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Kitchen And Taxes Almost Done

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We just about finished our kitchen this past weekend.  It’s very exciting to see it all come together and have it look just like we planned.  We still have some trim/paint/touching up to do, but we should be finished this week.  Then we need to get cracking on replacing the carpet in our upstairs.  We’re going to be making our second living room into a dining room, but we have to move the couch out of the living room and into the baby’s room first.  But we don’t want to move the couch upstairs until the new floor is in.  So for now we have our dining room table in the middle of our living room, which is a bit cramped.  It’s good motivation to get us going asap on the floors…

We gave my parents and sister gift certificates to Home Depot as a thanks for all their hard work on our kitchen.  (They put in three full weekends of work, so they deserved a lot more than we gave them).  It looks like we finished the whole kitchen for just about $3000, which is less than some people pay to replace their oven.  So we’re feeling pretty good about the whole thing.  Since we plan to be in this house for the long term, we might as well have a large, useful kitchen – and it helps that it’s really beautiful too.  But we couldn’t justify spending $20,000 on a kitchen remodel, so we’re very happy with frugal compromises we made. 

I had an appointment with our accountant today, and I think I have all of my tax questions answered.  So I should be able to file everything for the corporation this week.  I’ll figure out exactly how much I need to contribute to my IRA for last year in order to get our Savers Credit, and then I’ll e-file our personal return.  It will be so great to put another year’s taxes to rest.  I’m looking forward to just sitting down and watching a movie on a Friday night, instead of spending my evenings pouring over tax websites!

Category: family, taxes  2 Comments

A Tax Break

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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.