Easy Weekend at Home. Unexpectedly.

This past weekend was an easy weekend at home. That was somewhat unexpected. After an easy day on Saturday we had plans to go for an ambitious hike at Pinnacles National Park on Sunday. But Sunday morning Hawk was feeling a bit ill and not ready for an ambitious hike. We discussed more moderate alternatives but couldn't agree on anything that seemed worth the effort. Plus, Hawk wanted to catch up on a few hours of work. She did that in the morning while I finished up our taxes.

After lunch we ran some shopping errands. I bought a few more bottles of wine and six-packs of beer at Total Wine. The past several weeks I've been doing this whole, "Taste all the beers I used to like and see which ones I actually like" thing. I should write soon about some of my taste tests. I've been meaning to.

Speaking of writing, I've accidentally broken my streak of writing every day. I meant to post to my blog last night (with basically this post minus this thing about breaking my steak 😉) but I was so monstrously tired after dinner I went to bed around 8:30pm. I was afraid that would mean I'd wake up at 2am and be unable to get back to sleep. That's happened before when I go to bed unusually early. But this time I slept the whole night through. Yay?

Hidden Tax Increases

I finished up my household's taxes this weekend. The last leg of my work was spending about 4 hours figuring out why TurboTax had my taxes $1,300 higher than my estimates and, if possible, lowering our bill.

The short version of the story is that TurboTax was right (this time) and we owe $1,300 more than I thought.

The long form is two things. First, the "abusive relationship" I've groused about having with TurboTax. The problem is that TT has been wrong a few times in the past, wrong to the tune of thousands of dollars. It's only through having spent significant time over the years educating myself on taxes and keeping an estimation spreadsheet that I caught these errors. And every single time TT has made it hard to check its math by.... well... hiding its math. Even though TurboTax's bottom line answers were correct this time, because of its occasional major mistakes in the past and persistent lack of transparency it remains an untrustworthy and thus abusive partner.

The second thing about that $1,300 difference is that it's basically a hidden tax increase. If you do your own taxes or pay attention to taxes you know there's the 22% bracket, the 24% bracket, 32%, etc. But computing your tax bill is more than adding up all your income, subtracting your deductions, and then applying the right tax brackets to the dollars remaining. Lurking within the tax rules are "phaseouts", countless little provisions it's hard to notice in the 100s of pages of instructions that say, "If you make more than X, go do this worksheet on page 37 of the instructions for form Y to see if your deduction of Z is limited."

This year we got bitten by 3 new phaseouts, one on our federal taxes and two on state. They weren't new-new; they've been there for a few years. This was the first year they applied to us. Yay, we earned more in 2021 than previous years. Boo, taxes getting more complex with hidden increases beyond the brackets.

Packing for a Trip - Las Vegas and Amarillo

This evening I packed for a trip. Not just any trip; a business trip. The kind I haven't had in over 2 years!

Tomorrow I'm headed out to Las Vegas for a few days for a sales kick-off (SKO). It'll be a few days of training, aka Death by PowerPoint, trying not to overeat at team dinners, and trying not to stay up too ridiculously late drinking and socializing with colleagues.

Combining Work and Leisure

After a few days of SKO I'll be staying in Vegas an extra day and Hawk will join me. But not to gamble or see shows. We'll go hiking in Las Vegas. Likely we'll hike Calico Rock in the mountains west of town to see amazing far-off views of the city like we did several years ago... though that plan, unlike the trail I'm referring to, is not graven in stone.

After a day of hiking somewhere near Las Vegas we'll fly onward together to Amarillo, TX.

"Amarillo?" you ask. "What's in Amarillo?"

Actually nothing. But a little south of it is Palo Duro Canyon State Park, billed as "The Grand Canyon of Texas". We'll go hiking there for a day or a day and a half then fly home.

Packing

Those are a lot of plans for the next 7 days. My plans for this evening, by comparison, were simple: get packed.

I felt an odd bit of stress about packing. It's not that I haven't packed for a trip in 2 years. I've taken a number of leisure trips. in the past 10 months. But this is my first business trip in 2 years. There are different things I have to think about packing for business. And on top of that, it's a combination leisure and business trip. That means I'm packing things that normally don't go together, like hiking boots and pocket squares. It turns out that packing, like riding a bike, is one of those things you never forget after mastering it years ago. The packing I felt anxious about was done in about 30 minutes.