Planning on being west of STL

Humidity, oh well, can't be as bad as Florida lol. Drivers in the area where I visited seemed just fine compared to out here. Yea.. sorta scared about the snow/ice factor when driving but... I figure I'll be moving in Spring/Summer so I won't have to worry about it lol.

 

Actually, this isn't a bad idea at all. You get the benefits of KNOWING you'll never see a crazy tax bill, and you'll get an unplanned short-term infusion of cash to hopefully pay down high-interest revolving debt. It's the equivalent of sending XXX dollars to savings every month, with the discipline to tap into it only once per year.

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Everyone's a democrat until they start making money and paying taxes.

 

By bad financial strategy, I was referring to that once you get situated in life (ie can calculate pretty close to what your taxes are going to be), you should be able to get within a couple hundred bucks - / +.

The bad part is that by me getting a big return, I essentially gave the government an interest free loan for the entire year. Figure I'll be getting around a 10k return, I could have invested that money (though not the best year for it) and easily seen a 5% return on it.

Unfortunately, I'm not settled yet, so my taxes jump everywhere year to year.

 

Wow... I had no idea you were talking those kinds of numbers. I would advocate paying $100 or $200 per month more than what is estimated, not $800 or $1000.

However, if your final amount of return each year is $10k, then your average amount of money is approx. $5k, then you're only looking at losing about $250 per year. Sure, it's very rough estimate, but good enough for illustrative purposes.

BTW- if you can afford to put $800 per month towards the government (essentially nothing).... why are you driving a scion? :D ...


.... I cant wait until actually make money... it'll be nice...

 

Well, usually I wouldn't be paying nearly that much extra to the government, but buying a new house and paying a ton of interest throughout the year, plus getting married and not really messing my wife and I's withholdings = large return.

I usually aim for the $1500-2000 mark for a return, but yeah, I didn't really mess with it this year as the large return could really help.

And as far as why a Scion. It's just for a few years. Needed to pay for a wedding, put a down payment on the house, furnish the new house, buy the wife a car (within the next few weeks...probably 2005 BMW 330. Sucks they made the new body style so ugly), pay off some college debt (bar tabs add up quick), etc. Probably once the Scion is paid off (2.5 years at minimum payments), I'll upgrade to something else (Sti or Evo I'm guessing, but depends on if I have kids or not).

 

no state taxes here in texas!!...

so im getting around 1200-1500 back...

 

I'll be getting just over a grand back for FED and that is after paying $0 in all year. However my state is horrible. I paied around $1600 to state and only getting $49 back and the kicker is i paid $52 to file my state taxes, so I take a $3 loss just to send it in.