Back in the summer when I first started blogging more regularly, I decided to go all John Steinbeck and keep a journal (or blog, in my case) documenting my progress on Soldier of Dorsa. Then the school year started and I had to give up the practice of daily progress reports in favor of weekly ones — which I have kept to pretty faithfully since late August.
Now that we’re on lockdown and my school year is, in some respects at least, effectively over, I’m going back to my practice of daily progress reports (for now). So on that note:
0 words written so far today. Manuscript total: 1,048 of 150,000 (projected).
Today’s word count goal: More than 0.
The Tax Man
So I’ve been using my lockdown time to catch up on often-neglected projects. I’m proud to report that in my first week of lockdown, I avoided the temptation to ignore my taxes until April 10th or so and visited TurboTax to do the work.
It was so stressful.
Not doing the taxes — TurboTax makes that part remarkably easy, even for someone with complex finances like me — but paying the taxes.
I knew I was going to owe money. Because of my income from my books, I always do (one of these days I will start paying quarterly, I swear). And in a normal year, whatever, it’s fine. In a normal year, I have anticipated what I will owe and socked tax money aside all year, so when the bill comes due in April, I simply pay it and that’s that.
But this year I wasn’t able to put anything aside. And as I expected, the tax bill is more than I can actually afford.
Before you go judging me, I want you to know that I’m g-d good with money. When you are as poor as I have been most of my life (and why that is is a whole other story I don’t want to get into), you have to be. Until I took on student loans for grad school, I was basically debt-free except for a small car note, and I do not carry a balance on my credit cards.
My friend A. asked me if I would still get paid for student teaching even though the high school was shut down.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
(wait let me catch my breath)
HAHAHAHAHA
Wouldn’t it be lovely if student teachers got paid!
Most other professions get paid for the fieldwork hours they put in as essentially interns. Not student teachers. We basically teach an entire school year for free.
Which means that I’ve gone an entire school year without a paycheck.
Thank goodness for my books and my readers! I would have been totally sunk without you guys! But as it is, my book income is like a robust part-time job… It brings income in, but only part-time income. Which means that I’ve been bleeding money every month since I started graduate school almost a year ago.
COVID-19 to the rescue!
So yesterday, I posted about the silver linings to COVID-19, and when it comes to my tax situation, I think I found another one! It sounds like those of us Americans in the middle and working classes are all going to get a stimulus check of about $1,200.
It couldn’t come at a better time for me, as the shutdown means I have probably lost the long-term substitute position I lined up for the end of the school year and will therefore be back to relying just upon book income (and whatever other part-time work I cobble together this summer) until I get a regular teaching job come the fall. Though $1,200 doesn’t go very far in SoCal, it’s still going to take the edge off my financial stress a little.
Thanks, U.S. government. (For once, I’m not even being sarcastic.)
Anyway, this post isn’t very interesting, because you probably don’t really care / want to know about my tax situation, and also, I made it longer than I meant to.
But I did want to ask you this: What do you plan on doing with your stimulus check?
And: For those of you in other countries, is your government planning anything similar to the $1,200 checks we Americans are supposedly getting soon?
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