Writing

one year ago today

One year ago today we had a small group of close family and friends over to watch us get married and help us celebrate.  I don’t think that it is a stretch to say that it was one of the best days of my life.  Looking back on that day… it was perfect.  There is not a single thing that I would change or do any differently.

One year ago tomorrow we got on a plane and flew to Maui, and the night we landed we drove up to the top of Haleakala to watch the sun rise.

on top of the world

This is our favorite picture of us together.  Some random stranger took it for us shortly after the sun rose over the cloud cover.  (Thank you random stranger, you did a great job!)  We’ll be back there someday.

Happy anniversary, John.  This has been an awesome year.

I love you!

forget-me-nots

Forget-me-nots are my favorite flower.

When I was working out what I wanted to do for my wedding bouquet and boutonnieres last year, I didn’t much care what other flowers were in it as long as I had forget-me-nots and the other flowers I picked looked good with them.  I didn’t think that it would be easy finding forget-me-nots at a florist (afterall, they are hardly a common bouquet flower) so I made sure that I had some in my garden that I could pick and use.

John and I both have fairly straightforward taxes, and it takes less then an hour with tax software to take care of them.

Since this is the first year were we are entitled to file differently then we have for all of the previous years of our lives, we were curious if it would be more beneficial for us to file separately or jointly.  In other words, marriage tax penalty, or marriage tax break?

Actually, it turned out to be marriage tax nothing.  I ran the numbers, doing a joint return and separate returns for the sake of comparison.  We (collectively) get more money back by filing separately, but there was no big difference between our tax situation this year and our situations last year.  Eh, worth a look-see.

I know that getting a lot of money back from the government at tax time is bad, because that means you did your witholdings incorrectly and basically gave the government a big, interest-free loan over the course of the year.  I know that ideally you actually should owe the government a tiny bit of money at tax time.

I know that, and yet I still love getting my refund check. When it shows up, I will dance all of the way to the bank to deposit it.

It feels like free money to me, since it is money that just shows up (kind of) and that I do not have a plan for.

Also, I have no idea how to update my witholdings since one of the reasons I get a chunk back every year is because of being a homeowner.  I am pretty sure that the tax forms that I had to fill out for payroll at work don’t take that into account.

Also, I just don’t like the idea of having to write off a check to the federal government.