So, I did my taxes last night.\u00a0 All told it took 4-5 hours, but it seems to be getting easier each time I do it.\u00a0 I actually had almost $500 in charitable contributions to deduct this year.\u00a0 Surprise!\u00a0 Unless your medical expenses are 75% of your gross pay and you’ve done a LOT of charity giving you can’t write it off anyway – because it won’t be more than your standard deduction.\u00a0 (charitable deductions, medical expenses, and a few other things are added up on schedule 1040A – itemized deductions, if that is less than your standard deduction then you’ll just use the standard, which for me was $5,450)<\/p>\n
Luckily this year I was able to write off all those medical expenses from the 2008 cancer\/thyroid scare (almost $4,000!) since my business showed a profit (albeit small).\u00a0 And how did I show a profit?\u00a0 I didn’t write off any of my entertainment expenses this year (after painstakingly organizing them).\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Nevermind the fact that the majority of those medical expenses were illegal charges from the care providors (surprise, a little known fact is that if a providor takes your insurance they aren’t allowed to bill you for what the insurance doesn’t cover!).\u00a0 I can’t fight it of course, as I paid the bills when they came in – long before I read the tiny legal article in an in-flight airline magazine coming back from San Antionio in September.\u00a0 Plus the illegal charges are from several different sources, Sol Weiss MD, Quest Diagnostics and about five different bills from the ER “associated care providors.”<\/p>\n
Anyway, my point is that writing off your donations may not be as solid a piece of advice as I thought.\u00a0 I was telling Byron to donate a lot of his clothes before he moves and write it off on his taxes next year instead of just dumping them in the trash.\u00a0 He should still donate them – just because that is the nice thing to do – but writing off that donation isn’t as simple as I thought.<\/p>\n
Also – did anyone else notice that the tax tables are… missing.. from the California 540 instructions?\u00a0 They have a list of sales tax by county – but nothing to tell you what your income tax should be.\u00a0 For that you have to go to the website – where they have a calculator.\u00a0 I assumed (in error) it was the tax on the last page (which I’m now assuming is sales tax instead) and owed the state of California something like $700.\u00a0 After discovering the calculator it turns out the state owes me money.\u00a0 I wonder how many people they are counting on making that mistake… since, y’know, we’re bankrupt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So, I did my taxes last night.\u00a0 All told it took 4-5 hours, but it seems to be getting easier each time I do it.\u00a0 I actually had almost $500 in charitable contributions to deduct this year.\u00a0 Surprise!\u00a0 Unless your medical expenses are 75% of your gross pay and you’ve done a LOT of charity […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=759"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":760,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759\/revisions\/760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.andrewlorenzlong.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}