When this goes live, I’ll be on the road to the Financial Bloggers Conference outside of Chicago. That translates to a day off here.
Monday, I’ll be back with a whole bucket full of bloggy goodness.
Future Me Returns
This is a conversation between me and my future self, if my financial path wouldn’t have positively forked 2 years ago. The transcript is available here.
What would your future self have to say to you?
Taxes
It’s almost time to pay Uncle Sam for the privilege of living in the US.
Since my business partner and I just finished our corporate taxes last week, I thought it would be a good time to finish my personal taxes. I’ve got a relatively complicated tax situation. I’ve got personal taxes, my side-hustle taxes, and our side-hustle taxes. I had my side hustle taxes done and my personal taxes were just waiting for the final numbers from our corporate filing. We’re an LLC, run as a partnership, filing as an S-Corp.
I was all set to get about $100 back from my personal and side-hustle #1 taxes. That’s a perfect tax year. No more money out-of-pocket and no free large loans to the government.
Side-hustle #2 ruined that. It started taking off in September, so we’d never paid any estimated taxes. When I added those numbers in, I owed a bit under $2000.
Ick. I hate owing.
Thankfully, I set aside 25% of all of my side-hustle income just to cover this.
It was still too much. What could I do to lower my tax bill?
My IRA!
I’d only contributed $100 to my traditional IRA last year. Contributions are tax deductible and you can make them until April 15th of the following year.
That’s great. I had money sitting in a savings account, earmarked to get wasted by the government, and I had an unused tax deduction that I could still contribute to.
That got it down to a $1000 tax liability.
Was there more? What could I do?
When I paid off my car last year, I started sending half of my car payment to an account earmarked for the next car. I had $1700 sitting there, so I sent $1200 of it to my IRA, leaving $500 to hopefully cover any car repairs that come up. Hope isn’t a good financial strategy, but I’ve also got a straight brokerage account that’d doing pretty well, so I can cash that out, if necessary.
Down to $800.
Contributing a bit over $3000 to my retirement saved me more than $1000 right now. That’s sweet, but I still owed money.
Did I miss something on my first side hustle?
$67 to oDesk? How did I manage to keep my annual oDesk bill down to $67? I had a full-time guy in the Philippines for a while last year, and I regularly hire writers for my niche sites.
So I hit oDesk and ran some reports. I was off in that deduction. By $2400. I have no idea where that $67 came from. Including it dropped my side-hustle profit considerably, and brought my total tax bill to a net $7 refund.
There is a reason I never file my taxes as soon as I finish with Turbo Tax. I always wait a week or two, and I always come up with something I missed. This time, the wait saved me nearly $2000.
Smoking Saved My Life
Lately, I’ve been traveling for work about twice per month. The trips have generally been to my company headquarters, about 5 hours east of my house, though at the time this goes live, I will be ending another trip in the Chicago area.
Earlier this month, I was out there to conduct some training webinars and enjoy the company Christmas party. After the party, my insomnia kicked in and I couldn’t sleep. At 6AM, I decided to give it up for a lost cause and pack my stuff for the 5 hour drive home.
On no sleep.
The morning after a nasty ice storm.
I do not have a death wish.
Really.
I got packed, ready to go. Then crawled back in bed with the nap timer on my phone set. Thirty minutes later, I checked out of the hotel and got in my car.
I really don’t want to die, though this trip scared me a bit. It’s a long 5 hours, 4.5 of those hours are on one road, driving across southern Wisconsin. Tedious is one word that comes to mind. Mind-numbing and lullaby-driving are two others.
Instead of getting on the highway, I drove to Wal-mart. I stocked up on cigarettes and Rockstar.
Now, I quit smoking 6 years ago when we found out brat #3 was coming a bit faster than we expected. It was purely a financial decision at that point, but breathing turned out to be a nice change, too.
Nicotine is a stimulant with immediate effects. That means, if I start feeling drowsy, I can smoke a cigarette and I quit feeling drowsy while I chug energy drinks.
Good plan, Jason.
It worked. I made it home, then fell on the couch and didn’t move for 4 hours. Then I ate dinner and went to bed.
Unfortunately, even after quitting for 6 years, by the time I got home, it felt like I’d never quit. So I get the joy of quitting again.
By the time you read this, the craving should be gone and I should just be getting ready to climb in my car for a long drive on not enough sleep.
Huh?
Am I the only one who just noticed that it’s Wednesday? The holiday week with the free day is completely screwing me up.
Just to make this a relevant post:
Spend less!
Save more!
Invest!
Wee!
Cheap Lo Mein
- Image via Wikipedia
I’ve never been a fan of making Chinese food. It always seems to involve ingredients I don’t stock and several hours of prep work. It’s not usually worth the hassle. Several months ago, I began to notice that, when we went out for Chinese, all of my kids had the same favorite dish: lo mein. It would be nice to be able to have the dish without having to pay restaurant prices, so I did some research and came up with a quick, easy, and cheap recipe for lo mein. It takes 3 dishes and 20 minutes.
Lo mein has 3 components: noodles, sauce, and the rest.
Noodles
I use spaghetti noodles. I leave them a bit al dente, because they will spend some time in the hot lo mein sauce, which will cook them a bit more. 1 box of noodles is enough for two meals for my family of 5.
Sauce
- Chicken broth, 4 cups
- Rice wine vinegar, 2 tablespoons
- Sesame oil, 2 tablespoons
- Red pepper flakes to taste, about 1 teaspoon
- Soy sauce, 1/4 cup
- Sugar, 1 teaspoon
Mix it all in a bowl, then wisk until the sugar is dissolved. Nuke until hot. I do this while the wok is heating up and the noodles are cooking, so the pepper flavor has a better chance to blend with the liquid.
The Rest
- Sesame oil
- Minced garlic
- 1 Onion, cut to whatever size you like
- Protein, chopped
- Vegetables, chopped
- Ginger powder, to taste
Chop everything first. When you start cooking, you will be busy cooking, not prepping.
Get the pan hot. Splash in some oil, then toss in the meat when the oil is hot. I usually use chicken, but any meat you like–or even no meat at all–will work.
When the meat is almost completely cooked, add the onions and ginger. Stir constantly.
When the onions are barely translucent, start adding the vegetables, in the order they will take to cook. You can use any vegetable you want. Broccoli, carrots, and peas work well. Whenever the grocery store has a sale on stir-fry vegetable packs, we stock up for about $2/bag. Just defrost ’em before you start cooking, so it’s possible to chop them up, and they work great. Otherwise, any vegetables you have on hand will work. Add them, and stir constantly.
At some point, toss in a spoonful of minced garlic. When depends on how much garlic you want to taste. The earlier you add it, the tamer the flavor.
When it’s all cooked, spoon in some lo mein sauce and toss to coat. Remove from heat.
Serve
Spoon the rest of the sauce over the noodles and toss. You will have extra sauce, so don’t add it all at once. You want the noodles coated, not floating.
Combine the noodles with the stir-fry and serve.
If you buy the noodles, vegetables, and meat on sale, this meal costs about $10 to make. Like I said, that’s two complete meals for 5 people, 3 of whom have adult appetites. The rice wine vinegar and sesame oil aren’t cheap, but you don’t use much, so the cost per meal is negligible.
