[Wednesday’s run: 3 miles, Saturday: 6 miles in Mines of Spain]
We have an appointment with the tax accountant tomorrow. I am not much of an accountant. I usually used TurboTax for our tax work and year after year it was pretty much the same. Our annual income went up by about, maybe a bit more than inflation. So it was straightforward stuff.
But last year I retired, received a lump sum payout of my accrued vacation, moved to a new state, started a new job, rented the old house. And there was a major change in the tax withholding laws. So it was a bit of a mess. We hired a tax man. We ended up paying a bit at tax time.
I was thinking this year would be about the same. I’m at my new job, the household income is less than last year but greater than previous years. And I am not betting the farm on charitable deductions. But it looks like we are going to take a bigger spanking this year than last year. Much bigger.
I think the thing that saved last year from being worse was that lump sum distribution. About half of that went straight to taxes. This year we didn’t have that, and our multiple sources of income are not withholding as much as they should. Ah well. I’ll be sending checks to the IRS until we get it paid off.
One of the jobs for tomorrow is to figure out how to adjust the withholdings to make next year a bit less painful.
One reply on “Taxing”
The standard deduction is huge after the 2017 tax changes. That makes the decision about itemizing much simpler for people. It also removes that added incentive to give to charities and churches and, personally, I thought that was interesting given the politicians that voted for the change (no Democrats did) were largely supported by right wing religious folk. Usually, the politicians understand which side their bread is buttered on but in this case they just ignored that and did the opposite. (There were *huge* tax deductions for business – to the point there was increase to structural deficits.)