Happy Tax Day (Poll!)

[houseelf]

Happy Tax Day!

We are spending our money per the advice of Suze Orman (NOT!). We are going to Disney and having a painter paint our living room/kitchen/hallway/stairs a bland white color to maintain the resale value of our house.

Kelly

[BonBon]

Oof...we just sent in 50k. They better spend it well!!!

Kelly, didn't you just paint your kitchen??

[SueC]

We are putting gutters on our house finally! My husband took ours down 4 years ago (when we painted the house) and we've been meaning to replace them but hadn't gotten around to it yet. We're worried what kind of damage we're doing to our foundation.
The remainder will either go towards debt, will be put in a savings account to act as a buffer until my husband starts moonlighting, or we will piss it away, which is our normal style whenever we get a nice little chunk of money!

[SueC]

OMG Chris---50 K!!! 8O

[houseelf]

Chris,

Did you mean $50k or $5k? I think that I will have a heart attack for you if you truly meant the former.

Yes, I painted my kitchen a light sunshine-y yellow and our agent told us that white is best. I will leave the two walls not visible to the public areas with this color...but the rest are going to go back to white. As medspouses are all too familiar, we will have to sell our home fairly quickly when we leave. She said that we needed to do three things: change the living room window treatments, refloor the kitchen, and paint the main living areas white/neutral. I was like, yeah, how scandalous is pale yellow? Whatever. Even though we own the place, all but two walls are white. When we get to our final house, I'm going to go nutso painting.

Kelly

[mommax3]

I chose "savings" because that is where we put the money when we got it back......we efiled quite a while ago. However, we will be using part of it to fix up our house in anticipation of listing it in about a year. We have already painted our front door and the trim/shutters on the front of our house, and we are having a new storm door and light post installed today. We are going to go looking for carpeting this weekend, and have two different places come out and measure our three bedrooms and hallway (once we have picked out carpet) and get estimates.....then the plan is to get the new carpeting installed by June 1st. I am sure that will cost a pretty penny and be a HUGE pain in the ass (moving all the stuff out of the bedrooms 8O ) but I know it will pay off in the end. We have a few other things we want to get done, too, mostly painting though, so it shouldn't cost too much.

Sally

Refund? What refund? Between what we owed and my quarterly payment (also due April 15)....grrrrrrr.....

[PrincessFiona]

Hey Kelly...why repaint the house just yet I think you should enjoy the walls and wait until you get ready to move!

Have a blast at Disney, btw!

We used our refund to make a final payment on having a sprinkler installed and paid off one credit card (our lowest balance but highest interest rate.)

This is our last year of getting a refund

kris

Kelly -- our house is painted some funky colors and we had no problem selling. Our agent put in the description "designer colors". I have seen this on other home descriptions -- seems like a selling point.

[Auspicious]

I owed a grand total of $64. I like it when everything comes out even like that.

[fluffhead]

this kind of thing makes me crazy - I lost lots of money on investing in 2003, but am only allowed to take a loss of $3k against EARNED income! So we ended up owing!
grrrr

[Phoebe]

Kelly- selling anytime soon? We bought our house with funky colors and asked for a painting allowance in our offer. Several walls were lime green.

We made a major purchase with our refund. It was supposed to be a new car since my current automobile has become a money pit. However, we are putting off that purchase until this year's models become a little cheaper and ended up buying a new washer and dryer. It is amazing what we lived with during the training years and everything is on its last leg now. I would have preferred a new car!

Jennifer

Furniture! We bought a king-size Select Comfort (sleep number) bed and two art-deco looking chairs for the living room.

Unfortunately we owed $6,000!! Yikes, that was a hard check to cut!! We did our taxes in Feb, but couldn't bring ourselves to part with our money so soon so we waited to mail everything off until last week.

We have so much withheld in taxes that I thought for sure we would break even, but I guess dh's moonlighting is what did us in!! We don't own a house now or have any children, so we can't write anything off. Luckily, we'll be homeowners at the end of the month, so hopefully we won't be so broke when the next April 15th rolls around.

[migirl]

We owed this year too. Fortunately, through the magic of home ownership and student loan interest deductions we only owed $500 net (owed $1000 to the Feds, and got $500 back from the state). Still, it was nice getting a fat check last year, I'm envious of those of you getting refunds...