Day 162

Last night sucked.  Blah.  The last of my W-2 forms came in and so John and I started working on our taxes.  Let's just put it this way... it bypassed bad and went straight to ugly.  Really ugly.  We've run the numbers like 5 times, and they don't change, so there's really not a lot of hope there.  I know how it happened... I saw how it happened as I watched the numbers change in Turbo Tax.  Last year I worked for 3 companies.  For the first half of January I worked for one temp agency, from the end of January to the middle of March I worked for a second temp agency, and then I started at the company where I am now.  Each individual company has me in the 15% tax bracket (well, technically the first 2 have me in the 10%, but that's only because of the length of my employment).  However, when you combine the three, I just barely make it into the 25% bracket.  It's the job I'm with now that really messed things up for us.

Then when it rains it pours... John's car is a leased 2010 MINI Cooper.  I've been begging BMW (MINI's parent company) for information about our personal property taxes.  Seriously... I've called 3 times asking for more information: when is it being assessed? How much?  What's going on?  No answers.  Today I open my email and our payment is like, $500 more than usual.  Yup, property taxes.  Due in 2 weeks.  FML.

Sigh.  We have the money to pay the taxes, I'm just pissed that our entire emergency fund is going to the IRS, and then we're breaking into our savings to pay MINI.  We were about 1 month away from paying off John's now-smallest credit card with our extra money, but now that's going to take about 4-5 months instead, because all our extra funds will be replenishing our savings.  The worst part about all of this is we took a CPA's advice on how to do our taxes.  I'm not sure I'll be so trusting of CPAs in the future.

So summarizing the last 24 hours: Our income is going to drop by like, 10% (since we clearly need to adjust our W4s), we owe an insane amount in taxes, and all the debt payment progress we made is pretty much at a standstill.  Our saving is kind of at a standstill, as well, since we need to replenish before we can move forward.  This month just feels like one step forward, eight steps back (two steps back just didn't cover it).