As you may have guessed, I'm in charge of taxes in our family. We haven't formally divided up tasks in our marriage, but so far the following divisions of labor have arisen naturally:
1. I do the dishes (Ed hates doing dishes)
2. Ed cooks (He's just more into making dinner than I am)
3. I do the laundry (I have too many needy clothes to ask someone else to take care of them)
4. Ed takes out the trash and kills bugs (definitely man jobs)
5. I do the taxes (because I have a phd in accounting)
6. Ed does the investing (because I can't stand watching our money bounce around with the ebb and flow of the stock market)
7. We both clean our own bathrooms. We'll see how that one plays out when Ed moves in with me.
Quote of the week: "Honey, you know that hot stock pick you gave me on Monday? It's gone up 7% since then. I didn't buy it."
7 comments:
Stupid Harvard's breaking the law! They still haven't sent me my W-2. Yesterday I was all excited and bouncy when I saw a letter from Harvard that said "tax information inside." I opened it and it had *my $50 royalty income!* Just a little form telling me that I have to pay taxes on $50. Of royalty income. How do I have royalty income? I have no idea. Anyway, to make a short point long: I want my W-2!
Oh yeah, and tell us how the married filing jointly vs. married filing seperately thing goes.
As far as I can tell, you are almost always better off using the 'married filing jointly' status unless one of you has big casualty losses or medial expenses that can only be expensed if they exceed a percentage of your AGI (and where they would exceed the percentage of one spouse's AGI but not the combined incomes).
Anyway, I'm going to be looking into it further (because I'm wondering if there is an advantage to 'married filing separately' for state taxes when we have both lived in different states for the whole year) so I'll keep you updated.
This is quite timely. We're more than halfway through using TurboTax Online for the fourth consecutive year (or more - can't recall). It has a running total which can give you sticker shock when you have investment profits, or glee when you realize the true blessings of paying your tithing - cold, hard, cash!
It's quite odd to open an envelope and root for your property taxes to be higher than ever!
As far as the division of labor is concerned, you forgot to mention who is the IT technician of the household. I've been assigned IT and TV/Computer/Cable maintenance, investing and taxes, correspondence, dishes and we split laundry and beagle maintenance. Kristine would like to tell you she does everything else. It's close. :-)
We both take care of our own IT problems, which mostly consist of cursing at our computers for running progressively more slowly.
I also try to get Ed do anything that involves talking to a stranger ("You want Dish TV? You take care of it.")
Russ has already completed most of our taxes online, we are just waiting a couple more days for Atlas something or other to give us some info. Then we can file, and when we do it will be the biggest return we've had yet! We'll be getting back twice as much as we paid. As Russ said, there are benefits to deploying.
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