Last year, the Year of the Renewable Energy Credit, was incredible. Massive refund from the federal government, which we promptly plopped on our solar panel loan so the payments wouldn’t balloon. And we owed the state about $300.
This year, I knew the federal refund would be smaller, and it was.
But the state. Yowza. The state, we owe just over $2,000.
What happened?
We’re already low on the number of dependents indicated on our W-4s, particularly on my main job, which is the lion’s share of our income (I work two jobs while my wife works three.)
But four of those jobs, no federal or state tax collected. We’ll have to re-evaluate those W-4s right away.
Nobody seems to be able to explain it to me. There’s some noise on the internet from last year saying Idaho changes its tax laws to align with federal laws, but there’s nothing aside from lambasting me for not updating those W-4s to explain why we owe so much more in taxes.
So maybe that’s it. We’ll have to check those to see how many allowances are on them. Because if I’ve done the math right, at our current tax rate, that would mean we underpaid (on two of those jobs, where we got more money than the other two jobs) equals about $2,300 in unpaid states taxes. But I dunno. It’s also contract work for those two jobs. Maybe that makes a difference? In any case, we’re checking on those.
But that explains only part of the problem – because last year, with the same allowances on those jobs, the amount due to the state was far less. Did I, as Erma Bombeck says, plant crabgrass and taxes came up? Everything I see online is yapping about changes that occurred prior to the 2019 tax year, so I have to assume nothing major happened. We all know what you get when you assume, so it’s probably that kind of situation. But why don’t they speak plain English?
Anyhoo, will be filing lots of new W-4s this month, to avoid a future debacle.
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