Weekend Plans Post: Taxes
Maribou and I got married in October and she didn’t start working until, like, the last week in December. When March rolled around and we had to do our taxes, we were delighted to find that, according to the government, I’d been married all year.
Of course, this was back in 1998 and so I was only making around $16k/year ($27k/year in 2022 dollars!) so, like, it’s not like we were rolling in it when we got our tax return a couple months later, but it was a delightful surprise.
Of course, the year after that was the year we miscalculated our withholdings and we had a tax bill that had us tightening our belts for a month so we could get our check to the IRS by April 15th. We immediately laid down a couple of rules. The most important was: No more doing taxes late! None of this mid-March stuff! We were never going to be blindsided again! And since then it’s been a dance of recalibrations, recalibrations, getting bitten, getting twice shy, and recalibrating again.
Well, for us, last weekend was Tax Weekend. We dug out all of our paperwork and dug out the TurboTax disk we bought from Costco and that means we had to find the DVD player now that computers don’t come with them standard anymore and we sit down and Maribou plugs in numbers and we boggle at how much money gets sloshed around before it gets within 10 feet of paycheck and then the tax bracket weirdness with this much at this low rate and this much at that somewhat higher rate and then the figuring out the whole jointly versus separately thing and do you want to take the standard deduction or do you want to itemize and how much interest did you pay on the house last year and how much did you donate and it feels like there’s all this effort that goes into not really paying *THAT* much income tax, at the end of the day (I mean, compared to, like, Canada or Europe).
It’s like there’s all this rigamarole that makes taxes feel like they’re higher than they are.
Well, that’s behind us now. We just have to deal with the aftereffects of being stressed out about doing the taxes.
Good thing it’s President’s Day, I guess. A three day weekend is just what the doctor ordered. Maybe I’ll check out mattress prices.
So… what’s on your docket?
I got a new truck (Toyota Tundra SR5), so I get to play with that this weekend.Report
Theoretically I have D&D on Sunday, but since the bottom of my street is currently infested I don’t know if it will happen.Report
Ah, shame you’re fun has to be inconvenienced by some political protests. Maybe your country shouldn’t have been as iron fisted as it was re covid?Report
No politics.Report
God bless you, sir.Report
No religion.Report
That’s funny. I’ll bet God was invoked at least once during your tax software travails.Report
Multiple ones.Report
I wasn’t the one to bring politics into the convo first my dear Jaybird.Report
Nothing! I have NOTHING! But Arsenal host Brentford tomorrow morning and I’m hoping it’s a healthy dose of revenge for the season-opening embarrassment inflicted on Arsenal in the reverse fixture. And then KU travel to Morgantown to hopefully squeeze out a win over WVU and claim at least a piece of the title (I’ll probably have to run while watching this one because Kansas has a way of finding the most stressful way possible to win).
After that…maybe some laundry? Geez.Report
I always thought it was a hoot to adopt British conjugations when talking about soccer.Report
I’m kinda surprised that anyone still sells software CDs. I’ve been using an online service for years. I got nailed by Sleepy Joe’s (say what you will about the Donald, he was kind of clever with the nicknames) early rebate, so I’ll be kicking about half of it back.
No real plans, and now that MLB is pushing back spring training, the Super Bowl-start of the MLB season gap has made winter just a little bit longer. Time to start thinking about the annual MiLB weekend with my son.Report
Okay. Fine.
If you want the full story, here it is. We purchased the DVD and Activation Code from Costco and they sent us a DVD and Activation Code.
I put in the DVD player that we bought back in 2017 or so and it still had the 2021 TurboTax disc in it.
I swapped out discs and it didn’t read it. Like, the reader died between this year and last year.
So I went to TurboTax.com and spent an hour figuring out how to give the download the code that said “I already paid for this”.
Seriously. That was a pain in the butt. It’s like they wanted you to pay for it a second time.
Anyway, I figured it out and told it “We live in Colorado, we lived in Colorado the last dozen years you asked us this, seriously… nothing has changed.”
And *THEN* we were able to do our taxes.
Which meant that Maribou sat in my chair and I sat in the other chair and I leafed through a D&D book while she did our taxes and, occasionally, told me to go upstairs and find this or that or the other thing.
But that didn’t make a good post.Report
It’s below 20 today and tomorrow, then rainy for the rest of the week. I guess today’s my best chance to do something outside, so I guess I’ll check out the deer trail down the road. It’s been a bad year for seeing deer. I need to commit to going out closer to twilight, but I’d rather have whatever benefit the sun can get me.Report
We had a high in the 60’s today (it made for an absolutely DELIGHTFUL jog) and, tomorrow night, it’s going to hit the teens.
That’s not the worst swing I’ve seen in the shortest amount of time, but I have no doubt that I will be saying stuff like “why do I have a headache?”Report