never too old to learn

It depends on what your income situation is, but paying tax estimates has been part of my life pretty much forever. Comes with making money by being an investor instead of by salary.

My nasty surprise this year came when TurboTax greatly raised my NM tax due when I installed an update around February 26. It turns out that NM had made a change from previous years which increased the marginal tax rate for capital gains by 67%, and Intuit had failed to update their NM version to reflect this huge increase until then.

Had such an increase been applied to a socially sympathetic group, it would have been all over the papers, but I don't recall seeing a single story on this one.

I will have to start paying tax estimates. Not only did I owe a huge tax bill but was also assessed an underpayment of tax penalty. uggg!

I've been paying fed & state taxes quarterly ever since I retired 25 years ago. It's always a tough call when preparing the 1040ES since I never know how the investments will do for the current year. Capital gains are the killer, since there are always unpredictable swings from year to year.

To keep from getting hit with a big tax bill and maybe underpayment penalties, I usually include extra $$ on the 1040ES to cover unforeseen events. It's a crap shoot at best though.

Two years ago my wife found a bug in TurboTax. In CO
we had a fire remediation deduction that didn't work
correctly. TT support found the line of code in error. We were warned that it wouldn't be fixed that year. Well,,, last year is wasn't fixed either. This year for more reasons than that we are using an accountant.
advised

Is I will live with the $1600 times 4 payments. I'll even live with the $210 or so in lost interest.

But not everyone has a spare $6k to let the IRS borrow for a year.

This is a special case for me because in my 32 years of having investments, it's the first time I cashed in 5 figures. I'm sure it won't be the last, so I get it, this is the system, nobody did anything to me. Learn it, abide by it.

Imagine, the place where I reside, PA, they get to tax that at the ordinary income rate. What did they do to earn that payment? Nothing.

The other funny thing is with Turbo Tax I got out all the paperwork for the American vehicle we purchased, punched in the VIN, only to find we don't qualify lol and then also paying that huge sales tax to PA our SALT was still greater. Just funny I used to "care" where I don't want some entity like Intuit knowing this info when it's not going to be useful. Today we often go with the flow and let our personal data be mined.

I mean think about this, how much easier is it for me to let Turbo Tax download my 1099 from Fidelity when the sale of the security, said security was purchased from 1994 to about 2004? As opposed to me manually typing it in? There was a time I didn't want to pass through a Fidlelity login in order to keep it secured. Now I just go with the flow....this was a scary reminder on how absolutely much relies upon 2 factor to my cell phone. Meaning if I "got a free iPhone 17 Pro" with a new line i.e. change my number, what a very bad day it would have been on Saturday. This happened in 2022 when I got the iPhone 13 Pro for $309 no trade--changed my number and had to deal with it. But back then far less 2 factor was going on.

p.s. I'm on a Windows 10 laptop (again kept it this way due to BMW factory software running on it), and more and more sites will not allow me to access their web page due to unsupported Windows and browser. That's not a bad thing. This website doesn't seem to care about https lol which is strange to say the least

I started using an accountant for my taxes back in the 1980s and have never regretted it for one minute. There have been three over the years, as I've moved, but have been using the same one for 20 years now. I also have investments, but have scaled back after retiring.

Two years ago, I took some losses I've been sitting on and had no tax due. My accountant didn't charge me anything that year, even though there was still a pile of paperwork to submit. I pressed her and wanted to pay *something* but she flatly refused (which bothered me a bit, because I don't want to feel like a "charity case", LOL).

Last year, she charged me $60. This year, I'd expect about the same. But the point is, I don't have to worry about buggy tax software or making dumb mistakes, I leave it to a pro.

Regarding https and this site... really... what's up with that? IMO, there is just no excuse not to use https today, it can be done for nothing. If a website requires you to create an account with a password, it *really* needs to use https.

We were discussing the demise of gpsreview.net in another thread. Tim, who founded the site, remained as the forum administrator even after selling it years earlier. They weren't using https either and I asked him why. He said that was a sore point, he had been urging management to adopt https but they weren't interested. Soon afterwards, they shut the whole thing down without any advance notice.

Some of you might also remember laptopgps.com. I questioned why they weren't using https and the site owner had some odd reasons why it would be a problem. A few months later, he shut it down (although at least it was announced in advance).

I hope the management of this site will adopt https. In the meantime... do you use the same password on other sites? If so, now is the time to change that.

It used to annoy me when I worked and all the young clerical staff would be going on and on about how much they were getting back from taxes. They always looked confused when they asked me how much I was getting and what I was going to do with the money because I always just looked at them and said, "I have to pay..." Ah, youth.

I have been paying tax estimates to avoid any penalties at tax time. I was not awary of teh increase of the marginal tax rate for capital gains but I am not sure it will impact me too much.