March 28, 2006 - 10:00 AM

Money (It's What I Got)

I e-filed my taxes a week and a half ago, and I already have the state refund in my bank account. Initially, I did my taxes by hand this year, as I always do, because I assumed that with all the stuff I bought, I'd have a boatload of deductions that would be more than the standard deduction of $5000. On that list was my car, which I finally bought outright after leasing it for 4 years; a bunch of gas and service for the car since I drove it nearly 20,000 miles this year (as opposed to an average of 10,000 the previous four years) and needed to change the tires; nice monitoring speakers for my audio setup at home; a nice new workstation/desk; and various sundry "job-related" expenses including my cable/internet bill, my cell phone bill, my DVD and CD purchases, movie tickets, and concert tickets. I spent 2 hours one night just sorting out my car deductions (which were disappointing, because I could only use about 1/8th of the car purchase price as a write off, and the mileage reimbursement from work covered most of the rest of the auto expenses [amazing...the government is putting us 9 trillion in debt but they can figure out a perfect cents-per-mile reimbursement number]), then spent another 3 hours figuring out all the other deduction expenses. At the end, I came up 300 dollars short of the standard deduction with my itemized deductions. Grrr.

So I didn't have to waste those 5 hours on lists and receipts and calculations. Whatever. At least I could do my taxes online. E-filing turned out to be fairly easy, and it was nice not having to futz with the calculations myself. For an asian guy, I do make a lot of simple arithmetic mistakes. I was off by $2000 when I first added up my gross income on last year's forms, and on this year's return, when I did it by hand, I messed up the 1099 info by $300. But the smart compooter figured it all out for me, and now I'm getting more than 400 back from the federal government sometime this week.

Where will that money go? Investments? IRA? PLO? KFC? Nope. When I told Tony the amount of my refund, he said "Hey, that's about the price of an iPod." And, yes, yes it is. The 60 gb video iPod, black, will be here in 5-9 business days, courtesy of Amazon. Between now and then, I will have to work on putting all 900+ of my CDs onto my Mac in mp3 form so that I can have my entire music collection with me wherever I go. Now, I have to ask your advice, oh friendly readers (all 8 of you). I will need accessories for the iPod. Knowing my clumsy nature, should I get a hard case? Do you have any recommendations? Also, I want to use it with my car stereo...is the tape adapter that I currently have for my CD player fine, or should I get an FM transmitter? And what kind of power charger do you recommend?

In addition to the iPod, I also threw money at Amazon for a Plantronics bluetooth headset for my cell phone, several DVDs including a price-reduced Ong-Bak: the Thai Warrior, and a buttload of CDs (Muppet Christmas with John Denver for less than 6 bucks!). My shopping spree didn't end there. I also picked up the newly released Studio Ghibli DVDs of Howl's Moving Castle, Whisper of the Heart, and My Neighbor Totoro (FINALLY! God I love this movie) from Costco. And, I got a new digital blender since my old one's rotary blade mechanism has become unturnable. More fruit smoothies for me!

The great thing is, all this spending this past week won't be putting me in debt. I'm not used to having the paycheck that I now earn, after 4 years of near minimum-wage existence working in recording studios, so I've managed to save money without even meaning to, just by continuing to live a pretty boring life. So there's a lump of money in my checking account, accumulating nothing more than lint in its belly button. I think I'll go rouse it, make it pack its bags and move over to my Roth IRA account, which sadly, I haven't contributed to in 3 years.

It's nice to have a little money.

Now Listening To : Massive Attack-Mezzanine
Random Thought : Andre Braugher is back on TV tonight! Thief! 10 PM! FX!

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