Andare, Partire, Tornare

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All the news that's unfit to post

All the news is bad news. Well, not really - in the grand scheme of things, the crisis of today has been resolved in a tidy and adult manner, to make up for my less than adult handling of it in the past. But the only way it was handled was by throwing lots of money at the problem, along with a promise to continue to throw money at it.

Basically, three years ago, I fucked up my withholdings. I didn't notice it immediately, because the timing meant that I only owed the IRS fifty bucks. The next year, however, I owed a bunch, realized what had happened, and both Bemo and I went back to our HR people, and made sure that our W-4's were set correctly. Still, somehow, things weren't correct, so Bemo and I went back to our HR people, and Bemo had an additional twenty bucks per paycheck held out. We also resolved to have a professional do our taxes this year, to make sure things were correct.

Today, we ended up paying the tax people $172 dollars to inform us that we owed the guvmint $1,340 bucks. Which we will need to come up with by April 15th, because we're currently on a payment plan to pay off the approximately 1,500 bucks from the past two years combined. THe reason for all this tax owed today? Is that for both of us, not nearly enough tax was being withheld. And we don't know why.

I am, however, in typical fashion trying to figure out a way that it's my fault.

We've got most of the money for the taxes this year - except it will all of our combined savings, which was paltry to begin with. (And most of that was a generous Christmas check from Bemo's dad.) But we've both now got to go wrangle with our HR people, and get used to even smaller paychecks, and pay off our previous taxes with a fifty dollar check every month.

To make things easier, Bemo and I have been alternating fits of depression all day. There has been weeping, and yelling, and black silence, and forced cheerfulness, and some genuine laughter here and there, but mostly there is that deep feeling in the pit of the stomach that says, "You are so, so fucking incompetent. And now you pay for it."

11:12 p.m. - 2005-02-26

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