Saturday, May 24, 2008

How hard is it to be competent?

So it looks like the department screwed up my contract again, and as well as having to wait eight weeks at the start of semester before I got paid, I'm likely to have to wait as long again to get paid for the final few weeks of teaching. But you know? Apparently, I should be GRATEFUL. Because this puts that last bit of my earnings into the next financial year and it will be tax free.*

(And the most shameful thing? When they pointed this out to me, I WAS grateful.)

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* Tax this year is a particularly sore point with me, since my only earnings in 2007 were in the second half of the year, and my only earnings in 2008 are likely to be in the first half. So although I actually earned only around $10,000 a year for each of 2007 and 2008, I'll be taxed as though I earned twice that.

3 Comments:

Inside the Philosophy Factory said...

Is it that they'll withhold the higher amount and then you'll have to wait until your tax refund to make things right?

Am I correct in inferring that your tax year and the calendar year are different? Our tax year doesn't end until December, so they'd have to delay your pay a lot longer than weeks for you to be paid in the 2009 tax year...

StyleyGeek said...

No, I won't be getting it refunded. They really will count it as me having earned $20,000 in a year, so I'll be taxed on $12000 of the money. If I had earned it in the first half of each year, it would have fallen into two different tax years and I would have been taxed on only $2000 of it each time, totalling $4000.

Our tax year runs from July to July.

peterxyz said...

I thought the annual tax-free threshold was $6,000 per tax year not $8,000 ?
Are there any expense deductions you can take advantage of? (Australia has a lot more than other countries do) Educational expenses is a category that springs to mind