Fucking taxes!!! Why is e-filing MORE expensive than paying someone to do it in person??
It's not. You're just doing it in the wrong place?
Or you make a ludicrous amount of money, I guess.
I read that efiling was supposed to be free and direct from the IRS, but tax preparation lobbyists prevented that from happening.
Free efile is only available if you make less than $60k.
What? How does that make sense? I don't think I've done my taxes on paper once and the rest was via the Australian Tax Office's online tax filing. Condolences your governmental system.
Aren't you saving the IRS money by doing it online and as early as possible (we even get minor bonuses for having ours in early)?
I love when American mass media use 'socialist' as a bad word. Any time a foreign country has 'socialist' tendencies I imagine mass media produces rubbing their palms together, self congratulatory on describing all other countries as being communists. In reality however these countries are just providing public products and services.
However when idiots get into power and want to copy the US model it fucks with our "socialist" ways (counting the days till Tony Abbott gets hammered in an interview again).
Considering how complicated the US tax code is the idea that tax preparation lobbyists would be behind this is not an extraordinary claim. There are a LOT of CPAs that have tax compliance as their sole purpose in life. If we tried to simplify the tax code, even in a sensible way, it would be fought against hard.
Fucking taxes!!! Why is e-filing MORE expensive than paying someone to do it in person??
It's not. You're just doing it in the wrong place?
Or you make a ludicrous amount of money, I guess.
I read that efiling was supposed to be free and direct from the IRS, but tax preparation lobbyists prevented that from happening.
Free efile is only available if you make less than $60k.
I got no sympathy for people who make $60k+ and complain about the cost of filing their taxes. Sorry dude.
I make $60K+ but I live in Connecticut and have crippling medical issues along with my daughter. It's not all wine and roses in this tax bracket. We just finally paid off a bunch of credit accounts and finally might be able to fix our leaking roof and drafty windows.
Fucking taxes!!! Why is e-filing MORE expensive than paying someone to do it in person??
It's not. You're just doing it in the wrong place?
Or you make a ludicrous amount of money, I guess.
I read that efiling was supposed to be free and direct from the IRS, but tax preparation lobbyists prevented that from happening.
Free efile is only available if you make less than $60k.
I got no sympathy for people who make $60k+ and complain about the cost of filing their taxes. Sorry dude.
I make $60K+ but I live in Connecticut and have crippling medical issues along with my daughter. It's not all wine and roses in this tax bracket. We just finally paid off a bunch of credit accounts and finally might be able to fix our leaking roof and drafty windows.
It's somewhere in between. I'm actually grossing about 75 and so is my wife, but you'd be amazed how little ground that $150k in combined gross covers when somebody is in the hospital every year. We live in a falling down 1600 sq ft cape and up until very recently when I cashed out pension funds to pay off a bunch of debt, we were struggling whenever an appliance died or a car went in the shop, etc.
Hoping for much better progress now that we've matured a bit and have much more experience with money and much less need to take on credit than when we were younger.
I got no sympathy for people who make $60k+ and complain about the cost of filing their taxes. Sorry dude.
I make $60K+ but I live in Connecticut and have crippling medical issues along with my daughter. It's not all wine and roses in this tax bracket. We just finally paid off a bunch of credit accounts and finally might be able to fix our leaking roof and drafty windows.
I'm not saying supporting a family on that salary is peaches and cream. Just that it's something like $20k more than I'd be making if I was full time, so using a small chunk of that to pay for tax stuff still puts you ahead.
Is it bullshit that our government doesn't provide its own free efile interface for people who want to do their own taxes? Yeah. It's absolutely bullshit. But complaining that you make too much money to use free efiling is kind of a dick move when you consider that most people in the US don't make it up to the threshold.
Is it bullshit that we have to pay so much for healthcare? Yeah. It's absolutely bullshit. But the people who qualify for free efile are even worse off because they are either (1) going bankrupt to pay for those hospital stays, or (2) not getting care at all.
I'm just asking for a little perspective, not saying you don't have your own problems.
Sadly, most efforts to "simplify" the tax code also seem to become encrusted with add ons that basically mean shifting even more of the tax burden to those who can least afford it. "Fair Tax", etc.
I'm all for making taxes so simple that you don't need an accountant to do them, but not willing to risk the bullshit, twisted result that the current Congress would beat it into. :-/
Somehow, yet another adobe/corel disagreement fucking my day up, except this time, it didn't show till the sample print was complete, cutting into my already limited stock.
Up until I took a state position, our medical premium plus our HSA (required to cover our deductible) was costing us $800/month. We would regularly max our deductible by April or May and then I'd make payments on everything through the end of the year as my HSA populated. I used to do this up front with an FSA, but the ACA changed how all of that works and now we have an HSA paired with our plan, which makes an FSA really inconvenient or impossible to use.
Our mortage/property taxes/home insurance alone are $2025/month, so that's already well above your $20k/year figure before we even get started on other expenses. And we aren't living in a mansion, here.
I'm living on a dead end street in Plainville. There's a meth house on the corner that's been raided twice and refilled with new meth heads twice. We could refinance and get a better rate than our 6.5% if our credit wasn't so shot, but we're basically screwed. Since it's an FHA we might be able to do a streamline, but finding a broker who doesn't make me super suspicious and uncomfortable has proven very difficult, and my understanding is that some sort of downpayment/lump sum is still required and I'm not sure we can budget it.
That includes escrowed taxes, PMI, and home insurance. It's not purely mortgage.
So, I dunno where you live or how your mortgage is so low, but we're not exactly living in a McMansion on 10 acres here. We have a falling down log cape on a quarter acre in a mediocre neighborhood.
Cyclist ran a red light right in front of me as I was crossing at a crosswalk. The fail isn't that he did it, the fail is that I didn't have the reflexes or sense to deck him as he passed.
We also do about $75 per person per week for food but that's $300 for us. Our electric is more than twice yours. Our water and sewer is "free" because we have a well and septic. It probably works out to about $60/year not including the electric to run the well pump. We just got rid of two car payments and four credit card payments (CareCredit and Car Credit among them, so those only sort of pseudo count.)
I'm planning to drive our two vehicles until they die, but I'm slightly tempted to trade the van in on a sedan for the gas savings and because the trade value on the van is still very good for the time being and it's paid off. We'd only have to finance about $7K on a new car. Considering it.
New Milford is way out in the middle of fucking nowhere for us.
Our house is only 1632 sq ft, but Plainville is the geographic center of the state. Shit's expensive here. Not like, Fairfield county expensive, but still.
We fill our oil tank anywhere between 2 and 4 times a year depending on how cold the winter gets (lately, damn cold) and how much firewood we've got (this year, basically none, but last year: tons.)
I keep forgetting my points. Gas in Plainville is like $2.06 right now. If I used my points I'd get at least one fill for what I used to pay for gas when I was in high school.
I tried out the online grocery shopping with one of the large supermarket chains here (Woolworths).
The site seems to be coded in a silly manner, there is no link between the database of the items they have in stock and what is displayed for purchase. The list of purchasable goods updates separate to what is occurring live. In some part this is taken into account when going to checkout, the system checks if items are present and if not you are alerted before any money is passed.
However they then sent an email out 5 minutes before the delivery window stating that one of my items was not in stock and I would be credited for my payment.
I felt as if it was an immature and unfair business practice, to top things off they gave me 2 jars of capers instead of one. The whole point of online shopping is so that you can control your inventory more accurately and the customer can more easily find and purchase the stuff that they want. In this case they failed.
The kind of stupid thing is that if many of your other items are bought in grocery shopping if they are part of a recipe, for example the thing they were out of stock on was mangoes however I was making a mango dessert and had also bought a few other items to make that (which were delivered and paid for). I ended up having to not make my awesome dessert and wait till I can get some more.
If the store could fix these bits up or make the system more accurate like Amazon or any major online retailer I could easily see supermarkets shutting down their large operations and having smaller shops with most of the warehouses delivering groceries.
Yeah, that's been annoying me for a long time. Local chains - including Woolies - will piss and moan about online vendors like amazon, mount lobbying attempts to lower the amount for GST exclusion on imported goods, try to generally block them out of the market, and yet, they can't competently provide an equivalent or even halfway decent service. If they put half as much time and money into making their shit work well as they do whinging and trying to block competitors out of the market, they wouldn't need to be so goddamned worried about them coming and drinking their milkshake.
Comments
How does that make sense?
I don't think I've done my taxes on paper once and the rest was via the Australian Tax Office's online tax filing. Condolences your governmental system.
Aren't you saving the IRS money by doing it online and as early as possible (we even get minor bonuses for having ours in early)?
I love when American mass media use 'socialist' as a bad word. Any time a foreign country has 'socialist' tendencies I imagine mass media produces rubbing their palms together, self congratulatory on describing all other countries as being communists. In reality however these countries are just providing public products and services.
However when idiots get into power and want to copy the US model it fucks with our "socialist" ways (counting the days till Tony Abbott gets hammered in an interview again).
Hoping for much better progress now that we've matured a bit and have much more experience with money and much less need to take on credit than when we were younger.
Is it bullshit that our government doesn't provide its own free efile interface for people who want to do their own taxes? Yeah. It's absolutely bullshit. But complaining that you make too much money to use free efiling is kind of a dick move when you consider that most people in the US don't make it up to the threshold.
Is it bullshit that we have to pay so much for healthcare? Yeah. It's absolutely bullshit. But the people who qualify for free efile are even worse off because they are either (1) going bankrupt to pay for those hospital stays, or (2) not getting care at all.
I'm just asking for a little perspective, not saying you don't have your own problems.
Bankruptcy is something we wanted to do but Bush took chapter 7 away from "rich" people like us. ;-)
But point taken, absolutely. I can certainly afford $50 to file taxes.
I'm all for making taxes so simple that you don't need an accountant to do them, but not willing to risk the bullshit, twisted result that the current Congress would beat it into. :-/
I have a kid, house and pay alimony and I have no problem living on $20k a year (my income is higher but needs are easily covered with just that.)
Our mortage/property taxes/home insurance alone are $2025/month, so that's already well above your $20k/year figure before we even get started on other expenses. And we aren't living in a mansion, here.
That includes escrowed taxes, PMI, and home insurance. It's not purely mortgage.
Plainville does have high taxes, though.
Other expenses are low too, $100 for electric, water and sewer is about $200 a quarter. Food is about $75 per person per week so $150.
Up until next month there was no car payment but I have to do my part so I started spending money on non essentials again.
I'm planning to drive our two vehicles until they die, but I'm slightly tempted to trade the van in on a sedan for the gas savings and because the trade value on the van is still very good for the time being and it's paid off. We'd only have to finance about $7K on a new car. Considering it.
New Milford is way out in the middle of fucking nowhere for us.
Our house is only 1632 sq ft, but Plainville is the geographic center of the state. Shit's expensive here. Not like, Fairfield county expensive, but still.
The site seems to be coded in a silly manner, there is no link between the database of the items they have in stock and what is displayed for purchase. The list of purchasable goods updates separate to what is occurring live. In some part this is taken into account when going to checkout, the system checks if items are present and if not you are alerted before any money is passed.
However they then sent an email out 5 minutes before the delivery window stating that one of my items was not in stock and I would be credited for my payment.
I felt as if it was an immature and unfair business practice, to top things off they gave me 2 jars of capers instead of one. The whole point of online shopping is so that you can control your inventory more accurately and the customer can more easily find and purchase the stuff that they want. In this case they failed.
The kind of stupid thing is that if many of your other items are bought in grocery shopping if they are part of a recipe, for example the thing they were out of stock on was mangoes however I was making a mango dessert and had also bought a few other items to make that (which were delivered and paid for). I ended up having to not make my awesome dessert and wait till I can get some more.
If the store could fix these bits up or make the system more accurate like Amazon or any major online retailer I could easily see supermarkets shutting down their large operations and having smaller shops with most of the warehouses delivering groceries.