persistent voice for better healthcare, better education, and fairer public policies—the kinds of policies that let kids go to bed at night with full bellies and go to school in the morning without a bullet-proof backpack.

But tell me: How can a woman improve a country, how can she write or fight for anything—anything worthwhile, anyway—if all she’s considered by the people around her is “cute?”

Brendan West is a New Zealand tax resident. He works full time at Mitre 10 Mega. He is also a musician and works part time at the local bar on Fridays and Saturdays. Brendan received the following gross amounts during the year ended 31 March 2019.

Ref   Description   Source   Amount $
          
1   Salary   Mitre 10 Mega   58,000
2   Bar income   Local bar   15,000
3   Interest   ANZ Bank   200
4   Garage sale receipts   Various people   1,000
5   Dividends   Fletcher Building Ltd   600
6   Tips   Various fans   400
7   Board fees   School Board of Trustees   980
8   Lotto- Powerball winnings   LOTTO New Zealand   750
9   Free Holiday voucher   Mitre 10 Mega   350
10   Loan   Kiwi Bank   14,000

Supplementary Notes - the numbers in this section refer to the items in the table above.
1.PAYE of $10,420 was deducted by Mitre 10 Mega.
2.Brendan worked part time as a musician at the local bar (as an independent contractor).
3.Brendan provided his IRD number to ANZ Bank and RWT was deducted at 30%.
4.Brendan had a garage sale to sell items that he did not need.
5.This dividend from Fletcher Building Ltd was fully imputed and an appropriate amount of RWT was deducted.
6.Brendan received cash tips from his part time work at the local bar.
7.Brendan is on the Board of Trustees of the local primary school. Withholding tax of $280 was deducted from this amount.
8.Brendan won various amounts playing Lotto during the year.
9.To recognise 20 years of service, he received a $350 gift voucher from Mitre 10 Mega
10.Brendan took a loan of $14,000 from Kiwibank to renovate his house.

Brendan made the following payments during the 2019 income year:

Fees of $750 for preparing his income tax return;
Loss of income protection insurance premiums $860;
Provisional tax $3,800
Costs of transporting musical instruments to local bar where he worked as a musician $2,600.
Interest on loan $3,200.

Required:
For the year ended 31 March 2019, calculate Brendan’s income tax liability and the terminal tax to be paid or tax refund.

Salaries for teachers in a particular elementary school district are normally distributed with a mean of $44,000 and a standard deviation of $6,500. We randomly survey ten teachers from that district. Find the 85th percentile for the sum of the sampled teacher's salaries to 2 decimal places.

how school districts are currently being affected by COVID-19 and possible issues come Fall. Will schools reopen in the Fall? If they do not, how will this affect families? What about budget cuts in the upcoming year, pass/fail options, and potential layoffs?