A Tax Break

It’s after midnight, and I’ve been working on our taxes since about 11 am, so I’m a bit cross-eyed at the moment.  But I’m nearly finished.  I have a meeting with our accountant on Monday to go over our corporate return, which I need to finalize in order to complete our personal returns.  But it shouldn’t take more than a few hours after my meeting with her to be able to file everything. 

I deposited our paychecks today and was planning to transfer $2600 to our HSA tomorrow, which would have maxxed it out for the year.  But now that I’ve got a rough idea of what’s going on with our taxes, I think I’ll only put $1000 into the HSA, and hold onto the rest for a few days.  When I did our taxes today, I estimated the amount that is going to show up on our K1s from our S-Corp, since I haven’t finished the return for the S-Corp yet.  All my other numbers were exact, but the K1 amounts could be off by a few hundred dollars in either direction.  With the estimate I made, our AGI for 2007 is just over $53,000.  That puts us over the limit to claim the Savers Credit for our IRA contributions (we put $4200 into our IRAs in 2007).  But if I were to put another $1500 into my IRA as a 2007 contribution, it would lower our AGI to under $52,000 (the cut off for the savers credit for a couple filing jointly), and we would get a tax credit of 10% of our IRA contribution.  So by putting $1500 extra into my IRA, we would not be paying taxes on that $1500, and we would also get a credit of $570 on our tax bill. 

So… I’m going to hang onto the money I was going to send to the HSA.  Once I meet with our accountant and get the final numbers for our K1s, I’ll figure out exactly how much I need to put into my IRA for last year in order to get our AGI below $52,000, and send in my contribution.

I’m exhausted right now, but I’m stoked to be so close to finishing our taxes, and I’m really glad I noticed how close we were to qualifying for the savers credit before I drained our checking account to max out our HSA.  The HSA will still be there in April – and I’ll be able to use our tax refund to max it out.

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