Taxes!

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.

thankfully i make little enuf that this isn't massive chunks of change we're talking about yet.

grrr.

also how fucked up is mass in that you get taxed MORE (and w/o most deductions, no less!) on out-of-state "investment"!? they only let you take out special in-state deductions for it, insteada the gamut, so my education deduction (which is xo!@%$@#ing huge) does no good.

[on the health insurance tip -- i need to figure out how to make sure the plan is "through" the business or whatever. yeah -- a tax atty could actually have probably saved me $ this year. next time round...]

now, if you fuXors only had money i could make a mint representing yer asses come audit time :-)

that said, yeah if you are self-employed and have business expenses you stand a better chance than if you are just self-employed and have no expenses. also, anything having to do w/ "flow-through entities" (basically, partnerships, limited liability companies, and S corporations) get a closer look (b/c of well-publicized instances of outright fraud wr2 such entities).

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