Monthly Archives: March 2023

An Evening Of Taxes (or Not Quite As Prepared As I Had Hoped)

Posted on March 3, 2023 | Comments Off on An Evening Of Taxes (or Not Quite As Prepared As I Had Hoped)

I got my taxes done this past week. I know that there is a lot of time before they are due, especially now with the extension for CA, but I like to get them done as quickly as I can. The main reason I like doing them early is so I don’t have to be worried or stressed about how much I might owe for a long time. But also, the tax person I go to discounts her rates if you do them early. I missed the deadline to get the biggest discount, but I still saved money doing them now instead of waiting a few more weeks.

My taxes haven’t been simple for a long time, but I’ve gotten used to what I need to track and keep receipts for so it helps me stay organized throughout the year. It used to take me a lot longer to prepare for my tax appointment, but now I can usually get my packet completed in under an hour. It’s nice that all the little things I do over the year add up to saving me as much time as they did. I did notice that I didn’t have as many deductions as I used to have, but I wasn’t as worried about that since those really can vary from year to year. I also knew that in the past, I was only working 1099 jobs and in 2022 I also had a W2 job. So the estimated taxes I paid might have been more than needed since I also had taxes taken out of my paycheck. There isn’t much I can do when preparing my packet that will change what I did with my deductions or estimated payments for 2022, so I just tried to make sure I put down everything I needed to and was hoping for the best.

I’ve had a few years where I really overpaid my estimated taxes and got a nice amount back when I had my taxes done. And I’ve had other years where I’ve owed since things didn’t quite work out how I expected them to. I just know that I try my best to stay organized and pay attention to making sure I do all the things I have been told to do in order to make my appointments as easy as possible.

My tax appointment this year was another virtual one. I could have gone in person and I really did want to do that, but I would have to drive to the valley and my schedule is busier than it was when I did go in person to get my taxes done. Maybe next year I’ll be able to go there since that does make it a bit more fun. So I sent all the paperwork I needed to send in advance along with my tax packet and then a few days later I had a phone appointment to go over any questions my tax person had and to find out what was going on. There weren’t a lot of questions for me during my phone appointment since things weren’t that complicated this year compared to the past. But there were some surprises.

I had the biggest tax bill I’ve had in a long time. It’s not as bad as what others may have since I did pay quite a bit into my estimated taxes. But I really thought things would have been much better this year. But there were a few things working against me. For my job that takes taxes out of my paycheck, they are not taking out enough and I need to fix that for this year. But the bigger issue was that one of my 1099 jobs changed how some things were classified and that changed how much I owe in taxes. Since my estimated taxes were based on the old classification, I had a lot that I didn’t pre-pay like I normally do.

I was a bit shocked at how much I owed, but I also understand that this is what it’s like for a lot of people. And if I hadn’t done my estimated taxes or kept track of things the way I did, things could be easily been a lot worse. I’m also lucky that I will be able to pay what I owe from money that I had been saving for other things. I might have to delay when I buy some things that I was hoping to get, but obviously paying my taxes is more important and other things can wait.

This year, I’ll be paying more into my estimated taxes and I’m looking into how I can change how much is withheld at my other job, so hopefully, that means in a year I won’t owe as much as I do now. Maybe I’ll have more things I can use as deductions too and that will help, but I can’t guarantee those will happen. So I will just do what I can control and hope that I’ll be as prepared as possible in a year and maybe I’ll have a much more fun outcome when I get my taxes done then.

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Posted in Saving, Tough Stuff

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Getting Out Of A Doctor Appointment (or I’m Lucky I Was Listened To)

Posted on March 2, 2023 | Comments Off on Getting Out Of A Doctor Appointment (or I’m Lucky I Was Listened To)

Considering all the medical things I deal with and how many recurring doctor appointments I have, I’ve been pretty lucky with having good doctors who listen to me and don’t make assumptions. This isn’t always the case and I’ve had some doctors who aren’t as helpful or won’t believe either my symptoms or my lab results, but I usually can avoid those doctors after they act that way.

In the past, I wasted time trying to get doctors to believe me when things aren’t what they expect. For example, I have low cholesterol, low blood sugar, and normal blood pressure. But because there are assumptions about people who are a certain weight or size, I have had doctors wonder if the results were correct. Or if I’m seeing a new doctor, they look at my past test results and think that they must not be accurate anymore so they make me do all the same things again to prove to them that I am healthy. Things have gotten better over the years, but there are still some doctors who believe that weight is the reason behind any ailment and won’t budge or look into what the cause could potentially be.

I’m always nervous when I’m meeting a new doctor or seeing someone I haven’t seen before. For example, when I went to urgent care recently, everyone there was new to me and they don’t know my history. I know that I will always have to do some of the basic vitals when I go to urgent care, but sometimes because of the situation, they aren’t normal results for me.

When I was in urgent care last month, part of the intake was to do my blood pressure and heart rate. I know that my blood pressure reading can be weird sometimes. It has come back impossibly high, not just high like what a living person could have but high where I should be dead. Those results are obviously not accurate, and I’ve learned things I need to be mindful of when I get my blood pressure taken. One of the biggest things I need to do is make sure my feet are on the ground. I usually can’t touch the ground with my feet when I’m sitting back the way they want me to be, so I need something for my feet otherwise I know the results won’t be right. And when I was in urgent care, I tried to tell the nurse that so I could get my blood pressure taken correctly. They didn’t have anything I could use, but my results weren’t high so I figured that was the end of that.

Then a week later, I got something in the mail saying I had a doctor’s appointment I didn’t schedule. I called my insurance and found out that it was for me to go to the blood pressure clinic again because of dangerously high blood pressure in urgent care. That didn’t make sense to me since it was in the normal range, so I looked at my online records and realized that there was a typo in my vitals so it looked a lot higher than it was. I asked if I could get that appointment removed because of that error, but they couldn’t do it unless I spoke to a doctor.

So I had another phone appointment this week to discuss what happened. I’m so glad that even though this was a doctor I didn’t know, he listened to what I said and found other things that seemed off about my vitals from that appointment. He said that my blood pressure should have been taken at another time since I was in pain and my heart rate was very high. There were signs that I wouldn’t have normal blood pressure, even if my feet were on the ground, so I shouldn’t have been referred to the blood pressure clinic. I don’t think he really cared that there was a typo in my records because the other information showed him that I was ok. And there is a history of recent blood pressure reads where it is normal so having just one high one with all the other information shouldn’t have triggered the referral.

I was totally prepared to explain a lot about why this seemed wrong, and I was lucky that this doctor already found things that didn’t seem right and I didn’t have to make that much of an effort to get the appointment removed. He did say that I should get my blood pressure done at my next in-person appointment, which I always have to do so it will be done soon enough. And of course, if it comes back high then, I might have to go back to the blood pressure clinic.

It’s nice when I really don’t have to put in as much work as expected to have a doctor hear me. This should be how it always is and I’m fortunate that it’s like this most of the time. It’s only the rare time now that I have to stand up for myself more and I’m glad that it’s become less and less frequent.

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Posted in Health

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Working On Feeling Better Mentally and Physically (or Picking A Workout Challenge For March)

Posted on March 1, 2023 | Comments Off on Working On Feeling Better Mentally and Physically (or Picking A Workout Challenge For March)

When I set my monthly challenge for February, I had no idea I’d basically be forced into sleeping better in order to get over the cold I caught. I was going to bed earlier and could sleep in because I wasn’t going to my workouts. I think the last time I got that much sleep was when I was out of work and was not getting up too early to work out in the morning.

And getting that much sleep that week proved how much I really needed to work on my sleep schedule. I’m back to getting up as early as I normally do since I’m back to my workouts, so my focus has to be on what time I get to bed. There are some nights when I’m getting to bed a lot earlier than I used to and there are other nights when I’m noticing I’m staying up too late. But even those later nights are still not as bad as they used to be. I’m averaging about an hour more sleep a night, which is a start. I want to get it up a bit higher, but that will take some time. But at least I’ve made a start that I can build off of. This is a work in progress, but it’s the most progress I’ve made on this goal that I’ve had for myself for a long time.

And for this month, I’m doing another health-related challenge and it’s inspired a bit by the time when I was sick. After I took a week off from my workouts, I did notice that I had gotten a bit weaker. This was expected since I had to take time off, but it was frustrating. And since I’ve been back, I’ve been really wanting to build my strength back up. But as I’ve been doing that, I also have wondered if I’ve been stagnant with what I have been doing. So this month, I want to challenge myself to find where I can be stronger and work harder in my workouts.

I know that there are some parts of my workouts that might be easier to build upon than others. I think it will be hardest to have improvements with my rowing, but I know I can still try. But because of some physical restrictions, there is only so much I can do. I’ll see what can happen when I try, but I’m not setting any crazy expectations. But I think I can make some good improvements on the bike and with the floor work. I want to see if I can increase the resistance level on the bike a bit more for some of the workouts and also see if I can pedal faster when I’m using the levels I’ve been using for a while. And on the floor, I know it’s not just as easy as using heavier weights, but I should be more comfortable with testing out the heavier weights to see if it’s possible or if I could do some of the reps with the heavy weights before using my normal ones. This isn’t the most straightforward progress, but they are steps toward improvement and that’s what I need to be ok with doing.

As much as I’d love to see super fast progress and immediately have improvements in my workouts, I think seeing how my sleep improvement went made me remember that any steps of progress are good. So even if I end March with marginal improvements, that will still put me ahead of where I am now. And if I can make small improvements every month or every other month, that will add up over time. All I can do is try and see what happens over the course of this month and hopefully, there will be some changes that I can continue over time so I see some big improvements and changes at the end of the year.

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Posted in Fitness, Fun Stuff, Health

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