Taxes.....Ugh........

I knew our income tax situation this year wasn't going to be pretty. But it was nice just to assume that for a while and not see the cold hard facts in black and white. Or red and green. Whatever.

We usually get a pretty significant refund at income tax time, because we allow the government to take more out of our regular paychecks than they should. We KNOW the conventional wisdom says not to do this. We KNOW we are allowing the government to keep our money for a year without paying us any interest. We KNOW that we could make some interest on it if we put it aside every week/month and saved it.

But we also know we won't do that.

We do commit a pretty significant amount of money to savings anyway, and we really don't mind helping out the government with our measly few thousands every year. They do so much for us. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

We usually take a spring trip with our income tax refund, or occasionally we use it to improve something in the house. One year we used it to put a privacy fence around the swimming pool. But we usually spend it on a vacation.

We knew this year would be different. I went back to my part-time online teaching job, which is considered contract labor and does not have taxes taken out of it. I was smart enough to set aside 1/3 of that pay every month (well, almost every month) with the anticipation of having to pay taxes.

Then we won that damn Harley. Don't get me wrong; I'm not complaining about winning a Harley. But that is also considered "income," and they didn't take taxes out of it either, unlike the folks at The Price is Right who deduct the taxes before you leave the stage.

So we're getting slammed this year with a tax bill of more than a couple thousand dollars. And I really shouldn't mind. We sort of broke even, after all. When we won the Harley, we sold my Honda, and we used THAT money to pay for the trip to the Dominican Republic we're going to take in April. We can pay the tax bill with the money that I set aside just for that purpose, so it all evens out.

It just doesn't FEEL like it.