Taxes!

I'm told that the loan for the house I'm buying is structured in such a way that I can deduct the entirety of my mortgage payments. Something smells very Fat Tony about it, but if true I'm really looking forward to that.

I'm trying to get it done by Tuesday so I can just go to my accountant's and be like, "here's the stuff, it's done, go to it." Then I get to watch my hard-earned checking account drain away. Sigh. It'll be worth it to have it behind me, though.

Nothing was taken from that relatively small amount of profit, but I assume it will absolutely drain any chance I have at a refund. (The last few years have been just under $1K.)

I can't see how I can possibly owe you two grand. I'm sure there are people who make twice as much as me who don't owe fuck.

I r queen of last minute taxes.

suckahs :-P

xpost

anyway, you wind up owing money this way:

if you're married, and you mark "married filing jointly" on your withholding forms at work, they withhold LESS money from your check than they would if you marked "single." this is because the tax system (wrongly, in almost all cases) assumes that if you're married and filing jointly, you're supporting your wife. If both people are working, you have to go through the two-earner, two job worksheet to find out what the difference is b/w what they'll withhold and how much taxes you will actually owe. This is almost always short though for some reason. (note: this is all only true for Federal. State, which is what I owe, doesn't bother to give you a nice worksheet to figure this out. They just say "fuck you", give you no tools to find out how much you owe, and then charge you when you're short. This is called "California is broke and squeezing you for money, bitches.").

If your income fluctuates from month to month because of overtime or bonuses or something, then God help you.

Being married sucks for taxes because of this, and also, this: say you make 70k. Say your spouse make 40k. If you're single, you pay the tax rate for someone making 70k, and your spouse would pay the rate for someone making 40k. But if you're married, you pay the rate for ONE income making 110k. Which is a higher percentage than the others. This means you pay more taxes when you're married than single people making the same money. This is called the marriage penalty and everyone thinks that they got rid of it last year. They did, but only for very low income people. The rest of the country (ie: the middle class) gets fucked.

you can pay taxes off over 12-24 month periods w/ interest rates that are pretty low compared to an interest rate you'd get on what is essentially a loan. if you can pay a chunk of it upfront and then spread the rest out over a period of time at the cost of a few hundred extra bucks it's prob worth it imo (nyc freelancer life)

idk what magic sarahell used, but we got a big return this year after being totally screwed last year

Lol you can pay taxes off over whatever period you want… you aren’t required to sign up for an official payment plan. The main benefit of the official payment plan is that you won’t risk wage garnishments … as a freelancer, this wouldn’t be relevant.

Geese are even getting their songtitles to the top of ILE, it's all paid for

Lol you can pay taxes off over whatever period you want… you aren’t required to sign up for an official payment plan. The main benefit of the official payment plan is that you won’t risk wage garnishments … as a freelancer, this wouldn’t be relevant.

― sarahell, Tuesday, April 14, 2026 12:01 PM (thirteen minutes ago)

helpful tip and i didn't even have to pay you!

sorry to link to l*ss wr*ng but here is a post from a guy who has made his entire personality about filing taxes correctly but not paying them... apparently the IRS can't do much thanks to statutes of limitation https://www.lesswrong .com/posts/AskPyNg6hHP6SrmEy/redirecting-one-s-own-taxes-as-an-effective-altruism-method

Uh, the IRS can do things … dude is just lucky.

I had a client during the Iraq war who mailed her payment to the social security administration as a protest action (it was self-employment tax) … didn’t work out for her, sadly.

my returns are usually pretty simple... I used the new IRS free file last year which worked very well, and of course was cancelled by the Trump admin. I'm sure Turbo Tax or someone like that made a hefty contribution to make it go away

So I went down to the library and got the paper forms... If they're gonna inconvenience me, then I'm gonna inconvenience them

I took an early distribution from my 401k last year, from which was withheld about a third in taxes, but they failed to warn me about the 5-figure tax penalty I have to pay also. For using my own frigging money.

Got my first significant return (not even that significant really) in ages because all I had was a W-2, no self-employment income or EBay. Finishing in under 15 minutes was pretty nice.

Xp — did you look through the various exceptions to the penalty and determine none applied?

It is super demoralizing telling clients that they owe under this administration… I have a trans client who is afraid to deduct her medical expenses for gender affirming treatment…

I did, and every exception I checked it was like, "lol, nope!"

my tax prep people have really jacked up their prices and it's now almost double what they cost when i started using them a few years ago so i used an online site for expats. it probably took 4-5 hours to fill everything out and collect all the info but they only charge like $175 for it and it worked fine

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, April 15, 2026 1:09 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Tell me about this site. E pays an absolute fortune to get her US expat taxes done.

We owe close to five grand this year. We collectively made 72 grand last year. We don't have 5 grand.

Fuck this shithole country.

that sucks! sorry to hear that

if anyone is stressing, I just used an online free filing thing called TaxSlayer and it went pretty well... no charge and they were able to file my CA taxes as well

TurboTax wanted to charge me $70 to file with student loan interest (of maybe $15?), so I used one of the free ones on the IRS site.

i filed for an extension and we’re going to go to a tax person. i am pretty sure that what is happening is that because we file together, it is thinking that i am receiving excess ACA subsidies…. but I pay for my plan myself?

i just can’t believe this shit. 7% of our yearly income, and for what!

Figured it out: basically, I gave our financial info to PA ACA marketplace— if there are changes in income, then you are supposed to inform them. Of course, I didn't think to inform them when my husband became salaried and started making a fair amount more money in September, because why would I? But this altered our tax liability, and thus altered what I would have been offered in subsidies, and now we need to pay some/all of that back.

Sick sad world.

Ugh that sucks.

table that is exactly what happened to me when I owed last year, my sympathies

now I have no ACA at all, so that's that

TurboTax wanted to charge me $70 to file with student loan interest (of maybe $15?), so I used one of the free ones on the IRS site.

― Lady Sovereign (Citizen) (milo z), Tuesday, April 14, 2026 2:33 PM (four hours ago)

probably the last year I use them. I owed 1k in federal and got 2k back in state and after all their fees ended up only getting 600-700 or so back

Got a decent state refund this year and a very small federal refund. (I use TurboTax.) It helps that my record label loses money every year. But I'm currently in the process of reconfiguring BA as a 501(c)(3), and I lost my day job in October, and I really don't know what effect those two things are gonna have for next year.

The ACA subsidy repayment thing is one of the things I hate the most about the current tax code (and I am far too familiar with the federal tax code… because I had to study for the fancy licensing exam last year)… there have been caps on repayment in the past, but this year’s stupid bill eliminated them all.

The way they calculate the subsidies can also be weird… idk … I remember how much I had to pay before ACA existed so I always overestimate my income because $300/month for health insurance is still cheap based on my memory. …of course if I couldn’t afford $300/month, that would be a different story.

Meanwhile I have become an accidental salesperson for self-employed retirement accounts…

i have been trying to speak to someone at the IRS for over 2 weeks, I call multiple times a day and get all the way though until it goes to transfer me to someone and then I get the " We are experiencing extreme high volume please try later or tomorrow, bye"

I'm really at my wits end, it's really fucked up for them to send a notice with instructions to call by a certain date and then it's impossible to get through.