Taxes
 

Ugh I am annoyed and need to vent. I think its ridiculous married people that make good money and have no kids get taxed so much. I thought I was going to get money back this year since my hubby and I both claim 0 and they took out so much in taxes this year. So I did my taxes on tax slayer and we owe $347!! Grr, I am beyond annoyed. Meanwhile all the people I know that have kids are getting between 2-8k back. What I also thought was crap was my friends with no kids who are trying to get preggers were able to write that off as well. I mean come on. Thats just ridiculous!!! I get to hear about how my friends are all taking vacations and buying stuff for their house which is beyond annoying. Everybody tells me I should be happy I make good money but in reality my hubby and I pay so much in taxes that we really dont make much more than we did 5 years ago.

Oh please. At least you get a break as a married couple. When you're single with no dependents, you really, really get it up the backside. To add insult to injury, I was slapped with AMT last year. And I barely take home half of what I earn as it is. And NY/NYC has the highest state income tax and property taxes in the nation. And NYC sales tax is very high too- 8.65% I really wonder where all of my money goes... it surely doesn't go towards pothole repair!

yeah i guess the married thing helps but then again we got cash back last year so i guess i find it so odd to owe this year. its just annoying when everybody i know is getting so much money back and i am scraping to pay my real estate taxes. grr!! i feel for you with paying so much in taxes. that sucks. what is AMT if you dont mind me asking?

Well...
 

before Debbie passed, we always got about $600-$700 every year, just by claiming "joint married at a higher amount" on our tax papers provided by work. Hell, we were both would've been happy to not have to pay taxes even if it meant no refund...And we never paid taxes one single time to either state or federal, always a refund.

Only thing that annoyed me tax wise since her death was the IRS LOSING all my paperwork last year I mailed in for the "First Time Homeowner Credit"...Instead of having the refund by the usual time of the beginning of March - it was the first week in JUNE!

I received a letter from the IRS in November stating that if I moved from the residence (Within the next 3 years) I claimed on the credit I would have to payback the amount of the credit...Gee, if one pays off their 'mortgage' doesnt that sometimes mean they're planning on STAYING in the home? :D


On the positive/humourous side of taxes - I was trying to decided in December 2010 if I needed to split my "property tax" for the home into 2 payments (Which is an option in the county I live in - One payment before December 31,2010 and the other is due before March 31,2011) but decided "why split a tax bill of $12.84 into 2 payments?" :lol:

yeah we both claim 0 but we didnt choose the withhold at higher single rate option. i tried that once when i first started working at pitt but they ended up taking an extra $400 a month in federal and that was just way too much. i was really shocked this year to not get any money back since you figure our mortgage interest was around 10k alone. we gave some money to charity and donated stuff and things like that so i was really expecting a nice refund. $347 isnt much to owe thats for sure but its just odd to have to owe when we are getting so much taken out of our paychecks.
that is crazy about the IRS losing paperwork for the first time homebuyers credit but i have heard about that happening more than once thats for sure. i think they purposely say they lost it or something. that is crazy to know that you would have to pay that money back if you sold your house in 3 years. thats so stupid especially since you paid off your house, ha! idiots!
wow now that is some seriously low propery taxes!!! awesome! i thought that the $1354 a year i was paying was low -ha ha!! sweetness.

one thing that confuses me when doing my taxes online. there was a question where it asked if you got a refund last year and i said yes and then it had me enter the amount. i put in the $715 we got back last year and noticed it added it as income. so if this is the case wouldnt all the people i know that get 2-8k back have to put that as income on their returns too? if so i would think that would jack up their income enough that they wouldnt get nearly as much back next year right?

To be honest, I still don't quite understand Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). You can read about it, but it's all gibberish to me:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_minimum_tax

In a nutshell, it used to be a way to make sure "rich" people don't itemize their way out of paying income tax. However, the threshold for AMT was set a very, very long time ago when nominal income was much lower and is now totally out of sync with the times; "middle class" people are starting to get hit with it. I had to pay for an additional worksheet plus paying some amount in addition to my customary returns. Good grief!

Correct. Anything you got back last year is considered "income" since you technically didn't pay taxes on it when it was withheld from your paycheck.

yeah i dont understand it all either but its total sh*t. ridiculous!! they need to change the threshold for the AMT like STAT because these days even making 100k really isnt that much. everything costs so much more now. i feel for you for having to pay extra for that crap. its so not fair!

gotcha! thanks i was wondering about that!!

my husband claims 2, there are 3 of us~ we usually get 2-3 grand back, but this yr we got 4500.00 because i had to put in a new furnace & got a tax credit for that~ they tax the crap out of my husband's pay because he works buko overtime, so even when we didn't have a kid, we got back around 900.00~

Good grief. Don't you people have schools and roads to fund? :shrug: My property tax this year will be over $6000, and that is considered cheap for the area! And my lot is tiny- barely a third of an acre. Supposedly it costs each child attending the local public school system something like $12,000/year, which is basically like a university education. What is all this money being spent on? Ipads? What happened to just teaching reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic? Sure, I am all for increasing education spending if there was actually something to show for it. But these kids are just as smart/dumb as ever, despite the parabolic increase in spending over the past decade. It's seriously time to stop spending money on polo, swimming pools and golf.

wow that is awesome! i am soo jealous! :)

you know another thing that kinda bothers me is that my hubby and i dont plan on having any kids. so i think its crap that we have to pay school taxes for other people's kids. there should be a tax deduction or something if you dont have kids or if you do have kids and they arent going to a public school. no reason to have to pay for it if your not using it. i know i know this will never change but its annoying!!

Well, I do think that access to a quality public school education is a right for all citizens, and as a fellow citizen I am willing to pay my share of it. It's a good idea that is poor in execution. The school systems around here are full of micro-districts full of highly paid administrative staff who really do not do any kind of teaching whatsoever, yet they receive incredibly generous union benefits and pensions. Schools should be administered on a county or state level rather than on a town-by-town level. And there is so much money spent on expensive pursuits that don't improve test scores and don't prepare kids for higher education or life in general, e.g., ice hockey, water polo, golf, tennis, etc. The priority should be on math, science and English, period, as well as some life skills like home economics. Only kids who excel in these areas should be allowed to pursue extracurricular activities (at parents' expense). With all of this excessive access to technology in the classroom, kids are no longer required to learn how to think or learn how to solve problems. Why bother when all of the answers you need are just a few swipes away on your iPad, right?

Don't know...
 

but that's one of the pluses of this county I live in...Low taxes (Property and county, which I think is 4%)

Roads were fixed (And maintained) a long time ago by "Tribal DOT's", the schools here are fine because they focus on education moreso than 'making sure each student has a PC to do their work upon' crap like larger districts do these days (They actually do better in statewide testing than the schools in the large Oklahoma metros of Tulsa & OKC), so I can't honestly say where my $12.84 went to.



Forgot to add, when Oklahoma 'legalized' gambling (Including horse racing, casinos & lotteries) a percentage of money made by betting on horses, the sell of lottery tickets and profits made by "Tribal Casinos" goes straight to public education. In the past 5 years there were more "tribal casinos" built in this area I live in than probably out West (Including the new Kiowa Casino located only 1 mile on highway 9 from where Debbie passed from this existence from...Which I find kinda humourous, I guess her spirit can have someplace 'fun' to haunt.)

i get what you're saying there about the school taxes~ i pay school taxes on a district that my son isn't even eligible to attend~ that is why i home school him~ when i inquired about this & a whole bunch of other BS, like why my son cannot ride the bus & such, they told me because he is white & wouldn't change the social educational background of the school any...WTF?!?!?!?!? IS THAT?!?!?!?~ he is due o start middle school next year & i want him w/ more kids his own age so being w/ me 24/7 won't turn him into "norman bates", where "a boy's best friend is his mother...":laugh:~

i have went to the local news & everything, no one will help, so i am looking into getting an attorney, about the school system, not the taxes:confused:~

wow talk about a load of bs. geesh!! i would get an attorney as well. that is such crap!!!

Wow.

Location, location, location......

I've got a 4 bedroom house, on 5 acres, with an inground pool. Before the real estate market hit the fan, it was worth about 250K, and my taxes are 2K, and I thought that was high!? Well, for here, it is.

I believe our state passed a 1% cap on homeowners property taxes, and 2% on commercial properties, a couple of years ago.

And I DO agree with the no kid rant, on taxes. BECAUSE the people who have 6 kids, are almost always, the ones who don't pay ANY taxes. Which is bullsh*t, in my book. Those who can't afford kids, shouldn't be having them. But it seems like it's always the ones who can't afford them, that keep shooting them out of their like basketballs.:lol:

Hehehehe...
 

"You know how I define the economic and social classes in this country? The upper class keeps all of the money, pays none of the taxes. The middle class pays all of the taxes, does all of the work. The poor are there... just to scare the **** out of the middle class. Keep 'em showing up at those jobs." - George Carlin

that is soooo true!!!

yeah the school districts in the area i live in are pretty bad as well. when i graduated high school in 1995 i didnt have to take geometry. so when i went to college and tried to take calc and some other math classes i kept failing even with a tutor. how the heck can you not make geometry a requirement? we used to have this teacher that would show up drunk to class everyday and we even found a liquor bottle under her hat and nobody would do anything. she was there for 20 years and they werent getting rid of her no matter what. most of the teachers at my school didnt care one bit. so many people i knew went to community college and had to take foundation classes because they were all so far behind. ridiculous! i live in the city and the schools in the city are so much worse. the drop out rate is super high and the test scores are well below passing. its ridiculous to pay so much and have such crappy schools. because i live in the city i pay 3% for the school and local taxes and then i pay my real estate taxes of $1354 on top of that.

I read somewhere that you are rich if you make $1000/day, middle class if you make $1000 a week and poor if you make $1000/month. That actually sounds about right!

To add insult to injury, in my little development there are multi-million dollar waterfront properties with docks and boats that are paying only a little more in property taxes than me. I'm landlocked! Why aren't those bastards getting raped over a barrel like me? I would be lucky to sell my house for what the town is assessing it.

Maybe it's time for me to consider a lower cost part of the world to live in. I'm just really starting to wonder why I put up with the lousy weather, lousy traffic, high taxes and expensive real estate. I love NYC and the culture, but sometimes I wonder if I'm missing out on a better quality of life somewhere else. Every day is a struggle.

wow that is so crappy that you are getting taxed so much!! its not fair thats for sure. yeah maybe you should check into moving somewhere else. i live in pittsburgh and the cost of living is pretty low here. i live in the city so its a little more but you can get some cheap nice houses in the suburbs for 50-60k and the taxes on those are nothing. if you dont live in allegheny county the most likely you would pay 1%-2% in taxes so its not too bad. lol the weather isnt the greatest but the traffic and crime are low. believe me i would love to live in nyc but i know that it would be impossible to have the size house i do now and i cant give that up . i would miss my family and i am such a sports nut that i cant ever leave my steelers, panthers or penguins, ha ha!!
i love visiting nyc though. its such an awesome place! my favorite areas are soho and greenwich village. i love coney island too. the idea of hopping on a subway and going anywhere in the city is so cool to me. we have a small subway system here but it really only hits a few places in town and the south hills suburbs. i wish they would expand it to go further down in the southside where i live.

OMG, I took geometry in 10th grade. I was in calculus by my senior year... but by then my "senioritis" started kicking in something fierce, so I slacked my way into failing it. It was no fun trying to make up for it in college. Is it really customary for public schools to stop teaching math after algebra? :shrug: That is so shocking to me... I attended a "magnet school" for science and math, so my curriculum was a bit more rigorous than most, so perhaps I am the outlier!

wow i wish i would have had to take it. we only had to take 3 years of math and we got to choose which math we took. i took algebra 1 & 2 and then business math my senior year. i wish i would have been forced to take geometry thats for sure. it screwed me up in college. i took calc 3 times with a tutor and did practice programs for hours a day and still could not pass it. i got a D and for it to transfer i had to get a C. pisses me off!

Oh, I did my time in Pennsylvania many years ago- 2.9% FLAT state income tax. :thumbsup: Boy do I miss that! And although it took some getting used to, I kind of liked living there- just outside of Philadelphia. It was smack dab in the middle between NYC and DC and it was a breeze to get around. Ironically I met much more interesting people in PA... people I meet in NYC these days tend to be a bit aloof and really, really vapid. I tend to think I am now living amidst a city full of facebook zombies.

thats cool!! it sounds like you were in a great area being close to both nyc and dc. thats nice! i like the people in the area we live because everybody is really nice and its easy to make friends. also people here dont seem to be so self absorbed as they are in other cities. i like that!!

At my high school...
 

you had to have 4 credits of Mathematics above Algebra I to graduate - you had to choose between Algebra I, II, III, Trig., Calculus and Computer Science (aka Business Math)...Glad Math was my favorite subject. 1988 was the first graduating class at MHS (Muskogee High School) where you had to have 24 credits to graduate (4 Math, 4 English, 3 History, 2 Science and the rest were left up to what you wanted to take) but it has since changed due to 'math being too hard' for most.

Ironically, I spent alot of time in my high school years (Mainly 10th,11th & 12th grade) in math classes giving reviews for new music releases and concerts reports to my friends and a few teachers too! I was like the mobile music newspaper back then :D