It’s been awhile since I did a debt update, so lets take a look at where I’m at vs when I started debtkid.com back in 2007.
2011 was definitely not my best year for earning, especially compared to 2010 and even 2009. I let my work slack off with moving to Portland 2010 and getting married and other major life stuff.
So I was not able to save as much this year as I would have liked. I also started investing back into my current business more and so the last few months I’ve been going negative on my savings! Yikes. Hopefully only a few more months of that and I can start saving again.
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Perhaps you acquired your pets before your financial circumstances changed. Perhaps you’re self-employed and having a low month. We’ve been on our journey to get debt-free for two and a half years now, following the “baby steps” from Dave Ramsey. The Ramsey program says you only carry $1,000 for emergencies. Which is fine, until your cat gets sick.
That’s exactly what happened. My cat Andrew got sick a few months ago. Naturally, on a holiday.
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Sigh, I’m still not a fan of the stock market. I guess being out of the market the last few years has probably cost me financially, but I still don’t think I could take the stress of the ups/downs. The funny thing is that I still watch quite a few stocks, daily even, but I don’t own any of them.
Betterment.com contacted me recently and wanted me to take a look at their new site. I’d usually just ignore the email, but their site looked so pretty I decided, what the heck, I’ll take their call.
So, they set me up with a sweet referral site of my own, and I setup my account last week. The registration was pretty easy, but they do require a deposit verification, which I just completed this morning. So, you can setup an account in about 3 days or so. Pretty painless for an online financial account.
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Dear IRS, (You read Debtkid, right? If not, you totally should. Good stuff here.)
I’d like to know, why it is unacceptable for me to withhold paying my taxes beyond the due date, however, the IRS is at liberty to delay payment of a refund due indefinitely and without interest. What’s up with that?
We’ve got a whomping refund due this year as a result of the outstanding adoption tax credit. This will pay off our only remaining debt—an adoption loan, plus fund our emergency fund, and maybe even get us started on our savings for our trip to Sudan.
But alas, no news.
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Finalizing our youngest daughter's adoption on her fifth birthday.
Note: This is my family’s tax story, not to be confused with actual tax advice from a qualified professional.
I’ve mentioned before that we’re an adoptive family. We welcomed our “bundles of joy” to the family in 2005 (daughter age 7 from the USA, now 12.5) and in 2008 (daughter age 3 from Ethiopia, now 5.5).
There’s a cool little feature in the tax code that gives you a credit to help offset your adoption expenses. When we adopted our first daughter, the credit amount was about $10,000 and with our second daughter, I think it was up to $12,000. It doesn’t fully cover the cost of adoption, but offset 1/3-1/2 of costs in each case,and really made the process much easier–especially since we’d used a lot of debt to make these adoptions happen.
The problem is that if you don’t pay that much in taxes, you spread your tax credit over several years—each year, getting back everything you paid in, until such time that that you’ve run out of credit to take.
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As a dumb 20-something, I day traded away over a quarter-million dollars and found myself deep in debt. 