Tax Projections

The federal taxes have been restructured in recent legislation. I'm told we won't see any changes in our pay until February or so: my employer uses ADP so I'm presuming those folks are on top of this and working weekends & nights to get the adjustments into their payroll software as quickly as possible.

In my projections, my overall tax will goes up about $1,000.

True, my federal tax will drop about 3%, but the $10k cap on itemized deductions on state income taxes & property tax is a problem. The standard deduction is $12k, 20% higher, but it still leaves me out in the cold. For 2016, my itemized deductions were approximately $18k: $12.6k in Maryland income taxes, $2.4k in property tax (my half... Kent gets the other half) and $2.6k in mortgage interest (again, my half). In short, itemizing my deductions under the caps will limit me to about $12.6k. That means I have to pay state & federal tax on an additional $5.4k, more than offsetting the reduced federal tax rate.

So I get to pay more taxes as though I made an additional $5,400 but without actually having made & enjoyed that $5,400. I am not happy about this.

The midterm elections in 2018 had better have a lot of talk in the campaigns about restoring deductions if anyone wants my vote. I think multi-billionaires can take a small hit to their sudden windfall to help smooth things for the middle class: they'll have had a year to buy their personal jets, island paradises, and hide their assets by then.

New Phone!

Earlier this month, my old Samsung Galaxy S6 bit the dust. Rather, the pavement. Well, kinda.

I was climbing out of the minivan after delivering Kent to the metro station when it fell from my pocket. It does have a case, but it somehow managed to land flat on its screen, successfully avoiding any contact with the protected surfaces. And the brunt of the shatter pattern was over the selfie camera. The beast worked still, but it was distracting to read because of the shatter pattern, and well, no selfies.

I considered the S8 since I've had a good run with Samsung, but they want $800+ for one. No.

Even the older S7 was going to be $600, much more than I'm willing to pay.

In the end, I went with the Asus Zenfone V. Frankly, I didn't know Asus was making mobile phones but Verizon Wireless was offering it for $240. In my testing, it was slightly less responsive than high end phones but still ran everything I needed to with the same built-in flash storage & RAM, a great screen and higher resolution cameras on front & back.

After a couple of weeks, I'm happy to report it's working well for me. My only significant complaint is that it sometimes doesn't transition nicely from wifi to 4G: occasionally I leave the range of the connected wifi network and it simply refuses to latch onto anything, including the regular mobile network I know is functioning around me. A reboot of the phone brings it back, but that's a bit inconvenient sometimes.

The performance though is more than what I need and the battery life is a big improvement over my old aging S6.