Blogging Away Debt

Last year I paid a man to cut our grass every week or at least bi-weekly. He charged me $15 per cut and did a good job. This year I decided to save the money and cut the grass ourselves. The dilemma was we don’t have any lawn maintenance equipment, specifically a lawn mower.

Free Equipment

Thankfully, my grandmother had an old lawn mower she wasn’t using and said we could borrow it for the summer. Yeah!

Unfortunately, after years of little to no use, it has needed a lot of work. A handyman friend has spent countless hours here replacing parts, band-aiding issues and helping us with workarounds. It worked for a few weeks. My only cost…gas.

That lawnmower is still sitting here, but won’t crank at all.

Then, my uncle brought me an old lawnmower from our old lake house. This lawnmower is probably 20 plus years old. He changed the oil and sharpened the blade before bringing it over.

It ran well for several weeks too. And then the cord you pull broke. An easy fix, if you can find the part to fix it. And since it’s so old, haven’t had any luck yet.

The Rains Came

Then it started raining here. And rained and rained and rained.

Our grass is now two feet tall. And I have no way to cut it.

What to Do

The man who has been helping me fix and maintain the lawn mowers for the last couple of months graciously loaned me a mower today. I had hoped to get the lawn cut before the rain begins again.

Gymnast cut the bulk of the front yard and then this mower died too. Do you think it’s me?

I must now figure out what to do. We still have 3-4 months of regular lawn care to do. Here are my options and the associated costs, what is your advice?

Pay someone to cut the grass. I’m not sure I can get it for $15 per cut again, but think I could get it for $25 or so or $100 per month.
Continue to band aid the lawn mowers I have and limp through. I haven’t had to put any money into them thusfar, but now I will need too. Hopefully with just a small investment I could get one or both of them running for the duration of the season.
Buy a mower. I have found a cordless electric mower for $115 with a needed $20 add on piece to make it a mulching mower. (I have researched gas vs electric mowers, and I think electric is the way to go for our small yard, less maintenance and ease of use.
Snow Joe Sun Joe MJ401C 14-Inch 28-Volt Cordless Push Lawn Mower

If I can get my friend’s help, I think I’m leaning toward Option 2. It seems the most economical. And if I can get and keep the two mowers running…it seems the best option. The issue has been the headache of getting and keeping them running.

CPA Update: 2017 Taxes

by Ashley

I realize we’re now half-way through 2018, but I never provided a full update of our tax situation from 2017! The news is mostly good…..but a little “mixed,” I guess.

Our Tax History

In 2016 we messed up badly. During that year, hubs was still fully self-employed and although I had a full-time job where taxes were withheld from my employer, I also still worked part-time in a contract position where taxes were not withheld. Long story short, we WAY underestimated our tax payments. Come tax time, we were hit with a MASSIVE (like, felt insurmountable) tax bill. On advice of our CPA, we tried to fight a portion of the tax bill and it took 6 MONTHS of back-and-forth before we were finally able to come to an agreed payment plan. I’ve never revealed the exact amount of back-taxes mostly due to embarrassment. I did say that the payment plan we settled on will have us paying $283/month for….basically forever. A long time, okay?

ANYWHO….. The 2016 tax experience scared the pants off of us and made me extra cautious in 2017. I knew I was withholding more from my paychecks than necessary, but I wanted to err on the side of caution. 2017 had a lot of big changes for us: hubs closed his business and went back to school full-time. I had to leave my part-time job after getting a big raise at my full-time job and having to sign a non-compete agreement. All these changes made it so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect come tax time. Again, we used a CPA. I gave him all our stuff and held my breath, biting my nails, until taxes were complete. For some reason, I was still expecting we’d owe money. I was just hoping it wouldn’t be too much.

2017 taxes

When taxes were done, I couldn’t believe the end result. We were owed a refund! I’m using round numbers here, but we had overpaid our federal taxes by about $400 and had overpaid state taxes by over $800!!! This was a HUGE relief for me! I knew the federal overpayment would be applied to our back-taxes, but I fully expected (naively) that the state refund would still come back to us. I checked online a couple of times to try to verify the refund, but the online system just said that due to the high volume it was taking longer than normal to process tax refunds and to wait 8 weeks before calling to inquire further. So here I am, thinking I’ll get a check in the mail and it’s just going to take awhile.

Spoiler alert: I did not receive a check in the mail. Instead, I received this letter in the mail.

We used some or all of your 2017 refund to pay outstanding liabilities……
By law, we must offset any refunds or overpayments to certain government agencies.

Of course they do. They had to use the refund to pay for our 2016 back-taxes. I should’ve known this would happen. For some reason (false hope), I really thought we’d get the state portion of the overpayment back. But nope. It goes straight toward our past debt. Would’ve been nice to use that money for different, higher-interest debt. But I get it. It is what it is.

Long Story Short

No refunds for 2017. But no additional tax liability either. Now that our work situation has stabilized a bit (hubs now goes to school AND works part-time as a personal trainer where his taxes are withheld & I still just have the one full-time job where taxes are withheld from my paychecks), I feel safer to adjust my withholdings slightly so I will get just a tiny bit more per paycheck. Overall, we’re in a pretty good place. I don’t want to overpay in taxes (especially since I now know for 100% fact that we aren’t getting any overpayments back!!!), but I also don’t want to be short and end up owning money either. We should be in pretty good shape to be right about $0 owed or overpaid for 2018. We’ll check-in with our CPA again in a couple months just to make sure everything looks good and to see whether he suggests or recommends any additional changes to our check withholdings. With any luck, we can come in right about even for 2018 taxes. Fingers crossed!

And the $283 monthly payments to the IRS will continue as-is. For the rest of time. 😉

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Lawn Woes