My wife and I have been spending a fair amount of time unpacking boxes from our move a few month’s ago. One thing moving tends to do is make you realize how much stuff you have that you no longer need. We literally had two bedrooms full of boxes that we haven’t used in some time (at least since we’ve moved here and probably a lot longer than that!)

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My Investment Experiment this year proved to be an expensive learning experience. While I have a few winners and a load of experience under my belt I made some costly mistakes.

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As I mentioned in an earlier post on Saving on taxes through additional retirement savings I’ve selected an administrator for our solo 401K. In the end after talking with nearly a dozen providers it came down to two choices.

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Apologies for not having this up first thing in the morning. There were a lot more submissions to go through than I expected…

Anyway, without further ado, I present the 80th installment of the Carnival of Personal Finance! I’ll be reading through the submissions I haven’t already today and moving the catagories or deleting irrelevant posts. If you find any problems, please contact me.

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My wife and I are in a rather unique (for us anyway) situation this year. She lost her job at the end of January, and was given a lump-sum severance equal to nine months of her salary. The severance was taxed at the 25% bonus tax rate which means a huge chunk was withheld by the federal government. To make matters worse, there were no 401K contributions taken out of the severance amounts, meaning the full amount would be taxed.

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This has been an extraordinary year for us. Between my wife getting laid off, moving to Illinois and the changes in my job I haven’t had a lot of time to plan things out. It’s mid-November already and time is running out to put plans in motion that will affect our taxes for the year.

Rather than one huge post, I thought I’d break things down into bite-sized chunks. The first post on reducing our tax burden through additional retirement savings will be posted later today.

Many people (both readers of this site and in my day-to-day life) have been asking what I am going to do once we move. Well, I’m happy to say I was offered another position within my existing company which will allow me to work from home most of the time.

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Claire over at Tired but happy has posted an excellent review of the book Money Without Matrimony. While I no longer fit the demographic this book targets, it would have been nice to have in my previous relationship.

I would like to say though that us married folks get discriminated against too…especially those of us who don’t have children.

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Our accountant finished our taxes last week. We just about broke even. I sent a check to the Feds for $604, including $5 in interest. We’re getting $581 back from the state of Michigan.

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We still haven’t filed but have finsihed with our receipts.  I sent a note to our accountant to file an extension for us.  I’ve gone and estimated our taxes for the year.  Sadly, we won’t be able to start Roth IRAs this year, our income was too high for us to qualify.   One business showed a small profit, the other a somewhat larger loss.  It would have been much closer to profitable if not for the loss of the horse to colic last year.

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