I tossed and turned in bed last night in a perfect storm of tax related muses…nightmares…planning.
I had a meeting with a CPA yesterday. I had arranged the meeting to try to get a handle on my tax plan for next year. This is the year I finally bury my old career at Freeman. ESOP payout time is here and I need to figure out how to protect what’s left of my retirement.
Before my meeting though, I was scanning my feedreader. Just a normal morning while I have my pot of coffee…And one story struck a nerve on this morning of taxing muses. It seems the top 200 earners in the US of A have an effective tax rate of about 15%…Now for most of America, you only see a 15% tax rate if you have an income of under $68,000 if you are married filing jointly. Seems pretty odd doesn’t it as you listen to everyone screaming about our tax rates overburdening those few of us that are so discriminated against with tax rates above 33%. Yet somehow these very same uber-earners manage to pay taxes at a rate like the poorest amongst us…These poor rich folks are so put upon.
So anyway…I head off to my meeting. The news I am given there is that since I have asked for the money to come to me first before I roll it over into savings plans of my own choosing, the government is taking a chunk first…Just to be sure I don’t take the money and run of without giving good ol’ Uncle Sugar his fair share. Now even if I roll over every dime I receive, the money the government is holding will be considered income for this year. Guess what my tax bracket will probably be once we add in my wife’s earnings? You got it 33%. We won’t have any of that money…It will already be with the IRS…We just get taxed for it.
Granted I did this to myself…I knew this is the way it would happen. It’s just this will be the only chance I get to take any of this money out for four years without penalty…Nice how it’s rigged. Of course had Freeman not changed the rules at the last minute this would be mute because by the old rules I would have received payments over six years with tax liabilities spread over the same time period.
I am almost beginning to think the company I worked for all those years is getting a finder’s fee from the government. At every step in the process of booting me out they have done it in a way that increased my tax liability. They paid my severance package at the end of the year giving me my highest earnings in any year to date…Along with my highest taxes.
I shouldn’t complain, I have some retirement savings…Not what I expected to retire with, but better than it could have been. I managed to bail out of the market with my 401K before the market tanked…And I’ve watched with amusement as the financial planner types kept telling everyone to stay put as the market kept diving for the bottom. You would think bad advise would get old after a while.
Oh…The final little bit of tax news…While I was sitting in the CPA’s office we got the word that a private plane had crashed into the Austin IRS Office and the building was on fire. Now I’ll admit the first thing that popped into my mind was…I am sure glad I haven’t mailed in this years return yet…Crass but true. As I followed the story later in the day I saw my tax muses hadn’t come close to what that guy’s tax nightmare had become. Whatever drove him over the edge, he went way to far by endangering his family and others to make his point and end his own tax troubles…
Joseph Andrew Stack was a tax protester turned violent.
It’s an old Wingnut lineage, with roots in both right-wing and left-wing resistance to the federal government. And yesterday’s explosion in Austin, Texas, wasn’t the first time that unhinged anger at the IRS resulted in a body count. ~ The Roots of the Texas Suicide Attack – Page 1 – The Daily Beast.
So it was just another tax story to add to all of the tax thoughts I took to my bed…
So last night I tossed and I turned…Visions of 1040A’s kept dancing in my head. IRA’s, Keogh’s, Money Markets, FDIC…It was an alphabet of dancing forms and plans.
So the death of one life and the rebirth into another and they are all tied together with taxes…I wonder if I can claim the rebirth as an additional deduction?
