Anyone who’s followed this space for any length of time knows I despise tax season.  I don’t generally use the term “hate”, but in this rare case it seems to apply.

Hate,    –verb (used with object)

to dislike intensely or passionately; feel extreme aversion for or extreme hostility toward; detest: to hate the enemy; to hate bigotry.

I’m not to the point of  “extreme hostility” yet, but the rest of the above certainly applies.

It’s not that I’m against paying taxes.  I understand the benefit.  Someone has to pay for the roads and highways we use, banking and aviation infrastructure, etc…

It’s the rest of the fraudulent and wasteful crap that my tax dollars spent on that really peeves me.

At any rate, corporate returns are due Monday, and I’ll be filing an extension.  Not because I’m not ready, I just don’t like being rushed.

More on how things turned out later.

Category: Taxes Tags: tax code, Taxes

Last night my wife and I went out to a movie for the first time in a long time.  We brought Grandma over to look over little Squeebles, and mom and dad went out on town.

We went to see The Blind Side, which I highly recommend.  The underlying story is of a well-off couple with two kids who take “Big Mike” (a teenage kid from the “other side of town” with only the clothes on his body) under their wing, buy him clothes, send them to school, and he ends up getting a scholarship to play football at Old Miss.

I’m not much of a movie critic, and the the previous paragraph doesn’t do the storyline justice.  I recommend seeing it for yourself.

A long time ago I wrote about how I paid good money (and a lot of it) for a bottle of water, when there was a water fountain right next to the concession counter.

Well, I failed in frugality once again.

Last night I paid $8 for a “large” bag of popcorn.  I admit it, guilty.

I can’t believe I did that, but popcorn sounded really good at the time, and I figured we’d split it, which we did.

There’s no way that bag of popcorn was worth $8.  But I paid for it anyway, and apparently by the looks of the line at the counter, other people did too.  I suppose a product is worth what people will pay for it, but for something as cheap and easy as popcorn, it strikes me that so many people are willing to pay for it.

I was only slightly vindicated by putting $4 worth of free fake butter and salt on the popcorn.  If I’m gonna overpay for popcorn, I’m gonna load it up with all the free stuff I can.  Arteries be damned.

Category: Finance, Life Tags: frugality, popcorn, theater prices

Although I’ve achieved this goal a lot later in the program than I’d like, I managed to max out both my wife and I’s Roth IRA’s for 2009… in the nick of time.

With a kid romping around and daycare chewing up the extra cash, it will be much more difficult to fund all $10,000 for 2010, but I’m gonna try.

What bugs me now is that I’ve got money sitting on the sidelines.  It bugs me because I want it to be working for me, but I’m not sure where to put it to work.  I’m still overweight in a few stocks that I’m paring out of gradually, which is where a bulk of the idle money is coming from.

I’m still thinking interest rates are going to be on the rise, along with taxes…

Another subject I’d rather not think about now.

Category: Investing, Saving Tags: Roth IRA, Saving