It's that time of year again when everyone has to sift through their receipts and fill out those confusing forms to find out if they're going to be getting money back from the government. Starting out optimistic quickly turned to sadness when I realized that I wasn't getting a refund this year. In fact, I owe a LOT more than I thought might be possible. Ugh... this sucks!
Part of the frustration comes from the fact that I spent several hours adding receipts, re-adding, and adding again only to find that I had categorized my expenses wrong. Due to the nature of our business, actors have many receipts and I realize that I didn't do the greatest job of saving them from last year. So, I fixed that and put it all into the program (I was using TurboTax) just to find out that the "standard deduction" was the way to go... to the poor house, in my opinion. Between the federal and state of New York, I owe what I think is an insane amount of money. I think part of it is that my survival job isn't withholding the right amount of money from our checks but, I don't know how to fix that (other than getting a different job).
Luckily, I have enough in my savings that I can actually pay it off in one lump sum but, that's not what the savings was for. This year, I'm going to start setting "tax money" aside so, hopefully, I'll have it set specifically for taxes if this happens next year. It stinks to do that but, what other choice do I have? It's not cheap to live in New York and this is just another example. At least this only happens once a year, right? Pffft!
So, until next time...
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