A Rant About Taxes & Unexpected Bills

February is a month out of the year that people tend to enjoy, loathe or hate.

People who enjoy it are usually happily in love and able to celebrate the festivities that accompany Valentine's Day. Chocolates, flowers, and all the other commercialized nonsense associated with February 14, as it were. Conversely, people who hate it tend to be in the opposite scenario. Maybe they've had a bad break-up or gotten divorced and haven't yet been able to make peace and move on to whatever comes next for them. In the middle are those folks who just plain loathe the month of February which, at least this year, is where I find myself. Not for any kind of marital issues, mind you - rather issues of the sort that come from dealing with the Internal Revenue Service and hospitals/medical insurance providers.

My wife & I are pretty good at handling our personal finances. That's something I'm proud of seeing as how it seems like you hear of just as many, if not more, young couples splitting up as a result of stress over financial matters as you do matters of infidelity. We make more good decisions than we do bad ones, I would say, as neither of us are particularly prone to going off on spending sprees that would put us out of whack. We both have good jobs and we make sure our bills get paid; we sometimes have to juggle with more running chainsaws in the air than we'd like, but who doesn't these days?

Filing taxes has never been a particularly rosy endeavor for me. As far back as I can remember, it was always the case that I would wind up getting a little bit of money back from the state of South Carolina only to then have Uncle Sam turn around and say "Wait, I need that too, sorry - maybe next year?" (while snickering under his breath, no less). It was a frustrating cycle when I was single because I would see all these other folks out enjoying their suddenly bloated wallets, meanwhile I'm eating bologna sandwiches and drinking tap water.

Things have improved only somewhat since my wife & I have been married. If I remember correctly I believe we may have looked into the prospect of filing separately our first year of marriage. That idea got squashed quickly when it developed that I would've had to fork over a substantial amount of money to the IRS. Suffice to say that things got much better when we combined our information into a joint filing, but be that as it may I felt bad then and I have ever since because it seemed as though I (through no real fault of my own other than trying to earn a living, I guess) was damaging our potential for getting back a decent a return.

Since Jill and I have been married, we have always taken what we got back on our taxes and put it towards our annual trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. We've been lucky in that we've gotten back enough to pay for the rental of the house we stay in; this year we were particularly fortunate in that we were able to handle that expense plus pay off the majority of what we had left over on the amount due for our next Walt Disney World adventure (which is coming up in May for the 2014 edition of Star Wars Weekends).

Those were monies which were returned to us by the state of South Carolina, for which I am thankful. We aren't getting any money back from the federal government, however. Nope, not one cent. As a matter of fact, we owe the Internal Revenue Service $190. Yes, you read that correctly - one hundred and ninety dollars.

When my wife informed me of that (yes, she does our taxes - because she's awesome, that's why), I couldn't help but laugh. $190? Really? I'm not begging for punishment here but what is $190 to the United States government? If you look at the nation's debt, we rack up roughly $50,000 PER SECOND in expenditures that, as a nation, we can't actually afford. How is our measly $190 going to help matters, given the state of things?

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad we don't owe more. It just seems like a futile amount in the grand scheme of things, is all. That's not enough money to hire a decent plumber, for crying out loud. What are they going to do with it, pay the guy who shines some senator's shoes? That gives me a great idea, actually. I think every tax paying citizen of the United States should receive an itemized list of where every single penny of their taxes are spent. I think we deserve that level of transparency seeing as how they, on some level, apparently know about every phone call, email, text message, etc. that we generate.

Actually, I take that back. I don't want to know what they're doing with our money. It's bad enough that our government takes from us as much as it does, knowing how it's being spent might only make the situation that much more frustrating. "My money contributed to a study on whether or not cocaine makes Japanese quail engage in sexually risky behavior? (Yes, it happened.) Well isn't that lovely..."

Adding to this frustration is the fact that during the month of February I received an unexpected medical bill related to the sleep study I had done last year (click here to read about that experience, if you haven't already). This is on top of what I'm already paying the hospital in monthly intervals, mind you; from what I've been able to gather it's an adjusted sum that my insurance didn't cover. (Insurance being another deduction that gets sucked out of my paycheck which goes towards a service that rarely gets used then doesn't seem to help much when I need it.) Fortunately it wasn't an absurd amount of money (it's in the area of $60) but when you consider I had that procedure almost a year ago and I'm just now getting this bill, it left me wondering if there's not a statute of limitations on this kind of thing. Am I going to be 40 and get another bill related to this thing or what?

I hate to complain via my blog because I know people don't necessarily enjoy reading this kind of trite, but the simple fact of the matter is that this arena is one of the better opportunities I have to vent. Getting out your frustrations is healthy, and it's even better if you can do so in a constructive manner. (In my mind, it was either this or I go knock over a gas station; I think I chose wisely.) Trust me when I say that I would sooner write about a dozen different things than this - even so, this blog is about my life and February 2014 has been affected by these issues. It's one of those deals where you have to take the good with the bad, the uplifting moments with the frustrating ones, and try to look forward to whatever comes next. We shouldn't expect defeat, after all, because that only makes things worse.