tax-season
And so another tax-season drifts into the filmy past.
Our final income-tax, the Fed, will get mailed off this morning at the vaunted West Bloomfield post-office, certified, return-receipt requested.
The New York State Income-Tax got mailed yesterday (Monday, April 16, 2007).
We owe the Feds over $1,000 — the State owes us 400 smackaroos — for which reason we may get penalized by the Feds.
Withholding amounts will need to be dickered: the Feds up, the State down.
The amounts we set up earlier were a ballpark figure; but are obviously being thrown off by job-income at the beginning of the year.
Our income was almost what it was when we worked — maybe $15,000 less. We didn’t have to hit our savings at all.
Federal withholding will have to be increased against Linda’s pension (mine is a lot smaller), and/or our Social Security.
I did the income-tax myself — unlike Bill (I guess, or like Jack), we don’t have 89 bazilyun sources of dividend-income. In fact, what income our 401(k) investments (they’re mutual-finds) generate is automatically reinvested, so we never see it. I.e. it isn’t declarable income.
So our income-tax went fairly easily, and in fact kept getting put off because of that.
Schedule-A just about fills in itself, since I have an Excel spreadsheet that gives me the totals — and it’s updated throughout the year.
And there is the fact all the forms are fillable online PDFs, which put the kabosh to filling in forms by-hand, and possibly mucking-up.
Linda did most of these. I did one, and all the pencil-throughs. The PDFs are just formalizing the pencil-throughs.
Linda also made spreadsheets that totaled the entries on the forms: a way of verifying math.
Now, you’d think the gumint could advance farther into the new century. If they can PDF the forms, they should functionalize the forms — even come up with your tax, instead of the taxpayer trying to make sense of a contorted table.
You’d think they might want to do that, like to lessen the likelihood of taxpayer foul ups — but NO!
Another advancement was that the PDFs cranked-in Linda’s Social-Security number automagically. Apparently the gumint has decided that Linda and I are married. (Almost 40 years.)
And then there is New York State, which sloughed off W-2 (and 1099) information onto the taxpayer. “Do not attach W-2s or 1099s under penalty of law — include forms IT-2 and 1099-R which summarize your W-2s and 1099s.” (Visions of the mattress-tag police. Uniformed buzzcut minions eying us taxpayers warily with binoculars out of white idling antenna-festooned Econolines.)
This despite strict admonition that part of the W-2 and 1099 are for attachment to the state income-tax.
As a result, the state income-tax increases to four pieces of paper, thereby complying with Paperwork-Reduction by doubling the paper used.
IT-201 (the New York State Income-Tax long-form) already doubled from one to two sheets (back-and-front means filling in four pieces of paper).
Thankfully, no undecipherable hairballs this year.
At first, the Social-Security worksheet seemed to have circular reasoning, but on further perusal it didn’t.
No “amounts-less-than-zero.” I wrote a column about that that ran long ago in the mighty Mezz. To me that made no sense, because zero was as small as it got.
There was a line of the 1040-Fed for figuring your tax-penalty, but that referred to another form (2210) from which I gleaned the gibberish I posted last night.
We passed. Their advice was that the form was so undecipherable that you should let the gumint figure if you should pay a penalty — that it was only a way to justify not paying a penalty.
Our final income-tax, the Fed, will get mailed off this morning at the vaunted West Bloomfield post-office, certified, return-receipt requested.
The New York State Income-Tax got mailed yesterday (Monday, April 16, 2007).
We owe the Feds over $1,000 — the State owes us 400 smackaroos — for which reason we may get penalized by the Feds.
Withholding amounts will need to be dickered: the Feds up, the State down.
The amounts we set up earlier were a ballpark figure; but are obviously being thrown off by job-income at the beginning of the year.
Our income was almost what it was when we worked — maybe $15,000 less. We didn’t have to hit our savings at all.
Federal withholding will have to be increased against Linda’s pension (mine is a lot smaller), and/or our Social Security.
I did the income-tax myself — unlike Bill (I guess, or like Jack), we don’t have 89 bazilyun sources of dividend-income. In fact, what income our 401(k) investments (they’re mutual-finds) generate is automatically reinvested, so we never see it. I.e. it isn’t declarable income.
So our income-tax went fairly easily, and in fact kept getting put off because of that.
Schedule-A just about fills in itself, since I have an Excel spreadsheet that gives me the totals — and it’s updated throughout the year.
And there is the fact all the forms are fillable online PDFs, which put the kabosh to filling in forms by-hand, and possibly mucking-up.
Linda did most of these. I did one, and all the pencil-throughs. The PDFs are just formalizing the pencil-throughs.
Linda also made spreadsheets that totaled the entries on the forms: a way of verifying math.
Now, you’d think the gumint could advance farther into the new century. If they can PDF the forms, they should functionalize the forms — even come up with your tax, instead of the taxpayer trying to make sense of a contorted table.
You’d think they might want to do that, like to lessen the likelihood of taxpayer foul ups — but NO!
Another advancement was that the PDFs cranked-in Linda’s Social-Security number automagically. Apparently the gumint has decided that Linda and I are married. (Almost 40 years.)
And then there is New York State, which sloughed off W-2 (and 1099) information onto the taxpayer. “Do not attach W-2s or 1099s under penalty of law — include forms IT-2 and 1099-R which summarize your W-2s and 1099s.” (Visions of the mattress-tag police. Uniformed buzzcut minions eying us taxpayers warily with binoculars out of white idling antenna-festooned Econolines.)
This despite strict admonition that part of the W-2 and 1099 are for attachment to the state income-tax.
As a result, the state income-tax increases to four pieces of paper, thereby complying with Paperwork-Reduction by doubling the paper used.
IT-201 (the New York State Income-Tax long-form) already doubled from one to two sheets (back-and-front means filling in four pieces of paper).
Thankfully, no undecipherable hairballs this year.
At first, the Social-Security worksheet seemed to have circular reasoning, but on further perusal it didn’t.
No “amounts-less-than-zero.” I wrote a column about that that ran long ago in the mighty Mezz. To me that made no sense, because zero was as small as it got.
There was a line of the 1040-Fed for figuring your tax-penalty, but that referred to another form (2210) from which I gleaned the gibberish I posted last night.
We passed. Their advice was that the form was so undecipherable that you should let the gumint figure if you should pay a penalty — that it was only a way to justify not paying a penalty.
posted by BobbaLew at 9:42 AM
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