I know this is a long shot and I’d say no if someone asked me, but I’ll put it out there just for the hell of it: I run payroll at work, I’d be happy to look at your paystub and see if I can make sense of it. As we’re all thinking, it looks like either you left something out or you’re misreading it. If you were interested (and, again, I’m just putting it out there) redact all the personal info and probably all the YTD stuff.
Of course, this is moot if you read the thread and figure out what’s going on.
I didn’t say that. I didn’t count that in the “62”.
Nope
I don’t believe it either. But there it is.
I did make a small error. I meant to type “Federal” but typed “FICA.” Nevertheless, the amount is correct, and the final check is 28% of the gross earnings.
The medical premiums. 62% is the government’s haul, almost 10% to insurance companies, and 28% to me. I said the government took 62%, but my OP lists about 72% of deductions.
So you obviously live in California since no other state has an income tax rate about 12%. In order to break 12.3% in California your income is $526,444 or higher. I agree that it sucks to pay that much in taxes but that’s what you get for living in California.
As has been stated else where someone is screwing up your FICA payments badly and you should probably go talk to them since you’ll get back close to 10% there and should be paying just over half your marginal money to the government.
All that being said I’ve kind of been there and it sucks to pay more in taxes then most people make in income, I had one year with six figures in total taxes so I can kind of relate, but you’ve just got to look at the bright side and realize that you just took home more than $550/day after taxes and from that you make roughly $23/hour to sleep.
W-4 wouldn’t explain why FICA above and beyond the limit was taken out, even assuming it’s at rate for self-employment. The payroll department is either incredibly screwed up or Chessic is leaving something out.
None of the numbers makes sense. Even a 12.5% state income tax can’t be right. California tops out at 12.3% (marginal, not total) unless you make more than $1 million.
But you still didn’t answer any of the questions:
Divide your take home by your gross earnings. Does it really come to .28?
Are you sure you’re not adding (purposely or because it’s the way it’s written on your stub) your portion as well as the employer’s portion of medicare and SS? That would cause some confusion. I’ve had many employees over the years get their first paycheck and ask me why I’m taking takes out twice, after explaining it to them and sometimes doing the math in front of them (to show that the “employer contribution” is, more or less, just for show), do they begin to understand.
Also, remember that taxes are taken out after insurance premiums. It’s not going to move the needle much in the is case but it’s something to keep in mind.
And just to reiterate, FICA is a combination if Medicare and Social security and your FICA number seems to be (very possibly coincidentally) some odd combination of the correct numbers and the numbers your posted.
What this comes down to is that unless we see your pay stub the logical conclusion is that this is either a math error or misunderstanding on your end. Again, it would really be helpful if you would check to see if your take home is, in fact, 28% of your gross or it it was a simple error.
If it is in fact a payroll error, the payroll software I work with for a small company (Quickbooks) doesn’t let you set FICA for individual employees only state and fed withholding. Changing your withholding numbers will force Quickbooks to attempt to ‘catch up’ so that it’s where you want it to be by the end of the year. I can’t say if that would happen with FICA numbers.
Now I’m curious if that’s even a number I can change. I do know that it comes down from the software updates, but I’ve never tried to adjust it on my own.
For sure. With health insurance premiums being pre-tax, that implies an annualized premium of over $70k. He might as well hire a full-time personal physician.
I certainly don’t make that much money. Either this is a drastic error or it’ll fix itself next paycheck. I sure hope so.
Yes. Check amount/gross earnings = .2798
It doesn’t specifically say on the check, but the numbers check out anyhow. Gross - taxes - premiums = check amount. It’s not like there’s some other number shown (employer share or otherwise) that isn’t subtracted from my total.
That solves one mystery. After taking out the premiums, tax withholdings are almost exactly 35%.
Not a mistake. It’s 27.98% I’m sure you’ll forgive the rounding.
This is the most likely cause. I did give a W-4, but perhaps they didn’t file/load/apply/use it yet. I suppose we’ll learn next paycheck, eh?
But even if there is a logical explanation, it’s Pit-worthy that this happens in the first place. Nobody should start a new job and have to figure out a way to streeeetch the household finances to cover a gap in paperwork. The IRS shouldn’t be able to say “I’m just gonna hang onto this $$ for a few months, I’m sure you won’t mind.”
22%, I’d still bitch about, but could understand. 35%?! On top of FICA?! Then get hit up by the state, too?! It’s too much!
I propose a new regulation: If you want to play the “We don’t have a W-4, so we’ll assume you’re a millionaire” game, you have to wait for a full-time paycheck or the third paycheck, whichever comes first. Until then, the taxpayer gets treated like he or she makes just their salary, not like they might have made $500,000 before starting the new job.
It’s not “We don’t have a W4 so we’ll assume you’re a millionaire.” It’s “We don’t have a W4 so we’ll assume you are single and don’t have any withholding allowances.” Some people deliberately do not claim any withholding allowances for various reasons- someone else claims them as a dependent or they have other income not subject to withholding etc.
But if this is what happened, it’s your employer’s fault, not the IRS’s. I don’t think the W4 even goes to the IRS under normal circumstances. If you completed the W4, there’s no reason the taxes couldn’t be properly withheld from your first paycheck.
There’s a calculator here that you can use to see how much should be withheld if your employer is using the single, no exemption rate. If the number doesn’t match your paycheck, there is some other problem.
Forget federal income tax withholding, none of that explains why FICA and state income tax withholding vastly exceeds the appropriate percentages, either.
Things still aren’t adding up. There’s no reason to ever take more than 6.2% for social security and 1.45% for medicare in this case (apparently not self-employed). So, why is Chessic Sense reporting way more than twice that amount deducted from the paycheck for these items? Likewise, there’s no reasonable way that 12.5% is deducted for state income tax, even in California. This company or the OP is failing at some really basic arithmetic.
The math is beyond wonky to the extent that we absolutely SHOULD be bitching at the government - for educating our kids so poorly that we must suffer the bad math in this thread. Fund the schools, goddamnit, and we won’t have to suffer stupidity on this scale.
Regarding the W-4 thing, that had no bearing whatsoever on your FICA tax. Your W-4 is used to calculated your state and federal withholding. I think someone upthread said you’re in California. That means your should be filing a DE 4 for your state withholding. If it’s anything like it is in Wisconsin, if your employer doesn’t have that paperwork on file, they just file you as Single with no exemptions. That’s not going to change your take home from 70% to 30%. For most people, adjusting those numbers changes their pay by a few dollars one way or the other.
Also, as I said earlier, when you change those numbers, the payroll software will work to ‘catch up’. So while I’m not sure quite exactly what you’re proposing (Again, I really don’t think you understand how payroll tax works) but as for ‘who would disagree’ it would probably be the people that do finally turn in the paperwork and get a bunch of $12 paychecks to make up for all the huge ones they got because they claimed 0 exemptions.
Also, it should say right on your paystub what your exemptions are. Single 0/0 or Married 2/1. See any numbers along that line or anything that says Married or single?
It’s his portion plus his employer’s portion (12.4 and 2.9) divided into the gross when it should be divided into [gross - untaxed insurance premium]so it appears higher.
ETA, it should be just his portion divided by [gross - untaxed insurance premium].
But if his take home really is 28%, something somewhere is really wrong.
Of course, we can see right in the OP he (or in the very unlikely case his employer) is quadrupling his FICA taxes.
Still shouldn’t be that high. Even with some weird math, you can maybe get up to 14.2%, not 14.9% for social security and just over 3%, not 3.5% for medicare.
I’m not seeing a way to get up to 14.9% even from 12.9% or 3.5% from 2.9% without some incredibly poor reading of the paystub combined with some bad arithmetic.
I’m not really seeing a way to get these numbers without the OP being wrong in at least some way, even if the employer has some issue with the amount of federal withholding.
Chessic is getting seriously ripped off by his employer, either accidentally or purposely.
Chessic is telling stories (I have no reason to believe this is the case).
Chessic, do you feel like blacking out all personal information on your pay stub and uploading a picture of it? If scenario 1 is the case, we can help you decipher it. If scenario 2 is the case, we can help you document your case for the correct legal authorities.
Can we dispense with this theory already? I don’t care how strongly Antibob thinks I’m incapable of division, I’m not miscalculating my numbers. If I were, I would notice that the pieces aren’t adding to 100% or that there’s money in my “Net Pay” column that doesn’t belong there.
Most likely.
Nor should you.
Heeeeeeell no. That’s, like, a 9 on the “really bad idea” scale.
