Ah. A hahahahaha HAHAHA HA! Right. Uh, ixnay on the arcay.

With the new decision to start looking at cars, to make some inquiries at the dealership that Dave does work for, to work on our savings goals, etc, we decided to do our taxes to see what our refund would be like this year. And by refund, I mean "money that we are assured to receive, because we bought a house this year and everyone raves about the tax benfits of buying a house, so Yippee! Direct deposit that bad boy!"

Except, according to TaxACT, the direct deposit isn’t really an option so much, unless we’d like to dirdep THEM some money. Because, for the first time ever, we fucking OWE taxes.  Ironically enough, we owe about exactly what we had decided to earmark for a down payment on a car. I’ve plugged everything in, and actually, just this second I’m realizing that I probably don’t have everything yet, because I should probably be getting another 1099 (interest paid out) for the last of my savings bonds that I cashed in when we bought the house. So, yeah, FUCK. We probably owe more.

Dave and I made the same amount of money, within 500 bucks, and our withholdings were about as similar, so it’s not like there’s some big, obvious "oh, one of our W4s was messed up huh?"  I’ve figured in mortgage interest, points, even the educator expense credit. Everything. And we still owe to the feds and the state.  So, not only am I NOT getting a car, our window fund is going (Har Har) out the window to pay for the taxes. Fuckity Fuck Fuck.

On the other hand, one of TaxACT’s features compares your return to national averages, and it said, improbably (?), that our AGI was in the top 20% , nationally.  Kind of humbling, and sort of mystifying, and makes me wonder about how much that I see people having as objects of wealth are really indicative of wealth itself.  And, we’re lucky that we have the money to pay the bill, it won’t put us into financial ruin, we have a house and at least one reliable car, and no credit card debt, etc etc, so there is always a bright side, right?

However, if the universe wants to drop a Ford Focus station wagon in my driveway, that would be cool, too.