This is epic. We’re going to make deadline. We usually have to ask for an extension.
Guild Wars 2 is running an annual tax-time silliness called the Adventure box, which emulates the old 1960’s games, like Star Raiders, Frogger and Pong, with demented icon-characters and more jumping challenges. This is not my cuppa, but it’s Jane’s, and she’s going to do some R&R online, I hope. I’ve been so done-in by allergies this last week I’m doing well to function at all. I’m able to concentrate, but thread a needle? I’d stare at the two objects and wonder stupidly what one had to do with the other.
Our star magnolia, meanwhile, is breaking buds, the tree peonies and azaleas are developing their flower buds, and the quince outside my window is doing the same. Spring is springing, never mind that we had frost two days ago. Such a hard winter!
But 15 days from now we may begin getting word of baby fishes. We’ll need to get down and get that pond netting on. And our taxes will be done, done, done.
Jane is a rare gem. I have no idea on the status of our taxes; we handed them off to our tame tax accountant a couple of weeks ago, so one hopes they are just about ready to be submitted. At the bare minimum, an extension should be getting filed.
When you do your taxes, do you have to file two (or three) separate returns? The individual returns for you and Jane (Married filing jointly, I presume) and then business tax returns for each of you, or are there ways to combine your taxes so you only have to file one return? I recall you said in prior years you would file quarterly, i.e., business taxes…..
two. Used to be 3. But Corporate is a whole different creature involving more forms and quarterly reporting.
We got our tax returns about a month ago and are using them to fly to Dallas to see the Grandkids next weekend.
Comment
For the past six years or so, or Dutch tax office (IRS?) has had the slogan “We can’t make it more fun, but we can make it easier” (to pay your taxes); and they really have made great strides in making it easier for ordinary people.
They started it with a law requiring banks to report all end-of-year account balances to the IRS, and a ruling that all local governments (which tax their citizens according to the worth of their property, i.e. a homeowners tax) had to report the end-of-year worth of all these homes to the IRS, and one requiring mortgage holders like banks and penson funds to send in the amounts of those mortgages and how much has been paid off or paid as interest on them (you get deductibles for that).
All employers already had to report what they’d paid tgeir enployees over the year, and how much the employers had already withheld for taxes and social security payments.
Then they started making it possible to file one’s taxes electronically, using a national secured digital signature to sign it. If you used the digital option instead of the paper one, all the above-mentioned financial information is pre-filled, you just have to check that their numbers are correct and answer a few fairly easy questions like “were you married this year” “did you have a child under 26 living at home” “did you get extra income from renting out your main home during vacations” and such, to check if you should get more deductibles or had non-standard sources of income that you need to add in yourself.
For most people who earn a wage from an employer, and who’s biggest property is their own home, it means that you can do your yearly taxes in less than an hour (including looking up all the numbers).
I have no experience being self-employed, with irregular cashflow, or running a company, so I have no idea if they’ve managed to make those any easier.
Would Americans be willing for the goverment to get all those financial numbers (which you have to report to the IRS anyway) directly from the financial institutions and employers, to make tax-time easier in this way?
Or would that be considered big government interference?
One fun twist to the employers witholding the income tax straight from your wages, is that you can tweak this to get a guaranteed lumpsum pay-out at tax time. You can ask your employer to withhold a bit more taxes each month – if you have other income sources that can be very useful to avoid having to pay a lump of taxes afterwards. If you don’t have other income sources, having automatically paid in more than necessary means you get a lump sum back at tax time. It’s a way to save without noticing it as the tax is withheld before your salary is paid.
However, unless the government pays interest on that amount you overpaid, you aren’t really benefiting from the overpayment. If you took the amount you overpay and invest it in an interest-bearing account, at least, you’d have both the principal and the interest together, and not give the government what is essentially an interest-free loan.
‘Interest free’ is actually more accurate than you might realize. Although it’s always a good idea to have a bit of spare money in case of emergency, most interest bearing accounts are so low right now that the main benefit is being safer than burying it in a pickle jar in your yard. Whether the Feds or a bank keeps it is a matter of taste and convenience.
As Chondrite said, most savings accounts pay virtually no interest, say 0.25% percent if you’ve got more than 10.000 on the account (which I haven’t).
On the other hand, I’ve been unpleasantly surprised by suddenly having to pay a lump of taxes when the present government decided to take back through taxes the yearly monetary assistance for small-income homeowners which a previous governmental subsidy program had accorded me.
After that, I set things up this way so I won’t get such unpleasant surprises again, only positive ones.
Maybe not financially benefiting, but since my savings account changed fom 0.25% interest to 0% it’s also not a financial loss. And the benefit in peace of mind at tax-time is real to me.
Bear in mind, I’m a risk-averse peron living in a risk-averse person’s paradise, a very stable and prosperous democratic socialist monarchy. It might sound like hell to some Americans, but for most ordinary (not super wealthy) people it means we take care of each other collectively, as a matter of course, without having to go begging at religious charities when hardship strikes, and without having to worry we’ll go bankrupt and lose our homes if we get sick or a recession strikes.
We don’t have to worry about health insurance (my yearly premium for a 50+ woman with several lifelong conditions like asthma is about 500 euros, including extra coverage for glasses, physiotherapy and dental work) and the law sets the maximum copays (I think that’s the word for what you have to pay for yourself, despite the health care insurance?) at 325 euros per year.
If I lose my job, I’m guaranteed 70% of my present income for at least 2 years (how long depends on how long you’ve been working), and after that you get a basic social security income.
As health care is not organised through your employer, losing a job or working less hours has no impact on that.
The basic guaranteed pension, related (like social security) to the minimum wage – which is a living wage – is slowly raising the age at which you start to receive it from 65 to 67, but it is still guaranteed and well-funded, so we needn’t worry it will run out when we need it.
Our tax rate is incredibly high in American eyes (38%), but our tax money really is used for our collective benefit; not only the abovementioned social security stuff but also the physical stuff, like roads, schools, energy generation and distribution, water and wastewater and water defense and such are excellent and well-maintained, something that improves all our lives.
Sorry for the long rant, it’s been building up in me for some time. I’ve been following some American news on the internet for a while now, and been rather appalled at the scaremongering and often flat-out lies about how horrible ‘socialist Europe’ is on some networks (especially Fox news, which from a distance, and getting information from multiple sources, looks not like any kind of real and true news, just very slanted propaganda). I know some extreme right-wing splinter groups in Europe like to feed that narrative by planting very slanted and/or completely false stories, but honestly, if life with a high tax rate and supposedly full of entitled ‘welfare queens’ was so awful over here, why would the northern European countries consistently over many years and many different studies score as the happiest, as well as highly productive?
I’ve been thinking about this. Politics is a big no-no on this blog, and I don’t want to break that rule, or bend it too far. Everyone needs to be able to feel comfortable here; after all, the world needs all kinds of people, not just those who share my views!
On the other hand, this Wavy Navy community is the one community on the web that I feel connected to, strongly enough to want to correct misinformation and give information if I have it.
Now, regarding the situation in Europe/Holland, what I know best is my own situation. That is enough to see that some representations in American media are either generalizations from a single extraordinary incident, very biased or plain wrong. This makes me want to balance that by giving what information I have, insofar as it doesn’t break the rules of this blog.
I also feel comfortable enough to share a lot of my general financial information here, if it will give people a chance to form their own opinion on what living in a place like Holland is like, compared to life as you know it in America.
I’m a low-to-midlevel civil servant (no subordinates, but not an entry-level position either, doing computerwork), in the modal earning group (about as many people in the Netherlands earn less than me as earn more), with the experience of starting at an entry-level administrative job (at the same level as a sanitation truck driver or public groundskeeper).
Would people here be interested in that information?
In that case it might take me a few days to pull all the data together and make a readable post out of it. I’m not going to link to any personal stuff, so finding general links to support what I say may take me some time (and probably a lot of them will be in Dutch, and from what I’ve seen Google translate is quite bad …).
I’d keep it strictly to the Dutch situation I know, and steer clear of any American politics. I just want people here to have some real evidence to base their own conclusions on – not that any conclusions you come to regarding the way Dutch society is organised is going to be any help in your own situation, so maybe this whole idea is useless.
As I understand it, the numbers from banks and investment companies are reported to government electronically, along with the information from employers. So the stuff on the forms is mostly for your own information, and for confirmation to government, with, as you say, whatever might have been unreported. It can be done quickly if you qualify for the “EZ” form, but anything else takes longer.
Still have to do my taxes. Not looking forward to it.
so glad mine were done last month, and were relatively simple, even with the transfer of my IRA to another set of funds and the subsequent $3,700 increase in value….:o….electronic filing and the refund was in my account within 2 weeks……probably the last time that will happen… 😉
I think the spam monster ate my last post…..
PJ is correct; US banks have to report any interest in excess of $10 paid to account holders and interest paid on mortgages; states have to report state income tax refunds, brokers now have to report the cost of stocks & bonds sold if they were bought after 2012 (I think) in addition to reporting the sales proceeds. So my job as a tax preparer largely involves making sure that anything the government knows about is in fact on the taxpayer’s return. And the IRS isn’t telling us what it knows about; I have to rely on the taxpayer to gather all the papers they got starting in January through March. Sigh. Only one more week for me; I’m taking a short trip with DH instead of working through until April 18th.