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Help me figure out taxes
I consider myself a pretty savvy guy but figuring out taxes is confusing me.
As I posted in another thread, I am re-evaluating our W4's with a couple months left in the year. I re-filed them maybe 4-5 months ago, because much had changed since the last filing (birth, moving, etc).
More or less, our incomes are roughly the same as last year, but we moved into a new house and 2010's tax filing only included about 1/2 a year of mortgage interest. So, all things equal, our total tax liability before credits should stay the same or go down [because our income may have gone up but we'll have a larger interest deduction].
I can't get the IRS withholding calculator to give me realistic numbers - it's saying that we're going to be short by like $5k which makes zero sense when comparing its predicted tax liability to last year's.
So I started looking at last year's W2's because in the online W4 calculator, there aren't places to put things like healthcare premiums, pension contributions (not 401k/403b but pension) and union dues. I noticed an extremely large discrepancy between the "wages, tips, other comp" (box 1) and my wife's gross from her last paystub in 2010 (12/31/2010) - like $14k difference. [mine are relatively close since she is the one that pays for healthcare, etc]
My guess is that the IRS calculator is not taking into account these other deductions and giving us bogus numbers. So, I am trying to figure out what exactly comprised that $14k difference. If I add up every deduction other than state and federal taxes and FSA's (which are manually entered in the IRS calculator), I am still about $3k short.
Does anyone have a simple XLS sheet that does these calculations? I don't like using the IRS's black box calculator.
As I posted in another thread, I am re-evaluating our W4's with a couple months left in the year. I re-filed them maybe 4-5 months ago, because much had changed since the last filing (birth, moving, etc).
More or less, our incomes are roughly the same as last year, but we moved into a new house and 2010's tax filing only included about 1/2 a year of mortgage interest. So, all things equal, our total tax liability before credits should stay the same or go down [because our income may have gone up but we'll have a larger interest deduction].
I can't get the IRS withholding calculator to give me realistic numbers - it's saying that we're going to be short by like $5k which makes zero sense when comparing its predicted tax liability to last year's.
So I started looking at last year's W2's because in the online W4 calculator, there aren't places to put things like healthcare premiums, pension contributions (not 401k/403b but pension) and union dues. I noticed an extremely large discrepancy between the "wages, tips, other comp" (box 1) and my wife's gross from her last paystub in 2010 (12/31/2010) - like $14k difference. [mine are relatively close since she is the one that pays for healthcare, etc]
My guess is that the IRS calculator is not taking into account these other deductions and giving us bogus numbers. So, I am trying to figure out what exactly comprised that $14k difference. If I add up every deduction other than state and federal taxes and FSA's (which are manually entered in the IRS calculator), I am still about $3k short.
Does anyone have a simple XLS sheet that does these calculations? I don't like using the IRS's black box calculator.
