Taxes!

I'm trying to get it done by Tuesday so I can just go to my accountant's and be like, "here's the stuff, it's done, go to it." Then I get to watch my hard-earned checking account drain away. Sigh. It'll be worth it to have it behind me, though.

Nothing was taken from that relatively small amount of profit, but I assume it will absolutely drain any chance I have at a refund. (The last few years have been just under $1K.)

I can't see how I can possibly owe you two grand. I'm sure there are people who make twice as much as me who don't owe fuck.

I r queen of last minute taxes.

suckahs :-P

xpost

anyway, you wind up owing money this way:

if you're married, and you mark "married filing jointly" on your withholding forms at work, they withhold LESS money from your check than they would if you marked "single." this is because the tax system (wrongly, in almost all cases) assumes that if you're married and filing jointly, you're supporting your wife. If both people are working, you have to go through the two-earner, two job worksheet to find out what the difference is b/w what they'll withhold and how much taxes you will actually owe. This is almost always short though for some reason. (note: this is all only true for Federal. State, which is what I owe, doesn't bother to give you a nice worksheet to figure this out. They just say "fuck you", give you no tools to find out how much you owe, and then charge you when you're short. This is called "California is broke and squeezing you for money, bitches.").

If your income fluctuates from month to month because of overtime or bonuses or something, then God help you.

Being married sucks for taxes because of this, and also, this: say you make 70k. Say your spouse make 40k. If you're single, you pay the tax rate for someone making 70k, and your spouse would pay the rate for someone making 40k. But if you're married, you pay the rate for ONE income making 110k. Which is a higher percentage than the others. This means you pay more taxes when you're married than single people making the same money. This is called the marriage penalty and everyone thinks that they got rid of it last year. They did, but only for very low income people. The rest of the country (ie: the middle class) gets fucked.

I always have to pay more, so I procrastinate.

i’m lucky to be able to afford someone to do this for me, as every year i get about $3k back. if it was me doing it i’d either 1) not do it 2) mess it up or 3) spend so long on it that i may as well have paid someone to do it in the first place

133 pages this year. Great system.

Filed in mid-February, got my NJ refund yesterday, which is me cutting my last tie to that state. I are an Montanan now.

Been in the US since last spring, went to see a tax advisor yesterday as we have a slightly confusing set-up with one partner working full-time and income also coming in from a couple of different UK sources. Left the meeting vastly more confused than when I went in, which seems par for the course with accountants going by past experience. Bloody hell I thought dealing with the Inland Revenue was bad!

compared to the inland revenue it is ... unbelievably bad.

Oh jeez Matt#2. This is your first go around then? It is profoundly unpleasant (and expensive).

Been in the US since last spring, went to see a tax advisor yesterday as we have a slightly confusing set-up with one partner working full-time and income also coming in from a couple of different UK sources. Left the meeting vastly more confused than when I went in, which seems par for the course with accountants going by past experience. Bloody hell I thought dealing with the Inland Revenue was bad!

Oh jeez Matt#2. This is your first go around then? It is profoundly unpleasant (and expensive).

American taxes are so dumb. Last year I made a mental error and ended up owing a couple thousand, so I predictably overcorrected for that this year PLUS I didn't account for a couple of changes in our favor — standard deduction went up, IRA contribution limits went up, plus most significantly also our health insurance went from us paying for it ourselves through the marketplace to my wife getting it through work, which means it now comes out pre-tax.

All of which means that even though we on paper made more money this year than last year, our taxable income went down while I boosted my estimated tax payments — so now after owing money last year it looks like we're going to get the biggest refund of our lives this year. Which MAYBE I could've anticipated if I spent more time thinking about all of this or thought about it more than once a year, but anyway it's a dumb system.

And now I'm afraid the big jump in refund will somehow get us audited, but whatever, I think I could survive that.

Every single state and national politician in the USA loves to tinker with the tax code. The result is a mind-boggling complexity that never repeats itself from year to year. The forms keep shape-shifting, the instructions are baroque, credits come and go with bewildering rapidity.

I've kept our financial life as boring and vanilla as it possibly could be and I keep comprehensive records. But I finally gave up doing our taxes because I never knew for sure that the some new wrinkle had been inserted deep into the instructions, so I had to relearn the procedures every year. The tax software helps, but now I just hand it over to a preparer and wash my hands of the whole mess.

I plugged along on my own for some years but I remember Elvis Telecom telling me in the start of the 2000s I should really go for a tax guy. After I realized a couple of long-standing errors in approach that I'd been doing for some time a few years later, I took said advice and frankly I'm all the better for it. My situation is certainly less complex than some but it's not easy plug and play either, and frankly I'll always be reassured knowing someone else's name is on the return as well as mine.

For awhile there weren’t very many changes tbh (between 2000 and 2016) … the last 7 years have been chaotic in comparison. The “evil software companies” love to advertise how many changes there are and how it is just so much that you really need to pay for their software…. the reality is that the vast majority of the changes to the tax code don’t affect the average person’s tax return. Also, as a professional tax person, I have now come around to the concept of the free file, pre-filled click and submit thing for people whose taxes are simple. Like if everything you are taxed on and can deduct is reported to the IRS already, and there isn’t anything else… you shouldn’t have to pay for help or software or spend much time dealing with it.

I can nerd out about it but … yeah, it is dumb

The stupid Trump Cock Jizz Act of 2017 was the biggest set of changes since 1986 … and it has a lot of really stupid provisions that need to go away ASAP

I do my own and it’s medium complex (a bunch of 1099s, plus Burning Ambulance is an LLC) but nothing I can’t handle. People act like taxes are like slide-ruling a mission to Mars but they’re really not IME.

stockholm syndrome

they really did become much more complicated a few years ago for me, but luckily i only have one 1099 this year, so absent some colossal fuckup on our healthcare advocate’s end, we won’t owe money this year— last spring, we got a new coat put on the roof and also owed the IRS $1300 because we made more money than we had predicted on our healthcare forms. doesn’t sound like much but it basically ruined the next four months of our lives.

gonna have to do the installment plan this year :(

It's not impossible to figure out what needs to be done to fill out one's taxes, just detailed, time-consuming and very tiresome. For example, Oregon's lawmakers keep adding credits, then removing them, or changing the qualifications. A few years ago the OR Dept. of Revenue revised their basic tax form from 2 pages to 4 pages. When the big federal tax changes were passed at the tail end of December 2017 it caused states to make cascading revisions to counteract the many punitive features the Republicans inserted just to pwn the libs in the NE and west coast. So, have fun!

People act like taxes are like slide-ruling a mission to Mars but they’re really not IME.

Very much depends on circumstances I think. Mine are more complicated since becoming self-employed, though still not excessively so. We do standard deduction, but if you're in an itemizing-deductions situation, that gets more complicated too. For all the years my wife and were just getting employer W-2s and a little bit of freelance income, yeah, that was easy-peasy.

I have the extra simplicity of living in a state with no income tax. Big change from my NYC years where there was federal, state AND local.

Oregon is a challenge as far as states go, you are otm Aimless. And then there is the Multnomah County form on top of that…

made it