Ugh. I know I messed up my taxes. Scratch that—TurboTax messed up my taxes by being idiots. Not figuring self-employment tax… Goddammit…
On the upside, I can get over $500 back in property taxes for being a poor little renter. The downside to that is that I won't get money back until August.
I hate the fact that my taxes are simple in actuality, only with about six or eight dollar figures that go in to the equation (they'd be even simpler if I hadn't gotten a new job), but so complicated in practice.
Looking at the federal picture, say we have adjusted gross income (AGI) and self-employment income (SI), with some federal withholding (FW) and federal estimated tax payments (FP) already in the government's hands. I qualify for the standard $4750 and $3050 deductions that apply to a guy like me, and I was in the $6000–28,000 bracket, meaning I had a base tax of $600 and a rate of 15%. Self-employment tax is applied to 92.35% of self-employment income, and is 15.3%.
So, my standard income tax from gross income is
(AGI−4050−3050−6000)×0.15 + 600 = GIT
And my self-employment tax is
SI×0.9235×0.153 = SIT
The total amount I owe to the feds would be
GIT+SIT-FW-FP
So, TurboTax wants to forget about the second (important) bit and charge me $20. Bah. I should have just done it on paper.
Posted by mike at January 29, 2004 01:56 AM | Money , Work | TrackBackWhen I need my taxes done, I take them to the 2004 tax wizard. He pulls a little monkey wearing pink shorts out of his beard and within a few short moments the monkey can do my taxes in full. I thank him with a reward of peanut butter and chocolate milk.
Call me crazy, but i think it's a good system.
Posted by: cactusmonkey at January 29, 2004 11:08 AMAh. Monkeys. Where would we be without them?
Posted by: mike at January 29, 2004 03:42 PMIM CONFUSED! hi thurrrr how be u? im bored.... boooooooored..... stumbled upon ur site by accident... have fun u!
Posted by: WHEE! at March 2, 2004 09:34 AM