I turned in all my work mileage before I left about a week ago, and I came to work the other day to find a nice $40 check! I'll use this money for the farmers market this month since I need to have cash for that and I seldom carry any.
We went down to BOFA the other day and pulled off SCB's unemployment deposit off his EDD card and sent that to savings... ($192.00-- brings out EF to $11,395.56!)
I've been working like a slave at work and my paycheck had an extra $128.64, which will help pay for my SMOG and my car registration... which we will hopefully get done tomorrow since i'm working again on Sunday.
But the real kicker is the fact that I did our taxes the other day!
Apparently I get a discount with Turbo Tax since I have an account at Vanguard and since I can never figure out California State taxes and what I can write off, I pay to use Turbo Tax since my tax amount owed is always lower then when I do them by hand (I thought I owed $600, instead i'm getting refunded $637 so its worth the 27.70 I paid for my state return to do it through them). My federal return cost me $22.45, and it looks like we will be getting $1,198 back.
For the first time ever, I qualified for the "savers credit" so we are getting $200 back just for putting money in my Roth IRA (making my investments grow by at least 4% this year by doing nothing at all).
So after all the tax fees from turbo Tax, we are netting $1,784.85 back! Our slush fund is going to dance and we will finally be able to start knocking out some of the things that have been going on our back burner list!
So hopefully by the end of the weekend, my car will be washed (to get all the SALT off it from UTAH), Smog'ed, and re-registered! Then we will start working on getting SCB some new glasses and looking into fixing the cavities in the lower part of his mouth that we didn't do the first time he went in because of all the drama.
Lots of good news!
ReplyDeleteWhy not do the free turbo tax through the IRS website? Does it disqualify married people?
ReplyDeleteI didn't know there was a free turbo tax on the IRS website... but if there is, I don't think we would have been able to use it because we need to list our itemized deductions (even though we take the standard) so they appear on our state taxes (which are the ones I can never understand)
DeleteI think you can list the itemized, but I'm not sure since I use tax cut every year. Here is the website - look into it next year to save yourself even more money!
Deletehttp://www.irs.gov/efile/article/0,,id=118986,00.html?portlet=106
You can also file for free in some situations through the CA tax site. I'm not sure about their itemization rules, but it's worth checking out to save yourself over $50 between the 2 returns!
https://ftb.ca.gov/online/CalFile/index.asp?WT.mc_id=HP_Banner_CalFile
Isn't it nice to get unexpected tax credits? :D I wish we qualified for the 50% SAVERS credit match, but that's for the very low income folks. Nice to dream, though.
ReplyDeleteYa, we only qualified for any credit because we are married. Last year I wouldn't have been able to since I would have earned too much money (and because it goes into a ROTH IRA, it doesn't affect our AGI) but since we are married, we had a higher threshold before we were eliminated and my larger income would be better balanced with his smaller one.
DeleteJust happy to get a little extra back for adding money to our retirement accounts :)