The Picket Line — 5 September 2004

5 September 2004

Last September I kept track of every penny I spent so I could really get a fix on my budget and my spending habits and make sure I was living sustainably under the tax-line. For me, this means that I should spend less than $15,000 per year.

The results of my anally-retentive record-keeping were encouraging. But a year has passed, my health insurance has moved me into a more expensive age bracket, and I’ve moved to new housing with lower rent and a different set of utility bills.

So I’ve gone and done it again:

Category

Last year’s 30-day total

This year’s 30-day total

Notes

rent

$421.50

$360.00

electricity/gas

$15.00

$10.00

phone/internet

$45.14

$38.55

television

$12.50

—

water

$11.50

$10.00

food (groceries)

$149.99

$98.92

food (prepared)

$48.61

$106.53

beer/wine/spirits

$84.68

$23.02

coffee

$18.66

$4.57

health insurance

$231.25

($330.00)

transportation

$60.87

$57.83

medical/toiletries

$16.55

$14.69

website hosting

$12.61

magazine subs

$3.50

$2.50

state taxes

—

$24.38

federal taxes

—

$4.65

laundry

—

$6.59

cat stuff

—

$26.12

haircut/clothes

—

$9.50

movies/entertainment

—

$5.00

other/unusual

$33.57

$86.61

Totals

$1,165.93

$901.97

$13,991 / year

$10,824 / year

Notes:

Some of these numbers are more guesstimated than others. I didn’t include any expenses that were directly related to my home business or my contracting job that I can deduct from my income because they won’t count against my $15,000 limit.

*	This year, I can deduct 100% of my health insurance premiums from my income for federal income tax purposes since I’ll be earning my keep this year as a self-employed contractor. So although I’ve included the number here for comparison, this amount is not included in my yearly total.
A:	Last year’s total may have been understated because I didn’t amortize equipment installation costs. I’ve spread the installation costs over one year for this year’s figure. Last year I had “cell phone” as its own line-item.
B:	My discipline was poor on this last month. Over the last 40 days, I’ve spent $140 on 13 restaurant meals, ranging from a $2.25 burrito to a $25 sushi dinner (average meal cost: $10.75). In that same span, I’ve had 107 home-prepared meals made with $130 worth of groceries (average meal cost: $1.20).
C:	Plus milk, sugar, coffee-filters, etc.
D:	This year I tried to keep track of every time I was being hit directly by the California sales tax (and the CRV bottle tax). Last year, I just absorbed the tax into the cost of whatever was being taxed. Last year my state income tax rate was about 0.7%, while this number puts my state sales tax rate at about 2%. There is some talk of changing the federal tax law so that you can deduct the higher of your state sales or income tax (currently you can only deduct the state income tax), so that’s part of my motivation for keeping track of this.
E:	Yep, the feds got me. When I carpool with someone, I often pick up the tab for gasoline, and when I do I pay a federal excise tax on it. Also, there’s a federal excise tax on alcoholic beverages. Last year I didn’t account for these taxes separately but just wrapped them in to the “transportation” and “beer/wine/spirits” categories.
F:	Last year this got wrapped into utilities since we had a washer & dryer at home. This year, I’ve got to hike my stuff to the laundromat.
G:	Last year, wrapped into “other.” This year, amplified by extra vaccinations and flea stuff, as my new home is surrounded by a veritable urban wildlife habitat including families of squirrels, opossums, and raccoons.
H:	This includes a new smoke detector, a curtain rod, spackle, and some other things for the new home, the cost of printing out and faxing in a health insurance application, a donation to NWTRCC, etc.

So I’m well below the $15k threshold this year. The lowered rent helped, but the best part is being able to deduct my health insurance premium from my income as a contractor. I couldn’t do this last year because my 2003 income came from being a salaried employee.

I think also that this month’s expenses were unusually high because I was moving in to a new home, so hopefully this will drop some now that I’m settled. Also, I continue to search for a new health insurance plan that will have a lower premium and that will allow me to take advantage of a tax-free Health Savings Account. And I’m redoubling my commitment to make my meals at home.

I’ve added a new RSS feed to the site, linked from the “RSS 1.0” graphic in the box to the left. The nice thing about this one is that it includes both a summary of the Picket Line entries and also the complete entries, so you can read The Picket Line in an RSS aggregator if that suits your fancy.

The site redesign looks fine for me at home on Mozilla 1.4 and Konqueror. A friend of mine says it looks fine on IE too. But I got email from another friend who says on Mozilla 1.7 the two layout columns overlap. I don’t have any feedback yet from users of Safara, Opera, et al., and IE on Macintosh is apparently a much different beast than its Windows namesake, so I’m eager to hear how that looks.

I’ve got to say that the more I learn CSS the more I like HTML. I remember when every browser had its own little proprietary HTML tags and attributes and you were never sure how your page was going to look. Then things started to solidify on a standard, and today when I write in XHTML-Transitional I pretty much know it’s gonna look okay everywhere.

Now with CSS, it’s the same old headaches but magnified. It’s amazing how not-right they managed to get it this time around. It’s such a hack. All these little “Opera does it like this, but you can exploit a bug in the Mac version of IE to hide the Opera stuff from it, and this other browser incorrectly skips attributes with backslashes in their names so you can hide things from it that way…” This is the future of web publishing?

Nevertheless, I’m going to try to muddle through. I could write this site using only XHTML-Transitional with no CSS at all. It would look pretty much the same (the only visible effects I can think of that I couldn’t reproduce without CSS would be the behavior of the cursor when hovering over tags with “title” attributes and the forced removal of the underlining text-decoration on links). But I’d like to learn this stuff, as kludgy as it seems.

I’d appreciate feedback. If something on The Picket Line looks not-quite-right to you, could you leave a comment or write me an email telling me what the symptoms are (and what browser you’re using)?

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How you can resist funding the government → getting under the income tax line → how it’s done → keeping an eye on your budget → keeping an eye on my budget: ▶; ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦; If I’m going to live under the tax line sustainably, I’m going to need to develop the virtue of frugality.; All through September I kept track of every penny I spent and what I spent it on just to make sure I was living within my budget. Here are my results.; Last month I kept track of every cent I spent. I’ve done this one-month-accounting for three years now. It confirms that my tax resistance strategy is sustainable and it also keeps my finger on the pulse of my economic well-being. And: Ammon Hennacy and Henry David Thoreau also took care to carefuly account for their expenses at times. It’s a shame that we’re so averse to paying attention to how we spend money.; Last month I kept track of every cent I spent. I’ve done this one-month-accounting for four years now. It confirms that my tax resistance strategy is sustainable and it also keeps my finger on the pulse of my economic well-being. Also: the I.R.S. reveals how much they think you should get as a refund for that federal excise tax on long distance phone service that they misapplied for years.; Last month I kept track of every cent I spent. I’ve done this one-month-accounting for five years now. It confirms that my tax resistance strategy is sustainable and it also keeps my finger on the pulse of my economic well-being. Also: the government shuts down a tax protester web site… I wonder when they’ll get around to me.; Last month I kept track of every cent I spent. I’ve done this one-month-accounting for six years now. It confirms that my income tax resistance strategy is sustainable and it also keeps my finger on the pulse of my economic well-being.; Last month I kept track of every cent I spent. I’ve done this one-month-accounting for seven years now in order to keep my finger on the pulse of my budget and keep my spending within the limits of my below-the-tax-line income.; Last month I kept track of every cent I spent. I’ve done this one-month-accounting for eight years now in order to keep my finger on the pulse of my budget and keep my spending within the limits of my below-the-tax-line income. This year the needle is in the red, but it might be a fluke.; In April I kept track of every cent I spent and did an accounting to estimate my spending rate for the year. That was kind of a weird month though, so I decided to carry the tally on through May to see if the numbers came down to normal. Here’s what I found.; Last month I kept track of every cent I spent. I’ve done this one-month-accounting for nine years now, in an attempt to confirm that my low-income tax resistance strategy is sustainable. The trick is finding a “typical” month to use as a sample. Also: a tax strike by farmers in China in 1952.; In September I did my annual budget check and was a little alarmed at what I found. Now I’m living in a new home, in a new town, and last month I ran my budget check again. How did it turn out this time?
How you can resist funding the government → my tax resistance → budget check: ▶; ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦; All through September I kept track of every penny I spent and what I spent it on just to make sure I was living within my budget. Here are my results.; Last month I kept track of every cent I spent. I’ve done this one-month-accounting for three years now. It confirms that my tax resistance strategy is sustainable and it also keeps my finger on the pulse of my economic well-being. And: Ammon Hennacy and Henry David Thoreau also took care to carefuly account for their expenses at times. It’s a shame that we’re so averse to paying attention to how we spend money.; Last month I kept track of every cent I spent. I’ve done this one-month-accounting for four years now. It confirms that my tax resistance strategy is sustainable and it also keeps my finger on the pulse of my economic well-being. Also: the I.R.S. reveals how much they think you should get as a refund for that federal excise tax on long distance phone service that they misapplied for years.; Last month I kept track of every cent I spent. I’ve done this one-month-accounting for five years now. It confirms that my tax resistance strategy is sustainable and it also keeps my finger on the pulse of my economic well-being. Also: the government shuts down a tax protester web site… I wonder when they’ll get around to me.; Last month I kept track of every cent I spent. I’ve done this one-month-accounting for six years now. It confirms that my income tax resistance strategy is sustainable and it also keeps my finger on the pulse of my economic well-being.; Last month I kept track of every cent I spent. I’ve done this one-month-accounting for seven years now in order to keep my finger on the pulse of my budget and keep my spending within the limits of my below-the-tax-line income.; Last month I kept track of every cent I spent. I’ve done this one-month-accounting for eight years now in order to keep my finger on the pulse of my budget and keep my spending within the limits of my below-the-tax-line income. This year the needle is in the red, but it might be a fluke.; In April I kept track of every cent I spent and did an accounting to estimate my spending rate for the year. That was kind of a weird month though, so I decided to carry the tally on through May to see if the numbers came down to normal. Here’s what I found.; Last month I kept track of every cent I spent. I’ve done this one-month-accounting for nine years now, in an attempt to confirm that my low-income tax resistance strategy is sustainable. The trick is finding a “typical” month to use as a sample. Also: a tax strike by farmers in China in 1952.; In September I did my annual budget check and was a little alarmed at what I found. Now I’m living in a new home, in a new town, and last month I ran my budget check again. How did it turn out this time?

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