Coffee heat rising

Taxes

Twenty-First Century as Gigantic Rip-off

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Those of us who are decrepit enough to remember life in the late 1900s can surely attest that there were plenty of ripoffs on the float, back then in the “good” ole days. But jeez…

Every which way from Sunday, here’s somebody trying to siphon your money out of your wallet. I swear ta gawd!

Today I had to register the Dog Chariot. Every year or two (depending on how much you’re willing to pay at any one time), you have to trot your car into a state facility to get an emissions test, for which you have to pay about 20 bucks.

Once you pay, they give you a sheet of paper that you have to use to re-register your car. This year: the tab is $227 and change. In other words, it’s going to cost almost $250 to register a nine-year-old car. For one year.

I find this passing infuriating. Yes, I know: we need to pay to maintain the roads and hire highway patrolmen. But we already pay an exorbitant state income tax. And stiff sales taxes on everything that passes a cash register.

But evidently there’s nothing one can do about it.

For a change, though, this year’s ritual was not the unpleasant production of the past. Used to be, you’d drive in and find a dozen lanes, any one of them with ten or fifteen cars ahead of you. So you get in line and you wait and you wait and you wait and you wait and you wait and you…

…and you don’t have much choice of which line you get into. And this is August. The hottest month of the year in Arizona. (Understand: it was 112 here today…and that was actually a fairly balmy day.)

To my surprise, this time there were not very many cars and trucks ahead of me.

A worker motioned me to a line that had only one vehicle, and it was already inside the drive-thru.

So, incredibly, I didn’t have to wait long at all — only a few minutes.

Get in there…and usually they make you get out of the car and wait inside an uncomfortable booth: hot, stuffy, and claustrophobic.

This year, though, they seem to have done away with those. He didn’t even make me get out of the car!

And…it only took him a few minutes to do the job — not a quarter-hour or more. Forthwith he came back, handed me the paperwork, and said I was good to go!

Hallelujah, brothers and sisters! No hassles??????

Well.

Then you look at the paperwork.

The fee to register that nine-year-old vehicle is $227.77.

Can you imagine?

Two hundred and thirty bucks to drive a car I should have traded in four years ago?

Dayum. What do you suppose it costs to register a brand-new Venza? If they even still make them….

I don’t drive that car much. Now that I don’t have to schlep to jobs in Tempe or in Glendale, I rarely have any reason to bucket around the roads. Yeah: I drive to the grocery store, the Costco, and the occasional doctor’s or veterinarian’s office, but that’s about it.

If we had decent public transit here, I probably wouldn’t even own a car.

But we don’t, so I do.

There’s good reason not to feel safe on the city’s buses and trains. Mainly, the transients ride them for free (partly because on the train, no one is taking tickets, and partly because various organizations hand out free bus passes. And o’course, because they’re air-conditioned). Most of those folks are harmless. But some are…not. Many are ex-convicts. Most are drug users. Some are out of their heads with mental illness or the effects of street drugs. So…no. They’re not strangers you want to spend a lot of time with, in elbow-to-elbow seating. Or standing.

And that’s specifically why I don’t ride lovely Phoenix’s buses and vaunted trains.

So here we are in a city — and a state — where public transit is neither very practical nor very pleasant, and those of us who have to drive (that includes almost everyone) gets gouged for the privilege of putting our cars on the road. Don’t forget: this is not the only tax we pay. Gasoline is taxed liberally. Most retail products are taxed at the checkout counter (and points along the way thereto…). Power is taxed. Water is taxed. On and on it goes.

Not that one doesn’t want to support government and public services. But maybe the funds should be used intelligently?

Lordie! One extreme idea after another!

 

She’s B-a-a-a-a-c-k!…

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And in case you wondered where she was, well…it’s been a bit of a Looney Tunes saga.

To start with the most immediate phenomenon: Funny about Money was knocked off the “air,” as it were, along with its sister sites, Plain & Simple Press and The Copyeditor’s Desk. At least, we believed that to be true…and so it may have been, for awhile.  Or maybe not.

This fiasco began when I made up my venerable mind to close my technical editing business, having tired mightily of reading academic papers in mathematics, political science, and economics. First step in this process, I figured, was to close my corporate bank account and transfer its funds into my personal checking account, thereby (I hope) simplifying next year’s tax efforts.

This process disappeared all the credit union’s data for CE Desk — some years’ worth. Fortunately I had already downloaded all the 2021 transactions. This was…wise, lucky, whatever-you-wanna-call-it. Because of course nothing can be simple…and the history of all those transactions was about to be needed.

I had been auto-paying a slew of bills out of that acccount — anything that could even remotely be construed as business- or tax-related, This included utility bills, XXS, YYY, and whatnot. I listed all of these creditors so I could call up their billing departments and arrange to have the autopays made from my now much-bloated personal account.

So I’m tooling around, more or less going on about my business, when LO!

In comes a message saying I haven’t paid the Web hosting bills for Bigscoots and they’re going to take down my three websites.

Huh?

By now, of course, the business bank account is long gone, but as far as I can tell from the year’s worth of entries I downloaded to Excel, I’ve never autopaid Bigscoots from CE Desk’s account. Repeated threats to close the three sites keep coming in.

To make a long and painful story short, eventually my Web guru, Grayson Bell, was informed of this, since it appeared we were about to lose my little Web empire altogether. He did his own thrashing around and eventually elicited a report from Bigscoots that my bills are paid in full, and there is no delinquency.

So…it appears that this was another scam like the one that came in from Amazon a few weeks ago.

The alarming thing is, these people know wayyyy too much about me. The crooks who tried to extract money from me over some supposedly unpaid bill at Amazon knew what was in my Amazon seller’s account. Or…at least they appeared to.

They certainly could have surmised some fairly accurate guesses simply by studying what I was selling (or, more accurately, not selling) at Amazon. But how would they know Funny is hosted by BigScoots?

Welllll….it develops that it’s pretty easy. You can find out where a website is hosted here… and here…and here…and here….and on and on and on. It’s public information.

Once you know a blogger’s Web host, it’s a simple matter to try to scam him or her. And that appears to be what has happened.

I don’t expect these clowns will stop harassing me, now that they’ve got me in their crosshairs. On Monday, I intend to call the FBI just to report this. The website gambit, of course, is a negligible matter. But trying to hack into my bank accounts? Not so much.

Meanwhile, the uncomfortable — sometimes outright painful — peripheral neuropathy persists. About that, the main thing I can say is that it appears our medical system leaves much to be desired. But then, we knew that…

About 18 months ago, in mid-2010, my doctor at the Mayo decided the cause of the crazy-making tingling and stinging in the hands, feet, lips, and gum were the result of a vitamin B-12 deficiency. This, she surmised, was occasioned by what she takes to be alcoholism.

Say what?

A glass of wine with dinner alcoholism does not make…at least not so as I can tell. I do not toss back half a bottle of cabernet with breakfast. I do not drink until I’m drunk. I do not drive after drinking. I do not qualify as a lush by the Mayo clinic’s criteria, or by a prominent alcohol treatment center’s self-test, or by Alcoholics Anonymous’s criteria…  Turns out the woman the Mayo has assigned to me as my primary care doctor was raised by a pair of Christian Scientists.

My mother’s family were Christian Scientists, too. They are quite extreme on the subject of booze: disapprove of letting so much as a drop touch your lips.

At any rate, six months of uninterrupted tee-totaling did nothing to improve the neuropathic symptoms. Clearly if booze was the cause, there’s no cure for the ailment. But clearly, too, booze is not the cause: six months on the wagon did exactly nothing to help the misery. Nor did a year of gulping down megadoses of vitamin B-12.

When, in December of 2020, I developed vertigo — dizziness so severe that at times it was unsafe to drive my car — I started to look around…and discovered that vertigo can be caused by OD-ing on vitamin B-12. Not only that, but the British National Health Service inveighs against taking B-12 supplements at all! Turns out the stuff is not a benign drug. Not only it cause vertigo, it also can cause or aggravate peripheral neuropathy. Yea verily, it turns out the Mayo Clinic itself says the stuff can cause dizziness.

Yeah verily.

Meanwhile, a checkup at the Mayo revealed the supposed B-12 deficiency was gone. Not surprising, since I’d been tossing back 1000 micrograms a day for months and months.

Quit scarfing the B-12, and after a few weeks, the vertigo is beginning to seem better. Telling, isn’t it, that the world started spinning about three months after I started dropping megadoses of B-12…

On the other hand, a month ago I managed to reconnect with Young Dr. Kildare. He thinks the dizziness is caused by inner-ear inflammation brought about by allergies. And it must be said, the air here has been even worse than usual — which ain’t good. We’ve had week on week on week of classic Southern California-style smog. Not surprising, since our wise City Parents have modeled development of Maricopa County directly after Los Angeles County. And during all the three years we lived in unlovely Long Beach with its air so thick you often could barely see across the high-school campus, I enjoyed head and respiratory symptoms just like the ones I’ve been enjoying over the past few weeks.

YDK suggested using one of several over-the-counter antihistamines. None of them seem to do much good except for Benadryl, which has its own untoward side effects. However, taken in extreme moderation, it seems to help some.

Also the fact that a West-Coast storm system has (finally!!!) made its way over the Coastal Range and has blown the smog out of the Valley may have something to do with it.

I can’t live with this kind of smog. If, as I suspect, it’s now a permanent Thing, I’m going to have to move out of the Valley. My son is dead set against my moving at all — even to another neighborhood (to get away from the racket on Conduit of Blight and Gangbanger’s way and away from the commercial nursing home Tony the Romanian Landlord is installing across the street). He’ll be particularly displeased if I propose to move to Prescott, Oro Valley, or Patagonia…

None of this miasma has been helped by the two years’ worth of covid isolation.

The church pretty much shut down in response to the plague. Choir stopped. And this left nothing for me to do with my time other than walk the dog around the neighborhood.

Seriously.

Choir is now slowly resuming for social-distanced services…but alas, I dare not rejoin them. I can get spectacularly sick from just an ordinary flu bug. When I was a little girl, a doctor slapped me in the ICU and told my mother I would not be alive the following morning.

Guess that was the first time I gave the lie to a doctor, eh? 😀

But the truth is, I do NOT want to get the covid bug. That really is likely to kill me. Choral singing is one of the most dangerous things you can do during time of contagion. And I ain’t ready to go yet!

Lo! A day ago, our interim choir director sent out an email announcing that six of the members have come down with covid. Surprise!

In the absence of choir, I volunteered to help staff the church office’s front desk: receptionist duty.

Appropriate: I started my life in the work world as a receptionist…and now am ending it in the same job.

Except my first gig as a receptionist — in one of the Southwest’s largest firms — was fun. We were busy all the time, and in slow times were assigned various filing and mail-room chores. In this volunteer position…well. Literally, you can sit there all afternoon and not get even one real phone call. A  phone solicitation, maybe, but that’s it. There is otherwise almost NOTHING to do. And…well…if I’m going to do nothing, I’d rather do it at home.

Meanwhile, a dear friend fell and broke her hip…within days after marrying a man she met online. Had to have surgery to fix the femur. It looks like she’s on the mend, but she’s going to have a long haul. Her doc told her the same thing the orthopedist told me: it will take about a year for the bone to heal. Arrrghhh!

Well, speaking of doing nothing, it’s almost 5 a.m. The dog has gone back to sleep, having dragged the human off the bed so as to go outside and then to mooch a doggy-treat. So I’m gonna knock this off and go back to sleep, too. I hope.

A Quick Guide to Taxes for Self-Employed American Expats

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Susan-B.-Anthony-DollarThe United States is only one of two countries that have adopted a citizenship-based taxation system, the other being Eritrea in Northeast Africa. This means that all U.S. citizens and permanent residents (also known as Green Card holders) are required to file a return and pay tax on their worldwide income, even if they are based in a foreign country.

For self-employed expats who are thinking of starting a business abroad, this could mean an additional layer of complexity to an already complicated system of tax filing and reporting. But just because the U.S. tax system works against expat taxpayers doesn’t mean you should give up on your goals.

Here’s a quick guide to filing taxes as a self-employed expat.

What is self-employment?

People who work for themselves are considered self-employed. While the term is generally associated with small side hustles, working as an independent contractor or opening a business also counts as self-employment.

According to the IRS, a person can be considered self-employed if:

  • They carry on a trade or business as a sole proprietor or an independent contractor
  • They are a member of a business or trade partnership
  • They are otherwise in business for themselves (including a part-time business)

It’s important to note that a person can be both self-employed and also work as a salaried employee. Many expats have started businesses on the side while holding down a full-time job.

Self-employed expat taxes

Self-employed expats often deal with heavier tax responsibilities compared to their salaried counterparts.

For starters, self-employed taxpayers have to withhold taxes from their income themselves, which results in extra paperwork and research. They also have to pay self-employment tax (for Social Security and Medicare) on top of their income tax.

Self-employed taxpayers may also have to pay estimated taxes quarterly. Ask a tax professional to clarify your tax situation to avoid a hefty penalty at the end of the year.

What is the threshold for self-employed tax

The reporting threshold for self-employed individuals is substantially lower than what most taxpayers are accustomed to. Self-employed expats who earn more than $400 in a year are required to file a tax return.

Is foreign income subject to self-employment tax

All income from self-employment, even from foreign sources, is subject to U.S. taxation. Self-employed individuals are required to pay a 15.3% self-employment tax: 12.4% for Social Security and 2.9% for Medicare.

However, you may claim an exemption from paying U.S. Social Security tax if the United States has signed a totalization treaty with your country of residence.

Self-employed tax deductions

The IRS allows self-employed individuals to deduct business expenses from their taxable income, reducing their tax bills. Make sure to take advantage of all the benefits available to you to minimize your tax liability.

Some business expenses you can deduct include:

  • Legal and professional services
  • Business-related travel
  • Equipment and supplies
  • Marketing
  • Utility bills
  • Insurance
  • Business meals and entertainment

Just make sure to keep your records updated in the event of an IRS inquiry. Every deduction must be supported by documentation such as a receipt to justify the claim.

Self-employed tax exemptions

Self-employed expats who already pay income tax to their host countries can take advantage of tax exemptions to minimize their U.S. tax liability on the same income.

For instance, the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion allows you to exclude up to $108,700 (for tax year 2021) of foreign-earned income from U.S. tax if you are based in a foreign country.

You may also take a Foreign Tax Credit for foreign income taxes imposed on the same income. Self-employed expat taxpayers may claim a dollar-for-dollar tax credit on income tax paid to the host country’s tax service. This means you can use your foreign income tax bill to offset your U.S. taxes.

What if I’ve never filed self-employed taxes?

Self-employed American expats who haven’t filed a U.S. tax return may use the Streamlined Foreign Offshore Procedures program to report foreign-earned income and pay back taxes without facing penalties.

Tax planning for self-employed expats

Filing taxes as a self-employed expat can be confusing and time-consuming. You are expected to stay on top of your tax obligations while running a business abroad. You also risk incurring heavy penalties if you make a mistake on your tax return. If you want to make sure your taxes are done correctly, your best option is to work with a professional tax service .

The Biggest Bugaboo of Hallowe’en…

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Tax records.

Actually, the real biggest bugaboo this year was covid-19, which pretty much put the eefus on Hallowe’en in our neighborhood. Over in lower Richistan, the young parents insisted on entertaining Hallowe’en tricksters and treaters, many of them creating hilarious long ore slides through which they could deliver candy without having to get close to the kiddies and the teenagers. But over here in the peanut gallery, most people simply shut down their property. I turned off the lights and hunkered down in the back of the house, and noticed that most of the houses around me were darkened, too.

Usually Mr. & Mrs. WonderAccountant host a little party on their driveway. Ruby and I go over there and hang out all evening, and a great deal of fun is had by all. The kids are such a kick in their costumes, and they’re usually accompanied by adults who are commensurately decked out. But this year, even if the WonderAccountants hadn’t decided to opt the festivities…well…with a shiny new life-threatening condition, I surely can’t afford to expose myself to a disease that is likely to carry me away, just for the fun of handing out candy to a bunch of strangers’ kids in costumes.

That notwithstanding, I left a big box of candy out on the sidewalk for passers-by. Usually when you do that, someone will steal the whole thing. Not even the thieves were out and about! 😀 The junk was still out there this morning, and now I’ll have either to throw it away or to donate it to some charity. Personally, encouraging kids to eat that crap is agin’ my religion, so I’ll probably toss it.

Meanwhile, we’re nigh unto the end of the year, and so it’s time to organize this year’s transactions for WonderAccountant’s delectation. Arrrhhhhhh!!! How I hate that task!!!!!

And THAT is the Biggest Bugaboo of Hallowe’en! Eeeeeek!!!

After last year’s torture, I decided I would download and organize a month’s worth of transactions at a time, so that by the end of the year only one miserable month’s worth would await.

But no. Not a chance. I am simply too, toooo lazy to force myself to attend to an aversive task on a regular basis. Plus it’s been a bit of a shitty year health-wise, and so I surely haven’t felt like farting with that garbage. From what I can tell, I kept up with the credit-union transactions through the end of May and the AMEX transactions…well, not at all. I’ve only got one AMEX download: May through June.

It will take hour after hour after brain-numbing HOUR to download these hundreds and hundreds of transactions and organize them by category in Excel.

This used to be an easy task in Quicken. But the program I was using turned out not to be compatible with newer Mac operating systems, so about all I can do is track the stuff in Excel and then pass the Excel files along to WonderAccountant. She can access my CU statements, but of course she has no idea how to categorize about 95% of that stuff. To save her time and my money, I really need to do the scutwork myself.

Ohhh gawd!

You know…as my time on this earth grows shorter and shorter, my patience with things electronic grows shorter, too. I am SO goddamn sick of hassling with computers! And wrangling data. And trying to overcome every damnfool new “improvement” and “update” foisted on us, most of which are far from improvements but represent some new headache. The last thing on this earth I want to do is spend several hours a day the next three or four weeks wrestling with data from the credit union, from American Express, from Medicare, and in Excel.

Well, with any luck at all, given the current state of affairs, maybe this will be the last thing I’ll have to do in that department.

Thank heaven for small blessings…

Come Saturday Mornin’…

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Another week has blown past. The older you get, the faster time passes…remember when you were a little kid and an hour seemed like an eternity? Yeah…now it doesn’t even make it up to five seconds.

Finally managed to finish and post this week’s chapter of Ella’s Story. Slowing the post schedule for each bookoid — Ella, If You’d Asked Me, and The Complete Writer — from three a week to one a week was a good idea. That seems obvious in retrospect. But Asked and Writer are already written. And really, if I would get off the dime I could (in theory) write a chapter a week for Ella’s Story.

It’s just that, well…I’m not about to get off the dime. Too many distractions beckon, not the least of which is the doggy drama. One could say it’s not that I have too much to do but that I overly enjoy doing too little.

Right this minute, for example, the dryer buzzes angrily. Yesterday Cassie waddled over to the dog bed parked under the computer desk, dragged herself onto it, and…yeah. Squatted right there and pooped all over it. So much for writing. Get up, drag out the bed, clean up the mess, see that the dog is in a bad way, carry the dog outside to do its business, pick her up, carry her back inside…on and on it goes. Instead of doing this — right this minute — I should be dragging out the garbage, picking up the dog shit out of the back yard (again), cleaning the dog shit off my shoe from where I stepped in it this morning, taking down the leaking hummingbird feeder and power-washing the flagstone beneath it before the day gets warm enough to awaken the Ondt Queen’s hordes, drafting a kind of “g’day” email to send out to my missing clientele, returning to LinkedIn and rebuilding a presence there, starting to work more seriously on Drugging of America, putting a load of actual laundry in the washer, sneaking out with Ruby to squeeze in a mile’s walk, checking the pool chemicals, applying a coat of silicone lubricant to the rubber gasket on the pool’s pump basket, calling my friends to see how they’re settling into their new abode, downloading and entering data into Excel for the tax accountant…

Ugh! There’s the hangup: I hate hate HATE the job of entering day after day of income and expense data into a complicated spreadsheet. So, the chore becomes one of entering month after month of data… And, that, having been put off in a monthly fit of aversion, is going to take several long days of drudging away. I don’t want to do that, so…I don’t do anything. Because really, that should be the first priority (January being more than at hand…), and so of course I can’t do anything else before doing that. Can I?

Right…

I fail to see the point of recording every single goddamn transaction. Why can’t we enter tax-related transactions only? Income: sure. Medical-related expenses: yeah. Business expenses: of course. Property tax, state tax, and car registration: yep. Capital improvements on the house: yes. But come ON: every trip to Costco, Walmart, and Safeway? Every bottle of olive oil, loaf of bread, package of dog food? Seriously? Why is that necessary?

Obviously, for the business “tax-related” would mean every single transaction. But for the personal stuff, what is the point of entering dozens and even hundreds of transactions that are irrelevant for tax purposes? If all I recorded were income, medical and insurance expenses, charitable contributions, tax payments, capital improvements, investment income & expenses…wouldn’t that be quite enough? I mean, for godsake…we know what net worth is, and we know what net income/expense balance is: all we have to do is enter the bank balance at the beginning of the year, the bank balance at the end of the year, and figure the difference. Quickbooks downloads bank transactions and preserves them, in a clumsy way. Fidelity provides reports for all IRA and non-IRA investments. So…why are we doing this?

Add to the list of things to do today: Ask accountant why are we doing this.

Ruby just peed all over one of Cassie’s pee mats. Suspicions confirmed. Because Cassie has come un-house-trained, now Ruby figures she can forget that “outside” rubbish, too.

Cassie fell into a disturbing relapse yesterday. On her best days, she’s far from well. On a bad day? Well: disturbing.

She started having difficulty walking. The past few days, her chassis has just kind of given out: her hind legs either collapse or, on the slippery tiles, slide out from under her. Yesterday she was very weak, and by evening clearly was in pain. I dosed her with half a Benadryl and a baby aspirin at night, and by this morning she seems better.

Sometimes she becomes confused. A few minutes ago I found her standing in the office with her nose sticking into the bookcase. She seemed not to know how to disengage herself from this pose. More and more often, too, she goes outside, she looks around…and she appears mystified. Her expression and body language seem to say What is this place? Where am I and how did I get here?

So…that’s depressing. Yesterday I thought it was “Time,” but knowing she may spring back to at least a marginally acceptable state discourages me from whisking her off to the vet to be put down. And yea verily: this morning she’s not well, but she’s not in those desperate straits, either. Far as the human eye can discern.

I discovered that closing the doors to two of the bedrooms cuts down considerably on the excreta pick-up. Why? That is unclear. But without the freezer/crafts room floor and the spare bedroom floor to use as outposts of the doggy loo, they’re both more inclined to arf at the door when the mood beckons.

But Cassie really needs to be physically guided outside and reminded to do her business about once an hour. Sometimes, if she’s feeling feeble, this entails picking her up, carrying her out the door, toting her to the peeing ground, setting her down, and then picking her up and carrying her back inside. Besides the obvious joy entailed, this poses yet another problem:

SDXB is determined to get me to go on a day trip to Castle Hot Springs with him. So enthused is he about this expedition that he has engineered an entire party with his present girlfriend and one of his other ex-girlfriends., which he expects me to join. He now has this scheduled for early February.

The problem is…if Cassie doesn’t accommodate his plan by shuffling off this mortal coil before then, there’s no way I can go with them.

I can’t leave her with my son: he has a job. (Remember those?) I can’t leave her outdoors all day: for one thing, she’s always been an indoor dog, and for another, even if she were accustomed to spending hours out of doors, it’s too cold now for that.

So…uhm… I really don’t quite know what to say… “Sure, I’ll come along if my dog is dead by then”?

Right…