Saturday, April 5, 2008

Taxes and budget

I'm pretty much officially done with taxes, now. It's quite the good feeling.

What's even better is that taxes were much simpler this year than last. TurboTax got their shit together and improved the importing feature to make it actually useful. I had to manually enter in all my options trades from E*TRADE, though, because those aren't required to be reported to the IRS (by E*TRADE), so it's up to me to do it. Still, things went much smoother this year. I only cursed once or twice!

The final tally is that I owe $1527 to the federal government, and $1416 to Missouri, but get $775 back from Kansas. Unfortunately, this comes at the same time as both my auto and home insurance policies need to be renewed. I'm talking with my insurance agent next week, but it's going to be around $2000 for the year. My server upgrades and some clothing purchases, plus discounted software purchased as part of my Microsoft trip (in addition to all my regular spending) results in an ~$1300 credit card bill this month. Then I have to pay my second half of 2007 property taxes (~$2150) by May 12. It's all hitting at once, and I'm down to my last $1-2000 in cash, which is below my comfort zone. I was so looking forward to buying a new main computer!

1 comment:

Lord Hughes said...

Ouch. That's some serious hurt from taxes. I came out with getting a refund from federal, but paying Kansas which ended me with a $300 deficit all together which was pretty good.

Don't worry. Soon your cash reserves will be back up and that shiny new computer will be shipping before you know it!