I’m not charting/posting an index today. I spent my time away from my family doing taxes. I used the Turbo Tax, like I’ve done for years. I had to upgrade to Quicken 2008 to get everything to transfer and allow me to continue downloads after April from my credit cards and brokerages.
I’ll give a review of Quicken 2008 Premier after I’ve had a little more time to play with it. First impression is good though. A problem I’ve seen with Quicken/Turbo Tax in the past and again this year is that it doesn’t pull over all dates for my trades. For about a third of them I had to enter the sell date for my options manually. I don’t know what made some import correctly and others didn’t.
As expected we owe due to my capital gains for 2007 being more than I planned for. I’ll work it a little differently from now on. After I build back up from the losses I currently have on paper (which will be realized losses before too long), I’ll get a feel for the rough amount of capital gains I’ll have for 2008. My current plan is to adjust my W-4 to take out extra so I still owe some next year, but not as much.
Our effective tax rate ended up being 21.98% of my taxable income this year compared to 20.4% last year. Our effective tax rate on total income was 17.5% versus 15.3% last year. We have a little bit more of our income falling in the 33% tax bracket now thanks to my gains in stocks and my wife’s employer stock options and extra exit bonus she received at the end of her employment with her last company.
I’m not taking anything out of savings to pay the taxes, but will reduce my deposits to my trading account for a couple of months. I already skipped January in anticipation, so I think I’ll skip March and be OK. I sent $2,000 in on Friday, so February is taken care of.