Daley Ponderings

Taxes weren't too bad to calculate this year, though last year we paid TaxAct, so apparently, they decided we aren't ever allowed to go back to the free version again, unless I sign up with a new username.  So, we ended up just doing them on paper, and discovered that in some ways, TaxAct makes it more difficult, since they require you to type in lots of extra information that isn't actually needed.  e.g. they make you type in all of the contents of the 1099-MISC forms, (and this year we have ten of them or something like that) and really all the IRS wants is a total number for all self-employed income, so the paper version is much quicker.

I did make a $49 math error or something along the way, and of course it was a number that affected almost every other number on every form, so I had to redo all of that again.

But, the good news is that Pennsylvania considers us so poor that they we qualify for tax "forgiveness", and they are going to refund all of our estimated payments, so that is a nice bonus.  Completely crazy that they do that, but I won't argue.  I do need to see if other folks at church know about it, because I previously had assumed we wouldn't qualify for it, but it is based on the number of kids you have, so the larger families can have what I would call large incomes (as in, more than I've ever made).

I have one question for our local tax office, so I am going to go to office hours later this month to figure that out.  We just discovered that they never sent us a refund for last year's taxes, and I am pretty sure the tax officer I talked to last year is wrong, though she insisted I give her less money, so I didn't argue then, but I figure I need to ask every year, since the instructions clearly say that they want to collect taxes on our rental income.

The final total is $2200 for all of our income taxes, not including the $470 rebate for our woodstove, which I don't count as part of the "taxes", since it's more like a coupon for the purchase, rather than anything to do with taxes.

Another thing we discovered is that our health insurance plans still count as a high deductible plan, so we can still contribute to an HSA, so we'll need to see if that makes sense - we would need separate HSAs, and at least with our old HSA plan, that would mean double the monthly fees, but maybe there are better HSAs out there that don't charge fees just for having the account open.