The Grumpstump

Over the past month or so, I’ve been working on some new projects outside of the Grumpstump. Combined with the wedding (if any of the groomsmen are reading this I need your tux measurements!) I have been a very busy boy.

This of course, has left little time to think up snide remarks for people who don’t like capitalism, money, or free trade.

I was going to input a quick link here to a cool page on capitalism but apparently stumble upon only has 4 pages tagged with capitalism as a tag word. That makes me sad..

I wonder how many pages are tagged with ‘lol cat’ or some nonsense….

Heard back about my taxes from last year from the good ole accountant. Looks like I’m going to owe good ole Uncle Sam about $1600.

Ouch.

I think I figured out what happened. Last year, I ended up getting a much bigger refund than I would have liked (over $2,000). Obviously, the ideal tax return is $0. If I break even with the government on April 15th, I’m a happy camper. So, I reduced my witholding last year in anticipation of the problem.

The problem was that at the end of the year, we are awarded a bonus (well, this isn’t really a problem at all, but it caused the tax problem ) . Now, I think that the computer that did the witholding checked to see what rate to tax the withdrawal at by looking at how much you had made so far in the year.

I went back and looked, and I was less than $100 from one of the tax rate breaks ( to go from 15% - 25%) at the time of the bonus. This means that the bonus check contained almost entirely money that would be taxed at 25% but was only witheld at 15%.

Stupid Computer.

So, at the end of the day, my net tax owed / due would have been less than $200 either way if the computer glitch ( I call it a glitch) hadn’t underwitheld.

Don’t worry, I thought the computer was dumb so I put a little aside to pay for taxes. Doesn’t quite cover it, but I can cash flow the rest.

Do you have a witholding nightmare?