Well, sort of.
My taxes are done! Unfortunately, no breaking even for me. No big refund either. I owed a chunk of money to the feds, as I mentioned before. W-4 problem has been fixed, however, so I’m crossing my fingers that next year is significantly better.
I did discover another perk to TurboTax, however. After telling me that hey, I should check out my W-4, TurboTax also calculated estimated tax payments for my 2009 taxes, should I choose to not change my W-4 (or not be able to do so). I was a little scared when I saw those payment receipts print out though. At first, I was worried that I had to make estimated tax payments because I had screwed up this year and owed so much money. TurboTax doesn’t bother to explain that little detail.
A little bit of research and I had it all figured out, though. The internet knows everything. No estimated tax payments for me. Somehow, it’s less painful to never see that money, rather than have to hand it off to the government every few months. I know, I’m weird.
Megan is a 40-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:
In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance. It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information. It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck. While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.
While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.
Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.
So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan. I needed to budget. I needed to know what I was spending my money on. I needed to prepare for the future.
I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way. I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.
haha, well at least you know what’s up 😉 i don’t mind giving the gov’t a free loan at all – much happier w/ that extra chunk every year than trying to break even and all…i could never figure it out anyways.
Congrats on getting your taxes finished. TT should’ve given you a heads up before scaring you like that! 🙂
I’m nervous about my taxes. We’re about to work with a CPA to a) get the small business part of the taxes done and b) make sure that I don’t have to do estimates taxes this coming year. But I withhold a little higher, so I hope it’ll come down about right.