We still haven’t finished our taxes and will likely have to file an extension.  Not a huge deal but disappointing.
As I posted before, work has been nuts for the last couple of months.  My wife had surgery on Thursday (was in the hospital until Friday).  She came through it fine (looks like someone beat her up though…her face is all bruised.)

Read the rest of this entry »

I can’t believe February is almost over already!  I really need to sit down and pull the data together for our taxes…  I’ve got all the paperwork from the accountant as well as our W2s and 1099s sitting in a drawer, just need to take the time to organize it as well as all the receipts from our two businesses.  The latter is the biggest pain as it is all sitting in a box and there is a lot of it.

The sooner the better too because if our modified Adjusted Gross Income is low enough I plan on fully funding a couple of Roth IRAs for us.  Those would need to be opened by April 17th even if we end up extending our filing deadline.

If your Adjusted Gross income (AGI) is below $50,000 for last year, you may be eligible to file your federal taxes electronically for free. Check out the IRS’ Free File page for more details.

We definitely don’t qualify for this and normally pay our accountant to do our taxes anyway. It costs us a couple hundred a year but is worth it to me since I don’t need to spend hours figuring out how and what I can deduct for our two businesses (web hosting and horse farming - neat combination eh? :)) I wish I could say I didn’t have to spend much time with the taxes but the horse business generates a ton of receipts that need to be collected, entered into a spreadsheet and categorized. Hopefully this year we can get a bit more organized about this stuff since it will be the first full year we’ve used MS Money to track our finances.

Anyway, hope the tax man is kind to you all this year… reminds me that I need to speak to our accountant about whether or not we can open a Roth IRA for last year or not and I need to do some tax planning for this year.

Got a letter from my 401K custodian last week. It seems that the raise I got last year pushed me over the limit for being a highly compensated individual for my company’s plan. This means I am limited to contributing only 10% of my salary to my 401k on a pretax basis and 3% after tax. Frankly I’m a bit shocked and a little angry. By earning a few thousand dollars more per year I now will be able to save several thousand dollars less on a pre-tax basis (the IRS limits for 401K contributions this year have risen to $15k). This will have the net effect of costing us over $1000 in additional taxes, not to mention the drag it will put on my 401K contributions. Takes a lot of the joy out of getting a raise…

Read the rest of this entry »