A common talking point whenever I speak with my parents. They truly do live in a different universe.
Finally had time to sit down with the fed taxes. Income stayed flat, tax liability went down a couple % (a few hundred dollars). Owe nearly ~1k, thanks to the withholding tricks in the new law, so it feels a lot worse.
My new discovery is that job hunting expenses are no longer deductible. Thanks Paul and Mitch! What a bunch of assholes.
Are you itemizing? If not, it won’t impact you. I believe the % of folks itemizing should/will drop significantly.
Just got our taxes back from our accountant (gotta love having a CPA for a father in law :D). Got about a $1k refund back this year, which was kind of unexpected. I’ve always owed money except last year in which I had a $500 refund. I can’t really compare tax liabilities to see how it changed from last year though cause my income significantly changed though.
At the beginning of 2018, I never adjusted anything in my withholdings, so naturally I was left with a bill of around $800-900.
I didn’t do the math yet to see how I ended up overall for the year, to consider if my take home pay was higher to offset what I owed at the end, but regardless it’s just insane that every individual person is expected to go through this process in the first place.
It’s such a corrupt institution to force hundreds of millions of people to carefully scrutinize their withholdings because of a cryptic new tax law intentionally designed to trick people while fucking over ordinary people.
And then those people get ridiculed and blamed at the end of the year when they complain that they owe money because they didn’t know they were supposed to spend hours adjusting their withholdings, in addition to spending hours doing their taxes, thanks to TurboTax’s lobbyists preventing all this from being automated in the first place.
What’s worse, I think you can be penalized for habitual under withholding. My income is unearned, not wages, so I’m on a two-year cycle. I owe a tax liability one year, which means the next year I have to make quarterly payments. They always end up by being an overpayment, so the following year I don’t make quarterly payments. Then of course I owe, so I’m back to quarterly payments.
Can you clarify these complaints? While I’m definitely losing out under the new tax plan (California, big state deductions loss), my understanding is that the plan does simplify things for more baseline individuals. With the standard deduction, things get closer to net zero tax return/liability at the end of the year, if you have just straightforward work income.
Even if not, I’m not following how it would take hours to change withholdings if you wanted a different outcome (not clear what outcome you wanted, net zero or tax return for some reason). Finally, I’ve never heard this Turbotax lobbying complaint. Can you provide more info on that?
WOW. What the actual fuck. Check it out: my total yearly 2018 income in TurboTax shows as having gone up by $5400 and change, but thanks to this GOP tax scam and losing the personal exemption this year (which with my state income/property tax + charitable deductions would have dropped my taxable income by about $2400 vs what it ended up being, since I had to take the standard deduction), my taxable federal income jumped by nearly $8150, so I get to pay Uncle Sam over 600 bucks more in federal income tax this year, wheee! Some tax cut. And because they reduced the withholding, I’m left writing a bigger check and may even get socked with a penalty.
Fuck this administration in the ear, and the whole GOP Senate and (former) Congress as well.
If it makes you feel better the penalty waver increased to 85%.
If not I also would have been penalized for underpayment.
Well, we’ll see about the penalty*. I haven’t filed both my returns yet (waiting on some info for the Oregon return), but it’s kinda bullshit that my taxable went up by nearly 3000 bucks more than my actual income did, when my mortgage interest + property taxes combined only dropped by maybe 80 bucks and the total charitable contributions dropped by about 100 (and I bet charities in future are going to take a hit because of this stuff).
*The software says that it applies if you’re not 90% withheld, but you’re saying it’s 85%? I would have thought TurboTax would have told me something by now if it did affect me. The check left to write looks bigger than 10% of my liability, but might be under 15%.
Look, the Republicans just want to simplify your taxes and close loopholes! Stop being such snowflake libtards about it!
We got thumped on our taxes this year.
Thanks Donald, Paul and Mitch.
I’m single, so I don’t have a family to support, but at ca. 70K/year I’m hardly rolling in it, either, especially for Portland these days. What worries me is that these tax cuts are temporary for the middle class (to make the projections look good for the CBO) and if I’m already behind the curve in the first year, what do I have to look forward to? I know they’re not going back to the old law, either (by which at least we’d get that personal exemption back). Meanwhile the deficit blows up* (in good times BTW) while the fatcats rake it in. The loss of the personal exemption was the key to the deception.
*BTW, regarding that, it’s no great feat to stimulate economic growth when the federal government is running such huge deficits. It’s extremely inefficient stimulus, of course, because it’s going to people with a low propensity to spend it, but there it is. The R’s are the ultimate (lemon) Keynesians.
I thought I recently read that they’ve further reduced it to 80% because of the number of people impacted this year.
BTW, I was discussing this with my brother who works in real estate financing, and he recently saw a tax return of someone who brought in something like 600k last year. Right up front the guy’s accountant had noted for his client that the new tax law had saved him 20 grand vs. the old law. Must be nice.
I checked the TurboTax report for my 2018 return and my effective tax rate (income tax/AGI) was a whopping 0.15% lower, woohoo! I’m sure that makes the huge hole in the budget (when the government could be fixing infrastructure, fighting the opioid crisis, working to get us off fossil fuels ASAP) worth it. :rolleyes:
My wife has been in the US just over 10 years, me about 5. This is the first time we’ve owed the IRS money. And by a quirk of fate its only 300 dollars. Somehow my wife’s social security contributions got reset in the middle of last year so we’ve over paid. If not for that we’d owe thousands.
Some rare bi-partisan action in Congress coming up.
They’re about to eliminate the scourge of a free government tax filing system. This is America, god dammit, and filing your taxes should always be costly and difficult.
Ok so reading the article deeper, it sounds like the law will also force tax-filing companies to offer a free version of the software to people making a certain income threshold.
Is that right? If so, it sounds like an ok improvement over the current status quo, which is essentially the same thing, but the fact that a free version exists is under promoted.