Thursday, March 22, 2007

Tax Day

Eleven days until work starts, and what am I doing between now and then? Filling out my taxes.

Yes, very exciting stuff.

Anyway, thanks to TaxCut Pro (I'm not shilling for them), it was actually a mild dull head pain, rather than the usual full headache that requires an open bottle of advil and Jack Daniels.

I went through the usual deductions and income calculations, and the program spit out two things to check that I hadn't thought about:

1) IRA Contributions: theses are pre-tax deductions that can lower your taxable income. Read more about it here.

2) Job-related expenses: specifically job-search expenses. I thought I found gold here, except, as it turns out, if its your first job, it doesn't count. For all you "youn'uns" out there, that's bad news. For anyone who has been around the block, stuff some pre-tax expenses here!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What the hell does "first job" mean? I'm 20, but that doesn't mean I haven't been working since 1986.

Oh man. Screw Traditional IRA - unless your company does matching. At my tax bracket Roth IRA is the best. This year I'm trying to max out my contribution. You can pull out 10k free for your first home/apartment. Great deal.

Finance Guy said...

It really depends on your marginal taxes. When that is low, Roth IRA makes sense. When it is high, a traditional IRA helps.