Monday, February 4, 2008

taxes done

i sat down and worked out my taxes yesterday. kind of a pain - but so good to have it done! and it's only the beginning of february. go me! i'm getting about $3500 back. it's high mainly because this is the first year i could actually itemize deductions and count my mortgage interest.

so what should i do with the money.....?? hmmm... i mean i guess it could just go into savings, i could forget i ever got it. or i could use it to finish funding my ROTH from last year, i guess that would be pretty responsible too. there's a couple of big purchases i'd like to make too, like a new washing machine, but... oh... i dont know. i'm torn between the desire to use it like found fun money and the desire to be responsible and do something "smart" with it. (sadly, there's no "put it towards the next vacation" option because there are really no trips on the radar anytime soon. darren and i had talked about going to yosemite in april, but it doesn't look like it's going to happen.)

one other thing about taxes - i had to report my "free" tv as income from last year. it was valued at $1650, so it effectively increased my tax bill by $412 (or rather, reduced my refund by that amount.) so i guess it wasn't so free after all. but it's still a sweet tv. and even at 412 bucks, that's still tough to beat.

2 comments:

Betsy said...

unless you are buying the mother of all washing machines I think you can buy a washing machine, fund your Roth and have enough left to buy something fun! WIN!WIN!WIN! Situation :)

M said...

lol, yup. Good luck trying to decide. Mike and I never get a refund, they just roll it over into the "if we keep it, then you will have less to pay next year" catagory. So we end up waiting to do the taxes till April 15th. I mean come on what incentive do we have to do it sooner?

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