The Weight of Money

Sunday morning, after sleeping in too late, I obsessed over getting our taxes completed. The partner and I have been having lots of little talks about money and upcoming spending and needed to know if our tax fears were valid.

Within an hour of starting, I had completed both our state and federal taxes. However, in my zeal of following step-by-step instructions and filling out forms (I’ve got a thing for forms), I forgot to address the “what if” scenario with the partner. While I’d already figured out that any tax owed would come directly from savings, we hadn’t discussed the situation. However, what would we do with a refund? And, what difference, if any, would the amount of the refund make in deciding what to do with it?

So, after calculating our refunds, I asked the partner those exact questions. I didn’t reveal the numbers the forms already had because I wanted to pretend we were starting this conversation at the right time – before there was a real dollar amount to consider.

The partner responded that I probably wanted to put it all toward debt with a slight sneer to his voice. It seems that I’ve been pushing that debt reduction button pretty hard in his eyes, or maybe it was just throwing $5,000 at it the other month that still makes him a little uncomfortable.

He then threw out his standard argument of wanting to see the numerical comparison of putting it toward debt and, based on the monthly interest reduction, how long it would take to save up that amount. Tired of that argument, and feeling a little unsure of making those calculations, I just argued for a more immediate answer.

Next, he wanted to make some logical comparison of owing taxes versus getting a refund. What would we do if we owed taxes? Put it on credit or pull it from savings? Credit! No way, it’d come from savings. Since the credit card tax payment wasn’t an option that reasoning method was rejected as well.

Finally, we both agreed that we wanted to put it all into savings. Basically, the house needs to happen this year and it won’t happen without more cash. Also, if we put it toward debt, it would not reduce our payments enough to allow us to save up that amount by summer.

Now, I just need to decide if I’m going to file electronically or on paper – the paper form is already filled out, would just need to drop it in the mail.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 8:43 am and is filed under general, income, relationships. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.