J and I have been talking about getting our finances under control for some time now. We were given tickets to a Dave Ramsey event a couple of years ago and even got our copy of “Total Money Makeover” signed when Dave was in the area on his book tour.
This past week we finally stopped talking about it and started to do something about it. We were blessed this year with a substantial tax refund, due in part to my severance from Kroger – severance pay is taxed at the full rate. Since I ended up double dipping for a month or so this year while I was getting my severance pay and working a new job and working out an arrangement to get paid for the time that I was in Wisconsin for my brother’s wedding we were really blessed this year with income like we have never seen.
So this years tax return did not bring any new purchases to the household, instead we opened up a savings account at the local credit union for our (baby step one) emergency fund and the bulk of the refund went to pay off 3 bills (2 of them were major purchases). So we already have an “extra” $115 to add to our debt snowball as we continue to attack this debt and get our financial house in order. Speaking of finances I came across some stats that put some real numbers to some of the political banter…
According to the IRS $43,318 is the median US income.
The means that if your household income is…
$ 60,040+ you are among the top 25% of wage earners.
$ 99,111+ you are in the top 10% and you contribute 68% of tax revenue.
$137,500+ you are the top 5% and contribute 57% of tax revenue.
$328,048+ you are the infamous top 1% and contribute 37% of tax revenue.
Any more numbers or statistical breakdowns are far too upsetting. We need a flat tax! or a more fair tax system, such as a national sales tax and repeal of 16th amendment.
Tags: family
February 26th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
Good for you! If I hadn’t gotten my own act together a few years ago before I lost my job, I wouldn’t have made it. It won’t be easy, but it will be worth it in the end. And you are teaching your kids lessons that will stick with them. Persevere. Surround yourself with support. Get someone to be accountable to. And don’t worry about statistics. Focus on yourself and do what you need to! I’m rooting for ya!
March 1st, 2007 at 11:33 pm
[...] so remember when I was talking about money (two posts ago)… and a couple of weeks ago Tom spoke about Money|Margin during the Stressed? series. The main point of his talk was, “If we create more margin in our finances we will reduce stress.” Well as previously stated, we got on Dave’s plan and started our emergency fund. Well, Murphy decided to show up this week.. I got a reimbursement check on Sunday that I deposited on Monday, so we had some extra money in checking when my paycheck went in on Wednesday. Due to a calculator error (as best as we can tell) when my deposit was written into the checkbook and balanced it was added in as double the actual amount, but with the extra funds already there it just didn’t click… until today when I checked the online banking site and saw that they show that we have an available balance of N and the checkbook shows a balance of Nx3, given that we had just sent some checks out this morning I ran up to the bank that has the emergency fund account and moved some back to the back with the checking account. But you know the best part… we had the money to cover the mistake!!! Do you have ANY idea how just awesome that is!? Margin really does reduce the stress surrounding money… just wait until we are debt free! [...]