So tonight I decided to do my taxes online so I can get a quick refund, since I’m jobless as of Friday and the few extra dollars could come in handy.
Not having any fanchy-schmancy itemized deductions, I took the standard one and bing, bang, boom…I owe over a hundred dollars.
God damn my fucking employer. I received a 10 % raise for doing a good job in February, and a 5% yearly raise in July (since it goes by the fiscal year.) Of course, does my employer do the smart thing and increase my tax dedictions? Apparantly not, since this is the only God-damn reason I can think of of why I would owe money. Fuck them. Fuck them in their ear. I was really hoping to get a nice refund to help out with bills and such, and now I find out that I am making myself worse off financially. Is this standard fare for an employer? To just go ahead and give me more money and not pay attention to my withholdings? I even attempted to do an itemized dediction, since for half the year I was having a lot of business expenses and had some small medical expenses, but it was still about $1,000 shy of the standard. I’m certainly not going to cheat on my taxes just to avoid a $100 fee, but God damn if it wasn’t tempting to claim I gave away several hundred dollars worth of stuff to charity. Of course, even then, I’d still be few hundred short of being more than the standard, and even if it was a little higher, it wouldn’t be enough to offset what I need to pay.
We pay the feds but the state tosses us a small bone. Ever since the spawn reached the age of majority, we pay. We own our home, but we’re on the “home stretch” so to speak, so not much in the way of interest is paid anymore.
For the purposes of this discussion anyway, in Australia, taxes are paid only on your income, are taken out weekly by your employer, and then passed on to the federal government (who might or might not give you some back at the end of the financial year depending on your deductions etc). For your average PAYE worker, there is no way you can end up with a tax BILL.
Unless you have a HECS debt of course!! HECS (Higher Education Contribution Scheme) is the deferred fee from attending university that the tax-man takes out of your income, either weekly, or at the end of the financial year if you reached the yearly income threshold (currently 36k AUD).
In other words, with my own situation as an example, I earned just $10 under the threshold last year and got a big fat refund cheque of around 2k. Had I earned $36,001, my **debt ** to the tax office would have been around 2k. For a measly $11, there is no way known I was going to incur such a bill.
I can’t think of any time that my employer has ever determined how much to withhold for my taxes. That’s a decision I’ve always made for mysef. How would they know how much you want withheld? Some people get just enough taken out to cover their taxes, some people get a lot more taken out so they get a big refund, and some get the bare minimum taken out so they can just pay the difference in April. I don’t see how an employer could automatically make decisions like that on your behalf.
I lost a child credit because the fucking Social Security somehow was only able to process 2 out of 3 social security number applications. Why the third sister didn’t get processed is beyond me, but there ya go. I lose the tax break and Uncle Sugar takes somehting like 800 bones out.
I’m going to owe about $2,500. But that’s OK because I knew that ahead of time. That $2,500 got me a nice 9% return over the past year in my portfolio.
I can’t honestly imagine this is the case, bouv. I do payroll every two weeks for my firm (with my accountants) and the amount we remove for deductions has, basically, two parts to the equation:
Deductions as specified in your W-2.
Amount earned per paycheck.
So your employer would have automatically deducted more from your check with each pay raise due to your increase in #2 above.
You got an interest free loan from the government for over one hundred dollars. If you’re rather give the government an interest free loan, then it’s up to you to change your withholding.
For 2006 I will no longer have a large (~$4000) deduction due to counseling expenses (yay! For not needing it, I mean), so I should probably take care of this now. I don’t wanna hafta pay extra…
You must make a hell of a lot of money. I make pretty good coin, but 50%? I don’t even think I pay 33%. If your location is correct and you’re in Ontario, you need to hire a better accountant.
Irrespective of what you make, getting hit with a one time tax bill you didn’t expect is what really hurts.
At least here in Canada (Sorry for posting twice) they usually base it on what you’d owe the government assuming you didn’t make any deductions. It’s a very predictable relationship, so they’re, at least in my case, always dead on, and then with deducations I get some dough back.
You CAN ask them to change your deducations but it’s up to you to say so.
Well, then why would I owe money? I can’t recall the specifics when I was hired, but I do remember telling them to withhold the normal amount. Not the bare minimum with the expectation I’d pay more in April, and not more than usual, either. So if they were to withhold every week a percentage of my pay equal to the tax bracket I am in, and that calculated amount went up when my pay went up, then why would I owe money?
I don’t have any savings account, no stocks, bonds, or mutual funds. No interest that I collected, and even paid interest on qualified student loans that can count as a deduction.
I’m just having a hard time understanding why, if over the course of the year, X dollars of my Y dollars per year was withheld, and then at then end of the year I apply the standard deduction and find out I should only have been paying taxes on Z dollars per year (Z<Y), and X suddenly goes up. Shouldn’t it have gone down? Obviously the problem was that not enough money was withheld from my paycheck. I just wish I knew why.
Yeah, that’s how it worked for me. When I was hired, I just said “withhold whatever it says the percentage is for my tax bracket” and thought nothing more of it, thinknig that after some deductions, I would get some money back. But that’s not the case.
I haven’t doen my state taxes yet, so maybe I’ll get some back on that, though at best it will probablty just compensate for what I am paying the federal givernment.
