From Refund To Owing Taxes

A strange thing happened this year: we had to pay taxes to the IRS and state when we would normally be expecting a tax refund. It is strange because nothing has changed in our employment or personal lives from last year, unless the tax code itself has changed. I even run the numbers several times (using different tax preparation software) and different ways (filing jointly versus separately) to make sure there wasn't a mistake, but no matter how I filed, we still owed. I expected my business to owe some taxes (and it did), but why did we owe on personal income?

We've had to review the exemptions we take on our W-4, and how we pay for our benefits, and I think it might be because we were both taking exemptions. I do not know why this wasn't a problem last year (our first time filing jointly) where we received a sizable refund. The best we could do is have my wife claim only one or two exemptions and allow higher tax withholding as if she were single. That will help next year.

But the best solution, however, will be for her to claim no exemptions and remain at the higher married/single withholding rate. I would claim only the head of household exemption and also do the higher married/single withholding rate. I've learned that this arrangement would ensure a nice tax refund every year.

Wheat-Free for One Month

After the success of our "one car for one month" experiment, we decided to start looking into how and what we eat. Fresh off her diet, my wife suggested we try a month of wheat-free nutrition. The research turned up mostly gluten-free and vegetarian foods, which we have been on since the beginning of this month.

The research also turned up diet ideas based on blood types, with all its controversies. This is worth consideration another month, as I think there is some scientific merit for a hypothesis that you should eat what would be more compatible with your blood (which is where it ultimately all ends up anyway). An interesting topic ...

The goals for this experiment are simple: to see whether wheat-free can reasonably deliver healthier nutrition as claimed, and how life is like on gluten-free/vegetarian diets, especially for us meat-lovers. Depending on how deep we get, how difficult will it be returning to our normal foods and what will we miss most? It's not like we weren't already eating reasonably healthy food, but perhaps there are good habits and recipes we can roll into our lifestyle.