Howdy, boys & girls. I’m back with an update for the ol’ blog. We have secured the tax return. While it’s not the amount I had initially estimated, it was a notable sum. The most important thing is that it was enough to cover the bills we had concerns over. Not only that, but it was enough to give us that security plus a bit of spending cash.

Now, with my existing second job, I can probably set back that second paycheck and use it to fund the ATV I’m wanting. Shouldn’t take but about 8-10 weeks and I’ll have enough for a good down payment.
That’d put me getting it somewhere around the end of March to mid-April. That’s not too bad.

Apparently we lost out on the larger return amount because of some stupid Federal guidelines or some mish-mosh. We were told that even though we filled out our W4’s as “single and 0 dependants” on the part-time jobs my wife and I worked… that the employers’ payroll departments had to gauge the withholdings based on the annual income from that particular job.

The Federal Government doesn’t have a “part-time-job” bracket to judge withholdings from. So, when the employers looked at their annual charts of how to withhold the “single and 0 dependants” claim… they saw that the part-time job status would put our annual salary below the poverty level and they withheld far less than they should have.

To make the long story short… we basically screwed ourselves out of some extra Return money, because our part-time job taxes were based off one scale… and the annual income bracket was another scale. We didn’t lose the money… it was just paid to us in our paychecks rather than as part of the Return. It sucks, I know. The Feds really need to look at this and make a provision as to what status an employee needs, tax-wise.

If it’s going to be a full-time position, fine. But if it’s only part-time, then there should be a different tax bracket to calculate on. Eh, what do I know? I’m just one of the blue-collar workers. Actually, I guess you could consider me a light-blue collar worker. I’m sort of in the middle…somewhere between ditch-digger and corporate executive.

At any rate… I have a new cellphone. I got a Motorola RAZR v3 flip-phone. Yup, it’s ultra-cool. Love this thing!! So, at least something good came out of all of this headache. This, and the ability to catch up on the bills. All in all… not a bad situation, I reckon.

More later…